The Crises Confronting Evangelicals
Evangelicals at the Brink of Crisis: Significance of the World Congress on Evangelism, by Carl F. H. Henry (Word, 1967, 120 pp., $1.75), is reviewed by Gerald Kennedy, bishop of the Los Angeles Area, The Methodist Church, Los Angeles, California.
A high-school student in an English class was surprised to learn he had been talking prose all his life without knowing it. After reading this book I concluded that I am more of an evangelical Christian than I knew because there is so much here with which I agree completely.
Let me say right away about this volume that not only will it bring comfort to those within the evangelical fold; its pointed criticism should also force an honest reaction from those outside it. Indeed, for all who have uncritically assumed that everything ecumenical has to be good, this book should be required reading. Dr. Henry points out in the introduction that Time magazine “emphasized the controversial Bishop James A. Pike above the events in the Berlin Kongresshalle from October the 25th to November the 4th, 1966,” though the worldwide scope of this World Congress on Evangelism made it significant.
After the introduction, which includes the congress declaration, Henry speaks about “Evangelicals and the Theological Crisis.” He maintains the continued centrality of the Bible and the secondary position of tradition, taking issue with the Roman Catholic brethren on this point. His implication is always that there are some things that ought not to be compromised in the name of unity. He denies universal salvation while insisting upon the universality of the Christian religion. He is aware of the theological weakness of evangelicals and pleads for a new and stronger emphasis on theology. The editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is himself a first-class theologian, and he deals competently with this subject.
In the next chapter, “Evangelicals and the Evangelistic Crisis,” Henry expresses a lack of confidence in new evangelistic gadgets and methods. The Christian is by his very nature evangelistic; loss of this characteristic means that his central religious experience has grown dim. In a day when “it takes six pastors and one thousand laymen in the United States to introduce one person to Jesus Christ in an entire year,” something obviously is missing. The book summons those whom we call conservative Christians back to this fundamental task, and it certainly has a clear word for liberals also.
When he comes to “Evangelicals and the Social Crisis,” the author says that evangelicals believe in more than the personal Gospel. From Billy Graham on down, he says, evangelicals are now committed to Christian social causes. Yet there is this warning: “A program that emphasizes good works and neglects the great creedal affirmations of Christianity has in fact little to distinguish itself from an adult version of the Boy Scouts.” This chapter emphasizes that social action cut off from a theological foundation quickly becomes a very shallow thing.
The closing chapter is “Evangelicals and the Ecumenical Crisis.” Henry believes that the ecumenical movement has been willing to sacrifice theology for denominational union, and that it “is still no nearer an agreed definition of evangelism than it ever was.” In a day when to say anything negative about “the ecumenical movement” is like talking against prayer, it is refreshing to hear some pointed criticisms of what is being left out and of the direction in which the Church is being led.
There are some places in this book where things are said in a different way than I would say them. And in a few instances it seems to me that too much emphasis is placed upon secondary matter. But I can feel quite at home in this atmosphere of Evangelicals at the Brink of Crisis, and I believe evangelicals are an essential and challenging part of the Christian Church. I do not want to be separated from them.
Life As A Free Man
Setting Men Free, by Bruce Larson (Zondervan, 1967, 120 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Vance H. Webster, pastor, First Baptist Church, Eugene, Oregon.
“Are you satisfied with your life the way it is? Does the world need another person like you? Do you ever ask yourself what you are getting out of life? Are you standing on the hose of God’s blessing to you?” These are some of the pertinent questions with which Bruce Larson confronts the readers of this book. And he suggests that questions like these are valuable as we seek to be effective conversationalists for Christ.
As executive director of the magazine and the fellowship of “Faith at Work,” Larson writes out of a rich background, a warm heart, and a deep concern to encourage laymen and ministers to join in small groups and person-to-person ministries, which were so effective in New Testament times. “The Great Adventure of our time,” says Larson, “is that God is raising up secular saints for today’s society.”
The book is based upon the words of Jesus in John 8:36, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” In Christ there is a new freedom for living and for service. Larson desires to motivate laymen and ministers to bring Christ’s renewal into the lives of those around them. His presentation is in two parts; the first five chapters deal with the arts of living, conversation, introduction, strategy, and communication, and the second five present the gifts of humility, freedom, dialogue, love, and fellowship.
