On the day after Washington demonstrations against American policies in Southeast Asia, President Johnson heard a different view expressed by evangelist Billy Graham in Houston’s Astrodome.

“Even a little handful can make a great noise and get national attention if they are protesting and demonstrating,” said Graham, who was winding up a crusade in Texas’s largest city.

Continuing his pre-address welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, the evangelist pointed out that in Houston nearly 400,000 people of every color and creed had attended the ten-day meetings “to protest sin and moral evil and to affirm their belief in moral integrity and old-fashioned religious convictions.” The fact that most of them had been under 25 indicated that “the youth of today, in spite of a noisy minority, are probably the most religious-minded of any generation in this century.”

The President and his wife had flown in specially from their ranch, where Graham and his associate Grady Wilson hail been guests the previous weekend. Johnson’s fulfillment of a promise made to Graham, a longtime friend, made history. It was probably the first time a President in office had attended an evangelistic meeting. And the experience was doubtless a novel one also for many members of the White House press corps, which was out in force. In view of the Texas tragedy of two years ago, pressmen and photographers were asked to watch their language: the President was to be “filmed,” not “shot.”

Two days before the beginning of a crusade twice postponed because of his illness, Graham had addressed a capacity crowd at the University of Houston auditorium. In this, his first public address in twelve weeks, the fit-looking evangelist pointed to the fallacy of waiting for problems to be solved in a society “ruled by computers, systems and mass media,” which take no account of the fact that man is more than a statistic. This address was relayed to a TV audience estimated at more than 300,000 students in an eighty-mile radius.

Other distinguished visitors during the crusade included Texas Governor John Connally, who introduced the evangelist at the opening service; veteran singer Ethel Waters (“God bless each and every one of his sparrows”); and Vonda Kay Van Dyke, Miss America of 1965, who spoke and sang at the next-to-last service, specially directed at youth. “Christ is the only one who can give you real happiness,” she told more than 37,000 listeners.

At the closing meeting Graham expressed violent disagreement with those “who would throw God and religion out of our schools” and outlined the dangers of educating a man without moral and spiritual strength. “This is one of the most dangerous aspects of Communism,” he declared, “and we are in danger of copying the Communists.” Taking his address from Paul’s famous Mars Hill message, Graham said that the Apostle would find in an American city “immorality, crime, and even more idols than in Athens.” Modern man tries to make God conform to his own wishful thinking, involving an absence of judgment and punishment for sin, the evangelist declared. “God is not suggesting that we repent of our sins—he commands it.”

The final day’s crowd of 61,000 was 10,000 more than had ever watched the Houston Astros in their home Dome. The 218-foot-high air-conditioned amphitheatre, built at a cost of $20 million, is 4½ times the size of Rome’s Pantheon. On seeing it for the first time, even a Texas sports writer was stopped in his tracks and gasped, “It’s like stepping through the gates of heaven.” And that’s precisely how many onlookers felt as 13,100 inquirers responded to Graham’s call for commitment. They stepped onto a playing held that developed extensive patches of dead grass after the Dome ceiling was painted to reduce glare in athletes’ eyes.

Expenses of the crusade, including rental of the Dome at $12,000 a night, were more than covered before the end, and the offering taken during the final meeting was designated by local sponsors to buy radio time for future evangelistic projects of the Graham association.

Not realizing that the final meeting was an afternoon one, a New Orleans man and his son flew in just as the presidential plane left Houston International Airport. Taking his disappointment philosophically, the Louisianian said: “Never mind, I’ll hear Billy Graham in Greenville.” The next crusade is planned in that South Carolina city March 4–13. Before then, Graham goes to Washington for his annual pre-Christmas appearance in the Pentagon concourse.

Solidarity In Bolivia

The world’s loftiest capital, La Paz, Bolivia, saw an unprecedented display of Protestant solidarity last month as 15,000 believers—many in colorful Indian attire—paraded peacefully through streets more accustomed to hostile mobs.

The two-hour procession and two weeks of services capped a year-long “Evangelism-in-Depth” drive coordinated by the Latin America Mission. Next is “consolidation,” with each of fourteen cooperating denominations launching its own program.

During the year, 20,000 Bolivians professed faith in Christ (1,000 in the final La Paz meetings) and hundreds of young people vowed to enter Christian service.

The picturesque parade drew wide press reaction, none more significant than that of the leading Roman Catholic daily, Presencia:

“The diverse Protestant sects have united here and have organized these activities in spite of their differences and with the Gospel as a backdrop. This is a great step and shows a very interesting spirit.” It said the neat, sober evangelicals offered proof of “a social action and of a philosophy of preaching which produces positive results for these people and for the nation.”

W. DAYTON ROBERTS

Hearth And Homily

United Presbyterians and Roman Catholics plan to publish a joint worship guide next fall. The project was revealed after a two-day private ecumenical meeting in Philadelphia, the second official encounter between the two churches.

The guide will have three sections: specimen worship services with sermons and “homilies” emphasizing such topics as peace, unity, and thanksgiving; Bible study and worship for smaller groups; and an elaboration on Bible selections with commentary to show where Protestants and Catholics differ.

The worship guide is reminiscent of a recent book on the informal “living room dialogues” being promoted by the National Council of Churches and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (Catholic education agency). These new “hearthside” discussions, scheduled to start next month, include prayer and Bible study but not worship services as in the Presbyterian project.

The “role of the Holy Spirit” was another topic at Philadelphia. After discussing a treatise, panelists agreed on three points:

1. The traditional trinitarian doctrine.

2. “The universal salvific will of God manifested in the God-man Jesus Christ, the mediator for all men.”

3. Church reform and renewal as the work of the Holy Spirit.

On point one, panelists said they took historic creeds at face value and never considered the possibility that modern theologians might be assigning new meaning to traditional formulations.

One of the Presbyterian leaders, Dr. David Ramage of the Board of National Missions, said after the meeting that the most troublesome area was the relation between Scripture and tradition, a topic on which the Catholic Church recently took action (see page 36).

JOHN MILLER

Thumbs Down To $1,111,898

Furman University turned down a $611,898 federal science grant and Mercer University shunned a $500,000 loan when the South Carolina and Georgia Baptist Conventions enforced traditional beliefs against government aid.

The pressing aid problem (see page 57, November 5 issue) also dominated fourteen other recent state meetings in the Southern Baptist Convention. The aid ban was upheld, at least for the present, in Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana, Virginia, New Mexico, and California, while seven states set up study committees to decide whether a change is due.

Among the seven is Kentucky, where Baptists raised only one-third of the $9 million they needed for four schools. The federal challenge at Furman spurred the South Carolina convention to provide the money.

In Maryland, Dr. Conwell Anderson denied reports he quit as president of a planned Baptist college because the state convention refused federal aid.

Contra Contraception

Pope Paul reportedly directed the Ecumenical Council to re-endorse the birth-control doctrines of Popes Piux XI and Pius XII in its “Modern World” schema.

Ecumenical Council commissioners who prepared the new version of the schema decided also to include Paul’s own statement of June, 1964. which affirms traditional Roman Catholic teachings until they are changed by himself, subject to advice from a special papal commission.

That commission has been unable to agree, although the majority is rumored to favor change in the church’s ban on contraception by any means other than the natural “rhythm” method.

The latest papal move is interpreted variously. It may be an attempt merely to clarify the current church stand. However, it may signal a freeze on the birth-control issue, which would mean no change is forthcoming, at least in the near future.

The onrush of events, however, will put the world spotlight on the Pope’s decision. Besides the ever-present challenge of population growth, there is the special White House advisory panel’s plea for greatly expanded birth-control programs sponsored by the U. S. government, both at home and overseas.

The panel, headed by Professor Richard Newton Gardner of the Columbia University Law School, said man has a “basic right” to choose family size, but two-thirds of mankind lacks both information and the means to do it. The United States should provide both, said the study group of thirteen, which had only one Roman Catholic member. George N. Shuster, assistant to the president of the University of Notre Dame.

There is also continuing scientific expforation. A controversial report of sex research now being prepared by two Washington University gynecologists reports discovery of a vaginal chemical that can kill sperm in ten seconds. The scientists hope it may provide an answer to Catholic objections. The Ford Foundation recently announced $14.5 million in new research grants on birth control and related fields.

The viewpoint of the “death of God” movement is hard to identify precisely, but it seems to boil down to one or a combination of the following propositions:

1. It is no longer meaningful to believe in the existence of God. This proposition cuts across several areas of our experience, (a) It is not meaningful to believe in God because such a belief is irrelevant to the problems of today’s world, (b) It is not meaningful to believe in God because we do not have the language or symbolic categories to discuss him precisely or with genuinely communicable understanding, (c) It is not meaningful to believe in God because propositions about such a being are not subject to empirical verification by any form of controlled observation, and assertions that cannot be verified empirically are meaningless.

2. It is no longer possible to believe in the existence of God. Modern science has brought supernaturalism of any sort into disrepute. Things that are outside the scope of the “natural” and that are not, at least ideally, comprehensible by the methods of science simply do not happen.

3. It is no longer necessary to believe in the existence of God. The “mysteries” of the universe have been or are being explained by scientific concepts and methods, so it is no longer necessary to postulate a God. And our ethical and moral structure finds a sufficient foundation and exemplar in Christ and the attitude of love and service he provided during his ministry; it adds nothing to assume that a transcendent God exists above and beyond that attitude.

These propositions, it is believed, point to the conclusion that God has died. But are the propositions intrinsically and inevitably sound, or do they rest upon some prior assumptions—a particular intellectual point of view’—that might be called into question?

Time quotes Professor Altizer as follows: “We must recognize that the death of God is a historical event: God has died in our time, in our history, in our existence”.… There are several possible interpretations of this quotation:

1. It could mean that people no longer take their belief in God seriously and no longer follow what they believe to be his will in their day-to-day conduct. Certainly there are vast numbers of people for whom God has ceased to exist. There are also vast numbers for whom he has never existed. On the other hand, there are vast numbers of people for whom he has not died, because they have believed and still believe in him and conscientiously seek and follow his will as they understand it. Thus, God has not died in any definitive sense.

