President Hudson T. Armerding of Wheaton (Illinois) College is proposing “a national university composed of cooperating regionally accredited Christian liberal arts colleges.” He unveiled his idea before fellow Christian educators last month in meetings in Denver concurrent with the annual national convention of the National Association of Evangelicals.
The Armerding plan is based on the need for a graduate program “of breadth and depth not now available at any one of the potential participating colleges.” He envisions it as functioning within the framework of presently qualified colleges whose facilities would be combined to implement the program. Said a Wheaton spokesman:
“Leased lines, coaxial cables, and other communications devices could expedite cooperative instruction. Library resources might be shared through the use of new data retrieval systems. Key faculty could, if necessary, commute by air from one campus to another.”
“The integration of the various campuses organizationally could be provided by a board of control responsible for policies affecting the national university as a whole. It would be expected that each campus would still retain its own board policies peculiar to that particular institution.”
Under the leadership of towering General Director Clyde Taylor, nearly 1,000 Denver delegates passed ten major resolutions on current affairs of interest to evangelicals at the main NAE sessions.
On world ecumenism, NAE reaffirmed “its conviction that Christian unity is primarily a spiritual relationship” and recognized “helpful diversity in structural relationship.” It said unity, “given by God and made real in us by the ministry of the Holy Spirit, is manifested in love-inspired fellowship that promotes cooperative effort in our Christian witness without the necessity of ecclesiastical union or uniformity in practice.”
Taylor said evangelicals within major denominations face two problems: “compromising mergers, and serious theological defections.” He said such evangelicals “may be forced out of their denominations.”
The NAE represents forty small denominations and individual congregations with a membership of two million, and through affiliated agencies serves a constituency of eight million. It has set three objectives for next year’s twenty-fifth anniversary: 10,000 new member churches; 10,000 special gifts; and 10,000 attending a special anniversary dinner. The anniversary year might also feature the start of a national radio program and a national evangelism congress.
A resolution on “Christian atheism” said NAE “vehemently condemns the treachery of some clergy and religious leaders to the gospel they are appointed to defend.” In politics, NAE deplored “a new treason” in “the burning of draft cards, subversive movements and seditious utterances, and prevalent disloyalty to the United States of America.”
The first resolution charged the motion picture industry has broken its own “gentlemen’s agreement” or production code and is turning out increasingly licentious material. It urged Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to “form guidelines short of censorship in the interest of insuring ethical propriety” in movies and TV programs.
NAE maintained the “finality of the ethics of the Ten Commandments and of the New Testament” and condemned the “New Morality, or Amorality, both in national and private relations, and the representation thereof on stage, screen, radio, television, and in the press.” It saw “loose prevalent standards of morality everywhere manifest.”
Philip Gilliam, for thirty years a Denver juvenile court judge, said that “the big challenge in America today is making decency popular.… I am shocked at the downhill plunge in morality today. The good guys aren’t winning any more.”
A major resolution on “Law and Order” characterized an “unamerican mood which has invaded our society” as “godless, revolutionary, and disloyal to government.” It pledged itself to “obedience to the injunctions of Scripture to respect the authorities over us and pray for those in high office.”
Another resolution urged “increased effort for world relief,” not only in much-publicized India and Viet Nam but also in the Congo and Rhodesia.
Discrimination was raised during a morning Bible message by Dr. Mariano Di Gangi, pastor of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church. He said he had received possible calls to pulpits but later was turned down because of his Italian name. “They thought I probably push a banana wagon, have garlic on my breath, and am a card-carrying member of the Mafia,” he commented.
Dr. Rufus Jones, general director of the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society, was elected new NAE president. NAE honored its treasurer, Robert C. Van Kampen, as “Christian Layman of the Year.” He has retired from full-time business to work with several evangelical organizations but remains a director of fourteen corporations and two banks.
The Wheaton Declaration
More cooperation among evangelical missionaries is expected as an immediate effect of the historic Wheaton Declaration. The 5,900-word strategy document, adopted in unanimous votes, section by section, at last month’s Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission, seems already to be encouraging merger talks among missionary boards.
More than 900 influential missionaries and national leaders from seventy countries participated in the adoption of the declaration at the eight-day, precedent-setting congress (see April 29 issue, page 43) called by the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association and the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association. Plenary sessions were held in Pierce Chapel, on the campus of Wheaton (Illinois) College.
