The motivation behind one’s decision to accept Christ as Saviour always bears scrutiny. It seems that in the first century the people in Corinth who made such a decision viewed it as a means of escape. With a sigh of relief they began divorce proceedings against the non-Christian husband or wife. Withdrawal from society protected them from further exposure to cruelty, drunkenness, immorality, perversion, and debauchery. The slave felt that he should no longer be subject to his master.

But Paul said, “Wait! Stand where you are! Stay in the condition in which you were when you accepted Christ” (1 Cor. 7:20 ff.). In other words, be Christian where you are. If you are a slave, as the Phillips translation indicates, never mind. If you’re a Jew, stay a Jew, if you’re a Gentile, stay a Gentile. Don’t let your outward condition or status worry you.

The Main Thing In Life

Here is a great lesson. The main thing in life is not the outside condition, but rather the inner spiritual reality. In other words, it’s not the material things that count most; it’s the spiritual. A Christian is a new man under the same old conditions. Salvation is the old life made new. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). After conversion you live on the same street. You hold the same job. You go to the same school. You have the same wife or the same husband. But you are a new person in Jesus Christ.

The Apostle is not indifferent to the status of people and to their daily problems. He advises that if they get a chance to be free, they should by all means do so. But if you are a slave, recognize that there is a divine Master in your life; if you are free, know that you are a bondslave to Jesus Christ. It was possible for the slave to become free. On his own time, when he wasn’t busy serving his master, he could earn extra money. The results of this moonlighting were deposited, not in the local bank, but rather in the temple. After almost a whole lifetime of saving a few pennies here and a few pennies there, the slave would meet his master in the temple on an appointed day. The priest would bring the cash savings (twenty pieces of silver in those days) and present the money to the master. The slave would then be free, as far as men were concerned; but he now was literally owned by his god. Not until the day he died would he forget that he owed his freedom to his god.

Paul is saying: “Don’t you know that you have been bought with a price? you’re not your own? Therefore, glorify the one who has purchased you.” The Christian, purchased by Christ, is the property of Christ and should be subject to the Master. The Christian should not “kick over the traces” but should remain under God in his daily responsibility.

Sometimes people say to me, “I once had a call to be a missionary,” or “I once felt that I should be a preacher.” Don’t you know that you are a missionary? That you are a preacher? Every person purchased by Jesus Christ must now serve him. It’s not a question of taking ordination vows. Your ordination, your commission, comes from Jesus Christ. God expects us to be Christian right where we are. This takes courage. It takes very little courage to withdraw, but much to stay put and let your light shine where you are.

The Courage To Serve

Think, for example, what it means to be a Christian in East Germany today! At the time of the clanging shut of the gates in the Wall of Shame dividing East and West Berlin, many Christians from East Germany were on vacation. Should they return? Some stayed, but many of them went back to the place where they felt they could serve Jesus Christ more fully—behind the wall! Some of the parents sent their children to school in West Berlin, but they themselves stayed under Communism. There they felt they should be Christian. Thank God for a man such as Otto Dibelius who, as the Bishop of the Evangelical and Reformed Church of the Brandenburg Diocese in East Germany, not only stood up to Hitler, but today takes his stand with the Christians on the east side of the Wall of Shame. He is being Christian where he is.

Think of Dag Hammerskjold, the late secretary general of the United Nations. That man of massive mind, massive charity, and massive patience, gave his life as he stood at the crossroads of rising and falling nations. This man was a Christian, an able, courageous, dedicated, and noble soul of vast mind and lofty spirit. He had a Christian mother and father. His butler, who ministered to his needs as he lived in Manhattan, gives this testimony: “Mr. Hammerskjold was a saved man, a Christian.” In his luggage after the fatal plane crash there was found the devotional book, The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis. Thank God for a man who would be Christian where he was, in the midst of the United Nations.

Some of you have heard of Mrs. Eleanor Searle Whitney, one of the most beautiful women of our nation. Wealthy, charming, intelligent, she is part of Long Island society, with her home on the north shore. In 1957 she went to Madison Square Garden to hear Billy Graham. She went forward, dedicated herself to Jesus Christ, and for five years, in many other countries, but especially here in America, she has been used of God in witnessing to the social set. It takes courage to be Christian among the Four Hundred.

Donn Moomaw, one of the ten greatest football players, the All-American center and linebacker from UCLA, said, “I want to be an All-American for Christ.” When he became a Christian, he stayed on the gridiron. He fought a noble battle as a football player, giving his testimony not from the sidelines, but from the line. This takes courage.

Bob Richards—what a switch he made! Bob was pastor of a large church in Long Beach, California, but felt he could be a more effective witness by getting back into the sports world. Every time you see him, the World Olympic pole vault champion, clean-living and speaking for Wheaties, he is also speaking a word for Christ. That takes courage.

There is also Wally Moon of the Dodgers. And Bobby Richardson of the Yankees of World Series fame, who signed a contract when he was seventeen years of age. Homesick and lonely, away from home, arriving at his first camp at four o’clock in the morning, he found waiting for him a letter from his high school baseball coach, who wrote, “Undoubtedly, you wish you were home. Stay where you are and stay as a Christian. Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you.” Then there is Ty Cobb, that all-time great who played 3,033 games and for 12 years led the American League in batting average. For four years, he batted over 400. On his death bed, July 17, 1961, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Saviour. He said, “You tell the boys I’m sorry it was the last part of the ninth that I came to know Christ. I wish it had taken place in the first half of the first.” Now is the time to be Christian! And to be Christian where you are.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, rather than leaving the entertainment world, stay in it and are Christians where they are. Jerome Hines of the Metropolitan Opera and Mahalia Jackson are Christians where they are. Be Christian where you are. “Wherever God has put you,” Paul said, “stay in that state.

We thank God for Governor Mark Hatfield. This man came to a point of decision when three careers opened up before him: education, the ministry, and politics. He has said to a massive convention in assembly, “Laymen should bear the responsibility of giving witness to their faith by their lives, deeds, and words, seeking not to Christianize institutions, but to bring the individual within the institution into the family of God.” This takes courage.

What About You?

John Glenn, the astronaut, is giving simple witness to his faith in Jesus Christ. But what about you? Certainly, you say, it is good to hear about these famous people. But what about your being Christian where you are? Vance Packard, in his provocative book entitled The Status Seekers, says most people want to be well accepted by the right crowd. Christians, for example, want to be thought of highly by church people. But isn’t that a low standard? Is social acceptance to be our greatest concern? Isn’t it far more important to be in good standing with God? To be “okay” with our Heavenly Father, right with our Creator?

Paul is saying to the Corinthians, in the midst of the quagmire of iniquity which shriveled and seared the soul of sensitive people, “Now that you are right with God and know the difference between right and wrong, be Christian where you are. Don’t get out. Stay.” Anybody can run. Anybody can withdraw from a denomination marked by modernism. Anybody can resign from the club where worldliness is the order of the day. This will preserve your spotless reputation with your fellow church member, but it takes courage to be Christian in that club. The Bible urges you to say, “To me to live is Christ.” To really live—in the locker room, on the nineteenth hole, in the smoke-filled room, at the office, when the cocktails are clinking and the dirty stories are rolling, when a crooked transaction looms—be Christian! As a young person on a date, be Christian where you are! In that examination, in your profession, as a leader in your community, be Christian!

Christians must not be content with vague generalities of religiosity worn as a cloak. We must not be content with the fringe benefits of a secularized Christianity. We must not surrender to the pride of our particular closed order. We must not be satisfied with the abrasion of our modernity. Jesus became so involved with the common things of life that the religious leaders charged, “He eats with publicans, associates with wine-bibbers!” He wasn’t an Essene. He didn’t live in caves of the mountains. He was in the market place where people desperately needed him. He was identified with the common ventures of men. He was moved with love to such a degree of identification with people and was so surrendered daily to his Heavenly Father’s will on earth that he rebelled against oppression. He accepted man’s guilt and died for man’s salvation. He came to bear the burden and the brunt of the hate and the rejection that were the common lot of man. Jesus brought God’s grace at the point of man’s despair. Jesus is there when man comes to the end of himself, when man needs him the most. We must love as Christ loved, in the framework of man’s extremity. We must love Him because he first loved us. We who are justified with God must associate with and help the unjustified. We who have received spiritual life must share this life even to the point of losing physical life.

We must be Christians in our homes, therefore, even with a husband or wife who is a non-Christian. This is the place to be Christian. As a wife you may be concerned about the spiritual welfare of a non-Christian husband. You have talked and talked and it doesn’t seem to do any good—right? Try being Christian in your living. Student, be Christian at school; man, in your work. Be Christian in your lodge life, in your race relations, in your politics, in your business, in your recreation, in your sports. Love your enemies. Go the second mile. Turn the other cheek. Be truthful, honest, helpful, loyal, kind, trustworthy. Reach out to the underprivileged, the minorities, the poor, the lonely, the unloved, and the forgotten, and share Jesus Christ and his love.

For The Whole Of Life

It is easy to be Christian in church for an hour each week, but we must be Christians in all of life. Booker T. Washington, the Negro born a slave on a Virginia plantation of unknown parentage (though he often said he thought his father was a white man), never knew what it was to sleep in a bed until emancipation took place. He slept on the dirt floor of a 14′ × 16′ log cabin which had no windows, only holes in the wall. He lived like an animal, scavenging for food and seldom having enough. He was ignorant and friendless. This young man was led to Christ by his slave mother. As a slave, he loved Jesus Christ. As a slave, he sought knowledge. As a slave, he became a friend to every Negro and an advisor to presidents. This is the man who lifted his race and founded Tuskegee Institute, which now has 1,500 students and an endowment of over $2,000,000. He did not say, “If I had a different place to live, if I were not a slave, if I had enough to eat, if I had better education—then I could be an effective Christian.” He was Christian under adverse circumstances.

For Times Like Ours

Paul said to the slave of Rome, “Be Christian where you are.” He is saying to the twentieth-century slave to materialism, “Be Christian where you are.” To the Space Age man probing outer space and neglecting inner space, the Apostle says, “Be Christian where you are.” To Christians caught in a world of fear because of a bearded bandit on a tiny island, the word of the living Lord urges, “Be Christians where you are.” To little people shaken by N bomb testings set off by big people, the God of history counsels, “Be my royal subjects where you are.” To the children of God vicariously identified with suffering, divided humanity, the Heavenly Father says, “Be sons of mine where you are, and enter the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”—A sermon by Dr. J. LESTER HARNISH, Minister, First Baptist Church, Portland, Oregon.

Choir Of Angels

Pastor Peterson has demythologized Christmas. For at least three generations our Christmas program has followed the traditional scenario. No script has been needed for years. Even the props are standard; the manger, the shepherds’ crooks, the crowns of the wise men, and ‘the angels’ wings are always stored in the attic.

The actors vary a bit, but the casting is uniform. Mary and Joseph are recruited from the Senior department, the shepherds are Junior boys, and the angels are Beginner and Primary girls. We still have a choir loft behind the pulpit, and the most theatrical part of the program is the apparition of the angels.

