“That they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the Lord hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it.”
—Isaiah 41:20
This was the motto of the thirteenth annual convention of the American Scientific Affiliation, its first of the Sputnik age, held at Iowa State College in Ames, August 26–28.
Describing itself as “a group of Christian scientific men, devoting themselves to the task of reviewing, preparing and distributing information on the authenticity, historicity, and scientific aspects of the Holy Scriptures in order that the faith of many in Jesus Christ may be firmly established,” this evangelical organization pursues its goals not only through national conventions but also by means of local section meetings, book publication, and circulation of a quarterly journal.
ASA membership, up from an initial five in 1941 to more than 700 today, presumes a harmony between correct observations of science and “simple, direct interpretation of the Bible narrative,” inasmuch as Holy Writ and the physical world have the same Author. The scientists confess their faith as to the “inspired origin of the Bible” and “find in it a stimulating, satisfying, and irreplaceable contribution to their scientific picture of the universe.” As they seek to bracket the world of nature evangelically, they are reminded of two perils: “a too-ready acceptance of anything in the name of science and a forcing of scriptural interpretation to fit,” and the other extreme of a “stubborn clinging to some doubtful biblical exegesis which distorts the whole outlook.”
The stated chief function of the ASA is “to survey, study, and to present possible solutions”; and results of a convention are of necessity tentative, the conferees more often being dealt a delineation of the problem areas than rewarded with enduring answers.
Perennially, if not inescapably, the favorite topic of the conventions is evolution with its related subject matter. The 1958 convention was no exception. Consideration of this was delayed only until the afternoon of the first day when a panel discussion took place entitled “What Is a Kind?—the Species Problem.” Dr. J. Frank Cassel, chairman of the Zoology Department at North Dakota Agricultural College, set the mood with his stock reply to inquirers, “Tell me what a species is; I’ll tell you whether a Genesis ‘kind’ could be a species or not.”
Dr. Frank L. Marsh, professor of biology in Emmanuel Missionary College, Berrien Springs, Michigan, gave a paper on “The Genesis Kinds in our Modern World” in which he pointed out that basic types in Genesis, appearing through an act of special fiat creation, are described as “not only being formed each after its specific morphological pattern, but also with a reproductive mechanism which caused each type to produce new individuals like itself.”
In opposition to the doctrine of “extreme fixity,” Professor Marsh sees Genesis as neither excluding “the possibilities of variation within the kinds” nor asserting that “plants and animals were created in their present details and set down in the areas where we find them today.” But Darwin failed to observe that variation “is not without bounds” and is limited to basic type or Genesis kind.
Today’s creationist turns to nature to discover the degree of fixity indicated by Genesis. The existence of gaps between the basic types of organisms, with the discontinuity among the fossils, is one of the great problems of the evolutionist. More faith is required, claims Dr. Marsh, for the belief that “all modern types have evolved gradually from one or more simple blobs of protoplasm” than for the belief in “the theory of special creation.” Fossil evidence supports the Genesis-taught fixity of group characters (not all individual characters). There is no one category of classification today which corresponds to the Genesis “kind.” In different cases the created unit may be species, genus, family, or order.
Wheaton College’s Dr. Russell L. Mixter found himself “more or less” in agreement with Marsh’s conclusions but felt it unwise to think of these as the only possibility. The lack of fossil intergrades is “negative evidence” and with new discoveries “the gaps have been closing.”
Others commented on the fluidity of the definitions of species and Genesis kinds, said to make premature the arguments for their immutability.
General Chairman Walter R. Hearn, Iowa State College chemistry professor and confessedly “a sort of radical wing” of the ASA, asked his fellows whether if new Genesis kinds did arise, would this not simply be the result of God creating by process. He wondered also if the content of Genesis in regard to the kinds could not be reduced to meaning simply that offspring “resemble their parents to a certain degree.” “Theistic evolution is a legitimate concept for a Christian,” even as the spontaneous (natural) origin of life is a “legitimate working hypothesis.” Dr. Hearn also held out the possibility of man’s soul being created by God through an evolutionary process even as the theory concerning his body.
Such sentiments expressed in ASA meetings have caused concern in some quarters, amazement in others. And this division upon certain variations of the evolutionary theme persists in evangelical colleges. While the philosophy of scientific naturalism is of course rejected, the relationship of the evangelical’s God to the idea of evolutionary process is developed concessively or obscurely, some observers argue. The doctrines of sin and redemption are not considered threatened. But warnings are heard concerning assumptions of the finality of prevailing scientific theory and failure to do justice to certain statements in Genesis.
