HAM ON RYE
I think somebody should be interested in the tomato game, or perhaps even in the lemon game. It was quite a shock to me several weeks ago to discover that the tomato worked its way into international cookery very late in the so-called progress of man. Now I challenge you to get through the day without a tomato.
I remember one time ordering a club steak and tomato salad; when the tomato salad arrived, they had another tomato sliced up on the steak plate—to make it look like more than it was, I suppose. Sometimes they give you a couple of slices of lemon just to make things “pretty”; but I am sure most of the time the real goal is to help fill up the plate because the entree doesn’t.
This may be a part of the increasing feminization of life. The first time I took our oldest daughter out to eat she said she wanted a sandwich. When the waiter asked, “What kind?” she said, “This kind,” and drew a picture of a triangle on the table top. She didn’t care what was in the sandwich so long as it looked “nice.” Personally I think the bread is just a handle for the contents of the sandwich, but this is hard to sell to the waitress. I said to a waitress one day, “Give me a ham on rye.” “With lettuce?” she asked. I said, “All right,” and so we went on down the line through potato chips and pickle slices. Meanwhile I puzzled over whether I wanted anything except the ham in the sandwich.
Sometimes I think this is getting to be a parable on the American Way of Life. Everything around the edges is so full of minor lights that we forget what the main issue is. And a church, you know, is considerably different from and considerably more than the next exciting program.
POIGNANCY ON TWO CONTINENTS
The opening article on “The Theological Situation in Europe” and the editorial “Theological Default in American Seminaries” (Sept. 11 issue) speak a very poignant word.…
Vandalia Presbyterian
Greensboro, N. C.
I particularly enjoyed your … discerning analysis of the drift in European theology, and will look for further articles … along this same line. I have watched with great concern through many years the way our teachers of theology seem to drift into “schools” dominated by one type of thought after another, the prevailing idea being “what everybody believes,” and a horror of teaching anything that “Oh, nobody thinks that way anymore.” To me the way the “demythologizing” idea was taken up has been the strangest of all. I can’t see how it has lived this long. A pity logic and philosophy are not taught as well as New Testament criticism.…
It is good that CHRISTIANITY TODAY is taking the lead as the sort of journal Protestantism ought to have.…
Editor
Dictionary of World Methodism
Atlanta, Ga.
It seems to me that conservative scholars and evangelical seminaries may best serve the cause of the Church of Jesus Christ by opening new paths and offering live alternatives instead of castigating those who fearlessly venture forth in hopes of bringing new light to bear upon our human dilemma and our knowledge of God and his will for man.
Hamden Presbyterian Church
Hamden, N. Y.
I do not concede that a distinction between a non-supernaturalistic Jesus and a supernaturalistic Christ cannot be made on the basis of the Gospels.…
Second Parish Church
Hingham, Mass.
Just a note to express appreciation for the very challenging study of Continental currents in theology and the relation of seminaries to them. You are rendering a great service by giving cogent expression to this sphere of thought.
Gordon Divinity School
Wenham, Mass.
EVEN THE BRAVE AND THE FREE
I found J. Edgar Hoover’s article, “The Faith of Our Fathers” (Sept. 11 issue), shocking! Is his anti-Communism so dear to you that you should be compelled to print such a theological disaster? Having been a consistent reader of your periodical for over six years, I know that some of Mr. Hoover’s theological concepts must be repugnant to you.
Most basic to his difficulties is a total unawareness of original sin. We cannot raise man’s “eternal striving to be free” to the level of a spiritual virtue. You know, as well as I, that man’s “eternal striving” is directed primarily against God, and therefore, in itself, cannot be trusted. Yet Mr. Hoover and others who espouse this current form of political religiosity consistently give us the impression that a totally free man will be a totally responsible man. Unfortunately, this dream runs afoul the Garden of Eden.
I believe, with all my soul, in the necessity of political and social freedom. I reject Communism with all my heart. But we cannot confuse political necessities with deeper theological realities. Even the brave and the free need Jesus Christ.
