Seeking an evangelistic breakthrough in Switzerland, where the Protestant Reformation once struck deep roots, Dr. Billy Graham’s experiment with two-day crusades in Berne, Zürich, Basel and Lausanne provided the most extensive mass meetings for evangelism in Swiss history. The spiritual hunger of the masses was attested not only by crowds running into the tens of thousands, but by the fact that hundreds in each city overcame their natural and traditional reticence and registered public decisions for Christ.
Although Barthian theology crippled the hold of liberalism on Swiss church life, Barth’s notion that all men are already saved in Christ, and need merely to learn the news, is one of the factors retarding evangelism. Graham and Barth spent a day together in advance of the crusades, and while Barth acknowledged no hope for this world other than in the return of Christ, he also expressed lack of enthusiasm for Graham’s evangelistic invitation asking sinners to “accept Christ in order to be saved.” Graham said that the revival of theological thought and the awakening interest in evangelism could once again profoundly affect social and political life.
In a meeting with ministers in Basel, Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, who also addressed well-attended gatherings of the clergy in Berne, Zurich and Lausanne on the rim of the Graham meetings, gave a spirited critique of neo-orthodox theology from the standpoint of evangelical apprehensions.
Graham’s pattern of two-night outdoor meetings in Switzerland was an experimental venture to conserve his strength while multiplying the strategic centers of his ministry. In Berne he was preceded by associate evangelist Roy Gustafson who conducted one-night services in nearby churches; in Zürich his meetings in Hardturm Stadium came in the midst of an unaffiliated but cooperating crusade nearby by the Janz Brothers; in Basel his meetings in St. Jacob Stadium followed four services led in Sporthalle by associate evangelist Joe Blinco; in Lausanne, Graham followed meetings by associate evangelist Leighton Ford. The briefer crusades involved many organizational problems. In Berne, the amplifying system was so unsatisfactory that on the opening night Graham had to stop his sermon, forsake the platform, and speak to 16,000 persons from an improvised microphone in the grandstands. Hundreds had to stand without a view of the speaker, who had to contend even with dogs snarling at each other during the service, and with part of his congregation constantly on the move for a better view. Yet when Graham, unperturbed by these obstacles, turned the inner wall around the turf into an alter rail, hundreds stepped forward.
Switzerland: Religion By Canton
Switzerland is a confederation of 22 cantons, each of which are states asserting for themselves full religious sovereignty.
While on a national scale no one religious group has favor, a number of the cantons do maintain state churches, even to the extent of supporting them with tax monies.
Some 54 per cent of the population is Protestant. About 43 per cent is Roman Catholic.
Swiss Protestantism is generally of the Reformed variety, tracing its roots to Zwingli and Calvin. The Protestant state churches are linked together in the kirchenbund, the equivalent of a national council. But a number of free churches also are active in Switzerland, and these operate under a constitutional guarantee of religious liberty, the state churches notwithstanding.
Although their lay constituency is smaller, Roman Catholic priests far outnumber Protestant clergymen. Swiss Catholics maintain five dioceses and dominate 10 cantons.
University education is largely in the Protestant tradition. The oldest of the seven cantonal universities, at Basel, dates back to 1460. At Basel, Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, and Zürich the theological faculties are Protestant. At Berne there are Protestant and Catholic faculties. At Fribourg, the “newest” (1889), there is only a Catholic one.
Graham’s fervent outdoor preaching to Swiss throngs in the rain and cold was not without its physical toll. After the Lausanne meetings he mentioned reoccurence of an ear malady which has troubled him periodically. He received medical aid in Heidelberg.
Entrenched indifference to evangelism springs not only from the Barthian theology, but from other factors. The liberal element is still strong in some Swiss churches, and many State churches have a multiple staff representing conflicting theological views. State church disdain for evangelism grows in part out of the fact that the call for “decision” implies that the distinction of “saved” and “lost” remains even for those who have been baptized and confirmed. And yet, although in most cantons all Swiss people are baptized and confirmed, and automatically come into the membership of the churches, for which they pay special taxes, only 10 per cent are really active members. Someone has described the majority as “four wheel” members—coming for baptism, confirmation, then in the wedding coach, and next in the funeral hearse. Even Barth has caricatured the situation, saying that at confirmation the young men boast that they can now be like their fathers: “wear long pants, smoke, and stop going to church.”
