Feelings of guilt, according to the prevailing psychiatric understanding, stem from the parental and cultural conditioning of the child. They emerge below the conscious level but color all relations with other people and inhibit creativity in learning and work. The anxiety that is a part of the guilt problem drives the person to certain patterns of unconsciously motivated behavior in his desire to reduce or remove his dis-ease. The theological and biblical approach sees guilt as arising from man’s alienation from and rebellion against God. This basic alienation leads also to alienation between people.

The minister may want to bring psychological and biblical insights into a practical synthesis as he counsels the guilt-ridden. He operates from the assumption that feelings of guilt always involve more than anxiety over one’s inability to meet the demands of parents or society; they are related also to the fundamental need to be reconciled to God as the ground of a satisfactory relation to others.

“Sin” is now an unfamiliar word in the experience of most people. The value confusion introduced by the moral experimentation of the situational ethicists has, nevertheless, heightened the real guilt and anxiety problems in our society. Every university campus counselor knows about the increasing incidence of student suicides. The goal of the minister is not merely to eliminate the disabling symptoms of guilt but also to lead the person to find wholeness as a forgiven and cleansed person.

Consider the case of a church deacon of impeccable standing who, in a state of great agitation, rushed into the pastor’s office wringing his hands and saying repeatedly, “Why did I do it? I don’t know what made me do it.” During an argument at breakfast he had compulsively struck his wife, knocking her to the floor. Although there had been no serious tension during their eighteen years of marriage, he had suddenly committed this violent act. The distraught man, overwhelmed by guilt, had immediately sought the help of his minister. Only great emotional pressure could have led him to break through the structured role of a “good deacon” and admit what he had done.

In counseling a guilt-ridden person, the minister must be aware of his own emotional responses and needs. He must have a capacity to accept a distraught person without being either judgmental or sentimental. He must be able to compare the person’s negative feelings about himself with what he knows of the person’s life. In this particular situation, he needed to estimate how much value the man had placed upon his role as person, husband, deacon, church member, and respected citizen in the community. The sudden destruction of those expectations resulted in the acute experience of guilt. The man felt himself a failure in the roles for which he was valued most.

When confronted with the guilt-ridden, the minister has an obligation to be as serious as a medical doctor in his diagnostic duties. Long-range measures may be needed. The hostile act in this case took only a moment, but the feelings that triggered it may have been accumulating over a long period of time. No amount of pastoral compassion or abundance of theological or psychological observation can substitute for a responsible diagnosis and plan of recovery. The guilt-ridden person can feel such an overwhelming sense of self-rejection that he is a suicide risk.

The minister is God’s man. In this situation he must be very aware of the resources of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, and prayer. The parishioner has a natural desire for wholeness, a desire that is a gift of God. His feelings of guilt have brought him to the minister. Now the minister must identify with the sinner as Christ identified with all of us in his cross. He must recognize that guilt is an inescapable part of all human existence and that it is an intensely personal feeling of estrangement. As he listens to a torrent of confession, he must remember that, in the midst of a culture loaded with behavioristic and Freudian ideas that foster a sense of exemption from personal responsibility, here is a person accepting the obligation to reduce the discrepancy between what he is and what he ought to be. Only in the honest admission of guilt is there hope of salvation. This is the point of hope for the spiritual ministry in counseling.

Here are some practical steps:

1. Listen to the person’s whole story, trying to be sensitive to the levels of emotion he expresses and implies.

2. Be sure you understand the information he has given you about the onset of the problem.

3. Ask whether he has any history of emotional breakdown, whether he is undergoing any therapy, and whether he is taking any drugs.

4. Ask permission to talk professionally with the family doctor, but do not make any psychiatric diagnosis. Be supportive.

5. Take seriously any hints that his self-rejection could lead to suicide.

6. Make use of the confessional psalms and the forgiveness passages in the Gospels and Epistles. But be sure you are not using the Scriptures and prayer either to protect your ministerial image or to coerce your parishioner. Remember that you stand under the same judgment and in the same grace of God.

