The cream of Washington officialdom turned out February 7 for the 11th annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast. For the first time, the program of the breakfast was carried on a national television network live from the Mayflower Hotel.
President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson led a long list of dignitaries who were on hand. Seated at the head table with Kennedy and Johnson were Chief Justice Earl Warren, Associate Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, House Speaker John W. McCormack, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Anthony J. Celebreeze, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, and Postmaster General J. Edward Day. The only members of the Kennedy cabinet who have yet to attend a prayer breakfast are Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall.
Evangelist Billy Graham, who had risen from a sickbed in Texas to attend the breakfast, compared the plight of the modern world with that of Damocles seated under a sword suspended by a single hair.
“The blade keeps swinging back and forth and the hair grows thinner and more frayed day by day,” he warned. “The nation stands at the crossroads where it must either choose God’s way or face destruction.”
“I challenge you,” Graham said, “to lead this nation back to the God of our our fathers and to look to him for deliverance.”
Graham was stricken with acute bronchitis and a mild case of pneumonia while fulfilling speaking engagements in Dallas. He was hospitalized for several days and doctors ordered him to bed immediately after the breakfast.
Kennedy, Johnson, and Graham crossed the hall to another banquet room and spoke briefly to the third annual Congressional Wives Breakfast. An aide said Graham almost collapsed when he got up to address the group. Principal speaker was Mrs. Colleen Townsend Evans, who gave up a promising movie career to marry a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Louis E. Evans, Jr.
Kennedy narrowly missed being showered with water when a glass was overturned on a balcony table directly over him. The water dripped down several feet away.
Kennedy himself pulled a faux pas at the ladies’ breakfast. It lent a humorous introduction to the remarks of the ailing Graham:
NEWS / A fortnightly report of developments in religion
GRAHAM PREPARES FOR LONG TOURS
When evangelist Billy Graham returned to his North Carolina home following the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, doctors diagnosed a secondary infection and Graham was forced to cancel all engagements for a month.
The evangelist was ordered to take a complete rest prior to an extensive tour of the Far East. He is due in Manila March 8.
Graham’s schedule calls for a crusade in the Philippines March 8–17, a three-day rally in Hong Kong March 22–24, meetings in Formosa March 17–28, and a campaign with Japanese Baptists March 29-April 10.
A month later the evangelist is to begin a series of rallies in France and West Germany.
Graham and his wife announced in February the engagement of their oldest daughter, Virginia (Gi-Gi), to Stephan Tchividjian, a medical student in Montreaux, Switzerland. Virginia, currently a freshman at Wheaton College, will continue her education in Switzerland following their marriage there this summer.
“Most of you were not aware that we almost had a national tragedy here a moment ago. The President happened to step on one of these modern ladies’ pocketbooks that are heavier than the average man’s suitcase.”
The breakfasts highlighted International Christian Leadership’s 19th annual Washington conference. ICL spokesmen said there were simultaneous prayer breakfasts in all 50 state capitals. Still other breakfasts featured mayors and municipal leaders in more than 100 cities. All were described as having tuned in the telecast from Washington.
Graham was introduced by Johnson, who observed that the evangelist “has carried the message of prayer and salvation to more people than any other living person.”
Kennedy declared that “we cannot depend solely on our material wealth, on our military might, or on our intellectual skill or physical courage to see us safely through the seas that we must sail in the months and years to come.”
“We need the faith,” said the President, “which has sustained and guided this nation for 175 long and short years. We are all builders of the future, and whether we build as public servants or private citizens, whether we build at the national or the local level, whether we build in foreign or domestic affairs, we know the truth of the ancient Psalm, ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.’ ”
The ICL conference sessions featured two members of the British Parliament who stressed that material and social betterment do not solve spiritual problems.
