Gordon Wheeler, Roman Catholic bishop of Leeds, said in an essay in the London Tablet (7/8/67) that our age seems weak in its sense of history. Interestingly enough, the observation occurs in a discussion of what the bishop calls our “crisis of spirituality.” Our flight from the supernatural and rejection of fundamental Christian priorities, according to Bishop Wheeler, might be lessened by a renewed sense of past heroism:
There are those who say that we should forget the past. It is true that sometimes the past is best forgotten. But the great heroes of the past must always be remembered and honoured. Our Lord Himself loved to speak of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and David and the Prophets. These men were an inspiration to all of God’s people.
Our age, which has been called almost officially the “Age of Anxiety,” stands particularly in need of inspiration from persons of the past who loved truth for its own sake and who put spiritual values first—the men and women who are indeed for all seasons. One of many in this category is the poet Crashaw, whose depth of Christian persuasion carries no propagandizing at all but only the joy that came from his own living knowledge of the faith.
Richard Crashaw (1613–1649), one of the “metaphysicals,” as Dryden named the group of seventeenth-century English poets that included George Herbert and John Donne, lived at the beginning of the ill-fated Age of Reason. He had just passed his twenty-fourth birthday and was still at Cambridge in 1637, when Descartes’s epoch-making “Discourse” first appeared. As was true of the other metaphysicals, Crashaw’s intellect remained untouched by the so-called new enlightenment; his reason stayed loyally under the domination of revealed Christian truth. The asceticism and singlehearted devotion to truths of the spirit of this “poet and saint,” as his contemporary Abraham Cowley named Crashaw, are mentioned as outstanding traits by all who wrote of him.
Crashaw’s extraordinary command of poetic imagery and verse technique makes his religious poetry unforgettable. At the end of World War I, Constance Spender spoke of Crashaw’s poetry in these words:
All the young who have fought for freedom, and who have a vision of truth and justice for which they often agonize and despair, should read this poetry full of visions—in which there is no trace of agony or despair—full of an ecstasy and a brightness that nothing can dim nor dash.
Life in Stuart England was not particularly easy for the young cleric at Cambridge, any more than for anyone else. He was born three years before Shakespeare’s death and died the year Charles I was beheaded, and his life spanned a period of governmental and social chaos. Yet he found quietness and rest because he found, as Miss Spender suggests, truth and justice; and he found them at their very Source. No wonder his verses contain no trace of agony or despair but remain full of ecstasy and brightness.
Crashaw delighted in paradox, but only in the interest of simplicity. Paradox serves as a pathway toward sacred mysteries such as the Incarnation and the Trinity, which will someday be shown to be infinitely simple and harmonious. Indeed, paradox is often the only way the finite can accept divine truth. From the simple charm of such lines as these on the Nativity,
He left His Father’s court, and came
Lightly as a lambent flame
Leaping upon the hills, to be
The humble King of you and me,
to such an “incarnational paradox” as “Illi non locus est, quo sine nec locus est” (“There is no place for Him without Whom there is no place”), his religious message is as clear as it is profound. Not only does Crashaw think with the saints; he also thinks with the philosophers. And he follows the highest teaching of Greek philosophy (e.g., in Aristotle’s “The world and all that happens in it is the longing of matter after God”) by giving its Christian equivalent as he cries to the Babe of Bethlehem:
O little All! in Thy embrace
The world lies warm and likes its place.
His haunting word pictures teach much as did those of St. Francis four centuries before him, and his poetry burns with the fire in which man’s real self lives, the fire of the spirit. It was the late Irish poet A.E. who declared that “we must pass like smoke or live within the spirit’s fire,” and Crashaw did live in the one sphere in which a human being can be true to himself. “In the fire of love we live,” sang A.E. in his poem “Immortality.” Or, he adds, “we pass by many ways, by the unnumbered ways of dream to death,” for there is no other alternative. Thus Crashaw, writing on that shield of faith which is prayer, called prayer not only a shield but a whole armory. He once described a prayerbook:
It is the armory of Light.
Let constant use but keep it bright.
