The Rev. R. Eugene Crow of Los Angeles is the winner of a competition sponsored by CHRISTIANITY TODAY for sermons dealing with universalism. His entry, “Eternity, Our Responsibility,” begins on page 13. Other winners are listed on page 12.

The year-end mood always has a tinge of sadness, as the article on the opposite page says, and the passing of 1963 will be particularly sad. The editorial on page 20, however, calls attention to some encouraging notes. Another editorial, “Christ Comes Twice,” underscores hope for tomorrow.

Circulation this issue 214,822 copies.

The following report is based upon an exclusive interview with Mrs. Marguerite Oswald by Jimmie R. Cox, CHRISTIANITY TODAYnews correspondent, one week after her son was slain at Dallas police headquarters.

Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, mother of the man accused of the assassination of President Kennedy, tried under difficult circumstances to provide religious training for her three sons.

Her own parents were of different faiths. Her father, a Roman Catholic, permitted her mother to oversee the religious upbringing of the family. Her mother, a Lutheran, had Mrs. Oswald baptized in a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in New Orleans where she also was confirmed at the age of twelve.

When Lee Harvey Oswald was born on October 18, 1939, his father, Robert E. Lee Oswald, had been dead for two months. Although the elder Oswald had been an insurance salesman, he had insured himself for only $3,500. The only other money available to the widow was a small sum from the sale of the equity in the family home.

Like his mother, the infant Lee was baptized in a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in New Orleans. He was never confirmed.

Mrs. Oswald attempted to stay at home and rear her family but eventually was forced to go to work. She paid a maid to care for the children for a time, but when World War II came, she had to make other arrangements. The older two sons she placed in a Lutheran institution which accepted children having only one parent. She said she was expected to pay whatever circumstances would permit.

But Lee was too young to enter the church home. Mrs. Oswald said she had no choice but to leave him to the care of a sister, who also lived in New Orleans, and to hire other attendants for him whenever possible.

“The older boys received a wonderful religious education,” Mrs. Oswald declared, pointing out that Lutherans also operated a school in connection with the children’s home. But Lee was not accepted until he was three and remained in the institution only two years.

At this time, Mrs. Oswald remarried and moved with her second husband to Fort Worth. She took Lee with her and had the other two sons enrolled in a military academy. But the second marriage ended in divorce after only eight or nine months.

Mrs. Oswald remained in Fort Worth, working and sending her sons to school until Lee’s next oldest brother. Robert Oswald, entered the service. She then moved to New York to be near Robert and his wife.

“I wanted to have someone in the family to care for Lee while I worked,” she said. Lee then was eleven.

Immediately on moving to New York she enrolled Lee in a Lutheran school. It was an hour and a half, subway time, from their home, however, and she later moved to the Bronx, where Lee attended public school. A psychiatric report at that time is said to have considered Lee “dangerous.” but Mrs. Oswald refused to discuss it.

Mrs. Oswald moved back to New Orleans with Lee toward the war’s end, again so that she could be near a relative, her sister. When Robert Oswald received his discharge from the service, he wanted to return to Fort Worth, and Mrs. Oswald, with Lee, moved there, too, in July, 1956.

In October of the same year, Lee, then seventeen, joined the Marine Corps, thus beginning the turbulent career that ended in a tragedy which stunned the world.

“In every place we lived,” Mrs. Oswald insisted, “I always tried to be with my children. I was an active worker in my church in New Orleans before Lee was born, and as he was growing up I would try to see that he attended Sunday school and church.”

She said she was not able to attend regularly because of the necessity that she work for her children’s livelihood. At this point she commented somewhat bitterly on the attitude of some professing Christians toward her during her struggle to provide for her family:

“I don’t remember ever being visited by a minister or anyone representing a church during all that time, as we moved from one city to another.” She allowed, however, that perhaps church people were unable to contact her because she worked long and irregular hours.

Nevertheless, she added: “Some good people were very thoughtless and inconsiderate. They wouldn’t think of missing church on Sunday, but they would expect me to have Sunday dinner ready for them when they returned.” The implication was that it never occurred to her employers that she also might want to worship on the Lord’s Day.

In spite of this, and all that has happened, however, Mrs. Oswald asserts that her own faith in God has remained unshaken, and if anything, has been strengthened.

In the week following Lee’s arrest for the assassination of the President, she received more than 400 letters from all parts of the United States and even from foreign countries. Many of the letters have been from Christians—some quoting Scriptures of comfort to the distressed, others offering sympathy and material assistance both to the mother and to her dead son’s Russian-born wife and two children.

“I know that my son was not an atheist,” Mrs. Oswald declared. She recounted an incident that occurred shortly after his return to the United States after three years in the Soviet Union. His wife, who could speak no English, brought a double picture frame to his mother. One side held a picture, taken in Russia, of the young couple with their child, June. In the other side was a print of “Christ and the Child.” Pointing to her daughter, then to the painting of Jesus, she indicated in sign language and broken English that she wanted the child baptized.

Mrs. Oswald said Lee asked her to make arrangements for the baptism to be performed at a Lutheran church in a public ceremony. He later decided not to go through with the ceremony on grounds that a financial contribution usually was expected from the parents of children when they were christened.

“At the time,” said Mrs. Oswald, “he didn’t even have money to buy food and clothing for his family.”

Lee Oswald’s wife later had the christening performed in an Eastern Orthodox church in Dallas. The clergyman who performed the rite has been quoted as saying that it was done without Lee’s knowledge.

Mrs. Oswald said that on returning to her apartment in Fort Worth after her son’s burial, she found cards in her door from ministers of many denominations offering to make themselves available to assist her in any way possible. She said she was disappointed and grieved by the attitude of some persons, however, among them close acquaintances who remained aloof and showed no concern for her during her moment of greatest trial. A few persons were reportedly upset because her son was buried in the same cemetery with their deceased kin.

Mrs. Oswald still maintains that her son was innocent of the murder of the President, despite the evidence compiled against him.

She says, too, that she has no worries about the future. She recalls the words her minister spoke to her at the burial of her first husband. In answer to her question about why her husband had been taken, the minister replied, “You know that we can’t ask such things. Never question the will of God.”

“I did not question His will then and I do not question it now,” says Mrs. Oswald. “I know that things will be worked out according to God’s purpose.”

Sidelights

Lyndon Baines Johnson, thirty-sixth President of the United States, has been a member of the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of Johnson City, Texas. His wife and two daughters, however, are Episcopalians. The family has attended both Episcopal and Christian churches while in Washington. On Thanksgiving Day they worshiped at a union service in a Methodist church.… Only one other American President has been a member of the Disciples, James A. Garfield.… Numerous church leaders attended the funeral services for President Kennedy at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Prominent clergymen included evangelist Billy Graham and integration leader Martin Luther King.… Britons flocked to churches on hearing the news of the assassination. Religious News Service reported from England: “It is safe to say that there was not a church, chapel or synagogue in this land in which there were not special prayers—in some cases special services—in which the worshippers paid tribute to the late President”.… The Bible upon which President Johnson placed his hand as he was sworn into office may have been a Douay Roman Catholic version. U. S. District Court Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath, recalled that “I thought someone said it was a Catholic Bible”.… Only two weeks before he was elevated to the Presidency, Johnson cited Psalm 91 as his favorite Bible passage. He quoted the entire chapter in reply to a query from a New Jersey teen-ager.… The minister who presided at the burial service for Lee Harvey Oswald was the Rev. Louis A. Saunders, executive secretary of the Fort Worth Area Council of Churches. He is a clergyman of the Disciples of Christ. He went to the cemetery on his own and was called to officiate at the last moment after an out-of-town minister, through a reported misunderstanding, failed to appear. Having had no time to prepare, and having even left his Bible in his car parked two blocks away, Saunders began: “We have come here today to lay away the body of Lee Harvey Oswald. We are not here to judge him but to bury him. May God have mercy on his soul.” The clergyman then turned to newsmen and security men and said Mrs. Oswald had asked him to say that Lee was a good son to her, a good husband to his wife, and a good father.

