The Student Exposure

C.F.H.H.

The influence of Bultmann has become so blunted that European seminaries once known as “Bultmann centers”—Tübingen, Zürich, Marburg, Mainz—no longer fit this designation. This is all the more true in such “secondary strongholds” of Bultmannism as Heidelberg and Bonn. Even Marburg, where Bultmann now lives in retirement, is hardly a secure fortress of his views. Kümmel, since 1951 Bultmann’s successor at Marburg, is a vocal critic of his master. And Fuchs’s arrival in 1960 brought in a post-Bultmannian champion, one whose lectures are heard by two-thirds of Marburg’s 300 theological students. Colorful in personality and strongly polemic, Fuchs with his dark sayings, vivid illustrations, and prophetic note readily captures student interest. Walter Schmithals, another Bultmann disciple, also broadly retains his former teacher’s perspective at Marburg.

In Tübingen, Ernst Käsemann draws 500 of the 700 divinity students to the university’s largest lecture hall, a following two times as large as that which Barth enjoyed in his prime at Basel, with its enrollment of about 300. But this turnout represents as much an interest in Käsemann’s tart phrasing and mocking of other positions (“the pietists want proof in their pockets”) as it does an actual Bultmannian commitment. While Käsemann’s hostility to the Fuchs-Ebeling existential setting of the hermeneutical problem convinces quite a few, most students remain committed to the Fuchs-Ebeling perspective. In either case, the temper is Bultmannian. At Tübingen also is Hans Rückert, the repentant Nazi church historian, who is friendly to Bultmannism and respected by Bultmann scholars. Both Otto Michel in New Testament and Adolf Köberle in systematic theology give important representation to conservative theology. But their following is larger in the older generation than among today’s students, who expect more show and scrap in the classroom.

Next to Marburg, Bultmannians consider the Zürich influence most important because of the scholarly work of Gerhard Ebeling, who, like Käsemann of Tübingen, gives more scope than Bultmann to the historical Jesus. In Mainz, Braun and Mezger register their impact somewhat to Bultmann’s left, while Wolfhardt Pannenberg is a forthright opponent of Bultmann’s theology. Philipp Vielhauer carries forward the Bultmannian view in Bonn, where no successor has yet been named to Erich Dinkler, another Bultmannian now at Heidelberg.

Gerhard von Rad is currently the drawing card at Heidelberg. Most students feel they ought not to miss this “exciting Old Testament voice” along the way, and Von Rad gets a hearing from at least half the 700 students. Von Rad is sometimes called “the Bultmann of the Old Testament,” a designation encouraged by his break with the old Erlangen understanding of Heilsgeschichte in the interest of a “history of traditions of revelation” approach. In Von Rad’s scheme, the Old Testament becomes a collation of theologically significant existential confessions of faith, but historical foundations remain in doubt. Yet it is noteworthy that the critical struggle characterizing New Testament theology, torn as it is between competing emphases on the historical Jesus and on Docetic tendencies, does not pervade Old Testament studies.

With an eye on the efforts of Von Rad and others—Ulrich Alt of Leipzig, Walter Zimmerli of Göttingen, and Hans Kraus of Hamburg—the Göttingen theologian, Otto Weber, observes: “All the things that New Testament theology could also have rediscovered (history, the covenant, the event of the Word) have been found in Old Testament theology.” Although no single theological influence predominates at Heidelberg, Bultmannian theology has become influential through the presence of Erich Dinkler and Günther Bornkamm, who retain Bultmann’s methodological premises yet deviate to stress knowledge of the historical Jesus. Karl Kuhn likewise has Bultmannian sympathies, but as a Qumran specialist he thinks Bultmann exaggerates the supposed Gnostic influence on the New Testament. Thus he stresses the late Jewish background more along the line of Jeremias of Göttingen. But other Heidelberg scholars are also well received. Both Peter Brunner and Edmund Schlink have long exerted strong influence for the Barthian stream of dialectical theology, although their interest is shifting increasingly in the direction of ecumenical theology.

The mood in Erlangen, where there are 320 students, has much less in common with Bultmann than with Barth and Brunner. Its dominant interest in Brunner probably comes from Paul Althaus’s emphasis on general revelation and on law as distinct from Gospel.

Göttingen has never been dominated by the influence of Bultmann. Of the 300 students, Hans Conzelmann and Joachim Jeremias each draw about 200 to their lectures, where Conzelmann promotes the Bultmannian line but Jeremias rejects it. Reformed theologian Otto Weber outdraws all his colleagues, however; he is not only an able teacher but also a fluent and vigorous lecturer. Through Weber’s influence, and now also through that of his colleague in Lutheran theology, Ernest Wolf, Barth’s position has long been the dominant force at Göttingen and perhaps still is.

At Hamburg, Thielicke’s teaching ability and public popularity attract the largest following from the 300 students. Leonhard Goppelt is appreciated for his historical overview within a broadly conservative framework, although students do not find in him a definitive point of view. Thielicke, Goppelt, and Hans Rudolf Müller-Schweffe are all aggressively anti-Bultmannian, and Thielicke is a firm critic of Barth as well. Bultmann has gained a measure of student influence through biblical studies that support his systematic theology; Barth’s dogmatic writings, on the other hand, are bypassed by most students because of their discouraging length.

The Netherlands and Switzerland, particularly Basel, are broadly conservative exceptions to the dominant pattern of European theology. Basel has never shown great enthusiasm for Bultmann because of Barth’s opposition and that of Oscar Cullman. Both men have recognized the enmity between demythology and the Gospel. Although Barth’s retirement has made Basel a less exciting center for American students, his spirited off-campus student colloquia there still preserve some of his vigorous influence. Except for Cullman’s contribution, the school has little atmosphere of theological controversy. But this is doubtless due in part to a professorial tendency to read lectures prepared for forthcoming books rather than for classroom use.

Swedish theology, more than that of other Scandinavian countries, has moved largely outside the orbit of Continental debate. Denmark, on the other hand, has been most actively engaged. Neither at Uppsala, with 700 students, nor at Lund, with 420, is there much concern with normative theology of any kind. At Lund, Anders Nygren and Gustaf Aulén brought systematic theology to prominence; it has been New Testament exegesis, however, that has traditionally exerted a stronger influence at Uppsala. Since philosophical existentialism is foreign to both Norway and Sweden, any translation of biblical theology into existential categories would only have made Christianity even less intelligible to the “modern man” in those lands. Hence Bultmannian influence, as through his former student, Nils Ahstrup Dahl, New Testament professor of the State Faculty of the Church of Norway, carries little existential significance beyond the broad emphasis on contemporary relevance. Yet Dahl denies that divine revelation is objectively given in history and is thus knowable by historical critical investigation. Reider Hauge, the State Faculty theologian, is a former student of Barth. Despite large indebtedness to his teacher, Hauge questions Barth’s universalistic tendencies, shares Brunner’s commitment to general revelation, and emphasizes the person of Christ as the center of revelation more than objective propositions and subjective decision.

Theological debate in Norway, however, has revolved much more around the classic modernist-conservative themes than around a dispute over dialectical-existential theology. It was a protest against Ritschlian emphases within the State Faculty of Theology that in 1907 led to a faculty division and brought about establishment of a Free Faculty in the Church of Norway. Whereas the State Faculty has enviable facilities, the Free Faculty has 350 students, more than four times the number enrolled under the State Faculty. More open ecumenically, the State Faculty is also less confessionalistic and theologically more diverse. The Free Faculty is more confessionalistic, unreservedly rejects the dialectical theology, and insists on the full inspiration of Scripture. At the same time, the Free Faculty is not totally committed to the orthodox Protestant view of the Bible. Its theologian, Leiv Aalen, contends that inspiration bears only on the Bible’s function of “speaking of creation and salvation in Christ,” and this, he insists, the Bible does everywhere, either directly or indirectly. Aalen considers Genesis a figurative and symbolic representation not to be literally interpreted, and admits elements of “an ancient world view” into the larger scriptural testimony.

In Denmark, where the early Barth of the Römerbrief exerted considerable influence forty years ago, that influence soon attached itself also to Gogarten and finally to Bultmann, to whom a small circle still responds. But independently of his European interpreters, it was Sören Kierkegaard who most directly influenced the Danish scene. That other nineteenth-century Danish opponent of Hegelianism, N. F. S. Grundtvig, also left an enduring impression. In Copenhagen, where there are 280 divinity students, N. H. Söe is broadly sympathetic to the later Barth. Barth’s influence, thinks Söe, will in the long run outrank that of Bultmann.

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Theology

Who’s Who in German Theology

Leslie R. Keylock

The young pastor or theologian who tries to keep reasonably abreast of contemporary theological thought soon becomes bewildered by the sheer volume of German scholarship. More immediate translations and such series as Harper’s “New Frontiers in Theology” which discuss noteworthy developments help reduce the language barrier. But so many theologians clamor for attention that the lack of an index to the multitude of German names is an imposing obstacle.

Probably the easiest and most helpful way to group German theologians is in terms of faculties of theology. Because the most significant faculties are part of Germany’s famous universities, German theology is integrally connected with the German academic tradition. Since the partition of Germany after the Second World War, the West has been deprived of much of East Germany’s intellectual life, including the scholarship of the theological faculties still functioning at Leipzig and Halle-Wittenberg. Little is heard from the land of Luther in contemporary German theological debate. But this silence is more than offset by the volley of words thundering from such theologically momentous cities as Göttingen, Marburg, Heidelberg, and Tübingen.

In the north of West Germany is Hamburg, newest of the schools of theology. Organized by Helmut Thielicke (b. 1900) in 1954, it now has nine professors. Thielicke, its professor of systematic theology and rector of the university since 1960, is known in America primarily for his university sermons and his interest in Spurgeon. Of more abiding significance, however, is his three-volume work, Theologische Ethik (Mohr, 1951–58), not yet available in English translation.

South of Hamburg lies Münster, famous during the Reformation as the site of a radical uprising. Founded in 1780, the university has both a Protestant and a Catholic theological faculty. Its best-known professors of theology are Willi Marxsen and Kurt Aland. Marxsen (b. 1919), professor of New Testament exegesis and theology and a leader of the Redaktionsgeschichte school of New Testament criticism, has written an important study of Mark that achieved a second edition in 1959. Kurt Aland (b. 1915) is professor of ecclesiastical history, but he is perhaps better known for a new synopsis of the Gospels with an up-to-date critical apparatus which he is preparing with the aid of his students at Münster and the latest mechanical equipment available. Available in English are his Problem of the New Testament Canon (Canterbury, 1962) and Did the Early Church Baptize Infants? (Westminster, 1963).