2. The statement could mean that the systematic, empirically verified explanations of modern science have replaced God as an effective force in the universe. Here again, the power of the statement is weakened because of the many people for whom the achievements of science have not replaced God. Furthermore, this interpretation assumes that there is no God other than that which man himself “created” as a comfortable, catch-all explanation for phenomena that he does not understand. Further, this interpretation places far too much faith in the ability of science to provide “ultimate” answers; the inevitably partial and limited character of scientific explanation is overlooked. Here we might note the “humble” outlook of such scientific greats as Heisenberg and Einstein in forming our expectations about the kinds of answers science can provide.

3. The statement could mean that God and related biblical concepts have outlived their relevance in that they do not offer any solutions to the widespread personal, social, economic, and political problems that beset today’s world. In a sense, this interpretation combines the assumptions underlying the first two. (a) Since people no longer see or search for any relevance of biblical concepts in the “real” world, God has lost his meaning, i.e., has died, (b) Since people now place more confidence in the effectiveness of so-called rational, non-theistic approaches to their problems, the God that they created to help solve those problems is no longer necessary or useful. Once more, there are many people who see a vital relevance of biblical concepts for today’s world and bend every effort to apply them. For many of these individuals, the systematic and empirically supported advances of the natural and behavioral sciences are considered to augment rather than to replace a God-centered orientation to the world and its problems. A conscientious Christian might well consider it not merely his prerogative but his duty to bring all his resources to bear upon the problems he faces. These resources certainly include his ability to understand and apply the contributions of science.

Can it be that the “death of God” writers have fallen into the trap (so common to purveyors of intellectual abstractions) of assuming that most people see the same and the only reality that they themselves see?

If the “death of God” position is, as seems most plausible, that God has died because men no longer find him believable or useful, then it must follow that God never really lived except in the imaginations of men. Apparently, these men are saying, not that God has died, but that he never really had an independent existence. These theologians never say outright that there is no transcendent, independently existing God. Rather, the essence of their argument seems to be that we cannot know or comprehend God because of our limited perceptual, cognitive, and intellectual abilities. Moreover, such capabilities as we do have are inevitably confounded and trammeled by cultural forms and predefinitions. Here, the question seems not to be one of the nature of God but one of the nature of man as a knowing being.…

The “death of God” theologians seem to hail their admission of his demise as a breath of fresh air. Now that the theological air has cleared and Christianity has become thoroughly secularized, Christians can abandon doctrinal nonsense and express their Christianity in deep, heartfelt concern. The churchman will now be more free to demonstrate his Christian love by actually doing things for the economically deprived, for the undernourished millions, and for the ethnic and racial minorities in their struggle for equality. In other words, the Christian’s concern will shift from an “other-worldly” focus to a “this-worldly” focus.

But is this a safe assumption? Will booting God out of our churches by trying to bury him necessarily mean that church people will show an increased concern for persons and social problems?…

Are the “death of God” theologians really in a position to say that God has died? Or must they limit themselves to saying that within their own particular conceptual frameworks they have not been able to find him? What if they had made different assumptions or accepted the validity of different kinds of data or asked different questions? Would they still, of necessity, not be able to find God? Or does the question of whether God does or ever did exist still boil down to the age-old question. “To believe or not to believe?”

Persons of the more traditional, evangelical persuasion, using different assumptions, accepting different kinds of data, and holding to the validity of faith as a category of belief and experience, say that God does exist. We assume that God could and does reveal himself in various ways, including the written word as found in the Bible. We accept the life and works of Christ as, above all, the material expression of God’s love and grace. To support our sometimes intangible-looking faith, we fall back upon the evidence of history. For example, something happened shortly after the crucifixion of Christ to bring about a miraculous revitalization of his depressed, dejected, and utterly defeated disciples. Something happened that we remember as the “day of Pentecost” that stimulated a social, ethical, and religious movement that has had a tremendous impact upon the world. Is this sort of evidence sufficient reason for believing in God and in Christ as the Son of God? We naïve Christians think so, and we believe.

Assistant Professor of Psychology

The University of North Dakota

Grand Forks, N. D.

Diagnosis praised; physician scorned

Cybernetics

Discussions about machines “taking over” usually end in an insecure half-laugh, because sometimes you just can’t be too sure. That automation is here to stay is undeniable. That some scientists think life can be created in the laboratory is supposed to pose all kinds of threats for theology and especially the doctrine of man. And that some combination of unemployment and living terror is ahead of us is increasingly becoming the theme of avant-garde writing.

But I think that in the long run we have the machine stopped. Neither machines nor laboratory cells can really replace human beings unless they reach the stage at which they start blaming one another. This practice is a reflection of the true human condition, and it seems an impossibility without somewhere the fact of sin.

One of C. S. Lewis’s best books is The Great Divorce. It was William Blake who made classic the hope of universal salvation when he wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, meaning by his title that eventually heaven and hell could get together. But in The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis, with his usual penetration and wit. sets before us the possibility of people in hell moving on into heaven. The only trouble is that they can’t bear to live in heaven because they carry hell around with them, and the hell is that they can’t forgive and, worse than that, can’t stand to be forgiven. Pride won’t allow it.

Lewis points out that Napoleon is moving into deeper and deeper hell because he insists on settling with his generals the question of whose fault it was at Waterloo. Not being able to let loose of this obsession, he moves on toward the deep darkness.

Try it on yourself. Is the burden of your sin finally the inability to quit blaming someone for yourself?

EUTYCHUS II

The Bible Is For People

When I started to read Dr. Hughes’s article. “What Is the Bible For?” (Nov. 19 issue), I wondered if he would present a lot of philosophical and theological ideas without explaining such a simple thing as why my wife and I love to read the Bible. But he came through wonderfully.…

JOHN STANTON

East Dennis, Mass.

Excellent diagnosis! Helpful witness!

PAUL IHLENFELD

St. Louis, Mo.

After reading the article … I have just one observation to make to the editors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY: “Physician, heal thyself”.…

If Luke were to write to Theophilus today, his manuscript would doubtlessly be returned with a rejection slip and the notation that, while his work was good, his subject had already been assigned to a staff writer.…

MIDGE SHERWOOD

San Marino, Calif.

Ecumenical Dialogue

I have just read Dr. C. Darby Fulton’s article (Nov. 5 issue), dealing with the subject of organic church union.

It is the finest thing l have read on this subject. He covered the subject marvelously in a few words. I believe time will reveal how right he is.…

FRED MCPHAIL

First Baptist Church

Aurora, Mo.

I feel a little unhappy about the headline on page 4, “Spiritual unity cannot exist without organic church union.” Perhaps this could be extracted from what I say in my article about a false antithesis between “spiritual unity” and “organic union”; yet it is a misreading of what I mean. I feel a very considerable degree of spiritual unity with many Christians from whom I am still visibly separated. What I will not do is to accept this state of affairs as being adequate to what our Lord requires of us or what the Bible teaches. The whole ecumenical movement springs, as it seems to me, from the joyful conviction that in Christ we have (underlying many differences) a spiritual unity, but that it remains for us to clothe it in forms that are less confusing, anachronistic, and unserviceable than the ones we now have.

PATRICK C. RODGER

Executive Secretary

Commission on Faith and Order

World Council of Churches

Geneva, Switzerland

It’s the compromising view that organic unity must be had at any cost and is the most important end, which most of us abhor.… The most important thing is that Christians, regardless of what other tags they put on themselves, must work together with love toward one another if they are to have a profound influence on the world.…

ESTON W. HUNTER

Anderson, Ind.

We must ask ourselves whether or not the current chase after “ecumenicity” is prompted more by factions seeking greater material gain and higher social status than by an actual outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Diminishing and perverting of practiced morals and ethics has never been more evident. Is it likely that a host of nominal Christians, seldom evincing goals beyond those of social affluence and personal pleasure, should suddenly express a collective desire for the organizational unity of a spiritual body?…

Christ’s members are not known by the societies or institutions to which they may belong, nor are they distinguishable by the doctrines which they profess to believe. Christians … are only intimately known by the Spirit who indwells them and, generally, by each other as common works … manifest their faith.

HENRY A. GOERTSON

New Westminster, British Columbia

Dr. Darby Fulton’s article on church unity says what I have always felt.… I truly believe one faith must come first. Organic union first won’t last.

BETTLE D. BRIDEWELL

Donaldsville, La.

Musings On Music

Re “Quiet Revolt in Gospel Music” (News, Nov. 5 issue): There are two impressions given … which are not quite accurate. [The National Church Music Fellowship is] not really iconoclastic, eager to snatch away the “unworthy” music which is cherished by the man in the pew. Our program is a positive one, seeking to find the middle of the road between “the two extremes—those who judge music only by artistic ideals and those who aim only at the desires of the listener.” Our constitution states our purpose thus: to promote a ministry of music that may bring, “through the power of the Holy Spirit, the most powerful and permanent spiritual results.”

Secondly—I doubt that my friends at Moody Bible Institute have turned their backs on church music education that is broad in scope and excellent in quality. The same issue of the magazine announced that they will grant degrees. I understand that this includes a degree in church music that could be accredited by regional agencies and the National Association of Schools of Music.

DONALD P. HUSTAD

La Grange, Ill.

I was practically standing up cheering by the time I had finished it. I am an evangelical but I am also a musician, and I am often heartsick at the music standards which believe that if it is quality music it must be sinful, or at least a product of the liberal camp.…

MARY HOFFMAN

Vancouver, Wash.

For more than forty years I have labored in the music field of the Church and am one of those greatly disturbed by the present trend which seems to be a campaign by the American Guild of Organists to educate congregations to the use of more music by the three B’s. I find no fault in this save to point out that this does nothing to help people to worship. I have given up my membership in the A.G.O. and regret that this over-emphasis on music ability is causing many defections from the Church itself.…

WESLEY A. STRICKLAND

Stony Brook, N.Y.

You quote the results of the Lutheran effort to raise the standards of their music, and I am sure that they have worked very hard; but have you ever sat in a Lutheran church (as I do every Sunday) and listened to the deafening silence as the three trained musicians in the congregation try to carry the whole group when they are singing one of their liturgically correct, properly written songs? Or—have you observed the polite yawns and disinterest when some outstanding choir threads its way through a great old unintelligible oratorio? I can’t believe these things especially please the Lord.…

If other churches succeed in putting together such a mass of uncomprehendingly difficult and crashingly boring music as the Lutheran church has in its latest hymnal, then they can see, as we do, churches full of people … with their mouths closed as the organist perspires his way through a hymn.

