This is the week all church choirs—pros and shaky amateurs alike—tackle cantatas. The most popular new one is probably “The Wonder of Christmas,” penned by a man who has sold one million copies of ten cantatas.

In 1957, John W. Peterson was known only as a writer of hymns and gospel songs, but “without really knowing how” turned out his first cantata, “Hallelujah, What a Savior,” in a month. Since then, twenty-live to fifty fan letters a week have poured in, including one from the superiors at a Michigan convent who “adjusted” the text.

Viewing his career from this popularity crest, Peterson finds even the setbacks—a ruined vocation, wartime piloting in Burma, foodless days in college, the rise of Elvis Presley—were guidance from God. He’s now forty-two but looks about thirty-five, an effect enhanced by a tall, trim figure, dark hair, and an almost boyish face with a ready grin.

The Petersons are spending their first Christmas in Grand Rapids, where he recently moved to steer the renascent Singspiration, a gospel music house with a mercurial past. With the composer are his serene wife, Marie, and three daughters who reflect her dark Syrian beauty: Pamela, 13; Candace Kay, 15; and Sandra Lynn, 18, back from Moody Bible Institute. Their handsome L-shaped ranch house might lack furniture and rugs at the moment, but because of its newness, not lack of finances. There’s a white Imperial in the garage, too, but one day fifteen years ago, when he also was at Moody, Peterson didn’t even have twelve cents to ride Chicago’s Lake Street el.

In analyzing this cantata-based prosperity, Peterson listed pitfalls he has tried to avoid: “Most cantatas are disjointed. The choir has a number, then everything stops while the soprano wails through a solo, then another break,” he said, slicing the air with his hands. “I try to weave it together as one big package of music.”

As thread, he uses modulations between sections instead of abrupt key changes, Scripture narration, and a recurring song theme. But this may be the key to popularity: “Because I’m basically a writer of melody, I always use some sweeping, lyrical melodies which will be fun for the choir to sing.”

He throws in just enough modern harmony “to make it interesting” but eschews a highbrow style which he contends would “ruin my message” and “only sell to 10 per cent of the city churches.” His musical credo is that “you can become too musical.… I’m not primarily interested in raising musical standards.… I don’t want music to get in the way, but to carry a message.”

A man who prefers music’s middle of the road, Peterson was born on a Lindsborg, Kansas, farm, the youngest of seven in a Swedish-American family. He was four when his father died, after the family had moved to nearby Salina.

When John was a boy soprano, a Major Bowes team came to town. He won the local talent contest and chimed in on three shows. As a result of this exposure, a voice teacher gave him free lessons for many years, and KFBI put him on the air weekly as the folksy “Singing Farm Boy.”

At twelve, Peterson said, he received Christ as his Saviour, but in high school “the Lord really got ahold of my life.” He began to read voraciously from Christian books and became active in local evangelism, a course which ruined a youthful dream:

“My one passion was to be an opera singer,” he recalls. “After my voice changed, I still had a good tenor voice and even a group of fans. But I started so young as a church songleader and did so many campaigns and meetings it ruined my voice.”

As a high school senior, he added a tune to a previously written poem—his usual method even now. “After that one song, there was a fire in my soul, and it’s been there ever since.” He wrote a lot, scrapped most of it, bombarded publishers with the rest. Then in 1940, while guitar-strumming around the countryside in one-night meetings with his brothers’ “Norse Gospel Trio,” he sold “Yet There Is Room.” The thrill of that first $8 check was blunted by the publication, which credited “John W. Patterson.”

Being on the road so many Sundays, Peterson lost touch with his home Swedish (now Evangelical) Covenant church and has since worshiped with all sorts of Protestants, often in independent Bible churches. However, he has been a Baptist for much of the past decade.

The daily touring grind permanently lowered the pitch and quality of John’s voice but led to a life partnership. His future wife, an acquaintance in high school, became a radio fan, came to hear him at a tent meeting, and became a Christian. (Her family had been nominally identified with Eastern Orthodoxy.) They married several years later, while he was in the service.

During the war, Peterson was a troop supply pilot in the Himalayas. Cruising fiercely alone into florid sunrises, gazing up at endless stars and down at massive peaks, he realized anew “what a tremendous universe this is.” Often he worshiped right in the cockpit or sketched song ideas on the back of his flight plan.

One sketch later became his first big hit while he was a post-war student at Moody: “It took a miracle to put the stars in place; It took a miracle to hang the world in space.…” When Percy Crawford was on campus, he bought it and eleven other songs from the aspiring writer. Crawford later sold the rights to a New York publisher, Hill and Range Songs, which had the song framed as one of its all-time best money-makers. For each of the dozen songs, Peterson got $3.

But he had a daughter and wife to support, and “I really needed that $36 that week,” he said.

After Moody, he almost entered Northern Baptist Seminary, but prayer led him instead to get a bachelor of music degree at the American Conservatory in Chicago, majoring in theory and composition—a course he had dropped after a week in high school. His composition teacher. Erwin Fisher, tried vainly to steer him into highbrow orchestral writing.

From graduation until 1955, he worked for Moody’s WMBI. One song from that period, “Over the Sunset Mountain,” was so popular that a commercial publisher offered a fat price for it if he would “broaden” the last line from “Jesus my Savior I’ll see.”

That temptation didn’t last long, but the lure was stronger after he moved to Montrose, Pennsylvania, and his first full-time writing job with Singspiration and its founder, Al Smith. A year later, Hill and Range Songs, mindful of the success of “It Took a Miracle” and of the Hit Parade popularity then of “inspirational” songs, got Peterson into its plush office. There it offered him big promotions and recordings on name labels with stars like Eddie Fisher, and handed him $2,500 as a teaser. He signed a contract.