Certainly there is no desire in Crashaw for “tolerance” of all religion, including some odd, low, and pitiable opinions of God outside Christianity. He was too honest a philosopher not to recognize that the desire to give a respectful hearing to all men’s opinions about what God is, is in actuality a diabolical way of denying that God exists. The Love that Crashaw pronounced “absolute sole Lord of life and death” is no more successfully represented in any lesser religion than Christianity than it is in what the world in its caprice falsely aligns it with, namely, sexuality. What Bishop Wheeler in the article mentioned above calls the need for the “conscious priority of God” is what Crashaw liked to call a “supernatural Dawn.” Such a Dawn he envisioned enveloping the Magi on their way to Bethlehem. In his poem on the Magi, Crashaw contrasts the true Light with what the first rationalists were already calling “enlightenment.” The warning in the following lines is to the point as he speaks of the Wise Men who had been lost in their paganism; for they
… strangely went astray
Lost in a bright
Meridian night,
A darkness made of too much day.
“Bright meridian night” (with the explanatory line that it was “a darkness made of too much day”) shows something of the poet’s sure perceptivity in difficult theological matters. The increasingly unhappy results of the blinding of men by their own minds as they put those minds in opposition to revelation were to appear in the centuries after Crashaw throughout Europe and America.
But Crashaw would be little help to an era like ours, one when so many people around us are losing their faith, if he had been merely negative. His stress, first to last, is not so much on the either/or offered man—God or Mammon—as it is on his surety of God and the self. He spoke from his own experience when he said that “the eager Heavens devise ways” proportionate to the immediate needs of men who appeal to those Heavens. His faith speaks in such remarkable metaphors as, “Hope walks and kicks the curled heads of conspiring stars.” The glory of Richard Crashaw—and of how many other Christians, known or unknown, through the ages—is that his truth needed no test of time.
He was a contemporary of the German mystic Angelus Silesius, whose accent was also on the Light, that is, the truth in the Spirit that makes all things new. Who could know this better than the young poet who, exiled from Cambridge by Cromwell, saw with shocked eyes, as he wrote a friend in 1643, that in the great church of St. Peter in Leyden, “in the place of the saints that heretofore it seems had usurped the window,” had been set up “the plain pagan Pallas, cap-a-pie, with spear and helmet and owl and all.” Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom, was not to be mentioned in the same breath with those heroes of the will, the saints, who confessed our Lord as Saviour and as life’s Guide and thus might live, not according to the decrees of a blind fate but by faith and hope and love, a life transformed.
This overt return to paganism Crashaw saw as a mental breakdown no less than a moral one. The ancient seers like Socrates had some inkling of the fact that the two breakdowns go together in the great discovery that the soul and consciousness are inextricable. When Christianity came to the Western world, the ground had indeed been prepared for it by the Greeks, and prepared by that same insistence that man’s consciousness and his soul are inseparable. Among the notable heirs of this heritage are such converts as Augustine, Ambrose, and even St. Paul. By no accident did the early Church Fathers study the ancient classics. But it must be remembered that they took from them only what was good and saved only the good for mankind’s use. We find St. Paul quoting Menander (1 Cor. 15:33), Aratus (Acts 17:28), Epimenides (Titus 1:12) with approval; and he must have thought with gratitude too of Socrates and his successors, who viewed the soul as a sensorium of eternal realities. Nor should it be forgotten that Socrates opposed the worship of the old Greek gods because of their palpable crimes. Surely the Sage of Athens suspected something at least of the truth that was revealed to the Hebrew prophets but came with full force and completeness only in the Christian revelation: that man’s defiant will underlies both his lack of wisdom and his criminality.
In one of Crashaw’s “sacred” poems in the volume Steps to the Temple (1648) we find the hymn, “To the Name Above Every Name, The Name of Jesus.” It begins,
I sing the Name which none can say
But touched with an interior ray.
It is in this long poem that his consistently Christ-centered muse is most at home. If its 249 lines are as meaningful as they are musical—twin criteria for any poem—the reason is in the perfection with which they celebrate Christ’s mastery of the mind, singing of “the hidden sweets / Which man’s heart meets” therein. In the midst of his own rapture and surety he turns back to martyrs of the past, exclaiming:
O, that it were as it was wont to be!
When Thy old friends of fire, all full of Thee,
Fought against frowns with smiles; gave glorious chase
To persecutions; and against the face
Of death and fiercest dangers, durst with brave
And sober pace march on to meet a grave.
Among the young poet-preacher’s so-called divine epigrams on various biblical texts, we find his lines on Acts 21, “I am ready not only to be found but to die”:
Come death, come bands, nor do you shrink, my ears,
At those hard words man’s cowardice calls fears;
Save those of fear, no other bands fear I;
No other death than this: the fear to die.