Don’t mistake my criticism of the Lutheran church. I love it.…

KENNETH M. CLAAR

Palmdale, Calif.

The Trouble Is The Pulpit

The Trouble with the Church: A Call for Renewal, by Helmut Thielicke, translated and edited by John W. Doberstein (Harper and Row, 1965, 136 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Carl Kromminga, professor of practical theology and director of field education, Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This book is a translation of Helmut Thielicke’s Leiden an der Kirche. In it Thielicke applies his skill as a theologian and writer to diagnosing the trouble with the Church. The result is not just another jeremiad on the contemporary impotence of the Church, for Thielicke’s diagnosis and prescription are responsible as well as brilliant.

Thielicke locates the trouble primarily in preaching. Because he is a master preacher himself, his criticism certainly merits a careful hearing. Yet he is not out to exalt the gifted and “successful” preacher at the expense of the earnest and somewhat pedestrian one. His aim is to disclose the fatal flaw in Protestant preaching and to challenge preachers to correct it. Although this book was originally addressed to the German Protestant situation, it includes references to circumstances in American Protestantism with which Thielicke is acquainted through firsthand experience.

“Does the preacher himself drink what he hands out in the pulpit? This is the question that is being asked by the child of our time who has been burned by publicity and advertising” (p. 3). This quotation discloses what, in Thielicke’s view, is really wrong with the Church. Preaching lacks authenticity. The preacher’s unreal tone, strange words, and intolerable abstractness raise the question whether he really “exists” in the dogmas he proclaims. Does the preacher really bring his daily experiences, his study of modern literature, his humor—in short, the whole range of his life—into this house of dogma? The author testifies that many German preachers who passed through harrowing experiences in World War II can converse about those experiences with animation while their preaching remains general and colorless. This is why many of their hearers suspect that they are not really living in the house of the dogmas they proclaim.

Thielicke contends that people today are asking, not “Where shall I learn to believe?” but rather, “Where can I find credible witnesses?” The central problem is credibility, and the problem of credibility ultimately comes down to the question whether the witness really lives by the faith he proclaims. It is this concern for authentic witness that governs the further development of the book. Thielicke writes with deep feeling on the causes of pulpit jargon, the necessity of limiting the scope and purpose of each sermon, the need for textual-thematic preaching, the problem of addressing real rather than abstract man, and the preacher’s temptation to retreat into “busywork and liturgical artcraft.” No summary can do justice to his discussion; it must be read to be appreciated.

The writer observes that Protestantism stands before a “rubhish heap of dead words.” On the other hand, Roman Catholicism seems to be moving toward a rediscovery of the vitality of the word. This prompts him to ask whether Protestantism really has a right to separate existence.

As useful steps toward the revival of preaching Thielicke suggests that we pay close attention to life situations that call for answers from the Gospel, organize parent discussion groups in which we can hear genuine questions being raised, and postpone confirmation until it can be an act of individual decision. Although this part of the book is particularly suited to the German situation, it has a message for the “establishment” in America as well.

Has Thielicke really uncovered the basic cause of the uncertainty that robs so much of Protestant preaching of genuineness? It appears that his analysis has not penetrated far enough. In an excellent translator’s note, John W. Doberstein cites as one of the causes for the discouragement of preaching the current preoccupation in theological education with the problems of exegesis. He agrees with Thielicke that this preoccupation has made preaching sterile. Although he does not depreciate exegesis, he is concerned about the paralyzing effect on preaching of recent debates on the “hermeneutic question.”

It is precisely at this point, however, that the basic cause of many a modern preacher’s uncertainty shows itself. Until this cause has been eradicated, preaching will never become authentic as the proclamation of the Word of God. The hermeneutic question is simply this: “How can I hear the Word of God in the text of Scripture?” Basic to this question is that of inspiration. The right answer to the question of inspiration will not automatically eliminate all problems of exegetical detail. Unless that answer is found, however, the preacher will feel deep down that his affirmations lack a clear foundation in ultimate divine authority. And this uncertainty will inevitably inject a note of debilitating relativism into his preaching.

Once the question of biblical authority is properly answered, however, the preacher must pay close attention to what Thielicke has to say. The preacher’s convictions must be expressed in a way that clearly shows he is alert to the needs of men in his time. This alertness can be acquired only if the preacher is willing to participate fully in life in his time, both through the medium of significant current literature and through ongoing vital contact with the members of his congregation in their daily concerns.

The translator’s note is a fitting introduction to the book. Doberstein has served us well with a vigorous reaction to current laments that the pulpit is dead. He grants that we have made the preacher into a “pastoral director” and that this remodeling job has led to the degeneration of preaching. But he refuses to concede that the devitalized preaching of “directors” is proof that preaching is useless. Ministers who really believe this should be forbidden to preach. The congregation should not be required to listen to what these “slovenly defeatists” hand out as a “weekly chore.”

Thielicke and his translator have presented the case for vital preaching in the conviction that right preaching is still God’s way of powerfully confronting men with the Gospel of his Son.

CARL KROMMINGA

A Real Tonic

A History of Christian Missions (Volume IV in “The Pelican History of the Church”), by Stephen Neill (Eerdmans, 1965, 622 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Herman J. Ridder, president, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.

Bishop Stephen Neill was indeed the man to write this book. A wide knowledge of missions, the careful work of a scholar, and the zeal of a man long identified with world missions are reflected on every page. In a day when we have read much about the demise of the institutional church, it is a real tonic to read this volume.

Among the more interesting positions taken by Bishop Neill is his challenge of the idea that William Carey is the father of modern missions (p. 261). The exhaustive treatment he gives to the years preceding Carey is evidence enough that Carey was not the father but part of a great succession, the heir of many pioneers. Neill defends without apology the slogan of the Student Christian Federation in the 1880s and 1890s: “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation.” Believing that some have confused evangelization with conversion, and therefore have rejected the phrase, Neill defends the slogan on the basis that it is an “unexceptionable theological principle—that each generation of Christians bears responsibility for the contemporary generation of non-Christians in the world …” (p. 394).

This history, which concludes with an invaluable twenty-two-page bibliography on missions, meets the needs of both-missions scholar and concerned Christian. After reading the book one can sing “like a mighty army” without ambivalent feelings, proud to be a soldier in an army that fought this hard and accomplished so much in the name of Jesus Christ.

HERMAN J. RIDDER

For Beginners

The New Testament: Its History and Message, by W. C. van Unnik (Harper and Row, 1964, 192 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by William L. Lane, associate professor of New Testament, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

This introduction to the New Testament, first published in Dutch in 1962. is intended for readers who are just beginning to study the Bible. It is very simply written, and there are no footnotes. It is, nevertheless, an adequate and interesting treatment of its subject, and it introduces the reader to some of the background and foreground of the New Testament.

Approximately three-fourths of the volume is concerned with the New Testament itself. Background information begins with the Roman period, and while the statements on the Stoics and the Cynics are helpful, those on the Epicureans, Skeptics, and Eclectics are too brief to be satisfying. New terms that should be known are italicized, e.g., “sanhedrin (a loan-word from the Greek meaning a council or court of law).” In his treatment of the New Testament, Professor van Unnik shows a high regard for the essential integrity of the record. He speaks openly of God’s intervention in history. There is an almost “chatty” approach, as when he writes. “You can find plenty of examples for yourself by reading through the Gospels.” From time to time there is sounded a distinctively evangelical note; on page 13, for instance, he defines what it means to believe on Jesus, and on page 38 he notes. “Then as now the encounter with Jesus Christ called for a decision: to receive or reject him.”

There are. naturally, positions open to challenge. Van Unnik appears to accept the authenticity of certain non-canonical agrapha (pp. 15 I.): he argues, on the basis of Colossians 4:16, that Paul wrote several letters that have not been preserved (p. 16); he feels that an eclipse of the sun accounts for the darkness at Jesus’ crucifixion (p. 90). The treatment of Second Peter is limited to a single, non-committal paragraph under the heading and treatment of Jude; First Peter alone is discussed under “Peter.” There are also instances where brevity of treatment, together with a momentary forgetfulness of the type of reader for whom the volume is intended, creates problems. Is it sufficient to say, without further explanation, to one beginning his study of the New Testament, “Also certain things were added as time went on: as with Matt. 6:13 and 1 John 5:7” (p. 21)? And the beginner may be pardoned if he is quite puzzled when he reads, “We must not forget, however, that as the New Testament record makes clear, the resurrection of Jesus means, not that he comes back into our world but that he goes forth into God’s” (p. 93). At such points brevity is not a virtue, and the beginner will need more help than Van Unnik has given him.

This is the kind of book to use with high school students or lay people who are becoming alert to the New Testament for the first time. But they must be encouraged to raise questions that Van Unnik raises or provokes and fails to answer, so that the conversation initiated by the author may be carried forward.

WILLIAM L. LANE

A Book To Read

What’s the Difference?: A Comparison of the Faiths Men Live By, by Louis Cassels (Doubleday, 1965, 221 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by fames Daane, assistant editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Not only are newspapers giving religion far better coverage than formerly; religious news editors of the secular press are writing religious books. One of the finest comes from Louis Cassels, twenty-year reporter for United Press International. Without becoming theologically ponderous, he presents with high adequacy the positions of the various religious faiths. The presentation is lucid, succinct, and a model of clarity. Perhaps the average minister would achieve something of this crisp, uncluttered style if his words had to be conveyed over a wire service. When words cost money, it is surprising how thrifty and concise language becomes!

Cassels writes with a purpose. He wants to show the differences among the various forms of Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, various sects, and the non-Christian religions. The last two categories he merely touches, but the others he sketches amazingly well in very brief compass. Occasionally his thumbnail sketches are flawed by theological imprecision or faulty theology. But there are also times when he shows very shrewd theological insight.

He writes to show the differences because the question be has been asked most during his many years as a religious reporter is: “What’s the difference …?” His deeper reason is his belief that the differences do make a difference; his concluding section shows why “Christians cannot compromise.”

Cassels writes out of personal religious conviction and gives fair warning, “This is not an ‘objective’ book.… I do not see how it is possible for anyone to be truly neutral about religion.… So I think you are entitled to know that I write as a committed Christian, who has been nourished in the Protestant tradition.…” He adds that he has been “trained, during more than twenty years as a wire-service reporter, to be as fair and accurate as humanly possible in presenting the other fellow’s point of view. Even if UPI had not pounded this maxim into my head, I hope that my own conscience would not permit me to malign or misrepresent any person’s religious faith.”