Though such issues loomed traditionally large on the convention agenda, members also found time to consider the following: a scholarly paper on “Frontiers of Space Research” by Dr. Robert M. Page, director of research, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D. C.; the moral implications of the nuclear fallout problem; a plea for support to agencies striving for world peace; and an endorsement of the proposed World Calendar as not contrary to Scripture.
The ASA is projecting its second volume, for next year’s Darwin centennial, on the theme of Christianity and evolution (the first: Modern Science and Christian Faith, Wheaton, Illinois, 1950).
Sadly neglected by this able group of scientists and completely overshadowed by biological and evolutionary disputations, is the much-needed formulation of a Christian philosophy of science. Recognition of this lacuna by the ASA is seen in their scheduling a joint conference with the Evangelical Theological Society for 1959, the subject being “Toward an Evangelical Philosophy of Science.”
Evangelicals, appreciative of the ASA’s worthy contributions of the past, will wish them well in this new endeavor. Too often has the charge been leveled with justification that science teachers in evangelical colleges simply teach science and fail to transmit simultaneously the mutual implications of science and Judaeo-Christian revelation. How futile then the cry against the “secularization of science.”
The issue is rendered more acute with the Sputnik-Age emphasis upon science. Where does science fit, in the economy of God? Is not Jesus Christ, the Logos, key to creation as well as redemption? Science needs her King. With growing apprehension she courts morality which must lead her to a rendezvous with religion. But if she proudly demands a religion of her own prescription, destiny’s hour will pass and science will still not be saved.
Graham At Charlotte
In the fall of 1947, a young evangelist held a campaign in Charlotte, North Carolina, his home town. He went on from that series of meetings to gain recognition as the most popular spokesman for twentieth century evangelicalism.
This week, Billy Graham was “back home” for another crusade. He could look to Charlotte in 1958 not only for a sympathetic reception, but for a new opportunity in television evangelism. More stations than ever before have lined up to transmit Saturday night rallies at Charlotte Coliseum. The first hour-long telecast is scheduled for the ABC network the evening of September 27.
The crusade itself begins Sunday, September 21. Charlotte Coliseum seats 12,500 in its main auditorium. Closed circuit television is being installed in an adjoining auditorium to accommodate another 2,500 persons.
Preparations for the Charlotte crusade were encouraging. More than 2,000 were registered for counselor training classes. By the beginning of September, there were a total of some 900 churches cooperating or participating.
Three thousand prayer meetings were organized. More than 2,000 choir member applications were received.
The crusade was scheduled to run for four or five weeks. An outdoor stadium rally may provide the climax.
To give himself a rest, Graham kept summer speaking engagements at a minimum. Following California meetings, he held a rally at San Antonio, Texas. Thereafter, his only public appearances were at Bible conferences at Lake Junaluska and Ridgecrest, North Carolina, and Winona Lake, Indiana.
More than 30,000 people gathered at Alamo Stadium July 25 to hear Graham speak of the end of the age. A 2,500-voice choir sang. Eight hundred servicemen stationed near San Antonio sat together. Delegates included groups from below the Mexican border, 125 miles to the south. Three thousand decisions were recorded.
On the San Antonio platform was Texas Governor Price Daniel, who told the audience: “To me, Billy Graham is the most important man in the world.”
At Lake Junaluska, Graham warned that “if the church does not meet its responsibilities in this generation, it may go into an eclipse.”
The evangelist spoke to a crowd of 3,000 which overflowed an assembly hall on Sunday night, August 10, and to more than 2,000 the next morning.
After Charlotte, Graham’s next big move will be in Australia, beginning in February. Two major campaigns are planned to run consecutively, one in Melbourne and the other in Sydney. In addition, meetings are planned in other Australian cities and in New Zealand.
Graham announced that he still hopes to conduct a crusade in Chicago despite a decision by the Church Federation of Greater Chicago against taking up the sponsorship of such an endeavor.
Christian Unions: Labor For The Gospel
Advance representatives of Billy Graham, in Sydney to prepare for his 1959 Australian crusade, recall that in Britain in 1953–54 some of the most valuable cooperation came from “Christian unions” operating in business organizations. “They came to light like gophers popping out of their holes,” said one team member.
At first glance, few such unions were apparent in Sydney; only 10 organizations were known to have Christian fellowship groups. With diligent research, some 25 were found, and on June 27 Graham representative Jerry Beaven addressed 450 potential “Christian unionists” in the large Central Baptist Church, Sydney.
This month, with nearly 60 groups already organized and oprating, the 1,600-seat Assembly Hall was booked for the first rally of the Sydney Christian Employees Fellowship. First practical undertaking of the organization: the supplying of a regular staff of capable volunteer workers for the Graham crusade office.
