Elden E. Rawlings
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Church of the Brethren. The largest of the Brethren denominations in North America said no to the Consultation on Church Union last month. By a decisive vote of 881 to 220, delegates to the annual conference of the Church of the Brethren adopted a study committee’s recommendation against full COCU participation. The denomination now maintains an observer-consultant relationship, and that will continue.
COCU leaders reportedly had held out a big hope that the 200,000-member Brethren body would be the next to join. There are already eight denominations participating in the COCU talks, representing a prospective new superdenomination of some 24,000,000 members.
The Brethren committee expressed doubts about such a “vast” church organization. Their report called on the constituency “to be even more creatively and responsibly involved” in the ecumenical movement but indicated anxiety over the effect of a merger on pacifist Brethren convictions.
Such a merger, the report added, might also endanger the denomination’s conversations with other churches. Exploratory talks on unity have been held during the past year between the Church of the Brethren and four other denominations: the American Baptist Convention; the Churches of God in North America, with headquarters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; the Brethren Church, with headquarters in Ashland, Ohio; and the Evangelical Covenant Church.
The committee noted that COCU, in its negotiations looking toward a united Protestant church, regards only baptism and communion as sacraments. This, it said, “diminishes the recognition of the presence of God in other acts of the church such as feet-washing, anointing, marriage, and ordination.”
In addition, the committee said, “the forms and office of the ministry in the merging united Church, based upon the acceptance of the historic episcopacy, seem to perpetuate the sharp cleavage between clergy and laity, and give insufficient recognition of the growing creativity of the ministry of all believers.”
Lutheran Church in America. The question most Protestants are asking of the Lutheran Church in America never got an answer during the 3,260,000-member denomination’s third biennial convention in Kansas City.
Why has the LCA, largest and most ecumenically minded of the Lutheran denominations, steered clear of the Consultation on Church Union? Both the LCA and the 2,600,000-member American Lutheran Church have rejected even observer status. Much to their surprise, the more conservative Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod listened in officially at the May meeting of COCU.
Franklin Clark Fry, the articulate LCA president who was re-elected, says Lutherans have “no doctrinal basis” for unity talks with COCU. Lutherans, he declared, feel that common doctrine is the only basis for unity, whereas leaders of Reformed bodies see unity gained through organic union, followed by the working out of doctrinal problems as the union matures.
“We would be willing to sit down right now and discuss doctrinal statements,” Fry said. “We emphasized there was no antipathy toward the discussions, and our rejection was received in good faith.”
What happens now? Even though Fry is a strong ecumenist (he heads the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches), he is obviously not advocating a rushing into Lutheran-Reformed talks. The LCA and the ALC are still working out the problems of the mergers that brought them into existence four years ago, and they don’t want to jeopardize hopes of a merger with Missouri’s 2,780,000 members.1The LCA, however, has implicity declined for the time being overtures from the other two churches for pulpit and altar fellowship. Such a union would represent 90 per cent of the nine million U. S. Lutherans.
As expected, last month’s LCA convention voted unanimously to become part of the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A., seen by some as another big step toward more Lutheran unity. This cooperative agency will replace the present National Lutheran Council, which has served the LCA and the ALC and their predecessors since 1918. Conventions of the ALC, Missouri, and the smaller (20,000 members) Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches have already approved participation in LCUSA. A parallel body is to be formed in Canada.
The new agency will engage in theological studies, public relations, military personnel and educational services, and welfare and mission activities. The Rev. Dr. C. Thomas Spitz, a Missouri Synod pastor long active in broadcasting, is to be selected general secretary, a position in which he has been working unofficially for several months. An organizational meeting is scheduled for November, and the new offices will open in New York in January.
In a statement on church-state relations, the convention chose a middle ground. Said one of the framers, Philadelphia seminary dean William H. Lazareth, “A political position which advocates separation between church and state presupposes separation between Creator and Redeemer. Since God is One, this would mean schizophrenia in the Godhead.”
“The state is God’s agent for his non-redemptive work,” Lazareth said. “This is not an endorsement of the principle of state aid to private education” or other institutions, he added, nor does it mean the Church feels it is “morally mandatory” for the state to offer financial aid.
The statement said, “The position rejects both the absolute separation of church and state and the domination of either one by the other, while seeking a mutually beneficial relationship in which each institution contributes to the common good by remaining true to its own nature and task.”
In the first step of a “master plan” toward realignment of seminaries, the convention voted to merge a small seminary at Fremont, Nebraska, with the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. In other action, delegates overrode a Fry recommendation and voted a study of the role of women in the ministry. (Fry felt the study is “unwise” at this time, explaining that Missouri now limits its ordination to men and that in view of current talks, he hopes to narrow, rather than widen, the gap between Lutheran bodies.)
The delegates also: passed a sixteen-point “manifesto,” designed as a checklist for local congregations, which reaffirms the theological position of the church and invites congregations to work with churches and secular groups “in activities that promote justice, relieve misery and reconcile the estranged”; spoke strongly for abolition of the death penalty, noting that capital punishment falls disproportionately upon those least able to defend themselves; heard Fry report that the church was forced to dip into reserves for more than $300,000 to complete its work last year because of lack of revenue; and expressed cautious approval of U. S. involvement in Viet Nam, commending men serving in the war but recognizing the right of those who feel they cannot participate in the war to hold this position.
The convention turned down an amendment offered by a Milwaukee industrialist to a statement dealing with programs to counteract deprivation. The amendment of Carl T. Swenson, a lay delegate, sought to shift the emphasis to non-governmental programs as a means of eliminating injustice and want. Swenson said that talent should be enlisted from industry to help carry out programs planned in a Christian framework.
A variable-income pension approved by delegates will give program participants the option of sharing directly in the value of common stocks. The pension plan provides payments for life, but they will increase or decrease according to fluctuations in dividend income and market value of stocks in which members’ contributions are invested.
Evangelical Free Church of America. Joining the swelling ranks of U. S. Protestants who need money for their schools and yet desire to keep church and state separate were delegates to the eighty-second annual conference of the Evangelical Free Church of America. A dean of the denomination’s college called for “judicious use” of federal aid, but a committee report turned thumbs down on the idea. The whole question was tabled pending further study.
Immediate effect of the action was a loss of $183,000 in a grant said to have been offered the church’s Trinity College by the federal government for a new science building.
National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. A banquet address by Mormon George Romney, governor of Michigan, was heard by some 1,000 persons during the annual meeting of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. Romney told them that churches should help provide the moral character needed for responsible citizenship in all areas of life. The association is the largest of the Congregational church groups opposing the merger that created the United Church of Christ.
Evangelical Covenant Church of America. Two official Sunday School curricula have been adopted by the Evangelical Covenant Church of America. One is the Covenant Life curriculum, a cooperative venture with the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) and four other denominations. The other is that of Gospel Light Publications.
At the church’s 81st annual General Conference, held in Chicago, delegates adopted a resolution supporting President Johnson’s “willingness to negotiate unconditionally to achieve peace in Viet Nam.” They did not pass specific judgment, however, on the American military action there.
A committee on interchurch relations was instructed to continue explorations regarding merger with other denominations. Such talks have taken place during the year past with the Moravian Church in America, the Evangelical Free Church, the Church of the Lutheran Brethren, the Church of the Brethren, and others.
The Rev. Milton B. Engebretson, 45, was elected president of the 66,000-member church to succeed the retiring Dr. Clarence A. Nelson next year.
Toward A Consecrated Rebellion
Among the largest of American religious conventions is one where no laws are enacted, no resolutions passed, and no politics allowed. It is the annual North American Christian Convention, unofficial focal point of the conservative element of the Disciples of Christ. The only activities are naming of officers (president for 1966–67: L. Palmer Young, a minister from South Louisville, Kentucky), formal speeches, discussions, and fellowship.
This year’s convention in Louisville, which drew a staggering total of 25,000 registrants, included an incisive address by Donald H. Sharp, minister of Woodland Heights Christian Church in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Here are excerpts:
“Jesus rebelled against religious legalism, social injustice, and personal hypocrisy.
“Since Jesus there have been a parade of rebels. Among them there have been charlatans and fools. There have been egocentrics looking for some scrap of notoriety. There have been kooks rebelling for kicks. And yet every great leap forward seems to have come through the inspiration of some deeply consecrated rebel who, as Frank Meade has said, ‘objected not so much to men or institutions as to the abuses of men within those institutions.’ …
“We must remember that the separation of the rebel fools and the rebel greats is clearly defined in what man becomes indignant about. To wildly rebel against the establishment for the sake of rebelling is to play the part of the fool. Rebellion must have purpose beyond itself. To rebel against hypocrisy, social injustice, and religious bigotry is rebellion with a purpose and is to become at least in one sense God-like.
“Our brotherhood does not send delegates to conventions to pass resolutions and to impose decrees upon the brethren, and this is as it should be. However, our brotherhood does have positive responsibilities in convention, one of which is surely to instill into every hearer the will to be a God-like rebel.
“I’m tired of Christendom winking at hypocrisy, condoning social injustice, and upholding religious bigotry in the name of conservatism. I believe in conserving the faith once and for all delivered unto the saints, but I rebel against man-made traditions that draw little circles to shut men out. I believe in the separation of church and state but I rebel against this profane silence that we have fostered because we are afraid of being identified with the liberals.…
“Faith in Christ answers man’s need to rebel and be a rebel. We can rebel against the hypocrisy of our own lives.… We can rebel against social injustice beginning first with ourselves, for when we have removed the logs of injustice from our own eyes we shall be much better prepared to see how to correct the injustice fostered by others. We can rebel against religious Pharisaism by placing our pet opinions under the light of God’s Word and then quit imposing our opinions upon others as God’s law. Much of our brotherhood’s division is not on what the Bible has said but rather on what the Bible has not said.”
American Baptist Association. “Baptists have been slow to change,” said President Vernon E. Lierly of the American Baptist Association, “but many times their resistance has been based on tradition rather than truth.”
Lierly declared at the ABA’s national messenger meeting in Houston that “nothing is wrong because it is new, neither is anything right just because it is old.… Be sure your resistance to change is based on the Word and not on tradition and prejudice.” He added that “we should seek to make truth appealing to men of all ages and from every walk of life. It is wrong to present the truth in an offensive way when truth itself would not offend.”
The ABA is a fellowship of some 3,220 congregations with a total membership of some 726,000. Administrative offices and a publications business are located at Texarkana, Texas.
General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. Resolutions against neo-evangelicalism and against antidefamation bills now said to be under consideration in several state legislatures were adopted at the 35th annual conference of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches held in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The most vehement denunciations, however, were aimed at death-of-God theologians Thomas J. J. Altizer, Paul M. Van Buren, and William Hamilton. The GARBC said all three should be discharged from their teaching posts.
Baptist General Conference. A 536–124 vote to bring the Baptist General Conference into the National Association of Evangelicals highlighted the denomination’s 87th annual meeting, held in San Jose, California. Delegates also reaffirmed affiliation with the Baptist World Alliance, but called for more study on whether to seek membership in the BWA’s newly-organized North American affiliate. The Baptist General Conference is composed of some 90,000 members in 633 churches.
Dr. Clifford E. Larson was elected moderator. Larson recently resigned as dean of Bethel College to become a professor of education at Bethel Seminary.
Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Final approval of the reunification of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church with its Negro branch was voted by the church’s 136th General Assembly at Memphis. The Negro group, known as the Second Cumberland denomination, must still ratify the merger with a three-fourths vote of its presbyteries. If they do, the General Assemblies of both bodies will meet jointly at Paducah, Kentucky, next June for the official reunion ceremony.
The white Cumberland church has about 85,000 members in 900 congregations. The Negro group has some 20,000 members in 125 local churches.
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In a seminar unprecedented in recent evangelical history, fifty-one biblical scholars met at Gordon College and Divinity School (Wenham, Mass.) for ten days’ intensive discussion of the authority and inspiration of the Bible. Participants, most of them seminary professors and administrators, came from six European countries as well as from Australia, Korea, Canada, and the United States. They were members of various communions, including Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, Free Church, and independent bodies.
The lively discussions were conducted with remarkable freedom and candor in an atmosphere of Christian fellowship and submission to the authority of Scripture. Daily sessions, moderated by members of the convening committee (Harold J. Ockenga, chairman; Frank E. Gaebelein; and Russell T. Hitt), were supplemented by many hours of informal conversation.
Major papers and responses covered such subjects as archaeology, biblical authority in the light of exegesis and hermeneutics, Roman Catholic attitudes toward Scripture, liberal stereotypes of the evangelical view of the Bible, the contemporary relevance of Warfield’s approach to inspiration, and the theological definition of authority, inspiration, and inerrancy.
Among those presenting papers were Dr. Donald J. Wiseman, professor of Assyriology at the University of London; Dr. Herman Ridderbos, professor of New Testament at the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Churches, Kampen, The Netherlands; Dr. James I. Packer, warden of Latimer House, Oxford; Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, preacher on “The Lutheran Hour”; and Dr. Kenneth S. Kantzer, dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Much of the wide-ranging discussion was on inerrancy. Some held this to be an essential biblical doctrine, while others preferred to speak of Scripture as infallible. There was general agreement that any definition of inerrancy must be framed in the light of all the biblical data, and there was also a consensus on the complete truthfulness of the Bible and its authoritativeness as the only infallible rule of faith and practice. No participants affirmed the errancy of the Bible.
At the conclusion of the seminar, this statement was adopted—not as a formal confession but as a report of mutual attitudes, common ground, and matters requiring further study:
Text Of Communique
A privately sponsored Seminar on the Authority of the Bible was held at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts, June 20–29. The participants sought to clarify their understanding of scriptural authority in order that they might more faithfully acknowledge it as the authority of Christ himself.
The historic Protestant confession of the supreme authority of Scripture provided the background for discussion and the structure of hearty agreement. Among the agreed positions affirmed were the following:
That the Holy Scriptures, comprising the sixty-six canonical books given by the Holy Spirit, are verbally inspired and are the revealed Word of the Triune God;
That the Scriptures are completely truthful and are authoritative as the only infallible rule of faith and practice;
That because the Word of God was written by men in particular historical contexts, the disciplines of accurate scholarship have a full and proper use in its study;
That the Bible as a whole sets forth the history of redemption and directs us to Jesus Christ, the Word incarnate;
That God has committed the Scriptures to his people to search, obey, and proclaim, and that through the working of his Holy Spirit he effectively uses the Scriptures for the salvation of men, the instruction and government of his Church, and the consummation of his purpose.
