In a newspaper article written in 1926, Karl Barth offered his readers some help that on the face of it must have seemed quite unnecessary. “I hope to assist readers who want to think about Christmas as part of their Christmas celebrations,” he wrote.
But the question raised in the minds of those who pondered Barth’s words forty years ago presses on us today. How can we celebrate Christmas without thinking about its meaning? The answer is that this uneasy syndrome of great promotion of the outward trappings and Yuletide customs and a virtual denial of the real meaning of Christmas is not only a possibility but a stark reality in 1967.
What we have in mind is not the commercialization of Christmas, the unholy exploitation of sacred themes in the interest of storekeepers’ profits; nor the all-too-common outlook on Christmas that, in a simple-minded way, never gets within a thousand miles of the real thing. As a piece of poetic doggerel puts it:
The fun of wrapping parcels,
The smell of Christmas tree;
Feasts and fun and giving—
What Christmas means to me.
Rather, the tragedy of Christmas on the modern scene is the wrong emphasis Christians can unwittingly give, by which they distort the Gospel of the Nativity into something foreign to the New Testament and the historic Christian faith.
One indication that we are in danger of such a distortion comes readily to mind: the use we make of the crib and manger imagery. Two misunderstandings quickly follow from this type of misrepresentation. For one thing, by overdramatizing the Nativity story we tend to concentrate too much on the past. The birth of Jesus is securely anchored in history, to be sure. The birth narratives are carefully dated in the reign of Herod (by Matthew) and the governorship of Quirinius (by Luke). But if we stop at that point, it may happen that the only picture the world gets of Christ through his Church is one of him as a baby—or on a cross, at Eastertime.
Evangelicals oppose the crucifix for the simple reason that it imprisons Christ in a victim-state, impaled on a tree, and forgets that the Crucified overcame the sharpness of death and rose in triumph, never again to taste that bitter cup of mortality. Should we not apply the same line of reasoning to the crib, and turn away from all suggestion that he is still the helpless babe, the object of sentimental and saccharine devotion? To both misrepresentations of the Christ of New Testament faith we must reply: ‘He is not here—either in the crib or in the grave. He is risen.” And he is our living contemporary in the world of 1967.
James Denney brings us up with a jolt when, in a memorable epigram, he says simply: “No apostle, no New Testament writer, ever remembered Christ.” And (as he goes on to show) this fact is more important than may appear at first sight, for “the Christian religion depends not on what Christ was, merely, but on what he is; not simply on what he did, but on what he does.”
When we remember Bethlehem as an incident of history long ago, it is our peril if we stop there amid the tranquil and tender scenes. We must go on, by way of Galilee, Calvary, and the empty tomb, to the ascended Lord and his promised presence, “I am with you.” In a word, Christ-mas—the festival of Christ—has no meaning unless we celebrate the regnant Christ on the throne of the universe today.
A second consequence of making the crib the center of the Christmas scene is a trivializing of the very event Scripture and theology declare to be the most stupendous happening of all time: The Word became flesh. We trivialize by making so much of unimportant details. It is a sobering fact that many of the hallowed components of the Christmas-card presentation are absent from the apostolic preaching. Paul never mentions the manger, nor does he refer to Mary by name. The shepherds and wise men disappear from the kerygma—to say nothing of such accretions as cattle and snow! Latter-day Christianity, with the Church’s patronage, has highlighted the trivialities—and pushed into obscurity the really vital matters.
What, then, lies at the heart of the Christmas Gospel? Not the crib, surrounded by spotlessly clean cattle and sheep and starry-eyed shepherds, with haloed Mother and Child bathed in a dim, religious light. The key word is Incarnation—the coming of God into human life. His taking our nature—indeed our flesh (as Romans 8:3 declares with breath-catching insistence)—upon him. Trying to break down this technical theological term into its constituents, we may venture upon three essentials of the biblical meaning.
First, identification. If Christmas means anything, it surely spells out the fact, firmly set in world history, that God has come into the stream of our humanity. And it is a muddy stream. He has not held himself aloof and remote (a God “up there”) but has drawn near. Nor has he come in the person of a messenger or envoy. He has come himself, in his Son, and come all the way into our sin-cursed life, thus identifying himself to the fullest possible extent with those he came to save. This view does not, of course, imperil the sinlessness of Jesus. But it declares that his moral conflict was real, and that he overcame sin at every point “by the constancy of the Will” (to use William Temple’s phrase).