Last Call For Tax Benefits?

American church-goers who put extra dollars in the offering plate by December 31 may get some income tax relief.

Contributions made before the end of 1963 will be deductible from gross income that is taxed at the 1963 rate, and present indications in Washington are that 1964 income tax rates will be a little lower. Thus, a charitable gift will not be worth as much in 1964 in terms of tax saving as one made this year.

Under present tax rates, a contribution to a religious, educational, or charitable institution means a tax saving of from 20 cents to 91 cents on the dollar, depending on the taxpayer’s bracket. The tax reduction bill which passed the House of Representatives in September sets rates 16 cents to 77 cents per dollar.

Congress, facing an election year in 1964, is believed almost certain to pass a tax bill, especially since President Johnson has made it the first plank of his legislative program and has promised Congress an effort to reduce expenditures and bring the budget into earlier balance.

It is believed that there is only a remote chance that the Senate would restore to the bill a provision recommended by the late President Kennedy that would allow any kind of deductions only to the extent that together they exceed 5 per cent of an individual’s income.

Even if this provision is rejected by the Senate, as it was in the House, there is a possibility that donations will be tax deductible only if they exceed $50 for an individual or $100 for a married couple.

Adjournment

Amid speculation that Pope Paul VI may not be as progressive as many have thought, the Second Vatican Council adjourned until next fall.

The pontiff issued a personal decree that made permanent certain transitory rights and privileges of Roman Catholic bishops, but left the big question of the collegiality of the bishops still unresolved. He took the edge off some of the liberals’ disappointment by announcing plans for a visit to the Holy Land next month.

Decrees were promulgated on liturgy and communications. They represent the only two of the seventeen schemata on the council’s agenda that have been completed. Both were approved by overwhelming votes.

Mapping Out Mapilindo

A fragile cultural federation in Southeast Asia embracing a combined population of 140 million spells opportunity for a group of Protestant evangelists. They feel that the loose association of Malaysia, Pilipinas (native spelling for the Philippines), and Indonesia provides a favorable climate for more effective proclamation of the Christian message. They have appropriated the term “Mapilindo” and are busy organizing an evangelistic strategy for the three countries.

The term “Mapilindo” was created by the chiefs of state of what was formerly Malaya (now Malaysia), the Philippines, and Indonesia during a summit conference in Manila last July. The federation still stands, despite the highly problematical attitudes of Indonesia and the Philippines toward the formation of Malaysia. The common racial beginnings of the three date back to the ancient Madjapahit Empire.

First step in the Mapilindo evangelistic plan will be a conference for Christian leaders in Singapore next August. Plans will be set in motion for the appointment of Mapilindo gospel teams comprising one evangelist each from Malaysia, Pilipinas, and Indonesia. The idea grew out of an early-morning prayer meeting among a group of concerned evangelical workers in Singapore last summer.

Much of the impetus for the new strategy came from Philippine evangelist Gregorio Tingson, a product of both Oriental and Occidental education. A former law student at the University of the Philippines, Tingson was sent to the United States following World War II by an American Christian serviceman who had heard him preach. Tingson had been converted to Christianity under the influence of Miss May Coggins, an American Baptist missionary now living in Phoenix, Arizona. While in the States, he studied at Olivet College of the Church of the Nazarene in Kankakee, Illinois.

Since his return to the Philippines, Tingson has taken yearly evangelistic tours through parts of Asia. His latest, this year, saw him in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Calcutta, Madras, Colombo, and Singapore.

It was the consensus of those at the Singapore prayer meeting that while the word “Mapilindo” is basically an appellation for the cultural federation of the three nations, the same word may yet serve as a strong rallying point for the cause of evangelism in that part of the world. A number of church leaders have voiced support. They believe that with the common aboriginal bond and racial affinity among the Mapilindo people, the formation of Mapilindo gospel teams will push ahead the cause of Asian evangelism significantly.

The teams could mean much, especially in Malaysia, where reportedly there is not a single native Malay Christian. The British government some years ago caused to be included in the Malayan constitution a provision prohibiting foreign missionaries from doing evangelistic work among the native Malays. The Christians found in Malaya are either Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or some other non-Malay nationality.

Evangelical observers in the Mapilindo region feel that the Mapilindo gospel teams may hold the answer to reaching the native Malays. A person from the Philippines or Indonesia has physical characteristics very similar to the native Malays.

The Mapilindo region as a whole counts only three million evangelical Christians out of the 140 million population (100 million in Indonesia, 30 million in the Philippines, and 10 million in Malaysia).

EUSTAQUIO RAMIENTOS, JR.

Last month at Oxford there died a man who had the rare gift, many said, of making righteousness readable.

Clive Staples Lewis was born in 1898, the son of a Belfast solicitor whose immediate forebears had come from the hills of Wales. The son achieved a Triple-First (highest honors) at Oxford and taught there many years. But it was Cambridge that gave him deserved honor in 1954 by appointing him to a new chair of medieval and Renaissance English, from which he retired this fall because of poor health.

Lewis had the knack of relevance and intelligibility in speaking to people, as was discovered in World War II when a series of his talks on radio won wide popularity among all classes. He was at once logical and imaginative. Preaching at Oxford one of the greatest sermons that city has known in modern times, he said:

“We are half-hearted preachers, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”

All the writings of C. S. Lewis give the impression of an effective effortlessness; yet the Roman Catholic Tablet, comparing him with G. K. Chesterton, rightly joins in hailing him as one of the greatest Christian apologists of his time. The Tablet said it was puzzled, however, that his sense of “the Church” was astonishingly faint and crude.

A puckish humor could be discerned even in the index to Miracles (1947), which has the intriguing reference:

“Higher Thought. See Tapioca.”

As an Oxford don he never quite conformed, and his satire That Hideous Strength (1945) was sharper than even some of C. P. Snow’s commentaries on college life and intrigue. He was impatient with the cult of culture, could smell cant a mile away, and would not hesitate to scandalize the puritanical by a reference to “my favorite pub.”

Yet he was a profound biblical and patristics scholar whose Reflections on the Psalms (1958) shows what he might have done had he given himself to that field.

In his vivid apprehension of evil he has some affinity with John Bunyan, to whom this world was a constant battlefield with the soul’s eternal destiny in the balance. This outlook is seen in The Screwtape Letters (1942). It is his best-known book, but Lewis himself considered that his earlier work, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), in which he explained a recovery of faith, was a much more important volume. His published sales in paperbacks alone now top the million mark. Perhaps the most moving part of Lewis’s life, most of it lived in bachelorhood, was after his marriage in 1956 to an old friend, Mrs. Joy Davidson Gresham, while she was ill. It was like writing a new chapter to The Problem of Pain (1940), a penetrating work which had won him great acclaim. Through her illness he cherished her; then under the pseudonym “N. W. Clerk” he wrote A Grief Observed after her death three years ago. Few know the little book, fewer still that he was the author.

(Mrs. Gresham was an American divorcee, a poet and essayist who once joined the Communist party only to break away in disillusionment. She was the daughter of a New York Jewish couple. She was greatly influenced by his Miracles, and it eventually led her to him.)

A moderate Anglican layman, Lewis identified himself with no party and was no supporter of denominationalism. Perhaps his influence was most marked on the backslidden and the agnostic, whom he won without any dilution of the Christian challenge.

Most evangelicals enjoyed Lewis’s work and acknowledge especially his tremendous contribution in exposing the superficialities of many intellectual unbelievers.

Some evangelicals, however, have had reservations, including Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, a personal friend and the minister of historic Westminster Chapel in London. Dr. Lloyd-Jones told CHRISTIANITY TODAY that because Lewis was essentially a philosopher, his view of salvation was defective in two key respects: (1) Lewis taught and believed that one could reason oneself into Christianity; and (2) Lewis was an opponent of the substitutionary and penal theory of the Atonement.