Then, overnight, rock ‘n’ roll swept the country, and Hill and Range poured its interests into the fad. Peterson had a chance to rethink the deal and decided against it.

“What is the music of America?” he asked. “The ones who hit the majority of people are Rodgers, Gershwin, Porter—you can’t get around it.” One of his unfulfilled goals is to write his own musical, with a Christian message in it, using a non-biblical story with the typical boy-meets-girl angle and colorful format.

Interested librettoists will be able to reach him in a few weeks at a brand-new Singspiration plant in Grand Rapids, where he owns the company along with the Zondervan brothers of book-publishing fame.

The Ncc Election

Bishop Reuben H. Mueller, ranking clergyman of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, was elected to a three-year term as president of the National Council of Churches. He was named at the NCC’s sixth General Assembly in Philadelphia.

Mueller, 66, is the presiding bishop of his 748,000-member denomination and has served since 1957 as chairman of the NCC’s Division of Christian Education. He is also a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches.

Fulfillment Of A Forecast

A prophecy came true in Toronto last month when the Rev. Kenn W. Opperman began his ministry at the Avenue Road Church of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

The prophecy dates back to 1943 when Opperman, then eighteen, first visited the church to give a Christian testimony. He had been converted just four days before, and a devout Christian woman at the testimony meeting predicted that he would some day be the church’s pastor.

The Avenue Road Church was enjoying amazing popularity in evangelism at that time under a youthful, handsome minister—Charles Templeton. As a sports cartoonist-turned-evangelist, Templeton was a phenomenon, especially among young people. Starting with an empty church scheduled for demolition, he soon headed a prosperous congregation which saw many answers to its prayers. Finances were met in the toughest times—even after a disastrous fire which gutted the church the night before the dedication of its newly renovated quarters.

Templeton and his wife were also gifted vocalists, and he went on to become a leading figure in Youth for Christ.

Subsequently he left for Princeton Theological Seminary, and under his urging the until-then independent Avenue Road Church joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1949.

Templeton became then a Presbyterian evangelist in the United States. But at the peak of his church career he left the ministry. He went on to secular work and today is one of Canada’s leading television personalities.

Meanwhile, Opperman studied at Canadian Bible College in Regina, Saskatchewan, spent four years as a pastor, and served several more as a missionary in Peru. Some began to see in him the earmarks of a missionary statesman. His last venture before assuming the pulpit at the Avenue Road Church (succeeding the late A. W. Tozer) was a world tour of mission fields.

The prophecy of Opperman’s appointment was well known to Templeton: the woman who made it was his mother.

KENNETH G. WARES

The church-state-school controversy with respect to religious exercises anti observances in public schools promises to be a continuing affair, and the most any discussion (including this one) can hope to do is to lift some aspects of the question into a place of prominence where they may in turn shed some light upon the substantive issues involved. One of the interesting aspects of the discussion has been the claim that in relieving the public schools of the nation of the responsibility for conducting religious exercises, the courts have left the schools free to inculcate without bias the moral values upon which our society rests.

Underlying this contention is the supposition that our religious pluralism comprises three major traditions and no more. Actually, thoughtful persons recognize that, as Bernard J. Kohnbrenner notes in School and Society (May 20. 1961, p. 241, there are four visible pluralistic elements in our society: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, and secular humanism.

The self-conscious spread of the fourth of these, secular humanism, vastly complicates the problem at issue. In place of a situation in which the public schools are left free to be creedally neutral, we have in point of fact a series of strictures upon public education which actually foster the avowed creed of secular humanism.

But, someone is heard to object, may not the values which we prize be transmitted to students by a neutral public school, and in such a manner as to avoid all sectarian difficulties? Or, another asks, may not any influence upon the lives of children in the public school be accepted as part of God’s pervasive activity in behalf of children? Yet others will prefer that nothing of a religious nature be mentioned in the public school, thereby leaving a clear field to the religious educational facilities of the three major religious traditions.

The first of these objectors assumes that our basic values stand in their own right, and require no spiritual undergirding. He does not ask, “How shall our children’s spiritual needs be met?” but assumes that the schools’ inculcation of moral values will be effective without reference to supernatural concerns. But can we assume that educators who themselves are without spiritual anchorage will interest themselves in wholesome ethical values, much less teach others such values? We think not.

Far from reassuring, for example, is an article in School and Society, issue of Summer, 1963, entitled, “The Function of Schools in a Changing Society.” Written by Grace Graham, professor of education in the University of Oregon, the article takes for granted that “values” are completely fluid, and that in such times as these, the transmission of adult “beliefs, values, and attitudes” to the young leads to total irrelevance.

The article further assumes that children and youth (presumably of all ages) are capable of discovering adequate value systems for themselves, if only their minds are developed “in many directions through different kinds of experiences.”

The grading and incentive systems of the public school are alleged to commit the “sin” of sifting the gifted from out of the mediocre upon a purely class basis. It is alleged that patriotic groups within our society seek to foster an antique form of nationalism, and that “Puritan attitudes toward work, thrift, and play seem out of place in modern America” (p. 259). It goes without saying that the article decries any requirements that would test political beliefs (i.e., loyalties) of teachers or that would protect the young from the salacious products of the press.

In the light of the foregoing, it is far from certain that the values of “the life which we prize” will be conserved in the school which is made safe only for the secular humanist. The overtones of Professor Graham’s pleas for “freedom of the mind” are not encouraging for the continuance of an ethically based free society.

