A new mystic has burst upon the contemporary consciousness in the person of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French savant who died some half-dozen years ago but whose writing are only now being translated into English. Besides being a Jesuit priest, de Chardin was a paleontologist of distinction who spent many years in China. The last four years of his life were lived in New York. The translation of his book The Phenomenon of Man, which appeared in 1959, has already gained for him a remarkable posthumous reputation in the English-speaking world, despite the difficulty and novelty of much of its thought and language. In it he presented an evolutionistic perspective of man as developing into a new species, the category of which has been defined by the Incarnation.

It is evident that in setting before himself the task of reconciling the concepts of evolution and incarnation de Chardin has been faced with the necessity for breaking with the classical mystic concept of matter as an impediment to the soul and of bringing about some kind of reconciliation between the categories of “nature” and “grace” which for so long have been divorced in the theology of Roman Catholicism. This he has attempted to achieve through the development of a kind of “materialistic” mysticism which sees God everywhere—“in all that is most hidden, most solid, and most ultimate in the world.” The meaning and method of this mysticism, which is central to the thought of de Chardin, are expounded in his book Le Milieu Divin. An English translation has appeared under the same (untranslated) title.

In the first place, de Chardin calls for the “divinization” of our activities. Viewing the universe as a single whole, the centre and sun of which is Christ in whom all things consist, he conceives the power of the Incarnate Word not only as animating the higher reaches of existence but even as penetrating matter itself. “Nine out of ten practising Christians feel that man’s work is always at the level of a ‘spiritual encumbrance’ … that time spent at the office or the studio, in the fields or in the factory, is time taken away from prayer and adoration,” with the consequence that they lead a “double or crippled life in practice.” The Christian, however, should experience the “sur-animating” power of God in his daily activity which enables him to collaborate in building the Pleroma and thus to “bring to Christ a little fulfillment.” Moreover, his work should be to him “the very path to sanctity” and “a manifold instrument of detachment,” so that, through the divinization of his actions in Jesus Christ, it is not selfish ends but “God alone whom he pursues through the reality of created things.”

The next stage on this spiritual journey is described as “the divinization of our passivities,” that is, of the things which we endure or undergo. There are “passivities of growth,” such as the life force within man, and there are “passivities of diminishment,” such as misfortunes suffered outwardly and, in the inward sphere, “natural failings, physical defects, intellectual or moral weaknesses, as a result of which the field of our activities, of our enjoyment, of our vision, has been pitilessly limited since birth.” There is, too, the inescapable deterioration of old age. Death, finally, is “the sum and consummation of all our diminishments.” But we must welcome death by finding God in it, by embracing it as our “excentration,” as our “reversion to God” and the step “that makes us lose all foothold within ourselves.”

A consideration of de Chardin’s doctrine of matter in relation to the mystic’s ascent to the contemplation of God in his essence indicates, however, that it is not radically different from ancient Pythagoreanism, even though he avoids the crude dualism of the latter by placing matter within an evolutionary process that leads to an ultimate spiritual state. He is, indeed, able to speak of “holy matter,” redeemed by the act of the Incarnation and informed with a spiritual power. Matter, for him, is not so much a weight as a slope, up which we may “climb towards the light, passing through, so as to attain God, a given series of created things which are not exactly obstacles but rather foot-holds”; and he maintains that “the soul can only rejoin God after having traversed a specific path through matter.” De Chardin would have been quite at home with Socrates!

But it is not only the soul that is to achieve this spiritual fulfillment: the world itself, by means of progressive sublimation, is to attain its consummation in Christ Jesus, so that de Chardin is able to speak of “the general ‘drift’ of matter towards spirit,” until “one day the whole divinizable substance of matter will have passed into the souls of men; all the chosen dynamisms will have been recovered: and then our world will be ready for the Parousia.” His, however, is still the age-old objective of mysticism, namely, to escape from the world. Thus he writes: “The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confines himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.”

What de Chardin envisages is, in fact, nothing less than the transubstantiation of the universe, brought about by “the omnipresence of christification,” the dynamism of the divine milieu. “The eucharistic transformation,” he says, “goes beyond and completes the transubstantiation of the bread on the altar. Step by step it irresistibly invades the universe.… In a secondary and generalized sense, but in a true sense, the sacramental Species are formed by the totality of the world, and the duration of the creation is the time needed for consecration.”

De Chardin’s writing is beautiful and calmly passionate. But it is gnostic rather than distinctively scriptural. His philosophy is incarnational in the sense of an evolution which gradually incorporates all into the Incarnation. His theology would seem to leave aside the Cross except as significant of a divine participation in the sufferings of his creation. It will be a great day when at last a Roman Catholic thinker breaks free from the tyranny of the analogia entis.

Major Contribution To Bible Study

The Layman’s Bible Commentary, 25 vols. (John Knox Press, 1959 and 1960, about 135 pp. ea., $1.75 or $2 ea., in any combination of four titles), are reviewed by G. Aiken Taylor, Editor, The Presbyterian Journal.

The Layman’s Bible Commentary is the major contribution of the Presbyterian Church, U.S., to the field of Bible study. It is being published at the rate of four volumes each October. Volumes 1 (Introduction), 2 (Genesis), 14 (Hosea thru Jonah), 18 (Luke), and 22 (Galatians thru Colossians) appeared in 1959. Volumes 9 (Psalms), 12 (Jeremiah, Lamentations), 20 (Acts), and 25 (I John thru Revelation) were released in October, 1960.

Faithfully reflecting the spiritual temperament of the Presbyterian Church, U.S., the commentary takes a position which can generally be characterized as evangelical, or conservative. However, it does so with overtones of critical and radical theological interest reflecting the beachheads of liberal thought that have been established within the Presbyterian Church, U.S.

Thus, readers of the latest set of four volumes will notice that Jeremiah actually wrote Jeremiah, John actually wrote the Revelation, and “there is reason to believe that David composed some of the psalms.” The constituency of the sponsoring denomination—mostly conservative—is satisfied.

But the “Word of the Lord” to Jeremiah is to be understood only as a “presentiment”; the Revelation is only one of a large body of apocalyptic literature written to the early Church and in every essential respect alike (although most of it somehow did not get into the Canon); and in Psalms the reader encounters this: “The prophetic thought in vv. 3–6 is too clear to allow a Davidic authorship of Psalm 24.” (David didn’t write Psalm 23 either.) The liberal is not offended.

The actual exposition of the biblical text is generally satisfying to the evangelical seeking enlightenment. Although not a detailed treatment (allowing the author to skip over occasionally difficult verses), the biblical train of thought is rather faithfully reproduced. Some of the volumes (Acts, in the latest set) deal respectfully of the miraculous and reverently of the Holy Spirit.

On the other hand, the supernatural implications traditionally recognized in many familiar passages of Scripture are pointedly avoided. The result (Psalms and Revelation, in the latest set) is often incongruous, sometimes incredible.

For instance, Psalm 110 is interpreted without the prophetic elements inferred from it by the Book of Hebrews. The reference to Melchizedek is treated thus: “The psalmist is saying that each Davidic king stands in a long succession of priest-kings who have reigned in Jerusalem and whose most illustrious representative is Melchizedek.” Not only does the reference to a “long succession of priest-kings” suggest a very late date for the psalm; the “priest-king” dual role is a rather novel thought for the period; and the comparison of Melchizedek with David’s line contradicts Hebrews which finds significance precisely in the fact that Melchizedek was without ancestry and without descendants—and a type of Aaron, not David.

The problem, of course, is created by the alleged need to offer an interpretation which does not depend upon any “futuristic” or “prophetic” elements in the biblical text. The resulting effect pops up time and again throughout the commentary, which is not often inclined to allow an interpretation of any passage implying a revelation not ordinarly available to human “presentiment.”

The treatment of the Revelation affords the best example of this weakness, of course. The Revelation is interpreted as “apocalyptic literature,” meaning a style of writing in the sense that poetry is a style, that the fable is a style, or that the parable is a style. Authors of “apocalyptic literature” employed symbols and veiled figures in order to convey hidden meaning to those who knew how to unravel the mystery of the writing. But the “future” perspective in any “apocalyptic literature” is a sort of farsighted attitude of mind with which one faces the present. The result is a philosophy of history such as Augustine’s “City of God.” Says the commentary: “This book contains nothing essentially new to the other portions of our New Testament.”

Bible students seeking a suggestive interpretation of the Psalms, a graphic reproduction of the message of the prophets, a Christian ethic, and a Christian philosophy of history—as well as a discreet and restrained treatment of the Gospel—will find these in the Layman’s Bible Commentary.

On the other hand, Bible students seeking a treatment of history and of prophecy in which the supernatural element is measurably greater than in contemporary human experience will often be disappointed.

G. AIKEN TAYLOR

Interpreting Jude

A Commentary on the Epistle of Jude, by Richard Wolff (Zondervan, 1960, 150 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by E. Earle Ellis, Visiting Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Bethel Theological Seminary.

A native of Germany, Wolff entered the United States in 1951 and is now associated with the Back to the Bible broadcast. He finds the literary relation of Jude and Second Peter difficult but finally decides for the priority of the latter. The Enoch quotation is a genuine strand of extra-canonical tradition. Likewise, the devil’s contending for the body of Moses must not be regarded as an illustrative argument from a well-known story but an affirmation of an historic reality (p. 38). Despite an occasional slip (e.g., p. 59, 80) the style is lucid and sometimes moving. This is a scholarly effort which evidences a wide acquaintance with the literature. One might have wished, however, for a greater interaction with the twentieth century commentators.

E. EARLE ELLIS

History Of The Bible

The Bible in the Making, by Geddes MacGregor (J. B. Lippincott, 1959, 448 pp., $6) is reviewed by A. Berkeley Mickelsen, Associate Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Wheaton College Graduate School.

Here is a readable, fresh, and living history of the Bible from the time of the composition of the books to the present day. In terms of authorship, background, and composition of the books, the author would be in general agreement with the late R. H. Pfeiffer and James Moffatt.

Most of the book is spent not on the Bible “in the making” but on the Bible in the historical process of being copied and disseminated. The Bible before the age of printing and from Gutenberg to the present occupies the author’s attention. No aspect is neglected. Four chapters are devoted to the King James Version. Particularly outstanding is chapter 13, “The King James Version in Production,” and chapter 12, “The Makers of the King James Version.” What people do not know about the King James Version is astonishing. In an admirable way, MacGregor removes such ignorance with fact coupled with human interest.

The book has 14 appendices. These alone are worth the price of the book. Appendix III is superb: “Modern Languages into which the Bible Has Been Translated (pp. 331–383). The history of the Bible is inherently a fascinating theme. MacGregor’s The Bible in the Making has made actual what was inherently potential.

A. BERKELEY MICKELSON

Dark Atomic Age

The Future of Mankind, by Karl Jaspers, translated from the German by E. B. Ashton (University of Chicago Press, 1961, 342 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, Professor of History, Catawba College.

This is a book that should be read by every liberal who has lost contact with the grim reality of an atomic age, and does not see the crisis which the West faces, and by every evangelical who seeks to keep abreast of the intellectual trends of the day. The liberal will be brought face to face with the utter shallowness of the basic assumptions of that liberalism with which he has been blinded, and the utter futility of his optimistic view of man in belief and progress as it is usually defined. On the other hand, the evangelical will gain a new insight into the stark pessimism which threatens to overwhelm the modern mind.

Writing against a backdrop of the very real possibility of atomic warfare, and his belief that such a conflict would bring only complete ruin to civilization as we know it, and perhaps, the extinction of the race, Karl Jaspers examines the usually accepted proposals for averting such catastrophe and finds them all insufficient in that they offer little or no hope to modern man. His criticisms are marked with great insight and keenness and in these chapters he is at his best. He finds the commonly accepted idea of the soldier and warfare of the past as totally inadequate in the present emergency. In his discussion of neutrality (not to be confused with political neutralism), he recognizes that it can no longer retain its old meaning which it still possessed as late as 1914. “Neutrality means the self-preservation of freedom, and the mere existence of such a political condition irritated totalitarianism” (p. 138). This new neutrality must arm for its own defense, but at the same time such a neutral state “might come to symbolize the possibility of peace for all” (p. 139). But Jaspers does not indicate just how it might become such a symbol. Particularly pertinent in the light of the present situation are his comments on the United Nations. He insists that this organization “resembles a stage on which an incidental interlude is presented” (p. 155), while the great powers make their plans. “It is the sham communications in which they hide their purposes by placing themselves among some eighty major and minor states and recognizing the equality of all” (p. 155). He feels that the United Nations Organization offers little or no hope for permanent peace and should not be relied upon to any great extent. “The UN of today is the ambiguous structure that promotes chaos and wants to bring order out of it at the same time” (p. 159).

Jaspers, almost overwhelmed by the enormity of the crisis confronting humanity, is hard pressed to find a solution. Neither existing institutions, nor science or theology are adequate for the task. The future of mankind does not lie with either Christianity or the Church. They can help, but philosophy is needed, and he defines it as “the thinking that enables man to ascertain what exists and what he wants, to grasp his meaning and to find himself from the source” (p. 196). Thus, the only remedy to be found is an existential approach. There are frequent references to human freedom, which is never adequately defined, and to a rationalism which is existentialist in character. The book displays, with a dismaying clarity, the bankruptcy of “the post modern mind” as it staggers under the load of persistent problems for which it has no answers.

C. GREGG SINGER

Advice For Travelers

Assignment: Overseas, by John Rosengrant and others (Crowell, 1960, 152 pp., $1.95), is reviewed by L. Nelson Bell.

Every pastor should be aware of this book and see that a copy is placed in the hands of any of his parishioners who is to take up residence abroad.

There are Americans who give offense to peoples of lands they visit because they are themselves crude and indifferent to the feelings of others.

There are others who give offense through sheer ignorance of cultures, customs, and the mores in the lands to which they may be assigned. These people want to know how to meet new situations and are anxious to avoid the mistakes which make for resentment and misunderstanding.

Assignment: Overseas is a comprehensive book with a wealth of information and sound advice, written by a number of men with broad experience in the field about which they write.

Business firms with branch offices abroad; our own government with its multiplied representatives scattered around the world; the traveler; even the casual tourist would profit greatly to get this book and read it carefully before leaving our shores.

By so doing they can avoid embarrassment and misunderstanding and at the same time prove worthier representatives of the best America has to offer.

L. NELSON BELL

Spiritual Guidance

My Answer, by Billy Graham (Doubleday, 1960, 259 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by J. D. Grey, Pastor, First Baptist Church, New Orleans, Louisiana.

“Can you tell me this?” is the introductory statement of sincere appeals for help constantly heard by pastors, Christian workers, and others. In My Answer, Billy Graham answers hundreds of questions that have been propounded to him and answered by him over the years in his syndicated column carried by over 150 newspapers five days a week.