First a blue light shows the sleepy forms of the shepherds on the platform; then a white spot bursts out on the herald angel rising to her feet in one corner of the loft. At the conclusion of her announcement the whole angelic choir stands to sing as a floodlight is switched on.

A few improvements have been made in the last few years. The herald angel part is now taken by Miss Fixture since it was found that the sudden illumination often left a Junior angel more terrified than the shepherds. The wise men have gone back to stocking feet after an unsuccessful experiment with “zoris” for sandals.

That was before Pastor Peterson began preaching about Christmas. Last year he shook up our wise men tradition. Most of us knew that the wise men came much later than the shepherds, and that the Christ-child was most certainly neither in a stable nor a manger by then. But the Pastor made the details of the biblical narrative so vivid that people began to notice the contrast with our pageant.

This year he treated the shepherds and the angels on the Sunday before our program. The pastor demythologizes in reverse. He doesn’t treat the biblical accounts as myth, but shows the mythology in our understanding of the Bible. Where, for example, do we get our notion of feminine, fluttering, infant angels? The heavenly host is the army of the mighty sons of God attending the Lord of Sabaoth. When the Pastor described these Mighty Ones shouting glory to God in the fields of Bethlehem, it seemed that these angelic invaders must burst the gates of hell and demolish the walls of darkness. They did not hover in heaven, they stood on earth. They did not bring greetings to men of good will; they proclaimed the peace of God’s rule to the men of God’s pleasure.

Yet they came as evangelists, not avengers, to declare the peace of the Prince. The Lord of the angels is found of the shepherds in swaddling clothes.

This demythologizing is disturbing. How can you put that in a program?

EUTYCHUS

Ecumenics And Merger

With mild alarm, I read … “A Layman Views Church Merger,” by Justus N. Baird, Jr. (Nov. 9 issue). In his pattern of logic, Mr. Baird seems to commit one of the oldest fallacies in the world. This is the premise that because a given movement may possibly fall victim to certain misuses, the entire movement must therefore be evil.

It is perfectly true, I admit, that the enthusiasm of some persons for modern ecumenical efforts is stimulated by the rather shallow motive of a yen for organizational bigness. No human motive ever is simon-pure. But above this—and I am confident that it does lie above—is the imperative of Christ himself that “they all may be one.” …

A. HUGH DICKINSON

St. Philip’s Church (Episcopal)

Laurel, Del.

His illustration of the birds seemed to be the keynote for the whole article. My conclusion: His whole article is for the birds.…

RICHARD N. MILLER

Mt. Morris, Ill.

I am in accord with Mr. Baird in that I am skeptical of mergers on the national, denominational level.

The article suggested four courses of action for the individual layman who is faced with merger and is opposed to it. I would like to add a fifth course of action which applies to merger on the denominational level.…

I suggest that the individual layman who is faced with a denominational merger should consider leaving that denomination and seeking a church which is autonomous and not controlled by its denomination. A local church of this type would be only slightly affected by a merger of its denomination with another. Although I do not belong to such a church, it has been my experience to find that the self-governing church, as a rule, has more vitality and its denomination places much more emphasis on the needs of the local church.…

The question of which type of church polity is best is not the point of this discussion. The point is simply that the layman who is disturbed by a denominational merger and questions the present “big business” organization of segments of modern Protestantism may be much more at home in a self-governing church.

JAMES H. TREDINNICK

Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

The fruit of life together is clarity of vision—a broad view of the Church in the world actively engaged in the life and death struggle to win and hold men for Christ. I say that Mr. Baird’s spiritual myopia is based upon a dollars and cents, anti-officialdom bias which is not only unreal, but unrealistic. That there are problems of communication between the national bodies and the local congregations cannot be denied. But Mr. Baird’s suggested annihilation of the national bodies that propose to merge is certainly not the answer to any of the problems which mergers raise.

KARL H. BREVIK

Bethlehem Lutheran Church

Kalispell, Mont.

Justus N. Baird, Jr. makes the following statement: “If the multiplicity of denominations confuses the African aborigine, we owe him no apology.” I beg to differ. In my opinion, an apology of the first magnitude is owed.… I have spent … three years of my life preaching Christ to “African aborigines” in Nigeria’s Eastern Region. Sincere pagans … have asked, “Sir, which Christ do you want us to follow?” I always answered them by quoting John 17:20, 21, and similar passages which teach that there is but one true Christ who prays for his followers to be one. I apologized to these Nigerians as sincerely for the sin of denominational division … as I apologize on behalf of white, professed followers of Christ who participated in the West African slave trade years ago.…

Back to the birds just a minute. Their biggest trouble was choosing a “leader” and a “flight plan.” Mr. Baird may have something there. If we really choose Christ for our leader and the New Testament for our flight plan, we could be one.…

REES BRYANT

College Church of Christ

Searcy, Ark.

It seems to me this article reflects a policy of harrassment of the ecumenical movement rather than any attempt to offer constructive criticism.…

NORMAN D. STANTON

Director of Christian Education

North Avenue Presbyterian Church

New Rochelle, N. Y.

I agree with much that [he] writes.… Certainly if splitting churches has often proved a costly method of upholding our “convictions,” then our working together, in whatever form, cannot be without some “price.”

However, I would like to add a fifth alternative, … that is supporting local councils of churches. These councils are not pushing for church merger, but they are endeavoring to be a channel through which churches, especially laymen (as opposed to ministerial associations), can work together. Local councils are not usually ambitious so far as having heavy overhead, or in endeavoring to become a sort of super organization. However, they are anxious that the Protestant churches make some united impact and witness in the community, while at the same time holding to their own peculiar beliefs and autonomy.

LEONARD R. HALL

Executive Secretary

Peoria Area Council of Churches

Peoria, Ill.

Teilhard De Chardin

May I beg to add a few words to your Review of Current Religious Thought (October 26 issue) on Teilhard de Chardin?

Teilhard de Chardin had to withdraw from his chair at l’Institut Catholique de Paris, because of his opinions on evolution. In spite of the plea of the Rector of the Institut at the time to retain him, his superiors were adamant. Ever thereafter he lived under a cloud.

All his life Teilhard de Chardin was in fact a pilgrim in exile. His career in China, Indonesia, America and South Africa, was spent abroad. If he was allowed to make occasional trips to France, he was never permitted to live permanently in his country. Under the same policy, when he was over seventy years old, in 1951, he made his last trip to New York where he died in 1955. It is true that he gave some lectures at La Sorbonne in Paris. However, even after making a personal trip to that city, he was denied by the authorities of his Order in Rome to accept a chair at Le College de France, the highest institution of learning in France.

Teilhard was forbidden to publish his works during his lifetime. Copies of them were made by friends and circulated in small circles. A short time before his death, on the friendly advice of a brother priest, he willed all his manuscripts outside his Order. Otherwise all his writings would have never seen the light. They would still be buried or scattered at large in scientific reviews.

In spite of the controversial issues raised around him, Teilhard de Chardin will remain a “Sign in our Times.”

P. M. LETARTE

Highland Park, Ill.

Ole Miss: Two Echoes

You do have some faint glimmering of the fact that the basic issue (Editorial, Oct. 26 issue) is not merely race: Hundreds fought at Oxford who have not the slightest concern with integration or segregation as such. This fact is brought out clearly in some of the articles by the newsman who died there; is that the reason the marshals murdered him?

Your wording is interesting on page 25: “Use of Federal troops and consequent mob violence.” It is quite true that one was consequent upon the other. There would have been no mob violence, as you term it, if it had not been deliberately provoked by the Federal marshals. The students, thrown out of their dormitory by marshals moving Meredith in, were arrested as rioters; coeds driven out of a dormitory where no disturbance had occurred by tear gas thrown in by marshals, were beaten with clubs and handcuffed to trees. Several Mississippi law officers trying to control the crowd were fired upon and wounded by the Federal Gestapo.…

S. S. JONES

Louisville, Miss.

Contrary to your notion, the mob violence was the cause, not the consequence, of the use of Federal troops at Oxford—as anyone who has read the daily papers during the period can testify.…

Why don’t we come right out and say that, so long as the states’ behavior indicates that they are insisting on their (states’) rights in order to deny their citizens theirs (citizens’), then the only adequate moral response to the states is raucous and mocking prophetic laughter!!

WAYNE REINHARDT

Nashville, Tenn.

Work Of Norlie

“When a man thinks he knows a lot, he has a lot to learn.” “You could not take it.” Who does not see sermons leaping from such texts? These are 1 Corinthians 8:3 and 3:2 … from Norlie’s translation.

Olaf M. Norlie of St. Olaf’s College, Northfield, Minnesota, worked quietly on it for years.… It is the clearest and most American version I have seen.…

It does not have the English literary texture of Phillips’ masterpiece, but it has certainly passed the other translations this side of the water. You are missing something if you do not have this devoted and reverent translation on your desk. I might make bold to consider myself a minor authority on the New Testament, since I have read it through each week for 30 years in a score of languages and a dozen translations.

CHARLES G. HAMILTON

Booneville, Miss.

Can’T Help Believing

One cannot help believing that the mode and doctrines of baptism on the part of most denominations is a primary cause of present world conditions. The origin of both present-day modernism and Communism can be traced back to churches that have failed to follow the Bible in doctrine and mode of baptism.…

H. F. SCHADE

Kitchener, Ont.

To Locate The Tension

In his article “Protestant-Catholic Tensions” (Oct. 12 issue), C. Stanley Lowell presents “the parochial school aid question” as one of the areas of tension.… May I suggest that this is not so much a tension between Protestants and Catholics as it is … between those who believe religion and morality to be an integral part of the educative process and those who do not.

I, a Christian Reformed Calvinist, am happy to join the Catholics in their position that religion is a vital part of education and that all children are entitled to an education from the publicly gathered tax monies, regardless of which school they may attend.… I cannot join my Protestant brothers who, apparently, believe that religion and morality can be separated from education and that the government may only support the education of children who attend these areligious and amoral schools. [I conclude] that the government favors an areligious education over against a religiously-oriented education. And, this, it seems to me, violates the Constitution, which protects the right to practice one’s religion.

It is because I believe as I do that I have joined Citizens for Educational Freedom. Although it is true that 90 per cent of CEF’s membership is Catholic (which is quite reasonable in view of the fact that 90 per cent of the non-public school enrollment is in Catholic schools), I feel quite at home with my Catholic friends, for we seek the same goal of equity in the education of our children.

JOHN VANDEN BERG

Chairman of the Board

Michigan Citizens for Educational Freedom

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Death And Taxes

When first I read my Bible I did not realize:

(1) That when it said “the moon (shall be turned) into blood” that this would be a threatening possibility within human means during my lifetime, nor that my taxes would help to make it so. I confess, I used to think the passage was symbolic.

(2) That when it said “every eye shall see him” that man himself would create the Telstar network to facilitate this visual miracle on a globular world, nor that my monthly telephone bill would help to make it so.