Sir Cyril W. Black, K. T., said that “we once generally accepted the propositions that (1) if we abolish poverty, we abolish crime; and (2) if we raise educational standards and opportunities, we shall raise moral and spiritual standards. But they have been disproved by experience, for in Great Britain crime has increased six-fold since 1900, and moral and spiritual standards have declined despite the spread of education and abolition of poverty.”
The Honorable John Cordle traced the development of the welfare state and said that “most of the social benefits are directly traceable to the work of Christian leaders and to the influence of the Christian church as a whole.”
“But the conditions we have produced by the application of Christian principles to our society,” he added, “seem to make it harder to win a hearing for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“Social betterment seems to have produced a materialistic outlook with a sense of wealth and comfort unknown to earlier generations,” said Cordle.
In essence, he added, “The Christian church in our country has done really a magnificent social job without producing a corresponding spiritual result. The social gospel of the last half century has proved inadequate to meet human needs, which go deeper than housing and pensions and education and health. Man’s deepest need is for God’s forgiveness, for God’s power in his life, and for the realization of the abiding presence of a living Saviour.”
The Fuller Presidency
In racing up the ladder of academic respectability, Fuller Theological Seminary knew the danger of losing balance. Last spring, when the University of Chicago tapped Professor (and former president) Edward John Carnell to represent the conservative Protestant view in a panel with theologian Karl Barth, Fuller had apparently reached a vantage point enjoyed by few evangelical seminaries. But some critics insisted it was a precarious perch. The president’s chair at the Pasadena, California, seminary had been without an on-campus occupant for ten out of fifteen years. How long could a seminary hold its stature without the steadying influence of a resident president?
Early in January, Fuller trustees decided they had procrastinated long enough. They had traveled thousands of miles interviewing prospects for the presidency. They had weighed dozens of factors. Their deliberations were climaxed at a grueling 12-hour meeting, an invitation was extended, and a telephone call on February 4 confirmed it: Fuller trustees had plucked a new star out of the evangelical sky in the person of Dr. David Allan Hubbard, 34, Old Testament scholar and one of Fuller’s own graduates.
Behind the buff-tinted walls of Fuller Seminary lies a success story paralleling the post-war resurgence of evangelical Christianity in America. The school had its roots in the mind of Dr. Charles E. Fuller, preacher on the widely heard Gospel radio program “The Old Fashioned Revival Hour.” Fuller’s father had left money for establishment of a Christian training school, and Fuller called on Dr. Harold John Ockenga, scholarly minister of Boston’s Park Street Church, to lay the academic groundwork. Four faculty members and 37 students were on hand for the first classes, held in the fall of 1947 at Lake Avenue Congregational Church, Pasadena, when zoning restrictions barred immediate use of a large estate on South Orange Grove Avenue, the city’s “millionaire row.”
Ockenga was first president, and from the outset Fuller trustees tried to persuade him to give up his Boston parish and move to California. The plea was renewed numerous times in subsequent years. Once he publicly announced, then retracted, a decision to come.
Ockenga served as president in absentia until 1954, when he was appointed chairman of the board of trustees and Professor Carnell, then 35 years old, became Fuller’s first full-time president. Three years later, the seminary won full accreditation from the American Association of Theological Schools. But the studious Carnell never could get enthusiastic about administrative burdens of the presidency. On the advice of doctors he resigned the office in 1959 to devote himself to study and teaching as a faculty member. Ockenga again resumed the responsibility of the presidency in 1961.
The school prospered consistently. Its campus now embraces a healthy parcel of real estate straddling palm-lined North Oakland Avenue. A new library building will be dedicated this year. Total student enrollment now stands at 286.
The latest presidential selection procedure at Fuller had the misfortune of getting somewhat entangled in a trustee debate over the seminary’s evangelically oriented ten-point statement of faith1The first two points: (1) “There is one living and true God, infinite in glory, wisdom, holiness, justice, power, and love, one in His essence but eternally subsistent in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” (2) “The books which form the canon of the Old and New Testaments as originally given are plenarily inspired and free from all error in the whole and in the part. These books constitute the written Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” which every faculty member is required to sign annually. At least one trustee said he wanted to see the statement “strengthened.” Most of the board, however, argued that any tampering might be misconstrued.
