Great works of literature, art, and music, the beauty of nature, friendship and true love are enhanced by close association. But there are other things, familiarity with which tends to breed unconcern if not actual contempt. Groups as well as individuals may become so used to situations that are wrong or dangerous as not to see them as they are. Thus American society tolerates certain things that are exacting an enormous toll in suffering and life. Among these are the devastation on the highways to the extent last year of about 40,000 deaths plus many more injuries; the five million alcoholics with the accumulated tragedy; and the 40,000 deaths from lung cancer in 1962, largely traceable, according to the American Cancer Society, to cigarette smoking.
Long familiarity with these social phenomena has produced among us callous unconcern for the human welfare they jeopardize. When areas stricken by natural disaster need aid or when our imagination is captured by the plight of miners trapped underground, we are capable of showing “reverence for life.” Yet at the same time we continue strangely apathetic to much needless suffering and loss of life right on our doorstep.
Consider, for example, the relationship of cigarettes to lung cancer. The Consumers Union Report on Smoking and the Public Interest (Consumers Union, Mount Vernon, New York), published this year, presents the problem with thoroughness and with an abundance of statistical and experimental evidence. As the subtitle of the first chapter of the report says, “we are living in an epidemic”—an epidemic of lung cancer. This is plain fact. And in the light of it the unchanged determination of the cigarette industry to sell to as many people as possible a product that is a leading cause of this epidemic is dismaying. One is astonished to read that cigarette sales in 1962 amounted to one half trillion, thus exceeding by about one hundred billion the total sales in 1953, when the country was first informed on a wide scale of the medical evidence relating cigarette smoke to cancer of the lung. Moreover, when one also learns that the cigarette industry last year spent over $200 million on advertising, a sum representing an increase of 134 per cent over a ten-year period during which evidence of the cigarette-cancer relation has piled up, dismay and astonishment give way to indignation.
We urge upon all with a concern for the public welfare a careful reading of the Consumers Union report. After the chapters setting forth medical evidence, the section in which the authors analyze the attitude of the industry reveals a determined refusal to face facts and a promotional cynicism that, while economically understandable, are indefensible. If, as the report more than once says, “1,000,000 children now of school age may die prematurely of lung cancer” (and the statistic is well founded), this alone shows that we have a social and moral problem that demands action, such as has already been taken in one way or another by the governments of Great Britain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. Of these, Great Britain, despite its stake of £900 million (about $2.5 billion) in tobacco excise taxes, has mounted the fullest offensive against cigarettes with a broad and intense program of traveling exhibits, posters, films, and advertising.
The Consumers Union Report on Smoking and the Public Interest approaches the problem on a medical and social basis without direct reference to its moral aspect, although ethical implications inevitably shine through its discussion of the industry’s deliberate blindness to evidence and the mendacity of its advertising. But the Christian community is in a different position. It can no more look at the cigarette-lung cancer problem from a morally neutral point of view than it can be oblivious of the moral implications of the daily slaughter on the highways and the human wreckage through alcoholism.
So the question arises, “Is there a Christian position in relation to the cigarette problem?” We believe that there is indeed such a position and that it is a clear and biblical one. Prior to 1953, when evidence about the carcinogens in cigarette smoke began to be widely publicized, the Christian attitude toward cigarettes was different from what it is today. Then some Christian groups equated smoking with worldliness and ruled it out on the ground of incompatibility with “a separated life.” Others, including many fully committed to the evangelical faith, considered cigarettes along with other forms of smoking an optional practice to be decided through the exercise of Christian liberty. There was also the point of view, cutting across both groups, that frowned on smoking as a physically harmful habit, although clear evidence of its link to lung cancer had not been found.
Today the situation is radically different. Abundant evidence has accumulated to implicate cigarette smoke in lung cancer as well as in coronary heart disease and emphysema. Apart from quibbles whether it is the cause of lung cancer, statistically and experimentally it is unmistakably related to the current epidemic of that disease. The degree of this relationship is high. Dr. Alton Ochsner, an authority on lung cancer and president in 1962 of the International College of Surgeons, does not hesitate to express it like this: “I have made the statement, and I am sure it is true, that every person who smokes cigarettes will develop cancer of the lung if he lives long enough. The only thing that will ever keep him from such cancer is that he will die of something else before he develops it” (“Dabblers in Death,” The Sunday School Times, June 22, 1963).