(3) That when it said “there shall be no night there,” that my country would send up a pilot flash in the sky to give six minutes of nightlessness to the Pacific area. With a little more experiment and control, and some more taxes, this could take on a global continuity in nightlessness.

STANLEY H. BEAN

Albany, N. Y.

Search For An Ethic

According to the New York Times, Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, urges the formation of a board of professional moralists to advise businessmen and politicians who wish to distinguish right from wrong.

Well, Mr. Warren surely needs some elementary moral advice. Any man who favors homosexuality on the same day he opposes prayer, or on any other day, is desperately in need of being told that sodomy is a sin against the laws of God.

The great trouble with Mr. Warren’s suggestion is that a body of governmental professionals to regulate the rest of us would probably be closer to the Chief Justice’s perverted moral opinions than to the divinely revealed laws of the Bible.

GORDON H. CLARK

Butler University

Indianapolis, Ind.

Danger: Gunmen At Large

It I could go back and do it again, I’d study at least one more subject in seminary. Then I’d do all I could to see that others studied it as well. The subject is “firearms.” There is a remarkable similarity between preaching and the study of guns. Not that it should be this way, mind you, but it is nevertheless.

Let’s get down to cases. My first exposure to the types of preaching available to the pan-Protestant Christian came in the seminary. A buddy who had been assigned a preaching post in a nearby village for the coming Sunday was asked how his sermon preparation was coming along. His suave answer was as smooth as a diplomat’s coat tail. “Oh, I’m not doing a lot of work before time; I’m just going out and shoot from the hip.” The old pro himself! A bona fide hip shooter—the man who’s so confident he doesn’t even need to take aim.

Then, there’s his blood first cousin, the fast draw artist. I wonder how often this fellows shoots himself in the foot, then hops around complaining he was sabotaged. If you couple his stock-in-trade with a machine gun, then “Look out, everybody!” Already blasting forth before the choir can sit down, never letting up in the staccato delivery, he finally throws up his hands and quits, saying something about the peace of God which passes understanding. He’s never at a loss for words.

More prevalent is the type whose preparation is unquestionable. You know he has been thinking. Else how could he put together so many nice-Nelly words that really say nothing? He simply goes off in all directions at once. His condemnation of sins or admonitions to be good are so broad as to defy comprehension. He volleys forth point upon point, but since he never hits the same target twice, it’s obvious that he’s only a scattermatic trying to comprehend the length and depth and height—all in one sermon!!

This preacher too has a cousin—he’s the rifleman. Firmly positioned with only the target in mind, he is perfectly capable of putting bullet after deadening bullet through the middle. Make no mistake; this is no slouch at work. His perfect shots are masterful. The only difficulty is that the congregation may be only spectators at his shooting gallery. Who is moved by watching an expert take target practice?

Last Sunday I was incapacitated and had a fresh experience (via TV) with a type I had not seen in a long time. Here was an example of the heavy bombardier. His artillery was polished and pointing. He had the trigger of this big brass cannon filed to a fly’s weight. There would be a five- or six-word lull in the pulpit battle and then without warning—BOOM! The effect was more terrifying than “the rockets’ red glare or the bombs bursting in air.” Fact is, I never did see where the banner really was! And the lesson I learned was not to get sick and miss church on Sunday!

At least he did not disappoint you, like a friend of his—the flash-in-the-pan. Here is the preacher who “gets off a good one” in the introduction, but from there on (he must have looked a week to find that story) it turns out to be a steady downhill drag, with the emphasis on the “drag” for the last thirty minutes. There oughta be a law against having your hopes raised up like that, only to have them expire on the spot.

Two other types deserve honorable mention. The gun collector handles all sorts of firearms, but he only toys with them. One Sunday he needs only the cane-bottom chair to make like Billy Sunday; the next Sunday you would think he is lecturing on the plant life of the Falkland Islands. His buddy is the nuclear fizzizist. He begins with some wild and incoherent idea, only to spend the rest of his time cleaning up the debris created by his explosive and heretical-sounding thesis. At last, he appears from the woods, pointing to a pea-sized crater and a mountain of unrelated rubble. Somehow or other the contraption refused to go off.

But there is another kind of preacher who honestly does occupy the great majority of our pulpits—probably the one you and I hear when we can—and is not a firearms man at all. Maybe the seminaries don’t need to teach a course in this. Our favorite man in the pulpit is most likely a very uncomplicated man doing an uncomplicated thing, like the postman who simply leaves a letter in your mailbox. It is a letter of good news from God about what he has done in Christ. And your reaction is like Kirkegaard’s, “Why it’s about me that this is written! This has my home address on it.”

RAYMOND A. PETREA

Faith Lutheran

Warner Robins, Ga.

“Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,” wrote Charles Lamb to a friend; “and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.” As usual, the gentle, stammering little man with the tragedy-scarred face speaks for most of us. And yet (again as usual) he hints at neither the heights nor depths of man’s agelong confrontation of these two imponderable realities, for man has always been space-haunted and time-haunted. Nor has modern thought reduced the mystery. Instead, it has deepened it, for it asserts, among other things, that there is a sort of incredible interchangeability between the two concepts, and between them and motion. The lay mind is increasingly inclined to agree with certain modern physicists who declare that the ultimate nature of reality is, quite explicitly, unthinkable.

These words, therefore, are not written in any hope of shedding broadly philosophical light on the mystery of time. Their purpose, rather, is to point to one or two beams of light shed on the subject by Scripture.

Time The Shadow

Because it is impossible to define time (although it seems easy when one first sets out to do so), most of our inner awareness of it is expressed in the form of similes and metaphors. Time is said to creep with petty pace or to rush like a winged chariot; to flow silently like a dark river or to blow upon our faces like an interstellar wind; to drift down like snowflakes or to blow over man’s habitations like sands of the desert. Or it may be personified: “Old Time the clock-setter, that bald sexton, Time,” writes Shakespeare; time the reaper; time the devourer; time the dart-thrower; time the shadow at our elbow.

Some simply deny its existence. To the nominalist, “time” is no more than the word we have invented to denote a feeling we have, a feeling of purely subjective significance.

To the scientist, time is a phenomenon susceptible to measurement and instrumentation. His search, therefore, is for a scale, a universal constant. Until recently, the speed of light in space has served this need, but now experiments with “laser” light (Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) suggest that light is traveling faster than it used to. This has led to a query in a recent magazine: “Is it the speed of light that is actually changing, or time itself?” (Time, April 20, 1962). The mind finds itself incapable of pondering the second alternative.

The practical-minded man sees time as a simple matter of minutes, hours, days, and so on. But he may be quickly forced to admit that these are merely statistical derivations from the fact that our earth happens to revolve about the axis and about the sun at a certain (and changing) rate.

On the other hand, it is the Newtonian conviction that time is absolute, that each moment possesses in itself a temporal reality, not dependent upon the relationship of any given moment to all others nor upon that moment’s relationship to co-existent events.

A recent book on the subject—and there are surprisingly few in the history of philosophy and science—The Natural Philosophy of Time, by G. J. Whitrow (London, 1962), denies both the Newtonian and the subjective views. To Dr. Whitrow, there is a “unique basic rhythm of the universe,” but it is not absolute in the sense of being without beginning or end. “The concept of the first moment of time is not a self-contradictory concept,” he writes, “for it may be defined as the first event that happened.…” But, objects a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement of June 22, 1962, this asserts that “there was a time after which there was a time before which there was no time.” Dr. Whitrow would probably acknowledge this, for to him time is event; in a static universe there is no time. After the last event has occurred, after the last atom has disintegrated and energy is lost from totality, time will cease again. If, however, the slightest particle in the universe moves, time begins, marks the event, and stops again when the particle finds its rest.

But whatever may be the contradictions and confusions inherent in intellectual attempts to define time, man’s emotional and artistic responses to his temporal environment have been almost uniformly poignant. Each individual’s experience of time transcends abstract theories about it, and that experience is uniform. It teaches that time is linear, and that its inevitable sequence is this: nothingness-beginning-middle-end-nothingness. It is the nothingness at each end which haunts and frightens. “Our little life is rounded with a sleep”; man is a tragic figure (as all great literature depicts him) because he is a transitory one. Every moment lived leaves one a little closer to the end. The grains of sand can be seen as they fall into the bottom half of life’s hour glass, but the top half is covered and no one can tell how many golden grains remain. Hence the hedonist’s frantic effort to jam into every moment as many pleasurable sensations as possible; hence the mystic’s efforts to transcend the condition of mortality and link his soul, in ecstasy, with eternity; hence the despair of the suicide who finds it intolerable simply to wait, in suffering, for the final running out of life.

The naturalistic philosopher, incidentally, has a difficult time explaining man’s time-caused sadness. Whence his ineradicable longing for a condition which, to the naturalist, he has never known and which, by the nature of things, he can never achieve? What “natural” forces have implanted this hopeless dream and this inconsolable sadness?

The mystery is deepened by man’s incapacity, in his own wisdom, even to imagine what he does want. Not simply an indefinitely extended lifetime, surely. The Wandering Jew was cursed, not blessed, by everliving. The Sibyl of Cumae had eternal life, but when (as Petronius tells it) the boys jeered at her in her cage and asked, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die.” Nor does he want absorption into the Wholeness of things, as taught by certain oriental religions, for that involves total loss of being, a prospect which daunted even the fierce hearts of Milton’s fallen angels. Nor does he seriously want the fleshly paradise of the Moslem, where all sensual delights are eternally magnified and the pains eradicated. Solomon had a chance to come pretty close to this ideal, and it bored him to distraction even before he had lived out his human lifetime.

In all of human history, true light breaks from only one source, the pages of Scripture. There we learn that man will never be satisfied with less than, first, a re-made, regenerated life, righteous and reconciled to God; and, second, a radically different, time-less environment, whose dimensions are the limitless ones of God, the God whose self-definition is the simply majestic assertion, I AM.

Time To Turn In

Surely earthly time must be one of the mysteries into which the angels long to look. It is not “eternity” which is strange to them, but the confining bourne of time, where men live. Time, they may be imagined to reason, is a strange, bewildering phenomenon, derived from the appalling fact of rebellion, sin, and their consequence, death.

And so Scripture shows it to be. The tragic picture of man in history, his hand ever at his lips bidding adieu, his heart ever oppressed by the fear of ending, his mind tormented by bewilderment—this is not the picture God originally painted in Eden. Before the fall, Adam and Eve existed in a living, dynamic condition of sequence and change, meaningful in that events were relevant to each other, but were not part of a chain ending in nothingness. Only with rebellion from the God of eternity did man’s dimensions shrink to his own scale and his philosophy become bounded by his own dimmed reason. Bereft of relevance to that which is Absolute Being, man was forced to think in terms of dualism, to attribute reality only to the tension existing between opposites. Thus light is real only because there is darkness; good is real only because there is evil; life is real only because there is death; and time (being) is real only because there is non-time (non-being). This is the two-sides-of-the-coin fallacy which, at least for the existentialist, logically demonstrates that the essential quality of human existence is tension, anxiety, between being and nothingness.