Over the years Göttingen has had a number of well-known theologians. Names such as Michaelis, Ewald, Wellhausen, Ritschl, Weiss, W. Bauer, and Gogarten are known in theological circles for brilliant and often highly controversial theories. Today that tradition is still just as brilliant but probably not so radical. In fact Joachim Jeremias (b. 1900), professor of New Testament studies, is broadly conservative. Like Schleiermacher and Bultmann (whom he opposes), he comes from the Pietist tradition of the Herrnhuter (Moravian Brethren). Jeremias is best known in America for his books Jesus’ Promise to the Nations (Allenson, 1958) and The Parables of Jesus (second ed., Scribner, 1963). Untranslated is his two-volume study of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus (second ed., 1958). Jeremias’s new colleague in New Testament is Hans Conzelmann (b. 1915), whose important study, The Theology of St. Luke, has been translated into English (Harper, 1960). Conzelmann is a Bultmannian who has given up the “new quest of the historical Jesus.” Also in the biblical field is Walther Zimmerli (b. 1907), professor of Old Testament and pro-rector of the university, whose major contributions to scholarship are his commentaries on Ecclesiastes (1936) and Ezekiel (1955) and his study of Genesis 1–11 (1957), which are all untranslated.

But more widely known in America today is the faculty of theology at Marburg. Preceding Rudolf Bultmann in the faculty of theology have been such notables as Adolf Jülicher, Wilhelm Herrmann, Karl Budde, Rudolf Otto, and Hans von Soden. Both Bultmann and Martin Heidegger belonged to the “Old Marburger” club. Bultmann is a major molder of such influential concepts in contemporary thought as demythologizing, form criticism, and kerygmatic theology. Bultmann’s successor in New Testament is Werner Georg Kümmel (b. 1905), formerly president of the international body of scholars known as the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, publishers of New Testament Studies. Among Kümmel’s works available in English are Promise and Fulfilment—The Eschatological Message of Jesus (“Studies in Biblical Theology” 23; Allenson, 1957) and Man in the New Testament (Westminster, 1963). Even better known is the radical post-Bultmannian, Ernst Fuchs (b. 1903), also professor of New Testament. His untranslated work on the quest of the historical Jesus places him in a position very close to that of the nineteenth-century liberals; his The New Hermeneutic will appear as the second volume of “New Frontiers in Theology.”

The capital city of West Germany, Bonn, has a relatively new university, founded in 1818. Here Bruno Bauer fled after his break with the Hengstenberg school. Currently professor of Old Testament exegesis is Martin Noth (b. 1902), who carries on the form critical tradition in the area of Old Testament studies. In English are his famous History of Israel (second ed., Harper, 1960) and a commentary on Exodus (Westminster, 1962). One of the most promising of the younger professors of New Testament in Germany is Cameroun-born Philipp Vielhauer (b. 1914), whose work on the Son of man sayings in Jesus’ preaching (1957) has been warmly received in Germany. At Bonn too is the Roman Catholic historian Hubert Jedlin (b. 1900), author of a three-volume History of the Council of Trent (Herder, 1957–65?).

Farther south along the Rhine lies Mainz. Its Johannes Gutenberg University was founded in 1477 and has both Protestant and Catholic theological faculties. Closed for well over a century, it reopened its doors in 1946 and now has Herbert Braun (b. 1903) and Wolfhardt Pannenberg (b. 1928) on its Faculty of Evangelical Theology. Braun’s chef-d’oeuvre is his two-volume study of the relation of Jesus and the synoptic tradition to the Qumran community (1957). Pannenberg is Mainz’ professor of systematic theology and at the age of thirty-five has already established himself as an authority on the Christian understanding of history. A projected volume in the “New Frontiers in Theology” series will make his thought readily available in the United States.

Heidelberg’s university is among Europe’s oldest. Founded in 1386, it is also among the largest of Germany’s schools of higher education, with some 13,000 students. Former faculty members include Richard Rothe, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, and Martin Dibelius. Today its theological faculty is probably the strongest in all Europe; at least seven professors have earned international reputations. Among them is Gerhard von Rad (b. 1901), professor of Old Testament exegesis and author of such important works as Old Testament Theology (Vol. I, Harper, 1962) and the recent commentary on Genesis (Westminster, 1961). His approach to the Old Testament has been compared with that of Bultmann to the New Testament. Also in the field of Old Testament is Claus Westermann (b. 1909), whose major work has been done in the field of Old Testament hermeneutics. The professor of systematic theology, Peter Brunner (b. 1900), has established a solid reputation for his Barthian interpretation of Calvin and Luther, but his works have not been published in English. Günther Bornkamm (b. 1905), professor of New Testament exegesis, became known in this country as a conservative post-Bultmannian on the basis of his book Jesus of Nazareth (Harper, 1960). More recent is a book written in collaboration with two of his students, Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew (Westminster, 1963). A newer arrival on the New Testament faculty is Erich Dinkler (b. 1909), co-editor with Bultmann of the journal Theologische Rundschau. Bornkamm’s brother Heinrich (b. 1901), a specialist in Reformation history, is the author of Luther’s World of Thought (Concordia, 1958). Although Heinz Eduard Todt is now professor of social ethics, his chief claim to fame is his untranslated study of the Son of Man sayings in the synoptic tradition (Mohr, 1959).

Tübingen’s university, founded in 1477, is known to most English-speaking theologians for its radical application of Hegelian philosophy to the New Testament (the so-called “Tübingen school”) in the nineteenth century. In years past its halls heard the voices of Ferdinand Christian Baur, David Friedrich Strauss, Adolf Schlatter, Gerhard Kittel, and Karl Heim. Its most important faculty members today are Artur Weiser (b. 1893) in Old Testament, Hermann Diem (b. 1900) in systematic theology, and Ernst Käsemann (b. 1906) in New Testament. Weiser’s magnum opus appeared in the United States as The Old Testament: Its Formation and Development (Association, 1961), regarded by some as the most adequate introduction to the Old Testament and now in its fifth edition in Germany. Although Diem’s Dogmatics is the primary source of his recognition, he is also a Kierkegaard scholar of some consequence. Käsemann is known as the initiator of “the new quest of the historical Jesus” through his 1954 article, “Das Problem des historischen Jesus,” which appeared in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche. In the faculty of Catholic theology Hans Küng (b. 1928) carries on the ecumenical tradition of Karl Adam.

The Swiss Seminaries

Although Basel and Zürich are technically in Switzerland, the theological faculties have long been closely linked to those of Germany.

Karl Barth was the towering giant who placed Basel on the theological map for most Americans. Now retired, he has been succeeded by thirty-five-year-old Heinrich Ott (b. 1929). Ott’s untranslated book, Thinking and Being (1959), is widely regarded as doing for the “later Heidegger” what Bultmann did for the “earlier Heidegger.” His essay, “What is Systematic Theology?,” forms the core of The Later Heidegger and Theology, first volume of the series “New Frontiers in Theology,” edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb (Harper, 1963). He studied under both Barth and Bultmann and holds a position usually closer to the former than to the latter. At Basel as Ott’s colleague in systematic theology is the extreme left-wing theologian, Fritz Buri (b. 1907). Neither of Buri’s two volumes in systematic theology, Dogmatik als Selbstverständnis des christlichen Glaubens (Haupt, 1956, 1962), has as yet been translated. Walther Eichrodt has been Basel’s professor of Old Testament since 1922. The first volume of his monumental Theology of the Old Testament is now available in English (Westminster, 1961). In the area of early church history and New Testament is Oscar Cullmann (b. 1902), who also teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris. He is renowned in the English-speaking world through such works as Christology of the New Testament (Westminster, 1959) and Christ and Time (second ed., Westminster, 1964).

Just as Basel is known to us as Karl Barth’s home, so Zürich is known as the home of Emil Brunner. At least two other Zürich theologians today are well known in theological circles in America. Brunner’s successor is Gerhard Ebeling (b. 1912), editor of Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, and author of The Nature of Faith (Fortress, 1962) and Word and Faith (Fortress, 1963). Far more conservative is the New Testament scholar Eduard Schweizer (b. 1913), best known for his article on the Spirit of God in Kittel’s Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament and for two volumes in the series “Studies in Biblical Theology,” Lordship and Discipleship (Allenson, 1960) and Church Order in the New Testament (Allenson, 1961). (Karl Barth’s brother Heinrich is a professor in Zürich’s philosophy department.)

In the Bavarian region, Erlangen stands alone. In recent years it has maintained a more moderate stance than most German universities. In the last century the great conservative scholar Theodor Zahn taught New Testament there. The New Testament department is still relatively right-wing. Both Paul Althaus (b. 1888) and Ethelbert Stauffer (b. 1902) have upheld a strong anti-Bultmannian outlook, but from divergent points of view. Available in English are Althaus’s Fact and Faith in the Kerygma of Today (Fortress, 1959) and Stauffer’s New Testament Theology (SCM, 1955).

In The East Zone

The East Zone of Germany has its theological heritage, too. Leipzig once heard the voices of Franz Delitzsch, Rudolf Kittel, Albrecht Alt, Konstantin von Tischendorf, Paul Tillich, and Ernst Fuchs. Halle was founded by the German Pietist Philipp Spener. Later its faculty included such greats as August Francke, Christian Wolff, Johannes Semler, Wilhelm Gesenius, Willibald Beyschlag, Martin Kähler, Friedrich Loofs, Hermann Gunkel, Julius Schniewind, Otto Eissfeldt, and Kurt Aland. It merged with Wittenberg in 1817 and became Martin Luther University. Today, however, both schools are somewhat isolated politically.

Berlin stands out as a lone star in the East German sky. The Free University of Berlin, founded in 1948, now has some 12,000 students. Its theological studies are found in the philosophy department, where Helmut Gollwitzer (b. 1908) is professor of Protestant theology. His name has become known to theologians in America largely as a result of his introduction to and selection from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics that appeared recently as a Harper Torchbook (Harper, 1962). In years gone by Berlin could boast more outstanding persons than any other theological faculty in Germany, including Friedrich Schleiermacher, W. M. L. de Wette, Neander, I. A. Dorner, E. W. Hengstenberg, Otto Pfleiderer, Bernhard Weiss, Adolf von Harnack, Reinhold Seeberg, Karl Holl, Adolf Deissmann, and Hans Lietzmann.

This guide has fixed attention on those theologians who are known to Americans through English translations of their works, although several others have been included because their untranslated works are of special significance. To avoid excessive cataloguing we have omitted Fohrer, Loewenich, Dörries, Otto Weber, Kraus, Michel, Goppelt, Campenhausen, Kuhn, Schlink, and Lortz, names that those versed in German theology may feel should have been included. Several of the men mentioned in this survey represent positions with which many will violently disagree; but the aim of all reading, of course, is to learn what is valuable and to dismiss the chaff. Germany is still a leader in theological thought today. Evangelicals dare not neglect its scholarship, because it begs for interaction with them and not only with those in America who represent other theological traditions.

