Whump-poing! As phony as the charge of the Ajax white knight, but with an aim just as sure, the onslaught of the new television season slams America in the pit of the stomach. Men of science (see them marching in white coats) have given TV power … power … power to blast you out of the kitchen and drop you in a programmed channel.

There you will sit for hours, avoiding twenty million other Americans by watching the same programs. Saturation is about complete. More than 90 per cent of American households have television sets, and the average set runs for five or six hours every day. Never were so many joined in one cult at one time; never did the common act of so many mean so little. Americans do not really work together, live together, or pray together; they only escape together.

The tube is still one-way. TV scans live audiences in the thousands at its sports spectaculars, but it cannot zoom in on the loners and Adams families in the millions who sit and watch at home. But the viewers are never forgotten. Audience-measurement experts count the hands that twist the dials. From the samplings of National Arbitron (or Trendex or Nielsen ratings) they will tell the sponsors how many people are learning that hexomonia is stronger than dirt. They do it with formulas—sure to impress the makers of hexomonia. Artists may avoid formulas, but industrialists love them; commercial television is an industry. Critical praise won’t save a single show doomed by this month’s Nielsen rating.

It takes a formula to beat a formula. To determine what millions will watch, find out what they are watching and give them more. The medium is still too costly for gambling on fresh approaches: will Jesse James stake everything on the cards to top the gambler in the back room? You bet your boots he will, and so will “Paul Bryan” running for his life on another channel the same night. The producer won’t gamble with a hero who won’t gamble!

The only thing safer than applying the formula is copying the way another show with a high rating has already applied the formula. No one is supposed to miss the family resemblance between the Cartwrights of Bonanza (NBC) and the Barkleys of The Big Valley (ABC). The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC) began as a copy of movie spy James Bond and has ushered into the Bondage a new version of Amos Burke—Secret Agent (ABC); a female counterpart, Honey West (ABC); and an integrated spy team in I Spy (NBC). The Wild, Wild West (CBS) puts the secret agent to work for Ulysses S. Grant, but with a railroad carload of preatomic gimmicks. Since the original Bond series was a slap-happy caricature of the sexy spy story and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. spoofs Bond, the next step was predictable. Get Smart! (NBC) spoofs the spy-spoofs and at last the TV audience is laughing. Smart, of course, is the spy. His shoe-telephone rings in a symphony concert; he stumbles out to a closet to answer it, locks himself in, shoots out the lock to escape, and emerges at last from the unequal struggle with Mr. Big, the midget-sized villain, to utter a memorable closing line. As the crook blows himself and his ship to pieces with a charge of Inthermo aimed at the Statue of Liberty, Smart sighs, “If only he could have turned his evil genius into … niceness!”

A few doses of such parody could be amusing; McHale’s Navy has managed to stay funny for almost half the time it has been on the air. Yet the spectacle of TV running in circles after its tail grows tedious, even when the dizzy hound is in color.

The new shows offer little hope of a change in pace or formula. “Turn on the ACTION,” as the ads demand, and you have tuned in on Formula One: E = SV2 (Escape equals sex times the square of violence). The action shows may be spiced with sex, but violence carries the wallop. The scene is indifferent: war, the West, espionage, the underworld—any battleground will do, except, of course, one that would involve the viewers too directly: Viet Nam and race riots must be avoided.

Why all the violence? Is the mass audience masochistic? Do coddled Americans want to be punched in the stomach or nailed in a barrel?

The answer seems to be simpler. It’s almost impossible to stop watching a fight, particularly if you are identified with one of the combatants. I know. I had expected a headache when I accepted a week of watching for this article. What I got was a stomach-ache as I took classic clobberings with Robert Horton of Shenandoah, Lee Majors of The Big Valley, Ivan Dixon of I Spy, and half the cast of Laredo. The worst was the vicious cruelty suggested in a beating administered to Roy Thinnes of The Long. Hot Summer by the old residents of Frenchmen’s Bend, allegedly in Faulkner country.

But while you are being kicked in the stomach you can’t stop looking. You will therefore stay in the channel and hear about the underarm deodorant that pays for this illusion of mayhem.

And next week? The millions come back for more, because life seems to gain in meaning when you watch a man fight for it.

Of course not all the action shows use the formula the same way. Combat, a veteran series, avoids gimmicks and works for human drama. Somewhere near the opposite end of the scale is Amos Burke, where violence is flippant and meaningless and sex is thrown into the limit of the NAB code and the ABC network censorship. Laredo, one of the new shows, has a built-in bantering tone; two of the principals kid their hapless hero-comrade and the script. But the banter was curdled in sudden, incongruous slaughter at the end of the first show when the bogus Indian “Lazyfoot” was hit with a knife in the back. The bored scriptwriter seemed to have forgotten that the formula still uses human life—and death.

Enough violence? Then turn on the FUN. Formula Two states that entertainment equals stars (E = S). Stars may be stacked in ranks, as in variety shows, or given individual settings as in Jackie Gleason’s wry pantomimes.

Variety shows like Hullabaloo present a surrealistic version of old vaudeville. Stars in outlandish costumes writhe with the mike: “Ah gah choo, babe!” Sudden seizures of expression crack the face mask above the rocking pelvis. Again, a strange detachment. Is this a satire? Are the performers mocking the act?

The viewer who wants reassurance will flip to a different sort of fun—the situation comedy. Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, based on Jean Kerr’s book, brings some fresh ideas and an English sheep dog to the domestic comedy pattern. Gidgel is the normal teen-ager implausibly billed as a “surf bunny,” but the second program had the interesting thesis that lascivious dances are innocent for the high school crowd but spell trouble for grown-ups. Mona McClushey is a slight vehicle for the talents of Juliet Prowse. She plays a movie actress married to an Air Force sergeant who wants to be the head of his house.

My Mother, the Car is a formula derived from crossing Bewitched with Mr. Ed, the talking horse. Mother is reincarnated as a 1928 Porter. The show is as silly as the idea. It is not, however, the silliest new series. That award goes to Lost in Space. This program loads a rocket ship with a fantastic payload: the space family Robinson, an evil scientist, a robot, and all the blinking lights and whirring noises in the studio. The rocket goes into “hyperdrive” and escapes the galaxy. Very good. TV follows it. Very bad.

Such is the “New Year” of TV: blossoming with color, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It includes technical triumphs, skilled performances, talented people, but it does not look at life—it looks away. The “Big” new programs do not answer the big questions; they scarcely dare ask them. The old morality play of the good guys and the bad guys is still a formula for Westerns, but it is losing to the Loner with blood on his hands, the Fugitive fleeing unjust retribution, and Shenandoah, man of lost identity, seeking what he fears to find.

The religious figure appears only as the fanatic seeking vengeance of Jesse James, or the confused preacher whose pacifism is a hazard on the frontier. The most meaningful questions of the new season, overplayed though they are, may be found in Run for Your Life. A man whose months are numbered sees life differently. The threat of death is “a hand erasing all life’s equations and writing new ones.”

To the Christian Church the greatest threat of television is not its incitement to violence or lust but its banality. Christians are watching when they ought to be praying. A recent study of TV audience attitudes showed that most people feel guilty about the time they waste. The editor asks. “Why these Calvinistic hesitations about televiewing, in contrast with the self-satisfaction associated with reading?”¹Gary A. Steiner, The People Look at Television (New York: Knopf, 1963, p. 59).

Tell him, somebody.

Now for our concluding commercial: Don’t miss A Charlie Brown Christmas, Thursday, December 9. 7:30–8:00 P.M. EST, on CBS.

The hour has struck for our “conversion,” for personal transformation, for interior renewal. We must get used to thinking of man in a new way; and in a new way also of men’s life in common; with a new manner, too, of conceiving the paths of history and the destiny of the world, according to the words of Saint Paul: “You must be clothed in the new self, which is created in God’s image, justified and sanctified through the truth” (Ephesians IV, 23).

The hour has struck for a halt, a moment of recollection, of reflection, almost of prayer; a moment to think anew of our common origin, our history, our common destiny.

Today as never before, in our era so marked by human progress, there is need for an appeal to the moral conscience of man. For the danger comes not from progress nor from science; indeed, if properly utilized, these could rather resolve many of the grave problems which assail mankind.

In a word, then, the edifices of modern civilization must be built upon spiritual principles which alone can not only support it but even illuminate and animate it.

We believe, as you know, that these indispensable principles of superior wisdom must be founded upon faith in God.… To us, in any case, and to all those who accept the ineffable revelation which Christ has given us of Him, He is the living God, the Father of all men.

The Pope who uttered this eloquent appeal for transcendent justice and moral renewal at the United Nations General Assembly had spanned a greater distance than that of his one-day flight from Rome. As all are aware who have stepped from a medieval city to a modern metropolis, he has markedly moved away from predecessors who once made all European states west of Russia feel the sway of papal power. If the conception of the world as a single empire-church remains Rome’s fundamental policy, Paul VI had no spectacular show of world power to exhibit at the U. N. “You have before you,” he asserted, “a humble man … and among you all, representatives of sovereign states, the least invested if you wish to think of him thus, with a minuscule … temporal sovereignty.”

Gone are the days when Henry IV was forced to beg for mercy from the pope while shivering in the cold with bare head and feet. Gone also are the days when King John of England was deposed by the pope and received his kingdom again only after signing a document “freely” offering and granting “to God and the holy Apostles Peter and Paul and the holy Roman Church, our mother, and to our Lord the Pope Innocent and his Catholic successors, the whole realm of England and the whole realm of Ireland … for the remission of our sins.” In a time of Communist-vs.-free world tension, resurgence of non-Christian religions, exploding world population, and pervasive secularism, when Christians of all affiliations have increasingly recognized themselves as a minority, Paul VI wisely cast himself in the role of persuader rather than compeller.

President Johnson conferred with the Pope in New York. In a precedent that may prove controversial, the platform of the United Nations was turned over to a world religious figure; Pope Paul was welcomed by Assembly President Amintore Fanfani of Italy, who kissed the Pope’s ring in an act of public obeisance. Television and radio networks allotted preferential time and treatment, and the day’s activities were carried on a public service basis from the moment of the Pope’s arrival through the Yankee Stadium mass.

The papal plea for peace in a world on the brink of atomic war, for international understanding in a time of global rivalry, and for a new era of world brotherhood included little that had not been heard before. But much that Paul said needed to be said again, emphatically, and with all possible urgency. And it will stand repetition by many others until words have become deeds and hope has become reality.

Every civilized human heart could applaud the plea for universal peace. Only the barbarous want war. But no biblically literate Protestant could give more than lip service to John F. Kennedy’s aphorism quoted by the Pope, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” This is still God’s world. God is still its true Sovereign, and Scripture does not sanction the notion that he may permit all mankind to be wiped out in an atomic holocaust.

