Every man who stands in the pulpit Sunday after Sunday has his moments, and sometimes his seasons, when he wonders whether all his efforts are futile. His congregation grows slowly if at all; his sermon-critics judge the Word but remain mere sermon-tasters, not judging themselves by the Word. His preaching seems to change nothing; the saints seem hardly to grow in saintliness, and all things seem to remain as they were. Discouraged he doubts his own effectiveness. At worst, he may even doubt whether his Gospel really says anything relevant to a social, political, economic, and cultural order caught up in convulsive upheavals and revolutionary changes. Looking back over the year, he finds little in his congregation that reflects any real difference, and he wonders half consciously, half instinctively, whether he can bear to go on for another year.
It is not difficult to understand why futility and debilitating discouragement soon overtake the man of the pulpit who offers his hearers only his own best insights and suggestions for the agonizing human problems of our times. Has such a pulpiteer any right to expect an effective ministry and to enjoy the sense of accomplishment? In his heart of hearts he knows that he has no ultimate answer, that the next man’s suggestions are as good as his. How can he expect to fill church pews and human souls if the main diet he offers is a review of best sellers, something his members can get—and get better—from newspapers and local literary clubs? If the only light he raises to cheer man’s way is an analysis of the latest political crisis in Istanbul, by what right does he expect any radical change in men’s lives and hopes? Lippmann, Cronkite, and Krock do this more expertly, and even they are not turning the world upside down. If to a troubled humanity he brings only his own word, as surely as night follows day he will engage the mood of futility and inevitably admit that the empty pews witness to his inadequacy. For unless they dwell in Pumpkin Town, his members can get that kind of offering from persons more qualified and expert than he, and even in the suburbs of suburbia people are smart enough to discriminate this from the New Testament Gospel. As Time shrewdly observes, hungry sheep are not fed by a Christianity as bland and homogenized as the product of the kitchen blender, nor by something no more Christian than a discussion group, or the togetherness of a softball team.
Our concern here, however, is with the man of the pupit who, truly proclaiming the gospel of Christ and assaying what he sees, feels ineffective—and finding his juniper tree is tempted to say, Lord, it is enough. In moments of dark discouragement—and they come to the best ministers today as they came to Elijahs and Jeremiahs in the past—let him remember that the most powerful thing in the atomic age is still the Word of God. Nothing but the proclaimed Word can comfort the sorrowing, give peace to the anxious, rest to the weary, and strength to the weak. What else can supply life to the dying, hope for despair, the garments of joy for those of mourning? Nothing in the wide world is as powerful as this Word which he publishes from his pulpit, for by it even the worlds were made. The Word he bears created the universe and heals its brokenness; the Word he heralds arrested history and divided the times in B.C. and A.D., the before and after of sin, despair, and death. Let the earthen vessel not forget its divine content, and remembering take courage and be of good cheer.
Let the faithful minister of Christ to men remember that the power of the ages to come, in which he dead works quietly and secretly in the souls of men. More powerful than the world it created with its ancient noise of thunder and modern scream of jet, it yet works noiselessly like a yeast in the depths of man’s life. For the Kingdom comes not in the great fire, rushing wind, or with observation. Rather, it seedlike sprouts and blades and bears its ear, mysteriously, no one knowing how. It regenerates the heart, and creates the new man in Christ, though the observer, seeing nothing, cannot gainsay the report of deed and confession that something has indeed occurred. He who preaches the Gospel must in faith remember that the Word of God never returns void, but secretly and without observetion works its purpose. It causes men and women of today to die with Christ at Calvary and rise in newness of resurrection life. It does so in such a way that if the newsstaff of Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters and Tass were there, they would see nothing and go home without a headline. As Christ is hidden from our eyes and His Spirit works unseen, so does the Word of the Christian message. Poll takers and statisticians are of small value here; they, and the minister no less, can no more see the World workig in its power than Adam could have seen the event of his own creation, Lazarus his resurrection, or the Christion his death and rising with Christ.
Ministers of Christ are but men, of no special breed. They need recall themselves again and again to greater faith in that same Word to which they summon others to put their trust. If only they had more faith in the power of the Word they proclaim! The difference between one preacher and another, between some ministers and some popular evangelists often lies just here: in the size of the faith of those who call others to faith.
U.N. Falters In Another Crisis After India Invades Goa
Daily more evident is the fact that world leaders are unable to moralize power. For years “neutralist” India has condemned West and East alike for reliance on force, presumably on the premise that right is its own might. But India’s invasion of Goa violated not only her professed antipathy to all use of force, but also her U. N. covenant. Soviet veto of the Western resolution urging withdrawal of invading Indian forces not only reflected Communist expedience (whatever advances Red interests is right) but, as Adlai Stevenson sensed, carried foregleams of the U.N.’s death. But the U.S. too is paying the price of tardy recognition that morality and might are inseparable concerns. Pacifist detachment of might from morality ends up at last with a powerless morality, even as totalitarian detachment of morality from might issues in amoral power.