- More from Leslie R. Keylock

Letter to a Seminarian

Malcolm Nygren

DEAR STUART,

I know what you mean when you write that you are uneasy about going to a parish ministry when you are ordained. Our troubles are well-publicized. Our mental breakdowns have been counted and discussed in the press. Sociologists study our complaints, national magazines record our casualties. A picture has been painted of the pastor’s lot as anxiety-ridden, frustrating, crowded with triviality.

The picture is probably a true one.

I doubt if the parish ministry has ever been more anxious, more difficult, more filled with the possibility of failure. That’s what is good about it. This may well be the most exciting time in the long history of the pastorate. Never has this call offered more to the man who wants the Lord to give him a job that is bigger than he is, who prefers risks to certainty, who is willing to fail ten times to succeed once.

Anxiety? Plenty of it. For one thing, people today take seriously what ministers say and do. If they didn’t, pastors wouldn’t have to be so wary of people who want to use them. Because people take pastors seriously, some of them are mad at their minister all of the time and quite a few are likely to be at any given time. If a pastor is lucky today, he can often have extremists on both sides of him, equally unhappy. Sometimes he gets tired of the uproar and wishes that no one cared what he thought. (Monday is usually my day to feel this way.) But most days he is glad that they do care. In these days of secularism, racial turmoil, and moral disintegration, the minister has to speak. If his words result in anxiety, it is because people are listening.

We can’t deny that it is frustrating, either. Somehow the church spelled with a small c doesn’t correspond very well with the Church we discussed in seminary. The pastor discovers early that most of his members have a very different view of the Christian faith from any he has read. They are not divided into liberal and evangelical, Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian. In fact, they aren’t easily classified at all. If there is a majority view, it may be a kind of eclectic universalism whose major premise is that any belief is good as long as you believe it sincerely. The parish church is not a well-drilled Christian army waiting to commission a seminary graduate as its general. It is a confused gaggle of saints, pagans, and people with unrealized possibilities. In short, it is a group of people who need their pastor more than they know. They will often surprise their minister, when their faith and vision outrun his. They will more often disappoint him. For the minister, the parish represents an unanswered challenge that will never be completely answered.

I don’t know about the triviality. I do know that there is never time enough to read or write. We don’t play much of a role in history. The history-making concerns are always being crowded aside. The great issues before the Congress and the United Nations are great issues to us, too. But we are always being interrupted by the crushing concerns of our people, people whose names won’t be remembered by the historians. The pastor is called from his study to go to the emergency room at the hospital, to drink coffee late at night in strangers’ kitchens. He is summoned from his typewriter and his books to hold dying hands, to look into eyes glazed with grief. And so often there is nothing he can do—nothing but suffer along with them, and care enough to be hurt when they are hurt, and pray. He will not take the hurt away with good theology and a smattering of amateur psychiatry. All he can do is care, and trust, and hope. Is this trivial? I don’t know. But I do know that the pastor should care. Hardly anyone else does, and people need him for that.

The parish minister is constantly being brought into bruising contact with the brutality of life. He has many more failures than successes, and the successes are so slow and intangible that he’s never sure that there are any. He is often insecure, often alone, too often faced with tasks beyond his power.

Yet, can you understand what I mean when I say that this is what is good about it? The very things of which we complain are the exciting, the worthwhile part of a pastor’s life. If no one cared what we said, if our churches were bands of perfected saints who didn’t need us, if we didn’t share the joy and heartbreak of people of little fame, it would all be safe, but empty. The pastorate is not quiet and comfortable. If it ever gets that way, it will be no place for the Lord’s children to serve.

Yours in anxiety and joy,

Malcolm Nygren

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Theology

The Theological Crisis in Europe: Decline of the Bultmann Era?

The Editor

First in a Series (Part II)

Rudolf Bultmann singles out Hans Conzelmann of Göttingen and Erich Dinkler of Heidelberg as his most representative disciples whose results stand closest to his own and whose theology consistently veers away from the relevance of the historical Jesus. When pressed for additional names of “genuine disciples” Bultmann lists almost all of his former students, despite their deviations. “Although I cannot say with certainty, I think they all go along,” he remarked, “though with many modifications.” In such generalities, Bultmann reveals his awareness that, while none of his former students (Mezger, Conzelmann, Dinkler, Fuchs, Ebeling, Schweizer, Bornkamm, Vielhauer, Käsemann, Kümmel) breaks in all respects with basic Bultmannian positions, yet their departures therefrom cannot be minimized nor can the differences among the men themselves.

The significance of the historical Jesus for Christian faith is the controversial issue that divides these scholars.

Not only against the Mainz radicals who emphasize personal relationships exclusively, but also against Bultmann and many post-Bultmannians, Fuchs contends that “community between men is possible only in the community between God and men” and that “the historical Jesus stands in the midst of revelation.” Fuchs turns these principles against Braun and Mezger and whoever else seeks to invert them on Bultmann’s premises, as well as against post-Bultmannians who are interested in the historical Jesus as he and Ebeling also are, but who are “unsure whether God’s presence is dependent on revelation or revelation dependent on God’s presence.” Both Conzelmann and Käsemann, complains Fuchs, are unclear about how the historical Jesus and revelation are to be correlated. Conzelmann, unlike Käsemann, concedes to radical historical criticism a role even more important than that of existential interpretation, while he nonetheless seeks to be an orthodox Lutheran. And while Bornkamm shares an interest in the historical Jesus, he subscribes also to Bultmann’s notion that “the faith came with Easter,” while Fuchs, on the other hand, insists that “the faith came from Jesus.” Yet when Schweizer of Zürich carries his post-Bultmannian interest in the historical Jesus to the point of inquiry into Jesus’ Messianic self-consciousness, Fuchs calls this an illicit undertaking: “The New Testament is dogmatics, and this cannot be translated into historical data.”

Bultmann himself meanwhile decries the fact that the growing interest in the historical Jesus may revive an appeal to historical factors in support and proof of faith. He still maintains that history can never provide a fundamental basis for faith and that faith does not need historical legitimation or historical supports. For Bultmann, the kerygma (the primitive Christian proclamation) alone is basic for faith.

Not even a post-Bultmannian like Bornkamm disputes this point of view, despite his insistence that Jesus’ pre-Easter preaching contains inner connections with the post-Easter kerygma, and that faith is interested in Lite content of Jesus’ preaching. “Bultmann is completely right,” he insists, “in his view that faith cannot be proved, and that the resurrection of Christ is the point of departure.”

In conversation Bultmann now seems to move even beyond his earlier limitation of historical interest to Jesus as merely a Jewish prophet and to his death. “We can know that he lived and preached and interpreted the Old Testament; that he deplored Jewish legalism, abandoned ritual purifications, and breached the Sabbath commandment; that he was not an ascetic, and was a friend of harlots and sinners; that he showed sympathy to women and children, and performed exorcisms.” In fact, in Wiesbaden, where Bultmann was seeking cure of an ailment, he was almost disposed to allow that Jesus healed the sick!

Nevertheless, Bultmann’s theological outlook can tolerate no return to the historical Jesus as decisive for faith. His readiness to minimize the clash between his disciples must be understood in this context. “We agree that the historical Jesus is the origin of Christianity and agree in the paradox that an historical person is also the eschatological fact which is always present in the Word.” By insisting on the event of Jesus Christ, Bultmann aims to distinguish the kerygmatic Christ from any mere Gnostic redeemer-myth.

Now it is true that Bultmann is formally right in insisting that the Easter message is the decisive starting point of Christian faith. He wants no return to the historical Jesus that would erase a decisive break between the historical Jesus and “the Easter event.” But his repudiation of the Easter fact, his “demiracleizing” of the Gospels, and his abandonment of the question of the historical Jesus as a theologically fundamental question all rob this emphasis of power. The complaint has widened that his complete rejection of any theological significance for Jesus of Nazareth does violence to apostolic Christianity. Bultmann’s view seemed more and more—his intention to the contrary—to dissolve apostolic proclamation into a Christ-myth through his one-sided severance of the kerygma from the event it proclaims and his censorship of the relevance of the historical Jesus.

Breakdown Of Bultmann’S Positions

While the broken defense of existentialist positions has thus divided the Bultmannian camp, the assault from outside has increased in scope and depth. Over against Bultmann not only post-Bultmannians, but also the Heilsgeschichte scholars and the Pannenberg school as well as traditionally conservative scholars, are demanding the recognition of a Christian starting point also in the life and teaching of the historical Jesus. “The smoke over the frontiers has lifted,” reports Leonhard Goppelt of Hamburg, “and a new generation is in view. Bultmann’s spell is broken, and the wide range of critical discussion signals an open period. Now that a shift from Bultmann is under way in a new direction, we are on the threshold of a change as significant as that of a century ago, when Hegelian emphases gave way to the neo-Kantianism of Ritschl.”

As Joachim Jeremias of Göttingen sees it, the vulnerability of Bultmann’s theological structure is evident from the fact that three of its fundamental emphases are now more or less shattered:

1. Bultmann’s neglect of the historical Jesus has broken down, and a deliberate return to the historical Jesus now characterizes New Testament studies. In deference to Wellhausen, Bultmann held that Jesus was but a Jewish prophet and that his life and message were not of great importance for Paul. The untenability of this position is now clear, and it is widely agreed that Christianity cannot be truly understood without a return to the historical Jesus.

2. Bultmann placed great weight on an alleged Gnosticism which supposedly influenced the Gospel of John and other New Testament literature. But the Dead Sea Scrolls show that the dualism of John’s Gospel is Palestinian and Judaic. A monograph by Carsten Colpe is widely credited with demonstrating convincingly that the model of a pre-Christian Gnostic redeemer-myth which Bultmann locates behind New Testament writings is actually nothing but the myth of Manicheanism of the third century A.D., which very likely sprang from a Docetic Christology repudiated by historic Christianity.

3. Bultmann defined the task of exegesis as the existential understanding of the New Testament, and he therefore stressed anthropology: “The Gospel gives me a new understanding of myself.” But “the Gospels stress theology, and they give us new knowledge of God,” counters Jeremias, one of the most articulate spokesmen for traditional conservative positions. Jeremias comments that “the history of the Church has shown that it is always dangerous when New Testament exegesis takes its method from contemporary philosophy, whether the idealistic philosophy of the nineteenth century or the existentialist pholosophy of the twentieth century.”

