Not some scientific discovery, but a sociological fact may well be the great headline of the twentieth century: men have learned to work together. Even if they have trouble living together, they at least know how to labor co-operatively. Foreshadowed in the nineteenth century, this great organizational trend has reached its fruition in our day, dominating not only the commercial realm but the intellectual as well. With the world too big and too fast to understand let alone control even to a small degree, man has sought emotional, mental, and physical refuge in the Organization. Big government, big business, and big institutions have resulted, and each category has developed a special breed of modern organization man.

Operation Organization

Apparently here to stay, organized bigness warrants analysis and understanding, especially since the church, too, finds itself enmeshed therein. Committees that plan and executives who expedite affairs of the kingdom are familiar facts. Is this philosophy of Operation Organization suitable for the church however? Has this trend any spiritual validity? Efficiency may be necessary in these complex times. When, however, religious organizational machinery regulates and overrides both the individual and the church, then strong protest is in order.

Ignorance of this trend in church life reveals either lack of contact with the church or sheer blindness to what transpired. Church government once controlled religious bodies. Today, however, instead of governed churches we have administered denominations. Administrative groups now range alongside traditional church governments and take responsibility for more and more functions once controlled by the church governments. Much of this transference was necessitated, it must be admitted, by poor and inept church government; often only the devoted and energetic work of administrative executives prevented a total breakdown of the church program.

Organization, technically speaking, is that part of the denominational leadership which is supported only for administrative purposes. In denominations ruled by bishops this statement may not appear valid, since a bishopric government and administration normally heads in one man. But even here, an administrative organization has arisen alongside the rule of government. By contrasting the present and original structures of the various denominations, the distinction between government and administration becomes readily apparent. Some observers affirm that administration is only an extension of church government. Others, however, express deep concern over granting to administrative organization the sanction of government.

Among the dangers of organization is its careless disregard for the individual; personal worth, after all, is a central tenet of Christianity. On the dust jacket appears this descriptive summary of The Organizational Man: “The Clash between the individual beliefs he is supposed to follow and the collective life he actually lives—and his search for a faith to bridge the gap.” Chapter headings—many ministers could superimpose these captions over their church functionings—include: Belongingness, Togetherness, A Generation of Bureaucrats, The Practical Curriculum, The Pipe Line, The Well-Rounded Man, The Executive Ego, the Tests of Conformity, The Fight Against Genius, The Bureaucratization of the Scientist [Theologian], Love That System, and The Web of Friendship. Some of these emphases taste of Christian virtue; under the organizational complex, however, they may become actual vices.

New Source Of Authority

Previous generations found their religious authority in the Bible, in the creed, or in both. Today, however, religious man finds his authority in the religious organization. While the Roman Catholic church has carefully transformed organization into something sacred with an absoluteness geared to winning modern man, it has done so without taking administrative authority from church government. Protestant churches have not yet effected such a union of the sacred and human, although there may he administrative authorities who hope in this direction.

If the religious organization man is more specialized in the humanities or perhaps a better public speaker than the organization man of commerce or government, he nonetheless differs from him in motivation and value judgment only by great personal effort. A minister disinterested in organization is considered somewhat suspect, for everyone is supposed to become involved in regional and national activities promoting the organizational program. If the organization offers a minister some special responsibility he feels honored. Acceptance means facing the problems of the organization. Pressure for organizational conformity comes through communication media, education, social pressure, and possibilities of professional advancement.

Fortunately almost everyone in the religious organization espouses personal faith, and usually men of great personal integrity have moved to the top administrative posts. Even integrity, however, is inadequate to correct the foibles of human nature in an organization. Organization demands conformity. A leader surrounds himself, therefore, with those indebted to him and accordingly compliant to his will. As men build their own parts of the organization, they engage in occasional power struggles. And they may display an alarming disregard for the Christian doctrine of the priesthood of believers. Lacking, too, may be administrative faith in the common man, the local church, and in the local pastor. While awaiting directives from higher echelons, pastor and people in the local church, therefore, may soon lose heart and initiative.

Service Or Control?

In addition to its threat to the individual, the organization poses two major problems for the church: first, its tendency to control the church, and second, the organization’s tenacious determination to perpetuate itself.

The first problem is a clear case of the tail wagging the dog. The administrative organization properly exists to serve the church, but the fine line between serving and controlling is easily blurred or altered in the course of operations. By straddling most lines of communication the organization soon has undue power to influence the affairs of the church.

Whether in Congregational or Episcopal churches, organizational problems are very similar. This similarity may explain why most pressure in favor of ecumenicity comes from men in the administrative organization. In the different denominations, administrative structure is very much alike and, as far as the administrators are concerned, often much more vital and vigorous than church government. The religious organization man finds similarities in organization far more important than differences in government.

For its work the organization seeks the best and ablest men and sometimes literally robs the church of great and strategic talent. It importunes them through men already in the organization, or on the basis of the task to be done. To recruit the best is only natural since the organization’s problems are difficult and challenging, and the church’s support for its program is really quite meagre.

Tendency To Self-Perpetuation

The second danger of the organization is its tendency to self-perpetuation. The 20 per cent of the ordained ministers of the United Presbyterian Church who soon will be employed outside the pastorate are an example. Since most of these nonpastoral positions are at least partially in or under the organization, the organization thus assures itself a high degree of continuation.

To guarantee this self-perpetuation the organization has largely captured the theological education of the church. However unobtrusive the pressure may be, the organization nonetheless urges seminaries to reflect the dominant theological views of the denomination, be they liberal, neo-orthodox, or evangelical. Securing conformity is difficult enough, without battling an additional complication of theological diversity. Individual faculties, too, should preferably be of the same persuasion; and in the larger denominations all seminaries are expected to be the same theologically. In the eyes of the organization, seminaries are to produce interchangeable cogs to maintain smooth operation of its machinery. Original independent teachers and unique leaders may be the joy of a denomination; to the organization such persons portend only trouble. “Don’t give the church Luthers or Wesleys,” says the organization to the seminaries. “We can’t use such men.”

Expansion of the administrative organization is quite inevitable. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” says the professor in his humorous book, Parkinson’s Law. Almost any active organization, he notes, will grow about five per cent in any given year even with no increase in output. While Professor Parkinson’s book is hilariously funny, it is sadly apt in describing what is actually happening in the churches.

The religious organization follows a pattern. After a group of concerned ministers or laymen has performed some task for several years as a labor of love, the work inevitably becomes a payroll operation. Then as soon as an executive finds himself with several different types of responsibility, the temptation comes to employ assistants who can be supervised since an administrator’s work ideally should be logical, coherent, and compact. With no check on its Topsy-like growth, such expansion of the organization swallows tremendous material resources.

What can be done about these dangers to the church? Obviously the present mania for organization experiences little opposition in the church. Fundamentalists have no essential quarrel with the concept itself; their discontent centers rather in not having control of the organizational machinery. Both the theologically more conservative denominations and the more liberal communions share similar organizational woes. In their groups, the organization and the organization man operate almost unchecked. In national government Democrats and Republicans look over each other’s shoulders. In business the corporation executive answers to stockholders in his annual statement. If a group in the church, however, tries to organize opposition to the religious organization, it may be accused of opposing either the church or the church government, and is labeled schismatic.

Actually the organization has devised a unique procedure for dealing with any possible critics. Such persons receive all sorts of honors. Those with prestige are placed on committees, named on letter heads and mastheads, and occasionally assigned some prominent responsibility. They may also be delegates to workshops, seminars, and meetings in distant cities or beautiful resorts. While these techniques require large expenditures of money, they often neutralize potential trouble and discontent.

Some Possible Correctives

Although it seems quite impossible to revert to some simpler period of church life, the present situation is certainly not beyond control. Several persistent questions indicate both the complexity of the situation and also the possibility of its correction.

The central problem is that of the organization’s purpose. Where a church acknowledges Christ as Lord and is governed through the agency of the Holy Spirit, what shall be the function of an administrative organization? Church government arose from a need for doing things decently and in order, but is this need a valid reason for administrative control? How necessary is a centralized executive function and program agency to a church? Can a distinction be made between administration and government in the church? Can administration and government be separated? If the two can be separated, the possible loss of which one would be least detrimental to the church? If there is to be executive organization, shall the church or the organization determine its purpose?

Other related questions quickly follow. How much of the organization exists to support the mission of the church and how much exists to support the organization itself? Is not rigid austerity in stewardship of church money important? Has modem administrative organization effected an improved spiritual condition in local churches? Does the organizational method conform to the discipline of the school of Christ, or does it simply adapt the management principles of industry to the church? Are the values of the marketplace to be the values of the church? Can an obsession with public relations honestly reflect the image of Christ? Does the spirit of competitive self-aggrandizement found in secular business have a rightful place in the Kingdom?

The organization would probably answer these questions by urging the strengthening of the executive and program agencies of the church to secure greater efficiency and more energetic accomplishment of work. Certainly the church’s work needs prodding; the Christian solution, however, may be not in the organization but in affirming Christ’s kingship in the church.

It is easy but wrong to charge the administrators with the present situation. If there is blame, the whole church is at fault. Even if some may have overreached themselves, administrators as a whole cannot be blamed for aggressively doing their church-appointed tasks. It is the organization rather than its men that is at fault. To change the personnel would provide only temporary improvement; the system itself needs alteration.

How churches should meet this problem is difficult to say because they represent so many differences in church government. Generally speaking, organizations need to be streamlined. Duplication of function should be eliminated and organization policy determined not by its own administration but by church government. Local churches can certainly exercise some initiative in program areas rather than parrot all that arrives in the mail from headquarters. Surely each denomination has areas where its own creative imagination can effect church improvement.

Can the church survive, if it does not control its organization? After all, tremendous resources of material and energy are consumed by the organization. It could therefore provide some of its best service to the church by instituting a self-limiting device for itself. On the other hand, the organization can inspire the government of the church to maintain itself as the Ecclesia semper reformanda.

Some startling events have taken place recently in Scotland, a land which takes its religion seriously. In 1957, for example, when the “Bishops’ Report” was issued and an irresponsible press campaign raised the alarm that Presbyterianism was to be sold down the river, a story was told of two university lecturers discussing the crisis. “Why are you so worked up?” asked one, “I thought you were an atheist.” “So I am,” replied the first, “but I’m a Presbyterian atheist.” On a lower level, the bi-annual matches between Scotland’s two most famous football teams are often made the occasion of pseudo-religious partisanship leading to thuggery and mob violence. The past months have seen the religious issue brought into even sharper focus:

1. The Pope has set up a Secretariate to help non-Romans follow the work of the impending Vatican Council, and to help other churches arrive at unity with Rome. This brought significant comment from the magazine of the normally irenic United Free Church: “The argument that union has become a necessity in order to combat Communism is specious. Communism is stronger in Catholic Italy than in any Protestant country in Europe. The followers of Christ are not pledged to combat this or that political ideology, but to preach Christ.…”

2. A majority of this year’s Church of Scotland General Assembly evidently approved the suggestion that when he goes to Rome next year for anniversary meetings of the Scottish congregation, the Moderator might call on the Pope. This proposal, unthinkable 30 years ago, was received typically by the Free Presbyterian Church’s official organ. “To those of us,” it says, “who have known the downgrade movement in the Modernistic, Scoto-Catholic, Arminian and Antinomian Church of Scotland … it has caused no surprise.…” (The F.P.’s, it should be added, regard the Roman hierarchy as a kind of cosmic swindle, while that hierarchy’s local representatives profess sorrowful amazement that, despite alleged common aims, “this little church on the Western seaboard of Scotland is … the Catholic Church’s most unrelenting antagonist.”)

3. Three Scottish dailies somewhat sensationally published details of a “secret meeting” about Church unity between Church of Scotland “leaders” and representatives of the Roman Catholic church. What in fact happened was not worthy of blaring headlines. About 35 ministers and elders were invited as individuals to attend for a day the annual conference of the Superiors of Roman Catholic religious orders in Scotland. One purpose of this was that the conference should hear Presbyterian views on such subjects as papal infallibility, the Mass, and the place of Mary in Roman worship. These were made with complete freedom and frankness, and received with great patience and courtesy. There was no debate. Not surprisingly, many in the country felt that such an invitation should not have been accepted. Others, like Sir Thomas Taylor felt a duty to discuss agreements and differences.

Public reaction to these three developments naturally raises the question, how strong is the Roman church in Scotland? The Roman Catholic archivist for Scotland, writing in the Glasgow Herald during last year’s fourth centenary celebrations, pointed out that while it was the aim of the Scottish Reformers to abolish forever the Mass in Scotland, 1000 Masses were daily said in the country four centuries later. In the light of this a Scottish Protestant, looking back to John Knox’s “uproar for religion,” might be tempted to rueful remembrance of Southey’s words from another context:

“But what good came of it at last?”

Quoth little Peterkin.

“Why that I cannot tell,” said he,

“But ’twas a famous victory.”

Since achieving legal toleration under the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, Roman Catholicism has grown steadily in Scotland (members estimated at 50,000 in 1860, nearly 800,000 in 1960). There is no historical justification for the romantic fiction that in the Western Isles persisted “a pious Catholic populace who maintained their faith undisturbed by the Reformation,” and modern Scottish Catholics are largely the result of Irish immigration. Last year for the first time the Roman Catholic school population of Glasgow rose to one-third of the whole, and if the process continues at the same rate, the fifth centenary of the Reformation may be celebrated by a minority.

Other signs are not lacking. The United Free Church’s General Assembly recorded the increasing influence of the Roman Catholic church in civic affairs in certain areas, and strongly recommended to all church members a deeper interest in local government and a consideration of individual responsibility as a vital part of Christian witness and service. The education committee of a Scottish county refused to allow an essay competition in its schools in connection with the Reformation celebrations, prizes to be provided by the local Church of Scotland presbytery. The Committee’s refusal provoked a pertinent comment from a former moderator of the presbytery who voiced the growing uneasiness of many in Scotland. “In view of what has happened in this county,” he said, “I congratulate the Roman Catholic Church on its wisdom in limiting the power of the Education Authority.” A few years ago, only the efforts of a single far-sighted theological professor prevented the Roman church from acquiring as a seminary for its priests a building overlooking the Martyrs’ Monument in St. Andrews, the nursery of the Scottish Reformation. Finally, a rare event in the Church of Scotland, in the past 12 years two of its ministers, one of them with long service in the most rigidly Calvinistic of the Hebridean islands, have become Roman Catholics.

