There was a time, about three generations ago, when the minister was known as the parson. Parson, in those days, was not a nickname but an honorific title, and it meant The Person. More often than not the parson was the best educated man in the community and he ranked with the physician, the pedagogue, and the lawyer in eminence. But our time has seen a complete switch in this situation. The minister is no longer a parson. The advent of a highly educated public has put the minister close to the bottom of the listings of educated persons. Our reaction to this turn of events should have been a determined and disciplined effort to regain and maintain superior excellence in the things which pertain to God. Instead, the clergy retreated in mad scramble behind the breastworks of administrative detail, ecclesiastical trivia, and community vagrancy. Whenever our conscience bothered us, we simply ran off to another meeting to make arrangements for succeeding meetings to flee to. We are no longer parsons, now we are “good Joes”; and in place of providing the Church with her needed “scholar teachers” who are equipped to bring God and man together in reasoned relation, we now find ourselves among those who need to be reached by the “scholar teacher” and wise men of God. What is the resolution of this ridiculous farce?

MINISTER OF THE WORD

The answer ought to be obvious. Actually, it is in the nature of a cabala. Here it is in its taunting simplicity: Make him a minister of the Word! But what does that mean? What could be more esoteric? Very well, we’ll say it with more passionate bluntness.

Fling him into his office, tear the office sign from the door and nail on the sign: Study. Take him off the mailing list, lock him up with his books—get him all kinds of books—and his typewriter and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts, broken hearts, the flippant lives of a superficial flock, and the Holy God. Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God till he learns how short his arms are; engage him to wrestle with God all the night through. Let him come out only when he is bruised and beaten into being a blessing. Set a time clock on him that will imprison him with thought and writing about God for 40 hours a week. Shut his garrulous mouth forever spouting “remarks” and stop his tongue always tripping lightly over everything non-essential. Require him to have something to say before he dare break silence. Bend his knees in the lonesome valley, fire him from the PTA and cancel his country club membership; burn his eyes with weary study, wreck his emotional poise with worry for God, and make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God.

A LIFE AFLAME

Rip out his telephone, burn up his ecclesiastical success sheets, refuse his glad hand, and put water in the gas tank of his community buggy. Give him a Bible and tie him in his pulpit and make him preach the Word of the living God. Test him, quiz him and examine him; humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine, and shame him for his glib comprehension of finances, batting averages, and political in-fighting. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist, scorn his insipid morality, refuse his supine intelligence, ignore his broadmindedness which is only flatheadedness, and compel him to be a minister of the Word. If he wants to be gracious, challenge him rather to be a product of the rough grace of God. If he dotes on being pleasing, demand that he please God and not man. If he wants to be unctuous, ask him to make sounds with a tongue on which a Holy flame has rested. If he wants to be a manager, insist rather that he be a manikin for God, a being who is illustrative of the purpose and will of God.

ONE THING NEEDFUL

Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and day: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” When, at long last, he dares assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a word from God; if he does not, then dismiss him and tell him you can read the morning paper, digest the television commentaries, think through the day’s superficial problems, manage the community’s myriad drives, and bless assorted baked potatoes and green beans ad infinitum better than he can. Command him not to come back until he has read and re-read, written and re-written, until he can stand up, worn and forlorn, and say: “Thus saith the Lord.” Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity, smack him hard with his own prestige, corner him with questions about God, and cover him with demands for celestial wisdom, and give him no escape until he is backed against the wall of the Word; then sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left: God’s Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down-street gossip, but give him a chapter and order him to walk around it, camp on it, suffer with it, and come at last to speak it backwards and forwards until all he says about it rings with the truth of eternity.

Ask him to produce living credentials that he has been and is true father in his own home before you allow him license to play father to all and sundry. Demand to be shown that his love is deep, strong, and secure among those nearest and dearest to him before he is given contract to share the superfluity of his affability with all sorts and conditions of persons. Examine his manse whether it be a seminary of faith, hope, learning, and love or a closet of fretting, doubt, dogmatism, and temper; if it be the former, let him go abroad, conquering and to conquer; if it be the latter, then quarantine him in it for praying, crying, and conversion, and then let him go forth converted, to convert.

SIGN AND SYMBOL

Mold him relentlessly into a man forever bowed but never cowed before the unconcealed truth which he has labored to reveal, and let him hang flung against the hard destiny of almighty God; let his soul be stripped bare before the onrushing purposes of God, and let him be lost, doomed, and done that his God alone be all in all. Let him, in himself, be sign and symbol that everything human is lost, that Grace comes through loss; and make him the illustration that Grace alone is amazing, sufficient, and redemptive. Let him be transparent to God’s grace, God himself. And when he is burned out by the flaming Word that coursed through him, when he is consumed at last by the fiery Grace blazing through him, and when he who was privileged to translate the truth of God to man is finally translated from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently, blow a muted trumpet and lay him down softly, place a two-edged sword on his coffin and raise a tune triumphant, for he was a brave soldier of the Word and e’er he died he had become spokesman for his God.

And who shall return us to this ministry?

“Therein the patient must minister to himself.”

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.

First in a Series by Evangelical Scholars

The theological way proposed by Rudolf Bultmann has many attractions. It seems to maintain the essence of the Gospel. It incorporates insights won from Kierkegaard and existentialism. It gives a warm and dynamic preaching in realistic terms. It has its solution for problems raised by biblical study. It frees the Gospel from the language and thought forms of the past. It permits academic inquiry and takes away the offense of peripheral phrases and factors. In short, here are the advantages of the liberal program apparently without the mistake of open distortion or destruction of the substance of Christianity. Why should we not follow Bultmann?

CENTER OR PERIPHERY?

Some subsidiary reservations suggest themselves. Perhaps it is not so easy as assumed to separate the center of the Gospel from the periphery. Does not the Empty Tomb, for example, really belong to the center even though not itself the Resurrection? Again, is the link with existentialism really an asset? In his acute study Rudolf Bultmann (Evangelischer Verlag, 1952), Karl Barth points out that there are probably “not many ‘modern’ men who will really feel that they are adequately understood” in Heidegger’s thought (p. 39), and in any case the fashion in philosophies changes quickly. Moreover, the concept of myth is surely an importation to the Bible’s own standpoint, and where are the criteria to differentiate the supposed mythological factors? As Barth asks, “is not Bultmann’s concept too formal to cover what we call myth either in the past or the present?” (ibid., p. 31 f.). Indeed, is there not here the deeper hermeneutical mistake of bringing the Bible under a general rule instead of making it “the model and norm of all hermeneutics” (ibid., p. 50)? May it not be that after all the Bultmann structure rests on seriously insecure foundations?

BULTMANN’S SELF-SPUN MYTH

More deeply, however, the proposed demythologization of Bultmann entails a genuine mythologization which makes true theology quite impossible. As Bultmann seems to see it, the reality of the Gospel consists in a so-called existential proclamation leading to an existential death and resurrection in terms of the end of a false view of life and the dawn of a true. If so, then ultimately the factuality of the New Testament incidents and records matters little. Many things may be endorsed, but many others may be freely discounted as mythical accretions. What finally matters is the message and actuality of the Christ event alone. To be sure, this is an improvement on the older liberalism in its call for total involvement and in its assertion of the centrality of death and resurrection. But for Bultmann the gospel record, and even Jesus Christ himself, can be only a starting-point, medium, and representation of the true reality which lies in the existential death and resurrection of believers. As Barth shows, this is not really “a doctrine of Christ, but essentially and properly that of an event of conversion which has merely found its beginning in Christ and simply bears his name and title” (ibid., p. 18). The Gospel is here a salvation myth depicting and mediating the true salvation which is existential. The minor attempts at demythologization disclose a radical mythologization. What Bultmann proposes is in fact real mythology.

LOSS OF A DATED REDEMPTION

It is mythology in its severance from genuine historicity. Certainly Bultmann emphasizes the words Geschichte (history as occurrence) and Geschehen (event), especially in contrast to Historie (history as record). But for him Geschichte is not so much the history of past, objective fact; it is the dynamic history what happens here, now, in me. The event of crucifixion is not basically the death of Jesus on Golgotha under Pontius Pilate about 30 A.D.; it is my death to sin and error. The event of resurrection is not the raising of Jesus from the tomb; it is the message of new life and my awakening to it. Of course, these things are important. There must be an event of preaching and an event of response. But are these the true salvation event? Does not the Gospel differ from all mythology in the very point that its essence is a dated event, an enacted work, an accomplished salvation? Does not Bultmann silence the chief note of the Gospel by not letting it say that “it has pleased God to humble himself, and therefore to become earthly, this-worldly and, horribile dictu, datable” (ibid., p. 32 f.)? What is crucifixion without Calvary? What is resurrection without the rising of Christ and the Empty Tomb?

BARTH’S FIVE QUESTIONS

The latter point is particularly important. For, while Bultmann accepts the death of Christ, he dismisses the Resurrection as one of the mythical intrusions, as a “nature-miracle,” as a “miraculous proof” which demands interpretation. “For our part,” says Barth, “we maintain the direct opposite.” The statement that Christ is risen “is valid in its simplest sense, and only in that sense is it the central affirmation of the whole of the New Testament.” The weaknesses in Bultmann’s reasoning are exposed in five questions which Barth then proceeds to address to him: “1. Is it true that a theological statement is valid only when it can be proved to be a genuine element in the Christian understanding of human existence?… 2. Is it true that an event alleged to have happened in time can be accepted only if it can be proved to be ‘historical fact’ in Bultmann’s sense?… 3. Is it true that the assertion of the historicity of an event which by its very nature is accessible to (this) ‘historical’ verification … is merely a blind acceptance of a piece of mythology?… 4. Is it true that modern thought is ‘shaped for good or ill by modern science’?… 5. Is it true that we are compelled to reject a statement simply because this statement, or something like it, was compatible with the mythical world-view of the past?” (Church Dogmatics, III, 2, pp. 443 ff.). Until Bultmann produces solid answers to these questions, Barth is confident that we both may and must continue to “accept the resurrection of Jesus, and His subsequent appearances to His disciples, as genuine history” (ibid., p. 447).

BIBLICAL STUDY BECOMES FUTILE

The content of this history is that God himself has acted in human affairs in a series of events, culminating in the Crucifixion and Resurrection, by which salvation has been definitively accomplished. Nor is this Geschichte divorced from Historie. In and with the events he has given an authentic record, Holy Scripture. To reject this Geschichte is to throw away the kernel of the Gospel; to reject this Historie is to condemn biblical study to final irrelevance and futility. In the last analysis, indeed, it is to imply a final Docetism (cf. Rudolf Bultmann, p. 34) no less grotesque and unconvincing than that of Gnosticism: a crucifixion, but no necessary or significant Cross; a resurrection, but only the myth of an Empty Tomb; an event of salvation, but no historical enactment; a kerygma, but no true record; a Christ, but an unimportant and uncertain Jesus.

THE BREAK WITH OBJECTIVITY

Again, the Bultmann view is mythology in its non-objectivity. This point is obviously linked with the first. Without datable events in a true record there can be no objectivity. Yet in view of Bultmann’s presuppositions, the break with objectivity may well precede and underlie that with history. We have only to consider his approach to the Bible and its message. Bultmann knows in advance what the real theme is. He knows without consulting Scripture that there is myth in it. He knows of himself how to differentiate between the factual and the mythical. He knows without learning from Scripture how to understand Scripture. To Barth, this is perhaps the most radical and depressing feature in the whole program: “In distinction from many others who cannot follow him, I find the greatest difficulty, not in his massive anti-supernatural negations, excisions and transmutations, but in his underlying—how shall I put it?—pre-Copernican attitude” (ibid., p. 53). By contrast, Barth approvingly quotes the objective principle of Luther: “The Sacred Scriptures desire a humble reader … who always says, Teach me, teach me, teach me!” (ibid., p. 50). If he had practiced this objectivity at the outset, Bultmann could have been kept from his mythologizing “de-historicization.”