The Pope’s advocacy of the laying down of arms leads to a problem. While he rightly said that “as long as man remains that weak, changeable, and even wicked being that he often shows himself to be, defensive arms will, unfortunately, be necessary,” neither he nor any of us knows of a time when men have been other than weak, changeable, and wicked, nor do we anticipate a time when all men will be righteous. Therefore, the problem persists of how a peaceful world is to be maintained by wicked men. To be sure, in his closing moments Pope Paul called for a world built upon spiritual principles. But the record of the United Nations is such that its principles are repeatedly accommodated until it has become more a showplace of strength than a temple of justice. Thus one must look with skepticism on the statement, “Is there anyone who does not see the necessity of coming thus progressively to the establishment of a world authority, able to act efficaciously on the juridical and political level?” In response to the Pope’s proposal favoring a world political authority, a multitude of thoughtful people still say No. For such an authority may betoken the closing days of this age even more than the wickedness and injustice of the present hour.

When the Pope spoke of his own humility and of his minute temporal sovereignty, a great number of non-Catholics could not but have questions. Many still think that if one were pope, his first spiritual duty would be to cease being pope, if that office implies being Christ’s vicegerent and spokesman for the whole Church. The Pope also preserved the fable of political sovereignty so boldly expounded by some of his predecessors. Yet Jesus himself, whose vicar Paul VI asserts he is, made no claim to any political sovereignty but said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The claim of the Roman pontiff to unique political and spiritual sovereignty is not reconcilable with the New Testament.

The Pope’s plea for the repudiation of war through disarmament also needs to be read in the context of the New Testament and especially of the words of Christ, who is the Prince of Peace. Whether or not we are living in what Scripture calls “the last days,” this is, as even leading scientists have observed, an apocalyptic age. Granting the sincerity and good will of the supreme pontiff of the Roman church, parts of his message sound strange when read in the light of Christ’s description of the end of the age in his eschatological discourse recorded in Matthew 24 and Mark 13. All Christians should agree about the need for personal transformation and renewal. But underlying the Pope’s plea for peace through disarmament there seems to be the concept that final and enduring peace will come through human agencies, such as the United Nations, which in its aspect of brotherly cooperation he called “the world’s greatest hope.”

Scripture speaks differently. It holds forth as the world’s greatest hope Jesus Christ, who is sovereign over all churches, all nations, and all men; who said he would return not to a world where men have made peace but to a world in tribulation; and who promised through his own reappearing the realization of that most often repeated prayer, “Thy kingdom come.” To say this is not to urge the least slackening of human effort toward what the Book of Common Prayer calls “peace in our time.” But it is to place humanity with its sin and failure at the feet of the only true hope of the world, Christ the coming King.

We Americans with our traditional hospitality have welcomed Pope Paul with his urgent words in behalf of peace. Would that all those who have accorded him such deep respect might echo in their hearts the welcoming prayer that closes the Bible, “Even so, come Lord Jesus.”

The Hayneville Verdict

To accept as just the acquittal of Thomas L. Coleman in his trial for manslaughter at Hayneville, Alabama, requires a gigantic suspension of disbelief that few Americans can muster. In principle United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was right in pointing out that such a verdict is the price to be paid for the jury system. Yet to make no other comment is too facile a dismissal of an agonizing situation. This latest addition to the depressing list of civil rights slayings for which no judicial penalty has been paid entails a terrible hazard. It may seem futile to voice a protest at the inadequacy of the charge against the killer of Jonathan Daniels and his acquittal after a trial in which testimony characterized by the Assistant Attorney General of Alabama as “perjured” was accepted by the jurors. But such things must be protested, lest we become accustomed to condoning murder.

God’s law that declares “Thou shalt not kill” cannot be set aside in favor of any unwritten law of local mores. Perversion of justice is the ultimate lawlessness. This is what the verdict from the Hayneville courtroom is saying to us, and the national conscience has reason to be troubled.

The christian faith is based squarely on the revelation of divine truth God has given in the Holy Scriptures. Man frequently seeks to substitute his own opinions for this revelation, with disastrous results.

The proposed “Confession of 1967” of the United Presbyterian Church would shift the basis of faith from revelation to opinion. Because of the clarity of an analysis of this “confession” prepared by John S. and Margaret White Loomis, Presbyterians of Winnetka, Illinois. I have asked their permission to quote it in full.

Bible-believing Presbyterians should be concerned about the proposed “Confession of 1967.” This new confession seems to be based upon the premise that a restatement of doctrinal beliefs is necessary from time to time. But doctrines of the Christian faith, based upon the Bible, will not and cannot change. They are timeless truths, given to us by God, and God’s truth cannot change.

It is true that new views on the application of our faith may sometimes be needed to meet changing conditions in the world; but should not these views be set forth in a separate document and not embodied in a “confession of faith”?

This new confession undermines the authority and divine inspiration of the Bible. The Bible is placed on the back shelf, leaving us with nothing basic to rely on. The confession says, “The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate.” It is true that God did reveal himself in Christ; but we know this only because the Bible says so! God reveals himself to us through his written Word, our Holy Bible, which we as Christians accept as the infallible (in the original manuscripts) and inspired Wind of God, not just “a normative witness.” The Bible is always referred to as the Word. “When ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God …” (1 Thess. 2:13).

All we can really know about our Lord Jesus, about God the Father, and about God the Holy Spirit comes to us from the Bible, his written revelation to us and our only authority on all things spiritual and eternal. Inspiration may come to Christians through the indwelling Holy Spirit, but the revelation of heavenly truth comes to us only through the written Word of God.

About the Bible this new confession says: “The words of the Scriptures are the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written.” But where in this statement can we find any hint that these writers were writing under the inspiration of God through the Holy Spirit? We believe that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Tim. 3:16a).

The Presbyterian Church in the past has taken a strong stand for the doctrine of inspiration, and a failure now in the new confession to proclaim that the Bible is the inspired Word of God constitutes a denial of this inspiration. To us, the inspiration of God is the very heart and soul of the Bible and the basis of our Christian faith. Without it we have nothing. This proposed confession pointedly omits certain other basic Christian doctrines, also.

This vital truth about the inspiration of the Scriptures should be emphasized and proclaimed by our church. The human writers of the Bible proclaim its divine authorship; why can’t we?

Throughout the new confession there is a tinge of universalism that is in direct contradiction of the Bible. The theology of reconciliation is emphasized in a vague and misleading manner that at times implies that all men are or will be reconciled and saved. But our Lord said that “few there be that find it” (Matt. 7:14).

All Christians should know that our Lord Jesus, by his act of reconciliation on the Cross, removed the barrier of sin between God and man. By this act alone no one was saved, but the way was opened for all men to receive God’s gift of salvation and eternal life by repenting and believing in Jesus Christ and by receiving him as Saviour and Lord. This message of salvation is not properly proclaimed in the new confession.

The new creed implies that the substitutionary atonement on the Cross is an “image of a truth which remains beyond the reach of all theory in the depths of God’s love for man.” The Cross is hard to understand, but Christians believe it through faith. The Atonement is a great scriptural truth and not merely an image of a truth.

In this new confession too much emphasis is placed upon the social gospel, as if the principal duty of the Church is to improve the earthly welfare of men. As Christians we know that the job of the Church is to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:1–4) in order to try to win all men to him. Of course we must be concerned about human welfare, but we must keep a sense of proportion. In this welfare work we try to bring about a more abundant life for a person for the next ten to eighty years. But how about the next billion years?

The committee that drafted this new confession included in the proposed “Book of Confessions” the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds and others. They also included the Westminster Confession, because it is “demonstrative of the actual process of confessional utterance.” But the “Confession of 1967” nullifies certain basic truths proclaimed in the Westminster Confession. The committee admits that the proposed creed is in part “an intended revision of the Westminster doctrine on the Bible, which rested primarily on a view of inspiration and equated the Biblical canon directly with the Word of God.”

In effect, this new watered-down and confusing confession has erected a large umbrella under which modernists, liberals, neo-orthodox, and Bible-believers may all stand together. Apparently each may choose his doctrinal beliefs from the various creeds and write his own bible. It has been said that this new creed has “made legal” the unscriptural beliefs that have been held and taught by a large number of ministers and seminaries in the United Presbyterian Church. In the effort to formulate a creed that could in part satisfy all, it appears that truth has been diluted.

All concerned laymen and ministers of the United Presbyterian Church who do not approve of this new confession should make themselves heard. Fear of causing a division should not be considered. Certainly our Lord Jesus wants us to “hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering” (Heb. 10:23a). Remember what he said: “Suppose ye that I am come to bring peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division” (Luke 12:51).

If this confession is adopted without basic changes, Bible-believing Christians will be faced with a hard decision—whether to leave the denomination or to stay and “earnestly contend for the faith …” (Jude 3) from within. Our answer has to come from God. All must seek his will and pray for guidance. The Holy Spirit will lead us.

Yes, says the author; therefore we must get rid of the misconceptions that dominate the theological thought of our churches

To answer this serious question properly, we look first at a profound change that has occurred on the religious scene of the Western world during the past fifty years. About the turn of the century, European—and to a certain degree even American—Catholicism was deeply stirred by a book that had appeared in 1897 and had gone through seven editions in two years’ time, Catholicism as the Principle of Progress. Written by Hermann Schell, professor of apologetics at Würzburg and author of a famous dogmatics, it gave expression to the grave concern of all educated Catholics who realized that their church had lost the leadership in all fields of human culture. Catholicism meant to modern man backwardness, cultural inferiority, while Protestantism, the predominant religion of the leading world powers, seemed to have gained the undisputed leadership not only in politics and economics but also in literature and philosophy, in historical research, and in the natural sciences and technology.

The modernist controversy which was raging through the Catholic world under Pius X seemed to confirm this verdict. A deep feeling of frustration took hold of the young Catholic academics of all faculties. University professors had to be relieved of the anti-modernist oath that was otherwise demanded from all teachers of theology. Schell himself, who was aware of the great possibilities of Catholicism in the modern world, was suspected of modernism and had to revoke some of his propositions. This he did as a faithful son of the church, but he died of a broken heart. The turn of the tide began in 1914. With the death of Pius X and the accession of Benedict XV, the modernist controversy abated, and the First World War not only changed the political scene in the entire world but also shook modern civilization to its very foundations. A great devaluation of the standards of the nineteenth century took place.

