Altizer: Protestants must either turn radical or ‘submit to Rome’
Bennett: Christians have no monopoly on the saving grace of God
Cushing: Preaching of God’s Word is ‘at the center of our mission’
Graham: The Cross remains man’s ‘only hope of redemption’
Evangelism is the lifeline of Christianity. Since apostolic times it has been hard, controversial work. And it has always produced opposition outside the Church.
Today, however, there is a struggle over evangelism within the Church. Methodists were informed at a recent evangelism conference that revival services are now ill advised, in fact unchristian. The speaker, the Rev. Dr. Edmund Perry, a religious historian at Methodist-rooted Northwestern University, told the Miami Herald’s Adon Taft, “I abhor the notion of individual salvation.”
CHRISTIANITY TODAY, which is preparing a World Congress on Evangelism for Berlin next fall, has asked a wide variety of famous churchmen: “Is the traditional apostolic concept of Christian evangelism still valid? If not, how must it be revised in the next decade?”
The most radical of the new death-of-God spokesmen. Thomas J. J. Altizer, gave the symposium its first and longest response, saying Protestants must either accept his radicalism or “submit to Rome.” In stark contrast were words on evangelism from leaders like Richard Cardinal Cushing (“Nothing will ever take the place of preaching”), Archbishop Iakovos (“the truest and most valid basis of Christianity”), and Eugene Carson Blake (“the source of the power of the ecumenical movement”).
The highest official in world Methodist circles, Fred Pierce Corson, said “I most assuredly believe that there is a greatly needed place for the proclamation of the evangelical message of Christianity. It should be positive, but not dogmatic, and it should be a belief that has the strength that is expressed in the strength of a conviction.”
The dynamic Methodist bishop of Los Angeles, Gerald Kennedy, stated. “I have never been more certain than I am right now that the traditional apostolic concept of Christian evangelism is valid. Furthermore, I believe it always will be valid as long as man and time exist. The good news is unchangeable. Man in the 1960s needs to hear it just as the man in the first century needed to hear it. While our conditions and our environment change, the essential human situation remains the same.
“I hasten to add that we have to find different methods in every generation, and we ought not to be satisfied with past approaches if they do not get to the people. Let us have plenty of experimentation and try some radical new ways of breaking through to the human need. Let us not be so foolish as to assume that the message of the evangel has to be revised.”
Similarly, Protestantism’s famous writer and broadcaster, Norman Vincent Peale, said the traditional concept has to be revised, even though it is still valid, “to the extent of new skills in communicating it. The old theological language is no longer generally understood. The timeless message must be put in language and thought-forms of the time.”
Franklin Clark Fry, president of the Lutheran Church in America and chairman of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, agreed: “I do unhesitatingly believe that the ‘apostolic concept’ is still valid. No question arises in my mind at that point at all. What we need to weigh and sift is the manner in which evangelism, containing the same aim and essential content that it has always had, can be made effective in the constantly changing mood of our day.”
W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, who this month rounds out a distinguished career as general secretary of the World Council, suggested some changes:
“1. Stronger emphasis on the prophetic ministry of the Church with regard to social, national, and international life:
“2. Encouragement to the younger churches to express the Gospel in thought-forms of their environment rather than in Western categories:
“3. An attempt to distinguish more clearly between truly Christian standards and the values of Western civilization;
“4. Treatment of the younger churches as fully responsible and equal partners in the common Christian task.”
Visser ’t Hooft said the traditional concept is valid and that “the Christian Church is no longer the Church of Christ if and when it gives up that concept,” assuming that it is based on three convictions:
“1. That it is the duty of the Church and of every Christian to proclaim the divine lordship of Jesus Christ;
“2. That this Gospel is to be addressed to every man, whatever his religious or cultural background may be:
“3. That it is to be given in its purest form that is in accordance with the biblical witness and unmixed with extraneous religious or cultural elements.”
The president of the National Council of Churches, Reuben H. Mueller, affirmed the evangelistic tradition “if it refers to man’s need for forgiveness of sin upon his own repentance through faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.… If it refers to method and organization for evangelism, then I would say that these things have frequently changed throughout Christian history and undoubtedly will continue to do so.