The declaration was drafted by a panel of specialists, extensively revised by study committees, and further amended in floor debate at plenary sessions. The final product represents a broad consensus on evangelical missions strategy for the years immediately ahead.
An important addition to the draft document was a stand for racial equality, human freedom, and social justice (see text below). The approved document also added “family disintegration” to a list of problems—racism, war, population explosion, poverty, social revolution, and Communism—to which evangelicals are said to have failed to apply scriptural principles. A key deletion, attributable to protests of Latin American delegates, was the preliminary draft’s acknowledgment that “not a few [Roman Catholics] are already in Christ; may their numbers increase.”
The Wheaton Declaration stresses the need for certainty, commitment, discernment, hope, confidence, confession, evangelism and consensus. Its appeal is to “the Bible, the inspired, the only authoritative, inerrant Word of God.”
Here are excerpts relating to crucial contemporary issues:
On syncretism: “We must first divest our presentation of those cultural accretions which are not pertinent to essential gospel truth.… We must bear our testimony with humility and dignity.”
On proselytism: “The proselytism that includes forced conversion or the use of unethical means (material and/or social) is contrary to the gospel of Christ.”
On “Neo-Romanism”: “We recognize the danger of regarding the Roman Catholic Church as ‘our great sister Church.’ ”
On church growth: “We should devote special attention to those people who are unusually responsive to the gospel and will reinforce those fields with many laborers.… We must pray earnestly that the Holy Spirit will bring the less responsive fields to early harvest. We will not leave them untended.”
On foreign missions: “The proper relationship between churches and missions can only be realized in a cooperative partnership.”
On evangelical unity: “We will encourage evangelical mission mergers when such will eliminate duplication of administration, produce more efficient stewardship of personnel and resources, and strengthen their ministries.… We caution evangelicals to avoid establishing new churches or organizations where existing groups of like precious faith satisfactorily fill the role.”
On evaluating methods: “While the social sciences afford considerable insights for missionary methods, yet these must be subjected to the corrective judgment of Scripture.”
On social concern: “Evangelical social action will include, wherever possible, a verbal witness to Jesus Christ.… We urge all evangelicals to stand openly and firmly for racial equality, human freedom, and all forms of social justice throughout the world.”
On “a hostile world”: “Our supreme loyalty is to Jesus Christ, and all of our racial, cultural, social, and national loyalties are to be in subjection to Him.”
Following adoption of the declaration, delegates recited this vow in unison:
“In the support of this declaration, we, the delegates here assembled in adoration of the Triune God, with full confidence in Holy Scripture, in submission to the Lord Jesus Christ, and looking for His coming again, do covenant together for God’s eternal glory, and in response to the Holy Spirit, with renewed dedication, and in our oneness in Christ as the people of God, to seek, under the leadership of our Head, with full assurance of His power and presence, the mobilization of the Church—its people, its prayers, and resources, for the evangelization of the world in this generation. So help us, God! Amen.”
‘The Linen Stays Dirty’
The crusading editor of the 18-month-old independent National Catholic Reporter, Robert G. Hoyt, landed timely blows last month on the institutional midsection of the church periodical trade. He told 150 editors of Associated Church Press in St. Louis that most of their periodicals are instruments of managed news.
Church leaders, he said, “have not been willing to grasp the lesson the secular press has to teach, that honest reporting and objective criticism of their own policies and programs will serve the Church better than the techniques of public relations.”
Hoyt made examples of usually responsible Roman Catholic diocesan papers in Boston and St. Louis which played down or omitted important local developments last month, presumably because the reports would have reflected adversely on the church. But editors, publishers, reporters, and readers must all assume part of the blame, he added.
Institutional pride, according to Hoyt, “means that we Catholics, or we Methodists, don’t want to wash our dirty linen where the Presbyterians, or the Quakers, or the secular humanists can observe the operation. The result is that the linen stays dirty, because for some reason the kind of stains we’re talking about don’t wash out very well in our private laundries.”
Hoyt repudiated the notion “that if we can just get a copy of our paper into the hands of an indifferent church member, somehow holiness will pour through his fingers into his heart. As a result a great many religious publications depend for their circulation not on their merits, not on the service they offer to readers, but on extra-journalistic methods and procedures which derive their effectiveness from the consent of the powers-that-be in the Church. And when this is the case, the injunction of St. Paul to speak the truth in season and out of season gives way to the non-scriptural but sound platitude that he who pays the piper will call the tune.”