The book is interesting reading and is well illustrated with examples of what the author has seen Christ do in the lives of innumerable people. He challenges us as “twentieth-century Christians to discover, as did our first-century counterparts, that the most effective and relevant communication or witnessing can take place in the market place, at the country club, in the union hall, in the supermarket, and in the office.”
The Velvet Revolution
The Eumenical Revolution, by Robert McAfee Brown (Doubleday, 1967, 388 pp., $5.95) and Vatican Council II: Volume I: The First Session, by Antoine Wenger, translated by Robert J. Olson (Newman, 1966, 261 pp., $5.50) are reviewed by Bruce Shelley, professor of church history, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.
The Ecumenical Revolution will leave conservative evangelicals with mixed feelings of satisfaction and apprehension. Only the most intransigent anti-Catholic will fail to accept gratefully many of the changes introduced by Vatican II. And only the naive evangelical will fail to realize that “the coming great church” of some ecumenists includes the church of Rome.
Surveying the achievements of Vatican II with Professor Brown (of Stanford), one can only be pleased with the current renewal within Roman Catholicism. Perhaps “revolution” is not too strong a word. Consider the major results of the council. An official statement on religious liberty at last! A rejection of the two-sources theory of revelation! A revision of the centuries-old Latin liturgy! A serious modification of the centralization of the hierarchy! The church that never changes has changed. Irreformable statements are, in fact, reformable. That fact itself may be the most far-reaching theological consequence emerging from Vatican II.
Of religious liberty, Brown writes “The Council was faced with two popes, within a hundred years of each other, saying diametrically opposite things. How could they be made to be saying the same thing?” Well, they have. But the question today is, How much can Rome reform and remain Rome?
Brown is confident that Protestantism and Catholicism are “reaching out” for each other, but he is not clear about what sort of union the embrace will bring. Will Rome join the World Council of Churches? That, Brown feels, would be tactically unwise at the present. One thing is patently clear, he says, episcopacy will be one of the features of a reunited church. We need not quibble, however, about the meaning of episcopacy. Simply get the couple to the marriage altar, he advises; understanding can follow the wedding.
Such openness of definition does not bother Brown. He is an optimist. He does not side-step difficulties, but he always puts an ecumenical issue in the brightest light and finds hope for the best results.
Those of us in the believers’ church tradition will find Brown’s snubbing of “sectaries” a bit annoying. He defines Protestantism in terms of the magisterial reformation and proceeds to interpret events accordingly. (1) In an otherwise excellent discussion, he ignores the Anabaptist contribution to religious liberty. (2) In his description of cooperative social action, he takes no serious account of the “present evil age” of the New Testament and the radical reformation.
Evangelicals will be bothered by his ignoring the nineteenth-century evangelical awakening in his survey of ecumenical beginnings and by his discussion of “conversion.” The “problem of proselytism” grows as the ecumenical mood mounts. “The posture of Catholics and Protestants to one another,” writes Brown, “… is not the posture of seeking to gain more converts from the other than one loses. It is not to engage in conversion work at all.…” Moreover, ecumenism makes “conversion” an improper stance of the Christian toward the Jew. Since the Vatican has created, in addition to the Secretariat for Non-Believers, a Secretariat for Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions to enable the church to enter into dialogue with Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews, are we to conclude that the need to share the Gospel with men without Christ has vanished?
The Ecumenical Movement breaks little new ground. It surveys the boundary between Catholic and Protestant ecumenism and does it well. It has one major omission, which Professor Brown recognizes: the place of Orthodoxy. That is where Father Wenger’s volume comes in. Although it covers only the first session of the council, Vatican Council II reveals the behind-the-scene role of Pope John, the early turn of the council toward a more representative assembly, and the background of the invitations sent to observers. Wenger discusses the diplomacy involving Rome, Moscow, and Constantinople, and the striking way the Russians pulled the rug out from under Constantinople’s participation in the first session.
Since Wenger’s is a Catholic newspaperman’s account of the initial session of the council, the general reader will probably prefer to turn to Brown’s book for an overview of the council and leave Wenger’s work to the historian for more detailed study.
