In a seminar unprecedented in recent evangelical history, fifty-one biblical scholars met at Gordon College and Divinity School (Wenham, Mass.) for ten days’ intensive discussion of the authority and inspiration of the Bible. Participants, most of them seminary professors and administrators, came from six European countries as well as from Australia, Korea, Canada, and the United States. They were members of various communions, including Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, Free Church, and independent bodies.
The lively discussions were conducted with remarkable freedom and candor in an atmosphere of Christian fellowship and submission to the authority of Scripture. Daily sessions, moderated by members of the convening committee (Harold J. Ockenga, chairman; Frank E. Gaebelein; and Russell T. Hitt), were supplemented by many hours of informal conversation.
Major papers and responses covered such subjects as archaeology, biblical authority in the light of exegesis and hermeneutics, Roman Catholic attitudes toward Scripture, liberal stereotypes of the evangelical view of the Bible, the contemporary relevance of Warfield’s approach to inspiration, and the theological definition of authority, inspiration, and inerrancy.
Among those presenting papers were Dr. Donald J. Wiseman, professor of Assyriology at the University of London; Dr. Herman Ridderbos, professor of New Testament at the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Churches, Kampen, The Netherlands; Dr. James I. Packer, warden of Latimer House, Oxford; Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, preacher on “The Lutheran Hour”; and Dr. Kenneth S. Kantzer, dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Much of the wide-ranging discussion was on inerrancy. Some held this to be an essential biblical doctrine, while others preferred to speak of Scripture as infallible. There was general agreement that any definition of inerrancy must be framed in the light of all the biblical data, and there was also a consensus on the complete truthfulness of the Bible and its authoritativeness as the only infallible rule of faith and practice. No participants affirmed the errancy of the Bible.
At the conclusion of the seminar, this statement was adopted—not as a formal confession but as a report of mutual attitudes, common ground, and matters requiring further study:
Text Of Communique
A privately sponsored Seminar on the Authority of the Bible was held at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts, June 20–29. The participants sought to clarify their understanding of scriptural authority in order that they might more faithfully acknowledge it as the authority of Christ himself.
The historic Protestant confession of the supreme authority of Scripture provided the background for discussion and the structure of hearty agreement. Among the agreed positions affirmed were the following:
That the Holy Scriptures, comprising the sixty-six canonical books given by the Holy Spirit, are verbally inspired and are the revealed Word of the Triune God;
That the Scriptures are completely truthful and are authoritative as the only infallible rule of faith and practice;
That because the Word of God was written by men in particular historical contexts, the disciplines of accurate scholarship have a full and proper use in its study;
That the Bible as a whole sets forth the history of redemption and directs us to Jesus Christ, the Word incarnate;
That God has committed the Scriptures to his people to search, obey, and proclaim, and that through the working of his Holy Spirit he effectively uses the Scriptures for the salvation of men, the instruction and government of his Church, and the consummation of his purpose.
In an endeavor to put such theological truth into the language of today, a committee drew up the following statement, which does not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of each member of the seminar:
Attitudes toward the importance of the Bible are changing throughout the Christian world. The renewal of biblical studies among Roman Catholics and the increasing concern for the biblical message through the whole Church, together with current confusions regarding that message, are facts which call for new endeavor on the part of evangelicals. In this situation we must acknowledge that neither our methods of expression nor our practices have sufficiently witnessed to our faith in God’s Holy Word; hence we offer the following testimony to its power and authority;
The Bible is wholly trustworthy, for its words speak God’s truth and give men final answers to the deepest problems of their lives. Scripture throughout the centuries has brought men to the saving Christ who died and rose again, and we affirm that it will do this today when it is read and proclaimed in the power of the Holy Spirit. We stand under it and commend it to a frustrated age that needs above all to hear the clear and powerful voice of God in judgment and in grace.
Holy Scripture sets forth abiding standards of conduct for men and nations. Christians have often failed to concern themselves sufficiently with the suffering and injustice of our sick society and to hold forth to dying men the Word of Life. We, therefore, give ourselves anew to declaring the biblical Word, which alone offers hope in this world and the next.