It may well be that habitual cigarette smoking is no longer for the Christian a mere take-it-or-leave-it matter. It has moved from an optional indulgence to a question of the stewardship of the body. For there is a stewardship of the body. On the scriptural ground that the God who gives us our bodies requires accountability for their use, none of us has the right to contract any habit that has been shown to lead to grave illness and premature death. Because the body of the believer is, as the Apostle Paul tells us, “the temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19), no Christian has the right to destroy it through cigarette addiction, even though the addiction be socially acceptable. Nor, it should also be said, has he the right to destroy it through any other practice, whether addiction to alcohol or habitual indulgence in overeating.
This principle of the stewardship of the body has a biblical corollary—namely, regard for the weaker brother. Paul said it drastically, “… judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way.… Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died” (Rom. 14:13, 15). Responsibility for the effect of personal practices on others is, as Oscar Cullman has pointed out, set in a redemptive context—“him … for whom Christ died.”
In recent years the age at which young people (who may validly be considered our weaker brethren) begin to smoke cigarettes has fallen. According to a study of New York teen-agers made by the American Cancer Society, 9 per cent of the school children from twelve to fourteen years old who were questioned were smoking daily, and by the tenth grade 40 per cent of the boys were smoking “just about every day” (The New York Times, October 13, 1963). As the American Public Health Association declared in its statement of 1959 (quoted in The Consumers Union Report, p. 10), “If present trends continue, lung cancer will claim the lives of more than 1,000,000 present school children in this country before they reach the age of 70 years.”
Every experienced teacher of adolescents knows that a major motivation of teen-age youth is the desire for grown-up status. Like driving a car, cigarette smoking is a status symbol; but it is much more accessible and ultimately far more hazardous than driving. If the habit were not so prevalent among adults and if it were not so continually promoted through advertising cleverly linking it with manly prowess, beauty, and sex, it would lose much of its fascination for youth.
Cigarettes are not only physiologically dangerous; their addictive property also cannot be overlooked. It is this factor that explains in part the paradox of their continued use. Dr. Charles S. Cameron, medical and scientific director of the American Cancer Society, referred obliquely to the addictive factor in these words: “If the degree of association which has been established between cancer of the lung and smoking were shown to exist between cancer of the lung, and say, eating spinach, no one would raise a hand against the proscription of spinach from the national diet” (“What We Know About Smoking and Lung Cancer,” The Atlantic Monthly, January, 1956).
For both youth and adults the habitual use of cigarettes is incompatible with the biblical principle of the stewardship of the body. For Christian adults in particular it contributes by force of example to teen-age addiction to a dangerous and often fatal habit and thus violates the biblical principle of responsibility for one’s brother. No longer may it be considered a harmless, optional practice to be taken up merely for personal gratification.
Thanksgiving Is Worship
Like Christmas, Thanksgiving is becoming secularized. Just as commercialization has invaded the celebration of the Saviour’s birth, so lesser things have detracted from the lofty purpose of this holiday. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica says, “In the United States Thanksgiving, despite its religious association, often had a distinctly secular flavor.”
A nation to which God has entrusted a great share of the world’s wealth needs to learn the grace of thanksgiving. The observance of the fourth Thursday in November includes more than eating a turkey dinner with dressing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie, and going out to see a football game or watching one on television. These, together with the family reunion, have become part of our tradition. But they do not fulfill the deep purpose of the day.
Thanksgiving Day, so close to the “ordinary” things of life—food and drink, family relationships, sport and recreation—has other aspects. It bids us look up to the living God, the Giver of every good and perfect gift. It asks us to recognize his continual answer to the familiar petition, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and to see him in all of life.
True thanksgiving demands appreciation of the grace of God. And grace, we need to be reminded nationally as well as individually, is unmerited favor. No nation on earth deserves God’s favor—certainly not ours with its strange mixture of outward religiousness and inward erosion of morality, with its wrongs yet to be righted and its exaltation of money above men. Yet in our case, the evidences of His favor are very great: political and religious liberty, abundance of the necessities and even of the luxuries of life, vast natural resources, the time to enjoy these things—the list is one we all can fill out.
Close to the heart of Thanksgiving is the biblical concept of God as the source of the common, taken-for-granted blessings. Surely the inspired handbook for this day is the Psalter with its great summons, “Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits” (Psalm 103:1, 2). His benefits are not only spiritual as this great Psalm says, but they are also material, as its companion tells us: “He watereth the hills from his chambers.… He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth” (Psalm 104:13, 14). It was at a table in Emmaus that Cleopas and his friends recognized the risen Christ. But it was not until he had blessed the bread and broken it for the daily evening meal that “their eyes were opened, and they knew him.”