“Unionists” in the Municipal Water Board office were amazed at the growth of their group, one of the most active. “Just a short time ago there were only two or three of us praying together,” commented one. “At our last meeting there were nearly 100.”
To The Jew First
Christian witness to Hebrew peoples is a highly fruitful ministry, according to the American Board of Missions to the Jews. The board oversees Christian missions to the Jews in six countries.
Considering the number of missionary personnel and the amount of money invested, officials say, Jewish missions are three and a half times more productive of converts than Christian missions as a whole.
Christians who seek to win Jews still have a great challenge, however. Last month, an Israel Embassy spokesman in Washington said there are some 12 and a half million Jews in the world.
Europe
Wcc Anniversary
The World Council of Churches marked its tenth anniversary with a Sunday service at the Cathedral of Odense, Denmark. The service was attended by more than 1,000 persons, including churchmen from all over the world.
The pulpit was shared by Anglican Bishop George K. A. Bell of England and Bishop Otto Dibelius of Berlin, head of the Evangelical Church in Germany. Both are presidents of the WCC.
Russians And The Wcc
Back in Moscow after an initial ecumenical encounter, Metropolitan Nikolai of Kroetitsky and Colomna said the Russian Orthodox Church will “probably” join the World Council of Churches.
“It is difficult to define now all the forms of contacts,” the second-ranking leader of the Moscow Patriarchate told Religious News Service, “but they will possibly include sending observers to World Council sittings and to meetings of other various Christian churches.”
Two weeks earlier the metropolitan had met with top leaders of the WCC at Utrecht, The Netherlands. At that time, he said he would recommend to Soviet churches that they join the WCC.
The metropolitan also disclosed in a Moscow interview that a conference of “sister Orthodox churches” had been scheduled for November to discuss his report on the WCC meeting.
He made no mention of the possibility of sending a Russian Orthodox Church representative to the August 21–29 meeting of the WCC Central Committee in Denmark. The possibility had been discussed at the Utrecht meeting. However, no Russians appeared at the meeting, Religious News Service said.
Ecumenical Measles
Is the Conference of European Churches in competition with the World Council of Churches?
The question came up at a meeting of the conference held at Nyborgstrand, Denmark, on the eve of the August 21–29 meeting of the WCC’s Central Committee in the same Danish seacoast town.
Delegates had gathered to discuss the structure of their new organization and its relationship to the WCC. The meeting was the first since the conference was formed last year at Liselund, Denmark, by representatives of Protestant churches in 10 countries of Eastern and Western Europe.
It was generally agreed, Religious News Service reported, that the conference should not compete with the WCC.
Two of the delegates, Dr. John Baillie of Scotland and Anglican Bishop Ivor S. Watkins of England, said that British churches would oppose a new permanent ecumenical organization but would cooperate in “occasional” conferences.
Baillie warned against “meetingitis” as being the “measles of the ecumenical movement.”
City Of Contrast
The following account represents a theologian’s impressions of Berlin, a great metropolis split by the Iron Curtain for the past 13 years. The writer is Dr. Harold B. Kuhn, Asbury Theological Seminary professor who spent the summer in Germany.
The divided city of Berlin, surrounded entirely by the Soviet Zone of Germany, contains in miniature the two opposed worlds of Western freedom and Communist tyranny. Economic contrasts are conspicuous enough. Free Berlin is, despite grave economic and social problems, a show-piece of life as the West knows it. The Soviet sector, on the other hand, reflects the predominantly bleak form of Communist life.
This reporter has conversed with those who have experienced first hand the tyranny which exists in that gray world. Some have been refugees, who have found life in the German “Democratic” Republic intolerable. Others have been from the settled population of East Germany, who are still trying to exist and maintain their integrity. Newspapers from the East Zone, including the National Zeitung and the Berliner Zeitung, are also revealing. In the Red world, everything has political meaning and political significance. No event, however trivial, is overlooked in the attempt of the Red masters to exploit every situation for propaganda purposes. To the Western reader, newspaper fabrications are fairly easy to detect. One wonders, however, how the continuous drumming of such propaganda affects the mind without counterbalancing access to truth. The only possible antidote available to East German persons is the occasional unjammed broadcast from the West—with hearing always accompanied by grave risks of imprisonment or deportation.
Red propaganda instruments seize upon every scrap of news which can be turned to their purposes. For example, when the auto industry shut down factories to retool for 1959 models, East German newspapers dramatically presented Detroit as a “dead city.” In a parallel column, a garish article with a Budapest dateline appeared, declaring that the United States had deliberately falsified the unemployment figures, so that more than 11 million were (so the story went) unemployed in the United States.