It remains true nonetheless that Bultmann’s followers—whether “genuine” or “spurious”—perpetuate many methodological and critical presuppositions integral to Bultmann’s theology. Despite their interest in the historical Jesus, even the deviationist disciples retain Bultmann’s notion that the task of exegesis is existential interpretation. But this basic Bultmannian assumption is challenged by Kümmel, a spokesman for the Heilsgeschichte school. Kümmel repudiates the presupposition that the task of exegesis is to discover the self-understanding of the New Testament writers in order to correct our self-understanding. The real task of hermeneutics, he says pointedly, is to find out what the New Testament teaches. The New Testament is “a revelation of the history of salvation,” he insists, and he is confident that the critically founded search for the historical Jesus will “win the field.” Kümmel emphasizes that “the facts, not the kerygma, evoke my response.”

An Unrepentant Bultmann

Bultmann remains unconvinced that his presuppositions have been shaken. He hardly regards himself as an emperor in exile or about to be deposed. Of his a prioris, he considers the second (as Jeremias lists them) less important than the others, but even with respect to the supposed Gnostic background of the New Testament he clings still to the position that the theology of the Fourth Gospel and of Paul is influenced by Gnostic views. In fact, Bultmann is currently writing a commentary on John’s Epistles from this perspective to round out his earlier work on John’s Gospel. Bultmann attaches more importance, however, to his other a prioris regarding the historical Jesus and existential understanding, which, he says, “stand together.” Although he professes also to be “interested in” the historical Jesus, he speaks only of Jesus’ deeds, and of these in attenuated and non-miraculous form. Contrary to the nineteenth century “life of Jesus” school, he insists that we can know nothing of Jesus’ personality, and considers this no real loss. “What does it matter?” he asks. “What counts is his Word and his Cross which is the same now as then.” While Bultmann does not destroy continuity between the historical Jesus and the New Testament kerygma, he nonetheless denies continuity between the historical Jesus and the Christ of the kerygma. As he sees it, the kerygma requires only the “that” of the life of Jesus and the fact of his crucifixion. In other words, the kerygma presupposes but mythologizes the historical Jesus.

The issues of central importance, according to Bultmann, are the historical method and Formgeschichte in biblical theology, and the problem of history and its interpretation in hermeneutics, the latter being “connected with anthropological and philosophical problems.”

The complaint that he virtually abandons the concept of revelation Bultmann attributes to a misunderstanding of his thought and intention. He insists now as always on the reality of revelation, but he distinguishes Offenbarheit from Offenbarung—that is, revelation as an objectifiable fact from revelation as an act. In Bultmann’s sense, “genuine revelation” is always only an act, never an objectified fact. “Revelation happens only in the moment when the Word of God encounters me.”

But for all Bultmann’s self-assurance, European theology is increasingly moving outside the orbit of his control and influence. The so-called “Bultmann school” has never really been a unit, even if his disciples all work within similar critical and methodological assumptions. While they build on Bultmann as the most important New Testament theologian of our time, they now separate the two emphases which Bultmann conjoined: radical criticism of the trustworthiness of the Gospels and existential interpretation. Heidegger’s dark and harsh image of man, which so neatly fit the mood of a post-war generation plagued by anxiety, became most important for Bultmann’s disciples. The Fuchs-Ebeling line of existential exegesis turned Bultmann’s New Testament ideas into dogmatics à la Heidegger. But Bultmann’s disciples have increasingly pulled back from his views or moved around them in some respects, each man emphasizing a perspective which diverges from Bultmann—sometimes dealing severely with him—and combating other post-Bultmannians as well. More and more, Bultmann’s followers distinguish his exegetical and historical work from his philosophical and dogmatic intention. But none of the post-Bultmannians has so united the relevant data from a new perspective as to be able to shape a coherent alternative to Bultmann’s view.

Attacks on Bultmann’s position from outside his camp have become sharper and sharper and have exploited the interior divisions. Heinrich Schier, a former Bultmann student and disciple, became a Roman Catholic and is now teaching in Bonn. “Bultmann is a rationalist and neo-Ritschlian,” says Emil Brunner. “He seeks to overcome nihilism, which endangers his position, but his alternative is never quite clear.” And Peter Brunner, the Heidelberg theologian, points a finger at Bultmann’s “weakest point”: “In Glauben und Verstehen he nowhere tells us what a minister must say in order to articulate the Gospel, nor what (besides the name of Jesus and his cross) is the binding or given content of the message to be perpetuated. He presupposes that a message comes to the individual, and discusses the problem of the individual to whom the message comes, and how it is to be grasped. But if one raises the question of proclamation into the future, it becomes clear that Bultmann has not resolved the problem of content.” Says Otto Weber, the Göttingen theologian: “In a word, the reason for the breakdown of Bultmann’s theology is his existentialism.” And front Basel Karl Barth’s verdict has echoed throughout Europe: “Thank God, Bultmann doesn’t draw the consistent consequences and demythologize God!”

Criticism of Bultmann’s theology is increasing. Many scholars observe that while Bultmann scorns all philosophy as culture-bound and transitory, he nonetheless exempts existentialism. In his existential “third heaven” he claims to have exclusive leverage against the whole field of thought and life. But existentialism is no heaven-born absolute; it is very much a modern philosophical scheme. Any translation of New Testament concepts into existential categories must result in a version no less “limited”—linguistically and historically—than the biblical theology the existentialists aim to “purify.” The Bultmannians assume, moreover, that the New Testament writers, since they were especially interested in their subject, must have transformed (and deformed) the historical facts of the Gospels. This premise the existentialists fail to apply to their own special interest in the kerygma. While the Bultmannians rid themselves of the miracle of objective revelation, they seem to endow their subjectivity with a secret objectivity, and abandon the apostolic miracles only to make room for their own.

- More from The Editor

Paul II to Timothy II

Here we are in the wonderful year of 2,000. Space and race and keeping pace with science are forgotten. We are ruled by powerful thought-transference waves. We look alike and speak alike, and our children are all the same. The Political Power of Supreme Order has us all in hand.

The World Church has come and gone, having proved its absolute equation with the society of its day and having been swallowed by irrelevance. It wished itself big—and burst, one body splattered all the way to the Moon. One belief, one standard, and that a faith in a Thought outside ourselves!

I took a refresher course in World Theology last week and passed it with an excellent grade. I missed seeing you and was told that you were on a preaching mission to Mars. I understand that Universe Theology 202 is giving you trouble; that was one of the courses I missed.

I find in my travels that everyone is socialized. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that we all believe the same basic stuff. In World rheology I sat next to a former Muslim, and you can’t imagine the thrill of our conversation as we compared our means of raising money here and there. No barrier of belief—only a difference in financing.

I must tell you of a seminar I went to recently with some leading ex-Buddhists, who shared their findings on nursery supervision during meditation time. You know, these basic, how-to-do-it tools are what make the Universe Councils and Meditation Centers worthwhile.

The former Shintoists have an interesting theory that the representative from Mars was endorsing. It was something about Space-A-Vision Educational Programs for Cultural Promotion, replacing the regular Communion services in Christian Churches; after all, the sacraments have had no meaning since the Jesus-myth was exploded. Do you remember who he was?

Having Sabbath services on Monday is a real boon, because it follows no pattern set down by any great minds of the old religions. Really, it was a stroke of genius when the representative from Venus and the leaders of the Russian nation on World concurred. After all, with a two-day work week, we should spend a little time in meditation.

The brotherhood all of us feel is hard to express. It’s almost as if God—and I hesitate to use a word that is now generally outmoded—yes, almost as if God has finally been ousted and the supreme fight we have waged is at last coming to an end.

At a recent session of our Assembly, we expunged the word “World” from our constitution. The delegates felt that it was too provincial and that now we ought to have a Universe view.

There are negotiations going on in committee to link several Universes together in a United Universe Council and Meditation Center, but I sensed some lingering opposition from World and Venus. The new dwellers on the Moon were in favor of it, because their position astronomically is closer than ours to the others.

You have heard of the new theory of prayer and how very harmful prayer is in robbing conscience of selfhood and sufficiency? Then you will be pleased to note that at long last, the prayer movement has been outlawed, and what began in the early 1960s is at last a reality after forty years of struggle with traditionalist forces.

We attended a service at the World Cathedral in Moscow, Russia, World. The place was packed. The lecture was on the history of the development of ray-lessons that bombard the mind with elevating thoughts about the Universe. The speaker didn’t really follow a “text” so far as I could ascertain.

One of the living Saints of the Council was in attendance. His eloquence knew no bounds. He traced the movements for Unity from their beginnings and showed how living “greats” of every religion had contributed to the growth of spirit-dominance of World and the Universe of the Sun.

The newest translation of the Compilation is just out. You remember hearing of all the struggles in getting rid of the Bible in Christian America and the Koran and other sectarian books when you were younger? I lived through it, and I can tell you that this is the best version yet. It’s surely destined to be read in Meditation Centers all around the Solar System.

I shouldn’t say this, but somehow the new songs of spirit-outreach don’t impress me as much as the hymns of outmoded Christianity. But that may only be my experience. One of the favorites of the Assembly began;

We are all one; Master Thought has won;

We are all together.…

I can’t remember the rest.

Well, I’ll be home tomorrow on Spaceship 84. Sorry you couldn’t make the Saturn luncheon.

Ever your teacher,

PAUL II

—THE REV. IRVING C. BEVERIDGE, minister, Highland Avenue Congregational Church, Orange, New Jersey.

Mental Honesty and Seminary Recruitment

G. Ray Jordan

Send us your best men. They will barely be good enough.” This slogan, used by one of the stock-car racing organizations, is far more pertinent to the Christian ministry than to car racing. And since many seminaries are now recruiting students, tire slogan provokes the observation that appeals for students to consider the parish ministry must keep talent and mental honesty in clear view.

The complete candor of Christ as he spoke to those who professed they wanted to follow him still startles us. It should compel us to see that romanticizing our profession eventually leads to disillusionment. Christ never made an appeal to luxurious security. “ ‘If anyone wishes to be a follower of mine, … he must take up his cross and come with me’ ” (Matt. 16:21, NEB).

The young person contemplating the Christian ministry must carefully examine his mind and heart as to what will be demanded of him. Among the questions he must ask himself are these: “Can I face misunderstanding and opposition? Do I have the strength of commitment and purpose to stand against the society to which I belong when that society is wrong?”

Again and again the young clergyman will be forced to face the question: “Can I take it?” Indeed, the more talented he is and the clearer his understanding of the injustices and needs of our day, the more searching the interrogation will be. Tragic racial con diets in the United States emphasize this. But these are only symbols of a larger situation. Anyone who dares to cultivate insight into contemporary conditions in America or in the rest of the world can, at least to some degree, appreciate what is at stake.

