The Bible and education are indissolubly united. To understand something of their relation requires at least passing reference to what each is. The word “education” comes not, as commonly supposed, from the Latin educere (to “lead” or “draw forth”) but from educare (to “bear” or “bring up”). The distinction is not minor for the Christian. If education means nothing more than drawing out what is already within the person, then regeneration is unnecessary and the atoning work of Christ may be bypassed. But if to “educate” means to “rear” or “bring up,” then the creation of new life within the person through the Spirit’s use of the Word of God is recognized, and education becomes in its Christian aspect the nurture of the new man in Christ Jesus.
For this nurture the Bible is by its very nature indispensable. When the Apostle Paul said to Timothy, “… from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15, RSV), he was pointing not only to the educating power of the Bible but also to its function in regeneration, even as the Apostle Peter declared: “You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet. 1:23, RSV). Moreover, when Paul went on to say, “All scripture is inspired of God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16, 17, RSV), he was explaining both the nature of Scripture—the book “inspired by God” (literally, “God-breathed”), and its function—the formation of Christian maturity effective in good works.
Such is the essential educating power of the Bible. And without clear recognition of this power there can be no Christian education. Whenever education, even though church-sponsored, departs from a primary biblical frame of reference, it becomes secularized. It is obvious, of course, that by far the greater part of present-day education is divorced from the Bible. Equally obvious but less clearly understood is the not uncommon attempt by religious groups to maintain Christian education with the Bible relegated to a secondary or merely peripheral role. In fact, the low estate of Christian belief on many church-related campuses today may well be the result of undervaluing the educating power of Scripture.
Likewise the strange biblical illiteracy of multitudes of church members points to failure of pulpit and Sunday school to teach the people adequately the unique, God-breathed Sourcebook of their salvation. Surely one of the causes of much spiritual ineffectiveness in Protestantism today is that those who should be “the people of the Book” do not even know the Book. Not only so, but many of them are content to be ignorant of it.
Outwardly the state of the Bible was never more flourishing than now. This twentieth century may even be known by future church historians as a century of Bible translations. Circulation of Scripture is at a peak. The American Bible Society, which accounts for about 60 per cent of total worldwide Scripture distribution by the United Bible Societies, was responsible in 1962 for the circulation of 31,509,821 copies of Scripture in whole or in part. And in addition to this figure there are the millions of copies circulated apart from the Bible societies. Sales of the King James Version have not decreased, while sales of the newer versions (the Revised Standard Version, Phillips, and the New English Bible) are soaring. Yet this is also a day when modern literature and entertainment deal with the great questions of human life and destiny as if the Bible had never been written and as if the Ten Commandments and the ethics of the New Testament were unknown, a day when distinguished writers glorify the very vices the Bible denounces. No wonder that the morality set forth in Scripture is flouted on every hand.
Thus we face the paradox of such a Bible-possessing generation as ours being so little affected by biblical teaching. Yet the resolution of the paradox may be comparatively simple. To own a Bible and even to read it is not enough. The Book must be believed, obeyed, and lived by daily. Its truth is not just to be admired but to be done. For as the Apostle John said, “He that doeth truth cometh to the light” (John 3:21a).
An enduring revival will come only through devoted, informed, and trusting use of the Bible. Neither evangelistic campaigns, liturgy, social action, mysticism, nor charismatic experiences can revive and reform the Church unless the Bible is dominant in the minds and hearts of both clergy and laity. At this point, candor compels the admission that evangelicals cannot be exempted from the charge of possessing and even knowing the Bible without being willing to submit to its power. Orthodoxy for orthodoxy’s sake can never be a substitute for doing God’s truth.
Nevertheless, the educating power of the Bible remains unabated for all who will submit to it. Consider the incomparable record of its translations. Other ethnic religions have their sacred books, but none of them has a translation history like that of the Bible. From the Greek Septuagint down through the Latin Vulgate, the Anglo-Saxon versions, the Middle English of Wycliffe, and the translations of Tyndale and Coverdale—to name only a part of the provenance of our English Bible, the Book has been translated and retranslated. Not only so, but those who have had it in their mother tongue have been moved to give it to others in their mother tongue. The result is that, according to the American Bible Society, by the end of last year the entire Bible had been translated into 228 languages, and parts of it into 1202 languages and dialects.