The basic nonobjectivity, however, is matched by nonobjectivity of understanding. If the record is not an object in its own right, neither is the event recorded. The real reconciliation is not effected in first century Palestine; it is only represented. The revelation of God has not taken place; a mere mode of communication has been established. The new life has not come in the Resurrection; a mere sign has been given. The pre-eminence of Christ, his representative work, objective justification, faith in him—these are only a manner of speaking. The substance is existential. No one, of course, would minimize the importance of the application of Christ’s work. But here is a subjectivization which subverts and destroys the Gospel. The point of the Gospel, without which it is nothing, is that Christ “has already suffered the penalty of death for the salvation of all men, that he has already accomplished their transition from the old man to the new, that he has already effected their transposition to existential being, that he has not merely initiated but completed this process” (ibid., p. 21). If we dismiss the objectivity of this finished work, it avails us little to make it the sign or theme of preaching and understanding. No myth can be the Good News. The Good News is real news, that is, News of what God has concretely and definitively done for our salvation.

CROWDING GOD FROM THE CENTER

Finally, it is mythology in its substitution of anthropocentricity for biblical Christocentricity or theocentricity. Myths are stories of the gods, but man is their true theme. So it is with Bultmann. The terms and concepts have changed, but in the main liberal stream man is still the center and measure of all things. Man declares the nature of the Bible. Man distinguishes the mythical. Man demythologizes. Man decides the theme. Man is the substance and center of the salvation event. Jesus Christ belongs to the periphery. He is a cipher. He is a point of departure. He is a summons to man to actualize his salvation by his own faith and obedience. “How far is this really Gospel?” asks Barth. “How far is it any more than a new law?… How far in the usage of Bultmann can the pro nobis (for us) mean anything more than that the kerygma applies to us, that it is significant for us, that it is accepted by us as the law of our decision, that it is to be realized in the act of our faith, in the imitatio Christi?” (ibid., p. 19). In short, man not only controls his theology; he is its primary subject.

The true Gospel, however, is very different. God controls it. God is its subject. The story is his, the work, the power, and the glory. To put man in the center does not just pervert the Gospel, it displaces it. It makes it impossible. It substitutes a human word which is no less illusory in content than fictional in form. It implies reversion from Gospel to myth.

Further points of detail might be raised. Can the Gospel, for example, really be proclaimed in any other form than that which it has been given? Bultmann is no good advertisement here, as Barth dryly comments (ibid., p. 34). Such matters, however, are derivative. We cannot follow Bultmann because the presupposition of his demythologizing is a true and devastating mythologization. For all his good intentions and appearances, Bultmann accomplishes nothing for faith, understanding, preaching, or salvation. He finally leaves us neither with God nor Christ, neither with kerygma nor faith, neither with true death to sin nor true resurrection to life, but only with man in the existential message and moment of assumed knowledge and self-centered conversion. On what grounds and to what end should we follow?

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.

It is always a risk to divine the future, but perhaps it is not foolhardy to say that theological controversy in the next quarter century will be centered in the questions put by existentialism. It is true that denominational lines still persist and their respective theologies will continue to occupy the attention of scholars. It is also true that the ecumenical movement will continue to grow and discussions of faith, order, life, and work will press for a hearing. But the real stage of theological controversy must necessarily be where the great battle of our entire age is being fought. The locus of this critical struggle may be found where the creative minds of our day are shaping the sounds, the colors, the forms of the brave new world that is coming to birth.

The plays of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Jean Paul Sartre, the poetry of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, the painting of Picasso, Bracque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, the music of Bartok, Milhaud, Hindemith, the architecture of Saarinen, Rudolph, Le Corbusier—these are some of the forces that have been shaping the structure of the world in which we live. These in turn have been shaped by nineteenth century iconoclastic thinkers like Sören Kierkegaard, Fedor Dostoevski, and Franz Kafka. If we are to understand the times in which we live, we must come to know what these names mean and what has been said about them, otherwise we will be shouting against the wind and our preaching will be what Dean Inge said it is: “Merely spouting water over a host of narrow-necked bottles.”

Theology properly speaking is not an aspect of culture, but culture is the product of basic theological underpinnings. Nevertheless, there are certain theological movements which follow the pendulum swing of history, and in this sense we may say that the theology of Kierkegaard, Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich, and Niebuhr is largely the existentialist reaction to the liberalism of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack.

Liberalism, grounded in the work of Lessing, is an idealist philosophy with a historical method for ascertaining truth. Lessing said two things: 1. revelation is the education of the human race, and therefore truth is to be found by studying the historical relations of things; and 2. no historical event can be the basis of eternal happiness, and therefore one must find truth in a rational, idealist philosophical system. Thus it happened that, in the liberal line of theology that followed, historicism, fully appreciating the relativities of history, was coupled with a naïve faith in the inevitability of social progress as well as the optimism of individual moral perfectability. Moralism found expression both in the search for a genuine experience of personal piety and in the social gospel.

The liberals busied themselves with the search for the real Jesus in an attempt to find what is essential to Christianity so that they might attach themselves to this historical Lord and bask in his moral influence. Harnack concluded that the essence of Christianity is the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the kingdom of Christ as a community of love. Clearly the Bible was not understood as the gift of God in which he declares news of salvation through his Son. Rather the Bible was seen as an achievement of human history. But the quest of the historical Jesus ended in failure. By 1901 Schweitzer was ready to admit that the historical Jesus is forever lost and that all we can say about him is that he was a mistaken apocalyptic visionary.

LIBERALISM WEDS EXISTENTIALISM

Liberalism is dead today because it had within it the seeds of its own decay. When the quest of the real Jesus failed we might have expected the liberals to abandon their historical methodology, but this did not occur and historicism still dominates the modern mood. The side of liberalism which did collapse, however, was its cavalier optimism, exposed as it was by the two wars and the great depression. But out of its shallow grave arose a new spirit for our age. This is the principality or power which we call existentialism. The term is vague and almost indefinable. As diverse views as those of Eastern Orthodox Nikolai Berdyaev, Roman Catholic Gabriel Marcel, Swiss Reformed Karl Barth, Lutheran Rudolf Bultmann, Atheist Jean Paul Sartre, Jew Martin Buber, and non-Christian Martin Heidegger have all been jammed into the same theological closet.

The broadest definition of existentialism is that it is a realist reaction against the shallow optimism and easy rationalism of the nineteenth century liberals. But this does not say enough. Actually the existentialist spirit, in spite of its sophistication, is naïvely realist and therefore historicist. In that it adheres to historical methodology, one would not be wrong to say that existentialism is still fundamentally liberal, howbeit a chastened form of liberalism. It follows the old nominalist tradition in saying that existence is prior to essence. Indeed all reality is in historical experience. Essences are only abstract names. There is no real existence beyond history, neither in an ideal or mystic sense above history nor in an eschatological sense in future at the end of history.

This being the pervading spirit of our age it becomes necessary for us, says Bultmann, to interpret the Christian message in terms which are relevant. This he ventures to do in his realized eschatology which makes both forgiveness and judgment present realities. He applies all the resources of his abundant genius to manipulate the tools of form criticism to demythologize the New Testament so as to strip away irrelevant offense. All pre-scientific myths, he says, must be cut away, such as the Jewish myth of an apocalyptic cataclysm, the gnostic myth of the pre-existent Lord, the futurist myths of heaven and hell, the historical myths of angels, demons, miracles, virgin birth, empty tomb, and resurrection. What is left is the Cross and the kerygma of justification by grace through faith.

REDEFINING BASIC DOCTRINES

A great amount of energy and erudition has been expended by the existentialists on the subject of sin. Even the term original sin is accepted, but it is redefined to mean the limitation of human existence. Man finds himself bound by the all-pervasiveness of death, guilt, and meaninglessness. Sin does not enter through a fall in a mythical garden of Eden. Sin posits itself. Man is thrust into an existence in which he suffers a desperate calamity. He is inextricably the product of his past, yet he must accept full responsibility for himself as he is and not shift blame to either heredity or environment. He needs freedom from the past for his future within history. This he can find in the decision for Christ which brings him a believing self-understanding, a release from the powers of this world for service of that Power which man cannot control. Redemption is not through the objective work of a personal Lord but through the human decision made possible by the event of God’s grace in Christ. In this moment we stand before God and accept our acceptance, thus freeing us from the dead past for a living future in history.

How does existentialist theology affect some of the historic doctrines such as Christology, Resurrection, the Church, the Word?

1. According to Bultmann the historical Jesus is the Christ, but not in the traditional sense as the personal Lord whose body was raised from the tomb. Rather Jesus is the occasion for the encounter between the Cross and the sinner who makes the decision for the Ultimate. Apart from this encounter there is no more significance to Jesus than any other martyr in history. Really it is not the Jesus of history that concerns the existentialist theologians, but the revelation we meet in the moment of decision.

2. Resurrection is redefined to mean not a future life in an incorruptible body in a new heaven or eternal age, but a regenerate life here and now free from the frustration of death. Although death is inevitable we do not fear it because we accept it. As Niebuhr says: “Because of original sin man’s destiny is to seek after an impossible victory and adjust himself to an inevitable defeat.” Redemption is not a future victory. It is a present adjustment.

3. The concept of the Church is quite radically changed by the existentialists because of their category of Inwardness or Subjectivity. This subjectivism is not the romantic subjectivity of the liberals which was centered in a feeling of dependence upon God. Such a feeling would make God a projection of the human heart. Existentialists would consider this the idolatry of using God as a disposable object, and God is never an object. Always he is Subject; always Thou, never It. The divine Thou can never be manipulated. He can only be spoken to in answer to his call. The call comes to me inwardly, not objectively or mechanically or casually. God always treats me as subject too and never as an object. Hence the relation between man and God is neither a cognitive one which can be apprehended by means of a set of propositions nor an emotional one which can be grasped by a genuine feeling. The relationship is rather one of speaking and responding to God’s Word, hence it is one of decision. But no man can make this decision for another. Each must do his own believing just as he must do his own dying. The result of this doctrine, which is a one-sided truth, is an extreme individualism with no proper place for the sacramental community of the Church. Indeed for most existentialists the Church, as a visible structure, only gets in the way of the decisive conversation between the I and the Thou. There seems to be no place for the Church as the body of Christ, as Paul teaches, the living, historically continuous organism with prophets, apostles, martyrs, and saints in personal communion with the risen Jesus as head and Lord.

4. The same observation applies to the relation between the living Word and Scripture. The existentialists find the written Word to be a troublesome obstacle in the way of their decisive moment. How can an I meet a Thou if he has the written Word in between? The existentialists take the same offense in the written Word that the Jews took in Jesus: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” So they look at the written Word and say: “Is not this document of human hands, whose historical antecedents we know?” As a result the living Word is separated from the written Word and we are left without a rule or norm of authority. This is a new subjectivism, voluntaristic rather than intellectual or emotive, but just as earthbound as either rationalism or pietism. Moreover, as we might expect, the sacraments are embarrassing to Bultmann and the existentialists because in their concern to worship the hidden God they find the sacraments too terribly visible. The existentialists separate what they call Christ from Jesus, from the Church, from Scripture, and from the sacraments.

RELEVANCE VERSUS CONFORMITY

Is there anything good that can come from existentialism? We must go back to Sören Kierkegaard for answer. It is salutary that we should avoid alliance with rational systems whether of Aquinas or Hegel. Quoting Shakespeare, Kierkegaard said it is better to be well hanged than ill wed. But we may extend this to include the liaison with existentialism too. In our well-meaning concern to make the Gospel relevant, we must be careful not to identify the Gospel with any of the periods of the historical pendulum.

Kierkegaard was a much needed theological gadfly. It was good for him to awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers and ask us what it means to be a Christian. The resulting new emphasis upon inwardness and the hidden God is also helpful so long as we keep it free of subjective voluntarism, and so long as we recognize that the hidden God is only the God of wrath whom the Jews and the muslims also have. Nor does the hiddenness of God preclude his general revelation in nature, history, and conscience. We are Christians and our God is the revealed God, our Lord Jesus Christ, the babe in the manger and the man on the Cross. The realistic correction of liberalism’s optimism and moralism has certainly proved acceptable. It is good for the Church to be reminded that she is still in this world and she may indeed get in the way between man and God. The Church like the Christian man is simul Justus et peccator. One of the most alarming but nevertheless true judgments is that the world often articulates the kerygma more effectively than the Church as in the case of Sartre’s play The Respectful Prostitute. This is the world’s way of telling the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. It is time the Church learns to speak her message in the clear idiom of our day lest by default we give the message to the world and allow it to be perverted by the silky deception of Satan.