Scripture refutes such dualism. By sin came death, scriptural death, separation from God, which in Scripture is always distinguished from physical dissolution and which is never described as non-being or nothingness.

But from the first tragedy-darkened pages of Genesis the light bursts forth; for just as God in his omniscience and love transformed the terrible fact of death itself into the means by which the Son, sent in the fullness of time, made atonement for sin, so did he insert (as it were) into the fabric of eternity this incredible thing called time. By this amazing device, by creating time and by inserting it between the pronouncement of doom upon sin and the carrying out of the sentence, God gave Adam, and all men, “room” to repent in. The very burden of time, therefore, under which all men suffer, was made the channel of God’s grace, for he transcends time, foresaw its every instant, its beginning and its ending, and determined the moment within time when his Son should invest it with eternity by giving his life a ransom for many, an event in time, effective out of time. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, not because he subjectively feels time differently from us, but because he is outside it, using it for his eternal purposes and to his glory.

In timelessness, in eternity, every act is eternally valid. Only in a temporal environment can we “put things behind us,” change direction, turn—as the Bible so often exhorts men to do. There is no scriptural hint that Satan can repent. His rebellion occurred in the fixed condition of eternity, and is eternally binding, for “God spared not the angels that sinned but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into claims of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment” (2 Pet. 2:4).

But God’s love showed itself to man by removing him from eternity and by putting him into time. Quickly Adam was barred from the tree of life, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Gen. 3:22). (The tree is to appear no more until it grows in the Holy City, “in the midst of the street of it,” bearing twelve manner of fruits, its leaves “for the healing of the nations,” Revelation 22:3.) The mysterious mode of being into which Adam was placed may be said to have two effectual terminations: first, of course, the ending of each individual life in death; and second, the foreordained termination of the entirety of human history, after which all things will be made new (Rev. 21:5). No man can foretell either termination, nor whether, in his case, the latter will forestall the former. He only knows that now he is.

Scripture leaves no doubt about the use which man is to make of his incalculable gift of time, nor about the terrible urgency of using it rightly. “… Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is” (Eph. 5:14–17). “For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succored thee; behold, now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).

To all such exhortations, the world’s wisdom recommends instead a little more slumber, a little more sleep, a little more folding of the hands in sleep, on the grounds that “there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?” (Eccles. 3:22) All Satan need do is to cast man into a state of impotent Prufrockian lassitude, or to divert him with baubles; for simply not to seize, in time, the proffered salvation is to enter eternal doom. There is no hint in Scripture that anything remotely resembling the astounding time-bound drama of human history will ever again be injected into timeless existence. Hence the tireless urgency of the prophets; hence the parables, metaphors, allegories, and direct injunctions throughout Scripture to act speedily; hence the burden of drama of such verses as this: “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink” (John 7:37).

Time In God’S Hands

Every life on this planet, therefore, occupies, with regard to time, one or the other of two radically different conditions. Those souls who have, in effect, said to God, “We will hear thee again of this matter,” and who are yet dead in trespasses and sin, simply await the running out of time in order to enter an eternity of separation from God. Those who have accepted the offer of divine pardon through faith and repentance have already died spiritually, crucified with Christ, and have received the new life in Christ, a life panoplied with the glory and eternity of the Son himself. For them, time’s teeth are drawn, and death is swallowed up in victory. What remains of human life to them is lived “as workers together with him,” in the knowledge that their labor is not in vain but is effective to their present well-being and future reward. So far is mere physical death from being fearful that Paul found himself “in a strait betwixt” a desire to continue his labors in love here, and “a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better” (Phil. 1:23).

We shall never truly comprehend the nature of time while yet we remain confined within it. But from Scripture we can see something of its origin, its use, and its relevance to eternity. We can remember that “time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop,” and escape becoming those “wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever” (2 Pet. 2:17). And we can marvel at God’s sovereignty and grace in using for his purposes this mystifying phenomenon, this strange thing “of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed.”

END

Objection

If Jesus had only argued,

We could have answered Him.

If Jesus had only said,

“Don’t you think …?” instead

Of “You must believe …,”

We could have answered Him.

But since He came

With all the authority of eternity

Behind His every word,

And since He was, Himself, the Word,

We have no way to argue,

No way to connive, debate;

No right to speak.

If Jesus had sought an argument

We might have given one.

But he seeks our souls.

FRED MOECKEL

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” So wrote Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx in their celebrated Communist Manifesto published in 1848. If that document were published today it would have to be amended to read: “A spectre is haunting the world—the spectre of Communism.” More than one billion souls have now come under the rule of Communist governments—one-third of the world’s population.

One of the notable characteristics of Marxist tyranny in every country where it has become securely established is its unflagging hostility to religion in every form, and especially to the Christian faith. This is not surprising since, working for human freedom, religion has ever been one of the strongest factors in history. Men and women who believe in God and his government of the world are not good material for any form of slavery. That is why all dictators who wish to make individual citizens subject to the dictatorship of the state, realize that first they must destroy or silence the Christian churches and ministers within their bounds.

The Marxist Cornerstone

This is how Lenin expressed himself on Marx’s dictum, “Religion is the opium of the people”:

“This dictum of Marx is the corner-stone of the entire Marxist world outlook concerning the problem of religion. All contemporary religions, churches and all types of religious organizations, Marxism forever looks upon as organs of bourgeois reaction serving to defend the exploitation and stultifying of the working class.” Lenin, Stalin, Malenkov, and now Khrushchev have steadfastly fashioned their attitude to religion by this statement. There has never been a softening of this rigid dictum except as the hand of Soviet leadership has been forced to relax its pressure.

Always there have been those observers of the Russian scene who assure us that Soviet opposition to religion was prompted by the unquestioned corruption of the Orthodox Church and especially by the fact that the church permitted itself to become a tool of tzarist tyranny. If only these leading Marxists could come to know some of the enlightened manifestations of our Western brand of Christianity, their attitude would undergo a decided change, say these observers.

A Mistaken Diagnosis

This, however, is a mistaken diagnosis. Some years ago Professor Julius F. Hecker, a native Russian and a teacher in a Soviet university, wrote these revealing words on the subject of religion:

There is a tendency among some writers on Communism to ignore the religious issue or to regard it a misunderstanding, interpreting Communist opposition to organized religion as an opposition to the abuses of religion but not to religion in its pure state. This is a great error. Communists, particularly Lenin, have always emphasized that reformed, modernized, socialized and every other improved religion is worse than the old Orthodox reactionary religion.…

Religion in every shape and form, and especially Christianity, is regarded by Communism as its archenemy.

Only once did Stalin ever relax his unrelenting opposition to Christianity, and then only when circumstances forced him to do so. When Hitler invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, he already had trained Orthodox priests standing ready to take over and operate the churches throughout the newly acquired territory. In addition, he broadcast in the Russian language that religion would soon be completely free throughout the Soviet Union. What a caricature of the truth Adolf Hitler, Liberator of Religion! At this moment 1,300 German pastors were behind bars in his own Reich. When Stalin learned that his people were going over to the enemy, he became frightened almost out of his wits and began to give a larger measure of freedom to the Russian churches. He sent his emissaries into the Russian mines, internment camps, and the frozen reaches of Siberia to ferret out almost-forgotten Orthodox priests and bring them back to newly opened churches. It might have fared ill with Stalin and his government had not the Metropolitan Nikolai come forward and urged the Russian people to rally to the motherland’s defense and rout the Nazi invaders.

Ever since these events the Soviet government has been more lenient with the Orthodox Church and its leadership, while at the same time steadily working to circumvent everything for which the church of Christ stands.

Stalin’s cynical attitude toward religion was revealed in 1942 when his government printed in English a beautifully bound book purporting to show the important place religion held in Russian life. This author was one of those who received a copy of the book. It was bound in sky-blue cloth, edged with gold, with many pages of artistically printed photographs. What gave the show away was a line of small print on the back page, bearing this information: “Put out by the Anti-religious Press of the U.S.S.R.” Several thousand of these had been posted before the censor discovered this unintentional blunder.

Turning The Tide

What can we Christians do to turn in our favor the tide that has been running with such strength toward Communism?

1. We should seek to recapture the spirit of first-century Christianity with its passionate proclamation of Christ’s inevitable triumph. Present-day Christians, by and large, have lost this note of conviction. Our leadership speaks with uncertain trumpets, and the masses of Christians are not preparing themselves for battle. We lack the spirit of confident militancy and are characterized by confusion, disunity, dubiety, and defeatism. It is the Communists who tell the world that the forces of history are on their side—that the wave of the future is sweeping them on to victory. It is the Communists who manifest confidence and tireless enthusiasm. They mean business. We do not. We plod wearily on—or merely mark time. It is the Communists who are sending out the greatest number of missionaries into all quarters of the globe, trained technicians who move into every vacuum that our apathy creates. We appear to lack both the will and the strategy of victory.

Where is that holy zeal that enabled the early Christians to vanquish the ancient gods of paganism and within three hundred years to lift the cross of the despised Galilean higher than Rome’s proud eagles?

Professor T. R. Glover, in an oft-quoted passage, puts the matter succinctly: the Christians “out lived,” “out died,” and “out thought” the pagans. They beat them all hollow in living, says Glover. Would to God that the same could be said today.

Christianity has not failed, but we have failed. Faith in their crucified but risen Lord freed all the true Christians of the fear of death and inspired them to stand defiantly before governors, magistrates, and kings. This spiritual dynamic saved the world once. By the grace of God it can save the world again.

2. We ought to choose carefully the battleground on which we will meet our adversary. Up to the present, Marxist strategists have induced us to meet them on their ground. Millions of Americans followed with absorbed attention the discussions that took place a few years ago between Mr. Khrushchev and representatives of our government and of American business. The Russian leader told us industrial production had made such unprecedented advances in so short a period in the Soviet Union that backward and uncommitted peoples, marvelling at this materialistic triumph, would cast in their lot with the Communists. In the foreseeable future, said the Russian leader, Marxism will win the whole world to its banner without recourse to war.

And what did our representatives say in reply? They talked of America’s materialistic might, her industrial strength, her monumental production, her high standard of living with comforts and luxuries undreamed of by any other people in history. An American government official remarked to Mr. Khrushchev that the strongest nation is the one “whose people are the best fed, the best clothed, and the best housed.” The Soviet leader could go back and report to his people that America is more materialistic than the Soviet Union.

Did that spokesman for the American people truly state our case? Was it the abundance of material things in this land that for more than a hundred years caused oppressed peoples all around the world to look to this nation as the champion of human freedom and the defender of the rights of man? Was it material resources and wealth upon which our forefathers laid the foundations of this great republic—or was it rather great moral and spiritual principles, from which we have drawn our strength through successive generations?

Why didn’t our representatives ask Mr. Khrushchev, in the hearing of all the world, when the Soviet government would be prepared to give to the Russian people and Soviet satellite nations the right to choose their own leaders and their own form of government? Why did they not ask him when he and his politbureau intended to fulfill Marx’s prophecy of the “withering away” of governmental tyranny—monopoly and political absolutism? The thing that Marx most feared was that the monopoly of the party would become the monopoly of a small oligarchy and the dictatorship of the oligarchy end in a tyrant who would become a kind of irresponsible and (in the case of Stalin) bloodthirsty monster, from whose decrees there could be no slightest hope of appeal.