These questions show the perplexing problems people face today and the deep distress in which many of them find themselves. Out of his vast experience, study, and observation, Dr. Graham answers these questions in a sympathetic, warm-hearted, Bible-centered manner. The book will prove most helpful to people in all walks of life who have their own problems. It will also prove indispensable in its aid to ministers, teachers, counselors, and other Christians seeking to deal with the disturbed and perplexed soul of many who come to them for spiritual guidance. The great heart and compassionate, sympathetic, understanding spirit of the noted evangelist emerges in glorious fashion as spiritual guidance is given in My Answer.

J. D. GREY

Unique Apologetic

Symbolism in the Bible and in the Church, by Gilbert Cope (Philosophical Library, 1959, 276 pp., $10), is reviewed by Bernard Ramm, Professor of Systematic Theology, California Baptist Theological Seminary.

In the author’s own words, “The general thesis of this book is that the imagery and symbolism of the Bible and the Church are valid and effective still—perhaps even more so now than the rational analysis of human consciousness and natural environment has disclosed such a vast realm of mystery and ineffability” (p. 12). Later he discusses Jung’s theory of psychological archetypes and cites with favor an author who sees in these archetypes “an enormous inexhaustible store of ancient knowledge concerning the most profound relations between God, man, and the cosmos” (p. 87). Then the author says: “It is in this spirit that the remainder of this book is written. It is an attempt to apply some of these ideas to the study of the Scriptures and of Christian worship in the hope that we may be helped to find a way out of the present impasse in religion” (pp. 87–88).

The book is, then, a kind of apologetic, but a very unique one. The Bible is currently rejected by scholars, critics, and scientists, but if the symbols of the Bible are approached through our knowledge of symbolism gained from anthropological research, and if religious experience is interpreted through the Jungian archetypes, then Christianity will become relevant to modern man. This new apologetic must be concretely applied to church architecture.

The author is widely read in certain areas only, but he is very literate. We are taken upon an unusually odd, unusually bizarre, and exceedingly confusing ride. Apparently the only two options Cope reckons with are: (1) orthodoxy of all kinds which takes the teachings of the Bible literally and thus manages to make a supercolossal mess of it; and (2) a strange synthesis of typological hermeneutics of sorts, a theological symbolism derived from a rather extensive cultural survey of symbols, and Jungian psychological archetypes. One example of this bizarre procedure is that he can readily agree that Joseph is Jesus’ father, and that Mary is the holy virgin Mary. Biologically, Joseph is the father of Jesus; but in the rich symbolism of femininity Mary is to the Church the Great Mother and Holy Virgin! This interpretation of the Virgin Birth, Cope tells us, will offend strict orthodox people and atheists (p. 153).

There are three serious weaknesses to the work. First, it is personal to the finger tips. It makes for interesting, fascinating, and unusual reading in spots, but serious theological exposition must be more than a registry of highly personal opinions. Secondly, the root of the problem of the book is theological methodology. Before the author can meaningfully talk about symbolism, it seems to me he must first settle the big problems of theological methodology. He needs to spend many hours with such authors as Paterson, Brunner, Lecerf, Barth, Warfield, Kuyper, and Weber who debate the deep and profound issues in theological methodology. Without fundamental work in theological methodology, the theses of Cope really hang in mid-air.

Thirdly, such a work on symbolism can only come to maturity when it is further based upon studies in linguistics, semantics (the philosophy of language), and logic (the rules of thought). The book suffers immensely in the mind of this reviewer, from a real grounding in any of these three.

BERNARD RAMM

Survey Of Religions

Religions of the East, by Joseph M. Kitagawa (Westminster, 1960, 319 pp. $4.50), is reviewed by Samuel H. Moffett, Professor, Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Seoul, Korea.

This useful and informative survey could be called “The Doctrine of the Church in the Religions of the East.” Kitagawa, who is now at the University of Chicago, has focused short studies of Asia’s major faiths around their varying concepts of the “holy community”: Confucianism and the family, Hinduism and caste, Buddhism and the Samgha, Islam and the Ummah.

The ecclesiastical structures of Hinduism and Confucianism, he points out, are adaptations of already existing social units—family and caste. Buddhism, on the other hand (like Christianity), created its own. Its Samgha originally included laymen as well as priests but was gradually narrowed down to the monastic orders, and only in recent years has Buddhism’s “ecumenical movement,” as Kitagawa puts its, begun to “glimpse … the Samgha Universal in the midst of the brokenness of the empirical Buddhist Community.” The Ummah of Islam is both a holy community and a body politic, a theocratic state which had no priesthood or special holy community apart from society.

Contributing to the value of the studies is a short and useful historical sketch of each religion with special reference to its modern developments.

Comparisons of religion too often fail in their labored claims of likeness or uniqueness. A strength of Kitagawa’s work is that, except in an introductory chapter, he contents himself with description and analysis and avoids misleading comparisons to Christianity.

SAMUEL H. MOFFETT

Lion At Bay

In the Arena, by Isobel Kuhn (C.I.M., 1959, 192 pp., cloth 8s. 6d., paper 6s. 6d.), is reviewed by John Job, Lecturer, Rawdon Methodist College, Leeds, England.

The editor of a Christian magazine recently said he did not altogether blame his readers if they found missionary writing distasteful. That one can sympathize with such a remark is a sad reflection on the missionary works of the last few years. Everybody has noted that Isobel Kuhn’s books are like an oasis in a literary desert. What is it about them? The obvious thing is that they welcome the reader. They do not repel him by giving the impression that a first-class Christian is addressing second-raters in whom missionary interest is a wan and flickering light. They are written with an honesty and genuine humility that gives to the problems she faced in remote lands a spiritual proximity to those faced by the housewife at home. Physical hardship, separation from husband or child, and danger of war heighten the colors, but the underlying picture is the same.

This book is not only an instinctive account of a missionary’s life in China, but also the testimony of one who found that God’s Word was indeed a light unto her feet—even in the darkest corners.

JOHN JOB

Revival In Wales

When He is Come, by Eifion Evans (Evangelical Trust of Wales, 1959, 108 pp., 4s. 6d.), is reviewed by the Reverend J. Gwyn-Thomas, Rector of Illogan, Cornwall.

The centenary of the great religious movements of 1859 has inspired the writing of new books partly to commemorate those movements and partly because there is a turning to God for a fresh outpouring of his Spirit in view of our contemporary religious situation, as desperate a condition as ever was in the past century. Dr. Eifion Evans has placed us in his debt by giving us this valuable study of the situation in Wales during the years 1858–60. This small book is well documented, chiefly from contemporary periodicals and books. The most useful feature of the work it that it is written from a theological standpoint; we are given a glimpse of what was preached by the leaders of this movement of the Spirit. The emphasis is not on technique but on doctrine.

Moreover, interwoven with the factual accounts there runs a constant theme on the place of prayer in the life of the churches affected by the Revival. These two factors alone make this book both valuable and timely. We strongly recommend this work of Dr. Evans to all readers who are seeking a fresh outpouring of the spirit and to that end are concerned with breaking the soil.

JOHN GWYN-THOMAS

Evangelistic Preaching

The Rich Man and Lazarus, by Brownlow North (Banner of Truth, 1960, 125 pp., 2s.6d.), is reviewed by H. M. Carson, Vicar of St. Paul’s, Cambridge.

This exposition of the parable was originally delivered as a series of addresses in the open air during the 1859 revival in Northern Ireland. In view of the great blessing which attended the ministry of Brownlow North, they will repay study in a day far removed from that flood tide.

The parables are notoriously difficult to expound. Shall we insist on one central lesson or shall we indulge in excessive allegorizing? Christ’s own exegesis of the Sower would seem to point the way, for in it he combines the emphasis on the central theme, with an exposition of the details, all of which bear on the theme. Judged by this standard North’s exegesis would stand. It is true that he expounds in detail the story; but his detailed exposition constantly converges on the main word of warning. Of course North himself took it as history, though he does seem to leave the question an open one as to whether it is history or parable.

Throughout there runs a strong vein of warning together with an urgent call to repentance. It is powerful evangelistic preaching; and one is forced to ask if this preaching of hell is not one of the forgotten dimensions in contemporary preaching. In this, as in so many things, even evangelicals tend to feel that we are wiser than our fathers. But a glance at the state of the church today compared with 1859, or the eighteenth century, might lead to second thoughts on the matter.

H. M. CARSON

Triune Truth

Stand Up in Praise to God, by Paul S. Rees (Eerdmans, 1960, 117 pp., $2), is reviewed by Richard Allen Bodey, Pastor, Third Presbyterian Church, North Tonawanda, New York.

Here is proof that doctrinal preaching, even when soaring through the highest orbits of Christian truth, need not be dull, pedantic, or irrelevant. These ten messages by the former pastor of the First Covenant Church of Minneapolis, three on each Person of the Godhead, and one on the Trinity, will clarify difficult points for the laymen, and spur the preacher on to feeding his flock with the strong meat of the Word.

RICHARD ALLEN BODEY

Adventist Literature

The Seventh-day: The Story of the Seventh-day Adventists, by Booton Herndon (McGraw-Hill, 1960, 267 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Walter R. Martin, Director, Christian Research Institute.

Following in the footsteps of its predecessor (Seventh-day Adventist—“Faith in Action,” by David Mitchell), The Seventh-day is a sympathetic portrait carrying the Nihil Obstat of the Adventist denomination. Advertisements for the book describe it as an “authorized” publication, so its goal at the outset is clear. Mr. Herndon is a non-Adventist, but the book is to all intents and purposes an Adventist book. It catalogs in narrative and travelogue form some of the admirable accomplishments of Adventist missionaries with a sprinkling of humor and an enthusiasm that is catching. The value underscores missions and the zeal of Adventists in propagating their beliefs. It is interesting and informative, but objectivity suffers greatly especially in the area of history and theology.

The general tenor of the book is best summed up in Mr. Herndon’s own words: “If … the primary desire … is security … then the Seventh-day Adventist must surely be content for his security is assured. They are as positive in their own minds as mortal men can be that, if they meet the conditions of personal righteousness, their lives not only extend to the grave, but far beyond it, forever and ever, in the steady and constant unimaginable joy.… In America at least, they contribute four times as much money to their church on a percapita basis than the national average of the other denominations.”

It is unfortunate that Mr. Herndon glosses over Ellen G. White and apparently was unaware of the fact that the very “reform dress” which she advocated and for which he lauds her was in reality a fiasco which exploded in her face and caused her no end of embarrassment. He also fails to mention Dr. Kellogg’s side of his disagreement with the Adventist church and Dr. Kellogg’s denouncement of James and Ellen White. These and other things make The Seventh-day an extremely one-sided volume.

In recent years the publishing field has been flooded with vanity books which capitalize upon a virtually captive audience (“The Cross and The Crown”—Christian Science; “Faith on the March” and “The New World Society”—Jehovah’s Witnesses; “Faith in Action”—Seventh-day Adventism). They provide a ready money market; and their sales are, to say the least, rewarding. Unfortunately they all betray a basic lack of research and acquaintance with primary data, and they are all notoriously prejudiced in favor of the subject.

The Seventh-day is also guilty of this in a lesser degree, although it must be viewed as propaganda for Seventh-day Adventism.

WALTER R. MARTIN

Book Briefs

Building a Christian Home, by Henry R. Brandt, and Homer E. Dowdy (Scripture Press, 1960, 158 pp., $3). A Christian “how” book written out of experience in scientific and practical marriage counselling.

Jesus Says to You, by Daniel A. Poling (McGraw-Hill, 1961, 119 pp., $2.95). 40 spirit-lifting devotional essays based on the sayings of Christ.

Hear Our Prayer, by Roy Pearson (McGraw-Hill, 1961, 174 pp., $3.75). Prayers for public worship on all occasions by the dean of Andover Newton.

Interpreting the New Testament, by H. E. Dana and R. E. Glaze, Jr. (Broadman, 1961, 165 pp., $3.25). A new edition of Dana’s Southern Baptist classic, Searching the Scriptures. Helpful studies in the history and techniques of Bible interpretation.

My Hand in His, by Herman W. Gockel (Concordia, 1961, 229 pp., $2.75). 110 vivid and inspiring modern parables which high-light Bible truth.

Love So Amazing, by D. Reginald Thomas (Revell, 1961, 127 pp., $2.50). Expository preaching that comes to grips with modern life.

When the Sinaitic Covenant was renewed to the hosts of Israel, poised in the plains of Moab for the conquest of Canaan, the ancient promises of blessing were repeated; but so too were the curses that must follow upon rebellion against the covenant Lord. The warning was also cast in the form of a prophetic song (Deut. 32) which Moses taught Israel that it might be in their own mouths as God’s witness against them in the latter days when many evils should befall them for their sins (cf. Deut. 31:19–21). Lamentations is the covenant congregation’s antiphony to the Mosaic song of witness.

Israelite history had run true to the pattern foretold in that song. When Jeshurun waxed fat, he lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation and provoked God to jealousy with strange gods, until he hid his face in wrath. The ensuing destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of her children occurred not as a single stroke but, like Job’s sufferings, as a succession of calamities. The years 605, 597, and 587 were all years of catastrophe, of siege and deportation. The beginning of the end might be traced to 608, the year king Josiah was slain in the valley of Megiddo, “and all Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah. And Jeremiah lamented for Josiah: and all the singing men and the singing women spake of Josiah in their lamentations to this day, and made them an ordinance in Israel: and, behold, they are written in the lamentations” (2 Chron. 35:24c, 25). Soon the passage of the unhappy years would be marked by the mournful fasts of the fourth month, and of the fifth and seventh and tenth months (cf. Zech. 7:3, 5; 8:19)—fasts memorializing major disasters in the protracted agony of Jerusalem’s fall. This was the generation of lamentations in Israel. And amid the funeral wailing and doleful dirges of these dark days, the canonical Lamentations came into being.

Form-critical investigations have identified three literary types in Lamentations: the funeral dirge in chapters 1; 2, and 4; the individual lament in chapter 3; and the communal lament in chapter 5. For an example of another communal lament over a city, see the Sumerian lamentation composed in the first half of the second millennium B.C., a bewailing of the fall of Ur III to the Elamites and Subarians (cf. J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 1950, pp. 455–463). Among various interesting parallels to the biblical Lamentations is the interpretation of the destruction of Ur due to divine abandonment.

Actually two or more of the designated literary types are interwoven in some chapters of Lamentations and all the types, even the individual lament of chapter 3, are expressive of the common tragedy of the whole covenant community. Such an employment of the individual form of lament and dirge was natural; for the eyewitnesses who was recreating the historic tragedy experienced it as a tragedy compounded of many personal tragedies—his own, his kinsmen’s, his neighbors.’