To return to the hymn above: even as Crashaw invokes “the gracious Guest”
Of humble souls that seek to find
The hidden sweets
Which man’s heart meets
When Thou art master of the mind,
he is constantly aware of the hidden evils where Christ is not present. Not even Kierkegaard in his invectives against lack of faith—which he forthrightly equates with sin—is more severe than Crashaw. He who could sing with such childlike delight of the Nativity, as shown in these lines from his “Shepherd’s Hymn”:
Welcome, all wonders in one night!
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night
Heaven in earth, and God in man,
could also express his utter horror of man’s rejection of divine love. We find in the same ecstatic hymn on “The Name of Jesus” a terrible word for those whose knees refuse to bend before the Light that enlightens all who come into the world:
They that by Love’s mild dictate now
Will not adore Thee
Shall then with just confusion bow
And break before Thee.
With Crashaw’s keen metaphysical vision lighted by grace he sang the Name of Jesus as literally the song of the soul. As suggested above, he saw man’s reason being enthroned above faith, and saw it turning life’s warmth to stone. It was this same idol that Kierkegaard, two centuries later, saw must be broken on its Hegelian throne. But where Kierkegaard had no positive philosophy to offer in place of the diseased one he attacked with such vigor, Crashaw holds to a positive relation between philosophy and faith. His is the joy of those who go with Christ, who “wheresoe’er He sets His white/Steps, walk with Him those Ways of Light.” So, never sententious or platitudinous, he sings from a mind “touched with an interior ray” of divine light; and, again like Saint Francis, he calls on all creation to sing with him: “Wake,” he cries,
In the Name of Him Who never sleeps, all things that are …
Answer my call
And come along;
Help me to meditate mine immortal Song.
In the spirit of Bishop Wheeler in our day he remembers the “wise souls” through the Christian ages,
The heirs-elect of Love whose names belong
Unto the everlasting life of Song.
Above all, he appeals to his own inward and spiritual self as God’s creature:
Awake, my glory! Soul (if such thou be,
And that fair name at all refer to thee)
Awake and sing,
And be all wing:
Bring hither thy whole self, and let me see
What of thy parent Heaven yet speaks in thee.
The answer to that call is immediate and holds the secret of the poet’s unconquerable hope in the midst of sin and death. So, we read:
Cheer thee, my heart!
For thou too hast thy part
And place in the great throng
Of this unbounded, all-embracing Song.
In the whole hymn, as everywhere else in Crashaw’s so-called sacred poems, the one basis of unity possible to our race is in the Light that enlightens all who come into the world. Thus when he wrote that “Christ’s Faith makes but one body of all souls,” he referred to those who comprise the community of the spirit, living in Christ in deed and in truth. Here too he is at home with the Christian seers of all ages from St. Paul and the immediate followers of Jesus onward through history. For if Crashaw, as a Cambridge contemporary said of him, “made his nest more gladly than David’s swallow near the house of God,” his eagle wings—to use another favorite poetic metaphor—of intellect lifted to heights of clear vision both him and his appreciative readers.
Certainly such vision as Crashaw’s is particularly needed in an age when even the Christian world is apt to conceive of its faith in secular terms. “The crisis of spirituality,” in the words of the English bishop cited at the start of this article, remains the most alarming crisis of our time.
Demytholoyizing The Evangelicals
The time has come, I think, to demythologize the American evangelicals. Somebody needs to strip away the cozy myths on which conservative frontiersmen fall to sleep at night and by which they delude themselves by day.
While most evangelicals primp themselves for tomorrow’s customary stroll through the secular city, signs of the times point to very stormy weather in the morning. And few evangelical forecasters seem to detect the ominous clouds.
In recent months faulty terrain-following radar was blamed for the United States Air Force’s loss of seven new F-111 airplanes; instead of repelling the North Vietnamese, each crashed in its turn and all failed in their mission. Later the cause of failure was said to lie elsewhere. But a faulty reading of the present tide of apostasy and unbelief may be well-nigh fatal to American Christianity in the next decade.
I see a rising tide of anti-clericalism in America, and many evangelicals complacent about it and even gratified by it. I see a falling-away of church attendance, particularly in mainstream churches, and many evangelicals rejoicing in it. I see a weakening of support for many long-established religious enterprises, and some evangelicals counting it all gain.
