The most comprehensive church-state study document ever to come out of an American church was adopted by the 175th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. last month.
Dr. Elwyn A. Smith, professor of church history at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and chairman of a special committee that drafted the report, described it as a “guideline” for local action. He regarded the report as an expression of the traditional Presbyterian principle, “God alone is the lord of the conscience.”
In adopting the report the assembly declared that “Bible reading and prayers as devotional acts tend toward indoctrination or meaningless ritual and should be omitted for both reasons.” It is “completely appropriate,” the report added, to introduce Bible reading “in connection with courses in the American heritage, world history, literature, the social sciences, and other academic subjects.” This part of the report aroused the greatest excitement of any of the assembly’s meetings, and extended debate. The Rev. Nevin Kendall of North Tonawanda, New York, told the 840 commissioners that they should not “let our public schools be part-time churches. I submit that we dare not identify ourselves with those people who insist upon using their majority position to cram this position down their neighbors’ throats. We want our children to hear the Word of God, but we will find other times and other places.”
Objection was registered also against the report’s theological basis: “The sole ground for the church’s critique of the state is that in Christ, God and the world are reconciled.” The Rev. Thomas P. Lindsay of Haddonfield, New Jersey, charged that the statement contained an implicit universalism, was contrary to fact, and was not a faithful transcript of Paul’s language.
The various recommendations of the church-state report rested on the theological foundation that since “in Christ, God and the world are reconciled” the Church lives on “a new level of freedom” which enables her to pursue her “overriding purpose” to witness to Christ under any circumstances, but prohibits the use of public schools to force the Gospel on a captive audience.
NEWS / A fortnightly report of developments in religion
‘THE RACE ASSEMBLY’
This year’s meeting, said a denominational publicist, “will be remembered as ‘the Race Assembly’ of the United Presbyterian Church.”
That may be an exaggeration, but the civil rights issue did prove to be a dominant concern at the week-long conclave in Des Moines.
The assembly sent to its 196 presbyteries for ratification a series of constitutional changes which would make integration mandatory in all United Presbyterian churches. The proposed changes would require the denomination’s 9,202 congregations to accept persons into fellowship and membership without regard to “color, origin, or worldly condition”; refusal is declared “a rejection of Christ himself.”
In related action, the assembly petitioned President Kennedy to call a White House conference on civil rights “at the earliest feasible time.” The assembly also established its first Commission on Religion and Race and with an allocation of $500,000.
Dr. Martin Luther King declined a last-minute invitation to address the assembly because he was busy elsewhere.
The remainder of the report was adopted after one speech and two minutes. The assembly quickly urged United Presbyterians not to push for Sunday closing laws, “to seek discussion with Roman Catholics … with a view to finding new and creative solutions to the present public-parochial school dilemma,” and to oppose federal, state, or local grants to elementary and secondary schools, including such indirect grants as “tax forgiveness or exemptions” to parents sending children to private schools.
In a move toward repudiating tax exemption for churches, the assembly urged the church “to begin the process of extricating itself from the position of being obligated, or seeming to be obligated, to the state by virtue of special tax privileges.” Actual instances of this real or seeming obligation were not cited.
Also adopted was the report’s recommendation that “the state grant a divorce when, and only when, there is an irretrievable human failure within the area of marriage.” Inasmuch as existing legal grounds for divorce in almost every instance concern criminal actions, the assembly declared “specific grounds for divorce should be that the family has been so broken that it is no longer socially desirable to maintain.”
On the question of a political candidate’s religious affiliation the assembly asserted: “A candidate’s religious conviction is relevant to the question of his competence to govern.” The question of religious affiliation should not “be sharply focused,” however, since “religious affiliation may not accurately reflect a candidate’s conviction.”
The 840 commissioners of the 3.2 million-member church called upon the United States government and its appropriate agencies “to encourage and support programs of research designed to provide improved means and techniques for dealing with the problems of overpopulation; and to be willing and prepared to provide, upon request, the medical assistance, the popular education, supplies and equipment necessary for adequate programs of responsible family planning in underdeveloped countries where economic and social development is seriously limited by uncontrolled population growth.”