In an endeavor to put such theological truth into the language of today, a committee drew up the following statement, which does not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of each member of the seminar:
Attitudes toward the importance of the Bible are changing throughout the Christian world. The renewal of biblical studies among Roman Catholics and the increasing concern for the biblical message through the whole Church, together with current confusions regarding that message, are facts which call for new endeavor on the part of evangelicals. In this situation we must acknowledge that neither our methods of expression nor our practices have sufficiently witnessed to our faith in God’s Holy Word; hence we offer the following testimony to its power and authority;
The Bible is wholly trustworthy, for its words speak God’s truth and give men final answers to the deepest problems of their lives. Scripture throughout the centuries has brought men to the saving Christ who died and rose again, and we affirm that it will do this today when it is read and proclaimed in the power of the Holy Spirit. We stand under it and commend it to a frustrated age that needs above all to hear the clear and powerful voice of God in judgment and in grace.
Holy Scripture sets forth abiding standards of conduct for men and nations. Christians have often failed to concern themselves sufficiently with the suffering and injustice of our sick society and to hold forth to dying men the Word of Life. We, therefore, give ourselves anew to declaring the biblical Word, which alone offers hope in this world and the next.
In the fruitful and candid discussions of the seminar, certain questions were found to require further study and consultation. They included the interpretation of historical, chronological, and literary difficulties in the Scriptures; the extent to which reconciliation of such difficulties should be sought; the bearing of modern science on biblical narratives; the concept of inerrancy, whether and in what sense it is a biblical doctrine, and its relation to biblical authority.
For those privileged to participate in it, the seminar brought rewards beyond those anticipated. Personal friendship and mutual understanding flourished in an arduous docket of meetings. The urgency of evangelical engagement in current theological debate became increasingly apparent. Above all, the clarity, excellence, and authority of the Bible itself commanded a response of praise in an enterprise where labor cannot be far from prayer.
Potions Under Study
Not only does LSD induce religious awareness, say the psychedelic prophets; it can also promote world peace, assuage the distress of the dying, help alcoholics, and boost learning processes. In short, this is what the world has been waiting for, according to some who participated in a landmark conference on LSD in San Francisco last month. The prospects of induced religious experience kept recurring, but a few of the more dubious participants had the nerve to challenge the cure-all claims and pointed instead to the rising incidence of LSD use among teen-agers, the hundreds of LSD-induced “acute panic” hospital admissions, and prolonged psychotic reactions—even suicides.
This was not enough to dampen the enthusiasm of Dr. Timothy Leary, flamboyant evangelist of the LSD cult, who said, “The present LSD boom is no less than a religious renaissance that is only just beginning.” The only real danger to a person, he asserted, is that he will “refrain from LSD and thus abide in his house of spiritual plague.” Further, “LSD’s first place of impact is in religious experience as it alters our attitudes toward ourselves and society.”
LSD is a chemical that is colorless, odorless, and tasteless when dissolved in water. It is the best known of a number of substances that, taken internally, produce hallucinations—or, as Leary and his disciples would have it, expand the person’s levels of consciousness (see June 24 issue, page 46, and July 8 issue, page 44). The six-day San Francisco conference, sponsored by the adult education branch of the University of California, was the first such scholarly colloquium on psychedelics (the technical term for so-called consciousness expanding compounds).
Because the word “religious” is “too loaded,” Dr. Paul Lee had misgivings about Leary’s view and preferred to label the LSD “session” or “trip” as “the most profound existential or mythical experience one can have.” Lee, who claims to have new insight into St. Augustine’s Confessions as a result of LSD intake, will teach philosophy beginning this fall at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been Protestant chaplain at Brandeis University and assistant professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lee suggested that a psychedelic experience can be seen in “the myth of Genesis,” in which Adam and Eve partook of “the tree of all possibilities—a symbol of mental creativity.”
“I do believe in psychedelic religion, where LSD is the sacrament,” said Dr. Frank Barron, a University of California research psychologist, “but I do not agree with it.” He pointed out two dangers: LSD can convert latent psychoses into overt forms; and it can cause a basic change in values, such as loss of distinction between right and wrong.
Essential sensations of a “trip” were outlined by a prominent psychiatrist and UCLA professor of medicine, Dr. Sidney Cohen, author of The Beyond Within: The LSD Story. These include loss of ego boundaries and fusion with the universe (“you may see your body melting into the carpet”), a philosophical basis of some major religions. Said Cohen: “Many who have taken LSD say they have discovered the great white light of God; they say that this is the ‘real reality,’ and they yearn to return to this state.” Thus the experience—not the drug itself—becomes addictive, a point repeatedly referred to during discussions of legal and moral implications.
Along more scholarly lines, Dr. Abram Hoffer, a Canadian psychiatrist and university professor, reported his use of LSD in treating 800 alcoholics. He said that more than one-third were cured as against the average 10 per cent cure rate of all other treatments combined.
For most of those cured, the “healing” came within a context of religious experience, said Hoffer. For example, there was the priest named John who, under LSD’s influence, “saw” God and heard him say, “John, no more drinking!” From that day, months ago, the priest has remained sober. While admitting the unusual nature of this instance, Hoffer said that “properly used LSD therapy can, with great speed and economy, convert a large number of alcoholics into sober members of society.”
A “Center for Dying and Being Born,” where terminal patients would be LSD-enabled to face death “in a conscious and open way,” was called for by Dr. Richard Alpert, a research psychologist and former Leary colleague. His idea received weight from a paper by Eric C. Kast, a Chicago psychiatrist. Kast wrote that LSD administered by him to experimental groups of dying patients created “acceptance and surrender to the inevitable loss of control” and even gave some “a new will to live and a zest for experience.” Added Alpert, “A patient could choose to die in my ‘Center’ under whatever religious metaphor he wished, because psychedelic clergymen abound today.”
Ecumenism At The Altar
News reports last month disclosed two unusual and presumably unprecedented marriage ceremonies.
A Jesuit priest was married to a former nun by a fellow Jesuit colleague at the University of Detroit.
A Southern Baptist pastor and a Catholic priest participated together in a wedding ceremony at St. Michael Catholic Church in Memphis.
Father Lawrence Cross, 47, former head of the sociology department of the Jesuit-run University of Detroit, made front-page news with his marriage to Joan Renaud, 37, a nurse who had left the Sisters of Mercy three years ago. Father Thomas Blackburn, chaplain of the university, celebrated the marriage.
Father Cross, on leave since January to teach at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, returned to the country in May and married Miss Renaud May 31. He entered the Jesuit order in 1937 and was ordained in 1951. In 1957 he joined the university faculty, after studying as a Fulbright scholar in Belgium. Father Cross has been active in civil rights work and served on the Archbishop’s Committee on Human Relations and in the Detroit chapter of the NAACP.
Under canon law, a priest who marries is automatically suspended of his “faculties” and cannot celebrate Mass, hear confession, or distribute the Holy Communion. He remains, however, a priest for life.
In Memphis, Joyce Jackson, a Baptist, and James M. Larkin, a Catholic, were married at St. Michael Church by Father James Miller, assistant pastor, and by Miss Jackson’s brother, William, pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church of Hebbardsville, Kentucky.
Father Miller led in the exchange of vows and Jackson delivered a sermon and gave the benediction. The sermon described love as presented in First Corinthians 13 as the basis for marriage.
The bride had visited Father Miller two days after the Vatican degree liberalizing restrictions on Catholic-Protestant marriage ceremonies and asked how her brother could participate in the wedding.
Jackson, a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Union University, said Father Miller had been very generous in allowing him time during the ceremony.
A Baptist Press release quoted Jackson as saying, “There were almost no restrictions given me, except that he had to exchange the vows and this is something that I would want to do at any wedding performed in my church.”
The bride said she will remain Baptist and her husband Catholic.
In a draft of a new hymnal for Presbyterian churches in the British Isles a hymn for burial services was inadvertently printed in the section for weddings. The misplaced hymn began, “Go happy soul, thy days are ended.”
Off LSD himself since February, Alpert theorized that the drug was possibly a key to show persons how to create and order their environment. He went on to link LSD-induced religious experience to most “rock and roll” groups: it makes possible mutual spontaneity in improvisation and rhythm which then becomes a high level of spiritual communication. He revealed plans already drawn up for a “discotheque church” that would include “rock and roll spiritual endeavor.”
The Leary-Alpert school came in for some hard knocks from Huston Smith, author of The Religions of Man. Smith questioned the “staying-power” of LSD-religion—“where faith is confirmed, awe felt, and obedience increased,” for true religious experience triggers from the core of man’s being a “triple movement of mind, emotions, and will.”
Smith chided the movement for “failure to integrate psychedelic experience with daily life” (referring to Leary’s radical doctrine of “quit society, quit work, quit school”) and also for its failure to face up to the problems of sexual irresponsibility, lethargy, and anarchy that grow out of its antinomian nature.
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
Tribute In A Window
The FBI director was honored June 26 by the congregation of the Capitol Hill Methodist Church, Washington, D. C., who named a window in their new $1 million building the J. Edgar Hoover Window. Hoover, a Presbyterian, was born and grew to adulthood in a home on the site of the new Methodist church.
The colored-glass window, designed to symbolize statesmanship through Christian virtues, is twenty-two feet wide and thirty-three feet high. It is constructed in seven longitudinal sections framed on all sides in limestone.
“The window is designed to symbolize the Christian virtues of Hoover and other Christian statesmen,” said the Rev. Edward B. Lewis, pastor. He explained that the symbols in the window include: an anchor, symbol of hope; balance scales, law and justice; a compass, temperance; the cross, faith; a lamp, education and learning; a lily, purity; and the oak leaf, courage and fortitude.
Social Activist
The Rev. Lester Kinsolving, founder and president of the newly organized Association of Episcopal Clergy, is also being given the full-time job of lobbying for repeal of California laws prohibiting abortion. The appointment was made by the Rt. Rev. James A. Pike, the resigning Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California.
A campaign to repeal abortion laws was begun after nine San Francisco Bay area doctors were charged with performing illegal abortions on women exposed to German measles.
The outspoken Kinsolving, who leaves his work as vicar of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Salinas, California, says that “certain aspects of the Church … are definitely in a bad way.” He organized the clergy association to aid in the defense of clergy in trouble; to correct injustices in relations between clergy and church superiors; to study the Episcopal Church’s pension fund; and to serve as a placement bureau for clergy.
The organization met some initial criticism from the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. John E. Hines, who called it a “trade union.” Kinsolving contends that the organization is comparable to the Association of University Professors or a teachers’ association and is not a trade union.
Federal Fever
The gradually growing religious lobby in Washington will soon have an Orthodox wing. Establishment of a secretariat in the nation’s capital at a cost of $100,000 per year was approved this month by delegates to the eighteenth biennial Clergy-Laity Congress of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America. The action came upon recommendation of Archbishop Iakovos, primate of the archdiocese, who indicated that he planned to spend considerable time in the new office. His rationale: “Because of the extent of our responsibilities and role as a major faith, we need a center in Washington to be in better direct contact with the nation and national politics.”
‘Up With People’ Ban
The Columbia Broadcasting System is refusing to let its television stations show the Moral Re-Armament film, “Up With People.” The film was to have been carried under the sponsorship of the Schick Safety Razor Company. Edward Baltz, vice president of the firm, said that a protest against the CBS ban would be lodged with the Federal Communications Commission.
According to Baltz, the reason given by the network for banning the show was a CBS policy that no sponsored program could be of ideological or editorial nature and that some segments of the film were contrary to this rule.
Prayers Under Protest
A federal judge ruled in Chicago last month that a traditional verse of thanksgiving without the word “God” does not constitute a prayer when recited by De Kalb, Ill., kindergarten children.
Judge Edwin A. Robson dismissed a request for an injunction against De Kalb’s Elwood School which asked children to recite:
“We thank you for the flowers so sweet.
We thank you for the food we eat.
We thank you for the birds that sing.
We thank you for everything.”
The ruling came in response to the request of Mr. and Mrs. Lyle Despain of De Kalb who charged that the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of their five-year-old daughter were being violated when she was asked to recite the verse.
Mrs. Esther Wayne, 63, kindergarten teacher, said that she had already eliminated “God” from the last line of the verse at the request of the Despains. She contended that the verse was not a prayer but “a method of learning graces and manners.”
Mrs. Despain testified that some children concluded the recitation of the verse with an “amen” or by crossing themselves.
The judge said there was no indication that the children “took a devotional attitude” in reciting the verse. The verse simply “expresses gratitude,” he said.
The Chicago decision contrasted with a 1965 decision by the Federal Court of Appeals in New York which ruled that a similar prayer without the deletion of “God” was unconstitutional in a Whitestone kindergarten. In the Whitestone case, parents of kindergarten children took action against the school for disallowing prayer after principal Elihu Oshinsky stopped school prayers in keeping with a Board of Education ruling.
The U. S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case after parents appealed the ruling of the Federal Court of Appeals.
CAROLYN LEWIS
Moscow Charges Bible Smuggling
Moscow Radio reported this month that three British tourists and a Dutch citizen were expelled from the Soviet Union for attempting to smuggle religious literature in the country.
The report said that Anthony Richard Hippisley and his wife, Anne Marie, tried to smuggle through a border checkpoint 400 Bibles and other books which they had received from the British and Foreign Bible Society for “illegal” circulation in the Soviet Union. The books, the station added, were concealed in eight secret compartments in a specially adapted Volkswagen.
A second smuggling attempt at the Lyausheny checkpoint in Soviet Moldavia, Moscow Radio said, involved two Baptist ministers—identified as John Murray, a Briton, and Johannes Fisser, a Dutchman. It said they tried to bring in similar literature concealed in an automobile.
In each case, the “smugglers” were said to have been ordered out of the country and their books and cars confiscated.
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In June, Americans were all over London, that much publicized “swinging city”: tourists, tennis fans at Wimbledon, Cassius Clay, Hugh Hefner unveiling yet another Playboy Club, and as the head of the British Safety Council observed, “two American savers of souls,” Ralph Nader, author of Unsafe at Any Speed, and Billy Graham.
Evangelist Graham far outdrew the competition, speaking to more than 900,000 persons, his largest audience ever for a month of meetings. The crusade was also his longest since Philadelphia in 1961. The meetings at Earls Court, Britain’s biggest hall, put the career total of persons responding to Graham’s altar calls past one million.
The Greater London Crusade was a bench mark for at least one other reason—Graham used television as never before. Three services were recorded in color for telecast later this year in America. Big-screen theater-type TV accommodated overflow crowds in the main arena and simultaneous services in ten cities across Britain. Graham is now talking about a “national crusade” in America, using closed-circuit TV.