Dare We Follow Bultmann?

“Germany is just as nearly ‘Bultmannian’ today as it was ‘Barthian’ a generation ago, ‘Ritschlian’ half a century or more ago, and ‘Hegelian’ still earlier; and Bultmann’s works and ideas have become Germany’s dominant theological export throughout the world.” That is the verdict of Dr. James M. Robinson, in A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (1959). And Dr. Nels F. S. Ferré, reviewing Dr. Karl Barth’s The Humanity of God (1960), remarks that “for the alert the age of so-called ‘Neo-orthodoxy’ is over” (Interpretation, Oct. 1960, p. 455).

In this issue CHRISTIANITY TODAY publishes the first of an important series of essays on the question: “Dare We Follow Bultmann?” The articles will appear at intervals during the remaining months of 1961, and will be contributed by outstanding evangelical scholars in Europe and America.

The series is prefaced in a general way by the preceding article, “Existentialism and the Christian Faith,” by Dr. Robert P. Roth, Professor of New Testament Theology in the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, South Carolina.

The first essay in the series also appears in this issue (turn the page), by Dr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, a translator of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and a constructive critic of Barth’s theology from an evangelical perspective. Bromiley’s specific assignment was to summarize Barth’s criticisms of Bultmann.

The next essay in the series, scheduled in an early issue, is by Dr. Herman Ridderbos, Professor of New Testament in the University of Kampen, The Netherlands.

The third essay will be from the pen of Dr. Johannes Schneider, Professor of New Testament in Humboldt University, East Berlin, East Germany. Other essays by European and American scholars will follow.

ED.

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.

It was a little old lady who said it (and sometimes little old ladies are better to have around than children when you are looking for something to the point), but it was a little old lady who said, “Sometimes, you know I just don’t understand God.” Me too! It’s pretty hard to say ahead of time just exactly how things are going to turn out. And if you will think along such lines for a little while, let your mind run from Amos to Bultmann—the whole gamut from A to B.

What ever happened to that wonderful preaching of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.? There can be no argument that we have in Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah four of the greatest preachers that ever lived. And the end product of all their preaching, by the success standards of our own day, was nothing but failure. They came to preach the truth of God to the existential situation, they preached with skill and with a desperate zeal, and the end of the matter was that the people were not converted and the nations north and south were not saved, and about the only thing left was gruesome suffering all around. Did they need instruction in methodology? Did Hosea fail somehow to identify? Was there something wrong with interpersonal relationships? Did they need group dynamics? (What has happened to that term?) Was it a failure of mimeograph machine? Maybe they should have organized. God moves in mysterious ways, so there came a root out of a dry ground. It was not quite the way we would have figured it.

It is almost impossible to open up a discussion with lay people on the subject of religion without the moot question of predestination coming out in the first two or three questions. This is as true of college and university students as it is of the after-meeting inquirers in the local church. “What about predestination?” they say. “What about it?” you counter. “Well, if God does everything, every little thing, do we have to do anything, does it matter what we do, are we only machines?” the questions tumble out. It seems pretty difficult so long as you keep the question an academic discussion to evade the conclusions they are pressing. The only trouble is that predestination works its way out a different way. Paul was a predestinarian thinker and tried endlessly to make everything different. Think about the Puritans, the Beggars, the Covenanters, the Huguenots; believing as they did surely that God is absolutely sovereign in the small things as in the large, that times are always in God’s hands, that no man comes to Christ except the Father draw him, they nevertheless gave themselves up to change people and to change events. Says Fairbairn in The Cambridge Modern History and very bluntly, “Calvin saved Europe.” Why work so hard at things when God does it all? Somehow as the discussion moves into action, true Calvinism remains predestinarian and at the same time bears no relationship to Kismet or Fate. It’s not what one would expect, but there it is.

There are other things which never cease to give me wonder, just little things which are full of suggestion. Why for example do the same people like new versions and old liturgies? They read Phillips, but they announce a Gregorian chant and recite a prayer from an ancient prayer book, and all in one service and all quite proudly from all appearance. Conversely, why do the exponents of the King James Version keep feeding us the modern jump tunes in the same service? Whatever they may think is especially pious about reading the KJV they immediately cancel out by getting me to sing (always under the leadership of the O-so-personable song leader) “I’ve got the peace that passeth understanding down in my heart, down in my heart.…” ad nauseam. How can anyone sing about “the peace that passeth understanding” to that kind of tune? Apparently because he has never really experienced it.

Take time to ponder the conservative liberals and the liberal conservatives. Have you ever been abashed and astounded to find a liberal completely illiberal especially in an argument with a man he thinks is a conservative. He acts as if he had forgotten all about loving the unlovely, that agape core to his theology. And it isn’t just a question of his attitude, it is also a question of his ignorance. In Wilbur Smith’s Wherefore Stand (and one would expect this from a man of his wide reading), every liberal is given his due. In books from liberal authors I search in vain for recognition of, understanding of, or plain dealing with the whole tradition from Hodge to Henry. If there is an answer to James Orr’s Problem of Old Testament History or Oswald Allis on the unity of Isaiah, I haven’t found it yet; but I have found sneers, jeers, and catcalls. Or try the conservative arguments proving that Song of Solomon is an allegory and that Jonah is sober history, and then try the liberal arguments proving that Song of Solomon is to be taken at its face but that Jonah is an allegory. Now reverse the arguments and it looks as if you have been dealing with movable parts, cut to fit any problem.

If this weren’t such a rainy, slushy, dull day, I could do better, but just as a parting shot, let me ask this: Is there anyone in the field today who quotes Scripture more than Bultmann does and in suspiciously proof-text fashion on occasion too? When he gets us finally to his basic kerygma, when all the demythologizing is over, will that kerygma be, just maybe, just possibly, just perhaps, a CREED?

The Church And Social Action

Politics and Evangelism, by Philippe Maury (Doubleday, 1960, 120 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Edward L. R. Elson, Minister, National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C.

Here is a book which ought to be read by every social action “expert” and by all who are unhappy over the absolutisms of the social action “cults.” Philippe Maury, French Protestant layman, now General Secretary of the World Christian movement, stakes down his case on the premise that both evangelism and political action, for the Christian, arise from the Word of God and the eternal gospel of Christ. “For the Church,” says Maury, “the meaning of history is the history of salvation, and no historical event can be understood outside this perspective, and especially that of the coming kingdom of God.”

Maury contends that the Church can and must speak, but must be certain that it is the Word of God which is spoken. The Church should be courageous but also prudent. It should always be cause for alarm when there is not a large concensus when the Church is disposed to speak. Prudence is also a form of courage, and to be silent when there is not a large concensus is more eloquent than speech. It must never be forgotten that the Church speaks by simply being the Church. Her very existence has a prophetic meaning, a missionary dimension.” Political, economic, and social declarations are derivatives; they are not the Gospel nor are they necessarily prophetic. The Church is a divine institution, but the Church is not God. To her has been committed one specialty—the proclamation of the gospel of redemptive love made known in time for all time by Christ Jesus our Lord.

EDWARD L. R. ELSON

New Phase Of Old Quest

Jesus of Nazareth, by Günther Bornkamm (Harper, 1960, 239 pp., $4), is reviewed by Everett F. Harrison, Professor of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary.

For many years the so-called quest of the historical Jesus has challenged German scholarship. Schweitzer made him out to be an apocalyptic dreamer. Bultmann retained the eschatological emphasis but stressed also the ethical imperative in Jesus’ teaching. In his attitude toward the possibility of precise knowledge concerning our Lord’s person and ministry, Bultmann was highly skeptical on the ground that we depend for our knowledge upon the testimony of the early Church, which has pictured Jesus in the light of her own situation rather than as he was.

Bultmann’s disciples have been somewhat disturbed that he held so lightly the importance of establishing a solid connection between the kerygma and the historical Jesus. Now, 30 years after the appearance of Bultmann’s Jesus, one of his circle has written on the same theme and opened a new phase of the old quest. Bornkamm is obviously in debt to Bultmann for his basic approach, which is theological and existential rather than historical in the usual sense of the word. He frequently sets aside the testimony of an Evangelist on the ground that it has been shaped or distorted by the early Church and therefore does not portray what Jesus said or did with reliability. “The extent to which the Church’s faith and theology have formed and added to the tradition of the history of Jesus appears most clearly in the legends and in a story’s legendary embellishments, as these increase from one evangelist to another” (p. 19).

What, then, it may be asked, is new in this presentation as opposed to Bultmann’s? One thing is the concern for grappling with the historical data instead of dismissing such data. Consequently there is a chapter on “Period and Environment” as well as one on “Discipleship” and another on “Jesus’ Journey to Jerusalem.” But the main thrust is to deal with Jesus’ teaching and seek for indications of the actual man embedded there. Bornkamm finds a solid bit of historical reality in the sovereignty and independence with which Jesus deals with persons and situations, as for instance his frequently acting contrary to people’s expectations and hopes (pp. 58–59).

The author comes to grips with the tension between the future hope of the kingdom of God and its present reality in the teaching of Jesus. Dismissing several attempts to handle this, including realized eschatology, he adopts something which has affinity with the latter viewpoint. “The future of God is salvation to the man who apprehends the present as God’s present, and as the hour of salvation. The future of God is judgment for the man who does not accept the ‘now’ of God but clings to his own present, his own past and also to his own dreams of the future” (p. 93). Jesus came to a people who had no present, who were preoccupied either with their traditions which recalled the past or their apocalyptic hopes for the future. “To make the reality of God present: this is the essential mystery of Jesus” (p. 62).

Bornkamm differs from Bultmann in placing the transition of the aeons between John the Baptist and Jesus rather then between Jesus and Paul. “The way to Christ and into the kingdom of God did not merely lead at one time—in a moment of past history—through John the Baptist, but it leads once and for all only along that path of repentance shown by him. Faith in Jesus Christ is only there where the believer, for himself and within himself, lets the shift of the aeons take place in his own life” (p. 51).

Bornkamm sweeps away the Messianic titles of our Lord as imposed on him by the early Church. In their stead he puts his own reconstruction, “that the Messianic character of his being is contained in his words and deeds and in the unmediatedness of his historical appearance” (p. 178). No answer is given to the ultimate question, Who is Jesus of Nazareth? None is attempted.

EVERETT F. HARRISON

One-Worldism

In Place of Folly, by Norman Cousins (Harper, 1961, 224 pp., $3), is reviewed by Dr. Howard E. Mather, Minister, First Presbyterian Church, Amenia, N. Y.

The publishers assert, “Now Norman Cousins brings together in a single book the essential facts concerning the present danger …;” and they call attention to his continuous writing in advocacy of a “sane nuclear policy” since 1949. That is exactly what this book is: A compendium of all Cousins’ previous cliches in advocacy of “one world government” and the bromides of the pseudo-pacifists who “even in self defense, will not engage in a war that would destroy the world” but would use the force of federal world government, “from which no state could withdraw or be expelled,” to coerce the nations.

The author’s chapters on the horrors of nuclear, biological and germ warfare are considered by many scientists in the “know” as exaggerations. The summary to every chapter is the same: The answer to all our racial and cultural and ideological problems, is federal world government. That powerful and unscrupulous forces might and would sieze tyrannical dictatorship of such a government never seems to occur to the proponents of “the human commonwealth of the whole.” Cousins’ “check list of enemies” includes the selfish and ignorant who do not go along with his “one world” ideology; the politicians and statesmen who do not accept his philosophy of “freedom under world law”; and the clergymen who interpret their religious obligations and responsibilities as spiritual rather than political.

The one supreme and controlling thought that is missing in this pessimistic evaluation of the world order is that of God who “holds the whole round world in His hands.”

HOWARD E. MATHER

Values Underscored

Scientism and Values, edited by Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins (D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960, 270 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by Arthur F. Holmes, Associate Professor of Bible and Philosophy, Wheaton College (Illinois).

