The Christian and the Rise of Secularism

Bastian Kruithof

Men of insight—prophets, poets, novelists, dramatists, philosophers—and the Word of God have spoken to this subject. Christopher Morley in that delightful book, Where the Blue Begins, has one of his characters say, “Modern skepticism has amputated God from the heart, but there is still a twinge where the arteries were sewn up.” And again, “The churches were so hemmed in by tall buildings they had no chance to kneel.” And Jesus, our Lord, has left us such imperishable sayings as these: “A man’s life consists not in the abundance of things he possesses.” “You are more than many sparrows.” “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth but in heaven.”

These quotations and many more point to the baffling yet challenging problems that perplex and console the serious mind.

We must make a distinction between the secular and secularism. These terms have their origin in the word saeculum, meaning age or world. In our criticism of secularism, it is our task to appreciate the secular. God is the Creator-God, not Aristotle’s Prime Mover, not Thought thinking upon Thought with no concern for the world and man. The Psalmist says, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.”

Our Creator called the universe into existence, not in time, but with time, as Augustine says. He made a God’s plenty of matter. Man has known this for a long time, but it is impressed on him more and more in this age of stellar adventure and space exploration. When God created man in His own image, He placed him on this earth with the stars as a canopy. As part of the divine image man also received lordship over creation with no restrictions except the warning against pride, which could cause the tragic fall of angels and of men. In spite of the Fall the world is still “the theater of God’s glory,” as Calvin says. As far as we know, man is the only soul-and-body creature who can believe, think, feel, and will, and who by divine grace can utilize the implications of lordship.

The God of the Christian is a revealing God. His self-disclosure comes to us by means of a general revelation and a special revelation, both requiring the sensitivity of faith. The Word of God itself honors general revelation, though it never suggests building a natural theology on such a basis. In the nineteenth Psalm we read: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” In Acts 14 Paul at Lystra speaks of the God who has not left himself without witness, and in Acts 17 the Apostle, addressing the Stoics and Epicureans, again tells of the one God who made and takes care of the world and men. Only when he goes on to speak of the One who was raised from the dead do the “thinkers” bow him out with a smile. And only a few believe.

In the first and second chapters of Romans Paul once more takes up the matter of revelation. He speaks of the inexcusability of man within the framework of the divine wrath. And he speaks of conscience that accuses or excuses man. But more is needed. It is the Word, the self-disclosure of God in Scripture and especially in Jesus Christ, that gives the right view of man and the world. As Calvin says clearly, the Word serves as spectacles to enable us to come to an understanding of general revelation.

Secularism has been called the refusal to let God be God. It has been characterized as “practical atheism.” It denies the relevance of religion to the major areas of life and concerns itself with dominating interests other than loyalty to God. “But Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked: then he forsook the God who made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.” Swinburne sums it up in the familiar words: “Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the Master of things.”

Shailer Matthews once used the phrase: “God emeritus.” This shocking statement is no figment of the imagination but a candid description of a tragic severance that leaves man scarcely suffering a twinge. The shift to nature, the present-day emphasis on science, is not to be overlooked. But preoccupation with the scientific has contributed to the atrophying of the sense of mystery, the ineffable, the noumenal, the holy. As Samuel Miller says in The Dilemma of Modern Belief: “Everything has become natural, biological, social, and quite clinical.” When man gets his every gadget, he can easily forget his God.

In Christian Faith and Natural Science Karl Heim speaks of two kinds of secularists. There are those who keep fighting God, and there are those mature secularists who are perfectly adjusted to a godless situation. We have with us and we have had for some time the religious atheists who are not devoid of fervor. Marx, Feuerbach, and Freud have their disciples. We think also of the gloomy existentialists marooned in their cellophane wrappers, filled with anxiety about death, yet drumming up courage to face the absurd.

The Fruits Of Secularism

One of the results of secularism is dehumanization. This is a strong term that reaches the heart of the matter. Very likely Gabriel Marcel had it in mind when he said, “Man has become a function.” It implies that there is no profound maturing of mind and heart. Science, the machine, organization, and massification have pushed man from the center of things. That spells spiritual tragedy, a return to chaos or the jungle. We can understand Kierkegaard’s lone battle against the crushing of the person and his pleading with “that solitary individual” to be the man God wants him to be.

Secularism results in fragmentation, pluralism, a loss of unity. In our time we have with a vengeance separation of church from state, of religion from education, of meaning from art. Philosophy has become the concern for the logic of words. There is no seeing of life steadily and whole. To speak of our age as pagan could be insulting to those Greeks who had a richer conception of, and a corresponding greater reverence for, life.

Secularism also spells a loss of mystery, a decline of the sense of transcendence. Life that is only horizontal crowds out miracle. An over-emphasis on visibility blots out vision. When truth and morals become relative, when the human character is caricatured, when art deals with the trivial, when tolerance means indifference, what is there left but an impoverishment in which glamor is a poor substitute for glory?

Economics and politics have also become infected. When dollar signs become our glasses, we have eyes mostly for the temple of Mammon. There is grave danger in thinking of good times only in terms of rugged individualism or Leviathan.

Secularism has invaded education. It has become “the supporting atmosphere” in colleges and universities far adrift from the moorings of the churches. Religion and Bible are not to interfere with the “full-orbed” training of the young. Psychology and sociology tend to replace theology and Christian philosophy. We are reminded of Paul Ramsey’s 151st Psalm, which begins like this: “Oh! come, let us sing unto Sociology; let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our group consciousness.” The rest of the song is a jolly exposure of the new idiom that seems to give some people status.

Even the churches seem to have lost their zeal for a God-centered education. True, we have the difficult problem of academic freedom with us; but the solution does not lie in the churches’ indifference. When the Christian faith loses a comprehensive Christian view of life and the world, education is impoverished.

Secularism is evident in much of contemporary literature. T. S. Eliot affirms “that the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call secularism.” It does not understand the supernatural.

The study of literature is very important because it reveals the pulsebeat of modernity. Man received a tremendous shock during the war years and their after-math. Idealism and optimism have given way to realism, naturalism, and pessimism. Hemingway tells us that there is no remedy for anything. Steinbeck reminds us that what God formerly took care of, man must now take upon himself. A character in Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest says he belongs in the world of petrified stumps where even death has little or no meaning. Stephen Vincent Benét frankly admits we will not be saved by anything, not by General Motors, nor by inventions, nor by Vitamin D.

John Killinger in The Failure of Theology in Modern Literature analyzes the writings of our times and sees in them the lostness of man because he has lost God. The pale Christ figures are quite ineffectual. They do not stand up or out. They represent the ideals of humanism, a secularization of Christ with no resurrection and no triumph.

There was a time, as in Dante’s day, when man was surrounded by the presence of God. There was a time when men searched for the Holy Grail. Today man is in quest of himself on a rather fruitless search. What was once a cosmic struggle has become a skirmish between the Id and the Ego. Redemption is an atmosphere foreign to most of our writers. Alienation and gloom compose the theme of the existentialists such as Sartre, Kafka, and Camus. The self faces the meaningless, the tragic, the absurd, with only enough courage left to face death with a minimum of quiver.

Inroads Upon The Churches

Since God has become a blur to millions, the churches also are affected. Where congregations become “the gateway to the country club,” where lectures and harmless homilies ten miles from any exposition of a text beguile the listeners, where sin and atonement are toned down, where love loses the content of faith and doctrine, where Jesus is sentimentalized and demythologized, where people no longer understand biblical terminology and prefer a new idiom, there secularism has also made its inroads.

We are well aware of the charge made by Bishop Robinson in his Honest to God and by Bonhoeffer. We need not agree with all their reasonings and their conclusions, but we do well to heed the warnings. Institutionalized Christianity is no substitute for a personalized faith and love. Christendom can be such a far cry from Christianity. Clericalism may crush the spirit. The noise of our solemn assemblies easily drowns out the voice of Jesus Christ. Churches concerned only with themselves are quite ineffectual in the world. Samuel Miller reminds us that religion concerned too much with itself is “spiritual incest.”

The fault does not lie with God. For many he may not be there, but that follows from man’s not being there.

For some people theology is unintelligible; for others it is unnecessary. But for the churches it is essential because their concern is to grasp the self-disclosure of God. In the light of the divine revelation life has meaning, purpose, and destiny. By it man comes to understand his tragic plight and the only escape from it. God in Christ as the center of the center alerts us to the triviality of our petty loyalties.

Today the cry for a new terminology is in fashion. But is God as “the ground of our being” more meaningful than God as Father or Jesus Christ as Shepherd? The latter designations have nothing to do with a three-story universe in which God might get lost.

As Christians we must correct our docetic tendencies. Concern for personal salvation must not overlook Christ’s significance for the whole divine plan. In Christ and Culture H. Richard Niebuhr maintains that Christ is the transformer of the best in culture. Herman Bavinck in his Philosophy of Revelation suggests that man needs a twofold conversion, first from the natural to the spiritual and then from the spiritual to the natural.

Scripture itself gives us the image of wholeness. The Hebrew writers speak of the God who may hide himself from our comprehension but who also leaves a great deal for our apprehension. The heavens proclaim his glory; the little hills skip before him; the pastures are fat because of his goodness; his voice rides on the winds.

In the Incarnation Jesus hallowed the natural. His resurrection assures ours. The Book of Revelation speaks of a new heaven and a new earth.

It should be evident enough that as Christians we are not to flee the secular but to be God’s agents in sanctifying that realm. Only a true sense of stewardship and of our high calling will bring that about. Christians are called, not only from, but also for. Privilege always goes with responsibility. The follower of Christ should have his head in God’s sunlight but his feet on the ground. His pilgrimage should be marked not so much by speed as by high seriousness within the atmosphere of divine revelation. It is Paul Scherer who reminds us that the world has been changed not so much by those who have both feet on the ground as by those who have one foot in heaven.