Spontaneous as is the emotion that pulses through these poems, they are a work of conscious art. That is evidenced in the strophic rhythm but especially in the alphabetic structure of the several laments. Taken together they constitute the most elaborate acrostic composition in the Old Testament. Each of the first four poems is a complete acrostic. The fifth poem contains 22 lines corresponding to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, although they do not begin with the successive letters of the alphabet. In chapter 3, not only the first but all three lines of each strophe begin with the appropriate letter of the alphabet (cf. Ps. 119). An odd detail is that, except in the first poem, the ayin-pe sequence is reversed.

For a summary of suggested explananations of the adoption of so artificial a form as the acrostic for the expression of such obviously spontaneous emotion, see Norman K. Gottwald’s stimulating Studies in the Book of Lamentations (London, 1954, pp. 23 ff.). He concludes that while memorization may have been one factor, the most significant “function of the acrostic was to encourage completeness in the expression of grief, the confession of sin and the instilling of hope” (p. 28) so that the laments might serve as an effective emotional-spiritual catharsis.

Whether or not the eyewitness-author was the prophet Jeremiah, we cannot be certain. In the Hebrew text the book does not explicitly claim Jeremianic authorship. Moreover, even though the sufferings of the individual who speaks in the first person as the representative of the nation in chapter 3 be regarded as reminiscent of the personal experiences of Jeremiah, a writer other than Jeremiah might have assumed that character as a literary device, similar to the speaking of personified Zion in the first person (cf., e.g., 1:12 ff.). However, earliest tradition, Jewish and Christian, is unanimously in support of Jeremianic authorship. The Septuagint translation is prefaced (though not in all extant nor probably in its earliest manuscripts) with the words: “And it came to pass, after Israel was led into captivity and Jerusalem laid waste, that Jeremiah sat weeping and lamented with this lamentation over Jerusalem and said.” This tradition possibly existed still earlier in Hebrew manuscript, for the Septuagint statement seems to be a translation from Hebrew. The considerable measure of resemblance between Lamentations and Jeremiah’s prophecy in literary figure and phrase, in temper and tone, as well as in historiographical perspective lends strong support to the early tradition.

Modern literary criticism, however, with few exceptions rejects not only the theory of Jeremianic authorship but even the theory of a single author. The unity of the poems is judged to be rather that of common theme and common cultic function. The provenance of these poems is identified by some scholars as both Palestine and Babylonia, and the completion of the anthology has been dated up to two or three centuries after the exile of Judah. A thorough recent defence of a moderate form of this point of view is offered by Theophilus Meek in the introduction to Lamentations in The Interpreter’s Bible. No single objection of Meek to the Jeremianic authorship is decisive nor is his case as a whole convincing. Meek finds evidence of an early tradition of non-Jeremianic authorship in the presence of Lamentations among the writings. He contends that if the book had been regarded as Jeremianic when the prophets were canonized, it would have been included in the second division of the canon. That contention rests on an erroneous approach to the whole question of the canon of Scripture. On the other hand, those who eventually adopted the three-fold arrangement of Old Testament books which is found in Hebrew editions possibly did base that division on the official theocratic status of the authors. But if so, we still could not be certain that they applied this primary criterion with thoroughgoing consistency (cf., Ps. 90).

Lamentations is one of those biblical songs occasioned by the fall of great cities. Some of these are taunt songs such as Isaiah prophetically uttered over Babylon (Isa. 47) or Ezekiel over Tyre (Ezek. 27; 28) or the New Testament Apocalypse over the harlot “Babylon” (Rev. 18). But because the beginning of judgment is at the house of God, Lamentations must be heard in the covenant community, mourning the judgment of the city of God, before the taunt song, except prophetically, over the fallen city of the world.

The weeping of Lamentations over the captivity of Jerusalem is fraught with the mystery of the ways of him who takes no delight in the death of the wicked (cf. 3:33), yet has not elected to life even all those who frequent his sanctuary; of him who wept over the condemned Jerusalem which he would have gathered unto himself, the light of life, and they would not. Still the captivity of Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s day was not yet the final catastrophe which Jesus lamented. The tears of Israel, carried captive in the sixth century B.C. from her paradise land of milk and honey, were more like the tears Adam and Eve might have shed as they were driven into exile out of the garden of God. The threatened curse had come; but there remained the prospect of restoration.

The redemptive omnipotence of the Lord is magnified when Israel exults over Pharaoh’s drowned hosts in the Song of the Sea (Exod. 15) and again at last when the Church, which has gotten the victory over the beast, stands by the sea of glass and sings the triumphant Song of Moses and of the Lamb (Rev. 15:3). But the vindication of the Gospel as God’s power in putting enmity between the elect and Satan and thereby in transforming them into steadfast friends of God is even more eloquently voiced in the doxology of a Job sung while he is still crushed in the serpent’s coils (Job 1:21; 2:10). Such is the praise which ascends from the covenant remnant to the heavenly Throne in Lamentations. At the nadir of theocratic history, while Satan is beguiling the nations into interpreting Jerusalem’s captivity as proof of Yahweh’s impotence and of the failure of his saving purposes, God raises a witness out of the mouth of the travailing remnant which was obliged to share in the judgment woes of faithless Jerusalem—a convincing witness to the redeeming and sanctifying efficacy of the Word and Spirit in their lives.

The victory of the Spirit of God in the hearts of his elect appears in Lamentations in the very fact that sorrow is expressed here not alone in soliloquy and rhetorical address to the passers-by, but ever anew in importunate prayer. Moreover, for the poet to interpret the judgment of the city of God as the judgment foretold in the covenant curse and to apprehend in the hour of judgment the hope of restoration presented in the word of covenant blessing was a triumph of faith and, therefore, of grace.

As for the fall of Jerusalem, Lamentations does not answer the Satanic attack on Yahweh’s sovereignty by attempting to isolate the tragedy somehow from the will of God. The problem of theodicy may not be solved at the expense of theology. The lamenting remnant rather stands in faith under God’s revelation through the prophets and fundamentally through the Book of the Covenant, and they declare their “Amen” to Moses’ Song of Witness against Israel.

Gottwald’s conclusion that the situational key to the theology of Lamentations is found “in the tension between Deuteronomic faith and historical adversity” (op. cit., p. 53) represents a radical misinterpretation of Deuteronomy. Our lamenting poet saw no such tension but rather affirmed Jerusalem’s recent history to be a faithful execution of the terms, in particular the curses, of the Deuteronomic document of covenant renewal (cf. Deut. 27:14 ff.; 28:15 ff.). “The Lord hath done that which he had devised; he hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old” (2:17). In every poem Israel’s covenant-breaking is confessed and Yahweh is recognized as himself the righteous author of Zion’s fierce affliction (see especially chap. 2). And, of course, the hope of renewed divine mercies, most graphically expressed in the anticipation of divine vengeance upon Israel’s gloating enemies (cf. e.g., 1:21, 22; 3:59 ff.; 4:21 ff), is faith’s response to the promise of Israel’s restoration which was presented in the Deuteronomic Covenant as the prospect of true Israel beyond the curse of Exile (cf. Deut. 30:1–10; 32:36, 43).

As incorporated into the canon of Scripture, Lamentations serves a purpose not unlike the Psalms. It is a pattern of piety for the devout; a call to repentance and prayer (cf. 3:40, 41). In particular, it instructs the children of God in the nature of godly sorrowing before their heavenly Father. Here is the manner of mourning when God pours upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and of supplications and they look upon Him whom they have pierced and there is great mourning like that for Josiah in the valley of Megiddo (cf. Zech. 12:10, 11). Here is the tenor of prayer when evil days befall God’s kingdom, when the bitter root of apostasy introduced by false prophets in revolt against the Word of Christ (cf. 2:14; 4:13) has produced a wild harvest of wormwood and gall.

The godly, while they need not suppress their soul’s deepest groanings, are not to grieve with the abandon of those who have no hope. Even the acrostic form of the poems serves to enhance the expression of emotion which is under the discipline of faith—a faith which recognizes history as the orderly outworking of God’s whole counsel from Aleph to Taw. The ebb and flow of emotion through the five poems is also instructive. The flood of lament is allowed to increase continually in the first two poems, but when in the climactic third chapter it threatens to become overwhelming, faith and hope take control drawing strength from the memory of the sovereign goodness of God: “I called upon thy name O Lord, out of the lowest dungeon; thou heardest my voice … thou hast redeemed my life” (3:55, 58). Once and again in the last two laments by reason of the present evil waves of sorrow wash over the soul. But the force of the tempest is now clearly abated. The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not yet seen has successfully assuaged the flood of despair. This godly lament, being like all true prayer faith’s response to God’s covenant Word, presently transcends the threatening storm with a confession of the certain realization of God’s revealed purpose: “The punishment of thine iniquity is accomplished, O daughter of Zion; he will no more carry thee away into captivity: he will visit thine iniquity, O daughter of Edom; he will discover thy sins” (4:22).

If Lamentations is like the Psalms in providing a model of prayer, it is like the book of Job in addressing itself to the righteous in their sufferings. Its closing note, while consistent with the composure achieved through confidence in the mercy of Israel’s eternal Lord, reminds us that we do not prematurely escape the groaning and travail of this world (cf. 5:19–22). But like Job, Lamentations summons the people of God, whatever the mystery of providence and however long God seems to forget them, to abide in the way of the covenant which is the way of the obedience, patience, and hope of faith.

Assistant Professor of Old Testament

Westminster Theological Seminary

The controversy over federal aid to education, particularly whether parochial schools ought to be included, promises to command special attention at approaching church conventions.

Most Protestants are strongly opposed to use of public monies by sectarian schools, and many fear federal educational financing of any kind. Thus convening churchmen can be expected to produce an abundance of resolutions calling upon the government to hold the line. And the resolutions will be issued in rapid succession, for spring is the favorite time of year for Protestant church conventions.

Ecumenical proposals are due for more debate this year, too. Much interest will focus on a four-way denominational merger plan advanced by Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, Stated Clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. The plan is aimed at organizationally uniting his own church with the Protestant Episcopal, Methodist, and United (Congregational Christian—Evangelical and Reformed) churches.

Blake declared this month that some 27 presbyteries have adopted resolutions or overtures favoring his plan.

There has been considerable dissent as well, which probably spells a long debate at the United Presbyterian General Assembly in Buffalo, New York, May 17–24.

The Blake merger plan has drawn comment both from churchmen whom it would encompass and others.

Bishop Gerald Kennedy, President of the Council of Bishops of The Methodist Church, says U. S. pluralism may be “not our weakness but our strength.”

“It may be,” Kennedy said in an article in The Christian Century last month, “that some will claim that organic union is an end in itself without any reference to the problems it raises or to the question as to whether it would produce more results. That position I repudiate, for winning people to Christ will always be more important to me than the method we use.” Kennedy made no direct reference to Blake’s plan.

Observed General Secretary Edwin H. Tuller of the American Baptist Convention: “American Baptists were not included in the list of four denominations which would merge.… The omission was deliberate, since no emphasis was given … to the necessity for believers’ baptism and the establishment of a personal and vital relationship to God through Christ as a prerequisite to church membership.”

Three overtures have been reported for discussing the Blake plan on the floor of the centennial General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern), to be held in the Highland Park Presbyterian Church of Dallas, the denomination’s largest, April 27-May 2. Another report due for presentation calls for a new approach to predestination, proposing a variation without rewriting the confession of faith.

The controversial film, “Operation Abolition,” probably will prompt considerable debate. Last month the 112-year-old First Baptist Church of San Francisco withdrew support from the National Council of Churches and severed all ties with local councils; Pastor Curtis Nims cited the film and added that “too many statements and actions” have been adopted by the NCC without the knowledge of whether even a majority of its member church bodies were in agreement.

A denomination organizational program will be reviewed at annual sessions of the American Baptist Convention to be held in Portland, Oregon, June 14–18.

A Southern Baptist spokesman said his own convention, scheduled for St. Louis May 23–26, “promises to be peaceful as far as the agenda is concerned,” but emphasized that any delegate could bring up a highly controversial topic with no advance notice.

Theme for the National Association of Evangelicals meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 10–14, is “Thy Word Is Truth.” It is understood that there may be some discussion as to what posture the NAE should take toward the ecumenical movement.

Other forthcoming church conventions: General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, April 3–6; National Holiness Association, Chicago, April 4–6; Independent Fundamental Churches of America, Chicago, April 20–25; American Council of Christian Churches, Phoenix, April 26–28; Christian and Missionary Alliance, Columbus, Ohio, May 17–22; Conservative Baptist, Portland, Oregon, May 25–30.

The Catholic Lobby

The U. S. Roman Catholic hierarchy demonstrated this month, as perhaps never before, the lobby power of its National Catholic Welfare Conference, which has headquarters along Washington’s fashionable Massachusetts Avenue. Unprecedented determination marked the hierarchy’s bid to have parochial schools included in federal aid-to-education measures. Priests regularly marched up to Capitol Hill to be heard at House and Senate committee hearings.

Caught in the middle was America’s first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, whose stand against federal grants to parochial schools put him at odds with the hierarchy. Some observers thought it a bad omen that the first big issue in the Kennedy administration was a Church-State conflict.

Kennedy himself indicated that he could not understand why current educational measures have raised “this major public encounter” in 1961 inasmuch as educational measures have been sent to Congress in previous years without such intense debates.

Administration bills in the House and Senate provide federal grants and loans to public schools only. Kennedy, who questions the constitutionality of federal loans to parochial schools, wants separate legislation for such loans. He says grants to parochial schools would be unconstitutional. He does not want to jeopardize a public-school grants bill by tacking on provisions for loans or grants to parochial schools.

Msgr. Frederick G. Hochwalt, director of the education department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, insists on keeping all provisions in the same bill. He says that some Catholics have fears about federal aid to education. He also declares, however, that if any aid is to be given, Catholic schools should share it.

Hochwalt was asked at a committee hearing how the nearly 100 Roman Catholic Congressmen would be expected to vote. He replied that “no one will try to persuade them against their own conscience.” He made it clear, however, that Romanist leaders will continue pressure for their stand.

A National Council of Churches spokesman testified in support of federal aid to public schools, but against such aid to private schools. He said NCC had formulated no position on loans.

Protestants and Other Americans United gave no position on federal aid to public schools, but registered strong opposition to grants and loans to parochials.

A spokesman for the National Association of Evangelicals indicated compromised constituency opposition to federal aid to public education as a principle. He joined in opposing loans and grants to parochial schools.

The Citizens for Educational Freedom organization is campaigning for federal funds to be given parents of children to be used for tuition in either public or non-public schools, ostensibly avoiding direct grants for sectarian use. Support of this was attributed also to the National Union of Christian Schools.