I know of no other book that carries such a tight cargo of information about the various religious faiths. I would suggest that it is a valuable reference book, but this would obscure the fact that the book’s style is clean, touched with humor, and highly readable.

JAMES DAANE

Static

An Introduction to Communism, by Henlee H. Barnette (Baker, 1964, 117 pp., $1.95), is reviewed by Arthur F. Glasser, home director, Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

This book was written by a member of the faculty of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, to provide future church leaders with a balanced introduction to an acute contemporary problem. In the preface one finds Barnette confessing his awareness of the seriousness of his task. He speaks of intense personal effort to be “objective and dispassionate” as well as “theological” in his treatment. Obviously, a review of his work should be devoid of the superficial.

Barnette’s development follows a rather irregular sequence. He begins with the aims and advance of Communism, and follows with sketches of its leading personalities to the fall of Khrushchev. Then he backtracks to describe what he terms “Communism’s basic ideas,” which he amplifies with two chapters on some general pros and cons. Next, for a theological critique, he summarizes a spread of opinions on Communism from several contemporary theologians but fails badly by including no evangelical among them. The book concludes with suggested guidelines for “Christian action” that are rather unrelated to a truly biblical orientation.

Obviously Barnette is a conscientious man, diligent in his documentation and outspoken in his convictions. He is widely read in his subject. But he does not really seem to attain his purpose. Indeed, his book is more a compilation of facts and opinions than a creative work. Perhaps that is what makes the style somewhat diffuse, often repetitive, and even pedestrian. Paragraphs are bundles of affirmations loosely tied together. Ideas do not flow smoothly. Some of the conclusions are unconvincing. This is unfortunate, in view of the good subject material Barnette has marshalled to his assistance.

But how shall the book be evaluated? The theological professor who seeks to introduce the subject of Communism to his students is tackling a formidable problem. Communism is at once a rather complex materialistic philosophy of life, an involved economic theory, a multi-sided political program, and a worldwide international problem. Furthermore, it is in great flux and change. Cold civil wars rage between its Moscow and Peking ideological poles. Much invective screams back and forth between Marx’s rigidly orthodox devotees and his liberalizing revisionists. Moreover, the Communist world is emotionally divided over the issues of race and nationalism. It is hardly the political monolith some evangelical Americans have allowed their fears to create. Not that this makes it less of a menace to the stability of the world; if anything, these tensions and divisions pose a greater threat to world peace than ever before.

In the face of Communism’s changing patterns of internal turmoil and exported subversion, one finds it a bit disturbing to come upon a book like this that presents the movement in rigid, static, editorialized categories. This sort of introduction is both out of date and inadequate. Indeed, a solid evangelical approach to this subject has yet to be written. And it is urgently needed. Just listen as today’s seminarians discuss Communism and you’ll discover why.

The greatest value of Barnette’s work lies in his abundance of documented sources and in his extensive bibliography.

ARTHUR F. GLASSER

The Gospel In The City

Mission in Metropolis, by Jesse Jai McNeil (Eerdmans, 1965, 148 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Donald H. De Young, pastor, Elmendorf Reformed Church, New York, New York.

Mission in Metropolis is well named, well written, and well worth reading. Readers whose attitudes are neatly polarized around restrictive loyalties to brand labels on truth may come away disturbed, since the stance of the author defies pigeon-holing. To me it was an evangelical witness turned out toward the world. The thesis is not a systematized document designed to refute any popular or unpopular persuasions. Rather, it comes as a warm and courageous response of biblical faith to the needs of the world. “To be on mission in the world,” Mr. McNeil says, “is to be involved in positive and ultimately constructive programs of action which are inspired by ideal social ends, sustained by an evangelistic purpose, and given distinctively Christian content by the gospel of Jesus Christ” (p. 93). “To be sure, the redeeming love of God in Christ can save a man’s sold in the worst surrounding conditions. But is not the gospel call also to a man’s life—to the full-orbed, socially responsible life which is possible here and now?” (p. 70).

This train of thought can be traced through the book. McNeil relies heavily on the “let the world set the agenda” school. Feuerbach, Buber, and Jaspers are seen as thinkers who provide a necessary corrective for the narrow and self-centered pietism of many contemporary believers. Some statements may seem extreme, as they appear to place the verities of the faith at the disposal of the world. The author would assure us of the privilege to do so based on a vital reliance upon Christ to lead and guide the affairs of his Church. “The kerygma which was proclaimed by Paul and the other apostles must be faithfully and forcefully proclaimed today.” The Church centered on him who declared, “For I am the Ford; I change not” (Mal. 3:6), may boldly (even though at present she may not “see the solution to many of the problems that somehow must be solved”) face the “awesome task of giving direction to a changing urban and technological society.” The dynamic relation of faith and social responsibility is seen throughout the book in a steadfast resistance to the gravitational pull toward the myopic visionaries who dwell in camps and on sides.

Leaving the “pie in the sky by and by” social-adjustment theory, he presents a fine chapter of “A Realizable Faith.” The rapid changes in metropolis, in the Church, and in various perspectives on ministry have by this time already been focused in the book (along with, I might add, exceptionally well-defined and helpful summaries of the argument in each chapter). Then, having insisted on the Church’s involvement in realizable goals—practicing the Gospel now as well as proclaiming it—he lifts this involvement away from the clutches of humanistic hands bringing in the Kingdom of God on earth. “The doctrines of divine-providence and redemption through Christ Jesus are alien to their exclusively this-worldly, self-sufficient faith. What lies beyond does not matter. Consequently they cannot deal effectively with all the disappointments and anxieties, the frustrations and failure, the ambiguities and contradictions peculiar to our historical existence. The power to deal with such experiences does not lie within human resources and genius. It lies beyond what men can do, beyond even their best and most prodigious effort. It must come as the Christian faith declares it must come—from God in Christ” (p. 99).

The late Rev. Mr. McNeil brings to this book the insights gained from fourteen years as pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in metropolitan Detroit. Dr. Martin Luther King said of the author that he “shows with unerring skill the Power of God’s word as a plumbline in giving balance to disordered lives.” It may be that the genius of the Negro leader and congregation in this day of revolution will be found in their providing deliverance for their white brothers who find it so easy to give up faith for activities of fear.

The love, determination, and dedication of faith at work may yet extricate the intimidated regiments of God’s army toward a new burst of biblically realistic idealism, the kind that so many young people seem eager to find. The end result of the thinking and challenge of this book will certainly bring something far nobler, richer, and truer to Christ than the ghettoized spiritual clubs of race and clan we have known till now.

DONALD H. DE YOUNG

Book Briefs

Dear Papa, by Thyra Ferré Bjorn (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963, 191 pp„ $3.50). A delightful story, humorous and wise, of a minister’s family. The book is a sequel to the equally delightful Mama’s Way and Papa’s Daughter, and their author is a sister of Nels F. S. Ferre.

Mesopotamia, by Jean-Claude Marguéron (World, 1965, 212 pp., $12.50). First in a series (Arehaeologia Mundi) designed to cover arehaeological research around the world in laymen’s language. It does not concentrate directly on contributions of Mesopotamian archaeology to biblical studies but provides a useful and reliable background. The text, though carelessly printed, is good, and the 130 page-size illustrations (many in color) are superb.

War and Revolution, by Nicholas S. Timasheff (Sheed and Ward, 1965, 339 pp., $6.50). In the interest of showing that wars are not, as some suppose, inevitable, Timasheff analyzes the French, American, and Russian revolutions and the two World Wars to find the factors that make for war and for its cessation.

Paperbacks

The Baby Born in a Stable, by Janice Kramer, illustrated by Dorse Lampher; The Boy with a Sling: The Story of David and Goliath, by Mary Warren, illustrated by Sally Mathews; Jon and the Little Lost Lamb: The Parable of the Good Shepherd, by Jane Latourette, illustrated by Betty Wind; The Little Boat That Almost Sank, by Mary Warren, illustrated by Kveta Rada; The Story of Noah’s Ark, by Jane Latourette, illustrated by Sally Mathews; and The World God Made: The Story of Creation, by Alyce Bergey, illustrated by Obata Studio (Concordia, 1965, 32 pp. each, $.35 each or $2 per set). Bible stories for children; true to the Scriptures, with very attractive artwork.

Psalm 139: A Devotional and Expository Study, by Edward J. Young (Banner of Truth Trust, 1965, 117 pp., $.75).

Are the “godless Christians” on the road to deepening darkness?

Some day, in a stronger age than this rotting and introspective present, must he in sooth come to us, even the redeemer of great love and scorn, the creative spirit, rebounding by the impetus of his own force back again from every transcendent plane and dimension, he whose solitude is misunderstanded of the people, as though it were a flight from reality;—while actually, it is only his diving, burrowing and penetrating into reality, so that when he comes again to the light he can at once bring about by these means the redemption of this reality; its redemption from the curse which the old ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who in this wise will redeem us from the old ideal, as he will from that ideal’s necessary corollary of great nausea, will to nothingness, and Nihilism; this tocsin of noon and of the great verdict, which renders the will free again, who gives back to the world its goal and to man his hope, this Antichrist and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of Nothingness—he must one day come.

These words from near the end of Nietzsche’s second essay in The Genealogy of Morals echo a mood now present again. Although the “death of God” theologians may not go the whole distance of Nietzsche, they surely share his repudiation of the supernatural, his rejection of objective truth and morality, and his plea for the free man. Whether Nietzsche’s consequent repudiation of Christ and his Church more consistently expresses the logical outcome of these assumptions than does the modern secularists’ sentimental association with Christian institutions is worthy of debate. But to all but the simplest minds it must be wholly evident that the “death of God” faddists are no more authentically Christian than was Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “death of God” implied a total rejection of both an atonement-theology and atonement-ethics. “The holy fable and travesty of the life of Jesus,” as he described the Christian view, was said to be simply the bait that makes people nibble at wrong (Judeo-Christian) values. Of the formula “God on the Cross” he had this to say: “Hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it promised a transvaluation of all ancient values.” Nietzsche depfored the “sentiment of surrender, of sacrifice for one’s neighbour, and all self-renunciation morality.” “The Christian faith … is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom …; it is at the same time … self-derision, and self-mutilation.” “It is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than semblance.…” “One should not go into the churches if one wishes to breathe pure air.”