With respect to the second question, whether the influence of the school upon children may be regarded, simpliciter, as part of God’s pervasive activity, we would find it difficult to be sanguine in the light of the anti-supernaturalism which seems to have been part of the regimen of a significant number of institutions of higher learning in which our more influential educators have been trained. One wonders whether the naturalistic teacher can serve with great effectiveness as an instrument for the transmission of a type of outlook compatible with any kind of spiritual world-view.

The view that no use of Scripture and no practice of prayer in the public school can be of any value to the spiritual life of a people is held by many sincere persons. Some, especially of the Jewish faith, hold that such teaching would be ineffectual in the case of their children, and that absence of religious practice in the school is a potent challenge to the synagogue, or to the church or Sunday school, to take its task with greater seriousness. Well and good. But may not a total severance, by an agency which commands the ear of the child for such a large portion of the week as does the public school, from religious concern or religious reference produce a spiritual wasteland in the mind of the child that no spiritual agency, with necessarily less time of access to the child’s mind, can ever hope to populate?

One is perplexed to know precisely what attitude to take toward the children of the overtly irreligious, who seem to feel with sincere conviction that they wish their offspring to be protected from contact with the expressions and forms of religious faith.

Certainly we ought to respect the feelings of minority elements in our society. But do the secular humanists take time to consider the sentiments of those of religious faith, whose children are increasingly subjected to indoctrination in terms of the secular humanistic creed? This fact poses for concerned Christians a continuing source of perplexity.

PRESIDENT OF PEACE—President Kennedy’s funeral may well have been in many aspects the most elaborate and impressive farewell a modern ruler has ever received, yet its key elements—the union of religious solemnity and military display—have been familiar for centuries. But something new was added this time: the reading of a part of his Inaugural Address, … which above all made clear his desire—which he realized—to be a President of Peace, and not a President of War.—The New York Times.

PRACTICING CHRISTIAN—John F. Kennedy was a sincere and practicing Christian and none of his predecessors was more eager to be President of all the people, regardless of religious ties. Reared in a Catholic home and a Catholic community, he probably was not aware of the extent of religious rivalry that sometimes affects political life until his responsibilities encompassed the whole nation.—Hon. BROOKS HAYS, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and special assistant to President Kennedy.

BARBAROUS ACT—Whatever the motive that fired the assassin’s bullet that killed President Kennedy, it was an act of insane barbarity. We bow in shame and sorrow that this deed could be done among us.—FREDRIK A. SCHIOTZ, president, The American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran World Federation.

RENEWED DEDICATION—[Methodists have] a renewed dedication to the ideals of universal peace, brotherhood, human welfare, justice and national integrity for which [President Kennedy] lived and worked so well.—The Methodist Board of Christian Social Concerns.

DELIGHTFULLY AMERICAN—Everything about him was so delightfully American. [He brought] a veritable breath of fresh air into areas of human life too often a setting for the stuffy, the amateur, and the inexpert. President Kennedy was not a utopian dreamer. He was a contemporary figure who measured up to the requirements of our modern age.—E. F. CARPENTER, Archdeacon of Westminster.

1900 YEARS LATER—In the emotional aftermath of President Kennedy’s murder, the nation is being subjected to a seemingly endless series of sermons, both in pulpits and in the public prints, on the evils of “hatred”.… The sermons are sincere and, hopefully, edifying as well. But they happen to be irrelevant to the death of Mr. Kennedy.… If it is absurd to try to blame the assassination on the political rights, it is yet more absurd to insinuate that it was the result of something dreadfully wrong with American political life as a whole. Until we know something different, the reasonable assumption must be that the assassination was the result of something dreadfully wrong in the mind of Lee Oswald. It would be good and desirable if the world could now adjure all hatred. But since hatred still exists 1900 years after the Crucifixion, it is … unlikely that it will vanish now.—The Sunday Star, Washington, D. C.

COURAGEOUS STAND—He knew well the dangers of the stand he had taken on behalf of the American Negro. A weaker man would have avoided trouble, but Kennedy was a brave man and he would not back down from his courageous stand.… He dared to penetrate iron curtains and proclaim not just a policy of containment or co-existence but a braver and more dangerous policy of co-operation between the Great Power blocs. If he believed in the rights of man, he strove also for the liberty of man.—H. C. WHITLEY, St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh.

SYMBOL OF MATURITY—John F. Kennedy was a symbol of America’s coming of age. As our first Roman Catholic President, as a President who committed himself unequivocally to the cause of the forgotten and disenfranchised in our society, he symbolized our country’s long-delayed and long-awaited repudiation of religious bigotry, racism and hypocrisy.—LEWIS WEBSTER JONES, president, National Conference of Christians and Jews.

ATTACKERS RESPONSIBLE—Those who have been making irresponsible attacks upon [President Kennedy] and his policies are as responsible for his death as the one who pulled the trigger.—A joint statement by EUGENE CARSON BLAKE, stated clerk, and SILAS G. KESSLER, moderator, the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.

AMERICAN APATHY—We as citizens of this country are involved in this terrible act insofar as we have shrugged off the frequent expressions of bitterness and hate made by people on the extreme left or the extreme right as of no threat to our country.—ARTHUR LICHTENBERGER, presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

A GOOD STEWARD—Endowed with extraordinary talents and a great measure of this world’s goods, he was ever the good steward, never forgetting that these gifts were entrusted by God to his care for the benefit of his neighbor. He described his own life when he uttered his famous appeal “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.”—A joint statement by the American cardinals and bishops attending the Mass for President Kennedy at the North American College in Rome.