World Council Stands Firmly For Religious Liberty
All Christians should acclaim the strong 750-word resolution on religious liberty issued by the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches from New Delhi.
Declaring that religious liberty is the “consequence of God’s creative work, of his redemption of man in Christ and his calling of men into his service,” the Council claimed this civil right “fundamental for men everywhere,” and boldly affirmed that all human attempts “to coerce or to eliminate faith are violations of the fundamental ways of God with men.”
The resolution served notice to free and to totalitarian governments, to old and newly-formed nations, and equally to Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox churches that religious liberty includes more than the right privately or publicly to worship God. It includes the right freely to teach, preach, and impart religious information through any media and across any frontier; to change one’s religion, and the parental right “to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” The right freely to engage in such activities, declared the Assembly, “is essential to the expression of inner freedom.”
Some theological minds may question the formulated basis on which religious liberty was said to rest. But Christians both inside and outside the WCC will thank God for this hard-hitting announcement of every man’s civil right to religious liberty, which secular governments, and at times every major section of the Church itself, has compromised.
Eichmann’S Day Of Reckoning: One Life, Six Million Corpses
That his Israeli judges found Adolf Eichmann guilty and sentenced him to hang probably surprised no one. A Gentile jury probably would have pronounced a similar verdict against the convicted “murderer of 6 million Jews.” Actually tiny Israel’s biggest problem still lies ahead: what to do with Eichmann’s appeal, with Israeli pressures to commute the death sentence, and with suggestions of mercy.
The trial is not without subtle theological overtones concerning Jewry and the Christ. Aware that the fate of a certain First Century Man touched the destinies of all mankind of every clime and of every time, many Christians were surprised at Eichmann’s conviction for “unsurpassed” crimes against humanity. So too, Eichmann’s declaration that the “wrong man” was found guilty and “must now suffer for the acts of others” had an ironic turn. Throughout Christian history men who reject the Crucified have found it easy to regard themselves as some messiah who suffers for others.
Whether this modern Barabbas goes to the gallows or goes free, the bare fact remains that neither Jew nor Gentile has matured to the long lesson of history. It would be a gross mistake simply to universalize guilt for the terrible slaughter of the Jews and thereby conceal the pernicious evil of anti-Semitism. But it would be even greater error simply to pinpoint and isolate the tragic roots of human sin in Eichmann or in pagan Gentiles. Hitler’s “final solution” for the Jew seems to have provoked us only to deal with the foul spirit of Hitler; all too little has it stirred universal concern over God’s “final solution” for the Jew and the Gentile.
Propaganda: Its Lines Extend Around The World
Monday morning’s mail oversweeps us at times like a terrifying deluge. In our low moments we sometimes consider duplicating machines, those special toys of the organization man and his public relations department, as rather questionable.
Take last Monday, for example. Although President Kennedy reportedly is flexing every muscle to balance the federal budget, even CHRISTIANITY TODAY found at its doorstep almost two pounds of government propaganda from the Agriculture Department on down the line. (All of it, of course, came postage free.) Later mail deliveries deposited one and a half pounds of press releases from our New Delhi correspondent about the closing days of the World Council of Churches’ Third Assembly. And Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson of Queens Village, New York, 1954’s self-proclaimed “King of the World,” supplied us a mimeographed prediction of “Peace and plenty for 1962 … in greater measure per square foot than the earth has experienced since the days of King Solomon.”
If all the organizational propaganda that crosses our desk were laid end to end, the only thing it wouldn’t reach—we think—is a happy ending.
The Evangelical Offensive In Contemporary Life
Where American evangelicalism stands, what it faces, where it is going—these live questions demand the attention not only of today’s church historians, but of every committed believer as well.
When liberalism was at its height two or more decades ago, evangelicalism inherited a significant role in American religious life. Championing the authority of the Scriptures it witnessed boldly against theological compromise. In a high-spirited and self-sufficient era of social and human optimism it preserved evangelism and soul-winning as the church’s first responsibility. Sometimes the rigors of its defensive position sent evangelicalism into isolationist hiding from the world of culture and social conflict, and into abject longing for the Lord’s return, but it always opposed any social gospel bereft of a redemptive framework.
Circumstances have changed in the religious realm and in the secular world of men and things. The bitter fruits of World War II pucker the soul of every nation in the world. Pessimism stalks everywhere, a spirit not unknown even in religion. The anxiety-ridden existentialism of men like Niebuhr, Tillich, and Sartre sees little hope for redeeming our problem-ridden world. On the heels of despair have come an alarming decay of morals and a vast array of wickedness. Although formal church membership is at an unprecedented high, statistics of crime, delinquency, divorce, and all manner of social and moral deviation are the largest in American annals. At the same time material prosperity has never been greater. Never have so many in so many walks of life had so much. Even the poor are infinitely more comfortable than those of fifty years ago. We are the world’s best-dressed, best-housed, best-fed nation.