We believe that the rising tide of secularism will never inundate the City of God. This calls, however, not for a ghetto existence but for a strong faith that has both content and the power to revolutionize where man’s revolt has failed.

With deep humility and only in the strength of Christ we Christians may chant:

For we are the movers and shakers

Of the world forever, it seems.

Theology

Imitation—The False and the True

John C. Cooper

The old proverb, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” is only half true. Imitation of an adult by a child, of an older writer by a younger writer, of one nation by another, grows out of something deeper than the desire to flatter. Imitation takes place when one person or institution accepts the philosophy, style, aims, or attitudes of another. That one imitates another reveals that the two have some deeper common basis that may not be readily apparent even to a critical observer.

Imitation is also the basis of art. Twenty-three centuries ago Aristotle defined poetry (by which he meant also drama and music) as “the imitation of an action.…” No matter how “original” or “creative” the author or composer may be, he must work with the materials given in life—that is, he can do nothing but imitate reality. He may emphasize, he may distort, he may offer a fantastically “new” point of view; he may utilize the contents of the subconscious or even the hallucinations of the alcoholic or drug addict; but like everyone else, he must work with reality. Therefore, no matter how far he may extend the situations of life by his imagination, the author-composer imitates life. And thus, historically, the creative person (the writer, composer, painter) has affirmed reality.

Nations have always recognized that the affirmation and continuance of their national life resides in their thinkers, and that they owe their freedom and dominance to their creative thinkers and leaders in all fields. The enemies of the human spirit have always recognized this, too. The Assyrians and Babylonians took into exile the thinkers and leaders of ancient Israel and other conquered states. Hitler systematically murdered Jewish intellectuals, while the Jewish underground leaders tried to save (and fortunately did save) many of their intellectuals; both sides knew that the fate of the Jews was bound up with the fate of that wonderfully fertile group of writers, artists, and scientists produced by European Jewry.

The Communists also, according to documented evidence, eliminated the intellectuals of those Eastern European countries they subverted or overran. Dr. Arthur Vööbus of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago has written extensively of the murder of the intellectual class in his native Estonia. Indeed, tyrants have always recognized what the modern Christian Church is only slowly remembering: that the future of any people—and of any institution, such as the Church—lies in the performance of its intellectual class. Moreover, the productions of writers, researchers, artists, and composers may ultimately be of more significance than the acts of military, governmental, and religious leaders. That other proverb, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” has been proved true, pre-eminently by the Bible, but also by the Dialogues of Plato, the Communist Manifesto, and Mein Kampf. “I care not who writes the nation’s laws, if I may write its songs” is an insight that the Church that produced “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and the hymns of Wesley should never forget.

A Lost Source Of Sustenance

By now the reader may be saying, “Very well, I agree. But what is the significance of these things?” The answer is plain. That modern literature, drama, music, and art have stopped “imitating” the Christian faith in any positive sense shows that Christianity has become irrelevant for many modern intellectuals. There is no longer a common religious root beneath the surface of society from which the artist, writer, and composer draw sustenance.

The obverse of the failure of modern writers and artists to imitate the Christian faith in any significant way is the more disturbing tendency of the Church increasingly to imitate the world. So key questions arise, such as these: “How is the Church imitating the world?” and “How is this kind of imitation undermining the communication of the Christian faith?”

The Church is imitating the world, first of all, in the standards, means, and goals its ministers adopt for their task. Consider the overriding concern with budgets, size of congregations and denominations, and building projects—a concern that reflects the statistic-sickness of the contemporary Protestant church. That this condition is an aping of the “success-philosophy” of secular culture needs no documentation. The church on the corner too often pursues the same goals by the same means as the company down the street. The literature the two distribute seems to be mass-produced by the same advertising agency. But it is carrying this success-philosophy into the pulpit that becomes a false Gospel. To equate the Kingdom of God with Sunday school attendance is to trample on pearls. Why should secular thinkers imitate the teaching of an institution whose parroted philosophy of “busyness” leaves even the most secular men empty within? Books like The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, stories like “Cash McCall,” and studies like The Lonely Crowd and The Status Seekers reveal the emptiness of the Horatio Alger myth. The secular writer has discovered what too many ministers have failed to see: “To be first,” to succeed materially, to make $1,000 a week, is not the fulfillment of life.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman poignantly portrays the agony of a man who accepted what the recruiting posters of modern industrial society proclaim: WORK HARD, THINK BIG, GET RICH! Poor Willy Loman ventured forth into the jungle of business with a smile and a shoestring; he didn’t make it, but he never stopped believing in the myth. This was his tragedy, that he died still believing in the sanctity of numbers written beside a dollar sign. His son Biff tried to help him, saying, “I’m a dollar an hour”; but Willy refused to believe that Biff couldn’t become “a leader of men” if only he would try. It is “not that they died, but that they die like sheep” that is the awful truth about so many in our society. We may fail as persons, but we never question the ethics of success. And if we succeed financially, we too often look down on those who do not succeeed, considering them worthless, shiftless, sinful people.

To our shame, we preachers of the Gospel have perpetuated this myth; earning for ourselves the curse invoked by Paul in Galatians, we have preached numbers, budgets, buildings, and “hard work for personal success” as another gospel. But the Bible rather discordantly says, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord …” and, “Not by works of the law will a man be justified but by grace through faith.”

The only positive means of combating the increasing irrelevance of the modern Church to contemporary writing, drama, art, and music, and thus to contemporary life (for they are one), is the old solution to the futility of life expressed in justification by faith. The pulpit must proclaim Jesus Christ, the strong Son of God, who is able to save us from the meaninglessness of a life devoted to material success, unrestrained sexual pleasure, alcohol-induced joviality, and leisure stupified by the nerve-jarring cacophony of television—all of which men grasp desperately to stave off the anxiety that nibbles away in the back of the brain like a maddened mouse. For, as any secular writer will tell us, there is no salvation in any of these things. Rather, as Eugene O’Neill never stopped saying, we have only our illusions to sustain us.

All Are Guilty

It may be that many who were commissioned to proclaim Christ have consciously or unconsciously decided that he, too, is an illusion, and therefore have sought substitutes from the world. This has been the historic weakness of liberalism. The rejection of revelation for reason, the rejection of redemption for ethical improvement, the rejection of the Bible for philosophic and psychological insights—these describe the history of liberal Protestantism from the seventeenth century to our own. The emphasis on theological, homiletical, liturgical, and church-administrational “methodology” since 1900 in all Protestant circles is a clear indicator of the abandonment of eternal truth for means to success determined by secular criteria. And we all—fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals, liberals, and modernists—have shared in this. All are guilty, for we all have stressed method (be it the use of radio, campaigns, committees and reports, membership drives, demythologizing, or the new hermeneutics) more than the Spirit and have generally relied upon the methods of the world instead of placing the Gospel of Jesus Christ first.

One of Camus’s characters in The Fall remarks, “Now that I have lost my character I must devise a method.” Unfortunately that is all too applicable to us, who were called to proclaim “foolishness to Greeks, a stumbling block to Jews.”

Many may take offense at these remarks. Yet I have stated what I believe to be true. And I could also say something of the techniques of preaching adopted from secular pursuits—chiefly from the semi-scientific critical approach used by university professors—that detract from so much modern sermonizing. Let me simply say that every lash I have laid on my brethren’s back I feel on my own. I sat where they sit and stood where they stand. As Plutarch said: “It is a thing of no great difficulty, to raise objections against another man’s oration—nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.”

To pretend to have produced a better work is folly. I can only point, as John the Baptizer did and as every preacher should, to him who imitates no one and nothing, but who is the Express Image of God, the Judge of every work of man, the Saviour of everyone who trusts in him.

John C. Cooper is assistant professor of philosophy at Newberry College, Newberry, South Carolina. He has the A.B. (cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of South Carolina; B.D. from Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, South Carolina; and S.T.M. from Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago.

The Christian Service Corps

Robert N. Meyers

We can wonder why, after 2,000 years of missionary effort by the Christian Church, Christians are still such a small minority in the world. A plain but shocking fact is that the Christian population of the world in relation to the general population drops 10 per cent every forty years.

The many reasons for this could be summarized by the statement that too many Christian people have failed to take seriously the words of Christ, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” If during the last twenty centuries the Church had really obeyed these words as it should have, the world would not be so unbelieving as it is with regard to worshiping God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Although the Church can point to great strides in its Christianizing efforts in the past and even at present, the future appears dim—indeed, dark.

If we look at what two great denominations in America are doing in foreign missions, we shall be able to see more clearly why this is so. The entire Protestant Episcopal Church, which is one of the wealthiest of all per capita and has a membership of over three million, representing in good part the middle and upper classes, has on the field only 270 missionaries. Mr. Clifford P. Morehouse, an Episcopal layman, said, “After more than a century of missionary endeavor, the church has only some 250,000 baptized members outside the United States.” The United Presbyterian Church, U. S. A., whose 3,300,000 members are primarily from the middle class, is a church strong in culture, history, institutions, and doctrine. This church, whose history dates from the formation of the first presbytery in Philadelphia in 1706, had only 1,246 missionaries and fraternal workers on the field at the end of 1962. The number of Presbyterian missionaries abroad has declined 7 per cent over the last four years, and budget restrictions for 1964 will force a decrease from ninety-eight missionaries sent in 1963 to seventy this year, not quite enough to replace losses by retirement, resignation, and death.