“While I believe that Christian evangelism must seek first the conversion of the individual, I also believe that it cannot stop there. Years ago, I heard Dr. Dan Poling say: ‘The Christian experience must be personal first, and social always. If it stops at being personal, if stops.’ I believe this.
“Where too many so-called liberals are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water’ today, it is just as true that too many so-called conservatives have gone to dry-as-dust seed, with nothing but a pharisaic crust that pretends to be spiritual. Some enthusiasts for new theories and methods of evangelism will find that there have been others, long before they came along, who tried out their ideas and methods, only to fail. God has been at the business of redeeming people through his Son, Jesus Christ, for a long time, and a few ‘bright lights’ who profanely proclaim that ‘God is dead’ will never be able to frustrate him. God doesn’t need my defense.…”
The outstanding man in America’s ecumenical movement, veteran Presbyterian leader Eugene Carson Blake, did not respond directly but shared a sermon in which he said:
“The source of the power of the ecumenical movement in the Church and in the world today rises out of its recapturing in purer and more pristine form that faith in Jesus of Nazareth that Peter proclaimed so boldly when, under pressure from the government and culture of his nation, he said: ‘There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’
“… [Faith] is a very different thing from the intolerant or hypocritical imposition of our religious ideology upon other men. It is rather the humble response of men like the first Christians to the love and power of God in Jesus Christ which enabled Peter and John to say to those who pressed them to betray their Lord by silence: ‘Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.’ ”
America’s most distinguished theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, said he was not well enough to join the symposium, but commented through his secretary that he has “a rather controversial objection, not to apostolic evangelism, but to American evangelism.”
Niebuhr’s longtime colleague John C. Bennett, president of America’s top ecumenical seminary, Union Theological Seminary, said evangelistic claims must be “qualified by three concerns that we should emphasize today:
“1. The recognition that much indirect evangelism consists of removing or trying to remove the elements in the thought and life of the Church which rightly keep many people at a distance. I refer to obscurantism in theology and to the identification of the churches with institutions of injustice. It is a sign of the failure of much Christian life and teaching that so many of those who care most about humanity feel that they must be atheists.
“2. The importance of respecting the consciences of non-Christians. So often are they clearer about the issues of social justice and of intellectual integrity than Christians that we need to emphasize what the churches can learn from them. Apart from that, we should avoid any tendency to allow deeds of love to be used for ulterior purposes, to bring pressure on the minds and consciences of non-Christians. God may so use them, but let Christians be very sensitive on this point.
“3. We must not surround evangelism with the assumption that Christians have a monopoly on the saving grace of God. We may believe that the revelation of God in Christ is normative, not only for us but for all men, but this is quite different from suggesting that God cannot save those who are outside the Christian circle. Belief in the sure mediation of God’s grace through Christ is motive enough to seek a Christian witness and a Christian presence in every community, but to stress the importance of this need not mean to deny that non-Christians are in relation to God and receive grace and truth from him in ways uncharted by Christian theology.”
Wide disagreement with this approach was expressed by Billy Graham, who has attracted more listeners than any other preacher:
“Among the basic things that have never changed are human nature, the Gospel, which is God’s remedy for it, and the Holy Spirit, who is the agent of divine communication. Our methods may change from age to age, culture to culture, and society to society, but these other things are constant from generation to generation. The Cross of Christ is still an offense to unregenerate man, but it remains his only hope of redemption. We dare not forget that the world is approaching an end-time, that there is a hell to escape and a heaven to gain.
“Many modern churchmen are accommodating themselves to the thought of our times, but Paul confronted the intellectuals of his day with the Gospel of Christ. We must proclaim the same message, and can count on the same divine consequences.”
Graham said the World Congress on Evangelism, of which he is honorary chairman, “can present to the Christian world an authentic biblical definition of evangelism which the World Council of Churches has been hesitant to espouse. One of the areas of greatest confusion today is over the mission of the Church, and the World Congress can illuminate this problem in the light of biblical truth.”