These are more than statistics. They are evidence that the Bible is beyond question the greatest single educating force the world has ever known. The missionary enterprise is inescapably educational. “Go ye therefore,” said the risen Lord, “and teach all nations …” (Matthew 28:19). And at its great heart is the Bible. The great outreach of missions since Zinzendorf has been through the Scriptures, so that the history of missions is in good part the history of Bible translation. Only the Scriptures so lay hold upon men and women as to compel them to go to the dark places of the earth, to stone-age savages and nomad tribes, with the Gospel. Constrained by the love of Christ, the pioneer missionary must first reduce the primitive language to writing and then, after years of effort, translate the Scriptures into that language. In this way, the door to literacy and thus to enlightenment has been opened to countless millions who would otherwise have remained in intellectual as well as spiritual darkness. No other book can compare in educating power with the Bible.
By the same token, the Bible is the ecumenical book par excellence. Despite the widespread superficiality of its use, God is working mightily through it today. Not all Christians agree about the ecumenical movement. But no Christian, no matter how deep his conservative and evangelical commitment, can deny the essential ecumenicity of the Word of God.
With this kind of ecumenicity all who acknowledge the educating power of the Bible should agree. Thus when word comes from an authoritative Roman Catholic source (Father Eugene H. Maly, president of the Catholic Bible Association and an official theologian of Vatican Council II) that “a version of the Bible acceptable alike to Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants of the English-speaking world … has become a definite possibility,” evangelicals, knowing the power of the Bible, cannot but be interested. Likewise significant is the news that the Liturgical Press at St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, recently issued a book, Death and Resurrection by Father Vincent A. Yzermans, bearing the imprimatur of the Bishop of St. Cloud and using for the Scripture readings the Revised Standard Version, thus making it, according to the jacket, “the first Catholic book employing lengthy excerpts from a text other than a ‘Catholic’ Bible.”
The objections of evangelicals to reunion of Protestantism and Rome are indeed rooted in their deepest convictions. Their grave concern that the price of such reunion would be the abandonment of the very heart of the Reformation faith is well founded. But these objections, valid as they are, do not apply to a common English Bible open to all who call themselves Christians. Such a new “Vulgate” would represent a kind of ecumenicity that any Christian would have difficulty in opposing. To be sure, the realization of a Bible of this kind is by no means round the corner. On the contrary, it may take years. Moreover, when and if it comes, it would undoubtedly not supplant in worship and liturgy the great existing versions. Yet it might find wider use than expected, and its influence under God could not be restricted. Provided that it be a responsible rendering of the original texts, competent in scholarship and made without bias, evangelicals should look forward even to the distant prospect of a new “Vulgate,” accessible to all who read English. For if, as John Robinson of Leyden truly said, “the Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy word,” they may trust God to use every faithful translation of his Word for the continuing enlightenment of all who read it.
Drug-Induced ‘Spirituality’?
An alarm signal of the plight and peril of modern man has been raised at Harvard University. Look magazine has confronted the American public with “The Strange Case of the Harvard Drug Scandal” (described by Andrew T. Weil, Nov. 5 issue). On May 27 of this year, Harvard’s President Nathan M. Pusey announced the first faculty dismissal of his term of office, which began in 1953, and the story behind it is disquieting, to say the very least. The overtones are tragic.
The dismissed man was a young assistant professor of clinical psychology and education, Dr. Richard Alpert, member of Harvard’s Social Relations Department and son of George Alpert, formerly president of the New Haven Railroad. Soon after his Harvard appointment in 1958, young Alpert became interested in the psychological effects of a group of drugs called the hallucinogens or psychotomimetics—substances producing hallucinations and strange changes of consciousness when used by normal persons. Drugs in this category are peyote (its active principle is mescaline), psilocybin, and LSD-25. With a colleague, Dr. Timothy F. Leary, a lecturer on clinical psychology, Alpert conducted an investigation of the new drugs.
Most of the medical evidence available had indicated that the drugs were not dangerous physically and could not bring about addiction. But there were reports of temporary acute mental damage which could become permanent. A student volunteer had nearly been killed by walking into traffic under the conviction that “he was God and nothing could touch him.” Drug effects were described as: “heightened perceptions, increased awareness of one’s surroundings, tremendous insights into one’s own mind, accelerated thought processes, intense religious feelings, even extrasensory phenomena and mystic rapture.” There were bizarre hallucinations and delusions.