How can we be content with our present endeavors when such figures and facts present themselves? Do we really care whether the Gospel gets to all the world? Unless something is done in the next decade or two, the Church will continue to fall behind in its efforts to win men to Christ and his Church. Something must be done to reverse the tide so that the statement in the opening paragraph above will read, “The Christian population of the world in relation to the general population rises 10 per cent every forty years.”

A Suggestion For Action

A Christian Service Corps (CSC) may be the answer. Such an organization would be very similar to our national Peace Corps, but it would be a Christian movement instead of an agency of the United States government and would be evangelistic in nature.

The CSC would be a lay movement that would cooperate closely with the Protestant churches. The term of service would be short, and it is possible that thousands of Christians would join for a two or three-year term. Response to the Peace Corps has been remarkable, and Operation Crossroads Africa has seven times more applicants than it can accept. Many Christian people who have served with such programs as these could use their training and experience with the CSC.

The mission program of the Church might be greatly strengthened by the services and Christian witness of laymen in the CSC. In this way the ministry of the laity could find significant expression. The Church has put emphasis on recruiting lifetime missionaries; it has done very little to prepare and send laymen to represent Christ in all the world. Another benefit of the program would be that it might help laymen to determine whether God was calling them to enter full-time service as missionaries, as ministers, or in some other church vocation.

The Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are examples of groups that have spread their faith by dedicated laymen. From its beginning Mormonism has strongly urged its members to give one or two years of their lives to the worldwide propagation of their doctrine. A hundred years ago the Mormon church under the leadership of Brigham Young was sending missionaries to Europe. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are well known for their enthusiasm in ringing doorbells and passing out literature. These heretical cults have grown substantially through the ministry of laymen. Surely the Christian Church must recapture the New Testament concept that everyone is an apostle—one called out of the world to be sent back into the world.

The Christian Service Corps program would represent and be supported by as many Protestant churches as possible. It is hoped that denominational churches (including Assemblies of God, Baptist, Christian and Missionary Alliance, Church of Christ, Church of God, Church of the Brethren, Disciples of Christ, Evangelical Covenant, Evangelical United Brethren, Lutheran, Mennonite, Methodist, Nazarene, Pentecostal, Protestant Episcopal, Reformed, Seventh-day Adventist, United Church of Canada, United Church of Christ), independent churches, and mission boards such as the Division of Foreign Missions of the National Council of Churches, the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, and the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, would participate in the CSC.

Corps Qualifications

Applicants for the CSC would need to have a skill usable in the Church’s missionary program in the world. Areas of skills could include medicine, dentistry, public health, social work, engineering, carpentry, construction, agriculture, commercial arts, business administration, printing, journalism, radio and television, education and literacy work, athletics and physical education, and the lay ministry.

Christian Corpsmen would be between the ages of eighteen and seventy. Married couples who could work in the same area would qualify; those with dependents under eighteen would be eligible but would have to finance their dependents. After filling out a detailed questionnaire, applicants would need to pass an entrance examination and physical and psychological examinations before beginning an intensive four to six-month training program.

The training programs would be given in church-related colleges, state colleges, Bible schools, and universities. Each program would be oriented toward a particular country and responsibility. Courses would be in three general areas: the history and culture of the country; the language of the country; the Bible and its use in preaching and teaching. No matter what a Christian Corpsman’s primary skill, he should be able to minister the Word of God. He would therefore need to have a workable knowledge of the Bible and to be willing to subscribe to a Christian statement of faith. Refresher courses in basic skills would be available also.

Examinations in history, culture, language, and Bible would be thorough and intensive. During the whole training period the candidates would be undergoing personal evaluation. At the conclusion of the training period final selection on the basis of skill, maturity, motivation, and Christian character would be made. The highest physical, psychological, and character standards would have to be maintained.

On Location

A Christian Corpsman’s place of service would be determined by his skill, the need, and his preference. The CSC would channel Corpsmen to the mission fields either through the denominational and independent mission boards or directly to the indigenous churches. Mission stations and churches could request persons with certain skills. Workers would be going out, not as missionaries or fraternal workers, but as Christian Corpsmen. They would be under the direct supervision and authority of the person or group in charge of the mission station or work. In other words, the CSC would supplement the work of the Church and existing missions in the world.

The Christian Corpsman would receive a subsistence allowance commensurate with the cost of living in the area in which he was serving. He would raise one-third of the total cost of his training, travel, subsistence, and insurance for his term of service. After a two or three-year term, he would be free to return home. He could also choose to stay on the field an extra year, or even for another full term. Upon returning to this country he would be given a $50 readjustment allowance for every year of his service.

A candidate, trainee, or Christian Corpsman could resign at any time. College students sent to Africa for two to three months under Operation Crossroads have made a significant contribution in human relations; surely a Christian Corpsman could substantially aid the missionary program of the Church in two or three years.

The Christian Service Corps would be organized as a non-profit corporation. The board of directors, which would be made up of thirty prominent and qualified Christian ministers and lay people, would have the responsibility of determining policy and objectives and of appointing executives. Each participating denomination and group would appoint one board member.

An executive secretary, working at the central Christian Service Corps office, would supervise the entire program. Four associate executives would be responsible for recruitment, financing, training, and supervision of personnel on the field. The five executives would be members of the board of directors in addition to the thirty regular members.

Publicity would be handled by the associate executive in charge of recruitment. He would cooperate closely with the personnel directors of the mission boards of the participating denominations and the independent mission boards, both in this country and abroad, as to need, qualifications, and placement of Corpsmen. Christian men and women would be challenged and approached in churches and colleges and by way of radio, television, and literature. In our country of millions of Christians the potential for prospective candidates is well-nigh unlimited.

A Two-Way Appeal

Financing of the CSC would be through the contributions of Christian people, endowments, wills, foundations, and churches. The Church both numerically and financially is in a position to carry out such a program in addition to its regular benevolent giving. Some Christian Corpsmen would be supported by churches or individual Christians who knew them. People are more ready to support enthusiastically someone they know than to support mission work in general. Funds could probably be raised for the program, since it would have a unique appeal not only to possible candidates but also to the givers. For a special organization such as this money might be available that would never be given to the regular mission program of the Church.

The Church has before it a door open to new and almost unlimited service. Asia, Africa, and South America are ripe for laymen to supplement and aid the existing Christian witness. Half the people who live in these three continents are under the age of twenty-one. In an address to members of the Presbyterian U. S. Board of World Missions, Jean-David Mukaba, press secretary to Congo President Joseph Kasavubu, said, “I was asked to bring a request for more missionaries.” Of the 242 million people in Africa, 116 million are animists and 89 million are Muslims. At present, for every convert won to Christianity in Africa three are won to Islam.

From Mexico to the tip of Argentina there are 205 million people. The Church in these areas needs leaders, qualified laymen who are dedicated to spreading the Good News. Many areas in the Far East, Near East, and Southern Asia with their millions are open to evangelism. Dr. Bonar Sidjabat, professor at Djakarta Theological School and secretary of the Study Commission of the Indonesian Council of Churches, recently told me that the church in Indonesia could use 300 more missionaries immediately. As it matures in its mission, the Church throughout the world sees new opportunity for witness and service and thus needs more workers.

What results would such a program have? First, it would decidedly strengthen the missionary program of the Church in evangelizing the non-Christian world. There are areas that are ripe and waiting to hear the Gospel. If the Protestant church does not win certain people within the near future, some non-Christian faith will. In some parts of Africa, Islam is winning more people because it is reaching them before we are.

It is not inconceivable that the CSC, working in a cooperative and united way with the churches, could have 5,000 trained and dedicated laymen on the field within eight years, and the number would increase as the program’s usefulness was proved. The benevolent giving of Christian people would increase as well. Indeed, the CSC might possibly turn the tide in the battle for men’s souls that we are at present losing.

The second result would be an awakening in the local church to the worldwide ministry of the Church. The Christian Corpsman upon completion of his service would bring to the local church the training and experience he had received. His influence would stimulate benevolences. He would be expected to make at least forty speeches to Christian groups within a year of his return and would encourage others to participate in the CSC. There would certainly be opportunities for him to work in this country with migrant workers, in rural areas, in inner-city churches, in mobile ministries, with minority and underprivileged groups, and in hospitals.

A minister whose church is the third or fourth highest in benevolent giving in its denomination remarked to me that this resulted from his trip around the world. He visited churches and missions and saw the physical and spiritual needs of the world’s people. Sharing his experiences with his congregation upon his return, he was able to stimulate interest in mission work.

Through the Christian Service Corps the Church would challenge laymen to serve Christ in this way. Ask what you can give to your country, but first ask what you can give to Christ and his Church.

Preacher In The Red

Having been quite deaf for many years, I learned to read lips reasonably well. While preaching a Thanksgiving Day sermon to a Portland, Oregon, congregation, I read the words of Revelation 19:1: “And … I heard a great voice of much people … saying, Alleuia; Salvation, and glory … unto the Lord.”

In the front row, directly before the pulpit, sat a young couple. They seemed to study me carefully and may have noted something indicative about my last name. Anyway, I saw the young lady lean close to her escort’s ear and say softly—but clearly, to my special lip-reading ability, “Now I know he is an Englishman: he leaves off his h’s”—THE REV. FRED H. WINSOR, Woodburn, Oregon.

For each accepted report by a minister of the Gospel of an embarrassing moment in his life, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will pay §5 upon publication. Anecdotes must narrate factually a personal experience and must be previously unpublished. Contributions should not exceed 250 words, should be typed double-spaced, and should bear the writer’s name and address. Accepted contributions become the property of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Letters should be addressed to: Preacher in the Red, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 1014 Washington Building, Washington, D. C. 20005.

