In 1961, CT greeted one technological advance with unreserved celebration: paperback publishing. Pocket-sized paperbound books became popular during World War II, and in the prosperous years following victory over Nazi Germany and its allies, cheap books flooded America. CT celebrated the many evangelical texts becoming widely available.
Books bound in paper have set off a revolution in publishing, bookselling and reading. … The book corners in drug stores, department stores and the “chains” have their eagerly patronized paperback racks. And a surprising number of religious books is available, though usually these are of a strongly liberal flavor.
Religious book publishers have read the “handwriting on the wall” and now we have Abingdon’s Apex Books, Harper’s Torchbooks, Eerdmans’ Pathway Books, the Macmillan line distinguished by its colophon, and a half dozen other quality sets. … Not all paperbacks are reprints. Some of those which are have been severely trimmed down to size with consequent damage to the original text. It is unfortunate that format and price should be an excuse for excluding valuable and essential content.
Eerdmans’ new paperback series in the strictly evangelical and highly competent tradition of this house includes G. C. Berkouwer’s The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, Edward J. Carnell’s The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism and Gordon Clark’s A Christian View of Men and Things. Eerdmans has also issued John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion in a 2-volume paperback edition. Kregel has put Josephus’ Complete Works in paper. Macmillan has done the same for C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity; also J. B. Phillips’ Letters to Young Churches and God, Our Contemporary. … There is here a tremendous potential in the popularization of religious books and a publishers’ bonanza.
One hardback book received special attention. Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press released a new Bible translation, which they said would be a successor to (and not just a revision of) the King James Version. CT asked British Bible scholar F. F. Bruce to review the New English Bible.
The New Testament panel of translators are to be congratulated on the excellence of their achievement. It is not the reviews which appear on publication day or the day after that will decide the acceptance of the new version. That will be decided, over the months and years that lie ahead, by the people for whom it was prepared. We trust with the translators, “that under the providence of Almighty God this translation may open the truth of the scriptures to many who have been hindered in their approach to it by barriers of language.”
CT editors found occasion to quote from the New English Bible in the same issue, in an article calling attention to the upcoming trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann and raising questions about the treatment of Palestinians in Israel.
The trial of Adolph Eichmann, charged by the State of Israel with the Nazi-regime murder of 6 million Jews, gets underway next month in Jerusalem. The Israeli government has authorized sale of films of the proceedings at cost to television and motion picture organizations, thus enabling the whole world to follow this incredible chapter in the twentieth century’s “evolutionary progress.” Eichmann’s aged father, a pious Austrian Protestant of deep religious feelings, has voiced this tear-drenched comment: “If he did what you say, he deserves to die.…”
Probably no courtroom spectacle in our times plows up as many far-reaching questions about truth, justice, and love as these charges that the former Nazi “racial expert” deliberately attempted to annihilate the Jews. The World War II death-ledger of the Hebrews runs like this: Austria, 40,000; Belgium, 40,000; Czechoslovakia, 260,000; Denmark (where the Lutherans displayed heroic defiance of Nazi race hatred), 500; Estonia, 4,000; France, 120,000; Germany, 170,000; Greece, 60,000; Holland, 200,000; Italy, 15,000; Latvia, 85,000; Lithuania, 135,000; Macedonia, 7,000; Norway, 900; Poland, 2,800,000; Rumania, 425,000; Russia, 1,500,000; Yugoslavia, 55,000. The God who is alert to each falling sparrow, and who values men far above “the grass in the fields, which is there today, and tomorrow is thrown on the stove …” (Matt. 6:30, NEB), must surely have endured the near limits of patience during those monstrous events. …
Will Eichmann’s trial in divided Jerusalem—where “no man’s land” separates Arab and Jew—serve indirectly to raise the question of the dignity of man along even wider lines than the tragic dimension of the despicable Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jewish race? While reparation remains due the displaced Arabs, the need for equity and conciliation shadows the Holy Land.
In Palestine a strand of sacred history links together the destiny of all races and nations. The Old Testament sheds its radiant light on the conflict of Jew and Arab, and the New Testament addresses its invitation first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.
Back in the US, CT worried about the decline in seminary enrollment and the shortage of ministerial candidates.
Unless a recovery materializes, there may be a clamor for emergency measures, especially if church membership continues to climb.
Enrollment in 122 accredited or associate member schools of the [American Association of Theological Schools] during the autumn quarter was 20,032. A year ago it was 21,088. The new figure is the lowest in five years.
Dr. Charles L. Taylor, executive director of the AATS, said there is “no simple answer” to explain the decline. Among factors involved, he suggested, are the appeal of science careers, weak recruitment programs, increasing costs of seminary training, the end of veteran education grants, and growth of Bible schools offering a “short cut” to ordination. …
The AATS and its member schools are “very much” concerned about both the quantity and quality of ministerial students, Taylor said.
He declared that to counteract the decline scholars are working “very hard” on scholarship aid, recruitment, and adequate housing for the growing number of married students.
The new presidential administration launched the Peace Corps in 1961, fulfilling one of John F. Kennedy’s campaign promises. CT, noting one of the directors was a graduate from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, interviewed him about the government program in June.
Q: Just what is the purpose of the Peace Corps?