The trustees’ lack of theological orientation obviously intensified the debate. Only three of them are clergymen: Ockenga, Fuller, and evangelist Billy Graham. Most are business executives.
Edward L. Johnson, a San Marino financier who served as vice chairman of the 14-member board, resigned in December. Neither Johnson nor the seminary would disclose the nature of his dispute with the other members. He stressed, however, that it was not over the selection of Hubbard, but preceded it.
Hubbard, an ordained Conservative Baptist minister, was elected to the presidency unanimously. A vote of the 17 Fuller faculty members which named him a professor of Old Testament also was unanimous. In a sense, Hubbard’s appointment poses a test of the seminary’s stability, as two graduates assume the reins over their former professors (the other: Faculty Dean Daniel P. Fuller, Basel-educated son of the radio preacher).
Born in the San Francisco Bay area, the son of a minister, Hubbard took his college work at Westmont in Santa Barbara, California, and moved on to Fuller for bachelor and master of theology degrees. He was awarded the Ph.D. at St. Andrews University in Scotland in 1957, having financed his way by representing an electronics firm on the Continent. He returned to Westmont as a faculty member and in 1958 was named chairman of its division of biblical studies and philosophy.
Hubbard’s published work includes contributions to Baker’s Dictionary of Theology, The New Bible Dictionary, The Biblical Expositor, and The Wycliffe Commentary. He has served as guest preacher on “The Old Fashioned Revival Hour” and as visiting professor of Old Testament at Fuller.
Hubbard will take office in September, following a tour to the Holy Land with his wife. The couple has one child, an eight-year-old daughter.
“Our aim,” says Hubbard, “is to train men who will preach with courage, vision, and clarity the Gospel of Christ to a generation so desperately in need of a clear appreciation of its message of judgment and grace.”
The chief ministry of Fuller, as he sees it, is “to make both a positive and an enlightened presentation of the historic Christian faith.”
Hubbard maintains that the seminary ought to be characterized by “competence with consecration,” that it should gain insights from current theological tides but should subject these tides “to a radical judgment in light of the revelation given by God in the Holy Scriptures.”
“I am personally committed,” he says, “to bend every effort to see that the goals originally set by Dr. Ockenga and Dr. Fuller will be implemented.”
Lutheran Consensus
The National Lutheran Council, “cooperative agency of American Lutheranism in matters of common interest and responsibility,” ranged across a wide variety of common interests—as is its custom—in its 45th annual meeting in New York City.
The large number of reports received included a study document which supported “limited and specified use” of public tax funds for non-public colleges and universities but opposed such aid to parochial schools. The council did not formally adopt the report but transmitted it—without expressing judgment on its contents—to the two NLC participating church bodies, the American Lutheran Church and Lutheran Church in America, for whatever use they may wish to make of it.
“Public tax support for church schools, even in limited and specified ways, would create great advantage for some religious groups over others at the elementary and secondary school levels,” the report said, “but would not necessarily have the same effect at the level of college education.”
Other reports included:
• Opposition to those who believe the ministry to military personnel should be completely manned and administered by civilians. (The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, not an NLC member, was named a supporter of this view.) Such a position, said the report, is “unacceptable to churches which take seriously the problems inherent in providing an adequate ministry for people who are called to guard our freedoms.”
• Announcement of the expected merger of the seven Lutheran bodies in Tanganyika into a united denomination to be known as “The Lutheran Church of Tanganyika.”
The council passed a resolution urging Congress to enact legislation to “adjust and correct” U.S. immigration policy. It called for the following revisions: providing for an allocation of immigration quotas from countries outside the Western Hemisphere on a basis which is more equitable and less discriminatory; facilitating the reunion of separated families; opening the way further for the immigration of persons with special skills.
