Easter Sunday proclaims in a special way the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. After 2,000 years his Resurrection is still history’s best news. Easter announces 1. the fact or reality of Christ’s Resurrection and 2. the meaning or relevance of his Resurrection.
Jesus Christ is alive! The glorious fact of it, the grand truth of it, flares like lightning in the hearts of his followers everywhere. Modern philosophers would rather emphasize Christ’s earthly ministry, or the Cross, or even the lowly birth. Don’t borrow trouble, they tell us, by setting out from the Resurrection. But the Christian faith is founded on the Resurrection fact; the New Testament was written from a Resurrection viewpoint; and the early Church lived in the Resurrection glow. As A. M. Ramsey, now Archbishop of Canterbury, put it in his book on The Resurrection of Christ (1945): for the early disciples “the Gospel without the Resurrection was … [no] Gospel at all” (p. 7). True, the world of unbelief still echoes with the hammering of those nails, the jeers of those soldiers, the cries of milling multitudes. But above this earthly dissonance sounds the Christian shout of triumph: “The Lord is risen.… The Lord is risen indeed!”
Christ’s Resurrection is “the pole star in the firmament of Christianity.” The bodily Resurrection and the Church’s commission stand together in the New Testament record. But more than a literary relationship joins Christ’s Resurrection and the Christian witness to the world. The saving events of the first century have historical continuity too. Most of all, their connection is theological. It is the momentous fact of Christ’s Resurrection, then, that underlies the Great Commission. The Christian message is preeminently just this world proclamation of the Redeemer’s Resurrection. “Ye shall be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8), that is, witnesses of the Risen Christ. The first and foremost compulsion for the Christian mission rests not in the needs of the people, staggering as these are, but rather in the stupendous news that the Risen Christ is Saviour and Lord.
What great fact propelled Saul of Tarsus from Judaism to Christianity? The Risen Lord! Why does the converted persecutor now defy the entire Sanhedrin? What changed the lives of the enemies of the Church? What explains the disciples’ new-found boldness? The Risen Lord’s anointing! “Ye shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you!” He equipped them for their witness and their work.
“All power is given unto me,” he said. Must the contenders in the modern power struggle shrug off this message with deaf ears? Mr. Khrushchev, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Macmillan, Mr. Adenauer, Mr. de Gaulle! Christ confronts the rulers of this world unafraid. Unafraid! They cannot forever evade the Easter headlines: ultimate power is the Risen Christ’s alone!
To all strangers to God’s grace we convinced Christians testify that the Risen Lord is powerful and present still. Do not dismiss his Gospel as a small-town affair. For good reason Jesus called it “leaven” and “salt.” It is through a “remnant” that God accomplishes his purpose in history. As in Noah’s day, the dedicated minority of God’s people is still the real cutting edge of history. Sociologists may write of this world’s shameful decline to barbarism, historians of the de-Christianization of the West, skeptics of the failings of Christendom. But divine sovereignty settled the inner meaning and direction of history long ago. Christ is alive! His Resurrection frames the horizons of history. The intellectual who snubs anything spiritual as superstition, the Marxist who rants at religion as an opiate, do not in the least disprove the case for the biblical view of life. They prove, rather, their personal estrangement to the fact and power of Christ’s Resurrection. If Christ remains on the Cross, then history loses its heart, and life is stripped of its crown. Only by losing grip on Christ’s Resurrection did Western culture lose its basic sustaining conviction, and thus revive the clutch of paganism. But modern man is discovering the hard way that without His Resurrection, emphasis even on eternal moral values and spiritual truths soon withers and dies. Undermining vital faith in Christ’s Resurrection makes it easier for the false prophets to peddle vague and erroneous generalities about life and history.
Recently C. L. Sulzberger noted in The New York Times: “So terribly much has happened, so terribly much is happening, and all with such terrible speed, that it is difficult to foresee where We are headed. The men who fancy themselves in control of events are no longer really in control.…” Let’s make no mistake about it: the real Lord of the times and tides of history is not subject to tenure, whether in Moscow or Washington or Cairo or London or Peiping. In international relations the Risen Lord is the only reliable constant. Christ alone can dispel the sense of suffocation that would choke man’s spirit. Demonic dictators and totalitarian tyrants, who for a season lord themselves over all human affairs, are soon dead and buried. One after another they cower before the once slain but now Risen Saviour for judgment upon their sins. He is risen! This fact warns all would-be manipulators of human destiny to ready themselves for divine judgment. Proudly we assert Christ’s crown-rights over a prodigal world. And in his name we challenge the resurgent paganisms. In the name of the Risen Prince of Peace we confront a generation still unrepentant despite Pearl Harbor, despite the blitz bombing of London, the fire bombing of Hamburg, the atom bombing of Hiroshima, the rape of Hungary, the division of Korea and Germany. For 16 years nations have fashioned ever deadlier nuclear monsters. But the powers of darkness do not hold this world in thrall. Hitler died. Mussolini died. Stalin died. Such evil-venting and power-hungry men wilt in a day like the grass of the field. Christ alone occupies a throne forever. While pretenders to world power may aspire to become the lords of history, they all perish each in his turn. Jesus Christ is risen. Before him and him alone every knee must bow.