The advent of the nuclear age brought to focus perhaps the keenest problem posed by modern science. Industrialization, technological advance, organization man, and the threat of human annihilation have stressed anew the urgency of conserving the uniqueness of man and his values in a scientific age. A respectable body of literature on the subject is rapidly accumulating, the present volume being one of the most significant.

Two philosophers, four sociologists, two literary figures, an economist, an historian, a political scientist, and a biologist present a colloquium on the subject. In particular they attack the “unity of science” thesis that the study of man can be conducted with the same methods, presuppositions, and supposed objectivity as are employed in the physical sciences. The term “scientism” is used to denote such a fallacy. It does not connote any antiscientific attitude; rather it underscores the uniqueness of man, the value-centric predicament of the investigator, and the creativity of the free human spirit. It exposes the over-simplified generalizations of those who treat human values as purely natural phenomena.

The criticism and evidence presented provide both a cogent case and refreshing perspectives. The reviewer gains the impression, however, that insofar as the volume poses a constructive view it is closer to a Neo-Kantian Kulturphilosophie than to a distinctly theistic view of man and his values.

ARTHUR F. HOLMES

Pacifism Defended

Christian Attitudes to War and Peace, by Roland Bainton (Abingdon, 1960, 299 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by W. Stanford Reid, Associate Professor of History, McGill University, Montreal.

The title of this work adequately explains its purpose. It provides an historical exposition of various Christian views on war including those of both Old and New Testaments. Professor Bainton holds that Christians have accepted one of three views: the just war, the crusade, and pacifism. He then applies these three categories throughout history although, from the reviewer’s point of view, not always with adequate authority.

As one might expect, the work mainly sets forth the claims of pacifism. Professor Bainton believes that now if ever, pacifism must establish itself, but this he feels will be possible only if a world government arises. His plea to Christians to push for nonresistance in an atomic age has much on its side. On the other hand it seems clear from the Scriptures that because of sin, wars will continue to the end. Perhaps the desire for peace through world government will help bring in the kingdom of antichrist. This book needs much careful study in order that nonpacifists may re-evaluate their position.

W. STANFORD REID

Ministry For The Times

Making the Ministry Relevant, ed. by Hans Hofman (Scribner’s, 1960, 169 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Andrew W. Blackwood, professor emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Harvard’s able young director of the University “Project on Religion and Health” has done well his work as editor. After his own able Introduction, setting forth the difficulties and the outlook, Paul Tillich stresses the difficulty of appealing to our secular age, and the call for vastly more of “the vertical dimension.” To me this is the ablest of all the provocative chapters. Reinhold Niebuhr stresses things ethical. Other experts deal with Depth Psychology, Psychiatry, Pastoral Counseling (Seward Hiltner), and “Theological Education after Ordination.” This last, by Reuel Howe, a specialist on Pastoral Studies, opens up a field of deep concern.

While not easy to read, all of these chapters should prove rewarding. To us of the older orthodoxy they show that we have much to learn from experts with different ideologies. Some day, we hope, such a symposium will include a chapter on making the ministry relevant by basing everything on the Bible.

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD

Reformed Point Of View

The Way of Salvation, by Gordon H. Girod (Baker Book House, 1960, 157 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by John R. Richardson, Minister, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia.

One of the best books to appear in 1958 was Girod’s The Deeper Faith. It exhibited remarkable theological insight into the Reformed faith. Two years later Dr. Girod contributes another outstanding work pertaining to salvation from the Reformed point of view. The ten chapters deal with the historic Ordo Salutis or the Way of Salvation.

Beginning with the sovereignty of God, the author continues with logical progression of thought till he comes to the subject of glorification which he calls “complete redemption.” God is sovereign but he is specifically sovereign in the area of the salvation of man. With this biblical presupposition, the author proceeds step by step in the explanation of the content of Christian salvation. A cogent argument is presented to show that man is powerless to bring about his own salvation from death unto life, and that he is saved by Grace alone.

Without apology the author insists that election is the sine qua non of salvation. In the exposition of Election, he follows the Canons of Dort. Election is shown to be a matter of practical importance. The author observes, “Only when you realize that you owe God everything will you give to Him the glory. Then you will honor Him as we all should. Then you will accord to God all the glory in your salvation.”

The engaging synopses of the great truths pertaining to our Christian salvation set forth in this volume constitute some of the finest theological and homiletical literature that has come from the press in a long time. The living convictions offered here with such marked simplicity and sound logic should be of tremendous value in today’s life. Laymen seeking to understand the content of the Reformed faith will be enlightened by this work and stimulated to further study in this sphere of Christian theology. Ministers will discover this work to be fresh and moving.

JOHN R. RICHARDSON

History Of Translations

The English Bible, by F. F. Bruce (Oxford, 1961, 234 pp., $4), is reviewed by Merrill C. Tenney, Dean of the Graduate School, Wheaton College (Illinois).

With deft hand and discerning analysis, Professor Bruce has traced the long and complicated history of the English Bible from the first Anglo-Saxon interlinear paraphrases of the Latin Vulgate to the New English Bible which has not yet been released for publication. He has covered adequately the early translations of Tyndale, Rogers, Coverdale, and the Geneva Bible which were the immediate ancestors of the familiar and currently dominant King James Version. The subsequent versions produced by committees, such as the Revised, American Standard, and Revised Standard Versions, and the private translations like those of Moffatt and Williams are discussed at some length. Two chapters on Roman Catholic versions complete the account.

For evangelical Christians the question of translation is singularly important, because the faith of the individual believer rests ultimately on his personal comprehension of the Word of God rather than in ecclesiastical traditions and dogma. Since he is not equipped to read Hebrew and Greek, he is dependent on the versions made for him by scholars. In the multiplicity of these there may be safety, for each will supplement or correct the deficiencies of the other, but the reader may be perplexed by the variety and occasional contradictions that he finds in their renderings.

Dr. Bruce’s excellent review of the history of these translations sets them in their historical perspective, and evaluates them with moderation and keen insight for accuracy, style, and usefulness. Those who have never undertaken to translate the Scriptures, and who consequently have no practical understanding of the difficulties entailed, can profit greatly from the account of the early translators. They risked their lives to give the Bible to the people in their own tongue. Later scholars in more peaceful times struggled with lexical and hermeneutic problems to make the meaning of the first century intelligible to the present day.

One or two translations are not mentioned at all, such as Ballantine’s and Helen J. Montgomery’s. Since these were American products, with rather limited circulation, they may not have been considered important enough to mention. The book is scholarly but not tedious, critical but fair and dispassionate, and occasionally lightened by flashes of humor. The layman will find it informative and enjoyable reading, and the scholar will gain from it new material for reflective thought.

MERRILL C. TENNEY

Steward Of Truth

Expounding God’s Word, by Alan M. Stibbs (Inter-Varsity, 1960, 112 pp., 4s.), is reviewed by Herbert M. Carson, Vicar of St. Paul’s, Cambridge.

This is the third volume of a trilogy, the earlier volumes being Understanding God’s Word and Obeying God’s Word. In the latest book we move from exegesis, with which the author dealt earlier, to exposition; but his contention links the two together, for any exposition worthy of the name is rooted in a faithful exegesis. Thus in expounding, the preacher is endeavoring to declare and apply to his hearers the meaning of the Word before them.

There are two ways of teaching men how to preach, namely, by giving them general principles and by showing them illustrations of these principles. This is the method adopted here. After his valuable emphasis on the importance of faithful exposition, in which the preacher is simply the steward put in trust with the truth of God, he gives illustrative expository outlines dealing with varied types of scriptural exposition. Beginning with six outlines on John 2:1–11, with different audiences in view, he goes on to deal with expounding narrative short statements and longer passages.

This is a valuable book for men in training for the ministry, and for lay preachers. Indeed, it may be that some who are already in the ministry and who are retracing their steps from the barren cul-de-sac of what the author calls “imposition,” rather than exposition, may find here an introduction to a truly expository ministry.

H. M. CARSON

Man Of God

Eivend Berggrav: God’s Man of Suspense, by Alex Johnson (Augsburg, 1960, 220 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by E. E. Ryden, Editor of The Lutheran Companion.

Most of us know something about the heroic role that Eivend Berggrav, Bishop of Oslo, played in the resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War II, but we have little knowledge of the formative years of this man and of the spiritual struggles that helped mould a man of God who in the day of crisis stood firm as a rock.

It is this period in the life of Bishop Berggrav that forms the most illuminating portion of Alex Johnson’s fascinating book, the English translation of which has been done in unusually lucid style by Kjell Jordheim, a Wisconsin pastor.

After eleven long years of doubt, during which he refrained from holy communion, it was the Lord’s Supper itself that furnished the final solution to the many questions that troubled the future bishop’s soul. Says the biographer, “When Berggrav came to realize that Christ was Christ, unique in Himself, and that He was, if not the Son of God, nevertheless the one in whom God was and worked, then he could refrain no longer from the sacrament. For Christ Himself had said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ Berggrav had to obey.”

“The whole maturing process,” the author goes on to say, “had been a gradual resolving of the tensions within him. All the sentiments, thoughts, discussions and experiences had unconsciously united into something organic within him, so that he did not sense his faith until it had become a reality. Thus it seemed clear to him that faith is neither thought, nor emotions, nor intellect, nor sentiment, but activity—a function within the soul, accomplished not by oneself but by God.”

After light had dawned on his own soul, Berggrav became particularly helpful to those who were “searching.” However, he could never quite forget that he himself had doubted so long, and that the “eager ones” had never been able to help him. He never, therefore, tried to “push others into faith. He drew them—slowly.”

How he finally became a country parson, then a bishop, and finally a spiritual leader to all of Norway during the dark days of World War II forms an intriguing story that makes for fascinating and profitable reading.

E. E. RYDEN

Soul Winning

You Can Win Souls, by C. E. Autrey (Broadman, 1961, 160 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by Faris D. Whitesell, Professor of Practical Theology, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

A deeply compassionate spirit of evangelism pulsates through this book on personal evangelism written by the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board’s director of evangelism. The reader can easily see why Dr. Autrey holds his present position and why Southern Baptists are spear-heading the Protestant thrust to evangelize America.

In thirteen chapters the author discusses the urgency for personal evangelism, qualifications and equipment of the soul-winner, approach and techniques, and how to deal with the anxious, the indifferent, the Jews, Roman Catholics, Spiritists, doubters, those with false hopes and the fearful.

While the book is orthodox, practical, clear and inspiring, yet it adds little to older books on this subject by such men as Torrey, Evans, Sellers, Scarborough and Wilson. The best chapter is that which deals with the Jews. There is need for a book on personal evangelism combining all the good and true in the older writers with the new insights and techniques of psychology, psychiatry, personality research, and social science.

FARIS D. WHITESELL

Book Briefs

When We Worship, by Robert T. Fauth (Christian Education Press, 1961, 88 pp., $1.50). A guide to effective worship.

Prayers for All Occasions (Baker, 1960, 80 pp., $1.95). Sixty-six evangelical leaders offer guidance in public prayer.

The Patience of Hope, by Spiros Zodhiates (Eerdmans, 1960, 299 pp., $4). Third in a stimulating and searching study of the Book of James.

Selections from Early Christian Writers, by Henry Melvill Gwatkin (Revell, 1961, 196 pp., $3). A Cambridge historian’s compilation of Christian writings (with original text) to the time of Constantine. Happy choice for a reprint.

The Eucharistic Memorial, by Max Thurian (John Knox, 1961, 117 pp., $1.75). An essay on “liturgical theology.” Seventh book in a series of Ecumenical Studies in Worship.

This Faith We Live By, by James H. Jauncey (Zondervan, 1961, 157 pp., $2.50). Practical insights into the real meaning of Christian living. Inspirational without being sentimental.

Introduction to Dogmatic Theology, by E. A. Litton (James Clarke, 1960, 608 pp., 27s. 6d). A new edition of a valuable and scholarly survey of Systematic Theology by a last-century Anglican evangelical.

“When the religious history of the twentieth century is written, perhaps one of the events of lasting importance will prove to have been the intervention of the Roman Catholic bishops in Puerto Rican politics.”