Meanwhile, East Germany maintains its pose as a model satellite. However, wages are depressingly low, and prices of basic foodstuffs and clothing rise to impossible levels. Reprisals of the most crude form are employed to keep the population in line. Meanwhile, an average of over 500 flee East Germany daily, creating a fantastic problem for West Berlin, and indeed for the free world.
Every conceivable form of harassment is employed against the forces of the free world. The latest was the surrounding of the borough of Steinstuecken (part of the U. S. sector) by 800 Red police, and the kidnaping of a refugee who had taken shelter there.
The pattern seems progressively clearer. The Soviet Union hopes to achieve world domination by whatever means may appear best to serve her ends. She overlooks no twist of language, no distortion of facts. As one highly placed man in the U. S. Berlin Command told this reporter, there is no logic or reason in the Communist use of words. Their twisting such terms as freedom, peace, democracy and truth is such that one can only hope to “play by ear” in dealing with them, since no basis for a policy based upon the supposition of Communist honesty exists.
The most vicious propaganda turn is, it seems to this writer, the way in which every “liberal” plea for the recognition of Red China or of the East German government by one of our citizens is hailed as a proclamation from one of the last remnants of decency in the “corrupt American order.” Even the words of well-meaning members of the U. S. Congress have been thus used.
From the religious point of view, the struggle for the minds and hearts of the youth continues without abatement, and with increasing cleverness. Secularized versions of baptism and confirmation, namely the Communist “naming” ceremony for children and the jugendweihe or youth dedication, have become the absolute essential for youth who wish any education beyond elementary school. Family life is being increasingly disrupted, particularly in those families in which the parents are seeking to maintain Christian ideals.
Pastors in East Germany face problems hard to comprehend in the Western world. With meager incomes, subject to every sort of subtle and hidden pressure, isolated from the rest of the Christian world, and often estranged from their own parishioners, they stand above all others in the need of prayer from “this side.”
Their courage and resoluteness are a standing source of challenge and inspiration. Their tasks and responsibilities are stupendous, matched only by the resources of their divine Lord.
People: Words And Events
Deaths: T. W. Tippett, retired Baptist Sunday School secretary of Georgia … Rev. Herman Frederick Hegner, 93, minister and educator, in Chicago … the Rev. Emmette Rigdon Spencer, treasurer of the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Church, in Baltimore … the Rev. Basil Kusiw, 71, honorary president of the Ukrainian Evangelical Alliance of North America … Dr. Anson Phelps Stokes, 84, retired canon of Washington Cathedral, in Lenox Massachusetts … Dr. Arthur Chichester Hobsen, 78, noted Anglican missionary, in Colombo, Ceylon … Miss Mary Frances Turner, 90, retired Presbyterian missionary-educator in Latin America, in Pasadena, California … Mrs. Ellen Camp, 72, Conservative Baptist missionary to Congo, at Ruanguba, Congo … Methodist Bishop Z. T. Kaung of Peiping, 72, who baptized Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, in Shanghai.
Elections: As president of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Dr. Lewis Webster Jones, president of Rutgers University … as president of the European Baptist Federation, Dr. Erik Ruden … as president of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil, Dr. Ernesto T. Schlieper, who has been acting president since 1956 … to the board of directors of the Evangelical Alliance Mission, Dr. Robert A. Cook, vice-chairman of Scripture Press Foundation … to the executive committee of the Baptist World Alliance, Mrs. R. L. Mathis … as president of the Lutheran Student Association of America, David Kruger.
Resignation: As director of the Winona Lake, Indiana, Bible Conference, Dr. J. Palmer Muntz.
Appointments: As president of Lorne Park College, Dr. C. H. Zahniser … as a professor at Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. E. Earle Ellis … as chairman of the Bible department at Belhaven College, the Rev. Norman Harper … as an associate professor of religion at Furman University, Dr. Jesse Morris Ashcraft.
Digest: Four persons were killed and 29 others injured when a bus carrying members of an ecumenical work camp ran off the road and upset near Mettlach, Germany. One of those killed was an American, James McGaffin of Troy, New York … A new film depicting the work of the American Bible Society, “Bearer of the Book,” will be premiered October 9 at Miami Beach, Florida … The Rev. Paul B. Smith, associate pastor of Peoples Church in Toronto, is conducting a series of evangelistic crusades in the Far East … September 23 marks the 101st anniversary of the “Fulton Street Noon Prayer Meeting.” Prayer meetings are held every business day at a location only a few hundred feet from the original site of the prayer meeting which sparked world-wide revival in 1857 … The Southern Baptist Convention Home Mission Board is to undergo a major reorganization “to take its increasing mission responsibilities in America.” New divisions besides administration include missions, education and promotion, evangelism and chaplaincy.