We must remind the Russian people, and indeed all nations, that the Soviet system with its athestic absolutism denies man’s individuality before God. We must affirm and reaffirm those spiritual principles upon which Christian democracy rests: belief in the dignity and worth of every human being; in the priceless value of human freedom; in the brotherhood of man based upon the Fatherhood of God; in those inalienable rights of the individual that have come to us, not from the hand of a dictator but as the gift of the Creator when he fashioned man in his own image and likeness.

The great postulates of freedom must be proclaimed, not once or twice or even a score of times but hundreds of times, until they become deeply implanted in the conscience of mankind.

3. We must insure that in our own lives and in our national life we do not contradict the very precepts we proclaim. One of our truly urgent tasks is to close the gap between our profession of equal opportunity and justice for all classes and races within our own borders, and our too-frequent practical denials of these high ideals. The Communists are forcing us to become a better people.

A special responsibility rests upon Protestant Christianity, which in the past has so often provided the leadership for spiritual and social advance, to manifest once again its concern for the sacredness of personality and human rights. Our churches, in which millions of people assemble each week, may well become the spearhead of a new spiritual reformation that will combat and root out moral flabbiness manifested in a national obsession with sex, a low estimate of marital vows and fidelity, preoccupation with material success, failure to recognize the dignity of labor, and an inordinate love of pleasure and mass entertainment.

We have lost faith in ourselves and in those lofty national purposes that have ever been our inspiration and hope in the past because we have been losing faith in God and his providential ordering of the world. The leadership of mankind will not be secured simply by the possession of megaton bombs—though we must not relax our vigilance—but by the nation that is dedicated to moral and spiritual ends which are bigger and more important than itself and its material possessions. In the face of a resolute, dedicated, disciplined, God-fearing people, mountains of difficulty will become a plain across which they shall speed to their divinely appointed goal.

END

MISSION TO THE WORLD

There is a paramount need for distribution of Bibles and Christian literature not only to meet the needs and the yearnings of the uncommitted world but as well to meet the pagan propaganda in the vast amount of Communist literature which is everywhere being distributed. Without the truth being available, Communism in this way mobilizes the thinking and hearts of its victims.

Above all, what is needed today is a renewed and vital Christian faith. The Christian believes in individual worth and dignity and the sacredness of the human personality.

Mankind today faces a struggle between the forces of religion and irreligion, between the forces of good and the forces of evil in the terms of ultimate human destiny.

The strongest power we possess is the practice of the Christian religion with its cardinal tenets of love, dignity, humility, and faith.

The Communist challenge covers religious, social, political, economic, and military fronts, and lays a tremendous burden on those who believe in spiritual values.

Can it then be said that the day of the individual or group missionary effort is past?

Mass Christianity of the Christian nations does not “rub off” on others who need it. It depends on personal relationships between God and man—and between man and man. To meet man’s hunger and need it demands the constant reinforcement of the zeal of dedicated individuals. It is in this, more than in any other aspect, that Christianity differs from other religions. It is personal religion, a religion that must be enshrined in the soul as well as the mind—and that, for all practical purposes, means that it must be renewed again and again in each individual.

The missionary zeal of individual Christians is the hope there is for the bringing about of a better world in time to stem the tide of that other world force which is the very opposite of everything that is Christian—the ominous and ever-threatening tide of materialism, whose political arm is International Communism.

It is sometimes said that a world struggle is being waged for men’s minds, but it is more than that. It is a struggle for men’s souls. Therein lies the assurance of ultimate victory. Here and there Communism may for a time win the minds of men, but it can never win their souls. What the Man of Galilee came to tell the world two thousand years ago is the need of today.…

The world needs the acceptance of the fundamental principles which Christ gave to mankind to meet the problems of mankind. In this age, one of the watersheds of history, Christian men and women need courage re-inforced on faith, for all history shows that however evil may have triumphed over short periods of time, good has ultimately triumphed.

We need a renewed realization that “except the Lord build the house they labour in vain that build it.”

Believing this, I have constantly advocated the need for provision being made for a room for prayer and meditation in the Parliament Buildings, similar to that established by the United States Congress. The Prayer Room in Washington is only a small room 17 feet by 18 feet. Its overall concept is: “This nation under God.” The concept rests for its greatness on the open, massive Bible. It signifies the need for divine guidance and blessing. A similar room will shortly be available in Ottawa.—Prime Minister JOHN G. DIEFENBAKER of Canada in remarks to the assembly of the Baptist Federation of Canada.

A missionary said one time that the Devil never laughs so heartily as when he can get Christians fighting on the wrong front, for then he has the main field to himself. You could hardly find a better description of what has been happening to Christianity in its struggle with Communism. We have been fighting too many secondary battles and we have too often lost sight of the main conflict. I believe that Communism is not primarily economics or politics, but religion. I believe that a false religion can be overthrown only by true religion. I believe that in this contemporary struggle—the most serious we have faced in a thousand years—we shall win or lose according to the strength or weakness of our Christian faith.

If the struggle is merely political, then we may expect the State Department to save us. If it is economic, we may trust the National Association of Manufacturers to lead us. If it is military, then the Pentagon will give the orders. But if it is essentially a spiritual and moral conflict, then the Christian church must be held responsible for the outcome.

In Russia, I observed so many signs of a rival religion that it was frightening. The State becomes God, and the secular rites take the place of the holy sacraments. A materialistic, earthly paradise is substituted for the kingdom of God, and individualism is original sin. There is zeal, loyalty bordering on the fanatical, and a sense of purpose and unity. I can still hear a young guide saying earnestly to me, “If my English were better and I had more time, I could convince you that the future is ours.” And that future is to be a materialistic paradise.

I am not too worried about Communism as a political system, although it has won some notable victories. But I believe democracy can outlast it and that men who have known freedom will not long endure tyranny. Communism as an economic system has certain undeniable strengths, but in the long run, the victory will go to free enterprise, and even Communism itself—its theory to the contrary—makes concessions in that direction. The scientific and military advances made by the Soviets are astounding, but I have faith in our brains and ability to more than hold our own in this rivalry.

My chief concern is the enthusiasm, the unity, the willingness to sacrifice, the sense of purpose, the puritanism, and the faith in the future which mark Communism. In such a fight there can be no quick, decisive victory, and the struggle must be waged in the daily life of men. This is the first century again, and the Christian church faces strong, entrenched, vigorous foes. This is A.D. 312 with Christians seeking desperately for another Constantine and a vision of the flaming cross in the sky as the promise of victory. It is A.D. 732 with a longing for another Charles Martel and another victory at Tours. But we must not wait for salvation from warriors, and the churches must gird themselves to take the offensive. For we shall not win with a continuation of our defensive tactics. It is time to hurl Christianity’s challenge straight at Communism and invade its strongholds. While it will sound naїve to many, I believe our defense must be worship and our offense must be evangelism.

Raising A Banner

We begin with God, for he is our refuge and our hope. Unless we understand this and act upon our understanding, we have no adequate protection against Communism’s advance, and we have no basis for destroying it. The real battle cry is sounded every Sunday morning when a congregation of Christians stand together and proclaim, “We believe in God the Father Almighty.…” This is no perfunctory, unimportant act, but the raising of the banner and the blowing of the trumpet.

For against tyranny with its attempt to control our souls, “a mighty fortress is our God.” How wonderful is the testimony of the Psalms and how inspiring is the example of Israel! God is a hiding place, and no matter how fierce the pagan attacks, we find our safety in him.

God is not only a fortress but he is an invader. He comes into human life through the Law, the Prophets, and the Word. But he comes primarily in Jesus Christ our Lord, and he enters every phase of human life and experience. He moves through men into the center of the evil condition. The history of Christianity has been a story of invasion—of going into all the world. We are not a people called upon to merely defend what we value and build the big barns for our increase. We are to enter a new kingdom and claim the whole world—yes, and outer space—for the King.

It is now time for the Christian church to get off dead center and move the civilization which it has created into an affirmative mood. We have sulked in our tents long enough while fearfully whining about our problems. No nation, including Soviet Russia, is to be out of bounds so far as our offensive is concerned. We have seen what life becomes without God, and we have watched a world sink into despair in its pride and hatred. Communism is a judgment against us. Now, on an aggressive spiritual basis, we must sound again the cry of the Crusades: “God wills it.” When Isaiah said “the crooked ways shall be made straight,” he did not imply this was to be done by a government committee. This is the Church’s task, and only Christianity can challenge atheistic Communism at its most vulnerable point.

In the year 1944, the Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas visited Moscow and consulted with Stalin. He notes in a recent book (Conversation with Stalin, Harcourt, Brace and World) that the doctrinaire Communists had been shocked to discover that in the crisis the people turned to the Church. It was the great statements of faith that reached their hearts with freshness and vigor. The government propaganda slogans seemed tired and stale in comparison. The words that set men on their feet and start them marching are always words about God.

Our ally is the human spirit, and strangely enough, it has been the Communists themselves who have shown us this truth. Their successes have not been attained by outproducing us or by contributing more to the underdeveloped nations. They have put more emphasis on hope, and they have shown a keen perception of the truth that man does not live by bread alone, even when he is hungry, although this denies their theory.

We have done a poor job in telling the world the kind of society we have built in America. It is easy to paint a dark picture of our failures, which, so far as it goes, may be true. But what free men have accomplished in establishing individual dignity and social responsibility in this country is one of the greatest stories ever told. It is not merely coincidental that this fruit has ripened on the Reformation tree. If the masses of men seek participation and recognition, then our attack must be on a system that sees them merely as servants of the State. Our promise is not only that men may sit under their own vine and fig tree, but that they may live in a society which recognizes that every man has the right to equal justice and equal status before the law.

What are the uncommitted people seeking? Primarily, I believe, they seek recognition as free nations and free persons. They want a better economic life for themselves and their families, but they are breathing the heady air of liberty. So they make mistakes and often seem amazingly unaware of obligations. But the revolutions have been inspired by the Gospel, and Christian teaching has certainly been subversive from the viewpoint of police states like Angola and Mozambique. But as far as propaganda power is concerned, the Christian Gospel makes the Communist promises about as alluring as ten cents’ worth of cold potatoes. The great answer for those who are hoping to be somebody is in the One who came to give us life. As John says, “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (1:12, RSV).

In the face of an almost universal drive for independence and freedom, Christianity challenges the sentimental basis on which this drive too often rests. The people under colonial domination have often assumed that the removal of the outside powers will give them freedom. It has not worked that way, and we watch small nations trade an imported tyranny for a domestic one. The Communist doctrine is that freedom comes when one class is substituted for another, as if virtue were an economic affair. A visit behind the Iron Curtain reveals a sullen, sad, proletarian atmosphere that is as different from the free societies of the West as darkness from light. All men are sinners, as the Bible makes clear, and all men are the victims of a lust for power. Only the democratic doctrine that no man is good enough to be trusted with unchecked power over another will ever establish a free society. And this stems out of the Church’s doctrine that each man is of final importance but all men sin.