So says Dr. Val Clear, who has prepared forCHRISTIANITY TODAY the following interpretative report on Church-State tensions in Puerto Rico with special attention to the now-famous pastoral letters issued by Roman Catholic bishops prior to last November’s election. Dr. Clear is chairman of the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Anderson College, Anderson, Indiana, on sabbatical leave for 1960–61. He is currently teaching at El Seminario Evangélico de Puerto Rico and also serves as planning consultant for the National Council of Churches Division of Home Missions.

The Puerto Rican legislature is investigating alleged irregularities in the 1960 election campaign which saw widely-publicized but unsuccessful intervention by Roman Catholic bishops. Target of the investigation is the Christian Action Party, closely linked with Puerto Rican Catholicism. In mid-January, both legislative houses voted unanimously to unseat two Christian Action Party members. The government is now trying to establish that their candidacies were fraudulently obtained.

[Roman Catholic Bishop James E. McManus of Ponce charged last month that the joint legislative inquiry was an attempt by the Popular Democratic Party of Governor Luis Muñoz Marin to destroy the Christian Action Party, supported by McManus and the island’s two other Roman Catholic bishops.

McManus made his charge in a memorandum to Roger N. Baldwin, adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, who testified at a series of hearings being conducted in connection with the legislative investigation. The bishop questioned the authenticity of witnesses who testified that their names and fingerprints were falsified on registration petitions.

Earlier in the investigation, a Catholic party member of the legislature had issued counter-charges of fraud against the Popular party.

The Catholic party had received an eleventh-hour approval to appear on last November’s ballot after registering 80,000 petitions in three months. In the election it received only 51, 109 votes.]

The reverse-field running of the hierarchy last fall left the Puerto Rican Roman Catholic uncertain as to his soul’s condition from one edition of the paper to the next.

The action of the bishops in the campaign, although crushingly repudiated at the polls, was a warning to the governor that the Roman Catholic hierarchy inintended to oust him.

Clouds had been gathering for some time, portending an ecclesiastical storm.

An agile statistician has pointed out dramatically that if continental United States were as heavily populated as Puerto Rico it could contain every person now living on earth. To tackle this problem of over-population the politically and socially liberal Popular Democratic Party of Governor Luis Muñoz Marin has set up a governmentally sponsored program of birth control. And when the Roman Catholic church sought by legislation to get released time for religious instruction, the government successfully resisted the move. The church subsequently decided to purge the incumbent government, the Popular Democratic Party, which is the unofficial but unmistakable Puerto Rican wing of the Democratic Party of the American mainland.

With the unofficial but obviously indispensable approval of the bishops, a political party was organized to promote “Christian” principles in government. Although it is often referred to as “Catholic Action Party,” its official name is “Christian Action Party.” It is more familiarly known by its initials, “PAC.” By indirection on several occasions the bishops have endorsed the formation of the party, but this approval still remains unofficial.

Three weeks before the election the three Roman Catholic bishops of Puerto Rico (two of them born and reared in American Catholicism) issued a pastoral letter commanded to be read in all churches the following Sunday. It attacked several specific paragraphs in the Democratic platform, but attention in succeeding weeks was to be centered on the objection to the section of the platform which said, “The democratic philosophy of our party implies that only those acts which the general consensus of Puerto Rican opinion considers immoral can be officially prohibited, such as murder, robbery, etc.; but that it is not proper that a government of liberty officially prohibit those acts toward which a considerable part of the population sustains a judgment that they are not immoral.”

This, said the pastoral letter, “is anti-Christian and anti-Catholic and it is based on the modern heresy that the popular will and not the divine law decides what is moral or immoral. This philosophy dispenses with the Ten Commandments of God and permits popular and human judgment to replace them.”

So, the bishops said, aware of their duties, they were obliged to condemn this philosophy and to forbid Catholics to give their votes to such a party. It was not their intention to impose Catholic morals on the government or the citizenry, but merely to tell Catholics that they could not vote for the PPD or any other party with such a philosophy.

The storm which accompanied the first pastoral letter was intense. Without exception all newspapers opposed the bishops editorially. A retired Supreme Court Justice, university professors, mayors—all said the action was not only bad religiously but indefensible politically. The Bar Association had a heated nine-hour session terminating in a 417–188 vote to disapprove the pastoral letters “most energetically.” The general initial reaction appeared to be overwhelming disapproval. Later the support for the letters was organized efficiently and the effect of generations of preconditioning in this Catholic society produced its result.

Confusion was general, however, as to the nature of the prohibition. The first letter forbade any Catholic to vote Democratic. Did this mean it was a sin to vote Democratic? Yes, said Bishop McManus. No, said Archbishop Davis, it is not. Well, said Bishop McManus, it is a sin but without punishment. No, said Cardinal Spellman, it is not a sin to disobey a pastoral letter if no penalty is attached.

To dispel initial confusion the bishops issued a second pastoral letter four days later. It reiterated the position taken in the first but served only to perpetuate the confusion. However, the complete text of the second letter was reproduced in a full-page advertisement one week before the election in such a way as to remove ambiguity. In huge letters the ad was headed, “To Vote for the Popular Party Is a Sin.” The implication was unmistakable. The ad was signed by PAC.

The people of Puerto Rico thought the affair was all over when election results were tallied. Governor Luis Muñoz Marin and the Popular Democratic Party won comfortably by a margin of 200,000, getting 58 per cent of the vote. His party carried the entire senate and practically all town contests.

After the election came revelations of numerous intentional irregularities in the subscriptions to the petition to place PAC on the ballot. The wife of a missionary in El Guacio and other ministers’ wives were included in those who had “signed” the petition, according to the record. But the most glaring falsification was the name of the Rev. Alberto Espada Matta, a Nazarene minister who had been living in New York for two years! Someone had signed Espada’s name in the presence of a court official and had dutifully entered fingerprints as required!

After a brief lull Roman Catholic authorities renewed their campaign against the government. The stinging defeat which the church party suffered, polling only six and a half per cent in a nation which claims to be 85 per cent Catholic, was a clear repudiation of the bishops.

Ecclesiastical business carried each of the bishops from the island for part of the time during and after the election and their inability to confer undoubtedly accounts for some of the confusion. Whatever the cause, Father Thomas Maisonet of the cathedral announced that all who had publicly sinned at this point would have to repent publicly before being served communion. Reporters became specific in their questions: Did this mean that Doña Felisa (popular mayoress of San Juan) would not be served communion? Yes, since she had sinned on TV, radio, and through the press, she would have to repent her sin and recant by TV, radio, and through the press before she could be forgiven and be served communion by any priest. And genuine repentence includes a sincere promise not to do it again, he added.

This aim at the 1964 campaign created a new consternation. Was the battle to continue for four more years? Was the PPD to be under a virtual interdict?

A controversial case was then publicized. Felix Melendez Rosado, who had worked as a diligent Roman Catholic layman, had been a member of the Holy Name Society and of the Legion of Mary, voted for the PPD shortly before he died of a heart attack. The parish priest, said the family, refused him the rites of the church, explaining to them that it was because the deceased had refused to obey the pastoral letters. Conflicting reports absolve the priest on the basis that he had to keep an appointment in the city that afternoon.

Whether the priest did or did not do as accused, it is significant that the public believed the family. The previous month had conditioned the people to expect from their church even such extreme castigation as burial without church rites, the most serious penalty conceivable to a devout Catholic.

A few days later Archbishop Davis, attending a meeting in Chicago, announced that no one would be punished for having disobeyed the pastoral letters. El Imparcial, an afternoon tabloid, hit the streets with red headlines covering half the front Page: “THE CHURCH WILL NOT PUNISH DEMOCRATS.” Political leaders expressed joy that the battle had closed, being carefully neutral about who had won.

It is significant that despite the numerous accusations and demands made by the church throughout the struggle, the PPD has not changed one line of its program or platform. It did not make one concession. It won a clear victory.

Governor Muñoz’ percentage of the vote fell in 1960 from its previous level. How much of the decrease was due to the attack by the church and how much to the population’s growing acceptance of the statehood issue pushed by his main opponent is hard to say. But it is extremely clear that only six and a half per cent of the population thought the church had the best answer to the political needs of the island.

Summer Campus

Fuller Theological Seminary of Pasadena, California, will acquire the Indiana campus of the Winona Lake School of Theology. The campus at Winona Lake will hereafter be the Summer School Division of Fuller Theological Seminary.

The acquisition agreement provides that Dr. John A. Huffman, Winona Lake president, will serve as director of the Summer School Division, whose academic program will now lead to Fuller Theological Seminary degrees. For new students, degree stipulations will include a minimum of one-year in residence at the Pasadena campus.

Winona Lake School of Theology was founded in 1920 by Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, noted British Bible expositor, and it has since served as a summer theological training center for pastors, missionaries, teachers, and Christian workers. It is known for annual “flying seminars” to Bible lands which will be continued, as will the school’s affiliation with the University of London on the external doctorate program.

Fuller Theological Seminary was founded in 1947 by Dr. Charles E. Fuller and won accreditation from the American Association of Theological Schools in little more than 10 years.

The Summer School Division will be staffed by faculty members from both the Pasadena and Winona Lake campuses, as well as from other seminaries. Visiting professors for this summer’s three-term session will include evangelical scholars from Canada, England, and Japan.

Canadian Selection

Dr. Thomas B. McDormand, executive vice president of Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, will become president of Eastern Baptist College, St. Davids, Pennsylvania, and its theological seminary in Philadelphia in September. He is to succeed Dr. Gilbert L. Guffin, who has tendered his resignation to become dean of religious education at Howard College in Birmingham, Alabama.

Korean Inauguration

Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, inaugurated its seventh president last month in Dr. Yyung Kan Koh, M.D. His installation ended six months of student and faculty unrest following violent demonstrations and the resignation of the former president, Dr. George Paik, who now heads Korea’s House of Councillors, the national senate.

Dr. Koh, a Presbyterian elder and physician, brings to the interdenominational university a distinguished record in Korean education. He has served as vice minister of education and president of Kyung Pook University in Taegu.

Stanley High

Stanley High, 65, author of a best-selling biography of Billy Graham and one-time editor of the Christian Herald, died in New York last month.

High was a theological student in his youth, but turned to writing and became famous for articles on religious topics. He was a senior editor of Reader’s Digest at the time of his death.

Following a two-year stint as editor of the Christian Herald (1928–1930), High became a speech writer for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He held that Roosevelt’s early aims were good, but later he broke with the New Deal and became a member of the Presidential campaign staffs of Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 and 1948 and of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952.

A memorial service for High was held in the Norton (Connecticut) Presbyterian Church.

Freedom Awards

Two members of the CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorial staff shared in Freedoms Foundation honors announced last month. The foundation also cited FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for his three-part series on communism which appeared in CHRISTIANITY TODAY last fall.

Hoover was awarded a George Washington honor medal, as was Dr. L. Nelson Bell, Executive Editor, and Dr. James DeForest Murch, Managing Editor.

Dr. Bell was cited for an editorial in the Presbyterian Journal, “Surrender to Fear.” He received a $100 cash award. A limited number of reprints of his prize-winning editorial are still avilable. This was the fifth consecutive year in which he has won a Freedoms award.

Dr. Murch was cited for a series of newspaper columns in the Cincinnati Enquirer, “Churchman Views the Issues.” He also won a similar award for an article, “How High Must We Build the Wall?,” which appeared in Christian Herald magazine in 1958.

People: Words And Events

Deaths:Dr. Emanuel Frederick Poppen, 86, former president of the American Lutheran Church; in Columbus, Ohio … Dr. Reginald Herbert Owen, 73, retired Anglican Archbishop of Wellington and Primate of New Zealand; at Paraparamu, New Zealand … The Right Rev. Norman Spencer Binsted, 70, retired Protestant Episcopal Missionary Bishop of the Philippines, in Hendersonville, North Carolina … Dr. Frederick Keller Stamm, 77, Congregational minister who was a popular radio preacher in the thirties; in Plumsteadville, Pennsylvania … Dr. H. D. A. Major, 89, former principal of Ripon Hall, Oxford, England, and one-time editor of the British Modern Churchman … Metropolitan Makarius, 78, head of the Orthodox Church in Poland; in Odessa.