The good news of Easter means more than resurrection from the dead and life beyond the grave. It means also the conquest of all evil, even the ultimate evil that would destroy the very Son of God. Right is sovereign; in the arena of history, holiness and truth will win. Christ’s triumph over death, therefore, affects both the moral issues of life and mankind’s final destiny.
He is alive! That is what so vividly stirs the hope of heaven in all who know him. While the Resurrection vindicates the person of Jesus, it is more than his personal triumph. It is the threshold triumph of Jesus’ great world mission, and it embraces the whole community of faith whose reproach he bore. He came to this earth as the gathering point for God’s new community. He united to himself all sinners who identify themselves with his perfect obedience and sacrifice. The Christian faith heralds the good news that in his Atonement and Resurrection Jesus did in fact carry all repentant sinners with him.
He is alive! This fact stirs also the fear of hell in those who reject him. Total destruction by monstrous weapons is not the only fear, nor the deepest fear, that torments mankind today. Over this twentieth century, too, hangs the fear of hell. We remind those who cringe only before some ultimate weapon, some colossus of physical destruction, of Jesus’ words: “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). Men are haunted by their many fears today because they no longer allow the fear of God to drive them to their knees in repentance and obedient service. While modern man glories in his harnessing of the atom, yet he dreads atomic destruction of the very planet he lives on. While he glories in his fashioning of the United Nations as a forum of the great world powers, yet he dreads the marching momentum of the Marxist movement. He glories in his own fragile achievements, but gives no glory and authority to Almighty God. The words “thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory” are a mockery on his lips. He disbelieves that men are dead in sin and swayed by Satan; therefore he no longer exults as did our forefathers in Christ’s triumph over sin and death. Man-made shelters may stand between us and atomic fallout; but are we sheltered for eternity by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ? What of your unforgiven sins? Only Christ’s saving death and Resurrection can protect you from the fallout of evil in this life and from the judgment to come. Christ is alive and still asserts his power over this world and the next. Graciously he offers us this interval for repentance, this decision-time for a godly tomorrow.
The Lord calls; he calls you, as you are, to repentance, to forgiveness, to newness of life. Do the false modern creeds—such as economic determinism, secularism, scientism and materialism—deaden your sense of guilt for sin? Smother your sense of guilt though you may, Christ speaks to the unsmotherable sense of need that remains. The Risen Christ still calls you away from the smog-bound horizons of your distorted life. As the Risen Christ he calls—you who are afraid to die; you who are nauseated by the nothingness of time-bound things; you who yearn for a life fit for eternity. He confronts your troubled conscience—about your violated marriage vows, friends you have wronged, workers you have robbed, the boss you have cheated.
Only the redeemed sinner can sing of victory. For he knows that the turning point of history is not Karl Marx and his economic determinism but Jesus Christ and his Atonement and Ascension. The crisis of human history is the Cross and the Resurrection. At CHRISTIANITY TODAY I interviewed that great statesman Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations. As he scorned the Communist dogma of economic determinism, I said, “Dr. Malik, what is the hinge of history?” Without hesitation Dr. Malik replied: “The hinge of history to me is Jesus Christ.” I ask you, is it not time we confronted the false fatalism that overruns the world today? The sentimental “whatever will be, will be”; the Marxist misreading of history; the evolutionary notion of an automatic paradise. In a world bound by the sovereignty of God, we have a duty to ask, What is truly inevitable? In the Book of Revelation (4:1) the Apostle John speaks of “things which must be hereafter”—the return of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the dead, final judgment of the wicked, the full establishment of God’s Kingdom in justice and peace, the conformity of believers to the holy image of God’s Son, the heavenly bliss of the redeemed, pangs of hell for the unregenerate. That is inevitable; that is what “must be hereafter.” “The hour is coming,” said Jesus, “in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:28, 29). Khrushchev will be there. Mao Tse-tung will be there. You will be there. I will be there. And what says the Apostle Paul? “For we mustALL appear before the judgment seat of Christ …” (2 Cor. 5:10). Again, the apostle writes: “He must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet” (1 Cor. 15:25). Here is the must, the inevitability, of history. The first time Christ came in fulfillment of the Holy Scriptures, he said, “this that is written must … be accomplished in me” (Luke 22:37); “thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day” (Luke 24:46). The inevitability of history was sure as the divine fulfillment of the Holy Scriptures. Remembering the prophetic Word (Matt. 26:54), Jesus said on the way to the Cross, “Thus it must be.” Those self-same Scriptures still speak their further God-assured inevitabilities—the terrible doom of the wicked on the one hand; on the other, the final glory of all who abide in Christ.