A compromise plan would allow parents to make their children’s tuition an income tax deduction.

The controversy had many overtones. Some observers say the parochial-school aspect serves as a smokescreen for federal aid to public education, which itself has never been universally recognized as desirable, but is more and more accepted as an inevitable political phenomenon. Others fear that parochial school aid would result in every little congregation in the country sporting its own little schoolhouse. Archbishop William O. Brady of St. Paul, Minnesota, said that since public funds are denied their schools, Roman Catholics should consider whether it is time “for another Tea Party,” apparently a reference to early American history when colonists, crying “no taxation without representation,” dumped British tea into the Boston harbor. The Rev. O. James Remington, pastor of the Lincoln Park Baptist Church in Newton, Massachusetts, said he would refuse to pay his federal income tax if Congress grants aid to parochial schools.

Peace Corps

President Kennedy’s Peace Corps is being likened by many to the Christian foreign missions enterprise.

It is “the governmental equivalent of the Southern Baptist Convention’s foreign mission program,” said Assistant State Secretary Brooks Hays, former SBC president.

“It’s virtually the same thing we have been doing for 12 years,” said Dr. James W. Sells, Methodist official in Atlanta.

Some churchmen are concerned over the image the Peace Corps volunteers will take to their foreign posts.

“These young people must have a moral and spiritual philosophy undergirding their efforts or it will be one of the most miserable flops in history,” said Evangelist Billy Graham.

“Unless these young people are deeply dedicated to Christianity, the Communists will make mincemeat of them. They could possibly do more harm than good.”

President Kennedy has named to the leadership of the Peace Corps a recent graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the Rev. William D. Moyers. When organization of Peace Corps headquarters is completed, Moyers, 26, will be Associate Director for Public Affairs. He had been serving as a special assistant to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Moyers was asked whether young ministers might be accepted for Peace Corps service. He said that the opportunities would be open to all, but that selection would depend on the need.

He emphasized that the Peace Corps will not be a channel for religious service, but added that it “will give us a chance to take the work of the church to the world.”

The New English Bible: What The Critics Say

The long awaited New Testament portion of The New English Bible was reported to have become a best seller almost immediately upon release in some areas.

Here are comments from critics and reviewers:

“The New English Bible has done what it set out to do,” says Dr. Frank E. Gaebelein in Christian Herald. “With clarity and simplicity it has put the Greek of the New Testament into plain English. And it has done this with distinguished avoidance of the trivial.”

Cecil Northcott says in The Christian Century, “What the New English Bible asserts without saying is that the Bible is born in every generation, to every age, to every man. It is universal yet personal, timeless yet contemporary, and on these grounds the New English Bible takes its place as a treasure to be discovered and loved.”

In The New York Times Book Review, Martin E. Marty says that the New Testament “is an achievement of first quality.” “This translation,” he declares, “is likely to be greeted with nearly unanimous enthusiasm within religious circles, just as it is likely to meet with the usual resistance from museum keepers.”

Day Thorpe, book critic of the Washington Star, calls the archaisms of the King James Version “only theoretical” (“it no longer sounds archaic in the cultivated ear”). “Furthermore,” says Thorpe, “how fatuous it is to think that one can extract the ‘meaning’ of the Bible from the coat of many colors of its language, and by presenting it in the prose of journalism make it available to anybody with five minutes to spare to it! The meaning and the language are inseparable, and the Bible is a difficult book. But if nobody has ever been able to pluck out the heart of its mystery, few have thought the effort to do so not worthwhile.”

Another Unity Group?

A new form of church association, halfway between organic unity and a church council, was proposed this month by Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, president of Union Theological Seminary, New York.

Van Dusen made public his proposal in a Washington address at the installation of the Rev. Virgil E. Lowder as executive secretary of the Council of Churches, National Capital Area.

The seminary president advanced the idea of a “confederation,” an organization resulting from the “pooling of resources” of member churches and “conscription of the ablest leadership out of every church.”

“Here,” he said, “is Christ’s imperative for his churches in this generation.”

The proposal bears a resemblance to Dr. E. Stanley Jones’ long-advocated “Federal Plan” for church union.

Autonomy Affirmed

Local churches affiliated with the new United Church of Christ have autonomy in the ownership and control of their properties, according to a ruling handed down last month by the Dade County Circuit Court in Miami, Florida.

Judge Ray Pearson’s interpretation of the denomination’s “Basis of Union” sees the document as granting “rights of immunity and freedom in congregational ownership and control” of a local church’s property.

The judge ruled for the Miami First Hungarian United Church of Christ whose property was sought by the Magyar Synod of the Evangelical and Reformed Church. His decision was believed to be the first of its kind involving the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church with the Congregational Christian General Council. The two merged in 1957 to form the United Church of Christ, but legal consolidation is yet to be realized. Separate litigation is pending in New York City.

The Florida judge ruled that the “Basis of Union,” under which the merged denomination has been operating pending formal adoption of a constitution, clearly shows that the United Church is congregational in government and form.

Foes of the merger have pointed to the document to argue that Congregational churches would sacrifice their traditional local church autonomy in blending with the E & R denomination, which has a modified presbyterial form of government.

The First Hungarian church was formed in 1948 and became a member of the E & R Magyar Synod. In 1959 the congregation broke away from the denomination in a dispute over finances and property ownership. Then the E & R Church filed suit claiming the Miami congregation’s property now worth about $125,000.

Bible Anniversary

Democratic Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota is sponsoring a joint congressional resolution to authorize and request President Kennedy to proclaim 1961 as “Bible Anniversary Year.”

The resolution introduced by Humphrey points out that the Rheims-Douay version of the Bible, used by Roman Catholics, was issued in 1610 and the King James Version, used by Protestants, appeared early in 1611.

He said the 350th anniversary of these English Bibles should be an occasion for rededication to Bible reading.

A proclamation which the Minnesota senator proposes would “urge all Americans to join in rereading the great spiritual truths contained in both the Old and New Testaments.” It would also “invite the churches of every denomination, as well as the agencies of communication, to cooperate and assist in carrying out appropriate observances and ceremonies during such year.”

The proposal for a Bible Anniversary Year was initially advanced by William I. Nichols, editor and publisher of This Week magazine, in an open letter to Kennedy last Christmas. A spokesman for the magazine said this month, “So far we have received no official reply”; he added, however, that the proposal has “awakened interest among both laymen and the clergy.”

Television Crusade

An hour-long film of Billy Graham’s crusade in Miami may become the most widely-seen religious telecast in history.

Some 140 stations with a potential viewing audience of 165 million persons scheduled a Palm Sunday showing. The scheduling coincides with the climax of a three-week evangelistic series in Miami Beach Convention Hall.

This week the evangelist was slated for a rally at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida. Hundreds of technicians from the nearby missile launching site at Cape Canaveral were expected to be on hand.

Church versus State

Climaxing a four-year battle against organized vice, the Ministerial Association of Newport, Kentucky, asked this month for ouster proceedings against eight public officials.

In a 31-page affidavit delivered to Governor Bert Combs, the association accused the following of failing to do their sworn duty in suppressing gambling, prostitution, and illegal liquor sales:

Mayor Ralph Mussman, Police Chief George Gugel and Chief of Detectives Leroy Fredericks of Newport, Circuit Judge Ray L. Murphy, Campbell County Judge A. J. Holly, County Police Chief Harry Stuart, Sheriff Norbert Roll, and District Detective Gardner Reed.

Freud in Social Work

The increasing disposition of American religious bodies to venture into “partnership” with government in the social welfare field is prompting church bodies to step up their recruitment of social workers for health and welfare activities.

Simultaneously, the prevalent concept of professional social work in both public and private agencies is being challenged. Raymond R. Herje of Minneapolis, a juvenile probation officer for Hennepin County, Minnesota, has scored the link to psychoanalysis that characterizes professional social work in America. He warns of the “threatening implications” of the fact that, in the next decade, more than 20,000 professionally trained workers—the great majority indoctrinated in a naturalistic outlook—will go from the nation’s 60 graduate schools of social work into key positions in welfare agencies.

Herje, a Congregationalist who has completed course work for his M.A. degree in the graduate School of Theology in Oberlin College, insists that the time has obviously come for a close look at the policies and practices of American public and private welfare agencies.

“The philosophico-metaphysical principle of contemporary social work,” he writes, “is … a form of naturalism. For the naturalist the real is only that which can be experienced by the senses, and this reality is totally describable in terms of spacial-temporal entities and their causal interrelations.… This naturalistic metaphysical principle is operative both in terms of thought and temper throughout social work literature.” Since naturalism denies the existence of “mindistic or supernatural entities,” the consequences of social work conducted on this premise for the inherited religious outlook are apparent. Indeed, “it negates in terms of its beliefs and attitude those views which are held by the majority of people in American society.”

Protestant Panorama

• The Judicial Council, U. S. Methodism’s “Supreme Court,” ruled last month that Jurisdictional Conferences alone have the right to choose their representatives on the general boards of The Methodist Church. The ruling upsets 1960 General Conference legislation in connection with the Board of Pensions providing that “the required number of members from each Jurisdiction shall be elected quad-rennially by the General Conference on nomination of the College of Bishops of that Jurisdiction.”

• St. Petersburg will become the first locality in Florida to have an American Baptist Convention church. A congregation is now being organized, according to William B. Hill, church extension pastor for American Baptist mission societies.

• A merger plan for four New Zealand denominations took a step forward this month with appointment of a special commission by the Anglican church’s triennial General Synod. The six clergymen who make up the new commission were instructed to “continue conversations” with the Joint Standing Committee on Church Union, a group representing the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregational churches as well as the Associated Churches of Christ.

• The Methodist Council of Bishops is calling on its 40,000 U.S. churches to take a special offering for Africa on Sunday, April 30.

• Biola College of La Mirada, California, was admitted to membership in the Western College Association last month. The recognition carries full academic accreditation.

• Dr. Ermanno Rostan, moderator of the Waldensian Church of Italy, said to be the world’s oldest Protestant body dating back to the twelfth century, is touring the United States.

• Evangelist Merv Rosell saw nearly 1,000 decisions made for Christ at a youth banquet in Seattle last month.

• Members of the Suomi Synod favor a proposed merger with three other Lutheran churches by a margin of more than three to one, according to the results of a congregational referendum announced last month.

• The Cumberland Presbyterian Church plans to develop a 160-acre site near Lake Maumelle, Arkansas, for national conference grounds.

• World Radio Missionary Fellowship, which operates radio station HCJB in Quito, Ecuador, plans to begin broadcasting from a newly-acquired long-wave station in Montevideo, Uruguay, early in 1962.

• Danish and Malayalam editions are being added by The Upper Room, daily devotional guide published by the Methodist Board of Evangelism. With the additions, it will be appearing in 32 languages (total circulation: 3,250,000).

• The Southern California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists will sponsor a program of public low-cost polio and tetanus clinics at many of its churches, denominational schools and other institutions in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

• The University of Chicago is initiating two graduate-level courses in theology by mail. “Introduction to Religious Existentialism” and “Tragedy, Comedy, and Human Existence.”

• A $7,500,000 Presbyterian Hospital will be built in North Dallas, Texas, in 1962. A public fund drive is planned to raise $4,000,000.

• The Christian Reformed Church is recruiting 100 youth for its 1961 Summer Workshop in Missions, which will take them to scattered parts of the country for evangelistic work. A pilot project last year saw 10 Iowa young people spend five weeks in Salt Lake City, conducting street meetings and personal work, visiting the aged and infirm, and even holding services in prisons.

• A tornado struck the Friendship Baptist Church of West Plains, Missouri, during a service Sunday, March 12. One woman was killed and 11 other persons were injured. The building was destroyed.

In a critical analysis of theoretical foundations of contemporary professional work, projected for publication, Herje contends not only that the psychoanalytic tradition tremendously influences social work, but also that “the objectives of professional education are designed to indoctrinate this viewpoint concerning human nature and behavior.” In recent years, he asserts, “psychoanalytic thought has penetrated every area of case work thought, from child guidance to the problem of the aged; from adoption and foster home placement to family counseling.”

Herje contends that the entire social work curriculum has been systematically permeated by the educational conception of “a carefully planned behavior-changing process” heavily indebted to the Freudian tradition. The objectives and methods of social work education are designed, he holds, “not only to enable the student to understand the Freudian outlook, but also to enable him to accept it and apply it.” In addition, “unanimity in outlook” is secured, he contends, through a discriminatory selection of pre-professional candidates by social work educators who “counsel out” those inclined toward alternate views. Social work journals are largely closed to critical essays.

Some observers think that the time is ripe for a “first class intellectual attack” on “psychoanalytical inspired social work,” and sense mounting opposition. University of Wisconsin is reportedly one center where a multiple approach to human behavior problems is gradually taking form, largely through the influence of Arthur Miles, recent chairman of the School of Social Work.

The negation of the Hebrew-Christian view of man by the prevalent social work theory is prodding some church leaders to scrutinize the training and presuppositions of church-related welfare activity. The Freudian tradition treats the knowledge claims of evangelical Protestant religion “as irrelevant or as nonsense,” writes Herje. “Theology becomes nothing but a projective system of the immature man.” Since Protestant liberalism tends to be agnostic in metaphysics, this tension does not exist. “The more liberal Protestants feel there is no inherent conflict,” he writes, whereas “the conservatives are clear that there is a conflict, and that basis of conflict is philosophical in nature.”

C.F.H.H.

Church Day

The presidium of the German Evangelical Church Day (Kirchentag or DEKT) organization announced this month that its 1961 congress would be held in Berlin as originally scheduled.

The presidium said its decision was made after failure of prolonged negotiations with the Soviet Zone government on the possibility of holding an all-German congress in Leipzig. The negotiations were undertaken after the East German regime banned all DEKT celebrations in East Berlin on the ground that they had a “political character” and menaced the “internal order” of the Soviet Zone.

The East German government, said the presidium, failed to give sufficient guarantees that all West German church leaders would be granted entry permits for the DEKT events, which will take place July 19–23.

Church officials pointed out that, in view of the East German ban, all public meetings in connection with the DEKT congress will have to be held in West Berlin. They said that the only events in East Berlin will be observances in churches and church-owned buildings.

Norwegian Debate

Should arguments against association with the World Council of Churches also apply to the Lutheran World Federation?

Norwegian mission authorities are debating the question while trying to decide whether to have a consultative tie with the WCC after it is integrated with the International Missionary Council.

Norwegian opponents of ties with the WCC have charged that it:

—fails to limit itself to a biblical basis, but opens its doors to liberal theology on the one side and Orthodox and Coptic churches on the other;

—tends to become a powerful super-church;

—short-circuits the mission lines by which older Western churches and their “daughter” churches have traditionally been related.