During the three-day ACP convention, the Church’s lack of candor also came under attack in speeches by a local newspaper editor, a state senator, and two journalism professors from Syracuse University. They reflected growing uneasiness over the present role of the church press (see March 4 issue, p. 48). Appropriately enough, it was the ACP’s fiftieth anniversary, the theme being “Gateway to New Insights in Christian Journalism.” “Gateway” was an intentional allusion to the new 630-foot Gateway Arch, which is already to St. Louis what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.
Another highlight of the ACP convention was the presentation of awards, two of which went to motive, Methodism’s avant-garde monthly for students. One was for “excellence in physical appearance” and the other for “consistency in just good writing.”1motive probably scored the coup of the year in religious journalism with its publication of a satirical, newspaper-style “obituary” on God by Anthony Towne, whose manuscript had been turned down by the New Yorker and the Christian Century, motive rarely pays contributors, and Towne got only acclaim.Christianity and Crisis got the third award for “relevance of content for intended readership.”
The ACP, founded in St. Louis on December 6, 1916, as a fellowship of editors of Protestant periodicals, takes on new dimensions this year with the acceptance of its first Roman Catholic publication (Continuum, a scholarly quarterly) and the establishment of a secretariat in Chicago. The Rev. Alfred P. Klausler, editor of the Missouri Synod Lutheran youth publication Arena, will switch from part-time to full-time executive secretary July 1.
Mass For The Married
On April 17, Father Anthony Girandola celebrated his first public “mass for lepers”—fellow Roman Catholic priests who have been excommunicated for getting married.
The service was held in a St. Petersburg, Florida, public school cafeteria rented for $19. In attendance were 200 persons, including a dozen Protestants and ten newsmen. Girandola hopes to build “Dismas House” in the city as a refuge for what he estimates are America’s 5,000 married Catholic priests.
A Communist In The Vatican
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko last month became the first Communist leader to call on a pope. World peace topped the agenda. Both sides underplayed the historic nature of the forty-five-minute talk, terming it a continuation of a chat during Pope Paul’s visit to the United Nations last October.
After the audience, the perpetually grim Gromyko said both men felt peace must be sought “independently of ideology or convictions.” The Red diplomat also proposed a meeting of all European leaders on national security problems.
Gromyko refused comment on chances for a papal visit to the Soviet Union in the near future. Paul had hoped to make his first visit behind the Iron Curtain for the current celebration of 1,000 years of Christianity in Poland. Months-long negotiations broke down in the complex church-state feud centering on strong-willed Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski.
The Communist and the Pope reportedly discussed Russia’s success in bringing a truce between India and Pakistan, and closer Vatican-Moscow contacts, through either the Soviet ambassador in Rome or an unofficial Vatican delegate in Moscow.
Contacts between Communism and Catholicism have been sparse. In 1922, the new Soviet regime refused Vatican appeals for guarantee of religious freedom and permission to aid starving Russians. In 1945. Josef Stalin reportedly rebuffed a bid from Pope Pius XII, sent through an American emissary, for a Vatican delegate in Moscow. Pope John XXIII renewed efforts toward a thaw in Moscow and in 1963 received Alexei Adzhubei, son-in-law of Soviet Premier Khrushchev and then editor of Izvestia.
The 40-year-old priest was automatically excommunicated under church law a year ago when he married his attractive wife Larraine, 28, before a board of priests in Bridgeport, Connecticut, had acted on his petition for release from celibacy vows. The couple were married by a priest friendly to Girandola. Though he accepts the excommunication as a lawful exercise of church authority, Girandola insists he is a Catholic and “a priest forever.”
The celibacy revolt was the only obvious digression from Catholic practice at the Mass (his wife and four-month-old son Anthony Jr. were in the congregation). Communion was offered to all who attended, but only twenty-three accepted the Eucharist from Girandola’s hand. He conducted the Mass in the new English form, facing the congregation.
Mrs. Girandola, raised in a Protestant fundamentalist home, was an airline stewardess and a nominal Christian who converted to Catholicism and became a nurse. She met the priest while he was a patient at Seton Psychiatric Institute in Baltimore. After their marriage, he worked for a Seventh-day Baptist newspaper in Westerly, Rhode Island, before moving to Florida.