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church
Newark, Del.
Thank you, thank you for publishing the article; and thanks to J. Edgar Hoover for writing it; and most of all, I thank God for inspiring and keeping alive “The Faith of Our Fathers.” I only wish a copy of Mr. Hoover’s article could be put into the hands of every man and woman, and every boy and girl—in America at least.
Baltimore, Md.
BAD RIDERS ON THE HILL
I wish to commend your editorial on “The Church and Political Pronouncements” (Aug. 28 issue). I believe strongly that it is the duty of the Church and its preachers to speak out clearly and strongly on social and moral questions, and thus to be the conscience of society. But I also believe that it is not the proper function of the Church to operate as a political “pressure group” in support of particular legislation.
The Methodist Church
Rippey, Iowa
“The Mission of the Church” as defined by the Board of Directors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY (July 17 issue) … shines a bright light through a lot of controversial haze surrounding the theology of the Christian mission today. Churches that take the New Testament seriously will concentrate their efforts on fulfilling the task Christ assigned himself and his disciples for the period of his first advent, leaving the invasion and conquest of Caesar’s realm to his second coming.
Principal
Brussels Bible Institute
Brussels, Belgium
The Word of God comes to us in the words and through the personalities of fallible, limited men. Some were spiritual giants, some almost spiritual morons, but God used them as far as he was able.…
The writers of the Bible, known and unknown, were men of their age.…
Gravois Mills, Mo.
FROM A NEW NATION
I am grateful to God for CHRISTIANITY TODAY and all those who make its publication and circulation a reality twice a month.
Methodist Tamil Church
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
ECCLESIASTICAL LUBRICATION
Your editorial (“Honest Before God,” July 31 issue) does not tell the whole story on honesty before God in financial matters. It stated that some of the smaller denominations gave far more liberally to foreign missions than the larger denominations. Perhaps the cause may in some instances be found in the fact that the larger denominations spend a proportionately larger amount for administration and for keeping the large ecclesiastical machine oiled and repaired. Thus the church members may be very honest before God in their giving and yet only a small percentage of their contribution reaches to foreign lands. An honest presentation would demand the full story of how mission monies are spent.
Ohio District
The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
Napoleon, Ohio
CHRISTIAN SERVICE CORPS
I am a Naval officer with two years remaining on my obligation and presently flying aboard a carrier in the Pacific. I must remark with enthusiasm that I find the idea for a Christian Service Corps, proposed by Robert N. Meyers (July 17 issue), very appealing. I am sure there are thousands in situations similar to my own; persons just getting out of the service or out of school or who are dissatisfied with their present jobs—all who have at some time thought seriously of service on the mission field. The opportunity for interim service with a CSC would give qualified and dedicated personnel (and not only the “young” ones) a crack at the missionary involvement without the necessity of a lifetime commitment. I am aware that participation cannot be solely on a superficial try-it-see-if-you-like-it basis; yet it would perform a great and needed function for the Church with, as we would say aboard ship, a good percentage “shipping over” for a career.
Nas Miramar, Calif.
Is it not possible, and I speak only personally, that the Church should strongly support the entry of Christians into the Peace Corps as a means of fulfilling Christian vocation, and thus be able to use its personnel and financial resources in areas beyond the purview of the Peace Corps?
The Peace Corps Office of the National Council of Churches would welcome reactions from the readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY to Mr. Myers’s article … and to the work of the Peace Corps.
Director
Peace Corps Office
National Council of Churches
New York, N.Y.
The article was clearly written and to the point on one of the tragedies of the Christian Church today.
As a serviceman serving overseas one realizes how much of a need there is in the world for Christ. Please count me as one of the Corps’s fervent advocators. What can I do to help?
Chaplain’s Assistant
Headquarters, 2d Battalion 34th Infantry
APO 112, U. S. Forces
I would be interested in promoting such a project.
Pilot Grove, Mo.