Whatever its inadequacies, Barth’s theology must be credited with a remarkable influence on Swiss church life, which was pervaded by the older liberalism a generation ago. Barth provoked many of the clergy to a searching of the Bible in quest of its unique message. Before his impact, week-night Bible meetings were scorned as an activity of “narrow-minded pietists,” Sunday School classes and youth guilds were to be found only outside the “regular” churches, which administered the Lord’s supper only four times a year. Today a congregation (even in a liberal church) is considered abnormal if it lacks a Bible meeting, Sunday School classes and youth guild, and many churches are introducing a monthly communion service. The softness of the hymns inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries led to a movement for a new hymnal with more of the doctrinal strength of Reformation times.
Even so, the Swiss church is scantily stocked with invitational hymns. Graham’s impact, moreover, has set the Gospel call squarely in the open arenas of the great cities, where multitudes go their way indifferently to the churches, and he has confronted them with the necessity for a personal and open acceptance of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.
Protestant Panorama
• The Protestant Episcopal Church plans to erect a 12 to 14 story headquarters building on a newly-acquired site two blocks from the United Nations Building in New York City.
• Dr. W. Wesley Shrader, former Yale Divinity School professor, resigned as pastor of the University Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, this month, stating that “my integrationist views on the race question make my pastoral leadership of this church impossible.”
• A new public elementary school in Levittown, Pennsylvania, is named for Dr. Albert Schweitzer, famed Protestant medical missionary in Africa. The school has two murals depicting Schweitzer and his work which were given by Dr. Frederick Franck, one of his associates.
• Two of Canada’s leading religious publications, The Observer (United Church) and the Canadian Churchman (Anglican) came out this month with a double editorial blast against obscene literature and films.
• Anglicans in Australia are helping to circulate a petition which will be presented to Queen Elizabeth II as a protest against the governments Matrimonial Clauses Act, which reduced the number of grounds of divorce from 30 to 14.
• The pastor of a Protestant church near Hamburg, Germany, made his sanctuary available to a French Catholic group which had been banned by the management of a camp for the homeless from celebrating mass.
• Dr. Henrik Kraemer, a leader of the Netherlands Reformed Church and former director of the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute, is touring Japan for a series of conferences with Protestant leaders.
• The Lutheran World Federation’s Commission on World Mission is postponing its second All-Asia Lutheran Conference, originally scheduled for October, 1961, in Prapat, Indonesia. No new date has as yet been set The Lutheran conference was to have coincided with the centenary celebration of the host body, the 717,000 Batak Protestant Christian Church, largest Lutheran church in Asia. One reason for the postponement, a spokesman said, was the proximity of the originally scheduled date to the time set by the World Council of Churches for its Third Assembly next fall in New Delhi.
• The International Youth Fellowship of the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) plans to establish a camp on the island of Trinidad.
• An anonymous grant of $11,000 will help the New York City Mission Society to extend its “cadet corps” program among adolescent Puerto Rican boys.
• Among dignitaries scheduled to be on hand for the Nigerian independence celebrations October 1 is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher.
• The Latin America Mission plans to hold its second “Evangelism-in-Depth” effort in Costa Rica in cooperation with all the country’s evangelical groups. The effort begins immediately and runs through next April.
• Dr. C. Adrian Heaton, president of California Baptist Seminary, delivered the guest sermon on CBS radio’s 30th anniversary broadcast of the “Church of the Air” this month.
• Production is under way on a new dramatic television series for 1961 on documented experiences of conversion and Christian development, sponsored by the Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas. Entitled “Living Christianity,” the series will have 26 half-hour episodes and will be presented on the church’s nine-year-old “Herald of Truth” program over 74 television and 240 radio stations in the United States and abroad.… A new radio series, “Take Time for Thought,” is being launched by the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.
• Protestants and Other Americans United are premiering a new film, “Boycott,” showing how a Maine merchant lost his business under Roman Catholic pressure.
In spite of persistently bad weather, the aggregate attendance for Graham’s eight Swiss rallies totalled 118,000. Nearly 6,000 of these recorded decisions for Christ.
The opening service in Basel came on a cold, windy night. A heavy downpour soaked thousands in Zürich. Rain also fell during both meetings held in the Olympic Stadium at Lausanne, but crowds totalling 38,000 sat through. Graham’s biggest reception came in French-speaking Switzerland.
A Divine Amen?
Mentally keen though obviously aging, Karl Barth modestly declined to predict (“I am not a prophet”) the future of Continental theology, but nonetheless spoke eagerly about current trends in the Church and the world in an interview with Evangelist Billy Graham before attending the opening meeting of Graham’s two-night crusade in Basel. “Bultmann is right now most influential,” he said, “but his followers are already diverging, and much depends on the direction they go. Lutheran Confessionalism is also aggressive and this would mean an authoritarian, liturgical and sacramental Church.”