The death-of-God theologians mistakenly think they can occupy some misty flatland between Nietzsche and Paul. They strain their beliefs through the sieve of empirical science, discarding the supernatural and transcendent. Then they superficially appeal to the distinctive agape-morality of Jesus, as if this could be retained by that same sieve. There is a reason why Nietzsche, and the Communists, and all hard-core naturalists, turn against the morality of Jesus, instead of appealing to it. That reason lies in the prior rejection of an objectively real supernatural world and of objective truth and goodness. Nietzsche linked the freedom of man’s will with “the emotion of supremacy” and boasted that the free spirit exudes a godlike desire to autonomy: it loves life (and hates other gods). Hence he Could rail against “the holiness of God, the judgment of God, the hangmanship of God.…”

Paul Tillich, who reduced all divine attributes to symbolic representations, likewise rejected a Deity who “deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing.… This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control” (The Courage to Be, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952, p. 185).

The night before his death, Tillich had engaged in a vigorous argument with Professor T. J. J. Altizer of Emory University. Altizer is spokesman for the “godless Christians” on a campus that is currently seeking $25 million as a Christian university. Tillich’s speculative-philosophy postulated the Unconditioned over against the God of the Bible but resisted godlessness. Yet because Tillich rejected the objectivity of the Unconditioned and reduced all ascriptions such as “personality” to symbolic significance, Altizer credited him with having fathered the American death-of-God trend.

Whither Theology?

There is nothing original in the assertion that God is dead. Nietzsche said it long ago. What is original is its repetition by official representatives of the Christian religion. Nietzsche placed this blasphemy in the mouth of a madman; today it is proclaimed by responsible teachers within the church.

Thomas J. J. Altizer, one of the most articulate death-of-God theologians, was a keynote speaker at a recent conference at Emory University on “America and the Future of Technology.” The occasion gave him a further opportunity for expounding what many radical thinkers believe to be the task of theology “within the context of the dislocation and uprootedness of American life.” “We are now living,” Altizer explained, “in a time when the whole inherited body of our theological language is disappearing into the past” and a “new history is dawning in our midst before which theology is increasingly becoming speechless.”

We may agree that we are living in a time of transition, and that theologians have the responsibility, as always, of making the faith meaningful by translation and interpretation. The faith needs to be expressed in the terms of today. But Altizer is not content to express the faith in contemporary thought-forms; he requires something far more radical: a fearless destruction of the old faith and the birth of a new. Not only the form but the substance of the faith needs to be changed. “Not until theology moves through a radical self-negation,” he says, “thereby undergoing a metamorphosis into a new form, will it be able to meet the challenge of our present.” “A Christian expression of apocalyptic faith must move into the future by negating the past, for apart from a total negation of the power of the past there can be no movement into an eschatological future.”

We may be grateful to Professor Altizer for stating clearly the implications of his philosophy. The Christian can no longer “find security in an absolutely sovereign God who exercises a beneficent and providential government over the world.” That God, he says, has disappeared from view. We can no longer truly know God in the present. The God who appears is “alien and lifeless,” “in no sense a source of redemption and life.”

What, then, is the task of theology? “Theology,” Altizer explains, “must resolutely confine the Christian name of God to the past, and wholly refrain from proclaiming his redemptive presence in our historical present.”

“Only the death of God,” the theologian continues, “can make possible the advent of a new humanity.” “Just as apocalyptic imagery centers upon the defeat of Satan or Antichrist, whose death alone ushers in the victory of the Kingdom of God, so con temporary thought and sensibility is rooted in an absolute negation of God, a negation which already promises to dissolve even the memory of God. We must take due note of the fact that [William] Blake, who dared to name God as Satan, identified the transcendent Lord as the ultimate source of alienation and repression.”

The bizarre philosophy of the new theology is only a recrudescence of the old humanism. It represents the untamed autonomous intellect asserting itself in defiance of the revealed truth of God.

The God of historical Christianity, Altizer affirms (quoting Blake), is “Satan” or “an abstract and impassive Nothing.” “The new humanity dawns only at the end of all that we have known as history, its triumph is inseparable from the disintegration of the cosmos created by historical man, and it calls for the reversal of all moral law and the collapse of all historical religion.” “All America is called to freely accept and will the death of God.” “To refuse the death of God and cling to his primordial image” is to have a bad faith; it is to negate life and history.

Only by the most remarkable legerdemain can this be described as anything but nihilism. It is emphatically not the Christian religion. “Once ecclesiastical or historical Christianity has itself been negated,” Altizer explains, “then the Incarnation will de cisively and historically become manifest as the death of God in Jesus.” The Christian religion, it need hardly be said, is not the death of God in Jesus; it is Jesus declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.

The radical proponents of the new theology have taken upon themselves an iconoclastic role. Old landmarks are being destroyed, old sanctities overthrown. What is the responsibility of those who believe in the validity of revealed religion? When Altizer invites us to reverse all moral law and to hasten the collapse of historical religion, what do we say? We reply in the words of the prophet Isaiah: “To the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to this Word, it is because there is no light in them.”

Nietzsche saw the reason for the decline of Western theism. Medieval scholasticism and then modern philosophy obscured “the father” in God, and subsequently “the judge” and “rewarder.” And pantheism erased God’s “free will” (“he does not hear—and even if he did, he would not know how to help,” he taunts). But the sting of Nietzsche’s next comment should be felt by contemporary theologians whose speculative theories of revelation have concealed the Living God who speaks and acts definitively. In Beyond Good and Evil he writes: “The worst is that he [God] seems incapable of communicating himself clearly; is he uncertain?—This is what I have made out (by questioning and listening at a variety of conversations) to be the cause of the decline of European theism” (Sec. 53).

Never has the burden of presenting historic Christian theism fallen so heavily upon the shoulders of a vanguard of evangelical theologians. That the living, supernatural God has revealed himself; that he has made his ways known in objective historical acts and in objective truths about himself and his purposes; that the Bible is the authoritative norm of Christian faith and practice—these were elemental truths that the early Christians proclaimed to the pagan world. Today even some theologians, teaching in professedly Christian seminaries and universities, not only are in doubt about these truths, but even make their doubts the structure of a counterfeit confession.

Did Jesus Die On Calvary?

While some off-beat theologians have signed God’s death certificate, one California scientist states that Jesus may not even have died on the Cross. Michael J. Harner, assistant director of the University of California’s Lowie Museum of Anthropology, is quoted in a UPI report as saying that Jesus “may have been fed a drug that put him into a trance and fooled his Roman guards.”

A leading research anthropologist, Dr. Harner has been investigating the use of stupor-inducing drugs for eight years. Could the professor accidentally have sniffed a bit of the potent drink?

For one thing, historians base their judgments on documents from the past, but Dr. Harner substitutes a vivid imagination for supportive historical testimony. Now that many anthropologists have rewritten Genesis to their fancy, the California scientist—despite an Episcopal upbringing—has apparently taken to rewriting the Gospels on his own assumptions.

If Jesus did not die on the Cross, where and when did he die? Surely these questions were of more than incidental concern to his followers. And how could an uncrucified-unrcsurrected Christ have inspired the martyr spirit of the apostles, and shaped the birth of the Christian movement and the mighty missionary thrust that transformed the pagan West? Had the apostles and their converts also inadvertently sniffed the drug? If so, modern civilization so desperately needs a moral and spiritual awakening that Dr. Harner might well patent a drug capable of producing such consequences.

Perhaps the kindest closing reminder is that anthropological speculations do not justify historical conclusions. Dr. Harner notes that the juice of the mandrake plant can effect deathlike states “during which the individual has visions.” Could be.

Confessional Confusion

A confession of faith is exactly what the term asserts: a confession of the Church’s faith. A creed constructed within these limits has every right to speak with authority and, hopefully, to speak timelessly. The injection of admonitions and urgings and of ethical rules and regulations into a confessional statement, however, is a confusion of faith with practice. Faith should indeed lead to practice. But to confuse faith with practice is—confusion.

Although the Westminster Confession based its views on divorce on biblical teaching, by including such ethical principles it nonetheless diverged from the true purpose of a creedal statement. But the proposed United Presbyterian Confession of 1967 errs even more broadly on this score. Dr. Charles C. West of Princeton Seminary, according to a Religious News Service release, said the proposed confession “urges Presbyterians to work for talks with.…” If so, the proposed confession is admonishing people to certain forms of activity; such admonitions and urgings belong in the pulpit, not in a confession of faith.

Why confess what Presbyterians are not doing? Is not such a confession a confession of sin rather than of faith? It is precisely the inclusion of strictly non-confessional elements that opens the door to Dr. West’s mistaken view that creeds have no “timeless status” but only validity at the time and place of their composition.

Giving: For The Wrong Reason

There are people who agree with Jesus that “it is better to give than to receive,” but they agree for the wrong reasons. They know what Lincoln Steffens meant when he asserted that gratitude is a damnable feeling. They find no position so uncomfortable as that which calls for gratitude. They would much rather give and let the other person be grateful.

The most affluent society in all history is in its most expensive Christmas. One of Washington’s exclusive department stores is attracting the Christmas giver with a dark mink coat for $5,000, a ring for $11,000, and a set of earrings for $1,200. Another store offers a handkerchief for $300 and a diamond necklace for $465,000.

For many people, the price they pay to buy a gift for another is of small matter. They happily bear extravagant costs. They would rather pay the price than receive the gift.

And largely lost in all this high-cost giving is the true Christmas Gift and the price that Another paid in giving it. Many would rather play God in their giving than accept that priceless Gift which God gives. Whoever accepts this Gift cannot help being eternally grateful.

Kicking Away The Ladder

A man would be foolish to let someone kick away the ladder on which he was standing. But America is being just that foolish.

Her greatness does not stem only from natural resources, geographical location, or innate inventiveness and willingness to work. It also derives from the spiritual heritage of those of our forefathers who rested on the Bible as God’s written rule of faith and practice. Woven into the fabric of our national life there has been a regard for the Holy Scriptures on the part of a great segment of our people. “In God We Trust” on our currency, “One Nation Under God” in our oath of allegiance to the flag, and the Bible in every courtroom, bear testimony to the “faith of our fathers.”

The concerted effort—without and within the Church—to destroy faith in the integrity and authority of the Bible is an effort that, if successful, will sooner or later weaken the nation. Erosion of faith lowers spiritual values, and this in turn leads to moral disintegration.