“We live in a very different world from that which the Reformers knew,” says the 1960 Church of Scotland Year-Book, “but the battle is still the same.” No one is likely to be misled into thinking that this is a battle peculiar to Scotland only.

Current Mood Of Our Century: Alienation

Modern Thinkers Series, edited by David H. Freeman (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1960, 8 paperbacks): Nietzsche, by H. Van Riessen (51 pp., $1.25); Sartre, by S. U. Zuidema (57 pp., $1.50); Kierkegaard, by S. U. Zuidema (50 pp., $1.25); Barth, by A. D. R. Polman (68 pp., $1.50); Bultmann, by Herman Ridderbos (46 pp., $1.25); Niebuhr, by G. Brilenburg Wurth (41 pp., $1.50); Dewey, by Gordon H. Clark (69 pp., $1.50); and Van Til, by Rousas J. Rushdoony (51 pp., $1.25), are reviewed by Robert D. Knudsen, Assistant Professor of Apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Our century has been witness to a profound shift of mood. This shift is not very apparent in public life in America, but it has had a very deep influence on our world of letters, particularly in theology. Generally the newer mentality is spoken of as a departure from the optimistic idealism of the nineteenth century. It involves an unhinging of earlier antitheses, or at least the placing of them in new settings. There has been a change of moral values, and even of the evaluation of morality itself, as epitomized in Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil.” In place of the feeling of being at home in one’s universe, there has come a sense of alienation from one’s world and from oneself. The innovators take a stance against the Enlightenment and the conceptions of human reason, will, and technical progress which they attribute to it. The shift of sentiment has of necessity involved a criticism, as in Oswald Spengler, of our humanistic Western culture, and of some of its most hallowed traditions. It may fairly be said that today the philosophy of existentialism most clearly expresses this change of mood and that it tries to answer the problems of our time on a level which it feels has yet been little explored.

How is the evangelical mind to assess this shift? This question is especially challenging because the newer mind has itself interpreted the shift as being unfriendly to orthodoxy. For instance, Paul Tillich, who shares this point of view, has associated evangelical thinking with the spirit of the Enlightenment, and in criticizing the latter has set the Reformation in what must seem to the orthodox Christian to be an altogether strange light.

Fortunately the orthodox Christian is not altogether without help in making this assessment. The above Modern Thinkers Series, for instance, in the volumes presently available and those yet in the planning stage, should offer considerable aid. Each of the contributions presently available deals either with a thinker who is symptomatic of this shift or who has wrestled with it.

Professor Van Riessen, of the Institute of Technology in Delft, Holland, vividly portrays the saga of a man, Friedrich Nietzsche, who tried to set himself uncompromisingly against God (“God is dead”) and the bourgeois culture which he thought was the product of the decadent influence of Christianity. Faced with the resulting nihilism, he proclaimed the supremacy of the will to power of the superman as the meaning of life, only to fall into meaninglessness again as his ultimate became the law of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche was a conscious opponent of Christ; nevertheless, he was forced to admit his admiration for him, and he framed a philosophy that has been said to be unthinkable apart from the influence of the man from Nazareth.

In this series the thinker who most closely approximates Nietzsche is Jean-Paul Sartre. Professor Zuidema, of the Free University of Amsterdam, finds in Sartre’s thought a radical freedom philosophy in which man elects himself as sovereign in place of God, and creates himself in negation of the world and of his own past. For this view of freedom, says Zuidema, Sartre must pay the price of isolation and nihilism, eventuating in a philosophy of frustration.

In the two preceding thinkers there is the fruit of a methodical elimination of God. The result is the radical encounter with nothingness or meaninglessness which is one of the hallmarks of existentialistic thinking. In the following treatise, Kierkegaard, Professor Zuidema portrays the so-called “father of existentialism” who sought to incorporate the encounter with nothingness into the experience of God.

Zuidema’s monograph is organized around the question of the relationship between Kierkegaard’s analysis of human existence and the absolute Paradox, God manifest in the flesh. He concludes that in Kierkegaard there is already a secularization of Christian concepts; human existence is understood apart from the revelation in Christ. There is in Kierkegaard himself a point of contact both for the existentialists who desire an existential analysis of man apart from the Incarnation and for the dialectical theologians who desire to elaborate on the revelation in Christ apart from any reference to human existence. Zuidema concludes that as Kierkegaard’s thought moves between these two poles he emerges with an untenable and contradictory synthesis of a distorted Christian faith.

It is, of course, Karl Barth who has increasingly sought to interpret Christianity in Kierkegaard’s spirit without any reference to an existential analysis of the human situation. Professor A. D. R. Polman of the theological seminary of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, Kampen, sets Barth’s Romans in an unusual light and then proceeds to expound and discuss his views on the Word, predestination, and creation, as presented in the Church Dogmatics. Polman sees in Romans a book whose teachings are not simply to be affirmed or denied but whose conscious exaggerations are intended to arouse a lethargic Christendom and to battle immanence theology. After a sympathetic and sometimes even irenic exposition of each of the doctrines under consideration, Polman proceeds to a confrontation of Barth’s views with the Word of God, as understood by orthodoxy. In each case, he discovers that Barth has approached the Word of God with a pre-established framework. Throughout, Polman has an eye for Barth’s actualism, which he discovers as Barth’s attempted answer to nihilism. He could, however, have made this theme more central both in his expositions and criticisms.

It is, on the other hand, Rudolf Bultmann who, of all New Testament scholars, seeks to understand the Christian message in terms of an existential analysis of man’s situation, after having relieved it of the supposedly mythical form in which it has been transmitted to us by the biblical writers. As Professor Ridderbos, Professor of New Testament at Kampen, sees it, the problem for Bultmann is whether a person who no longer thinks in mythological terms can find divine redemptive proclamation within the redemptive act, described in the New Testament as a mythical event, and within the person of Jesus, conceived of as a mythical divine person. In what is one of the clearest expositions of the entire series, Ridderbos presents a respectful analysis of Bultmann’s existential position; nevertheless, he concludes that Bultmann’s reconstruction of the New Testament message is a failure and is itself a greater unlikelihood than the supposed mythical world view he is intent on eliminating.

Another thinker who has busied himself with myth is Reinhold Niebuhr. Instead of relinquishing so-called “mythical” expression altogether, he developed what he earlier presented as a “mythical theology.” Professor Brilenburg Wurth, also of Kampen, traces Niebuhr’s development from his early break with liberalism to his mature theological expression, especially with regard to the redemptive work of Christ and the revelation of the kingdom of God. The monograph concludes with a general evaluation. Wurth finds that Niebuhr lacks a clear-cut biblical starting point, and misunderstands such doctrines as the creation; instead, he is influenced by existentialism, and thinks within the framework of the Kierkegaardian dialectic of time and eternity. In Wurth’s presentation there are lapses in detail; however, he is one of the few who in their evaluation of Niebuhr have subjected the basic dialectical structure of his thought to scrutiny.

The next volume, Dewey, by Professor Gordon H. Clark of Butler University, is of a different genre. It is, first of all, an original contribution to the series, the treatises mentioned heretofore having appeared in Dutch as chapters of a symposium, Thinkers of Our Time. Furthermore, it deals with pragmatism or instrumentalism, which is one of the main objects of attack by the existentialists. But as Clark passes Dewey’s philosophy under review and analyzes his views of science, values, and logic, he concludes that Dewey is also an irrationalist. Dewey eliminates eternal ideals and attempts to base values on a scientific experimental basis. Clark argues that science offers no basis for establishing ultimate values. Thus Dewey’s sense of values must depend upon nothing more than his own personal preferences. Not even the law of contradiction is safe when descending into the maelstrom of Dewey’s philosophy of flux. Clark’s presentation, on his Christian rationalistic presuppositions, is more technical as it gathers momentum; but everything except the last section is understandable for one who does not have a specialized philosophical training.

The last essay deals with one who has set the Christian world and life view sharply against both the older idealism and the newer pragmatic and existentialistic thought. In his essay, Van Til, Rousas J. Rushdoony, minister of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Santa Cruz, California, and editor of another series in the same International Library of Philosophy and Theology, presents us with a clever chapter, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” taken from a larger work on the philosophy of Van Til. He has preceded this with an introduction in which he presents a more general approach to the background and the present crisis of Western thought. In contrast to classical Greek thought, modern man has made time central, but failing to see it on the background of God’s counsel and his covenant, it has fallen into irrationalism. With broad and sometimes bold strokes Rushdoony pictures contemporary philosophy as a flight from reality. He is correct that there is a crisis and that this crisis is connected with the inability to solve the problem of reality, to cope with the threat of nothingness; but his discussion throws especially the existentialistic philosophy into a perspective that is somewhat alien to me. He is aware that the existentialistic position demands the encounter with nothingness, if one is to come to himself or to God. He is, however, apparently little aware that for the existentialists nothingness and man’s alienation from himself and from his world are problems with which they start and which they try mightily to overcome. To my mind this is a forlorn and hopeless effort on their part, since they first of all give autonomous man full sway, and then and only then seek to reconstruct a new foundation of meaning beyond nihilism. As Rushdoony points out, the school of Christian philosophy developed by Abraham Kuyper points out a different way which challenges autonomous man at the outset and demands that philosophy be built upon the only true foundation, the message of the Scriptures.

Though brief and necessarily fragmentary in treatment, these treatises should nevertheless provide stimulating reading, especially for the Christian college student who is faced by the need to find his balance intellectually in a perennially difficult world. This is particularly so, since the authors to a man have a high view of the inspiration of the Scriptures and seek, with whatever nuance of approach their particular methods may entail, to found their thinking and their evaluations of contemporary trends firmly on the unfailing Word of God.

ROBERT D. KNUDSEN

From Mary To Titus

Great Personalities of the New Testament, by William Sanford LaSor (Revell, 1961, 192 pp., $3), is reviewed by F. F. Bruce, Faculty of Theology, University of Manchester, Manchester, England.

We give a hearty welcome to this companion volume to Dr. LaSor’s earlier work, Great Personalities of the Old Testament. The New Testament is not a whit behind the Old in biographical interest, and Dr. LaSor makes the principal characters of the New Testament live again before our eyes in these pages.

A preliminary chapter on “The Fullness of Time,” which sketches the historical and cultural setting of the New Testament narrative, is followed by a study of John the Baptist. Dr. LaSor is well acquainted with the new background which recent years have supplied for the ministry of John, but he reminds us of the important features which distinguish him from the ascetics of Qumran.

Three New Testament personalities are sufficiently important to receive two chapters each: one (of course) is our Lord (“Jesus the Son of Man” and “The Triumphant Christ”), the second is the leader of the Twelve (“Simon Bar-Jonah” and “Peter the Rock”), and the third is the Lord’s chief herald among the Gentiles (“Saul of Tarsus” and “Paul the Apostle”). Without the slightest modification of the historic Christian faith about the person of our Lord, Dr. LaSor brings out impressively the reality of His manhood. The chapter-heading “Peter the Rock” reminds us of the New English Bible rendering of Matthew 16:18; Dr. LaSor’s exposition of that text holds “that Jesus was designating Peter as the Rock on which He was beginning the building of His Church” (p. 73). With regard to Paul’s ministry it is good to note the espousal of the south Galatian interpretation: “travel in Galatia will convince all but the most stubborn” (p. 109, n. 2). Dr. LaSor is also undoubtedly right in his view that Paul spent the 10 years of obscurity before Barnabas brought him to Antioch “preaching in the province around his home town” (p. 123).

Other chapters deal with the Virgin Mary, Andrew, the family at Bethany, Stephen, Barnabas and Mark, Luke, Priscilla and Aquila, Timothy and Titus, Thomas, “John the Theologian” (apostle, evangelist, and seer). Each chapter is full of points of interest, frequently occasioning surprise and sometimes disagreement, but always provoking thought and fresh reference to the sacred text. It is a pleasure to commend this book unreservedly.

F. F. BRUCE

Edworth And Oxford

The Young Mr. Wesley, by V. H. H. Green (Arnold, 1961, 342 pp., 35s.), is reviewed by A. Skevington Wood, Minister, Southlands Methodist Church, York, England.

Of books on John Wesley there seem to be no end, and only an author with something genuinely new to disclose can justifiably claim attention. Dr. Green, Fellow and Senior Tutor of Wesley’s own college at Oxford (Lincoln), establishes this right and has, indeed, filled a considerable gap in our understanding of Wesley’s pre-conversion years. He has utilized not only the researches of Léger and Schmidt, which are unavailable in English, but also, and more significantly, Wesley’s unpublished Oxford diaries.

The result is a volume of exceptional interest to the historian, presented in a choice literary style which will appeal to general readers. The background of Wesley’s university career is greatly illuminated by Dr. Green’s specialist knowledge, and the home life of Epworth Rectory is depicted with unusual insight. We are not certain, however, whether Dr. Green fully appreciates what is involved in an evangelical conversion, and it is with evident reluctance that he concedes that this crisis did at least make “some difference to John Wesley (p. 287). His conclusion must rank as a classic understatement.

This failure to penetrate the secret of Wesley’s warmed heart leads Dr. Green almost to regret the concentration of his interests on the God-given mission of evangelism. Leisure and he had parted company, and he no longer possessed either the time or the inclination to pursue the social round in which he had formerly participated. Indeed, what we learn here concerning the pleasure-loving Wesley prior to 1738 points up rather than minimizes the change of direction effected by his conversion, although Dr. Green does not seem altogether to realize this fact.

He comes nearest to it when he speaks of Wesley’s dissatisfaction with his former way of life (p. 80). Yet he suspects such autobiographical confessions, particularly if made under the stress of emotional experience (p. 81), and “too abundant religious zeal, more especially in its extreme Evangelical forms” (p. 171), as likely to produce a lack of balance. It is this basic antipathy which prevents Dr. Green from doing full justice to the work of grace in Wesley.

A. S. WOOD

To Start A Sermon

Proclaiming the New Testament, a series of homiletical comments and ideas covering the New Testament and edited by Ralph G. Turnbull (Baker, 1961, first three vols.): The Gospel of Matthew, by Herschel H. Hobbs (135 pp., $2.50); The Gospel of Mark, by Ralph Earle, (119 pp., $2.50); and The Book of Acts, by Ralph G. Turnbull, (161 pp., $2.75), are reviewed by Charles W. Koller, President, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Each author follows the prescribed pattern for the series and discusses every passage under the following heads: I. Historical Setting, II. Expository Meaning, III. Doctrinal Value, IV. Practical Aim, and V. Homiletical Form.