Barth did not comment on reports that his possible successor at University of Zürich may be either Heinrich Ott, who veers toward Bultmann, or Fritz Buri, who has swung from liberalism toward neo-orthodoxy.
At the hour-long interview in his study, in which Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and Evangelist Joe Blinco participated, Barth warned that Christianity’s worst enemy is not Communism “but our own feeble living and preaching. It is unfruitful just to look at the outside world—whether Moscow or Rome—and deplore the godlessness only of other atheists and naturalists and to overlook ourselves. Communism is a sort of ‘call to repentance’ for us, much as the Old Testament prophets warned of the menacing pagan nations.”
On Romanism, Barth said that the Church of Rome “retained many elements of real Christian faith that Protestantism has lost, alongside a misunderstanding and destruction of Christian faith. But we must not face Romanism with ‘Protestant self-righteousness.’ ”
Barth stressed his view that faith is “an answer to God’s call” and not a choice between two horizontal decisions, and also his conviction that all men are already included in Christ. He dissented especially from the evangelistic invitation and the “follow-up” apparatus, and urged
Graham to close his meetings simply with “a Divine Amen.” But Graham—who expressed the hope that a spiritual methodology with less “statistical technique” might develop, recounted to Barth the testimony of an eight-semester divinity student from Heidelberg and Basel who had stood to his feet in the ministers’ meeting that morning and told how he had skeptically attended the crusade the previous night, responded to the invitation, and for the first time knew Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.
Barth had received an unprecedented dispensation from the city government to continue teaching when he reached the retirement age of 70. Now 74, he is currently completing his Dogmatics IV/2, on the sacraments and Christian ethics. He has said that Dogmatics V, on eschatology, will appear in a single volume because “I have been speaking of eschatology also all through the earlier volumes.”
C.F.H.H.
Visit with Brunner
Recovering at his Zürich home from a stroke, Swiss theologian Emil Brunner thinks sex is one of the world’s great problems today and hopes, if he writes another book, to shape a Protestant theology of sex. “None of the Protestant theologians,” he says, “has yet worked out the relation between sex, eros and agape.”
Conversing with Evangelist Billy Graham during the latter’s Zürich meetings, Brunner agreed that “one cannot have a dedicated life unless one’s sex life is dedicated.” Against those who tend to minimize the modern sex revolution, Brunner spoke of “the terrible loss of the sense of personality” as at the bottom of vagabond sex relations as well as at the basis of the totalitarian state. He specially commended CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S article by P. A. Sorokin on “The Depth of the Sex Crisis” (July 4, 1960 issue).
Brunner faces the possibility that the third volume of his dogmatics, now being translated, will be his last work. In it he contrasts the situation in Europe (“The Crisis of the Church”) with the situation in America (“The Boom of the Church”), and also reinforces his criticism of both Barth and Bultmann. He has had to discontinue all preaching, and paralysis of his right hand has crippled his ability to write and type. He is currently “scribbling and dictating” his overcomments on the appraisal of his outlook in the “Living Theology” series.
Graham told Brunner that he thought his theological impact, which helped undermine the liberal theology of immanence, had prepared the way for evangelism.
Brunner acknowledged that the theological impact associated with his name and that of Karl Barth is now somewhat on the defensive in Europe. “Bultmann is now king among the young intellectuals. But this will not last long,” he predicted, “because he has a very meagre Gospel. His theology is a passing fad. Some say we are already in the post-Bultmann era. We should not take Bultmann so seriously.”
As to Barth, Brunner had this word: “Bultmann reduces the Gospel to a point so thin it has no content; Barth gives the Gospel so much volume that it includes everything.”
But Brunner insisted that theology must remain existentially oriented. He grinned when asked about the future of systematic theology, which he regards as “a very dangerous instrument. Its real value is to produce a dictionary of theological terms.”
“The great danger in the world today,” Brunner added, “is Communism.” He thinks that “two totalitarian powers—Romanism and Communism—may yet fight it out with each other.”
C.F.H.H.
Medical Mission Aid
Plans for a “partnership” between U. S. church mission agencies and the American Medical Association to help keep missionary doctors overseas abreast of the latest developments in medicine were formulated at a meeting in Chicago last month.
Attended by Protestant and Roman Catholic missionary leaders and AMA officials, the meeting concluded with a recommendation that the association’s trustees formally adopt the program.
Under the proposal the AMA would become a clearing house of medical information for mission outposts, some of which are so remote that medical missionaries have difficulty keeping themselves informed of the newest findings in medicine.
