The derivation of the word “Easter” is somewhat uncertain, but it had to do with a pagan festival and seems to have been connected with an Anglo-Saxon spring goddess named Eostre. It would be far better if in English some other word of less questionable derivation could be applied to the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
There is nothing uncertain about the language the New Testament uses when speaking of the event we call Easter: “resurrection” and “raised from the dead.” Those terms assume, of course, that there was a death. If Jesus had not died on the cross at Calvary, there could be no talk about resurrection. The phrase “God raised him from the dead” is used again and again in Scripture. In First Corinthians where Paul defines the Gospel he speaks of Jesus as having died, been buried, and been raised again.
Those who do not want to believe in the Resurrection will not do so no matter how much evidence is presented to show that the empty tomb means that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. When the theories of wrong tomb, stolen body, fraud, and hallucination have been shown to be untenable, the non-believer is still unlikely to accept the Resurrection.
What is really important about the bodily resurrection of Jesus (and Scripture knows no other kind) is its identification with salvation. The preaching of the early Church was based upon the solid conviction that Christ’s resurrection was an essential part of the saving message of Scripture—that no one can be saved who does not believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Paul says: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved” (Rom. 10:9, 10).
Some who profess to believe in the resurrection of Jesus do not mean by it what the Scripture teaches and what the Church has traditionally believed. So far as they are concerned, the body of Jesus just turned to dust as every other body does. They acknowledge a “spiritual resurrection” but not a bodily one. But Scripture insists upon the necessity of belief in the resurrection for salvation, and because resurrection cannot be understood apart from the resurrection of the body, then it follows that whoever does not believe that Jesus was raised in the body cannot be saved. This is hard doctrine for those who, whether because of a refusal to believe in miracles or some other reason, cannot accept a bodily resurrection.
It would be immoral for those who believe in the necessity of belief in the bodily resurrection to give anyone hope for eternal life who does not accept the teaching of Scripture at this point.
Another point needs to be stated clearly. By faith, persons who receive Christ as their Saviour are justified. Justification is grounded in the atoning work of Christ on Calvary. Here the demands of the law were fully satisfied, and here God’s righteousness was vindicated. But the proof of the fact that the atoning work of Christ was sufficient and satisfactory lies in his resurrection from the dead. Without the genuine resurrection of Christ there is absolutely no basis for assuming that our sins are forgiven. Paul makes this evident in First Corinthians 15: if Christ is still dead we are still in our sins. No resurrection means no justification. No justification means no salvation. No salvation means we are lost and headed for eternal damnation. In Romans 4:25 Paul says that Jesus “was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”
In this Easter season we do well to remember that the Resurrection and justification go hand in hand. The glory of Easter is that what Christ did on the Cross has been validated; we can celebrate because Christ’s resurrection makes possible the forgiveness of our sin, our incorporation into the body of Christ, our relationship to God as sons and daughters, the assurance that we too shall rise from the dead in the resurrection morning and in glorified bodies shall live and reign with Jesus forever. Easter without this might just as well be devoted to the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre rather than to Jesus of Nazareth.
Little League Lessons
Do the Little Leagues take baseball too seriously?
Robin Roberts, a great major-league pitcher of a few years ago, would like to see Little Leagues disbanded. “Most professional athletes feel that way about kids under fourteen,” he said a few weeks ago. “Baseball at that age should be a softball thrown underhand where they can hit fifteen times a game, with no walks and no strikeouts. They should be running, sliding into bases. The score should be 42–38.”
Roberts argues that good athletes develop much more readily in environments where there is not parental pressure for precise technique and formal strategy, and where youngsters are left to get the hang of things in a natural way. He also contends that “if you took all the time you spend with Little League baseball and put it to other uses, there’s no problem in this country we couldn’t solve.”
Roberts is right in saying that a lot of parental time and energy could be used more wisely. If intended simply for competition and to gratify mothers and fathers, the Little Leagues ought to go. But organizing youngsters to learn principles and discipline is a very worthwhile endeavor, whether the field of action is baseball, botany, or Bible. Good habits are not easy to teach, and today more than ever youngsters need guidance in acquiring them. The best kind of response can be expected when good examples are set, when criticism is tempered with encouragement, and when youngsters see that parental motives are not self-serving. Nagging and frequent displays of anger, on the other hand, will counteract a great deal of good.
Elijah Muhammad
Elijah Muhammad, who headed the Lost-Found Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) and who died last month, gave blacks the spur they needed for progress. Long before the idea was popular, he taught that “black is beautiful” and that blacks could succeed in business and education; and then he showed them how to do it. (In Chicago the Black Muslims own a food store, a clothing store, and a restaurant.) He brought to black people a strong sense of community, of oneness. As one black put it, Elijah Muhammad was black while everyone else was still “colored.”
Some commentators have attributed his success with addicts and convicts, for example, to the strong religious discipline practiced by Black Muslims. He rehabilitated people, and it is just that ability that provides the greatest challenge to the Christian community. Clarence Hilliard of Chicago’s Circle Church says he gave those blacks on the lowest rung of the ladder a sense of purpose. “No other organization that I know of, the church included, has been able to do that.” Changing lives, he adds, is the test of the church, and with blacks at least he thinks the church has failed.