7. Notice the negative, positive, and ambivalent self-references in what the person says. “I’m a fool” is a negative reference. “I feel better about things today” is positive. As counseling progresses, the positive references should begin to dominate.

8. Terminate the interview without conveying a feeling of rejection. Arrange for another, if necessary.

The goal of the minister in counseling the guilt-ridden is to lead the person to where he can sing:

The bright glories of thy grace,

Beyond thine other wonders shine.

Who is a pardoning God like unto thee,

Who hath grace so rich and free?

—DR. JAMES FORRESTER, vice-president for university relations, Inter-American University of Puerto Rico.

There is a famous bookstore in Washington, D.C., that I visit frequently. Almost daily new books are on display. Many have eye-catching jackets, and often the publisher’s blurb gives the impression that anyone who does not read this book will suffer from ignorance about earth-changing personalities or events.

Unquestionably many of these books are interesting, instructive, or thought-provoking. Others portray moral filth in attractive and sophisticated ways. But one ventures the conviction that in all of the tens of thousands of books available—good or bad—there is not one single volume that is of eternal significance to its readers—except the Bible.

Despite all our advantages, we as a people suffer from the greatest of all deficiencies—spiritual starvation—because of our ignorance of the Bible. Let’s think for a moment about this Book that is so available and so neglected.

The Bible is certainly the only book in all the world that comes with the seal of divine authority resting upon it. In its pages God speaks to man so that he sees himself as God sees him, and sees time and eternity in their proper perspective. Every spiritual awakening has been accompanied by a turning to the Scriptures for instruction and light on the daily path.

The Bible is a book of many facets, and the ways in which its teachings can be brought to bear upon our lives are limitless. As a physician, I often see medical analogies in its pages and have often noted that in a very real sense the Scriptures are like a spiritual X-ray. We read in Hebrews 4:13: “Before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.”

Some years ago a woman walked into my office, limping and complaining of increasing pain in her foot. One look through the fluoroscope showed me that a sewing needle was imbedded in the sole of her foot. Removal was easy, and before long the pain was relieved and the patient cured.

The world—even some church members—goes limping along with personal and social problems unresolved because God has not been permitted to speak through his Word, diagnose the disease and offer a cure. Many true Christians are miserable, at outs with themselves and others. They long for the peace and joy that should be theirs in Christ but never permit the searching light of God’s truth to enter their hearts and reveal the sickness there.

The Bible may also be likened to a mirror in which we see ourselves as we really are. Many are unwilling to look into it because of their fear of what they may see.

Years ago a Confucian scholar was brought into our missionary hospital with a broken hip. During the weeks he was with us he was given a Bible to read, and the night before he was dismissed he gave a feast for the staff. With typical Oriental courtesy he expressed appreciation for the care given him. Then he continued, “When I came to this hospital I thought I was a good man. I had tried to lead an honorable life and had done a great deal for the poor. But after reading the Bible, I saw myself as I really was, and I saw too that God had made provision for a sinner like me in the death of his Son on the Cross. I am leaving this hospital believing in Christ as my Saviour.”

We also find that the Bible is at times truly like a sword—“the Sword of the Spirit.” As such it pierces the respectability that we put on as a cloak. It goes to the heart of the matter to discern “the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Only this morning I was reading a portion of Scripture that exposed a secret sin in my heart.

At the core of the Holy Scriptures is found Jesus Christ, the Son of God. To him both the Old and the New Testament bear witness. Paul indicated this in writing to his spiritual son Timothy: “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15).

We tend to look for Christ only in the New Testament, but the risen Christ himself said to his disciples, “These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44).

To divest Christ of his supernatural and miraculous nature, work, and power is to talk of a Christ who never existed. To accept him as he is means a transformed life and destiny.

The Apostle Paul makes a bold assertion (and experience shows the folly of denying its truth) that all Scripture is inspired by God. Because of this it is profitable:

First, for teaching. The world searches for knowledge, but the Bible gives true wisdom. Lacking the insights afforded by this wisdom, man gropes in the darkness of human speculation. Secular education leads to knowledge about many things, but true wisdom and understanding are found only in the divine revelation. It is hard for the academic world to accept the fact that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Far easier to deny or ignore him!