St. Paul’s United Church of Christ
• Those interested either in helping or in gaining further information should write to Robert N. Meyers, Building 212, Park Terrace Apartments, Vienna, Va.—ED.
ANGLICAN IDENTITY
I am disturbed by the review of C. S. Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm (July 31 issue). The reviewer, J. D. Douglas …, is obviously no Anglican.
Mr. Douglas writes (and I edit freely, but accurately): “When the reviewer is made uncomfortable … he is tempted … to take refuge in the reassuring thought that Lewis … is not always orthodox. And indeed he is not. He admits he prays for the dead and couples this with an engaging plea for something akin to purgatory.”
What Mr. Douglas fails to consider is that C. S. Lewis was an Anglican—an orthodoxAnglican—and prayers for the dead (as well as belief in purgatory) are part and parcel of Anglican eschatology.…
Grace Episcopal
Estherville, Iowa
• Only our correspondent’s presuppositions lead him to conclude that Dr. J. D. Douglas is “obviously no Anglican.” Dr. Douglas is, in fact, a member of the Church of Scotland; yet, even so, it would have been more reasonable to conclude that on the disputed point he is in agreement with the Anglican view, for in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England there are no prayers for the dead. The framers of the Prayer Book, finding no sanction in the canonical Scriptures for the practice of praying for the departed, discarded it entirely. Indeed, they regarded the practice as subversive of the Gospel and of the believer’s assurance of security in Christ. We would suggest, in all charity, that Mr. du Bois is mistaken in his assessment of what is classical Anglicanism. But the real point at issue is: Is the custom of praying for the dead scriptural? With the primitive Church, we acknowledge Holy Scripture as the rule or canon by which all things must be judged. If he can prove that this custom is scriptural, or not contrary to the teaching of Scripture, we shall be open to conviction.—ED.
In Robert H. Lauer’s “The Autocracy of Automation” (August 28 issue) is a clear example of the type of error that J. Howard Pew so effectively denounces in his timely and persuasive article, “The Mission of The Church” (July 3 issue). If the Church follows Lauer’s advice and example, it will be engaging in the propagation of a socially oriented gospel based on false assumptions about the cause of modern man’s predicament; and it will contribute to the chaos and bitter strife of secular society by passing judgments and prescribing measures that have no basis in the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, assumptions that are as false, if not as immoral, as the teachings of Marx. It is noteworthy that Lauer cites as his authorities modern psychologists and sociologists rather than the Holy Scriptures. Just this type of ecclesiastical and spiritual prostitution discredits a religious outlook that went overboard for optimistic humanism in the decade before 1914; that sponsored temperance by law in the ill-starred eighteenth amendment; that vociferously and successfully insisted that the democracies disarm before 1939, thereby encouraging Hitler and Mussolini’s aggression, which precipitated the Second World War; and that today is promoting civil rights legislation and demonstrations which have already brought lawlessness and bloodshed and gives fair promise of worse results in the future.
In criticizing Mr. Lauer’s thesis I speak as a Christian who spent over forty years as a successful industrial engineer, manager, and executive, while serving as a lay minister of the Gospel, and who retired from business recently in order to devote full time to the propagation of the good news of Jesus Christ.
Mechanization, automation, assembly-line productivity, according to Mr. Lauer, “promote unemployment,” “drain man of individual dignity and worth,” imply that man is “a temporary asset, whose replacement only awaits electronic refinements,” “may be harbingers of an even greater slavery—the bondage of man to the despair of a pointless existence,” cause the “sense of calling” to fade out “along with the sense of the dignity of the work.” These are pontifical pronouncements, uttered with an assurance that makes them a base from which the Church is advised to design its ministry, in part at least, to modern world society.
Any attempt to refute these assertions decisively would entail extensive presentation of data. That I do not attempt. There is at least a reasonable doubt of the accuracy of the analysis on which the assertions are based; hence any attempt to design a religious program for the solution of the alleged problems is likely to end in the discrediting of the amateur and professional sociologists and philosophers operating from a Christian base, which in turn will tend to close ears and hearts to the true Gospel of Christ and to induce dissention within the Christian community.