The Risen Christ is Lord! His Resurrection guarantees our resurrection on that last day. It promises a divinely renewed and restored heaven and earth. It defines history not in terms of economic necessity, but of divine certainties, of theological necessity. Communists win followers to their counterfeit doctrine of history by deceiving those who ought to know that the real world is governed by spiritual and moral imperatives. Will a death-dealing mushroom cloud crush the last life out of this wicked world? Or will a cloud of glory bring the return of Jesus Christ in power and judgment and triumph? Anyone alive and alert to the Resurrection of Christ and to the Pentecostal era of the Church can never surrender to pagan reconstructions of history, cannot yield the world once again to impersonal nonspiritual forces.
No figure in the modern world is more pathetic than a professing Christian who mouths a confession of Christ’s Lordship but crowds Christ out of his personal life. The truly regenerate believer know’s that our destiny in this life and in that to come turns on the axis of Christ’s Resurrection. Satan’s best gift to Communism and to other secular antichrist movements is a careless Christian whose indifference allows Jesus Christ the hinge of history to become but a rust-covered hinge in his personal life. Not to count for Christ and his Kingdom is as devastating as being a card-carrying Communist. The Lord Jesus Christ linked his Resurrection to the end of history and to the end of time. The Great Commission has an end-time reference that makes our proclamation of his message doubly relevant today.
Man and maintain your position, Christian, against this world’s idolatrous views of history. Perform your strategic role; like the early believers, “go … make disciples.” This is no time for silence. Trumpet the good news of Easter: Christ is risen, Christ is Lord, Christ is our Coming King!
A Great Gulf Fixed In Scottish Ecumenism
The titular head of the Church of Scotland calls on the international leader of a well-behaved Scottish minority church. It is all done decently and in order. Who could be churlish enough to object, when an ecumenical reasonableness is the temper of the times? Scotland has traveled four centuries from John Knox’s blunt “Give the Devil entry with his finger, and straightway he will shoot forth his whole arm.” The Church of Rome has increased 16-fold over the past century in Scotland, where 1,000 masses are now said daily. Until recent years a Roman Catholic newspaper included in every issue an inset of Glasgow Cathedral (Reformed since 1560) and around it the words: “It was and yet shall be.”
Now that the Moderator has crossed half a continent to see the Pope, it may be hoped that his successor will resume the practice of crossing the street to the Free Kirk Assembly, where a very real (if less spectacular) work of reconciliation remains to be done. The trouble is that the Free Kirk might be tiresome enough to drag in Reformation principles—and haven’t we got past all that.
Can The Sunday School Bridle The Juvenile Crime Rate?
For every 25 juveniles today there is one juvenile arrest. While the number of ten to seventeen year-olds increased 25 per cent between 1955–60, arrests among them increased 48 per cent. Greatest upturns are in crimes involving stolen property (105 per cent), forgery (82 per cent), manslaughter (67 per cent), drunken driving (65 per cent), larceny (61 per cent), minor assaults (58 per cent), fraud (50 per cent), gambling (50 per cent), and robbery (49 per cent). Latest FBI figures reveal 1961 topped 1960.
Even if the juvenile crime rate increases no faster than the growth of juvenile population there will still be a greater number of juvenile crimes, an ominous fact in the face of prospective population explosions.
Should the church, specifically the Sunday school, assume some blame? Does it exercise the necessary compassion and concerted effort to reach those families from which most juvenile crime proceeds—families of low socio-economic status? Whereas many parents themselves spurn the Gospel, experience discloses that they nevertheless allow their little ones to attend Sunday school—if someone kindly and persistently invites them, regularly calls for and returns them. If the fullness of the Saviour and his Word are urgently and lovingly presented to these youngsters, future crime statistics should show a drop. Certainly the church school will have more fully met its responsibility.