Elections: As president of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, Dr. Kurt Scharf, East Berliner who will succeed Bishop Otto Dibelius.

Appointments: As commandant of the Army Chaplains School in Fort Slocum, New York, Chaplain (Colonel) Charles E. Brown, Jr.… as executive director of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, Dr. Walter F. Wolbrecht.

A more tragic cleft within Protestantism than that of denominationalism is the “deepening cleavage and complete lack of communication between that segment of American Protestantism which adheres to what one of its intellectual leaders has described as ‘classical orthodoxy’ and, on the other hand, that segment to which most of us belong, which might be described as a more ‘liberal orthodoxy.’ ”

The speaker was Dr. James E. Wagner, president of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and co-president of the merging United Church of Christ; his forum was the February meeting of the General Board of the National Council of Churches in Syracuse, New York; and he had a newsmaking proposition:

“I would like to see the National Council seek to initiate with devout and competent representatives of our avowedly more orthodox brethren a series of quiet, unpublicized, prayerful consultations aimed at restoring confidence and communication between those whose differing from one another is really one of degree of adherence to what all would recognize as the great Christian tradition.”

Stretching to retain for his NCC fellows both liberal and orthodox values, Dr. Wagner asserted, “We believe we are true to the historic Christian faith, but we interpret that faith in the light of the historical circumstances which have marked its development through the centuries.”

He identified the classical orthodox group as being represented “in the better element in such organizations as the National Association of Evangelicals, just as we find ourselves at home in the National Council. The ‘orthodox’ group now has an influential journal, respectable in its literary and intellectual quality [Dr. Wagner did not specify CHRISTIANITY TODAY by name], just as ‘liberal orthodoxy’ has found its voice in The Christian Century. The very effectiveness of these journals and the competent scholarship to be found in both segments of American Protestantism really tend to aid and abet a deepening of the cleavage between the two groups.”

Dr. Wagner told of another concern close to his heart: that NCC pronouncements “be so clearly grounded in the Bible and in biblical faith, so patiently interspersed with pertinent Bible references” to make evident to all that “we in the National Council family are no less committed to the Scriptures as our ultimate authority in faith and practice than are our brothers and sisters who tend to claim that they and they alone are ‘true to the Bible.’ ”

In a subsequent interview with this magazine, Dr. Wagner indicated his growing concern that something be done about the “spectacle” before the nonbelieving public of responsible Christian leaders from the “two major segments of denominational Protestantism” at times “sniping at each other” and generally “holding aloof” from each other. He feels that there is common ground between “classical orthodoxy” and “liberal orthodoxy,” that their differences are intellectual (matters of doctrine and biblical interpretation) and not spiritual. “We both trust the same Saviour. We both call Jesus Lord.”

Dr. Wagner confessed a certain wariness about articles in liberal periodicals where the “commitment” of the author “to Christ as Saviour and Lord” is in question. Professing to be “no extreme liberal,” he mused over his own background in the conservative Churches of God in North America, which emerged out of a revival movement among Pennsylvania Germans in 1825. Among this group, Dr. Wagner preached his first sermon at the age of 16, a year after making his profession of faith in an interdenominational evangelistic meeting.

Having maintained friendships from his more conservative days, Dr. Wagner seems nothing if not deeply sincere in his desire for quiet consultations across theological lines. Though a member of NCC’s General Board since its establishment and a past vice-president, he asserts that his remarks were made entirely on his own initiative and without previous planning with NCC leadership. Membership reaction was very favorable, he reports, and he is ready to push the matter if desirable, from his new position as chairman of the General Constituent Membership Committee. He believes the substance of his remarks should be a “major portion” of NCC concern in its second decade of existence.

As to the nature of the proposed consultations, Dr. Wagner denies he is thinking along ecclesiastical lines (in quest of church mergers) but rather declares his concern to be “in terms of theology and mission,” the latter being defined as “outreach for the unsaved here and abroad.” “My concern is not in any sense with any possible absorption of NAE or any other organization by NCC.”

General Board Pronouncements

Here are actions taken at last month’s meeting in Syracuse of the General Board of the National Council of Churches:

• Use of artificial birth control methods was approved as morally acceptable for planned parenthood. The board’s pronouncement on “Responsible Parenthood” was approved by a vote of 83 to 0, with Orthodox delegates abstaining because their communions recognize sexual abstinence as the only method of limiting families. Although the vote was technically unanimous, the pronouncement had the recorded support of only a third of the board’s 250 members, only about 115 of whom turned up for the Syracuse meeting (many were absent because of the airlines’ strike). The pronouncement opposed legal prohibitions against dissemination of birth control information. Abortion was condemned, except when the mother’s health is endangered.

• An advisory was prepared for local churches cautioning against use of the controversial “Operation Abolition” film without supplementary facts. The advisory questions whether the film accurately represents student demonstrations at a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in San Francisco last spring.

• A pronouncement was adopted recording opposition to the use of public funds to aid sectarian and other private schools.

Dr. Wagner’s remarks to the General Board were a commentary on the report of Dr. Roy G. Ross, NCC general secretary. He noted Ross’s expressed regret “that there are still a considerable number of Protestant and Orthodox communions which are neither engaged in conversations regarding organic unity nor joined together in the fellowship and witness of this Council of Churches.” TO CHRISTIANITY TODAY Dr. Wagner said: “Some of us look forward hopefully to the day when communions like Assemblies of God, Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), Churches of God in North America, to say nothing of Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans, will share more closely in the life, work and witness of the National Council.” But this, he said, was not the aim of his proposed consultations.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY elicited the following reactions:

The Rev. Thomas F. Zimmerman, NAE president: “It is evident that Dr. James E. Wagner’s statement was not hastily conceived. Therefore, I feel that it is inappropriate for me to hastily set forth an official reaction from the NAE viewpoint.” He said the statement would be discussed at a regular meeting of an NAE policy committee March 13.

Dr. Ramsey Pollard, president of the Southern Baptist Convention: “We would not give up any of our deep-seated convictions about the Scriptures … and there is no basis for fellowship unless people are agreed.”

Dr. John W. Behnken, president of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod: “In last December’s NCC General Assembly, there wasn’t any concern, from what I read, about doctrinal matters. We are already talking with other Lutherans on doctrine.”

Dr. Carl McIntire, president of the International Council of Christian Churches: “It is impossible to negotiate with men who are denying and compromising the Word of God.”

Dr. Reuben R. Figuhr, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church: “We … believe that clearer communication between various groups and all attempts to increase Christian fellowship are beneficial.… However, we … would not want to comment … unless it materializes as a definite plan that can be carefully studied.”

Evangelical Comments

NCC’s bid for intimate conversations with unaffiliated evangelicals has evoked varied reactions from conservative leaders:

Sympathetically, some say that:

1. The evangelical witness of conservatives should be lifted into face-to-face ecumenical confrontation.

2. The witness of evangelical forces within theologically-inclusive ecumenical agencies should be reinforced.

3. The fragmented witness of Protestantism calls for patient pursuit of wider church unity on a regenerate basis.

Critically, some say that:

1. The strong conservative contingent already within NCC is constantly penalized by ecumenism’s overall commitment to theological inclusivism. (Specially cited are WCC’s power-thrust for control of world missions, which is meshing IMC into WCC over the protests of evangelicals; and the open ecumenical sympathy and undercover support given the liberal Christian Century which, hard-pressed by CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S gains, has announced a $500,000 revitalization program, with NCC’s wealthy lay president, J. Irwin Miller, an ardent supporter [Time recently said of Miller that “he was for years sole angel of the Christian Century, still meets most of the magazine’s deficit”].)

2. Conservative positions are constantly ignored by organizational pronouncements (for example, NCC’s violated assurances to the National Lay Committee, of which J. Howard Pew was chairman, against promulgation of partisan politico-economic programs for which church leaders have no special competence or mandate; also the Cleveland “pro-Red China” positions; even in Syracuse, positions were taken approving artificial birth control—with Greek Orthodox participants abstaining—and cautioning churches against showing the film “Operation Abolition” without supplementation).

3. The NCC encourages conversations, while simultaneously promoting programs that penalize the free opportunities of non-related agencies (for example, NCC’s widening control of Protestant religious broadcasting and telecasting opportunities).

4. The “brotherhood versus bigotry” technique is now widely successful as a sheer political tactic.

5. The alternative to inclusive ecumenism is evangelical ecumenism, and any conversation should be biblically-oriented, examining present structures in the light of the nature and authority of the Church.

C.F.H.H.

Protestant Panorama

• United Presbyterian congregations in the Philadelphia area will be asked to sign “Covenants of Open Occupancy” as part of a campaign against race discrimination in residential housing. The Philadelphia Presbytery’s social action committee will ask church members to pledge that they will not discriminate against neighbors of other races.

• Southern Baptists showed gains in 1960 in all major categories except one, according to statistics released this month. Baptisms of converts fell from 429,063 for the previous year to 386,469 for 1960. Baptist leaders attributed the decline to “normal fluctuation” and to a simultaneous revival campaign in 1959 which was not repeated last year.

• Bishops in Sweden’s State Lutheran Church are appealing to King Gustav Adolf for the right of clergymen to refuse to perform marriage ceremonies for divorced persons. Their petition grows out of a court decision in which a pastor was fined for declining to officiate at a second marriage for a divorced person.

• Twenty Cleveland pastors representing fourteen congregations are conducting weekday morning worship services on a cooperative basis for those unable to attend church on Sunday. The services are held at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Ministers of the cooperating churches take turns in officiating at the services.

• The Christian Century, undenominational weekly, is appealing for financial support from readers to undergird a projected expansion program. According to a statement in the March 1 issue, trustees of the Christian Century Foundation seek to increase its development fund by $500,000, half of which has been promised by an unnamed Christian philanthropic organization contingent upon the raising of the other half from additional sources. The trustees say they believe that the weekly’s circulation (currently about 35,000) can be doubled in five years.

• Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, minister emeritus of New York’s Riverside Church, is donating his entire library of theology and resource books to two overseas seminaries. Some 1,400 books will be divided equally between the Seminario Evangelico de Puerto Rico and Dondi Seminary in Angola, West Africa.

‘Question 7’

More than a third of the world’s inhabitants, if they would serve God, must contend with Communist resistance. Many find that limited liberties present a far greater dilemma than outright suppression. The artistic portrayal of this theme makes “Question 7” one of the most significant films of our time.

A 110-minute drama set amidst the Church-State conflict in East Germany, “Question 7” exposes the subtle Communist strategy of attempting to exploit religious channels for Communist ends. Actual incidents in East Germany, as documented over the last four years by scenarist Allen Sloane, form the basis for the film, which had its world premiere March 2 in Washington, D. C., and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It promises to be well received by Christians in the free world, and should serve to instill gratitude for the opportunity to worship without fear of reprisal.

The absorbing story concerns a 15-year-old pastor’s son who aspires to be a pianist. He must choose between assuming the role of a “radish, ‘red’ but only on the outside,” or standing for his faith and thereby inviting oblivion. The plot raises questions as to the nature of the Gospel’s social relevance (whether on the spiritual or political level), and drives home the point that real freedom is something Christ alone creates.

An international, professional cast is led by British actor Michael Gwynn and Christian de Bresson, a French youth who has lived in America for a number of years. Almut Eggert, charming 21-year-old German actress who plays the young pianist’s girl friend, knows the film as a true-to-life situation: she has an uncle who, like the “Question 7” pastor, volunteered to forsake free Germany for a parish in the East Zone.

The title of the film refers to a questionnaire issued by Communist authorities. Commissioned by Lutheran Film Associates, Inc., “Question 7” was produced by Lothar Wolff and Louis de Rochemont Associates, all of whom collaborated similarly on “Martin Luther.”

Mission to Canada

A team of noted evangelicals are conducting a four-month “Mission to Canada” which has the blessing of top denominational leaders.

The 22,000-mile evangelistic tour led by Tom Rees, Anglican lay preacher, was formally begun at a commissioning service in Toronto last month. Among those who took part in the service were Anglican Archbishop Howard H. Clark, Primate of all Canada, the Rt. Rev. Hugh A. McLeod, moderator of the United Church of Canada’s general council, the Rt. Rev. Robert Lennox, moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s General Assembly, the Rev. Gerald M. Ward, president of the Baptist Federation of Canada, and Commissioner W. Wycliffe Booth of the Salvation Army.