Reading for Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• Who Speaks for the Church?, by Paul Ramsey (Abingdon, $2.45). A brilliant critique of the procedures in political policy-making exhibited by the World Council of Churches at its Geneva Conference on Church and Society.
• Baker’s Dictionary of Practical Theology, edited by Ralph G. Turnbull (Baker, $8.95). Every minister should have this scholarly source book on preaching, hermeneutics, evangelism, counseling, and other aspects of practical theology.
• The Davidson Affair, by Stuart Jackman (Eerdmans, $3.50). In the vivid immediacy of a news documentary, novelist Jackman grippingly re-creates the events surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus “Davidson.”
How Israel’S Laws Developed
The Laws in the Pentateuch and Other Studies, by Martin Noth (Fortress, 1967, 289 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by R. Laird Harris, dean and professor of Old Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.
Eleven articles of Martin Noth published in various German sources over the years 1938–58 are here collected in English. The major article—almost half the volume—is “The Laws in the Pentateuch.” The other items include both exegetical and theological studies.
Noth’s ideas are not those of the older Wellhausen developmental theory. The book, however, is a critical study of the development of Israel’s laws considered under the covenant concept. The meaning of the laws is not extensively studied.
Following the earlier ideas of Albrecht Alt, Noth emphasizes the premonarchic period of Israel’s history and locates the origin of many of Israel’s laws in that era. His claim is that the Pentateuchal laws could not have originated as state laws during the monarchy. For instance, the name “Jerusalem” does not occur in the entire Pentateuch, and “Israel” as used in the Pentateuch means the whole twelve tribes. Noth believes that Israel’s laws and Israel as a nation began before the monarchy when Israel was a confederacy of twelve loosely associated tribes, each in its own month caring for a central altar. Obviously, he pays little attention to the patriarchal histories of Genesis now so fully illuminated by archaeology.
Noth, probably influenced by Dead Sea Scroll studies, corrects his previous dating of the groundwork of Chronicles to 400 B.C., and he holds that the P document never had an independent existence. These and other positions bring into question some cherished points of older higher criticism. Unfortunately, many of Noth’s own views are equally subjective.
Breaking The Vicious Cycle
The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, by Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, including the full text of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (MIT Press, 1967, 493 pp., $3.95, paper), is reviewed by David O. Moberg, professor of sociology and chairman, Department of Social Sciences, Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Under the smoke clouds of flaming, riot-torn cities, this is an enlightening book to read. It helps one understand why united action to help underprivileged Negroes has been impossible. It reveals distortions and misrepresentations that enter into discussions, news reports, magazine articles, and plans for social action. It illuminates self-deceptive processes that blind religious leaders, social scientists, and civil-rights spokesmen to their own errors and make them view other persons’ truthful perspectives as distorted and selfish. It helps correct the error of those Christians who see social problems in terms of a purely personal morality. (This error makes it easy to say that the hardship suffered by minority-group victims results from their sinfulness, a tendency that is strengthened because symptoms of the problems include high rates of illegitimacy, crime, and desertion.) Above all, it greatly clarifies the problems of American Negroes.
In March, 1965, Daniel Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor, wrote a report on the condition of the American Negro. The document was first circulated privately to key government leaders and was made available for general distribution late that summer. It emphasizes problems of the family and the vicious circle prevalent among a substantial proportion of American Negroes (and certainly present also among whites). Since Negro men have no stable place in the economic system, they cannot be strong husbands and fathers. Therefore families break up, and women must rear children without male help. Growing up without a stable home life, children are unable to achieve in school, and they drop out. Hence they are unable to qualify for stable jobs that provide a decent family income, and so the cycle starts all over again.
Moynihan recommended that government programs break the circle by giving direct attention to strengthening the Negro family instead of sustaining it, as current welfare policies tend to do. He was one of the drafters of President Johnson’s speech of June 4, 1965, “To Fulfill These Rights,” which in effect called for action along lines suggested in the Moynihan Report:
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity.… So, unless we work to strengthen the family, to create conditions under which most parents will stay together—all the rest: schools and playgrounds, public assistance and private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the circle of despair and deprivation.
Despite such strong support and even a White House conference on fulfilling the rights of Negroes, the program flopped. Why?
