“The currents of life are running deep—in bewildering confusion, in wild abandon to pleasure and lust, in commitment to demonic purpose, in yearning for redemption from lostness and guilt and weakness, and in searching quest for values that can survive nuclear chaos. The Gospel speaks to life like this, at the deepest and highest levels. But the most agonizing concern, the most daring thinking, and the most skillful portrayal of life seem to spring from sources unacquainted with the truth that makes men free. Here is a challenge to the Christian writer—to tell the good news so convincingly that there will be a new birth of faith and hope and love.” With this timely definition of the Christian writer’s task Dr. Clifton J. Allen, Editorial Secretary of The Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, recently convened the annual writers’ conference at Ridgecrest, North Carolina.
If the Spirit of God is creative and re-creative, should not Christian writing pioneer new motifs and patterns that impart new glory to the written word? For evangelicals a special theological connotation attaches to “the Word of God written”: the Living God has in-scribed his thoughts into the language of the sacred writers. Ought not this confidence, therefore, to challenge the evangelical writer in each generation to utilize language as the colorful marketplace of spiritual truths? If Christianity is a message for all people, for the masses—as indeed it is—each succeeding year brings greater responsibility to Christian writers for creative material that tackles life, in Dr. Allen’s phrase, “at the deepest and highest levels.”
Even the secular press currently voices a growing demand for something fresh and worthwhile.
Evaluating the 1961–62 television season, Associated Press reporter Cynthia Lowry noted: “For a second year in a row, it has been a period rarely sparked by creativity—a period dominated by formula writing and production line entertainment containing very little that was fresh or novel.… It was a time when there were few original dramas, and most of those were second-rate and seemed to have been scripts found at the back of an author’s desk drawer.”
Jenkin Lloyd Jones, editor of The Tulsa Tribune, has said: “It’s time we quit giving page one to the extra-marital junkets of crooners.… time we stopped treating as glamorous and exciting the brazen shack-ups of screen tramps.… time we asked our Broadway and Hollywood columnists if they can’t find something decent and inspiring going on along their beats.”
Constantine Brown writes in her syndicated column: “Today in America, any teen-ager can drop into the corner store to buy a magazine from a wide selection of obscene literature which can subvert the young mind and possibly leave a lifelong scar.… America’s children are her future.… What great wrongs are being perpetrated against the souls of our young people! Many of the thrills of life have been refused them.… They must find their inspirations in forbidden evils to satisfy the exuberance of youth.… Where are the sons of America who can inspire our youth and our people? Who can renew our faith …? (The Evening Star, Washington, D. C., May 8, 1962).
A recent essay in Motive listed truth, love, and power as qualities of good writing that indicate craftsmanship-plus. Who is capable for these qualities but writers of maturity, of insight, of feeling, and above all of Christian devotion and depth?
Our generation thinks of power mainly in terms of the capacity to control, to manipulate, and to destroy; it knows little of the power of the Gospel, of the tender pressure of the Holy Ghost, of the majestic might of the Lord of Glory. Can Christian writers so frame contemporary life against the sacred realities that the sin-scarred nations of the world will see bloodshed and hear the thunder of our times overshadowed by the blood of the Cross and God’s shaking of the heavens?
Without truth and love, the power of words is destructive dynamite that sears the souls of saintly men and triggers the temper of weary and over-wrought nations. Without truth and power, the love of words is but an adolescent blush of immaturity. Without love and power, the truth of words is merely the echo of Sinai’s wrathful thunders; its lightning flashes earth ward to vanish forever into blackness. There is no hint of respite from the storm, of a rainbow in the sky, of the strong Son of God who to the soul’s dark midnight brings the abiding glow of triumph. To join words in truth, in power, and in love is to articulate and to mirror the central reality of the Christian faith, namely, the eternal Word become flesh.
Answerability to truth, therefore, is a sure plus hallmark of the Christian craftsman.
Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the General Assembly of the United Nations, has said: “The Christian seeks to know the facts. This is not easy these days, with so much hearsay, sentimentalism, and prejudice; and so he cannot be too wary against propaganda and falsehood. Nothing is more comfortable than to be swept with the current, especially when the current is so strong; but a Christian fights stupidity, superficiality, and tendentiousness like hell. There is truth, his duty is to seek it, and his destiny is to find it and feed on it. The difference between the attitude of the Christian and that of so many others is that, whereas others may wish to transform the nature of things to suit their own purposes, the Christian only wishes to discover that nature so as to conform to it himself. Their attitude is more one of will and power; his attitude is more one of understanding” (Christ and Crisis, p. 88, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962).