In the fruitful and candid discussions of the seminar, certain questions were found to require further study and consultation. They included the interpretation of historical, chronological, and literary difficulties in the Scriptures; the extent to which reconciliation of such difficulties should be sought; the bearing of modern science on biblical narratives; the concept of inerrancy, whether and in what sense it is a biblical doctrine, and its relation to biblical authority.
For those privileged to participate in it, the seminar brought rewards beyond those anticipated. Personal friendship and mutual understanding flourished in an arduous docket of meetings. The urgency of evangelical engagement in current theological debate became increasingly apparent. Above all, the clarity, excellence, and authority of the Bible itself commanded a response of praise in an enterprise where labor cannot be far from prayer.
Potions Under Study
Not only does LSD induce religious awareness, say the psychedelic prophets; it can also promote world peace, assuage the distress of the dying, help alcoholics, and boost learning processes. In short, this is what the world has been waiting for, according to some who participated in a landmark conference on LSD in San Francisco last month. The prospects of induced religious experience kept recurring, but a few of the more dubious participants had the nerve to challenge the cure-all claims and pointed instead to the rising incidence of LSD use among teen-agers, the hundreds of LSD-induced “acute panic” hospital admissions, and prolonged psychotic reactions—even suicides.
This was not enough to dampen the enthusiasm of Dr. Timothy Leary, flamboyant evangelist of the LSD cult, who said, “The present LSD boom is no less than a religious renaissance that is only just beginning.” The only real danger to a person, he asserted, is that he will “refrain from LSD and thus abide in his house of spiritual plague.” Further, “LSD’s first place of impact is in religious experience as it alters our attitudes toward ourselves and society.”
LSD is a chemical that is colorless, odorless, and tasteless when dissolved in water. It is the best known of a number of substances that, taken internally, produce hallucinations—or, as Leary and his disciples would have it, expand the person’s levels of consciousness (see June 24 issue, page 46, and July 8 issue, page 44). The six-day San Francisco conference, sponsored by the adult education branch of the University of California, was the first such scholarly colloquium on psychedelics (the technical term for so-called consciousness expanding compounds).
Because the word “religious” is “too loaded,” Dr. Paul Lee had misgivings about Leary’s view and preferred to label the LSD “session” or “trip” as “the most profound existential or mythical experience one can have.” Lee, who claims to have new insight into St. Augustine’s Confessions as a result of LSD intake, will teach philosophy beginning this fall at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been Protestant chaplain at Brandeis University and assistant professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lee suggested that a psychedelic experience can be seen in “the myth of Genesis,” in which Adam and Eve partook of “the tree of all possibilities—a symbol of mental creativity.”
“I do believe in psychedelic religion, where LSD is the sacrament,” said Dr. Frank Barron, a University of California research psychologist, “but I do not agree with it.” He pointed out two dangers: LSD can convert latent psychoses into overt forms; and it can cause a basic change in values, such as loss of distinction between right and wrong.
Essential sensations of a “trip” were outlined by a prominent psychiatrist and UCLA professor of medicine, Dr. Sidney Cohen, author of The Beyond Within: The LSD Story. These include loss of ego boundaries and fusion with the universe (“you may see your body melting into the carpet”), a philosophical basis of some major religions. Said Cohen: “Many who have taken LSD say they have discovered the great white light of God; they say that this is the ‘real reality,’ and they yearn to return to this state.” Thus the experience—not the drug itself—becomes addictive, a point repeatedly referred to during discussions of legal and moral implications.
Along more scholarly lines, Dr. Abram Hoffer, a Canadian psychiatrist and university professor, reported his use of LSD in treating 800 alcoholics. He said that more than one-third were cured as against the average 10 per cent cure rate of all other treatments combined.
For most of those cured, the “healing” came within a context of religious experience, said Hoffer. For example, there was the priest named John who, under LSD’s influence, “saw” God and heard him say, “John, no more drinking!” From that day, months ago, the priest has remained sober. While admitting the unusual nature of this instance, Hoffer said that “properly used LSD therapy can, with great speed and economy, convert a large number of alcoholics into sober members of society.”
A “Center for Dying and Being Born,” where terminal patients would be LSD-enabled to face death “in a conscious and open way,” was called for by Dr. Richard Alpert, a research psychologist and former Leary colleague. His idea received weight from a paper by Eric C. Kast, a Chicago psychiatrist. Kast wrote that LSD administered by him to experimental groups of dying patients created “acceptance and surrender to the inevitable loss of control” and even gave some “a new will to live and a zest for experience.” Added Alpert, “A patient could choose to die in my ‘Center’ under whatever religious metaphor he wished, because psychedelic clergymen abound today.”