Teams of specialists would be organized to bring mission physicians up-to-date on new developments and expedite the post graduate education of those coming to the United States for additional training.
Among mission representatives at the sessions were Auxiliary Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, national director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Roman Catholic church’s missionary arm; Dr. Frederick G. Scovel, secretary of the Christian Medical Council for Overseas Work, National Council of Churches; and Dr. Paul S. Rhoads, editor of the AMA archives of internal medicine and chairman of the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations’ medical committee, United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Also the Rev. Edward F. Garesche, head of the Catholic Medical Mission Board; the Rev. Roland G. Metzgler, liaison officer for the Congo Protestant Relief Agency in the United States; Dr. Harold Brewster, secretary of medical work, The Methodist Church; and J. Raymond Knighton, executive director, Christian Medical Society.
Dr. Julian P. Price, chairman of the AMA’s trustees, said the conference marked the first time organized medicine had attempted to study the problems facing some 1,000 English-speaking medical missionaries. He explained the sessions were convened as the result of a resolution adopted by the association’s house of delegates.
The AMA may even form a department of international health to aid overseas doctors, Price added.
People: Words And Events
Deaths:Colonel Wayne Lindsay Hunter, 52, commander of the Army Chaplain School at Ft. Slocum, New York; at Ft. Slocum … Dr. Corliss P. Hargraves, 81 Methodist minister and retired administrative official; in Los Angeles … Dr. Orville L. Davis, 60, director of church relations at DePauw University; in Greencastle, Indiana … Dr. Merrill Thomas Macpherson, 69, former president of the American Council of Christian Churches; in Weyburn, Saskatchewan … Carl A. Warden, 56, controller of the United Lutheran Church in America; at White Plains, New York.
Elections: As first president of the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul), Dr. Ruben H. Huenemann … as president of the Board of Education of The Methodist Church, Bishop Paul N. Garber … as president of the Lutheran Student Association of America, Bruce Johnson, a Stanford University senior.
Appointments: As secretary for synods and presbyteries in the United Presbyterian Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations, Dr. Winburn T. Thomas … as extension director of the Canadian Bible Society, J. Allan Upton … as professor of theology at the Nazarene Seminary of Tokyo, Dr. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop.
Vatican Envoy
Sir Peter Scarlett, British ambassador to Norway, will succeed the late Sir Marcus Cheke as minister to the Vatican.
Sir Peter, 55, is a member of the Church of England. He has served in Iraq, Latvia and Belgium, and has been Britain’s permanent representative on the Council of Europe at Strasbourg.
The practice is that the British minister to the Holy See is always a Protestant, and that the first secretary at the British Legation in Rome is always a Catholic. The first secretary at present is Brian MacDermot, a Downside-educated Irishman.
Catholic Efficiency
An overall rating of 9,010 out of a possible 10,000 points for administrative excellence was given to the Roman Catholic church this month by the American Institute of Management.
The non-profit AIM audit showed that the church has had a “marked improvement” in administrative efficiency since the 1958 election of Pope John XXIII.
The church’s new rating, according to the AIM, puts it in the same ranks—as far as administration is concerned—with such firms as General Motors and Procter and Gamble.
A similar audit in 1955 gave the church a rating of 8,800 points out of an optimum of 10,000. Minimum rating for excellence is 7,500 points.
“There is less of a Roman clique behind today’s decisions in the church, and more of a hard-working cardinalate,” the institute said.
Bigotry at the Olympics
A Roman Catholic prelate used his position as an Olympic Games official to bar all Protestant clergymen from the Olympic Village.
Msgr. Nicola Pavone, head of the Olympic Committee for Religious Assistance, did not relent until he had provoked an international incident. On August 26, Danish Lutheran cyclist Knut Enemark Jansen collapsed during competition and died four hours later. It was another four hours before a Lutheran pastor was informed, according to the Federal Council of Italian Evangelical Churches.
The Danish Embassy and the Federal Council lodged a sharp protest with Pavone’s committee.
Noting that the great majority of the Olympic participants were Protestants, the council charged that these had been “totally deprived” of religious counsel. As far back as March 22, the council said, it had requested that a pastor be assigned for spiritual assistance to non-Catholic Christians taking part in the games. The request was rejected.
Another formal request was made July 22, the council said, asking that a Protestant pastor be included in the Committee for Religious Assistance. Pavone again turned down the request, saying “the committee didn’t exist.”
The council also charged that listings of services in Rome’s Protestant churches handed to the committee were not distributed to the athletes.