Robert N. Meyers, assistant minister of the Vienna United Presbyterian Church, Vienna, Virginia, holds the degrees of B.S. in Ed. (Wisconsin State College) and B.D. (San Francisco Theological Seminary). He did graduate work at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

Questions about Evangelism

Carlton L. Myers

For the evangelical, evangelism has priority. Realizing the need for a greater emphasis on Christian ethics in today’s world, evangelicals still rightly insist that before a man can follow the ethics of Christ, he must accept Christ as his gracious Lord. It would seem, then, that proper evangelistic methods would be one of the evangelicals’ greatest concerns. But is this so?

Granting the genuineness of our concern and the correctness of our theology (or most of it), what about the methodology of our evangelism? Can we assume that we have adopted evangelistic methods that are adequate for our age? We believe that our doctrine of evangelism is based on a correct interpretation of the Bible; but can we safely assert that this doctrine never changes? The doctrine of salvation is, of course, as unchanging as the nature of God. But can this be said of the manner in which the Gospel must be presented to man?

We preach the same Gospel as Paul did, but we use modern means, such as radio and television, to spread that Gospel. In place of the simple musical instruments of the first century, we use the electronic organ. Instead of meeting in homes, we spend millions on large church plants. The question is—are all our practices as modern as these? Or are we clinging to some evangelistic methods that were successful in rural areas in the earlier history of our country but are now beginning to lose their effectiveness? Will the methods used to reach men on the frontiers a century ago reach the sophisticated middle class in suburbia today? If so, let us be about our Father’s business in the way we have been doing it. But if not, failure to correct our methods can add to the failure of men to respond to the Gospel.

A good business continually re-evaluates its methods and policies. Evangelism, the most important enterprise in the world, should do no less. Are our methods succeeding? Are we reaching men? (If this be pragmatism, so be it!) I do not claim that this article offers all the answers to questions about evangelism. Nor do I suggest that it is a valid critique of all evangelistic methods in use today. I do propose, however, to ask some important questions whose answers must be known if we are to reach our generation with the Gospel.

First, what is the realistic assessment of the unregenerate man’s concern for the Gospel? One often hears at evangelistic conferences, “The lost are just waiting to hear the Gospel. Millions of the unsaved are voicing the ‘Macedonian Call’ to ‘come over and help us.’ ” Are they really? Or are they profoundly indifferent, if not actually antagonistic, to any concern on our part for their spiritual welfare? Christian witnessing would surely be much easier if these millions of men were concerned about their spiritual welfare and were praying that someone would show them the way to peace and rest.

This leads to a second question: Do we really believe that laymen should witness to others? If we do, then let me ask: How much training do we give our church members for this task? Or do we perhaps consider most of our members already qualified? Does not many a layman attempting to bring a man to Christ end up by asking his pastor to go to him?

The third question follows logically: Is soul-winning so simple that all a man has to do is learn a few biblical proof-texts and then present them to every prospective convert? Though the “way of salvation” is identical for all, can we afford to give laymen the impression that all men can be brought in the same way to this way of salvation? The man with his doctoral degree has fully as much need of regeneration as the man on skid row. But can anyone say that these men would be reached by similar methods, or even by the same kind of people? Can we properly write books on such subjects as “Soul-Winning Made Easy”? Can genuine results be guaranteed? Can soul-winning really be made that easy? Ask men who have tried it! If we are really serious when we say that every Christian ought to be a soul-winner, are we not faced with the need of completely revising our church training program?

A fourth question concerns our methods of publicizing evangelistic services. Are we getting the unregenerate man to attend? Does he respond to the big sign on the front of the church that says in bright red letters, “Revival Services Nightly—We Preach the Old-fashioned Gospel”? How many non-Christians want to attend such a revival? How many modern suburbanites are interested in an “old-fashioned Gospel”? Granted, the Gospel does not change; but can we not find better terminology? Perhaps television advertising methods would not be suitable for advertising evangelistic efforts, but they do reach the people for whom they are intended. And they get results—which is more than can usually be said for the way churches publicize a revival. Perhaps evangelical forces and the advertising industry need each other.

With the mention of terminology, we have reached question five. Would more people, both regenerate and unregenerate, attend our “revivals” if we changed the name of these services? Should we call “Revival Services” by such names as “Spiritual Life Crusade,” or “Preaching Mission,” or “Bible-Study Week”? “Revival” is indeed an honorable word with an impressive history, and it speaks of new life. But perhaps the word also reminds the twentieth-century man of the world of high-powered, strongly emotional methods of getting men to kneel before a mourner’s bench or join a church.

The sixth question may invite charges of heresy. Yet it must be asked, not to suggest a negative answer but to provoke honest consideration of the question. Do we need revival services? We say we believe in perennial evangelism. If so, is the annual parade of two-week revivals, and week-end revivals, and youth revivals really necessary? Or does it make up for our failure in perennial evangelism?

Speaking of two-week revivals, have we the right to insist that our church members attend a service on each of fourteen consecutive nights? We certainly give a lot of recognition to those who do attend every service. And what about some of the “gimmicks” we use to ensure a large crowd at each week-night service? Some churches by this time may be offering trading stamps for attendance. This at best is a sticky business.

The final question invades the field of theology. Do we have the right to guarantee to all who will listen that the converted man will have a new life, a new purpose, a new set of standards, a new philosophy of life? My Bible says yes. My observation seems to say no. Maybe we should make sure our converts are really converted before we take them into our membership, before we hold them up to the unconverted as examples of what Christ does for a man. Maybe it is time we stressed emphatically that the Christian life is more than an intellectual acceptance of Christ as Saviour. Christianity is more than a creed, a set of doctrines. We need to remind men everywhere that it is a way of life. It involves more than publicly professing faith, being baptized, and accepting a box of church envelopes. It is also a life of self-discipline, of complete commitment to the will of God.

Since I am an ardent admirer of Billy Graham and have noted with great pleasure his successful crusades, it may seem odd that I should ask all these questions about evangelism. I do ask them—not of Dr. Graham, but of us who minister in the local churches and of laymen who support church evangelism.

Who will give us honest, correct answers to these questions? Such answers ought to go far toward helping evangelicals to evangelize contemporary America.

A Scot Looks At The American Kirk

The American ecclesiastical scene never fails to intrigue us on our periodic visits. We have just returned from a two-month sojourn there, during which time we worshiped in a Presbyterian church in Maryland. It has a full-time secretarial staff, a superb collection of buildings, and a formidable array of organizations.

So many things have to be crammed in on Sunday that everything is planned with military precision. The first of two morning services, held at 9 A.M., must be finished by ten sharp, or the timetable is disrupted. Lest the worship of God be prolonged, we sing no more than two verses of each hymn—always the two opening verses.

Sunday after Sunday we depressingly never get as far as death’s dark vale, are left shivering on the wrong side of Jordan’s brink, and are consigned to an evident eternity of watching, praying, and fasting, with no assurance that the end of sorrow shall be near the Throne.

There is one exception to this two-verse rule: every Sunday at a given moment we rise and sing the first verse only of Ein’ Feste Burg. Somehow it always struck us as peculiarly unfortunate to close with what may seem a solid boost to the devil: “On earth is not his equal. Amen.” (For some reason we were always scrupulous about the Amens.)

One Sunday we rebelled, and despite looks of blank incomprehension from our kind American hosts who thought our behaviour extraordinary, we walked three miles to another Presbyterian church, recommended to us as “evangelical.” We sang “Heavenly Sunshine,” and were exhorted to shake hands with the person sitting next to us, which we amiably did. Later the same treatment was accorded “the person sitting behind you.” Happily it stopped at that; there’s no saying where all this chumminess in church might lead—J. D. DOUGLAS, in the Church of England Newspaper

Carlton L. Myers is pastor of the Van Buren Street Baptist Church, Annapolis, Maryland. A graduate of Philadelphia College of Bible, he has been chairman of the Music Committee of the Maryland Baptist Convention.

Shakespeare and Christianity

Roland Mushat Frye

Shakespeare wrote in such a way that all men may find beauty and understanding in his words. For this reason, he is called our most universal poet; we can all respond in some measure to what he says. The reading man will make this response through studying Shakespeare in print, but even the illiterate respond with excitement and pleasure if they see a good stage production of one of his plays. He wrote works and words in which we feel the essence of beauty and yet find that beauty closely united to truth about man and society. We can gain enjoyment from him and learn from him as from no other secular writer.

What are we to say about Shakespeare in relation to Christianity? First of all, we must say that he was writing objective drama in which he gave expression to virtually every opinion that men anywhere have ever held. His characters cover the full range of the human spectrum, representing every shade of vice and virtue, every degree of piety and impiety. But Shakespeare has left us no account of his own innermost convictions. Of mankind he has told us much, but of himself very little. We simply cannot tell precisely what his own most intimate religious beliefs were. We can say, however, that he appears to have been a lifelong conforming member of the Church of England. Let us first look at this evidence from his life and then turn to the relation between his plays and Christian teaching.

Shakespeare was born into a solid middle-class family of Stratford-upon-Avon, the kind of family that history shows to be most productive of genius: neither very poor and debased nor very rich and prominent. Considered from the social point of view, it was a family much like that of Calvin in France. The precise date of William Shakespeare’s birth is unknown, as it is unknown for most of his famous contemporaries, but the records of baptism were considered important enough to preserve; thus we know that on April 26, 1564, William Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church of his native town. Fifty-two years later he died and was buried in the same church.