A second ingredient of the Incarnation is mystery. Wherever God is at work there is the inexplicable, and never more so than at Bethlehem. Not even the revealed truth of the Virgin Birth, set as it is within the biblical framework of God’s intervention in history, fully explains the central mystery of God being born. As J. K. S. Reid, the Aberdeen theologian, comments: “The Virgin Birth is not an explanation; it is the affirmation of mystery and miracle.” To the human mind there is something almost incredible in the assertion that God became a Man, and we would never have presumed to believe it, had not God revealed it. Yet this is what Christmas says—and we take refuge from our bewilderment, not in explanation, but in adoration:
Our God contracted to a span,
Incomprehensibly made man.
Thirdly, we cannot escape the New Testament insistence that he came into the world to be its Saviour. From the earliest annunciation, “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21), through to what may well be the last portion of New Testament literature to be written, “The Father has sent his Son as the Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:14), the unanimous testimony of Scripture bears out this affirmation. Loyalty to divine revelation at this point makes us hesitant about some theories of the Incarnation. These see the coming of Christ as the crowning of humanity, the fulfillment of homo sapiens, and hold that he would have come even if Adam had not sinned. Indeed, this very issue was a favorite debating point in the leisurely days of the medieval church, when, more frivolously, theologians tried to decide how many angels could sit on the head of a pin. Calvin cut through all such unprofitable speculation to bring reality to this important concern. Whether Christ would have come or not if Adam had not fallen is beside the question, he declares. What we do know is that he came to “bring relief to miserable sinners” who desperately need him; and that’s the end of it.
Indeed, it is the whole of it, for Scripture, again and again, from its first preaching of the Gospel in Genesis 3:15 to its final celebration in the Jubilee of the ransomed hosts in Revelation, joins together his birth and his death for sinners. There is no Gospel of the Incarnation that does not enfold the Atonement; there is no theology of the Word-made-flesh that does not imply the Word-made-sin; there is no manger scene that does not stand in the shadow of the Cross; there is no birth story that does not point to a sinner’s new birth by the same Holy Spirit by whom Christ was conceived and sent forth on his mission to the world.
Christmas preaching, like Christmas meditation, needs the undergirding of all that the Incarnation means. He who came to visit us in great humility became one with us in our misery and woe. As he came from God in a sense in which no other came, so he came in a way—by the Virgin’s womb—in which no other came. And he came to do for us what we desperately needed, as Denney finally reminds us: “We know the world only as a sinful world, and we know the relation of Christ to it, experimentally, only as that of its Saviour from sin.”
“Christian worship is the most momentous, the most urgent, the most glorious action that can take place in human life.” These words of Karl Barth will find a responsive echo in all who are concerned with the life of the Christian Church today. Even violent anti-Barthians cannot fail to perceive their relevance.
That the importance of worship is being acknowledged in all sections of Christendom, is evident in developments ranging from the liturgical movement in Roman Catholicism to the insistent concern for a more structured order of service among non-episcopal churches. The “parish communion” idea, with its re-emphasizing of the family Eucharist inside the Episcopal Church, has been widely and favorably received on both sides of the Atlantic, following in the wake of studies by Gregory Dix, John Robinson, and Massey H. Shepherd, Jr.
But reform and renewal are bypassing large segments of American Protestantism; recent proposals have yet to capture the attention of non-liturgical pastors and call them to re-evaluate what they understand by their worship services Sunday by Sunday.
What are the fundamental principles of Christian worship? As there is a theology of Christian doctrine—the so-called loci communes—so there is a theology of worship that is rooted in Scripture and coheres with such essential elements as the Christian understanding of God in his nature, revelation, and communication with men, and the place of the Church as the worshiping body of Christ. Let us look at some chief features of worship.
First, Christian worship finds its dignity and fullness when its dialogue pattern is discerned. The distinctive genius of this corporate exercise is the two-beat rhythm of address and response. God speaks because he has once-for-all spoken; we answer. God acts because in Christ he has decisively acted; we accept and give. God gives in our present encounter; we receive.