Again on August 27 authorization was requested for Protestant pastors to visit any Olympic athlete who might want to see them, the council said. This request was likewise rejected, on Sptember 1.
The council stated that subsequently its president, Methodist minister Mario Sbaffi, requested an interview with Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, together with Methodist Bishop Sante Uberto Barbieri, a president of the World Council of Churches, and Italian pastor Pier Luigi Jala.
The Olympics had just one more week to go when Pavone received the Protestant churchmen. Only then were the entry permits granted.
Help for the Congo
America’s largest Negro church body was urged to dispatch a core of educated youth to the Congo to live permanently, “some as missionaries and others to work in other fields and serve as ambassadors of the free and democratic way of life.”
Dr. Joseph H. Jackson, who has been president of the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., for seven years, urged world opinion to “place the blame for the civil war in the Congo where it belongs—on the Belgians, and their long subjection of the Negro, for what they could get out of them.”
Jackson’s remarks were delivered to the opening session of the denomination’s 80th annual meeting in Philadelphia. The meeting subsequently turned into confusion with two factions claiming to have elected a president. Jackson’s re-election was challenged by Dr. Gardner C. Taylor of Brooklyn, president of the Protestant Council of New York.
The dispute was taken to court. Sessions were temporarily suspended.
‘A Mightier God’
A Michigan pastor told delegates to the annual sessions of the National Baptist Convention of America that they had a God mightier than all their problems. The meeting was held this month in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The Rev. John V. Williams of Grand Rapids, Michigan, took his cue from the theme of the convention, “Mighty Problems, Mighty Challenges, but a Mightier God.”
“During these days of problems that have become mighty and challenges that have become mighty,” Williams said, “I feel it is necessary to remind you that our God is mightier than any problem or challenge that may face us individually or collectively.
The Crime Trend
Serious crimes reached another all-time high last year, according to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and still another sharp rise is indicated for 1960.
“This ominous rise in crime cannot be explained away as being due to population increase,” said Hoover. “Crime has been rising four times as fast as population. Unless positive steps are taken to check this rising crime trend, this country will face a crime problem of emergency proportions in the years ahead.”
Offenses during 1959 are catalogued in the latest Uniform Crime Report, published annually.
“The mighty problems of today are marriage, working wives and mothers, handicapped children, retarded children, and retiring at a young age. For each of these mighty problems, we have a mightier God. American homes need God as their head, for law-breaking homes will produce law-breaking children.”
The 4,000,000-member NBCA met at the same time that another Negro Baptist body—the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., with 5,000,000 members was holding its annual sessions in Philadelphia.
Dr. C. D. Pettaway of Little Rock, Arkansas, was reelected president of the NBCA.
Baptism Goals
Southern Baptists hope to record more than 2,000,000 baptisms by the end of 1964. The figures represent a revised goal announced this month by C. C. Autrey, director of evangelism for the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board. Previous goals for the 1961–1964 period were more than 1,000,000 higher.
Autrey said the revision was made after reports indicated that baptisms this year would fall below last year’s peak of 429,063.
“We feel that these goals are realistic and well within reach,” he declared, “if Southern Baptists respond to the challenge.”
The new goals were formed through meetings of the secretaries of evangelism for the denomination’s state conventions.
‘The Gospel We Preach’
Representatives of Canadian Lutheranism, meeting in Winnipeg this month for two days of doctrinal discussion, unanimously adopted a seven-point statement on “The Gospel We Preach.”
Present at the conference were 28 representatives from 12 Canadian districts or synods of seven parent bodies in the United States.
Here is the text of the statement:
1. The Gospel is the good news of God’s promises and their fulfillment in Christ, who by his perfect obedience, suffering, death, and resurrection, has redeemed man from the fall and its consequences.
2. The Gospel is the central message of God’s unchangeable Word through which God offers, conveys, and affirms the forgiveness of sins, thus imparting life and salvation to those who believe it.
3. The Gospel is the true, divine, saving means of grace. It gives to the sacraments, Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, their saving power. It creates faith to accept what it offers.
4. The Gospel is God’s unconditionally free offer of salvation to all men; its rejection seals man’s condemnation.
5. The Gospel is the means whereby God gives, together with faith in Christ as Saviour, the desire and the ability to do His will by giving us both victory through Christ in the struggle with our sinful nature and grace to grow in the virtues which characterize the new life in Christ.
6. The preaching of the Gospel is the proclamation of the Christ of the Scripture; God incarnate, who died for our trespasses, rose for our justification, and lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, who together with the Father sends the Holy Spirit; He is the head of the Church, which is His body, and He will return to judge the living and the dead.