Throughout his life all the records concerning his religious associations connect him with the post-Reformation Church of England, and most connect him with this particular parish church. His marriage was approved by the authority of Bishop John Whitgift of the diocese of Worcester, in which Stratford lay. (Whitgift later became one of the most famous of the Archbishops of Canterbury and was always a stickler for close conformity to church law.) Shakespeare’s three children were baptized in Holy Trinity, and most of his family was buried there. Every particle of positive evidence connects Shakespeare with the reformed Church of England, and certain important negative evidence points in the same direction: in Shakespeare’s age, attendance at the established church was required by law, and careful lists were kept of those who did not attend. The name of William Shakespeare nowhere appears on any such list, either in Stratford or in London or anywhere else, and so we can assume that he was at the least sufficiently regular in his attendance to satisfy the requirements.

His father, John Shakespeare, was once fined for not going to the established church, and this fact has sometimes been used to “prove” that the elder Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic; but the use of this argument demonstrates at best only the ignorance of those who use it. The record of the case clearly states that the father stayed away from church for fear of being served with papers prosecuting him for debt, and the records also show that he was having financial troubles at this time. Other “evidence” has been cited by those who are intent upon claiming Shakespeare for Rome, but all of it is historically unconvincing. Few if any responsible Roman Catholic scholars make such a claim.

There is one positive piece of evidence bearing on William Shakespeare’s relation with Rome, and this is a copy of the second folio edition of his plays that was censored by authority of the Inquisition. The censorship consisted of the blacking out of “offensive” passages in many of the plays and the complete elimination of Measure for Measure, in which a layman poses as a friar and hears confession. Other deletions from Shakespeare’s King John and King Henry VIII eliminated passages that seemed offensively Protestant to the official censor, an English Jesuit named William Sankey. This censorship was carried out within about thirty years of Shakespeare’s death and represents, of course, an official act of the Roman church. (The censored folio is in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a detailed report on it is to be found in the appendix to my Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine.)

The Bard And The Bible

The evidence of Shakespeare’s plays demonstrates that he was intimately familiar with the Book of Common Prayer and with the Bible. His study of the Bible appears to have continued throughout his life, and the plays give evidence that he knew it primarily through the Geneva Version, which was the most popular version of his time, and the Bishops’, which was the version approved by the Convocation of Canterbury. His citation in Henry V of specific Roman Catholic usage of the Scriptures is in error at an obvious point, whereas his knowledge of “catholic” doctrine and worship as preserved in the Church of England is accurate and familiar. For readers interested in Shakespeare’s use of Scripture and liturgy, there is Richmond Noble’s authoritative study entitled Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of Common Prayer.

Shakespeare is important to us today, however, not because of his personal life and ecclesiastical affiliations but because of his writings. If we are to understand Shakespeare’s use of Christian doctrine in his drama, we must keep at least two things in mind: the doctrine of vocation as it was understood in his age, and the attitude of that age toward literature. The doctrine of vocation that the Reformation embraced and taught should be familiar to us all: it held that God called some men to secular vocations just as surely as he called others into the clergy, and it ennobled all life by this emphasis on the nobility of secular efforts. One of Shakespeare’s associates in the Globe Theatre, an actor and dramatist named Nathan Field, wrote a magnificent letter to a preacher who had unfairly attacked the stage (as preachers have sometimes done). Field’s letter is a minor theological masterpiece, defending honest dramatists and actors as carrying out the calling of God in their own secular sphere. In this instance, the man of the theater was far closer to the position of the great Reformers than was the man of the cloth.

But we must also recognize the attitude toward literature that characterized the century of the Reformation in which Shakespeare lived. The literature that Elizabethan Englishmen primarily knew was the literature of Rome and Greece, rather than the specifically Christian writings of Donne and Herbert, Milton and Bunyan, which came later. Literature was regarded as a secular field—not in any pejorative sense, but acknowledging that it concerned natural law and natural theology rather than revealed theology.

This was the attitude taught by great Reformers such as Luther, Calvin, and Hooker, as can be conclusively proved by page after page of evidence. The poet’s vocation primarily concerned the secular sphere—this world, the here and now—and his contributions were to be judged in these terms. Luther declared that genuine theology could not endure if it ignored the insights of literature so conceived, and Calvin wrote that to show disrespect for such literature was to show disrespect for the operations of the Holy Spirit in the secular realm.

It was in these terms that Shakespeare wrote, and it is in these terms that he can best be understood. Unlike John Milton, his great successor and chief rival among English poets, Shakespeare was not attempting to transmit Christian revelation and saving grace through the medium of his writings. Yet the literature he produced was just the kind called for by the great leaders of the first century of the Reformation.

Doctrines In Drama

When we approach Shakespeare’s plays within this frame of reference, we can profit from them as men living within the secular order and as Christians who strive to live our lives under the jurisdiction and in the anticipation of the City of God. When Shakespeare’s dramatic needs require it, he can and does write with mature and even brilliant understanding of many central Christian doctrines. What he says of original sin and its offshoots in myriads of particular sins, of repentance and of forgiveness, of justice and of mercy, and of scores of other Christian doctrines is always appropriate to his poetic situation and is dramatically revealing to us as Christians. So, too, is what he says of non-Christian men who struggle to follow the best they can know in pre-Christian times, as is also his treatment of those men in all ages who perversely choose to dedicate themselves to serving the demonic powers of darkness. All this is present in Shakespeare, just as it all is present in life.

The most accurate description of Shakespeare’s literary concerns may be found in the words of Hamlet when he declares that the purpose of drama is and always has been to hold “the mirror up to nature.” Now in Shakespeare’s time the Bible was repeatedly described as a mirror held up to reflect grace and divine revelation. That was not the mirror Shakespeare was striving to create; what he took as his task was the creation of another mirror. But if this was not a mirror of divine grace, it was nonetheless a mirror that reflected the moral law; for as Hamlet went on to say, the purpose of drama was “to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” So fully did Shakespeare discharge this poetic vocation in the secular order that succeeding centuries have regarded him as not of one age, but for all time.

Roland Mushat Frye is research professor, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B. and Ph.D.), he has been professor of English at Emory University. He is a Presbyterian elder and has studied at Princeton Theological Seminary. His latest book is “Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine.”

The Mission of the Church

Carl F.H. Henry

The objective of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is to help restore to Protestantism those principles and purposes established by the Apostles, recovered by the Reformers, and now generally held by Protestant denominations in their constitutions and official articles of faith.

To accomplish this objective, CHRISTIANITY TODAY reaffirms its belief that the Bible is the very Word of God, inspired and infallible, and inerrant as God gave it, and is to be interpreted in a grammatico-historical manner, whereby the precise meaning of a passage is gathered from the Scriptures themselves.

Samuel Bolton, a leader of the Westminster Assembly, expressed the above principle in these words: “The Word of God, and God in his Word, the Scripture, and God in Scripture, is the only infallible, supreme, authoritative rule and judge of matters of doctrines and worship, of things to be believed, and things to be done.”

Among the most vital issues confronting Protestantism today is that of the mission of the Church. This must be carefully ascertained and defined.

The Church is a spiritual body of which Jesus Christ is the sole Head. The Church must manifest herself in the world and conduct herself in no other manner than that shown by Christ while he was upon earth or as he has directed in Holy Scripture.

As a spiritual body, the Church has a message primarily for the spiritual needs of mankind. Once she shifts her emphasis from spiritual to secular matters, her influence wanes; and this is a danger she faces today. In the New Testament we find our Lord and the Apostles living in the midst of social, economic, and political evils as great as any in our times; yet we find their ministries primarily directed to the spiritual needs of mankind and are assured that only as the hearts of men are changed can these evils be eliminated. However competent or informed the corporate Church may be or become in social, economic, or political affairs, these matters are beyond her proper, God-given jurisdiction. When the Church keeps to her divinely appointed mission, the Holy Spirit leads men to perform the will of God in all areas of life. Nothing herein stated deals with the responsibility of the pulpit, the Christian press, or the individual Christian in regard to social, economic, and political affairs. Subsequent statements will appear on these subjects.

The Church must adhere strictly to the infallibility of the Scriptures. So long as the Church interprets Scripture correctly, the Church will be kept from error. But when she becomes involved in a secular, controversial issue, those who oppose the Church’s position on this issue will question the ability of the Church to speak authoritatively on ecclesiastical and spiritual subjects.

We, the Board of Directors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, proclaim the eternal verities that have long been accepted by believers. We reaffirm the dedication of ourselves and this magazine to the glory of God and the salvation of mankind. We invite the prayers and cooperation of all who will join us in advancing the Kingdom of God and supporting the faith of our fathers.

The Board of Directors, CHRISTIANITY TODAY

Harold John Ockenga, Chairman

The Last of the Reformers

On a green hill overlooking the Dnieper River lie the remains of the most celebrated of all Ukrainians, the nineteenth-century poet and reformer Taras Shevchenko. Originally the gravesite was adorned with an ornate iron cross, but Soviet authorities replaced it with a monolithic pillar that supports a statue of Shevchenko. The switch aptly illustrates the tug-of-war now being waged between Communists and the free world for the memory of Shevchenko. In a major bid to preserve what they regard as an accurate image of his religious and social philosophy, thousands of Ukrainians from throughout the Western world streamed into Washington, D. C., for the dedication June 27 of a Shevchenko monument on a park site authorized by Congress.

At stake this year, which marks the 150th anniversary of his birth, are the Ukrainian nationalistic spirit and Christian orientation of Shevchenko’s poetry, generally considered among the greatest in Slavic culture. The Ukraine, although as large as France in both land and population, is seldom thought of as having any importance as an independent nation. Not even the fact that it is a charter member of the United Nations seems to mean much for its national identity. So dominant is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that the Ukraine’s voice is as weak as it was in the thirteenth century, when an invasion by Genghis Khan ended its first four centuries of independent existence.