Thanksgiving apart from recognition of God in the ordinary things of life is no Thanksgiving at all. Dinners eaten and leisure enjoyed without a word of praise to “the Lord who daily loadeth us with benefits” (Psalm 68:19) blunt the very purpose of Thanksgiving, which is a day which should include church-going and prayer.
Luke records the story of ten lepers who were cleansed in answer to their cry for mercy. Only one, a Samaritan, turned back to fall at the feet of Jesus and give thanks. Whereupon Jesus asked, “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine?” (17:17).
A thankless Thanksgiving? Such it will be for all who take no time on November 28 to praise the God who forgives all our iniquities, redeems our life from destruction, and satisfies our mouth with good things.
True thanksgiving does not come easily to our wayward human hearts, especially when we have gotten used to our blessings. Rather does it come more readily from those who have experienced trial and hardship, as did the Pilgrims in 1621 and Lincoln in 1863.
Yes, thanksgiving is worship. It is not optional but essential to the adoration that we owe God at all times. To ask God for things is easier than to thank him for what he has given us. The thankfulness that pleases God is without self-interest. It gives him the glory and seeks nothing for self. True giving of thanks is purest worship.
And it also imposes an obligation on all who do it. After a smashing victory over his enemies, Oliver Cromwell wrote a letter to John Cotton, one of the early overseers of Harvard College, in which he exclaimed, “How shall we behave ourselves after such mercies?” For our country this is not a time of military victory. We have other and even greater mercies, including for every Christian the inestimable mercies of redemption, and for us all the hard but needed blessing of conscience awakened to the social and moral problems of the day. Thus we too must ask, “How shall we behave ourselves after such mercies?”
‘The Pulpit’
The critical essay on “The Sermon” in Melville’s Moby-Dick (p. 9) brings to mind the preceding chapter of this classic, a book as American as Thanksgiving Day. Entitled “The Pulpit,” it describes the unique pulpit in the Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford. From this pulpit Father Mapple preached his sermon on Jonah with its overwhelming emphasis on sin and repentance, an emphasis essential to the presentation of the Gospel in any day.
The front of the pulpit was like a ship’s bow with the Bible resting on a projection like a bowsprit. Melville tells us that Ishmael, who heard the sermon, asked: “What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost prow; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world.”
A high view indeed of the pulpit! And if far fewer today would concur in it than in 1851 when Moby-Dick was written, one of the reasons may be that not all who occupy the pulpit in our time, and by no means all who hear what is spoken from it, are really aware of the source of its strength. “For,” as Melville says, “replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, [the] pulpit … is a self-containing stronghold … with a perennial well of water within the walls.”
Any preacher might read with profit this brief chapter of a very great book. Its symbolism will remind him of the lofty responsibility of his calling.
The Vernacular And The Bible In Rome
Extreme caution has marked predictions about what the Second Vatican Council will produce. As far as possibilities for Protestant-Roman Catholic union are concerned, this caution reflects healthy realism. Roadblocks to union are so formidable that assessments of success are usually limited to declarations of a change in the climate of opinion, or the claim that attendants at the Vatican Council on returning home will not be the same. Even the most ecumenically minded leaders admit that they see no possibilities of unity in the foreseeable future. We share this point of view.
Two things, however, are significant, at least for evangelical Protestants, who believe in the power of the Word of God. The Vatican Council is moving toward greater use of the vernacular in some portions of the mass, and indeed in all of the sacraments. In the United States this, of course, means English. But whatever the language, the hearing of the truths of Scripture in understandable language sets free the Word of God in human hearts and minds, where it will do its divinely appointed work.
The other occurrence that brightens the future for those who take seriously the Word of God is the quite remarkable movement within Roman Catholicism toward Bible reading, group Bible study, and biblical preaching, as well as toward even more extensive scholarly study of Scripture. One hears too of utterances that suggest that Roman Catholics do not regard the relation between Scripture and tradition as an absolute equation, as many Protestants think. The equation seems now to be an imbalance, weighted on the side of Scripture. In any event, Protestants ought not to restrict their belief in what the Word of God can do once it is let loose. The Word of God does not return void; it is still the power of God unto salvation, able to divide the thoughts and intents of the heart. Not even the rigidity of Roman Catholic tradition nor her structured monolithic power can in the end resist the movements of the biblical Word and its power to renew and reform. Protestants should remember the Reformation; what the Word wrought once, it can work again.