Supporters and skeptics alike will now maintain close scrutiny of the 40,000 persons who registered decisions for Christ. About a tenth of these responded to the appeal at the closing service July 2 in Wembley Stadium, England’s largest outdoor arena. Under a near-cloudless evening sky, they filed silently onto the tarpaulin-covered turf track where dogs had raced twenty-four hours earlier. In all, some 86,000 got into Wembley.
Surveying the dramatic throng, the purple-cloaked Lord Bishop of Coventry, Dr. Cuthbert Bardsley, inserted some commentary before his benediction. He said Graham “brought new life to our nation when we greatly needed it.” While critics say Graham doesn’t “preach a social message,” the bishop predicted thousands of reformed individuals would go forth from the crusade to help reform society.
Some considered the crusade as a holding action, merely reinforcing the faithful. Although a large part of the audience was churchgoers, figures on the “inquirers” tell a different story. Counselors’ cards show a third have no church connection at all, while another third have church membership but no regular participation.
Another significant fact: Two-thirds of the inquirers are under 25. This is in marked contrast to the three-month Harringay crusade in 1954, where those going forward were predominantly middle-aged. A magazine ad on Graham’s behalf seemed to capture the mood: “Make religion a real live switched-on thing.”
London will also be remembered for the stark silence as the inquirers responded. After thorough discussion, Graham’s team decided to eliminate the usual choir song of penitence, chiefly to counter criticism that an emotional spell was cast. Once the change was made, new critics popped up, claiming the shuffling of thousands of feet was just as hypnotic.
The spell of silence was interrupted three nights, twice by individual protesters and, on the final Tuesday, by a dozen youths chanting, “Save souls in Viet Nam.” As they were hustled out of the hall strewing leaflets, the sober converts filed past. The next night, antiwar demonstrators reportedly planned to interrupt Graham’s sermon every five minutes. But that day the United States bombed near the centers of Hanoi and Haiphong, and protests centered on the American embassy instead.
Another night, a gang of war critics planned to go forward and tie up as many counselors as possible in political arguments, but few went through with the plan. Before another service, a telephone crank threatened to bomb the counseling room.
Graham’s refusal to preach on international politics also caused criticism from clergymen. There was a string of other complaints: Graham shouldn’t “seek publicity,” should mention the sacraments, should be more intellectual, should take a parish in an underprivileged area. A common reservation was voiced by the Archbishop of York, a distinguished Graham supporter: “We may not like all the methods he uses.…”
But Congregationalist analyst Cecil Northcott says theology, not methods, was the basic issue. The week after the crusade closed, Northcott contended in the Church Times (Anglican) that the £1 million (nearly three million dollars) spent on Graham activities in 1954 and 1966 would have been better used to found and endow a “National Institute of Mission” for “ecumenical study” of evangelism, free of Graham’s “biblicism and servitude to the printed word.”
Amid all the Protestant complaints, Roman Catholic writer-editor Michael de la Bedoyere praised Graham for getting down to the essentials of the faith, asked prayers for his success, and said, “We may yet see him as ‘Saint Billy’!”
The Graham team took a turnabout look at the churches in a special meeting for clergymen. Lane Adams said that “the average church expects more maturity from crusade inquirers than veteran members” but should remember they are “spiritual infants.” Graham appealed for more basic, uncomplicated gospel preaching.
The evangelist’s approach to British churches came through in his nightly talks to inquirers. He said they must become active in a church even though many say “that’s the hardest thing you’ve asked me to do.” But he told them also to join one of the 6,000 Bible study groups now functioning in the London area. He urged the new Christians to take part in social service, such as visiting the sick or lonely or “making friends with someone of another race.”
A lot has happened to Great Britain and to Billy Graham since their encounter a dozen years ago. Something of an American curiosity in 1954, Billy Graham in 1966 is a world figure. He carried his biblical beliefs to luncheon with Queen Elizabeth, a charity ball to which he was invited by Princess Margaret, a breakfast meeting for 150 members of Parliament (many of whom had been debating on the floor of Commons until 7:30 A.M.), and 2,000 leaders of society and culture at a Foyles Literary Luncheon.
Graham’s sermons contained the same concise, dramatic Gospel he preaches everywhere, but these upper-crust gatherings produced some new material.
In introducing Graham at the literary luncheon, publishing magnate Lord Thomson said “the cynics are quieter than twelve years ago” because there is more crime, child cruelty, laziness, and selfishness. After being toasted with champagne, the teetotaling evangelist said that in Britain and America “there is a developing vacuum like that in prewar Germany. If it is not filled with something hopeful that will answer the ultimate problems of life, there will be trouble in the next generation.”
Graham said the life taught by Christ “never had all the taboos built up in the Victorian period.” And at the parliamentary breakfast, he called for a “new Puritanism” of “disciplined, New Testament living.” In the style of Earls Court, he said a new revival “could begin in the heart of someone here today.”
As for the crusade, Graham told a church audience to judge its results in five or ten years. (Dozens of ministers converted at Harringay were in evidence at Earls Court.)
The evangelist will return to London for two days in September to shore up new converts, on his way to a preaching mission in Poland. He has no major events scheduled over the summer.
The evangelist told an unofficial meeting at the Anglican Church Assembly July 5 that he found widespread religious interest in Britain but also “a revolt against the institution of the Church,” particularly among laboring classes. He said professionals alone cannot evangelize Britain. The laity must be mobilized, and this will require “a drastic revolution.” He said it is time for the Church to take the offensive, with “unambiguous proclamation.”
Graham labeled the “so-called radical movement” as “reactionary” because it is merely “defensive in the face of secularism, humanism, and rationalism.” He said the Church has also been defensive in morals by hesitating to denounce sin.
Billy And The British Press
One of Billy Graham’s most extraordinary achievements in Britain was making salvation into page-one news. There were hundreds of articles in stately journals and lowbrow dailies, notices of crusade trips in provincial papers, and seemingly endless letters to the editor. The treatment of Graham was rougher than anything he gets from secular journalists in the States.
The Communist Morning Star, in a huge headline, dismissed the crusade as “Sky-pie—in the new king-size, flip-top packet.” A Reading columnist said bluntly, “Go Home, Billy Graham.” In a similar vein, a Glasgow writer said that with “150 million scarlet sinners in the U. S. A.… Graham’s search for souls in London surely takes on some comic opera qualities.”
Anti-Americanism also cropped up in a letter to the Ipswich Evening Star: “It’s no use sobbing your socks off at Earls Court about your minor peccadilloes if you then go off and murder men, women, and children in Vietnam because President Johnson tells you to.”
The Mirror’s Cassandra, who is syndicated in the United States, said soberly, “Billy Graham hasn’t changed, but I think that we in Britain have—for the worse.” He considers Graham “a good, simple man who comes from a country where revivalism has a bad record.”
The Times, the “Establishment” daily, was rare in perceiving theological undertones to anti-Graham feeling within the Church. It said “few could deny the harsh truth” in much that he said.
Some reporters went into print with stories that the crusade might not be able to pay its bills. As it turned out, contributions proved to be more than enough.
Despite the barbs by columnists, Graham thanked the press from the pulpit for its objective coverage in the basic news stories and said he “felt sorry” for some reporters because “they don’t have a clue to what it’s all about.”
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Orthodox Anti-Semitism?
Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism, by Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark (Harper & Row, 1966, 290 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by James Daane, director, Pastoral Doctorate Program, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, Calif.
This is the first of seven projected volumes on “Patterns of American Prejudice,” based on five years of research conducted by the University of California Survey Research Center at Berkeley, with a $500,000 grant from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Since, as the book shows, anti-Semitism is a widespread sin among Christians, it is disturbing that this first scientific research study into the religious roots of anti-Semitism was conducted not by the Church but by a secular institution and was financed by Jewish monies.
Glock and Stark are both professional sociologists; the former is a member of the American Lutheran Church, and the latter, a onetime Lutheran, is now unaffiliated. They admit that their findings, gleaned from responses to very long questionnaires by almost 3,000 people in the San Francisco Bay area, indicate that there is a high degree of anti-Semitism in the churches, although no church is deliberately fostering such prejudice. Their findings also reveal that there are several sources of Jewish prejudice (people dislike Jews because they allegedly are crooked in business, control international banking, are sinister conspirators against the rest of the world), and that a small percentage of Christians have anti-Semitic feelings but do not translate them into aggressive action. This latter fact confronts Glock and Stark with a phenomenon they admittedly cannot explain. Yet it does not long deter them, for they are quite willing to admit that even sociologists cannot explain everything.
This group ought not to be so easily dismissed, however, for it is sand in the book’s smooth working thesis. The thesis is that orthodoxy (a religious faith with a doctrinal content) involves particularism (if my faith is true, all others are untrue) and that this combination of orthodoxy and particularism spawns religious prejudice, which when directed toward the Jew is anti-Semitism. The authors, it should be noted, tentatively adopted their thesis and then formulated their questions. The nearly 3,000 responses confirmed what they suspected. The most orthodox Christians, those holding Christian doctrines as alone valid and salvation-bringing, were the most hostile toward the Jews. Who were they? The Southern Baptists and the Missouri Synod Lutherans. Whether this distinction of being the most orthodox and particularistic is to their discredit or credit depends on one’s appraisal of the researchers’ questions and particularly of their method.
The questions were necessarily geared to provide data that would either support or invalidate the projected thesis. This is not to say that the questions were loaded but to suggest that many of them were ambivalent and unfitted to a yes or no answer. The most critical questions concern Jewish responsibility for the Cross and the divine reaction to their role in the Crucifixion, particularly as both relate to the modern Jew. I suggest that from the biblical perspective of the orthodox Baptist and Missouri Lutheran, many of the questions could not be properly answered by a simple yes or no. Anyone acquainted with God’s dealings with the Jew and Gentile as taught in the New Testament, particularly in Paul’s description in Romans of the logically elusive and zigzag divine method of dealing with them, will recognize the impossibility of answering simply yes or no or even perhaps to questions about this method. The logic of divine grace in its historical workings is not suited to such questions and answers.
Serious questions can also be raised about Glock and Stark’s methods. These researchers were careful enough to recognize that the discovered correlation between orthodoxy-particularism and anti-Semitism might not be causal. They therefore put their thesis to test again, this time checking the attitudes of the same adherents of the orthodoxy-particularism to the Negroes. But their thesis held, for the responses showed no significant equivalence to the responses of the same people toward Jews. They also tested the possibility that the anti-Semitism of the polled people was due to any one of a long list of non-religious causes. But again their findings supported the thesis that religion was the chief source of anti-Jewish prejudice, and that the more orthodox-particularistic the higher the prejudice.
Nonetheless, the method remains open to serious question. Indeed, the book itself prompts the question and leaves it without a clear answer. Does this method show that Christianity per se fosters anti-Semitism? Or does it merely show that Christians, even the most orthodox, are also sinners? The first page of the first chapter (entitled “Orthodoxy”) asserts that “religion is many things,” and that for all these many things theology is “the bedrock,” and that, therefore, “if religious roots for anti-Semitism are to be uncovered, the place to begin the search is in this bedrock of theology, in the doctrines and dogmas making up the Christian solution to questions of ultimate meaning.” Aside from the pragmatic overtones of this assertion, the intended affirmation is correct. The Christian faith is a certain response to something, namely truth and dogma. This is correct. Moreover, this response is particularistic in Glock and Stark’s sense, namely in believing that no other truth will do.
Yet the last part of the book, while conceding the impracticability of asking Christians to give up that claim to truth on which they stake their lives, also suggests that anti-Semitism would be alleviated if Christians would be less insistent on orthodox-particularity. To this suggestion is attached the claim that in being less insistent, Christians would give up nothing essential to their faith. This is manifestly untrue. Furthermore, Stark, in his comments to a group of Jews, Roman Catholics, and Protestants that met in New York in May to discuss this book, broadly suggested that the findings of the five-year research were sociological and not theological; that is, the findings showed, not that Christianity per se spawned anti-Semitism, but that Christians, particularly the more orthodox kind, for whatever reasons did reveal a higher degree of anti-Semitism. Thus the first part of the book seems to support the thesis that an orthodox-particularistic Christianity spawns anti-Semitism, while the last half contains the suggestion that anti-Semitism is only a sociological Christian foible that could be abandoned without the surrender of anything essential to the Christian faith. At this crucial point of what the five-year research actually shows, the book is ambivalent. If the contention of Glock and of the first part of the book is true, then the anti-Semitism found among Christians could be eliminated only by the surrender of Christianity’s claim to be the unique saving truth; if, on the other hand, the suggestion of Stark and of the last part of the book is to be taken as true, then anti-Semitism within the Christian churches is not spawned by Christianity but is rather an incidental product, resulting from the failure of Christians to live up to the demands of Christianity. The difference is vast.
Christians of the orthodox-particularistic type would find the thrust of the latter part of the book theologically acceptable, for while it points up their anti-Semitic sin, they can admit sin without violating Christianity. They will, however, be initially jolted on discovering that the first part of the book was written by Glock, a member of a Christian church, and the last part by Stark, who is no longer affiliated with a church. All this is, at first thought, most confusing; for Glock is right in his presupposition that the Christian faith is orthodox and particularistic but wrong in his conclusion that Christianity per se spawns anti-Semitism, while Stark is correct in allowing the possibility that anti-Semitism has its roots not in Christianity but in sinful Christians.
I find myself more in sympathy with non-church member Stark’s sociological understanding than with church member Glock’s theological understanding of their research and its results.
It should be noted that the formula “orthodoxy and particularism produces religious prejudice” is a general formula having no special bearing on the unique relationship between Christianity and the Jews. This appears to me to be a flaw in a method to uncover the peculiar phenomenon of anti-Semitism.
Thus the book leaves us in confusion as to whether Christianity as an orthodox-particularistic religion spawns anti-Semitism or whether anti-Semitism stems from the Christian’s sin and lack of Christianity. This confusion may tend to make the book a contributor to rather than a solvent of anti-Semitism. And this is profoundly regrettable.
The book’s greatest value may well lie in its unintended disclosure of the beliefs—or lack of them—of church members. Here it is far more convincing than in its disclosures about anti-Semitism.
Finally, it is also regrettable that the writing is often something less than scientifically cool and objective. Judgmental assertions—that persons holding to an orthodox-particularistic religion are “self-righteous” and “think of themselves as having a patent on religious virtue and hence discredit all persons who do not share their faith,” and that their view of their religious status “implies invidious judgments of the religious legitimacy of persons of another faith”—are neither true to fact nor indicative of the kind of objectivity one expects in a scientific study. At these points somebody’s religious prejudices were showing.
JAMES DAANE
Feast Of Good Things
The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, by Joachim Jeremias (Scribners, 1966, 278 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by William Childs Robinson, professor of church history, church polity, and apologetics, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.