Today’s 45,000,000 Ukrainians regard Shevchenko as having dealt a crushing blow to Tsarist tyranny and the serfdom of his time. Communists go a long step further and assert that he was a Bolshevik who died before his time. Christians maintain, on the other hand, that he was a devout patriot. Indeed, Ukrainian Protestants credit him with inspiring the first translation of the Bible into the Ukrainian vernacular.

Shevchenko, though a nominal church member, sharply attacked the religious establishment of his day. He regarded Russian Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism as corrupt and hypocritical. He denounced ritualism and reflected in his writings indignation over such things as widespread drunkenness and gluttony during holidays.

Ukrainian Protestants interpret Shevchenko as rejecting accretions and excesses that he considered unbiblical. He had ready praise for creative Christian action, as seen in a poem he wrote about John Hus described by one critic as depicting “a social and religious reformer glorifying the final victory of the spirit over the material existence.” Shevchenko never set forth his own religious convictions systematically, and what reflections he did record were not designed to withstand close theological scrutiny. Nevertheless, his cry for church reform was not unlike that which had broken over Europe three centuries before but had failed to penetrate much beyond the Carpathian Mountains. Shevchenko was in a sense a latter-day amplifier of that cry.

The Rev. Wladimir Borowsky, executive secretary of the Ukrainian Evangelical Alliance of North America, says that Shevchenko’s objectives of church reform represent Protestant principles.

“This approach to religion and to Christianity, a social action concept, differs from the concepts generally accepted by the Ukrainian traditionalists who limit God’s kingdom to heaven,” Borowsky declares. “His concepts are in accord with modern Protestant thought which stresses the spirit of the Gospel, its realistic and practical aplications to daily life, its emphasis on the ecumenical uniting concepts that foster brotherly love.”

Shevchenko was born in 1814 as a serf on an estate near the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. His artistic ability won him formal training, but the feudal master demanded payment of 2,500 rubles in return for freedom (Shevchenko’s parents died before he became a teen-ager). The money was raised through sale of a portrait by a professor in St. Petersburg’s Academy of Arts who recognized the Shevchenko genius. Once he was out of bondage, the young Ukrainian’s key interest shifted from painting to poetry. His first collection of poems was published in 1840 in a book Kobzar (Folk Bard), which in its complete form has had total sales of more than eight million copies. His greatest poem, Haydamaki, an account of the Ukrainian nationalistic struggle, was completed in 1841.

A secret organization, the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which sought political and ideological liberation for the Ukraine, captured Shevchenko’s imagination. When authorities clamped down, Shevchenko was arrested and banished to an army post as a private “under the strictest supervision with the prohibition of writing and drawing.” He was pardoned in 1857 but kept under police watch. He resumed writing and secured permission to publish only a few months before his death in 1861 his Primer. Dr. Clarence Manning, a Columbia University scholar and an expert in Slavic literature, says that it “was definitely written for the Sunday Schools which were springing up in Ukraine under the new order.”

Shevchenko was only forty-seven when he died. He had enjoyed only nine years of freedom in his entire lifetime.

Communists began a drive to exploit the memory of Shevchenko in North America shortly after World War II. The “people of the Ukraine” presented to Canada a monument of Shevchenko and promptly turned it into a base for the dissemination of Communist propaganda. Ukrainians in Canada came to Shevchenko’s defense and erected a statue of their own in Winnipeg; it was dedicated in 1961 by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.

The idea of a memorial in Washington has had the support of virtually all Ukrainian groups—Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox. It was inspired by the fact that Shevchenko had considered George Washington a type of hero needed in the Ukraine. One of his poems asks:

“When shall we get ourselves a Washington to promulgate his new and righteous law?”

Located across the street from the famous Church of the Pilgrims (Southern Presbyterian), the U. S. memorial to Shevchenko features a fourteen-foot bronze statue of the bard by the Ukrainian-Canadian sculptor Leo Mol. It is dedicated to “the liberation, freedom, and independence of all captive nations.”

One of Shevchenko’s most interesting associations was with the American Negro actor Ira Aldridge, who was then considered one of the outstanding interpreters of Shakespeare but who was not accepted by the American theater. The two became close friends.

Another intimate acquaintance of Shevchenko’s was Panko Kulish, a literary celebrity, and this friendship is regarded as having been the keystone in planning the translation of the Bible into the Ukrainian vernacular. After Shevchenko’s death Kulish spearheaded the translation work, and the first New Testament was published in 1880. The entire Bible came out in 1903.

SHEVCHENKO SAMPLER

Our soul shall never perish,

Freedom knows no dying,

And the greedy cannot harvest,

Fields where seas are lying;

Cannot bind the living spirit;

Nor the living word,

Cannot smirch the sacred glory

Of th’Almighty Lord.

—From “The Caucasus”

… Beneath your breath a prayer of pride

Asks God to send the worst adversity

And every kind of plague in high degree

Upon your fellow Christians …

May God appoint your condign overthrows,

All ye new pharaohs with your hearts of clay,

Rapacious Caesars of this latter day!

—From “The Neophytes”

My poor, lowly tribute

… To that Czech renowned,

To the martyr great and holy,

Hus the well revered.

Take it father, I will humbly

Pray to God Almighty

That the Slavs may be hereafter

Worthy friends and brothers,

Sons of that same light of Truth,

Heretics forever,

Like that noble heretic,

Who at Constance suffered!

May they give true peace to mortals,

Glory too forever.

—From “John Hus”

Terrible to fall into chains,

Die in captivity,

But worse, far worse, to sleep, to sleep,

To sleep in liberty …

—From “Days Are Passing”

Shevchenko had been an avid reader of the Bible in Russian and drew on its themes for his poetry. His full stature as a religious reformer may not be recognized, however, until his works win wider distribution in translations that do them justice. William Bahrey, associate editor of the Ukrainian Christian Herald, says that to appreciate Shevchenko “the English-speaking people must await the translating genius of an Edward Fitzgerald (whose translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is considered classic).”

Perhaps the most descriptive affirmation of Shevchenko’s personal faith is found in a letter he wrote to a countess in 1857:

“Now and only now, have I come to understand the truth of the words, ‘As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten …’ (Rev. 3:19). Now, I only pray and thank Him for His eternal love for me and for the trial He sent me. He cleansed and healed my poor and suffering heart. He removed from before my eyes the distorting lens I once used in appraising others and myself. He taught me to love my enemies and those who hate us. No school—other than the school of trial by suffering and extensive meditation—can teach this to you. I now feel myself to be, if not perfect, then at least a blameless Christian. Like the purified gold just out of the hearth, like the infant just out of its bath, so do I leave the misty purgatory to see the new and lofty ways of life. This I call my genuine good fortune.… With the certainty of a Christian reborn I have described to you my sorrowful, seemingly dreamlike past.”

Stricken Patriarch

The 78-year-old Athenagoras I, “first among equals” of Eastern Orthodox patriarchs, collapsed while officiating at a lengthy ceremony in Istanbul this month. He was later described as being in “satisfactory” condition, and physicians prescribed a regimen of “complete rest” for at least a month. Reports conflicted on the cause of his collapse, although exhaustion was stressed in all.

The Ecumenical Patriarch was officiating at a ceremony involving the blessing of a sisterhood group engaged in carrying out welfare and philanthropic work. He had been standing for three hours and was about to distribute the “holy bread” (communion). As he fell, he was caught by priests attending him. His scepter crashed to the floor. He was taken immediately to his residence at the patriarchate and placed under “strict” medical attention.

The patriarchate had been reported under considerable pressure in Istanbul since the outbreak of fighting between Turkish and Greek Cypriotes. Although the government has said that the patriarchate, staffed by many Greek Orthodox prelates, would not be affected by the controversy, some severe restrictions were reported.

The Theology Of Healing

What is the purpose of Christian medical ministries?

This was perhaps the key question that held the attention of a special consultation in Tubingen, Germany, last month. The majority of participants were doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel attached to ecclesiastical institutions around the world. After six days of discussion they issued a statement calling upon the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, the two organizations that sponsored the consultation, to take a “new look” at the meaning of healing and particularly at the role of church-sponsored medical institutions.

The statement stressed the need to reexamine the concepts within the Church that view Christian medical work either as primarily for meeting physical needs or as a tool for evangelism.

It recommended that pilot projects be set up within selected hospitals in which teams comprising a physician, a nurse, and a pastoral counselor would seek “to treat the patient in the totality of his sickness.”

It was asserted that “the Christian Church has a specific task in the field of healing” and that it has “insights concerning the nature of health which are available only within the context of the Christian faith.”

The statement affirmed that “all healing is of God.”

Mission In The Mountains

As L’Abri Fellowship begins its tenth year in the Swiss mountains near Aigle, its trickle of inquirers has become a small, steady stream of atheists, existentialists, college and university students, and even young ministers probing Christian answers. They find “The Shelter” an open house for candid discussions, directed reading courses, access to 600 hours of taped lectures, and weekly Saturday-night colloquiums by the founder of the spiritual compound, Francis Schaeffer. A missionary who teaches weekly classes in a coffee shop near Lausanne University and has traveled as far as Cambridge University to engage atheists in group discussion, Schaeffer has one main theme: non-Christians live on incredulity, while Christianity has satisfying intellectual answers.

