‘Christian burial’ needs re-evaluation in light of the evangelistic task

What does the Church say about the Gospel through the way it buries the dead and ministers to the bereaved? Are its burial practices consistent with the messages of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ alone? Or do they imply a vague but convenient universalism, a universalism that avoids all painful confrontation between the Gospel and the world? Hard answers to these questions call for re-evaluation of the so-called Christian burial in the light of the evangelistic task.

Inherent in the evangelistic plea—“be ye reconciled to God”—is the recognition that all men are not yet reconciled. God gave his only Son so that all men could be saved, but not all have received that precious gift. There are those who are Christians. There are those who are not. And this distinction does not end automatically at the moment of death.

Yet much of our funeral practice takes no account of this. Often Christian burial is offered to all, whether or not they have openly professed faith in Christ; whether or not they have served him in the Church; and whether or not they have manifested the fruit of the Spirit.

In the day of death, the clergyman is often called in as chaplain of a “community religion” that has little in common with the austerities and boundless joys of the Christian faith.

The implication is that the Church makes no distinction between the overtly Christian soul and the non-Christian soul—after death. The world may easily conclude, therefore, that it doesn’t matter whether or not one lives as a Christian, since he will receive the benediction of God at the end anyway. Thus, in the world’s eyes the Gospel is reduced to a thing of little importance, and the word spoken at the burial is regarded as a human invention for cushioning the hard emotional impact of death. This practical universalism in burial practices continually suggests to the world that the Church does not mean what it says when it speaks of the necessity of decision, repentance, and faith in Jesus Christ.

Two objections are often raised when church leaders insist on making distinctions between people at the time of death and burial. The first objection is that the burial service is not actually for the dead but for the comfort of the living. In some churches this is simply untrue; and even in churches where it is true, the problem re-emerges at the point of finding valid words of comfort for the bereaved. The Episcopal Prayer Book, for instance, implies throughout that the deceased is a “faithful departed in Christ.” Although Episcopal clergymen do have the option of using other devotions for those not among the faithful, the majority use this burial order indiscriminately. In non-liturgical churches the manner of conducting the service is left entirely to the discretion of the ministers; perhaps many face the problem squarely.

Yet the question remains: What word of comfort can a minister who is true to the biblical Word honestly address to the mourners of a non-Christian? When the deceased has lived an openly Christian life, there is no end to the comforting assurances of God. But these assurances cannot honestly be given in the case of one outside Christ. The death may in fact be a stark tragedy. Is it true Christian concern for the living to shield them from the fact that a life lived outside Christ is not pleasing to God? Hope can be offered to the living on condition that they will put their own trust in Christ; but any hope for the living based on the assurance of the salvation of the non-Christian deceased is spurious, with no warrant in the Word of God.

We may be reluctant to pile sorrow upon sorrow, and reluctant we should be. Yet it is a betrayal of the living to cover over the fact that life without Christ is indeed tragic and that the certainty of death is a reminder of the need for eternal life in Christ. If the gospel doctrine of salvation is true, the kindest thing we can do for any man, including one who is bereaved, is to deal honestly with the facts that affect his eternal welfare.

The second and more serious objection is that the Church has no right to make judgments on the state of a man’s soul at the hour of his dying. That is true. We remember the dying thief who received gracious pardon in the closing hour of his life. Such is the grace of God that, even after a life of depravity, a man may enter the Kingdom through repentance and simple trust. Any person who has died may have turned to the Lord for salvation with his last breath, and the Church on earth would know nothing of it. The Church cannot say with certainty that any particular man is lost to God forever.

Yet neither can it say with certainty that one who has not openly confessed Christ before men and served him in his Church is “right with God.” The most favorable thing the Church can say is that it does not know whether this person was born again; his judgment is in the hands of God. Moreover, it is hypocritical and dangerous for the Church through its ministers to pretend that the life of one who lived outside Christ is cause for Christian praise and thanksgiving when death comes, whether or not he is saved through a last-minute act of faith.

Still, this is exactly the note that is often struck at burial services where Christian pastors officiate. Many times everyone present knows that the deceased did not profess Christian faith and had scarcely any relation to the Church. Nevertheless, he is eulogized as if he were a saint, and the ringing certainties of the Gospel are applied to him with the same confidence with which they would be applied to St. Peter himself.

To use the Episcopal Prayer Book as an example again: the soul of the departed is commended to Almighty God “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” These are fitting words for one who has lived unashamedly as a believer in our Lord. But they are peculiarly inappropriate for the myriad of those whose only overt connection with Christ and his Church is an unacknowledged childhood baptism and a year or two in Sunday school.

Surely, in the interest of evangelism, Christian burial practices ought to make some distinction between those who have lived lives of open confession of Jesus Christ and those who have not.

The distinction need not imply that the Church is making an infallible judgment on the eternal state of a man’s soul. But it does need to indicate that there are certain distinguishable marks of the Christian life for which the Church can give thanks to God in the presence of death, and that the lack of these marks makes the giving of thanks impossible. It is the Church in the person of its leaders that is asked to do the burying and speak the appropriate words. And the Church has the authority to apply its own standards, under the guidance of the Spirit, to any activity in which it participates. Whatever standards a particular church may use to designate a member “in good standing” can fairly be used in determining what attitude that church should take toward providing Christian burial when it is requested. Persons who are under discipline or who are outside the church’s fellowship should be treated accordingly.

Most Americans are surprised to learn that Canada is the largest country in the Western hemisphere (6.5 per cent larger than the United States) and, aside from Soviet Russia, the largest national territory in the world. Since 1967 is Canada’s centennial, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will devote its March 31 issue to our enterprising neighbor. This special issue will portray the religious situation in a land of 20 million inhabitants, assess the present situation in its churches, and propose programs of evangelical and evangelistic advance.

In recent months CHRISTIANITY TODAY has opened a branch editorial office in suburban Toronto at 1125 Leslie Street, Don Mills, Ontario, with J. Berkley Reynolds, minister in the United Church of Canada, as Canadian editorial representative.

From April 6 to 12, I shall be addressing audiences across Canada from Vancouver to Halifax on current theological trends.

Growing Canadian interest in CHRISTIANITY TODAY is evidenced by the fact that among new subscribers in recent months there were more than 500 Canadians. The special offer of a free copy of The New Testament in Four Versions with a one-year subscription at $5 is still open to new subscribers both in Canada and in the United States. Orders should be posted to 375 West Center Street, Marion, Ohio 43302.

In the months since the International Seminar on the Authority of Scripture that took place at Wenham, Massachusetts, during June of last year, numerous articles and letters-to-editors have appeared dealing with biblical inerrancy. Having established a reputation for volubility at the seminar (Dr. Ockenga seemed ready to give me a prolixity prize at the final session), I find myself emotionally compelled to enter the postmortem fray.

But what I have to say will be quite brief, since my concern is restricted to one key problem, which kept cropping up under various guises throughout the ten-day seminar: the question of induction vs. deduction in relation to the inerrancy of Scripture. I was amazed to find that a number of the seminar participants (generally exegetes) associated the historic Reformation, evangelical conviction that the Bible is factually errorless with a “deductive” process of reasoning from such passages as Second Timothy 3:16, while preferring personally to leave the question of factual error open on the “inductive” ground that every problem passage of Scripture warrants interpretative consideration sui generis.

Such arguments have been making headway even without Dewey M. Beegle’s Inspiration of Scripture (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 26. 1963). Thus Robert H. Mounce, in his June, 1966, Eternity article entitled “Clues to Understanding Biblical Accuracy,” asks his readers the (to him) rhetorical question, “Are we to argue deductively that inspiration logically necessitates Cape Kennedy accuracy, or shall we adopt the inductive approach and ask Scripture to define its own terms?” In my judgment, even if we blast the “Cape Kennedy” straw man from this question, we are still left with a query as misleading as, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

The great Wittgenstein, in a famous remark, claimed that the aim in philosophy is “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Let’s see if we can extricate the contemporary theological fly from the inductive-vs.-deductive fly bottle.