Lewis died November 22, the same day that President Kennedy was killed. The news of the death was not made public until two days later.

Other Deaths

Two noted figures on the American religious scene died in November: Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, 70, and the Rev. John La Farge, 83. Rabbi Silver was long a champion of the Zionist movement and was known as a principal architect of the modern state of Israel. Father LaFarge was associate editor and former editor-in-chief of the Jesuit weekly America.

THE HOME STRETCH

This little gem is being written late in the day, and I have a feeling that the only solution to the way I feel right now is to go home and sleep for forty-eight straight hours. I contemplate sadly, however, that we have company for dinner, after which I have to drive forty miles to lecture for two hours, after which I shall drive forty miles again to come home jiggety-jog and face the company again, and we will be up all night, and there is the beginning and the ending of a day. Furthermore, tomorrow does not really promise to be a whole lot better, after which the week-end, as they say, looms.

Many people excuse bad behavior in youngsters by saying that they need more sleep. I am willing to go along with that in most cases if only to get the youngster out of circulation and into bed; but I would like to pursue sometime the question of what has been called “cumulative fatigue.” Why doesn’t some physiologist or psychologist work on a thesis to show the relation between lack of sleep and juvenile delinquency? I see no reason for believing that lack of sleep makes for bad behavior in infants and does not make for bad behavior in adolescents.

If my observations are sound, maybe we ought to start packing our adolescents off to bed and at least get the juveniles off the streets. I happen to know one boy who lowered his quarter-mile track record by almost four seconds after about two months of regular exercise, regular meals, and enough sleep. I am confident that for weeks at a time college students do not get enough sleep, and that their ragged dress, their careless habits, and their slovenly speech betray their sleep hunger at every turn.

Our times are out of joint, and there is something wrong in more places than Denmark. Probably the wave of the future belongs to some simple folk somewhere who can get enough sleep. I won’t fight em. I’ll join em.

EUTYCHUS II

SILENT CHURCH

Your editorial on “Cigarettes and the Stewardship of the Body” (Nov. 8 issue) is appreciated, but as a moral issue the problem of cigarettes is much broader than that of the stewardship of the body. It is true that defilement of the human temple is both a beginning and a fundamental consideration. But beyond are considerations like the utter worldly conformity inherent in the customs of smoking, the offensiveness to many of those who are free of the habit, the economic drain upon the poorer elements of our population, and the very binding nature of the habit.

It is largely futile to face this issue in piecemeal fashion, and the silence of the Church is ominous. It may be that there is too large a stake in the profits of the whole tobacco industry, including income from the growing, manufacture, and merchandising of tobacco in all its forms.

J. WARD SHANK

Mennonite Church

Broadway, Va.

If 1,000,000 present school children in this country will die of lung cancer before they reach the age of seventy, and if in 1962 there were 40,000 deaths, largely traceable to cigarette smoking, to a great degree the blame will have to be placed at the door of the Christian Church. The Church in all ages was meant to be God’s watchman upon the walls of Zion.… For decades now, the medical science has raised the red flag of danger over tobacco smoking. Yet the voice of the watchman—the Christian Church—has been silent or discouragingly feeble.

JEREMIA FLOREA

Pontiac Seventh-day Adventist Church

Pontiac, Mich.

It would seem appropriate now that some apologies be forthcoming to the “fanatical” (?) Christians who for at least a century have maintained the principle of stewardship of the body (to which you are now forced to agree by scientific evidence) by requiring that members of their church be non-tobacco users and teetotalers.

And perhaps a “Nobel Health Prize” or its equivalent should be given to Seventh-day Adventists for championing and practicing these truths shown them by the divine (they believe) counsel of the Spirit of Prophecy via Mrs. E. G. White.

CECIL A. PADEN

Vincennes, Ind.

It may interest you to know that the Baptist Church in Moscow does not permit anyone who smokes cigarettes to become a member of the church.

JEROME DAVIS

West Haven, Conn.

Your splendid editorial … was favorably discussed in last Sunday’s (Nov. 3) religious section of The Houston Chronicle.

Congratulations for taking such a courageous stand on this highly emotional and touchy subject!

With the lives, health, and happiness of so many people at stake, we need to be more forthright as Christian leaders, responsible before God for the training of our people.

W. D. KUENZLI

Webster Presbyterian Church

Webster, Tex.

APOSTOLICITY

A thousand thousand thanks for the gracious and insightful article by Dr. L. David Cowie on Dr. Graham’s “apostolic preaching in Los Angeles” (Oct. 25 issue). Dr. Adoniram Judson Gordon used to say that it is apostolic men that make an apostolic age.

FRANCIS E. WHITING

Director

Dept. of Evangelism and Spiritual Life

Michigan Baptist Convention

Lansing, Mich.

CHRIST AND THE CHURCH

It seems to me that Dr. Sasse’s article on “Rome and the Doctrine of the Church” (Oct. 11 issue) comes breathtakingly close to the heart of the matter. But why not go all the way?

Having shown that wide acceptance has been given to the statement that “the Church is Jesus Christ,” why not go on to show that the fundamental ground for the doctrine and all its disastrous implications is the ancient Jewish identification of the Messiah with the people?

The notion of a “corporate personality” is supposed to satisfy the biblical assumption that only a flesh-and-blood person can have the attributes of person; but it implies that the Messiah is really a “myth” and the true hope of man is in “the people” or, now, “the Church.”

Modern thinking is so conformed to this “mythology” that few people are aware that a corporation is a legal fiction assigning to an association the legal responsibilities of a person; that a corporation is therefore modeled upon flesh and blood, and flesh-and-blood personal powers are not modeled upon those of an association, even if the law says it has a “corpus” or body.

Is not this what John is contending against when he declares, “Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist” (1 John 4:2, 3)?

Believers can love and be loyal to the flesh of Jesus (his human nature) and be joined to him by the bond of mutual willed love or loyalty in the manner in which a husband and wife are made “one flesh”; but how can such a bond exist between a believer and a “myth” or a “corporate personality” like Uncle Sam?…

“As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” said the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 15:22).

It is possible to be “one body” with another person; but not with a mythical “corporate personality.”

The “body metaphor” of St. Paul will stand up to exhaustive detailed analysis as long as it is anchored to the flesh of Jesus. It will also demolish all nonsense about “successors” to Peter or any other apostle. Witnesses and founders have no successors. Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid.

T. ROBERT INGRAM

St. Thomas’ Episcopal

Houston, Tex.

DIVISION AT THE LORD’S TABLE

The article by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes under “Current Religious Thought” (Sept. 27 issue) points out well a grievous sin of our divided Christendom. It should be an occasion of sorrow and repentance for those of us who profess belief in Christ that we cannot all meet together at the Lord’s Table. However, I feel that your non-Anglican readers should be made aware of some distortions by Mr. Hughes about our position in regard to the sacrament of Holy Communion, distortions that I trust were made unwittingly in a spirit of charity and ecumenism.

First, he speaks of the Bishop of Leicester’s invitation to baptized and communicant members of the British Christian Youth Conference to receive the sacrament in his cathedral as being “essentially Christian and fully in harmony with the hospitable spirit of classical Anglicanism.” To say that it is essentially Christian is to beg the question; to say that it is within the hospitable spirit of classical Anglicanism is either to exclude the Prayer Book rubric requiring Confirmation before receiving from the “hospitable spirit” or to exclude that “spirit” from the Prayer Book.

Second, to claim that “the validity of the sacrament depends on its being given by and received at the hands of episcopally ordained ministers” is a “modern refinement on the part of some Anglicans “is either to say that the Prayer Book requirement that only a priest shall celebrate the Eucharist is “modern” or to say that the Anglican communion has insisted on something. i.e., episcopal orders, that was not in any true sense necessary and that it has insisted without reasons until some modern Anglicans saw fit to provide them.

