THE HOME STRETCH
This little gem is being written late in the day, and I have a feeling that the only solution to the way I feel right now is to go home and sleep for forty-eight straight hours. I contemplate sadly, however, that we have company for dinner, after which I have to drive forty miles to lecture for two hours, after which I shall drive forty miles again to come home jiggety-jog and face the company again, and we will be up all night, and there is the beginning and the ending of a day. Furthermore, tomorrow does not really promise to be a whole lot better, after which the week-end, as they say, looms.
Many people excuse bad behavior in youngsters by saying that they need more sleep. I am willing to go along with that in most cases if only to get the youngster out of circulation and into bed; but I would like to pursue sometime the question of what has been called “cumulative fatigue.” Why doesn’t some physiologist or psychologist work on a thesis to show the relation between lack of sleep and juvenile delinquency? I see no reason for believing that lack of sleep makes for bad behavior in infants and does not make for bad behavior in adolescents.
If my observations are sound, maybe we ought to start packing our adolescents off to bed and at least get the juveniles off the streets. I happen to know one boy who lowered his quarter-mile track record by almost four seconds after about two months of regular exercise, regular meals, and enough sleep. I am confident that for weeks at a time college students do not get enough sleep, and that their ragged dress, their careless habits, and their slovenly speech betray their sleep hunger at every turn.
Our times are out of joint, and there is something wrong in more places than Denmark. Probably the wave of the future belongs to some simple folk somewhere who can get enough sleep. I won’t fight em. I’ll join em.
EUTYCHUS II
SILENT CHURCH
Your editorial on “Cigarettes and the Stewardship of the Body” (Nov. 8 issue) is appreciated, but as a moral issue the problem of cigarettes is much broader than that of the stewardship of the body. It is true that defilement of the human temple is both a beginning and a fundamental consideration. But beyond are considerations like the utter worldly conformity inherent in the customs of smoking, the offensiveness to many of those who are free of the habit, the economic drain upon the poorer elements of our population, and the very binding nature of the habit.
It is largely futile to face this issue in piecemeal fashion, and the silence of the Church is ominous. It may be that there is too large a stake in the profits of the whole tobacco industry, including income from the growing, manufacture, and merchandising of tobacco in all its forms.
J. WARD SHANK
Mennonite Church
Broadway, Va.
If 1,000,000 present school children in this country will die of lung cancer before they reach the age of seventy, and if in 1962 there were 40,000 deaths, largely traceable to cigarette smoking, to a great degree the blame will have to be placed at the door of the Christian Church. The Church in all ages was meant to be God’s watchman upon the walls of Zion.… For decades now, the medical science has raised the red flag of danger over tobacco smoking. Yet the voice of the watchman—the Christian Church—has been silent or discouragingly feeble.
JEREMIA FLOREA
Pontiac Seventh-day Adventist Church
Pontiac, Mich.
It would seem appropriate now that some apologies be forthcoming to the “fanatical” (?) Christians who for at least a century have maintained the principle of stewardship of the body (to which you are now forced to agree by scientific evidence) by requiring that members of their church be non-tobacco users and teetotalers.
And perhaps a “Nobel Health Prize” or its equivalent should be given to Seventh-day Adventists for championing and practicing these truths shown them by the divine (they believe) counsel of the Spirit of Prophecy via Mrs. E. G. White.
CECIL A. PADEN
Vincennes, Ind.
It may interest you to know that the Baptist Church in Moscow does not permit anyone who smokes cigarettes to become a member of the church.
JEROME DAVIS
West Haven, Conn.
Your splendid editorial … was favorably discussed in last Sunday’s (Nov. 3) religious section of The Houston Chronicle.
Congratulations for taking such a courageous stand on this highly emotional and touchy subject!
With the lives, health, and happiness of so many people at stake, we need to be more forthright as Christian leaders, responsible before God for the training of our people.
W. D. KUENZLI
Webster Presbyterian Church
Webster, Tex.
APOSTOLICITY
A thousand thousand thanks for the gracious and insightful article by Dr. L. David Cowie on Dr. Graham’s “apostolic preaching in Los Angeles” (Oct. 25 issue). Dr. Adoniram Judson Gordon used to say that it is apostolic men that make an apostolic age.
FRANCIS E. WHITING
Director
Dept. of Evangelism and Spiritual Life
Michigan Baptist Convention
Lansing, Mich.
CHRIST AND THE CHURCH
It seems to me that Dr. Sasse’s article on “Rome and the Doctrine of the Church” (Oct. 11 issue) comes breathtakingly close to the heart of the matter. But why not go all the way?
Having shown that wide acceptance has been given to the statement that “the Church is Jesus Christ,” why not go on to show that the fundamental ground for the doctrine and all its disastrous implications is the ancient Jewish identification of the Messiah with the people?
The notion of a “corporate personality” is supposed to satisfy the biblical assumption that only a flesh-and-blood person can have the attributes of person; but it implies that the Messiah is really a “myth” and the true hope of man is in “the people” or, now, “the Church.”
Modern thinking is so conformed to this “mythology” that few people are aware that a corporation is a legal fiction assigning to an association the legal responsibilities of a person; that a corporation is therefore modeled upon flesh and blood, and flesh-and-blood personal powers are not modeled upon those of an association, even if the law says it has a “corpus” or body.