It has never seemed more obvious to me than just now that the conflict is spiritual and religious. No single concentration of physical power will protect us. We have to make clear to ourselves and to the enemy that our faith in God revealed through Jesus Christ has brought us through crises as great as this one. The Christian faith changes men, creates new societies, and lifts them to new moral heights. It is that power which sustains us in the perilous fight. For no matter what the immediate future may be, we know that the ultimate triumph is in God and in Jesus Christ, whom he has sent. This faith is the assurance that even Communism’s successes are but steps toward its ultimate failure, while even our own setbacks are but incidents along the road to final victory.

END

The American people have been buoyed up by Khrushchev’s backdown in Cuba and by the apparent split between China and Russia.

This may be false security. An official high in the Kennedy administration told me, “This could possibly be a trap to lull us to sleep again while the Communists consolidate their positions, heal their differences, and plan new strategy for world domination.”

Who would have thought three years ago that Russian generals would command a well-armed and well-disciplined army only 90 miles from American shores? Who would have thought that the four-power government of Berlin would be split by a wall, or that American troops would be fighting in a Southeast Asian war, or that China would dare to attack neutralist India?

I have just returned from touring most of the countries of Latin America, where we encountered some harsh facts. Castro’s agents are busy everywhere, and in some places such as Venezuela and Guatemala they have resorted to terrorism. I was in Latin America during the Cuban crisis, and I found leaders were not so much afraid of the rocket and missile bases as they were of the continued Communist subversion activities.

Few of the articles which I have seen lately have emphasized one very important point. In spite of a few recent reverses, the Communists have been winning during the last 15 years. This is the unvarnished truth, and it is time we faced it squarely. It is difficult for us Americans sitting in the quietness of our living rooms watching television to comprehend what has been taking place in other parts of the world. Because of America’s heritage of political freedom and our long-standing respect for constitutional law, both of them by-products of the Christian faith, we have thus far been spared the chaos and confusion that Communism has engendered in many parts of the world.

From my vantage point of world travel, the view is far from encouraging. During the past few years I have talked to a number of Communist leaders in several parts of the world. I am convinced that we face a titanic, self-confident movement that may never take “No” for an answer, that in its drive toward world domination it has little intention of stopping or giving up. While there may be a vast difference between the Soviet and Chinese brands of Communism, yet when the chips are down they will probably be united. The thing that unites them is their ultimate goal of building a kingdom on earth without God. They plan to build a world totally unlike anything history has ever known. Their methods of obtaining this goal may differ, but their objective remains the same. During the past few years, when the free world finally struck back after a long series of aggravations in such places as Guatemala, Berlin, Korea, and even Cuba, the Communist machine has merely paused, regrouped, and started using other tactics. They have often used smiles—employed “peace”—which led to Western relaxation, only to frown suddenly and resume aggression. These situations have not upset the table of conquest; they have only slowed the pace of operation temporarily.

We of the free world can discuss, we can debate, we can suggest, we can appease, we can exchange notes, we can beat our breasts, we can analyze our failures, we can issue ultimatums, but not a single one of these things has managed to halt the Red Tide during the past 20 years.

When we seek summit meetings to reduce international tensions, we realize the Communists have little intention of making concessions unless it is to their advantage to do so. We have also learned from sad experience that they do not tell the truth. Mr. Gromyko sat in Mr. Kennedy’s office and brazenly told him there were no offensive weapons in Cuba when American intelligence already had proof that there were.

When we try to increase mutual understanding through the churches, we often find our Christian efforts treated like imperialist propaganda. A European bishop and respected leader in the ecumenical movement told me that the World Council of Churches has become in measure one more theater of conflict in the cold war. This was certainly evident both at New Delhi and at the Central Committee’s recent discussion of the Ghana problem in Paris. The World Council finds it difficult to rebuke the Communist world for fear of “offending” the churches in Eastern Europe.

Thus at every turn Western man finds himself frustrated in his efforts to maintain his freedom and identity in the oncoming tide. His appeals to reason are lost in the verbal avalanche that sweeps from the other side. His outlays for needy neighbors are often used to turn these neighbors against him. The words “freedom” and “democracy” and their defense have become confused by the other side’s use of the same terms to explain its plan of enslavement. Very little seems to work.

In the face of such a juggernaut what shall we do?

Searching The Future

Many Bible students are beginning to search the Scriptures anew in terms of eschatology. Dr. Markus Barth of the University of Chicago recently startled a chapel audience at Harvard University with an address on “The Second Coming of Christ.”

The question that many students of the Bible are asking is simply this: Are the present days of crisis prophesied in Scripture? Even a casual investigation would seem to indicate that the Bible warns of a time of turmoil and trouble such as the world has never known. A predicted period of crisis was the burden of Christ’s prophetic ministry. He even ventured so far in the Olivet discourse as to look ahead through the centuries and mark out the major movements that would transpire throughout the entire age of the Church. As one theologian summarized His words:

“The age would start with bitter persecution of His followers. There would be wars and commotions, but this would be no indication of the imminence of the end. The age would conclude with the return of the Son of Man with power and great glory.”

Christ warned the disciples not to be deceived; he exhorted them to possess their souls in patience, and when certain predicted events came to pass to look up, knowing that their redemption was drawing nigh. In this same passage Jesus warned against our “hearts being overcharged with surfeiting.” He urged us to be ever watching and praying. He indicated that “those who become involved with the sin of the present order will neither watch nor pray, and their spiritual senses will be overtaken with sluggishness. They will be unable to peer through the darkness of the midnight and catch the first faint glimmer of dawn.” There is no doubt in my mind that the great upheavals predicted at the climax of history will be preceded by certain manifestations that indicate their nearness. Spiritual Christians who search the Scriptures will be able to read the signs of the times.

Up to now the Church—particularly in the United States—has tended to live in a dream world. I find that the Church on the rim of the Communist world is far more “aware” than we are.

Are we perhaps under the spell of some diabolical spiritual power? There is an unmistakable mystery in all this. The Bible speaks of the “mystery of iniquity,” and the power of antichrist. Could it be that our apathy is a strategy of those principalities and powers that war against the souls of men? The Scriptures teach, “Because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved … for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie” (2 Thess. 2:10b, 11).

Could it be that Communism is some vast judgment that God will allow to fall on the West for the deep moral rot that has infected almost every country? Will history repeat itself? Concerning Israel, who had rejected the truth and gone into immorality and idolatry, 2 Chronicles 36 says: “God sent his messenger the prophet to warn the people because of his great love for them, but they mocked the messenger of God, despised his word, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people till there was no remedy.” Therefore “he brought upon them the king of the Chaldees.” In other words, God allowed a great pagan king to bring judgment upon his own people. Jesus said, “To whom much is given, much is required.” The English-speaking world and Western Europe have had far more spiritual light than any other nations in the world’s history. Except for a dedicated minority, we are rejecting that light intellectually and morally.

Events of the present hour should shock the Church into renewed dedication and vigorous action. It is reported that on the day that the Bolshevik Revolution began in Russia, church leaders in Moscow were wrangling over what color to paint the walls of a certain cathedral.

Loss Of Initiative

My second observation concerning Communism and the present world crisis is this: It seems to me that in the face of materialism’s appalling gains the Church has retreated into a defensive position. Some of us have panicked as we have viewed with horror the rise and spread of the anti-God colossus of materialism at home and of Communism abroad. So we have become defenders rather than crusaders. We are on the defensive rather than the offensive. I personally think we have spent far too much time in apologetics, and not enough in declaration. The early Church did not defend the faith; they propagated it. Christ needs no defense. He needs to be proclaimed! He needs to be exemplified in human personality. He needs to be lived!

This genius marked the early Church. They took Jesus’ words literally: “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men nigh unto me.”

Rome was the “Moscow” of Christ’s day, and the goal of Roman imperialism was to bring the world under its dominion. In many ways, of course, Communism cannot be compared to Rome. For one thing, Communism has all the modern psychological techniques of “brainwashing.” It also has modern weapons whereby a relative few can control an entire nation. (Only 3 per cent of the people of the Soviet Union are Communists.) Despite the tyranny of Rome, however, I read no speeches in the Bible by Peter, John, or Paul against the political regime of their day. They preached Christ and they preached Christ alone. They declared his Lordship and his Redeemership, and did it within the context of a tyranny that eventually imprisoned and killed them. Their powerful Christian thrust was shortly to shatter the Roman imperial colossus, and to inaugurate the Christian era.

We are living in one of the most challenging periods of history. It has been my privilege to preach the Gospel in every part of the world, and in every area I have found dedicated followers of Jesus Christ. I have seen thousands of all races and speaking many languages march forward on every continent to receive Christ as Saviour. This age is a great time to be alive. These are days of unusual opportunity. Never before have we had such wonderful tools for propagating the faith.

Dwight L. Moody once said: “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. Its ruin is getting nearer and nearer. God said to me: ‘Moody, here is a lifeboat; … rescue as many as you can before the crash comes.’ ”

The Lord Of History

Another thing we must remember is that Christ is the Lord of history. “He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” The calendar cannot contain him. Nothing takes him by surprise! Kingdoms are shattered, nations crumble, systems fall in the wake of him who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He shall have the final word, the final reign, the final glory, and the final judgment! Nothing, not even the gates of hell, can prevent his triumph.

Even today, in the Soviet Union, Jesus Christ is causing trouble! Newsweek recently reported: “American church leaders have been returning from the Soviet Union with reports of unexpected vitality in Russian religious worship. But the trend may be a fleeting one. The Communist party announced last week an accelerated drive against religion, including a major campaign for the popularization of atheism.”

The atheistic regime is disturbed by the undercurrent of Christian belief that persists despite redoubled efforts to stamp Christ out of the people’s conscience. Thus, by asserting his mastery of the present, Christ again vindicates his Lordship of history.

Until the day of his final victory and consummation there will be many upheavals and wars and rumors of wars. The Church may undergo persecution to an extent and with an intensity the world has never known. It is not impossible that the tide of Communism and materialism now sweeping the world may be motivated by the winds of divine judgment. In turn, however, God’s judgment will also descend upon the world of atheism, materialism, and worldliness. If the Scriptures are clear at all they are certainly clear on this point: “The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ.”

The Holy Spirit has kept me from the horrible abyss of thinking that man by his own accomplishment would bring all things to perfection. Instead, the Bible teaches that left to himself, sinful man will bring about all the disasters announced in its pages. It could well be that the weaknesses of the West, together with the failure of the Church, have made possible the strength of Communism.

The Christian posture should be one not of defense, but of preparation for “that day.” These should be days of personal rededication; of retreat into the closet of prayer; of girding our children for days of possible persecution because of their faith. I personally find myself studying far less for sermon preparation these days and more for devotional purposes, and pray that I may be worthy to suffer for Him if he so decrees.