Rome’s movement toward the Bible, and her increasing use of it in the vernacular, might just accomplish under God much more than Rome either expects or hopes. And evangelicals, of all people, should never underestimate the Word, for they believe it is mighty to break down any stronghold.
To entertain hope that the Vatican Council may have results that are good for the Church is not to put faith either in Rome or in men. It is to place faith in the power of the Word and in the Spirit of God that accompanies the Word. It is possible that forces are being let loose in the Roman church that only God can control.
Thank God For Problems
A young minister of our acquaintance has recently been confronted with some heart-breaking problems, the problems of a domestic situation in which a girl and her parents have become estranged due to willfulness on her part and arbitrariness on theirs.
First there was a telephone call from the daughter asking her pastor for an interview; but before this could be held, the parents appeared in his study for a conference. Both sides poured out stories in which the obvious but unadmitted mistakes of all concerned were bared.
Two nights later the pastor had just gone to sleep when there came another call from the girl. She was with a relative, having been practically driven from her home by an ultimatum to which she was unwilling to submit. There followed telephone conversations lasting over an hour and a decision to meet for further counseling the next day.
At this point the besieged minister had recourse to an act of faith that many in similar circumstances have followed: he thanked God for those seemingly insoluble problems which He often presents to his children, problems which make them turn and rest solely on his promises, even when they can see no end in sight.
Thanking God for problems is not easy. Such faith is born out of adversity and is the result of seeing God work his wonders in his own way. And out of these experiences there comes a renewed sense of God’s goodness and power, of his nearness and concern, of his faithfulness in working on behalf of those who admit their helplessness and turn to him in simple faith.
The Christian faith is not a conglomeration of abstract theological concepts. It is a wonderfully practical relationship between people of simple faith and a God who can and does intervene on behalf of those who turn to him for help and guidance.
There is considerable talk about making the Christian religion relevant to life today. But it will never become relevant unless those who bear the name Christian take God at his word and claim the promises so clearly stated in the Holy Scriptures. Therein are found guidance, wisdom, comfort, and hope.
Important as theology and philosophy are in this time of search for meaning, it is well to remember that the most intellectual of the apostles spoke of “the simplicity that is in Christ.” The relevance of the Gospel may even be lost in the foolishness of man. But when childlike faith (and our Lord certainly commended this) is exercised at the level of daily problems, the life of the Christian takes on a different light, because he is no longer walking alone.
Therefore, thank God for problems!
Bread And Water
The skies dropped Soviets on American soil to negotiate for United States wheat but withheld their rains from the soil that had produced the surplus. The whole land was dry, parched by a nation-wide drought that began last spring. Thousands of small forest fires dotted the country from coast to coast; each day brought dozens of new ones. Sucked dry by the sun in a long warm Indian summer, drought-seared counties in Texas were declared disaster areas by the Department of Agriculture. So parched was the land and so great the danger of fires that many states postponed hunting seasons, closed state parks, and rationed water. Pittsburgh had its worst dry spell in twenty-six years. In one town citizens were allowed only two inches of water in their bathtubs. There were no reports on the degree of compliance.
Bread and water are simple things, yet essential to human existence and national welfare. The Soviet Union is short on bread, the United States on water. By what simple things may the principalities and powers of this earth be brought to embarrassment and stripped of vaunted pretensions of self-sufficiency. The Soviet Union and her satellites have come to the United States to ask for their daily bread, and the United States by the simple want of water may yet be induced to pray the Almighty to send rains upon the land.
Once upon a time a kingdom was lost for want of a nail; but even a modern nation can be lost for want of bread and water. There are still elemental forces of nature beyond the control of a highly sophisticated, scientific society. The God in heaven who makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust—as it pleases him—may close the curtains of heaven and thrust down the mighty into the dust.
Americans have grumbled because of their surplus of wheat. It costs money to care for it until we get hungry and need it! They might well consider how easily and how quickly matters could change. Our current nation-wide lack of water could conceivably become a lack of bread. America’s grumbling about surpluses might well give way to gratitude and the thankful spirit. And the Soviet’s lack of bread might suggest to them that if their hands cannot produce something as elemental as bread, it is most unlikely that they hold in hand the destiny of the universe.