Some leading churchmen have charged that to take up such arguments would be to commit them to a similar position regarding the LWF or be inconsistent.

Danish Design

The Danish Ministry of Church Affairs is conducting a world-wide contest for architects, sculptors, and painters. Their assignment: to design a Lutheran church in the industrial quarter of a modern metropolis. The final design should be the result of the combined efforts of architect, sculptor, and artist with particular emphasis on an artistic general impression.

First prize will amount to “at least 50,000” crowns (about $7,250). Other prizes will total an additional 50,000 crowns.

The jury will be appointed by the Ministry of Church affairs in conjunction with international organizations of artists, architects, and sculptors. Entries must be submitted by September 1.

Eutychus Extra

Eutychus, whose irresistible urge to write a letter to the editor is well-known toCHRISTIANITY TODAYreaders, greets Easter with an unusually intricate piece (page 13), its eye on the modern myth-makers for whom the Resurrection is simply the up-beat of devout music. But Eutychus also has a word for the masses, for whom the Easter theme is a concern of rabbits and ribbons more than Resurrection. His stanzas on “Dreaming,” sent primarily for the editor’s enjoyment, are herewith shared with you, the reader, as a “Eutychus Extra”:

Dreaming

I dreamed that I was preaching

With homiletical perfection

To pews of chocolate rabbits,

A congregational confection.

They sat in solid silence,

Their ears erect in my direction,

To show that Easter bunnies,

Of course, endorse the Resurrection.

Their heads were gay with ribbons;

The slender wore metallic sheath,

And those that were not hollow

Were filled with coconut beneath.

A curious reaction

Came over me; I never felt

So thrilled on Easter morning—

To think my audience might melt!

EUTYCHUS

Exclusive Rights

The Dead Sea Scrolls housed at the Palestine Museum in Jerusalem will be turned over to an unnamed Dutch scientific institution for the exclusive right to study and publish, according to a proposal said to have been accepted in principle by Jordan Education Minister Sheikh Shankeeti.

Old City sources say the plan involves a payment of $56,000 and is conditioned on the scrolls remaining in the country as the property of Jordan.

It is believed that the proposal came from the Vitus Testamentum (Old Testament Institute) of Leyden University in Holland, which recently intensified its archaeological activities in Jordan.

After 40 Years

After 40 years of wandering in a “modern” wilderness, 48 refugee families who still speak Christ’s native language of Aramaic will be given new, permanent homes this summer by the World Council of Churches.

The building project, to begin next month, will cost $50,000, to be provided by funds raised mainly in Britain from World Refugee Year efforts.

The community that will be benefited numbers about 195 men, women, and children. They are a group of refugees from Armenia whose wanderings have taken them through Iraq, Syria, and now Lebanon, where the homes are to be built.

Terror in the Congo

A new reign of terror affecting missionaries was reported in the Congo in mid-March.

U. S. missions executives, many of them anxious since last summer for the safety of their personnel, were hoping that the newly-organized federation of Congo states would bring stability to the political situation.

An unidentified American woman missionary was raped and beaten by Congolese soldiers. Roman Catholic priests were clubbed and nuns stripped and abused by Congolese troops in Kivu province. Two Protestant missionary families belonging to the Worldwide Grace Testimony Church were reported unable to leave the Kivu region.

Executive Director J. Raymond Knighton of the Christian Medical Society, just returned from a five-week tour of Africa, reported a dire need for doctors throughout the continent. He said whereas at the time of independence there were 750 medical doctors in the Congo, now there are approximately 200, only about 50 of whom are working in rural areas. Knighton’s tour covered 11 countries; he was accompanied by Dr. C. Everett Koop, professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. G. A. Hemwall, a Chicago surgeon.

Egyptian Protest

Strong protests by leaders of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt followed reports last month that the Jordan government had seized the Dayr-as-Saltan Egyptian Coptic monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem and handed it over to Ethiopian Coptic monks.

When news of the seizure reached Cairo, the Holy Synod was immediately convened under the chairmanship of Patriarch Kyrillos VI of Alexandria, head of the Egyptian Coptic Church, with 18 archbishops and bishops present.

The synod unanimously voted to ban Coptic pilgrims in Egypt from visiting Jerusalem this year as a gesture of protest. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was asked to return the Jerusalem monastery to its Egyptian owners.

Anglicans and Apartheid

Dr. Richard Ambrose Reeves resigned as Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg this month. He had been deported from South Africa last September for protesting government apartheid policy.

His resignation, according to Religious News Service, moreover reveals differences with the outspoken Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, Dr. Joost de Blank, on what should be the church’s attitude toward retaining segregationist South Africa in the British Commonwealth.

(South African Prime Minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd subsequently withdrew his country’s application for readmission to the commonwealth after she becomes a republic May 31.)

De Blank now feels that the vast majority of the colored and black peoples of South Africa wish to stay within the commonwealth. He spelled out his view in a letter to The Times of London.

The day following the announcement of Reeves’ resignation, The Times published his rebuttal to de Blank’s remarks.

“The crux of the issue,” wrote Reeves, “is found in the archbishop’s belief that a day will come when the evils of apartheid will end, because it is on this ground that he chiefly pleads for the retention of South Africa.

“His Grace does not indicate the way in which this will happen. Unless sufficient pressure can be brought to bear on the South Africa government to change its present racial policies, chances are that this new day will only come after a titanic clash between the government and the non-whites.”

He added that “to retain South Africa within the commonwealth may well help to precipitate such a conflict and be the first step, incidentally, in the dissolution of the commonwealth itself.”

Buddhism For Burma

Prime Minister U Nu reaffirmed last month his determination to see Buddhism become the state religion of Burma, but he added that constitutional protection will be given minority religious groups.

The prime minister told 13 bishops of the Anglican Council of Southeast Asia:

“It is the intention of the government to ensure that the protection now afforded by our constitution to all our religious groups will in no way be affected by the formal adoption of Buddhism as the state religion of Burma.”

“Indeed,” he said, “it is our determination that the harmonious relationship existing between the Buddhists and the followers of other religions will be perpetuated for all time, and that neither persecution nor discrimination on religious grounds will ever be permitted to blacken our history.”

He called upon all to “work together for the common good” of Burma.

People: Words And Events

Deaths: The Right Rev. Richard Bland Mitchell, 73, Protestant Episcopal bishop of Arkansas from 1938 to 1956; in Sewanee, Tennessee.… Dr. Alexander MacMillan, 96, noted minister of the United Church of Canada; in Toronto.… Dr. A. C. Snead, 76, for 35 years the foreign secretary of the Christian and Missionary Alliance; in Orlando, Florida.… Miss S. Ruth Barrett, 62, noted for her work in the American Bible Society in making the Bible available to the blind; in Englewood, New Jersey.

Citation: As Religious Heritage of America’s Clergy Churchman of the Year, Dr. C. Oscar Johnson; as Lay Churchman of the Year, Dr. Robert Gerald Storey.

Elections: As president of the Protestant Church-owned Publishers’ Association, Walter L. Seaman … as Anglican archbishop of Wellington and primate of New Zealand, Dr. Norman Alfred Lesser.

Appointments: As executive director of the Augustana Lutheran Church’s Board of World Missions, the Rev. Rudolph C. Burke … as professor of homiletics at Southern California School of Theology, Dr. K. Morgan Edwards … as dean of students and associate professor of practical theology at Union Theological Seminary, New York, the Rev. James Mase Ault … as minister of New York’s Broadway Presbyterian Church, Dr. Stuart H. Merriam.

Nehru’s Faith

India is buzzing with speculation that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru now believes in God, according to Religious News Service.

Long known as one of the world’s most articulate agnostics, Nehru has repeatedly attacked religion in general and Hinduism in particular, declaring in his book, The Discovery of India, that “India must … lessen her religiosity and turn to science.”

But in The Mind of Mr. Nehru, a new book on the Indian market, Nehru is quoted in an entirely different vein. The book, published by George Allen and Unwin, London, contains the transcript of tape-recorded conversations between the Prime Minister and R. K. Karanjia, editor of Blitz, a Bombay weekly.

In it Nehru refers to the need for spiritual solutions of some problems and Mr. Karanjia asks him: “Isn’t it unlike the Jawaharlal of yesterday to talk in terms of ethical solutions? What you say raises visions of Mr. Nehru in search of God in the evening of his life.”

Nehru replies: “Yes, I have changed. The emphasis on ethical and spiritual solutions is not unconscious; it is deliberate.… I believe the human mind is hungry for something deeper in terms of moral and spiritual development without which all the material advance may not be worthwhile.… The old Hindu idea that there is a divine essence in the world, and that every individual possesses something of it and can develop it, appeals to me.”

When Charles Darwin began his historic voyage on the Beagle in 1831, many scientists and others of that day believed that the account of man’s creation recorded in Genesis was literally true. The idea that man might have evolved from animal life was not new, but the biblical statement describing man’s origin was generally judged to be reasonable, historically reliable, and consistent with the design which was apparent in nature.

The scientific quest for the origin of man has since led the modern world to accept the theory of evolution. First clearly formulated by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859), this theory is now believed to account for the origin of all living things. So many scientists in so many disciplines have committed themselves to the evolutionary concept, that the theory today dominates the thinking of our age.

Kinds and Species

Although biblical language speaks of the creation of different kinds of living things, the idea of special creation was soon conjoined with belief in a special creative act for each species. Darwin thought this to be unreasonable. Observing the tremendous number of species in the world, he subscribed to the theory that all species were derived from previous species over a long course of time. To explain this he developed the principles of variation and natural selection which are still the basis for evolutionary theory. Variation is observable, and Darwin recognized that here was a process which might account for evolution. In the reproduction of almost all living things, far more individuals are produced than ever survive. Perhaps some small variation enables certain individuals in a given plant or animal population to adapt successfully to a given environment. These individuals, the product of natural selection, in their reproduction enhance or develop that difference until eventually a new variety, species, or kind of living things, evolves.

However, plants and animals apparently are designed for their particular environment and way of life, and scientists are still perplexed in seeking to account for these specializations by mechanisms of internal change and environmental selection (cf. C. L. Prosser, American Scientist, vol. 47, p. 536 [1959]; J. B. S. Haldane, Nature, vol. 183, p. 713 [1959]; C. H. Waddington, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 2, p. 379 [1959]). Biologists have not really proposed any adequate explanation for the apparent design and purpose in nature.

Geology and Fossils

The common belief (recall Bishop Ussher’s chronology of 1654) in the mid-nineteenth century was that the earth was but 6000 years old. Yet it is clear that the majestic statement in Genesis 1:1 which says that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” is chronologically unrelated to that which follows. Before long, however, scientific study attested a much greater antiquity for the earth. It was affirmed that evolution must be a very slow process, requiring much more time than a 6000-year-old earth would permit. Once it was persuasively argued that the earth was at least several million years old, the theory of evolution became far more reasonable. Geologists have long been aware that the earth’s crust may be described in terms of layers which provide evidence for many long periods of time in the earth’s history. Attention was turned to the study of fossils as well as to living things in order to support Darwinism with experimental evidence. The discovery of fossils in these layers, their identification, and studies of their age have provided the definitive data for the theory of evolution.

The search for fossils had begun long before Darwin’s time, and the general nature of geological strata was well known. The earliest fossiliferous period had been characterized as the Cambrian—an approximately 500 million-year-old stratum representing about 80 million years. In it had been found what was then the earliest fossil evidence for living things, and it was recognized that here all known plant and invertebrate animal phyla appeared suddenly and contemporaneously, and differentiated into classes and orders. Although now there does appear to be evidence of Precambrian life, there is still lacking rational evidence to account for the origin of these admittedly highly developed kinds of living things. It was also known that in the Silurian layer—an approximately 350 million-year-old stratum representing about 30 million years—the vertebrate phyla appeared suddenly and fully developed with no fossil evidence to account for their origin (cf. A. H. Clark, Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 3, p. 523 [1928]; A. S. Romer, ibid., vol. 21, p. 33 [1946]). Darwin recognized in his day that this was serious evidence against his theory. Today, 100 years later, the paleontological evidence which a concept of “total evolution” requires is absent, although we do have convincing evidence that development has indeed taken place but possibly only within restricted limits.

The classical example of evolution, and one of the few which is documented with fossil evidence, is that of the horse. If the modern horse has evolved as the evidence indicates, a question which needs to be answered is, “Do we have evidence that the horse has developed from something other than a kind of horse, or is this only evidence that evolution has occurred within this particular kind of living thing?”

The geological dating techniques which have been used in order to assign ages to fossils, involve stratigraphy and paleontology (cf. A. Knopf, Scientific Monthly, vol. 85, p. 225 [1957]). These procedures attempt to establish relative geological sequences and assign to them their proper ages. The dating of rocks by radioactive techniques, such as the determination of the U238/Pb206 isotope ratio, has provided data which to a very large extent has confirmed the ages which have been assigned to various geologic eras. Such evidence compels us to reckon with the fact that life upon the earth is not “recent” (e.g. 6000 years). Our exegesis of Genesis must take this into account.

However, this radioactive dating procedure has not lent itself to the study of man’s ancestry since this search involves the paleontology of the Pleistocene period which is too recent for the uranium series of transformations to give useful information.

Dating of Early Man

In the study of early man one has had to rely upon standard geological dating methods until the carbon-14 radioactive method was developed by Dr. Libby. It is generally agreed that this new method is extremely reliable and is capable of determining ages of organic matter up to 60,000 years old with a high degree of probability. But for the most part the dates which have been given to the various examples of early man have been assigned without benefit of this method. In recent years the carbon-14 method has been used in an attempt to verify these earlier assignments, and it has become apparent that serious errors have been made in standard geological dating.

In Dr. Libby’s study of late-Pleistocene geology and archeology, it became clear that the dating which had been done was inaccurate, and the resulting chronology was quite insecure (cf. W. F. Libby, Radioactive Dating, [University of Chicago Press, 1952], p. 101). The dating of early man in North America is related to the Mankato glaciation in Wisconsin which was previously dated at 25,000 years ago. This has now been radiocarbon-dated at 11,000 years ago (ibid., p. 105). The cranium of Piltdown man (after the discovery of the hoax in 1953) was estimated to be 50,000 years old but is now reported to be 620 years old (cf. H. deVries and K. P. Oakley, Nature, vol. 184, p. 224 [1959]). The striking paintings of the Lascaux caves, considered to be the art of primitive man, were assigned an age of about 60,000 years but recent carbon-14 analyses indicates an age of about 15,000 years (Lascaux Caves: The Grotto of Lascaux, by Jean Taralon, Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques, Grand Palais, Cours La Reine, Paris VIII). The discovery of a complete but apparently ancient skeleton in Australia a few years ago led to an assignment of 125,000 years old but was subsequently dated as 6000 years old by carbon-14.