It is against this background that one must see the rise of Catholicism in the last half century—its growing influence on modern man, especially on highly educated people, and the corresponding change in the evaluation of Protestantism. In Denmark, the Catholic Bishop of Copenhagen complains of the unhealthy disproportion in the membership of his small church, with its many converts from the academic professions. Sweden was the land of a “Luther Renaissance” after the First World War. But this theological movement had no influence on the comparatively small section of the nation that had any interest in religion. Even the theologians who are looking for a “normative theology,” now that the time of a mere historical theology seems to have come to an end, seek it, not in the great Lutheran tradition of the past, but either in a somewhat nebulous ecumenical doctrine of the future or in Catholicism. Catholics can teach in the theological faculty of Upsala. The shocking breakdown of the old doctrinal standards, of church order (e.g., in the ordination of women, which is contrary to the law of the Lutheran Church as based on Scripture and the confessions), and even of the moral standards of the Ten Commandments (this church discusses seriously whether premarital intercourse must, in view of the facts of present Swedish life, be regarded as sin under all circumstances) has led the Church of Sweden to the brink of an outward catastrophe that for the time being is prevented only by the Establishment. And this may go overnight if the growing agnostic or even atheistic “humanism” wishes so.

In Germany, where this humanism is organizing itself as “the Third Church” (besides Catholicism and Protestantism), the situation is similar. The Lutheran ministry is undermined by the theology of Bultmann and his disciples, the moderates among them being the most dangerous because their nihilism is hidden behind some orthodox phrases and pietistic sentiments. It happens again and again that candidates who have passed their examination declare that they will not seek ordination. As one of these honest men declared to his bishop (this happened in the church from which Bultmann comes), “I could perhaps preach on an ordinary Sunday. But how could I preach at Christmas or Easter? I cannot preach on myths.” He is right. The gaps are filled with girls who crowd the theological lecture halls. Some of the bishops, pious and conscientious Lutherans, refuse to ordain them. But most of them have no objections, especially since the new hermeneutics (is not that the art of making the Bible say what we want to hear?) and the “evangelical” understanding of the New Testament (which makes obedience to Christ’s commandments “legalism”) support them, to say nothing of the great authority of Karl Barth, also on their side.

Thus the Church of the Reformation perishes in the old Lutheran countries. Ranke, the great historian of the Reformation, once said: “The German nation has had one great love, and this was Luther.” It has been stated that today no one loves Luther any more. We could perhaps add: with the possible exception of some Catholics who have just discovered him. But who loves Luther in Germany, in the Scandinavian countries, and in the Lutheran churches of America, where they do not even understand him?

Will we forfeit the heritage of the Reformation? We Lutherans are rapidly doing so. We must leave it to the theologians of the other confessional groups that arose out of the Reformation, and that means first of all to the Presbyterians and Reformed and to the Anglicans, to answer the question for themselves.

What can we do about it? This question can be answered only if we are clear about the cause of this loss. This we shall understand if we realize what has been lost. It is the doctrinal substance, the confession, the dogma that belongs to the very nature of the Christian faith. Each of the churches that grew out of the historic events which we call the “Reformation” had its own confession. These confessions were not only divisive: they certainly contradicted each other in many and very important points, even to the extent of exclusiveness. One cannot confess simultaneously the Augsburg Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, the Helvetica, Gallicana, Scotica, and Belgica confessions on the one hand and the Formula of Concord on the other, or the Anglican Articles of Religion along with the dogmatic decrees of Trent (as John Henry Newman had to learn in his futile attempt to reconcile them in Tract 90). For Rome also had to undergo a Reformation, though a very different one, in the encounter with the “Protestant” Reformation, In many respects Rome was in 1563 a different church from what she had been in 1517, one of the confessional churches that had replaced the one medieval church of the West. And yet, what a surprising amount of agreement did exist among these confessions.

In the Smalcald Articles, written in 1537 in view of the council that had been summoned for the following year, Luther gives his program for what today is called the ecumenical dialogue with Rome. He divides the articles of faith into three parts. First, the “sublime articles of the divine majesty,” the trinitarian and the Christological dogma. “These articles are in no contention or dispute. Therefore we have not to discuss them at present.” Second, the main article of the Christian faith which teaches that Jesus Christ alone is our salvation and that we are justified by faith in him alone, together with the consequences of this doctrine, the rejection of the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass, the invocation of saints, and the claims of the papacy. No compromise is possible on these articles. The third part contains the articles on which a discussion is possible and necessary with “learned and sensible men” from the Roman church “or even among ourselves.” Here all the great doctrines of the Reformation are mentioned: sin and repentance, Law and Gospel, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the office of the keys, confession, and even the doctrine of justification. The seeming contradiction between Luther’s preparedness to enter into a serious doctrinal discussion with Roman Catholic theologians and his uncompromising “No” to the papacy is nothing else but the Sic et Non of the Reformation: the Yes to everything that is in accordance with the Word of Cod, wherever it is found, even in the papal church, and the uncompromising No to everything that is contrary to God’s Word, even in our own denomination.

If we men of an age that has lost the deep sense of religious truth look back at the confessional era of Europe from Augsburg 1530 to Westminster 1647, we are inclined to see only the disagreements and splits. No one should ever try to minimize the shame of these divisions, the sins from which many of them arose, and the human tragedies that followed them, though we should not indulge in the dreams of a golden age of an undivided Christendom (before 1517, or 1054, or 451, or 325, or before the last of the apostles died). But we must not overlook the strange unity that underlies all these contradictory confessions and binds together the confessors. It is not only what sociologists call “the solidarity of the loyal” (as, for example, the solidarity among Catholic priests, Lutheran pastors, Communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hitler’s concentration camps) that united the martyrs of various faiths in England and on the Continent. These men went to the stake to die for the Reformation or for the pope because they wanted to be loyal to Christ. They died with the same psalms on their lips. Their aim was, as the preface to the Augsburg Confession says of either side in “the dissension concerning our holy faith”: “to have all of us embrace and adhere to a single, true religion and live together in unity and in one fellowship and church, even as we are all enlisted under one Christ.” This was the great common possession of all Christendom in the age of the Reformation, the basis of all its confessions: the firm belief in the Triune God, as it is expressed in the ancient creeds, the Nicene Creed of the Church Universal, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Symbolum Quicunque for the Western Church. They all believed “in one Lord Jesus Christ,” as the Nicene Creed confesses him, “begotten of the Father before all ages, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.” They all believed that the words, “who for us men and for our salvation descended from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man, crucified also for us …” meant that this Jesus is our only hope of salvation. Even the Council of Trent speaks the anathema against any one who “asserts that the sin of Adam … which is in every man as his own sin can be removed either by man’s natural powers or by any other remedy than the merit of the one mediator our Lord Jesus Chris.…”

When this great common heritage of all Christians was lost, the heritage of the Reformation was also forfeited. We cannot relate here the tragic history of the dissolution of Christian dogma which began in England. When the last great confession of the Reformed churches was written at Westminster, the feet of those who would bury the heritage of the Reformation together with the common Christian faith were at the door. The great religious revolution began in the form of a highly spiritual piety. It was the revival of that “enthusiasm” in which Luther and Calvin had recognized the great enemy of the biblical faith of the Reformation. It is deeply related to the mysticism of earlier times, which, incidentally, was at the same time revived in the Roman church. According to the Reformation, my salvation rests entirely on what God has done for me in the history of salvation, in the incarnation of his Son, and in the atoning death of Christ and his glorious resurrection and ascension. Of this I can know only from Scripture and from the scriptural preaching in the Church, from the objective outward Word. In the external means of grace, the Word and the sacraments, the Gospel comes to me, the great promise, “for you.” In these means of grace there comes to me the Holy Spirit, who, “where and when it pleases God,” works faith, the saving trust in that promise. The revolutionary change consists in this, that the decisive encounter between God and man takes place no longer in the events of a sacred history about which I read in old books but in the immediate experience of my soul today. What matters is not that Christ was born in Bethlehem (so this may be regarded as a legend) but that he is born in me today (of this I am sure, for I trust my pious feelings).

The early Pietists regarded this change of emphasis from the objective facts of history, which they did not deny, to subjective experience as a mere clarification of the Christian faith. But the history of the Quakers, whose influence on the Continent cannot be overestimated, shows what is really involved in this shift from object to subject: the devaluation of Holy Scripture, which is now no longer the firm rock it was for the Reformers; the abolition of the sacraments of Christ as means of grace; the destruction of the confessional church and its replacement with what henceforth is called “undogmatic Christianity”; the beginning apotheosis of man, first the pious, the religious man, then the enlightened man whose reason becomes the supreme judge of everything and everybody, including God.

No one, of course, had wanted such a development. Such a religious revolution may begin with almost imperceptible changes in thought and terminology. If the theologians try to correct this, they are accused of hairsplitting. However, there are crucial situations in the history of the Church where theology must do some hairsplitting, fight for an “iota,” as the world calls it, namely, when only a hairbreadth separates the saving truth from pernicious error. In such cases, the Church needs theologians who with prophetic clairvoyance, or better, in virtue of the charisma of discerning the spirits, see where the narrow path lies between truth and error. Such a man was St. John, the Apostle, at the end of the first century, when the border between Church and pious Christian Gnosticism had become blurred. Such a man was Athanasius, in the middle of the fourth century, when, as the consequence of the constant interference of the emperors, even the greatest saints were not clear about the border between orthodoxy and the moderate forms of Arianism. Such a man was Luther, in the sixteenth century, in his fight against Rome and the enthusiasts for the sola fide, when he predicted what it would mean to the Church if people no longer understood the “crucified for us” of the creed in its full biblical sense. From the ranks of such men, he said, “will now come (and many of them are already at hand) those who will not believe that Christ has arisen from the dead, or that he sits at the right hand of God, and whatever else follows concerning Christ in the creed. These will knock the bottom out of the barrel and put an end to the game. For therewith the whole Christ will perish.…”

“Undogmatic Christianity” has replaced the Christian faith of the Reformation. This was the fate of Protestantism. The long line of its prophets and witnesses stretches from Fox and Penn to Francke and Zinzenclorf, Kant and Goethe, Schleiermacher, Ritschl and Harnack, Troeltsch and Tillich, Rauschenbusch, Fosdick, and the Niebuhrs. For three centuries Protestantism has followed this way that leads, and perhaps has led already, to the end of the Protestant churches. This is what Rome has seen for some generations. The Roman church is today reaping the harvest that Protestant theology has prepared for it.