First and foremost, we must grant the priority of induction in setting out a doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Why? Although all investigative operations involve the interplay of deduction and induction—together with a liberal dose of what Peirce called imaginative retroduction (see my paper, “The Theologian’s Craft,” American Scientific Affiliation Journal, September, 1966)—only inductively justifiable results necessarily jibe with the phenomenal world. The only purely deductive procedures are logical or mathematical in nature, and they at best offer only a “scaffolding” for the world of fact, not an account of any particular facts. Independently of the Bible, no one has any right, on alleged “deductive” grounds, to pronounce on the nature of scriptural authority.

But (and a more important “but” cannot be imagined) to affirm the primacy of induction in the inerrancy issue in no way establishes the view that factual error can be compatible with a proper inspiration doctrine. “Induction” is not a monolithic, simplistic procedure in which one stares at one problematic fact at a time and then draws conclusions from these facts. Actually, one does not know how to treat particular factual problems until one has a gestalt or pattern in which to fit them. This gestalt is, of course, inductively derived from the material to be analyzed; but, since it provides the structure for understanding the particulars, its significance transcends that of the details. Unless it is properly induced, further induction will be fruitless.

Let us take some non-biblical literary examples. In understanding modern stream-of-consciousness writing (e.g., portions of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; his Ulysses; parts of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), the reader is hopelessly led astray by the indicia of the narrative until he discovers, through the express teaching of the novel, the actual age of the characters involved. Having learned this, he has an inductively derived gestalt for understanding the particular problems of the stream-of-consciousness narration; to reverse the procedure would be to lose all hope of meaningful interpretation.

The wild hilarity of Frederick C. Crews’s Pooh Perplex (in which he “analyzes” Winnie-the-Pooh from the standpoint of “varying critical persuasions,” such as the Marxist and psychoanalytic literary schools) stems from an intentional overlooking of the gestalt principle. Each interpreter hopelessly misconstrues Pooh, not because he doesn’t employ genuine, inductively derived indicia from Milne’s book, but because he never determines the gestalt: the fact that Winnie-the-Pooh is a children’s book, not a treatise on class war or the Oedipus complex.

To know how to treat biblical passages containing apparent errors or contradictions, we must determine what kind of book the Bible is. A doctrine of limited biblical authority derived from passages manifesting difficulties is as false an induction and as flagrant a denial of the analogy of Scripture as is a morally imperfect Christology derived from questionable acts on Jesus’ part. In both cases, proper induction requires that we go to the express biblical teaching on the subject (Jesus’ deity; Scripture’s authority) and allow this to create the pattern for treating particular problems.

And how does one correctly determine the nature and extent of scriptural authority? Not by staring at genealogical difficulties or ancient king-lists as (to use Luther’s figure) a cow stares at a new gate, but by going directly to the Bible’s central character, Jesus Christ, who declared himself to be God incarnate by manifold proofs, and observing his approach to Scripture.

Christ’s attitude toward the Old Testament was one of total trust: nowhere, in no particular, and on no subject did he place Scripture under criticism. Never did he distinguish truth “in faith and practice” from veracity in historical and secular matters, and he told the Evil Foe in no uncertain terms that man lives “by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4, quoting Deut. 8:3). To his apostles, under whose scrutiny the New Testament would be written, he promised his Holy Spirit, who “shall bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26, cf. 2 Pet. 3:15, 16).

Inerrancy? Yes. Induction? Yes. The way out of the fly bottle? Approaching Scripture always and everywhere as did the Lord Christ.

Would you believe that the name of Pope Paul VI was booed at a rally near Vatican City last month? First time in fifty years, according to the Washington Post. The vocal venom came at a meeting of 1,000 persons who favor a liberalized divorce law for Italy. The Pope had said that civil divorce is a “sign of pernicious moral decadence” and had asserted church supremacy on the issue granted under the 1929 concordat between Mussolini and Pope Pius XI.

Or would you believe:

That two days after the Pope overruled a decision in his own diocese against joint prayer with Protestants for unity (after the service in question had already been canceled), a Vatican spokesman said ecumenical prayer remains “an open question” and the Pope’s ruling was an “exception.”

That Britain’s Father Wilfrid Stibbs, 54—former director of the international Legion of Mary—no longer believes in papal infallibility, and quit the church like his now-married friend Charles Davis. Or that Father Herbert McCabe, editor of a British Dominican monthly, stayed in but commented on the Davis turmoil that “the Church is quite plainly corrupt.” Or that the order’s director then banned McCabe from editing or writing.

That Monsignor Victor Popishil, a canon lawyer, writes in Diakonia that the church’s belief in the absolute permanence of marriage is “historically unfounded and theologically unjustified.”

That the hierarchy in France sent the Vatican a 4,000-word statement that rejects the concept of “a list of propositions to condemn” and says the “questioning of conscience” by Catholics should not be stopped by “authority alone.” They were replying to a worldwide Vatican directive last summer to watch for errors cropping up in Catholic teaching.

That liberal Catholic Professor Leslie Dewart contends in a special Commonweal issue on God that “the classical concept of God has become unviable. It can no longer enter fully and integrally into the life of believers themselves.”

That Archbishop Karl Alter started an investigation of the University of Dayton to see if theology teachers were being heretical.

That Monsignor Ivan Illich, director of a Mexican center that trains missionaries for work in Latin America, charged in America that the thousands of workers and millions of dollars sent to Latin America from U. S. Catholics in recent years have done great harm—for instance, by creating “a satellite to North Atlantic cultural phenomena and policy.” Cardinal Cushing, the Latin bishops, and the Vatican’s apostolic delegate to the United States all denied the criticisms.

That John F. Donnelly quit as president of the National Council of Catholic Men after learning that the five U. S. bishops in charge of lay organizations had no intention of conferring with NCCM leadership.

That two priests sent on a five-day disciplinary retreat after joining a Texas farm workers’ protest march said it was just a matter of “church protocol.”

That failure of real-estate investments forced the Salvatorian Fathers last month to sell three of their six seminaries. Or that the American Federation of Priests, founded by suspended priest William DuBay, is also losing money but is still surviving with thirty dues-paying members.

That Catholic grade-school enrollment dropped nearly 250,000 in the current school year, the first major loss since World War II. Or that eleven Chicago priests are opposing a $250 million fund drive, largely for schools, because the church is “fighting a losing battle” in maintaining a separate school system, which “is financially impossible.”

That a new catechism for six-year-olds from Paulist Press now in use in fifty dioceses in the United States discards the traditional question-and-answer approach in favor of modern teaching methods to help children “enter into a personal relationship with the triune God.”

That TV star Fulton J. Sheen, new bishop of Rochester, New York, is bucking a Vatican emphasis by having youths confirmed in church membership around high school graduation instead of at age 9 to 12. Or that the National Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a memorandum that deliberately failing to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday is not a sin, and not abstaining from meat on Lenten Fridays for “light” reasons is not a mortal sin. Or that a bishop in Chile has stretched Pope Paul’s permission for mother superiors to distribute Communion to their nuns: he let the head of a convent administer the sacrament to all parishioners.

That Cardinal Suenens of Belgium favors selection of future popes by a representative synod of world bishops rather than the College of Cardinals. Or that Catholics in Canada may restore the long-neglected order of permanent deacons to give married laymen a part in the ministry. Or that the Cleveland diocese is asking members to nominate and vote on names for a new bishop.

That the right-wing Catholic Traditionalist Movement last month began distributing protest cards for members to put in the offering basket instead of money. They state:

“I shall resume my customary contributions as soon as you will resume the celebration of at least one Mass each day, including Sunday, offered according to the traditional Liturgy; entirely in Latin, at a real Altar by a priest not facing the people, and conducted in a quiet atmosphere without hymn-singing and without lectors or commentators.”

Surprise.

Protestant Panorama

An open letter from Disciples of Christ executives asks denomination members to increase the “financial and personal resources of our brotherhood” to help the church meet the world’s overwhelming needs. The letter notes that “our stewardship has not enabled us to meet even those needs which, through our actions in assemblies, we have selected as our particular responsibility within the world church.”