Finally, to say that “the difficulties of intercommunion … are located … in the elaborations of denominationalism” is to speak the truth. But, is the way out of these elaborations the way of pretending that they do not exist? And is it not pretending that they do not exist when we have services of “intercommunion” among people who believe that they are receiving an efficacious sacrament and people who do not believe that they are receiving a sacrament at all?

WILLIAM C. GARRISON

St. Martin’s Episcopal Church

Chattanooga, Tenn.

I appreciate the spirit in which Mr. Garrison has written in criticism of what I said.… I did indeed seek to express myself in a spirit of charity and ecumenism. I hope, however, that Mr. Garrison will turn to the New Testament and to the evidence of historic Anglicanism, and then be prepared to withdraw his accusation that I have been guilty of distorting the facts.

If he will read the treatise entitled “Of Ceremonies” which is prefixed to the Book of Common Prayer, he will find this statement: “In these our doings we condemn no other nations, nor prescribe anything but to our own people only: for we think it convenient that every country should use such ceremonies as they shall think best to the setting forth of God’s honour and glory, and to the reducing of the people to a most perfect and godly living, without error or superstition.” The rubrics and rules of the Book of Common Prayer are directed toward the proper ordering of the worship of the Anglican church. They are not intended to make it an exclusive sect. Hence the freedom of intercommunion that existed between the Church of England and its fellow Reformed churches in Scotland and on the Continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The lack of episcopacy constituted no barrier to such intimate fellowship.

Accordingly the Confirmation rubric, to which Mr. Garrison appeals, prescribes a purely domestic, regulation, and was never intended to be applied in a universal manner. Thus Professor Gwatkin has written: “It seems historically clear that the rubric was never seriously understood as excluding nonconformists till long after the rise of Tractarianism. It was then a new interpretation, and it was rejected by great churchmen of all schools.” And Archbishop Fait of Canterbury replied to those who had objected against the corporate service of Holy Communion which he held in Westminster Abbey for the scholars working on the revision of the English Bible: “Some of the memorialists are indignant at the admission of any Dissenters, however orthodox, to Holy Communion in our Church. I confess that I have no sympathy with such objections. I consider that the interpretation these memorialists put on the rubric to which they appeal at the end of the Confirmation service is quite untenable.… I believe this rubric to apply solely to our own people, and not to those members of foreign or dissenting bodies who occasionally conform.”

Mr. Garrison may also have heard of the Open Letter on Intercommunion addressed to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York by thirty-two theologians of the Church of England two years ago.

The evidence is against Mr. Garrison when he accuses me of distortion. But be that as it may, nothing would please me more than to have the opportunity of discussing this important question with him in person, and in a friendly spirit, if one day our paths should have the good fortune to cross.

PHILIP E. HUGHES

London, England

ENCOURAGING DEVELOPMENT

In that more journalism students each year become interested in applying their talents in the field of religion, your special issue (Sept. 27) on religious journalism met a great need here.

WILLIAM E. HALL

Director

School of Journalism

The University of Nebraska

Lincoln, Neb.

Many of us have had the humiliating experience of being taken in by an imposition of one kind or another. There have been times when we thought we were getting a bargain only to find the article purchased was far from what we thought.

We have been deceived by people and by things. We have enthusiastically followed some individual or movement only to find that we had been duped.

That “all that glitters is not gold” is discovered by some early in life; others take longer.

In other words, everyone has a streak of credulity which can be costly and even disastrous.

We believe Christians are today confronted with a monstrous counterfeit, a deception not recognized and for that reason all the more dangerous.

Christianity’s greatest counterfeit is not Communism, nor is it the religions of the world, in all of which there are obviously elements of good.

The great counterfeit—the thing against which we in the Church must guard lest it deceive us and those outside—is the substitution of humanitarianism for Christianity.

That against which we must guard is the equating of compassion for mankind and concern for physical and material welfare with Christianity itself.

Concern for the welfare of the body is right, a duty of the Christian; but it is no substitute for concern for the souls of men.

Concern for temporal comfort for self or for others is no substitute for a concern for the eternal verities.

And yet, all of these things are being equated with the Christian faith, and humanitarians are being called “Christians,” even though they may deny God or his Christ.

Humanism is basically a preoccupation with mankind here and now. Such concerns are valid, but unless they are kept in proper perspective, the meaning of the Christian faith can be lost in an emphasis which has nothing to do with Christ and his Cross.

When our Lord spoke to his disciples of his coming death in Jerusalem and subsequent resurrection, Peter rebuked him, only to be told that his concept of Christ’s mission was of Satan. Then Jesus laid down the principles by which man must live in this world: bear his cross—follow Him—be willing to lose his life within the holy will of God, all with a realization that it is not this life that is final but the one to come.

Within this context Jesus then said: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matt. 16:26).

Humanitarianism, humanism, and all which proceed therefrom can become man’s greatest stumbling block if confused with, or substituted for, Christianity itself.

Christ came into the world to open the way into eternity. He came abounding in love and concern for the welfare of those with whom he came in contact. His miracles are a continuing evidence of his concern for the physical and material welfare of those around him.

But such concerns were evidences of a far greater and deeper emphasis—man’s eternal destiny. Repeatedly our Lord said, or it was said of him, that he came into the world to save sinners; that he came to give eternal life; that his Kingdom is not of this world; that there is an infinite difference between the flesh and the spirit, between time and eternity, between secular and spiritual.

This being the case, the great counterfeit has to do with anything that blurs the distinction and that makes optional that which is imperative.

The great counterfeit is also manifested in the field of education. The increase in knowledge is beyond the human mind to grasp. But knowledge without wisdom is a menace, not a blessing. Only as God gives wisdom can man use knowledge wisely. And yet, even in the realm of so-called Christian education too often the emphasis is on the secular and literary at the expense of spiritual insights.

Again, the great counterfeit is seen in social emphases which cater almost solely to human welfare. For many, racial integration is equated with the Christian Gospel, despite the fact that purely monetary considerations may be involved. By this token the most “Christian” teams in the major leagues are those with the largest number of Negro players.

Within the Church, ecclesiastical unity and a monolithic organizational structure are often equated with “true Christianity,” a fetish being made of organization at the expense of doctrinal integrity. Again, the most “Christian” congregation or denomination is the one with the largest number of members, regardless of what those members believe or do not believe.

The basic problem has to do with the demand that there be “fruit” without reference to the spiritual tree from which alone good fruit can be a reality. It is not that man’s welfare is unimportant. Rather, it is failure to admit that man’s eternal welfare must come first and is bound up in the preaching and believing of the Gospel.

What shall it profit the world if every social evil is abolished, every political oppression abolished, every economic problem solved, every racial tension relieved—without at the same time a saving faith in the soul’s redemption effected for man on the Cross of Calvary?

True, there must be social concern. There must be the cup of cold water for the parched throat while the balm of God’s love is preached to the hungry heart. But without the Gospel of redemption for the sinner there is no Christianity, and all that may be substituted is but a counterfeit which perishes when testing comes.

“Benevolent moralism” may smooth the path of those caught up in the toils of this dying world. But by itself it is a tawdry counterfeit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ given as man’s only hope for eternity.

A thirsty woman came to the well of Samaria. She wanted water for herself and her household. Our Lord did not deny the necessity of actual water, but he said: “Every one who drinks of this water shall thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13, 14). Our Lord here put the temporal and eternal in their proper perspective. Christianity must do no less today.

Even within the Church many are led to think only of those things which meet human needs at the material level. What a travesty on Christianity! How subtle a counterfeit which makes men satisfied with stones instead of bread, with scorpions instead of fish, with water that perishes with the using rather than that spiritual well from which man may drink for life eternal.

We do not discount secular and material needs. But if we settle for these and these only, we have become victims of Satan’s masterpiece—the great counterfeit.