The Bible is also profitable for reproof. The world is suffering from sin, and sin must be reproved. Men are going in the wrong direction and need to be told of that fact. Permissiveness in matters of eternal import is folly. The Bible calls sin sin.

In addition to teaching and reproving, the Bible has power to correct. It shows the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong. As glasses correct vision or a cast corrects a bone weakness, the Bible speaks clearly and frankly about what God requires of man and tells of his provision to that end.

The Bible trains in righteousness, makes the Christian complete, and equips him for every good work.

Finally, the Bible is the only book that authoritatively speaks of the past, the present, and the future. In its pages are to be found the answers to the problems and pressures of life.

Little wonder that Satan hates God’s Word! From the beginning he has asked with a sneer, “Did God say?” He fears the Bible because it is the Sword of the Spirit” against which he cannot stand. His greatest victory today is among those in whom he has planted a seed of doubt, by frank denial or by insinuation, in classrooms, in books, and in the pulpit itself.

God’s words through Jeremiah speak to us today: “The wise men shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the LORD, and what wisdom is in them?” (Jer. 8:9).

But to the believer he also speaks: “For ever, O LORD, thy word is firmly fixed in the heavens.” “The unfolding of thy words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple (Ps. 119:89, 130).

May our response be: “I rejoice at thy word like one who finds great spoil” (Ps. 119:162).

It’s worth trying, because it works!

L. NELSON BELL

In Honor Of W. C. Robinson

Soli Deo Gloria, edited by J. McDowell Richards (John Knox, 1968, 176 pp., $5), is reviewed by Glenn W. Baker, professor of New Testament, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

This volume is offered as a tribute to Dr. William Childs Robinson on the occasion of his retirement from forty-one years of teaching at Columbia Theological Seminary. The esteem that this professor of church history, church polity, and apologetics enjoys among his colleagues is attested by the reputation of those who contribute to this Festschrift. Among the nine distinguished scholars who write are Dr. Robinson’s own two sons.

The introductory offering is by Oscar Cullmann, “The Relevance of Redemptive History.” The article has special interest because it includes corrections that Cullmann has made to his own system: redemptive history no longer is thought to move in a straight or unbroken line, nor is all of secular history considered redemptive. Nonetheless, Cullmann remains convinced of the superiority of his position, especially when viewed in the light of its modern counterparts:

In every way redemption history, far from interesting only the past and driving us back to an outmoded position, is an element of life which urges us forward, because it is capable of placing our modern time with all its prodigious progress within the continuity of a past history and the perspective of future history.

In the article “Jesus Is Lord,” F. F. Bruce denies that this confession owes its existence to Hellenistic Christianity (against W. Kramer) and that it was originally associated with the Parousia. The ascription of Lordship, he affirms, “can be accounted for only by the immediate impact which personal confrontation with Jesus—living, crucified, risen, and exalted—made on his followers.”

Bo Reicke, in “Paul’s Understanding of Righteousness,” argues that in Paul, justification is not primarily forensic and individual but is dynamic and collective, in accordance with Paul’s missionary concern.

George Ladd, in an excellent essay on “Paul and the Law,” shows that Paul’s problem before his conversion was not a sense of failure before the demands of the Law but pride and boasting because of the Law.

William Childs Robinson, Jr., in “Word and Power (1 Cor. 1:17–2:5),” affirms over against the NEB translators that in Paul’s preaching the “power of the cross” referred not to the way it was portrayed but to the effect it produced. It not only freed a man from the need for sinful self-assertion before God but allowed him to move more radically into his worldly existence.

In “Lampades in Matthew 25:1–13,” J. Jeremias finds from a study of Arabian wedding customs that lampades are not “house lamps” but “torches” carried in the wedding procession and used in the wedding dance.