The sequence in this pattern is to be closely followed. God comes first and the worship second. By definition worship means a celebration, in praise and prayer and offering, of the worthiness of God, who, in and of himself, is worthy to be praised as sovereign Lord of all creation and, in Christ, the Redeemer of his people. Just as there can be no human response without a prior revelation from God, so neither can there be meaningful worship unless its objective, revelational, given character is recognized and preserved. God is found not by our diligent searching but in his gracious self-disclosure in his Word. Samuel S. Hill, Jr., in his book Southern Churches in Crisis, places his finger on a sore spot, though his overall diagnosis and remedy leave much to be desired. He notes that worship in many churches often “is construed as a function of personal and subjective ends.… The note of worshiping God for his own sake, of presenting the act of worship as itself a service to God, exists if at all only subconsciously.”
Second, and as a corollary to the primacy of God in worship, a human response is called for. The worshipper is not a passive, motionless recipient but an active participant, called upon to “make an offering” of himself. Much of current Protestant worship with its jealously guarded tradition of the centrality of preaching has not only neglected the worshiper’s responsibility by denying him a serious place in the dialogue pattern; it has also dehumanized him by treating him solely as a mind to be informed by a barrage of words. Stephen F. Winward, in The Reformation of Our Worship, perceives this: “Our Protestant worship … has been radically intellectualized; it moves too exclusively in the realm of thoughts and words. It is addressed to the ears, and not to the eyes; it is predominantly notional.” He argues that much of Protestant worship ignores man’s many-sided personality, which includes appreciation of visual art in architecture, paintings, sculpture, and drama, even though it draws a formal distinction between helpful aids in worship and a false use of symbols in unreformed worship with its statues, icons, and, above all, its error of the Mass. Our worship often lacks beauty and appeal because the tapestry is dull and unimaginative. Moreover, he writes, sermons preached in words alone often misfire because the “proletarian … does not love and move in the realm of abstract ideas.”
Hill, in a somewhat limited perspective, concedes the same point when he observes that Southern Protestantism “gets past its strong predilection for the verbal only with some awkwardness.” And he aptly illustrates his point with a reference to nomenclature: “What could be more natural than for the southern church to speak of its place of public worship as an ‘auditorium,’ a hall for hearing!”
A third aspect of Christian worship is that it is an act of obedience to Christ’s own words, which authorize our assembling in his name in expectation of his living presence in the midst (Matt. 18:20; 28:20). The focal points of this rendezvous with the risen Christ are the places that carry his own imprimatur, namely baptism in his name and the breaking of bread in remembrance of him. The historic church knows of no worship that excludes the ordinances or sacraments as dramatic enactments that mediate to living faith the presence of the contemporary Lord.
How close does the American pattern come to these high standards? In many churches the forms of worship are exemplary. In others, unfortunately, there are glaring aberrations.
First, it is all too true that in many churches the transcendental character of worship has been lost and there is a functional attitude to the entire Sunday morning “program.” That very word gives the game away! For it means that the structure is oriented horizontally, not vertically. As evidence of this Samuel Hill points to the stress on emotion and subjectivism in both music and sermon in some churches: “The anthem, or special music, is introduced as a ‘mood-setter’ by way of attuning the congregation to the sermon and in many cases to the ‘invitation’ or ‘altar call’ at the conclusion of the sermon.” The consequence, he feels, is that worship is often “primarily a matter of feelings” rather than “work done in God’s service,” which is the primary sense semantically of leitourgia.
Popular hymnology is a litmus test of the transcendental character of worship. By definition a hymn is a musical and poetic offering of praise to God; but between the covers of every Protestant hymnal are many compositions that should never be dignified by the word “hymn.” They are “songs,” couched in sentimental language, introspective in gaze, and horizontally projected. They do not lift us up to God and his glory; they bid us look inward—or outward to our neighbor. To be sure, there is a place for personal affirmation of faith and aspirations after God, such as the psalmist knew (Psalm 42); but these, in a healthy religion, are God-oriented, not introvert.
A second area of worship where aberrations are common is the worshipper’s reaction and response. From a biblical standpoint, the response is gratitude and self-giving. But even this can be prostituted, in a number of subtle ways. The presence and centrality of choral worship holds a potential danger in focusing attention on the choir—made resplendent by handsome robes, many of which would make Joseph’s coat look tawdry. The choir worships, not with the congregation, but instead of it; and the congregation (possibly unconsciously) projects itself on the choir and so worships vicariously. But vicarious worship is nonsense. That is why Protestants condemn the popular celebration of the Catholic Mass: it is a spectacle that the worshiper detachedly beholds.