7. The Lord, who builds His church through the preaching of the Gospel, has expressly commanded, that they who believe in the Gospel must bear witness to it; “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation.” Mark 16:15.
The doctrinal talks were arranged in place of unity discussions which the Canadian groups had held annually for five years up to 1959. They were temporarily suspended last year pending completion of merger negotiations among several parent bodies in the United States.
THE EPISTLES OF EUTYCHUS (YEW’-TI-CUSS)
… The jet take-off of your first issue is going to be something to see!
But sir, you need a Pseudonymous Letter Writer, for which position 1 herewith make application. I can hear you muttering, “The pseudonymous, while not synonymous with the anonymous, is equally pusillanimous …” I wish you wouldn’t talk that way. Where would American literature be without Mark Twain? Besides, as that great master of pseudonymity, Sören Kierkegaard, has explained, using a pseudonym may show too much courage rather than too little! My nom de plume suggests not a personality but a picture. Easy slumber under sound gospel preaching was fatal for Eutychus. The Christian Church of our generation has not been crowded to his precarious perch, but it has been no less perilously asleep in comfortable pews …
So began the epistles of Eutychus (cf. Acts 20:9) in the very first issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
For more than 100 issues, the “epistles” have led off this magazine’s letters-to-the-editor section, known as “Eutychus and his kin.” Now, Eerdmans is bringing out a collection of these humorous but pointed features under the title, Eutychus (and his pin).
Basically a series of theological reflections, the Eutychus essays won popularity and stature in the annals of religious journalism with terse wit and a premium on timeliness. When toothpaste additives seized advertising headlines, Eutychus saw the chance to dramatize redemption as the basic ingredient of Christianity. When togetherness began to beckon for intellectual attention, he compared it to the “crowded emptiness” of life outside of Christ. When Sugar Ray Robinson regained ring acclaim with a spectacular knockout, a quip of the champion was applied to a brief dissertation on communications.
Sometimes Eutychus becomes a poet, sometimes a playwright, and occasionally a cartoonist.
No topic has been beyond his reach. The commentaries have embraced every major holiday (“Sirens on New Year’s Eve chill us with prospect of atomic war, but bells speak of peace”), the electronic organist (“Beware of blasting”), insects at a picnic (“Are we to choose, then, the liberty of the rebel fly, or the burden of the adjusted ant?”), fashion (“The toughest assignment is to ignore fashion for the sake of truth”), collage (“now regarded as a fine art as well as a kindergarten pastime”), and pastoral clinics (“Many contemporary sermons are lacking in organization. Give your sermons the Connective Test”).
With the appearance of the Eutychus collection ends the mystery of authorship. The hitherto anonymous scribe is a 43-year-old father of five, the Rev. Edmund P. Clowney of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, upon whom CHRISTIANITY TODAY has prevailed to carry on his fortnightly frolics for another year of publication.
Clowney (A. B. Wheaton College, B. D. Westminster Theological Seminary, S. T. M. Yale Divinity School, candidate for Th. D. Union Theological Seminary, New York) is associate professor of practical theology at Philadelphia’s Westminster Seminary. His gifts in the lighter vein can be traced back to the days in which he edited a campus weekly, The Wheaton Record. But his writings readily take on a serious air, as Eutychus readers well know. Clowney’s second book, due next year, is titled Preaching and Biblical Theology. Also an amateur pastel artist, he illustrates his own copy.
“It would be much beyond the competence of the author to present an adequate apology for this edition of pseudepigraphical literature,” says Clowney in the introduction to his first volume. “Eutychus was summoned to his post as a symbol of Christians nodding, if not on the window sill, at least in the back pew. He has sought to prove, in this emergency, that the pin is mightier than the sword. His supreme accolade came from a fellow-correspondent who sent a genuine straight pin to use in deflating ecclesiastical pretense.”
Clowney recognizes “hazards in withdrawing from the aloofness of pseudonymity.” Why the mystery? “May I plead that the shelter was designed as a cloister and not a duck-blind! Since drowsiness in my case is in no sense fictional, perhaps I may hang up a ‘Do Not Disturb! sign’ and retreat to my window seat.”
Ever one to sense the lighter side, Clowney found he could not resist the injection of a Eutychusism even in the sober formality of a CHRISTIANITY TODAY biographical data form. Asked his knowledge of languages, Eutychus replied that he could read Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Dutch and some German. And English? “Reading, speaking—some writing.”
Islamic Defense
Ten thousand South African Moslems gathered for a rally near Capetown heard one of their leaders defend Islam this month against what he said were “attacks which spared no effort to vilify it.”