America has many enemies, and among them are those who would blithely kick from under us the ladder of obedient faith in the Word of God.

Ferment In Protestantism

In the current issue of Fortune magazine, the well-known writer Duncan Norton-Tayfor notes that “laymen are contributing more time and money than ever, but they aren’t always sure what they are underwriting.” Mr. Norton-Tayfor, Episcopal layman, entitles his essay “What on Earth Is Happening to Protestantism?” and in it mirrors both the vitality and the confusion of the Church today. As new forces producing unrest, he notes ecumenical pressures, dilutions of historic Christian theology, and ecclesiastical concentration on political affairs. The span of divergent voices now runs from theologians who think God is dead and churchmen who regard political action as evangelism, to laymen who think the Bible remains the divine rule of life and evangelists who honor the Great Commission above all else—while a multitude of others are much less certain about the Church’s message and mission.

In this panoramic diversity God continues to do his work—bringing conviction and blessing where the Bible is proclaimed, lifting sinners to salvation where the Gospel is preached, and bestowing peace and new life upon all who trust him. The evangelical witness was never more needed than now. The revisionist messages will soon give way to other fashions, but the Word of revelation abides.

Cutting The Amish Knot

A democracy functions best when its people are well-educated. This assumption has been challenged by the Amish for years, and recently a long-smoldering brush war erupted in Hazleton, Iowa, when the law moved in on twenty-eight Amish children and their two primitive one-room schools. The Amish, for religious reasons, are old-fashioned; they wear plain clothing and oppose modern innovations like the telephone and the automobile. They think an eighth-grade education is adequate for their children.

It was ludicrous for the authorities to seize the youngsters and to cart them off to public schools like truants. The Amish do not provide the level of education required by state law; but neither the parents nor their children have become a burden to society, nor is there evidence of criminal conduct among them. Constitutionally the principle of independent school education is firmly established. What is in question is whether inferior parochial education justifies involuntary enrollment of the students in public schools.

A temporary truce has been called in the battle; this is good. But what the state did was highly unfortunate. It is patently absurd to use a cannon to kill a fly. The Amish do not come off well either. They are obviously guilty of an infraction of the law and should be aware of their civic obligations. Peter says: “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Ford’s sake” (1 Pet. 2:13a). Amish conscientious objection to public schools is legitimate; the law provides for such objection, insisting only that a minimal level of parochial school education be provided. The Amish should obey this provision and do so promptly. This way they can keep God’s law and Caesar’s law, and also maintain their own way of life.

On The Frontier

If I were asked to find a seminary based upon a non-metaphysical world view and teaching the death of God, I would more than likely head into the scrub land of the old southwest. This would be an ideal spot for a sure-enough structureless seminary. There on a barren stretch of land I might happen across an old wooden pole once used for staking tomato vines, and nailed to it a sign announcing several of next semester’s courses.

Theology 101—An Introduction to Institutional Demolition and Post-Christian Ordinance.

Old Testament 103—The Puncturing Hypothesis: An Exegetical Approach to the Old Testament World View.

Old Testament 104—Ghost Writers in the Sky: A Study of the Prophets.

Church History 101—A Historical Survey of God’s Disappearance.

Theology 202—Genetic Problems of a Dead God’s Son in a Christocentric Context.

Ethics 208—The New Humanity in the Context of Grave Digging.

Practical Theology 100—Introduction to Metaphysical Flatness and Dynamics of a Non-God Forgiveness.

Theology 104—The City: A Theological Answering Service.

New Testament 128—The Trinitarian Emptiness in the Gospels.

Theology 149—Eschatological Movement and Non-Celestial Navigation.

Christian Philosophy 101—Optimism over the Non-Verification of God.

New Testament 206—Heidegger’s Influence on Jesus: A Study of Jesus’ Temple Visit.

—PAUL A. MICKEY in Viewpoint, Princeton

Theological Seminary student paper

The Christian faith does not need to be defended; it needs to be lived. True! But for each succeeding generation the basis of this faith needs to be stated and restated, so that all may know what they believe and why.

The Bible is precious because it reveals to us Jesus Christ, the Son of God, telling us who he is and what he has done. Without this written Word, we would know nothing of Christ’s person and work. Christians therefore have every right to reject all efforts to call into question the biblical record and thereby denigrate the Scriptures.

The battle for the complete integrity and authority of the Holy Scriptures has now reached an extent never before known, whether from without or from within the organized church. The harm being done is incalculable. Many today are exerting great effort to get rid of certain basic truths while offering nothing valid in exchange.

One contention that confronts ns is that faith in the infallibility of the Scriptures is no longer tenable in this scientific and scholarly age. The fact is, however, that not one discovery of science, not one newly acquired manuscript, has invalidated a single doctrine of the Christian faith as taught in the Scriptures.

As we see where the denials are originating and being promulgated and as we see the lengths to which some who deny the Word will go, we can speculate about the ultimate end.

The latest fad in extreme liberalism is found among some who continue as professors in good standing in theological institutions while saying that God is dead and that we must develop a “Christianity” without God. These men have the freedom to be atheists if they wish; but it seems almost unbelievable that they should continue their wild claims under the aegis of the Church and in places where men are supposedly being trained to preach the Gospel.

But obviously the day of ecclesiastical discipline, certainly for liberals, has passed. Those who have made theological compromises themselves find it embarrassing to insist that others not do so. The result? Every man does that which is right in his own eyes—a chaotic outlook.

Where does this start? How do these denials of Christianity develop? What is the point from which such deviations begin?

The answer is a solemn warning to all Christians, particularly those who have the sacred responsibility of teaching. Deviations that lead ultimately to denials of Christianity begin when we reject the clear affirmations of the Bible in favor of the opinions of men. For years some men respected in the ministry have denied such things as the biblical account of the manner of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth; the full implications of the Atonement, including our Ford’s vicarious sacrifice on Calvary; and the fact that he arose from the dead in bodily form and is coming again in power and great glory.

The inevitable result of such denials, long continued, is a further set of denials that constitute a repudiation of the Christian faith. These denials depend on the wildest speculations, all rooted in a rejection of the clearly stated record.

In thinking about these matters, let us not lose a proper perspective. The Bible is not a book we can defend while at the same time we ignore its teachings and warnings for our own lives. If the Scriptures are real to us, then the Christ of the Scriptures must also be real. Many will say, “We worship Christ, not a book.” Of course this is so. But we do respect and rejoice in the Book without which we would not know about the One who came from eternity into time and who continues to inhabit all eternity.

Why get excited? Why not leave those who deny the Word of God—or who are, as Paul describes them, “men of corrupt mind and counterfeit faith”—to the judgment that is ultimately theirs? My answer is this: I do not like to have my pocket picked, nor do I want others to find themselves robbed of their precious possessions.

The Bible is, first of all, the primary source of our knowledge of God and his Christ. It is also the chart and compass for daily living.

Antiquated? It is more revealing than tomorrow morning’s newspaper, because it explains so many things to be found in that newspaper.

Unscientific? When the curtain of history is pulled down and we see time in the light of eternity, we will be amazed at how accurately science fits in with the teachings of the Bible.

Irrelevant? The Bible is relevant for all men in all times because it is, as Dr. Emile Cailliet has said, “the book that understands me.” It is relevant for every day we live, because it speaks to the innermost recesses of our souls. It cuts like a scalpel, down to the place where truth is separated from error, hypocrisy from faith, and honesty from deception. It speaks to the sex-obsessed of our generation and shows the sordidness of their existence in the light of God’s purity.

The Bible contains promises more valuable than anything the world has to offer. It brings hope in the midst of heartache and distress. It gives us glimpses into eternity while we are living in time. It gives stability in the midst of chaos, and certainty where otherwise there would be nothing but doubts.

The Apostle Paul warned against substituting the vain speculations of men for the eternal verities: “O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it some have missed the mark as regards the faith” (1 Tim. 6:20, 21, RSV). He tells of a time when there will be men “holding the form of religion but denying the power thereof” (2 Tim. 3:5); and, after cataloguing the danger signals of a generation that rejects the divine revelation, he concludes with these words: “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:14–17).

The Word of God will continue to stand while its detractors marshall their forces against it—of this we can be certain. But we need to be deeply concerned about those who have been or are being robbed of a faith in the integrity of the Scriptures.

The enduring realities are anchored in the God revealed in Christ

The poet Edmund Spenser speaks of “the ever-whirling wheele of Change, the which all mortal things doth sway.” And down the years, peaceful or war-tormented, change has indeed been the order of time. Watching history, we are tempted to say with Shelley: “Naught may endure but mutability.”

The mainspring of movement is in all things; nothing stands still. Seemingly immobile matter is but energy in prescribed patterns of motion. Sun and sand, oceans and blood-rills, star-swarms and morning glories—something is happening to all of them, always. “Get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them,” said Marcus Aurelius.

Yet paradoxically change has ever been disturbing to mankind. Many a person might say with the character in Browning’s Paracelsus: “I detest all change, and most a change in aught I loved long since.” Men like ruts. They cry, as did the man in Jesus’ parable who tasted the new wine: “The old is better!”

Change often disconcerts Christians; yet from time to time transitions must be made. “The old order changeth” and the new invades our lives. Theology and philosophy are affected; doctrines may need reinterpretation; translations of truth may crowd in upon us. Sometimes we are shocked, sometimes amused. We sweat in agony of spirit when some scientist threatens to mar that awful opening sentence of the Bible—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” But we wag our heads and grin when in place of the King James Version’s, “Greet all the brethren with an holy kiss,” we find the paraphrase, “Give a handshake all round.”

In dead seriousness evangelicals face such innovations as the rise of the “new morality”; or the stand of a chaplain in an allgirl school who in a campus chapel says, “Sex is fun.… There are no laws attached to sex. I repeat: absolutely no laws. There is nothing you ought to do or ought not to do. There are no rules to the game, so to speak.” This is practically a reversal of the Bible-minded man’s philosophy of sex.

Mores, manners, laws, behavior may change; but what changes shall the evangelical make ethically? Is the kind of sexual activity forbidden in the Scriptures allowable to a disciple of Jesus in 1965? The Word of God orders men always to speak the truth; can a Christian side with the businessman who argues that to do this is to go bankrupt?