For there is not such a thing as “undogmatic Christianity” because Christianity is essentially a dogmatic religion, perhaps better, the dogmatic religion. None of the great religions of India or of the ancient world has known anything like a dogmatics. Not even the “testimony” of the Mohammedans or the “Hear, Israel” of Judaism (Deut. 6:4; cf. 1 Cor. 8:6) is “dogma” in the sense of the Christian Church. We cannot enter into the question of the nature of the Christian dogma. Suffice it to say that it is the binding doctrinal content of that confession which Jesus demands from all men—from his disciples when he asks them, “Whom say ye that I am,” and from his adversaries when he asks them, “What do you think of Christ? Whose Son is he?”

We shall have a long way to go if we who claim the heritage of the Reformation are to get rid of all misconceptions that have grown up in three centuries and still dominate the theological thought of our churches. We shall have to rethink the doctrines that have been the common heritage of all Christians since the age of the Reformation. We shall have to study again the great creeds of the ancient Church, which are a product, not, as Harnack believed eighty years ago, of Greek philosophy in the Church, but of deep biblical studies. Through every clause of the Nicene Creed one can still hear the passage from the Bible on which it is based. We have to learn that der Sitz im Leben of the creed is the liturgy, as shown by the Te Deum, which is one of the greatest confessions in the twofold sense of confessio as praise of God and confession of the faith, dogma in the form of praise and prayer. And we have to learn that, according to the Old and New Testaments, the liturgy of the people of God on earth is inseparably connected with the eternal liturgy in heaven (Isa. 6: Rev. 4). If in this respect we have to learn from insights regained by the Catholic churches in East and West during the last two generations, they have to learn, and are beginning to learn from the Reformation, what the Bible means as source and standard of the prayer and the doctrine of the Church. To take one example, Lex orandi lex credendi (the rule of prayer is the rule of faith) is valid only if it is also inverted: Lex credendi lex orandi. Nothing is correct in the liturgy, the worship of the Church, that is not doctrinally correct.

These pages are written on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the old feast of the koimesis, the falling asleep, the death of Mary. In 1950, Pius XII declared it to be “a revealed dogma that … Mary … when she had finished the course of her earthly life was taken up, body and soul, into the glory of heaven.” Where has this dogma been revealed? Not in Scripture. It was unknown for many centuries. Hence even a proof from tradition cannot be given. What, then, is the source of the “infallible oracle,” as the breviary calls the papal definition that puts the Assumption of Mary dogmatically on the same level as the Ascension of our Lord? Not God but man is its source. “Enthusiasm,” piety that does not stick to the Word, “clings to Adam and his descendants … and is the source, strength and power of all heresies, including those of the papacy and of Mohammed,” says Luther in the Smalcald Articles (III, 8).

In the sixteenth century the Church of the Reformation stood lonely in a hostile world and gave, over against all forms of enthusiastic religion, its witness to the truth, the power, and the sufficiency of the written Word of God. Will we retain this heritage? Will we be able to give the same witness over against the new and much more powerful manifestations of the same old foe that have entered and almost destroyed our own churches? This depends largely on whether we still know the deepest nature of the Reformation. It began, as did every great new epoch in the history of the Church, and as did the Church itself, with the mighty call to repentance: “Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in saying, ‘Repent ye, etc.,’ meant the whole life of the faithful to be repentance.”

Since the Reformation, the Reformers’ message has been diluted.… Today the Church needs a new “outpouring of God’s Spirit”

Dining with a well-known evangelist not long ago, I was somewhat shocked to hear him remark that although the Reformation witnessed a rediscovery and re-enunciation of biblical doctrine, a real spiritual revival did not take place until the eighteenth century. He apparently did not feel that a great resurgence of interest in and obedience to the Scriptures in itself evidenced a deep spiritual movement. That secular historians who have had little interest in the teachings of the Reformation have described it as a great social revolution, in fact the beginning of Western capitalism, and have credited it with other achievements good and bad, seems natural. But that many Christians either ignore or deny the fact that the Reformation was probably the greatest revival ever to influence the Western world seems strange indeed.

Yet perhaps one should not be so surprised at this attitude. The Reformation had a strongly intellectual flavor. For one thing, at its very core was doctrine: justification by faith, the priesthood of believers, and, above all else, the sovereignty of God. Moreover, apart from the vernacular Bible, the most powerful and effective book of the movement was the first great work of Protestant systematic theology, Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Reformation also had a great effect on the intellectual world, being responsible not only for the reforming of many of the old universities but also for the creation of many new ones. Because of this, it had much to do with subsequent intellectual developments, such as the “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, it had wide repercussions in social, economic, and political thinking in many lands. For these reasons, today many Christians feel that the Reformation was too “intellectual” or too “worldly” to be spiritual, forgetting that at its heart was a dynamic, spiritual force without which it could have accomplished nothing.

It would seem well, therefore, that Christians stop to examine this matter, for a careful analysis of the Reformation should make it quite clear that the essence of the movement was a true Christian revival.

Probably the most important and most fundamental characteristic of the Reformation was that it restored to Christian thought Christ’s centrality in salvation. During the Middle Ages, although Christ had not been denied, others had tended to take his place. The saints and martyrs, the Virgin Mary, and the belief in the resacrifice of the Mass had all partially obscured his atoning work. Then, too, when good works became a means of avoiding or at least mitigating purgatory, the faithful found it more important to look to their own and the saints’ merits than to Christ’s. Thus when Luther sounded forth the biblical teaching that man is justified by faith in Christ alone, he introduced a change in the whole pattern of Christian thought. A little later John Calvin related this doctrine to other biblical doctrines, to make it clear that redemption through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ comes solely from divine grace. Thus the Reformation brought to light the central doctrine of the Atonement.

This revival of the doctrine of justification brought another change: a new emphasis on faith. True, during the Middle Ages great stress had been laid upon faith in what the Church taught, because the Church represented the realm of grace and revelation; but this was to be an implicit faith, that is, a general acceptance of and obedience to the Church’s teachings. To the Protestant Reformers, however, such faith meant nothing. Man as an individual must make his decision for Christ and by faith must personally commit himself to Christ as his Saviour. Faith was no longer thought to be merely a general or implicit acceptance; it became once more a matter of personal transaction between man and God. Moreover, the Reformers also recognized that no man comes to this position except by the drawing action of the Holy Spirit of God himself. In this way the Reformers became the means for a new proclamation of the Gospel of grace.

The revival of the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith had another natural but very important effect: it led to a revival of preaching. During the Middle Ages preaching had gradually declined, largely because of the emphasis upon the sacraments as the means of the conveyance of grace and upon the intercessory role of both saints and priests. The Reformers, however, with their New Testament conception of the importance of personal decision and self-committal to Christ, found that they had to take seriously the New Testament stress upon preaching. To reach sinners and persuade them to believe in Christ required not more ceremonies or symbols but the clear proclamation of the Word calling all men everywhere to repent and believe. Preaching again came into its own at the very center of the service of worship, for the preacher did not proclaim his own theories but set forth the Word of God. In this way preachers once more became conscious of themselves as ambassadors for Christ.

But when men had laid hold upon the Gospel, they also had to live by it. In medieval times, holiness was generally thought of as physical separation from the world. The holy men and women were those who separated themselves from the rest of mankind by going into monasteries or nunneries. And if one remained “in the world” he could seek and find holiness only through fastings, pilgrimages, and penances. Yet by 1500 monasticism had so deteriorated that monks and friars were often bywords for immorality, while pilgrimages and the like had become excuses for self-indulgence. It remained for the Reformers to point out that holiness in the biblical view consists not of outward conformity to human ordinances but of the outworking of Christian love, faith, and obedience toward God. From this true concept of holiness there came a revival of truly Christian living.

This revival then led to a further step. The Middle Ages had distinguished between nature and grace, nature being the realm of man’s life merely as man: his daily work, thoughts, and actions. In his actions he was always to obey the Church when it spoke of faith and morals; but if it said nothing, he could do whatever his autonomous reason directed. To the Reformers such a position contradicted biblical teaching. All of man’s life must come under the light of eternity. Christianity is totalitarian in its demands. The Reformers proclaimed Jesus Christ as Lord of life—all of life—and of the whole of the universe. Each Christian must be directly responsible to him and must see himself as a steward of God’s bounties. Thus the Christian found himself faced with his responsibility to God not merely as a churchman but also as a citizen, a businessman, a scientist, a teacher. Even today we have come nowhere near these New Testament objectives.

From the foregoing one can easily see that the Reformation was a revival in that it was a rediscovery of biblical Christianity. It brought to light teaching that pointed man once more to him who is the true object and source of faith, the triune God. The Church ceased to be the mediator between man and God, and man stood before God himself, to learn through Christ and the Holy Spirit how to know him, trust him, love him, and obey him. This in itself was a revival such as the Christian world has not seen since that day.

Even if one looks at it from other angles, however, the Reformation was still the greatest of revivals. For instance, it came at the end of a period of spiritual darkness greater than Europe had seen for a thousand years. Learning, education, culture had all reached very high points by 1500, but the moral and spiritual situation had hardly ever been worse. One need only think of the scandalous lives of the Borgia popes, of the flagrant disregard of nearly all moral standards throughout European society, of the superstition that abounded, and above all of the venality of the Church, with its selling of ecclesiastical benefices and its trade in indulgences that Christians might escape the terrors of purgatory. Out of this darkness, only God by his Spirit could bring forth light—and he did.

This light manifested itself in the many transformed lives that resulted from the preaching of the Gospel. True, none of those who heard the teaching of Luther or Calvin and believed became perfect overnight; the correspondence of the Reformers clearly indicates that. Christians in those days as in ours had their weaknesses, their failings, their sin. But still through it all one can see, in the changes that occurred in such men as Luther, Calvin, Knox, as well as in many of the humble and almost unknown Protestants, that the Spirit of God worked mightily in those days. How many, indeed, in France, Germany, Holland, England, Italy, and elsewhere went gladly to slow and painful deaths to bear testimony to Christ! Others expressed the newness of this life by their day-to-day living. One has only to read Knox’s account of Geneva or Palissy’s description of the Reformation in Saintonge to realize that this was indeed a tremendous revival.

Furthermore, this change of life did not take place merely in one or two places but affected over half of Europe. Sometimes it virtually captured a whole city, such as Lucca in Italy, so that when the Protestants had to migrate because of persecution, the city was left almost depopulated. The Reformation reached to out-of-the-way places such as Transylvania and Serbia; it gained a large part of the population in central and northern Germany and what is now Holland, and in England, Scotland, and France. Between 1517 and 1564 it had gained hundreds of thousands of adherents, practically turning the whole of Christendom upside down. True, in some places hostile rulers and ecclesiastics succeeded in crushing it out while in others it had a long fight for its life. Nevertheless, it had an effect upon the world for which one can adduce no parallel since the Day of Pentecost.