I also see—though some of my evangelical compatriots do not—a significant decline, in American Christianity, threatening to reach, perhaps within a decade, to the low level of European Protestantism current in this generation. If this occurs, only a small percentage of church members (and an even smaller percentage of the population) will attend preaching services. Evangelistic and missionary agencies will use capital reserves to meet annual budgets that were projected by an earlier generation within its current giving. Moreover, the secular community will hold the clergy in less respect than the newscaster and the stockbroker.
What is worse, I have the uneasy feeling—very uneasy—that evangelicals may be contributing unwittingly to the tide and tempest of this sad situation. And I am not thinking only about the matter of neglected evangelism. Unfortunately, evangelicals are most widely heard and publicized, not for the winsome exposition of a powerful alternative to contemporary religious currents, but for their denunciations of the political clergy, of ecumenical subversion, of the corruption of modern Christianity. In the secular milieu today, anyone who invites men to a Christian commitment must often overcome barriers that evangelicals or fundamentalists have themselves put in the way of an eager response.
I am convinced that evangelical Christianity can afford the luxury of even wholly necessary criticism only when in the act of criticism it shows itself to be the bearer of truth and righteousness and power and love in the world. When its impact centers mainly in flame-throwing defoliation of the ecclesiastical environment, or in the remote bombing of non-evangelical targets, the odds increase with every mission that it too may become a casualty of the conflict.
Some fifteen years ago, in my California days, I was active in Great Books discussion groups and had several television opportunities to press the Christian perspective in open dialogue, as well as to teach these books by the Socratic method. In this effort I assisted the Pacific Coast director for Great Books, a brilliant young lawyer, who had himself become convinced that naturalism invites the dead end of personal meaning and of civilization. I recall a day when, after I had witnessed to him about Christ, we pulled the car to the curb and prayed together. He told me that he was not far from a personal commitment, and that it could not be in the barren dimensions of Protestant modernism but had to be within either historic Roman Catholicism or evangelical Christianity. We talked at some length about the issues at stake in these alternatives. Because of my move to Washington, some years passed before I renewed contact with this gifted intellectual. When we corresponded again, I learned that he had become a convert to Roman Catholicism. I asked him about the deciding factor. “I attended the numerous churches,” my friend told me, “for an advance exposure to what I would be hearing from the pulpit. In evangelical churches where the Gospel was preached, I almost invariably heard ministers going out of their way to criticize fellow ministers and other churches, even evangelical churches. But I never heard a priest criticize his church or a fellow priest from the pulpit. [American Catholicism has changed very noticeably since then!] The more I thought about it, the more I felt the Church of Christ must be bigger than this one congregation and this one minister—whoever he was—who could not find a good thing to say about fellow ministers, even those who shared his faith. My spirit was more at home in the Catholic Church, for the Church must indeed be universal if it is to count for much in the modern world.”
Now I am not going to defend or to assail my friend’s reply. But I cannot help wondering how many thinking moderns have been turned from some of our churches because they simply cannot buy the tune that “I and I only am left.” Too well they know that this means leaving behind too much of what is truly Christ’s.
If and when evangelical Christianity becomes primarily a “search and destroy” operation, it will have forfeited its biblical right to survival. One of my favorite Bible passages has long been the third chapter of John’s Gospel. I am captivated by its great truth that all the world stands condemned except as men respond to God’s great gift of his only Son as the sinner’s sacrifice. And I am equally captivated by its equally great truth that “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:17). Sometimes I wish I could hear some great modern Spurgeon echoing this mighty theme: not to condemn, but to save. There is a lost note here, I think, in some of our evangelical attitudes not only toward the world but toward Christendom as well.
Surely the Apostle Paul wrote the Corinthians to rebuke their factions, to deplore an unspiritual carnality, to lament their moral license and their tolerance of immorality, to expose serious faults in the churches. But above all this, the Great Apostle left no doubt that the Christian’s supreme concern must be to transmit the evangel. He made love so much the final test of Christian integrity that even the truth of revelation is invalidated by lovelessness, just as love is falsified by untruth. I take it that, to be authentically Christian, the effective confrontation of our generation must be in terms of the divine Redeemer’s death for our sins and his bodily resurrection on the third day, grasped in the context of the whole biblical revelation of God’s plan and purpose. I suspect that when the Apostle Paul invaded Athens as a missionary target, he knew quite a lot about the foibles and follies of the Stoics and Epicureans; in fact, he refuted objectionable facets of their theories. But he did not make it his main business to leave the enemies of faith publicly exposed in their philosophical nakedness. He preached “Jesus and the resurrection” and left them no place of effective retreat. On Mars Hill he locked up the Athenians to final judgment by the Risen One; when some of them laughed outright while others believed, the cutting edge of their division was nothing other than the Lord’s claim. While the Mars Hill message brings the future judgment into contemporary focus, the sermon is crowded with compassion. It is not basically anti-this and anti-that; it is pro-Logos—so magnificently pro-Christos, in fact, that the false gods can find no shelter, and even the philosophers are left with no better option than mockery of the alternative. And mockery is no sure path into the future, whether others mock the Evangel or evangelicals mock their adversaries.