Will Russian Orthodoxy Advance Communist Objectives?
Does the present thaw in the Kremlin’s attitude toward religion signal a change in the basic Marxist view that religion is an opiate?
A significant volume, published in German (Die sowjetische Religionspolitik und die Russische Orthodoxe Kirche, Münich, Institut zur Erforschung der USSR, 1960) by a Russian-born professor, appraises Soviet religious policy. The author, Dr. Alexander Kischkowsky, currently teaching Slavic languages in the University of Southern California, and one time lector in the Russian Orthodox Church, points out that since 1945 the Soviet regime has brazenly exploited its relationship with the Orthodox Church and used it instrumentally to promote Communist goals.
Professor Kischkowsky’s thesis, that the Communist regime actively advances its goals through the Russian Orthodox Church, has especially far-reaching implications, since that church now belongs to the World Council of Churches. Some observers predict that the next two or three years of ecumenical association in World Council circles will clearly indicate whether the Russian church will fulfill its own destiny and image, or whether it will reflect that of the Soviet rulers.
From an analysis of official Soviet documents, Professor Kischkowsky concludes that, despite the Kremlin’s softer attitude toward the Russian Orthodox Church, the basic Marxist outlook on religion has not changed since Lenin came to power in October, 1917. The faith and dominant Weltanschauung of Soviet and International Communism are dialectical materialism, which is admittedly atheistic and hostile to religion. Beneath its changing tactics in respect to bourgeois religion, the intention of Communism remains that of destroying all religious faith in the Russian mind.
From 1917–27 Kremlin rulers methodically and progressively emasculated the powers of the Russian Orthodox Church. Kischkowsky details the state’s confiscation of church property, subordination of all schools to the state commissar of education, elimination of all state subsidies to churches. Although the fifth Soviet Congress of July 10, 1918, separated church and state, and granted every Soviet citizen the right to religious and antireligious propoganda, the net result was the loss of legal protection by all religious faiths. Clergymen were denied the right to work and were catalogued as nonworkers (parasites); many were charged with reactionary tendencies or treason, and not a few were executed. Mass terror against the Orthodox church was widened in 1928 to include heavy persecution of Baptists and other religious groups. Soviet leaders exploited the “divide and conquer” technique, by allowing the formation of rival churches which undermined existing ones. While assuring the world at large that religious causes were faring well in Russia, the Kremlin actively supported organized blasphemous processions and demonstrations.
The period 1927–30 Professor Kischkowsky characterizes as “The Politics of Destruction.” It begins with Patriarch Tichen’s declaration of loyalty to the Soviet upon his release from prison. His successors were forced into the same mold. Freed from prison, Metropolitan Serjij, in his statement to the faithful, implied virtual subservience of the church to Soviet ends. The mass closing of Orthodox churches followed nonetheless in 1928, justified by the government as the will of the people; persecution spread even to rural areas; priests were assigned to forced labor and exile, and some were executed. Despite the new Stalin constitution of 1936, 612 churches were destroyed in 1937, and 110 mosques, 1,100 Orthodox, 240 Catholic and 61 Protestant churches were closed.
But the years 1939–54 reflect, as Kischkowsky puts it, “The Politics of Exploitation.” For purely tactical reasons the Soviet rulers took a different approach toward religion. When Hitler’s hordes moved against Russia, the Orthodox church lent moral support against the invaders, and Soviet commissars in turn were appointed for the various religious communions. But, notes Kischkowsky, this atmosphere of good will and exchange prepared the way, after 1945, for the Soviet regime to exploit the Orthodox church to its own advantage. The Russian Orthodox Church, he contends, is anything but a free partner of the state; both in peace and in war it is forced to further Soviet goals. What freedom it has is limited indeed; its so-called freedom of the altar has been purchased at an exhorbitant price that includes the surrender of active Christian propaganda and evangelism.
Professional Boxing: Legitimate Sport Or Legalized Brutality?
The brutal beating which sent welterweight boxer Benny (Kid) Paret to his death has raised a coast to coast protest against professional boxing. The protest was stiffened by news one week later that heavyweight Tunney Hunsacker suffered a similar brain injury and went into a coma after being knocked senseless in a West Virginia ring. There is a growing demand by both Protestants and Roman Catholics, and by people of civilized instincts and moral sensibility, that professional boxing be banned.