A Lutheran Church of America agency is calling for a broad new appeal for capital funds. The church’s Board of American Missions voted to request the denominational executive council to approve such a church-wide appeal in view of rising costs. New ministry demands are said to be draining off the amount transferred each year to church property loan funds.

Whatever the Episcopal Church eventually does about resigned Bishop James A. Pike, he “does not have a seat or a vote” in the House of Bishops. So says John Henry Esquirol of Connecticut, chairman of the bishops’ constitutional committee. According to Esquirol, the ruling by his committee passed without dissent at the last meeting of the house. The question arose after Pike resigned as leader of the California diocese but retained his ecclesiastical rank.

Personalia

Two clergymen of the International Council of Christian Churches were reported expelled from the Cameroun, where they had come to confer with local Presbyterian pastors. Some days earlier a group of the pastors had walked out of their General Assembly, vowing to continue their denomination in defiance of a merger vote. The Christian Beacon blamed a pro-union Presbyterian police chief for the expulsion.

Army Chaplain (Colonel) James A. Connett, a Methodist, was chosen “Chaplain of the Year” by the Reserve Officers Association. He is a paratrooper.

Three Anglican bishops and a Methodist leader have been reported arrested in Communist China and placed in an “indoctrination” camp. The Church Times of London says the churchmen and other leading Christians were imprisoned by the Mao regime.

Dr. Arne B. Sovik was chosen executive secretary of the Board of World Mission of the Lutheran Church in America. Sovik, a clergyman of the American Lutheran Church, has been associated with the Lutheran World Federation for the past twelve years.

Ralph L. Keiper was named to a professorate in pastoral theology and evangelism at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver. Keiper is now employed by the Evangelical Foundation of Philadelphia and serves as an associate editor of its monthly publication, Eternity.

The board of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School last month put outgoing president Robert J. Arnott on immediate “leave of absence” until his resignation becomes effective this summer. While BBDS seeks a new president, the seminary will be administered by Richard Hoiland, retired executive of the American Baptist Convention’s Board of Education and Publication. (See Dec. 23, 1966, issue, page 35.)

A Presbyterian, Penry Jones, takes over the religious broadcasting department of the British Broadcasting Corporation this month. He is the first layman and the first non-Anglican ever named to the post. Until now he has been religious broadcasting officer of the Independent Television Authority.

General Secretary Edwin Tuller of the American Baptist Convention goes to Viet Nam this month on a preaching mission to servicemen for the National Council of Churches. President Arnold Olson of the Evangelical Free Church is traveling there also, under the aegis of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Deaths

ALBERT W. T. ORSBORN, 80, who headed the Salvation Army from 1946 until 1954; in Bournemouth, England.

GEOFFREY O’HARA, 84, a Presbyterian from Canada who wrote the popular church solo “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked” and other religious songs; better known by the general public for the World War I-vintage stuttering song “K-K-K-Katy”; in St. Petersburg, Florida, of anemia.

Miscellany

Enrollment in Lutheran elementary schools fell off last year for the first time since 1942. There was also a drop in the number of schools.

Mississippi’s Committee of Concern is allocating the last $300 in its treasury to the Shady Oak Baptist Church, which burned to the ground January 20. The committee has been instrumental in rebuilding forty-two burned Negro churches in Mississippi during the past two years. Its chairman, Episcopal Bishop John M. Allin of Jackson, has issued a plea for more donations.

Despite full-scale resumption of hostilities after the four-day Lunar New Year cease-fire in Viet Nam, informed analysts kept detecting a smell of settlement. A few vocal clergymen added to the complexities with continued insistence that the U. S. government yield enough ground to Hanoi to bring the warring factions to a conference table.

Two unrelated developments last month dramatized the Church’s implication in the war: the sudden death of an octogenarian pacifist who had just returned from North Viet Nam, and the flurry of publicity over a poem by a teen-ager, already a church dropout, who is “concerned” over American use of napalm in Viet Nam.

But the most prominent ecclesiastical personality to make his views known is still Pope Paul VI. After granting a half-hour audience to U. S. Senator Robert Kennedy, the Pope issued pleas for extending the Lunar New Year truce. North Viet Nam’s President Ho Chi Minh responded with a tirade against the United States.

In New York, the Rev. A. J. Muste, 82, held a news conference to answer questions about his newly formed Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam. A few days later Muste died in his apartment of an apparent heart attack. The tall, gaunt Presbyterian clergyman had just returned from Hanoi and talks with Ho Chi Minh to report Ho’s “offer” to meet with President Johnson in Hanoi. He had been a pacifist for fifty years and since 1948 had refused to pay income taxes because the money was spent for armaments.

Muste’s new movement was understood to be a more radical protest group than the ad hoc “Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam,” which held a two-day rally and demonstration in Washington several weeks ago and called a three-day fast consonant with the beginning of Lent and the Lunar New Year (see Feb. 17 issue, p. 48). Another “visitation” to Washington was scheduled for March 1.

In Philadelphia, the United Presbyterian Board of Christian Education announced that the Defense Department had canceled 13,000 subscriptions to a junior-high Sunday-school publication because of a poem on napalm. The poem was composed by Barbara Beidler, 13, of Vero Beach, Florida, and published by Venture, which paid her one dollar for it. Barbara’s parents are members of a Presbyterian church in Vero Beach. Barbara, however, doesn’t attend much any more. Her poem—which her father had not seen until the controversy hit the front pages—goes like this:

All was still.

The sun rose through silver pine boughs,

Over sleeping green-straw huts,

Over cool rice ponds,

Through the emerald jungles,

Into the sky.

The men rose and went out to the fields and ponds.

The women set pots on the fire, boiling rice and jungle berries, and some with baskets went for fish.

The children played in the streams and danced through the weeds.

Then there was the flash—silver and gold

Silver and gold,

Silver birds flying,

Golden water raining.

The rice ponds blazed with the new water.

The jungles burst into gold and sent up little birds of fire.

Little animals with fur of flame.

Then the children flamed.

Running—their clothes flying like fiery kites.

Screaming—their screams dying as their faces seared.

The women’s baskets burned on their heads.

The men’s boats blazed on the rice waters.

Then the rains came.

A rag, fire black, fluttered.

A curl of smoke rose from a lone rice stem.

The forest lay singed, seared.

A hut crumbled.

And all was still.

Listen, Americans,

Listen, clear and long.

The children are screaming

In the jungles of Haiphong.

Upon learning of the cancellation, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a Presbyterian layman, reversed his department’s ruling and announced that Venture was being put back on the recommended curriculum roster for U. S. military chaplains.

Kennedy, during a ten-day trip to Europe, fanned rumors that secret negotiations on the Viet Nam war were under way or imminent. He was reportedly rebuked for his remarks by President Johnson.

In Nashville, two prominent churchmen wired Secretary of State Dean Rusk to say that he had “hardened the U. S. position” on possible peace negotiations with North Viet Nam.

A Christian To Lead Nazareth

For the first time in seven years, Nazareth, Israel, has a Christian mayor. He is Musa (Moses) Iktaily, a Greek Orthodox farm-machinery salesman who was chosen as a compromise candidate after round-the-clock negotiations.

For six years, Seif ed-Din Zoibe, head of a large Muslim clan in Galilee, had been mayor of the predominantly Arab Christian town that was the home of Jesus. After a 1965 election deadlock in which Communists suddenly won half (six) the city council seats, a Muslim cousin of the former mayor, Abdul Aziz Zoibe, agreed to serve as mayor, but this compromise failed last year.

So another vote was held late in 1966. The Communists held five seats and demanded concessions. Then Seif ed-Din Zoibe, now a member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), further fragmented the picture by offering to return as mayor. But townsmen charged that his regime had been corrupt. Iktaily, whose brother is Israel’s only Arab judge and whose wife is a public school headmistress, emerged as a dark-horse candidate. The Iktailys have a married son who is studying medicine in the United States.

DWIGHT L. BAKER

L.B.J. To Worship ‘Privately’

Calling it a “private matter,” the White House last month announced that the time and place of the First Family’s church attendance will no longer automatically be made public.