Wyn Potter, administrative assistant at the Grant Avenue Community Center in Plainfield, New Jersey, claims that the black evangelical community, too, has failed to be where the black person is. Muhammad “raised black evangelical consciousness,” says Ms. Potter, “so that we could begin doing for blacks what the Black Muslims are doing.”
William Pannell, who teaches evangelism at Fuller Seminary, explains that Elijah Muhammad also showed the power that comes when people live a sanctified, separate life. The church, he adds, has lost the emphasis on holiness and discipline that characterizes the Black Muslims.
The memory of Elijah Muhammad indicts the evangelical community, which to a large extent is still racially separated. We are grateful that so many people learned self-respect through his teaching. But we are also ashamed and penitent that this self-respect was taught by a virulent anti-Christian. Jesus brings to each Christian the full reality of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual worth. Why are we still so far behind in the task of bringing this to blacks?
Worship Aid, Military Style
After five years of work and more than $1 million in production costs, the United States armed forces have achieved something that civilian religious groups and churches have failed to do: they have developed an ecumenically serviceable “Book of Worship.” It is for chaplains to use in conducting religious services. The 805-page volume includes Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish hymns and chants, plus a Catholic mass, two Protestant services, a Torah service, the Eastern Orthodox divine liturgy, and occasional services. The Revised Standard Version and the Good News for Modern Man New Testament are used for responsive readings. Anyone can buy the book from the Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C.
The book contains only a fourth of the 600 hymns found in the last hymnal, published in the late fifties. It is intended to appeal to young people and has such songs as “Turn Back, O Man,” a version of which was sung in Godspell, and “I Danced in the Morning,” the Shaker hymn better known as “Lord of the Dance.” It does not, however, include two other songs that are very popular with young people, the Catholic chorus “We Are One in the Spirit” and the Presbyterian hymn “Morning Has Broken,” which, in a version sung by Cat Stevens, led the top-ten charts a couple of years ago. There is an index for guitar fingering.
A blend of old hymns, new hymns, and some old hymn tunes with new words, such as “Bless Thou the Astronauts Who Face,” sung to the tune “Melita,” gives a good balance. “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” has sixteen verses, some written as recently as 1970. “God of Concrete, God of Steel” updates the things for which we praise and thank God, and shows him to be the ruler of life in the twentieth century as well as the first or the eighteenth. The selection of Christmas carols is good, offering some nice lesser-known songs such as the sixteenth-century German carol “Joseph Dearest, Joseph Mine” in addition to the very familiar ones.
Those who like gospel songs will be glad to find the new book such numbers as “Wonderful Words of Life,” “At Calvary,” and “Just as I Am,” which makes a lovely communion hymn.
Interesting descants are included with many of the hymns, which makes the book useful for choirs as well as congregations. The lowest common religious denominator was not sought in choosing hymns and services. Among the ten criteria used were spiritual reality, scriptural fidelity, and beauty in language and music. The book should not offend any and will meet the worship needs of the various groups for which it is intended.
A New Baptist Pipeline
Leaders of the Baptist World Alliance laid the groundwork this month for a Division of Evangelism and Education. The proposed new division is intended to encourage a sharing of information on evangelism and education among Baptists everywhere. It is a very worthy addition to the BWA program, one that deserves wholehearted approval at the organization’s congress in Stockholm this summer.
On Swearing To Your Own Hurt
President Ford has invoked the principle of moral obligation in his attempt to persuade Congress to send more money to the Lon Nol government of Cambodia. The question has been raised whether there is such a moral obligation, but more attention has been given to such practical objections as the doubt that our help will really lead to a negotiated settlement and the belief that it’s a waste of money anyway since the present Cambodian government is doomed.
Leaving aside the tragic Cambodian situation, it is too bad that the concept of moral obligation has not been more fully discussed in our day. Understandably, the concept is not likely to be a popular one in a society that takes a loose view of commitment, a fact to which our divorce rate testifies.
The Scriptures indicate that our commitments to other persons have a morally binding quality. He shall dwell on God’s holy hill, according to the Psalmist, “who swears to his own hurt and does not change.…
Joshua learned the hard lesson of the consequences of making unwise commitments. The Gibeonites deceived him into believing they had come from a far country, and he and the leaders of the nation entered into a treaty with some of the very people they were directed to drive out of the land. When the congregation heard of the trickery they murmured against the leaders, but the treaty stood “lest wrath come upon us because of the oath we swore to them.”
We need individually and nationally to raise our view of the nature of commitments and to exercise greater restraint and judgment in making them.
Julian Huxley
Sir Julian Huxley was an atheist who believed that the world urgently needed religion. God, to Huxley, was “proving to be an inadequate hypothesis,” so Huxley conceived a new religious idea system, one designed to transcend the spirit-matter dualism that has dogged modern Western thought. His evolutionary humanism tried to blend what to him was a purely scientific world view with the recognition that there was more to reality than the materialist would allow. The result was his highly speculative Religion Without Revelation. He says:
For my own part the sense of spiritual relief which comes from rejecting the idea of God as a supernatural being is enormous. I see no other way of bridging the gap between the religious and the scientific approach of reality.