What of the “invitation system,” as a recent British critic has caustically labeled it? At no other point in our analysis is the distinction between intention and method more clearly needed. The intention behind the altar call is good; it is meant to press home upon the worshiper the need of response, commitment, and avowal lest worship evaporate into the nebulous and mystical. At times the altar call achieves this. Unfortunately, it often does not.
The idea of an “invitation hymn” harks back to the revivalism and camp meeting of the old frontier. Although successfully transplanted to an urban setting by D. L. Moody and refined by such contemporaries as Billy Graham, the basic idea of the invitation hymn as an integral part of worship every Sunday needs examination. Is it just part of our religious ethos, out of place in congregational worship? Does its inclusion every Sunday breed familiarity that muffles the call of the Spirit not only at the conclusion of the service but also at other points? Is its purpose also functional—does it serve to identify potential new church-members who are in no sense “seekers” or “converts”? What preacher would be temerarious enough to believe that every sermon he preached could suitably be followed by an invitation hymn?
Finally, the meaning and place of the Lord’s Supper in Protestant worship also calls for serious evaluation. Is it mere memorialism? Is it an occasion for mere sentimentalism? Or, worse yet, is it dispensable? Protestants must remember that whatever the Lord’s Supper commemorates, it does not celebrate an absent Christ or a dead figure, imprisoned in past history. It speaks of a victorious, once crucified Saviour who by his Holy Spirit comes to meet his people in the contemporaneity of their worship.
Fortunately, the call for a bold return of the gospel sacraments to the center of the Church’s liturgical action comes today from many sectors of sensitive Protestantism. Baptist writers like G. R. Beasley-Murray in England are insisting on baptism as a vital part of the believer’s response to the Gospel along with repentance and faith. In discussing the bankruptcy of our worship, Reformed scholars in Continental Europe such as J. J. von Allmen (in Worship: Its Theology and Practice) reserve their strongest judgment for the removal of the Lord’s Supper from the regular pattern of Sunday worship. They protest the denial of it to Christians as they assemble every Lord’s Day. Calvin wished to inaugurate this reform at Geneva but was thwarted. Now his latter-day disciples in the European Reformed churches call for it loudly. They ask, not for a crypto-sacramentarianism, but for an acknowledgment that certain patterns of worship were dominically instituted and are neglected or treated as appendages at our peril.
Church traditions are a precious heritage, not lightly to be discarded. But tradition can become endowed with a false dignity as brittle as the bones of any ancient mummy. Living things show their vitality and vigor by adapting to environment and challenge; otherwise they die out and become extinct. It cannot be anything but tragic if the outward and ostensible worship of the living God through the dynamic Spirit, with the risen Lord in the midst, is suffocated by the trappings with which we clothe it.
New teeth put into the Federal Communication Commission’s Fairness Doctrine by the recent “personal attack” ruling will almost certainly inhibit open discussion of controversial matters on radio and television and thereby hinder freedom of speech in America. The new rule holds that whenever an attack on a person or group is broadcast, the station must within one week transmit to the person or group attacked (1) notification of the date, time, and identity of the broadcast, (2) a script, tape, or summary of the attack, and (3) an offer of a reasonable opportunity to respond over the licensee’s facilities. Failure to comply subjects a station to fines up to $10,000 and jeopardizes its license renewal.
Broadcasters throughout the nation are protesting the “personal attack” rule. NBC, CBS, and others have petitioned the U. S. Court of Appeals to strike it down. NBC contends that the FCC-legislated rule is an unconstitutional restraint on freedom of speech and press, beyond the FCC’s statutory authority, and contrary to the public interest.
Independent conservative broadcasters across the country are voicing objections also. Dr. Carl McIntire, speaker on the “Twentieth Century Reformation Hour,” has stated, “The announced design of the ‘Doctrine’ is to provide for the airing of different views, but the realistic effect is censorship and suppression. It is aimed first at political conservatives and second at religious fundamentalists.” The “personal attack” rule is a prime consideration in current FCC hearings in Media, Pennsylvania, to determine whether the license of station WXUR, owned by Faith Theological Seminary, of which McIntire is board president, shall be renewed. Eighteen groups, including the American Baptists’ Division of Evangelism, the Anti-Defamation League, the Greater Philadelphia Council of Churches, and the AFL-CIO of Pennsylvania, have filed complaints against the license renewal. (The American Civil Liberties Union refused to join the complainants.) If the new rule is strictly enforced in the WXUR controversy and other cases, free-swinging critics like McIntire, Billy James Hargis, Dan Smoot, Edgar Bundy, William S. McBirnie, C. W. Burpo, and Clarence Manion will find it necessary to alter drastically their slam-bang attacks or lose broadcasting outlets. Criticism from the right will thus be significantly stifled.