The Bible reveals the necessity of change. We see Israel changing, politically and religiously, in the Old Testament. We observe the transition from the Old to the New Testament among Christians. “The priesthood being changed,” wrote a scribe of the primitive Church, “there is made of necessity a change also of the law” (Heb. 7:12). To be sure, the writer was speaking of a change in a priestly system rather than in the moral order; nevertheless the change is genuine.

Turning from religious institutions to the individual, we discover that one must be changed to become a Christian. From this initial transformation the process continues—“We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Ford” (2 Cor. 3:18).

Beyond this time and place the transfiguration is to continue. “… we shall be changed,” said the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:52). “We look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body …” (Phil. 3:20b, 21).

What further transformations God has planned for men in an age and order beyond our own we are not told. “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change!” cried Tennyson in Locksley Hall. But we come to impenetrable mystery at this point and must await further revelation.

In the meantime, we make changes that promise spiritual fulfillment while avoiding others that might involve the risk of eternal ruin. Paul speaks of those who change the glory of the immortal God into an image of mortal men and the truth of God into a lie (Rom. 1:23–25), and Jeremiah lamented: “My people have changed their Glory for a useless thing!” (Jer. 2:11, Moffat).

Knowing what changes to make and what ones not to make is a great asset for the Christian. However, the changes must always be in something or someone other than God. Christ needs no changing; nor does the Spirit with whom we communicate; nor do the Scriptures, which “cannot be broken”; nor does Christian ethics. Our manners, methods, and customs, our activities and attitudes, may need alteration; but the Gospel of grace and the Word of God are unchanging.

They err disastrously who imagine that because the world changes, God also must be subject to change. The “growingup” God of the “process” theologians is a stranger to the Scriptures, as well as a poor risk for man’s future. The God revealed in Christ is our last best hope. He is “the same yesterday, and today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

Change is often needed. But God does not change. “The heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall pass away.… They shall be changed like any garment. But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end” (Heb. 1:10–12, NEB). God remains; with him is “no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”—

Hastings, Michigan.

Each year divorce tears apart the homes of 750,000 children

Four thousand times a day a man and woman stand before a clergyman or magistrate to be united in matrimony. At that point they are at the door of heaven or at the gates of hell; they are beginning a life either of marital happiness or of what someone has called “conjugal infelicity.”

Many a romance has collapsed under the strain that comes when two people try to make a life together. That pretty girl who was always well groomed now spends half the day in a housecoat with her hair in curlers. That young athlete is beginning to put on weight around the middle. Before they were married, she admired him for his strength as he made end runs and touchdowns. Now when she asks him to put up the screens or mow the lawn, his strength seems to vanish. Somehow Hollywood does not tell us the whole story when it shows the hero and heroine riding off into the sunset. The real test of love lies ahead, as two people who before have lived separately now live together and attempt to adjust to each other’s faults and idiosyncrasies.

Nowhere is there greater optimism than at the marriage altar. Many young people stumble into marriage convinced that love conquers all. And yet one out of every four new marriages ends in divorce. (Among teenagers the rate is three times as high.) Each year 750,000 children have their homes torn apart by divorce. All this indicates that our ideas about love and marriage need re-examination.

What has gone wrong with American marriage? As a Navy chaplain, I have done a lot of marriage counseling. During one year I talked to many young people whose marriages were disintegrating; the longest any of them had been married was five months. One couple who had been married six weeks and another who had been married five weeks were both ready to give up.

What does the Bible say about marriage? What does God expect of married people? As the people asked the Old Testament prophet, “Is there any word from the Lord?” In this day of promiscuity and divorce, we have heard from Hollywood and Ernest Hemingway and Dr. Kinsey. The Christian Church now needs to return to the Bible to find the theology of marriage. Let us give our attention, then, to three ingredients not just of marriage but of holy matrimony.

Love is the basic ingredient. Yet so many unfortunate couples suffer through a loveless marriage because no one ever told them what love is. Their life together is one of frustration rather than fulfillment, because their philosophy of love is based on the idealism of a Hollywood musical, the perversion of a character in Tennessee Williams, the escapades of an Elizabeth Taylor, or the sob-stories of True Romance magazine.

One of the tragedies of American life is that love is being defined for us by those who have never experienced it. We are hearing about marriage from those whose own marriages—one or two or more—have failed. We have listened to the pied pipers of sex-obsessed movies and literature. Now we are reaping the consequences—the young man who wants his girlfriend or fiancée to prove her love by compromising her purity, though he is not willing to prove his love by waiting; or the young married couple (or not-so-young couple) who tell the marriage counselor that they just do not love each other any longer. The fact is that in the true sense they never did love each other. What they consider love is sadly like the degraded concept of it in “adults only” movies or in books that talk about “love in the raw,” or “free love,” or “love for sale.” The cruel hoax undermining our society is the notion that love is only physical. Capitalizing on this error, Madison Avenue tries to persuade us that to be loved we must use the right kind of toothpaste, bath soap, and hand lotion, and that domestic tranquillity depends upon keeping Anacin in the medicine chest and Billy’s bike out of the driveway.

Although we are all fairly well read on the subject of love, most of us have been reading the wrong books. We need to ponder what Paul wrote in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians: “Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth.” We need to listen also to Shakespeare’s words: “… Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/ … Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” We need to hear Solomon as he says: “Love is stronger than death.”

The trouble began when we stopped listening to Solomon and St. Paul and began listening to Sigmund Freud and Hugh Hefner; when we stopped listening to Shakespeare and Robert Browning and started listening to Bertrand Russell and Henry Miller; when we stopped listening to God and began listening to unregenerate man. That was when we began confusing love with lust, and when marriage started leading to the gates of hell instead of to the door of heaven. It used to be that a person with a shameful past moved away to a place where no one would know what he had done. Now he writes a book about it, Hollywood makes the book into a movie, and we call it sophistication, art, realism.

Conjugal love has its God-ordained physical expression. Suppose someone tells you that there is a fire in your house. Whether this is good or bad depends on where the fire is. If it is in the furnace, the stove, or the fireplace, it is good. If it is in the roof or the walls, it is bad. In the right place, fire provides warmth and comfort; in the wrong place, it destroys what is good. Lust is destructive not only of human relationships but of the human personality as well. It is impurity at the deepest level of the spirit, and quick boredom follows. But the physical expression of love within marriage is an endless road of profound satisfaction and ever-deepening union.

God made us the way we are and told us how to live. We are free to violate his laws, but we are not free from the effects of our transgressions. Married love has both a physical and a spiritual side. When we try to have one without the other, we are going against the plan God has made for our completion and happiness. It is he who has made us and not we ourselves. If we want to live life to its fullest we must do things his way, a way clearly outlined in the Bible.

The Bible most certainly condemns both adultery and fornication and says that they who commit these things will have no part in the kingdom of heaven. When God says “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not,” there is no room for rationalization. Today public opinion is more permissive of illicit unions and even of perversion than it has been since pagan times. Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. Yet the Christian rule is either marriage with complete faithfulness or total abstinence. Marriage is ordained of God and is thus a sacred institution of the Church. Therefore, a violation of the marriage vows is an enormous sin.

The greatest example of love the world has seen is our Lord Jesus, who loved us and gave himself for us and who wants for each of his children a holy love that honors God and enriches man. I had a couple in my church years ago—and they are representative of many others everywhere—who, having just celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary, told me they were more in love then than ever before. This is what God wants for us all.

The second ingredient of a true marriage is maturity. This means keeping one’s eyes wide open before marriage and half shut afterward. In marriage counseling, problems fall into fairly well-established patterns. One familiar pattern is the marriage in which two people who are deeply in love cannot stand each other. They lack the maturity to live together in a relationship any more congenial than that of a cobra and a mongoose. They fight over every picayune detail; one gets angry and the other gets hurt. They cannot stand being together and they cannot stand being apart. He shows her that he is the boss by trying to smack a little sense into her, and she, to show him he cannot treat her that way, goes home to mother—and we know whose side her mother is going to take. It is the old story of each trying to teach the other a lesson.

After two sessions in which I talked to a young man and his wife separately, I brought them together in my office and had them retell their respective sides of the story. The problem was obvious, and since they wanted me to tell them what it was, I did. I told the husband, “You need to grow up and stop acting like a child every time you don’t get your own way.” To his wife I said, “My dear girl, you talk too much.” And she did. There was no big problem, just little things they lacked maturity to cope with. Physically they were adults; emotionally they were children, married four months but not ready for marriage. Man and wife are two people united in matrimony but with different goals and divergent viewpoints.

A divorce lawyer once said he was absolutely convinced that any two people who had made the wrong marriage could be reasonably happy if they had enough maturity really to try. That may be far from the ideal marriage; but when a man and woman stand before God and solemnly vow that they will take each other for better or for worse, may God help them if they do not mean it. What God has joined together, man by judicial decree cannot put asunder. The state may legalize divorce, but God says that marriage is for life, and it is he who will ultimately judge us.

Jesus permitted divorce and remarriage for only one reason—unfaithfulness—and even that is not always sufficient grounds. By the laws of many states, marriage is easily contracted and easily dissolved. Yet in the sight of Almighty God it is a lifetime contract that can be broken only by death or by unfaithfulness. The marriage vows are sacred, binding, irrevocable. This is the divine order, and we cannot change it without serious consequences.

Success in marriage comes not just from finding the “right person” but also from being the right person. Booth Tarkington has said that an ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband. The degree of success in marriage reflects the degree of maturity brought to it. “Incompatibility” and “mental cruelty” are usually just pseudonyms for immaturity.

Many young people rush into an ill-advised marriage for no other reason than that it seems to be the answer to their problem of insecurity or of unhappiness at home. This is why most ministers read in their introduction to the ceremony that matrimony is holy and is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, and in the fear of God. Where in heaven’s name did we get the idea that marriage is a refuge from an unhappy home life, a haven of security, or a bower of moonlight and roses?

Genuine love and personal maturity, then, are ingredients for a happy marriage. But for those who want to go beyond a happy marriage to a perfect marriage, there is a third ingredient. This is a person, Jesus Christ.

St. Augustine said: “Love God and then do whatever you wish,” because he who loves God will never do anything to hurt love. It is true that some marriages are made in heaven. Human love has reached its peak when it says: “I love you because God made you mine.”