Ahmed Deedat directed his remarks in particular against Dr. Joost de Blank, Anglican Bishop of Capetown, for allegedly “trying to poison the minds of Christians against Islam” by describing Mohammed as “a sincere man but a false prophet” and asserting that there was no need for any religion in South Africa save Christianity.
Deedat said Islam was the only non-Christian religion which believed in Christ and his miraculous birth, and accepted him as a messiah.
He said he deplored the attack on Islam made by Archbishop de Blank because “Christianity and Islam have so much in common.”
He answered the charge that Moslems reject Christianity by observing that various denominations of the Christian Church also reject one another.
In addition, he denied the “so-called menace of Islam” by asserting that there was not a single Moslem mission in Southern Africa.
“Who is it, then,” he asked, “who is doing the attacking? Could not Moslems claim our faith is menaced by Christianity? To describe Mohammed as a sincere man but a false prophet is a contradiction in terms. Could a false prophet found a religion that has 500,000,000 adherents, and create a true brotherhood of man throughout the world irrespective of race or color?”
Bishop’s Deportation
Two days after his return from five months’ voluntary exile, Anglican Bishop Richard Ambrose Reeves of Johannesburg, a foe of South Africa’s apartheid policies, was secretly deported to England.
Surrounded by nearly a dozen security branch detectives, Reeves was placed aboard a South African Airways plane while it was still in the hangar at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg. His seat had been reserved by authorities under a different name.
The 60-year-old church official had been served with the deportation order and given 30 minutes to pack.
Reeves fled South Africa earlier this year to escape feared arrest when a state of emergency was declared following racial riots. He first went to the British protectorate of Swaziland, then to Southern Rhodesia, before going to London.
A Briton, the bishop was deported under a law providing for such action “in the public interest.”
The World Council of Churches asked its South African churches for a full report. Reeves is a member of the WCC’s Central Committee.
A Cabinet Christian
In the cabinet of Japanese Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda is Mrs. Masa Nakayama, the welfare minister, who has a Christian educational background. She is the first woman ever to become a member of the Japanese cabinet.
A member of the Liberal-Democratic Party, Mrs. Nakayama has served as the chairman of the Special Committee for Repatriation of Overseas Japanese and as the parliamentary welfare vice-minister.
After graduating from a mission school in Nagasaki, Mrs. Nakayama went to Ohio Wesleyan University, where she earned a B. A. degree.
Although Mrs. Nakayama, a Methodist, is not an active church member today, the fact that her upbringing and education is Christian is attracting the attention of many Japanese, Christian and non-Christian alike. Especially, her future success in the office is a great concern to Japanese Christians who remember a bitter experience of having had a Christian prime minister, Tetsu Katayama, whose term ended in failure.
Forgotten Candidate
A cloud on the horizon no larger than a man’s hand threatens to take on dimensions in the 1960 national election that presage a storm in the years ahead. The “weather prophet” in this case is a distinguished and dignified Baptist minister, Dr. Rutherford L. Decker, who is candidating for the presidency of the United States on the Prohibition Party ticket.
A revived and revitalized party with an aggressive young campaign chairman (Earl F. Dodge) and a municipal victory in Winona Lake, Indiana, to boost its morale is looking toward tremendous increase over its 10-state, 41,937-vote showing in 1956.
“We are experiencing a 100 to 150 per cent increase in interest at our national headquarters in Winona Lake,” says Decker. “We are planning to be on the ballot in 23 states.”
A staunch evangelical and pastor of the Temple Baptist Church of Kansas City, Missouri, Decker has been a member of the Prohibition Party since he was 14 years old, and is convinced that his service to his country is best expressed through this political leadership. “America,” he says, “is still basically a Christian nation. Our morality is derived from the Hebrew-Christian heritage.” His party receives support from Jews, Christian Scientists, and some Roman Catholics, although its origins are Protestant, and its national motto is the biblical text, “Righteousness exalteth a a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34).
Alcohol is only one segment of the national problem, Decker is quick to state; and the Prohibition Party has its views well formulated on such subjects as civil rights, assistance to backward nations, etc. But the party’s unique emphasis has always been symbolized in its name, and for 91 years it has unwaveringly championed the view set forth in its first political platform:
“The traffic in intoxicating beverages is a dishonor to Christian civilization, inimical to the best interests of society, a political wrong of unequalled enormity, subversive of the ordinary objects of government, not capable of being regulated or restrained by any system of license whatsoever, but imperatively demanding for its suppression effective legal Prohibition, both by State and National legislation.