A more controversial mass preacher is faith-healing evangelist Oral Roberts, the world’s most renowned Pentecostalist. He said:
“The problem we face in evangelism today is the tendency for our evangelistic efforts to be non-person-centered. That is to say, we are prone to feature some particular theological approach or specific point of doctrine in the place of the person of Christ himself. In my opinion, the apostolic concept of Christian evangelism was:
“1. To be so Christ-centered that ‘they took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus.’ They thought as he did, they exhibited love as he did, and they felt compassion for the suffering and lost of their generation.
“2. While they certainly enunciated specific doctrinal truths to help structure the philosophy of Christianity and the new converts, they did this only as a phase or part of Christ himself. For example, when they ‘broke bread’ they were feeding on the body of Jesus Christ; when they laid hands upon the sick to bring healing to them, they did so to bring Jesus’ life into body and spirit.
“3. The apostolic concept of evangelism was both private and public. They were soul-winners, and they won souls on an individual basis and on a mass scale as well. Actually what they did was more spontaneous than planned. Christ indwelt them. He was their light and life. He was the breath of their whole existence, and wherever they went they did what came naturally—to reproduce in people, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the same things that they had experienced themselves.…
“As I view Christian evangelism in the next decade, I see only a change in place and methods, certainly not of principle and practice. I see a willingness of the minister to preach, not only in his pulpit, but on radio, television, films, and in person wherever he can find an audience.… I am tremendously excited about the prospects of world evangelism. I am completely convinced that God is going to visit the world in a great charismatic outpouring, in which millions of people will feel the impact of the whole Gospel to make them whole men and women.”
There is no greater contrast in form than that between a Roberts meeting and the worship of the believers led by Archbishop lakovos, primate of Greek Orthodoxy in the Western Hemisphere. The archbishop said the apostolic tradition of evangelism “is today, and always will be for those who bear witness to Christ and his sacrifices for mankind, the truest and most valid basis of Christianity. Any qualification of this truism, however, centers on the meaning of the word ‘traditional.’ Even in early Christianity, traditional evangelistic concepts were augmented in the Church of Christ by the traditions of rite and ritual that took on living forms of worship and teaching, as they relate to everyday life.
“With the advent of the ecumenical movement for Christian unity, the churches of Christ have been increasingly seeking, working within a framework of basic evangelism, to bring the living force of the oneness of Christ’s Church to bear upon a multiplicity of problems involving humanitarian, social, and economic concerns. The evangelism of the next decade, and of the decades to come, must take into account these present considerations, so that the Gospel will continue to have essential meaning for all mankind for the betterment of man’s lot, as Christ himself intended in his precepts.”
Thomas J. J. Altizer also talked of the ecumenical trend, but rather than discussing evangelism as such, he said: “If the Protestant today is truly to accept a vocation of world evangelism, he must return to his radical roots.” Altizer then provided a much-sought definition of “radical Christians”:
“First, such Christians rebel against the Christian churches and their traditions, with the conviction that Christendom as a whole has betrayed its original foundations and regressed not simply to a pre-Christian but also to a demoniac and repressive religious form. They believe that Christendom has sealed Jesus in his tomb and resurrected the very evil and darkness that Jesus conquered, by [its] worshiping a transcendent Creator who is an absolutely sovereign and wholly other transcendent Judge.
“Again, they defy the moral law of the churches, identifying it as a satanic law of repression and heteronomous compulsion, and calling instead for a reversal of this law and an antinomian Christian freedom. So likewise they believe that the salvation history proclaimed by orthodox doctrine and liturgy isolates the reality of salvation in a distant and irrecoverable past, thereby foreclosing the possibility of the actual presence of Jesus or the Word in an actual and contemporary present.
“Finally, radical Christians are spiritual or apocalyptic in that they believe only in the Jesus of the third age of the Spirit, a Jesus who is not to be identified with the original historical Jesus, but who rather is known here in a new and more comprehensive and universal form, a form actualizing the eschatological promise of Jesus.