MAN OF CONVICTION—[President Kennedy] was a man of conviction. He stood for the separation of church and state in the face of demands for federal aid to parochial schools by his own Church hierarchy.… He symbolized a new era in the religious relationships of American citizens. He espoused the Civil Rights bill to guarantee the equality of all Americans regardless of race. He stood for the rights of the Negro as a first class citizen. He was a man of broad humanitarian sympathy.… He was a man of faith—faith in God, faith in country, faith in the American people and faith in himself as opposed to the nihilism of popular existentialism adhered to by the beatnik.—HAROLD J. OCKENGA, minister, Park Street Church, Boston.

Something Happens On The Way To The Pulpit

Bachelor of Divinity, by Walter D. Wagoner (Association Press, 1963, 159 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Wick Broomall, minister, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Augusta, Georgia.

The purpose of this brief book is to set forth the problems, frustrations, and possibilities of present-day seminarians as they train for and enter the work of the gospel ministry. Wagoner describes the material gathered in his book as resulting from “administering for eight years three very significant fellowship programs of The Fund for Theological Education: The Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship Program, The Rockefeller Doctoral Fellowships in Religion, The Protestant Fellowship Program” (p. 10). These programs, plus collateral activities, gave Wagoner “a staggering amount of empirical evidence concerning what is going on in theological education, the younger clergy, and the church” (p. 10).

That the picture here given of much of theological education is authentic can be doubted only by those who have no firsthand knowledge of what happens to the young man who leaves the cloistered shelter of his home and church for the three-year exposure to “history, myth, kerygma, demythologizing,” and to such men as “Barth, Bultmann, Bornkamm, and Buri” (p. 74).

In addition to the confusing and conflicting theories concerning the Bible and Christian truths, the seminary student of today faces a bewildering array of personal problems caused largely by early marriage, family responsibilities, and his divided loyalty between his duties in the classroom and his duties as supply pastor of some near or distant church.

In such a hurried and confused state of existence, torn relentlessly between domestic duties and theological problems, the young man preparing for the ministry finds that he has little time to develop his devotional life; and it appears, from Wagoner’s survey, that the average seminary gives scant attention to this important facet of a preacher’s life. Thus the young man preparing for the ministry inevitably comes up against the question as to why he should be in the ministry rather than in some other profession. Some answer this question by deciding to enter some non-ministerial field of activity.

Wagoner’s delineation of the impact of the ecumenical movement on ministerial education shows plainly that most young seminarians leave their divinity schools with little reason left in them for their denominational preference or loyalty. Either because of a commonness of theology, including a common ordination and liturgy, or because of the impact of the one-church idea firmly impressed upon their minds, most seminary graduates today, it appears, could just as easily serve in one or another of the major Protestant denominations.

As already indicated, there can be no doubt that this book gives a fair picture of the atmosphere prevailing in most theological seminaries in America today. One wonders, however, if the author’s conclusions are not largely drawn from such divinity schools as those connected with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Seminaries of a distinctly conservative and evangelical slant seem to have been left out of this survey.

This book diagnoses, on the surface, the disease affecting theological education; but it does not dig down below the surface to ascertain what are the real causes of the spiritual deadness so prevalent in seminaries and churches today. And if this investigation were ever consummated, one result would surely show that the dominance of a critical and unbelieving approach toward the Bible is at the root of theological education today.

WICK BROOMALL

Sermons As They Can Be

No Uncertain Sound, by R. L. Small (T. & T. Clark, 1963, 182 pp., 15s.), is reviewed by P. W. Petty, deputy warden of St. Ninian’s Training Centre, Crieff, Scotland.

The contents of this book merits its title. These sermons are not the work of a man determined to make the headlines at any cost and on any pretext, nor are they fiery exhortation more remarkable for heat than light, nor yet the easy platitudinous utterances of a man who has remained safely in his study and has not grappled with the perplexities and worries of life. Here we have the work of someone who knows what he believes without believing that he knows all the answers, a book that it would do anyone good to read. There is solid teaching here; but it is not dry, nor is it unrelated to life. Throughout, the different themes are handled with a competence and verve which make one envy alike the ability of the preacher and the congregation privileged to hear these words.

The book falls into three main headings: six sermons on the challenge of suffering, these all inspired by the Book of Job; four on the great festivals of the Church; seven on our response to all that God has done for us. All are magnificent; yet if the congregation privileged to hear such preaching needed the first sermon to be preached to it, “Missing Notes in Contemporary Christianity,” what hope is there for the rest of us? Are we in these days asking the sermon to do what it can no longer do? In the old days in a rural community, the sermon was discussed half the week; now it cannot be. What might the results be if the young people, whose needs are brought so vividly before the congregation in the last of these sermons, could really meet the members of that congregation and talk together of the great problems and issues of life in the light shed by the Word of God and by these pages?

P. W. PETTY

Usefully Used

The Marked Chain-Reference Bible, edited by J. Gilcrist Lawson (Zondervan, 1963, 995 pp., plus 554 pp. of study material, 17 maps; black leatherette, $14.95), is reviewed by John G. Johansson, production manager, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This work has a fine appearance, and its many pages of study material make it a useful tool for a better understanding of the Scriptures. The four-color scheme for marking references to the Holy Spirit, prophecy, salvation, and to temporal blessings will, no doubt, appeal to many readers. The (60,000 cross-references in the center columns seem excellent, although some bear off to a point where there is very little left of the thought of the initial reference. The Bible Readers’ Aids contain much interesting information about the Scriptures, such as various tablets or stones from Bible lands and reproductions of several codices and manuscripts.