Ecumenism At The Altar
News reports last month disclosed two unusual and presumably unprecedented marriage ceremonies.
A Jesuit priest was married to a former nun by a fellow Jesuit colleague at the University of Detroit.
A Southern Baptist pastor and a Catholic priest participated together in a wedding ceremony at St. Michael Catholic Church in Memphis.
Father Lawrence Cross, 47, former head of the sociology department of the Jesuit-run University of Detroit, made front-page news with his marriage to Joan Renaud, 37, a nurse who had left the Sisters of Mercy three years ago. Father Thomas Blackburn, chaplain of the university, celebrated the marriage.
Father Cross, on leave since January to teach at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, returned to the country in May and married Miss Renaud May 31. He entered the Jesuit order in 1937 and was ordained in 1951. In 1957 he joined the university faculty, after studying as a Fulbright scholar in Belgium. Father Cross has been active in civil rights work and served on the Archbishop’s Committee on Human Relations and in the Detroit chapter of the NAACP.
Under canon law, a priest who marries is automatically suspended of his “faculties” and cannot celebrate Mass, hear confession, or distribute the Holy Communion. He remains, however, a priest for life.
In Memphis, Joyce Jackson, a Baptist, and James M. Larkin, a Catholic, were married at St. Michael Church by Father James Miller, assistant pastor, and by Miss Jackson’s brother, William, pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church of Hebbardsville, Kentucky.
Father Miller led in the exchange of vows and Jackson delivered a sermon and gave the benediction. The sermon described love as presented in First Corinthians 13 as the basis for marriage.
The bride had visited Father Miller two days after the Vatican degree liberalizing restrictions on Catholic-Protestant marriage ceremonies and asked how her brother could participate in the wedding.
Jackson, a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Union University, said Father Miller had been very generous in allowing him time during the ceremony.
A Baptist Press release quoted Jackson as saying, “There were almost no restrictions given me, except that he had to exchange the vows and this is something that I would want to do at any wedding performed in my church.”
The bride said she will remain Baptist and her husband Catholic.
In a draft of a new hymnal for Presbyterian churches in the British Isles a hymn for burial services was inadvertently printed in the section for weddings. The misplaced hymn began, “Go happy soul, thy days are ended.”
Off LSD himself since February, Alpert theorized that the drug was possibly a key to show persons how to create and order their environment. He went on to link LSD-induced religious experience to most “rock and roll” groups: it makes possible mutual spontaneity in improvisation and rhythm which then becomes a high level of spiritual communication. He revealed plans already drawn up for a “discotheque church” that would include “rock and roll spiritual endeavor.”
The Leary-Alpert school came in for some hard knocks from Huston Smith, author of The Religions of Man. Smith questioned the “staying-power” of LSD-religion—“where faith is confirmed, awe felt, and obedience increased,” for true religious experience triggers from the core of man’s being a “triple movement of mind, emotions, and will.”
Smith chided the movement for “failure to integrate psychedelic experience with daily life” (referring to Leary’s radical doctrine of “quit society, quit work, quit school”) and also for its failure to face up to the problems of sexual irresponsibility, lethargy, and anarchy that grow out of its antinomian nature.
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
Tribute In A Window
The FBI director was honored June 26 by the congregation of the Capitol Hill Methodist Church, Washington, D. C., who named a window in their new $1 million building the J. Edgar Hoover Window. Hoover, a Presbyterian, was born and grew to adulthood in a home on the site of the new Methodist church.
The colored-glass window, designed to symbolize statesmanship through Christian virtues, is twenty-two feet wide and thirty-three feet high. It is constructed in seven longitudinal sections framed on all sides in limestone.
“The window is designed to symbolize the Christian virtues of Hoover and other Christian statesmen,” said the Rev. Edward B. Lewis, pastor. He explained that the symbols in the window include: an anchor, symbol of hope; balance scales, law and justice; a compass, temperance; the cross, faith; a lamp, education and learning; a lily, purity; and the oak leaf, courage and fortitude.