Finally, to look at the Reformation historically, it had the most lasting effect of any of the great Christian revivals. For four centuries its influence has been great. One can see this very easily in nearly every phase of Western thought: political, scientific, artistic. The Reformation has touched deeply every facet of Western life. But, perhaps even more important, the Reformation has provided the foundation for all subsequent revivals. This fact, very obvious when one considers the seventeenth-century Puritan movement, is also evident in the great revivals of the eighteenth century under the Moravians, the Wesleys, and Whitefield, or of the nineteenth century under Moody and Sankey and many others. These all drew their doctrine and their inspiration largely from the Protestant Reformation. The same is true in our own day and generation. The great trouble has been, however, that over the years the Reformers’ message has been undergoing dilution, with a consequent weakening of the power and influence of the more recent revivals.

Undoubtedly the Reformation still holds the position of the greatest Christian revival; it revivified the Church both intensively and extensively as no other has done. Thus today the Church needs not merely “a revival” but rather an outpouring of God’s Spirit such as that experienced in the sixteenth century. It needs a reforming that will not only give new enthusiasm and understanding to the Church but also, through the Church’s witness and testimony in every sphere of life, bring about a revolutionary re-forming of individual and social life. This will come only when the Church returns to its Reformation foundation and builds once again on the doctrines set forth and applied by the Reformers.

Modern natural science, which received its charter in the seventeenth century, arose in Christendom during the century that produced the Protestant Reformation. This leads to the questions: Is modern natural science the offspring of Christianity? and, more particularly, Was it cradled in the Reformation? In answering these questions, Christians in general and Protestants in particular must be careful neither to claim nor to disclaim too much.

It is a fact that modern science arose in Europe not before but only after the continent was Christianized, and that it arose independently in no other part of the earth. This suggests that it owes much to Christian principles, which indeed it does. But, of course, it is also in debt to ancient Greece and Rome, as are all things Occidental. In its pure form it articulates the Christian mind, but it is not divorced from the Hellenic scientific tradition that culminated in Aristotle nor is it a stranger to the Latin sense of order transmitted to the Middle Ages by the Stoics. Its lineage is complex.

Modern natural science did not arise under pagan auspices, nor did it arise when the Roman Catholic understanding of Christianity was dominant in Europe. This suggests that for its emergence something was needed that neither medieval Christianity nor the revived paganism of the humanistic Renaissance could or did supply. Did the Reformation then supply what was needed? Did it touch off the scientific explosion? There are indications that it did, but Protestants are here obliged to press their claims with care.

There is no doubt that certain Christian principles which tend to stimulate men’s interest in God’s creation but which lay dormant or were compromised during the Middle Ages were disclosed and vigorously proclaimed in the Reformation. There is also no doubt that the Reformed teaching tended to draw men into a study of nature, for among the pioneers of the new science were numerous adherents of the evangelical faith. Yet Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and many other distinguished scientists were loyal sons of the Roman church. To accommodate this fact it is not necessary, however, to withdraw the Protestant claim. It remains true that the Reformation purged and clarified the biblical conceptions that, when accepted and implemented, worked regeneratively in science. What must be acknowledged, however, is that the new understanding of Christianity thus attained was not absolutely new, nor could it be contained behind ecclesiastical walls; it bore relation to what had previously been confessed, and it worked as a leaven throughout the Christian Church. In view of this, it is perhaps best to say that it was Christianity that supplied the firm foundation for modern natural science, and that the Reformation was used by God so to delineate this foundation as to dispose men to build on it the vast new structure of science.

It is not necessary here to set forth, or even enumerate, all those points of Christian teaching that tended to evoke, and did in fact support, the new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But it is essential to consider the three points of doctrine—the teachings concerning God, man, and nature in their interrelations—which appear to impinge most immediately upon the scientific enterprise, and which N. Berdyaev may have had in view when he declared, “I am convinced that Christianity alone made possible both positive science and technics” (The Meaning of History, p. 113).

1. A fundamental affirmation of Christianity is that nature is a revelation of God. This entails at least two further affirmations: Nature can be known and nature ought to be known.

a. In Christian teaching God is the all-knowing One who created all things after the counsel of his plan and who has since regulated and disposed them in accordance with his good and all-wise purposes. This means that nature proclaims the wisdom of God, a wisdom that is accessible, within the limits of finitude, to those created in God’s image. Nature is imbued with rationality and thus intrinsically intelligible.

The Greeks never attained to this conception of nature’s intelligibility. God was for Plato and Aristotle intelligent enough; he was indeed Pure Thought and Perfect Rationality. But he was not infinite and omnipotent. Beside him there existed an independent and essentially intractable Matter, which could not be completely “formed” or rationalized. A natural thing or process in its empirical concreteness could therefore never be completely known—not even by God; it always retained a residue of irrationality and unintelligibility. This is one of the reasons why a natural science, as distinct from a philosophy of essences, was never developed among the Greeks.

It was only after the Greek notion of material intractability and mathematical imprecision, also in its attenuated medieval form, was abandoned by the Protestant Reformation that the way was opened for natural science to go forward. Science, if it is to proceed with vigor and confidence, must believe that a recognizable pattern is to be found in nature. Modern science is animated by this belief, and continues to be so animated even since the promulgation of Planck’s Quantum theory and Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy. And the origin of this belief is plain. As A. E. Taylor says, “The conception of God as perfect and flawless intelligence is manifestly the source of our rooted belief in the presence of intelligible order and system throughout nature; it has created the intellectual temper from which modern science itself has arisen” (Does God Exist?, p. 2).

b. But the fact that nature is a revelation of God means not only that nature can be known but also that it ought to be known. That it ought to be known, and therefore diligently studied, the Reformers never ceased to declare. Nature, they taught, is a book to be read or, more dynamically considered, a discourse to be heard; and no Christian with the requisite talents may absolve himself from this task. The traces of God’s steps, the patterns of his wisdom, the signs of his power, and the evidences of his glory are in nature, and these are to be carefully observed.

Stimulated and driven forward by this idea, men like Bacon, Beeckman, Boyle, Harvey, Newton, and Ray—men of massive intellect, consuming curiosity, and authentic Christian piety—went out to nature and helped determine the structure and direction of modern science. And men of like mind and similar Christian faith have appeared upon the plane of science in every generation since. In the nineteenth century there were Davey, Faraday, Joule, Kelvin, Maxwell. They were all devout Christians, and it was their religion that enlisted them for science. The power of the Christian idea, accented in the Reformation, that God wants to be heard and read in general as well as in special revelation, forced the Christian scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to make the same patient inquiries of nature that the conscientious theologians made of Scripture.

In the course of their investigations theologians and scientists might sometimes have arrived at incompatible conclusions, but both sorts of men knew that the message of nature and of Scripture is of one piece, and that where a difference appears, a mistake in reading has been made. What both understood, perhaps better than some of us today, is that the Bible is not to be interpreted in every place with strict literalness, nor to be regarded as a textbook on science. It would have been impossible for Calvin, for example, to oppose the Copernican theory on the ground that the inspired author of Psalm 96 had declared that “the world is established, it shall never be moved” (v. 10). He was too astute a student of the Bible to regard it as a purveyor of scientific lore. “He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts,” he said, in commenting on Genesis 1:15 and 16, “let him go elsewhere.… The history of the creation … is the book of the unlearned.”

2. A second fundamental affirmation of Christianity is that nature is subject to man. The late M. Foster has pointed out a difference between ancient and modern attitudes to nature. “On the ancient view,” he says, “man is a part of nature and his true destiny is to conform himself to it, ‘to live according to nature’.… In modern times science has acquired a different aim, that of mastery over nature” (Free University Quarterly, May, 1959, p. 126). This is true. Bacon in his Instauratio celebrates and recommends the “dominion” of man, and Descartes in his Discourse on Method contemplates men as “lords and possessors of nature.” As a result of this attitude, science has produced a technical civilization such as antiquity never could produce.

The idea that man, through science, is called upon to “control” or “subjugate” nature comes, of course, from the Scriptures, and it was pressed upon the consciousness of men by the Reformers. It is rooted in the divine mandate: “God said to them … fill the earth and subdue it: and have dominion …” (Gen. 1:28). Bacon’s conception of the “Kingdom of Man” may seem to some to indicate humanistic pride, and it must be acknowledged that the conception readily lends itself to secularization and perversion; but in Bacon’s usage it was a simple translation of Psalm 8:5, 6: “Thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands: thou hast put all things under his feet.”

It must be admitted, and even emphasized, that, the aim of science in Christian perspective is not merely “control.” The aim, as the Greeks discerned, is also “understanding.” And even more importantly, it is “praise.” It is significant that Psalm 8, which celebrates the “Kingdom of Man,” ends with the words, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth.” This indicates that “control” must always be by a man in subjection to God—by a man, that is, who in religious fear stands humbly before his Maker and in strict obedience to God’s law of love directs his domination toward the true betterment of man.

Along with this, however, it must be acknowledged that “control of nature” is an authentic biblical idea, and that it is in modern science only because it was first in Christianity. Because it is a Christian idea, the Christian is justified neither in lamenting the existence of technology nor in setting arbitrary limits upon man’s jurisdiction. The splitting of the atom, the exploration of space, the sowing of clouds to make rain—all this and more is the prerogative of the man who in subjection to God is Lord of nature.

3. A third fundamental affirmation of Christianity is that nature is created. This entails at least two further affirmations: Nature has a beginning and nature is contingent.

a. In the view of Greek science, nature was an organism that grew (phusis, from phuestai), and not a thing or machine that was made. Nature was a self-generating, eternal, divine being, which had no beginning. It was the living, throbbing, but impersonal reproductive matrix from which all things—even the gods—arose and into which they were periodically resolved. The consequences of this conception were many and diverse, but one of them was that Greek science put the emphasis not on efficient but on final causes. Not beginnings but ends were in focus. In modern science the opposite is true. Final causes, considered as immanent explanatory principles, have been banished altogether, and explanations are made in terms of efficient causes only.

The reason for this shift is basically a Christian one. It was stated succinctly by Newton in his Principia: “This Being [God] governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all” (Scholium Generale). What is here said is that nature is not divine but creaturely; not eternal but temporal; not self-generating but made. The events and processes that occur in it are not self-caused; rather, they occur through the play upon them of a Power from without. The ultimate explanation of their behavior is the transcendent God, who in and with time made nature out of nothing.

The banishment from nature of innate final causes was a great gain for science, and it was effected directly by the Christian teaching on creation. By the force of that teaching, which was compromised in medieval times by a foreign alliance with Greek modes of thought, the Reformers effected the death of Greek animism. Appetites, natural tendencies, sympathies, attractions became moribund concepts, and the way was opened for the development of the classical Newtonian physics, and indeed for every later advance in modern science.