For the biblical preaching and teaching which the present generation so greatly needs, these volumes offer real help in terms of sound interpretation and stimulating flashes of insight.

The volume on The Gospel of Matthew, by Dr. Hobbs, contains 28 studies, one on each chapter of this Gospel. It is intended to be “neither a commentary nor an exposition, nor a book of sermons, but an aid in sermon or devotional preparation, designed to save many precious hours of research.” To this purpose, the book is admirably adapted. The notes on the “Historical Setting” and the “Expository Meaning” should prove exceedingly helpful along with the doctrinal, practical, and homiletical values. Generally three or four verses are covered in each study. The homiletical hints are fresh and stimulating with occasional instances of slight straining to achieve parallelism in the homiletical phrasing of points.

The volume on The Gospel of Mark, by Dr. Earle, is pleasingly fresh and crisp in style, with no words wasted. It contains 35 studies, with one to four studies based on each chapter of this Gospel. From each selected passage the author takes a text and develops it in the light of its context, with careful attention to exegesis and historical setting. The result is, to a degree, both textual and expository, and provides a good starting point from which the reader may proceed to his own homiletical or devotional development of the passage. It would be an added convenience if the verses included in each study had been expressly indicated. These studies are not intended to be sermons but sermon starters. And since they are not sermons, the thesis, application, and illustrations are generally omitted. Each study is developed around three points, and these, with considerable ingenuity, are brought into alliterative parallelism. As is usual in such a structural pattern, there is, at times, a slight stretching of words to fit the pattern, though not enough to mar the value of the studies.

Dr. Turnbull’s studies in The Book of Acts cover all the 28 chapters. There are 29 studies in all, calculated to stimulate thought, at the same time supplying sound interpretation and helpful flashes of insight. They are more in the nature of expository analysis than sermon outlines; hence, there is generally no expressed thesis or proposition and no transition from the introduction to the body of the discussion. Illustrations are appropriately left for the individual to supply from his own experience, observation, and reading. The “Historical Setting” of each passage is carefully worked out, as is the “Expository Meaning,” with the aid of the Greek text. Persons and places are clearly identified, and relationship explained, along with the circumstances and the timing of events treated. There are many fresh touches, not elaborated but expressed in metaphor or apt phrasing such as will stimulate homiletical thinking.

CHARLES W. KOLLER

Response To Toynbee

The Intent of Toynbee’s History, edited by Edward T. Gargan (Loyola University Press, 1961, 224 pp., $5), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, Professor of History, Catawba College.

It was to be expected that a work of such broad sweep and ambitious hopes as Toynbee’s A Study of History would be subjected to searching criticism. But since the appearance of the first volume of this study, Professor Toynbee has been the object of a continuous storm of criticism seldom accorded to the most controversial of historians.

Some of these criticisms have their origin in the deep-seated antagonism of many historians to any attempt to study history as a whole rather than as national states and their political development. Still other historians objected to the details of the plan which Toynbee adopted, and to his use of analogy. They also rightly pointed out that in a work of such magnitude there were errors of factual detail. Another source of criticism lies in the fact that there have been major shifts in Toynbee’s own thinking since he began his work, and, as a result, there are fundamental cleavages between his earlier and later volumes.

This co-operative study of Toynbee reflects these various sources of opposition to his work. But underlying the critical approaches there is, on the part of all the contributors, a genuine appreciation for Toynbee’s tremendous scholarship and his imaginative use of historical data in a serious effort to find meaning in history. Perhaps the two most searching chapters in this work are those by Edward Rochie Hardy dealing with Toynbee’s conception of universal churches, and Eric Vogelein who gives a penetrating discussion of Toynbee’s Study as a search for historical truth. In these two chapters the basic deficiencies of his position are set forth, and all of his writings should be studied in the light of these penetrating analyses. Although Toynbee emphasizes the tremendous role which universal churches play in civilizations, he refuses to accord to Christianity and the Church their unique place in human history; he thus misses the key which makes available the only clues we have to the meaning of the historical process.

C. GREGG SINGER

Criticism In Chaos

The Bible and the Ancient Near East, edited by G. Ernest Wright (Doubleday, 1961, 409 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Oswald T. Allis, formerly Professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary.

This volume of “essays in honor of William Foxwell Albright” was presented to him on his 70th birthday after a lecture which he delivered at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. The presentation was made by the editor.

Most of the essays are by former pupils of Dr. Albright. They are the following: “Modern Study of O. T. Literature” (John Bright); “Biblical History in Transition” (G. E. Mendenhall); “The Hebrew Language in its Northwest Semitic Background” (W. J. Moran); “The Achaeology of Palestine” (G. E. Wright); “The Textual Criticism of the O. T.” (H. M. Orlinsky); “The Development of the Jewish Scripts” (F. M. Cross, Jr.); “The Chronology of Israel and the Ancient Near East” (D. N. Freedman and E. F. Campbell, Jr.); “South Arabian History and Archaeology” (G. W. Van Beek); “Sumerian Literature, a General Survey” (S. N. Kramer); “Formative Tendencies in Sumerian Religion” (T. Jacobsen); “Egypt: Its Language and Literature” (T. O. Lambdin); “Egyptian Culture and Religion” (J. A. Wilson); “Hittite and Anatolian Studies” (A. Goetze). The titles indicate the contents of the articles as biblical and archaeological in varying degrees. The names of the authors are a sufficient guarantee of the superior and expert quality of their contributions. As an appropriate conclusion the volume also contains an essay by Dr. Albright himself, titled “The Role of the Canaanites in the History of Civilization” (first published in 1942), and also a 27-page bibliography of his writings which indicates the amazing productivity of this indefatigable archaeologist.

The first two articles will be of especial interest to the readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. They may be said to set the stage for all that follows since they describe the present state of biblical criticism in the light of archaeology. The authors agree that Old Testament criticism is in a state of “flux” (pp. 13, 27) or even “chaos” (p. 33). We learn that one of the two pillars of Wellhausenism, the Development Hypothesis, has fallen (p. 14), that “Wellhausenism in its classical form has almost ceased to exist (pp. 18, 34), and that the Documentary Hypothesis which underlay it, while widely accepted and generally adopted, has been under severe attack, especially from the Upsala School, and has lost much of its importance. The position of the writers appears to be that progress may be expected along the lines of the Form Criticism, according to which the documents dealing with the pre-exilic period all represent the crystallization of oral traditions the original form of which is dependent on the findings of the archaeologists, among whom they assign Dr. Albright an almost unique eminence. Hence the importance of the essays which follow and form the bulk of this volume.

Like many others, this volume raises quite insistently the question of the relation between the Bible and the Ancient Near East. There are two very different answers. If, as we are told in the first two essays, biblical criticism is in a state of flux which might be called chaos, if the biblical sources for the early history of Israel are late and more or less unreliable, if it is true that “Perhaps the most important gap in the field of O. T. history is the lack of an adequate hypothesis to replace that of Wellhausen” (p. 38), then the Bible student will turn naturally and gladly to the archaeologist for light and leading and will accept his findings, even if they are uncertain, even if they contradict the statements of the Bible. But if he believes the Bible to be the Word of God, if he believes the Pentateuch to be Mosaic, if he believes that holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, then, while welcoming all the new light which archaeology has thrown on the history of ancient times and rejoicing that it has slain his great enemy Wellhausenism, he will claim the right to test the present findings of both critics and archaeologists by the Scriptures to determine whether these findings are true. Enthusiasm over these findings, valuable as they undoubtedly are, should not blind us to this fact that it is as idle to try to discover the true history of Israel, that redemptive supernaturalism which is its very essence, by digging in the ruin-heaps of ancient civilizations, as it is for the medical student to seek to discover the soul of man in the dissecting room. The soul of Israel is not to be found within the mounds of ancient cities, but within the pages of that Book committed to Israel as “the oracles of God.”

OSWALD T. ALLIS

Preacher And Theologian

Preaching and Biblical Theology, by Edmund P. Clowney (Eerdmans, 1961, 122 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by William Childs Robinson, Professor of Historical Theology, Columbia Theological Seminary.

Jesus came preaching, the Christian kerygma is a preachable theology. It is a pleasure to welcome this evidence that the Westminster Professor of Homiletics is a theologian, even as we welcomed D. Ritschl’s Theology of Proclamation as evidence that Austin’s theologian was a preacher.

The author shows himself a thorough scholar, at home in current thought as in the Bible, a master of words and sounds, a practical and helpful teacher in his field of service. The first section lays the foundation in great principles the first of which is that God speaks as well as acts, that his written Word is norm as well as source for our preaching. Then in the later sections of the book he brings out the practical application using a deep understanding of biblical theology to give the background for preaching.

The pragmatic pastor or rushed professor of homiletics may get engrossed in this helpful work by first reading the treatment of David and Goliath, of Abraham offering Isaac, of the Good Samaritan, or of Mary’s Anointing of Jesus and then return to the foundations from which such rich ore is quarried.

Professor Clowney insists that Holy Scripture is consistent. We agree that it is consistent from God’s point of view and that we can find rich treasure by recognizing and seeking this consistency. From our viewpoint, some of His wisdom is inscrutable so that we often face paradox and mystery—where reason staggers but faith worships.

WILLIAM CHILDS ROBINSON

For Ethics, Three Pillars

Ethics and the Gospel, by T. W. Manson (Scribner’s, 1960, 109 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by George Eldon Ladd, Professor of Biblical Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary.

Manson finds the fundamental structure of New Testament ethics in a Jewish rabbi, Simeon the Righteous, who taught that the world is based on three things: the law, worship, and the “imparting of kindnesses.” The rabbis taught that proper observance of the law included an undivided loyalty to God and full respect for human personality; and the final governing motivation for all ethical action must be a desire to please God and to do the right for its own sake with no ulterior motive whatever.

These three pillars form the outline of the Sermon on the Mount: the New Law (chap. 5); the New Standard of Worship (chap. 6); and the New Standard of Corporate Solidarity (chap. 7). Jesus’ ethics did not transcend Jewish ethics in their emphasis upon inwardness or motivation but primarily at this point: the quintessence of Jewish ethics was that one should love his neighbor as he loves himself, while the differentia of Christian ethics is that we should love our neighbor as Christ has loved us (John 13:34; 15:12). This alone is completely unselfish love. The same three pillars appear in the life of the earliest Christian community in Acts 2:32—the apostles’ teaching (the law), the prayers (worship), and the fellowship and the breaking of bread (kindnesses).

In the final lecture, Manson makes an interesting use of the claim of form criticism that much of the Gospel material, especially the parables, has lost its original historical setting and has been placed in the setting of the life of the church instead of in the life of Jesus. Parables which historically in Jesus’ teachings were concerned with an imminent eschatological crisis have become parables of good advice for Christian conduct in the church. Manson finds in this process of transformation an important principle. The early Church was not satisfied to retain an accurate historical memory of Jesus’ teachings; rather it was concerned to apply these teachings to its own life and needs.

Manson considers the biblical ethic from beginning to end to be an ethic of the kingdom of God—the ethic of Christ’s reign in the world. The living and reigning Christ will help us through his spirit to understand and apply the will of God today. “The springs of relevation are not dried up. The living Christ is there to lead the way for all who are prepared to follow him” (p. 68).

GEORGE ELDON LADD

In The Pulpit, Peerless

The Making of a Minister, the Autobiography of Clarence E. Macartney, edited by J. Clyde Henry (Channel Press, 1961, 224 pp., $3), is reviewed by G. Hall Todd, Pastor, Arch Street Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia.

Addressing a large company of ministers near the end of his distinguished career, Clarence E. Macartney declared that a minister can learn much as well as discover much that is useful homiletically in every autobiography. His dictum concerning autobiography in general is no less true of this moving document, replete with human interest and manifesting the wide sweep of the author’s reading as well as his interests, the vigor of his theological and moral convictions, and his singular powers of narration and depiction.

Broad is the scope of this life story which commences in ancestral Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Ohio frontier, and describes a boyhood spent on a western Pennsylvania college campus, a southern California college town, and a Colorado ranch. It is a story of education in public and private schools, a Methodist college, a state university, Princeton University and Theological Seminary, with many telling vignettes of his teachers; it is the account of a succession of pastorates, a student ministry in a Wisconsin village, a venerable church in the business section of Paterson, New Jersey, the classic splendor of Philadelphia’s Arch Street Presbyterian Church with a cultivated type of constituency and a long procession of students; the historic and cathedral-like church in downtown Pittsburgh, where he spent a quarter of a century.

Sections of this readable volume are devoted to the author’s role as polemicist and moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly during the stirring days of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy and the Princeton Seminary disruption, and also to his literary and historical activities, especially in the field of Civil War research, his far-ranging travels, and pilgrimages.

Here is his own life story by a man of great reserve yet profound human interest, a peerless pulpit orator, an intellectual who as historian and litterateur could have it commented concerning him as the late Dr. George Johnstone Jeffrey of Glasgow wrote of James Denney that he knew his Boswell quite as much as he knew his St. Paul, and a thrilling and cultured herald of the everlasting Gospel.

The book has been ably edited by Dr. Macartney’s longtime assistant, Dr. J. Clyde Henry who, in a masterful introduction, pens for the reader a delightfully sympathetic and appreciative portrait of a man who was known by most persons solely through pulpit and published utterances.

G. HALL TODD

Lundensian Theology

The Faith of the Christian Church, by Gustaf Aulén, translated from the fifth Swedish edition by Eric H. Wahlstrom (Muhlenberg, 1960, 403 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Ralph A. Bohlmann, Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology, Concordia Theological Seminary.

This second English edition of Bishop Aulén’s widely-used textbook in systematic theology has been thoroughly revised. Fourteen of the fifty-two chapters have been either completely rewritten or largely reworked. These include important chapters on the relation between Scriptures and tradition, the communion of saints, the Word of God, and the Lord’s Supper.

Aulén sees the task of theology as the analytical and critical elucidation of the content and meaning of the ecumenical Christian faith. The content of this faith is defined by the act of God in Christ and the message about this event. The necessary biblical validation of doctrine should not take place in a formal or legalistic manner, but rather by the standard of the Christ-event which is central in the biblical message. In Christ, the divine acts of victorious reconciliation and forgiveness have established man’s new God-relationship. God’s love continues today in the Spirit’s activity of creating the communion of saints and remains the basis for the life and hope of the Church.