James Robinson, writing on “World in Modern Theology and in New Testament Theology,” is concerned to move beyond Bultmann’s “understanding of existence” theology and anthropological orientation to one cast “primarily in terms of World.” This category, he believes, not only is useful for modern theology but, significantly, is already present and determining in the New Testament.

John Leith, in “John Calvin’s Polemic Against Idolatry,” shows that Calvin’s concern is no less appropriate for the twentieth century than it was for the sixteenth.

The final essay, “Theological Persuasion” by T. F. Torrance, touches on hermeneutics as well as the a priori of apologetics. Every minister will find in this last article particularly material that will inform him about his task of making the Gospel known.

These essays are heartily recommended.

Humanism Under Another Name

The Shaping of Modern Christian Thought, by Warren F. Groff and Donald E. Miller (World, 1968, 489 pp. $10), is reviewed by Milton D. Hunnex, professor of philosophy, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.

The main value of this book lies in its function as a sourcebook that puts under one cover significant selections from recent thinkers who have shaped modern liberal Christian thought. The influence of thinkers like Heidegger or Freud on the radical left can hardly be denied. But conservative Christian thought is generally ignored.

The authors argue that Christian thought must develop in dialogue with the secular world if it is to be either Christian or relevant. Since conservative Christian thought does not measure up to their criterion, it holds no interest for them, whatever its historical or contemporary manifestations may be. For them Christian thought seems to have metamorphosed into secular thought as modern Christian thought.

The impression the reader gets is that radical secular theology is the current expression of Christian thought. A “new style of faith thinking” is making its appearance, the authors argue. It sees “Christian theology and ethics … as a process of thinking and acting [rather] than as a fixed set of accepted truths and moral rules.” The object is to “tune in” on what God is doing today, but the trouble is that the God that one tunes in on turns out to be the future of human community, and there is nothing to prevent this “ongoingness of the human community” that is God from fulfilling Marxist or any other set of non-biblical goals, since biblical goals are neither final nor authoritative.

For the authors, the Gospel is as contextually determined as is ethics, since it cannot be Christian or relevant apart from its secular meaning. Unable to accommodate biblical thought to recent philosophical speculation, the authors rewrite that thought “to recover,” they say, “the kind of cultural orientation that was the strength of Schleiermacher’s approach to theology.” Their conclusion is that “a new faith style is now both possible in our cultural context and required by it. That style [is] … responsible openness within historical change.”

But the “responsible openness” that characterizes their contextual theology is primarily a collection of nineteenth-century speculative philosophical ideas that equate God in one obscure way or another with history or the future of man. Indeed, this book—like so many of its kind today—rarely even hints at being biblical. This is because biblical supernaturalism is incompatible with a contemporary Christianity that takes secularity seriously. And where biblical ideas do crop up, they are strangely handled. “In the last analysis,” the authors write, “salvation comes, not through any objective fact of history, but by faith alone!”—which is like saying that “in the last analysis nourishment comes not through any kind of food, but by assimilation alone.” Was this what Paul or Luther had in mind?

Although the authors speak of a “responsible openness,” they seem nontheless to suggest a new dogmatism that says in effect that if one cannot accommodate oneself to a changing Gospel or a disappearing God, one is anti-factual, anti-historical, anti-ethical, and even anti-Christian. It is surely odd that it is the theologian and not ordinary non-theological scholarship or even ordinary discerning people who think that it is Heidegger rather than Paul, or Freud rather than Calvin, who gives us Christian truth.

The new dogmatism holds that nothing, not even God or his Gospel, abides. It takes nineteenth-century philosophical speculation more seriously than biblical kerygma. The Lord of life and history becomes the “ongoingness of human community”—a Hegelian derivative—and if he disappears from the consciousness of that community, his disappearance is to be taken as his present epiphany by a historically relevant Christian consciousness. The “new style of faith thinking” is one that “moves within the temporal process and is itself changed by it,” the authors contend.