Formerly published by the John C. Winston Company as The Marked Bible, this work suffers because the old plates were used. This reviewer found broken letters on every page examined (in one place there was nothing left of two letters). Regrettable are: (1) the old KJV spelling and accentuation, instead of the modified spelling of today; (2) the many incorrect word divisions (mo-ther, ene-mies, hea-vens); (3) such plural spellings as “Ziphims,” “cherubims” (but “cherubim” in the encyclopedia part), and “Zuzims” (in the encyclopedia—but “Zuzim” on the map); (4) the use of Ussher’s outmoded chronology with its date of 4004 B.C. for the creation story; (5) the use of the old encyclopedic information (some of the copyright dates go back to 1937 and 1895), spelling “Selah” in 2 Kings 14:7 the same as the well-known “Selah” in the Book of Psalms instead of “Sela” (rock) as in more recent translations without any explanations as to difference in meaning.

The use of this work would be greatly enhanced if the publisher would go to the expense of resetting the type and revising the encyclopedia.

JOHN G. JOHANSSON

Haunted By The Divine Absence

The Failure of Theology in Modern Literature, by John Killinger (Abingdon, 1963, 239 pp., $5), is reviewed by Calvin D. Linton, dean of arts and sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, D. C.

Many men, including some of the more sensitive of modern writers, are finding this an increasingly lonely planet to live on. The population explosion neither alleviates nor intensifies the mood, for it is not people whom men miss. Rather, it is God, whose terrifying policy it is to withdraw from those who do not wish his presence—and our age, by and large, has not wished it. As did the Gadarenes, we have besought him to depart from us, for we are taken with great fear.

Modern literature, therefore, is often haunted—haunted by an Absence. And just as a close examination of the place where something weighty has long rested will suggest what was once there, so modern literature can teach much of God in its silences and its vacancies.

This, really, is Mr. Killinger’s theme: “What has happened to literature since Dante, since Spenser, since Milton and Bunyan? Why do we not continue to have literature of the first magnitude that is total and coherent in its witness to the Christian faith?” He is, however, more concerned with answering the first question—what has happened—than the second, why. Consequently, his title is a little misleading, since it is not theology that has failed in modern literature but modern literature that has neglected theology.

Mr. Killinger brings to his task several notable strengths. For one thing, he knows what Christianity is—not a codification of the social and psychological benefits man has decided over the years he would like to enjoy, but a divine intervention into human history, an Incarnation, bearing cosmic implications and radical solutions to the predicament of man. Hence Mr. Killinger does not find a Christian under every benign humanist he scratches, as have some recent writers on the same subject. Second, he brings an impressively broad and deep background of literary and theological knowledge, buttressed by formal graduate study, private reading, and teaching. Third (and most happily if not most significantly), he knows how to write, a rather rare trait in contemporary criticism.

Also unlike many other recent books on the same general subject, his volume is effectively organized around unifying ideas, and does not comprise merely a series of disconnected essays on certain modern writers. We have become too familiar with the kind of book that utters a few generalities at the beginning; examines half a dozen or so modern writers, rather laboriously summarizing plots and themes; and concludes each section with a more or less obvious summation of what the work “says” about religion. This author knows enough (in both senses) to stand, as it were, in the middle of a concept and to range out widely but selectively, weaving all of his data functionally about his major themes. Of the latter, there are seven, all basic doctrines of Christian theology: the doctrine of God, of Man, of the Church, of the Sacraments, of the Ministry, of Last Things, and of Atonement.

No one can speak of “modern literature” as if it were a unity, expressive of a homogeneous sensibility. There are too many contradictions, ramifications, and echoes. But one can fairly assess a few of the features which set modern Western literature apart from equally apparent and prevalent features of earlier periods. One of these is that modern writers are the first to write, as a group, “on the tacit or declared premise that there is no God.” (The words are Edmund Fuller’s.) If we adopt the popular Jungian word “myth” to denote the prevailing faith (possibly unarticulated and even subconscious, but real) of any age, we may agree with Mr. Killinger in his identification of the modern “myth” as that of “the Absence of God.” This produces a far grimmer mood than that of the purest paganism, either the stoic’s awareness of “whatever gods there be,” presumably dark and malign, or the epicurean’s pantheon of divine delinquents, fashioning man with weeping and laughter, loathing and love. This, rather, is the Myth of Emptiness. In that hollow round of nothingness there is not silence, but whispers and echoes, fragments of former faiths, remnants of earlier beliefs, symbols of abandoned worship. “The numinous is there,” writes Mr. Killinger, “but the Christian construct is missing. It is a demonic world.” The vertiginous nausea of a Sartre; the absurdity of a Camus; the jungles of Conrad and Greene; the madness and despair of Beckett—“I cannot think, I do not know, therefore I am—or am I?” One cannot objectively deny that here is evidence, not of a mood of serene acceptance of the “fact” that man is the highest being in the universe, but one of defiance, of rage against an Enemy; just as the world of James Joyce is not the vaunted “new creation” of a “liberated” writer, with the godlike author seated in the midst of his world paring his fingernails, but a mere inversion of another world, the world Joyce grew up in, of Christian faith and Roman Catholic ritual.

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that the tone of the book shares the assertiveness of these sentences. On the contrary, it is descriptive, objective, and scholarly. Only in the final chapter, on “The Christian Artist,” is there an element of special pleading, to which the reader might like to request “equal time” for reply. After quoting Tom F. Driver, for example, to the effect that Christian art “is always less clear [as to theology and dogma] than is that of preaching and discursive literature.” the author observes: “Certainly there is no such priority of verbal over sensory communication as Protestantism has asserted. Such a priority is merely a historical accident.…” Surely not. Philosophically and practically, the word must take priority over the artistic symbol in the central role of the Church.

A good index and useful footnotes (from which may be derived a selected bibliography, though none is printed separately) enhance the value of the volume.