Recent articles in several religious journals have criticized the encroachment of a “liturgical movement” on the formerly “informal” denominations, such as the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches. A careful reading of these articles reveals a widespread misunderstanding about what liturgical worship really is.

Consider first what it is not.

Liturgical worship is not “formalism.” It is true that we have too much of this and that churches once distinguished by a warm-hearted approach to the Gospel in which Christians are exhorted to love God, sinners are called to repentance, and sin is denounced in no uncertain terms, have become self-satisfied, immersed in mechanics, and absorbed in an attempt to “enrich” their services at the expense of fervent preaching and congregational participation. Worship, so called, has become formalized into a pattern which has no life; words are repeated without meaning, and exhibition pieces by the choir have replaced congxegational singing of familiar hymns. This is formalism, and it is a danger that must be met. But it is not liturgical worship—far from it.

In the second place, liturgical worship is not an attempt to “prettify” the service, to introduce new elements for the sake of novelty. The so-called Modern Creed has no connection with the liturgical, movement, which uniformly seeks to bring back the use of the historic creeds of Christendom, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed; these have not only the merit of long usage, but also that of theological soundness. True, the Apostles’ Creed is couched in the language of ancient thought and does not say everything that we believe. It must be explained and interpreted if it is to mean much to the congregation. But it is much more satisfactory than a collection of propositions that are supposed to be readily believed by modern Christians. The creed is the ancient belief of the Church, not the affirmation of the individual.

Likewise, the various ancient collects and versicles need perhaps to be translated into modern speech, in order that we may realize just what they mean. When this is done, congregations soon come to love these little interchanges of Christian affection between minister and people. It may seem archaic to some when a pastor says, “The Lord be with you,” and the people respond, “And with thy spirit.” But put that in modern speech and you see what it means: “God bless you, my friends.” “God bless you, too, Pastor!”

Here is an example of the way in which simple little words of love have become stylized and formalized through the centuries. But shall we leave them off because they are old? Not at all. Rather, we should explain them, translate them, and even on occasion say them in their simplest modern form. The Negro congregations of twenty years ago had a much more liturgical service than do most of us, for their worship touched the heart, and the seeming informality was clearly in the tradition of the ancient Church. But with the average congregation today the use of such liturgical responses, written down and read, is the closest we can come to the ideal of Christian fellowship in worship.

In the third place, liturgical worship is not primarily concerned with ceremony. True, there must be, and always is, even in the most enthusiastic sect, a “program” to be followed, else there would be chaos. But the liturgical movement is not seeking to add more ceremony. On the contrary, it is always looking for a way to make worship more simple. In the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, the revival of liturgy has been responsible for the change in the position of the priest at Mass, from before the altar with his back to the congregation, to the ancient place, behind the Table and facing the people.

Likewise, this movement in Catholicism has led to the reforms that are now being discussed at the Vatican Council, reforms that would do away with almost all the often meaningless motions that so easily become confused with worship. A recent liturgical conference saw some 13,000 Catholics worshiping in a Mass in which all extraneous and outmoded ceremonial was reduced to a minimum. There was little evidence of the type of action usually required—no genuflection, little use of the sign of the cross—and, on the other hand, there was hearty singing of hymns and reading of prayers in English by the congregation.

In Protestant churches, the liturgical movement often seems to be quite different, for it brings pastors into contact with the ancient worship of the Christian Church and leads them into some practices that may seem odd to those accustomed to a kind of service modeled on the frontier revival. In many cases, congregations have soon learned that the minister is seeking to train them to worship God, and to do away with the former conception of “going to preaching,” where everything prior to the sermon is “preliminaries” and where the choir is asked “to oblige with a song,” after which it is complimented in fulsome words.

But the liturgical movement, while it tends to seek a certain uniformity of worship forms in which Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and others can join together in an ancient ritual, is more concerned with the spirit of worship. Liturgically minded ministers do not think that forms matter more than faith, nor do they put their trust in creeds and catechisms; but they find merit in them. Nevertheless, they believe that there must be room for the Holy Spirit in their services, and that the best form is only a vehicle, not a destination. If they can lead people to sing with understanding, to say Amen at the proper time—and that can be in the middle of the sermon, as well as at the close of a prayer—they feel that they have accomplished much.

The liturgical revival in Protestantism is running along a course parallel with that of the Roman Catholic Church; in both groups the movement is leading to a new appreciation of the Bible, of biblical preaching, of the pastoral ministry, of the need for truly converted people, and of the futility of form without substance. It leads in some cases to a stripping down of ceremonies; in others, to the addition of some simple and worshipful elements that have been neglected, such as a prayer of confession, responses by the people instead of by the choir, and the plainest kind of clerical garb in the pulpit and out of it. But the motive is always the same: to worship God in the face of Jesus Christ, to join in humble prayer, to make the sermon a message from God and not from the preacher.

Does this seem completely out of accord with the conception of “liturgy” common among many Protestants? No doubt; but it is the true definition of the liturgical movement today. This movement must not be confused with the aestheticism of the twenties, nor with the medieval multiplication of ceremonies. It is a movement forward, not a retreat to the cloisters. Growing by leaps and bounds in the various denominations, it is without much organization or promotion. There are a few groups with names, such as the Methodist Order of St. Luke, the Episcopal Associated Parishes, and several Lutheran Liturgical Societies; but they are, for the most part, content to study and pray together, and their leaders are too busy preaching, praying, and serving their congregations to become promoters of even such a cause as this.

Finally, the liturgical movement is evangelistic. It is concerned everywhere with the task of interpreting Christ to men, of presenting him as Saviour and Lord. All other things fade into insignificance before that motive.

If there is a church that seems to have gone “all out” for ceremony, a church in which services are cold and lifeless and the minister is not concerned with preaching from the Bible, one should not say, “There’s an example of what liturgy can do.” That church does not belong in the liturgical movement. And if one finds a minister who is more concerned with the correctness of ceremony than with the message of God, the liturgical movement ought not to be blamed. For as an eminent leader in the liturgical movement has said, “This is the thing—the essential thing—the evangelical Gospel: Christ, a Person we must know, we must worship, and in whom we live. We cannot separate doctrine, worship, and life.”

Preacher In The Red

WHOSE IDEA WAS IT?

It was my first wedding, and I was definitely nervous.

The young couple stood in front of me. They were not too highly educated or sophisticated, and that was a help. I had, so I thought, prepared them well.

“Dearly beloved …” I began, and cleared my throat. (I must not let them see that I was nervous.) I was concluding the exhortation: “Therefore if any man can show any just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else for ever hold his peace.” The words were scarcely uttered when to my horror I heard someone say in a strong clear voice, “I will.” I looked up. It was the bridegroom himself. Then quick as lightning came a rebuke from his bride, “Shut up!”

Without the slightest trace of nervousness left, I stepped forward and continued: “John Jeremiah, wilt thou have this woman to be thy wedded wife …?”

A thin voice faltered, “I will.”—The Rev. R. W. BOWIE, minister, Old Mission Church, Calcutta, India.

For each report by a minister of the Gospel of an embarrassing moment in his life, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will pay $5 (upon publication). To be acceptable, anecdotes must narrate factually a personal experience, and must be previously unpublished. Contributions should not exceed 250 words, should be typed double-spaced, and bear the writer’s name and address. Upon acceptance, such contributions become the property of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Address letters to: Preacher in the Red, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 1014 Washington Building, Washington 5, D. C.

R. P. Marshall is pastor of the Summerdale Methodist Church, Summerdale, Pennsylvania. He has served as associate editor of The Christian Advocate. Mr. Marshall is national director of the Order of St. Luke (Methodist Liturgical Society). His articles have been published in a number of the religious periodicals.

TEXT: Matthew 25:31–46

The space age has generated its own questions. One asked recently was, “What would astronauts do with the body of a crew member who died on a long voyage to a distant planet?” A scientist replied, “The body could be pushed out into empty space where it would dissolve into cosmic nothingness.” The prospect, while frightening, is obviously true. Yet even in this materialistic age, we remember the long Hebrew, Greek, and Christian traditions with the joyful hope that while the body may dissolve to “cosmic nothingness,” life continues.