Schaeffer brushes aside any comparison of his rather inaccessible retreat to a monastic community withdrawn from life and society. “We don’t operate in a cave with a twelve-foot wall,” he says, “and we are in more contact with contemporary life than many of the churches.”

L’Abri’s converts have included many “offbeat” prospects—an English ballet dancer, an American operatic star, an atheistic law student, a Smith College art student studying in Europe, a Swiss “national poster girl,” a former divinity student under Barth and Brunner who turned atheist, and three teachers from a New England girls’ college.

The supply of potentials is hardly exhausted. In recent weeks the floating “student body”—participants need Schaeffer’s written permission to come—has included an existentialist couple and their baby born out of wedlock; a law student steeped in Hindu thought; a graduate of a liberal New York seminary and a graduate of a conservative Midwest college, both convinced that there must be “something more” to historic Christianity. L’Abri has a small working library, including a branch of the Evangelical Library in London, and its inquirers come for a period of a month to a year. Schaeffer and his fellow workers maintain a semi-family relation to guests and aim “to demonstrate the existence of God by living in the midst of answered prayer.” L’Abri’s academic thrust, meanwhile, seeks to relate a strict biblical view to the contemporary philosophical and cultural dilemma.

The existential-dialectical theology Schaeffer sees as one movement in the broad line of modern thought in the period after Hegel. He deplores a tendency even among the “general evangelicals” to deny the real possibility of intellectual answers by stressing a “leap” rather than a “step” of faith. Schaeffer insists that one need not sacrifice any aspect of philosophical truth to become a Christian. He deplores as misguided any regard for the dialectical theology as a “third force” and insists that it is simply a further development of liberalism.

The basic question of the times, as Schaeffer sees it, is “whether absolutes exist, in philosophy as truth and in morals as right.” The Christian solution, he stresses, lies not in the problem of revelation (where contemporary theology locates it) but behind this, in an emphasis on the image of God in man, in view of which man can know things truly and know the right.

L’Abri Fellowship is more a spiritual clinic on an academic basis than a campus. No formal classes are held, no credits given, no diplomas offered. Schaeffer’s program of itinerant lectures frees him from the necessity and opportunity of working out his position in comprehensive written form, although his taped lectures on such subjects as Christianity and science, Christianity and art, Christianity and modern philosophy, Christianity and modern theology are available on a lend-lease basis in several countries. The L’Abri learning center is named after the Protestant Reformer Guillaume Farel. There Schaeffer records one or two new lectures a week, and tape recorders are busy much of the week replaying earlier lectures.

Not all inquirers become converts by any means. One day the Lausanne coffeehouse lecture was attended by a “black Jesus” and “twelve black apostles,” as thirteen mockers named themselves. Schaeffer spent the hour in prodding them to justify, if possible, their faith in honesty and love, and countered that only Christianity provides a satisfactory basis. They never returned to mock. In Cambridge evangelical students arranged for a discussion with twenty atheists, one of whom became a believer some months later. While the total number of converts may be statistically small, L’Abri seems to garner more from the forgotten fringes of modern life than most evangelical efforts.

Schaeffer’s judgments on contemporary life and Christianity are harsher than mainstream appraisals. He sees secular life and thought as an exercise in futility and despair. He criticizes Protestantism—in both its ecumenical and its evangelical expressions—as neglectful of the purity of the Church.

Schaeffer was a student of the late Dr. J. Gresham Machen at Westminster Theological Seminary and graduated from Faith Theological Seminary. His first missionary appointment was under the Independent Board of Presbyterian Missions, but he refused continuing identification with Dr. Carl McIntire’s International Council of Christian Churches, which offered him its secretaryship. His wife, the former Edith Seville, was born in China to missionary parents under the China Inland Mission. The Schaeffers live in Chalet Meleze in Huemoz sur Ollon, where their three grown daughters are active in the work of L’Abri Fellowship. An eleven-year-old son attends school in England, where the movement has a branch work.

Schaeffer is pessimistic about the outcome of the Protestant-Roman Catholic dialogue, although he has an indirect debt to Rome in the establishment of L’Abri Fellowship. When he and his wife first came to Switzerland for missionary effort in 1948, they located in Champery in the canton of Valais, which had been untouched by Protestant effort since before the Reformation. Their evangelistic work grew steadily, and after some years of preaching, converts included an atheist, once baptized in the Roman church, who was active in the city council. He was the city’s first Roman Catholic to become a Protestant. When the Schaeffers returned from furlough, gendarmes presented them with two sheets of paper, one giving them six weeks to remove themselves from Champery for two years, the other ordering them to leave Switzerland. Out of the appeals and counter-appeals came a compromise under which the Schaeffers located in Huemoz sur Ollon, which is remote enough that one can walk eight hours on the foot trails and meet nobody. But the trails have become familiar to scores of borderline souls who have managed to locate L’Abri Fellowship, and a remarkable number of them have become Christian converts.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Uncertain Calvinists

A man once described as one of the few Calvinists not confident that he was among the fortunately predestined died last month at Maidenhead, England. Born Willam Maxwell Aitken in a Presbyterian manse in Ontario eighty-five years ago, he was elected to the British Parliament, became the first Lord Beaverbrook, bought and rejuvenated a struggling national daily, championed Empire Free Trade, fought strenuously against the threat of bishops-in-presbytery for his father’s native Scotland, and fought just as strenuously against Britain’s entry into the Common Market. His Sunday Express noted that he never missed a Gipsy Smith revival meeting if he could help it.

After a visit to Palestine in 1925 his disgust with the commercialism that had sprung up around the Holy Places, coupled with Christianity’s “strange and devastating departure” from the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, provoked him into writing a little book. For personal reasons it was not published until 1962, when it appeared as The Divine Propagandist. In it, he said, “I have searched the Gospels and neglected theology.” One might wonder if he searched the Gospels quite enough, for his conclusion suggests that, thanks to Jesus who showed us perfection, the human race is slowly entering into the Kingdom of God in becoming more humane, more charitable, more enlightened.

Though he referred to his Presbyterianism as too deeply rooted to be other than a dominant influence in him, Lord Beaverbrook gave to his beloved University of New Brunswick a statue of Thomas Aquinas to match one of Calvin. Toward the end of his life he admitted that he no longer prayed or read the Bible. Yet he remained in some sense the son of his Scottish father. Only two weeks before he died, the Scottish edition of the Daily Express (over whose policies he maintained strict control) had been severely attacked in the Kirk’s General Assembly for its criticism of a church report advocating a “brighter” Sunday.

The Rev. John R. Gray, who said that his Church and Nation Committee’s report had been “grossly and persistently misrepresented” by the newspaper, subsequently paid tribute to Lord Beaverbrook as “a great man.” Mr. Gray said he had respected the man because he stood by his convictions even at the expense of his newspaper.

Among Lord Beaverbrook’s charities was the monthly payment of $25 to every retired Presbyterian minister and minister’s widow in the Maritimes.

J. D. DOUGLAS

‘People Who Demonstrate’

On the morning after Nelson Mandela and his seven fellow accused were sentenced to life imprisonment in Pretoria, a cartoon on the front page of a London daily newspaper expressed the reaction of many Britons. It showed a row of Black South Africans arraigned in court, with the simple caption underneath: “Guilty—all 10,000,000.” In the course of his seven-month treason trial, Mandela had outlined his position thus: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.” He declared his willingness to die for his ideals.

Mandela, though he pleaded not guilty, admitted that he had been one of the chief leaders of organized sabotage against the South African government. It was necessary, he said, “because the government used violence against the Africans on every possible occasion. And government violence can only do one thing and that is to breed counterviolence.”

When it was known in London that judgment was imminent, there was a vigil at St. Paul’s Cathedral, organized by Christian Action. Afterwards there were demonstrations and processions in major British cities. Students at Oxford University rained blows on the South African ambassador. About fifty Members of Parliament marched from Westminster to South Africa House to protest against the conviction. They put through the letter box a message said to contain more than 100 signatures from Members of all parties. Asked by CHRISTIANITY TODAY to comment on British reaction, a spokesman at South Africa House would merely say: “We do not pay attention to people who demonstrate.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Rebel With A Heart

A rebel leader in the Congo was responsible for leading fourteen Protestant missionaries to safety after their mission at Lemera in central Kivu province had been surrounded by his Communist-backed followers for more than seven weeks.

Moise Marandura, once a servant at the mission, responded to an appeal for aid from the missionaries—twelve Swedes, an American, and a Briton—by saying: “You were very kind to me in the old days. Now I will see that you are unharmed.”

A rebellion against the central government led by the National Liberation Committee, a group of leftist exiles in Bujumbura, capital of neighboring Burundi, broke out in January. Most committee members were followers of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first premier who was slain in 1961.

The missionary group, which included three children, reached Kilibi on the Burundi border after Marandura and about forty of his men had escorted them on a sixty-mile journey through the rebel-held Ruzizi Valley. From Kilibi they proceeded to Bujumbura.

No Idle Pews

Church attendance in Nigeria is on the upswing, according to the newly-elected president of the Nigerian Baptist Convention.

Dr. Emanuel A. Dahunsi, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lagos, noting that “pews are never empty” in his own church, called attention to the growth of the convention since it was organized in 1914.

The convention now has 922 churches and preaching stations with a total membership of 65,000. Baptists totaled 9,000 last year, and some 98,000 students are in Baptist educational institutions.

Introducing Cameo

A blue-ribbon panel of evangelical educators aims to open broad new areas of coordination among some 105 North American foreign mission boards. Organized as the Committee to Assist Missionary Education Overseas, the group has already surveyed mission executives to determine ways in which it might help. It is a joint venture of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association and the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, which together represent a task force of some 13,971 active missionaries.