CALVIN D. LINTON

The Shape Of Glory

Them He Glorified, by Bernard Ramm (Eerdmans, 1963, 148 pp., $3), is reviewed by Harold B. Kuhn, professor of the philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

One is astonished when he realizes that there has been to date no volume devoted wholly to a systematic exploration of the doctrine of glorification, or even of the rich range of usages that the term “glory” and its cognates have in the Christian Scriptures. Professor Ramm’s present volume points up the vastness of the materials in Holy Writ on this subject, and promises to achieve and hold a place of leadership among further studies in this area.

It must be left to the reader to discover the meticulous research that has gone into this work, which is biblically based from first to last. The most that a reviewer can hope to do is to indicate the major lines of the author’s thought and the range of Christian truth he relates to his study of the terms “glory” and “glorify.” With respect to the person and work of our Lord, Dr. Ramm notes the centrality of the Cross as it relates to the manifestation of the essential glory of the Eternal Son. He notes the entire sphere involved in His glorification, avoiding on the one hand the vagaries of “incarnational theology” and emphasizing on the other the contribution of Transfiguration. Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension (as well as the Parousia) to the total structure of glorification.

The volume emphasizes, of course, the general pattern of Christian evangelicalism, including a strong stress upon an objective atonement. In relation to the manward thrust of Christian redemption. Professor Ramm is sensitive to the whole range of applied soteriology; he emphasizes the dimensions of moral freedom and personal responsibility no less than the glory of the “inheritance restored.” He seeks at each point in his presentation to add perspective to the Christian doctrines that he discusses. He sees clearly the element of discontinuity involved in the final and full renewal of man in Christ, as well as in the world-renewal. It goes almost without saying that he envisions the redemption of the whole man, including the body, and explores the Christian hope of a final reconstitution of a redeemed and glorious “communion of saints.”

This reviewer has not read a discussion of the “glorification passages” of the Book of Revelation that can approach, in quality and depth, that of Dr. Ramm, as he surveys with sober insight the rich range of prophecies and promises given to the Exile on Patmos so long ago. This treatment should effectively disarm those who regard the Apocalypse as fantastic or unworthy of credence by intelligent persons.

Dr. Ramm works within the framework of a frank Christian supernaturalism, and pursues his work with a painstaking reverence. This reviewer found the volume to be delightful reading: the author has himself found his work to be delightfully adventuresome and has succeeded well in imbuing his volume with that spirit. Them He Glorified is a work which not only merits, but cordially invites, reading and re-reading.

HAROLD B. KUHN

Walk With Me

Varieties of English Preaching 1900–1960, by Horton Davies (Prentice-Hall, 1963, 276 pp., $6.60), is reviewed by Ben Lacy Rose, professor of pastoral leadership and homiletics, Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia.

When one walks with great men he seeks almost unconsciously to match their stride. Here is a book which allows the reader to walk with some of the noblest souls of this century, to see some of their strengths and their weaknesses, and to be infected by their passions and guided by their hopes.

The author, the Putnam Professor of Religion at Princeton University, has selected fourteen men as representatives of preaching in England during the twentieth century. While he concentrates on the religious thoughts and style of preaching, Professor Davies sets forth salient and interesting facts about the life of each man. Choosing persons from many denominations, including Congregational, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Roman Catholic, the book reveals the vast differences between men whom God uses in a single generation to bring his message to men. The full list of preachers includes: J. H. Jowett, Bishop Henson, Dean Inge, Dick Sheppard, G. A. Studdert Kennedy, Monsignor Ronald Knox, Leslie D. Weatherhead, B. L. Manning, C. S. Lewis, Campbell Morgan, W. E. Sangster, J. S. Stewart, William Temple, and H. H. Farmer.

Professor Davies discovers six distinct types of preaching within the group: devotional, reasonable, liturgical, psychological, expository, and apologetical. To these are added two general categories: lay preaching and the preaching of truth through personality. For each type and category at least one and sometimes three examples are presented and analyzed.

The style of the book is popular and readable. The author, himself a son of an English manse, shows an understanding of and an appreciation for the pulpit work of each of the fourteen personalities, but his treatment of each is clear-eyed and impersonal. He faithfully reveals the failings of a man when this is necessary for the proper appreciation of his work and character. The truth is never lost in adulation and praise.

The author has no thesis to prove, no pet peeve to unload, no ax to grind. In a day when so many books are being written in an “accusative” mood, it is refreshing to read this book which introduces with proper enthusiasm men who did (or are doing) their task well and by whom all may be taught. It is not heavy reading, but it is profitable for any person, preacher or layman.

BEN LACY ROSE

God’S Own Theodicy

Acquittal by Resurrection, by Markus Barth and Verne H. Fletcher (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963, 192 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by James Daane, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This is a book of more than ordinary significance for both theology and ethics. It will have a long discussion, large influence, high praise, and sharp criticism. I can here only hint at the book’s overall position and rich content.

In the first section, Markus Barth, son of Karl, puts his eye unabashedly on Rudolf Bultmann and begins with a strong argument for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. The Resurrection is not a postulate of faith, nor the product of the creative faith of the primitive believing community. On the contrary, so unwilling were the disciples of Jesus to believe in the Resurrection that they preferred to believe in ghosts. Nor is the Resurrection a myth inviting demythologizing or spiritualizing interpretations. It is an event which occurred at a given time, at a specific place, before chosen witnesses. “There is no difference between the factuality, reality, actuality of the crucifixion and of the resurrection events. They possess the same historicity.” Even more pointedly, “Had the New Testament writers known of the devices of the twentieth century, they would perhaps have insisted upon the confirmation afforded by a camera, a recording machine, or a newspaper reporter.” Barth further adds, “If the essence of history should be sought and found not in an infinite becoming and dying … but in God’s struggle and care for man, then the resurrection is to be considered at least as historical, if not more so [this may raise questions], as the death of Christ suffered from the hands of his enemies.” Anything less than a truly historical Resurrection would fail to support Barth’s thesis that the Resurrection alters the whole universe in all its time and history. To show that in biblical thought the Resurrection has anchorage in history, Barth gives extensive exegetical treatment to those New Testament passages which deal with the Resurrection, and particularly to those which implicitly or explicitly contain Old Testament texts. His purpose is to show that the Old Testament no more than the New allows the Resurrection, as in Bultmann, to be regarded as a mere postulate of faith.