In other action, the NLC reelected as president for a second one-year term Dr. Raymond M. Olson, of Minneapolis, stewardship director of the American Lutheran Church, and approved a budget of $2,313,342 for its work in 1963, consisting of $1,405,450 from the two participating member churches and $907,892 from Lutheran World Action, the council’s annual financial campaign for a worldwide interchurch aid and assistance program.
Several days before the council meeting, representatives of the three major branches of American Lutheranism gathered in Chicago for a two-day session at which subcommittees were appointed to conduct intensive study of specific areas of activity which might be included in a proposed new cooperative agency to succeed the NLC. Negotiations toward possible formation of a new association that would be devoted to common theological study and Christian service were authorized last year by the NLC’s two member churches (reduced from eight churches through mergers over the past two years) and the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Together they comprise 95 per cent of the 8,600,000 Lutherans in the United States and Canada.
The meeting was constituted as the “Inter-Lutheran Consultation,” and a concluding joint statement said that the group reviewed results of earlier theological discussions on Lutheran cooperation, “noting areas of agreement and also points which would need further examination by the proposed Division of Theological Studies, which would be an essential part of the new agency.” In common theological study, the proposed agency “is to seek theological consensus in a systematic and continuing way on the basis of the Scriptures and the witness of the Lutheran Confessions.”
An invitation to participate in the talks had been declined by the president of the Evangelical Lutheran (Norwegian) Synod, the Rev. Theodore A. Aaberg of Scarville, Iowa, thus following similar action by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The refusals were based on the position that joint worship and work without doctrinal agreement constitutes religious unionism. Mr. Aaberg said that he had studied the six essays presented at the group’s previous meetings and found “no real agreement between the Missouri and NLC representatives on the question of what constitutes ‘the doctrine of the Gospel.’ ”
Just before the consultation, it was announced that doctrinal discussions aimed at establishing pulpit and altar fellowship between the American Lutheran Church and the Missouri Synod had been temporarily suspended. Fear was expressed that the proposal for doctrinal talks at this time might be “disturbing” to plans for a successor organization to the NLC.
F.F.
Genesis On Tv
The biblical teaching that woman was taken out of man is a “beautiful device of Scripture,” Dr. Hagen Staack told his nationwide Sunday television audience. Staack, professor of religion at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, asserted that it would be “very wrong to say God created first the male.” “What good,” he asked, “is the male without the female?” Presumably Staack’s audience would think that the answer depends upon what God had in mind. The purpose of the “device,” according to Staack, is to prevent either the male or the female from claiming priority and superiority over the other, to teach that man’s humanity is constituted equally by both and that both are given the function of being deputies over God’s world. Because man has this function, the Bible calls him “the little god of this world.”
Staack conducts the course on the “Frontiers of Faith” telecast on behalf of Protestant denominations cooperating with the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council of Churches. In the second of the 13-week NBC-TV series on Genesis, he discussed the question “Who Is Man?”
Man’s creation in the image of God was said to mean three things: man is a mirror of God, bears the impress of the divine seal, and is a spark of the divine. As something made out of dust “he is an animal”; he shares in the animal world, and being dust he must therefore die.
The divine creation of man did not at once produce man as we know him. Man through gradual development “because of the divine power that enters him” becomes man. “God’s own spark is in him.” We ought to accept the fact of evolution and not be afraid of it, declared Staack, for it does not exclude the idea of God as creator.
Staack asserted that the Genesis account speaks of God in the plural (Elohim), just as Christians today use trinitarian language to express the rich and incomprehensible majesty of God.
Man’s calling to be a deputy under God over God’s world was said to be illustrated in the Genesis report that Adam gave names to all animals and according to Staack, to plants. Although some Christians foolishly doubt it, man’s invasion of space is also a proper exercise of his calling, he added.