This extensively-revised edition of Aulén’s significant work will continue to serve English readers as the best guide to understanding the techniques and emphases of Lundensian theology. Careful readers will appreciate the author’s Christocentricity, his keen analysis of the basic motifs of the Christian faith, and his deep sense of the oneness of the Church. But they will often miss the normative use of Holy Scripture which one expects from a Lutheran theologian.

RALPH A. BOHLMANN

Golden Pin Award

Eutychus Foundation recorded this interview from its Annual Good Humor Award ceremonies. (Commercials are omitted.)

MC: Delighted to have you here, Eutychus. We know your column is meant to be amusing. Are we entering a period of good humor in church? Are there now more preachers in the red than pulpit pinks?

E: Yes, there is a marked increase in ecclesiastical humor, intentional and unintentional. The standard pulpit jokes are more used than ever.

MC: Standard jokes? Is there an official list?

E: Not exactly. It is a matter of unwritten tradition. Now and then a nonconforming minister will use another, but the last joke to secure universal consent, ab omnibus, is Cal Coolidge’s remark about the preacher who was against sin. It seems that “Silent Cal” was coming home from church, and …

MC: Yes, yes. I see what you mean. These canonical jokes are well known. But wouldn’t a little fresh humor help?

E: Oh, no. You will recall the quatrain:

“All my fathers have been churchmen,

Nineteen hundred years or so,

And to every new suggestion

They have always answered, No!”

This is the rule for humor; untested jokes are very dangerous.

MC: But isn’t the risk worthwhile? I heard no less a preacher than Billy Graham tell an excellent ecclesiastical joke. He said that a preacher had a dream. He dreamed that he was preaching; he woke up—and he was!

E: Heh, heh! That’s very good, and its not in the tradition. But it’s dangerous. After Dr. Graham told it, he had to explain that he wasn’t really sleepy, but was enjoying some kind of euphoria. And when I tried to tell it, and didn’t pause long enough after “he woke up” …

MC: What about situation humor? I’ve enjoyed reports about a Philadelphia rector who billed the British crown several thousand dollars for a church fence confiscated by the Royal Artillery during the Revolutionary War: $18 plus interest! E: Very whimsical, but I couldn’t convince my cab-driver that it was a joke. He thought this church money-raising scheme would divide the West. No, the Old Reliables are better. People recognize them as jokes and know when to laugh.

MC: Well, has the winner of the Golden Pin Award been announced?

E: Yes, it is Joe Bayly, for his charming farce, The Gospel Blimp.

MC: But there isn’t a conventional joke in that book. If standard jokes are …

E: Who needs a book for the Old Reliables? And Joe has a last chapter in which he explains his joke in the best ecclesiastical tradition. I should now like to pin this on him …

EUTYCHUS

We Grope In Darkness

Dr. Wilbur Smith, in his article “The Holy Bible” (Aug. 28 issue), is to be commended for his great Christian fervor in supporting the authority of the Bible.… But, with all due respect … he betrays a weakness in attacking Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam of The Methodist Church.

Bishop Oxnam has expressed difficulty in understanding the Virgin Birth. There are many ministers in our land today of the highest personal integrity who feel that it is not absolutely essential to a positive Christian faith. When … an intellectual roadblock, many ministers have very wisely advised their constituents to circumvent the issue and move forward in more positive areas.…

Perhaps one of the most difficult problems to explain to the human mind involves the Resurrection. The school of opinion that insists upon a physical resurrection will not satisfy a scientifically penetrating mind.… On the other hand, the “Metamorphosis Theory” which calls for a mighty act of infinite power … is far more satisfying to the scientific mind.… God’s infinite power was demonstrated in the Resurrection and we still grope in darkness seeking an accurate explanation.…

It becomes difficult to understand why Dr. Wilbur Smith … feels constrained to attack Bishop Oxnam.…

ROBERT ERICSON

Shelton, Conn.

Creeping Liberalism?

I was amazed at your report of the Wisconsin-Missouri break (News, Aug. 28 issue) which began: “Creeping Liberalism within the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod constituency was dealt a dramatic rebuke by a sister synod.”

… It is not “creeping liberalism” in Missouri. It is “creeping Christianity” in Wisconsin that has caused the split.… Wisconsin objects to such things as Boy Scouts, Army chaplains, etc.…

Missouri refuses to “creep” along. The King’s business requires haste.

HERMAN BIELENBERG

Warren, Pa.

This opening sentence reveals an editorial stand on the … controversy which has been the subject of delicate negotiation and long deliberations … not to mention an exceptional amount of forbearance and patience, … rivaled only by the Geneva atom test talks.…

WAYNE SAFFEN

Graham Taylor Chapel

Chicago, Ill.

In your editorial (i.e., news report) … you pontificate. May this Missouri Synod pastor suggest that such a lead sentence dealt a dramatic rebuke to the primary canons of honest journalism (accuracy, fairness, objectivity) as well as two primary Christian virtues (charity and truthfulness).…

CLIFORD L. BRUEGGEMANN

Director

Lutheran House

Detroit, Mich.

I have considered the Missouri Synod members as watchmen on the walls of Zion for the pure doctrine. We (American Lutheran) have never been pure enough for them.

OLAF LYSNES

St. Paul, Minn.

I am still pleased to belong to that church which Time magazine once labeled the “most conservative Protestant denomination in America.” May God always keep it so.

ROBERT J. MARTENS

Messiah Lutheran Church

Beloit, Wisc.

The Messiah

I enjoyed Dr. Henry’s good article in the Aug. 28 issue.… I share with you the truth that both Israeli leaders and Christian missionaries need to re-think their religious outlook.

I am Jewish. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Jewish Messiah 42 years ago … and I have felt that I was a better Jew because I accepted what my Jewish Bible and Jewish prophets predicted, portrayed, and prophesied when I saw in Jesus of Nazareth the fulfillment of my hope and promise for my salvation. I had to change from my rabbinical, traditional, and ceremonial ideas to biblical Judaism.

MEYER TAN-DITTER

Hollywood, Calif.

The incident (“Jewish Mobs Stone New Church in Jerusalem,” News, July 31 issue) has been used by the Arabs … to mock Israeli “democracy” in relation to freedom of religion.… A further harm was antagonism among some ignorant people in this country against Christian missionary activity.…

The people of Israel cannot be reached with the Gospel in the same manner as heathen in Africa, India, China, or other lands.… The Church of Christ missionaries were only asking for trouble when they brazenly opened their doors in an Orthodox Jewish district and offered inducements for Jewish children to attend their meetings.

This is a touchy subject.… Millions of dollars have been raised … to “Save Our Children” from the mission schools. The Jews … have greatly exaggerated the numbers … and “harm” done to these children.…

… In Israel today there is more actual religious freedom … than there was under the Protestant Christian Mandatory Government.…

These things and many more have to be known and understood before a proper evaluation can be made of a minor disturbance …, result of over-zealousness on both sides.

WILLIAM L. HULL

Zion Christian Mission

Jerusalem, Israel

Episcopacy And Ecumenics

Thank you so very much for printing the article “The Apostolic Ministry” by Roland Thorwaldsen (July 17 issue).… This in my experience is the view of Episcopacy believed in by at least 90 per cent of Episcopalians.

THOMAS REGNARY

St. Timothy’s Church

Iola, Kan.

It is significant to note the words of an Anglican, S. L. Greenslade, Canon Residentiary of Durham Cathedral and Professor of Divinity at the University of Durham. Evaluating the teaching of Irenaeus and Tertullian concerning heresy he emphasizes three significant points: (1) Their first concern is always for the preservation of true doctrine. “They are only secondarily concerned with the means by which the institutional Church is maintained in being.…” (2) “… the apostolic succession in question consists in the line of bishops in each local church, not a chain of consecrator and consecrated.…” “Apostolic succession always means (this) in the early Church.” (3) There is no particular stress on their being bishops. “The argument does not stand or fall by episcopacy.…” “The essential point,” as Greenslade observes, “is that there should be an orderly succession of responsible ministers in each local church” (Early Latin Theology, ed. by S. L. Greenslade, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. V, Westminster Press, 1956, pp. 28–29).

So far as any hope for a greater unity (not necessarily organic union) among various Protestant communions … is concerned, the view Calvin held of the ministry of the Church is far more helpful.… It may be briefly summed up … as follows: The ministry is Christ’s gift to His Church, of which he is both her foundation and only head. The ministry is validated by the apostolic marks of preaching and teaching the Word (canon), and administering the Sacraments according to the institution of Christ. Christ is the Church’s true Bishop; all ministries derive from his and are corporately held in his. The Church’s unity depends upon union with Christ himself, and not upon a monarchical bishop, though he may be a useful instrument. The apostolic succession of the ministry is dependent upon Christ’s gift to the Church and his secret call to men, and their exercise of their calling (Word and Sacraments). Ranks, administration, are political only, not divinely ordained. Therefore, the Church must employ that polity which will in no way obscure the headship of Christ to his Church. The form, obeying this principle, will vary according to the circumstances and by what will best exalt Christ.

Such an understanding of the ministry to the Church would permit mutual recognition of ministries and intercommunion of members … the two great stumbling blocks between Anglicans and Presbyterians.

ROBERT K. GOODWIN

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Burbank, Calif.

All talk of reunion must begin with a common faith in one Redeemer.… What are the God-chosen means of preserving and spreading this faith among men? The Bible is one of these. The effective signs of Baptism and Communion, specifically commanded by our Lord, are another. To the vast majority of those believing in the divinity of Christ (Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican Old Catholic, etc.) there is yet another, and this is the apostolic ministry. Long before our present canon of Scripture was fixed the biblical titles of bishop, priest (presbyter), and deacon were given to those who through the scriptural rite of laying on of hands were set apart to carry on the evangelical and disciplinary work of the Apostles.… As a preliminary to reunion, is it too much to ask the brethren-in-the-minority to receive once again that safeguard which they have lost?

EDWIN C. WEBSTER

Church of St. Margaret, Episcopal

Margarita, Canal Zone

Right And Left

Couldn’t help laughing at the actions of some of the ministers withdrawing from the Louisville Area Council of Churches in protest against its retention of Dr. Magruder as executive director (News, July 17 issue).

Were I a gambler I would wager heavy odds that these righteous Pharisees have never attempted similar action over a leftist member of their holy council.

MORRIS J. REDDOUT

Arkport, N. Y.

For The Record

We are more than ever convinced that “all” is a rather large word in spite of its only having three letters. In the July 17 issue (News) it was stated that “All Evangelical and Reformed congregations became a part of the new church automatically” (United Church of Christ).

For the sake of the record, we … know two of these congregations have remained outside of the union, keeping their property.… Both of these are in Ohio—one at Xenia and the other at Akron.

HAROLD V. KUHN

Presbyterian Church

Spencer, W. Va.

Prayers For The Dead

Professor A. C. M. Ahlen makes the statement that “The Apology to the Augsburg Confession specifically states that prayers for the dead are not forbidden” (July 17 issue). As the sentence stands, it is very misleading. No doubt Prof. Ahlen refers to Article XXIV “Of the Mass,” specifically to section “Of the Mass for the Dead” (De missa pro defunctis). There it says in section 94: “Now, as regards the adversaries’ citing the Fathers concerning the offering for the dead, we know that the ancients speak of prayer for the dead, which we do not prohibit.” However, if he will read the preceding paragraph, he will note what is meant: “It appears therefore that the Greeks made an offering as thanksgiving, and do not apply it as a satisfaction for punishment.” Every time a member in our congregation dies, we have a prayer, thanking God for having brought him to faith in Christ and beseeching Him to comfort the survivors. This is something quite different from what the Roman Catholic church understands under praying for the dead.

L. W. FAULSTICK

Highland Park Lutheran Church

Los Angeles, Calif.

It might be well to note that in the Smalcald Articles Luther is supposed to have made this question of prayers for the dead debatable (II, ii). A thoughtful study of his words in the Smalcald Articles ought to convince anyone that it was not Luther’s intention to make this point debatable any more than it was his intention to make another point in the immediate context debatable—namely, whether Augustine without Scripture could establish articles of faith! Luther merely indicates that if his adversaries abolished “the traffic in masses” he would then discuss these other two points with them, too; but it is an entirely unsupported assumption that he therefore considered these matters debatable. It would, no doubt, require a whole volume such as Dr. H. Martinsen-Larson wrote to defend this practice among Lutherans; but a mere careful reading of the few passages in our Lutheran Confessions which refer to this matter will make it evident at once that prayers for the dead, in the sense in which President Kennedy urged them, find no approval in our Confessional writings.

H. A. HUTH

Holy Cross Lutheran

Minneapolis, Minn.

Modern Assyrians

A report in the March 27 issue (News) states, “After 40 years of wandering in a ‘modem’ wilderness, 48 refugee families who still speak Christ’s native language of Aramaic will be given new, permanent homes this summer by the World Council of Churches.” It continues, “They are a group of refugees from Armenia.…”

While there are large numbers of Aramaic-speaking Armenians, most people whose natural language is that of Christ are Assyrians.… The 195 men, women, and children in the 48 families are … Assyrians.

HERBERT B. QUOYOON

Forest Hills, N. Y.

Each year, in the anniversary issue ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY,the news section features a panel of the world’s foremost religious scholars asserting their views on a significant, timely question. This year’s question is:

What are the most prevalent false gods of our time and how do you assess their relative significance?

KARL BARTH, professor, University of Basel: “Today, and at all times, precisely the church is the place on which false gods are established and worshipped. For the church has succumbed to the temptation to believe in the goodness and power of her own tradition, morality, and religious activity. So the church has come to believe in images of man, of the world, and of God, which she has fabricated of her own means. She believes in the excellency of the Christian and in the depravity of the indifferent, the atheists, and the Communists. Thus she does exactly the same as those believing in money, in sports, in technics, in sex, or simply in the glory of affluent and comfortable living. It is the church’s high calling to demonstrate that she believes in that God who has redeemed man from all false gods.”

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD, professor emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary: “In America today false gods abound. They call for perversion of things ideally good. In an order of descending prominence: self, money, pleasure, sex, romance (as in marriage), amusements (commercial), sports (professional), education (secular). Collectively, secularism and humanism. We need a return to the First Commandment, in the light of the Cross.”

F. F. BRUCE, professor, University of Manchester: “The most prevalent false gods of our time are the ‘status symbols’ cherished by Christians and non-Christians alike. On the personal level some of them may seem harmless enough, but their pursuit absorbs much of the energy which should be devoted to the extension of Christ’s kingdom. On the national and international level they are too often the very things that threaten the annihilation of mankind; yet their fatal attraction obscures a proper recognition of the things which belong to our peace.”