Girandola said the vow of celibacy had been a major problem for him—he had “dated” both as a seminarian and as a priest. The celibacy requirement is currently undergoing great strain (see “The Rebel Priests,” March 18 issue, page 44).
Girandola plans to continue public Masses for persons outside the pale of the Catholic Church. He laughingly said that St. Petersburg is an “auspicious” base of operations because “Peter was the first priest commissioned by Christ, and Peter was married.”
Karl Barth At 80
Two operations and a long hospital stay should be enough to slow down any man. But to the many reporters and well-wishers dropping in on Basel theologian Karl Barth last month on the eve of his eightieth birthday, the genial octogenarian seemed much his former self. He looked thinner. His face was more drawn, his hands more gaunt. He was wearied by a series of filmed interviews for Swiss and German television. But to all who spoke with him, the man who had largely by himself effected a revolution in twentieth-century theology answered with the same old wit, the same good nature, and the same overpowering intellect.
From his second-floor study, lined with the books that he has made his life, Karl Barth looks out through a very wide window on the world. “I would like to see something serious in theology today,” he tells his visitors. “But I do not see it. I complain about a lack of seriousness.”
Barth regards the works of his contemporaries Niebuhr, Tillich, and Brunner as having stature, and reflects with respect on the giants of his youth—Harnack, Hermann, Troeltsch, and Kähler. “But the things I see in Europe and America today are only attempts. What I see is a paperback theology.”
A case in point is the “God is dead” theology, which Barth dismisses as a “bad joke” with a characteristic wave of his hand. He calls its proponents “theological playboys” who have studied “neither the Bible nor the history of theology.” To the author of the multi-volume Church Dogmatics, which students in Germany measure in centimeters as well as in volumes, such men represent a debasement of theology to journalism.
“Men like Ebeling, Käsemann, and Pannenberg are serious,” Barth tells visitors. “But the upcoming theologians in Germany and elsewhere are too specialized. I believe, for instance, that Pannenberg will have to revise a great deal of what he has said as he grows older. What is missing is a great outlook, a great world view, a great conception of the Scriptures.”
Barth’s concern for a great world view has never led to a neglect of people. Many students will testify to Barth’s almost missionary fervor to have them wrestle with the problems with which he wrestled. “You must provide better answers. You, you must do it better,” he would say. Old age has brought its sorrows, however. His illness has terminated his preaching at the Basel jail. But he still pays weekly visits to Fräulein Kirchbaum, his accomplished secretary and life-long friend, now unable to assist him because of illness.
Barth’s mind also carries him into the political arena, where he speaks out forcefully against the American role in Viet Nam. “America should get out of Viet Nam,” he says. “Communism cannot be defeated with guns. It must be defeated with a better example of a better humanity. Freedom can only be victorious by showing itself real freedom. America must clean its own house, including its Negro problem, before it can act as a missionary in the world.”
Does Barth believe that the example he seeks is being provided elsewhere? In Europe, for instance? Not really. But the question is itself irrelevant. “It is America which has assumed world leadership, and America must give the example to the world.”
Last month Barth’s grandson, Peter, son of Markus Barth, participated in a protest march on Viet Nam before the honorary American Consulate in Basel. But this is not Barth’s idea of a better example. He emphasizes that Peter’s decisions are made without consultation with his grandfather.
How does Barth feel about his own work as his eightieth birthday draws closer? Most of all, he is thankful for a long and a productive life. “Now I look back with more or less satisfaction on my work, as old men do,” Barth confides to friends. But he will not comment greatly on the prospects of the “Barthian theology.” Only the future will show the effects of his work, Barth feels.
Whatever the long-range prospects of his theology, there can be little doubt that Barth has made a great impression on his friends and colleagues. On May 8, two days before his birthday, Barth was to attend a concert of Mozart pieces to be given in Basel in his honor. On May 9 he was to be present at an exclusive faculty evening to be attended by delegations from the intellectual communities of Europe.
The birthday itself was to be spent with the family, in accordance with Swiss tradition, in the quiet home on Bruder-holzallee, not far from the restaurant where many attended his widely praised colloquiums. This month a Festschrift will be published in his honor.
JAMES M. BOICE