The Church needs to develop an atmosphere in which martyrs are made. As Lester DeKoster has said, “The church’s whispers must become shouts; her lethargy must become enthusiasm; and her subdued light must become a beacon set upon the hilltops of the world.”

While she still has opportunity, the Church should evangelize with new vigor and call nations to repentance from sin to avert the coming crisis. The progress of history is not inevitable. Not even the progress of judgment is inevitable. When God decided to judge Nineveh, he sent Jonah to preach repentance. Nineveh repented of her sin and judgment was spared. Said Isaiah the prophet: “Except the Lord of hosts had left to us a very small remnant we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.”

When and in what measure judgment shall fall will be determined by the depth of the Church’s dedication to her Lord. Can we say that the Church as it exists in the United States is made up of God’s people? Are we the ones of whom the Scripture declares: “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death” (Rev. 12:11)?

END

ULTIMATE GOAL—Communists—in all countries—oppose religion because they do not recognize any authority beyond the human.… The [Soviet] regime tolerates a limited number of open churches. But there is no doubt that this toleration is a temporary expedient, and that the ultimate goal is to eliminate religion as a force in the Communist society.—“Religion Survives Against Heavy Odds in the U.S.S.R.,” Senior Scholastic, January 10, 1962, p. 20.

MOSCOW’S METHOD—In its over-all attempt to destroy the Catholic Church, the Communist regime of Walter Ulbricht is sedulously imitating the methods of his mentors and protectors in Moscow. First of all, pressure is exerted to deprive the Church of its most precious prerogatives: to instruct the faithful in the teachings of Jesus Christ, to maintain religious schools.… Finally, Communist regimes try to establish dissident “national churches,” which they manipulate brazenly in their all-out attempt to eradicate religion.—WALTER DUSHNYCK, “The Catholic Church in East Germany Today,” The Catholic World, April, 1962, p. 14.

COMMUNIST MISSION—Communism in American churches has gone shockingly far!… In 1942 I was ordered by the Party to maintain strong ties with the Baptist church.… I discovered that in Boston the Party had … a special subversive cell of hardened, disciplined, trained agents of Stalin, men who were ministers …!—HERBERT A. PHILBRICK, “The Communists Are after Your Church!,” Christian Herald.

FBI UNDERCOVER AGENT—Mrs. Brown also contributed information relating to the infiltration of church organizations and the use of such organizations for fund-raising, propaganda, and recruiting purposes.—Synopsis, “Communist Activities in the Cleveland, Ohio, Area,” Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, June 4 and 5, 1962.

MASKING ITS FACE—The Party is today engaged in a systematic program to infiltrate American religious groups.… The Party’s objectives are several: 1. To gain “respectability”: “… a church is the best front we can have”.… 2. To provide an opportunity for the subtle dissemination of communist propaganda.… 3. To make contact with youth.… 4. To exploit the church in the Party’s day-to-day agitational program.… 5. To enlarge the area of Party contacts.… 6. To influence clergymen.… If he can, by conversion, influence, or trickery, be made to support the communist program once or a few times or many times, the Party gains.… The church, in communist eyes, is an “enemy” institution to be infiltrated, subverted, and bent to serve Party aims.—J. EDGAR HOOVER, Masters of Deceit, Henry Holt & Co., 1958, pp. 325 f.

In Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, a textbook prepared by Soviet scholars in Moscow and currently being used by members of the Communist Party, U.S.A., this statement appears:

Materialists do not expect aid from supernatural forces. Their faith is in man, in his ability to transform the world by his own efforts and make it worthy of himself.

Here, in essence, is a basic appeal of Communism—a powerfully deceptive yet attractive appeal—that Communism realizes the true dignity of man, enables him to reach the pinnacles of spiritual achievement not possible in any other way. The word “spiritual” is often used by Communist writers, as, for example, when the same textbook states:

In the proletariat the Marxist world outlook has found its material weapon, just as the proletariat has found in Marxism its spiritual weapon.

This Communist emphasis that Marxism-Leninism realizes the dignity of man is a constant refrain of Party literature. “The dominant characteristics of the Communist man,” one Party organ states, “will be an all-embracing humanity and comradeship, a higher sense of freedom, personal initiative and a creative approach to life.” Another Party writer proclaims that Communism “for the first time … gave man the realization of his dignity and intellect.” Nikita Khrushchev, speaking about the Program adopted last year by the Twenty-second Congress of the Russian Communist Party, stated:

The Program is permeated from beginning to end with one aim—“Everything for the sake of man, everything for the benefit of man.”

This exaltation of man, that is, Communist Man, as he allegedly will be trained by the Party, gives a dynamic power to Communism—a power which we overlook at our peril.

Why does it work to the advantage of the Communists? Because the Party, utilizing this appeal, claims—very falsely—that it is working for the welfare of the individual man, woman, and child. “The Communist Party … champions the … interests of the workers, farmers, the Negro people and all others who labor by hand and brain …,” proclaims the latest Party constitution. Party leaders tirelessly assert that Communism takes its stand to end the exploitation of man by man, of class by class, of group by group. “One who is a Communist does not easily affirm that he belongs among the great and millions-strong army of the known and the unknown Communists who … have organized the poor and down-trodden, the oppressed and the despised, the hated and the vilified … who have led in the building of magnificent societies, infinitely better than those they replaced, in one-third the globe. To count oneself part of this most noble and sacred company is no small thing.”

This theme in jingled even in the “poem” of a Chinese “revolutionary” writer who proclaims:

I walk through the street in fetters,

My aspiration becomes even loftier.

I risked a prisoner’s fate,

That workers and peasants may be free.

In this false appeal, the Communists are confronting-directly and openly—our religious traditions. Though the Party proclaims, in open propaganda in this country, that it has no quarrel with religion, it is in actuality saying: “Look, churchmen, you proclaim that you desire to help the poor, the underprivileged, the unhappy. You say that you want to see man grow in nobility. But what have you done? Nothing but make his lot even more miserable. Don’t you know that religion is based on superstition and folk tales? The Church is an inextricable thread in the fabric of capitalism, doomed to destruction along with that debased culture. You are not helping man, but actually degrading him. Admit that religion is an opiate, mere ‘spiritual gin,’ obscuring rather than solving the problems of human existence, making man weak and timid, instead of strong and vigorous.”

Whereas Western bourgeois ideology is caught in a desperate crisis of disbelief in man and the future of civilization, the Marxist-Leninist world outlook inspires a desire to work for noble social ideals.

Here is the measure of the Communist thrust against the Church today. Here is the fanaticism of the Chinese Communist poet who wrote:

The enemy can only cut off our heads,

He cannot shake our faith,

For the doctrine we hold

Is the truth of the universe.

Or the Party poet who proclaimed:

We are young Bolsheviks,

Everything about us is like iron and steel:

Our thinking,

Our speech,

Our discipline!

The Plight Of Communist Man

Perhaps, however, that young poet, in his Communist enthusiasm, unwittingly betrays the inner meaning of the Marxist-Leninist exaltation of man when he uses the words “everything about us is like iron and steel.” For, indeed, if we look penetratingly at the Communist profession of faith in man, in its alleged concern for the plight of the human personality, we find a ghastly chamber of clanking iron and rusty steel. Communism, in actuality, is completely uninterested in man as an individual, as a living entity, as a child of God. The tragic irony of this mid-twentieth century decade is the heart-rending dichotomy between the vaunted claims of Communism to exalt man and its actual relentless and perverse subjugation of him to inhuman tyranny, with millions of men, women, and children behind the Iron Curtain being encased in a Communist strait jacket of conformity, meaninglessness, and spiritual impotence, all in the name of making man the master of his fate!

Here is the Communist confrontation of the Christian church. Communism is a false secular religion. As such, it is attempting to expropriate the outgoing love, concern, and humanitarianism which, over the years, have been the inner heart of the Christian faith. Though bitterly atheistic, Communism claims to bring to a higher degree of perfection basic moral principles than does the Church! In the name of love it is forging chains of hate; in the name of humanitarianism it is fashioning inhumanity; in the name of freedom it is imposing tyranny.

Actually, both in Communist theory and Communist practice, man is viewed not as an exalted but as a servile creature. The Soviet authors of Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, in a discussion of materialism and idealism, say: “Man is only a particle of multiform nature.” “What has raised him high above the level of the animal world?” ask the authors. The answer is explicit—and herein lies the true Communist conception of man: “His life and labor as a member of society.”

Under Communism man is not an individual, a child of God, endowed with certain inalienable rights, who can make a distinctive contribution to society, who is sacred because he bears the Divine Image.

No, this “particle of multiform nature” assumes value because “it” exists as a member of society, as a part of the collective, as a part of the larger social mass. The Communist thinks of man not as an entity with respect within himself, but only as a tool. What can he contribute to the ongoing ambitions of the state? What can he produce? And how fast? How can he help the revolutionary cause? What can he do to carry out the will of the Party? He is a utilitarian statistic, a production gauge.

Hence, Communism treats man as a thing rather than a person; as a material substance to be indoctrinated, manipulated, and directed for the revolutionary movement rather than as an individual with inherent dignity of his own.

This leads to tyranny. Communist policies of state are determined not by what is good for the individual, but by what is paramount for the state; not in terms of what can be done to increase the creative power of the citizen as a child of God, but in terms of how that person can best advance the interests of the Party. Communism is not genuinely interested in the inner feelings of man—his loves, his fears, his hopes. Sympathy is considered a weakness; sentiment, a bourgeois “hangover.” The true Communist Man is one who puts aside “childish” things, such as personal interests, and labors obediently for the state. The “morality” of Communism demands that the individual give unstintingly of his time, talents, and energy, never asking how he personally will benefit:

A Party member should unreservedly submit to the interests of the Party. He should be strict with himself and public-spirited and should have no personal aims or considerations.

Under Communism the fight is always against what is called “individualism”—the tendency of the individual to think and act in his own personal interests rather than those of the Party. The Communists, asserts Ho Chi Minh, President of North Viet Nam, in a lecture recently reprinted in Political Affairs, organ of the Communist Party, U.S.A., must always “come to grips with the enemy within: individualism.”

The Church’S Great Task

The Church today has a vital responsibility in unmasking the false pretensions of Communism to be the exalter of man, the source of the ennobling virtues of love, justice, and humanitarianism. A demonic secular morality, clothed with phrases stolen from our Judaic-Christian heritage, must not be allowed to pose as the spiritual fount of man’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations. More than any other institution, the Church is in a position to rip aside this false posture, to expose these Communist teachings for what they really are—a swindle of incredible proportions.

At this Christmas season, we might ask, “What can Christians do to answer the false claim that only in dialectical materialism can man find the true grandeur of his spirit?”

1. Know what you believe as a Christian. Far too many church members today are not sufficiently cognizant of what they believe as Christians. The Communists know for what they stand. Do we as Christians?

2. Attend church and Sunday school regularly. Make worship and the study of God’s Word a part of your daily life.

3. Be a personal witness for your faith. In Communism, we are facing a dynamic, dedicated ideology. “To sacrifice … even one’s life without the slightest hesitation and even with a feeling of happiness, for the cause of the Party … is the highest manifestation of Communist ethics.” Christians must live as men of God, standing firm on their beliefs, making their lives shine in the service of the Creator.