EMILE CAILLIET, professor emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary: “The false gods of our time are born of a pride of life that now pervades some of our oldest seminaries, so that the Christian proclamation is poisoned at its source. Our most immediate concern should be for that source, that is, for the kind of seminary a dedicated Christian should support.”

EDWARD JOHN CARNELL, professor, Fuller Theological Seminary: “Power and pleasure, or the vanities of self-sufficiency and self-gratification—just as they have always been. Each assumes that man can complete his life by his own resources. The god of power draws on science’s penetration into the elemental forces of nature, while the god of pleasure thrives on the traditional fruits of material prosperity and a general decay in moral standards.”

GORDON H. CLARK, professor, Butler University: “The phrase ‘false gods’ suggests polytheism; and indeed modern society has many gods. One of the most powerful is the secular, anti-Christian welfare state. No other modern god or demon so nearly controls all of life. Totalitarianism is today’s rival of the sovereign God.”

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN, headmaster, The Stony Brook School: “Speaking of the false gods of our time, I believe that prominent among them are the gods of materialism and self-indulgence set up by advertising, the entertainment world, and the popular press. The present slippage in morals reflects an ominous removal of restraints of good taste and moral standards. Through the stimuli of advertising, films, and the press, the false gods of materialistic glamor and sensual pleasure have invaded all areas of our society. America has already traveled far down the road of secular materialism. Unless there is repentence, judgment may be in store for our nation.”

JOHN H. GERSTNER, professor, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary: “There is and ever has been one and only one I-dol. The things or images which pass for idols are what I have made for Me. The civilized man, unlike the ‘primitive,’ dispenses with the intermediary image and makes himself directly the sole object of his own concern. ‘Deny thyself’ is the first sign of the new man in Christ.”

CARL F. H. HENRY, Editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY: “The false gods of our age are scientism, communism, and political democracy. All trust man’s warped passions to shape a paradise on earth. One thing sure about these gilded idols is that Christ will scatter their broken fragments in judgment and fill the vacuum left by their unkept promises.”

W. BOYD HUNT, Professor, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary: “In the West the most influential false gods are a secularized form of education—the delusion of man’s ability to save himself; materialism—the practical atheism which confuses immediate wants with ultimate needs; nationalism—the provincial obsession which denies the oneness of the world; and conservatism—the inordinate worship of what one already has. At the heart of each of these false religions is the effort to achieve a cheap security—the chiefest of the false gods, and the self-destroying refusal to accept the venture of biblical faith.”

W. HARRY JELLEMA, professor, Haverford College: “Detached from the judgment and grace of God, idolatrous reverence for the self in its solitary and hopeless subjectivity. Two major modes of narcissistic worship then present themselves: Either indulgence of the naturalistic drives toward temporal security, power, and pleasure; or the more sophisticated indulgence in the pathos of the self’s aloneness and inability to find life worth living.”

HAROLD B. KUHN, professor, Asbury Theological Seminary: “In today’s world of the West, the most tempting absolute is ‘our Western way of life’ or ‘life in the free world’, or ‘the best standard of living man has ever known,’ or simply ‘our liberties.’ Taken within a theological frame of reference, there is much to be said for these ‘values’—but taken as absolutes, they serve only to further our confusion. Not one of them can stand alone; none can survive, save among a stable core of persons whose lives are lived according to principle. Such a core of persons can be produced only through the dynamic of the Gospel of Christ. Take this away, and within a few generations, even the character-values will disappear.”

ADDISON H. LEITCH, professor, Tarkio College: “There are many gods—money, status, security, health, and even social adjustment. They become objects of idolatry when we confuse the creature with the creator, the gift with the giver. Their falsity lies in their being limited to this world and finite goals. The false god, therefore, is this world as an end in itself. We have lost the dimension of infinity, the hope of eternity. We forget that we are pilgrims and that we have no final place of abode here.”

CALVIN D. LINTON, dean, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University: “From the point of view of one educator, the prevalent false gods are: 1. The cult of automatic human progress. The belief that all environments tend inevitably toward perfection, with consequent search for the novel and the attendant neglect of ancient wisdom. 2. The cult of egalitarianism. The belief that not only are all men equal before God and under the law, but that all are equally deserving of reward, honor, and certificates of achievement 3. The cult of scientism. The belief that all human experience is ultimately reducible to instrumentation and technology.”

CHARLES MALIK, professor, American University, past president, United Nations General Assembly: “I would put them in the following order: Secularism—nature, man and history are self-sufficient, without any reference whatsoever to God as a righteous creator who really cares and who is above all nature, all history, and all men and without whom these things have no meaning and issue in absolute despair. Materialism—the derivation of man from and his reduction to material, economic, social and sensuous conditions with no independence whatsoever and no originality for his mind and spirit. Relativism—no absolute, objective truth valid for all, but each culture, each people, each tradition, each individual his own free judge of what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false, what is ultimate and what is evanescent.”

LEON MORRIS, principal, Tyndale House: “Men’s ideals today are various, but a good sermon might be worked out on the three S’s, success, security, and sputniks. Our generation has an almost pathological fear of failure, and success (variously interpreted) is the dominating passion of many. Others set all else aside in a single-minded pursuit of security. The ideal of scientific achievement attracts multitudes to its shrine. And these gods are failing us. No generation ever felt less successful than does ours. No generation ever felt more insecure. No generation had as much to fear from the results of scientific research.”

J. THEODORE MUELLER, professor, Concordia Seminary: “Perverted human nature never changes and so also the false gods of corrupt mankind never change. John describes them briefly but strikingly as the ‘lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.’ These lusts today manifest themselves in the whole world, outside of Christ’s kingdom of grace, in atheism, materialism, voluptuousness, arrogance, rejection of the divine Word and the precious Gospel of Christ, both among liberal theologians and laymen, as also in the gross outbursts of crime and the constant threat of war and tyrannical oppression.”

REINHOLD NIEBUHR, professor, Harvard University: “What can one do but ‘hold the candle light of the obvious to the daylight of common experience’? The false gods are obvious. The primary one is physical power and comfort.”

KENNETH L. PIKE, professor, University of Michigan: “In a system of abstract ideas the intellectual can put his trust; on it base his actions; out of it develop his worldview; through it get his deepest emotional thrust. Secularism (or naturalism, or behaviorism) is such a system. Trust here squeezes out—replaces—trust in God and the worldview which he gives us. Secularism becomes, therefore, the most prevalent false god in our modern academic community—more deeply rooted, perhaps, than is covetousness (or riches? or security?), ‘which is [also] idolatry’ (Colossians 3:5).”

W. STANFORD REID, professor, McGill University: “The principal false god of our time in this land is our standard of living. We are so concerned with material possessions that we forget they are the gift of God and that there are other things more important. We may yet have to lose our standard of living or surrender a large part of it before we become aware that there are much more important values. After all, man’s chief end in life is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, not to have a house with a swimming pool.”

WILLIAM CHILDS ROBINSON, professor, Columbia Theological Seminary: “In considering false gods, may I raise three questions: Are we worshipping visible success instead of holding on with Job, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him’? Are we insisting on decoding the faith into philosophical systems or mythological symbols rather than admitting mystery and refusing to let the things we do not know upset our confidence in the Christ we do know? Are we bowing to bigness rather than witnessing to the Word and waiting upon God to vindicate his Gospel?”

MERRILL C. TENNEY, dean, Graduate School, Wheaton College: “Prestige, possessions, power, and pleasures are the false gods of modern man. They represent a tragic devotion to material gain rather than to spiritual good, to transient gratification rather than to eternal values. They are as futile and unsatisfying to the spirit as any idol of wood or stone.”

Protestant Panorama

• Merger of the Baptist Missionary Training School of Chicago with Colgate Rochester Divinity School was approved last month by the boards of both. Resources of the two American Baptist institutions will be combined to develop a new graduate program of church vocations for women at Colgate beginning next year.

• The Beaver-Butler (Pennsylvania) Presbytery plans to petition the United Presbyterian General Assembly to take a more deliberate stand on the problem of alcohol. The presbytery has criticized “social drinking” and has asked that abstinence be reiterated as the standard of the church.

• Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann was honored this month for 25 years of service to the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Hoffmann is director of public relations for the church and speaker on “The Lutheran Hour.”

• Four Pentecostalist leaders in the Ural Mountain region of Russia face possible jail terms after being convicted of engaging in activities “of a character hostile to humanity,” according to Moscow radio.

• The American Bible Society is appealing for $250,000 to supply Bibles for Indonesia before an embargo takes effect December 23.

CORNELIUS VAN TIL, professor, Westminister Theological Seminary: “The historian Toynbee thinks that Christianity first observed the comprehensive character of the general cosmic law ‘proclaimed by Aeschylus’ that learning comes through suffering. Toynbee thinks he does justice to the uniqueness of the work of Christ by asserting that He first recognized the universal character of this law. Thus Christ is made to illustrate Truth which is above Him. This is idolatry.”

GUSTAVE WEIGEL, S.J., professor, Woodstock College: “There is only one God. He is always the same. The gods are many, but no matter how they are called, Zeus or atomic power, Venus or Libido, Mars or war, they are natural powers and they are always the same. They cannot save, no matter in what era their aid is sought.”

WARREN C. YOUNG, professor, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary: “The most serious idol of today is the status quo. Our Christian witness is ineffective because we are trying to witness conventionally to an age which is not conventional. Our evangelical churches are failing to meet the challenge of this changing culture because they have idolized the pattern and program of the dead past. Thus our method prevents us from making contact with the message of the Gospel. Christians and churches must learn again the unconventionality of Christ if they are to break the idol of contemporary conventionality.”

Baptist Men In Memphis

More than 7,000 clergymen and laymen gathered at Memphis, Tennessee, for the second National Conference of Southern Baptist Men held September 13–15, heard Charles Malik, past president of the United Nations General Assembly, plead that communism be recognized as “a total challenge.”

Calling the present world situation “in its deepest dimension a spiritual crisis,” he said that “anything less than total response to it is a fraud.”

Malik stressed the futility of the Peace Corps and similar responses against “forty million dedicated people (Communists) working day and night in every nation in the world … using every conceivable means, to attain its ends, world domination.”

He challenged the Church to pursue its particular part of the struggle: To convict of sin by confronting mankind with the Cross; to wield the weapons of the Spirit in the face of all that is spiritually neutral; and to remain absolutely faithful to Christ. “If—God forbid—the world should go up in smoke,” he said, “let the name of Christ remain above every name, and the Cross above every symbol.”

Keynote speaker, the Rev. Roy McClain, pastor of First Baptist Church of Atlanta, spoke on the conference theme “That the World May Know.”

“Militant Christianity is beating a cowardly retreat to the safe shelter of organized religion,” he said. “If the present trend continues, it is not unthinkable that the organized church could become Christianity’s greatest enemy.”

Calling the redeeming love of Christ a weapon that has never failed when properly and wholeheartedly launched, he stressed that “the best argument for genuine Christianity is not a sermon, song, service or statistic, but a Christian.”

The Rev. Louis Evans, minister-at-large for the Board of National Missions, United Presbyterian Church, declared, “We are too busy burning incense to the Goddess Production.… Now we must be at His work all the time—at the bench, in the field, shop and forest, on the campus and on the run.

“The church is running scared,” Evans said. “But the right sort of fear does not end in paralysis or panic, but in a new’ passion and a program.”

Seminars on timely and timeless topics from “Separation of Church and State” to “Effective Christian Witnessing” were held throughout the conference.

The following report was prepared forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby the Rev. T. Robert Ingram, rector of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church and School in Houston:

Working with unruffled precision, the 60th triennial General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church at Detroit, September 17–29, solidly endorsed every move put before it deemed at “the goal of unity of the church of Jesus Christ.” No voice raised the profound question whether ultimate defection from Christ’s sovereignty may also be inherent in visible unity.

The convention turned down a resolution introduced in its House of Deputies asking that it withdraw from the National Council of Churches of Christ, accepted the invitation of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. to join in an invitation to The Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ “to explore the establishment of a united church,” and did what was necessary to extend recognition or encouragement to a myriad of churches around the world, either in existence or on the planning boards, in the expectation that they will participate in the “coming great church.”

The convention moved under the ubiquitous eye of Bishop James A. Pike of California, whose public endorsement of the Presbyterian invitation as put forth by Eugene Carson Blake had caused the proposal to become known as the Blake-Pike plan. The names of Blake and Pike were deliberately dissociated from the invitation for propaganda purposes, and the convention was told to refer to it as “the Presbyterian invitation.”

Pike himself has been under fire for months for his questionable stand on fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith and was expected to be faced with charges instigated by other bishops, who alone can take such action. When it became clear that Pike’s dominant influence in the House of Bishops would prevent any such action, an effort was made in the House of Deputies to pass a resolution “that this house reassure the faithful that the belief and teachings of this church have not changed.” The resolution was tabled in what was clearly regarded as a personal victory for Bishop Pike.

A resolution originated in the House of Deputies endorsing the NCC’s stated purposes and reaffirming the Protestant Episcopal Church’s intention to remain in it was also approved by the bishops without change.

The resolution took note that “serious questions have been raised in some parishes about the manner in which certain pronouncements and statements on controversial topics have been issued from the office of the [NCC] with the authority therefore of the General Assembly and the General Board not made clear; and that certain of these pronouncements and statements have seemed to many to have been issued as if they carried the endorsement of the several constituent churches; when in fact they did not.

“Now be it resolved, the House of Bishops concurring, that this convention recognizes the importance of having the [NCC] speak to the churches about the Christian implications of contemporary, social, economic, and political issues, but also declares that no pronouncement or statement can, without action by this church’s authority, be regarded as an official statement of this church.”

The Episcopalian Joint Commission on Ecumenical Relations was asked to make a study of the structure, program, and finances of the NCC.

Further spelling out the fashion of the convention for unity, the House of Bishops originated and the House of Deputies endorsed two resolutions frankly interpreted in the press as “a two-headed club” against its own lay members who had voiced vigorous objections to the NCC, unity, and communism through an unprecedented wave of letters, telegrams and pamphlets. One “head of the club” was a resolution condemning “Marxist communism,” and the other cautioning against “extremist groups, and oversimplified appraisal of our situation which they promote, lest fear and suspicion destroy honest public debate and silence the expression of Christian faith in human affairs.”