An Obscure Search

The search for primitive man was perhaps first rewarded with the discovery of Neanderthal man near the Neander River in Germany in 1856. Dated geologically to be 60,000 years old, Neanderthal man is said to represent an early stone age culture in Europe and is often called the first cave dweller. The original 14 bones were reconstructed by Boule into a hunched-back creature with head thrust forward, knees bent, and flat feet. In 1957, Neanderthal man was rereconstructed and found to be posturally identical to modern man and in other respects essentially human (cf. L. Eiseley, Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 32, p. 323 [1957]; F. C. Howell, ibid., p. 330; W. L. Straus, Jr., and A. J. E. Cave, ibid., p. 348). Subsequently the assignment of separate species status for many fossil hominids which, like Neanderthal man were considered to be distinctly outside the known limits of human variation, has been questioned (cf. W. E. LeGros Clark, American Scientist, vol. 47, p. 299 [1959]). The recent studies of Australopithecus, the southern ape-man of Africa, have resulted in controversy over its meaning and importance in the problem of man’s origin (cf. Nature, vol. 183, p. 159 [1959]). The discovery of Zinjanthropus in Kenya by Dr. Leakey similarly provides evidence used to support the concept of the animal origin of man. In each case, however, it is clear that the ages which have been assigned are uncertain. Until reliable dating is done, it cannot really be known whether these fossils represent possible evolutionary intermediates. Without this information a logical sequence of fossils cannot be constructed. It is therefore not surprising that the scientific search for the course of man’s origin remains obscure. (cf. W. L. Straus, Jr., Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 24, p. 200 [1949]; F. C. Howell, Science, vol. 130, p. 831 [1959]).

God and the Enigma

The biblical statement of the creation of different kinds of living things does not rule out the development of new varieties or species. It is not unreasonable biologically or biblically to consider that God gave to living things the capacity to change, to develop variety, and to adapt successfully to differing environments. However, we have no record of any living thing changing suddenly or gradually into an entirely different kind of living thing. It would appear therefore that, within certain limits, development has taken place and does still occur. We may not be able to define these limits biologically, but they could be considered to be the kinds of life to which Genesis refers. Such a view is consistent with all that we know at the present time.

Scripture indicates that God created Adam, and then Eve, and that they were the product of a creation that was distinctly separate from that of the animal kingdom. When this occurred, and how they might have differed from us, we do not know. But it is not irrational or unreasonable in the light of present scientific knowledge to believe that the Genesis account of the origin of man is divinely inspired recorded history.

Sterling Winthrop Research Institute

Rensselaer, New York

Off with our shoes, please, for the Holy Trinity is holy ground. Away with finely figured syllogisms and ordinary arithmetic: here, logic and mathematics do not suffice. The need is rather for a listening ear, an obedient heart (John 7:17), rapt adoration, a careful engagement with the Holy Scriptures.

That the one God is three-personed is an audacious conception. Yet it is the confidence which has possessed us Christians ever since it dawned upon us in the days of his sojourn that Jesus Christ too was divine. We have understood that God is three persons existing in a single, uncompounded nature—in structural togetherness; the mid-numbered one in this eternal society being an actual alter ego, as is the Holy Spirit as well; there being three “hims,” three centers of consciousness, but one nature, essence, substance, Godhead.

Call it an intellectual elixir if it must be called that. Discount it as an “incomprehensible jargon” as Thomas Jefferson did. Throw it off as “the fairytale of the three Lord Shaftesburys” as did Matthew Arnold. Nonetheless, this is our confidence.

We cannot comprehend with our natural faculties this threeness in oneness, oneness in threeness. In part, this is because we have no analogies of it where our native faculties are accustomed to function. No three human persons are structurally one, without any hindrance to a full interpenetration of personal life; always there is a core of privacy about human persons. Nor is a human person, even with his intellect, feeling, and will, of such distinct threeness as we understand to obtain in God. We cannot therefore conceive the One Divine Three in man’s image.

Biblical Basis. The doctrine that God is three persons in one substance or essence is first of all an attempt to explain what is revealed in the Holy Scriptures. The unity of God is certainly the indispensable starting point. In the Hebraic-Christian faith there is but one God. Not three, as Roscellin (condemned for tritheism at Soissons in 1092) was inclined to say, but only one. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, the Fathers in general and the Schoolmen (excepting Roscellin) and the Reformers—all saw it plainly taught in the Scriptures that there is but one God. Those three New Testament “unity” passages used in the Socinian Racovian Catechism to oppose the threeness (John 17:13; 1 Cor. 8:6; Eph. 4:6) are simply enfolded into the Trinitarian conception, which admits that there is but one God.

And yet the Scriptures differentiate the Deity in a three-personal way. The most common designations are, of course, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The three are referred to at Jesus’ baptism (John 1:27–33). Our baptism too is to be in the name of the three, according to Matthew 28:19. Paul’s benediction enumerates them in 2 Corinthians 13:14. The three are spoken of in John 14–16; Ephesians 2:18; 1 Peter 1:21, 22, and so on. The Son is called God in John 1:1 and 20:28; 1 Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 1:8. That the Holy Spirit is God is implied in Hebrews 9:14; 1 Peter 3:18; 2 Peter 1:21.

After the nature of God was floodlighted by the New Testament revelation, Christians began to see that in the Old Testament there are numerous lesser lights thrown upon God which point to his tri-personality. One of them is the “holy, holy, holy” of Isaiah’s vision in 6:3, when coupled with the “… who will go for us?” of 6:8. Another is the plurality of persons possibly implied in the plural Elohim used so often, even in the Deuteronomy 6:4 “unity” passage; and certainly suggested in such passages as “Let us make man in our image (Gen. 1:26) and “… let us go down, and there confound their language …” (Gen. 11:7).

Creedal Statement. Secondarily, the doctrine of the Tri-Unity has been devised in order to explain our common experience of God. This common experience, shared in great part because of the scriptural disclosure, has been made express in the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian creeds. The Apostles’ Creed is not clearly Trinitarian. From that compact formula, taken by itself, you might think that only the Father is God, as in Arianism and adoptionism. You might read into it Sabellianism, with the Creed’s simple, successive mentions of the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. But the formulation does not state that the three are one, nor that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are divine. It might be taken as implying that they are not, since the Father and only the Father is referred to as God.

But when you get to the second of the three ecumenical creeds which Western Christianity espouses, the Nicene of A.D. 325, and when you read it with what was added to it on the Holy Spirit in 381, you have a Trinitarianism in which the three are divine and are of one substance. The Athanasian Creed centuries later, named for the fourth century figure most vigorous with a “Nay” to Arius, spells out both the oneness and the threeness much as an anthem conveys and re-conveys its message. At one point that creed affirms, “So the Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet there are not three Gods but one God.” It contains the important formula, “… neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.”

In Eastern Christianity, such as Greek Orthodoxy, it is taught, from the earlier version of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, that the Holy Spirit “proceedeth from the Father,” and not from the Son. In the Athanasian Creed and in Western Christianity in general, it has been taught that the “Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding.” This surely helps to explain why both “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” appear in Romans 8:9—although some say that the Spirit of Christ is Christ’s spirit, meaning Christ himself, which might tend to a binitarianism (as in the Shepherd of Hermas and in the fourth century Macedonian Heresy) but is actually used to a unitarian purpose. The Western view is also suggested in 1 Peter 1:10, 11, where “the Spirit of Christ” (that is, who proceeds from Christ) is evidently the Holy Spirit and not Christ because through the prophets he “testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ.” A passage in John can be taken as teaching either the single or the double procession of the Spirit, for Jesus says, “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father …” (15:26).

Myriad Impugners. There have been opposers aplenty as the centuries have passed. Some have been like Sabellius of the early third century, teaching that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three successive ways in which the uni-personal God has manifested himself. Many have been either adoptian or Arian, the latter being in a sense closer to the Trinitarian view in teaching not simply that a man was adopted as God’s son in a special way, but that Christ was the first and highest created being, of like substance with the Father—and the Holy Spirit a less exalted creature. But in neither of these is there participation in human life on the part of the Deity; in neither of them does a God-man die for our sins. God remains alone and aloof, unhurt by our humanity.

Faustus Socinus (d. 1604) was conspicuous for his anti-Trinitarianism and fathered the Unitarians, who have now joined organically with the Universalists. The English Deists, such as Lord Herbert and John Locke, impugned the doctrine and soon Leibniz and Wolff in Germany were also “enlightened.” That country’s Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel opposed also, generally in the direction of adoptionism or an impersonal pantheism—although Schleiermacher considered himself to be Sabellian.

The late William Adams Brown of Union Theological Seminary in New York figured that the threeness is simply the way we think about God, not the way in which he exists (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 156). One of the most articulate recent oppositions to the doctrine has come from another Union professor, Cyril C. Richardson (The Doctrine of the Trinity, New York, Abingdon, 1958). Richardson likes to speak of the three as “symbols” (p. 111), not persons. Frequently he calls them “terms” (p. 98). He supposes that the doctrine “often beclouds” (p. 14) “the vital concerns of the Christian faith.” To him it is “an artificial threefoldness” (p. 15). If you are a “thoughtful Christian” you are not supposed to believe in it (p. 14).

Richardson properly credits Leonard Hodgson with giving us one of our superb studies of Trinitarian doctrine (The Doctrine of the Trinity, Scribner’s, 1944). But while Hodgson says that there are three centers of consciousness in God, and that this makes for a more “intensive” unity such as obtains in organisms but not in arithmetic (p. 96), Richardson admits the possibility of the three making for a more intensified unity but asks why Hodgson stops with three centers of consciousness. Richardson suggests, “The logic of this should perhaps have driven Hodgson to posit an infinite number of persons in the Trinity” (p. 113). Hodgson posits only three because both Scripture and the creeds stop there—although Hodgson is like many others so vocal in our time in holding that revelation is in events conceived as divine disclosures rather than also in the biblical records of those events. Like Barth, Hodgson is more orthodox on this doctrine than on the Bible itself.

Not as many are impugning the doctrine of the Trinity now as, say, a generation or two ago, although the eternality of the three persons is often lost in merely modal views. During the late summer of 1960, the 90-member central committee of the World Council of Churches voted to recommend to the 1961 New Delhi World Council meeting that all member denominations confess faith not only in “Jesus Christ as God and Saviour,” as at present; but, along with a few other changes, in “… the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

A Prize to Promulgate. The doctrine of the Trinity, scripturally supportable and spelled out particularly in the historic creeds, is no doubt the one basic Christian belief, when it is thought of comprehensively so as to include redemption. In one of the few choice books on the subject, Charles W. Lowry calls the conception “… at once the ultimate and the supreme glory of the Christian faith” (The Trinity and Christian Devotion, 1946, p. xi).

There is a richness in the dogma. It means that God is no bare monad but an eternal fellowship. It is exciting to realize that God did not exist in solitary aloneness from all eternity, prior to the creation of the world and man, but in a blessed communion.

Although Jesus Christ is the proper magnetic center of our faith, and although faith in him distinguishes ours from other religions such as Judaism and Unitarianism, we evangelical Protestants are sometimes prone to relegate the Father and the Holy Spirit to lesser importance. It is to be expected that we would feel close to the one who “pitched his tent” among us; who bit dust for us, wept for us, died for us, is coming to translate us. Stressing the deity of Christ as we need to do, we might tend to make the begotten one the first instead of the second person of the Trinity. The three are of equal dignity, majesty, glory, power, eternity. Each has all the divine attributes. But the Father has a priority in eternally generating the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The fact that the incarnated Son obeys the Father, along with the biblical portrayal of the Holy Spirit as peculiarly characterized by personal self-effacement, also points to a priority of the Father. Whereas Jesus said that he and the Father are one (John 10:30), he also said, “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). He declared, “For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak” (John 12:49).

One way in which we have tended to give Christ the first-numbered position is by so often directing our prayers to him. Actually, prayer may be made to any one of the persons. But ordinarily, according to our biblical precedent, we should address the Father in Christ’s name and as the Spirit urges us, both in private and in public prayer. Very frequently, however, our private prayers, and often our public ones, are directed to Christ. Often when directed to “God” or to the “Father,” they are concluded “in thy name”—which probably means that we have thought of the prayer as directed to Christ.

A similar tendency to error in evangelical Protestantism lies in the common practice of asking Christ to forgive. He can forgive sins, according to the New Testament (Mark 2:10). But according to the same New Covenant Scriptures, we are ordinarily to think of the Father as forgiving the sinner because Christ by his death assuaged the Father’s holy wrath (Rom. 3:24–26).

Our tendency to give priority to the middle person may be reflected also in our making next to nothing of Trinity Sunday. It is doubtful if a high percentage of evangelical Protestant ministers even know that this festival falls the first Sunday after Pentecost. Because it was inaugurated in the West in 1305 and universally observed after 1334, and since we of the Reformation faith share the belief that God is triune, we might well mark the festival as do the Romanists and the Anglicans.

Bibliography: Augustine, “On the Holy Trinity,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, P. Schaff, ed.; R. S. Franks. The Doctrine of the Trinity; L. Hodgson. The Doctrine of the Trinity; C. Lowry, The Trinity and Christian Devotion; B. B. Warfield, Studies in Tertullian and Augustine.

Assoc. Prof. of Systematic Theology

Nazarene Theological Seminary

Kansas City, Missouri

REVIVAL—THE PRICE

The copy for a recent article on this page on “Revival” had been filed less than an hour when there came a communication to our desk enclosing An Open Letter to My Pastor. The urgency of the personal letter which accompanied it made me turn to the other with real interest.

Because the writer spoke to my heart, I believe this letter will speak to many of the readers of this page.

We talk glibly about “revival.” We frankly admit that it must begin within the Church. But few of us are willing to face the cost of revival in our own personal lives.

Believing this letter has a message which may, by the grace of God, do something to awaken us, we herewith give some extensive excerpts:

An Open Letter to My Pastor

“May I please crowd in here somewhere between Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, etc., etc.? Who am I? I am a voice from your congregation!

“Every week I listen to your message—now I am asking you to take time out from your busy schedule and listen to this message.

“I pray to God that I might speak with all the force and intensity, all the urgency of the feeling within me!

“Several months ago, heavily burdened with the complacency and indifference of our Christian people, I was led to pray for a spiritual revival. I had never prayed a more earnest or sincere prayer. It seemed I would give my very life. Then, like a flash across my thought, God asked me, ‘At any cost?’

“I thought for a moment; it was frightening, but I could not escape—I had to answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ If I said ‘Yes,’ it could mean anything—a cost beyond all comprehension. If I said ‘No,’ it would mean my faith was nothing more than shifting sand and my usefulness to God would be finished. I said, ‘Yes, Lord, at any cost.’