While Western theological thought, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, associates justification specifically with the Cross, and sanctification with the Resurrection, Barth points to those biblical passages which make the reverse association and present the Resurrection as a divine act of justification or acquittal. Here the Resurrection is understood not merely as the justification of sinners, but as a public annunciation of God’s justification of himself. Barth writes, “By the resurrection God not only reveals what he is pro me; he manifests also what he is in himself.… God manifests not only that he ‘makes righteous’ but also and foremost that ‘he is righteous’ (Rom. 3:26). Unless the resurrection is explained as a deed by which God manifests, distinguishes, and describes himself, even his love and power, his holiness and righteousness, his mercy and grace—it is not explained at all.” Thus the Resurrection is also God’s justification of himself, of all his ways and works with men, specifically of his election of Israel, his promises to her, his covenant with her, and his call of Israel to service. In New Testament language, the Resurrection is God’s vindication of his amazing act of justifying the ungodly! Thus the Resurrection is theodicy—something which theologians and philosophers usually associate with the problem of evil rather than with that righteousness of God which triumphs over evil and justifies the ungodly.

The Resurrection as theodicy is, moreover, as every theodicy must be, total. It means the justification of all men, not merely of those who believe; the forgiveness and renewal of all things, of the entire cosmos, of all principalities and powers, which Barth defines as the state (Romans 13 is said to have a Christological foundation), as any structured power such as labor unions or political parties, or even the powers that inform an age or a culture. The Resurrection is a justification of all these things, for all things are made new, and a justification of God himself for his gracious acquittal of all men and all things. This is known, of Course, only in the Church, for the meaning and the fact of the Resurrection are known only by those who in faith participate in it. The Church’s task is to announce this hidden truth to all the world, to live according to this fact, and to gratefully praise God because it is true.

At this point the Resurrection becomes ethically relevant for politics, the state, for labor, culture—for everything. Here, too, the question of universal salvation arises, one which the book neither explicitly urges nor, indeed, in any way concerns itself with.

Barth’s argument is that the universal import of the Resurrection must be understood within a juridical context in which Jesus Christ appears as the legal basis for the justification of all men and of God himself for his act of justifying the sinner. And it is presented with massive exegetical and biblical interpretation. The questions and problems which it raises will not be resolved by the recitation of orthodox slogans or isolated texts—if for no other reason than that texts can be cited against every theology that has ever been constructed. The issues Barth raises can be successfully met only by an equally massive theological effort. Markus, it seems to me, stands in the tradition of his father, and his simpler style only makes his theological heritage the more powerful. In new and forceful ways he raises old questions: How can one construct a theology informed by an unlimited atonement and by a limited Resurrection? How can one avoid a theological, inverse version of Bultmann, a theology which posits the historicity of the Cross and Resurrection, but makes their effectiveness contingent upon the human response of faith?

Fletcher, in the second section of the book, indicates the sweeping ethical implications of this cosmic interpretation of the Resurrection for all areas of life: politics, law courts, and all structures and formations of power. He urges that the secular world is no subordinate, lower, natural kingdom (à la natural theology, or world versus Church), but the one realm for which Christ was bodily crucified and physically raised, and in which he therefore now reigns as Lord. On the basis of Markus Barth’s understanding of the Resurrection as acquittal, Fletcher argues that capital punishment is unchristian. The state may punish to protect itself against evil and evil men, but it may not demand the death of a murderer, since Christ already died in his stead. How can the state rightly ask for the life of a murderer when Christ has already given his life for the murderer’s deed? Fletcher’s discussion of the ethical obligations of nations who possess abundance in a world of poor and undeveloped countries, is no less provocative.

On the basis of biblical teaching, there can be no doubt that the physical, historical Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the justification both of sinners and of the God who thereby justifies them. Where this book rightly interprets this truth, it is right in a big way; where it is wrong, it is wrong in a big way. The theological task of discerning where the one ends and the other begins is equally big.

JAMES DAANE

Memorable Journey

Landscapes of the Bible, by Georg Eichholz, trans. by John W. Doberstein (Harper and Row, 1963, 152 pp., $8.95 until Dec. 31, 1963, then $10), is reviewed by Frank Farrell, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The title suggests the content though it does not exhaust it. The reader is taken on a tour of the Bible lands, not simply from Dan to Beersheba but from the Euphrates to the Nile. The narrative follows 104 color photographs, chosen to illuminate the terrains of biblical history.

Avoided is the motley array of commemorative structures which tends to obscure rather than enhance the biblical scenes. The photographs, many of them stunningly beautiful, are largely original in perspective and manage to capture the unexpected. In these pages one may view the mammoth monuments of the Pharaohs, gaze up at the towering columns of Baalbek, roam the forbidding fastnesses of Qumran, enter the gates of Jerusalem to the brilliant-hued Dome of the Rock, wander among the golden columns of sun-drenched Palmyra astride the Syrian desert in isolated splendor, then watch the sun set over the crusader castle which dominates Sidon’s harbor.