A: The Peace Corps will provide talented Americans to do needed jobs in newly-developing countries of the world. Many of these countries have leadership at the top—people trained at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and other institutions in the West and in the Communist bloc—and there is usually an abundance of unskilled labor at the other end of the economic ladder. The missing link is manpower at the middle level: teachers, electricians, home economists, government clerks, nurses’ aides, farmers, water and sanitation experts, medical technicians, and so on. Peace Corps volunteers will go to do this work—and I emphasize very strongly that they will be doers, performing operational functions—and in the process will teach local people to do the work themselves. …
Q: Will you co-operate with religious, sectarian, or semi-religious agencies?
A: No project which meets Peace Corps criteria and standards will be barred from receiving Peace Corps support because it is sponsored by a religious or sectarian group, provided the project does not further any religious, sectarian, commercial or propaganda cause or releases funds for such purposes.
Q: Will you encourage liaison with U.S. missionaries and missions boards?
A: We have already been in touch with many missionaries individually and with several of the boards.
CT also noted the growing popularity of rightwing radio.
Some 50 radio stations linked with the Mutual Broadcasting System added a 30-minute weekly broadcast this month featuring the voice of Dr. Billy James Hargis, founder-director of Christian Crusade, “largest anti-communist ministry in America.” Hargis was already being heard on 15-minute daily broadcasts carried by some 76 stations and on 30-minute weekly broadcasts heard over 66 stations. …
The right-wing renascence is basically a political phenomenon, but some of the motivations are religious, as are some of the repercussions. …
Responsible evangelicals applaud the initiative of genuinely sincere anti-Communists. But some observers record their reservations over an excessively negative approach. They agree that the public ought to be more aware of Communist strategy, and that the ideological transition from socialism to communism is well worth publicizing. But they question whether some of the hoop-la rallies provide much ideological orientation. More important, these observers are disturbed at preoccupation with communism to the neglect of positive Christianity. The question is asked: Would we not be more profitably engaged if we indoctrinated the masses in the fundamentals of the Christian world-life view and called for personal commitment and for aggressive cells of workers?
Editor in chief Carl F. H. Henry repeated this call for evangelicals to be more positive in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, arguing they should not be “known in the public mind as merely an anti-Liberal, anti-Catholic, and anti-Communist movement.” CT reported:
He said the evangelical movement “must face the theological, social, political, and economic trends before us, rather than seeming to be resigned forever merely to react to the world’s initiative” in these areas. And, speaking on “theological trends facing the evangelicals today,” he challenged the NAE to promote a “comprehensive evangelical exposition of three great concerns—the problem of religious authority, the mission of the Church, and the nature of the Church.”
CT also called for more unity among evangelicals—but only on the proper basis.
Evangelicals often seem to be one of the most divided and divisive forces in the ecclesiastical world even in their internal dealings. Splits, suspicions, wordy campaigns are common features. Squabbling about less essential matters seems to absorb the energy that should go to working together on essentials. And the tragedy is that the world both needs and would unquestionably be impressed and affected by a genuine manifestation of unity in spirit, purpose, and action on the part of evangelicalism. …
Without a common looking to the Lord, a common confession of him as Saviour, Lord, and God, a common knowledge of God in him, there is no building on the common basis and therefore no hope of unity. Faith in him, however, is not a leap in the dark. It is no blind or chance encounter. It is faith responding to a Word. And this Word is the authentic and authoritative record given concerning him. True faith in him is faith in the Jesus of Scripture who embraces both the so-called Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It is faith enlightened and instructed and impelled by the written Word and its preaching and exposition. To the one basis belongs also the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Eph. 2:20). To build apart from Scripture is to build apart from Jesus Christ himself and therefore to destroy unity. Yet this faith is neither abstract nor ideal. It is busy and active. It is impelled as well as instructed. It is obedient. It accepts a task. It is given orders. It is endowed with the high privilege of ministry. It is given a Great Commission.
Fear of the spread of Communism was not easy to dismiss, though. CT reported on the major success of the Soviet cosmonaut program in a piece titled “A Man in Space!”
There was dancing in the streets of Moscow; and in the corridors of Washington’s Pentagon there were grim and bothersome questions.
In a span of one hour and 30 minutes, man opened a new frontier. It all began at 9:07 with a five-ton vehicle soaring off a launching pad somewhere in Soviet Russia. For 89 minutes that vehicle whipped along at a speed of 17,000 miles an hour, in a path of travel, 188 miles beyond the earth. This “beyond-the-earth sphere” in which the object moved was one which from the dawn of time until that special 89 minute segment of April 12, had been “without a traveller.”
Aboard this earth-orbiting vehicle was a 27 year-old Soviet peasant who, after riding 89 minutes with history, put down on a predetermined piece of soil, and stepped from his “sky scooter” with the light of distant stars in his eyes … the first man to travel in space! …
[Soviet Prime Minister Nikita] Khrushchev has said of his cosmonaut that he had achieved immortality. Obviously this top Communist and atheist did not mean that this first space man is now unliable to death, that 89 minutes in space performed for him what union with Christ performs for the Christian. He simply meant he had captured an enduring fame. His is one of the names born not to die.
We will have to go along with that judgment. … He has inched every one of us to the edge of tomorrow.