The second resolution was beamed at the work of a group of laymen and a few clergymen who distributed tracts and pamphlets in opposition primarily to the NCC but also to communism generally. It had been falsely linked with the John Birch Society. The influence of this group, led by a Grosse Point housewife, was indicated by the venom and heckling turned on them in the booth which they manned. They were cursed, called anti-Christian and one priest flung a pamphlet in the face of a man working in the booth. The bishops thus posed “Marxist communism” as one extreme against opponents of church unity in the opposite extreme.

Concern over bitterness aroused by the unity movement was voiced in the House of Deputies by several speakers who had deplored such high feelings from 1937 to 1946, when conversations were underway looking toward uniting with Presbyterians. They feared it would reappear as unity talks were revived, and one deputy told the House it already had in his diocese.

Integration, or “unity” of race, was put before the Episcopalians in convention at Detroit as a dramatic phase of the overall drive toward totalitarian unity. A group of clergy who had gathered at New Orleans hound for Detroit to pray in mixed groups, managed to get themselves arrested in a Jackson, Mississippi, restaurant. They received their due in headlines, but the issue was soon lost in the tension of more immediate and pressing issues connected with church unity. An effort to have the convention favor mixed marriages was tabled.

A Vote Of Confidence

Does membership in the John Birch Society disqualify a person from interchurch leadership.

The executive board of the Louisville (Kentucky) Area Council of Churches, which reviewed charges of “weak and ineffective leadership” made against Executive Director N. Burnett Magruder, thinks not.

The board declared last month that it found “no justification” to the charges, brought by a group of United Church of Christ ministers who demanded Magruder’s resignation.

“I don’t see how a person who espouses the ideas of the John Birch Society can be an effective leader,” said the Rev. Robert S. Mathes.

Magruder acknowledges the Birch membership but asserts that there is nothing within the society’s principles that would deter him in his council work.

The Louisville council embraces some 250 churches and is one of the most representative councils in the nation. Its member churches range from the Pentecostal to the high-church Episcopal.

Magruder is a Southern Baptist minister. While studying at Yale Divinity School, he won the top scholarship in his class, which enabled him to go on to Columbia University and earn an M. A. in labor economics. He has served as the Louisville council’s executive director for three years. The controversy over him began some 18 months ago with the appearance of a magazine article in which he contended that some Protestant clergy were tinged with “the Marxist virus.”

Fighters Without A Cause?

Rampant chiliasm was one reason advanced by observers for the September launching of a new “pre-millennial Baptist mission society” by leaders of the Conservative Baptist Fellowship, a group noted for stronger separatist views than those generally held by leaders of the Conservative Baptist Association with which all leaders of the new society are also identified. The two bodies are independent. The permanent form of the society is expected to be effected by the time of the next meeting of the Conservative Baptist Association in May, 1962. Both home and foreign missions are to be combined under a single board.

Already in the field are two independent missionary agencies, the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society and the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, both noted for remarkable vigor of outreach. The former body, for example, has some 380 foreign missionaries on the field after only 18 years of existence. It broke off from the American (then Northern) Baptist Convention in protest against liberalism. With its constituency of some 300,000 Conservative Baptists, its program compares favorably with that of the 1,555,360-member American Baptist Convention which supports some 391 foreign missionaries.

Introduction of a new mission society at this time highlights a division within the Conservative Baptist movement which has outwardly revolved about an eschatological question: the extent to which pre-millennial views shall be required of Conservative Baptist staff and convention “messengers.” Practically all Conservative Baptists are pre-millennial anyway, and those working for reform are generally those of dispensational convictions who believe in a secret rapture of believers before the tribulation.

Enthusiasm for the new society on the part of the two general directors of the existing societies was notably lacking. Said Vincent Brushwyler of the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society: “I don’t think a new missionary society is needed. Ours for all practical purposes is a pre-millennial society.”

Said Rufus Jones concerning the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society: “I believe it remains true to the basic doctrine and ideology which brought the movement into being, and it is my opinion that those who are forming the new society would be able to find other missionary agencies already existing which share their ideology.”

Degree of separatism is another point of division among Conservative Baptists. The declaration of purpose of the society now forming reads: “… the impact of Neo-Evangelicalism and its twin evil of ecumenical evangelism has had a divisive and deteriorating effect on the schools, societies and churches of our movement …” Key issue here is whether Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns merit support. Also, some are opposed to co-operation with the National Association of Evangelicals.

Some observers both inside and outside the movement sadly read the division in terms of underlying personality clash and power struggle. They speak of “fighters without a cause” and see the doctrines of soul liberty and the priesthood of believers imperiled by factional strife. Said one: “I don’t believe in unbiblical inclusivism, but neither do I believe in an unbiblical exclusivism.”

A Baptist Split

Controversy among North Carolina’s Original Free Will Baptists resulted in a split in the denomination last month when 61 delegates, refusing to accept a “statement of faith and discipline” at the 49th annual convention of the North Carolina State Association of Original Free Will Baptists, walked out and formed another state association.

That organization—to be known as the Conservative Fellowship of the North Carolina State Convention of the Original Free Will Baptists—claims it represents an estimated 18,000 of the 40,000 Original Free Will Baptists in the state. The Rev. Frank Davenport of Goldsboro was elected moderator.

The walkout climaxed a controversy involving the ouster of the Rev. Donald Creech as pastor of a church in Durham over doctrinal differences and against the wishes of what was claimed to be a majority: of his congregation.

The focal point of controversy in North Carolina has been the question of whether a denominational conference has the right to intervene in serious local disturbances.

Subsequently, a history teacher at Mount Olive (North Carolina) Junior College, which is supported by the Free Will Baptist Church, resigned his post, admitting he had “made use of the Fifth Amendment and other constitutional privileges protecting individual rights against governmental encroachment.”

The resignation of William McKee Evans followed an investigation at the college which was made after a protest was voiced on the floor of the state convention.

18-Month Respite

Among the last bills passed by the 87th Congress before its adjournment Sept. 27 were measures extending (1) the school aid program for federally-impacted areas and (2) the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Enactment of the legislation likely means that federal aid to parochial schools, opposed by most Protestants, will not again be a live option for 18 months or more.

The debate over parochial school aid was the most intense to come before the first session of the 87th Congress. President Kennedy stood his ground in opposing such aid, even in the face of intense pressure from Roman Catholic party colleagues, but the price he paid was his own proposal for federal aid to public education, which was defeated along with parochial aid plans.

The extension of the National Defense Education Act for two years did not entail any amendments. Some observers charge that the program violates the principle of church-state separation when appropriated for scholarships for seminarians.

Baptists In Government

Dr. Paul F. Geren, former Baptist missionary and educator, is now second in command of the U. S. Peace Corps operation. His appointment by President Kennedy to the office of deputy director was announced last month.

Geren succeeds Bill D. Moyers, another Baptist clergyman, who now becomes associate director for legislative relations. Moyers is an ordained Southern Baptist minister and a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary who was on the staff of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson when appointed to the Peace Corps earlier this year.

Geren, who was executive vice president of Baylor University, a Southern Baptist institution, from 1956 to 1958, has been serving in the State Department as deputy director of the Office of International Finance and Development. The son of an Arkansas Baptist minister, he attended Baylor as a student and later received a master’s degree at Louisiana State University and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

In 1941, Geren went to Judson College in Rangoon, Burma, as a missionary and economics teacher for the American Baptist Convention. His work there was cut short by the Japanese invasion of Burma.

He then joined the staff of Dr. Gordon Seagrave, famous Burma surgeon.

Peace Corps Problem

Peace Corps volunteers were already at work in Ghana and ready to begin in several other countries, but back in Washington the administration was still tussling with a principle: Should the Peace Corps sign contracts to work through sectarian agencies?

As of late September, the Peace Corps had not as yet signed such a contract, but policy makers were known to be toying with the idea.

President Kennedy has already signed into law the bill which establishes the Peace Corps as a permanent agency, but Congress did not specify any safeguards against intrusion upon the principle of separation of church and state.

The Hard Way Home

The only home he ever knew was the Baptist orphanage at Petah Tiqva and Edward Salim Zoumut, now 16, wanted to return. But authorities in Jordan took a dim view of allowing the boy to cross the Jerusalem border to get back into Israel. So, for more than eight months since he came to the Old City to pay his refugee parents a Christmas visit, the young Arab has been stranded. What’s more, he had been placed in a Roman Catholic boarding school, where, according to Religious News Service, “he complained of being unhappy.”

The Israel Baptist Convention, meanwhile, sought desperately to have the boy returned legally, but to no avail. The situation took a strange turn one day last month when Jordanian police picked up two men who had been seriously injured in a land mine explosion in no man’s land. One was Dr. Robert Lindsey, a highly-respected Southern Baptist missionary from Norman, Oklahoma. The other was Edward Salim Zoumut.

Lindsey was arrested on charges that he had tried to smuggle the boy back to Israel. He was placed in the prison ward of a government hospital, where subsequently one of his feet was amputated. The boy suffered an eye injury.

Lindsey, a noted Bible scholar, has served as a missionary to Israel for the past 16 years. He had been translating the New Testament into modern Hebrew and had served as a judge in the international Bible contest held in Jerusalem in 1958. With his wife and six children, Lindsey lived in Tiberias.

Israeli authorities requested officials in Jordan to return Lindsey to Israel. They indicated they would not prosecute him for the illegal crossing in view of “his sincere motives.”

People: Words And Events

Deaths: Dr. Conrad Arthur Moehlman, 82, retired professor of church history at Rochester Theological Seminary (now the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School); in Avon Park, Florida … Herman Fisk Bell, 81, author of three books on religion and theology; in Brooklyn, New York … G. Sidney Phelps, 86, former YMCA executive in the Far East; in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Appointments: As dean of Illinois Wesleyan University, Everette L. Walker … as director of graduate studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Dr. Ray Summers … as professor of Old Testament literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, Dr. James Barr … as faculty members for the initial term of the Near East School of Archaeological and Biblical Studies in Jerusalem, Dr. Bastiaan Van Elderen, Dr. R. Laird Harris, Dr. Stanley Horton, and Dr. Joseph Free … as professor of Christian education, English, and drama at Pacific Bible Seminary, Miss Mary Harding … as editor of the Scripture Union publication, Every Girl’s Magazine, Mrs. J. Hills Cotterill.

Resignation: As executive secretary of the Associated Church Press, the Rev. Alfred P. Klauser, a Reserve Army chaplain whose unit began a tour of extended active duty October 1. Klauser was recently promoted to the rank of full colonel.

Retirement: Dr. Ralph W. Sockman, minister of Christ Church, Methodist, New York, effective December 31. Sockman has served the church for more than 44 years—and thereby holds a record among Methodist ministers.

Election: As president of the House of Deputies of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Clifford P. Morehouse, New York publisher of literary materials for the church.

In a cooperative effort,CHRISTIANITY TODAY, The Sunday School Times, and Eternity sent Alan M. Fletcher, managing editor of the Times, on a fact-finding tour of British Guiana, which many believe offers the Communists a toe-hold on the continent of South America. Fletcher was chosen for the task because of the knowledge he gained of the country in previous visits. Here is his report:

My visit last month to the lush jungle land of British Guiana convinced me anew that it deserves the attention of Christians everywhere. This Idaho-sized colony on the northeast coast of South America abounds in natural beauty, including waterfalls four times taller than Niagara, but its current ideological inclinations are of far greater import. In elections held on August 21, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) gained a substantial majority of legislative seats under a strong new constitution that guarantees absolute control of British Guiana’s internal affairs. The PPP and its premier, 43-year-old Dr. Cheddi Bharatt Jagan, an American-educated dentist, have been widely accused of Communist orientation. The religious implication is that British Guiana could become the first nominally Protestant country to go into the Communist orbit.

The refined-appearing Jagan was scheduled to visit the United States this month in a hid for aid. He is a mahogany-skinned East Indian, a native of British Guiana. (Nearly 50 per cent of the population are East Indians, who were brought in when the British abolished slavery in 1834; another 35 per cent are Negroes.) He is married to the former Janet Rosenberg, a known Communist whom he met in Chicago. His early education in Anglican and Church of Scotland schools apparently had little spiritual effect on him for he took his oath of office on a Hindu holy book.

British Guiana’s first attempt at self-government ended in December, 1953, when the Royal Welsh Fusiliers marched in to enforce Britain’s suspension of the infant constitution after a drift to communism had become all too evident.

Jagan’s PPP was the ruling party at that time. It is the ruling party today, under the new constitution, with complete independence perhaps only a year away.

British Guiana is in the center of an area originally called Guiana, discovered by Columbus and explored by Sir Walter Raleigh. Here was sought El Dorado, the city of gold, now thought to be a fabrication of the Spanish aimed at keeping European powers out of richer territories. The portion of Guiana now known as British Guiana changed hands between the Dutch and the English several times in its early history.

Since 1803 it has been the property of Great Britain.

Four-fifths of British Guiana is forest. About 95 per cent of the population lives in a 10-mile-wide strip of coast line. Most of the interior is inaccessible. Georgetown, the principal city and capital, has a population of 125,000. The colony’s welfare is linked with two agricultural crops: sugar and rice. Chief mineral exports are bauxite and manganese.

In addition to the PPP, there are two other political parties in English-speaking British Guiana, the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the United Force. All are divided very closely along racial lines, the PPP being the party of the East Indians, the PNC drawing its support from Negroes, with minority nationality groups such as American Indians, Europeans, and Chinese backing the United Force. The PPP and the PNC are both socialist, with similar platforms. The United Force is democratic, supporting the free enterprise system.

Members of both the PPP and PNC at times sound suspiciously communistic, but the people of British Guiana are neither Communist or socialist. The working people know little of any ideology, despite a literacy rate which is rather high for an underdeveloped country (one source says 70 per cent).

When a middle-class housewife asked her East Indian maid if she planned to vote for Jagan’s party, the maid replied, “Yes, mistress.”

“But don’t you know that Mrs. Jagan is a Communist?”

“Oh, no, mistress,” said the maid. “She are no common woman.”

The close racial nature of the PPP and the PNC has created an ugly tension between the East Indian and Negro population. A recently-organized “African Society for Racial Equality,” led by two school teachers, sees the future for Negroes one of subjection to the more business-minded East Indians. Rallies under the motto “Equality or Partition” are enjoying enthusiastic support.

The PPP has been the majority party continuously since 1957. Its manifesto calls the plantation system under which sugar is produced “anachronistic and … it should be the subject of reform.”

The PPP plans to allow “importation from any source so that the country can benefit from purchasing in the cheapest market.” “Control of prices is essential.”