This ends a long Washington tradition in which Presidential church attendance has generally been given advance announcement, at least to the press corps.

The Rev. George R. Davis, pastor of National City Christian Church, which the Johnsons often attend, expressed approval: “I believe the President has every right to privacy in his worship.”

But at least one other Washington clergyman disagrees. Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, pastor of Washington’s National Presbyterian Church, which has issued pew-reservation receipts to nine former Presidents, rebutted: “What a public figure of his eminence does in a public institution (a church) is in the public domain.”

Bible In Wax

Eve ate the apple at age 20. Daniel was in the den with African lions. Christ was blond and blue-eyed. Or at least so says Frank L. Dennis, a Washington, D. C., public relations man turned waxworks kingpin, who is spending $250,000 to convert an old pipeorgan factory into America’s first Bible History Wax Museum.

The museum, scheduled to open in the nation’s capital in late June, will have seventeen tableaus of events from Creation to Crucifixion. Each will be accompanied by an appropriate King James Scripture portion. The total effect, Dennis hopes, will be to “stimulate interest in the meaning of various events in the Bible.”

The Bible Museum will be waxworks number nine for Dennis. The others, located across the country, deal with American history. The departure this time comes from a recognition that the Bible “is fundamental to our whole way of living.”

The museum will depict scenes from both the Old and the New Testament. A figure of Lot’s wife will turn to salt at the touch of a button. Noah will be loading the Ark in the rain. Jesus will be shown as a “teen-ager” working as a carpenter and later on, walking on the water at “three in the morning.”

Future expansion plans include a wing on important religious leaders.

Along with the religious significance, non-aligned Protestant Dennis expects his new museum to be big box office as well. An American history museum he now operates in the city saw 700,000 people pass the cashier last year.

Misappropriating a biblical term, Dennis added, “We expect the Bible History Museum to do damn near as well.”

WILLIAM D. FREELAND

Under New Management

Faced with a $1.5 million debt that hasn’t been reduced in three years, trustees of Bibletown, U. S. A., in Boca Raton, Florida, are putting a new man in charge—evangelist Torrey Johnson.

He replaces flamboyant founder Ira Eshleman, who seventeen years ago began turning the former Air Force radar station into the nation’s biggest winter Bible conference and built two 150-acre residential communities near the grounds.

The biggest monkey on Bibletown’s back is a 2,500-seat auditorium completed in 1960 for $1 million. It is the center of a thirteen-week winter program that draws Christian tourists to Florida’s sunny Gold Coast.

Meanwhile, a tax battle with local officials is in process. The auditorium and a Sunday school building have been ruled tax-exempt, but still in question is an $8,000-a-year levy on 105 motel units and other facilities.

ADON TAFT

The Making Of A Marxist

How does a youth “converted” in an evangelical Baptist church, active in youth work, and “called” to the ministry, end up a Communist?

Ask Steve Hamilton, 22, who now awaits sentencing for trespass in last year’s University of California student uprising. Hamilton is one of several well-known revolutionists at UC’s Berkeley campus who had planned to become clergymen. Mario Savio had his sights set on the Jesuit priesthood. Stewart Albert had planned to be a rabbi.

Hamilton says that while attending Wheaton (Illinois) College and working in a Chicago slum Sunday school, he began reading liberal theologians and soon found himself doubting the relevance of traditional Christianity.

Restless, he explored the Episcopal Church and attended laying-on-of-hands services. After transferring to the Berkeley campus, he decided to enter the Episcopal priesthood and was confirmed by Bishop James A. Pike, whose “courage and convictions” he is said to have admired. Through classes with Pike and other Episcopal contacts, he became involved in civil-rights protests.

When police “roughed him up” during his first arrest, Hamilton says, he turned completely against the “establishment.” In 1964, he represented the University Church Council in the leadership of the campus Free Speech Movement, which led student strikes.

During this period, Hamilton absorbed the Communist interpretation of history after taking a course that presented Marxism “sympathetically.” By 1965, he had discarded all theological belief. To him, “the height of irrelevance during an era of social struggle” was a theologian droning on for hours about “the ground of being.”

Communism has wrought drastic changes in Hamilton’s moral outlook. He now feels no guilt about the use of violence—even murder—by those attempting to bring about “change.” He considers himself a true atheist. As for Christ, “he disappeared with the theology, I guess, and I haven’t thought about him since.”

Another 22-year-old ex-evangelical in the Bay Area is Patrick Taggart. As a teen-ager in the First Baptist Church of Chatsworth, California, Taggart was active in church youth activities and Youth for Christ and served as a counselor in Billy Graham’s last Los Angeles crusade. But he said he was ousted from church leadership when he began to discuss “liberal” ideas. He left for the Bay and met Lois Murgenstrumm, 21, who introduced him to the Satan-worship cult in which he is now the right-hand man. The girl served as a nude “living altar” during a recent well-publicized satanist wedding (Feb. 17 issue, page 49).

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

The Consultation on Church Union got its tenth participant last month, the all-Negro Christian Methodist Episcopal Church with its 466,718 members. In May, CME representatives will meet those from other denominations to discuss the pending giant Protestant merger.

Whatever happens at that session in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the major U.S. ecumenical question of 1967 is whether the Episcopal Church as a whole will love COCU in September as its delegates did in May.

The Episcopal ecumenical commission recently announced its plans for the September General Convention in Seattle. It proposes that the church authorize its delegates to negotiate a specific merger plan. The delegates from COCU’s two biggest members, the Episcopal and Methodist Churches, lack this authority, although several other denominations have approved such escalation. The ecumenical commission also wants the U.S. church to “commend” COCU to the worldwide Lambeth Conference next year. The General Convention won’t meet again until 1970, and the next Lambeth Conference is in 1978, so both proposals are important in the COCU timetable.

Virginia’s Bishop Robert F. Gibson, Jr.—ecumenical commission chairman and former chairman of COCU itself—said COCU executives who met last month thought the merger timetable “has clearly slowed up over what we thought possible” at the last COCU meeting in Dallas, where “Principles of Church Union” were approved.

Gibson is confident the Episcopal Church will vote to continue with COCU, but is less certain it will approve entry into specific negotiation. His panel’s proposal could be amended to freeze talks at the present ambiguous level.

Although many Episcopalians think COCU is inevitable, its most conspicuous opponent, Canon Albert J. duBois, is “much more hopeful” COCU can be stalled than he was when he began a two-month series of two-night stands across the country. DuBois, 60, is the veteran executive director of the American Church Union, an organization of 11,000 Anglo-Catholic or “high” churchmen.

He finds many Episcopalians who had no previous interest in ACU and disagree with its liturgical slant are backing its drive against COCU. He also reports a significant increase in financial aid from bishops.

Also on tour against COCU is ACU President Chandler W. Sterling, the bishop of Montana, whose mailing address in Helena—Last Chance Gulch—may be prophetic.

The ACU case is presented in the current issue of its monthly American Church News. Essentially, the argument is that COCU is a move toward Protestantism at the expense of closer relations with Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. (Bishop Gibson’s commission asserts it is trying to move in both directions.) The ACU’s objection to COCU agreements on the ministry, bishops, and apostolic succession seems to be that the COCU church will not be the Episcopal Church. From the non-Episcopalian’s point of view, the Episcopal negotiators have won more concessions within COCU than any other denominational team.

The Episcopal delegation includes such high churchmen as Peter Day, the denomination’s ecumenical officer, and Bishop Stephen F. Bayne, Jr., who directs liaison with the world Anglican Communion. Another delegate is Chicago’s Bishop Gerald Francis Burrill, one of nineteen bishops who belong to the ACU. Last month, he opened the year’s discussion of COCU in the Episcopalian by saying the denomination must decide “either to obey our Lord’s command to be one and to enter willingly into the difficult, often painful, negotiations with all other Christian bodies” or to “be satisfied to be a sect, isolated from the rest of Christendom.”

Asked to comment on the ACU criticisms, Burrill said they are “not valid, on the whole,” but he agrees with its concern about the “position and impact” of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, traditional doctrinal standards of the Episcopal Church now questioned by Bishop James A. Pike and some other liberals.