Those who say that automation creates unemployment must be embarrassed by the fact that the United States now has more than 70 million people at work. Increasing production does create local and temporary unemployment, but it increases the quantity and quality of goods available to the consumer and reduces their price. The overall effect is to increase employment. The examples and supporting statistics that could be given are legion. The unemployment and poverty that characterized society before the industrial revolution and automation were incomparably worse than those we now have. Furthermore, the help provided for the unemployed today, however inadequate or ill advised, is on any valid comparison much more humane and effective than what there was then.
Any company, manager, or foreman that fails to recognize the dignity and worth of the worker or fails to consider the psychological and physiological effect of any task assigned to him in a modern industry is soon going to find that such indifference does not pay. The shop steward and the success of competition will see to that. I think that these and other agencies can well do without the interference of the Church’s amateur sociological efforts, as can the worker, whether the effort is made from a Protestant pulpit or by a papal encyclical. The idea that the duties of a worker on an assembly line, or of an observer of the charts and indicators of an automated production machine, or of the operator of a $10 million 100-cubic-yard excavator, are more degrading than those of their predecessors who toiled for long hours at physical drudgery more than suggests that the critic has had only meager experience with either the old or the new system. Labor of all kinds imposes both physical and psychological burdens on man. But the suggestion that either of these has been increased by modern industrial life is the dream of minds that seek to find the cause of godlessness and immorality and frustration elsewhere than in the heart of fallen, unbelieving, rebellious, and unregenerate man. Such a compromise of the Christian message may temporarily win favor with humanists, socialists, sensationalistic journalists, and other non-Christian idealists; but it achieves this by reducing the scandal of the Cross of Christ. I am sure St. Paul would have objected to it just as vigorously as he did to legalistic circumcision, and for exactly the same reason—an adulterated gospel is no Gospel.
In what way does automation imply that man is “a temporary asset,” any more than a milking machine suggests that a milkmaid could not become a good mother? How does it suggest a new “slavery—the bondage of man to the despair of a pointless existence”? No doubt, tasks consisting solely of routine drudgery tend to deepen the darkness that characterizes the soul without faith or hope; but on balance, is it not clear that the use of automatic machines greatly increases the percentage of workers who must apply a high degree of skill, intelligence, and creative competence in the design, installation, maintenance, sale, application, and operation of such devices? The suggestion that today there is a smaller proportion of workers engaged in skilled and creative tasks than there was in the day of the medieval stone mason is preposterous nonsense. Serfdom, slavery, feudalism, and cruel exploitation were the social order of that day, and they kept all but a few of the population in abject poverty, painful toil, filth, and undignified self-abasement. Ask any auto plant employee his opinion of the car he drives and he will very likely tell you how good it is and let you know that he helped to produce it, even if his job consists of checking the performance of the horn and headlight switches or inflating the right front tire. Of course, he may not realize how much damage the triviality of his drudgery is doing to him until he visits the World’s Fair and studies Michelangelo’s Pietà and it dawns on him that man was made for higher things. His pastor may be able to help him by explaining the importance of the reliability of horns and the correct tire pressure. At the same time, the clergyman can probably make him feel good by explaining to him how fortunate he is in not having the intelligence and manual dexterity that might have resulted in his being trained as a skilled machinist, as then he would have been a candidate for gastric ulcers; and further, that if he had been that kind of a person, he would probably have had ulcers anyway, because he would have become so frustrated by assembly-line duty—a task far beneath his dignity—that he would find tooting horns and hissing air unbearable. (The parson should bear in mind that resentment against hot air is an occupational hazard he cannot avoid.)
In what way did the dark, cold, and filthy shops before the panic of 1837 salute the dignity and personality of the workers, while by comparison the “lighted, ingeniously laid out, scientifically organized assembly-line plants” of today insult them? How do the men in the “spacious headquarters and offices of the great American corporations” kill this dignity and personality, while the pre-1837 factory owner, with his paternalistic tyranny and indifference to health and safety, nurtured them?