The perfect marriage is a uniting of three: a man, a woman, and Christ. This is what makes matrimony holy. When a husband and wife pledge their lives each to the other and build their relationship solidly on spiritual principles, they create the greatest assurance of success and happiness possible. In 95 per cent of all divorces cases, either one or both partners did not attend church regularly. In regular church families, only one marriage in fifty-seven fails. And in families that worship God publicly in church and privately in the home, only one marriage in five hundred breaks up. It may be trite but it is nevertheless true that families who pray together stay together.

Those who look to Christ for guidance in choosing their marriage partner and who make Christ the head of their home will be blessed. Those who leave him out of their life and out of their marriage will be left to ways of their own choosing. One of the consistencies of human nature is that we are always wrong when we are not right with God. “Except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it.” Jesus said, “Without me ye can do nothing.” He is the pilot who knows what is ahead—the narrow channels, the rocks and reefs where many lives have been wrecked. And he says; “If you will trust me, I will direct your life.”

What marriage is may be summed up in these lines from a wedding ceremony used by Peter Marshall:

“Dearly beloved, the marriage relation when rightly understood and properly appreciated is the most delightful as well as the most sacred and solemn of human relations. It is the clasping of hands, the blending of lives, and the union of hearts, that two may walk together up the hill of life to meet the dawn—together bearing life’s burdens, discharging its duties, sharing its joys and sorrows.

“Marriage is more than moonlight and roses, much more than the singing of love songs and the whispering of vows of undying affection. In our day it is by many lightly regarded, and by many as lightly discarded. But marriage will ever remain in the sight of God an eternal union, made possible only by the gift of love which God alone can bestow.”

The Wrong Corpse

With their fraternity mates, the beatniks, the confirmed secularists in the “God is dead” cult have plunged into the, depths of existential despair, romped about in the dark in their subsurface play-pens, and emerged to announce that “God is dead. He died in our time, in our history, in our existence.”

Who assassinated God? One is moved to ask whether they were sufficiently well acquainted with the Person pronounced dead to be able to identify the deceased.

What kind of “good news” is this? And what hope? Am I now to tell my son that the whole business is a fraud—that all these years I have been working for a “corpse” when I believed that the Jesus of history emerged from the tomb on Easter Day to become the living Christ of the Ages—and that in this vindicating and authenticating act of God there is “good news” for the race? The ages assure us that God doesn’t die by pronouncement, denial, or assassination—and already the “God is dead” cult is passé while it is aborning.—DR. EDWARD L. R. ELSON, in a sermon in the National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C.

Disinterest in personal redemption and in private morality go hand in hand

The Gospel of Jesus Christ in its entirety, including the full spectrum of Christian morality, is the only hope for the world. But this is not what some clergymen are preaching. In many church circles morality is being ignored or fragmented, and social service is replacing the Gospel. Some churchmen are presenting as alternatives things between which there really is no choice. They distinguish between public and private morality, emphasizing the former while considering private morality unimportant and even superfluous. Others go further and demand no choice where a moral choice is imperative. The Master of St. Peter’s College, Oxford, had such persons in mind when he condemned the attitude of men who not only note that immorality is prevalent but also say that it is right.

The false alternatives of public and private morality are evident in a statement issued by Dr. John C. Bennett and other distinguished church leaders during the last Presidential election campaign. It is true that the primary purpose of the document was political. But now that its political implications have been swept away, the statement leaves us heir to some strange ethical conclusions. Dr. Bennett and his colleagues complained that during the campaign emphasis was placed on “a few episodes involving personal morality,” and that this emphasis was obscuring “the fateful moral issues related to public life” (the italics are mine). It is clear from the campaign issues that by “episodes involving personal morality” the churchmen meant the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker cases and the moral tragedy of homosexuality in the life of an important official. And by “the fateful moral issues related to public life” they meant civil rights, poverty, and nuclear war.

According to the statement, private morality in this context is a “distortion of morality”; but public morality is “fateful” and has great “implications.” Thus, public and private morality are considered to be separate; indeed, the implication seems to be that the two are at war. What the statement seems to say is: The public moral attitudes of private persons toward race, poverty, and war are important; but the private morality of public figures is not important—or at least none of our business.

The alternatives presented in this way are utterly false. The truth is that the fateful issues of the day will never be resolved by men of careless personal morality. Morality offers no choices marked “private” and “public.” It is not a question of either/or; it is vitally a question of both/and.

The confusion is compounded by the Reverend Howard Moody, whose article, “Toward a New Definition of Obscenity,” gains significance from its publication in Christianity and Crisis, a journal edited by Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett. Mr. Moody says: “For Christians the truly obscene ought not to be slick-paper nudity, nor the vulgarities of dirty old or young literati, nor even ‘wierdo’ films showing transvestite orgies or male genitalia. What is obscene is that material, whether sexual or not, that has as its basic motivation and purpose the … dehumanizing of persons. The dirtiest word in the English language is … the word ‘NIGGER’ from the sneering lips of a Bull Connor.… A picture is notc dirty that shows a man and woman in … intercourse.… The dirty or obscene is the one that shows the police dogs being unleashed on the Negro demonstrators in Birmingham” (Christianity and Crisis, January 25, 1965, p. 286). From these premises Mr. Moody goes on to attack those who attempt to bring obscenity under control.

Quite apart from the questionable semantics that allows Moody to define the brutalities of racial prejudice as obscenity, it is clear that for him obscenity as such is unimportant and that to fight it somehow detracts from the effort to right the terrible injustices suffered by American Negroes. Perhaps it was this fragmented sense of morality that led to the presentation in his church of a dance program in which, according to the New York Times, a nude man and woman moved across the platform.

We should like to applaud Mr. Moody’s passion for social justice. But how can we, when he leads us into false alternatives that are wholly unacceptable? A social revolution that does not accept the full spectrum of Christian morality will only lead from one confusion to another. It offers no sure path to the promised land but takes us instead in the opposite direction.

Protest is a powerful weapon of change. But it is a negative weapon. The Church’s main task is to create new life, not just to protest the old. Exponents of the “new morality” doubly ignore this when they attempt to combine legitimate social protests with a contradictory tolerance of pre-marital sex and of pornography on stage and screen and in literature.

In 1941 the British statesman Lord Salisbury said: “More than death, wounds and destruction I dread the moral desert that lies ahead.… This war is going to destroy the moral sense of nations. Values that it has taken generations to establish will be smashed. I do not mean the political and economic changes that are bound to come. They may be good for us all. I cannot say. But the smashing of absolute standards of morality that you and I believe in, the denial of truths of the spirit, the elevation of man’s mind and body in place of God—these are things out of which nothing but darkness and decay can come, and these are the things that I see before us” (quoted in Britain and the Beast, by Peter Howard).

It may be helpful to speculate on what lies behind the tendency of some in the Church to depreciate standards of personal morality. May it not mean that the Church is infected by the skepticism of our age? May not the difficulties of attaining personal moral standards breed doubt about the efficacy of grace? This is particularly true in relation to sex. If I will not live purely, I am led to rationalize impurity and to use my brain to kill my conscience. Finally, as a frustrated idealist, I turn from the proposition that I can live by grace to a program of social service that does not need grace. Instead of bringing the full power of the Gospel of Christ to bear upon the problems of society, I indulge in some more “up-to-date” expression of self-effort.

Thus, the real danger in the separation of private and public morality is that we may lose sight of a vital purpose of the Church. For the Church must create a new type of society emerging from a new type of man. This does not mean that the problems of race, color, poverty, and war must not be tackled vigorously and head on. It does mean, however, that such effort must never become a substitute for bringing men to that rebirth which puzzled Nicodemus and every pragmatist who followed him. This world needs what St. Paul spoke of, “If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation.” This new creation inevitably includes the fulfillment of personal morality. If we do not comprehend this, there is a very real possibility that the Church will become nothing more than a glorified social service agency.

Without some character-creating power at work in men, society may well become prey to a pervading legalism backed by physical force. For example, racial integration depends for its true success on men’s freely choosing to associate with one another. Without the creation of new motivation in individuals, it will be left to the state to originate and enforce each social development.

This is evident in President Johnson’s Great Society program. The Civil Rights Law of 1964 had been in effect less than a year when Congress had to enact new legislation to enforce the right of Negroes to vote. No one can complain if the state, in the absence of an unselfish spirit of responsibility and a virile sense of social justice on the part of its citizens, adopts laws that reflect Christian principles. To do so is its right and duty. But this does not alter the fact that the state is thus compelled to intrude into what should be areas of free and private choice. It is never a healthy thing when the state has to enforce what should be a Christian action springing from personal attitudes of brotherhood and responsibility. At bottom, integration is a matter, not of color, but of character, and character is a concern of the Church. Yet intervention by the state becomes almost inevitable if the Church fails in its unique work of creating under God the distinctive type of man who is called a Christian.

We have a threefold choice in this matter: a chaotic conflict between black and white, a pervading legalism enforced by the state, or the creation of a new type of man whose inner qualities cause him to do what he should. We are reminded of William Penn’s statement: “Men must choose to be governed by God or they condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants.”

These are the areas in which the Church incurs the risk of running not only into theological and ethical inconsistencies but also into ideological ones. A basic tenet of Marxism is that human nature is incorrigible but by force can be made to conform to a new environment. Such a philosophy inevitably accompanies atheism, because apart from God human nature is indeed incorrigible, as Scripture so plainly teaches. And atheism makes materialism inevitable.

It would be tragically ironic if the Church, because of an unrecognized atheistic skepticism about God’s power to bring about full personal morality by transforming human nature and creating a new man, were to fall into the same ideological error as Communism and attempt to transform man by altering his environment.

If anyone is tempted to think the Communist way is best, let him ponder the decades of Communist experimentation in Russia. After nearly half a century of cataclysmic changing of the environment, the Soviet authorities are having to shoot robbers and rapists; their plans are frustrated by corruption, and they do not know how to control their youth. Admittedly, the West has much the same problems; but this does not make less significant the fact that Khrushchev, before his decline from power, was reported to be wondering how to produce a new type of man that could make his revolution succeed. And it is at least arguable that Communism may be reaching the end of a cycle and may be ripe for the Christian truth of personal redemption rejected at the beginning of the Marxist revolution.

If this is so, the Church may have its one chance to work for the conversion of Peking and Moscow. It would be tragic indeed if all we had to offer were the outmoded materialism that the Communist leaders may now be discarding as wrong and inadequate.