To Christians, who believe that all things exist for the glory of God, it may appear unfortunate that, under Christian auspices, modern science should banish all final causes and deal only with efficient causes. But, as A. F. Smethurst correctly observes, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton “did not suggest that there are no final causes, but only that these are not the concern of natural science. Nor did they mean that there is no purpose in nature, but only that such a purpose cannot be discovered by scientific, experimental, empirical methods” (Modern Science and Christian Belief, Abingdon, 1955, p. 23). No doubt they were right.

b. Greek science, like Greek thought generally, was rationalistic. The Greek mind supposed it knew beforehand what things were like. This is evident in Greek theology. Whereas the Hebrew knew he had to be told by God himself what He was like, the Greek supposed that he already possessed a pattern of perfection according to which he could challenge every claimant to divinity. In science, too, the Greek proceeded aprioristically. He supposed he knew, for example, that there could not be any change in heavenly bodies and that they could not move except in circles. In the words of Professor Hooykaas, for the Greeks “that which is not comprehensible is hardly real, and what is not logically necessary but contingent, is considered a defect in nature, hardly worthy to be studied.” But, he continues, “the Christian physicists of the seventeenth century, Pascal, Boyle, and Newton, did not recognize an intrinsic necessity of physical events. In their opinion regularity of the sequence of events depends wholly on the will of God” (Free University Quarterly, October, 1961).

It was when this conception entered fully into the consciousness of men through the mediation of the Reformers that authentic empiricism was born. Modern science is nothing if not empirical, but the origin of this feature is found in Christianity. In the Christian view, God is the Creator and nature is radically contingent. What happens in it the scientist can learn only through observation. What can or cannot happen in it he does not know beforehand, for here as everywhere he must wait upon God’s revelatory activity.

Modern science, then, can rightfully be claimed by Protestant Christians as a fruit of the Reformation. Natural science as such is no enemy of the Christian faith but its child, and it can and should be utilized in the service of the Father.

Even a brief survey of the far-reaching effects of the Reformation on education and the arts must recognize its antecedents. For one thing, the Reformation was closely related to the Renaissance. While Luther’s testimony at Worms was as Carlyle said “the greatest moment in the modern history of man,” it was also the culmination of the spiritual ferment of the several centuries preceding Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers. Nor may the results of the Reformation be confined to Protestantism; they are found as well in Catholic thought and life.

Two great principles were basic to the influence of the Reformation on education and the arts: the final authority of Scripture, and the priesthood of the believer.

For Luther and his colleague Melanchthon, who had so much to do with education in sixteenth-century Germany, it was a spiritual necessity for the individual to read the authoritative Word of God. Therefore, great numbers of elementary schools were needed—a requirement called by Professor William K. Medlin of the University of Michigan “the most important educational development in European history since ancient times.” And such it was, because in the long run it led to public schools.

The other principle, that of the priesthood of all believers, led in the same direction, for it “took the responsibility for education out of the hands of the priestly hierarchy and, practically speaking, placed it upon the rulers and ultimately upon the people” (Clyde L. Manschreck, Melanchthon: The Quiet Reformer, p. 132). Luther himself wrote in his “Sermon on the Duty of Sending Children to School” (1530): “I maintain that the civic authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school.… For our rulers are certainly bound to maintain the spiritual and secular offices and callings, so that there may always be preachers, jurists, pastors, scribes, physicians, school-masters, and the like.…” In all this, Melanchthon was at one with Luther, and so extensive were his educational endeavors that he “provided the foundation for the evangelical public school system of Germany” (ibid., p. 143). Melanchthon also profoundly influenced secondary education through what he did in shaping the German “gymnasium” and was instrumental in the development of the university throughout Protestant Germany.

Aside from insisting with Luther on the responsibility of secular authority for education and the necessity of educating all children (and Luther was far ahead of his time in providing for the education of girls as well as boys), Melanchthon held a concept of an integrated Christian education similar to that which has recently been rediscovered by Protestant educational philosophers, evangelicals not least among them. He “put into the curricula of his schools, especially the higher schools, those subjects which would contribute most to an understanding of the scriptures” (ibid., p. 146) and justified the various subjects, including physics and astronomy, by their relation to God. His was an integrated curriculum, centering in the principles of “back to the sources” and “knowledge of Christ.”

But the educational influence of the Reformation spread far beyond Germany. Along with the Lutheran there is the Calvinist influence. Like Luther, Calvin was committed to the extension of learning. Calvinism affected education in the Netherlands, where the Synod of Dort in 1618 required every parish to furnish elementary education for all and where the Protestant Christian school reached its fullest flowering and set the pattern for the Christian day school movement in America. In Scotland the educational impact of Geneva came through Knox, and in 1646 the Parliament required a school in each parish. Education in France and Switzerland was mightily affected by the Reformation. “No one,” said Calvin, “is a good minister who is not first a scholar.” In an essay entitled “The Reformed Tradition in the Life and Thought of France” (Theology Today, I, 349), Emile Cailliet stresses the essential democracy of the French Reformed movement: “The new Christian learning stayed in close contact with the people. In France as in Geneva, every Reformed church was bound to have a school. Mothers would learn to read so that they might be the first Bible teachers of the children.… It was a Protestant, the philosopher, Pierre Ramus, who at the time of the Renaissance organized higher education in France.” Moreover, in the nineteenth century many French Protestants were educators, Guizot being a pioneer of the public school system.

To be sure, educational progress under the impetus of the Reformation was not an unbroken development. There were setbacks and lapses into formalism. But the indestructible seed had been sown.

Americans are well acquainted with the fruition of that seed. At its beginnings in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, education in this country was rooted in Puritanism. That our colleges and universities and also our free schools are generically among the educational fruits of the Reformation is not arguable. If America has the most extensive system of education the world has known, this is in large part the result of the Reformation. According to the distinguished educational historian, Edward P. Cubberly, “The world owes much to the constructive, statesmanlike genius of Calvin and those who followed him, and we in America probably most of all” (The History of Education, p. 332).

Even so rapid a sketch of the educational results of the Reformation as this would be incomplete without some reference to Roman Catholicism. To the extent that the Council of Trent was the result of the Reformation, so the Reformation may be said to have influenced the improvements in Catholic education. Loyola and his followers assimilated into their own Jesuit system the best educational thought of the time, borrowing ideas from the College of Guyenne (headed by Cordier, Calvin’s teacher), the colleges of Geneva, and Johann Sturm’s school at Strassburg.

Through all the ebb and flow in education since the sixteenth century, the most productive event was Luther’s translation of the Bible into the vernacular. Setting the pattern for the German language, it also reached far beyond the confines of Germany. (William Tyndale, whose translation contributed so much to the King James Bible and who had visited Luther at Wittenberg, was greatly influenced by Luther’s German Bible.) Among Luther’s highest achievements was his giving the people God’s Word in their everyday speech. And it was Calvin who went on to develop from Scripture the great system of Reformed doctrine.

Let these things be kept clearly in mind, as our survey moves from education to another field. For the recovery of the Bible and the priesthood of the believer are at the roots of the influence of the Reformation in the arts as well as in education.

Two of the greatest arts—music and painting—must suffice to illustrate the aesthetic results of the Reformation, which also exclusively affected the other arts. Luther himself was a good musician. Through his emphasis upon the use of the chorale and through liturgical changes, he gave Protestant worship the inestimable gift of congregational singing; “Luther provided for liturgical forms that gave the congregation opportunities for direct participation in the service …” (Howard D. McKinney and W. R. Anderson, Music in History, p. 302).

In his love for music, Luther was a true child of sixteenth-century Germany, which was “bursting with song.” Zwingli, who was also a musician, banned music from the church as unworthy of sacred use. But Luther knew better. “The devil,” he said, “has no right to all the good tunes,” and his view prevailed. Calvin was not himself musical. Yet contrary to uninformed opinion, he did not object to the use of music by Christians but considered it among “the excellent gifts of the Holy Spirit.” In the Reformed tradition, the use of music was narrower than in Lutheranism; yet it had its place, chiefly in the musical setting of the psalter. And the Church is permanently indebted for some of its enduring hymns (“Old Hundredth” among them) to such a composer as Bourgeois, who lived and worked in sixteenth-century Geneva.

If Calvin’s attitude toward music has been misunderstood, that of the Puritans has been slandered. In a definitive study, Percy Scholes, whom the great musicologist Alfred Einstein calls “an unimpeachable British witness,” has demolished the persistent misrepresentation that the Puritans hated music (The Puritans and Music in England and New England).

But to speak of Reformation influence in music is to bring immediately to mind that most towering of musical geniuses, Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was no isolated phenomenon. He came from a family so musically eminent that in Erfurt musicians were known as “Bachs,” even when no members of the family were there. He also had great Protestant predecessors, such as Buxtehude and particularly Schütz, who wrote some of the most spiritual of all music.

Bach is the man who in a single work, The Well-Tempered Clavichord, “opened up all the wealth of later music, with its absolute freedom of key change,” and who in his church music, notably the B minor Mass (a thoroughly Lutheran work, the form of which makes it impossible to use in the Catholic service), the St. Matthew Passion, and the cantatas, expressed the essence of the Reformation faith. The historian who said that in the course of three hundred years only one German ever really understood Luther, and that one was Johann Sebastian Bach, may have been guilty of a degree of overstatement, but he came close to the heart of the matter.

To trace the influence of Bach in musical history would require calling the roll of the great composers who succeeded him with the possible exceptions of Gluck and Berlioz. Although Bach was far from unknown to his major successors like Mozart and Beethoven, it was Mendelssohn who had much to do with the rediscovery of his choral music. At the age of twelve, Mendelssohn read an autograph of the St. Matthew Passion in the Royal Library at Berlin and did not rest until years later he had given the work its first performance since Bach’s death. Thus wide recognition of Bach’s church music came late. Today this music still stands supreme. At the heart of this supremacy is the man himself, the devoted Lutheran Christian, who could not view the passion of Christ as a spectator but only as one who was personally related to the Lord whose suffering he so poignantly portrayed in tone.

Side by side with Bach stands another great Protestant musician, Handel. Professor Carl J. Friedrich of Harvard says, “The crowning glory of baroque music, in which it reaches the pinnacle that transcends all limitations of period and style, was achieved by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and Georg Friedrich Händel (1685–1759) …” (The Age of the Baroque, p. 87). It was Handel who took the oratorio, which had originated during the Catholic Reformation in the Oratory of Philip Neri in Rome, and made of it such a glorious work as The Messiah, the libretto of which is derived in every detail from Scripture. Different from Bach in the acclaim that came to him during his lifetime, which was largely lived in England, the man who wrote The Messiah could say that he hoped to die on Good Friday that he might rise with his Christ on Easter Day. Among the successors to his biblical oratorios, which also include Israel in Egypt and Samson, there stand Mendelssohn’s masterpieces, Elijah and St. Paul, as well as many later works, such as Stainer’s Crucifixion.