The American Church Union points out that the COCU “Principles” consider the creeds as corporate, historic “symbols,” but “it is not stated, however, that anyone has any obligation to believe” them. The Apostles’ Creed, it fears, may become “an interesting historical relic,” rarely used. The status of Nicene is even more vague.

The ACU, which also dislikes the National Council of Churches, fears that the COCU church will be another NCC, run by the same people but carrying more authority, since it will be the Church rather than a voluntary council. “The sorry record of the National Council of Churches gives us a very dependable indication of what the leadership in the new COCU Church will do.… We will be bound by its heretical publications and the many distressing resolutions it chooses to set forth.” And ACU envisions an administratively muscle-bound, undemocratic church full of bureaucratic parasites.

The ACU questions whether the united church would be “truly evangelical.” “In the absence of a definite standard of beliefs for teaching, it is not likely that the new COCU Church would have much Evangelistic force in its effort to reach out for conversions.”

Although a denominational official said the ACU is an “extreme” minority, duBois claims to be more in tune with the grass roots than the COCU delegates. Many active laymen are conservative (most of ACU’s membership is lay), and he points out that a majority of Episcopal clergy are converts from other denominations, and thus many are unenthusiastic about losing Episcopal distinctives. He is convinced that if the denomination votes to join COCU, some members will form a continuing Episcopal church.

To duBois, “the ecumenical movement is forcing us to a decision on our very nature.” The Episcopalians have traditionally straddled the Protestant-Catholic fence. DuBois says many Episcopalians want to do nothing to cut off channels to Rome, and “are willing to accept the pope as a visible head of the church—a chairman of the board—but not as a monarch.”

Bishop Gibson thinks the ACU is “over-interpreting” what the COCU “Principles” are: “They are asking for more definition than anybody else has.” He calls the ACU statement “a misinterpretation of what Dallas did do and what it tried to do.”

Most of the Episcopalians who will vote on COCU this fall will be chosen in diocesan conventions this spring. The COCU resolution must pass with a simple majority in both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies (priests and laymen). The bishops’ approval is considered automatic, so the real action will occur in the other house, where each diocese has one vote. If the lay and clergy delegates within a diocese disagree, their votes cancel each other out. Any eventual merger proposal would need to pass two General Conventions in a row, with a two-thirds majority in each house.

Evangelistic One-Upmanship

About forty evangelism specialists of the American Baptist Convention braved Chicago snowdrifts last month to plan strategy for the next two years, but the biggest evangelistic controversy in the ABC got little attention.

Just before the meeting of state evangelism executives with national evangelism director Jitsuo Morikawa and his staff, the ABC General Council had repeated and re-explained its previous decision to boycott a hemispherewide, pan-Baptist Crusade of the Americas in 1969. The ABC plans instead to boost its own “Faith and Work” curriculum and handle evangelism on its own terms with ABC-aligned churches in Latin America.

The vote showed the gap between the ABC and the much larger and more conservative Southern Baptist Convention, prime mover of the 1969 crusade. But the ABC stereotype of the SBC must have taken a jolt when Wayne Dehoney, former SBC president and chief planner of the forthcoming crusade, proposed that Roman Catholics join with Baptists in the campaign. “We are hopeful, and happy that a spirit of evangelism and outreach based on the proclamation of the Gospel and New Testament faith is breaking loose in the Catholic Church.” He said Methodists and Southern Presbyterians also are interested.

Several of the state and local ABC units represented at the Chicago meeting plan to cooperate with the crusade on their own, which is fully permissible under Baptist autonomy.

The Chicago conferees mainly discussed internal efforts from headquarters such as “Action-Reflection” visitation and more efficient follow-up when ABC members move to a new community. A leading ABC figure said the lack of a pro-crusade drive in Chicago probably means the issue will be raised at the national convention in May.

Southern Baptists are still smarting from comments by Morikawa at the November meeting where the ABC first shunned the crusade. He belittled the old-style evangelism of Southerners and Pentecostalists and criticized the preeminent crusade role of the SBC, which he said has not faced up to its racial responsibilities. ABC President Carl Tiller, in his February report, said many members are losing confidence in the General Council and the “convention superstructure.” He said that many also believe the ABC evangelism program “does not meet the needs,” and that “restlessness” exists on interchurch strategy. Tiller, whose congregation belongs to both ABC and SBC, hopes for better relations across the Mason-Dixon line. To help things, Tiller has agreed to serve, as an individual, on the laymen’s committee for the 1969 crusade. His term as ABC president runs out this spring.

Confession Of 1967

The controversial Confession of 1967 appeared headed toward adoption last month. Religious News Service reported February 16 that out of ninety-one presbyteries known to have voted on the document, seventy-six had approved it. Favorable action by two-thirds or 126 of the 188 presbyteries is required for passage.

After Hash, A Barbecue

Should Christians send their children to Sunday school? Resigned Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike provided both the question and an answer when the National Council of Churches staged its annual Division of Christian Education meeting in Dallas last month. Generally it added up to a “no.” He said the “no” for the benefit of some 1,000 professional Christian education workers. Then he qualified it a bit: children should not be sent to “most” church schools, he explained. He would recommend only the kind that does not teach anything that has to be “unlearned” later, and that means that the supernatural would not be taught, and nothing about heaven and hell, and certainly nothing about a once-for-all conversion. Just the natural—“if true”—not the supernatural, said the bishop. Let the children stay home and read the funny papers (unless they are the blood-and-thunder sadistic kind), he counseled.

Pike addressed only one of sixteen sections meeting simultaneously, with other groups scattered across downtown Dallas.

Another Episcopalian almost stole the headlines from the former bishop of California. He was Malcolm Boyd, principal speaker at the meeting of adult workers, which specialized this year in approaches to young adults. Boyd chose the occasion to announce existence of the “underground church,” made up of those who are impatient with the existing practices of organized churches.

Defining members of the underground church, Boyd said, “These people are refusing to worship God merely along denominational lines. They ignore official structures and hierarchy. They regard Protestant-Catholic reunion as having already taken place. Their fellowship includes priests, pastors, laymen, nuns and even many Jews.” He said they celebrate the Lord’s Supper together at mealtimes, as the early Christians did.

He explained that the builders of this nameless revolution have decided simply not to worry about ecclesiastical and doctrinal differences, which bore them and seem futile. They are for Pope John and against Cardinal Spellman. The martyred Dietrich Bonhoeffer—along with a few secular figures such as Albert Camus—is a saint in their canon. But by and large they try to avoid too much celebrity worship.

The priest and sometime night-club performer said some of the underground church members go to church and some do not. He found an immediate reaction in the audience of adult workers, and somebody decided to call him phony, even though he had earlier said that all members of the underground church reject everything that is phony.

The adult workers, in seeking better understanding of young adults, spent some time one evening visiting bars, “gay” hangouts, and other habitats of unchurched young men and women.

Youth workers heard from another controversial minister, Howard Moody of Judson Memorial Church in New York City. He spoke of the need to move from “the apathy of the fifties to the action of the sixties.” He suggested that leadership of young people has moved from the academy and temple to the streets, and urged the development of “mobile ministries.” He asked youth workers to help the church find a new morality and get over its pietism.

Workers in week-day religious education had among their speakers Rabbi Arthur Gilbert, who stressed a need for objective teaching of religion in schools but rejected any devotional use of religion in schools and Bible study as such. He thought the teaching of religion in history would be more acceptable to the entire community than teaching the history of religion.

The sixteen sections all met independently, and the only time that all 1,800 registrants were together was at a concluding barbecue and fellowship luncheon.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Second Thoughts On Structure

Last fall the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren General Conferences voted to unite into what is to be known as the United Methodist Church. Now some top executives of the two denominations want to change the terms of the pending merger.

“We believe that there is a need for redesigning the structure of the new United Methodist Church,” said a resolution adopted at a joint meeting of the Methodist Council of Secretaries and the EUB Council of Executives.