Missionary News Service reported that a subcommittee of CAMEO will be devoted to coordinating recruitment procedures for short and long-term missionary candidates. Another subcommittee will study educational opportunities for missionaries on furlough and perhaps develop new programs.

Also in view is a plan to provide assistance to missionary boards in working out accreditation policies and procedures.

CAMEO is made up of executives of more than a dozen major evangelical colleges and seminaries in the United States. They hope to encourage American schools to share selected faculty members with overseas institutions and to send administrators as well to aid less sophisticated educational endeavors. New scholarship programs, curricula studies, and textbook coordination are also envisioned.

Theology

Current Religious Thought: July 3, 1964

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

Students of the reformation will welcome the appearance of Tome I of the Registers of the Company of Pastors of Geneva in the Time of Calvin (Librairie E. Droz, Geneva), which completes the text of the registers for this period. (Somewhat perversely, Tome II covering the years 1553 to 1564 was published first. In both tomes the language used varies between Latin and French.) It was only late in 1546 that the ministers of the Genevan church resolved “that it would henceforth be useful to put into writing the deliberations, decisions, and ordinances, and other matters worthy of mention, concerning the state and government of the church, for use as time and place might require.” But prefixed to the register is a copy of the Ecclesiastical Ordinances that were promulgated by the civic authorities in November, 1541, shortly after Calvin’s return to the city of Geneva.

The Ecclesiastical Ordinances prescribe four official orders for the government of the church: pastors, teachers, elders, and deacons. Of these the pastors alone constituted an ordained ministry. Their office was the administration of the Word and sacraments and the oversight of the Christian flock, and they were elected and appointed only after the most thorough examination of their life and doctrine. The function of the teachers was the instruction of the young in an education that was as Christian as it was cultured. The elders were delegated members of the civic authorities whose special responsibility was the maintenance of discipline and who formed an important link between church and state. The province of the deacons was the dispensation of alms and the care of the poor and the sick, and of widows and orphans.

For the rest, the Ecclesiastical Ordinances lay down certain regulations concerning the administration of the sacraments, the conduct of marriages and funerals, the visitation of the sick and prisoners, the catechizing of children, and the enforcement of discipline.

Unfortunately the register does not afford a complete record of the deliberations and transactions of the Company of Pastors. It seems to have been somewhat spasmodically written up. Nonetheless, it is a document of great historic interest and importance. (An English translation by the writer of this review is to be published in a few months’ time.) Space permits the mention of only a few of the more important matters that occupy the pages of the register.

Calvin’s Geneva was a city dedicated to the ideal of the harmonious cooperation of church and state in common subjection to the will and Word of Almighty God. Yet there is ample evidence in the register that relations between church and state were at times strained and near the breaking point; it is evidence, moreover, that dissolves the legend that Calvin was the tyrannous ruler of Geneva, for it shows that the magistracy was jealous of what it regarded as its own prerogatives and did not hesitate to withstand Calvin and his fellow pastors when it wished to do so. This is seen, for example, in the prolonged trouble over Philippe de Ecclesia. The civil power was then largely in the hands of those who were hostile to Calvin because of his policy of welcoming refugees from persecution to Geneva. De Ecclesia was one of the pastors, and despite evidence against him, the magistracy persistently refused the request of the Company of Pastors that he should be deposed from the ministerial office. It was only in 1553, after four years of obduracy, that the council bowed to the intractable facts and at last dismissed De Ecclesia from his office. This could never have happened had Calvin been the absolute dictator that his slanderers have made him out to be.

Another bone of contention concerned the question whether the right of excommunication was a function of the secular or of the spiritual sword. The dispute came to a head in the case of Philibert Berthelier, which is recorded in the register and which dragged on embarrassingly for several years. The obduracy of the council in refusing to sanction his excommunication scandalized the ministers and was taken as an affront to the dignity of their office. At last, in January, 1555, it was conceded by the magistracy that “the Consistory should retain its status and exercise its accustomed authority, in accordance with the Word of God and the Ordinances previously passed.”

Calvin was always particularly careful to preserve in their integrity the respective jurisdictions of church and state. He had no vote in the councils of state and when he was consulted by the secular authorities always gave his opinion in the capacity of a private person. Indeed, it was not until five years before his death that he was accorded the privilege of citizenship in the city to which he gave such unremitting service. It is significant that at the end of the Ecclesiastical Ordinances the proviso was added that their prescriptions were to be observed “in such a way that the ministers have no civil jurisdiction and wield only the spiritual sword of the Word of God … and that there is no derogation by the Consistory from the authority of the state.”

The register also contains a full report of the theological interchange in the case of Jerome Bolsec, an ex-monk and a physician of sorts who, though not resident in Geneva, attacked Calvin and the doctrine of election taught in the Genevan church. The upshot was that Bolsec was banished from the city by the magistracy and subsequently became the most venomous of Calvin’s calumniators. The register reveals that Calvin had besought the council even with tears that the matter might be dropped. This in itself is sufficient to give the lie to the legend that Calvin was a heartless and vindictive monster.

A Matter of Insults

The Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States may be faced with a major controversy in the wake of a row over the church’s role in battling racial discrimination.

The Rev. William H. DuBay, assistant at St. Albert the Great Church in Compton, California, called for the removal of James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, Archbishop of Los Angeles, and was promptly relieved of his administrative duties at the predominantly Negro parish.

The 29-year-old white priest, who charged in a letter to Pope Paul VI that the cardinal was guilty of “gross malfeasance” in not disseminating more actively the church’s precepts on racial equality, was allowed to continue his priestly duties, at least for the time being.

DuBay made his dramatic announcement about the 700-word letter to Pope Paul at a news conference he called at the Los Angeles Press Club. He said the pastor of his church was in Ireland and unaware of his action.

Responding to a question, DuBay held that his “insult” to Cardinal McIntyre was less than “the insult and injury suffered by the several hundred thousand Los Angeles Negroes at the hands of white Catholics whom the local church refuses to instruct in their specific moral obligations.”

He told reporters he had been “disciplined several times for speaking on the issue” of racial justice and was “threatened a year ago with suspension from priestly duties if I continue to preach that integration is a moral issue.”

It was not immediately apparent whether the incident would develop into a showdown case on Roman Catholic attitudes toward the race question.

Following the announcement of the action against the young priest, a group of white and Negro pickets, local parishioners and members of Catholics United for Racial Equality, formed a line outside the chancery. They carried such signs as “The Church Needs Father DuBay Now.”

Dubay said that “just recently sixty theological students were disciplined for their general commitment to racial justice and for taking part in an informal conversation with John Howard Griffin, noted Catholic author and spokesman for the civil rights movement.” He said that one student was dismissed, another was “recalled from receiving ordination to the subdiaconate,” one left the seminary for reasons of conscience, and others were sent home “for vacation on probation.”

Protestant Panorama

Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission broke ground for a new headquarters-studio building in Fort Worth by touching off an explosive charge with a signal bounced off the Echo II communications satellite.

Lutheran Church in America’s Board of World Missions will start provisional missions for the first time in Trinidad and Peru.

The Christian Advocate, Methodist fortnightly, called for more frequent sessions of the church’s General Conference. An editorial charged that “the executive branch of Methodism does the work of the legislative branch.”

Deaths

THE RT. REV. ARTHUR BARKSDALE KINSOLVING, 70, retired Episcopal Bishop of Arizona; in Carmel, California.

DR. WILLIAM MCKINLEY BEAHM, 67, dean emeritus of Bethany Theological Seminary; in Chicago.

DR. ANDREW THAKUR DAS, 73, a regional secretary of the United Presbyterian Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations; in New York.

THE REV. AUBREY SHORT, 55, president of the Alaska Baptist Convention; in the crash of a single-engine private plane, near Anchorage.

Personalia

Alabama Governor George C. Wallace was awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree by Bob Jones University. He was lauded as “a David warring against the giant tyranny.”

The Rev. Hugh A. MacMillan elected moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

The Rev. Gordon Van Oostenburg elected president of the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America.

The Rev. Vincent A. Yzermans named director of the Bureau of Information of the National Catholic Welfare Conference.

The Rev. James B. Moellendick appointed executive secretary of the International Union of Gospel Missions.

Bishop Filaret of Brisbane, Australia, elected primate of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

Miscellany

American Association of Theological Schools granted full accreditation to Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana; Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri; and St. Paul School of Theology (Methodist), also located in Kansas City.

A resolution adopted by the Military Chaplains Association assailing the American Civil Liberties Union was described by the ACLU as having distorted its official position. An ACLU spokesman said the organization “has never attacked the concept of the chaplaincy program.”

The U. S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a federal judge’s order that permitted doctors to give a blood transfusion to a Jehovah’s Witness who was seriously ill but refused such aid on religious grounds.

Maine’s Board of Education issued a policy statement permitting the state’s public schools to use the Bible in literature and history courses.

The New York State Court of Appeals upheld use of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

About This Issue: July 03, 1964

In this Independence Day issue, Dr. S. Richey Kamm gives an incisive analysis of the American Revolution, and the distinguished Princeton historian, Dr. Arthur S. Link, writes movingly about Woodrow Wilson.

A leading Christian layman, J. Howard Pew, discusses the vital question of the jurisdiction of the Church in respect to economic, social, and political affairs. This important principle, about which CHRISTIANITY TODAY is deeply concerned, will also be dealt with editorially in later issues.

A Mississippi minister, Dr. George W. Long, asks American Christians which they consider to be the “higher powers,” those of the individual states or those of the federal government.

Two major editorials speak to aspects of our greatest national holiday.

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