Musicians for the team are Frank Boggs of Atlanta, Georgia, and Lex Smith of Glasgow, Scotland. Clergymen include the Revs. A. LeDrew Gardner, Arthur Rose, Alan Stephens, and Maurice A. P. Wood.

This month the team is touring the Maritime provinces and Quebec. Meetings in Ontario will be held from March 28 to April 25, and the team will then proceed to Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. Final meetings will be held in Whitehorse, Yukon, in July.

Cult Research

A new quarterly devoted to the study of cults made its debut last month under the name Religious Research Digest. Editor is Walter R. Martin.

Religious Giving

Total religious giving in 1960 for all faiths reached an estimated $4.18 billion, compared with $3.9 billion the previous year, according to the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel.

Oberammergau Film

A filmstrip worship service, based on photographs of the 1960 Oberammergau Passion Play and designed for use at the Easter season, is being released in the United States through the Christian Education Press of the Evangelical and Reformed Church. More than 200 U.S. bookstores are handling distribution.

Barabbas on TV

Hallmark’s “Hall of Fame” color television series will present an original drama, “Give Us Barabbas,” over the NBC-TV network on Palm Sunday, March 26. James Daly, veteran actor who starred in Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning verse drama, “J. B.” will play the leading role. “Give Us Barabbas” was written by Henry Denker, who produced and directed the radio series, “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

Crime Increase

Serious crime showed a 12 per cent increase in 1960 over the previous year, according to a preliminary survey made public this month by the FBI.

Aid to Education

Official Roman Catholic reaction to President John F. Kennedy’s plan for federal aid to education scores the multibillion dollar proposal on grounds that it excludes help to private and parochial schools. The plan does provide for scholarships in church-related colleges.

In a statement released by the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington, Bishop Lawrence J. Shehan, chairman of the conference’s department of education, expressed “keen disappointment” that the plan “denies even the least bit of help to five million children in non-public elementary and secondary schools.”

At Lenten devotions in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, Bishop Joseph F. Flannelly called upon some 2,000 persons to write their Congressmen to protest the Kennedy plan.

Another issue in New York state is Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller’s tuition-aid program. Last month the State Council of Churches withdrew its opposition to the program in a statement saying it no longer considers the plan unconstitutional. It was emphasized, however, that the council is not endorsing the plan or expressing preference for it over other higher education proposals. The American Jewish Congress reaffirmed its opposition.

Upholding Bus Rides

The U. S. Supreme Court upheld last month the constitutionality of public school bus transportation for parochial school students.

In a seven to two per curiam (by the court) order, the nation’s highest tribunal declined to hear an appeal from a group of Newtown, Connecticut taxpayers.

The court’s opinion noted that Justices Felix Frankfurter and William O. Douglas felt that the case should have been heard. However, four of the nine justices must vote to take a case, before a hearing is granted and the other seven members of the court apparently agreed with the motion to dismiss filed by Connecticut’s Attorney General, who said the constitutional issue had already been resolved by a 1947 decision which held that it was legal for New Jersey to pay for transportation of children to private schools.

Churches Under Castro

The Cuban government wants to establish two national churches—one Roman Catholic and the other Protestant—according to refugees interviewed by Religion Editor Adon Taft of the Miami Herald.

“Severing the Cuban Catholic Church from its ties with Rome and setting up a Cuban ‘Pope,’ with Communist leanings” says Taft, “appears to be the first aim of the present government.” He went on to add that harassment of Protestant churches has begun and “half a dozen clergymen working in the government are being groomed to become the ‘hierarchy’ of the national Protestant church, with one of them slated to become boss of the church with cabinet rank.”

Brazilian Incident

Seven missionaries and three children from the interdenominational New Tribes Mission were jailed at a remote Brazilian army guard house last month. U. S. State Department intervention prompted their immediate release.

J. B. Knutson, general secretary of the mission, termed “homicide” charges against the missionaries as ridiculous. Their arrests were reportedly made at the urging of Roman Catholic authorities. Reports said that the missionaries had been jailed at Manaus, an Amazon River town 1,000 miles inland, after having been arrested by soldiers at Bobope, 900 miles northwest of Manaus. The missionaries were allegedly accused of “teaching Christians to poison people, prohibiting them from planting their farms and raising chickens and pigs, and instructing them to burn Roman Catholic churches and break their images.”

Those arrested were Mr. and Mrs. James Curtis and their two children, Mr. Walnie Kliewer, and Miss Myrtle Rehn, all of whom are Americans; also Mr. and Mrs. Henry Loewen, their son, and Miss Elizabeth Koop, who are Canadians.

Reaching the Moros

A missionary to Bolivia is reported to have made successful contact with the fierce Moro tribe.

The missionary, William Pencille, has spent a month with the tribe in the Salinas de Santiago region of Bolivia, according to Mennonite Brethren Church headquarters in Hillsboro, Kansas. Mennonites and other missionaries have been trying for years to establish relations with the Moros, who live in the jungle border area of Bolivia and Paraguay. Not only have their efforts failed, but the Moros have killed and wounded a number of colonists in sporadic attacks.

Kornelius Issak, a Mennonite missionary, was killed by Moros in 1958 while trying to visit them in Paraguay.

Pencille’s contact included talks with the Indian chief whose son is thought to have been Issak’s murderer.

During Pencille’s stay, another tribe with whom the Moros had long been at war came to the village and agreed to a peace treaty.

The Lagos Outburst

Nigeria has been one of the most fruitful fields for mission work in Africa, largely because of its favorable attitude toward other races. Acceptance of the white man has given an open door, generally speaking, to the Gospel. Missionaries were therefore carefully noting reaction to the Congo chaos, especially following the announcement of Patrice Lumumba’s death. Pro-Lumumba riots were expected in Ghana, Guinea, and the United Arab Republic. But an unheralded outburst of anti-white feeling in Nigeria came as a shock to missionary forces in Africa’s largest—and most stable—state. Whites were stoned, and wild demonstrations took place in Lagos.

Some church leaders and missionaries at first feared that further violence might follow, and that, as in the Congo, missionaries would not be differentiated from other whites in the racial fever.

But reassurance came from the Federal Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who officially condemned the “acts of hooliganism.”

The Minister of Information, the Hon. Theophilus O. Benson, although a member of one party which had issued an anti-white manifesto, also denounced the demonstrations, and they have been largely dismissed as isolated otubreaks by a few left-wing youth leaders.

W.H.F.

A Diverted Gift

A sleek pleasure boat which former President Eisenhower had planned to present to Soviet Premier Khrushchev will be used instead to take the Gospel to a remote part of Ethiopia.

The boat was returned to the manufacturer after cancellation of Eisenhower’s trip to Moscow last spring, and it was subsequently purchased by the West Allis (Wisconsin) United Presbyterian Church to be given in turn to their denominational mission in Ethiopia. The craft’s destination is a region accessible only by river during the rainy season. Even then the river is only a few inches deep.

The 19-foot boat, which operates on a jet principle (ejecting water to propel it), is particularly useful in very shallow water.

The Rev. R. Byron Crozier, pastor of the West Allis church, will fly to East Africa to make an official presentation.

Can the Church ever get too big? Can she spread herself too thin? Can she become more things to more people than her Lord intended? Questions like these need to be asked and they need to be answered. For many churches are drifting into a new definition of themselves, a definition which can involve basic change in their task and structure. Before this has altogether taken place and only rationalization is left, we should ask whether we want it to happen, and if not, what we can do to keep it from happening.

The changing concept of the Church is due in part to a changing concept of the State. The welfare State with its plethora of services to individuals has necessitated wider utilization of private groups. The potential of the State’s bureaucracy is enormous but it is not unlimited. Confronted with a continuing demand for services, the State has hit upon the device of hiring private groups to perform many of these activities. Private groups, including churches, can be engaged to minister to the ill; to care for the aged, orphans, and indigent; to distribute relief; to do research; to educate, to administer foreign aid, and so on. The government pays these groups out of taxes for the social services they perform. It is sometimes argued that the more of these services that can be assigned to churches the better.

Big Government and Big Church

This development in government has been paralleled by a like development in the churches. We may call this the concept of the “Big Church.” Recently an official of a denominational board of hospitals was boasting of the empire he ruled. He martialed statistics of beds, patients, nurses, doctors, technicians with obvious relish. All he needed was a few more of this and a few more of that to round out his domain. Here, I thought, is the unthinking exponent of clericalism. Here is the advocate of the Big Church. Society would be better off—it could even be saved—if only church institutions could be bigger and more numerous. The concept of the Big Church would of course get an enormous boost if tax funds were available. Indeed, what could God not do if he had the money!

A Methodist bishop writes an article pleading with his church to take more tax money for the performance of spiritual tasks. His thesis is simple: the Lord has set the Church here to do good works. The Church is doing them, but her endeavors are limited by lack of funds. Where is the greatest source of funds available for spiritual and humanitarian endeavors? The State! Therefore it is the State’s duty to provide and the Church’s duty to accept all the funds that can be made available through this channel.

Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen went before a Congressional committee studying foreign aid to urge that all aid programs in the categories of relief and welfare should be assigned to the church. The church, he felt, would do a more “spiritual” job. A number of church officials recently appeared before another Congressional committee asking that all military surplus abroad be turned over to the missionaries for use in their programs. They argued that this was the best possible use that could be made of these enormous stocks of goods and equipment.

Some leaders of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States are vigorously advocating a new plan for education of the young. They urge that we forego our traditional program of public education controlled and administered by the people acting through their duly chosen officials. They urge that we substitute instead a plan by which education would be turned over to clerics and other private groups who would be subsidized by the government to do the job.

Roman Catholic Bishop Lawrence J. Shehan of Bridgeport, Connecticut, preaching at a Red Mass in connection with the American Bar Association, lectured Chief Justice Earl Warren and two associate justices of the United States Supreme Court who were present on how wrong they had been in their interpretation of the First Amendment. He accused the United States government of being unfair to Catholics by levying such high taxes that they could not pay for their denominational schools. He called for a new interpretation of the First Amendment in which government would cooperate with the church by extending subsidies for the work the church was doing in educating the young. Cardinal McIntyre charged that school aid programs which did not include Catholic schools are “discriminatory.”

The Task of Christ’s Followers

What is a Church? This is a highly pertinent question. It is our contention that the Church is a unique society and, because unique, limited. She has a mandate from her Lord to proclaim the Gospel. She is charged to bear witness to what God has done in Jesus Christ. The Church is the only group on earth which has this mandate and this is the only mandate she has. As she is true to her founder and herself, she is to do this one thing.

The Church is not primarily an educational institution. She is not a healing agency. She does not consist of homes, orphanages, relief headquarters, or social agencies. She may be all these things incidentally, but she is not any or all of them basically. The foundational function of the Church is worship and her basic task is evangelism, including missions. In the practical conduct of this enterprise, education certainly is necessary; healing, relief, care of the unfortunate are necessary as well. But these services are means to the end of the authentic Christian enterprise. They are never ends in themselves so far as Christians are concerned.

The Church is caught in this dilemma between the “small” and the “big.” Is the Church a colony of heaven, a unique society founded by Jesus Christ with but tenuous roots in the passing cultural scene? Or, is she primarily a social institution, a convenient form of organization for the performance of social servises? If she is the latter, the Church should seek all the aid from tax funds that she can obtain. She should become frankly competitive with other non-profit groups and openly strive for the lion’s share of the State’s welfare dollar. If the Church is a welfare agency existing for the purpose of performing social services, then she should be this to the hilt.

A Note of Warning

It is only fair to sound a note of warning as the Church seems to move in that direction. If the Church succumbs to the lure of the State’s gold and becomes merely one of many social functionaries, her loss will be irreparable. Certainly she will forfeit whatever claim she may exert as a unique society. Under such circumstances the Church becomes, in effect, another secular institution. That is to say, she ceases to be the Church and becomes something else. She has no reason for survival beyond the performance of immediate temporary tasks.