The Joint Commission on Union was asked to “set up a committee on redesigning the structure of the church, to develop succinct statements on mission (purpose) and to draft a plan of restructure.”

The commission met the next week and voted to set up fourteen committees, one of which was assigned the job of studying the restructure request.

The Methodist-EUB executives want the restructure action taken in 1968. That’s when the merger question will be up for ratification. A plan of organization and administration for the United Methodist Church has been drawn up but will not be voted upon until then.

Schism Out Of Ecumenism?

Six emissaries of the Evangelical United Brethren hierarchy plan to hold peace talks next month with fellow churchmen in the Pacific Northwest who want no part of a merger with Methodists.

Last fall’s EUB General Conference, which voted to unite the denomination with The Methodist Church, also recognized formidable resistance from congregations in Washington, Oregon, and Montana, and authorized the General Council of Administration to appoint a special negotiating team. The group is expected to visit the area in mid-April and try to persuade as many churches as possible to recognize the expected merger. If schism cannot be avoided, the negotiating team is understood to be planning concessions to avoid court fights over church property rights.

The resistance is primarily among theologically conservative churches that do not want to be dissolved into the more liberal Methodist machine. Some authorities estimate that as much as 85 per cent of the EUB constituency in the Pacific Northwest may refuse the merger. The eighty-two EUB churches in Washington and Oregon have a total membership of about 11,600. There are twenty-two churches in Montana.

At least six churches have already taken a congregational vote against participation in the merger. Virtually all the large churches oppose union.

A leading EUB minister has declared that anti-merger members “are not a belligerent people. We are a strong holiness movement abiding by the discipline of our church, rather than departing from it.”

There is already considerable talk of forming a new regional fellowship of the non-merger churches. A number of previously independent churches are also reported to be interested in such a move. Together they will be in a good position to court association with an existing national body. Four national holiness denominations have already made approaches to EUB churches in the Pacific Northwest.

Presbyterian Rules Retained

When the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U. S., meets this June in Bristol, Tennessee, it will follow the same procedural rules it used in 1966.

To Southern Presbyterians, that’s news.

Last October the denomination’s Permanent Committee on Assembly Operation caused a furor by announcing it would make sweeping changes in the rules. The agency, which makes the arrangements for the annual assembly, has now reconsidered and withdrawn the changes.

The committee claimed authority to amend the procedures from a motion passed at the end of the 1966 assembly. It was approved after several commissioners complained of the haste with which some business (notably the decision to become a full participant in the Consultation on Church Union) was handled. But differences of opinion later arose as to whether the minutes had recorded the motion accurately.

After objections to the proposed rules began to come in, the committee reviewed the whole matter. Tapes of the concluding minutes of the 1966 assembly were heard, and makers of two procedural motions were interviewed. When it was all over, committeemen said there was a reasonable doubt about how much authority had been given them and about the intent of the motions.

The proposed rules, which resembled some used at United Presbyterian assemblies, would have assigned only half of the commissioners to standing committees. (All Presbyterian U. S. commissioners have been serving on committees.) Another unpopular change provided that the retiring moderator, the stated clerk, and the chairman of the assembly operation committee (instead of the moderator alone) would appoint the chairmen of standing committees. Another was aimed at cutting down on lobbying.

Instead of going into effect at the 1967 assembly, the rules (with several important revisions) will now be submitted as recommendations for adoption and implementation at the 1968 assembly.

If the committee’s decision on the rules settled one hassle, another of its decisions might start a new one. It voted to hold the 1969 General Assembly in Mobile, Alabama. Officials of the United Presbyterian Church had been expecting the Southern church to join it and the Cumberland Presbyterians in San Antonio for simultaneous assemblies that year. Presbyterian U. S. proponents of closer relations with the other two denominations might seek to reverse the committee’s action and push for a family reunion.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

History And The Christian Faith

Vindications: Essays on the Historical Basis of Christianity, edited by Anthony Hanson (Morehouse-Barlow, 1966, 192 pp., $5); The Historical Shape of Faith, by Ralph G. Wilburn (Westminster, 1966, 240 pp., $6); and Christ the Meaning of History, by Hendrikus Berkhof, translated by L. Buurman (John Knox, 1966, 224 pp., $5.50), are reviewed by John Frederick Jansen, professor of New Testament interpretation, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas.

Different as these books are in scope and approach, they express a common concern that the Christian faith must take history more seriously than some tendencies in modern theology have done.

Vindications is a symposium of six essays by five British authors. Three of the essays deal with the historical skepticism that characterizes form criticism of the Gospels. R. P. C. Hanson objects to the tendency to deny any genuine historical or biographical interest in the Gospels and seeks to show that “if nothing is certainly original, then we cannot be sure that anything is certainly secondary.” He points out that the time between Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is remarkably short for such a radical transformation of the message of Jesus as some posit. Anthony Hanson carries this critique further by examining Nineham’s commentary on Mark to show that his approach could discredit the reliability of any historical document. One may ask whether the comparison with other ancient literature does enough justice to the specifically confessional character of the Gospel. A. R. C. Leaney shows the most appreciation of form criticism as he deals with the quest of the historical Jesus in recent discussion. All three recognize the legitimacy and importance of the form-critical method but object that often conclusions are based less on form analysis than on prior presuppositions.

Ralph Wilburn’s The Historical Shape of Faith relates Christian concern for history to the development of the idea of history. He begins with the eschatological view of history as seen in the New Testament and in Augustine. The New Testament discussion is not very satisfying; it is much too brief and settles for rather sweeping generalizations. But Wilburn rightly shows how the eschatological view was challenged and undermined in the Enlightenment, and how rationalism’s “light of universal reason” failed to take history seriously. He gives a readable summary of the direction that the understanding of history has taken, paying particular attention to Croce, Toynbee, and Collingwood. The remaining chapters examine the implications for theology, especially for Christology and for the quest of the historical Jesus.

This is an interesting book. One wonders, however, why the jacket claims that it is “the first book to analyze just what history is, to define the impact of this modern idea of history on the Christian faith, and to consider ways in which theology must respond.…” The same publisher gave us Alan Richardson’s History, Sacred and Profane in 1964, a book that receives no mention in the present volume and yet is, in my opinion, a more substantial work.

The last book is Hendrikus Berkhof’s Christ the Meaning of History (written in 1958). An apocalyptic era, he suggests, calls the Church urgently to a theology of history. But church dogmatics has too much left a theology of history to the sects. Berkhof proposes to appropriate the message of biblical theology, including biblical apocalyptic, for an answer to the threatening alternatives of wrong meaning and no meaning in history. Since Israel first saw history genuinely as goal-directed, he examines the significant Old Testament traditions from the Exodus faith through Daniel, criticizing the manner in which prophecy and apocalyptic are often set over against each other. The New Testament portrays Jesus Christ as both the End and the Beginning of history. That is why “consistent” and “realized” eschatology are complementary expressions of this End and Beginning, both in the life of Jesus and in the life of the Church. The new beginning is seen in the missionary endeavor of the early Church. Berkhof examines modern secularization and says: “Secularization is the child of the gospel, but a child who sooner or later rises against his mother. And yet, the mother would not be what she ought to be if she did not desire the child.”

The most important chapters portray the Crucified and the Risen Christ in history. Here Berkhof deals with New Testament apocalyptic, including such thorny questions as the future of Israel and the millennial hope. Finally, he deals with the Consummation, both as break and as connection with past and present history. Eternity is not “timelessness”—or else there is only break and no consummation of history. Yet Berkhof does not follow Cullmann’s tendency to minimize the break between time and eternity. In his conclusion, avoiding historical skepticism and predictive confidence, he points to the practical necessity of making relative decisions in the present. An epilogue, written in 1965, indicates that Berkhof remains opposed to the basic conceptions of the Bultmann school.

These three volumes show that Christian theology need not settle for an uncritical biblicism or a historical skepticism that is indifferent to historical foundations of the faith. Of the three, I found Berkhof’s the most rewarding.

Reading for Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

• Reformed Dogmatics, by Herman Hoeksema (Reformed Free Publishing, $14.95). A systematic treatment of biblical and Reformed theology, thirty years in preparation, that develops the traditional topics of theology, anthropology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology.