Both Alpert and Leary became convinced that the mystic insight that could be gained from psilocybin would be the solution to Western man’s emotional problems. Life, they claimed, must be seen as a game, and ability to do this comes from visionary experience, which is most simply induced by hallucinogenic drugs. The drugs thus become the fulfillment of man’s search for happiness. Both men believed that government had no right to deny people the liberty to explore their own consciousness. Denial of the drugs, they felt, would be denial of “internal freedom” and a step toward totalitarianism. They chafed under a restriction the university came to impose: no undergraduates would be allowed to take part in experiments. There were stories of students and others making use of hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual. Marijuana and mescaline could be bought in sandwich shops.
An “experiment in multifamilial living” was conducted. A large house was purchased, and in it was constructed a “meditation room” furnished only by mattresses and cushions on the floor. There was just enough light to illuminate a Buddha statue in one corner.
Harvard finally discharged both Alpert and Leary, who planned to carry on research in Mexico but were expelled by the Mexican government. They said they would look for another country.
But in this country more will be heard from their “cult of chemical mystics.” Philosopher Aldous Huxley participated in the experiments and sees in the new drugs some hope for mankind. He describes their educative powers as “a course of chemically triggered conversion experiences or ecstacies.” He believes “all of us are ‘infinite in faculties and like gods in apprehension.’ ”
In surveying the religious undertones of the movement, one senses an irony of history: two professors of the school originally founded for the training of Puritan ministers seek the solution to man’s emotional problems through drugs, and Buddha replaces Christ in the meditation room. Members of a fallen race are of course driven to seek solutions. But history testifies that tragedy is compounded when Christ is sidestepped and the Cross overlooked. The ego becomes the cruel substitute deity, fed by the hope of infinitely expanding human faculties, worshiped at a futile altar of human contrivance, cherished as a protector from divine light that would reveal a dark design to exclude the one true and holy God.
Huxley’s conception of man is reminiscent of the serpent’s snare—“Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The proposed man-made solution by means of drugs recalls to us the words of our Lord about the unclean spirit returning to a man with seven other wicked spirits: “and the last state of that man is worse than the first” (Luke 11:25). Indeed, any usurpation of Christ’s throne room of the heart is demonic and idolatrous.
In terms of sound nourishment, the emptiest place in the universe is the heart of modern man. By God’s grace this is matched by another emptiness—that of the garden tomb. Here God speaks in ultimate terms of ultimate fulfillment and of ultimate satisfaction.
‘American Women’—The Federal Report
It will not raise as many eyebrows as the Kinsey studies, but American Women, a federal commission’s eighty-six-page report made public last month, presents a lot of telling statistics.
The scope of the report, result of a twenty-two-month study, is considerably narrower than the title implies. It is not concerned with women’s personal habits. The authors, members of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, were told to confine themselves to women’s legal rights, employment practices that affect women, and “new and expanded services that may be required for women as wives, mothers, and workers, including education, counseling, training, home services, and arrangements for care of children during the working day.”
Within this area of concern is posed at least one question of considerable moral import: Why must nearly three million American mothers with children under six work outside the home even though there is a husband present and, in a good many cases, the husband’s income adequately meets family needs? A 1958 survey indicated no fewer than 400,000 children under twelve whose mothers worked full time and for whose supervision no arrangements whatsoever had been made.
The problem of the working mother is a puzzle in our society. Why in the prosperous United States should there be any appreciable percentage of mothers employed outside the home? Yet in nearly half a million families with children under six years, the report says, the mother frequently provides the sole support.
The report does not distinguish between mothers whose financial circumstances make outside work necessary and those employed for such reasons as personal and cultural fulfillment. Almost everyone familiar with suburban living knows mothers who work because they are otherwise bored, because a stenographer’s duties are easier and more interesting than a homemaker’s, because they want an escape from the tensions of the modern home, or because they want the more luxurious standard of living that comes with the added income. One could not ordinarily justify the need, for instance, of an extra paycheck in a family where the husband makes $7,500 a year.
But why distinguish between working mothers? Has not our culture outgrown the notion that a woman’s place is in the home?