The disturbing thing about man, said Staack, is that he can at any time say “No” to God. “This is the chance God takes with us.”
J.D.
Methodist Concerns
Sectarian instruction and devotions in public schools cannot be “religiously constructive” and are therefore undesirable, according to a resolution adopted at the annual meeting of the Methodist Board of Christian Social Concerns. In this and other resolutions passed at the meeting, the board was said to be speaking only for itself and not for all Methodists.
Other resolutions: asked for destruction of chemical and bacteriological weapons and use of the production facilities for medical research; urged repeal of the Connally Amendment, a ban against military use of outer space, and inclusion of France and Communist China in Geneva disarmament talks. The board turned down a request by civil defense authorities to designate the Methodist Building in Washington as a fallout shelter. It approved construction of a new $4,000,000 National Methodist Center building in Washington.
Ecumenical Challenge
An official Protestant guest of the Second Vatican Council challenged the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America to live up to the ecumenical spirit of the council by declaring a moratorium on its campaign for federal aid to parochial schools.
Dr. Stanley I. Stuber, a Baptist who spent three weeks observing the council at work last fall, issued the challenge at the 15th annual National Conference on Church and State in Denver.
There is a discrepancy between what happened at the Vatican and what is happening in America, said Stuber, who is executive director of the Missouri Council of Churches.
“The Roman Catholic Church,” he declared, “must apply in action what it pleads in principle.”
Stuber was an official guest of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. He predicted in his address at the Denver conference, sponsored by Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, that the Second Vatican Council will “deal forthrightly” with Protestant-Catholic differences. He said the first session reflected a “remarkable spirit of … goodwill toward Protestants.”
“I therefore propose in the spirit of the Vatican Council that the American bishops of the Roman Catholic Church declare a moratorium on their campaign for Federal aid to parochial schools … and that they instruct local priests and groups of laity to do likewise.”
Dr. Glenn L. Archer, executive director of POAU, told the conference that “clericalism is on the rise in the United States.” As an example of clericalism, he cited a public school in Antonito, Colorado, where 23 members of a Roman Catholic religious order were said to be serving as salaried teachers.
“The church that cannot survive on the tithe is dying,” Archer said. “A church that lives on the state is no longer a church.”
POAU presented “religious liberty citations” to the Rev. James E. Goff, Presbyterian missionary to Colombia who more than any other person has attracted world attention to persecution of Protestants there, and to Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, secretary of public affairs of National Association of Evangelicals.
Sodom And Gomorrah
Like Lot’s wife, 20th Century Fox should not have looked back toward Sodom. It would have been better had the cities of storied infamy remained interred in their ashes. For in spite of violence, torture, clashing battles, sex, and a latter-day humanistic idealism, the cities never come to life. Although shot through with political and moral intrigue, the film never becomes intriguing. It does little more than bore.
In the early part of the two-and-a-half-hour film much of the speech is so indistinct as to be unintelligible. This loss, however, does not long annoy, for the viewer soon learns that the plot is so obvious and inconsequential that it scarcely needs literary conveyance.
Any resemblance of the movie’s script to the biblical record is wholly incidental to creating box office. The plot is simple, yet sometimes confusing. Lot soon learns that the science of Sodom knows the value of salt for the human body living in a hot climate. From then on salt plays its role, without rendering the movie less insipid. Lot buys land from the queen of the two cities. While he is paying for it and making it habitable, the practice of his Hebrew religion involves him in the life of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he and his family are thoroughly and quite easily corrupted. His religious struggle against the wanton wiles of the cities is as phony as his daughter’s moral struggle for her virtue against the seduction of the queen’s brother. Decrying slavery and proclaiming human rights and dignity to the pagans of Sodom, Lot sounds like a latter-day Abolitionist, and his daughter sounds like the original Oklahoma girl who couldn’t say no: her religion of Jehovah withstands the assaults of a Sodomite lover’s charms for at least 30 seconds. The producers were apparently so eager to entice ticket buyers with human corruption that they didn’t take time to give the corruption, or the religious foil against which it is wrought out, any depth. As a result the film’s wickedness has little excitement, its moral struggles no tension. The movie demonstrates that where there is no profound moral sense, even human wickedness becomes dramatic trivia.