Huxley’s expressed intent was to come to terms with the most obvious and demonstrable aspects of human existence, and the relish with which he goes about it makes his work fascinating reading. But he failed to come to terms with the implications of one extraordinarily apparent aspect of life as we know it—namely, that it ends. His oversight did not spare him. Death found Julian Huxley on February 14, 1975.
An Ethical Short Circuit
From the Governing Board of the National Council of Churches this month came a statement proclaiming “a Christian perspective” on the forthcoming Bicentennial.
At one point the statement asserts that “private property can no longer be held to be the inviolate private possession of the one who happens to control it. Essential resources belong to the entire community, whether local, national, or global.… It is the inherent right of the community to assert its ownership of resources when they are being abused, squandered, or used to enrich a few.” The widespread use of eminent domain and of embargo, not to mention everyday taxation, show, contrary to what the NCC seems to think, that no private property is inviolate. But merely to “assert [community] ownership,” with no reference to fair compensation for property lawfully and ethically acquired is periously close to the “community’s” stealing what it wants as King Ahab and Jezebel did when they coveted Naboth’s vineyard.
The “millions of hungry and starving persons” who are said to “cry out for such an understanding of property” would be better served if the NCC were to challenge its constituency to demonstrate a greater sense of compassion, financially and personally. The biblical command to care for the poor cannot be biblically fulfilled by short-circuiting the command against theft.
Fed Up With The “Fed”
A Christian is to be a good steward of the money God entrusts to him. When he is going to buy something, he should try to get the best deal he can for his money—which is not really his but the Lord’s.
American business claims to be based on the principle of competition. (Serious studies allege that some businessmen, despite their protestations, really do not like genuine competition, but that is another matter.) However, in shopping around for many kinds of goods and services, the consumer who wants to survey the competition is at a great disadvantage. Many businessmen simply don’t advertise their true charges. They’ll tell you if you ask, but digging out the needed information becomes too time-consuming to make comparison shopping worthwhile.
One example of seller silence is in the large area of loans for buying cars. (Of course, paying cash may well be preferable, but since one forfeits the car to the lender if payments are not kept up, borrowing to buy a car would hardly violate whatever scriptural injunctions there may be against indebtedness.) Buyers often assume that all types of car loans cost pretty much the same. That assumption is wrong. Consumer Reports, in its March issue, lists the rates charged by several banks in each of several cities. Banks will tell you their rates if you ask, but many apparently hope you won’t ask—just pay what they tell you. The differences are notable, sometimes outlandish. For example, at the time the figures were compiled, one large Dallas bank was charging 50 per cent more than a competitor.
But hark, the federal government, through the Federal Reserve System (commonly called the “Fed”), in a move seemingly in line with a policy of discouraging bank competition, called forth the FBI to spend taxpayers’ money in an attempt to find out who, if anyone, “leaked” the list of interest rates to Consumer Reports! It turns out that the Fed has been spending money in litigation before the courts to keep this information from the citizenry. Consumer Reports had to use its limited funds to bring suit under the Freedom of Information Act. The district court had, reasonably enough, ordered the Fed to give the magazine the information to pass along to its readers. CR should not have had to go to court in the first place, but after it did, and won, the Fed should have graciously accepted the court’s verdict. Instead, the Fed, whose expenses are met by the banks, appealed the decision to a higher court. Just what purpose was the Federal Reserve seeking to serve?
Christians as consumers should be thankful that magazines like Consumer Reports help us to be better stewards of our money. A responsible consumer ought never to contract for a loan without checking to see what rates competitors offer. And Christians as taxpayers should be outraged at highhanded and wasteful practices of agencies such as the Fed. As citizen-taxpayers we should continually stress that the people on government payrolls are civil servants, not the masters that they often presume to be—a presumption to which we often spinelessly acquiesce.
On Bearing One Another’S Burdens
Christ calls the Christian community to unity. It comes from love—God’s for us, ours for him, ours for one another. That love distinguishes us from the rest of the world. Christ also calls his followers to have a loving concern for the world, and these days of economic stress give us an unusual opportunity to show this.
A Midwestern bank provides us with an example of what Christians could be doing. Because of rising unemployment, more and more people were defaulting on loans. Instead of taking a hard-nosed approach of foreclosure, the bank’s executives got people who wanted jobs together with those who had jobs to fill.
Christians in executive positions should make every effort to do the same. Christian organizations that for financial reasons must cut staff should also try to find jobs for those who need them. Christians could take the lead in setting up job clearinghouses, grocery co-ops, exchanges of goods and services. Most of us know people who are unemployed: have we shown a desire to help them? Suggestions for job-hunting, a loan or gift of money if it’s needed, a diverting evening for a couple who are experiencing hard times—these are some ways to say “I care.” Many Christians seldom move beyond sympathy in bearing one another’s burdens. Now opportunities abound for acting upon the love God gives us.