A series of resolutions projected by the church’s Standing Committee on Church and Society were adopted. They included support of the United Nations and efforts toward “the goal of general and complete disarmament … realizing that general and complete disarmament would require the establishment of a world-wide authority …”
The assembly and its Permanent Judicial Commission upheld the New York Presbytery’s ouster of Dr. Stuart H. Merriam as minister of Broadway Presbyterian Church but ordered the session reinstated. The San Francisco Presbytery was overruled in its removal of the Rev. Floyd R. Waddell as minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburg, California. The commission said the presbytery had failed to establish its authority for Waddell’s removal.
Baptists In Detroit: Religion And Politics
The young waitress looked toward the river and confessed that although she had lived in Detroit all her life, she had never found time for the six-minute tunnel ride into Ontario. But no such parochialism marked the fifty-sixth annual meeting of the American Baptist Convention, which this month brought some 10,000 delegates and visitors from forty states to the new, strikingly handsome Cobo Hall convention center on the Detroit River, “world’s busiest waterway.” With a Canadian flag waving in the distance, the Baptists moved to a climactic final night of mission emphasis featuring a parade of flags of twenty-two nations where American Baptists have missions. The flags were followed by missionaries themselves, clad in native costumes. And later, some 10,000 candles were lighted in a service of consecration for thirty-three new missionaries.
Just prior to the processional, the international theme was sounded in the presentation of newly elected president (not of his country but of his denomination) Harold E. Stassen, in 1948 a drafter of the United Nations Charter, who now pledged to his fellow Baptists that he would “work to: bring the arms race under control …; lift the foreign policy of our country to policy of ‘Humanity First on this earth under God’; establish the complete respect for the dignity and worth and human rights of each man … without discrimination or segregation or classification for race or color or creed.”
Later in the convention, lifelong Baptist Stassen, a former deacon and currently a member of the Convention’s policy-making General Council, urged that the arms race be brought under control of the U. N. and suggested the establishment of a “beginning zone of arms limitation” along the Bering Strait in Alaska and Siberia.
During the convention, some seventy-five breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners dotted the heavy program. Speakers on hand for these and major convention sessions read like a who’s who in United States political and ecclesiastical life. The roster included names like Ralph Bunche, Franklin Clark Fry, Elton Trueblood, Roy McClain, and Edith Green.
Indeed, the addresses overshadowed business sessions, and concern was registered over the sparse attendance as resolutions were being passed. It was somehow reminiscent of the old parson who termed denominational resolutions “the most harmless form of amusement ever devised by the human mind.” But on the other hand, delegates could point wearily to an exhausting 8 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. (or later) daily schedule.
Several of the addresses contained implicit reference to debate which has in past months been carried on within the Convention over emphases in the evangelism department, which some feel tend toward Barthianism. universalism, and excessive preoccupation with political and social issues. These charges are resisted by other American Baptists. Evangelism is a particularly touchy subject within this denomination these days due to great concern over lagging numerical growth in comparison with other major church bodies. The title of the convention sermon, delivered by Dr. Clifford C. Medeen of First Church, Haverhill, Massachusetts, was “It’s Time to Grow Again.” He pointed to a decline in American Baptist church membership from 1,561,000 in 1950 to 1,544,000 in 1962 despite a number of denominational programs for growth. In outlining a prescription, he referred to the current debate and said: “We Baptists ought to know that any theology which smacks of universalism cuts the nerve of evangelistic zeal and world missionary endeavor.”
Timber Survey
Newspaper men covering the American Baptist Convention had sensitive ears tuned in for any whispers of presidential politics. Newly elected convention president Harold E. Stassen, former Eisenhower assistant and onetime Minnesota governor, now practices law in Philadelphia, but he is an announced candidate in next year’s New Hampshire presidential primary. Though unopposed in Detroit for his church office, he can hardly expect so smooth a road in New England.
A possible primary opponent also spoke at the Detroit convention. Michigan’s Governor George Romney, a Mormon, reminded his Baptist listeners that if they were interested in conversions, Michigan had 11,000 lakes handy for total immersion. The press was quick to note that, in outlining signs of internal U. S. “weakness,” Romney headed the list with divorce.