The biblical story’s considerable dramatic possibilities go wasted, and the movie is as phony as a mummy’s headache. One Sodomite speaks with a lovely, husky Italian brogue. Lot’s men, going to battle against armored horsemen with shepherd’s staffs and wooden hay rakes, look like workers going to harvest. Yet Lot’s ingenuity is equal to the battle. He obtains two large reservoirs of oil(!), channels it under a covered ditch, puts the torch to it, and thrusts the enemy against a wall of fire. This, of course, would have been wholly successful had not the ingenious Lot left his reservoirs wholly unguarded. Victory is assured, however, when he opens his dam, looses the water, and flushes the enemy out of his life.
There is a measure of the usual kind of sensuality, and a hint of sodomy when the queen’s brother bites her finger, tastes blood, and says he no longer likes the taste.
Anouk Aimee as the queen gives one of the film’s few credible performances; Stewart Granger as Lot could have done a lot better had some moral and religious dimension been built into his role.
At the movie’s longed-for end, Lot’s wife-turned-salt looks like the product of a second-rate Egyptian embalmer. Divine judgment has entered, of course, to set the moral record straight—and in just the proper proportion. The judgment is not, as Time suggests, an insult to Jehovah. The wrath of God comes in proportions exactly equal to the moral-religious dimensions of the movie’s plot and in the size required to topple its sandbox mud cities.
Trade copy sent out to aid advertisers advises: “Stress the title, which suggests sin and wickedness to all readers of the Bible.” The public might well be advised by Solomon, who knew something about these things: “Whoso is simple let him turn in hither.”
J.D.
The 1963 Mardi Gras
The 1963 edition of the New Orleans Mardi Gras, climaxed this week, was set against the backdrop of a vice cleanup that had far-reaching political effects in the city.
The cleanup campaign was staged by Jim Garrison, a young lawyer who surprised everyone by being elected district attorney last spring. Garrison’s crusade was stopped short when criminal-court judges cut off his expense fund. He was subsequently convicted of criminal libel when he said the action raised “interesting questions about the racketeer influences on our eight vacation-minded judges.” The libel conviction meant a possible jail sentence.
Lust thrives in New Orleans all year long. The Mardi Gras celebration offers a final fling at revelry before Lent, somewhat like the sailor’s proverbial last night on shore. Balls and parades highlight the merriment, and alcoholic consumption rises sharply.
The New Orleans celebration dates back to 1827, when a group of young men who had witnessed pre-Lenten merriment in Paris returned to organize a procession of street maskers. The wearing of masks actually can be traced back much further—to the Roman Lupercalian feasts deplored by early Christian leaders. Present-day observances are privately sponsored by numerous carnival organizations that have sprung up through the years.
To what extent do church people participate? Roman Catholics are deeply involved, as are some Protestants, particularly those from groups less influenced by the Puritan stream of church history. Some church groups play the spectator role and rent a hotel room from which they can watch the pageantry.
City officials, wary of adverse publicity that might hurt the tourist trade, minimize the extent of law violations during Mardi Gras season.
“Many think of Mardi Gras as an outstanding example of sacrilege,” observes Dr. H. Leo Eddleman, president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. “But it has been so completely divorced from religious implications for most people that this is hardly correct.”
Eddleman adds that “perhaps this is history’s compensatory gesture to even things up: if the church has often borrowed from the world its methods of promotion, statistical criteria for success, materialism, and political methodology, in this case the world is borrowing from the church.”