There are, for example, too many facets of the challenge of Communism for us to ignore its sweeping character. Its fierce competition and the varied reactions of churchmen to it vividly exemplify conditions with which the young minister must deal. It is staggering to consider the virility of this idealistic, atheistic religion. In less than fifty years, Communism has gained one-fourth of the land surface of the world, and it now controls one-third of the world’s more than three billion people. Yet all Christian churches—Roman Catholic and Protestant—can claim only 900 million members. This immediately suggests perplexing problems the parish minister cannot escape.

Relationships of clergy and laity, which have already become severely painful, also confront the young man contemplating the ministry. Widespread secularism and Epicureanism in the churches, unashamedly accepted by thousands of members, will plague the young clergyman day after day. The parish minister who is trying to be honest with himself and with life will discover conditions so harassing that we can at least understand why hosts of preachers find it easier to try to bypass rather than face them.

This depressing situation weighs more heavily than the numerous duties expected of all parish ministers. Yet so time-consuming can these demands become that almost unconsciously ministers may minimize the all-important privilege of communicating the Gospel.

The Laymen’s Involvement

We ministers are under obligation to show laymen how all of us can and must work together if the Church is to be effective. Until our members become stronger spiritually, more involved in human needs, and more Christian in suffering with the oppressed, we have no right to anticipate effective Christian leadership. The laymen must understand their own involvement in the failures they too often try to transfer to their ministers.

Any leader must, of course, stay “ahead” of those he leads. But when church members stubbornly remain so far behind that they are not even aware of the preacher’s message or, if they do hear it, are antagonistic, there is serious trouble for minister and laymen.

Church members who are thoroughly Christian will pray for their minister. All too often, however, members of the congregation prey upon him. Frequently, they gloat over the mistakes of young ministers, instead of accepting divine aid for correcting their own. Many clergymen who are earnestly trying to interpret and apply the prayer, “Thy will be done,” are considered “dangerous.” Thus, because so many church members resent being asked to ponder prayerfully the problems of class and caste churches, the minister is frequently compelled to deal with perplexing issues alone, without the aid of intelligent and dedicated lay leaders.

Even more serious, a young clergyman will often be sickened by the discovery of how completely his congregation has been conditioned by secularism and the love of luxury. All too frequently their religion is essentially a cult of comfort and peace of mind. As a result, the minister cannot speak prophetically on human dignity and social responsibilities without being misunderstood, criticized, even denounced.

Denominational Demands

Within the confines of his own denomination, the clergyman’s question, “Can I take it?,” is never rhetorical. It is rather a probing experience.

At times the earnest preacher may be depressed by the number of hours he is expected to spend on wholly sectarian matters. He finds himself bound by demands for “denominational progress” while many of his members are struggling with spiritual doubts. He realizes that the religious problems of most people do not essentially concern what church to join. They are rather related to doubts whether there is any need for a church; indeed, whether there is a God, and if there is, what he is like.

Sometimes the whole issue is exaggerated and aggravated by ecclesiastical officials who, having never held pastorates or having had little interest in “the practical program” of the Church, have never participated in the struggles of the parish church. Some of these refuse to believe in and act upon the second-mile character of Christianity. Fortunately, the keen-minded ministers in the front-line trenches are not blind to the incapacity of such leaders to enter vicariously into the experiences current conditions demand—sometimes at great cost.

Regrettably, some young people who once thought that devotion to God’s word, eagerness to learn skills of communicating the Gospel, and ardent dedication to the Christian evangel were adequate, are quickly disillusioned. They are often made to feel that they will never really succeed unless they are rewarded with some ecclesiastical office. It ought to be easy to see that pride of achievement, fed by an avid desire for power, is thoroughly unfitting for the Christian minister or layman—yet it is painfully clear that this realization is not always easily gained.

The demands of Christ are, of course, the only ones we dare consider, and his requirements include attainments far beyond our human ability. Recall how Jesus emphasizes the divine requisite: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). We are wise to the degree that we refuse to accept any lower criterion—even of ecclesiastical success. When we intelligently and eagerly respond to the ardent appeals of Christ, the “honors” coveted by status-seekers become insignificant.

Stooping To The Practical

The young person who seeks to equip himself in the most satisfactory way for the ministry may also be surprised and disappointed to discover that some instructors in the religious field condescendingly look down upon what they call the more “practical” areas of the ministry. This is difficult to understand, since in the parish church the dedicated clergyman is expected to help carry the burdens of others. Constantly he must deal with issues of church administration and program-planning, give careful advice to his workers in all areas of the Church, and counsel with others about their problems of home, business, and society. At the same time lie should be continuing his studies in order to communicate the Gospel effectively.

Because some seminary instructors are neither involved nor genuinely concerned with the heavy obligations of the parish minister, they cannot grasp the tragedy inherent in their attitudes. They seem to overlook the evident fact that there would be no need of instructors or of seminaries were there no churches that required trained ministers. Their lack of pastoral experience, however, explains why some of them find it difficult to discuss curriculum and other aspects of academic discipline in order to aid professional students in practical preparation for the parish ministry.

Many forget that directing men in research is not necessarily training them for the parish ministry. “Research,” unless skillfully handled, may make it more difficult for the young clergyman to develop rapport with his congregation. Substituting knowledge of facts for depth of personal understanding feeds the tendency to downgrade “practical disciplines.” On the other hand, when laymen suspect that their ministers are inferior in scholarship and incapable of understanding the total program of their profession, there is a breakdown in morale, and effective service may become impossible.

For these reasons the student preparing for the Christian ministry must be able to watch some people bow before the gods of so-called scholarship while at the same time he develops toughness of purpose and an unyielding commitment to his own disciplines of study. Moreover, these ministers-to-be must always learn sincere consecration to the total welfare of those who will constitute their parishes and to all they serve in the spirit of Christ. By doing this they will be able to “take it,” because they know how to pray: “Our Father … thy will be done.”

The talented preacher thus learns that every contribution he can make, by both the teaching and the preaching ministry, is desperately needed. These critical days demand a united effort by all who are concerned with the future of the Church and of Christianity. Even if we fail to see the world redeemed, we can at least hope that God will use us in such a way that the world will not destroy itself! Furthermore, since high religion deals with attitudes and relationships to God, to fellow workers, and to people of all creeds, colors, and characters, our integrity and Christian dedication are involved. All this becomes a call we dare not ignore when we realize that the present crisis offers exciting opportunities to make God’s will central in human affairs.

We are now deciding whether we want to pattern the Church on familiar political procedures or on what Christ called the Kingdom of Heaven. All young people who are contemplating the ministry as their life-work, as well as those of us who are seeking to make the years we have left count for God, must demonstrate intellectual integrity and moral honesty. We now have the necessity and the privilege of facing frankly the most critical situation we have known and eagerly acting upon its challenge.

G. Ray Jordan is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Preaching and chapel preacher at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. He holds the A.B. from Duke University, the B.D. from Emory University, and the A.M. from Yale University.

- More from G. Ray Jordan

The Call to the Ministry

Mack B. Stokes

No more urgent need exists in the Church today than that of confronting gifted young people with the challenge of the call to the ministry. During the past several decades Christian leaders have become increasingly aware of this need. But the Church has not been sufficiently aroused at the local level for enough of our youth to consider prayerfully whether or not God might be calling them. Moreover, several factors have caused difficulties.

First, the amazing opportunities for work in science and technology attract vast numbers of young people. These fields often claim the best students in high schools and colleges before these young people have so much as considered the challenge of the ministry.

Second, the problems of the ministry have often been paraded in magazines and have also been on display in seething communities engaged in the struggle over human rights. Many parents do not want their sons to get involved in complicated social issues. They envision little more than disfavor, trouble, and meager pay for a minister. Besides this, periodic attacks of ignorant people who insist that the ministry is infiltrated by Communists or other subversive groups have done some damage. These strangely twisted minds, who “see a scorpion under every stone,” have created misgivings and aroused needless fears.

But the chief difficulty lies, not in these factors or in others like them, but within the Church itself, in the spirit and thinking of ministers and laymen. There is an inadequate understanding of the whole sweep of the biblical revelation according to which the sovereign purpose of God is to realize his Kingdom through the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our tendency is to start with the need for ministers, the number who retire and drop out each year and the number needed to replace them, the job opportunities in the various fields of Christian work. This information we must have. But it will not do much to inspire a gifted young man who has an opportunity to go into industrial management, electronics, international affairs, law, or medicine.

Since our understanding of God’s revealed purpose is often obscure, the thought of the call to the ministry tends to become vague and remote. The sense of urgency evaporates.

There must be absolute clarity at this one point: God’s policy is to realize his Kingdom through people under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The proclamation of his Gospel requires the ministry. God does not leave the carrying forward of his work either to the mercy of blind chance or to the whims of people. He deliberately acts through the Holy Spirit to call some into the ministry because only in this way does he choose to accomplish his holy purpose. No one knows before confronting God’s challenge whether or not God wants him to preach the Gospel. But God expects consecrated ministers and laymen to be alert to his aims and policies and therefore to assist in presenting the call.

Some Questions

Someone may ask, “But are you sure that God calls people to the ministry?” The question is natural and must be faced. The answer is to be found in an adequate theological understanding. The God who created the universe deliberately for his purpose, who sent the Saviour into the world to die for sinful men and to inaugurate the new era of the Kingdom, who sent the Lloly Spirit to create the body of believers who magnify Jesus Christ as Lord—this God would not be so irresponsible and foolish as to neglect what is necessary for continuing what he started. And the ministry is necessary for proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is why Paul rightly thought of himself as “set apart for the service of the Gospel” (Rom. 1:1, NEB).

But does not God call everyone? The answer is that he calls everyone to surrender his or her life to Jesus Christ but calls only some to devote their whole time and energy to the understanding, teaching, and communication of the Gospel. At this very point there is confusion among both ministers and laymen. I have been at many conferences on Christian vocations in which the impression was left that almost any good work connected with the Church is on a par with the ministry. Is not any honorable work a divine calling?

There is a truth here from the heritage of the Reformation that must be preserved. Every layman, doing his task faithfully under Christ, is surely called of God to be a true workman wherever he is. Moreover, when anyone prayerfully decides that it is pleasing to God for him to do a particular kind of useful work in making a living, that work becomes for him a divine calling. But there is a difference between this and the call to the ministry. Some are set apart for the awesome responsibility of proclaiming the Gospel. Although they might do any one of many things that would otherwise be honorable, none of these other forms of daily work would be honorable for them, since God has called them to be his ambassadors through leadership in worship and service at home and abroad.