Retiring Baptist President Ben Browne was asked in a press conference to comment on Baptist Nelson Rockefeller’s recent marriage. Said he: “I do feel one of the great issues today is the stability, the sanctity of the home. It adds nothing to the high standards of American life for any of our great leaders to break up two homes, declare themselves happy, and disregard the children. Those who aspire to leadership cannot dismiss this as matters that are private.”
Other addresses revealed varying concepts of the relationship between salvation and social concern. After praising the evangelistic work of Walter Rauschenbusch and Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dr. Jitsuo Morikawa, secretary of the division of evangelism, spoke of the need for personal regeneration and also for demonstration of the doctrine in love for the world: “We cannot individually be neighbors to the world but through action of Congress, support of the United Nations, Church World Service, Home and Foreign Missions, support of urban housing, Federal aid to education, slum clearance and emergency aid to depressed areas, support of the Negro’s struggle for civil rights, we can identify ourselves and enter into solidarity with the world. The singular mark of a Christian, the one identifying mark of a man born again, is that the world is the arena of his concern, he belongs to the whole human family, he thinks … and acts with the whole human race in view.”
On this general subject, Harold Stassen cautioned: “The great teachings of our church should be brought always to the issues and situations of everyday life and of our modern world in the space atomic age; but the political considerations and daily differences should never be brought into our church.” Results of a survey were announced which revealed that 92.5 per cent of American Baptist pastors contacted believe that evangelization of the individual is their major concern, while 29 per cent include also the regeneration of man in his social relations.
In action which could have far-reaching results, the convention approved creation of a council on theological education for “implementation” of recommendations made by a special committee. This committee had indicated the advisability of relocating and merging some of the denomination’s eight seminaries.
Convention condemnation of racial discrimination was reflected in the collection of nearly $4,500 to rebuild the bomb-damaged Birmingham, Alabama, home of the Rev. A. D. King, brother of Martin Luther King. After Dr. Ralph Bunche’s address, which was critical of Birmingham city officials, Dr. Benjamin P. Browne, the Convention’s seventy-year-old dynamo of a president whose charm was a considerable convention asset, called on a Birmingham white for the benediction. Quickly explained Dr. Browne: “Our brother is from Birmingham, Michigan.”
F. F.
Celebrating Life
When the Unitarian Universalist Association assembled for its annual convention in Chicago last month, Gordon Cooper’s orbital flight was the only heavenly topic in conversation. To these liberals, orthodox terms are fuzzy, though a Wisconsin minister quipped, “If I use the word ‘God’ hyphenated with ‘damn,’ everybody knows what I mean.” But with deists, mystics, humanists, naturalists, existentialists, and perhaps atheists in UUA, rare reference to the supernatural speaks of an impersonal “being” or “force.”
Some UUA members still consider themselves Christians, but most of them don’t worry about it anymore. UUA President Dana McLean Greeley, a clean-cut diplomat with a Harvard accent, says the century-old debate has been “transcended.”
The only convention speaker who stressed the word “God” was Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath, leader of America’s more than one million Reform Jews. While echoing UUA’s concern with a nuclear test ban and racial understanding, the rabbi was realistic about man’s part in these moral crises. Just as Isaiah called Syria “the rod of God’s anger,” he said, so Communism may carry rods of judgment for the sins of the West.
This didn’t exactly coincide with UUA’s optimistic outlook on man and belief in a never-wrathful deity, though the rose-colored glasses of nineteenth-century liberalism have been taken off forever. Before the two liberal denominations joined two years ago, there was an old saw that “Universalists believe God is too good to damn men; Unitarians believe man is too good to be damned.”
There are many factions in UUA, but schisms don’t bring animosity here. Outspoken UUA members revel in a good argument, and their spirit was usually as jovial on the General Assembly floor as in the downstairs cocktail lounge. With emphasis on the here-and-now, 2,000 delegates felt most at home in the political-convention atmosphere of business sessions. Above the low hum of voices, heated debate, microphone cables and lights sat moustached, grev-maned Moderator Marshall Dimock, steering proceedings with a political scientist’s objective hand.