The Unchanging Times
“Unless you see that paper sometimes, you can have no idea to what a point the Anglican party have arrived in their pilgrimage toward Rome. The gravity with which they discuss vestments, incense, etc., is amazing at this stage of the world.” This reference to the Church Times was made in 1866 by the wife of Bishop Colenso of Natal, when that newspaper was in its third year. This most widely read of Church of England weeklies (circulation 63,926), which has just passed its century, was founded to promote the views of the Tractarians, “who were then fighting a hard battle against fierce opposition (such practices as having two candles on the altar were considered popish).”
It has never believed in ignoring political affairs. Thus the initial issue on February 7, 1863, reports that General Grant had left Memphis for another attack on Vicksburg, and quotes the Emperor Napoleon III of France in these terms: “The oracle is gracious enough in all conscience, but unfathomably reticent.” On which the issue of February 8, 1963, comments: “The words might have been designed for the Emperor’s successor in Paris to-day.” Admitting itself strongly Confederate during the Civil War, the Church Times referred to a speech of Lincoln’s as “the rhapsody of a jester affecting to be devout, addressing the assembled Parliament in the whining accents in which a buffoon might caricature an illiterate Scripture-reader.” When the President was shot in April, 1865, the paper’s chief preoccupation seems to have been to ask “What was he doing in a theatre on Good Friday?”
Still owned by the Palmer family, the paper has had eight editors, the most recent being Roger Lewis Roberts, schoolmaster turned clergyman, appointed in 1960. He makes it clear that the principles of the Church Times remain unchanged from those of a century ago, viz. “those of the Church Catholic, as interpreted by the Church of England, and enunciated in no faint accents in the Book of Common Prayer.”
Still fiercely partisan, the paper is currently under attack by fellow Anglican Prism, a self—consciously iconoclastic stripling whose February issue churlishly suggests that “some of its [i.e. the Church Times’] editorial methods may be called in question amid the festivities.” More particularly, Prism charged its elder brother with stirring up a feud against Dr. Alec Vidler of Cambridge who had featured in a controversial TV discussion (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY News, December 21, 1962), and quoted approvingly a secular weekly which described the Church Times as having shown “a clean pair of heels in the venom stakes.”
In the latter’s centenary issue, greetings were published from a formidable number of ecclesiastical potentates, among whom was the editor of the Church of England Newspaper, whose message concluded: “Long may the Church Times keep steaming!”
J. D. D.
Courtesy Of Mammon
London’s Financial Times and the Primate of All-England formed an unlikely alliance on the occasion of the journal’s 75th birthday on February 11. In a supplement entitled “The Forces That Shape Our Lives,” Dr. Michael Ramsey contributed an article dealing with religious faith in a scientific age. He suggested that the science-religion conflict of the early 20th century had been “largely eased and removed by the recognition that religion does not require Biblical literalism, and that the sciences need not claim to give a total account of the meaning of man.” The result was, however, an uneasy truce, for the scientist often finds religious propositions “not so much untrue as meaningless and irrelevant.”
Referring to Marxism as a materialistic theory which gives God no place, the Archbishop said that in Western countries the rejection “takes the form of apathy without a distinctive non-religious philosophy of life,” leaving room for the survival of religious influences even where religious practices seem to have ceased altogether.
Hendrik Kraemer is cited as one who “has encouraged an emphasis upon the uniqueness of Christ in such a way as to treat other religions with uncompromising exclusiveness,” but despite his guarded language the Primate gives the impression that he does not go along with this view. He suggests that “many partial revelations of God have been known though Christianity is the crown and completion of them all.” He states that in Christian missions the necessity is for “those who combine the conviction of the finality of Christ with a reverent and sympathetic understanding of the spirit of other religions.”
Commenting on this, a member of the Church of England’s House of Laity expressed the view that the Archbishop’s “reverent and sympathetic understanding” did not noticeably extend at present to the evangelicals within his own church.
J. D. D.