“It was not long before I knew a part of the price I was to pay. I, the least of the least, a Christian only two years. So here I stand—nothing more than an instrument-competing with the ‘great’ theologians for your attention—but I stand, and I must be heard!

“The world is filled with people—lost, searching, dying without a knowledge of Christ; while our people—God’s people—go along indifferent, unconcerned, each wrapped up in his own little world of self-indulgence. Every pastor has probably many times asked the question, ‘What will it take?’ Only God knows the answer, but a part of that answer lies with you, right here and now. Will you step out and stand and say ‘Yes, Lord, at any cost’?

“I know you have given your life to serve Him, but will you, right now, allow God to search your heart and see if you are truly committed to Christ? I know about the meetings, the planning, the organizing, the visiting, the counseling, the preparation, the phone calls, the emergencies, the constant interruptions—I am not talking about what you do for Christ; I’m talking about what Christ does through you. I’m talking about the work of the Holy Spirit. Does he have his rightful place in your life? Are you truly committed to his will?

“Do you lay aside all self-sufficiency, go to your knees and seek his will? Do you do this before or after your schedule or sermon is all planned? I believe that every Sunday, in every congregation, there is some person whom God has prepared for a definite message. Are you open to the voice of the Holy Spirit to receive and deliver that message?

“Will you be completely candid and open before God? Will you allow him to reveal the truth to you regardless of what it means or how much it hurts?

“Do the thoughts and actions of other pastors (or ‘great’ theologians) influence your decisions? Does such influence ever supersede the actual spiritual needs of your people? Please do not be trapped by Satan’s plan of collectivism. Christ is not only a personal Saviour, he is personal concerning your purpose and mine. To know and fulfill that purpose, we must each individually seek and follow his will. No, this does not mean we would each take off in separate ways; instead, we would see a unity of purpose unknown in the Christian world today. Nor does it mean we would all band together under one impressive ‘title’ for the furtherance of man’s power. ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.’ Unity comes from within, not from without, and God’s plan can never be improved upon: We are to serve God, not God serve us!

“Are you prepared to prepare your congregation? Will you stop pampering us and try Paul’s method of preaching, ‘not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your (our) faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God’?

“We have a choice, which must be made now. We either take our stand with God—prepared for battle with love, faith and courage, determined to follow his commands regardless of what it may mean; or we drift until we are made to wake up through tragic circumstances.

“The most important man in our nation today is not the President; it is you, the man in the pulpit! Through you the Holy Spirit must bring this nation to its knees before God.

“As you now stand at the place of decision, do you stand with Joshua and Caleb ‘who hath fully followed the Lord’? Do you have enough faith in God’s promises to walk with him against all odds? Do you have enough love for Christ to humble yourself before God and man?

“The future of this nation hangs in the balance and you will decide its course! Where is the fight Paul speaks about? Are we all concerned? Are we all afraid not to conform? Are we more afraid of man’s opinion than of God’s judgment? ‘God is not a man that he should lie; hath he said and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?’

“God is ready; he is waiting; he must begin with you. God has set before us a ‘blessing and a curse.’ Which shall it be?”

The author of this “Open Letter” is a faithful church member and a loyal supporter of her pastor. And she has the spiritual insight and concern to realize that if we are to have a spiritual awakening it must begin in the Church.

The writer of this column has a similar burden and also the highest possible regard for the Christian minister by heritage and by present family ties.

Because of this, we long to see a spiritual earthquake take place in the pulpit and in the pew, a new Pentecost in which the Holy Spirit will be given his rightful place in the life of the Church.

“A form of godliness, but denying the power thereof” stands under the judgment of God. Nevertheless, God is both willing and anxious to transform such sham into a mighty spiritual power if we are willing to pay the price.

The question of this “Open Letter” is, Are we willing?

L. NELSON BELL

JESUS AND ANASTASIA

A learned Areopagite

Who held a Ph.D.,

Awarded him kat’ exochen

By the Academy,

Was pleased to spare a moment when

The preacher had been heard

To take aside the little Jew

And offer him a word:

“You’re right, of course, about the gods;

Homeric fable can’t

Be credible here on the Hill

We willingly will grant.

“We much admired your reasoning

Well seasoned with quotation;

With training in philosophy

You’d gain a reputation.

“It was the more unfortunate

You closed with such a blunder;

Your resurrection concept is

As crass as Zeus’ thunder!

“I do not mean you should refrain

From preaching Anastasia;

The Hellenist finds deeper truth

In all the gods of Asia,

“And Resurrection as a myth

Is one with Plato’s Real;

The legend of an empty tomb

Has popular appeal.

“You need not change your discourse much,

If only it is clear

That Jesus’ body is quite dead

For myths can’t happen here!”

This poem is fresh from Pastor Peterson’s study. I told him that it had only one thing in common with the verse of T. S. Eliot: the need for footnotes. An “Areopagite” is a member of the council that met on Mars’ Hill, the Areopagus. Kat’ exochen is Greek for par excellence; here it means he graduated summa cum laude. “Anastasia” is the Greek word for resurrection made into a proper name. According to the pastor, Acts 17:18 suggests that the Greeks thought Paul was preaching two foreign deities, Jesus and “Resurrection.”

EUTYCHUS

FROM FIELDS ABROAD

Your magazine will have its place in helping to mold the religious thought of our new Republic. We do not have complete religious freedom but we do have a lot of guaranteed freedom, if we use it. No one can change his religion without his parent’s or guardian’s consent until he is over 21 years of age. The greatest restriction at present is the fanaticism of the villagers and their leaders.…

T. M. HUTCHESON

American Academy

Larnaca, Cyprus

I … find help in the suggestions it offers.

ROBERT E. ANDERSON

Beirut, Lebanon

We always hope and pray for the growth of this magazine.

SARE ISAAC

Myitkyina, Burma

We increased in worship, since we have read your CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

LABWE HTINGNAN

Myitkyina, Burma

I am writing this at a youth conference—about 100 miles from my home. We are having good times with these youth and Sunday School leaders. Here is one of the questions asked last night: “You tell us we should use illustrations to get across the truth to the young, but I have not got a single picture, leave alone other equipment. What ways would you suggest I could use to get the Bible truths across to the children?” This is not the exception to the rule here. It is the rule. How we would value supplies of flannel-graphs, pictures of the right kind, children’s simple lesson books which we can translate into other languages, simple daily readings for families, etc. Things which may seem trivial in the States are regarded as very essential in this young country. The prayers and fellowship of the American Evangelical Christians will be of tremendous value to us all in these times of upheavals—and staggering spiritual needs.

FESTO KIVENGERE

P. O. Box 3

Kabale, Uganda, East Africa

It is one magazine that I … keep on file here in my office.… I share it with my two co-pastors here in Bethel Temple, and they, too, enjoy reading it.

ALFRED CAWSTON

Bethel Temple

Manila, Philippines

Have derived help and blessing.… I often enjoy the excellent poetry.

HELEN KORNFIELD

Grace Christian High School

Manila, Philippines

Especially appreciate your coverage of events which concern every evangelical Christian.

HERBERT KRETZMANN

Manila, Philippines

As I visit evangelical student groups in countries throughout the Far East (Korea to Malaya) … and as I seek to strengthen the fellowship between the different groups … it has been helpful to get the wider perspective which comes through reading CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

DAVID H. ADENEY

International Fellowship of Evangelical Students

Hong Kong

I must admit that there is very little time left in each day for me to do real constructive thinking on the basis of the articles in your magazine. I suppose I’m not too much different than other missionaries.…

HUGH AUW

Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan

You are demonstrating by your periodical that there is a wealth of serious and responsible theological scholarship available in the evangelical Christian community.

LEONARD SWEETMAN, JR.

Christian Reformed Mission

Tokyo, Japan

High value … for me and my service in every relation.

TRISTAN BOETTCHER

Herford, Germany

When I was in Moscow … last spring I saw CHRISTIANITY TODAY on one of the desks in the office of the Baptist Union.

EARL S. POYSTI

Buchen, Odenwald, Germany

Being appointed to conduct divine services at a mission festival … I and the audience shall benefit by the accumulated inspiration from your publication.…

The modern German rationalism prepared the way for Hitler, and any detraction from the word of God will automatically prepare the way for other aberrations also. Watchmen are needed on the walls of Zion and instruments for sounding the signals. Here it seems … CHRISTIANITY TODAY has [its] … task. And the signals must be plain though profound.

SIVERT NESDAL

Loen, Nordfjord, Norway

FROM LAODICEA, NO SAINTS

In your article on the drop in seminary enrollments (News, Jan. 16 issue) you quoted Dr. Charles L. Taylor, executive director of the American Association of Theological Schools, as saying that one reason for the decline in seminaries is the growth of Bible schools which offer a “short cut” to ordination. Then, in seeming support of this allegation, you added in parentheses the fact that this year the member schools of the Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges have a seven per cent increase in enrollment over 1959–60.

The juxtaposition of the allegation with the growth of enrollments in Bible colleges is extremely unfortunate, for there are no known facts to establish a relationship between the drop in seminary enrollments and the growth of Bible schools.… It is the denominations that maintain standards for ordination, not Bible schools, and those standards in terms of formal preparation have not been lowered.

… Because Bible colleges are undergraduate institutions, they are profiting along with colleges generally from the increased birth rate of the 40’s.… Another reason for their growth is that most Bible institutes and Bible colleges are operated and in turn serve dynamic evangelical bodies, many of whom are identified with the “Third Force” rather than with the conventional denominations. There is no stultifying liberalism among them nor their schools.…

As for short cuts to ordination, there has been very substantial upgrading in quality and length of Bible college programs in the past two or three decades. A growing number of Bible colleges require five years of work beyond high school for their pastoral training programs. This includes two years of liberal arts and three years of theology.…

At the risk of being considered presumptuous, I should like to make a few comments on the drop in seminary enrollments.…

The one critical admission requirement of AATS is that no more than 15 per cent of students may be admitted from other than regionally accredited colleges and universities.… This 15 per cent limit excludes all but a few Bible college graduates even though they may be prepared for seminary by sound general education and a conditioning of heart and mind for theological studies.…

The test of the life of a church is in the number of its young people who dedicate themselves fully to the service of Christ. A Laodicean church gives birth neither to saints nor to soldiers of the Cross. The answer to a dearth of ministerial candidates is revival.

S. A. WITMER

Executive Director

Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges

Fort Wayne, Ind.

Since when do the “appeal of science careers,” “weak recruitment programs,” “competition from industry,” etc., influence men who are called of God to preach the Gospel? The truth of the matter is that such men so influenced, have never received the call to preach the Gospel. They will be better off, as far as the furtherance of the work of Christ is concerned, in some other field.

JACK B. BACHER

Calvary Bible Church

Berne, Ind.

In the second semester which has just begun, our total enrollment for the year has risen to 333. This compares to 318 for the final count for the previous year and represents an increase in enrollment of about 5 per cent. The figure you quoted was … of course the first semester enrollment.

JOHN F. WALVOORD

Dallas Theological Seminary Pres.

Dallas, Tex.

MORAL RE-ARMAMENT

In the interest of freedom of speech, press and religion, please publish the following:

“Preamble to the Articles of Incorporation of Moral Re-Armament in the United States”:

“Riches, reputation or rest have been for none of us the motives of association. Our learning has been the truth as revealed by the Holy Spirit. Our security has been the riches of God in Christ Jesus. Our unity as a world-wide family has been in the leadership of the Holy Spirit and our love for one another. Our joy comes in our common battle for a change of heart to restore God to leadership. Our aim has been the establishment of God’s Kingdom here on earth in the hearts and wills of men and women everywhere, the building of a hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world. Our reward has been in the fulfillment of God’s Will.”

ROBERT W. YOUNG

North Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pa.

MRA “salesmanship” publicizes policies in terms of divine guidance and direction. On the other hand, any attempt to discover how these policies are determined and financed on the human level, and how their agents are appointed or dismissed, is met with evasion and equivocation. In one breath we are told that the Oxford Group or MRA is a registered company with the names of its officers duly filed; in the next we are told that it is not an “organization” and that no one can join it, resign from it, or be dismissed by it. Nevertheless it admits that it receives financial support from sources which it declines to disclose.

GWILYM O. GRIFFITH

Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, England

PAUL, A PLAGIARIST??

I am sending you herewith a copy of a book of which I am the author, One Fold and One Shepherd. It is my answer to the superficial and erroneous statement about “Mormonism” (December 19 issue). (“The Lord, in his wisdom, directed that the fourth-century Middle-American religious history, the Book of Mormon, be written on imperishable material—gold. The record was to be hidden from the world for many centuries. The hiding and the secrecy were the very essence of the strategic plan of God for teaching the atomic-age world to believe.… It is the only revelation ever given to man concerning tangible things—in it the Lord revealed names of cities and nations.… The cities are now being found” [pp. 340, 350].)

THOMAS STUART FERGUSON

Oakland, Calif.

Dr. Hugh Nibley, head of Department of Religion, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, under whom I took a course entitled: “The Critics of the Book of Mormon,” a man with a Ph.D. in ancient history from U. of California, said in class to me: “Who knows but that Paul plagiarized the Golden Plates?” This statement was in reply to one I asked: “How do you account for the precise wording in Moroni 8:45 f., of the King James Version as found in 1 Corinthians 13:4 f.?”

C. SUMTER LOGAN

Trinity Presbyterian Church

Ogden, Utah

I refer to William Waide’s brief note (Jan. 30 issue) that in India Seventh-day Adventists reported other Christian converts as their converts. This statement sounds a bit ridiculous to one who has been a missionary in India. If Waide knew the process which one must go through to become a Seventh-day Adventist, he would see how utterly foolish is such a statement.

E. A. CRANE

Sturgis, Mich.

DILEMMA DIFFUSED

The “dilemma of the deep south layman” (Jan. 16 issue) has been far more acute and far more painful than any that has been faced by the clergy thereabouts. And the lack of a positive teaching and preaching clergy has only served to intensify the many pains of daily living with these problems.

BELDEN MENKUS

Nashville, Tenn.

The principles and faith of the founders of America are to be found more clearly in the South—and to some extent the Southwest—than elsewhere in the country.

F. H. JOHNSON

Dayton, Ohio

The name “Southern Baptist” implies doctrinal conviction.… The name no longer has anything to do with territory or Deep South sentiments (on segregation or anything else).

PAUL O. CHEEK

Calvary Baptist Church

Merced, Calif.

The Catholics have 34 churches for colored here in Lafayette diocese and 20 missions while the Protestants oppose efforts to evangelize the Negro.

AARON A. BOEKER

American Sunday-School Union

Elton, La.