Proponents of boxing defend the prize ring by urging that boxing lifts many young men to whom it appeals from poverty, nonrecognition, pool hall, and juvenile delinquency, to disciplined purpose, wealth and prestige. While side benefits cannot be denied, the argument is transparently weak. As though there were not a thousand better ways of achieving the same benefits! What proponents of professional boxing fail to point out is that these benefits come to some at the cost of injury and death to others. They may urge that there have been only two prior deaths in championship bouts since 1897. But they fail to say that Paret is one of more than 450 men who have died because of boxing injuries since 1900. Nor do they tell of the many boxers, who after years in the ring, live out the rest of their days with scrambled brains and dulled senses.
Boxing in the past appealed to many people who never saw it close up. Television is changing that. They now see the cut and closed eyes, the face punched to bloody pulp. They are discovering that professional boxing is not a sport at all, but a cruel thing stocked with problems for moral conscience.
The argument that boxing is no more illegitimate than football and basketball because deaths also occur in these does not face the real issue. Accidents occur in many legitimate sports, but they are incidental to them. In boxing the aim is to maim, to pound into pulp to clobber into unconsciousness. The objective is the knockout punch. This makes it a form of savagery, not a sport.
Because it is at best dangerous, at worst murderous, and for long involved in underworld activities, many voices are demanding that the prize ring be banned. If Christians do the same, a society which insists on humane treatment of animals, may insist on as much for human beings.
Nuclear Disaster—The Threat And The Promise
Proposing the thesis that “nuclear disaster will befall us unless a worldwide taboo miraculously grows up,” John F. Wharton, New York lawyer and author, writes for a recent issue of the Saturday Review under the perceptive and stimulating title “The Threat and the Promise.” According to Wharton, two things are necessary if this “taboo,” the last hope of mankind, is to be effective. First, it must be accompanied with an understanding among all men that restraints are laid upon them; and second, it must be met at once with a suitable plan for worldwide control.
Mr. Wharton is not an optimist, to be sure, but his proposed solution to the arms race betrays an unfounded optimism concerning the nature and abilities of man. It betrays the erroneous opinion that man is equal to his problems and can with sufficient effort and application overcome them. Against this optimism the Christian must place the biblical affirmation of a sinful and therefore selfish human nature.
Is this to say that the Church has no hope to offer concerning the “threat” of a nuclear war? By no means. But it does mean that the Church must resist an optimistic “promise.” It must declare that man by his own abilities has no strength to avert this disaster. At the same time, the Church must grasp the essence of its message, the proclamation of Jesus Christ, who calls men to himself, promises them the reality of a new and transformed life and who offers the restraint for which Mr. Wharton calls. The threat of war has its overriding promises, but they are the promises of God through Christ.
Space Cooperation May Prove To Be An Earthly Trap
Russia’s precipitate willingness to join the United States in the scientific exploration of space is more than significant, it is ominous. Having violated the spirit of honest negotiations by the explosion of some 50 tests while carrying on the Geneva talks last year, she now grasps at a proffered suggestion, immediately following Colonel John Glenn’s orbiting of the earth.
Is this a gesture of good will? We fear not. Rather it suggests the strong probability that we have discovered techniques the Russians are desperately anxious to acquire for themselves.
History should have warned us by now. Up to 1948 Russia had entered into 40 major agreements with us and violated 38 of them. Since then the record is equally dismal.
D. S. Greenberg, writing in Science for March, 1962, says: “The impasse at Geneva serves as a warning that the chasm between East and West remains perilously wide, and hopes for space cooperation should therefore be restrained from going into orbit.”
Will we never learn?
Moral Dilemmas, Dual Standards Widen In A Self-Righteous Age
In a fortnight packed with moral dilemmas … Castro demanded $62 million ransom to release 1, 180 men caught in the Bay of Pigs invasion. For the Free World to comply would only encourage more such demands, (Jewry is daily paying ransom money to rescue Jews from behind the Iron Curtain.) Not to do so would violate a fundamental Free World principle: namely, that human lives count more than dollars, even if the dollars temporarily buttress a corrupt regime.… The UN’s rebuke of Israel over the Syrian crisis widened Israel’s reputation for replying to provocative acts with physical force. Yet the U.S., herself involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, had the temerity to sponsor the UN resolution.… U.S. Steel (whose 1961 earnings were only five cents per common share above dividend requirements) raised the price of steel and promptly shocked the conscience of government leaders who show little if any zeal to decrease the federal debt.