No one is entitled, of course, to a spirit of arrogance that presupposes omniscience of all learning and experience; profound humility in the presence of truth in its wholeness ought always to characterize a truly devout spirit. But the Christian need not apologize for his distinctive beliefs, and has no reason to calculate how little rather than how much he can believe of his heritage and still remain Christian. It was John himself, the apostle of love, who stamped upon his epistles the radiant refrain: “We know.… we know.… we know that we know!”
Our age of propaganda finds it difficult to discern and to tell the truth; its capacity for misjudging love is equally profound. The problem is not simply that the unregenerate world identifies the Great Lover with some character in a paperback and not with the central figure of John’s Gospel. After all, ignorance of God’s redemptive mercy characterizes much of the unregenerate world. Nor should Madison Avenue, despite its odd focus on Christian motifs, bear the whole blame. The secular world often is confused about the meaning and role of love because its exposition and portrayal by Christians is ambiguous. Even evangelical writers sometimes present the Gospel with a wideness that strains the quality of mercy. Scripture clearly registers the meaning of love in the life of Christ; somehow love in the life of the Christian often seems to change with the times. In one generation it-may mean support for socialism; in another, promotion of pacifism; in still another, propagandizing for higher minimal wages or for Red China’s admission to the United Nations, and so on. A divinity student in Washington, D. C., murdered a young woman because he “loved” her so much. How important it becomes then for Christian writers to distinguish apostolic compassion from post-Christian sentimentalism.
The Bible sets the exposition of love in the context of God and neighbor. Broad generalizations like “universal brotherhood” and “one world” too easily lose the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of the scriptural guidelines of love. Granted that the Great Commission is global, and that the evangel is for everyman, yet it is specific deeds of love and mercy to the needy neighbor at our side that confirm or compromise our confession of faith and love.
For this reason Christian writing—be it fact or fiction—lends itself so remarkably as a concrete mirror on the abstract idealism of our age. The Gospel demands to see love “close up”; to hear the truth “close up”; to experience power “close up.” Jesus lingers to talk with the Samaritan while others shun and pass her by. Friends lower the sick man through the housetop for healing. Matthew invites his neighbors to supper. We see the priest bypassing the man who fell among thieves. The Gospel reveals me, too. I may deplore the gross sexuality of our sensate age, but may be enjoying some lustful look. I may deplore the evils of big business, but may undermine my fellow-worker’s advancement to a superior position. This is the stuff of daily life, the sordid stuff that new life in Christ helps to erase. By taking hold of life in all its concrete expressions one steps into the boudoir of one’s own soul and into that of one’s neighbor. How to move within those private chambers to the bedside of prayer and penitence and wholeness is the craftsman’s task.
One sign of evangelical literary skill must lie in the way a writer strikes his point of contact for the Gospel with his intended reader, particularly if that reader is predisposed against Christianity by the prevailing bias of the age. Granted that one falls short of New Testament theology unless he includes such facts as atonement, justification, regeneration, and sanctification (whether in contemporary or in classic vocabulary), does the novelist suddenly squeeze his unchurched character into a church service (in which the latter would otherwise scarcely be caught alive) in order to “get across” the full three points of a Bible-packed sermon? Does he flay the sinner with God’s wrath, hammering away at the sinner’s sense of guilt? Or is he aware that the sense of guilt may be defensively repressed or long disowned? Is he then alert to speak to the sinner’s existential need, until its frontiers can be extended to include the need of forgiveness and faith, the need of atonement and reconciliation?
Does he hurry the unrepentant character’s confession of Christ, so that instead of sharing the Apostle Paul’s disappointment over Agrippa’s “with a very little (evidence) you seek to persuade me,” the reader is astonished that the stubborn obstacles to belief are so swiftly overcome?