This is a translation of the third German edition, revised and expanded, of this work by our leading authority in the investigation and recovery of the very words of Jesus. In this study he finds that First Corinthians 11:23–25 was written in 54 but goes back to the usage in Antioch before 45, while the Markan form comes from the first decade after the death of Jesus. “We have every reason to conclude that the common core of what Jesus said at the Last Supper is preserved for us in an essentially reliable form.”
As to the Saviour’s meaning, Jeremias finds that “Jesus speaks of himself as a sacrifice.” In terms of Isaiah 53, the saving power of Jesus’ death is in the phrase “his blood.” “This is therefore what Jesus said at the Last Supper about the meaning of his death: his death is the vicarious death of the suffering servant, which atones for the sins of the ‘many,’ the peoples of the world, which ushers in the beginning of the final salvation and which effects the new covenant with God.” By their eating and drinking Jesus gives his disciples a share in the atoning power of his death, and they become part of the redeemed community. “Table fellowship with Jesus is an anticipatory gift of the final consummation. Even now God’s lost children may come home and sit down at their Father’s table.”
Among the illuminating sparks that fly from Jeremias’s anvil are the discernment of Eucharistic words and their meaning in John 6:51c–58, of the eschatological implications of the Lord’s dealing with the Canaanite woman (Mark 7:24–30), of the Aramaic original shining through First Corinthians 15: 3 f.; and of “in remembrance of me” as an appeal to God to remember the Messiah in that he causes the kingdom to break in by the Parousia.
But taste of this feast of good things for yourself!
WILLIAM C. ROBINSON
Evolutionary Salvation
The Appearance of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, translated by J. M. Cohen (Harper & Row, 1966, 286 pp., $5), is reviewed by Boelo Boelens, pastor, Hessel Park Christian Reformed Church, Champaign, Illinois.
In evangelical circles, opponents of the theory of evolution hold that the Bible teaches creation rather than evolution, and proponents say that evolution was, and still is, the way of creation. The former, in other words, take it that the concepts of creation and evolution are mutually exclusive; the latter, that the concept of evolution is simply the philosophical counterpart of the doctrine of creation. Either group, however, in trying to prove that Holy Scripture is on its side, often seems to have forgotten that Scripture, by virtue of its very nature as witness to Jesus Christ, as the Word of God proclaiming salvation to believers and non-salvation to non-believers, neither explicitly affirms nor explicitly denies the validity of any philosophical concept. The Bible is not primarily concerned with philosophy and metaphysics; it deals with relationships. Only by way of inferences, and therefore never conclusively, can we “prove” from it the truth or the falsehood of philosophical and metaphysical assertions.
Teilhard de Chardin is, needless to say, one of the most vigorous proponents of the theory of evolution. The Appearance of Man is a series of essays he wrote on the subject between 1913 and 1955, the year of his death. Some of them are highly technical; all are an elaboration of Teilhard’s basic conviction that one day, and quite naturally, science and dogma will agree that man was created “not precisely from a little amorphous matter but by a prolonged effort of ‘Earth’ as a whole” (p. 32).
Humanity, according to Teilhard, is born from the prolonged play of the forces of cosmogenesis (p. 210). Over some billions of years the stuff of the universe has been ceaselessly weaving itself (p. 211), forming at last, and only recently, a thinking envelope around the earth, a new skin (p. 222), the Noosphere, mankind. It is not possible, of course, by virtue of this evolutionary principle, to consider our planet as the only planet with Noosphere; on the contrary, planets with Noosphere are quite simply the normal and ultimate product of matter carried to its completion (p. 229), which is another way of saying that there must be other inhabited worlds (pp. 229, 230).
What point has our own Noosphere reached in its evolution? One thing, in Teilhard’s opinion, is perfectly sure: the evolution of Homo sapiens, having hitherto been expansive, is now beginning (!) to become compressive; that is, it is drawing nearer (under the impact of collective reflection) to some supreme and saving pole of super-consciousness, to an ever-increasing biological selfunification, indeed to a peak of hominization called the point Omega, i.e., the Universal Christ.
Teilhard’s concept of mankind as having first evolved from the stuff of the universe and now concentrating itself irresistibly into the reality of the Universal Christ, consistent and fascinating though it may be, seems to this reviewer a blik (Hare) rather than a clearly discernible biblical concept or a clearly defined philosophical theory. It is an interpretation of world history and of the meaning of human life that is undoubtedly of the utmost importance and relevance to him who believes it, but that nevertheless is unverifiable as well as unfalsifiable from either a biblical or a philosophical point of view. For, on the one hand, as already remarked, the Bible is not primarily concerned with ontological concepts, and, on the other, ontological concepts cannot be shown conclusively to be in harmony with the Bible.
Yet speaking strictly theologically, Teilhard’s blik does leave us with some pertinent questions, particularly his blik of the future.
1. Mankind, says Teilhard optimistically, is irresistibly concentrating and internalizing itself into the Universal Christ, i.e., in biblical terms, into salvation. The first question is, Can nothing go wrong in this happy evolutionary process? What about the reality of man’s sinful nature, a sinfulness of which the biblical authors say that its wages are not salvation but non-salvation, indeed death (Rom. 6:23; James 1:15)? Is there any biblical justification for Teilhard’s belief that a sinful mankind will change into the Universal Christ simply and merely because of “the existence of the flux of biological convergence in which we are swimming” (p. 253)? Is, in other words, salvation also a matter of evolution? Must we take it that evolution is not only the way of creation but also the way of re-creation? But even if this were true, how could we avoid the unbiblical notion of universal salvation, that is, of salvation for all men? Behind Teilhard’s evolutionary concept of salvation there seems to be not only an inescapable universalism but also an unmistakable Roman Catholic optimism with regard to human nature.
2. A second question concerns Teilhard’s belief that one day, and “quite naturally” (p. 32), science and dogma will reach agreement in the burning field of human origins. Does Teilhard mean that one day and “quite naturally” science as such will come to recognize the reality of the Creator; that science as such will naturally find God; that one day it will adore the Universal Christ, the “Word incarnate”? But, first, how does Teilhard know that it is the “Word incarnate”—that it is, indeed, the biblical Christ—toward whom mankind is biologically converging? And, secondly, even if it were the biblical Christ, how is science as such ever to recognize and adore him? Is recognition of Christ a matter of study, thinking, reasoning? Is it not rather a matter not of what science is doing but of what the Spirit is doing (John 3:3, 5)?
3. Deism claims that God is transcendent; pantheism, that he is immanent; theism, that he is both. Evolution, as Teilhard conceives of it, is God’s immanency, his creative (and re-creative?) activity within the structures of our world. Thus it is a secular concept, a concept likely to be meaningful and relevant to a great many people in the midst of a world in which it has become increasingly difficult to grasp the supernatural. But to what extent can one couch the Christian message in terms of evolution and still be loyal to traditional theism? Has one perhaps, in doing so, become automatically and inevitably a “non-theist” and prepared the way for an ever further-going secularism? These questions, of course, are not meant to suggest that Teilhard ever intended to be a “non-theist” or to give any initial support to the rise of a death-of-God movement. They merely suggest that, unless some basic problems are sufficiently thought through and satisfactorily solved, we must be careful not to swallow Teilhard’s evolutionary system hook, line, and sinker.
BOELO BOELENS
Nothing Fixed
Theological Ethics, by James Sellers (Macmillan, 1966, 210 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Gordon H. Clark, professor of philosophy, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana.
The value of any theological ethics depends on the kind of theology and the kind of ethics. First, the ethics.
The norms of ethics, according to this author, change. Dr. Sellers, professor of Christian ethics and theology at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, acknowledges no fixed principles. “We need a new morality,” he declares (p. ix), and, quoting from Paul Ramsey with approval, “At the level of theory itself, any formulation of Christian social ethics is always in need of reformulation” (p. 39).
For the present, at least, the main norm is “wholeness.” What the author means by wholeness and what actions the principle of wholeness requires are difficult to see. The term is vague, but it has something to do with the appropriation of secular culture (pp. 44, 49–51, 147, 151). For the most part, however, the author prefers to leave the details as vague as the principle. From page 146 on (“Operating Concepts for Fulfillment,” “Realization as End of Action,” “Sanctification and Eschatology”), the concepts of Calling, Compromise, Commonwealth, Kairos, and Sanctification permit trivialities only and prove concretely inapplicable.
The author’s defense against the charge of having omitted all concrete ethics, except civil rights, may be that his aim is to insist that ethics is based on theology. This is an excellent aim.
However, it is not surprising that a changing ethics is based on a changing theology. Most of the book is an attack against the Bible and Reformation theology. “We cannot rely on … the unilateral authority of the Bible” (p. 22); “To say sola fide is to invoke an obsolete view of human capacity” (pp. 43, 47, 48); “We can replace the limp passivity of older theology with a stout doctrine of human ability” (p. 60); “Worse, in some places where it is not silent, [the Bible] gives us advice that is manifestly bad.… As to the theme of race relations I am prepared to defend my own morality over that of the authors and editors of this portion of the Gospels” (p. 88).
Of course parts of the Bible, if not literally interpreted, are of use in ethics; but this source must be supplemented by “the Judeo-Christian tradition,” the “Church” (the author does not say which one), “natural human activity,” and the directive that “our guidelines should be aimed at shaping human wholeness and that alone” (p. 147). Such a combination is obviously impossible as a basis for theology, since it includes no criterion by which we can decide to accept one part of a component and reject another part. Indeed, if we had a criterion, the combination would not be needed.
Throughout the whole argument the author displays a vast ignorance of historic Protestantism. Queer misinterpretations abound. For example, “Protestantism normally has taken for its critical standard … faith” (p. 32). Normally, historically, the criterion of both theology and conduct—i.e., the critical standard—has been the Scriptures alone.
In rejecting sola Scriptura, the author misappropriates the Westminster Confession X, 2, which does not say “that natural man is ‘altogether passive’ until he has been ‘quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit’.” This section of the confession concerns effectual calling, something that God does, and therefore man “is altogether passive therein, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call.” By omitting the italicized words, Dr. Sellers alters the meaning completely (p. 43).
Later, when he contrasts the Protestant principle with Romish tradition and Quaker mysticism, he reworks it to fit neo-orthodox novelties. Historically Protestantism never said that “the written word” is “a witness to the revelation of God to man” (p. 93). The written word is itself the revelation, and Dr. Sellers has distorted history. He even alleges that “a better description of [Protestantism’s] emphasis than sola Scriptura might be scriptura prima inter pares” (p. 94). But he offers no support from Luther, Calvin, Knox, Turretin, Quenstedt, or any of our founders to support his allegation.
Finally, eschatology is redefined so as to refer not to the ultimate outcome of history but to matters of ultimate importance at present. It is true that Dr. Sellers regards Bultmann, whose phrases these are, as too existential; but Alan Richardson “is even worse: ‘The scene of the final salvation must be beyond earth and beyond history in the world to come’” (p. 193). The author seems to have no place for the life to come at all. Eschatology has to do with human action, not divine intervention. Eschatology is not eschatology. What wonders can be done with Christian terminology by giving it secular meaning!
GORDON H. CLARK
Book Briefs
Christ the Center, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Harper & Row, 1966, 126 pp., $3). Lectures on Christ, reconstructed from student notes, that cast a fuller light on Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity.”
Words of Life, edited by Charles L. Wallis (Harper & Row, 1966, 248 pp., $4.95). A religious, inspirational album containing 1,100 quotations from writers of twenty centuries; illustrated by scenes of the Holy Land. For the coffee table of the thoughtful.
The World of the Bible (five volumes) (Educational Heritage, 1964, $49.50). Two thousand full-color illustrations with an accompanying scriptural verse for each and illuminating historical and archaeological data that create a sense of the world of the Bible.
The Child’s World (eight volumes), Anne Neigoff, managing editor (The Child’s World, Inc., 1965, $59.50). Well-written, well-illustrated books for children on such subjects as plants and animals, countries, and the arts. Except in religious matters, of which there are few, these are excellent; parents may forget they are for children. Revised edition.
Theology of Revelation, by Gabriel Moran, F.S.C. (Herder and Herder, 1966, 223 pp., $4.95). Revelation as understood by a Roman Catholic.
Analytical Philosophy of History, by Arthur C. Danto (Cambridge University, 1965, 318 pp., $10). A speculative philosophy of history is precluded because “we are temporarily provincial with regard to the future.” The “inevitability” of history is attributed solely to “the fact” that by the time men know what they have done, “it is too late to do anything about it.”
That Girl in Your Mirror, by Vonda Kay Van Dyke (Revell, 1966, 123 pp., $2.95). Comments and opinions from a Miss America for whom beauty is more than skin deep. For teenage girls.
Monastic Spirituality, by Claude J. Peifer, O. S. B. (Sheed and Ward, 1966, 555 pp., $12). An expansive explanation of the theory of monastic life, a force in the life of the Church for seventeen centuries; for the purpose of contributing to monastic aggiornamento.
Mani and Manichaeism, by Geo Widengren (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, 168 pp., $6). The story of Mani, “Apostle of Light,” and the religion he founded.
The Vatican Council and Christian Unity, by Bernard Leeming, S. J. (Harper & Row, 1966, 333 pp., $7.95). A commentary on the Decree on Ecumenism of the Second Vatican Council, with a translation of the text.
In Holy Marriage: A Guide to Making Marriage Work, by George E. Sweazey (Harper & Row, 1966, 114 pp., $2.95). A running comment, sometimes wide-ranging, on the wedding service of the United Presbyterian Church.
Southerner, by Charles Longstreet Weltner (Lippincott, 1966, 188 pp., $3.95). A candid and compassionate examination of the South and its problems by a Georgian deeply committed to justice and opportunity for all Southerners.
Thomas Jefferson, by Stuart Gerry Brown (Washington Square, 1966, 247 pp., $3.95). Gives some glimpses into Jefferson’s religious life.
The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice, by Jack Mendelsohn (Harper & Row, 1966, 227 pp., $5).
Studies in the Bible and Science, by Henry M. Morris (Baker, 1966, 186 pp., $3.50). An engineer discusses problems of religion and science.
To Conquer Loneliness, by Harold Blake Walker (Harper & Row, 1966, 172 pp., $3.95). Good reading.
Popes from the Ghetto: A View of Medieval Christendom, by Joachim Prinz (Horizon Press, 1966, 256 pp., $6.50). For the scholar only.
What Is Sin? What Is Virtue?, by Robert J. McCracken (Harper & Row, 1966, 94 pp., $2.95).