Moses was doing an honorable work in tending Jethro’s flock. But he would not have been honorable had he kept on doing that after God called him to lead the people of Israel from their bondage in Egypt. All useful tasks contribute in one way or another to God’s holy purpose. But unless some are specially called and commissioned to understand, preach, and teach the Gospel, every activity of mankind will get lost in a barren and futile secularism. The minister is called, therefore, to speak for God, in behalf of God, to the end that all of man’s activities may be coordinated toward the realization of God’s Kingdom. The minister’s calling is not special because he as an individual is different from other men. It is special because his commission and work have to do with what is at the heart of God’s revealed policy for mankind. It is special because it requires, in a way that no other responsibility does, the direction and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. All noble work takes on a new glory when it is carried forward under the inspiration of the Spirit. But in a unique way this is true of the work of the minister.

It cannot be emphasized too much in these days that Christianity is revealed religion. At its heart is the promise of salvation through Jesus Christ to all who repent, believe, and have faith. This Gospel, then, is no merely human discovery. God acted through the patriarchs, through Moses, David, and the prophets, to prepare the way for the coming Deliverer. Then, in the fullness of time, he sent forth his Son. Indeed, creation itself was aimed toward fulfillment in Jesus Christ. To understand the deep meaning of the call to the ministry and the power of its hold over those called, therefore, we must have a clear view of God’s revealed determination to do his utmost to draw all men into his Kingdom through Jesus Christ. God has mightily acted toward this end through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the Saviour.

God’S Sword Thrusts

While translating the Book of Jonah some years ago I came to that place which says that God “prepared” or “appointed” a great fish to swallow up the prophet (Jonah 1:17). When I checked on the Hebrew word (manah), I found to my surprise that it also meant “to ordain” (Koehler’s Lexicon, p. 537). “An ordained whale,” I facetiously thought. But my wonder increased when I came to the fourth chapter. There I found that God also “ordained” (manah) a plant, a worm, and a sultry east wind! “A whale or a worm, a gourd or a wind,” I thought; “if God ordains them, he can use them.”

Over the years this rather strange and humbling little lesson has often come back to my heart to encourage me in the ministry.—SIDNEY A. HATCH, Portland, Oregon.

The Need For Proclamation

But this good news requires proclamation. “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Rom. 10:14). Paul saw clearly that there must be an inherent connection between the Gospel and its proclamation. The same God who acted to reveal his redemptive purpose and strategy had to set apart some for teaching and proclaiming his salvation in Jesus Christ.

For this reason, the call to the ministry is not identified merely by adding up psychologically attested gifts, nor human attainments—whether educational or otherwise—nor even by natural ability. Paul knew that gifts and qualifications have their uses. But, according to him, prior to all else is God’s plan of sharing his Gospel with men. Nothing supersedes in importance here the willingness to be receptive to the authority of the Word and to the empowering grace of the Holy Spirit. No qualification surpasses that of the commission from God himself to proclaim his Word. Those who are thus set apart, of course, must prove themselves within the community of faith and must carry out the implications of their calling by applying themselves, through prayer, study, and discipline, to the tasks at hand.

In the light of all this, it is reasonable to suppose that God would give people some clear indication that he is calling them. To be sure, men must bring themselves close enough to hear. And if they hear, they must respond. Otherwise the call is of no avail. God commissions; man accepts.

How does God call his ministers? A few persons, like Paul, have received an extraordinary call, and their response was almost inevitable. They could not do otherwise. For most, however, this has not been so. In the lives of most ministers the call came as a growing experience. The Holy Spirit took innumerable events, impressions, and impulses, too mysterious to understand, and fashioned them into his divine commission. Often one person—a minister, a Sunday school teacher, a speaker at a youth camp—was God’s instrument in completing the transaction. But whether gradual or sudden, the fact of the call is no less real.

Four signs of the call to the ministry are worthy of special note here. They are not absolute; the mystery of God’s dealings with a human soul cannot be caught up into any simple formula. But whenever these signs come together in the experience of a young person, he may be sure that God is challenging him to take a careful look at the Christian ministry.

First, if in his highest and holiest moments there is the recurring sense that he ought to give himself to Christ for the work of the ministry, he should pay attention to this. It is very likely that this is the Holy Spirit calling. Everyone has mediocre moments. They are unauthentic. God finds it difficult to speak through the static of our trivialities. If the Holy Spirit speaks to us at any time in life, surely he does so in those moments of great inspiration and holy consecration. It is important to note the word “recurring.” For most people one experience is not enough. It is the recurring and growing movement of thought and life that goes deepest.

Second, if in a young person’s growing awareness of the world’s vast needs, he feels that he must do something personally to minister to those needs, this too may be the call of the Holy Spirit. The concern of a young Christian for humanity, for people in their needs, is a sure sign that God is at work in a special way. By itself alone this sign may indicate any one of many avenues of possible service. But, coupled with the first, it would definitely tend to confirm the fact of a call to the ministry.

Third, if there is a growing sense that the answers to man’s deepest questions, both individually and socially, are to be found only in the Lord Jesus Christ, this too is a mighty confirming factor. Here the negative experiences of people past and present suffice to show that Jesus Christ is not only the way but also the only Saviour from sin and the inaugurator of the Kingdom.

Finally, if a young person finds a growing sense of satisfaction in the opportunity to speak at youth services, in Sunday school, and in churches, or to visit the sick, the prisoners, and the lonely, or to lead in camp activities and social concerns, this too tends to confirm the validity of his call. In general, the desire to speak and serve in churches and other groups—particularly when accompanied with talents in this area—may be another sign that the Holy Spirit is calling.

A word of caution is needed here. Some are slow to find their way in public utterance. Others are shy at first. These too may be called. For neither slowness of speech nor shyness is a fatal obstacle. Moses, keenly aware of his inadequacies, said he was “slow of speech and of tongue” (Ex. 4:10); yet he was chosen to be the deliverer of Israel. God takes man’s weakness and turns it to his mighty ends. Nevertheless, it is still true that the increasing enjoyment of the kind of work that goes on in the life of a local church is a good sign.

No one of these four signs is sufficient by itself. Indeed, all four of them together offer no final proof. But when these signs are recurringly present in a life that is seeking God’s will, the Holy Spirit uses them to confirm the call to the Christian ministry.

Mack B. Stokes is associate dean and Parker Professor of Systematic Theology in Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. He holds the A.B. degree from Asbury College, B.D. from Duke University, and Ph.D. from Boston University. The author of three books, he is an ordained Methodist minister.

- More from Mack B. Stokes

Theology

Judgment of the Theologians

Protestant Christianity no longer responds to any one final authority. The sad result of its theological defection from the biblical norm shows in the chaotic condition of Continental religious thought. For the third time in a century the supposed bulwarks of Protestant theology are falling and scholars are seeking new strongholds.

Many questions are being asked in Europe, some of them of special interest and significance for America. What future remains for the “theology of the Word of God”? What theological development and progress can be expected in the days ahead?

But, preoccupied only with each other, the theologians seem wholly unaware of their fading prestige in the world of thought.

Is this chaotic condition in contemporary theological thought a sign of God’s judgment upon the theologians? Has their persistent compromise or sacrifice of the message of the Holy Scriptures made them victims of their own confusion?

Theologians frequently remind us that divine judgment must “begin at God’s house,” a theme well-entrenched in modern dogmatics. Could it be, however, that they themselves have overlooked one of the subtler points of the biblical message—namely, that even theologians are not exempt from God’s scrutiny?

When theology was queen of the sciences, theologians recognized the indispensability of Jesus and of the apostles for understanding contemporary man (theologians included). But now that modern theologians have made themselves indispensable to the “understanding” of Jesus and the apostles, theology has become the slave of speculators. What God may be proclaiming in the history of our times is that modern theologians and their theology are quite unnecessary for the well-being and on-going of his Church.

Many theologians on university-related faculties seem oblivious of their fallen status; they seem unaware that their colleagues no longer give them the same academic esteem that scholars in other disciplines enjoy. One reason for this demotion is the apparent inability of modern theologians to communicate their convictions intelligibly. It is true that the frequently changing frontiers of dogmatics now necessitate conquering novel terrain with countless hazards of discussion. Nonetheless the physical scientists escort their colleagues over equally devious paths and do so successfully. This leads some academicians to ask whether the theologians—in the midst of their strongly asserted individualistic preferences—are perhaps using ambiguity to conceal their insecurity.

It is not only simpletons who cannot understand these theological subtleties but also some other scholars, whose own fields of specialty are highly complex; they stand amazed in the presence of the verbiage concealing Jesus the Nazarene.

But we do not believe that the theologians are deliberately clouding the atmosphere. Amid the confusion they have brought about, they are simply trying to market what is non-intelligible; that there are few takers in academic circles should surprise no one. Is it perhaps a sign of divine wrath and judgment that the theological leadership of major denominations is wielded predominantly by those who are content with changing fashions of doctrine, or who establish these changing fashions? The fundamental question for the cult of the professional theologians is simply this: What is God saying to them, to the theologians, who claim to be specialists in what he is saying to others? What is God trying to teach them in the historical fact that Protestant theology is suffering its third collapse in the twentieth century? Is he telling the theologians that they no longer know what the Word of God is?

As the religious thinkers of Europe look into the near future, what do they anticipate? While a few scholars wonder if German theology is approaching an era of divine chastisement, apparently none senses that judgment may already be in process. “It is likely,” thinks Adolf Köberle of Tübingen, “that in a short time dark events and judgments of God may come over us. The future of European theology hangs heavily on events in world history.”

The future, says Emil Brunner, is “a matter of the Holy Spirit. Bultmann does not even acknowledge the legitimacy of the term; for him the Holy Spirit belongs to ‘the myth.’ ” “Communism,” continues Brunner, “is still the greatest and most powerful ideological opponent of Christianity. Truth does not play a role in Communism, and totalitarian power can do away with theology.”

Most scholars abroad look for a generation of action and reaction in the realm of religious thought, a time of adjustment and readjustment, of combination and recombination. The course of European theology has been determined in the past so largely by the prevailing winds of philosophical speculation that Tübingen professor Otto Michel says candidly: “No man can predict the future. Spiritual developments are rooted deeper than the theological emphases of the professors. Yet they hang together with the philosophical currents and cultural and historical phenomena which often prove decisive.”

No new philosophical current as powerful as Hegel’s or Kant’s or Heidegger’s has appeared on the German horizon. The voices of Moses and Isaiah, of Jesus and Paul are permitted to say only what the critics allow. Younger theologians evidence a rationalistic drift to philosophy of religion. No clear alternative to the broken Bultmannian perspective is yet in view. While a few strong voices are rising, each distinct from the others, none speaks comprehensively and influentially enough to warrant recognition as an established alternative to Bultmann.