A Guide for Action

The Church would be well advised to hold fast to her heritage as Christ’s own society with her sole mandate for Him. As such, we would recommend that the Church avoid involvement with the State and refuse the support of all funds collected by taxation. If the Church should follow such a course, we offer the following guide for her educational, social, and welfare programs:

1. Such programs should avoid interlocking with the State.

2. Financial grants from the State should be rejected.

3. Participation in such programs should be limited to pioneer projects in which the Church could blaze a trail or open a new vista—the kind of enterprise that conventional groups might hesitate to sponsor. The Church should avoid routine forms of welfare activity.

4. The Church’s social and welfare programs should be geared to worship and evangelism.

5. They should be limited to those enterprises which the Church can herself support through voluntary gifts of adherents.

Associate Director

Protestants and Other Americans United

Washington, D. C.

God’s attributes cannot be separated from his Being. God and his perfections are one. We may not think of love and righteousness as incidental aspects of God’s character; on the contrary, God is with his whole Being love and righteousness, grace and holiness. Because this is so, one attribute cannot be limited by another. We may not say, for example, that God is not infinitely righteous because he is love. Though the attributes are many, God is one. While we distinguish the attributes for purposes of study, we can never separate them.

This essay will concern itself with the so-called communicable attributes of God. We may define these as attributes to which some analogy is found in man (the incommunicable being those to which no analogy is found in man). It should be remembered, however, that the difference between these two groups of attributes is relative. God possesses all his communicable attributes in an incommunicable way. Whatever we find in man by way of analogy is but a faint reflection of these perfections as found in God.

The following division of the communicable attributes has been adapted from Berkhof’s Systematic Theology: 1. intellectual attributes: knowledge and wisdom; 2. moral attributes: goodness, love, grace, mercy, longsuffering, veracity (including faithfulness), holiness, righteousness; 3. volitional attributes: the sovereign will of God and the sovereign power of God.

Intellectual Attributes. Under the intellectual attributes we note first the knowledge of God. Scripture tells us that “God is light and in him is no darkness at all” (John 1:5—all quotations from ASV). This designation tells us that God knows all things (1 John 3:20). God knows himself thoroughly and completely. Further, God knows all that exists outside himself. To this attribute we give the name of God’s omniscience. It includes the minutest details, even the numbering of the hairs of our heads.

God’s wisdom, though related to his knowledge, is to be distinguished from it. Wisdom means the application of knowledge to the reaching of a goal. God’s wisdom implies that God uses the best possible means to reach the goals he has set for himself. The Old Testament Psalmist was impressed with the evidence of God’s wisdom in creation: “O Jehovah, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all” (Ps. 104:24). Joseph in Egypt saw the wisdom of God revealed in the providential ordering of his life (Gen. 50:20), whereas Paul particularly saw that wisdom displayed in the plan of salvation (1 Cor. 1:18, 24).

Moral Attributes. Under the moral attributes we list first of all the goodness of God. By this we understand “that perfection of God which prompts Him to deal bountifully and kindly with all his creatures” (ibid., p. 70). This goodness is spoken of in such passages as Psalm 145:9 (“Jehovah is good to all”) and Acts 14:17. By some theologians this goodness of God is called his “common grace,” in distinction from his special grace shown only to his elect people.

The love of God is very prominent in Scripture, especially in the New Testament. The three persons of the Trinity exist in an eternal fellowship of love (John 3:35; 17:24), but in and through Christ, God reveals his love to man. In this connection John 3:16 comes to mind, as well as many other memorable New Testament passages. All the blessings of salvation are the fruits of God’s love: “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God” (1 John 3:1).

One of the major questions in the area of the attributes today is: How can we properly relate the love and the righteousness of God? The liberal theology of the nineteenth century virtually cancelled out the righteousness of God. Ritschl, it will be recalled, said that there was no such thing as the wrath of God, and that anyone who thinks so is laboring under a delusion. In contemporary neo-orthodox theology this old liberalism has supposedly been repudiated. As we examine the doctrine of the attributes, however, noting what neo-orthodox theologians teach particularly about the love and righteousness of God, we shall have occasion to ask ourselves whether the liberal rejection of the wrath of God has really been abandoned by these men or whether it has simply been restated in a different form.

Contemporary theologians describe love as the center and core of God’s revelation. Karl Barth, in fact, divides God’s attributes into “The Perfections of the Divine Loving” and “The Perfections of the Divine Freedom,” insisting that we must not begin with attributes which concern the being or essence of God and then go on to speak of his love, but that we must begin by discussing the love of God (Church Dogmatics, II, 1, pp. 348 ff.). When Barth goes on to define God’s love, he includes in its scope all men and all of creation: “God is He who in His Son, Jesus Christ, loves all His children, in His children all men, and in men His whole creation” (p. 351).

Emil Brunner, like Barth, stresses that love is the very nature of God (The Christian Doctrine of God, p. 185) and quotes with approval Luther’s statement that God is “an abyss of eternal love” (p. 168). Brunner describes this love as Agape (love poured out on those who are worthless, love which does not desire to get but to give) in distinction from Eros (love of someone because he is worthy of being loved). At this point Brunner acknowledges his indebtedness to Anders Nygren (pp. 185 ff.).

These men have much to teach us. However, when we note Brunner’s insistence that, for Paul, the righteousness and mercy of God are identical (p. 301), and when we look again at Barth’s definition of love, we begin to wonder whether both of them do not assume that agape requires God to treat all men alike. Our Lord Jesus Christ, however, clearly taught that there is a wrath of God which is to be revealed against those who reject God and refuse to believe in his Son. Christ speaks of the outer darkness, of the place where the fire is not quenched, of a hell into which one may be cast, and of the disastrous consequences of losing one’s soul.

Associated with God’s love are his grace—God’s love shown to those who have not deserved it, but have rather deserved its opposite; his mercy—God’s love shown to those who are in misery or distress; and his longsuffering—that aspect of God’s love whereby he endures evil men in spite of their disobedience, and seeks to lead them to repentance.

By the veracity of God we mean his truthfulness. God is the source of truth, true in his revelation and true in his promises. In this connection it is particularly the faithfulness of God which is to be stressed: he keeps his promises, and is ever faithful to his covenant people (see 2 Tim. 2:13).

We come next to the holiness of God. The origin of the Hebrew root QADASH (the Hebrew word for holy) is obscure; its basic meaning, however, seems to be that of apartness. Thus God’s holiness means first of all that he is other than the creature, infinitely exalted above his creation. In this sense the holiness of God is not so much a separate attribute as a qualification of all that God is and does. As an attribute, however, God’s holiness means, negatively, that he is “of purer eyes than to behold evil” (Hab. 1:13); that he is free from all that is impure and hates all sin. Positively, God’s holiness denotes his moral excellence—the fact that he perfectly embodies all that is pure and good.

When we take up the righteousness of God, we touch upon an attribute which is the object of much contemporary discussion. The basic idea of righteousness is that of being conformed to a rule or law. God may therefore be called righteous because he acts in accordance with law—not a law above him but a law which is within him, of which he himself is the Author. By God’s rectoral justice we mean God’s rectitude as the ruler of the universe, particularly of his moral creatures. By his distributive justice we mean his rectitude in the execution of his law. In this connection we think first of God’s remunerative justice, which distributes rewards—not on the basis of merit but solely by grace. Paul speaks of this in Romans 2:6 and 7: “Who will render to every man according to his works: to them that by patience in welldoing seek for glory and honor and incorruption, eternal life.” By retributive justice we mean God’s infliction of penalties upon those who disobey him—this justice is an expression of his wrath. Paul speaks of this in verses 8 and 9 of Romans 2: “But unto them that are factious, and obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, shall be wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that worketh evil …” (cf. also Rom. 1:32 and 2 Thess. 1:8). Although it is true that in Scripture the righteousness of God is generally applied to the salvation of sinners (think of what Paul says about justification in Rom. 3:21–28), the Bible teaches unequivocally that there is such a thing as retributive righteousness or the wrath of God (see Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, I, pp. 380 ff.).

Since this is a matter of crucial importance, let us see what contemporary neo-orthodox theologians teach about the righteousness of God. Barth treats God’s mercy and righteousness together, as “Perfections of the Divine Loving.” Citing both Luther and Anselm, he stresses the identity of God’s righteousness and mercy (op. cit., pp. 377 ff.). For Barth the great message of the Bible is: “There is no righteousness of God which is not also mercy and no mercy of God which is not also righteousness” (p. 380). In distinction from Ritschl, Barth maintains that there is such a thing as a punitive righteousness in God (pp. 382, 391). In a discussion of the significance of Good Friday, Barth goes on to show that God’s retributive or punitive righteousness is wholly satisfied by the crucifixion of his Son (pp. 395–406). While appreciating the profound insights offered here, we look in vain for any suggestion that God’s retributive righteousness is also to be expressed at the the last day in the punishment of the lost. In fact, Barth asserts that it is characteristic of heathen but not of scriptural eschatology to put “these two ways” before our eyes: the way of eternal glory and the way of everlasting fire (p. 293). The conclusion seems inescapable that, for Barth, there will be no final punishment of those who are lost. Barth’s teachings on election, in fact, have led Brunner to designate Barth’s views as “the most thoroughgoing doctrine of universalism that has ever been formulated” (Brunner, op. cit., p. 314).

So far as Brunner’s own teachings are concerned, he quotes approvingly Luther’s affirmation that the revelation of God’s wrath is his “strange work,” whereas the revelation of God’s love is his “proper work” (ibid., p. 169). Like Luther, Brunner holds that the wrath of God reached its climax on the cross, but that here faith sees God’s love behind his “strange work” (p. 173). When, however, we ask about Brunner’s view of retributive justice culminating in eternal punishment for the lost, we get an equivocal answer. Brunner, while sharply critical of Barth’s view of election (pp. 348 ff.), joins Barth in rejecting double predestination (pp. 345 ff.). Brunner firmly rejects universal salvation (p. 352) and says that we cannot eliminate a final judgment of wrath from the New Testament (p. 349). Yet he expresses his doubts about eternal punishment (p. 353) and elsewhere suggests that to die without Christ is equivalent to being annihilated (Faith, Hope, and Love, p. 56).

We see that, in this respect, Brunner is not as radical as Barth. Yet Brunner hesitates about eternal punishment—a doctrine which Nels Ferré decisively rejects (The Christian Understanding of God, pp. 217 ff.). As we reflect upon the views of these contemporary theologians, we cannot suppress the following questions: Does God’s retributive righteousness and particularly God’s wrath really come into its own in the views of these men? Or do we have here a repetition of the liberal subordination of the wrath of God to his love? Does not this contemporary treatment of God’s wrath rob the Gospel message of its deepest earnestness? Does it do justice to the teaching of our Lord, who spoke some of the sternest words about the wrath of God?

Volitional Attributes. Coming finally to the volitional attributes, we distinguish between God’s sovereign will and his sovereign power. By God’s sovereign will we mean his directing of the events of the universe and of the actions of his creatures in accordance with his plan. Needless to say, this sovereign will is the final cause of all that happens (“who worketh all things after the counsel of his will,” Eph. 1:11). To suggest that things may happen which are not under the ultimate direction of God’s will is to detract from his sovereignty and thereby from his majesty.

What do we mean by God’s sovereign power, also called his omnipotence? To say that God can do all things is to open the door to all kinds of foolish questions, such as: Can God sin? Can God make a stone too heavy for himself to lift? It is better to define omnipotence as that power by virtue of which God can do whatever he wills to accomplish (see Matt. 19:26).

God’s omnipotence must not be so conceived as to leave no room for human decision, or to reduce man to the dimensions of a radio-guided missile. Divine omnipotence does not eliminate but rather establishes human freedom and responsibility. It is precisely this fact which makes the sovereignty of God so deeply mysterious that man cannot fathom it.

Bibliography: In addition to standard systematic theologies by H. Bavinck, L. Berkhof, C. Hodge, and W. G. T. Shedd, I suggest S. Charnock, The Attributes of God. References to neo-orthodox works may be found above.

Professor of Systematic Theology

Calvin Theological Seminary

Grand Rapids. Michigan