Do we see the whole man—mind, feelings and will-locked up at last for a commitment to the whole Gospel? And what is the totality of the “good news”? Is the sinner’s reception of Christ as Saviour the main or only climax? Is this not the beginning-point rather than the end-point of Christian experience? If Christianity implies the triumph of Christ in history, is it not fully as important to show how virtue informs the new man’s decisions and deeds where once vice deformed them both?
The lifeblood of Western civilization has become infected with a death-dealing virus. In a recent address Karl Brandt of Stanford University noted that “many of the strands of suicidal thought in the minds of the Western community have their roots in the flood of negatively criticizing or muckraking literature on nearly all phases of the history of the West during the last 150 years.” Dr. Brandt adds: “How can the West win the battle of the coming decade if our young generation is ashamed of the history of our whole Western civilization? How can a civilization prevail if instead of having faith in its greater values and a missionary spirit of expanding its rule, the main emphasis is on liquidation, an abandoning, on retreat?” The lesson for Christian writers is all too apparent, unless we are reconciled to the continuing spiritual and moral suicide of the West. If the Western urge to suicide is to be replaced by yearning for new life, the twentieth-century man so inaccessible to the evangelical preacher may first have to be reached by the evangelical writer. And for this stupendous task the times call not merely for craftsmen, but for craftsmen plus.
Ncc Social Welfare Head Promotes Government Programs
The executive director of the National Council of Churches’ Department of Social Welfare, the Rev. Sheldon L. Rahn, recently traveled to the District of Columbia to address the Methodist Division of Temperance and General Welfare and carried along an endorsement of government welfare that stacked almost as high as the Washington Monument.
In contrast to the New Testament writers, Mr. Rahn had little if anything to say about social justice and righteousness, or concerning the gift of repentance as a cure for social evils. As “the four great problems in the field of social welfare” today, he named dependency, poverty, illness, and maladjustment (a collection of concerns that, we might add, neither the prophets nor apostles assigned priority, and which they failed to nominate for total eradication in fallen history). Mr. Rahn more than compensates for this scriptural omission, however. By 1975, he assures the Methodists, “a significant portion of this grief and human distress can be reduced or eliminated” if the United States avoids war, accelerates public as well as private insurance against unemployment, old age hazards, physical illness, and work accidents, and implements nationwide the objectives of the 1962 Public Welfare Amendments. In addition, Mr. Rahn urges Methodists to “strengthen the work of commissions on Christian social concern at the annual conference and local church level along with their counterparts in every denomination (and) organize and finance 100 new social welfare departments in city and state councils of churches.”
Many Protestant churches are already splintered by debate over whether the Church should implement its Christian welfare and health (or education) objectives through government programs and public taxation. Mr. Rahn’s passing comment for the rising tide of critics of the NCC’s policy was: “This (matter of church-state issues) is a major subject in itself and cannot be treated here.” But Mr. Rahn’s own mind is obviously quite made up: “In 1962, the United States is spending $95.2 billion for health, education and welfare, an increase of 122 per cent since 1950. About 65 per cent of this $95.2 billion comes from the public sector.… There are people who worry about this dramatic growth in the assumption of responsibility by government for meeting the health, education and welfare needs of the nation’s families. I would prefer, however, to look upon it as a resounding victory for the churches and for the spirit of concern and compassion which was in Jesus Christ, was before him proclaimed by the Old Testament prophets, and is finally finding its way into public policy.”
Those churchgoers who think that Christian compassion is to be voluntarily ventured and supported, rather than compulsorily legislated and tax-supported—and they are legion—had better speak out before this Big Government “victory for the churches” widens until (as in East Germany) welfare activity becomes wholly a state affair and no longer remains a church prerogative.
The National Council is eager to secure a social action committee in every local church, and Mr. Rahn wants “full and free discussion of contemporary problems within the local church itself.” There is nothing wrong in principle with, and much to commend, such a development, although it would be better were the prayer meeting and the social action committee one and the same. But Mr. Rahn asserts that “the primary responsibility for social education in the churches does rest with denominational boards of social education and action.” If they take their cue from Mr. Rahn, it should be obvious that they are in for a very liberal education indeed.
A Bulgarian Communist Sights In On America
A professing Communist official happily engaged in PTA work and willing to offer helpful words of criticism on the American way of life. Such is the retiring Minister of Bulgaria, Dr. Peter G. Voutov, now departing from Washington, D. C., after a stay of more than eight years.