We listen to Isaiah as he writes: “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for … the earth shall cast out the dead” (Isa. 26:19b). We view death with “the Preacher” and hear: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Eccles. 12:7). We peer over the rim of eternity with Daniel and are stirred by his words: “Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2).

When we turn to the pages of the New Testament, the words of Jesus lift our hopes to the stars: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” “My sheep hear my voice … and I give unto them eternal life.” “In my Father’s house are many rooms.” He proved his words with his resurrection in triumph over the grave, and now, hope becomes assurance.

We turn the worn pages of an old philosophy book and hear the most venerable Greek philosopher, Socrates, say on the eve of his execution, “… when I have drunk the poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed.… Be of good cheer, then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only …” (B. Jowett, trans., The Works of Plato, New York: Tudor Publishing Co., III, 267, 268). Thus even a pagan writing four centuries before Christ encourages us to hope for more than “cosmic nothingness.”

Actually, for most men the question is not whether or not there is a life after death, but, What kind of life is there for men who seriously consider the future? How can a worthwhile future life be achieved? Jesus Christ, the only one who ever came back from the grave to prove his promises, clearly teaches that it is God’s gift given through himself. We hear him say again concerning his followers, “I give unto them eternal life.” The whole Protestant Reformation was a return to the simple teaching of Jesus and the New Testament doctrine that eternal life, salvation, is the gift of God, not the achievement of men. Furthermore, Christ, as well as the writers of Scripture, made it very plain that eternal life is conditional, that it must be accepted to be enjoyed.

Strangely enough, this need for commitment and decision to enjoy God’s gift of eternal life has often been denied, especially in America. From the time of the theologian Origen at the beginning of the third Christian century, some Christians have believed that God will ultimately save all men. Their viewpoint, called “universalism,” has many historic sources. However, in America it has until recently been almost home-grown rather than part of a long-standing minority tradition.

It was often the sincere response to a lurid presentation of the judgment of God in physical terms. Jonathan Edwards’s sermon on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was the best of this venerable tradition of preaching the judgment of God in such a way that it appeared that God delighted in the tortures of the damned. How memorable are his words:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath toward you burns like fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours [Mayo W. Hazeltine, ed., Orations, New York: Collier Publishing Co., V, 1811].

He had many crude imitators, some of whom still ply their trade. Men of good will immediately saw that this treatment of the judgment of God neither squared with the character of God presented by Jesus Christ in the New Testament, nor faced the truth that hell was prepared for spiritual beings, the devil and his angels. The reaction was complete, and “Universalists” denied that God judged anyone after this life.

Second, there is a sentimental “universalism” that has no establishment but many prophets and voices. Its source is in the native sentimentality of American Protestants, and its theology is that God is too loving to punish anyone. Even a liberal mind like that of Harry Emerson Fosdick revolted at theology based on such sloppy thinking, held together by the glue of sentiment. He declared that God judged the unrepentant out of love for all men rather than because of a defect in his own nature.

Theology Based On Emotion

The third source of our home-grown American universalism is a psychological one. It does not take an acute observer to discover that many preachers who preach hell-fire and damnation are motivated more by the needs of their own twisted personalities than by a simple desire to declare the whole word of God. This simple observation has often been extended to a universal principle. Recently I was discussing this subject with a well-known leader who finally asked me, “Why do you need a hell?” My answer was, “I don’t need one. However, Jesus Christ said that there is one. If we can’t believe that we have a true account of his teachings on this subject, how we can believe any other part of his recorded teachings?” Further reflection led me to see why this particular man needed that there not be a hell. For the concept of hell is rejected by some men because they clearly see that in proclaiming it some preachers are moved more by their own vindictive feelings than by the Word of God. Yet others reject the concept of hell because of a different emotional need. Rut emotion is a poor basis for a theology. Evangelical Christianity has been able to deal effectively with these viewpoints.

However, a new universalism now poses a threat to the clear-cut scriptural teaching. It is doubly dangerous because its source is in the teachings of the most distinguished ally of evangelical Christianity, Karl Barth. This world-famous Christian theologian has turned many leaders of thought from philosophical theology back to a biblical theology. His monumental treatises have done much to move the whole Protestant church away from its drift into scientific naturalism, the “modernism” of a former generation.

The situation has been made more complex because many Christian churches have been greatly influenced by his thought. The Gospel is simple, but it must be applied to a very complicated world. Few men have the ability or even the time to work out for themselves the application of the Gospel to their own generation. Most ministers and theologians depend upon the few geniuses of their age for the framework of their theology and the application of the Gospel to their day.

Applying The Gospel To The Age

There are three basic approaches which great thinkers have always used in defending and in interpreting the Gospel as well as in applying it. The first is that of capitulating to the thought-forms of their generation while trying to retain what they call the essential core of the Gospel. Rudolph Bultmann has been the foremost exponent of this method. The second is that of dialogue or conversation in which the theologian effects a synthesis of the most valid concepts of the age and of the eternal Gospel. Paul Tillich is the leader of this approach. Unfortunately he often sounds more like a humanist than a Christian theologian informed by biblical sources. The last approach is the biblical one. The theologian using this method judges the world and his age by biblical thought-forms. While he understands and appreciates the thought-forms of his age, he is not bound by them; rather, he brings them under the judgment of the Word of God. Karl Barth is the ablest and best-known leader of this method. It is because he has succeeded so well that many great gains in evangelical theology have been made in the last generation, and these strides are tributes to this great leader.

But two emphases of Karl Barth have opened the door to a new universalism: his emphatic declaration of the triumph of the sovereignty and the grace of God. His thesis is that in Christ, God chose death and rejection for himself and life and acceptance for mankind. He clearly teaches that the grace and the sovereignty of God cannot be thwarted by man but will triumph. At the same time, he tries to avoid the implications of this by saying that only human presumption leads us to say what God’s final disposition of man in eternity will be. However, it is apparent that if God cannot be resisted because he is sovereign and that if in Christ he has chosen life and acceptance for all men, then all men will be saved. This is simply the old universalism of Origen, clothed in twentieth-century dress. It transcends our own native universalism and is therefore acceptable to those who have long defended Christian theology against its onslaughts.

The new universalism is enormously attractive even to evangelicals. First, it is born and nurtured within the basic evangelical tradition of biblical theology and doctrine. Second, it gives a solution to the problem of sin that does not lessen the seriousness of sin while accepting a substitutionary view of the Atonement of Christ. Third, it gives hope, based upon the work of Jesus Christ rather than upon human sentiment or the silence of the Scriptures, for the three classic types of lost men. It gives hope for the salvation of those who have never heard the Gospel. It gives hope for another chance of salvation for those who in their lifetime heard only a garbled version of the Gospel. It also provides the blight hope of a second opportunity for those who have heard the Gospel but have rejected it. The last two enticing features of this viewpoint mean much to people who have lost unrepentant loved ones. Thus a speculative theology becomes an applied one.

Because the new universalism has an evangelical flavor, because it is rooted in biblical concepts, and because it is so attractive, its threat to the whole evangelical cause is increased. Its many dangers are common to all types of universalism.

The first danger is the implicit denial of man’s freedom to choose or to reject a relation with God. Once men believe that God coerces or manipulates man, the majority political or religious group feels free to use coercion and manipulation to gain compliance. Institutions and men have been known to confuse themselves with the Almighty, and so the views that they hold of God affect their relations to men.

The second danger to evangelical Christianity is in the area of authority. In the name of biblical concepts of sovereignty and grace, the explicit, particular teachings of Jesus Christ concerning salvation, grace, and the eternal judgment of the lost are rejected. To deny the validity of the statements attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospels concerning sin and the judgment of the unrepentant is to reject either the authority of Christ or the accuracy of those who reported his teachings.