• Ancient Orient and Old Testament, by K. A. Kitchen (Inter-Varsity, $3.95). A British scholar applies ancient Near East data to problems of Old Testament chronology, history, and literary criticism and calls for a critical reassessment of widely held liberal theories and methods.

• Ring of Truth: A Translator’s Testimony, by J. B. Phillips (Macmillan, $2.95). The renowned biblical translator relates discoveries of the deep truths of God that have gripped his life during his long years of study.

Death-Of-Reader Theology

The Future of Belief: Theism in a World Come of Age, by Leslie Dewart (Herder and Herder, 1966, 223 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by David A. Redding, writer in residence, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.

The argument over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is nothing to our intricate theological needlework. The diversionary literature defining the death of God and refining the new morality grows more and more complicated and voluminous. Our debate has become so rarefied that it would have bewildered Dionysius the Areopagite. Surely it will amuse the next generation, with the brutally practical reaction it is sure to have.

The Future of Belief is a book about the author’s God. Mr. Dewart’s desire to release God from the prison of the past only means that He is to be incarcerated in a more effective one. The author adds his form of atheism to that of the Marxist and that of the death-of-God theologian. But in this book the reader dies before God does.

At times Dewart with his erudition sounds a little like Emily Post describing the proper way to extract a prune pit. Take this, for example:

But is it possible to transcend the conceptual dichotomy of God’s essence and existence?… If we depart from Greek metaphysics at their Parmenidean root, knowledge is no longer an immaterial “intrussusception” of reality, and the investigation of being is no longer guided by the equivalence of intelligibility and being.

These “come of age” theologians complain that all Christian expression that preceded them is adolescent and irrelevant. In a very knowing and humorless way, Dewart rushes into this thin air to deal with “the problems of integrating Christian belief with the everyday experience of contemporary man.” I had high hopes for this author, having just put down the most exciting book I’ve read in years by another Roman Catholic. But Dewart continues the rage of carrying religion off into a corner where only the very special coterie can look at it. The book is brilliant inside its own logic but far remote from contemporary man’s “everyday experience.”

Dewart does fluff up some issues on which theology has been sitting for ages. And he can be incisive: “Belief must bear upon the reality of God, not upon words or concepts.” “The Marxist counterpart is the rejection of the God who is truly that of the Christian faith, but who in fact is unfaithfully believed in by us.” The author offers a shakeup more illegible than mistaken, undisciplined rather than deadly. But, not content with knocking out windows, he goes on to knock out walls and leaves us no house at all. As he discusses such matters as the distinction between the essence and the existence of God, the atheistic and anti-theistic positions, and the possibility that God may or may not be a being, one suspects that he is not in the realm of The Future of Belief but in fantasy.

Books of this kind do not belong to prophecy, nor are they organic additions to Christian theology. The death-of-God mood is a revolt that rejects most ungratefully the past wisdom and genius of all those who have transmitted Christianity to us. This new conceit suffers under the illusion that we are smarter than the apostles and that Augustine and Luther are only adequate corollary reading for good secondary schools. Now, borne on the wings of modern enlightenment, we shall bravely free our lofty insights from the drag of yesterday. Such an attitude is that of a defensive teenager tooting his own horn, howling with reproof, rife with objection toward the masterpieces of the past. Having emerged so recently from two wars and trembling now within the shadow of another, how can we pontificate with such authority?

Do not the angels sing for Mr. Dewart? We shall wait for him to put his articulate pen to work on what Christ meant when he said, “Except ye … become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Dissecting 007

James Bond’s World of Values, by Lycurgus M. Starkey, Jr. (Abingdon, 1966, 96 pp., $1.45); and The Devil with James Bond, by Ann S. Boyd (John Knox, 1966, 123 pp., $1.75), are reviewed by Clyde S. Kilby, professor of English, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Dr. Starkey and Mrs. Boyd hold diametrical opinions on the work of Ian Fleming. Starkey believes that Fleming, through his hero, James Bond, glorifies sex, sadism, violence, snobbery, “gambling, guzzling, sports-car gunning, and gourmandising,” and a narrow nationalism. Mrs. Boyd proposes that Bond is in reality “a modern knight of faith whose adventures involve a gallery of modern demons who have been attacking contemporary mankind just as diabolically as Medusa and all the other legendary demons and dragons attacked mankind in ages past.” She thinks that Bond is indeed another St. George going about to slay the demons in contemporary society.

I do not find myself in much sympathy with either book. Starkey’s is not at all a study of Fleming and therefore has a completely unjustified title. Rather, it is a series of sermons against the evils he finds approved by Fleming’s hero. The sermons, which Dr. Starkey delivered over NBC television, are earnest, informative, and excellent in expression. They take Fleming, however, simply as a point of departure.

On the other hand, Mrs. Boyd makes a thorough examination, from her own point of view, of Fleming’s books. Her clever hypothesis is so intriguingly presented and so undogmatic that I think it might be palatable even to one as opposed as Dr. Starkey. She concedes that her view is “a little preposterous,” but she carries through on it so well that it becomes interesting for its own sake.

This is not to say that Mrs. Boyd is simply toying with her reader. She insists that the reading of all the Fleming novels in their chronological order will show the reasonableness of her argument. The spirit that has been missing in Western civilization, says she, is that of the image of St. George the dragon-slayer, an image that for generations captured the imagination of youth and benefited them. James Bond has such an image, says Mrs. Boyd, as partially proved by the fact that his novels have sold 45 million copies and sent 100 million people to see the movie versions. (Although both books were printed in 1966, Dr. Starkey reports only 18 million copies sold. It seems too bad that errors of this sort are allowed to pass both writer and editor.)

The thing that impresses me most about Mrs. Boyd’s book is not that she proves her point but the astonishingly wide backdrop against which she tries to prove it. She makes use of a large array of distinguished authority, particularly Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer. Although she sometimes marshals her material with strength, one often senses little more than ingenuity at work. I think she might have done better to forget Bond and use her insight and skill to try to show the need today of another St. George. There is indeed such a need.

I felt that I should not write this review without first reading one of Fleming’s stories. At random I picked up Dr. No. I discovered no St. George but only a salad of mystery entertainment, with a tart dressing of sex. On the whole, it seemed to be a very contrived performance. But then, Mrs. Boyd insists one must read not just one book but all. I did inquire of a James Bond fan (a Christian) and was told that the truth is probably halfway between Dr. Starkey and Mrs. Boyd. That is, Fleming, like many other popular writers today, dishes out lots of violence, drinking, and sex. At the same time his overcoming hero can become for some readers, a model—like Batman—of bravery and endurance.

Catalyst For Christian Writers

The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation, by U. Milo Kaufmann (Yale University, 1966, 263 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by John S. Ramsey, graduate student, University of Maryland, College Park.

The Protestant spirit, here and in England, has never been especially charitable toward imaginative literature; but in seventeenth-century England, the Puritan wing of the Reformation permitted the creative writer as little room for the practice of his art as the Tudor monarchs allowed the Puritan for the exercise of his religion. Yet within this heritage so inimical to the creative imagination, Puritanism discovered its most original genius and its most enduring work of art: John Bunyan and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

U. Milo Kaufmann’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation is a scholarly and penetrating analysis, marred only occasionally by its once having been a doctoral dissertation. It supplies a readable account of the theological forces within Puritanism antagonistic to imaginative literature, and it offers a convincing explanation for the artistic excellence of The Pilgrim’s Progress in spite of those forces. Indeed, Kaufmann suggests how the very restrictions of Puritanism upon the activity of the imagination defined a territory that Bunyan could imaginatively explore.

Significant in Kaufmann’s book is the fact that both in the Puritan reverence for the Bible as the sole authority for faith and conduct and in the corollary emphasis on the use of the Scriptures only for the discovery of doctrine, the creative writer’s imaginative devices were denied validity: His use of symbol, image and metaphor was not appreciated by his readers, since these literary devices communicated ambiguous suggestion rather than clear, unspotted doctrine. The Puritan spirit thus inhibited the poetic sensibility. And this inhibition reveals in part why modern Puritanism—call it orthodoxy or evangelical conservatism—has produced so few great writers, and perhaps no writers of the stature of those who have fashioned from their antipathy to the Puritan spirit a creative stimulus.