What is left of the good news is the call for courage to find in human community the answer to life as far as it is to be found. But isn’t this what philosophical humanists have always said and said without the tortuously prolix language of the new theologian? The authors conclude that Christians must either fight on as an irrelevant minority cult discredited and defeated by the forces of secularity or find in secularity itself the meaning of God and Christian mission today. “Faith is responsible engagement,” they write. Its object is “a relatedness in the midst of time and historical circumstances.” It is not obedience or trust in the supernatural God of Abraham or even the Heavenly Father of Jesus.

One wishes that all that is said could have been said in a style that improved upon rather than added to the discouraging obscurity of so much current theological literature. One is also entitled to a greater regard for facts and alternatives that do not happen to fortify the authors’ convictions. Finally, one wishes that the claimed involvement of contemporary philosophy in the dialogue could have been genuine rather than the occasional dropping of names like Wittgenstein or John Wilson, whose fine little book, Language and Christian Belief, hardly supports the authors’ thesis.

Israel’S God Of History

The Knowledge of God in Ancient Israel, by Robert C. Dentan (Seabury, 1968, 278 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Robert B. Laurin, professor of Old Testament, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina.

After I had finished reading this book I thought: “That was well written, competent, sober, but for the most part so familiar!” Why then the book? Virtually everything can be found discussed in greater detail, and therefore many times more clearly, in the standard biblical theologies. Indeed, the author admits this when he writes in the preface: “It will be evident that there is little that is original in this book.” Yet, in spite of all this, the book is worth having and reading. Originality in biblical studies is a scarce commodity these days, and what most of us need anyway is to understand the contents and implications, of what has already been discovered. Dentan, professor of Old Testament at General Theological Seminary, has done a fine job of summarizing and highlighting the results of study on the knowledge of God in ancient Israel.

The doctrine of God, as Dentan rightly observes, is the pole around which all other Old Testament topics revolve, since that which was distinctive about Israel’s religion was the character of God. So to understand ancient Israel, one has to comprehend her understanding of God. This can be grasped in general, says Dentan, by recognizing that God to the Israelites had acted in the past, was acting in the present, and would act in the future. “This belief that God is to be met first of all in the world of history is Israel’s most remarkable contribution to theology.” The permanent contribution of the Old Testament, therefore, lies in this fact. It is only because events are tied together past, present, and future in the continuum of history that we can find meaning for ourselves in the Old Testament view of God. The God whom Israel met in the disasters and triumphs of her life is able to be our God when we are involved with similar historical forces. This is why it is important to understand the character of Israel’s God. The book is structured to delineate this character through the threefold rubric of God in the past, present, and future.

The book has its frailties and omissions. The chapter on God and the natural world is the weakest of the lot. It fails to provide sufficient details to clarify the author’s arguments. Dentan assumes the existence of a Hexateuch without mentioning the alternate and strong possibility of a Tetrateuch. One also finds various overstatements about what was possible in Israel’s use of language—no understanding of scientific analysis, no ability to use poetic images among the earliest Israelites. But the book has its strengths and contributions, and these predominate. The excellent use of tradition criticism clarifies many points. The final chapter on the permanent contribution of Old Testament insights is also valuable. And there is a fine opening discussion about the “mystery” of Israel—her name, the forms of her existence, and her remarkable persistence.

Eighty Poems On Jonah

You! Jonah!, by Thomas John Carlisle (Eerdmans, 1968, 45 pp., $1) is reviewed by Kenneth L. Pike, professor of linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

This book is biblical, hard hitting, contemporary—“therefore the common people heard him gladly.”

Five years ago, emotion was out of fashion; to talk about justice was not socially acceptable. Now the college cry, in a climate of moral debate, is for external justice. Internal excellence is less prized. Nevertheless, people in this new climate may, perhaps, listen to a sharp but gentle attack on spiritual callouses. We often are dulled and lulled by superb sermonettes from pen and pulpit. Something additional is needed, if the unbelieving common man is to hear the Word gladly—or at all.

Poetry once shook the world. It may again. This book stabbed at me—with hilarious sadness. But who would have thought anybody could do that by writing eighty poems about Jonah?