4. Take seriously the Christian mission of love, justice, and truth, which is the inner heart of the Gospel’s teachings. By our prayers, our personal witness, our daily lives, we should make the light of the Church shine so brightly that the false pretensions of Communism to represent these virtues will wither away.

5. Live that optimism and hope which are inherent in the Christian faith. The Communists are geared for a long fight. “We clearly understand that the cause of Communism is a ‘100-year great task.’ We must fulfill the great mission which historical evolution has devolved upon us.” Christians have a faith which gives strength, courage, and vision. Never must they allow the fanaticism of the Communists to surpass their own dedication and evangelism.

Reporting to the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed—with great enthusiasm—that the Communists were “storming the skies”—“in the figurative and in the literal sense of the word.”

Yes, “storming the skies” they are—not only by Sputniks but by denying the Supreme Creator of all the universe.

But in this defiance, they are writing their own epitaphs—the doom of tyranny and inhumanity.

Here is our hope—and our challenge.

END

The ecumenical structure, if it is to have any solidity, must be built on a sound theological basis. Of this fact we have fittingly been reminded by two distinguished European theologians, Bishop Gustav Aulén and Professor Wilhelm Niesel, in books which have appeared in recent months. The voices of these scholars will command not only respect but also, it is to be hoped, response, for their approach is one of depth as they earnestly address themselves to the present ecumenical situation. The value of their contributions is enhanced by candor in analysis coupled always with charity of temper. The cause of unity is never well served by theological double-talk or evasion of doctrinal issues.

In his book Reformation and Catholicity, Bishop Aulén emphasizes that “the Reformation confession, like that of the ancient church, is a defence of the biblical confession of Christ. Its biblical character is obvious and unquestionable.” It is true that, in contrast to the Nicene Creed, the Reformation confession does not enjoy universal recognition. Is it not presumptuous, then, to designate it as a principal Christian confession? Bishop Aulén replies that the claim is justified “on the basis that it stands in positive agreement with the confession of the ancient church and especially with that of the New Testament.” Indeed, he contends that these “three chief confessions of Christendom” are in reality one: “They are all confessions of Christ as Kyrios.”

He points out that the appeal to the authority of Scripture on the part of the Reformation was nothing new, but was in fact “in line with the constant practice of the Christian church through the centuries.” That the Reformation returned the Bible to its central place in the life of the Church was due to “its clear conception of the Word as a means of grace.” This necessarily involved the restoration of preaching to its rightful function as “a means of grace.”

So far from the transmission of grace being dependent on episcopally conferred orders (valued though they may otherwise be), the Word and the Sacrament do not lose their power if these are lacking. “They have their validity in themselves”; for “it is not the office of the ministry that makes the means of grace a means of grace, but rather it is the means of grace which enables the ministry to function according to the commission and authority of Christ.” Christ, Bishop Aulén explains, “is not and cannot be tied down to any one form of ordination to the ministerial office.”

“There is no such thing as an impartial study of denominations,” Professor Niesel observes in his book Reformed Symbolics: A Comparison of Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. “Ecumenical thinking,” he maintains, “far from making everything relative, requires each of us to take seriously the truth which has found him and to speak frankly about it to the others.” Thus, he sees his task as essentially a critical one: “We must ask the denominations how they respect the Gospel entrusted to them, how they relate themselves to it, and how they communicate it.”

Important in this connection is his insistence that “the Church is a mission or it is nothing at all.” “It stands here on earth in Christ’s stead. Not that the Church itself has to accomplish, extend, or complete His work. It has all been done already by Christ Himself. It is finished. What the Church has to do is to proclaim this news ‘to all men.’ ” On this the Church’s very existence and survival depend, for “the Church is the congregation of those who hear and accept God’s Word.”

Dr. Niesel speaks of “the great scandal caused by the inability of Christendom to sit down together at the Lord’s table”—in large part occasioned by particular theories of ministerial validity, sacramental grace, and “apostolic succession.” But he hopefully asks: “Can unity still be impossible when men submit together to the Word of Scripture?”

Bishop Aulén refers to the common devotional services which are a regular part of ecumenical meetings as having “more than anything else revealed an inner fellowship which no confessional boundaries are able to destroy”; but he calls attention also to the “deep schism” that is apparent at these same gatherings: “Nothing can emphasize more forcefully or more accusingly manifest this schism than the fact that fellowship is broken off at the Table of the Lord.” Recent developments within the ecumenical movement lead one to expect that this scandal will prove to be more rather than less intractable in the future.

How can this impasse be overcome? Certainly, as has been suggested, only by submission to the Word of Scripture. But that submission itself is not a human act. It results from the working of the sovereign Holy Spirit in the hearts of men. And therefore what is needed, and what we should constantly pray for, is a powerful movement of God’s Spirit over the troubled face of Christendom. This will assuredly unite Christians in the truth of the Gospel and also in the fellowship of the Lord’s table.

Because of the respectability and complacency and cheapness of the profession of Christ in our Western world, it may perhaps be that this experience will be recaptured by the Church only in circumstances of persecution. This was the case with Wilhelm Niesel and his fellow believers in Hitler’s Germany when the crushing pressure of the Nazi tyranny closed in from all sides against the Church. It was in these circumstances that representatives of the churches met at Barmen in May, 1934, and drew up the memorable Barmen Theological Declaration. As Dr. Niesel explains, however, this gathering was not concerned with the theoretical formulation of doctrine: “it was concerned rather to testify that in that treacherous time it had heard out of Holy Scripture the voice of the Good Shepherd.”

Barmen was essentially a declaration of the faith which had become so precious—and so crucial—for those who professed it. It was not a matter of bargaining or apology: those present were arrested by “the truth which proves its power in life and in death.” Face to face with this, they were confronted by God himself, present in power in their midst. They “knew that they stood in the presence of this God; they listened to Him and were therefore His people. So in Barmen, and always whenever Christ comes on the scene, it was a question of faith and obedience. At Barmen then there was no negotiating with opponents in order to reach a theological compromise. The faith was simply confessed to them.” We too need to know that inner compulsion which caused the Apostles to declare: “We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).

THE WORLD SINCE 1945—The world has been in global conflict—using the term to include political, economic, psychological and military strife—ever since 1945, and there have been about 30 limited or small shooting affrays since World War II. Some of the present ones—notably in Vietnam and on the Indian-Chinese frontier—are sizable campaigns.… The current crisis could add other shooting episodes to this list. There are already points of extreme tension, unsolved political problems, divided countries all over the world. There are any number of scenarios that could be imagined that might raise the curtain on battle of one sort or another.—HANSON W. BALDWIN, The New York Times.

RECENT HEADLINES—“Soviets Rush Cuba Bases; U.S. Warns of War”—The Detroit Free Press. “Soviet Ships With Missiles; K’s Choice—War or Peace”—New York Herald Tribune. “Chinese Batter India in ‘Undeclared War’ ”—The Boston Herald. “The Congo: Again the Bombs Fall”—New York Herald Tribune. “India: The Undeclared War Becomes Hotter”—Los Angeles Times.

REPORT FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA—The grim, “unofficial” war in Viet Nam is opening up and will soon become more like a full scale military operation. Both sides will be wheeling heavier weapons into the area. American soldiers will be getting more and more involved in the actual fighting.—PETER ANDREWS, Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

NO PEACE PRIZE—There will be no Nobel Peace Prize for 1962. In making this announcement, the Norwegian parliamentary committee in charge of the award has refrained from offering any explanation, but none is really necessary. After all, one has only to take a quick look around the world to find reason in abundance for the committee’s decision to wait for a more propitious time to bestow the honor on a person worthy of it. Certainly, as far as 1962 is concerned, wars and rumors of wars, big and little, actual and potential, continue to abound throughout the globe.—The Sunday Star (Washington, D.C.).

STATISTICS ON VETERANS—The United States has about 22½ million veterans, of which 15.2 million served in World War II.—Topeka Sunday Capital-Journal. About 40 per cent of the population is made up of veterans’ families.… Since World War II, one out of every five Americans 18 years or older has served in the armed forces.—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

THE END OF WAR—Once upon a time it was called Armistice Day.… And then the word “Armistice” became a mockery.… The holiday became Veterans Day, as if we had finally gotten around to believing something Plato wrote three centuries before the birth of Christ: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”—Columnist BOB CONSIDINE.

AN INDISTINCT LINE—The line between war and peace grows somewhat confused in these times. Technically we remain at peace. But what is the meaning of peace to more than 30 Americans killed by Communist gunfire in Southeast Asia, or to a U-2 pilot shot down over Cuba, or to a rifleman on duty at the Berlin Wall?—Boston Traveler.

FADING MEMORIES—Veterans’ Day, its deep meaning long since lost in the continuity of wars, will be generally “business as usual”.… This trend away from the necessary solemn observance of a day of tribute to the nation’s heroic war dead is regrettable.—The Idaho Sunday Statesman.

HEROES AND HORSES—Some have asked whether the Armistice of November 11, 1918, that was to end wars, is still a valid occasion for a holiday. Others have questioned the advisability of another holiday in November. But no one could quarrel with yesterday … a three-day, post-seasonal vacation. Summer came back.… What’s more [it] was the occasion of the eleventh running of the Washington D.C. International at Laurel.… The band played that stirring national anthem, the Marseillaise, and the crowd which had lost its money on the three American horses came through with a resounding cheer.—Columnist GEORGE KENNEDY, The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.).

POSSIBILITY AMIDST PERIL—These are, as recent events have again reminded us, perilous times—more perilous, perhaps, than any since the Black Death of the Middle Ages.… In such peril there is also hope. The agony of the A-bomb menace is that it comes at a time when it is technologically possible for humanity to build a world of security, plenty and justice. It is such a world that wise and well-governed states must seek; and this is the central task of the United Nations.—The New York Times.

AN IMPERFECT WORLD—In the past 17 years, with varying degrees of success, the U.N. moral and physical presence has achieved at least five other important separations among the powers that might well have meant general war.… We would like to live unafraid and give our children a chance. But it is a risky thing even to be born these days and the prognosis is dangerous. We live in an imperfect world perfectly equipped for self-destruction, and the U.N. is an imperfect instrument in protecting us from this.—HENRY J. TAYLOR, New York World-Telegram.

THE ROAD AHEAD—Now we have got in front of us a long time of great danger. The removal of missiles from Cuba is a tactical victory, but only a tactical victory—perhaps even a strategic defeat.… We are almost certainly heading for a series of international crises, any one of which can be worse than the one before it. We must school our nerves and hearts for whatever is to come. We must prepare ourselves to live with deep trouble, and to live with frustration, and to live with despair. If we do that well enough, we cannot be defeated finally.—NICK B. WILLIAMS, Editor, Los Angeles Times.

ANY MOMENT POSSIBILITY—Nuclear war may start “at any moment by accident, miscalculation, or madness.”—President JOHN F. KENNEDY to United Nations in 1961.