Broadcasting executives committed to fair-play principles in airing controversial matters in the public interest criticize the new rule for requiring of stations the gargantuan task of monitoring all broadcasts for possible “personal attacks” without providing them with specific standards of FCC requirements in this area. They further claim that their need to notify a person that he has been “personally attacked” in effect makes them admit their complicity in an act that might make them liable for slander. In addition, they consider the task of providing air time for all persons and groups criticized in broadcasts a great hardship in their program scheduling. Rather than risk the chance of violating the FCC rules, or making themselves the defendant in a slander suit, or spending the money to monitor broadcasts, notify those attacked, and give air time for responses, many broadcasters will find it necessary to impose a blackout on anything that might come anywhere close to a “personal attack.” The result will be that freedom of speech on our airwaves will be curtailed. American radio and television will become more inconsequential than ever. And the cause of democracy and the public interest will be poorly served.
The FCC emphasizes that the Fairness Doctrine and “personal attack” rule are no attempt at censorship. The intent of the rules, said the commission in a public statement October 11, 1967, is not to “bar the presentation of any attack which the broadcast licensee believes should be carried; rather they are designed simply to insure elemental fairness.” The FCC denies it has made any attempt to censor religious programs or discourage their broadcast but holds that a licensee is acting properly in asking to examine the script of a program in advance.
McIntire claims that since the FCC issued its “personal attack” directive on August 14, 1967, certain stations have canceled his program because “they could not take any chances” at incurring a $10,000 fine, or have requested advance copies of his scripts, or have cautioned him against launching any personal attacks. He resents the pressures from the FCC to make the local station-owner a censor and the necessity to consider “every word and every matter he discusses in the light of the FCC’s demand upon the local stations.” McIntire emphasizes that he has issued a standing invitation to anyone he criticizes to reply on his program.
The central issue that emerges from the “personal attack” controversy is that of free speech in a democracy. The Institute for American Democracy, an arch foe of right-wing broadcasters, calls attention to irresponsible utterances by individual conservative broadcasters and excesses of particular stations. It contends that the “personal attack” rule is an asset to democracy in that it assists people to defend themselves and to counter “extremist” assertions.
Opponents of the rule agree that opportunity should be given on radio and television for advocates of all viewpoints to advance their positions and reply to their critics. This was possible before the adoption of the “personal attack” rule. They contend that the new rule is a blow against freedom of speech because it tends to make station executives censors of content and has the practical effect of discouraging stations from carrying controversial broadcasts. By lessening the opportunities for critics to express themselves freely on the air, say opponents of the rule, the FCC is abridging a constitutional right and depriving the nation of the ideological give-and-take on which a democracy thrives.
Although America has its share of irresponsible speakers on the extremes of both the left and the right, this is part of the price that must be paid if freedom of speech is to be a reality. In the long run irresponsible speakers cannot prosper in a free market place of ideas. If our verbal market place is to remain free, governmental policies must not be instituted that discourage broadcasters from serving as critics of the men and ideas that shape our society. We believe the FCC’s “personal attack” ruling tends to do this. For this reason, we hope the courts will nullify it.
Let all who broadcast on our airwaves speak responsibly so that our nation might remain strong and freedom of speech might ever continue. May the FCC and the courts not allow a desire to assist persons and groups under attack become the basis for a policy that may eventually destroy the freedom and justice it seeks to protect.
ROMNEY ON RELIGION
Michigan Governor George Romney’s announcement that he will seek the Republican Presidential nomination coincides with the publication of some of his religious views in the Mormon journal Dialogue; among them are belief in the Creator, individual responsibility, and separation of Church and state. His statements are laudable, even if predictable from a member of a minority religion. It is noteworthy, however, and even rather sad, that most Americans are eager to minimize the religious issue in public life precisely at a time when our national history most clearly bears the marks of a great religious crisis.