DISCHARGED

Discharge, O God,

discharge me

from all perils

and all responsibilities

and I shall not even know

that I am dead.

The reversal of expectancies, the author’s deep search for me—like God’s working with Jonah in his inner struggle—overflows the whole book:

INSIDE JONAH

I was so obsessed

with what was going on

inside the whale

that I missed

seeing the drama

inside Jonah.

Carlisle’s poetry will help readers to understand not only Jonah’s predicament but their own as well.

Another On The Great Dane

Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship: A New Perspective, by Vernard Eller (Princeton, 1968, 445 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by William W. Bass, professor of philosophy, Biola College, La Mirada, California.

Contemporary theological discussion desperately needs new alternatives. Even if Dr. Eller did not specifically say in his last chapter that this book presents a serious thesis” about the current state of Christianity, the reader could surmise it from the depth and kind of his historical perspective. By carefully comparing the views of Sören Kierkegaard with those of a representative denominational group (the early Brethren, with which Eller is most familiar), he shows that Kierkegaard is best understood as related to the historical sectarian protest against the established Christian tradition. And Kierkegaard is better allowed to speak as the “greatest exponent” and most “shrewd analyst” of this temperament rather than as a theologian, psychologist, or philosopher.

Eller’s detailed, objective, and discerning investigation makes this a work of first-rate historical scholarship and a valuable treatment of Kierkegaard. Both expected topics (inwardness, immediacy, nonconformity, the simple life, creedalism, religiousness, and contemporaneousness) and the unexpected (clericalism, sacramentalism, universalism, and celibacy) are examined. Eller treats the individual, faith, community, and Christology with careful reference to sectarianism, differing interpretations, and Kierkegaard’s dialectic. Discussion is cast against a carefully sealed discrimination of church types and movements, which distinguishes between wholesome sectarianism and the theologically and morally lax varieties of cultic and sectarian community.

Eller sees in Kierkegaard a spokesman who can demand a hearing for this variety of Christianity in today’s troubled theological climate. His penetrating discussions on creeds, religiousness, and contemporaneousness (to which Eller relates the series of quests for Jesus) also show what Kierkegaard and the sectarians have to say to the hour. Kierkegaard’s anti-intellectualism is explained as an expected corrective to philosophically tainted Christianity rather than an inherent antagonist of the rational process, a fact that speaks to the milieu of the evangelical as well as to that of the newer theology.

The passages from Kierkegaard cited in the section on contemporaneousness show his indebtness to the traditional philosophical categories of the “Eternal” and the temporal. This concept of the eternal, timeless, or transcendent is precisely what is identified negatively with traditional Western metaphysics by the post-Christian discussion to which Eller would like to speak. Thus, while his book presents a classical and neglected alternative that is relevant for recent considerations, there is a basic problem with Kierkegaard’s formulation, one that may not be inherent in the Brethren writings. The solution to the current hiatus will probably be even more radical than that proposed by Eller and firmly related to the Hebrew concept of the Kingdom of God and eschatological events (Cox) and the temporality of God (Ogden). Eller’s term “Neo-Sectarianism” will probably be applicable to the emerging formulation, which may have many of the characteristics described in this book, but which will have succeeded better than Kierkegaard in dropping all philosophical categories.

Book Briefs

Ministering to Prisoners and Their Families, by George C. Kandle and Henry H. Cassler (Prentice-Hall, 1968, 140 pp., $3.95). Telling of the inner and outer worlds of the prisoner, two prison chaplains propose a role for the pastor in helping the prisoner adjust to his situation and travel the hard road to responsible freedom.

An Introduction to Teilhard De Chardin, by N. M. Wildiers (Harper & Row, 1968, 191 pp., $6). A well-written guide to understanding the complex panorama of Teilhard’s theological-scientific thought. Shines new light on his intellectual and spiritual concepts of the universe.

Is the Last Supper Finished? Secular Light on a Sacred Meal, by Arthur A. Vogel (Sheed and Ward, 1968, 191 pp., $4.50). An Episcopal priest shines ecumenical light on the continuing reality of God’s presence, the bonds among “community, word, and body,” and the purpose of the sacrifice in making man God-like.