But Bunyan, Kaufmann shows, found his imaginative freedom for The Pilgrim’s Progress within the narrow boundaries of Puritan meditation, a discipline that urged the believer to reflect upon the Word (an exercise of making and preaching a Puritan sermon to oneself) and to meditate both upon heaven (a locus for infinite imaginative opportunity) and upon his experience (a process using memory and imagination in which the truth of the Scriptures was attested). Within these limits Bunyan’s imagination operated freely, as shown, for example, in his description of Christian’s sojourn at House Beautiful.

Moreover, Kaufmann’s demonstration of the importance of meditative traditions in Bunyan’s art places The Pilgrim’s Progress within the larger artistic context described by Louis Martz in his seminal works on this subject—The Poetry of Meditation and more recently The Paradise Within. Martz argues that much of the seventeenth-century religious poetry (which, incidentally, has been a major influence on a good deal of modern literature) was not ecstatic lyricism; rather, it was a poetry shaped by the rigorous formulas of medieval and Tridentine spiritual exercise.

The tradition of meditation, then, which seems to be a factor of artistic excellence in seventeenth-century English literature, is, according to Kaufmann, not exclusively the province of Donne and Milton, Herbert and Crashaw. Bunyan is there, too; his style, structure, and content prove it. Furthermore, Kaufmann’s study—and Martz’s studies, too—reveals that in the genre of meditative art, the best writers refused to oppose their antecedents; rather, they found in them a discipline for their art. The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation is perhaps the catalyst needed by the aspiring writer suffering within the restrictions of contemporary, orthodox Protestantism.

Book Briefs

The Mercersburg Theology, edited by James Hastings Nichols (Oxford, 1966, 384 pp., $7.50). Selections from the writings of John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff, nineteenth-century German Reformed Church leaders whose ecumenical theology stressed sacramentalism.

Pioneers in Mission, edited by R. Pierce Beaver (Eerdmans, 1966, 291 pp., $6.95). A Christian missions scholar amasses an abundance of ordination sermons, charges, and instructions that shed light on early American missions to the heathen.

Christ’s Parables Today, by George K. Bowers (Beacon Hill, 1966, 139 pp., $1.95). Unravels some of the enigmas of Jesus’ parables about the King, his kingdom, his subjects.

Peloubet’s Select Notes 1967, by Wilbur M. Smith (W. A. Wilde, 1966, 436 pp., $3.25).

The following article by J. W. Hyde appeared in the February, 1967, issue of the “Presbyterian Survey” under the title, “NIP*: Good or Bad?” (*New Improved Presbyterian). It explains one reason why there is so much unrest within all major Protestant denominations.

By and large, laymen know the world in which they live and look to the Church to preach and teach the Gospel by which alone people’s hearts can be changed. When they see the Church becoming a social-action group, they are rightly alarmed.

After listening to the pronouncements emanating from the courts of the church, one gets the impression that the Presbyterian Church U.S. has been preaching Christianity on a trial basis, and any day now she may change her name to the “New Improved Presbyterian Church.” We seem to have switched our emphasis from God so loved the world to Jesus went about doing good. I read these pronouncements with dismay and increasing alarm, and quite frankly, I would rather fight than switch.

Let’s take a look at a prototype—this New, Improved Presbyterian. His ecumenical viewpoint borders on what someone has rightly described as an ecumaniac—a man who believes everyone else’s religion is better than his own.

Briefly, his joy knew no bounds when we officially joined COCU. Nothing short of full organic union with all of Protestantism will satisfy him, and after this, a world church.

I firmly believe the strength of the Protestant Church to be in its multiplicity, not in its oneness. The unity of a free society resides in its diversity, and diversity is more compatible with Christian unity than is uniformity.

The ecumenical movement has translated unity and oneness to mean unison and union. But there is absolutely no relationship. Real unity does not require compromise, sameness, uniformity, nor union. It does require a unity of “mood, disposition and objective,” as well as an understanding of the freedom that is in Christ.

Unity does not require the submerging of differences and motivating forces. On the contrary, it is a united desire to present Christ to the world in the best way we know. Christians have a oneness with each other, not necessarily because we think alike, but because we pledge allegiance to a common Saviour. We should shout this—not from a common pulpit—but in a million different ways, and from a thousand pulpits. We should let the world know that this Christ in whom we believe does not demand uniformity and union among Christians, but rather a united concern to make the Christian faith a living reality in the world—an eagerness to get on with it.

Merger for the sake of putting up a united Christian front to the rest of the world is hypocrisy.

Regarding the mission of the Church, the New Improved Presbyterian’s viewpoint seems to be that while the Church is not necessarily wedded to the world, there should nevertheless be some sort of common-law arrangement to serve the purpose of accommodation. A sort of hide-and-seek arrangement, whereby every time the world progresses another notch on the scale of sophistication, the Church adopts a new stance in order to be recognized. She jumps out of her hiding place and says, “Look at me.” This she calls “relevancy.” I call it absurdity. She calls it compatibility—I call it compromise.

It is not the job of the Church to preach reformation through social action. It is the task of the Church to preach redemption through Christ. A man does not become a Christian through the knowledge that he is doing something morally right. It might help his conscience, but it will do absolutely nothing for his soul.

The Church has a high calling: to confront men with Jesus Christ. No other organization on the face of the earth is charged with this responsibility. She will, therefore, influence the world in direct proportion to her ability to bring about this confrontation. This is her great task—to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. She can eliminate every evil in the world, but if eliminating evil is her primary task, her job would then be through. If every person in the world today had adequate food, adequate housing, adequate income; if all men were “equal”; if every possible social evil and injustice were done away with and the world were truly a Utopia—men would still need one thing: Christ!

One cannot be concerned over the soul of his fellow man without being concerned over his welfare. Good work indeed is closely related to the teachings of Christ, as well as every other religion, and unconcern at this point makes a mockery of Christianity. It places the Church in the position of preaching Christ in isolation. The servant theme in the New Testament, however, does not suggest that men serve men, but that they serve Christ among men. The Christian’s concern for his brother and the Church’s mission are two different things.

As you might have guessed, the New Improved Presbyterian is unequivocally in favor of the National Council of Churches. In his sight they can do no wrong. Perhaps he is right, but they could surely use a good public relations man right now. I think the NCC does some good, but it also does some harm; and there is serious doubt in the minds of many as to which it does the most of.

The NCC shatters the unity of the Church by its very controversy, and the irony of it all is that the impression of unity expressed by Christians counseling together in this manner is overshadowed by disunity of Christians quarreling.

I don’t mind counseling with other denominations at all, nor do I mind being challenged and disturbed by groups who do not think as I; but I object very strenuously when the group initiates programs which I do not approve, makes pronouncements (from war in Viet Nam to unemployment insurance) on political and social issues, and spends my church’s money on causes to which I do not subscribe, yet conveys to the rest of the world not only that I agree, but that this is Christian unity.

I have come to the conclusion that the NCC is a politically oriented, religious organization run by professional clergymen who think that the Church should be involved in the mainstream of American and world politics. This view of the mission of the Church is incompatible with evangelical Christianity, which proclaims the “Good News” of the Gospel, not the pronouncements of the U.N.; which builds its message around a person, not an organization; which witnesses to the power of the Holy Spirit, not the Democratic Party; which teaches salvation by faith, not by united community action.

Certainly the Church should speak, but she should speak against the backdrop of the love of Christ for the world and his reason for coming, not in the name of social reform. Certainly the Cross should be taken to the market place, not necessarily by the Church, but by individual Christians working in the world. As George MacLeod has written, “Christ was not crucified in a sanctuary between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves.” He is present in the world to redeem the world, and the Church had better get this message across, or the sanctuary will become obsolete.

Copyright 1967, Presbyterian Survey.

Reprinted with permission.