Evangelicals are seeking relevant theological perspective in this complex age. They recognize and welcome the return to biblical theology by their former opponents. If they find this too full of detours, too far short of the mark, they do not begrudge but rejoice over what gains have been made. A more sprightly emphasis on the Gospel and on evangelism lends older established churches a fresh spirit; the old sharp distinctions between evangelicals and liberals have been narrowed, and must not be defined with greater precision—except by those who automatically consider all outside their own prescribed circle as suspect or apostate. Extreme dispensational views once embraced and zealously propagated by many evangelicals are losing ground in evangelical schools, and many believers no longer consider them defensible.
In recent years a school of thought arose which some observers called neo-evangelicalism; primarily it represents evangelicals with a special concern for applying the Gospel to all the arenas of life and culture, including political, social, and economic dimensions. Academically, numbers of well-trained teachers are increasingly achieving what a scholar like Machen once had to accomplish almost single-handedly. Evangelicals are no longer on the defensive. They are aggressively at work on all sides. At the same time their spirit is irenic. Willing to engage in conversation no less than in open battle, they are determined to occupy until the Lord comes. Through books, magazines, educational institutions, radio, and service organizations as well as evangelism and missions their sound goes abroad through all the earth. Evangelicals inside the larger denominations, no longer separatist in spirit, often pursue their work through denominational channels that respect their claims and receive evangelical adherents without theological proscriptions.
This theological reconstruction among evangelicals has also flushed out new areas of conflict. While the old liberalism will hardly rise again in the same form or with the same kind of influence, certain adaptations of its original spirit have long been evident in neo-orthodoxy. Many once liberal and even some conservative institutions in America now espouse the tenets of Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich, Niebuhr and their fellows. Evangelicalism has not yet adequately met the challenge of neo-orthodoxy, though it is more fully alert to the deadly menace of Bultmann and his school. But it is alert to the need for positive doctrinal exposition.
Another concern of evangelicalism is the enervating effect of prosperity. Those who fought in the last war, as well as those at home, became burdened for evangelizing a Gospel-needy, fast-ebbing world, and they thrust themselves into service for Christ. Today’s young people—born during the war and never exposed to the death-dealing battlefields of jungles, desert, ocean, and air—have known little but post-war materialism and luxury. Physical and economic sacrifice, deprivation, and discipline in the older context that often prepared young people for the rigors of Christian service and fanned the spirit of human compassion are largely unknown. This new generation is not without purpose, however. Its perspective reflects its cultural cradle; it pinpoints mostly on securing within the formal context of the Christian faith this world’s goods, this world’s approval, and this world’s goals. To go without the camp bearing Christ’s reproach is socially unrealistic; this world is no longer a place of Christian pilgrimage. Christian vocation often takes its orders from the prevailing way of life. America’s Christian youth is not necessarily apathetic or opposed to dying daily for the Gospel at home and abroad; it is simply unchallenged and unconcerned.
Many evangelicals consider communism their greatest present enemy. They fight communism because of its threat to democratic rights and freedoms and its denial of God. This approach stops short of communism’s real danger, however. Social justice ultimately is not guaranteed simply by the presence or absence of personal privileges or by some particular form of government, however desirable. To interpret man as wholly mechanistic and nonspiritual is to destroy his God-relatedness in person, perspective, and purpose. By neglecting his life in God, man destroys himself. The possibility of such cultural suicide is not tied to the threat of communism alone.
Evangelicalism is at a new crossroads. Without fresh perspective and awareness of the times it cannot confront the dynamisms rampant in the world today. Evangelicals must strive for freedom from cultural ensnarement, self-complacency, and spiritual pride. The present complexity of society has led many to despair of forthright solutions. They must face the world of values and decisions, however; despite charges of dogmatism and obscurantism in an age of compromise and hesitancy they must affirm their crucial convictions without compromise. True to the Lord of Christian thought and action, evangelicalism must affirm man’s relationship to God and God’s authoritative self-revelation in Scripture; the subjection of man and all his ways to the laws of God; the Church’s alignment on the side of true justice in a world of social and economic inequity; man’s worth on the basis of creation and redemption, not of race or color; rejection of demonic materialism, and dedication rather to the needs of the world; the challenge—especially to young people—of commitment and abandonment to Jesus Christ in life and service; and the unique and indispensable quickening, enduring power of the Holy Spirit. Repeated application of these principles will hone the cutting edge of evangelicalism. Spiritual incisiveness can pierce the sin and indifference of a hardened, resistant world to the glory of God and His kingdom.