We raise the point because it sounds some distinctly moral overtones. Perhaps the most serious aspect is a seeming tendency to regard child-rearing as a mechanical chore to be dispensed with as soon as possible in favor of more “creative” pursuits. The average American woman now has her last child at the early age of twenty-eight, according to the Population Reference Bureau. Moreover, an increasing number of mothers are seeking outside employment as soon as their children reach school age. The implication is that neither the home nor the child needs the attention we once thought it did.
We feel that the trend reflects poorly on the Church and is bad for the country. It underestimates the value of a wholesome home life. Children even through high school require time with their parents without the distractions of a harried mother who has a doubled evening work load because she has been away all day. The best in foods, clothes, and music lessons is no substitute for the parent himself.
The working mother places subtle strains on family life. Car pools, coffee breaks, overtime work, office parties, and bowling leagues figure in many cases of divorce involving unfaithfulness. Overworked wives have little time for their husbands. The sense of independency that comes with a separate pay check is also bad.
Working mothers are a national problem, for unhappy homes breed juvenile delinquency and reduce the efficiency of the working husbands. Futhermore, needlessly employed mothers aggravate the unemployment problem in occupying jobs that would otherwise go to males who need them.
Considering all these factors which go unmentioned in the report, the reader may be justifiably troubled by the commission’s implicit approval of baby-sitting operations financed indiscriminately by the government. The commission’s twenty-four major recommendations may well represent a needed treatment of symptoms. But it remains for the Church to battle with new vigor the causes, which certainly have moral implications. It remains for parents to realize again that there is no more creative challenge than rearing children in the fear of the Lord and in a happy home. The trend to transfer responsibility from the family to the school and to society is dangerous.
A Compassionate Bill
Both the President and Congress deserve commendation for the enactment of legislation authorizing a $329 million program of research in the field of mental retardation and mental health. The bill, the first of its kind our nation has had, includes matching grants for research and the education of teachers of handicapped children along with similar grants for community mental health centers. At a time when Congress faces critically important civil-rights and tax legislation, it is encouraging to see that this humanitarian measure has been passed. The personal concern of Mr. Kennedy and his family for the mentally retarded is well known. Like millions of their fellow citizens (the national rate of retardation is three out of every hundred children) they know at first hand the problem of retardation. For only those who have a retarded child, or a retarded sister (as in the President’s case) or brother, can understand what this handicap really means.
The signing of this bill has let a shaft of light into many thousands of homes. Much can be done about mental retardation. Children who would otherwise live secluded and aimless lives may be helped to become useful and contributing citizens. Others may be given more adequate care. Moreover, medical research holds out hope of the prevention of most cases.
What our government has done should be a spur to evangelical action in this neglected field. The Church has yet much to learn about the loving acceptance and the effective spiritual training of retarded children. Heartening signs in some evangelical quarters—provision of institutional care, setting up of special Sunday school classes, training of ministerial counselors—point the way to greater awareness of the problem and more extensive efforts to ameliorate it. Now that the plight of millions of handicapped children has been so helpfully recognized by the President and Congress, surely the Church should not lag further in accepting its responsibility of active concern for Christ’s little ones.
Civil-Rights Legislation
All social orders since the dawn of history have been confronted with the problem of balancing individual freedom and group resriction. These two realities are present in every order, and the characteristic of the order is determined by the kind of balance maintained. A measure of freedom is found even in the most intolerable totalitarian orders. On the other hand, when the highest possible degree of individual liberty is sought, there comes discovery that anarchy can be one of the crudest tyrannies of all.
Not every society is or has been concerned about individual freedom. But in the United States freedom has been a rallying cry since the nation’s founding. Moreover, the American concern for freedom has been linked to respect for law and acknowledgment of its necessity in a sinful society.
This nation now faces one of the severest challenges to its balance between freedom and law encountered since its birth. The challenge is a result of interpreting the founding documents of freedom and liberty as applicable only to part of the people. The Declaration of Independence was obviously not applied to Negro slaves in 1776. The same thing was true a few years later of the Constitution. And even today, full application of these documents becomes a possibility not primarily because of white crusaders but because of clamant cries of the descendants of those slaves for equal rights under the law.