Understanding the Old Testament (second edition), by Bernhard W. Anderson (Prentice-Hall, 1966, 586 pp., $10.60). A scholarly work for the critical student. Told with dramatic effect.
This We Believe: Meditations on the Apostles’ Creed, by John A. Ross (Abingdon, 1966, 143 pp., $2.75). Good meditations.
God’s Man, by Lynd Ward (World, 1966, 279 pp., $5.95). A Faustian tale of an artist who sells his soul for a magic brush. Told entirely in woodcuts of varying merit. No text.
God’s Love for a Sinning World: Evangelistic Messages, by Charles G. Finney (Kregel, 1966, 122 pp., $2.50). Five good evangelistic sermons of a former day.
Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich, edited by George L. Mosse (Grosset and Dunlap, 1966, 386 pp., $6.95). For those who want to see the quality of daily life in Hitler’s Germany.
Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen, by Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1966, 174 pp., $4). A cross section of the dialogue that took place between the early Church and the Greek world.
This Way to the Cross, by C. A. Roberts (Broadman, 1966, 83 pp., $1.95). The ways of life that led to the Crucifixion are still operative today. Light and brief.
Body, Soul, Spirit: A Survey of the Body-Mind Problem, by C. A. Van Peursen (Oxford, 1966, 213 pp., $4.80). A profound theological-philosophical study. Translated from the Dutch.
Funeral Meditations, by William R. Baird, Sr., and John E. Baird (Abingdon, 1966, 128 pp., $2.50). Evangelical funeral sermonettes that show fhe blessing of death.
Paperbacks
How the Catholic Church Is Governed, by Henrich Scharp (Paulist Press, 1966, 128 pp., $.75). An account of how the total power of the pope is structured in the Roman Catholic Church, plus a sketch of a pope’s typical day.
The Anarchists, by James Joll (Grosset and Dunlap, 1966, 303 pp., $2.45). A very fine study of anarchism as a religious faith and as a rational philosophy.
What Jesus Had to Say About Money, by Frank C. Laubach (Zondervan, 1966, 64 pp., $1). The “Apostle to the Illiterates” argues that anyone who has a bank account or property, or an automobile and a house, is rich.
Living Room Dialogues, edited by William B. Greenspun and William A. Norgren (National Council of Churches and Paulist Press, 1965, 256 pp., $1). A guide for discussion among Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant laymen.
Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis (Eerdmans, 1966, 145 pp., $2.45). First published in 1947. Good reading for the literary-minded.
Reprints
Light from the Ancient East, by Adolf Deissman (Baker, 1965, 535 pp., $7.95). A classic. First published in 1922.
A Historical Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, by William M. Ramsay (Baker, 1965, 478 pp., $6.95). A commentary not on the text but on the complex of historical problems associated with Galatians. From the 1900 edition.
A System of Biblical Psychology, by Franz Delitzsch (Baker, 1966, 585 pp., $8.95). A book of considerable historical interest by an author whose Platonism often shines through. First printed in 1855.
The Creeds of Christendom, Volume III: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds, with Translations, by Philip Schaff (Baker, 1966, 966 pp., $12.95). A very valuable classic long out of print. There is still no substitute for it.
The Beginnings of Christianity, Part I: The Acts of the Apostles, Volume IV: English Translation and Commentary, by Kirsopp Lake and Henry J. Cadbury (Baker 1965, 423 pp., $7.95). Far better than the average.
Eutychus
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A layman with a fetish
Unripe Instincts
It is about time that more people know that Red Oak, Iowa, is a pretty important stop on the Burlington. All the big Zephyrs stop and go either east or west—the California Zephyr, the Denver Zephyr (one of the best trains in the world), and the Ak-Sar-Ben (which is Nebraska spelled backwards). So Red Oak is a good place to be if you want to go east or west.
Waiting for the California Zephyr a couple of months ago, I had a chance to watch the other customers. I never saw a happier group than some people, somewhere around forty-five to fifty years of age, who were seeing one of their gang off to the west. The only sour note was a high school girl belonging to one of the couples, who stood around with a bored and haughty mien.
So why was she bored? Well, there wasn’t much to people taking a trip on a grand train to the west, though the old folks were putting on a pretty giddy display. There she stood, with the last word in shoes and slacks, and on top an athletic jacket too big for her. This I presume was her status symbol, the jacket of some high school hero. In addition to a chenille letter, chenille stripes on the sleeve, a chenille name on the back (I want to look into this chenille business—it looks like a good one), and all kinds of awards pinned on and around the varsity letter, she wore a gold football on a chain around her neck. But with all this she was bored. One wonders why.
About two weeks ago I gave the baccalaureate address at a state university, and I had a chance to talk for a while with the president before we were put through our paces. We were commenting on how high school students are all “used up” before they get to college. There isn’t much left to do in college any more. It has all been done—bands, big-name orchestras at the proms, pep clubs, caps and gowns—the whole bit. And I have seen pictures of kindergarten groups graduated in caps and gowns.
Socially ambitious parents and selfish children demand everything, and right now. “The trouble with American youth,” said a very wise man, “is the overindulgence of unripe instincts.”
EUTYCHUS II
Fetishes And Quirks
Re “Clergymen I Have Known,” by Lance Zavitz (June 24 issue): Then there are laymen who have the fetish which assails fetishes of the cloth, but who do not, on the other hand, offer one sentence (in a page and three-quarters, for example) that explains the goal behind national discussion of these quirks.
CLEMENT WM. K. LEE
Detroit, Mich.
In my mailbox today were the June 24 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and the June 20 issue of the National Observer. I found articles in both to be relevant.…
In Lance Zavitz’s article I read: “One of the more recent fetish words is ‘relevance,’ which means ‘bearing upon or applying to the case in hand.’ It is something of a shock to hear a preacher question whether Christ’s teaching is relevant to world conditions today and then reply in the negative, while declaring in the same sermon that Christianity should permeate every area of Christian experience.”
The National Observer article on “What’s Buggin’ the Campus” says: “One criterion of a good education, strongly urged by a vocal and committed group of students is relevance … relevance to the world of modern politics and social ferment, relevance to the human condition in mass society, relevance to the doubts, fears and hopes of thoughtful youth.”
Three episodes are then quoted for relevance in this context. The first tells of a “tall quiet undergraduate at a big Midwestern university”—“his voice was tight, but his words were clear.” “Why do you guys keep badgering us about what we do in the South or on the picket lines? It’s a little more exciting, but it’s not very different from what we’re doing when we work in mental hospitals or tutor Negro kids. That’s where we really learn what kind of world we’re really living in, and how to get along in it. We don’t in your blank blank classrooms.”
I respectfully suggest that we might well consider the relevance of the campus article by simply substituting “churches” for “classrooms.” Personally, I fear that in many churches, including the one I serve, the worshipers don’t get what is relevant to the kind of world they are really living in. For example, what goes on in their minds, if anything, when they hear God addressed as “our Heavenly Father”?
W. FRED WILLS
Simi Valley Presbyterian Church
Santa Susana, Calif.
Spiritual Values In Psychology
No one could intelligently take issue with the premise of Richard Cox (“Pseudo-Psychology in the Church,” June 24 issue) that evangelicals should seek to determine the highest academic and professional qualifications of psychologists with whom they associate and invite into their church meetings. On the other hand, taking offerings at counseling seminars, writing letters to persons with problems, conducting one-day seminars in counseling, and recommending one’s own books to individuals with emotional needs seems far less incriminating than Dr. Cox’s significant silence regarding the spiritual qualifications of the professional psychologist. Perhaps he places this consideration below academic training and affiliation in the professional organizations.…
Of course we should always seek professionally competent psychologists. But Dr. Cox’s impressive neglect of the importance of spiritual values in the profession of psychology, and his further suggestion that Christians who are psychologists should place themselves under the regulatory jurisdiction of professional associations which obviously know nothing about the very heart and essence of that spiritual dimension which alone forms the basis of the Christian counselor’s ministry, is unthinkable.…
MARK ALLEN
Wilmington, Del.
Having a very personal interest in the Covenant Counseling Center, may I say “thank you” for “Pseudo-Psychology in the Church.”
MARY LYONS
West New York, N. J.
Permission Granted
The article “One Race, One Gospel, One Task” which appears in the April 29 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, is such a stimulating message that we would like to have permission to reprint this article for a tract to be distributed free, for our church work in evangelism.
G. H. J. THIBODEAUX
Dept. of Evangelism General Secretary
A. M. E. Church
Shreveport, La.
Campus, Church, And Gospel
May I wholeheartedly congratulate you for printing “The Campus and the Church,” by Bob Auler (June 10 issue).…
College students are searching for the Truth. God’s Word has this Truth, and it is up to God’s messengers to see that the seekers find this Truth.…
BILL PHILLIPS
Assoc. Pastor
Chestnut Street Baptist
Ellensburg, Wash.
Southern Perspective
Many of us in the South are appalled by your attempted exoneration of James Meredith and his march on Jackson. How can you be possibly taken in by this cheap publicity stunt (as was also 1965’s notorious march on Montgomery)?…
Mississippi Negroes, who love the South as their homeland, will have nothing to do with this low-down riff-raff (white and colored) who invade the Southland with their cries of revolution.… Only an ostrich would deny that this philosophy is not Communistic.…
And all Southerners deeply resent your scurrilous reference to “the displaying of the Confederate flag in the South.” You owe an apology to those thousands of heroes who sincerely and honestly died for the lost cause of the Confederacy a hundred years ago!
JOHN H. KNIGHT
First Presbyterian
Opelika, Ala.
No Justification?
The review of my latest book, A New Approach to Sex (June 10 issue), contains a statement the reviewer had no justification for making: that my “theology is essentially non-Christian.”
I utterly deny that allegation. No one could be more firmly convinced than I that the life of Jesus is the most important event since the creation of the universe.…
WILLIAM FAY LUDER
Dept. of Chemistry
Northeastern University
Boston, Mass.
• The protest seems strange in the light of the following quotations from A New Approach to Sex:
Christians must admit that we cannot know any more of God than we can learn from Jesus. If they do this they can throw away irrelevant theology and pious phraseology (including some of Paul’s ideas) and return to the teaching of Jesus.…
God does not want to be worshiped. If we cannot understand what we see of the universe, can human beings—in this life at least—expect to know God? Why should we waste time on a theology of the unknowable?
We cannot know God. To claim that we can is the self-righteousness of the Pharisees.
The time has come for followers of Jesus to present him to the world as the scientist he was.—ED.
Reaching The Urban Millions
Let me congratulate CHRISTIANITY TODAY on an excellent issue (June 10) dealing effectively with a lot of practical problems of applying the Gospel to the life of the inner city.
Churches might do well to call a moratorium on a lot of things currently on the agenda and concentrate on the reaching of the urban millions in America. In the wisdom of God there must be some way.
ADIEL J. MONCRIEF
Church Editor
The Tampa Tribune
Tampa, Fla.
The Prophet Made His Point
Thank you for printing the article “Is There a Prophet in the Land?” (June 24 issue). In pointing out that the Church is failing in its prophetic mission, John Thompson has touched a sensitive spot, and his accusing finger is pointed so directly that all clergymen who read the article will surely feel uncomfortable. We need more writing like this to shake us loose from our complacency and lethargy, and to help point us back in the direction of our true mission as clergymen.
RICHARD GOINS
First Christian Church
Oskaloosa, Iowa
May I suggest humbly to the author that if his article is to take on the relevance that he asks for in the pulpit, his “applied Christianity” be taken to a local pastorate.
As a boy, I used to attend a small Baptist church in Maine. Every Sunday night they would sing this chorus, “Lord, Send a Revival, and Let It Begin in Me.” This is my word to the John Thompsons, the Peter Bergers, and the Gibson Winters: “The fields (the local pastorates) are white unto harvest” for the type of preaching that these men advocate.…
To all who would be reformers, and heaven knows we need them, I would say, “Lord, send a revival, and let it begin in me.” The fields are white unto harvest.
RICHARD D. ELDRIDGE
Pompey United Church
Pompey, N.Y.
Send It To The Bishop
I can’t tell you how I thank our Lord for a conservative publication such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY.… Bruce Metzger’s essay, “The Meaning of Christ’s Ascension,” (May 27 issue) was the best I’ve ever read on the subject of the Ascension. Please have a copy sent to Bishop Robinson (Honest to God) in England, whose mind is so limited by space and time that he can’t see beyond the existential.…
LONNIE KRAGEL
Hampton, Iowa
The True Teaching On Baptism
Re Dr. Daane’s Review of G. R. Beasley-Murray’s Baptism Today and Tomorrow (June 10 issue): Whatever values Beasley-Murray finds in infant baptism and regardless of Daane’s prejudices in favor of pedo-baptism, it is quite apparent that the conclusions of neither on this facet of baptism are biblical!…
Beasley-Murray’s belief that “all the chief Christian doctrines are involved in the theology of baptism” is a biblical conclusion borne out by Romans 6 among other texts. If evangelicals could get back behind “hereditary total depravity” on the one hand and “faith only” on the other and receive the Scriptures without Reformation presuppositions, then evangelicals could find a basis for oneness that has so far eluded the ecumenists.
Baptism, as taught by Paul, Peter, and Jesus himself, is neither “water salvation” nor “salvation by works” but rather the believer’s response in faith to God’s grace (1 Peter 3:21) and the point at which the believer identifies with, receives the benefits of, and unites in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Romans 6:1–14), following which the Holy Spirit of God is imparted (Acts 2:38) and the new life is begun (John 3:1–15, Romans 6:4).…
CHARLES A. SHELTON
The Church of Christ
Campbell, Calif.
A Soldier Speaks
Re your editorial “The Church and the Viet Nam-Bound Soldier” (May 13 issue): To say the least, I believe that this article borders on a shocking truth, that the Church is guilty of indifference to the military man.…
The article stated that the soldier wanted to “know whether the Church regards this service as worthwhile.” Unfortunately, I do not believe that the Church can honestly answer that question. That the Church cannot answer that question is largely due to its obsolete concepts of the role of the fighting man and the importance and worth of his military career. The Church has outdated concepts that the military man is essentially corrupt and that a Christian cannot exist within the realms of military life without succumbing to its evils. Thus it is my opinion that the Church, though it superficially sympathizes with the soldier, cannot honestly, as a whole, sense his needs and longing desires for love and fellowship.…
RICHARD G. GARTRELL, Lt. jg.
U.S.S. Providence
San Francisco, Calif.
More On The Institute
Your suggestion for the establishment of an Institute for Advanced Christian Studies (May 13 issue) is most timely.
The great change which I noticed in the university world after coming back from Australia was the presence of great numbers of evangelical faculty members. It is still my feeling that the greatest single untapped source of manpower for the evangelical cause lies here.…
CHARLES TROUTMAN
Wheaton, Ill.