Tour guide Georg Eichholz is professor of theology at Kirchliche Hochschule in Wuppertal, Germany. He writes simply and includes archaeological data along with basic facts of geography. All of this serves to give colorful background for Bible study and should serve as a considerable incitement for such when placed in the hands of the layman.

In covering such a wide geographic area, the author has had to be very selective in his choice of sites for illustration and comment. One may be disappointed at omissions, but what is included is treated gracefully. Lessons of providence and history are not neglected. On the place of Israel among the nations, Professor Eichholz says: “This [Isa. 43:1–4] tells us what makes Israel Israel: the incomparable wonder of the elective love of God. This is the royal theme of its history, even though Israel itself often fails to recognize it. Knowing that theme, we hold Israel’s history no far-off thing, but history that is near to us, just as surely as Israel’s God is the God of all the world. Knowing this theme, we know that Israel’s history is not a triumphal march in the midst of world history, but rather the story of God’s meeting with his people.”

FRANK FARRELL

A Sunday-evening church service ended with fatal blasts of buckshot in Asheville, North Carolina, this month. A 57-year-old ex-convict barged into the sanctuary of the West Asheville Assembly of God and killed the minister, his own recently divorced wife, and himself. Police apparently were unable immediately to fix a specific motive in the shootings. The slain minister, the Rev. Lester M. Cobb, 44, leaves his wife, a son, and three daughters.

Protestant Panorama

Southern Baptist Hospital Board asked the American Hospital Association to “curtail its activities in seeking government participation” in the work of voluntary hospitals.

Seven new Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) have been established in Puerto Rico in three years. Goal for the decade is twenty new congregations.

United Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race pledged “unflagging support” to President Johnson in carrying out civil-rights policies of the late President Kennedy.

In New Zealand, the Anglican Synod of the Waiapu diocese approved a tentative plan of merger with other Protestant denominations. Archbishop Norman Lesser observed, however, that the plan would not be put into effect if it would “render the hope of union with the Roman and Orthodox churches unlikely or impossible.”

In Sweden, the Riksdag (Parliament) is weighing a measure to allow laymen to participate in the election of bishops in the Lutheran state church. The proposal originated in the executive branch of the national government and was approved by the church’s general synod.

Miscellany

A Communist newspaper in the Uzbek Soviet Republic reported that three women Baptist missionaries had been charged with illegal religious activities and sentenced to two years in prison. It said the women had been accused of “organizing secret meetings of an unregistered Baptist sect.”

A significant increase in the sale of religious and inspirational Christmas cards since the assassination of President Kennedy was reported from New York by Religious News Service. Particularly in demand were two cards painted by Mrs. Kennedy for the benefit of the National Cultural Center. One depicts the journey of the Magi, and the other shows an angel heralding the nativity.

Protest marches against the ban on public school devotions were conducted in Washington, D. C., and Hartford, Connecticut, last month. An assortment of about 350 pickets paraded in front of the White House on Thanksgiving Day. Two days later, 600 Assemblies of God young people demonstrated on the steps of the Connecticut capitol.

National Council of Churches delivered an initial check of $12,000 to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church of Birmingham, where a bomb explosion killed four Negro girls on September 15. The money represented donations to a fund established by the NCC’s Commission on Religion and Race.

The Rev. Elmer B. Sachs, president of an evangelical youth organization known as Sky Pilots, was sentenced to six months in a Colorado prison for failing to pay a $1358 civil judgment.

The Rev. Koji Honda, leading Japanese evangelist, will conduct a nine-day “Olympic Crusade” in the Tokyo Bunkyo Auditorium next September. The crusade will be jointly sponsored by the Honda Crusades organization and World Harvesters, Inc.

An $8,500,000 expansion program was announced for Wagner College, New York City’s only private, Protestant-related liberal arts college. A dormitory is already under construction, and funds are being sought to erect a new science building. The college, whose picturesque eighty-acre campus overlooks New York harbor, is associated with the Lutheran Church in America.

A new publishing plant for All-Church Press designed to quadruple its printing capacity was formerly dedicated in Fort Worth, Texas, last month. The ceremonies also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the organization, which publishes congregational and denominational newspapers.

Fifty-eight American couples flew to Korea last month to adopt a group of orphan children ranging in ages from three weeks to thirteen years. The flight was sponsored by a Protestant group on the West Coast in cooperation with Flying Tiger Lines. Costs amount to about $950 per couple. Another flight is planned for April of next year.

The Canadian House of Commons passed a private bill providing a name change for what will hereafter be known as the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Canada (former name: Canadian Union Conference Corporation of the Seventh-day Adventists). The bill also adds an official French name and enlarges the power of the corporation to hold land and publish literature.

Personalia

The Rev. Alton M. Motter named executive director of the Minnesota Council of Churches.

Dr. Harold H. Hutson appointed executive vice-president of Methodist-related American University.

Dr. Gilbert F. White, professor of geography at the University of Chicago, elected board chairman of the American Friends Service Committee.

The Rev. Angus Finlayson named moderator-designate of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland.

Dr. Courts Redford, executive secretary of the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, plans to retire at the end of 1964.

Paul E. Hoffman, managing editor of the theological quarterly Lutheran World, was ordained in Geneva in what was described as the first Lutheran ordination service in the city’s history.

They Say

“How long shall we continue pompously to aver that the chief contribution of Jesus was simply to rehash all that had been said before by his Jewish ancestors? How long before we can admit that his influence was a beneficial one—not only to the pagans, but to the Jews of his time as well, and that only those who later took his name in vain profaned his teachings.”—Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath, in an address at the forty-seventh general assembly of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.