The authors have attempted to piece the story together by examining articles, speeches, and political maneuvers, by interviewing sixty-one key persons on all sides of the controversy, and by participating in activities related to the White House conference. The texts of key government statements, journalists’ interpretations, social scientists’ reactions, civil-rights leaders’ speeches, and the Moynihan Report itself are included in the book. Among those involved in the debate were certain church leaders and Christian publications, but neither CHRISTIANITY TODAY, the National Association of Evangelicals, nor evangelical leaders receive any attention. Their silence prevented these spokesmen from making embarrassing mistakes, but at the same time this neglect may reflect a head-in-the-sand stance toward current social issues. If so, a subtle indictment of being unconcerned about the family life, material welfare, and even spiritual well-being of America’s largest racial minority may be levied against them.
Much of the book can be interpreted as “Monday morning quarterbacking.” The hindsight about what went wrong with plans for action to improve Negro family life after they seemed effectively launched is sharpened by excellent interpretative reporting. The most important factors in the failure were growing involvement in the Viet Nam War, the Watts riots, and the opposition of some civil-rights leaders and Negro spokesmen who felt that focusing attention upon Negro family problems would lead to inaction, since people would claim that Negroes could lift themselves up by their own bootstraps through “self-help” programs.
The Moynihan Report contained little that was new to sociologists, who had studied the problem as much as a generation ago. Yet there remain gaps in the information, partly as a result of the “color blind” policies of government records. Significant questions are raised about the ways in which social scientists can and ought to be involved in public controversy; chapter 13 is an outstanding survey of this problem.
Clergymen can profit from reading this book in several ways. They can learn by analogy how their communications can be misinterpreted to mean the very opposite of what they intended. (The Moynihan Report was labeled as liberal propaganda and as “subtle racism.”) They can gain information about Negro problems that hinder evangelism and help explain their other difficulties. They will be reminded not to trust secondhand reports of basic documents (even if they come from churchly sources!). They will receive a case study of men’s propensity to notice what they want to notice and to ignore even the central ideas of contrary messages. They will recognize the need for cooperative action through lobbying and special-interest groups in order to bring about changes in and through government. They will realize anew that a message prepared for one audience (like the Moynihan Report, which was written for key government leaders) may not communicate effectively to another (such as newsmen and the general public). The same words can communicate different messages when addressed to different audiences.
The social issues raised in the Moynihan Report and discussed so well in this book remain with us. The controversies will recur repeatedly until the vicious cycle is broken and justice and equal opportunity have been established.
Quest For The Perfect World
Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, by Thomas Molnar (Sheed and Ward, 1967, 245 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by John Wesley Raley, chancellor, Oklahoma Baptist University, Shawnee, Oklahoma.
The parochial-minded American is disconcerted to learn that his country did not originate the idea of individual freedom or religious liberty within the framework of a political system. He must learn that man’s search for freedom is perpetual—and also that it is perennially betrayed.
In Utopia, The Perennial Heresy, Thomas Molnar traces the hopes of mankind through the forms of utopianism and explodes the generally accepted myth that the utopian process and goal are desirable. He defines, examines, and denounces utopianism as a basic philosophy that moves in counter-purpose to primitive Christian concepts.
Man seeks absolution for personal guilt through collective action whereby the entire community or state is cleansed. Beginning with this initial aberration, the utopianist moves farther away from Christianity and from the basic norms of a society of free men.
He may seek social perfection either in a godless state (e.g., the Marxist state) or in a divinely oriented state in which communal concerns are paramount (e.g., the European medieval system of a merged church and state). In each case, the state, speaking in the name of freedom for man, destroys that freedom.
Utopianism currently takes another form. Religion is secularized, science is enthroned, God is redefined and given a new role, and Christianity is considered increasingly irrelevant. In bold strokes Molnar outlines the scientific man. The heresy is fully revealed. A collective mankind becomes God, and God is, according to Tillich, not a person or even a name but “the ground of our being.” The thought of Saint-Simon, Huxley, and Teilhard de Chardin is bringing into being a new world.
In such a world, says Molnar, politics will become an exact science manipulated by twenty-one selected geniuses, “The Council of Newton.” Newton will become God, and the “Oligarchy of Scholars” will direct the affairs of all mankind. The perennial heresy of utopia finds a fitting form for every age.