His views on America are properly mixed. He ranks American farmers the world’s finest, and American scenery as surpassing Europe’s in some respects.
But on the standard of American education he quite justifiably sounds like Admiral Rickover: “You teach here in the sixth grade what we teach in the third.” He rightly deplores our lack of stress on languages.
The Bulgarian praises American square dancing and other folk arts but has “nothing but condemnation for the Twist. It’s not a dance. It’s something savage.… It presents a distorted picture of this country.” Shades of Khrushchev on the cancan!
Early in life, Dr. Voutov spent six years in a religious seminary so rigorous that he could speak to his mother only through an iron grill. “Today,” he says, “I am an atheist. I feel that when I die that will be the end of existence for me. My mother does not agree with these opinions.”
That America is vulnerable to criticisms of the foregoing nature from a “puritanism” bred in violence, is due in part to weakness of Christian witness. Let us heed Voutov’s words and at the same time hope that upon his return to Bulgaria he continues to apply cultural insights critically. We may give thanks for his freedom to do so here.
Protests Mount Over Sterilization Of Mothers
More than 50 indigent mothers have been sterilized at their own request since January under the voluntary sterilization program at Fauquier Hospital, Warrenton, Virginia. Evangelist Billy Graham agreed with a Roman Catholic prelate’s declaration that sterilization of people “is morally wrong whether it be voluntary or compulsory in nature.” But the Archbishop of Washington antagonized Fauquier County authorities when he said that the sterilization program has as its “obvious and crudely selfish and materialistic purpose … to reduce the tax rate.” The chairman of the Board of Supervisors indirectly told the Archbishop to mind his own affairs (Fauquier County officials “tend to our own business”), pointing out that a multitude of citizens would have to be sterilized if tax reduction were the objective.
The Fauquier program is aimed primarily at married women who have several children and whose physical condition makes future pregnancies undesirable. But it is also offered to women without a husband and home who continue to bear children, and only to those who have borne three or more children. That which differentiates a decision like this from other forms of birth control is its irrevocability. And that which renders one uneasy in the presence of such a far-reaching and unalterable decision is the temporary and fluctuating character of some of the circumstances which prompt it. Not only childbearing but the capacity for childbearing is eliminated. And what then of a new dawn which may take place in the soul, bringing Christ’s own light, and with it a new set of motives and desires?
Life is a stupendous gift. It gives us qualms to see a darkened conscience make decisions which later illumination is powerless to counter.
If We Must Always Win, The Race Indeed Is Grim
If the future of the world depended on a certain team in the National League winning the pennant, and winning it every year, baseball would not be a sport but a thing of desperation. It appears that we live in this kind of world.
President Kennedy recently asserted at Rice University that if the vast seas of space are not to be filled with instruments of mass destruction, the U.S., not the U.S.S.R., must win first place in the space race and retain first place. He vowed we will. We like the spirit, not the picture.
Yet the picture seems accurate. Once the nation that ruled the seas ruled the world. Then it was the skies, then the nation first with atomic weapons. Today it is space. The nation that controls space will control the world. Yet it is a grim and unthrilling race if the peace of the world demands that we win, and always win.
Once it was poor sportsmanship to hit a man when he was down. But in the space race there is no place for sportsmanship. All blows must be delivered from above in this grim contest where peace is the pennant and peace depends on one nation always being in first place. The posture demanded by the necessity of always being first in space conjures an image unpleasant and disturbing. But in this kind of race one either towers above his opponent, or looks up at him from below.
Amid Political Turbulence, The Quiet Power Works
While the world watches Cuba and what the United States will do about this Russian outpost, and the Brazilian Premier and his cabinet resign amidst political turbulence, the Gospel of Christ works its quiet leavening action largely unnoticed by governments and secular press. Since mid-August a five-man team has been making final preparations for the second Graham crusade in South America this year. The crusade opens this week in São Paulo, Brazil, fastest growing city in the world. It will also be carried into Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay in what will be the greatest evangelistic effort in the history of these four countries.
Dr. Graham reports that the Brazilian crusade has the support of all the country’s Protestant churches. May this display of existential, grass-root unity not go unnoticed either by the Church of Christ or by that divided and fragmented other America. May the greatest power in the world continue to save.