Bread and water! Such simple things, one hardly thinks of them. Yet the want of them can bring nations to their knees. God can be so existential! By what simple means he brings down the mighty into the dust to confront some of life’s most basic questions. Bread and water! By the things that are not, God can bring to nought the things that are.
‘The Brooding Spirit Of The Law’
The Supreme Court recently refused to review two cases of rape calling for the death penalty. The court’s refusal elicited a dissent from Justices Goldberg, Douglas, and Brennan. Their dissent may indicate that the wind is blowing toward the day when the Supreme Court will rule on the question whether the law of seventeen states allowing death to be exacted for rape is constitutional.
A dissent expressed by one or more Supreme Court justices is not, of course, a decision. But it is, in the words once uttered by Chief Justice Hughes, “an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day, when a later decision may possibly correct the error into which the dissenting judge believes the Court to have been betrayed.”
The rightness of capital punishment is being increasingly questioned by both humanistic and Christian moralists. Although they argue from different premises to the same conclusion, they share one important objection. Both appeal to the possibility of an error of judgment which will take the life of an innocent person.
If there is any area in which death can be mistakenly imposed upon the innocent, it is in the area of rape. Adjudication of cases of rape is not only subject to errors that arise through human fallibility; it is also subject, to errors that arise by deliberate calculation—a calculation which may be either vicious, or the self-protective act of a desperate, shamed person. Moreover, the courts frequently cannot decide the question of consent, and often medical judgments about the actual occurrence of rape are impossible. Whether the sex act occurred at all and, if so, whether there was in fact no consent, is so involved in tangled emotions and so often beyond clear objective determination that the possibility of error is much greater than in cases of murder or kidnaping.
Christian moralists who reject capital punishment for any crime have the task of getting past God’s word to Noah in Genesis 9 that “whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” This is usually done by pointing out that the same passage prohibits eating bloodwurst and that the Mosaic law prescribes death for adultery and for other sins, and by a positive appeal to the general ethical teaching of the New Testament. In the case of rape the task of the Christian moralist is simpler. According to Deuteronomy 22, rape was not punishable by death when it involved an unmarried woman. The punishment? Fifty shekels of silver for the father; marry the daughter, and live with her for life, with all possibilities of divorce excluded.
Death for rape? Despite the repulsiveness of the crime, the possibilities of error are very great, the facts very hard to determine; and even the Bible does not call for the death penalty in every case. Capital punishment, moreover, may tempt the rapist to murder, since the elimination of the witness at very worst threatens no greater punishment.
The commuting of death sentences to life imprisonment for three youths (aged 22, 24, and 25) by Governor J. Millard Tawes of Maryland last month is an act that deserves the approbation of the American people.
Persecution Of Evangelicals In Cuba
When looking for good news these days, one does not usually turn toward Cuba. Some of the latest news from that unhappy island, apart from Hurricane Flora, is particularly bad. It forms a sad aftermath to information last August that militiamen of Fidel Castro had invaded the British island of Anguilla Key in the Bahamas to kidnap nineteen of twenty-nine evangelicals who were sailing from Cuba to the United States. Their two boats, provided by Miami-based Cubans, were spotted by Communist Cuban boats and a helicopter. Soldiers and sailors followed the refugees to the British island and captured nineteen of them. United States Navy personnel observing the incident were powerless to intervene because the action was on British territory. Since that time British diplomats have been barred from seeing the imprisoned nineteen, although Britain maintains diplomatic relations with Cuba.
Present reports from usually reliable underground sources say that three Protestant clergymen among the captives were executed upon the order of the Communist government. If this is true, they are the first clergymen to be executed by the Castro regime.
And more bad news came from a refugee: “The Christians prefer going to the sea and taking their chances to staying in Cuba. There is a bad persecution against the Protestant churches in Cuba.” One refugee carries a scar on the back of his head from a Cuban soldier’s gun butt, wielded while the man was worshiping in a church meeting.
An ugly picture this: violation of foreign territory, execution of clergy, and signs which tend to dispel the hope that Castro was breaking from the Communist pattern of persecuting Christians.
In the wake of hurricane destruction, Castro now appeals to the United States to show heart in lifting what he describes as the economic “blockade” of Cuba. If such action is taken by our government, it might be possible to gain in exchange an agreement to let religious prisoners and refugees in Cuba have their freedom.