The deepest conflict was over an attempt to graft UUA’s anti-bias belief to the constitution by requiring open-membership policy for a church to vote in the UUA. But this humanitarian goal smacked head-on with congregational autonomy, perhaps the only long-standing tradition left in the organization. The amendment was proposed by ten Southern churches to stimulate Negro membership, but the few Negroes present debated on both sides. Conservatives won by preventing the necessary two-thirds majority, though a simple majority favored the change. A day later, liberal wounds were salved with a resolution affirming UUA’s advocacy of open membership and establishing a commission on religion and race. But on another issue, a delegate commented, “These resolutions come and go; it’s the constitution that counts.”
In other constitutional issues, a group wanted to gain recognition of the former Universalist canon of faith in “the spiritual leadership of Jesus, and the teachings of Buddha, Moses, Mohammed and all the God-men of all the ages.” An alternate proposal would have mentioned no specific creeds. But by a wide margin, the assembly retained its present affirmation of the universal truths of all ages “immemorially summarized in the Judeo-Christian heritage as love to God and love to man.”
The social stand of primary concern was for legalization of abortions if there is grave impairment of the mother’s health, if the child will be defective, if pregnancy results from rape or incest, or if “there exists some other compelling reason: physical, psychological, mental, spiritual or economic.”
Other resolutions adopted at the meeting opposed released-time for religious education of public school students, opposed Bible readings or religious observances in public schools, advocated comprehensive training in American history and government in schools, and called for liberalized immigration policies by the United States government.
Despite some strong anti-Catholic feeling, a last-minute resolution praised Pope John XXIII’s encyclical “Peace on Earth” as a “wise and noble utterance.”
Art is important to the UUA religion, and in a lobby display an Indiana minister turned even the lowly collection plate into an object of creative joy. But music has been a problem, since much of the good religious music available carries an orthodox Christian message. The delegates previewed “the first new denominational hymnal in twenty-five years,” expected to be in common use by November. “Hymns for the Celebration of Life” uses traditional melodies, but draws heavily on secular poets for texts. (Sample, from Vachel Lindsay: “Let not young souls be smothered out before they do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.…”)
UUA draws upon a history of strong individuals, including many of America’s founding fathers, and presently claims the allegiance of Albert Schweitzer. Today, UUA is small (250,000 members), but fast-growing (70 per cent in the past four years) and well-financed ($1.6 million annual budget).
Interestingly enough, some members asked themselves in bull sessions if liberalism could ever relate to the common man. Some worried about UUA’s being an intellectual, middle-class movement. Others felt UUA just passes resolutions, while the Quakers and Salvation Army actually go out and do something. One delegate had become disenchanted with the adoration of non-Western religion: “We talk about the beautiful Hindu temples, but if the religion makes people slaves, to hell with it.”
Such was the self-examination of the UUA members, a cerebral corps of strong individualists, concerned with the world around them, vaguely aware of a spirit above them. With the movement’s indefinite creeds, congregational autonomy, and glorification of dissent, it has more variety than any other group within Protestantism. So Unitarian Universalists display little unity and hold to few universals. And apparently they like it that way.
Through The Valley
If the church in the second half of this century is to recover from the injuries she suffered in the first half, there must be a new type of preacher.
—A. W. Tozer
Aiden Wilson Tozer regarded the man for the hour as an “old prophet type” who would “stand in flat contradiction to everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear.” The prophet would be profoundly loving, yet fearless, unpopular, lean, rugged, blunt-spoken, “and a little angry with the world.” Many who knew him felt that Tozer fit the description himself. He was one of evangelicalism’s leading essayists and the most influential figure in the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
Tozer was rushed to a Toronto hospital two hours before he was to take his pulpit at Avenue Road Church (where former evangelist Charles B. Templeton won considerable attention during the forties). He died the same night at the age of 66.
An immediate effect of Tozer’s death, attributed to a heart ailment, was to cast a cloud of gloom over the opening three days later of the sixty-sixth CMA General Council in Phoenix, Arizona. Last month’s six-day meeting climaxed a diamond jubilee year observance, but delegates seemed in no mood for rejoicing. Their dejection was implicitly rebuked by the effervescent F. H. Lacy, 72-year-old survivor of the famed Cleveland Colored Quintet, whose wife had died only a month before. She would not have wanted him to be long-faced, he said, whereupon he launched into a witty-creed1“We are a Christian organization saved from condemnation through old-fashioned salvation. We’ve made our consecration and have the blessing of sanctification, and we sing with inspiration, without hesitation, to any congregation, color, race or nation, providing their qualifications meet with God’s approbation, and we trust God for our remuneration. We have the joy and consolation that in spite of sin’s temptation, souls can be lifted from degradation, and have a conscious realization of Christ the solid rock foundation, and at the final consummation, when we have reached our destination, on that day of our translation, we with joy and acclamation will join in the coronation of Christ our King with adoration with all the saved of God’s creation from Genesis to Revelation throughout eternity and its endless duration.” while delegates roared.