It’s a great idea. Here is my dollar and a quarter since we’re a little deflated in Canada just now.
K. E. HALL
Ottawa, Ontario
I am prompted to add my dollar.… I am a teacher in Denver public schools.
OSSIE JANE OZBIRN
Denver, Colo.
Here’s my dollar for the institute.…
LARRY WATKINS
Hays, Kan.
You are to be commended for pointing up two things in recent articles and editorials: the carefully cultivated illusion of far too many professionals in religious circles that evangelical Christianity is merely a reactionary nostalgia for frontier Christianity and the mistaken belief that it is to be reckoned with only in terms of some kind of theological therapy or re-education of those so afflicted.…
You are also to be commended for noting that evangelicals ought to bolster their intellectual status.…
Perhaps … your proposal for an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies should be seriously considered and implemented under adequate leadership as soon as possible. Nothing could be more advantageous to evangelicalism now than a genuine strengthening of its intellectual status.
Here’s my dollar!
MILTON D. HUNNEX
Dept. of Philosophy
Willamette University
Salem, Ore.
I am … sending you a check for $5.00, this being $1.00 for each member of our family plus an extra one for good measure.…
ELBERT H. HADLEY
Carbondale, Ill.
Enclosed please find two dollars from myself and my wife.…
CHRISTIANITY TODAY continues to be my window on the evangelical world, from which I am able to gain satisfying perspectives in the midst of seeming contradictions, cross-currents, and eddies.
RAYMOND P. JOSEPH
Reformed Presbyterian
Greeley, Colo.
Want to add our bit to your institute fund!
ORVILLE S. WALTERS
Director of Health Services
University of Illinois
Urbana, Ill.
Enclosed you will find two dollars, for my wife and myself.… I trust that the Lord will bless this venture of faith.
Should your plans materialize, be sure that we will be regular contributors.
R. HOWARD MCCUEN JR.
Webster Presbyterian
Webster, Pa.
I dare not praise you for your latest idea of a Christian advanced studies center without my dollar; it is herewith enclosed.…
DOUGLAS FEAVER
Dept. of Classical Languages
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, Pa.
The Institute for Advanced Christian Studies is an excellent idea. Enclosed is my dollar.…
E. EARLE ELLIS
New Brunswick Theological Seminary
New Brunswick, N. J.
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The recent Seminar on the Authority of Scripture, held at Gordon College and Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts, may prove of historic importance for intra-evangelical relationships. The ten days of independently sponsored discussion were a significant though wholly unofficial demonstration of evangelical ecumenicity on the scholarly level. As such, they undoubtedly led to better understanding among evangelical scholars. Participants did not always agree, but they expressed their differences with candor and mutual respect, and within the fellowship of those who acknowledge the authority of the Bible as that of Christ himself.
It is heartening that some fifty scholars from ten countries and from various ecclesiastical backgrounds could find agreement in such vital matters as the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture, its complete truthfulness, and its authoritativeness as the only infallible rule of faith and practice. While important questions, among them the concept of inerrancy, were left for further study, the report adopted (see News, p. 41) shows that, when scholars who are committed to the supreme authority of Scripture talk to one another candidly and at length, they will discover important areas of agreement and be encouraged to increased scholarly activity.
In such discussion there might be tendencies that could lead on the one hand to isolationism within a doctrinaire orthodoxy and on the other hand to concessiveness to underlying liberal assumptions. But this need not happen if evangelical scholars continue to stand under the supreme authority of Scripture. Indeed, the ten days at Wenham may prove to be the catalyst evangelical scholarship has long needed for strengthening its forces and challenging liberalism anew. Certainly the following resolution passed by the seminar shows that there is much land yet to be taken:
In view of the great need within the evangelical community and in the whole Church, we recommend:
I.Work on the highest possible level of scholarship in these and similar fields:
A.The production of critical commentaries on the Hebrew and Greek texts.
B.An up-to-date statement of the Warfield position on Scripture.
C.Thorough discussion of inerrancy—the history of the use of the term, its scope, definition and so on.
D.Discussion of the inter-relationship of metaphysics, theology, and exegetical studies.
E.Discussion of language and Scripture, including divine communication through human elements.
F.Hermeneutics, including basic principles, close analysis of the history of hermeneutics, literary genre, and the use and control of presuppositions.
G.The nature of truth and the verification of the truth of Scripture.
II.The need for evangelical scholars to maintain fellowship and contact by:
A.Taking opportunities at such meetings as those of the Evangelical Theological Society, the American Academy of Religion, and other learned societies to meet on specific projects.
B.Theologians and biblical scholars continuing to meet together.
C.Finding means to extend this fellowship on an international level—e.g., the Tyndale Fellowship for biblical research in Britain.
III.A system of foundation grants, enabling individuals or small groups of scholars to pursue specific and agreed projects.
IV.The encouragement of evangelical institutions to strengthen their sabbatical-leave programs and to foster research by their faculty members.
V.A plea to the scholarly community to pay more attention to truly biblical research and academic writing and to resist temptation to popularize in areas already adequately covered.
Here is a call to evangelical scholars to lengthen their cords and strengthen their stakes. Heads of evangelical seminaries, colleges, and foundations, as well as Christian publishers, might well ponder these recommendations.
Why Hate The Bible?
The mailbag of a magazine contains everything from bombs to bonbons. The same bag that brings joy brings sorrow. One letter expresses the highest praise, the next the most scathing criticism.
Recently our mail bag has contained some printed material that explodes with hatred for the Bible. This does not come from readers in the neo-orthodox and liberal traditions, where the Bible may be badly used at times but is certainly not hated. It comes, rather, from people divorced from the Christian tradition who denigrate the Bible and refuse to find anything good in it.
One pamphlet alleges that there are contradictions, doctored passages, absurdities, tyranny, cannibalism, barbarities, atrocities, impossibilities, insane sex ideas, human sacrifice, and injustice to women within the Bible.
The author claims these facts are known to church leaders, who conceal them from the laity. “One-half the clergy are well-housed hypocrites,” he says; “the other half are poor ignoramuses.” Further, “the Bible is the greatest hoax in all history. The leading characters of the Old Testament would today be in the penitentiary and those of the New would be under observation in psychopathic wards.”
Why this hatred of a book that has led millions of people to a better life and produced fruits no one could object to? Some say, “It’s antiquated and outdated.” But nobody hates outdated textbooks in biology or chemistry. Others say, “It’s a collection of fables and myths.” But nobody hates Andersen’s Fairy Tales. No one wants to start a bonfire with Aesop’s Fables. No campaigns are mounted against Jupiter, Minerva, or Diana.
How ridiculous to say, as the author of this pamphlet does, that “if bad books are burned, the largest bonfire should consist of Bibles.” Yet what is perhaps most absurd of all is the assertion that “the Higher Critics have won. Their victory makes the Fall a fiction and the Atonement an absurdity. The descendants of apes need no savior.”
How true! Descendants of apes need no Saviour. Only men do.
Graham In A ‘Green And Pleasant Land’
“In America, it’s popular to go to church. In many places you have to go to be respectable or to get ahead in business. Here in London it’s the opposite—you’re sort of an odd person if you go to church.”
As usual, Billy Graham described the situation bluntly. Many American churchgoers are shams, but at least they go. In Britain, the situation is so bleak that many an active Christian has slipped into a kind of despondent minority-group attitude.
It took courage for Graham and his associates to enter this unpromising situation. The response they got (see p. 39) can be explained only as the result of the unheralded efforts of thousands of Britons and the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit.
Mass evangelism is nothing new to Britain. Graham has been there before, and Gipsy Smith and Dwight L. Moody were there before him. There are also many British evangelists. Yet somehow the call for public profession of commitment seems to go against the British grain.
On the eve of Graham’s arrival, lurking resentments boiled forth in Jim Hunter’s new novel The Flame, which appears to be England’s counterpart of Elmer Gantry. The Times Literary Supplement observed that the novel “assumes that evangelical fervour, conservative politics, and race hatred form an ineluctable syndrome. This, a flattering assumption for readers on the Left, is neither true nor helpful.” After watching the handling of Graham on a TV discussion program, a columnist in Newcastle-on-Tyne communicated that one would have thought the evangelist “was peddling something nasty like racialism, Fascism, or how to squeeze just one more gambling den into England’s green and pleasant land.”
Secular carping is predictable, but the abuse of a dedicated evangelist by those within the church is strange indeed. In an age when ecumenism seems to overcome all, Graham is ostracized by some on the grounds that his views of the Bible are too conservative. (If only these critics were as particular when it comes to liberal theology.)
Billy Graham is not simply an American-style evangelist but a New Testament-style evangelist. The main and continuing criticism is not that he uses TV, pancake makeup, a Southern accent, advertising, a fairly large staff, or popular-styled music, but that he does little more than preach what was preached in the first century, albeit with contemporary references.
The thousands of crusade converts, most of them young people, seem a small band compared to the armies of secularism. But quiet, grass-roots soul-winning will go on long after the Billy Graham team returns to America and the mass meetings are fading memories. And this could remake a nation.
The Good Gift Of Wholesome Humor
By the way, whatever happened to humor—honest humor, that good gift of God? The question was brought to mind in part by the recent death of Ed Wynn.
We recall pleasantly those ante-TV evenings of listening to Ed Wynn on the radio as the Texaco Firechief. Wynn, master of the pun and giggle, was a truly funny man. For half a century he brought his audiences a little bit of respite from the sometimes terrifying facts of daily life.
In a day when many comedians seem to feel that success depends on titillating their audiences with prurient appeals, it is refreshing to recall that Wynn rose to the top of his field by being not only funny but also wholesome.
We salute the memory of Ed Wynn, a master practitioner of the good gift of wholesome humor and hope for a worthy successor.
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Current theories have lost not only an authoritative Word but God himself
Professor J. V. Langmead Casserley, of Seabury Western Theological Seminary (Episcopal), makes a devastating point when he indicts modern biblical scholarship for producing “a way of studying the word of God out of which no word of God ever seems to come.” And although he cannot agree with the fundamentalists, he sees them as men who “have tried to react against a real scandal.” His word is not too strong.
It is important to see that the modern critical method is, by its very nature, unable to give us a divine word. That no word from God has so far appeared is not simply an accident. It is inherent in the very method of modern scholarship that the divine utterance cannot be found. To a man, adherents of this method denounce propositional revelation. They pride themselves on employing an objective approach that should commend itself to every scientific observer, believer or not. By confining their appeal to what the unbeliever can accept, they effectively prevent themselves from making use of any idea they might have that there is some quality of inspiration about the Bible. Given their method, there cannot be a word from God; it is simply not there. The Bible contains words of prophets and apostles, but these are little if anything other than the thoughts that came to godly men of an earlier day as they wrestled with then-current problems. It is for us to heed their example and to grapple in the same spirit with the very different problems of our day. But we cannot say of any passage, “This is a word from God.”
Evangelicals do not agree completely on how inspiration and inerrancy are to be understood. Few would claim that any way of stating it is the last word on the matter. But at the very least, evangelicals have tried to give due weight to Scripture’s constantly repeated “Thus saith the Lord” and have seen in the Bible a book whose message is to be taken with full seriousness and proclaimed to the very ends of the world. In giving due emphasis to the human authors of the Bible, they have tried not to overlook the divine.
Not only has modern theology lost the authoritative word of God; it has lost God himself, for “God is dead.” Many who use this expression mean, of course, not that there is no God at all, but only that a wrong way of thinking of him is now seen to be false. But the result of much recent writing has been to rid theology of God’s presence. Bultmann speaks of substituting anthropology for theology, and Bishop John Robinson approves. Instead of seeing God as a person, Robinson prefers to think of “the Ground of our being,” though what that means he fails to make clear. Plainly, God can no longer be addressed as “Our Father,” and this is an immeasurable spiritual loss.
With the loss of God goes the loss of vital personal religion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with his demand for “religionless Christianity,” looked for a day when there would be no religion at all. For men “come of age,” he thought, religion is not necessary or even desirable. Such an approach stresses secular life and minimizes the place of the spiritual.
A marked feature of recent theological writing is the very slight attention given repentance. This should perhaps be qualified by adding, “as a demand upon the world.” The Church, it appears, should repent. Churchmen have been guilty of saying their prayers and reading their Bibles and singing their hymns when they might have been out in the secular world living out the implications of the secular gospel. They are rebuked and, though the term is not used, invited to repent and to reform their ways.
Through the centuries Christians have consistently called on the world to repent and believe in Jesus Christ. Until recently this has not appeared to be a course for which they should apologize. The call for repentance and trust has been considered a part of the message of the Gospel. Until they face and accept this radical demand, men have been regarded as not Christian. Today, while there is not an express repudiation of this, yet the thrust of the modern writers is clearly otherwise. Repentance and penitence have dropped out of their vocabulary, as has faith in Christ. Although they often seek a certain response of faith in the existential situation, this faith is featureless, without content.
Certainly such a faith is not faith in Christ crucified and risen as the Church has always understood it. One would have to be a wise man indeed to understand what some writers mean when they call Christ “the Man for others.” Their Christ is not the sinner’s Substitute standing between them and their sins. He is not “the propitiation for our sins,” as John describes him; nor was he made “a curse for us,” as Paul puts it. Evangelicals have sometimes interpreted the New Testament doctrine of the Atonement all too crudely; but despite all their errors they end up with a Christ who really did save men. They rejoice in a finished salvation available for men here and now. This gives them a Christian life they can experience for themselves and a Gospel they can preach with conviction. But the Christ of the modern critics does very little for men—so little, in fact, that it is difficult to say with any precision what he does.
It is perhaps fittingly trinitarian that just as God the Father has dissolved into “the Ground of out-being,” and God the Son into “the Man for others,” so God the Holy Spirit has gone into eclipse. He does not appear even to have a new designation. He is simply ignored. It is rare indeed in recent theological writing to see a reference to the enrichment of life and empowerment for service to be expected when the Holy Spirit comes into a man’s heart and life. This is all of a piece with the humanistic thrust of the whole new theology. There is no divine dynamic. How could there be, in a creed with so many negations?
Eschatology is one of the “in” subjects. We hear of “realized eschatology,” of “consistent eschatology,” of “reinterpreted eschatology,” of “inaugurated eschatology,” and much more. But somewhere in the multitude of eschatologies the personal return of the Lord Jesus Christ has been misplaced. “The blessed hope” has such a new look these days that we wonder why the noun is even retained.
Every generation must face the critical questions that arise out of the life of that generation. We are no exception. But when we are offered such husks as these, we must firmly refuse them. The spiritual hunger of today will not be satisfied with half-truths and negations.