I think the time has come for evangelicals to lower the fences that divide them—fences between the American Council of Christian Churches and the National Association of Evangelicals and evangelicals in the National Council of Churches. It is time to give full entry to the renewing power of the Bible and the Holy Spirit. If devout evangelical leaders of an outgoing spirit could confer for a year across their fences, and leap those fences in order to pray together about evangelical unity and obedience in our time, it could prove a great boon to the furthering of the will of God and the truth of revelation and the Lord’s commission. Some friends of mine in the divergent groupings have already warned that any such plea will be stillborn. But I dare to believe that some evangelicals long to see God do a new thing. Our divisions have now become a scandal, and they are a barrier to effective fulfillment of the Great Commission. If you do not think so, produce the evidence of success.
Of course, we lonely evangelicals can boast at one moment that in our local situation we have “a packed house” or console ourselves the next moment that, after all, we are a minority, a godly remnant, a holy few.
The important issue for the future of Christianity is not how many graybeards we hold in the ranks but how well we communicate Christianity to the oncoming generation. The critical concern is the truth and power of evangelical Christianity, in the way we espouse the Way, to captivate and enlist the youth. Evangelicals are not winning the younger generation, any more than deviant and distorted forms of Christianity are. The masses of humanity average younger by the minute, and we are losing the young multitudes to a non-Christian and anti-Christian future. Some are devoted to nothing, to rain-check-itis on the great issues of life. Simon Gerson, press chairman for last month’s national convention of the Communist party, laments that most American college students “aren’t buying anything.” The whole future generation sways uncertainly in the balances, while evangelical Christians virtually share in a conspiracy of silence about the most compelling alternative.
Look at the facts. In the United States the median age is now twenty-five. This fall there will be 6,700,000 college and university students in America, and the present inclination is to provide a college education for every young person who wants it. Only 15 per cent of the students in our nation are now enrolled on church-related campuses, and, since “church-related” is no longer a synonym for “evangelical,” the percentage in evangelical colleges is much smaller. As a matter of fact, many more college students today are being stripped and deprived of evangelical beliefs than are being confirmed in them. Today’s university graduates tend to be least sure of enduring truth and eternal values, and are prone to rationalize their disengagement by direct assaults upon the Christian heritage. What they have learned from their professors through neglect, they more and more impart to their successors by conviction.
Some of us may point out with gratitude that Billy Graham’s crusades have not lost attraction for the younger generation, even though the evangelist is now thrice a grandfather. We may be impressed when Moody Monthly publishes its annual list of approved evangelical schools this year—twenty-three Bible colleges, ten Bible institutes, thirty-four liberal-arts colleges, and twelve seminaries, for a total of seventy-nine, with pointed omission of many denominational campuses. We may also hail the steady stream of missionary candidates enlisted by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship on the most prestigious campuses, or the brisk confrontation by Campus Crusade of whole student bodies with an invitation to faith. These are all worthy efforts, and the loss of any would have adverse consequences for evangelical witness in the student world. But all are products of a remedial strategy that perpetuates the primary problem—the lack of exposure for Christian ideas and ideals in the mainstream of serious intellectual dialogue—and all reflect evangelical satisfaction with an oblique role for the truth of revelation simply on the margin of contemporary American thought. Neither Jonathan Edwards nor Timothy Dwight would have given our spirits rest day or night in these circumstances. For almost all the leaders of tomorrow’s world—the clergy, the editors, the educators, the political leaders, the jurists, and so on—are in this great body of students whose ideas and ideals are now being forged uninformed by the truth of revelation.