PRAYER MEETING IN SPACE
America had itself another devout hero in astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, who named his space capsule “Faith 7” and uttered a 170-word prayer during his 22-orbit tour through space last month.
Cooper’s outlook was in contrast to that of John Glenn, who, though devout in his own way, thought it smacked of “fire engine religion” to pray in flight.
Cooper’s mother disclosed that “some of them wanted him to change the name of his capsule,” perhaps wary of the satisfaction it might bring Communists if the flight ended tragically.
The astronaut said he named his spacecraft “Faith 7” for three reasons:
“First, because I believe in God and country; second, because of the loyalty to organization, to the two organizations, actually, to which I belong, and, third, because of the confidence in the entire space team.”
A life-long Methodist, Cooper told Congress that “I am not too much of a preacher, but while on the flight on the seventeenth orbit I felt so inclined to put a small prayer on the tape recorder in the spacecraft—it was over the middle of the Indian Ocean in the middle of the night.” This was his prayer:
“I must take this time to say a little prayer for all the people, including myself, who are involved in this operation. I wanted to thank You especially for letting me fly on this flight. Thank You for the privilege of being able to be in this position; to be in this wondrous place, seeing all these startling, wonderful things that You have created. Help, guide and direct all of us that we may shape our lives to be much better Christians—so that we help one another and work with one another rather than fighting and bickering. Help us to complete this mission successfully. Help us in future space endeavors to show the world that democracy really can compete and still is able to do things in a big way, and are able to do research, development, and can conduct new scientific and technical programs. Be with all our families. Give them guidance and encouragement and let them know that everything will be okay. We ask in thy name. Amen.”
Vice-president Kenneth C. Fraser’s keynote address reminded delegates that although the CMA “packs a wallop in this world,” they were not assembled “to flex muscles but to see why we are coughing and wheezing.” He warned of the danger of an attitude wherein one feels he is getting ahead by holding his own.
Speakers repeatedly cited the need of a fresh anointing from God if witness is to be expanded. President Nathan Bailey expressed virtual frustration in view of worldwide spiritual needs. Said he:
“It’s like trying to climb Niagara Falls to meet these needs.”
If the CMA was passing through the valley of the shadow of death, the business sessions failed to reflect it. Delegates confidently took steps to put the CMA domestic outreach on a par with foreign advances. A motion was unanimously adopted urging local churches “to initiate programs or special meetings for the purpose of extension emphasis to the end that our constituency be made aware of this personal and individual responsibility to the same degree as now prevails toward our foreign missionary effort.”
A committee surveying domestic work noted that “if such proven means of extension as home Bible study, extension Sunday School and the ‘mother church’ concept were implemented throughout our society, each and every Alliance church could give birth to a new self-supporting extension church as often as once each seven years.”
The year 1961 produced a record number of 10,818 baptisms on CMA mission fields, 6,070 of them in New Guinea and Viet Nam. The Alliance now has 876 active missionaries and a foreign membership of some 140,000.
CMA North American membership climbed 3.4 per cent during 1962, to 71,548.
In other action: Delegates voted to recognize the Graduate School of Theology at Wheaton College as the official CMA seminary until the Alliance is able to establish its own.
Bailey, reelected president, also was named to fill Tozer’s unexpired term as editor of The Alliance Witness. The action was a stop-gap measure pending selection of a permanent successor.
‘Crisis Theology’
Evangelical editors assembled for their annual convention in Chicago last month were treated to a theological critique by Dr. W. C. Fields, chief of public relations for the Southern Baptist Convention.
“We are now accepting rapid change as normal,” Fields told a record number of 171 delegates at the fifteenth meeting of the Evangelical Press Association. He said this recognition affects so-called “crisis theology”—“we are seeing things in a slightly different light.”