I heard Jagan say, “So far as I am concerned, so long as any individual is willing to come and work with us, and live with us, we will welcome him with open arms.”

The government plans to establish industries, apparently in some cases in competition with private enterprise. Jagan’s party has already established its own newspaper, with printing plant, and has announced plans to establish its own radio station.

In international affairs, the PPP says it “will pursue a neutralist policy of friendship with all countries and will not permit our country to be used as a military base by any nation.”

British Guiana has always been free picking for all kinds of religious groups. The net effect has been to make the majority of the citizenry fall somewhere within the Protestant spectrum. The Saturday church directories of Georgetown’s newspapers list several Anglican churches, three Presbyterian, several Congregational, and many Methodist. There are also churches and chapels which are Canadian Presbyterian, Lutheran, Moravian, Salvation Army, Assemblies of God, Pentecostal, Pilgrim Holiness, Church of God, Christian Catholic, Christadelphian, Christian Science, Bahai, Seventh-day Adventist, Plymouth Brethren, plus the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Unevangelized Fields Mission has several churches and does extensive work among primitive tribes in the interior. The Christian Literature Crusade sponsors an attractive book store in Georgetown. Gideons also are represented.

In discussions with many Protestant leaders I learned that many churches are nominally orthodox, but I saw little evidence of zeal. Churches are well attended, but the motive seems to be largely status rather than spiritual strength.

Sober estimates indicated that within 10 to 15 years the “Christian” population will become the minority, for three reasons: The sluggish churches are scarcely holding their own, the predominantly pagan East Indian population has a growth rate far greater than the rest of the population, and the rise in racial feeling has caused increased interest in Hinduism and Islam.

Education of the colony’s children has always been the domain of the churches, which operate some 300 schools, but clergy leaders are worried. Through the years the government has subsidized the schools, paid teacher salaries, and often picked up the tab for construction of educational buildings. Shortly before the August elections, the government seized 51 church schools that had been bought and built with government funds. Church leaders have been protesting vigorously, but to no avail.

Education, says the PPP manifesto, is “the greatest liberating force in the struggle against ignorance, reaction, bigotry, superstition, and economic exploitation.… The system of dual control of schools whereby denominational bodies control the appointment and promotion of teachers on a denominational basis, while the government pays the salaries of the teachers and makes large grants to these schools will be eventually abolished.”

One thing is sure: Guiana needs revival. A Billy Graham crusade could kindle the flame. Graham is already well known in British Guiana through his radio broadcast, and nearly all the ministers with whom I spoke are eager to have him pay a visit.

Christian leaders in British Guiana urge that no additional religious groups from the United States establish permanent work. Some observers feel that missionary personnel from India would be the most welcome of any foreigners and would command the greatest audience for the Gospel.

It there is, among the distinctive articles of the Christian faith, one which is bask to all the others, it is this: that our Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, became man for our salvation. This is the affirmation that we have in mind when we speak of the doctrine of the Incarnation.

While “incarnation” (a term of Latin origin, meaning “becoming-in-flesh”) is not itself a biblical word, it conveys a biblical truth—the truth which finds classic expression in John 1:14, “the Word became flesh.”

The incarnation of Christ implies his deity and humanity alike. To assert that any of us “became flesh” or “came in the flesh” would be a truism; it is no mere truism that John voices when he insists that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” and makes this confession the crucial test of truth (1 John 4:2). He means rather that one who had His being eternally within the unity of the Godhead became man at a point in time, without relinquishing His oneness with God. And by the word “flesh” he does not mean a physical body only, but a complete human personality.

Nor is John the only New Testament writer so to speak. Paul speaks of God as “sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3)—where “likeness” does not suggest that his manhood was less than real, but that his human nature was like our sinful nature except that his nature was unstained by sin. Again, in the early Christian confession reproduced in 1 Timothy 3:16, the “mystery of our religion” (that is, Christ himself, the “mystery of God,” as he is called in Col. 2:2) is said to have been “manifested in the flesh.” The writer to the Hebrews bears the same witness when he says of the Son of God, through whom the worlds were made (Heb. 1:2), that since those whom He came to deliver “are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same”—in order that he might accomplish his saving purpose through death, which he could not otherwise have undergone (Heb. 2:14 ff.).

The doctrine of our Lord’s incarnation, then, is broadly based throughout the New Testament. When John, Paul, and the writer to the Hebrews present such agreement as this, it is usually safe to trace their agreement back to a germinal principle in the life and teaching of Christ.

The Fact of the Incarnation. That Jesus of Nazareth was a real man none of his companions doubted. But sometimes it came home to them with special force that there was something extra-ordinary about him: “Who then is this?” they asked when he stilled the tempest with a word (Mark 4:41). Even when they came to acclaim him as the Messiah, they did not immediately appreciate all that was involved in Messiahship as he accepted and fulfilled it. Fuller apprehension followed his death and exaltation, however, and nothing is more eloquent in this regard than the spontaneous and unself-conscious way in which New Testament writers take Old Testament passages which refer to the God of Israel and apply them to Jesus, whom they all knew to be a real man. In Jesus, they claimed, God had drawn near to man for his redemption; in Him, indeed, God had become man. “The Word became flesh”; in the man Christ Jesus they recognized the crowning revelation of God.

These simple affirmations, however, called for more precise definition. The relation of Christ as Son to God the Father raised questions to which conflicting answers were given; so did the relation of Christ’s divine Sonship to his manhood. Some answers offered to these questions might seem adequate at first blush, but they were quickly seen to create more difficulties than they claimed to solve, if indeed they did not positively undermine the Christian faith. There was the problem of vocabulary, too. Greek and Latin terms had to be used in new and specialized senses to fit a set of data with which these languages had not been called upon to deal before. And one thinker might use a term in a completely adequate sense while another would use it in a sense which did much less than justice to the data of biblical revelation and Christian experience.

In the first three or four centuries the major obstacle in the way of doing full justice to these data was the dualistic presupposition of much contemporary Gentile thought. This dualism involved a complete antinomy between spirit and matter, spirit being essentially good and matter essentially evil. This meant that any direct contact between the spirit world and the material world was impossible. In consequence, people whose thinking was based on this kind of dualism could not accept in its proper sense the biblical doctrine of the incarnation of the Son of God, nor yet the biblical account of his death and resurrection. They had to present alternative interpretations of these events. One of these interpretations, which began to emerge as early as the apostolic age (for New Testament writers are at pains to refute it), was Docetism, which considered our Lord’s humanity to be only apparent and not real. A later interpretation was Arianism, which thought of him as neither fully God nor fully man, but as a being of intermediate status. It is a matter of more than historical interest that such knowledge of Christianity as Muhammad had was derived from one of these defective interpretations. This accounts for those statements in the Koran which deny that he was the Son of God and also that he was really crucified.

It was only slowly and painstakingly that the early Church achieved a statement of our Lord’s incarnation which has commended itself ever since as satisfying all the data. Before this happened, we can watch the tripartite baptismal confessions of the first three Christian centuries (tripartite because they affirmed faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) having their central section—that which affirmed faith in the Son—expanded so as to make a fuller statement of the doctrine of Christ. The familiar Apostles’ and Nicene creeds provide sufficient examples of this. But the statement which the historic Church has adopted as definitive is that approved by the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451. This statement acknowledges “one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin.…”

The wording of this Chalcedonian definition may seem remote from the modes of expression with which we are familiar today. Yet, according to so able a theologian as B. B. Warfield, it has well deserved to remain the authoritative statement of the Church’s Christology (although it does not mitigate the difficulty of the conception to which it gives expression) because it “does justice at once to the data of Scripture, to the implicates of an Incarnation, to the needs of Redemption, to the demands of the religious emotions, and to the logic of a tenable doctrine of our Lord’s Person” (The Person and Work of Christ, p. 189).

We have in our day a vocabulary for expressing the various concepts and problems associated with personality which was not available in the fifth century. It would be an exciting and rewarding task to use this vocabulary to restate the doctrine of the Incarnation in a form which would correct defective views held today as defective views of an earlier age were corrected at Chalcedon. But such a restatement ought to pass the same stringent tests as Warfield applied to the Chalcedonian statement.

The Means of the Incarnation. The Church’s confession, as we trace it back to primitive times, sets alongside the fact of our Lord’s incarnation the claim that he became incarnate through being conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

There are those, indeed, who acknowledge our Lord’s incarnation without believing in his virgin birth, just as others (Muslims, for example) believe in his virgin birth but not in his incarnation. But it is undeniable that his incarnation and virgin birth are intimately bound together in the historic faith of the Church. Nor is this surprising. The Incarnation was a supernatural event—an unprecedented and unrepeated act of God. The more we appreciate the uniqueness of the Incarnation, the more may we recognize how fitting—indeed, how inevitable—it is that the means by which it was brought about should also be unique. Our Lord’s virginal conception must certainly be understood as a pure miracle; attempts to explain it by analogies drawn from parthenogenesis in lower forms of life are worse than useless.

Only two New Testament writers, Matthew and Luke, record the virgin birth of Christ; but they are the only two who record his birth at all. Their birth narratives are independent of each other; all the more impressive, therefore, are the features on which they agree: not only that Christ was born in Bethlehem, the son of Mary, who was affianced to Joseph, a descendant of David; but more particularly that Mary conceived him by the Spirit of God while she was still a virgin. One of these two birth narratives, moreover (Luke’s), has claims to be regarded as one of the most archaic elements in the New Testament.

These two narratives do not exhaust the evidence for the Virgin Birth, although they command the special respect due to their canonical status. Ignatius (c. A.D. 115) also bears testimony to the Virgin Birth, which to some extent reflects a distinct tradition—preserved probably in the church of Antioch.

Whether other New Testament writers knew anything about the Virgin Birth or not, they say nothing to contradict it. Indeed, in one or two places some of them seem to betray some acquaintance with it. However, these are not definite enough to have evidential value.

The argument that, if the chief characters in the birth narratives had known about the Virgin Birth, they would not have acted or spoken as they did on certain later occasions, makes insufficient allowance for the changing moods of human beings; besides, how can we make confident generalizations about the psychological effects of a unique event? The argument that our Lord would not have been perfectly man had be been virgin-born is hypothetical and undemonstrable; that he was indeed perfectly man is certain in any case.

The fact that he was publicly known as “Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph” (John 1:45) is irrelevant to the question of his virgin birth. There are other expressions in the Gospels which have been supposed to be inconsistent with it, but these are commoner in the two Gospels which exclude any misunderstanding by recording his virgin birth at the outset. Thus Luke, towards the end of his infancy narrative, refers to Jesus’ “father and mother” or his “parents” (Luke 2:33, 41), and reports his mother as saying to Him, “thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing” (v. 48). But the earlier part of his narrative shows how these expressions are to be understood. Later he reports the people of Nazareth as saying, “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary?” (Matt. 13:55). Whether these Nazarenes knew anything of the circumstances of his birth is doubtful; but the reader of Matthew and Luke is already acquainted with the real circumstances and is not misled by their question. Mark, on the other hand, who has no nativity narrative, reports them as saving: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mark 6:3).

The conception and birth of Christ could not and cannot be susceptible to the laws of evidence in the same way as his resurrection, for which eyewitnesses were not lacking. But God did a new thing in the earth when his Son became incarnate, and the virginal conception was part and parcel of that new thing. In this way, for once, the entail of sin was broken within the human family. No one will suspect Dr. W. R. Matthews of obscurantism, but there is substance in his statement that, “though we may still believe in the Incarnation without the Virgin Birth, it will not be precisely the same kind of Incarnation, and the conception of God’s act of redemption in Christ will be subtly but definitely changed” (Essays in Construction, pp. 128 f.).

Riches for Poverty. In the light of the further revelation of the New Testament, this Old Testament affirmation acquires a deeper significance. It is because God made man in His own image that He could accurately reveal Himself in a human life. So when, in the fullness of time, “God sent forth his Son, born of a woman,” it was in the form of man that he sent him—the form which he had from the beginning intended man to have. Thus the Son of God became partaker of our nature so that we in Him might become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).

He deigns in flesh to appear,

Widest extremes to join,

To bring our vileness near,

And make us all divine;

And we the life of God shall know,

Since God is manifest below.

(C. Wesley)

Bibliography: C. Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God; E. H. Gifford, The Incarnation; W. Sanday, Christologies Ancient and Modern; J. G. Machen, The Virgin Birth of Christ; D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ; H. E. W. Turner, Jesus, Master and Lord; O. Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament.

Rylands Professor of Biblical

Criticism and Exegesis

University of Manchester

Manchester, England

SEVEN DEVILS

“These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination to him.”

In our relationship with others we go out of our way to do the things our loved ones like and avoid the things which offend them.

How much more sensitive should we be when we are specifically told there are certain things which God “hates.”

Furthermore, we should understand that God hates, not as men hate, but that his is a holy hatred, a reaction to and recoiling against those things which are evil.

We all know that God loves sinners while at the same time he hates their sins. It was this hatred of sin, in its performance and its results, that caused him to send his Son to redeem men.

Christians, of all people, should exemplify the transforming power of Christ and the new life to be found in him. That we live on the right side of justification is not enough, for he has sent the Holy Spirit to continue his work of transformation. This work of sanctification, never perfected in any of us, should have its roots in those things which are pleasing to God and its guard up against the things which displease him.

What then are the seven things which God “hates”? What are these seven devils against which all of us must do battle?

“A proud look,” or “haughty eyes.”

How many are the Christians whose usefulness in the work of God’s kingdom has foundered on pride. That God resists the proud is an ominous fact. That he hates pride should make every one of us go to our knees, asking that we may be divested of every iota of self-esteem and conceit.

And how foolish is pride! We have nothing that we have not received at God’s hand and our only hope is in him. Pride then becomes an interposing of ourselves between us and God. In a sense it is idolatry in its worst form and it is human folly at its peak.

“A lying tongue.”

God is truth. Satan is a liar and the father of lies. The lying tongue is a trademark of unregenerate heart and an offense so serious that the Bible repeatedly warns against its consequences.

Some jokingly refer to “white lies,” but there is no evidence that God regards the perversion of the truth for anything other than what it is—an offense against Him.

“Hands that shed innocent blood.”

We live in a time when violence is rampant and when acts of violence provide much to be seen on TV programs after the supper hour.

But the innocent blood of many a fellow Christian has been figuratively shed by the critical tongue of another Christian. Some seem determined to build up their own positions by tearing down the good reputations of others.

The lying tongue can shed innocent blood where no knife is used nor shot fired.