One thing is clear, however. No one anticipates a golden era of theological prosperity in Europe. The conservative scholars on the seminary faculties are a woeful minority, and are often isolated. Thus any decisive shift in the outlook of Continental theology is less likely to issue from an evangelical counter-thrust than from some novel philosophy. As a successor to Heidegger’s existent, such a philosophy may accommodate Christian motifs to new forms of speculation. Or in a context of some dark turn in European history it may either plunge the Continent into bleak despair and unbelief, or prompt men in their anguish to seek afresh the God of the Bible.

Predictions concerning the future of theology differ in perspective and intensity. “The dialectical theology is secure,” says Rudolf Bultmann, despite its present turbulences, “and it has a future.” Wilfried Joest of Erlangen, who agrees that the division of Bultmann’s empire need not signal an end-time for dialectical theology, notes, however, its drift toward more extreme positions: “The Bultmann school is separating into diverse shades of emphasis.… It assumes even more radical forms among some of the Mainz professors.” According to the Göttingen New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias, “the hopeful sign and promise of a fruitful future in German theology exists through the evident turning from Bultmann’s presuppositions. We must now labor as carefully as we can to get at the words of Jesus and the content of his message.”

Two others, individualistic enough to preclude their attachment to any school of thought, should also be quoted here: Ethelbert Stauffer of Erlangen, now retired, and Helmut Thielicke of Hamburg. In these next years, says Stauffer, who is sometimes pictured by other New Testament scholars as “a twentieth century Renan, though not so sentimental,” “the Church will find it necessary to stand in the forefront of all human concerns, and we shall see the rise of a new Christian humanism.” “In 1916,” observes Stauffer, “Barth’s Römerbrief said a nein! to humanismus. The Nazi era divided Church from humanismus and Hitler fought both and conquered. What is needed now is not Khrushchev’s socialistic humanism but a new Christian humanism in which the Good Samaritan can lead us on.” Thielicke hopes that the present dead-end street in dogmatics will encourage new interest in the widely neglected realm of theological ethics: “The crisis of modern preaching lies in the fact that it speaks only to the ‘inner man,’ instead of addressing his socio-cultural situation.”

Yet in one major respect the present age of European religious thought differs from the recent past, and particularly from the generation that Barth called to a fresh hearing of the Word of God. This new generation is the one that has already heard the summons to “the God who reveals himself” and yet has turned away to Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian positions.

What will be the plight of a future generation whose spiritual confusion is compounded by the fact that the Barthian “rediscovery of special revelation” and the message that God speaks is for it an already by-passed option?

While Barth’s Wort-theology crumbled the defenses of the old liberalism, the new liberalism traced its own ancestry to the Wort-theology! What is the destiny of those who meet the plea for special revelation with deliberate detachment, who reject it as an incoherent and unconvincing option of dialectical theology?

Otto Weber of Göttingen captures the sorry mood in this observation: “Bultmann stressed that there is a Word of God even if he was unsure what it is. Bultmann’s students all speak about ‘the Word.’ But now we are already seeing a movement away from the certainty that there is such a Word.”

“Sometimes I fear the end of Protestantism in such a generation,” confesses Köberle of Tübingen. “But in a dark hour, many may long again for a firm foundation and for living bread” and by God’s grace “ears may be open again to the old unshortened Gospel.”

At present the prospect of a rediscovery of “the old unshortened Gospel,” by the theologians at least, does not seem very bright, for the chaos of contemporary theology rests in the frontier realm of the problem of religious knowledge. It is a strange fact of modern European theology that while most of its theologians stress special divine disclosure, they differ woefully as to its nature, content, and significance.

“The basic problem remains Christology,” insists Wilfried Joest of Erlangen. “The real issue is the meaning of the person of Christ for the Word of God, for truth, and for justification. Is he only the prophetic mouth of God, or is he present in the Word?”

But what is this Word? Notes Peter Brunner of Heidelberg: “If the Church does not experience a new awakening—not necessarily in the eighteenth or nineteenth century sense of pietistic renewal—then we shall not have a real renewal of theology. The prophet Amos speaks of a time when people go through the land and ask for the Word of God and there will be no Word of God. This bad situation must be turned by God’s grace into a good situation, or there is no hopeful future for German theology.”

Theology

One Simon a Tanner

James Black

Text: [Peter] lodgeth with one Simon a tanner, whose house is by the seaside … (Acts 10:6).

When a great idea bursts upon the world, its first and perhaps worst battle is to free itself from the ropes and cords that its own prejudiced friends try to fasten round it. Like the young bird in the shell, it has to crack the covering and get free. Our Lord’s great declaration of salvation and redemption to all men everywhere provides a striking instance of this. For the first thing that the early Christians themselves tried to do was to bind and tie His universal message to the old Jewish narrow system in which they had been brought up.

This is easily understood. These men and women were Jews by birth and religion: and they had no idea at first that any break-away from the Temple or the Synagogue might be needed. For years, although they had become Christians, they went every day to their devotions in the Temple. Ananias, for example—the man who helped Paul to escape in Damascus—is described as “a devout man according to the Law,” although he had become a convinced Christian: and James, our Lord’s brother, who was the Head of the young Church in Jerusalem, worshipped regularly and faithfully in the Temple, according to his life-long custom.

In fact, there soon arose an active party among the converts who argued that a Greek, a Roman, a German, or a Briton, if he wanted to become a Christian, must first become a Jew and must observe the full rites of the ancient system of Moses.

If this attempt had succeeded, we now see clearly that the so-called Christian Church might have become merely a new form of Jewish nationalism, and certainly its universal appeal and redeeming quality would have been lost for the Gentile world. In other words, the big free dream would have been shackled—tied down with ropes and strings by its own friends.

How was the young Church saved from this disaster?

The happy answer is that fortunately the dream itself was so galvanic and so self-expanding that it burst the ropes as if they had been threads. One by one, these man-made strings were snapped, until the message of Jesus was set free in its own natural fullness, free to enlarge and expand itself in its native power, free to win all men of every nation, heritage, or tradition, free to be itself, and free to proclaim the illimitable mercy of God without controls or conditions.

In the story of Simon the tanner, I imagine that we can see and even hear the first rope snapping. In principle, the future of the Church was settled in this apparent casual incident.

It is common knowledge that the Jews divided the concerns of life and religion into the clean and the unclean: and their ceremonial worship was very strict—and still is fairly strict—on this question of the clean and unclean. In particular, certain animals were regarded as ceremonially unclean; for instance, the pig, the camel and the coney: and in the same way, certain trades and occupations were put by them under the same dark shadow. One of the most despised of these occupations was the now fully honourable trade of tanning—the reason being, no doubt, that the tanner must handle the hides and skins of dead animals, and might even have to deal with the skins of unclean animals! No tanner, therefore, was regarded as clean or was allowed to have his house or his business premises inside the sacred city walls.

This accounts for the fact that this man Simon the tanner was forced to live outside the environs of Joppa, down by the unfrequented seashore—and let us remember that the seashore in those days was an outcast and derelict place, possessing none of the romantic or seasonal attractions it has for us to-day! Nothing is just so modern as our love of seaside resorts.

We can readily understand, then, the underlying bitterness of ostracism and aversion in this short sentence: “One Simon a tanner, whose house is by the seaside.” By compulsion, he had to live and work there, beyond the protection and amenities of the town, because no one would have tolerated him or his business inside the city walls. “Unclean, unclean!”

When Peter came to Joppa, we are told that he lodged “with one Simon a tanner, whose house is by the seaside.” Small as this fact seems, it represents nothing less than a revolution—a revolution of outlook and custom. What did this fact imply?

Go back five years before this, and say to Peter, “We are glad you have come to Joppa, but we are sorry that the town is so full that we haven’t a stray corner to put you up. But if you don’t mind, we shall lodge you tonight with a man called Simon, a tanner, whose house, of course, is outside the city walls.” What do you think Peter would have said?

We know that before he met Jesus, this disciple had a considerable gift for strong language, pungent and scathing. Indeed, even after he became a disciple, he could use his native talent in the court-room at Jerusalem with oaths and curses. I leave you then to imagine what his language would have been, had you told him five years before this that he was to lodge with Simon, a tanner. To put it mildly, he would have said, “Not on your life! I would rather sleep on the moors, in a hay-loft, or even in the streets. But I will not lodge on any account with an unclean tradesman like this tanner whose house is by the seaside.” And that would have been that!

I do not imagine that when he came now to Joppa, Peter had in any way thought or argued the matter out in his own mind. But I do suggest that when he did go down to Joppa and actually agreed to stay with Simon the tanner, his act helped to snap the first rope that bound the young Church! For in so doing, he broke with the whole ancient Jewish tradition of the clean and the unclean.

Remember, all these converts were still wholly Jewish in their ideas and customs. As we have seen, they regularly attended the Synagogue: they went to the Temple and offered sacrifices: they observed the full Jewish ritual and lived under the strict law of Moses. Especially in regard to the clean and the unclean, they had no notion as yet of the real meaning of Christ’s command, “Make the inside of the cup clean.”

Well, Peter came down to Joppa on this occasion.

So far, there were few converts in the town. But one of them, praise God, was this man Simon, the tanner, whose workplace and home lay out of the town, where he and his proscribed trade could not be an offence to his scrupulous Jewish brethren.

Rather diffidently—almost with a stutter and a very uneasy smile—he said to Peter, when he arrived, “I wonder, sir, if you would care to lodge with me? Fortunately, I have plenty of room in my house, and I think I can look after your comfort. But I ought to say, sir [here his smile must have become rather twisted and anxious]—I ought to say, sir, that I am one Simon, a tanner, who is compelled by our Jewish law to live outside the city walls. But, of course, if you are unwilling to come, I’ll understand at once.” And we can imagine how he must have feared, from old experience, a rude or (perhaps worse) a frigidly polite refusal, or some faked excuse that the Apostle was already engaged.

God bless you, Peter! I believe that at the moment when the man asked you to lodge with him, you got one of the shocks of your life! I think perhaps you were flummoxed and were completely taken aback at the moment. Then you remembered Jesus, and you said in a flash, “What would Jesus, my Lord and Master, do?”