“Believing that Christendom has wholly negated the original Jesus, the radical Christian seeks a way to the new presence and reality of Jesus by returning to Jesus’ original apocalyptic proclamation with the conviction that such a return demands both an assault upon the established churches and a quest for a total or apocalyptic redemption. Here, everything depends upon the meaning of an apocalyptic redemption, for its original meaning was certainly lost in the long course of the history of Christendom, and the radical Christian faces the task not only of discovering that meaning but also of mediating it in a new and ‘spiritual’ form to his own time and situation.…”
Altizer said that after watching the papacy of John and Vatican II, “the honest Protestant must now face the question whether or not he should return to a Catholic Church that so obviously is in process of reforming itself. Moreover, the judgment would seem to be inescapable that the Body of Christ is far more active and real in the life of the Roman church than in the increasingly sterile Protestant denominations.…”
Radical Protestantism is the answer, he contends. If it is refused, then surely we “must submit to Rome! For surely it is Judicrous to imagine that an authentic Protestantism must be more traditional or more ‘orthodox’ than Rome.…”
The most colorful and quotable figure in America’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, Richard Cardinal Cushing, stated:
“Nothing will ever take the place of the preaching of God’s Worth which stands at the center of our Christian mission. How can we forget the Lord’s admonition: ‘Go into the whole world, preach the Gospel to every creature’? Yet we know that each generation must hear the evangelical message in terms that make it meaningful for man in the environment in which he lives. In this sense, the unchanging revelation of God must change its emphasis as the challenges of each age rise and fall.
“For Catholics, the apostolate of the Word has received a massive new impetus from the discussions and the decrees of Vatican Council II. Perhaps most visibly in the revisions of the Sacred Liturgy, which Catholics call the Mass, we see a new honor and prominence given to the Scriptures; with this the new emphasis on the homily, which should elaborate in simple terms the evangelical texts, is of high significance. The new developments in the so-called Bible Vigil, aside from its ecumenical aspects, are for Catholics a return to the sources of faith and the Word delivered to the saints.
“The Council Fathers have made a point of stressing, in their theological declarations, the strong evangelical roots of Catholic teaching, most notably perhaps in the constitution on the Church, which in so many ways is the fundamental document of the council. All of this is bound to have an effect in focusing Catholic attention on the Word of God in a way that will reveal itself in the total apostolate. We will surely see the fruits of all of this in the life of the church in the years ahead.
“Important, however, as will be the evangelical element, Catholics will of course continue to give attention to the immense riches of sacramental life, especially Baptism and the Eucharistic sacrifice. We are led to salvation by all the means given to us by the Lord, and we neglect any of them only at the peril of our soul.”
James R. Mutchmor is the eminent elder statesman of the United Church of Canada, one of the pioneer results of the ecumenical movement. He began by quoting a statement from the 1937 Oxford Conference: “The Church has many duties laid upon her, the chief of which is to proclaim the Word of God, to make disciples for Jesus Christ, and to order her life through the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in her.” Mutchmor endorsed this as “sound evangelical teaching for today and tomorrow” that is New Testament-based.
“It is difficult, not to say presumptuous, to put God to the test to get support for the validity today of the apostolic concept of evangelism. Two things may be considered as well within the range and right of human inquiry.
“First, we begin with ourselves and our affluent society. And here let us think chiefly of our North American situation. It may be described by five words: production, power, pride, profligacy, and paganism. North America, with about one-twelfth of the world’s population, produces one-half of its goods and services. Our technological society is in high gear. This production gives us power, and as Lord Acton once remarked: ‘All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ So we are given to pride. It rules our wills. The steps to profligacy and paganism are short and steeply downward. Thus, in spite of our welfare society, our high finance, our amazing scientific achievements, our sins of pride and profligacy are too great a part of our record. We stand in need of God’s help. We are fearful in this thermonuclear day of a handful of atomic dust. We could tragically become the victims of angry men.
“Against this human dilemma the New Testament offers four wonderful words of life and hope. They are: repent, believe, go, and give. It’s hard for modern man to accept the essential need of the ‘turn ye’ to repentance, but there is no other door to God’s redeeming love. It’s the narrow and only door, and everyone who would be a child of God must humble himself and enter by the gate of repentance.