Undoubtedly the writer of this portion of the Proverbs was speaking against murderers, but we who are Christians should also regard it in the sense that we can slay the reputations of the righteous by an evil and slanderous tongue.

“A heart that deviseth wicked imaginations.”

Not long ago the writer went into one of the nation’s most famous newsstands to buy a book. In the few weeks interval since he had visited that particular store, it had been openly converted into a purvevor of lewd books and magazines, now displayed at the front of the store and shamelessly designed to attract and ensnare any and all.

No one enjoys a good detective story more than the writer. No one has greater enjoyment for an occasional good novel than he does.

But the books and magazines which are now flooding our newsstands and book stores are the products of diseased minds, minds so obsessed by evil and the exploitation of evil for personal profit that the world has never known such flouting of all that is decent and clean.

That God hates such wicked imaginations is a fact. That he will visit judgment on those who produce such filth and those who feed on it is a fearful thing.

The writer to the Hebrews affirms: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” and a little later in the book he says: “For our God is a consuming fire.”

If there were not a hell, God would have to make one for those who wilfully engage in traffic with the souls of men!

“Feet that be swift in running to mischief.”

“Mischief” is any evil work; anything which is contrary: to the law, will, and purpose of a holy God. How easy it is to walk the ways of the world—which are the ways of death! How easy it is to follow the crowd to do evil! How often we partake of other men’s sins by joining them in something we know in our hearts to be wrong!

Evil besets us on every hand. That we have security in the whole armour of God should be sufficient. That we adventure out without that armour is one of the great tragedies of life.

“A false witness that speaketh lies.”

Perjury is an offense against the laws of the land hut unknown and unrecorded except at the courts of heaven are those times when we have borne false witness against our neighbor—yes, our own familiar friend!

Gossip can be the bearing of false witness. Backbiting is a form of false witness. Criticism is often little less than a lie couched in terms of outraged piousness.

Many is the Christian who has suffered just such injury from the lying tongue of a self-righteous gossip.

“He that soweth discord among brethren.”

It is natural that there should be discord in the unregenerate world, for these are men vying for advantage and recognition. Attacks on others is as natural as the snarling and fighting of dogs in a pack.

But what is really distressing is that sowing discord among brethren is not unknown in Christian circles, in fact it is a sin so common that many of us engage in it without any regard for its sinfulness or its consequences.

As Christians we stand in need of a searching of our own souls. Who is not guilty of things which God hates? Who can say he has had no part in the things which God hates—which are an abomination to him?

This being true, how great is our need! Too many of us take a very superficial attitude towards Christ’s redemptive work. For too many of us the blood of Calvary has little meaning.

But it was because of the wickedness of our hearts and lives that Christ died. Our sole hope is in his cleansing power.

These seven “devils” which so often manifest themselves in our lives need to be driven out by the One who alone can save. Our need is great but God’s remedy is effective and all-sufficient.

The theological construction of Rudolph Bultmann, the ‘old master’ of a modern group of existentialist theologians within German Protestantism, has exercised a bewitching influence. Bultmann is the champion of “a new way” in theology that would pre-empt such absoluteness for his teaching that all other conceptions should be swept aside as useless. Bultmann’s theology stresses its capacity for a “deeper understanding” and a “more penetrating renewal” of the real import of the Reformation. Many of his followers actually believe that Bultmann gives the “sola fide,” the dominating Reformation principle of “faith alone,” the exclusive significance it deserves.

Currently there are some indications that the radical existentialism of Bultmann is on the wane and that many disciples of Bultmann have decided to strike out on their own in a way which deviates from the course set by the “master.” But the consequential reaction set off by Bultmann’s theological and philosophical construction is still as indisputable now as it was before. Thus the question, “Dare we follow Bultmann?” is certainly justified. We must subject his theses to an exacting examination in order to discern whether the tasks that Bultmann sets for theology are valid and justified.

Background For Bultmann

The disturbance engendered by Bultmann’s thought is healthy in that it has sparked renewed self-reflection in theology and the Church. What we are concerned with here touches the very theological foundation of the Church and its message; it deals with our understanding of the decisive, fundamental questions of Christian theology.

From the standpoint of the history of ideas and in connection with the theological development denoted by the movement proceeding from Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Herrmann, Bultmann’s teacher, one can trace that tendency of Bultmann’s theology which is bent upon accommodating the Christian truth to modern man in a new conceptualization. In this endeavor three facets of Bultmann’s thinking stand out:

1. It is impossible to harmonize present-day “cosmology” with the so-called “mythical cosmology” of the Bible. The framework, concepts, and images of biblical thought are declared antiquated; to modern man they appear “incredible,” “meaningless,” and “impossible.”

2. Then there is the matter of radical historical-critical research. This approach is consciously affirmed by Bultmann and carried out to its logical conclusions. Bultmann is prepared to surrender the entire New Testament tradition to dissolution and destruction, and to allow its “incineration” in the crematory of criticism.

3. Finally, the acceptance of the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger as an integral part of his theological construction provides Bultmann an escape from the difficulties and negations standing in the way of an effective proclamation of the Christian message. Reflection on “Being,” on modern man’s “self-understanding,” becomes the key for Bultmann in his apprehension of the Christian truth and, in the language of existentialism, for making this truth understandable to modern man.

Critical Counter-Questions

Are these allegedly manifest premises, submitted by Bultmann, tenable and theologically legitimate?

What is the real state of affairs in regard to Bultmann’s conception of “cosmology?” It is quite amazing to discover that Bultmann confuses the term “Weltbild” [cosmology] with “Weltanschauung” [world-view]. “Weltbild” is always in a process of transformation as a result of the ever-advancing scientific knowledge. “Weltbild” is both the object and product of rational knowledge. “Weltanschauung” is a matter of religious or philosophical interpretation. “Weltbild,” which one could say is a phenomenon related to the “horizontal plane,” can never contradict the meaning given to it through religion, philosophy, or faith, which are all related to the “vertical dimension.” All cosmologies, whether primitive, geocentric, or that of modern atomic physics, can be interpreted materialistic-atheistic, idealistic-religious, or in the Christian understanding of creation. Even in the Bible the mythical attachment of faith to space and time is broken. Bultmann thus is involved in a serious error in his treatment of the confrontation of cosmology and faith (cf. Ps. 139; 1 Kings 8:27; Jer. 23:24; Acts 27:28; Heb. 4:14; 7:26). Consequently it is plain nonsense when Bultmann emphasizes that, in view of all the modern technical advances, it is impossible for the man of today, who listens to the radio and uses electricity to uphold “the faith which reckons with angels, demons, and miracles.”

It is impossible to be any less critical of Bultmann’s fundamental historical skepticism. Even Bultmann’s followers have renewed the concern over knowledge about “the historical Jesus.” It is certainly true that the New Testament witness does not present an historical report; but as confession to Jesus Christ it always contains historical statements at the same time and without any doubt also possesses “historic” source value.

Finally, one must also ask the critical question: Is the language of existential philosophy adequate to express the message of biblical revelation? True as it is that the task of translating represents a theoretical obligation, nevertheless the modern way of interpretation dare not becloud and distort the biblical message. The danger with Bultmann is that his philosophical position leads him not to a modern interpretation of the theological substance but rather to a reconstruction or even destruction of it.

What Does Bultmann Teach?

In accordance with his existentialist maxim Bultmann develops the following new interpretations of the Christian tradition. Since the material of the primitive Christian tradition assertedly bears the stamp of “the contemporary mythology of Jewish Apocalyptic,” as well as the mark of “the redemption myths of Gnosticism,” in seeking to uncover the real Christian self-understanding, everything hinges upon “Demythologization.” Through this existentialist “purification-process,” all the miracle accounts, the “Son of Man” words and exalted titles of Jesus, the concept of preexistence, just like “the doctrine of the vicarious satisfaction through the death of Christ,” and the utterances over “the high priestly office” of the exalted Christ are to be discarded. For Bultmann only the “Existentialist Interpretation” of the mythological language of the New Testament, which sets forth the genuine existential connection and thus mediates a new understanding of Being, is decisive. This goal is entirely independent of historical factuality; for, according to Bultmann, one must make a sharp distinction between “historical facts” and “historic encounter.” The Christian kerygma of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ, however, has for him nothing to do with facts which may have happened between A.D. 1 and 30, but with the “kerygmatic Christ” who, in “the Word,” calls men “here and now” to the decision of faith. “Revelation is an event which places me in a new situation” so that I can attain salvation, that is, achieve the real purpose of my existence. Only in the word of actual proclamation is Christ manifest. Thus this kerygma “for me” itself represents the event of salvation which justifies me the sinner and leads me from death to life. Faith is not to be understood as faith in the personal Saviour but means “emancipation from the past,” “to be open for the future.”

Here again serious critical questions must be directed to Bultmann. Does not the rejection of every form of ontological thinking lead to a hopeless subjectivism? Isn’t the existentialist thought-scheme far too narrow to present the fullness of saving revelation in an adequate manner? The existentialism of Bultmann is nothing more than a modern variation of that anthropocentrism which, beginning with the Enlightenment, has continued to plague theology, and according to which the standard of validity is seen in existential significance.

The position of Bultmann becomes even more dubious and questionable when attention is focused upon the disorder, evident in his use of concepts, and caused by his new terminology. It is certain that through his contemporaneous, coeval interpretation of history, with utter disregard for historical factuality of the past, Bultmann basically misses the central concern of the Christian kerygma, which specifically proclaims a revealing action of God that is bound to history. Thereby the uniqueness of the biblical witness is reduced to the level of the usual and robbed of its historic basis and specific meaning. This is a repetition of that well-known process of classical idealism represented by Kant, Hegel, and Fichte whereby, indeed, Christian words are used, but through which an entirely different content is offered. Thus Bultmann’s existentialist theology means the opposite of biblical clarity and only serves to add to “the confusion of spirits” in these troubled times.

Why Must We Oppose Bultmann?

In effect, the new direction in theology taken by Bultmann amounts to a total conceptual metamorphosis. This process of transforming or modifying the central concepts of Christianity carries with it some disastrous features. The following examples are cited in confirmation of this contention:

Bultmann’s dreology is a “Kerygma-theology” whereby kerygma, the actual address of the message of Christ, is understood as the formal event of the call to the decision of faith. Only in this moment of proclamation is Christ real; only in this moment does salvation occur. According to the New Testament, however, kerygma is primarily and essentially the report of a completed event of salvation; it is the report of the perfected whole of the revelation of Christ which, indeed, happened “for the world” but which also happened “objectively,” and that means beyond the boundaries of human relationships.

For Bultmann there is no Incarnation. I he eternal “Logos,” “Word,” did not take human flesh, for the “pre-existent Son” becomes a mythological concept. It is impossible to make any statements about the “historical Jesus” of Nazareth. Doubt about his existence is indeed “unfounded,” “but not of essential importance.” Over his life it is impossible to make any biographical assertions or to give any chronological data. Thus the person of the historical Jesus shrivels up to an imaginary point, to an X, for only the formal “that” of his coming is important.

In the same way, under Bultmann’s interpretation, the fundamental importance of the cross of Jesus evaporates to the position of being a mere sign for the fact that it is worthwhile to bear one’s own suffering willingly. The message of a vicarious, sacrificial death is a myth.

The Resurrection, the fundamental event of salvation, is reduced by Bultmann to the mere knowledge of the “meaning of the cross.” The Easter reports are dismissed as legends and, so far as faith is concerned, the appearances of the Resurrected are dispensable and unessential. Here also the only norm is the existentialist understanding of “man’s rising with [Christ] as a present event.” With these theses the very heart is extracted from the original Christian kerygma.

Consistently with this distorted method of interpretation, it is inevitable that Christian eschatology must also be demolished. Bultmann stresses: “Awaiting the coming of the Son of Man is over,” for, as he sees it, the expectation of the parousia of the Early Church has been shown to be an error. But also the Christian hope in a “unique transportation into a heavenly world of Light” is for Bultmann rationally inconceivable” and “insignificant.” The concept of the “final day of judgment” is merely a mythological way of speaking.

In summary, we must conclude that for Bultmann the name “Jesus Christ” represents not a personal living reality of God’s saving revelation in the sphere of history but merely a concept, an ideogram, a symbol or a principle for the event of contemporary preaching. For this purpose, however, no importance is attached to the message of the event of salvation that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and died for the world and was raised by God and exalted to Lord, since this content merely reflects the language of mythology. Nothing but the formal existentialist claim of the kerygma understood in this way possesses theological validity.

“Dare we follow Bultmann?” This question is clearly answered with the observations of our investigation. The norm for the theologically tenable and necessary “Yes” or “No” to Bultmann’s theology is posited in the original Christian witness itself. Measured by this the following insights become evident:

All the theologically-decisive results of Bultmann’s construction stand in irreconcilable contradiction to the central message of the New Testament and to all ecumenical confessions of the Christian Church. Bultmann’s theological proposal is, in the real sense of the word, no theology at all, but it is rather a philosophical wisdom in Christian garb. In existentialist categories, “revelation” of God becomes a synonymous concept for the attainment of a new self-understanding; but in no way does it mean the reality of an actual intervention of God in the historical world of space and time. The reality of God’s revelation did not take place in Jesus Christ. The “new” is not the fact of world redemption completed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. It is only existence becoming open for God. Since Christ is not the living Lord, and represents nothing more than a symbol for the kerygma, it is also impossible for faith to represent a personal bond of trust in Jesus Christ. Thus faith is merely to be identified with the actualization of the new understanding of existence. Therefore it appears somewhat absurd to describe Bultmann as an executor of the last will and testament of the Lutheran Reformation on the basis of his philosophical elocution.

Bultmann’s endeavor to accommodate the Christian message to the problems and needs of modern man is doomed to failure because he is able to offer nothing more than anthropological solutions without any real knowledge of revelation. Bultmann’s theology is a pseudo-theology for it lacks the only enduring and all-sufficient foundation, Jesus Christ, who is none other than the historic man and at the same time the resurrected and transcendent Lord. With Bultmann’s kerygma, robber of its substance, it is impossible to preach, to comfort, or to carry on the work of missions. The same very serious question which in sharpest intolerance Paul directed to the congregation in Galatia must also be asked here: Is it a matter of another gospel? (Gal. 1:6).

The pretentious way to which Bultmann directs us shows itself to be a wrong way of dangerous heresy. In solid opposition to the way Bultmann would have us go stands the entirely other, genuine, apostolic kerygma: “that … which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled … that declare we unto you” (1 John 1:1, 3).