Social Activist
The Rev. Lester Kinsolving, founder and president of the newly organized Association of Episcopal Clergy, is also being given the full-time job of lobbying for repeal of California laws prohibiting abortion. The appointment was made by the Rt. Rev. James A. Pike, the resigning Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California.
A campaign to repeal abortion laws was begun after nine San Francisco Bay area doctors were charged with performing illegal abortions on women exposed to German measles.
The outspoken Kinsolving, who leaves his work as vicar of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Salinas, California, says that “certain aspects of the Church … are definitely in a bad way.” He organized the clergy association to aid in the defense of clergy in trouble; to correct injustices in relations between clergy and church superiors; to study the Episcopal Church’s pension fund; and to serve as a placement bureau for clergy.
The organization met some initial criticism from the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. John E. Hines, who called it a “trade union.” Kinsolving contends that the organization is comparable to the Association of University Professors or a teachers’ association and is not a trade union.
Federal Fever
The gradually growing religious lobby in Washington will soon have an Orthodox wing. Establishment of a secretariat in the nation’s capital at a cost of $100,000 per year was approved this month by delegates to the eighteenth biennial Clergy-Laity Congress of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America. The action came upon recommendation of Archbishop Iakovos, primate of the archdiocese, who indicated that he planned to spend considerable time in the new office. His rationale: “Because of the extent of our responsibilities and role as a major faith, we need a center in Washington to be in better direct contact with the nation and national politics.”
‘Up With People’ Ban
The Columbia Broadcasting System is refusing to let its television stations show the Moral Re-Armament film, “Up With People.” The film was to have been carried under the sponsorship of the Schick Safety Razor Company. Edward Baltz, vice president of the firm, said that a protest against the CBS ban would be lodged with the Federal Communications Commission.
According to Baltz, the reason given by the network for banning the show was a CBS policy that no sponsored program could be of ideological or editorial nature and that some segments of the film were contrary to this rule.
Prayers Under Protest
A federal judge ruled in Chicago last month that a traditional verse of thanksgiving without the word “God” does not constitute a prayer when recited by De Kalb, Ill., kindergarten children.
Judge Edwin A. Robson dismissed a request for an injunction against De Kalb’s Elwood School which asked children to recite:
“We thank you for the flowers so sweet.
We thank you for the food we eat.
We thank you for the birds that sing.
We thank you for everything.”
The ruling came in response to the request of Mr. and Mrs. Lyle Despain of De Kalb who charged that the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of their five-year-old daughter were being violated when she was asked to recite the verse.
Mrs. Esther Wayne, 63, kindergarten teacher, said that she had already eliminated “God” from the last line of the verse at the request of the Despains. She contended that the verse was not a prayer but “a method of learning graces and manners.”
Mrs. Despain testified that some children concluded the recitation of the verse with an “amen” or by crossing themselves.
The judge said there was no indication that the children “took a devotional attitude” in reciting the verse. The verse simply “expresses gratitude,” he said.
The Chicago decision contrasted with a 1965 decision by the Federal Court of Appeals in New York which ruled that a similar prayer without the deletion of “God” was unconstitutional in a Whitestone kindergarten. In the Whitestone case, parents of kindergarten children took action against the school for disallowing prayer after principal Elihu Oshinsky stopped school prayers in keeping with a Board of Education ruling.
The U. S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case after parents appealed the ruling of the Federal Court of Appeals.
CAROLYN LEWIS
Moscow Charges Bible Smuggling
Moscow Radio reported this month that three British tourists and a Dutch citizen were expelled from the Soviet Union for attempting to smuggle religious literature in the country.
The report said that Anthony Richard Hippisley and his wife, Anne Marie, tried to smuggle through a border checkpoint 400 Bibles and other books which they had received from the British and Foreign Bible Society for “illegal” circulation in the Soviet Union. The books, the station added, were concealed in eight secret compartments in a specially adapted Volkswagen.
A second smuggling attempt at the Lyausheny checkpoint in Soviet Moldavia, Moscow Radio said, involved two Baptist ministers—identified as John Murray, a Briton, and Johannes Fisser, a Dutchman. It said they tried to bring in similar literature concealed in an automobile.
In each case, the “smugglers” were said to have been ordered out of the country and their books and cars confiscated.