The chief glory of later Protestant music is the German Requiem of Johannes Brahms, a convinced Lutheran, of whom one biographer says, “The Christian teaching which he received from Pastor Geffcken, who prepared him for confirmation, laid the imperishable foundations of his love for old Protestant church music and its uncorrupted original melodies” (Brahms, Walter Niemann, p. 182). “People do not even know,” Brahms once said, “that we North Germans long for the Bible every day and do not let a day go by without it. In my study I can lay my hand on my Bible even in the dark.” Thus it is not surprising that for his Requiem Brahms himself chose the Scripture passages.

The Protestant spirit in music has many manifestations. Yet whether it be in the religious masterpieces of Bach or Brahms, or in the less known treasures of Moravian music rediscovered within recent years in the United States, the devotion to Scripture and the sense of the believer’s priesthood that are at the heart of the Reformation find musical expression. For the deepest strain in Protestant church music is that of spiritual inwardness.

These same principles carried over into painting, where they brought a new measure of freedom. The magnificent achievement of the great Italian Renaissance masters has enriched humanity, and the world can only be grateful for their work. Yet their art was largely aristocratic rather than of the people. It portrayed the Christ, the Virgin, and the saints with the utmost mastery of line and color. And perhaps some of it also tended to a kind of artistic docetism in which the essential humanity of Christ was submerged.

But the Reformation was not aristocratic. Nor did it encourage the Church to dominate art. In Protestantism, gorgeous ritual and the churchly display of magnificent painting gave way to the direct access of the believer in all his weak and fallible humanity to the Lord who was true man, “in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” Thus the Reformation, particularly in its Calvinistic phase, worked in painting to free it from the patronage of the Church and to make it more accessible to all men everywhere (see chapter v of A. Kuyper’s Calvinism, the Stone Lectures for 1898 at Princeton Theological Seminary).

The tendency to bring Christ close to man in the reality of his divine manhood is evident in such works as the Crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald, the most powerful of all portrayals of Christ’s suffering. Standing on the threshold of the Reformation, Grünewald shows with unforgettable pathos that it was man as well as God who hung and suffered on the Cross. In a new book, Jane Dillenberger says of this picture, “The miracle is that through the intensity of physical suffering speaks the atoning sacrifice of ‘the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world’.… The early years of the Reformation and the early twentieth century [Roualt] have both given us notable images of a Christ who died in order that the Christian believer may live and die in him” (Style and Content in Christian Art, p. 149).

The most representative of all German artists, Albrecht Dürer, spanned the transition from the Renaissance to the Reformation. He himself was deeply committed to Luther and his cause, and he “might have become the artist of the Reformation had not death intervened not too long after his crisis of the spirit” (Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand, p. 125).

But it is to the Netherlands, that most Calvinistic of Protestant countries, that we must look to find the painter who is the epitome of the Reformed influence in art. That man is Rembrandt. From his mother he gained great familiarity with the Scriptures. (One of his earlier portraits shows her reading her Bible.) His small library of only fifteen books contained, according to the catalog inventory of 1656, “een oude Bijbel” (an old Bible), in which he was deeply read. A man of the people who was not always on good terms with his church, Rembrandt reflects most profoundly the environment in which he lived. If he was, as Paul Jamot says, “the most religious of the painters,” it was because “he was religious and human at once.”

It is perhaps not generally recognized that Rembrandt was chiefly a painter of biblical subjects. His religious works greatly exceed every other category, totaling 850, whereas the next largest group (portraits) numbers about 500 (Dillenberger, p. 194). Furthermore, it is significant that none of his commissioned religious paintings was done for churches. They were essentially an “unchurched” kind of religious art, presenting Christ for every man and thus similar in spirit to some of the religious painting of our own day. Not only did they have scriptural subjects; they also showed deep insight into biblical truth. Rembrandt’s portrayal of Christ is far removed from the conventionalized and sentimental picture Protestant America seems to have taken for its own. Rather is Rembrandt the graphic presenter of God’s majesty and Christ’s tenderness. The Lord he depicts is “richly human. His face seems worn and its expression is inward, as if the words spoken were given rather than proclaimed.… The authority with which this Christ teaches and proclaims the good news and speaks of the forgiveness of sins is of divine origin. And yet he is wholly human” (ibid., pp. 186,187).

Rembrandt occupies a place in painting comparable only to that of Bach in music. With him the Reformed tradition finds its deepest pictorial expression.

Music and painting are among the most subjective of the arts. By insisting that every man is a priest before God, the Reformation freed the individual Protestant musician and painter to participate in the creative outburst of activity loosed by the recovery of the Word of God for the individual.

That the Reformation caused tremendous changes in the spiritual and ecclesiastical conditions of Europe needs no emphasis. Its impact on politics is also indisputable. But its effect on philosophy and ethics no doubt requires some explanation.

During the early Middle Ages, philosophy (what there was of it) followed in general the principles of a Platonic Augustinianism. The spiritual realm was considered to be directly accessible to reason, while the sensible world neither provided the basis of knowledge nor contributed any great amount to its sum total. Philosophy in effect coalesced with theology.

In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas replaced Augustinian thought with that of Aristotle. Sensation became the basis of knowledge, and God’s existence was proved by a tortuous argument from physical motion to an Unmoved Mover. Here is not the place to discuss the theological results of abandoning Augustine, but the philosophical result was an intricate scholasticism that led Jerome Zanchius to remark that “Thomas Aquinas [was] a man of some genius and much application, who, though in very many things a laborious trifler, was yet on some subjects a clear reasoner and judicious writer” (Absolute Predestination, chap, iv, pos. 8, par. 4, footnote).

Although there is no evidence that the scholastics ever seriously debated how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, Aquinas did indeed discuss whether an angel is in a place, whether an angel can be in several places at once, and whether several angels can be at the same time in the same place. These things, along with arguments on the passive and active intellect, prime matter, and whether only boys and no girls would have been born if Adam had not sinned, can easily produce the impression that Aquinas was sometimes a “laborious trifler.”

Later scholastics, particularly Duns Scotus, increased the number of subtleties. Contrary to Augustinianism, the area common to philosophy and theology became less and less. William of Occam made the break complete: nothing theological could be proved by philosophy—Christianity is based on revelation alone. If now Occam’s philosophy can be shown to the skeptical, then there is a peculiar return to Augustinianism in which no knowledge is possible apart from revelation. Luther’s philosophy was in effect this type of Occamism.

In a very real sense the Protestant Reformation may be said to have had no effect whatever on the subsequent history of philosophy. The main line—Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, the British empiricists, Kant, and Hegel—would presumably have developed essentially as it did, Reformation or none. Leibniz was a Lutheran and Berkeley a zealous Anglican, but the few necessary adjustments to Protestant or even Catholic thought do not seem to have had any really basic influence at all. Modern philosophy stems from the Renaissance, not from the Reformation.

Protestant thought on philosophic themes, on the other hand, was a complete reversal of scholasticism. Not only was the point of view of a spectator in an ivory tower condemned as useless, as trifling, and indeed as impious, but also the existence of God, instead of being a conclusion to an intricate Aristotelian argument, became the basis of all truth.

In the first chapter of the Institutes, Calvin, disdaining even to mention physical motion and an Unmoved Mover, begins with a question of greater Augustinian flavor: Does a man first know himself and then learn of God, or does he know God first and later learn about himself? Briefly Calvin’s answer is: “No man can arrive at the true knowledge of himself, without having first contemplated the divine character, and then descended to the consideration of his own.… Though the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves be intimately connected, the proper order of instruction requires us first to treat of the former, and then proceed to the discussion of the latter.”

In opposition to Aristotelian empiricism, Calvin, far from basing this knowledge on experience, refers it to natural instinct. “Some sense of the Divinity,” he says, “is inscribed on every hear.… All have by nature an innate persuasion of the divine existence, a persuasion inseparable from their very constitution.… We infer that this is a doctrine, not first to be learned in the schools, but which every man from his birth is self-taught” (I, iii, 1 and 3).

This Reformation theory of innate or a priori knowledge was not uniformly maintained in later centuries. Both deism and its Christian opponents introduced more and more natural theology. This should be regarded as a deterioration from the original position of Luther and Calvin.

Rejecting the ideal of one universal corrupt church, the Protestants were neither willing nor able to enforce philosophic uniformity. Jonathan Edwards was staunchly orthodox in theology, but he was peculiarly influenced by the British empiricists. Rudolf Bultmann thinks the New Testament anticipated Heidegger and existentialism; but since Bultmann is not staunchly orthodox, he may be a poor example. At any rate, Protestant theologians have oscillated between Scottish common sense and Hegelian personalism. Today the Free University of Amsterdam is the center of a serious attempt to produce a comprehensive Christian philosophy. With Calvin’s rejection of natural theology these men have brilliantly criticized non-Christian systems. Whether their constructive work will long endure remains to be seen.

The effect of the Reformation on ethics may be separated into theoretical and practical aspects. Consonant with the rejection of natural theology, the Reformation based its ethics on revelation and discarded natural law. This is pure theoretical gain. The theory of natural law commits a major logical blunder when it tries to deduce a normative conclusion from descriptive premises. No matter how carefully or how intricately one describes what men do, or what the provisions of nature are, or how natural inclinations function, it is a logical impossibility to conclude that this is or is not what men ought to do. The is never implies the ought. This criticism applies to all empirical theories. Both Thomism and utilitarianism insist that man is morally obligated to seek, not just his own good, but the common good. This principle, however, cannot be justified empirically.

When the Thomists argue that it is a natural law to seek what is good, because as a matter of fact everybody seeks what is good, they reduce the term good to the several objects of human desire. When they further state, “No one calls in doubt the need for doing good, avoiding evil, acquiring knowledge, dispelling ignorance …” (Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 329), they simply shut their eyes to beatniks, the Mafia, the tribes of the Congo, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Tautology or falsity is their fate.

The Reformation’s ethical principles were the explicit commands in the Word of Cod. Of course this presupposes the existence of God—discussed above—and the possibility and truth of revelation. If revelation is false, then its ethical theory is false, too; but no one can accuse it of tautology.