“The other words speak for themselves. The vital one is belief or faith. The just are to live by faith. Faith calls for trust and obedience. In spite of demythologizing and existentialism, faith today is deep and strong. The ‘go’ and ‘give’ are powerful apostolic and evangelistic words. Every last believer is a member of the apostolate. Always those in whose hearts Christ has made his home are disciple-making disciples. So the fellowship of believers grows with Jesus Christ and his cross and his resurrection in the midst. The fellowship grows to heal and bless even unto eternal life.”
Evangelical Jews?
America’s Reform Jews are rethinking their ideas about reaching and converting those outside their religion. This trend, added to the Vatican’s headline-making declaration on Jews, makes 1965 a landmark year in Christian-Jewish relations.
Concern about converts has been growing for years, spurred on by Gentiles who marry Jews and want to join the faith. By one estimate, 98 per cent of the converts come through marriage, their motives ranging from convenience to conviction.
A year ago, Dr. Maurice Eisendrath, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, asked his Committee on Proselytism to bring a proposal on conversions to the UAHC convention, held in San Francisco last month.
The committee decided Jews should say clearly that “we shall seek converts among the unaffiliated, both the unsynagogued and the unchurched.” The report said some persons come to Judaism on their own, but “many more would be added to our congregations if we were more active and out-reaching in making Reform Judaism known and in telling the unchurched as well as the unsynagogued that a warm welcome awaits them, and a secure outlook can be found in their joining the household of Israel.”
Until the rise of Christianity, Judaism was quite evangelical in confronting the pagan religions which surrounded it. But this ended abruptly in A.D. 315 when the Emperor Constantine decreed that Jews who sought converts or persons who switched to Judaism would be executed. Later, militant Islam further drove the Jewish religion into a stance of defensive self-preservation. The Jews’ religious relativism was reinforced by the rabbinical law that only idol-worshipers are a legitimate target for proselytism.
The committee report which called for a change in this historic attitude was bolstered by Eisendrath’s own speech on the subject in San Francisco. “Our failure to launch an aggressive program of conversion reflects, I fear, an unbecoming distrust of the Gentile—an unpleasant, provincial attitude toward our faith, as if it were an exclusive club into which one has to be born.”
Some convention delegates proved more club-conscious than the committee, and the final resolution was watered down. Now the newly named Committee for the Winning of the Unaffiliated from the UAHC, which is dominated by laymen, must coordinate planning with a similar committee from the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the organization of Reform clergymen.
The head of the UAHC group, Boston can manufacturer Solomon Stern, and the CCAR chairman, Baltimore Rabbi Abraham Shusterman, joined a third man to write the report which went to San Francisco. Stern plans to be on hand in New York December 22 when Shusterman’s committee discusses what to propose to the rabbis at their meeting next June.
Whatever form the outreach takes, it won’t be called evangelism, a word distasteful to many Jews. They will use a small-scale, tolerant, educational approach. Some of the more dramatic ideas in the hopper are reading rooms à la Christian Science, films and pamphlets, and mass media advertising.
Jews aren’t interested in converting active members of Christian churches, and some Christians would like their faith to reciprocate. One is the Rev. Dr. Frederick Grant, former president of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and professor emeritus at Union Theological Seminary. Last month, Episcopalian Grant, in a Sunday morning lecture at the Washington Hebrew Congregation (Reform), gave a resounding “No” to his title question, “Should Christians Seek Jewish Converts?”
Grant said a yes would be necessary if one believed all mankind was destined to hell apart from faith in Jesus Christ, but he doesn’t believe that. He listed several reasons why conversion is not necessary:
First, efforts to convert Jews have proven futile. Second, since the basic principle of Christianity is found in Judaism, why would one want to seek conversions? When a barbarian became a Christian there was a real change of life, Grant said, but when a Jew is converted, he simply adds “some additional matters” to what he already believes. Grant also said conversions are in “bad taste.”
Host Rabbi Norman Gerstenfeld couldn’t agree more: “No Jewish scholar could possibly object to anything Grant said.”