At this juncture one might carry forward these concerns in either of two directions. Beyond demythologizing the present-day evangelicals, one could declare war on neo-evangelicals, or proceed to demolish the non-evangelicals—be they modernist, dialectical, existential, or some other variety. Or one might make a plea that we rekerygmatize the evangelicals, not merely demythologize them; and this is what I want to do.
I hope the younger generation of American evangelicals—who are not bound by our past-generation prejudices in regard to race or denominationalism or anti-denominationalism—will soon emerge as a vanguard of new leadership. It is time they started to march and sing in the open arena, to lift their voices for Christ with a clarity and courage that our generation failed to muster. The evangelical student witness could today be welded into a missionary task force more awesome even than the Student Volunteer Movement at the beginning of this century, were it not for the fact that even our young people reflect the overall divided posture of evangelical Christianity in America. Let them carry placards of proclamation, not billboards of condemnation; let them dare to show the dawn rather than merely to damn the darkness. I intend no rebuke, no disparagement, of the older generation when I say it has failed to achieve a real breakthrough for the Gospel in our time. I belong to that older generation. But now it is time for those of us who felt that a lad could be ordained to the ministry in his twenties to ask ourselves why he cannot serve also as a lay leader and as a church officer as well, and why our past way of doing things has any special claim to infallibility. Jesus chose disciples who could run with faith, not patriarchs who had to be carried.
And they ran with joy, not with mace or tear gas or vituperation. I have to remind myself of this constantly; I do not speak in pharisaical self-righteousness. Every six months or so I have told colleagues at CHRISTIANITY TODAY that it is time to “ring the bells” again, to schedule a major editorial on the joy of being a Christian, the delight and dignity of walking with God. Augustine was one of the greatest of all Christian philosophers, but that brilliant mind was first attracted to faith in Christ by the spontaneous joy of the first believers he met. Men are starved for hope today, and we are to be God’s bell-ringers. And so I would say to one or another of my writers: “Suppose you were trapped with an isolated remnant, and they drafted you to make a statement to the world. You are the last stand for faith, as it were, and you are asked to tell out the joys of Christian commitment. Write it in 1,200 words, and I’ll use it as an editorial.” One theologian came back the next morning and said, “You know, one has to live close to Christ to write on that subject.” How true. The presence of Christ in the midst of his followers might be God’s best gift for confronting the death-of-God deviants and the political clergy. Our power is not in word only but in spirit.
I think that the moment of truth is here for twentieth-century evangelicalism, and that it needs to be demythologized of the traditions of its modern elders and revived in the realities of New Testament Christianity.
In this regard, I’ll not quote Billy Graham. Let me, rather, quote another:
The early Christians did not say in dismay: “Look what the world has come to,” but in delight, “Look what has come to the world.” They saw not merely the ruin, but the resources for the reconstruction of that ruin. They saw not merely that sin did abound, but that grace did much more abound. On that assurance the pivot of history swung from blank despair, loss of moral nerve, and fatalism, to faith and confidence that at last sin had met its match, that something new had come into the world, that not only here and there, but on a wide scale, men could attain to that hitherto impossible thing—goodness.…
That same sense of confidence must possess you if you are to pass from an anemic, noncreative, nay-saying type of person to one who is master of himself and his circumstances and his destiny.
But this confidence and faith must not be based on a self-hypnosis, a mental and spiritual fool’s paradise.…
The whole secret of abundant living can be summed up in this sentence: “Not your responsibility, but your response to God’s ability.”
These words are from a book entitled Abundant Living, by E. Stanley Jones (Abingdon, 1942, p. 183).
I am convinced that this offer of abundant life—or, as another contemporary puts it, this power of positive thinking—has a scriptural ability to fascinate the sallow spirit of modern man and to coax him anew to a hearing of the claim of Christ upon his life. If you are not satisfied with the way E. Stanley Jones, or Norman Vincent Peale, or Billy Graham, or this present lesser luminary, holds out hope to this generation, then for heaven’s sake, for God’s sake and the Gospel’s sake, don’t exhaust your energies in indexing their faults—which are many—but light a brighter light and live a life of greater power.
A greater than E. Stanley Jones and theologically sounder, a greater than Norman Vincent Peale and theologically sounder, a greater than Billy Graham and theologically sounder, a greater than Carl McIntire and theologically sounder, a greater by far than Carl Henry and theologically sounder, calls us to demythologize and to rekerygmatize, to abandon harmful attitudes toward other Christians, and to reassert the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit.—CARL F. H. HENRY.
Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”