Commission, monthly organ of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, was named EPA “Periodical of the Year.” The general magazine award was shared by Decision and Eternity. Tie, a quarterly published by the Council of Evangelical Churches of St. Paul, Minnesota, was honored for having “most improved format.” Other winners: His (youth magazine), Team (denominational magazine), Teach (Sunday school magazine), and High (Sunday school take-home paper).
In EPA’s “Higher Goals in Christian Journalism” competition, which selects outstanding editorial and picture content, these were the winners: Cover, The Evangelical Beacon and The Message ofthe Cross; original art, Eternity; title-page layout, Eternity and Venture; photo feature, The Missionary Tiding; single photo, Abundant Life. “I Recruited Wally Wakefield,” a story in His by Robert Adams, won in the fiction category. “A. D. 1962,” by Gloria MacKenzie in The Pentecostal Testimony, was honored in the poetry category. Also cited were the news page of Moody Monthly, a standing feature by U. Milo Kaufmann in Teen Time, and “Who Is Ministering to Ministers?,” an article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY by George C. Anderson.
The Ransom Price
Drug supplies for Protestant medical missionaries are being drastically curtailed because of the Cuban ransom deals.
Drug manufacturers in the United States normally donate thousands of dollars in medicine to missionary suppliers, such as the Christian Medical Society. In recent months, however, these firms have had to divert these donations to Cuba as the price paid by the United States for the return of captives.
The result is that the amount of drugs available through the Christian Medical Society to medical missionaries has been cut by as much as 75 per cent, according to J. Raymond Knighton, executive secretary.
Meanwhile, says Knighton, CMS is putting into effect a program—in the planning stage for several years—to broaden its financial base.
Until now, the organization has drawn its resources chiefly from member doctors. Knighton states the plan is to appeal for lay support, too. A new, profusely illustrated publication for laymen is being designed as part of the broadening process. It will concentrate on reporting Protestant medical missionary activities from around the world.
Faith Versus Work?
The United States Supreme Court will decide whether a Seventh-day Adventist who refused to work on Saturdays is entitled to unemployment benefits.
Adell Sherbert worked a five-day week at a textile mill in Spartansburg, South Carolina, for thirty-five years. The mill went to a six-day work week, and she was fired for refusing to work on Saturday, her Sabbath day. A commission denied her unemployment benefits on the ground she was not “available for work.”
The woman then filed suit to overturn the commission’s ruling, but the courts declined. South Carolina’s Supreme Court said the unemployment compensation law, in requiring unemployed persons to be available for work, does not prevent anyone’s free exercise of religion.
She then appealed to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that a state cannot require surrender of religious beliefs to qualify for unemployment benefits. She maintains she is available on a five-day basis for work in the textile industry, the only work she is able to do.
The state argued that it does not ask anyone to give up religious beliefs but only to be available for work. If religion disqualifies a person for work in an industry operating on Saturdays (all textile mills in the area are said to be on a six-day basis), he must be available for work in other industries.
The state points out that other Seventh-day Adventist families in the same community are employed without giving up any of their religious beliefs.
Sports And Morals
A Sports Illustrated writer asserted last month that recent scandals in professional athletics notwithstanding, “there is less outright dishonesty today than there was in the ‘good old’ days which, a dispassionate review would show, were not only not good but often sensationally crooked.”
The writer, John Underwood, said that “in an important sense, unless it is a sin to enjoy oneself, there is no crisis.”
“Yet beneath the surface of seeming morality there lurks a true crisis,” he added. “It is, instead, a subtle erosion of the quality of sport.”
Underwood declared that the men who control sport in the United States today are courting the risk of failing to cope with success.
“Sport will retain its character, its unique quality as sport, only so long as the player and the fan and the kid who stands three hours in the rain to get Willie Mays’s name on a crumpled program believe in its sacrosanctity.”
He added that “there is an almost spiritual quality to sport. Man and boy identify with the sports hero; the hero must therefore be the quintessence of his sport.”
‘No Ecclesiastical Tycoon’
When news reached his students last fall that Professor J. S. Stewart had been nominated moderator of the 1963 General Assembly, they carried him around the quadrangle of New College, Edinburgh. As was only fitting, the professor contrived to get one hand free in order to lift his hat to the statue of John Knox as he passed. No nomination in recent years has met with the same degree of warm approval in every section of the Kirk.