This book is strong meat for church leaders and should be studied for the light it sheds on temptations now confronting the Church. It serves as a reminder that man is a person before God, and not “a super-organism and collective thought-machine.”
‘It Ain’T Necessarily So!’
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, by Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper & Row, 1967, 209 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by C. Ralston Smith, director of development,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
This is the fourth volume to come from the heart of this comparatively young man who has within a decade become an internationally recognized champion of the Negro people. Dr. King continues to preach the reasonableness and necessity of recognition by men of every sort and color of the rights of all others. In this proclamation the arguments are weighted in favor of the Negro in America, and ultimately in favor of the colored people throughout the world. The six chapters move from a review of the present situation in America to a projection of what can be expected on a worldwide scope.
One is repeatedly moved to a sincere “amen” as King rehearses cogent arguments and obvious facts. While he pleads for patience as new nations struggle for independence, he also shows great and understandable impatience at the snail’s pace of equality here in our homeland. He gives a splendid review of the history of the Negro in America and of the conditions that have contributed to the liabilities still present in our urban Negro communities. King’s list of talented and successful Negroes is impressive evidence of the ability of those who have been given a chance. Notably absent from the list is Adam Clayton Powell, whom King later dismisses rather tersely.
The author is consistent in advocating non-violence and will have no part in the “Black Power” movement when it involves rioting and “defense” activities. He deplores these as means that have continually failed, and substitutes “pressure” as the successful agent.
The yearning of this champion of equality is epitomized in this sentence: “If the society changes its concepts by placing the responsibility on its system, not on the individual, and guarantees secure employment or a minimum income, dignity will come within the reach of all.” But, like all other panaceas, this one is too simple. And it runs contrary to the character of man as he was intended when created in the image of the Almighty. Little or nothing is said in the book about requiring industry or accepting responsibility, or about the baseness of human nature and its need for regeneration. All King requires, it seems, is that American capitalism give over its profits to universal urban renewal, the government of the United States use its space-exploration funds for the education and employment of Negroes, and the democratic nations disarm, whatever others of humanistic or atheistic disposition might do. To all this simplistic reasoning one must say, “It ain’t necessarily so!”
Book Briefs
Salt and Light, by Eberhard Arnold (Plough Publishing House, 1967, 342 pp., $4.75). The founder of the Society of Brothers offers reflections on the Sermon on the Mount that stress God’s forgiveness. He calls men to a life of complete trust in God so that their attitudes toward God’s kingdom, other men, material wealth, and earthly power are transformed.
In the Biblical Preacher’s Workshop, by Dwight E. Stevenson (Abingdon, 1967, 223 pp., $3.95). A peep over the shoulder of a professor of homiletics at Lexington Theological Seminary shows how the would-be expository preacher might well approach his task.
Resurrection Then and Now, by James McLeman (Lippincott, 1967, 255 pp., $3.95). Two adverbs in the title mark this book’s polarities: the “then” is the Resurrection of Jesus as understood and taught by the historic Christian faith; the “now” is McLeman’s fanciful reconstruction, stated as “not a deduction from fact but the creation of faith.” The old is better.
New Testament Commentary: Exposition of Ephesians, by William Hendriksen (Baker, 1967, 290 pp., $6.95). The indefatigable commentator makes his way through the N.T. literature. This is Hendriksen’s seventh volume and offers an exegetical and practical treatment of the text based on his own translation. Pauline authorship is defended by some independent study, and the author discusses rival views, if only to reject them. But occasionally his method borders on the fanciful, as when he uses the Greek word for “blessing” to supply a mnemonic device for an outline of Ephesians!
Genesis, by Nathaniel Kravitz (Philosophical Library, 1967, 83 pp., $3.95). Subtitled “A New Interpretation of the First Three Chapters” of Genesis, this book is a hodge-podge of little theological or exegetical value, written by a Jewish writer.
Quest for Reality, compiled by Merton B. Osborn (Moody, 1967, 128 pp., $2.50). Personal testimonies of encounters with God by fifteen well-known people, including Tony Fontane, Bobby Richardson, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