There is room for criticism of evangelical theology. It is far from having met all the intellectual challenges that confront it. But with all its faults, it at least gives men something on which their souls can feed. It turns them to a heavenly Father who loves them and makes provision for them, to a Christ who loved them and gave himself up for them, and to a Holy Spirit who pours God’s love into their hearts and directs and empowers them so that they may be the kind of people they ought to be.
Doxology For The God-Slayers
We get more than a little weary of the many tributes paid the death-of-God theorists by religious spokesmen who are presumed to be guardians of the faith.
Altizer, Hamilton, and Van Buren, we are told, have “insights” that Christ’s Church dare not ignore; they fill an important apologetic role to the world in a secular age, it is said. Moreover, they have made faith in God a vital theme of discussion—so the tribute runs—in a day when spiritual concerns are widely neglected.
All this sounds much as if the case for theism gains its vitality in the long run from the activity of the devil.
It was curious indeed, some months ago, to hear the Anglican bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, telling an audience at Indiana’s Wabash College that orthodox Christianity unwittingly undermined faith in the reality of the spiritual world by insisting on the reality of Satan. Yet, almost in the same breath, Robinson saluted God’s pallbearers. After describing the God-is-dead phenomenon as “a bubble that will soon burst,” he insisted that “this is the kind of protest we should listen to.”
A theology that no longer takes Satan seriously soon finds the shadow of the divine everywhere.
A theology that thinks the Living God gains vitality in the modern world through an affirmation of his demise is unworthy of Christian respect, however orthodox it professes to be.
A few weeks ago we were visiting with Elton Trueblood, who displayed his gift for the right comment in a reference to the paean of praise coming from theologians and denominational leaders over emergence of the death-of-God theology. “The immaturity of the response,” said Trueblood, “is almost as great as the immaturity of the attack.” We heartily agree.
Ideas
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Despite their virtues, evangelicals have defects enough to drive them to their knees in quest of renewal
Evangelicals are doing some things pretty well. They have a firm hold on the saving truths of the Gospel and they teach them fervently. Wherever there is a faithful evangelical ministry, men are challenged to decide for Christ, and they are constantly warned against thinking that faith can ever be secondhand. This emphasis on individual commitment contrasts with the anonymity of much modern life. It is all too easy for men to find themselves lost in the mass—social, political, or even ecclesiastical. This evangelical virtue often goes unnoticed, for it is not spectacular. An individual’s commitment to Christ cannot be photographed (as can, for example, a clergy committee calling on congressmen or the President). But it is no less important for that.
Again, evangelical Christians, as Dr. Richard C. Halverson of International Christian Leadership notes, are supplying much of the most competent scholarship in both systematic and biblical theology. “At a time when Protestantism in general is retreating from biblical theology, many evangelicals are being renewed in it.” Their conviction that the Bible is the record of God’s revelation to men leads to a concern for biblical teaching that is not characteristic of the Church as a whole.
They have a zeal for orthodox Christianity that is needed in a day that puts little stress on right belief. Their stubborn adherence to biblical truth is valuable when men are inclined to base their beliefs on the conclusions of a secular world. Their call for conversion and commitment points to a necessity in the face of an easy-going readiness to let every man go his own way so long as he is well intentioned. Their demand that a Christian’s life show Christian virtues is never out of season, least of all now when it is the new fashion to scoff at old-fashioned virtues.
But there is no room for complacency. If it is true that evangelicals have certain virtues, it is equally true that they have the defects of those virtues. The place of the individual is important. But individualism can be pressed to the point of pride and divisiveness. Dr. Harold John Ockenga, minister of Park Street Church, Boston, can say, “I am convinced that the greatest weakness among evangelicals is their tendency to fragment and divide. There are too many ‘chiefs,’ not enough ‘Indians.’ There is too much proliferation in practical endeavor—in missions, humanitarian concern, or service agencies.”
This proliferation is, of course, not without its advantages. The competitive spirit has sometimes given rise to influential and powerful movements. But the other side of the coin can be disastrous. As Dr. Ockenga says, “The tragedy of our evangelical movement is that we have not been able to raise a banner of the necessary doctrines that rallies the various evangelical groups in full cooperative support of that banner.”
This charge must be taken with full seriousness. Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, general director of the National Association of Evangelicals, maintains that many evangelicals have “fallen into much the same trap that the World Council of Churches has. They have fellowship on an organizational level.” They ask, not, “Are you a twice-born follower of Christ?” but rather, “What movement do you belong to?” This leads to a pattern of isolation and an easy confusion of association with unsaved people and theological compromise. “Evangelicals need to distinguish friendship as a social relationship from fellowship as a spiritual relationship.”
“Keep the windows open,” pleads Dr. Wayne Dehoney, a Southern Baptist stalwart, “for fellowship with, understanding of, and cooperation with all other Christians who serve our common Lord.” Too often, he says, the attitude of exclusivism or indifference has kept conservatives from cooperating in a common cause. Too many chiefs lay down their own conditions for fellowship.
This hampers evangelical outreach. By concentrating on their own little circles, evangelicals have lost opportunities for doing two things: playing their full part in the community and reaching out in evangelism for the unsaved. Dr. Halverson thinks that “the greatest weakness of evangelical Christianity today is our tendency to think in conventional forms so far as church structure is concerned—both denominationally and locally. We seem to have great difficulty thinking of responsibility to the world outside the establishment of the Church as the place where Christ has put us to serve him. We tend to equate attendance at church meetings with spirituality; if the choice is between prayer meeting and PTA meeting, it is readily assumed that the saint will always forego the latter. But ‘the field is the world,’ as Jesus said, and our failure to learn this is our greatest area of weakness. Our involvement tends to be with the church establishment and Christians rather than with the ‘secular establishment’ outside the Church.”
When a man becomes a Christian, he does not cease to be a citizen. His Christian awareness ought to make him take civic responsibilities more rather than less seriously. There is a very real work to be done for God in those areas where the Church has no jurisdiction. And it can scarcely be said that evangelicals are doing this work with any real zest. The chiefs are plotting their own paths and ignoring the Bible’s directives about the community.
Another complaint of Dr. Taylor is that too many who are fundamentalist in doctrine are “often unloving, critical, and proud, and do not measure up to the standards which should be associated with evangelical personality.” This is all the more serious if what Russell Kirk, an incisive Roman Catholic spokesman, says is true: “Probably the most important and difficult problem plaguing Americans nowadays is the preservation of personality.” The evangelical emphasis on the new birth and supernatural virtues was never more relevant than it is amid the contemporary secular concern for “the cure of souls.”
Some who vigorously champion the inerrancy of the Bible make this belief (which NAE also holds) the test for eternal life—contrary to the example of the apostles—and consider all who disagree with them to be lost or damned. “What is most needed,” Dr. Taylor says, “is a baptism of love.” There would be a mighty revolution in some lives if men began to take seriously Paul’s words, “the greatest of these is love.”
Evangelicals have been alert to unmask the mainstream Protestant compromise of scriptural Christianity with secular culture and ideologies. They have rightly denounced the misuse of the Bible as a prop for independently formulated programs and the ready dismissal of biblical teaching that cuts across modernist views. But they have not been without compromises of their own. Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, points to an uncritical identification of extra-biblical cultural standards with God’s revealed will by extremists in various areas: the racist defense of segregation, for example, or the dismissal of all modern amusement as Satan’s precinct. And the fault is not confined to extremists. There is a widespread mood of “my country right or wrong” and, in reaction to attacks on patriotism and on free-market economics, a reluctance to criticize unrestrained capitalism, even when it seeks profit through harmful products.
There are abundant signs of the vitality of evangelicalism. Any movement that as a matter of principle subjects itself to the whole biblical message cannot but be renewed from age to age. But there is nothing automatic about the process. There is enough that is disquieting about modern evangelicalism to drive those who are concerned for it to their knees. Prayer and concern, not pride and complacency, must be our watchwords.
L. Nelson Bell
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I speak for a friend downgraded by some, laughed at by others. I speak for a friend, the victim of unjust criticism, picked apart here and rejected there. I speak for a friend accused of being irrelevant for our times and even of being a fraud. But I speak for a friend greatly loved and proved true and trustworthy over the years, by me and by countless others.
I speak for the Bible, the written Word of God. Despite the often heard assertion, “The Bible needs no defense,” surely its friends should not remain silent in the face of irresponsible criticism that may lead others to ignore, neglect, or reject it.
The integrity and authority of this friend, the Holy Scriptures, are at stake. Little by little men are whittling away at both, and in so doing they are striking at the Son of God, revealed in the Word.
We who accept the complete trustworthiness of the Bible can do so on the basis of sound reasoning. It is inconceivable that God would have given a revelation, part of which was subject to question.
Above all else, we believe the Bible because of the Christ revealed therein. The Lord must become experientially real to all Christians, but only in the Bible do we find who he is, what he did, and why he did it, and our overwhelming need of him as Saviour and Lord. Eliminate the biblical record and only vain speculation is left. Accept that record and there is revealed—in all his beauty and power—Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God.
I speak a word for the Bible because there, in the clearest possible perspective, one can see God at work in his creation and history. One sees, etched in words of fire, his own need and God’s provision for that need. Without the Word there would be no explanation for man’s existence, his predicament, and his hope. In the light of the Word, this world and the next fall into their proper relationships.
I speak for the Word because our Lord himself did not hesitate to make use of the Old Testament Scriptures, referring to them as accurate and authoritative. Were it not for our Lord’s use of the Scriptures, we would be ignorant of the meaning of many passages that refer to him. His simple statement, “… that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44, RSV), should impel us to search the Scriptures, which, our Lord said, “speak of me.”
I speak for the written Word because the apostles in their writings refer again and again to the Old Testament Scriptures in such a way as to affirm their complete truthfulness and authority.
Those who today inveigh against “proof texts” would do well to notice how frequently Jesus, and later his disciples, used such texts. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that these critics of “proof texts” do not hesitate to resort to the same authoritative source when to do so suits their purpose.
I speak a word for the Holy Scriptures because of the claims they make for themselves. They claim the inspiration of the Holy Spirit for what was written. Again and again we read the words of the prophets, “Thus saith the Lord,” and we sense that only God could so speak.
When we read the Apostle Paul’s bold statement, “All scripture is inspired by God …” (2 Tim. 3:16), or the Apostle Peter’s words, “… no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pet. 1:20, 21), we are led to believe and to thank God that this was so.
There are those who sneeringly say that some of us worship the Bible, that we are “bibliolaters.” How foolish men can get! I know of no person who worships the Bible, but I know of many who worship the Christ revealed therein. A surgeon does not worship his scalpel; but he trusts it. So those who have approached the Word of God with faith, who through the Holy Spirit have come to understand it and by the help of God have tried to obey it, are convinced that the Bible is what it claims to be, the written Word of God.
I speak a word for the Bible because inherent in it is a power present and possible only where the Holy Spirit reigns. The Apostle Paul described the written Word as the “sword of the Spirit.” Our Lord used three thrusts of this sword to defeat Satan in the wilderness. It has been used again and again by believers to stand firm in the face of the devil’s attacks.
Furthermore, preaching that is saturated with the Word of God, that is based on and confirmed by this divine revelation, touches hearts with the awareness of sin and transforms indifference into conviction and action. “Thus saith the Lord” still has its ancient power; God’s Word is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12).
I speak a word for the Holy Scriptures because of what they mean to me. They speak to my heart and go down to the innermost parts of my soul. Through them I hear someone speaking, and there is no question who it is. As the Bible speaks I accept it by faith; and having done this, I find that the way to understanding is opened. Not that I understand all. No one would be so foolish as to deny that there are depths of mystery whose edges we barely touch. It could not be otherwise; in the world the divine revelation is seen only dimly. We contemplate the universe with awe and reverence; how much more should we worship and praise the God of that universe for who he is and what he has done for us.
I also speak for the written Word of God because it expresses my soul’s deepest feelings and aspirations. David, who our Lord says was “inspired by the Spirit” (Matt. 22:43), not only gives us in the Psalms revealed truth and prophecy but also lifts our souls to heights of adoration and praise of God without which we would be poor indeed.
Finally, I speak a word for the Scriptures because I have tested God’s marvelous promises and found them true. He promises to guide, and when we turn to him he does just that. He promises to give wisdom, and when we admit our own insufficiency and lean on him he does not fail. He offers to help us in every contingency of life, and he makes good his offer. When sorrow comes he gives solace. With temptations he offers the way of escape. When his Kingdom is given precedence, the necessities of life are assured.
Yes, I am speaking for a friend; one ignored, maligned, neglected, downgraded, and often openly denied. I speak because in my heart I know the Scriptures are to be trusted, and by experience I know they are true. This is a love affair that has grown with the years. Where once a verse or a short passage made up the day’s reading, now there is joy in extended study. As in praying, so in reading the Holy Scriptures one meets God face to face. He brings rest for the soul today and hope for the future, in the person and work of his Son.
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A German Lutheran evangelist’s message to the Berlin congress
An Unexpected Commission
The cradle and the grave are two great obstacles to fulfillment of the Great Commission. Every day, a new multitude is born, and a vast prospect list vanishes; in the United States alone, there are 11, 227 births and 4,970 deaths daily.
But the lack of dedicated witnesses compounds the Church’s problem, and when death removes devout workers of evangelistic zeal the loss is felt doubly. On June 20 Christ “summoned home” one of this century’s outstanding German evangelists, the Rev. Wilhelm Busch, who had carried on a youth ministry in Lutheran churches abroad for thirty years. His remarks prepared for the World Congress on Evangelism (reprinted here) were in the form of a devotional Bible study—on the theme, ironically, of the need for more workers. Willy Busch, as his friends called him, knew—as do all those invited as delegates to the World Congress—that the task of global evangelism must rest upon the shoulders of every professing believer in Jesus Christ.
Born in 1897, Busch was one of eight children of a preacher in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. He attended the classical Lessing-Gymnasium and during World War I was a lieutenant at the front. “My comrades and I lived far from God, under the dismal dominion of the idols Bacchus, Venus, and Death,” he confessed. But amid the horrors of war he found God. “Beside the corpse of a friend God spoke to me. I was on my way to hell until I held a Bible and read that ‘Jesus Christ is come into the world to save sinners.’” He became a theological student in Tübingen. “Schlatter had me under his spell. Then Karl Heim. With Heim we forgot that we were hungry, and that no dinner awaited us.”
His Christian commitment led him to the Ruhr—first as minister in a mining district, then as youth minister in Essen from 1931 to 1962, when he devoted himself to itinerant lectures. “I have a message that must be taken seriously,” he said often. “It is: God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That’s what I live by.”