At the annual meeting of the National Bible Society of Scotland last month, the sixty-six-year-old moderator-designate said: “We are living in a generation when the Bible is under attack from many sides, and many church people say we should leap to its defense against those who wish to de-supernaturalize it, de-ethicize it in favor of a new morality, and those who would de-personalize it in favor of a ‘new image of God.’ ”
He added that it is not our task to rush to the defense of the Bible, but rather to unchain it and let it go “ranging through the world to take the hearts of men by storm.” The Bible not to be regarded as a dull compendium of man-made thought and ideas; to a “disheveled, disturbed and burdened generation” seeking some sure word from God, this is the answer.
Professor of New Testament in a historic college since 1947, Dr. Stewart is perhaps better known for his continuing preaching ministry. “Here is no ecclesiastical tycoon, but a modest, almost painfully shy man, with a profound concern for people,” said the Baptist Times, adding quaintly, “and little time for the garish occasions he is sometimes expected to share in.”
J.D.D.
English-Style Mutiny
A peculiarly English scene was enacted last month in the ancient cathedral town of Wells, near Bristol. An ecclesiastical court presided over by the diocesan chancellor, Mr. Walter Wigglesworth, and the bishop, Dr. E. B. Henderson, met to discuss the state of war which existed in the village of Spaxton between a rector and his churchwarden. Said the latter’s wife: “The trouble arose because he refused to be a yes-man to the rector.”
The couple complained that they had been pelted with eggs one evening on their way home from a parish meeting. It was not suggested that the rector had a hand in this; indeed, it never did become clear what the rector was accused of. The court neither discussed specific allegations nor announced any findings.
The churchwarden, on the other hand, according to one newspaper which gave the confident impression of understanding the whole mystifying business, had been accused of mutiny, perjury, false pretenses, hatred, malice, envy, breaking an oath to the bishop, and misbehavior. In a woman’s inimitable way the accused man’s wife had the last word: “These are terrible things to say against a good churchman—and one of the few regular attenders at the rector’s services.”
J.D.D.
Reaching France
More than 10,000 Frenchmen swarmed into a German-made tent last month for the closing meeting of an eight-day Paris crusade by evangelist Billy Graham.
“The Graham crusade has reached more unchurched people than any effort we have ever undertaken in France,” said Pastor Andre Thobois, president of the French Baptist Federation. “Two-thirds of the people who responded to the appeal to receive Christ had no previous religious background.”
Altogether, Graham preached to more than 60,000 persons while in Paris. Some 1,200 of them responded to his appeal to receive Christ.
Confusion On Faith
Professor Albert Geyser was restored to the ministry last month by the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa. Heresy charges against him were dropped.
Announcement of the reconciliation was made as the Pretoria Supreme Court resumed hearings of Geyser’s appeal against the decision of a church commission on May 8, 1962, which convicted him of teaching doctrines that amounted to a denial of Christ’s divinity and deposed him as a clergyman.
Reversal of the commission’s verdict was reported in a joint statement by the commission and Geyser. It said a “brotherly discussion” had cleared up the situation.
Geyser presently occupies the chair of divinity at the predominantly English University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He had previously taught theology at the strongly Afrikaans University of Pretoria.
Geyser’s attorney had maintained that the crux of the dispute was in divergent attitudes toward racial matters in the church. Geyser had insisted that the Scriptures do not uphold segregation.
The joint statement said “it appeared there was confusion at the time of the trial as to whether Professor Geyser accepted all the articles of faith.”
Buddhists In Revolt
Eight persons were killed in the Vietnamese city of Hue last month in a massive demonstration protesting discrimination against Buddhists by the Roman Catholic government.
Subsequently, an eight-man delegation of Buddhist priests and laymen called on President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon, demanding that the government of Viet Nam be given the same legal standing as Roman Catholicism. The president is a brother of Roman Catholic Archbishop Ngo-Dien-Thuc of Hue.
Protestant missionaries in Viet Nam are reluctant to speak out against Roman Catholic domination of Viet Nam because of fear of reprisals. They are known to be irked, however, because Roman Catholic government officials repeatedly discriminate against Protestant believers.