CRUSADE AGAINST CANCER

Once upon a time a scientist came to the conclusion that the use of hymnbooks caused cancer. He brought his theory to a convention of scientists. A group worked on the project for two years and came to the unanimous conclusion that the correlation between those who used hymnbooks and those who were afflicted with cancer was more than coincidental. Whether it was the peculiar paper used in hymnals, the arrangement of the notes, the lack of syncopation, the dark bindings, or the surroundings in which they were produced, the conclusion was inescapable: there was a direct connection between hymnals and cancer. An independent study by British researchers came to the identical conclusions.…

Of course, the publishers of hymnals insisted that there was nothing to this. They ridiculed its scientific pretensions and set up their own investigating committee, which, not remarkably, came to the conclusion that there was no connection between hymnals and cancer. But even the newspapers in which they advertised lavishly and the magazines which they subsidized were unable to omit all news of the mounting incidence of those with cancer who were shown to have bought, used, or handled hymnbooks.

A crusade against hymnals was quickly organized, with four five-star generals, six ranking industrialists, two labor leaders, four college presidents, and eighteen bishops as leaders, along with a committee of a thousand prominent educators, rabbis, priests, ministers, and congressmen. The committee urged a national campaign to eradicate hymnals. Bills were promptly introduced in both houses of Congress to forbid the use of hymnals, while one measure proposed to classify it as a subversive activity. The committee on un-American activities promptly called witnesses to see if hymnals were not really produced by Russians or fellow travelers. Medical associations warned patients to have nothing to do with hymnbooks.

“We do not sell cancer here” was the sign displayed by church bookstores which refused to stock hymnbooks any longer. Over three hundred colleges announced that the use of hymnals on their campuses were forbidden. More than 4,321 students were expelled for using hymnbooks secretly or keeping them in their rooms. It was made part of administrative policy that any professor who kept a hymnbook would be regarded as incapable of teaching in a college devoted to Christian character of American institutions. Libraries were forbidden to carry any magazines with advertisements of hymnals and newspapers which ventured to defend hymnals were picketed at the newsstands.

Thousands of relatives of people who had died from cancer filed suits against the hymnbook publishers for deliberate poisoning. A nationwide petition with a million signatures listed those who declared that they would never again use a hymnbook. Synods, assemblies, conventions, and classes resolved that no hymnal should ever darken any door of theirs, and one enthusiastic Methodist conference urged that no man be ordained who would not pledge himself to never handle a hymnbook. The FBI exposed a conspiracy to bootleg hymnbooks in from Guatemala, and a former publisher of hymnbooks had to be protected by state police in Richmond. The president of the nation gave a nationwide telecast warning against any sympathy for the sellers of hymnbooks. A national interfaith conference resolved that “hymnbooks must go the way of slavery and polygamy into the limbo of forgotten practices.” The Apostolic Angels, Inc., pointed out that they had never allowed the use of hymnals in their services, and that there was not a verse in the 1611 Bible to sanction such a practice. And a new translator pointed out that the word translated “sin” in the old version should read “The wages of hymnbooks is death.” Hymnbook became an unmentionable word, and teachers urged little children never even to think it. Women who used hymnals were accused of poisoning their babies, and a death penalty was proposed for anyone who offered a girl a hymnal. Farmers were paid by the government not to raise anything that could be used in hymnals, and some country churches excommunicated all who refused to take this money.

The Attorney General noted that the use of hymnbooks was a violation of the 14th amendment in that it denied due process of law, and ordered all federal district attorneys to enforce the statute by filing suits. The governor of South Carolina called out the Southern Secession Sentinels to prevent the destruction of the large hymnbook factory in his state, but federal tear gas promptly dissolved the insurrection. A new amendment to the constitution was hurriedly ratified in special sessions of 46 legislatures, and it was proposed that the United Nations follow suit. There will be no more cancer from hymnals, solemnly proclaimed the American delegation.

… But it wasn’t hymnbooks that the scientists decided caused cancer.

CHARLES G. HAMILTON

Booneville, Miss.

WANTED: ONE COMPASS

Thank you for a little detailed reporting (News, Feb. 13 issue) on the relation of events in the Congo to missions; newspapers have generally ignored this aspect of the situation. Unfortunately, though, you got directions badly mixed in attributing recent chaos to the western sections and saying that the east was stable with no interruption of mission work.

WILLIAM E. WELMERS

Professor of African Languages

University of California at Los Angeles

Los Angeles, Calif.

My defense of orthodoxy is threefold. First there is the argument from history. I can prove from the historical documents that orthodoxy is bona fide Christianity. Dr. J. G. Machen did this in his little classic, Christianity and Liberalism, and in his more elaborate scientific work, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, which the liberals have been unable to answer even to this day. Over against Harry Emerson Fosdick’s evolutionary naturalism—with its dogma of progress and its naïve assumption of the thing to be proved, namely, that the religion of Israel moved from a primitive conception of God to the grandeur of ethical monotheism—Dr. Machen shows that in order to subscribe to the tenets of modern liberalism, one has to get rid not only of the supernatural in Scripture, but of the teachings of Paul concerning Christ and of the Jesus of history altogether. As a case in point there is Rudolf Bultmann who started out to remove the miraculous and now has nothing left of the Gospel. Dr. Machen has plainly proved that the supernatural character of the Person and Work of Christ cannot be eliminated from Scripture without giving up the whole of the Christian message.

The late literary critic, H. L. Mencken, a humanist, wrote of Dr. Machen in the Baltimore Evening Sun:

He saw clearly that the only effects that could follow diluting and polluting Christianity in the modernist manner would be its complete abandonment and ruin. Either it was true or it was not true. If, as he believed, it was true, then there could be no compromise with persons who sought to whittle away its essential postulates, however respectable their lives. Thus he fell out with the reformers who have been trying, in late years, to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary and social club, devoted vaguely to good works.…

Speaking of the basic postulates of the faith, Mencken continued:

These assumptions were also made, at least in theory, by his opponents, and thereby he had them by the ear. Claiming to be Christians as he was, and of Calvinistic persuasion, they endeavored fatuously to get rid of all the inescapable implications of their position. On the one hand they sought to retain their membership in the fellowship of the faithful, but on the other hand they presumed to repeal and re-enact with amendments the body of doctrine on which the fellowship rested. In particular, they essayed to overhaul the scriptural authority which lay at the bottom of the whole matter, retaining what coincided with their private notions and rejecting whatever upset them.…

It is my belief as a friendly neutral in all such high and ghostly matters, that the body of doctrine known as Modernism is completely incompatible not only with anything rationally describable as Christianity, but also with anything deserving to pass as religion in general.… It is one thing to reject religion altogether, and quite another to try to save it by pumping out of it all its essential substance, leaving it in the equivocal position of a sort of pseudo-science comparable to graphology, ‘education,’ or osteopathy. That, it seems to me, is what the Modernists have done.… They have tried to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and vet preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise.

I have used the words of an eminent critic at some length to clarify the fundamental opposition between orthodoxy and modernism. The latter is a total reinterpretation of Christianity in that it rejects all those elements which make Christianity an historical phenomenon on the ground that the supernatural and the historical are incompatible with science. As Machen proved, modernists have a different concept of the doctrine of God, of man, of Christ, of salvation, and of the Church. Therefore, orthodoxy alone has the right to call itself Christian from any historical or logical consideration. It is the only continuation of the religion of the apostles and the primitive New Testament Church.

THE SCRIPTURAL PRESUPPOSITION

However, I am not so naive as to think that I can convince the liberals with an appeal to history. For the real issue between orthodox Christianity and its enemies is the factness of a fact. What constitutes a fact? My opponents will not accept the facts I marshal. They bridle at the mention of an infallible Scripture or the fact of the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection. And behind the facts are laws. Who is author of these laws of nature and of laws of thought? Is it God or the void of irrationalism? Is nature the whole show, as the naturalist presupposes? Can we tear the sacred robe of truth and allow a nature independent of God, operating through blind irrational forces beyond the control of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Is religion a sphere by itself, in the realm of value and of personality, in which God has some squatting claims—but divorced from nature and science? Is man a creature of God depending for his being and for his knowledge on the self-revelation of God, or is he autonomous in his being, and the final reference-point for truth and experience? These are some of the crucial issues.

GOD AND HIS CREATION

Orthodoxy treats seriously the doctrine of a literal divine creation, which implies that all the facts as well as the laws of the universe are God-created. But the facts were also God-planned, they are God-controlled, and they are God-glorifying. It is our contention that this biblical presupposition is the only ground for meaningful human predication. Those who reject this basis for meaning and knowledge must ultimately land in irrationalism. They indeed defend their position with an appeal to man’s reason, but they have assumed an ultimate reality which shuts God out. Or, if God is enclosed within the system, he becomes finite so that the same categories that are applied to the things of time and space are applied to God. Man becomes the judge of truth and of being. Man becomes autonomous.

But what of human reason? If nature is the whole show, what guarantee is there that man can transcend his environment? No account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be real and valid, says C. S. Lewis; and, “no thought is valid if it can be fully explained by irrational causes.… Obviously then, the whole process of human thought, what we call Reason, is equally valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Hence every theory of the universe which makes the human mind the result of irrational causes is inadmissible, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs” (Miracles, New York, 1947, p. 28). Naturalism, like skepticism, cancels itself out. If we say that man cannot know, then how can he arrive at such a conclusion? If nature or reality is ultimate, how can we arrive at a rational person out of irrationality?

The point of all this is that one either begins with the scriptural presupposition that God is the ground of being and of knowledge, namely, that he is Creator, Provider, Redeemer, and Judge of his universe, or one is, willy-nilly, reduced to some form of irrationalism. Paul said, “Other foundation can no man lay, than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11). I believe this not only applies to salvation, but also to the knowledge situation, for in Christ all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden (Col. 2:3). As Christians, we gladly admit that our reasoning is circular—we begin with God and we thereby have assumed the whole case, for if one seriously says “I believe in God, Creator of heaven and earth,” he cannot back down at the question of miracle or the inspiration of Scripture or the deity and sacrificial death of Christ. It is all involved in the starting point. This is something the liberal does not see. He wants to begin neutrally. He wants to keep the mind of man autonomous. He wants to be judge of the facts. His appeal is to reason. It is a vain enterprise! If God does not enter at the level of human consciousness he has no place at all in man’s thought. The starting point method, and conclusion are involved in one another If one starts with the assumption of modern science that man’s mind is autonomous and has the power to interpret the brute facts of the universe, one is actually starting with a naturalistic assumption. Es gibt keine Voraussetzungslosigkeit, as the Germans say. There is no such thing as starting without a presupposition, there is no neutral mind in science or religion. Emil Brunner has remarked in his Gifford Lectures, “The metaphysical dimension of the mind never remains empty, but must always have a content.… Metaphysical neutrality simply does not exist, because neutrality in itself is a kind of skeptical metaphysics” (Christianity and Civilization, II, p. 24).

Now the point is simply that if we are to have human science and history at all, in the sense of meaningful knowledge, interpretation, and control of nature we need the Christian presupposition, namely, of personality and law and fact. On any other presupposition, we fall into the void of irrationalism. My contention, therefore, is that human predication is impossible and meaningless except on the presupposition of the truth of the Bible. It is only within a God-created, God-controlled universe that science and history can operate. In other words, every form of denial of orthodoxy is implicitly operating with a borrowed capital. A world without the God of Scripture is impossible, for it would have no plan, no structure, no meaning—it would have to be accounted for from the void, the contradiction of irrationality producing Reason.

THE GOSPEL AND CULTURE

Finally, there is the ethical-moral consideration. When Christianity came upon the scene, human culture was at a low ebb. Ichabod was written across the gates of the Academy and the Lyceum. Men said, “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die”; or they resigned themselves to the outrageous pangs of fortune; or drained the blood from their veins in despair and hopelessness. Then, in the fullness of time, God sent his Son.… The Gospel spread over Europe and brought new hope and vision. Later, the Reformation gave a new impetus to culture and to every human endeavor by a return to the purity of the Gospel.

However, the evil fruit of the Renaissance with its paganism and the principle of nature and freedom could not be contained. In the French Revolution it broke forth with its cry, “No god, no master!” and in the nineteenth century in Nietzschean nihilism the cry was, “God is dead!” As a result the world is today at the end of its tether. We are groping in a Götterdämmerung, resulting in the decline of the West. Cochrane suggests that we have been robbed of our man-made idols by the Russians, just as Micah of old was by the Danites. We have nothing left. Our gods of power and science have been taken over by our foes, and our great spiritual heritage is eroded.

ART AND DESPAIR

This despair of modern man, cut loose from God, is apparent especially in his art. The loss of religion results in loss of depth; with man’s ladder to heaven gone, the movement of the spirit is no longer vertical but only horizontal; all surfaces are flattened, all values are removed. As Brunner says, art has become barbarous and crude, dehumanized, and irrational. And Paul Tillich tells us, “The decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and the despair of it in the 20th century is the loss of God in the 19th century.… It drives one either to nihilism or to the courage which takes non-being into itself” (The Courage To Be, p. 139).

This courage of despair, which is said to be our only hope in an age of anxiety, is like the whistling of a boy in the dark, man pulling himself up by his own bootstraps out of the mire. This is truly the sickness unto death. In this world of anxiety, says Tillich, the ordinary categories, the structures of reality, have lost their validity. Thus modern art saw the meaninglessness of existence and participated in it.

Now, that is exactly my point. The anxiety of modern man is real. Why? Because he has lost his faith in God! To all intents and purposes, so far as man’s culture today is concerned, God is dead! Man is without God, hence without hope. Paul used those very words of his contemporaries. But Paul preached the power of God to such men, the Gospel of salvation by Grace. Without the Gospel, man’s only comfort is some sort of idealistic pantheism as reflected in Bryant’s Thanatopsis, or the defiant stoic humanism of Henley’s Invictus, or the sad, plaintive anguish of Russell’s naturalism:

The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death.

Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power” (“A Free Man’s Worship,” in Mysticism and Logic, London, 1950, pp. 46 ff.).

Over against these utterances of man’s heroic despair, of his whistling in the dark, let us take our stand with the saints of God throughout the ages who have spoken with assurance of faith. Let us say with Job: “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:25, 26).

Let us jubilate with Paul: “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Rom. 8:33, 34).

Sunrise

Malachi 4:2

The sun comes up and all the dark earth yields

Itself in dedication to the light.

Gray shadows scuttle through the waking fields

And slink away. Forgotten is the night.

Each tree on tiptoe now awaits the kiss

Of warmth and beauty in the green-gold way

Of light with leaf. All night is but for this:

The glorious appearing of the day.

Burst on my soul, O Sun of Righteousness,

With healing in Thy wings! The night is long

Indeed; but after darkness and distress

Earth-shadows flee away. There will be song,

There will be warmth and light, and love and grace,

Eternal sunrise—in Thy blessed face.

HELEN FRAZEE-BOWER

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.