Now, almost 200 years after the founding documents of our nation were written, civil-rights legislation proposed in Congress is a necessity not only to secure domestic tranquility but also to guarantee basic liberties to all citizens. This legislation admittedly tips the balance to some extent away from the degree of freedom held by the majority race in this country. But the necessity of such legislation becomes a judgment upon the white American, whose failures to grant elemental freedoms to a minority race have required it.
There have been and still are, in North as well as South, many failures in this area of our national life. And if one must point the finger, he must begin by pointing to himself. The churches have failed. The local communities have failed. Labor has failed. Management has failed. The states have failed. The federal government now steps into the vacuum that should not have existed, to do what it never should have been called upon to do.
But let us be under no illusions. Passing a civil-rights bill, essential as it has become, will not solve once and for all the racial problem in America. It is, however, an important step. The road ahead is long, and legislation regarding civil rights must be supplemented by the constraining love of Christ manifest in attitudes and personal conduct toward those of other races.
Revolution In South Vietnam
Many strands wove the story of tangled intrigue and bitter resentment that brought the downfall of the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc said prior to the coup that among the Vietnamese Buddhists there was considerable jealousy of the Roman Catholics. He could well be right. His brother, the late Diem, and his sister, Mrs. Ngo Dinh Nhu, have been known as devout Catholics. So has Mrs. Nhu’s husband, Diem’s right-hand man. The circumstances that breed jealousy were present. The government of South Vietnam was a family government dominated by Roman Catholics in a country where about 80 per cent of the population is non-Catholic.
One would expect that a family government belonging to a religious minority would wisely afford equal treatment to every religious group. But in spite of constant promptings by United States Ambassador Lodge, the government until the end refused to do so. Though Protestants were ignored, both Roman Catholics and Buddhists were aided by the government; but the Roman Catholics received preferential treatment. Buddhists, for example, had to have permits to hold meetings; Roman Catholics did not. Under such circumstances, jealousy was a natural product.
Yet jealousy alone would not seem to explain the government’s overthrow in Saigon. It would hardly explain the Buddhists who burned themselves to death, nor the thousands who were imprisoned. Even the destruction of the Nhu possessions suggests something more than jealousy.
On returning from Saigon, C. Stanley Lowell, associate director of Protestants and Other Americans United, declared that Buddhists felt like second-class citizens in a land where they are the vast majority. He also said that Buddhists resented being ruled by a family because it violated their belief in freedom.
For centuries the East slumbered in unfreedom. But those days ended when Christianity was brought to the East by both Protestants and Roman Catholics. Once the Christian truths of human freedom and dignity and the right to self-determination began to arouse the slumbering Eastern soul, the time of social and political revolution had begun. So great has been the power of freedom in the East that when those who profess Christ seek to suppress it, it will be lifted aloft by the hands of non-Christians. The leaven of freedom was working far more powerfully and widely than Diem knew. Ultimately it destroyed his own government.
Special Announcement
The Bible is the book of Christian faith and experience. Great movements have found their inspiration in a single verse of Scripture. Individuals have claimed particular promises of the Bible and have found in them great spiritual and practical help. “The just shall live by faith” marked the turning point in Martin Luther’s life, and the truth it contains became the foundation of the Reformation.
Christians today, no less than yesterday and just as surely tomorrow, gain comfort, hope, guidance, and spiritual power from Bible passages made alive for them by the Spirit of God. Beginning with an early issue in 1964, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will feature a special paragraph, entitled “God’s Sword Thrusts.” These paragraphs will provide our readers an opportunity to share with the more than 200,000 persons who receive this magazine a verse or passage that has been of unusual help in their Christian experience. Contributions, which must be original and unpublished, must be not less than 100 words nor more than 150 words in length. Ministers, for example, might write about “A Text I Can’t Forget”; laymen might write on “Food for My Soul,” “Help in Time of Need,” or something similar. But whatever text or passage is chosen, we want your own experience of the value and blessing of the Bible in your personal faith and daily life. Just as participants in the symposium in this issue speak of their personal use of the Bible, so contributors to “God’s Sword Thrusts” will speak definitely of what certain verses and passages have meant to them.
For every contribution used CHRISTIANITY TODAY will send the writer an honorarium of five dollars. Names of writers will be printed. Contributions should be addressed to Feature Editor, Christianity Today, 1014 Washington Building, Washington, D. C. 20005.
We are indebted to the Rev. Theodore E. Bubeck of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for the initial suggestion that led to this announcement.