We are told that man has been depersonalized and has lost the sense of the dignity of work and that as a result skilled machinists and those who work with computers have gastric ulcers and heart attacks. Just how the depersonalization and lost dignity of the faceless robot of the automated assembly line influence the health of the worker who is fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be in the highly skilled, highly responsible, and creative category is not explained. Nor is any reference made to the fact that workers having the aptitude and competence for these specialized occupations are probably the type who have a special susceptibility to the afflictions. I wonder if he has considered that the amount of caffeine consumed during the frequent coffee breaks occasioned by automation may be the real culprit?
It seems clear that a good consulting pastor will have to develop special competence in the fields of medicine, psychology, industrial engineering, personnel relations, and psychiatry in order to cope with the “Autocracy of Automation.”
If the Church bases its approach to modern man’s predicament on delusions of this kind, and rejects as outdated Christ’s social philosophy, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these shall be added unto you,” it will incur both the wrath of God and the contempt of the world.
One of the problems Mr. Lauer faces is that his analysis and conclusions tend to classify him with those anti-Christian humanists and social reformers who must avoid the “Word of the Cross,” which declares that the murder of the Son of God is a criterion of sinful man’s heart and nature, and who must find the explanation of man’s depravity in his environment. Mr. Lauer’s thesis is similar to the party line of the socialist and the labor leader, who use it to advantage in their propaganda for inflation producing “labor gains” and demands. The implication in this propaganda, and it is not absent in Mr. Lauer’s article, is that since industrial ownership and management are motivated by the profit urge, their program must be evil in its consequence. The profit motive is bad; therefore, automation is bad. The autocracy of automation may be a myth, but the presumption of prejudice is a reality that the Church will do well to shun. If the propaganda is truth, then no Christian should inveigh against it; but if it is fiction, or distorted truth, any Christian or church that promotes it does so at the risk of imperiling the Christian witness. And even if the propaganda were true, the danger to the Church from injecting its influence and judgment into the controversy is great. Why did Jesus and Paul so emphatically refuse to participate in social or political controversy and, for all practical purposes, stay out of secular world problems? Not because they had no thoughts about them, but simply because they would not engage in any activity that might distract attention from those moral and spiritual issues of man’s life which are so important and determinative that all other considerations are trivial. “I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ, and him crucified,” was Paul’s policy. It should be ours.
The history of interference by ecclesiastical authorities and organizations in secular affairs is deplorable and tragic, as I have attempted to show from the examples mentioned above. The same conclusion can be supported by reference to the mistakes of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, Cromwell, and others, to say nothing of the experience of ecclesiastical Rome. I am persuaded that this is so, not only because of the notorious incompetence of religious leaders in this field, but also and more particularly because God judges those who dare to confuse the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of the world, the Cross of Christ with social reform.
Whatever contribution Christianity has made to social reform—and it has contributed much—has been accomplished by an attack upon the real cause of social evil. This lies deep in the recesses of the heart of sinful man in revolt against God. It is to this source that the Gospel of Jesus Christ addresses itself in the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit of God, and it is by this indirect but highly effective means that the Church has succeeded in ameliorating the effect of the curse. In my activities as a Christian in the industrial world I have witnessed many examples of the practical effect of the Christian conscience in responsible action in social affairs, and it is my hope that I may have been able to make some small contribution in this field through the application of Christian morality in my work. At any rate, I did recognize responsibility in this area. As I understand the Scriptures, it is by this means that the Church is to function in the world order.
St. Clairsville, Ohio
• Mr. Hyslop was for many years president of Hanna Coal Company, a division of Consolidation Coal Company. He is a recognized leader in the field of labor relations, and his company was widely recognized for its excellent relations with employees and their union. He received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Marietta College for the promotion of federal and state laws relating to industrial health, safety, and welfare, including the Federal Coal Mine Safety Act of 1952.—ED.