The Heart of the Gospel, by Joseph F. Green (Broadman, 1968, 128 pp., $1.50). A presentation of faith as the life-giving organ of the Gospel. Deals with challenging questions such as relevance, immortality, and biblical authority.

Great Men of the Bible and the Women in Their Lives, by G. Avery Lee (Word, 1968, 107 pp., $3.95). Who can find a virtuous woman? Dr. Lee tells about the women found by eight men of the Bible, including Jacob, Samson, David, and Paul.

Kierkegaard: The Difficulty of Being Christian, edited by Jacques Colette (University of Notre Dame, 1968, 256 pp., $5.95). Selections from Kierkegaard’s profound thought outline existence as a gift from God that must be persistently entrusted to God if one is to find a purpose in life.

Paperbacks

Preface to Parish Renewal: A Study Guide for Laymen, by Wallace E. Fisher (Abingdon, 1968, 143 pp., $1.75). A valuable guide leading laymen and pastors to work together in fashioning a renewal program of radical change in persons, reflecting God’s purposes for his people as they are confronted by Scripture and Christian history.

Faith and Violence, by Thomas Merton (University of Notre Dame, 1968, 291 pp., $1.95). A Catholic monk asserts that a theology of love must seek to deal realistically with evil and injustice in the world by becoming a theology of resistance, emphasizing reason and communication. Treats such topics as Viet Nam, black power, and the death-of-God theology.

A History of Preaching, Volume 1, by Edwin Charles Dargan (Baker, 1968, 577 pp., $3.95). Reprint of a unique homiletical resource that considers the relation between preaching and world events from the Apostles through the sixteenth-century Reformers.

A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, by William Law (Westminster, 1968, 158 pp., $1.45). This influential eighteenth-century Christian devotional classic (here abridged) gives practical instruction for victorious living.

Dear Underground Evangelicals:

From North Hollywood, California, the nation’s leading producer of pornography, comes a new type of underground newspaper. Called The Wittenberg Door, the mimeographed four-pager is edited by two enterprising evangelical youth directors—Paul Sailhamer and Gary Wilburn. Through their brief and breezy articles they hope to prod Christian youth leaders and organizations to more creative Christian witness. Their awareness of what it takes to communicate the Gospel to today’s youth is shown especially in their satire of both worn-out approaches and pseudo-hip practices now in use. Sample their latest issue:

Hollywood Heaven: “Can you remember how long it has been since you sat through the glorious testimony of Freddie Fabulous, the converted nightclub and silver-screen star? And whatever happened to Cynthia Celebritania, the ‘transformed trapeze artist’ and singing sensation who gave up all to put her soul in the hands of that Great Safety Net in the Sky? It appears that the Lord has gone back to his old ways of redeeming just plain everyday sinners.”

Loser of the Month (The Door quotes a new tract): “Christ really socks it to you with some real heavy stuff.… Jesus Christ is truly the cool one.… If Christ is not your bag, then it’s bad news for you because you are on an eternal bummer.… Christ busted right out of the grave nearly 2,000 years ago. Right now he wants to bust into your life and make you hep to his program.”

Christian Village (a promotion honoring “Authentic Remnants of the Faith”): “I thought it strange as I entered through the gates constructed from Mother-of-Pearl, but was amused upon reading a poster: ‘see the last sheaves ever brought in.’ A flyer read, ‘For the first time, SEE a heart being spoken to!’ ”

The response youth directors have given The Door may be seen in a letter from a happy subscriber: “Your paper is irreverent, disrespectful, insulting, crude, and very interesting. Enclosed is my one dollar.” To be the first on your block to open The Wittenberg Door, send a buck to 13273 Cantara Street, North Hollywood, California. But remember, it’s for the young at heart.

Young at Forty,

Translation Gap?