And so, as quickly as you could, to cover your previous hesitation, you said, “My dear Simon, I’ll be honoured indeed. Yes, I’ll gladly stay with you in your house.” And you put your arm through his—whom no Jew had willingly touched for years—and you said, “Give me my little bag, and we’ll go straightaway to your house by the seaside,” and you went through the town arm-in-arm, bless your soul. I am sure that two men went down that narrow street with a new revelation in their hearts—you, Peter, who saw for the first time that your Master comes to all equally, clean or unclean, Pharisee or sinner—and Simon, a despised tanner, who for the first time walked that street as if he were treading on air. For he was a man now, equal with any and all, a really honoured man at last!

If you think of it, this is the first bursting of the ropes that threatened to shackle the free Gospel of Jesus. For it is the clear proclamation—in act, if not in words—of the liberating and ransoming Gospel of His love. What silly and narrow prejudice of man could possibly remain when the great Gospel came in and cut the ropes men tie about God and the human sold?

And now let us sit down and apply it to our own concerns.

There are as many, as vicious, as brutal, as Satanic prejudices today as ever cursed the social and religious life of Peter’s generation. If these prejudices are new or different—questions of race, land, blood, rank, class, or privilege—they are only the more devilish and hateful for that. For we are forming and enforcing them in spite of centuries of Christian teaching! Perhaps the old test may still sift many of us into Christian or non-Christian, or at least sub-Christian. Can we go down and lodge with one Simon, a tanner, whom people have kicked out and compelled to live outside the pale of the city—yes, and not patronize him, or talk down to him, or condescend to him, or blush for him, but regard him as our open equal, at whose table we can sit, not as if we were conferring an honour, or doing something for which we should get a pat on the back? If we act as if we were “honouring” someone, then we are not supping with Simon, but supping with the Devil! There is no real Christ in our hearts—the liberating, enfranchising power of Jesus—until all the little rotten arrogances of the prideful world and all the insolences of assumed privileges are blown clean out of us with the bursting of the ropes.

A few years after this, in a quiet gathering at Ephesus, the converts were having a Communion service. A new member was welcomed at the door. The simple Christians were glad to receive him, for he was a man of some influence and power. One of the disciples said, “Perhaps, my friend, you will take that seat over there—you see, that vacant seat on the other side.” The man hemmed and hawed for a moment and then whispered, “I say—ahem—you will excuse me, won’t you, but the man you are asking me to sit beside is—ahem—my own slave.” The disciple was silent for a moment, and then said with courage, “Yes, and why not?” “But,” said the man, “you know—er—he is my own slave!” “Yes,” said the disciple again, “and why not?” And then the man squared his shoulders, walked round the room, shook hands with his own slave, and sat humbly down beside him. Praise God!

When a thing like this takes place—master sitting humbly beside slave—Peter linking his arm with an unclean tanner—the ropes of human prejudice and custom, and all the cursed cords of shame, begin to crack for ever. This proclaims the glorious message that people may be outside the pale of the city, and yet be inside the pale of Christ.

Don’t let any of us try to dodge this terribly modern issue, more ghastly now than ever. Prejudice still runs red like a trail of blood through our social, political, and religious thinking. Let us believe and practise the following Christian affirmations.

1. There are no inferior races fit only to serve us and the likes of us. To believe in race inferiority is merely out-dated barbarism. What has the pigment of a man’s skin to do with the colour of his soul? All men are of one blood before God—equal in need, response, and capacity—and are made in God’s image. Be we white, black, brown, or yellow, to believe anything else is not only unchristian doctrine but also anthropological nonsense.

2. There are no inferior classes who are born to fetch and carry for our clean and dainty hands. There are, of course, natural differences of gifts and aptitudes among men, but there is no difference in their quality, capacity, or destiny. To believe otherwise argues a stupid view of the dignity of human labour, the worth of man, the ends of life, and the purposes of God. Classes, as we use the term, do not exist in the thought of Jesus. His is the one perfectly “classless” society.

3. There are no inferior people to whom we can graciously unbend or condescend. There are, of course, vulgar and common people everywhere in every so-called grade of society: but the worst vulgarity of all is the vulgarity of conceit, pride, affectation, vanity, the arrogance of riches, and the insolence of intellect. I praise God that Jesus gave His finest blessing to the “meek and lowly,” those who are essentially humble of heart.

4. There is no clean or unclean except what comes from the inside. We are not made dirty by our hands but by our hearts, or filthy by our clothes but by our minds. The world must live by honest dirt: and the only real “muck” I know is the muck in men’s thoughts. If you and I ever think some man, some job, some work, or some class unclean, the uncleanness is only in our own thinking. It is our type of mind that makes our type of world.

5. Jesus preached a glorious equality. Men and women equal! British and foreigner equal! Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Afghan, Negro, and American equal! Do I touch any of us on the raw? If so, it is not I, but Jesus, who stabs us. And He cuts the sore only that He may drain the poison.

Peter had his prejudices like any one of us. No doubt he called them “honest” prejudices. (I wonder why we always call them honest?) He believed, as so many of us do, that there are natural grades in life—things clean or unclean, chosen or outcast, privileged or common, precious or cheap. But as he allowed the power of the Gospel to liberate his soul and cleanse his mind, he was able to cast his prejudices to the clean winds of God and to stand in the freedom and equality of Christ.

It wasn’t done all at once: but though it took time, it was sure. For one cannot have Jesus and prejudice in one’s heart at the same time. And the cleansing process began here—yes, here—when in the strength of Jesus, Peter, formerly so biased, snapped the ropes that held him down, and went along that narrow street, arm in arm with an outcast, out through the city walls, and lodged with one Simon, a tanner, whose house was by the seaside.

If he hadn’t done it, what?

I wonder how long it would have taken Peter to go out and preach to the whole world the full Gospel of Christ’s grace, if he had stood on his false dignity and refused to accompany Simon, the tanner.

Remember—it is a final secret—one little liberation, nobly answered, alone makes us fit for the next!—From Days of My Autumn, by James Black (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1950). Used by permission.

- More from James Black

Theology

Current Religious Thought: September 11, 1964

J. D. Douglas

Equal in area to New York State but with a smaller population, Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Nazis in 1939 and by the Communists in 1948. Today it reflects all the good and bad features of a Soviet satellite. It takes four years and a large deposit to get a car, but there is a superb state health and welfare program. A system of informers operates against those churls who find life even in a Socialist Republic less than idyllic; but there is no serious juvenile delinquency, and people can walk the streets of the city of Prague at night in perfect safety.

About nine million Czechoslovaks (65.5 per cent) are baptized Roman Catholics, and 1¼ million are Protestants. Prominent among the latter is Dr. J. L. Hromadka, dean of the Comenius Faculty (current student enrollment about thirty-five). A fulsome eulogy earlier this year by New Testament professor J. B. Soucek purports to show how Hromadka by successive steps found liberation from various kinds of bondage. These stages included “the complacent glorification of culture prevalent in the years of his youth,” his “entanglement in the nationalistic sentiment,” “timid anti-bolshevism,” the equally narrow-minded anti-catholicism” current after World War I, and his “desperately clinging to the past forms of social and political life.” Thus, says Soucek, he has reached his present position courageously and without regret, seeking “the way of a christian and of the church in the midst of the rising socialist society.…” We might have hoped for more precise definition of terms here, as Soucek builds up the image of a man battling his way gamely through intellectual perils, toils, and snares, trying the spirits, and eventually choosing a sphere of service in which church and socialism work hand in hand for a better tomorrow.

Is this a complete likeness of the enigmatic figure who turned his back on the United States in 1947 after having held a professorship at Princeton Theological Seminary and who later joined Britain’s Red Dean in charging the Allies with using germ warfare in Korea? A little investigation might suggest that here is no latter-day socialist. In a penetrating and well-documented account of Hromadka’s theological politics, Dr. Matthew Spinka tells how at a convention in Prague as long ago as July, 1923, Hromadka declared that the “frequently derided and proscribed atheistic, materialistic socialism” could not be “brushed aside with a mere phrase ‘materialism’ and ‘atheism.’ ”

Twenty-five years later, at the WCC assembly in Amsterdam, Hromadka was already recognized as spokesman of the Eastern Europeans at a time when the Communist coup d’état in his homeland was barely six months old. He denies that Communism is either totalitarian or atheistic. “Its atheism,” he asserts, “is rather a practical reaction against the forces of the pre-socialistic society than a positive philosophically essential tenet.” He suggests that it is in many ways “secularized Christian theology, often furiously anti-Church.” The official report of Hromadka’s address on this occasion was significantly less anti-Western than the version published in Hromadka’s own periodical in Prague. (See M. Spinka, “Church in Communist Society,” Hartford Seminary Foundation Bulletin, June, 1954.) The vision of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin as Christians unawares is as intriguing and as theologically confusing as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s conviction that he will meet atheists in heaven. Both interpretations would tend to make a Party member very cross.

Despite an earlier avowed purpose of “Christianizing” the regime (a course endorsed by Karl Barth), Hromadka now evidently supports all its policies except the blatantly anti-religious. Eighteen months ago in Dresden, he said proof was available that soon after World War II certain “circles in the West” were preparing to liquidate the Soviet Union. He blames the United States chiefly for making West Germany a bridgehead for the economic, military, and diplomatic fight against the Soviet Union and charges Western propaganda with “casting the shadow of prejudice and false ideas” on East Germany. No one who reads such utterances with their maddening lack of precision, or who heard Hromadka’s keynote address at the Christian Peace Assembly this year, is likely to get the impression of a non-partisan quest for peace. Indeed, one sometimes gets the oddest sense of martial music just offstage.

Matthew Spinka a decade ago, in a remark still relevant, concluded with customary shrewdness: “Dr. Hromadka’s experiment in cooperating with the Czechoslovak and other Communist regimes is not without its positive value: for had he not made it, no one could tell whether this was a possible solution of the acute problem of the relation of the Christian churches to Communism. Now we know that it is not.”

In Prague I found the Second All-Christian Peace Assembly devoid of a strong eschatological note. Peace was the great preoccupation, in pursuit of which it is necessary (here I quote from the movement’s aims) “to concentrate all energies of Christian believers.” Many earnest Christians have been beguiled by the challenge offered in this dangerous half-truth. It goes far beyond Bonhoeffer’s reasonable statement (approved by the CPC) that in the past Christians had done much to further the various wars and that they should now do as much (or more) in a common Christian campaign for peace.

A godless regime (J. L. Hromadka has not proved it otherwise) would have liked the much-publicized findings of the Prague assembly less if an old lesson had not been overlooked: that true peace involves not merely the absence of conflict but the presence of God.

- More from J. D. Douglas

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The Swiss Seminaries

In The East Zone

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Breakdown Of Bultmann’S Positions

An Unrepentant Bultmann

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The Laymen’s Involvement

Denominational Demands

Stooping To The Practical

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Some Questions

God’S Sword Thrusts

The Need For Proclamation

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