Is not this what John is contending against when he declares, “Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist” (1 John 4:2, 3)?
Believers can love and be loyal to the flesh of Jesus (his human nature) and be joined to him by the bond of mutual willed love or loyalty in the manner in which a husband and wife are made “one flesh”; but how can such a bond exist between a believer and a “myth” or a “corporate personality” like Uncle Sam?…
“As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” said the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 15:22).
It is possible to be “one body” with another person; but not with a mythical “corporate personality.”
The “body metaphor” of St. Paul will stand up to exhaustive detailed analysis as long as it is anchored to the flesh of Jesus. It will also demolish all nonsense about “successors” to Peter or any other apostle. Witnesses and founders have no successors. Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid.
T. ROBERT INGRAM
St. Thomas’ Episcopal
Houston, Tex.
DIVISION AT THE LORD’S TABLE
The article by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes under “Current Religious Thought” (Sept. 27 issue) points out well a grievous sin of our divided Christendom. It should be an occasion of sorrow and repentance for those of us who profess belief in Christ that we cannot all meet together at the Lord’s Table. However, I feel that your non-Anglican readers should be made aware of some distortions by Mr. Hughes about our position in regard to the sacrament of Holy Communion, distortions that I trust were made unwittingly in a spirit of charity and ecumenism.
First, he speaks of the Bishop of Leicester’s invitation to baptized and communicant members of the British Christian Youth Conference to receive the sacrament in his cathedral as being “essentially Christian and fully in harmony with the hospitable spirit of classical Anglicanism.” To say that it is essentially Christian is to beg the question; to say that it is within the hospitable spirit of classical Anglicanism is either to exclude the Prayer Book rubric requiring Confirmation before receiving from the “hospitable spirit” or to exclude that “spirit” from the Prayer Book.
Second, to claim that “the validity of the sacrament depends on its being given by and received at the hands of episcopally ordained ministers” is a “modern refinement on the part of some Anglicans “is either to say that the Prayer Book requirement that only a priest shall celebrate the Eucharist is “modern” or to say that the Anglican communion has insisted on something. i.e., episcopal orders, that was not in any true sense necessary and that it has insisted without reasons until some modern Anglicans saw fit to provide them.
Finally, to say that “the difficulties of intercommunion … are located … in the elaborations of denominationalism” is to speak the truth. But, is the way out of these elaborations the way of pretending that they do not exist? And is it not pretending that they do not exist when we have services of “intercommunion” among people who believe that they are receiving an efficacious sacrament and people who do not believe that they are receiving a sacrament at all?
WILLIAM C. GARRISON
St. Martin’s Episcopal Church
Chattanooga, Tenn.
I appreciate the spirit in which Mr. Garrison has written in criticism of what I said.… I did indeed seek to express myself in a spirit of charity and ecumenism. I hope, however, that Mr. Garrison will turn to the New Testament and to the evidence of historic Anglicanism, and then be prepared to withdraw his accusation that I have been guilty of distorting the facts.
If he will read the treatise entitled “Of Ceremonies” which is prefixed to the Book of Common Prayer, he will find this statement: “In these our doings we condemn no other nations, nor prescribe anything but to our own people only: for we think it convenient that every country should use such ceremonies as they shall think best to the setting forth of God’s honour and glory, and to the reducing of the people to a most perfect and godly living, without error or superstition.” The rubrics and rules of the Book of Common Prayer are directed toward the proper ordering of the worship of the Anglican church. They are not intended to make it an exclusive sect. Hence the freedom of intercommunion that existed between the Church of England and its fellow Reformed churches in Scotland and on the Continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The lack of episcopacy constituted no barrier to such intimate fellowship.
Accordingly the Confirmation rubric, to which Mr. Garrison appeals, prescribes a purely domestic, regulation, and was never intended to be applied in a universal manner. Thus Professor Gwatkin has written: “It seems historically clear that the rubric was never seriously understood as excluding nonconformists till long after the rise of Tractarianism. It was then a new interpretation, and it was rejected by great churchmen of all schools.” And Archbishop Fait of Canterbury replied to those who had objected against the corporate service of Holy Communion which he held in Westminster Abbey for the scholars working on the revision of the English Bible: “Some of the memorialists are indignant at the admission of any Dissenters, however orthodox, to Holy Communion in our Church. I confess that I have no sympathy with such objections. I consider that the interpretation these memorialists put on the rubric to which they appeal at the end of the Confirmation service is quite untenable.… I believe this rubric to apply solely to our own people, and not to those members of foreign or dissenting bodies who occasionally conform.”
Mr. Garrison may also have heard of the Open Letter on Intercommunion addressed to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York by thirty-two theologians of the Church of England two years ago.
The evidence is against Mr. Garrison when he accuses me of distortion. But be that as it may, nothing would please me more than to have the opportunity of discussing this important question with him in person, and in a friendly spirit, if one day our paths should have the good fortune to cross.
PHILIP E. HUGHES
London, England
ENCOURAGING DEVELOPMENT
In that more journalism students each year become interested in applying their talents in the field of religion, your special issue (Sept. 27) on religious journalism met a great need here.
WILLIAM E. HALL
Director
School of Journalism
The University of Nebraska
Lincoln, Neb.