The practical effect of the Reformation on ethics is more easily observed by the general public, and Jesuitical casuistry and Tetzel’s scheme to raise money for St. Peter’s provide the sharpest possible contrast with Puritan conscientiousness. The massacre of the Huguenots and the massacre of the Covenanters by the Catholic Stuarts are highlighted by the Presbyterians’ refusal to take revenge when they came to power. Even in the days of John Knox, after the martyrdoms of the early Reformation, the Presbyterians in power in Scotland did not execute a single person for religious beliefs. Contrast this with the Spanish Inquisition and the Jesuit intrigues.

On a less gruesome plane, but not less an important point of ethics, the Jesuitical disregard and the Reformation regard for truth gives content to the discussion. It was no doubt the violation of oaths that led the Westminster divines to include in their summary of Reformation and biblical doctrines the following paragraph:

“An oath is to be taken in the plain and common sense of the words, without equivocation or mental reservation. It cannot oblige to sin: but in anything not sinful, being taken, it binds to performance, although to a man’s own hurt; nor is it to be violated, although made to heretics or infidels” (XXII, 4).

We live today (so it is said, and, I regret, said with truth) in the post-Protestant era. The spiritual interests of the Reformation are no longer interesting. A materialistic attitude and a humanistic philosophy characterize our civilization. As Nietzsche said, “God is dead.” It is an age of increased war and crime. Murder and rape occur in public, on the streets, in the subways, and New Yorkers refuse to get involved. Legislatures abolish capital punishment; and instead of punishing the criminal, the state rehabilitates him so that in seven years the murderer is paroled, sometimes to kill again.

Such are the results of liberalism, of banishing God and Christian ethics from the public schools, of denying the Bible, its miracles, and its salvation. Under these conditions a return to Luther and Calvin, a return to Protestantism, a return to the Bible would not be the worst fate imaginable.

Major fruits of the Reformation have been in the inseparably related fields of evangelism and missions. Evangelism is seeking so to present the Gospel to men and women that through it they may be born anew. If they have entered into the wonder and joy of the new life made possible through Christ, men and women will inevitably seek to spread the Good News throughout the world, whether among their immediate neighbors or in other lands.

In its essence the Reformation originated among those who had experienced the new birth. Because Luther had learned through painful struggles the amazing truth that is at the heart of the biblical revelation and the New Testament, that salvation is achieved not by good works but by faith—“the just shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17); “by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8)—he sparked the Reformation. Many factors contributed to the spread of the Reformation, some political, some related to the ambitions of kings and princes to control the Church; but at the heart of it were men who were moved by God’s grace in giving his Son, by the willingness of Christ to follow his Father’s will and go to the cross, by the marvel of the Resurrection, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit. The new birth came in a variety of ways: to some, as to Calvin, in such a way that they were reticent about the details; to others, as to Menno Simons, by stages. But always it issued in the fruits of the Spirit and always it was contagious.

From time to time across the centuries, from the currents finding channel through the Reformation fresh streams of evangelism have issued. Such was Pietism. When, in Protestantism in the Netherlands and Germany, a deadening formalism seemed to have blocked the springs of the new life, preachers and pastors such as Spener spoke of the necessity and possibility of the new birth and gathered about them those who experienced it, cultivated it through fellowship in prayer and Bible study, and sought to win others. John Wesley was an outstanding leader of those, not alone in Methodism but as well in other circles, who experienced the new birth. As he described it, in an hour which was to him transforming he felt his heart “strangely warmed,” felt that he did “trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation,” and received an assurance that Christ had taken away his sins and saved him from the law of sin and death. In a way that was different and yet essentially the same, God’s grace gripped Jonathan Edwards, Charles G. Finney, Dwight L. Moody, and in our own day Billy Graham. From them, and thousands of lesser fame, flowed “rivers of living water” (John 7:38).

The Reformation was late in giving rise to foreign missions. One reason was the belief of some of the early Reformers that the Great Commission was given only to the apostles. Another was that the Reformers were so engaged in the transformation of the Church in their own lands that they had little time for spreading the faith outside Europe. The major reason, however, was that for nearly a century after the start of the Reformation Protestant peoples had little contact with non-Christian peoples. The great exploring and colonizing powers of the sixteenth century were Spain and Portugal. Significantly, the great surge of Catholic missions that accompanied and followed their exploits was the fruit of the fresh awakening in the Roman Catholic Church which we sometimes inaccurately call the Counter-Reformation. That awakening arose through great spirits who wished the Catholic Church purified. Like Ignatius Loyola, a contemporary of Martin Luther who had had a profound and transforming experience of Christ and who founded the Society of Jesus dedicated to “the greater glory of God,” they were moved by a passion for souls. They planted the Gospel as they understood it in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, attempting to win the nominal Christians among their fellow countrymen to a vital faith and to protect the non-Europeans against exploitation and bring them into the Church.

Protestants planted missions wherever they had colonies and commerce. That was true of the early settlers in Virginia, of John Eliot and the Mayhews in New England, and of the Dutch in Ceylon and the East Indies. Those missions were minority enterprises; the majority of the settlers and merchants were not interested in them and even opposed them. Yet they were early fruits of the Reformation.

The major Protestant missions arose from Pietism on the continent of Europe and the related evangelicalism in the British Isles and America. The great pioneers were the Moravians. Refugees from persecution in Bohemia, they settled on the estates of Count Zinzendorf, who was a godchild of Spener. Zinzendorf saw in the little company of refugees, with their center in Herrnhut, instruments for fulfilling his dream of carrying the Gospel to all mankind. Under his initiative the Moravians founded missions in some of the few parts of the world to which Protestant peoples had access—among them Greenland, the Thirteen Colonies, and the Danish West Indies. German Pietists were the first Protestant missionaries in India, sent by the King of Denmark to a Danish trading post in Tranquebar. Out of the Great Awakening in New England came missions to the Indians, with David Brainerd as a famous figure. A prospective son-in-law of Jonathan Edwards, Brainerd died of tuberculosis contracted during heroic labors among the red men.

William Carey, rightly esteemed the major pioneer in modern Protestant missions, was converted in his youth. In 1795, three years after the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society which sent Carey to India, evangelicals of several denominations inaugurated the London Missionary Society. In 1799 evangelicals within the Church of England began what is known as the Church Missionary Society, to this day the largest missionary society supported by Anglicans. Out of what was known as the Second Awakening came the lads who at the Haystack prayer meeting in Williamstown, Massachusetts (1806), formed themselves into the Society of the Brethren with the purpose “to effect in the persons of its members a mission or missions to the heathen.” Through them came the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), which, except for an earlier Moravian society, was the first in the United States to begin missions in other countries. This Protestant missionary effort of the last decade of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth century sprang from evangelicals at a time when Europe was racked by the French Revolution, with its religious skepticism, and the Napoleonic Wars. It showed that, in the darkest days, from the minorities of evangelical faith can come movements that will bless the world.

Significantly, too, the missionary awakening came when the British Empire was beginning the expansion that in the nineteenth century opened much of the world to Protestant missions. In 1815, just at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, German and Swiss Pietists opened a seminary in Basel. For a time its graduates went out under British societies, but in 1822 it began sending missionaries under its own auspices. Before the middle of the century several other German missionary societies were organized, some of them the outgrowth of Basel.

In 1865 J. Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission. The son of warmly evangelical parents, Taylor had been converted in his teens. He soon determined to be a medical missionary in China, then only beginning to be opened to the foreigner. While studying medicine, through discipline and prayer he taught himself to depend completely on God for his physical needs. He continued that reliance during his initial years in China. Invalided home, he resumed his medical studies. The weight of China’s millions, dying without hearing the good news of Christ, became a crushing burden. He believed that God wished none of them to perish but all to come to a knowledge of the truth. He also believed that God must be waiting for someone to offer to be the instrument through whom the Gospel could be brought to the Chinese. With no organization behind him and no influential friends, he undertook, in faith, to be that instrument. The China Inland Mission was the result. Its program was to send its members to the interior where no other Protestants were at work, to depend entirely on God for personnel and funds, to have no fixed salaries, and never to go into debt.

Taylor found great strength in such biblical words as Ebenezer and Jehovah Jireh, carrying the assurance “hitherto hath the Lord helped us” and “the Lord will provide.” He accepted “willing, skillful workers,” regardless of their denomination. At the end of its first half century the China Inland Mission had more than 1,000 missionaries on its rolls. Wide attention was brought to it when in the 1880s it was joined by “the Cambridge Seven,” athletically and socially prominent converts of Moody in that university. Affiliated organizations sprang up in several countries, and other “faith” missions were inspired by it.

Marked reinforcement to Protestant missions came from the United States through the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. That movement began in 1886 in a conference at Mt. Hermon, Massachusetts, led by Moody. Its members signed the “declaration”: “It is my purpose if God permit to become a foreign missionary.” By its “watchword,” “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” was meant, not that the world was to be converted in that generation, but that it is the obligation and privilege of each generation of Christians to make the Gospel known to everyone in the world of its day. The movement spread to other countries, and through it thousands of students were enlisted for missions. The Laymen’s Missionary Movement, begun in 1906, had as its object the raising of the funds needed to fulfill the watchword.

From the Student Volunteer Movement came a great enlargement of the missionary enterprise. John R. Mott, one of the original hundred who at Mt. Hermon inaugurated the movement, became the chairman of its executive committee. He himself had made his full commitment to Christ through contact with one of Moody’s Cambridge converts, Kynaston Studd, who was a brother of one of the Cambridge Seven and who later was knighted and became Lord Mayor of London. Mott succeeded Moody as chairman of the annual student conferences at Northfield, Massachusetts, in the buildings of the girls’ school founded by the evangelist. He became an evangelist to students and held evangelistic meetings in many of the universities of the world.

From the conviction that students were to be the future leaders of their peoples and, if won to Christ, would be the best means of giving the Gospel to their nations, Mott organized, in 1895, the World’s Student Christian Federation. In 1910 he and J. H. Oldham, a leader in the British affiliate of the Student Volunteer Movement, organized the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. Mott presided and became the chairman of the Continuation Committee of the conference, and later the chairman of the International Missionary Council which followed. He saw in that council a means for coordinating all Protestant foreign missions in such a way that the dream of “the evangelization of the world in this generation” could be realized and churches planted and strengthened in every land. From former members of the World’s Student Christian Federation came most of the initial leadership of the World Council of Churches. Fittingly, Mott, then in his early eighties, became the first honorary president of that organization.

In light of such a record, of which this is only the barest outline, something of the contribution of the Reformation to evangelism and missions can be discerned. The original impulse from which the Reformation sprang—the joyous recognition of salvation through faith in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ revealing the love of God—has had global repercussions that are still mounting.