The third threat of the new universalism is that which it poses to the outsider. While few men today ever decide for Christ out of fear of eternal retribution, there is a sense of urgency to a choice that must be made now if eternal life is to be enjoyed. To assure all men that they are now redeemed is to remove any urgency in choosing for Christ. And this is the inevitable outcome of the doctrine. Listen to the words of a leader in evangelism from one Protestant denomination:

Do you have good news for all men, for the exploited and the unjust, for the saint and the sinner, for the religious and the irreligious, for the post-Christian man of unbelief? Or is it good news only to those who obey, only to those who decide, only to those who worship, so that your gospel is restricted in its goodness, confining within its breadth a new law rather than a new gospel, a religion of man’s works rather than God’s gracious workmanship?

The fourth major area of the life and work of Christians which is affected by the new universalism is that of evangelism. Universalism re-directs denominational programming from a search for the lost to a futile attempt to modify the social structure of society apart from individual conversions within that structure. Hear again the words of the above-mentioned leader:

Traditionally we have aimed at the response of individual men and women in faith and obedience to say yes to Jesus Christ and to join the church. But the call of evangelism is a response and a decision by a society in the world, a University of Mississippi, a U.S. Steel Corporation, the American Medical Association, a Theological Seminary in terms of their corporate life and “social ethics,” the way in which they function as a corporate power structure of inter-related people in relation to the rest of society.

Once all men are viewed as redeemed regardless of their decision on the subject, there is little left for the evangelist to do but to initiate social action. Ironically enough, if the new universalism is translated into a program long enough, the churches will be empty of people who should modify the structures of society out of love for Christ and for people.

Loss Of A Sense Of Urgency

Pastors and lay members of local churches will inevitably lose their sense of personal responsibility for the lost, if they accept the new universalism. With the loss of responsibility will also come a loss of urgency in reaching those who have never made a personal decision. In a rapidly moving society such as ours, many churches will be out of business within less than a decade if a sense of urgency is lost. If the new universalism becomes widespread in the historic Protestant churches in which it is finding its greatest welcome, the chief religious forces in American society will soon be the radical sects and Roman Catholicism. It will be interesting to see what will happen in the top ranks of denominational leadership when, as dwindling membership of local churches is expressed in the offering plate, the new universalism inevitably results in reduced denominational budgets.

Most men of good will are human enough to wish that there were no hell and no eternal judgment. Yet the teaching of Jesus Christ on both the eternity and the certainty of divine judgment for the unrepentant is just as clear as his teaching on the eternity and the certainty of the Beatitudes. In all of the known universe there is not one shred of eternal hope for man apart from repentance from sin and faith in Jesus Christ as the only Saviour sent by God. The tragedy is that so many of us who believe in the realities of eternal judgment fail to see or act upon our personal responsibility for the lost.

I heard Dr. Martin Niemöller of Germany tell how God had to give him a vision in a dream to make him aware of his personal responsibility for witnessing to others. He stated that he had felt no obligation to witness to his Nazi guards until he had the dream, during the seventh year of his eight-year imprisonment for defying Hitler. In his dream he saw Hitler pleading his case before the judgment bar of God. His excuse for his sins was that he had never heard the Gospel. Then Dr. Niemöller heard the voice of God directed toward himself: “Were you with him a whole hour without telling him of the Gospel?” Awakening, he remembered that he had been alone with Hitler for a whole hour without witnessing to him. Then he saw clearly that it was his duty to witness to all men, even his despised guards.

Must it take a vision from God to make us see that the eternal destiny of others is our responsibility? There is a God-given urgency to our witness. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only sure message of hope that can turn men away from the despair of a fate of “cosmic nothingness.”

This sermon was awarded first place in the contest sponsored byChristianity Todayfor sermons on universalism. Dr. Crow, a minister of the American Baptist Convention, is director of evangelism and public relations for the Southern California Baptist Convention.

Last year CHRISTIANITY TODAY announced that more than $1,000 would be awarded for sermons preached sometime in 1962—“that (1) expose the fallacies of universalism and (2) faithfully expound the biblical revelation of man’s final destiny and the ground and conditions of his redemption.”

In response to this announcement we received 250 sermons from a majority of the fifty states and also from Canada, Mexico, Peru, Wales, Scotland, India, Japan, and the Philippines. The sermons were by preachers from many denominations. The following served as judges: Dr. Andrew W. Blackwood, professor of homiletics, emeritus, at Princeton Theological Seminary; Dr. Harold B. Kuhn, professor of the philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary; Dr. Robert J. Lamont, pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh; Dr. Harold John Ockenga, pastor, Park Street Church, Boston. They were aided by a panel of experts, working with the executive editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Now that the long task of reading and evaluating 250 sermons has been completed, we announce the results of the competition. (The winning sermon follows this page.)

First Place ($500 award)—The Rev. R. Eugene Crow, D.D., director of evangelism and public relations of the Southern California (American) Baptist Convention, for a sermon entitled “Eternity: Our Responsibility.”

Second Place ($250 award)—The Rev. Bruce J. Nichols, M.Th., Union Biblical Seminary, Yeotmal, Maharashtra, India, for a sermon entitled “The Great Encounter.”

Third Place ($125 award)—The Rev. John M. L. Young, D.D., missionary in Japan of World Presbyterian Missions and president of the Japan Christian Theological Seminary, Tokyo, for a sermon entitled “The Curse of Christ.”

Fourth Place ($75 award)—The Rev. Faris D. Whitesell, D.D., professor of preaching, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Chicago, for a sermon entitled “Reconciliation Requires Response.”

Fifth Place ($75 award)—The Rev. Fred D. Howard, Ph.D., professor of religion and philosophy, Wayland Baptist College, Plainview, Texas, for a sermon entitled “The Moral Necessity of Hell.”

Honorable Mention—The Rev. Calvin Niewenhuis, pastor, First Christian Reformed Church, Waupun, Wisconsin, for a sermon entitled “Christ’s Life for His Sheep.”

The fact that within a period of about six months 250 congregations throughout the nation and in a number of foreign countries heard—perhaps in some cases for the first time—a biblical discussion of the errors of universalism together with a presentation of redemption shows the significance of this venture.

Universalism may be briefly defined as the doctrine of the ultimate, eternal well-being of every person. As a Christian heresy, it goes back to the early years of the Church. St. Augustine strongly attacked it, and the doctrine is rejected by the general tradition of the Church—Roman, Eastern, and Protestant. Nevertheless it has persisted and influences many Protestant pulpits today. It has two chief forms—restoration to God at death and restoration to God after future punishment. Its modern expression implies that all men are already saved, although they know it not, or that the victory of Christ includes the final reconciliation of all to God.

Universalism in America goes back to the late eighteenth century. In 1961 the Universalist Church merged with the Unitarian Church. This merger shows that the universalist heresy can lead even to humanistic rather than theistic religion, as with some churches in the Unitarian-Universalist Association today.

More dangerous to the spiritual welfare of Protestantism than the openly universalistic churches is the hidden universalism found in practically every major denomination. Often unrecognized in evangelical Protestant churches, it is present by implication in failure faithfully to proclaim the judgment as well as love of God. For many a Protestant what the New Testament teaches about hell is vague and unreal, because he never hears the doctrine except perhaps in the Apostles’ Creed.

Yet those who preach universalism openly, covertly, or by default must reckon with the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ. He who came to show us in his perfect humanity what God is, taught not only love but also judgment. The starkest words about hell were spoken by our Lord himself. The eternal lostness of the unsaved is hard to preach. But Christ, the Lord of love, taught it, and the Bible declares it.