“… In view of this, and inasmuch as the existing political parties either oppose or ignore this great and paramount question, and absolutely refuse to do anything toward the suppression of the rum traffic, which is robbing the nation of its brightest intellects, destroying international prosperity and rapidly undermining its very foundations, we are driven by an imperative sense of duty to sever our connection with these political parties and organize ourselves into a National Prohibition Party, having for its object the entire suppression of the traffic in intoxicating drinks.”
A former president and executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals, Decker says that his religious affiliation in no way interferes with his political candidacy. “I have always known that the grace of God is not limited to any one church,” he avers. “There is no human person or institution to whom I owe anything except love, sincerity and justice.” Raised in an Anglo-Catholic home, where drinking was customary, he now believes that “the only ultimate answer to the alcohol question is prohibition.”
Decker points out that today a fourth of all alcohol consumed in the United States is bootlegged and illegal. More significantly, he quotes Dr. Andrew C. Ivy of the University of Illinois medical school, to the effect that a new wave of prohibition sentiment may be expected in America about 1965. By that time, according to Ivy, it is expected there will be one or two severe alcoholics in every American family, and the public may be roused to action.
Toward such a goal the Prohibition Party is pointing. When the Volstead Act was passed in 1918, Decker explains, the people wanted Prohibition overwhelmingly, but governmental machinery was lacking to implement it; therefore Prohibition failed and repeal followed. This time, he says, “We want to be ready to take over the government. Then we will be sure that it will work.”
The way is not easy, for many states frown on political third parties and by requiring thousands of signatures, make it almost impossible for them to get on the ballot. In some states it is quite legal not to bother to count third party votes, so that the Prohibition Party will never know exactly how many votes are cast for its candidates.
Yet Decker says, “We have every reason to believe that the great majority of the people of the United States are enlightened, decent people, living in good families, who need a political party to raise the standard of righteousness concerning the vital issues facing our nation to which they can rally. We are not so much interested in winning elections as we are in providing that standard.”
Whither Alcoholism?
The 86th Congress virtually ignored the problem of alcoholism, which now claims more than 5,000,000 victims in the United States.
In the House, eight bills were introduced to curtail drinking aboard planes, two to set up education programs on the perils of liquor, one to establish a medical advisory committee in Health-Education-Welfare Department, and another to abolish alcohol advertising. All died in committee.
In the Senate, Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina also sponsored a bill which would have outlawed the consumption of alcoholic beverages aboard commercial and military aircraft. An interstate commerce subcommittee held a brief hearing on the bill shortly before the political conventions this year and favorably reported the bill to the full committee headed by Democratic Senator Warren G. Magnuson of Washington. The full committee took no action.
The Federal Aviation Agency opposed passage of the bill on the grounds that it had already established a regulation of its own to deal with the problem of drunken airline passengers. The FAA rule forbids a passenger to bring his own drinks and places at the discretion of stewardesses the amount of liquor to be served. The FAA’s authority over passengers is limited, however, and there is a legal question as to whether the regulation may be adequately enforced.
Pilots and stewardesses had collectively favored enactment of the Thurmond measure. Thirteen top-ranking Protestant churchmen did, too, in a letter to Congressmen.
The National Temperance League cites grass-roots apathy in the failure of Congressmen to take action against liquor traffic even though it poses a major health and safety problem in addition to moral implications.
“Unless Congressmen see a strong upsurge in temperance sentiment,” says Executive Secretary Clayton M. Wallace, “they can hardly be expected to risk their political futures.” Wallace called for “more fight” in local option issues.
Day of Prayer
President Eisenhower is calling upon Americans to observe the 1960 National Day of Prayer on Wednesday, October 6.
In setting aside the day, Eisenhower asked his countrymen to remember:
“First, that it is not by our strength alone, nor by our own righteousness, that we have deserved the abundant gifts of our Creator;
“Second, that the heritage of a faith born of hope and raised in sacrifice lays upon its heirs the high calling of being generous and responsible stewards in our own and among the kindred nations of the earth;
“Third, that in this time of testing we shall ever place our trust in the keeping of God’s commandments, knowing that He who has brought us here requires justice and mercy in return;
“And finally, that as we lift our thankful hearts to Him, we will see clearly the vision of the world that is meant to be and set our hearts resolutely toward the achievement of it.”
The annual National Day of Prayer was proclaimed by President Eisenhower under a joint resolution approved by Congress in 1952. It provided that the President “shall set aside and proclaim a suitable day each year, other than a Sunday, as a National Day of Prayer on which people of the U. S. may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups and as individuals.”