The World Congress on Evangelism will be deprived of the physical presence of Willy Busch. Perhaps the Lord of the Church desired for his message a wider audience than it would have had in the Berlin Kongresshalle. His Bible study follows.—ED.
But when Jesus saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd. Then said he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few; pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest [Matthew 9:36–38].
How many people are gathered here today? Even if we counted them very carefully, we would find in the last analysis that we had miscounted by one. This One we do not see. Everything, however, depends upon him. He is the most important Person at our gathering.
This One is the living Lord Jesus Christ. He is in our midst. And thus, as we see him and hear him in our text, it is he who acts and speaks among us. His words and works are always new and always of the highest relevance.
What Jesus says and does is not at all what we would expect but rather singular and astounding.
1. His eyes perceive things differently than do ours
“But when he saw the multitudes”—so begins our text.
Obviously, Jesus’ preaching enjoyed great outward success. It was public knowledge that he spoke with power, and that a word from him could even heal the sick. People came together in a great throng. I am convinced that the setting of our passage is a mass meeting.
We all know how exciting big gatherings are. Empty chairs and half-filled halls have a depressing effect upon us. But when multitudes gather, our hearts become glad. To see a vast crowd of people feeds the ego. A crowd elates and transforms the speaker.
But how differently the Lord approaches this throng! In fact, he doesn’t even see crowds; he sees only individuals, all kinds of them. And he sees each person’s needs, his dreary obligations, his unsatisfied desires, his sorrows and despair, his accusing, uneasy conscience, and his heavy heart.
“… he was moved with compassion on them.…”
I am certain that Jesus sees people today in exactly the same way. The incident in our text occurred almost 2,000 years ago. But what it says about people then is just as true of people today. The poet Goethe said: “Mankind is always progressing, but man as an individual never changes.” And so it is!
May I point out that right now, at this very moment, the Lord sees us, too, as we really are. In his eyes, such a congress as this is surely no impressive affair. He sees us—each individually—in our needs, in our unresolved personal problems, and also in our guilt and helplessness.
This is very comforting. In these days let us not be merely great missions strategists! Let us instead be people who are once again open to our great Helper and who learn anew to rejoice in him. “… he was moved with compassion on them.…”
At this point the Greek text uses very strong words to express how Jesus sees people: “… they were oppressed and trodden underfoot.” This is hardly an encouraging sight.
It happens again and again that persons are deeply impressed by the utter wretchedness of mankind. But they look upon their fellow men with cold detachment and refuse to become involved. Consequently they become cynical. I shall never forget one little experience I had when I became a pastor. “You will come to know men in their wretchedness,” my godly mother told me. “Be very careful that you never become a cynic!”
The wise of this world, the intellectually sophisticated and spiritually arrogant, have expressed such contempt again and again. Said Horace, the Roman poet: Odi profanum vulgus et arceo (I hate the masses and keep them at a distance). And the Pharisees in Jesus’ time said: “This people who knoweth not the law are cursed” (John 7:49).
Jesus, the Son of the living God, is the only one who has the right to view us humans at a distance, for he is the only one who could say of himself: “I am from above, you are from below.” He is the only one who has no share in the degradation of mankind. And more profoundly than any wise and any spiritually eminent one, Jesus sees all of mankind’s suffering and misery. After all, he knew man before the Fall. He knew and knows how God intended man to be. He sees the actual depth of our fall.
Yet this One views our suffering with neither the arrogance of the Pharisees nor the haughtiness of Horace. “… he was moved with compassion on them.…”
Here in the Greek we find an unusually strong word. It could be translated: “His heart turned within him.” Yes, his heart was so moved with compassion that he identified himself completely with the “oppressed and the downtrodden.” Never, in the last analysis, was anyone so despised as was Jesus in his Passion. And the misery of the world broke his heart as he died on Golgotha’s cross.
“… he was moved with compassion on them; because they were oppressed and downtrodden like sheep that have no shepherd.”
What has become of the impressive crowd? Now we see only individuals whom the devil has oppressed, betrayed, and seduced, who have been disillusioned a thousand times in the race toward oases that proved to be only mirages. Here now are men who have lost their original divine image. Here are men who—perhaps without being aware of it—are suffering under the burden of their guilt. Guilt before God is indeed a reality. It is a burden, even if man does not recognize it as such.
The Danish philosopher and theologian Sören Kierkegaard tells how as a boy he often took walks with his father. Sometimes the father would stop, look thoughtfully at his son, and say: “You poor child! You’re walking in a kind of quiet desperation.” Jesus is aware that all men are walking in quiet desperation.
And now we read something terrible: “… they are like sheep that have no shepherd.”
Everywhere and in every age appear leaders who are ready to assume the office of shepherd. Here by one mighty utterance of God they are felled and humbled. We too are pushed aside. No man, no one at all, is in a position in which he can really help, because no man can repair or reverse the Fall.
But we cannot stop here. We must elaborate upon our text. He who thus evaluates man and sees us in this way is indeed himself the God-sent “good shepherd.” He has come—now I use his own words—”to seek and to restore the lost, to heal the wounded, and to offer life and fullness of joy.” He is the one who, through his coming, death, and resurrection, repairs the effects of the Fall.
He is truly this poor world’s only hope!
We must point out one particular item concerning Jesus’ vision. With great insight into the meaning of our passage, Luther translated it: “… they were scattered like sheep that have no shepherd.”
Our age suffers conspicuously from separation, from division. Individuals have no contact with their neighbors—and become isolated. Nations, races and social classes are separated. Churches are separated, as are individual Christians. They are “scattered like sheep that have no shepherd.”
At the Julier Pass in Switzerland I once met a shepherd. He told me how, one day, at an altitude of 8,000 feet, he was surprised by a sudden snowstorm. The sheep became terrified and ran wildly in all directions. In the thick mist and driving snow they did not see the abysses, and many fell to their deaths.
I then asked the shepherd: “What did you do?” He answered: “I climbed on a rock and shouted. Those sheep which heard my voice gathered around me, were united into one flock, and were rescued.”
We can enlarge upon our text by saying: Jesus the good shepherd stands in this our world and lets his voice ring out. The shepherd’s voice should be heard in all our speaking and preaching. Jesus says: “My sheep hear my voice.” In him alone will we be united.
I once heard the late Russian evangelical leader Ivan Stepanovitch Prochanov give the following impressive illustration. All of us, as it were, are running aimlessly about in a circle. No one overtakes another. We remain scattered. But as each one, on his own accord, travels along the radius of the circle to the center, we come closer together. The closer we come to the center, to the God-ordained center—namely, the Lord Jesus—the closer we come to one another.
In the one “Good Shepherd” we are united.
To summarize:
a.Jesus sees men as they really are, and we should learn to see men through his eyes!
b.He alone can help. And our service must consist in pointing men to him.
c.New men, united men, have their source in Jesus.
2. He views our prospects differently than do we
Here the Lord Jesus says something quite baffling: “The harvest is great.” We might think that this assertion was applicable 2,000 years ago. But—does it still apply in our day?
“The harvest is great.” Let us notice that Jesus does not say: “The field is great.” We could say a great deal about that. But here he is speaking about the harvest, which is ripe and ready to be gathered.
The fourth chapter of John’s Gospel records how the Lord Jesus had a personal, spiritual conversation with a frivolous woman at a well in a Samaritan city. The woman was so deeply moved that she ran into the city and told the people about Jesus. Thereupon they streamed out to meet him. When Jesus saw the multitude, he said to his disciples: “Lift up your eyes and look upon the field; it is already ripe for harvesting.”
In our passage, the masses flocked to Jesus without benefit of publicity. They came without the invitation of posters or loudspeakers. Here he could truly say: “The harvest is great.”
But how is the situation today? Church attendance in Christian countries is frightfully small. Young people are so preoccupied with their political, social, and economic problems that witnesses for Christ have a hard time getting a hearing. And so we are tempted to lose heart.
Its All Greek To Me
In reading about the New Testament, Christians are sometimes puzzled by citations of Greek words. Here is a beginner’s list of New Testament words along with Bible references showing their use. Try matching the words with their definitions. Use the references if you are in doubt. Answers are listed below.
ANSWERS
JAMES LEWIS LOWE
Philadelphia, Pa.
In my country there are Christians who maintain with all seriousness: “The time for missions and evangelism is gone. Our only task now is to prepare our congregations for the return of the Lord.”
But “Jesus says something different: “The harvest is great.” Such a sentence goes against our reason. And we ask ourselves whether we will believe statistics and lose heart, or whether we will believe the word of our Lord and be convinced that the opportunities for evangelism are tremendous. The world hungers for God and his salvation. And we may be sure that the world is waiting for our message.
In his book A la decouverte et an service de l’humain, Henri Ochsenbein tells of a project undertaken by a prominent Swiss publication. Reporters were placed in the Zürich railroad station to interview fifteen people at random as they stepped off the train. Promising a considerable remuneration and absolute confidentiality, the reporters were to inquire what problem at the moment was weighing most heavily on these people. The result was shattering. It became clear that almost every person suffered deep, painful conflicts which gnawed at the very roots of their being and for which they sought help and a valid solution.
Yes, the world hungers for God.
As a young pastor I was assigned to a mining area in the Ruhr district where people had totally abandoned the Church. The situation seemed hopeless. Here were no heathen who had yet to hear the Gospel. A harvest here seemed impossible. This was a truly post-Christian world. These men seemed to have left Christianity behind them.
I set out and went from house to house. Usually people tried to slam the door in my face and often shouted hatefully: “We don’t need a preacher!” But I already had my foot in the door, and I declared: “That’s true! You don’t need a preacher. But you do need a Saviour!” At that they were taken aback, and they opened the door.
A year later I needed only to go out on the street. Men and women came to me with their needs and cares—and also with their sins.
Once when I was conducting a very difficult evangelistic campaign in a small industrial city and was beginning to feel somewhat discouraged, a young coworker burst into the room where I was collecting my thoughts and shouted: “All signs point to victory!”
He didn’t concern himself with the men who came or didn’t come; rather, he saw his risen Lord. And it was in the overwhelming joy of the triumph of His resurrection that he shouted the glorious statement: “All signs point to victory!”
No doubt he bore in mind that the Lord will indeed return. And he remembered that we are not to perform our service as if what we contend for would collapse without our frantic efforts. The final outcome has already been decided. For this reason all signs do indeed point to victory. “The harvest is great.”
Let us be about our harvesting and rejoice like farmers who have been blessed with an abundant crop! Labor in the hot fields will entail hard work and sweat. But the harvest is plentiful and ripe. And it stands waiting in the fields.
3. He gives us an unexpected commission
In view of what has gone before we might now expect Jesus to say: “There are indeed few workers in the harvest. The situation is bad. But in order that at least something gets done, you must now go out and gather in God’s harvest.” Surely that is how Jesus’ discourse must continue.
But that is precisely what Jesus does not say. What he does and says runs counter to our way of reasoning. One other time Jesus did indeed send out his disciples as harvesters; the account of this is in the very next chapter. But here, where we might expect such a commission, he says something completely different: “Pray the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth workers into his harvest.”
I can imagine impetuous Peter thinking at this moment: “Lord! Here are twelve strong and willing harvest workers! Why should we be asking for workers when we’re just the people for the job?!”
But this is what Jesus says: “Ask the Lord for workers!” Perhaps then the meaning occurred to Peter: “Pray for yourself, that you may become a true laborer. As yet you are not the kind of harvester that the Lord requires.”
I don’t think that we, we who are gathered here, should be so almightily convinced that we are usable harvest laborers. We are indeed harvest laborers. But whether we are usable is often very doubtful.
As a student I was once in a village where grain was still being cut with a scythe. I wanted to help, and so I joined the reapers. But after five minutes I had to quit. I couldn’t handle the scythe correctly.
Today we lay great stress upon comprehensive training. Well, I have nothing against that. But even if I had been trained as a reaper, I still would not have been able to keep up with those men, because I did not possess their muscle strength.
Harvest laborers for Jesus Christ need more than training. They need divine power. Their own strength must be broken. They need to be spiritually equipped by the Lord.
“Pray the Lord for laborers!” This brings us to say, therefore, “O Lord! In our present state we are completely unqualified. Make us into true, empowered, cleansed, selfless, ardent, and zealous workers in thy harvest! Forgive us our constant presumption in thinking that we are just the ideal persons for thy task. We are nothing of the kind. Therefore do thou thyself prepare us for thy service!”
And then, of course, Jesus’ command clearly means that we should pray for more witnesses. I do not believe that Jesus means that we should pray particularly for more professional preachers and ministers. He is concerned about reviving slumbering Christians. We are to pray that men and women become alarmed at people’s misery and according to the measure of their strength do something for Jesus.
What can we expect as the result of such prayer?
“Pray the Lord of the harvest!” If we read the New Testament carefully, we discover that strange things happen to those who pray. Almost always their impassioned prayer receives a negative answer or none at all.
We remember the woman who ran after Jesus and cried. “My daughter is demon-possessed!” (Matthew 15: 22). Jesus merely answered that she did not belong to the people of Israel and that it was to these alone that he was sent.
Or there is the story of the government official who pleaded for his son. Jesus answered forthrightly: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe” (John 4:48).
Near Jericho a blind beggar sat and cried for help. But for a long time Jesus acted as though he didn’t hear him.
Other examples could be cited. Jesus himself told a parable about a man who at night knocks at a friend’s door and asks for bread. But the neighbor shakes his head and says that it’s really quite impossible to fulfill such requests at night.
While all these pleas were finally answered, it was only after some obstruction was overcome.
If the Lord is here commanding us, his disciples, to pray for workers in the harvest field, no doubt we may encounter a similar situation when we pray. Our request must be so heartfelt and so filled with awareness of the need in the harvest field, so persistent in behalf of its great concern, that we overcome the obstructions and obstacles. Then the “Lord of the harvest” will answer us.
What an impact would be felt if this gathering would unite to pray unceasingly for the quickening of Christendom and the awakening of laborers in the harvest fields!
Recently a major newspaper carried an article about the possibility of blasting the projected new Panama Canal out of bedrock with but one thrust of atomic power. Vividly the journalist painted the picture: as the President presses a small, insignificant button, suddenly enormous forces, forces beyond comprehension, are released that chart new paths for the ships of the world.
Much greater and mightier achievements will be released when, finally united, the disciples of Jesus obey the command stated here. With their feeble praying they will unleash a force and quickening far more powerful than that which all other efforts can accomplish.
Lord! Grant us the spirit of prayer. Give us eyes open to the great possibilities of our times. Grant us thy eyes, which see men as they really are and see them with compassion!Amen.