God’s ministers are called to preach not what is congenial but what God has revealed in his Scriptures. For to preach so as to lead men to feel that somehow, somewhere, all will be well with their souls when they have never trusted Christ, is to lull them into a false security and to stultify evangelism and missions. Not that the biblical message about human destiny is only negative. On the contrary, it is gloriously positive, calling men to receive life more abundantly in Christ, inviting them to share in “the things that God hath prepared for them that love him.” Therefore, preaching of the awful possibility of hell must always be accompanied by the proclamation of redemption through Christ. The eternal destiny of the human soul is not a subject for speculation; it is truth revealed in the Word of God. As such, it must be preached in love for the lost and in hope of their acceptance of the Gospel of salvation.

As a theological force in America, Protestant liberalism is now open to increasing fragmentation. Liberal frontiers are in a fluid state; nobody seems able to chart lines of fixed differentiation authoritatively. A crumbling of positions, along with some realignment of loyalties, is setting in. The term “liberalism” is not self-definitive; its only common feature is a methodology; but the conclusions it draws from that methodology, which involves tentativeness, are constantly being revised. The one sure fact is that liberalism has less a character of its own than a settled temper of antipathy toward central aspects of biblical supernaturalism.

Plurality and variety have in fact marked liberalism since its beginnings. Under the banner of Schleiermacher there emerged in America, as H. Shelton Smith has noted, the traditions of (1) enlightenment (rational liberalism), both deistic and pantheistic, but Unitarian in either case; (2) transcendentalism (romantic liberalism), championed by New Englanders like Theodore Parker and Emerson, whose revolt against Locke was informed by Kant, Schelling, and Hegel in the direction of epistemological intuitionism; (3) Christocentric liberalism, which held a more radical view of sin and appealed to a Christological “norm,” as with Horace Bushnell, W. N. Clarke, W. Adams Brown, and Walter Rauschenbush; (4) empirical liberalism, which erected experience as the only norm and derived “truth” from process, as with James, Dewey, and Wieman.

The early 1930s proved a moment of judgment upon liberalism. Pressed from the right by the logic of evangelical stalwarts like J. G. Machen (in view of what liberalism wished to preserve) and from the left by the logic of naturalistic humanism (in view of what liberalism disowned), and pressed from behind by the pressures of post-war history, so-called post-modern liberalism sought to correct its positions. On the premise shared by Barth and by Machen, that “modernism is heresy,” both European neoorthodoxy and American evangelicalism called liberalism to higher ground, the former to an authoritative scriptural revelation and the latter to vertical divine confrontation. In these circumstances, liberalism was increasingly on the defensive, became less creative than its champions boasted, and espoused a guarded apologetic.

The emerging “realistic theology” halted short not only of evangelical positions but of Barthian commitment. The new note of realism in American liberalism was struck firmly within remaining liberal postulates. Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert L. Calhoun, Paul Tillich, H. Richard Niebuhr, Walter Marshall Horton, John C. Bennett, H Shelton Smith, and L. Harold DeWolf emerged as chastened liberals who refused to move to Barthian positions. At the time when Continental theology was most thoroughly influenced by neoorthodoxy and the impact of Barth and Brunner was at its height in Europe, a poll by CHRISTIANITY TODAYdisclosed that more American ministers still chose to be designated as liberal (14 per cent) rather than as neoorthodox (12 per cent). It was younger scholars studying abroad, much more than American theologians, who accounted for neoorthodox gains in America.

Barth’s supernaturalism (the Virgin Birth included) and his insistence on the absolute uniqueness of special revelation, and hence the rejection of general revelation, and a one-sided fideism (his denial of the necessity for any kind of philosophical apologetics for Christianity), were among the stumbling blocks. Instead of displacing liberalism in America, crisis-theology was welcomed simply as a form of liberal self-criticism. Every influential crisis-theologian on the American side not only began as a liberal, but also remains a liberal in methodology—not simply in the acceptance of organic evolution and biblical criticism, but in the rejection of special supernatural revelation and redemption. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear it said that Horton’s prognosis in the 1930s (“liberalism has collapsed”) was premature, and to learn that Niebuhr now considers many of his earlier broadsides against liberalism too sweeping.

After a generation of fermentive reflection and dialogue, the most prominent leaders in American liberal ranks are leaving the scene through either death or retirement—the two Niebuhrs, Tillich, Van Dusen, Shelton Smith, and others. The younger liberals acknowledge that no “new flag” is flying. It is a time for second thoughts, they say. Some, lacking a recognizable theology, are prone to substitute a conscience on political or sociological issues—particularly the race question. Their main excursion into dogmatic concerns, one is tempted to say, is simply a wild distortion or misrepresentation of evangelical views (the doctrine of original sin is made to mean that every man is “a bag of pus,” the doctrine of substitutionary atonement that God “becomes loving only when he sees blood sprinkled around,” and such calumnies).

It is clear that most liberals remain wholly out of touch with the massive works of evangelical orthodoxy—dismissed as irrelevant simply because the problems they addressed were of no immediate concern to liberals. While they grant the resurgence of “erudite evangelicalism,” some liberal denominational leaders maneuver to crowd the book tables at ministerial conferences with anything and everything but solid evangelical publications, as if to concede that liberalism today can survive only in a climate that is specially protected.

Among the regrouping liberal forces is a movement which H. Shelton Smith, one of the editors of American Christianity, designates as Christocentric realistic liberalism. Smith identifies himself with this wing, which he calls liberalism’s “reigning” type. Its emphases are on divine transcendence as well as immanence, divine revelation (general as well as Christian), God’s sovereign judgment in history, the sinfulness of man, the social gospel, and an ecumenical doctrine of the Church. Its methodology remains liberal, and it readily utilizes the accepted categories and beliefs of the ruling cultural milieu as a means of communicating Christian faith. It renounces any external criterion of truth (despite its claim to take revelation seriously), since this would lead to authoritarianism. It conceives of revelation in the form not of concepts and words but of subjective awareness. Its main claim to advance lies in its Christological affirmation: to be genuinely Christian, a theology must recognize the incarnation as the hinge of history. Jesus Christ is therefore not just another man; unitarianism is rejected, and Trinitarianism affirmed.

But when one examines this Christological ingredient at closer range, its real meaning is usually seen as much less than its apparent meaning. The Trinitarianism turns out to be not ontological but economic or Sabellian. The Chalcedonian formulation is rejected as based on a substance philosophy, and the Nicene formula approved. But this “Christocentric” view has other peculiar aspects. It does not embrace the Virgin Birth or the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Nor does it consider his teaching normative. At various points, it is said—Satan, angels, hell, eternal punishment, and so on—Jesus was simply the child of his culture. And while Jesus’ “vicarious existence” is emphasized, his death is viewed as simply the culminating event of a series of acts that rendered his death inescapable. (In the words of one spokesman for the Christological realists: “If Jesus had been strangled with a silk stocking, it would have meant just as much.”) Moreover, there is no doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to sinners, but simply an emphasis on divine forgiveness and moral stimulus.

Insofar as Christological realism sees that, to survive as a Christian movement, liberalism must move from an empirical to a Christological norm and thus to incarnational and Trinitarian ground, its instinct is sound. But thus far this readjustment has been hesitant and half-hearted. In Europe liberal Protestants have already passed through this zone—on the way up, or on the way down. Karl Barth convinced Continental thinkers that to take Christianity seriously, one must take divine initiative and special revelation and incarnation seriously and realize that “modernism is heresy.” There are weighty objections to many aspects of Barth’s theology, but not at this point. The tendency of Christological realists to console themselves with Cornelius Van Til’s judgment that Barth’s methodology is after all liberal, despite his conclusions, is scant comfort, for it is liberalism’s conclusions that seem constantly to call for revision.

This plight of liberalism results, no doubt, from its methodological predicament. It has lost what Barth has sought to recover, a “Thus saith the Lord.” The weaknesses even of Barth’s exposition are well stated in the recent book, Karl Barth’s Theological Method, by Gordon H. Clark. And right here, in the recovery of the divine authoritative note in modern theology and a new recognition of the role of Scripture as the rule of faith and practice, lies the key to the fortunes of the religious movements of our age.