The academic discussion between Professors Laird Harris and Stanley Hardwick (Sept. 27) was stimulating and informative. But neither of them touched upon one crucial factor: the use of the Bible as an evangelistic weapon.… Evangelism will not wait upon the now protracted search for the perfect, or evangelically acceptable, version.…

Meanwhile, many pastors will continue to be caught in the crossfire between those church members who are incensed if another version than the KJV is used and those who demand that Scripture be immediately intelligible.

Bethany Bible Fellowship Church

Catasauqua, Pa.

When Dr. Hardwick says, “In many ways the RSV is an excellent translation,” I heartily agree. I use it a great deal for my devotional reading as well as for reference and quotation. Yet over and over it slaps my Christian sensibilities in the face. Principal offenders are such texts as Dr. Harris and Dr. Paine have cited.

Dr. Hardwick states that “the New Testament goes beyond the Old Testament.” In the context of his article I understand him to mean that the New Testament superimposes upon the Old its Messianic application. That the statements in the Old Testament have their own immediate setting, I agree; but that they did not carry in themselves a divine impregnation of Messianic truth seems to me to be a denial of Christ’s teaching.

First Baptist Church

Williamston, Mich.

Professor Hardwick criticizes my argument that the RSV seems by preference to blunt the Messianic edge of Old Testament passages quoted as Messianic prophecy by New Testament writers. His point has some validity, in that occasionally a NT writer very clearly does ascribe Messianic import to an OT verse where the OT writer quite apparently did not intend such an import. This is specifically admitted in my original article and usually involves passing allusions (e.g. “out of Egypt have I called my son”).

In my view, Professor Hardwick’s criticism is weak in that, with the cases treated here, he adopts the assumption (more characteristic of liberal scholarship) that the OT statements must be considered as relating only to the immediate context. In other words, they were not originally prophetic, and it was the NT writers who made them so by “going beyond the OT.”

He himself admits that the language of the OT passages would lend itself to being translated as the NT writers have done, but this would make them transcend their original context—which he does not allow, but which is exactly what prophecy does.

President

Houghton College

Houghton, N.Y.

Surprise Gift

I am very much surprised to note that television is a gift of God (“Television Airwaves—Evangelism’s Frontier,” Sept. 13).

I do not have it in my home, but I see it when I happen in where it is turned on. I have quite a folder full of clippings to prove that it is of the Devil. For years my wife was interested in working with the children, but today they are TV-educated brats.

I have nothing to say against the person who can get in with a gospel message. More power to him.

Newfield, N. J.

Unmuffled Bell-Ringer

Our generation (seminary ’68) has within its grasp, through mass media and instantaneous communication facilities, the opportunity to provide modern man with the hope of joyful living in Jesus Christ. Yet we who are trained professionally to be God’s “bell-ringers” muffle the tone of God’s love in Jesus Christ by allowing ourselves to become incrusted with the pessimism, criticism, and schismatic responses of our day.…

Thank you for awakening a slumbering and dissenting “bell-ringer” with “Demythologizing the Evangelicals” (Sept. 13).

Stroudwater Baptist Church

Portland, Me.

I have subscribed to CHRISTIANITY TODAY for five years, and this single article is worth the total subscription cost.…

First Baptist Church

Monmouth, Ill.

Dr. Henry’s incisive comments will lead many of us to profound introspection … especially in view of the past failures of racist, tabooist fundamentalism.

Unless I completely overlooked this, … I found no expression of faith … in God’s sovereign providence in assuring that the gates of hell will continue not to prevail against the Church of Jesus Christ. In other words, I am suggesting that an optimism warranted from Scripture is lacking in this outgoing essay.

Church of the Covenant

Nashville, Tenn.

‘Beach’ Degradation

We are deeply grieved by the article “Fundamentalists on the Beach” (News, Sept. 13).… Only three lines say anything favorable.… For your paper to print such an article, and the caricature of Dr. McIntire, is degrading to our Saviour and his cause.

We feel you owe an apology. May God forgive you!

MR. AND MRS. NICK BIEREMA

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Your report of the ICCC Congress rightly stresses the impact made … by Mr. Paisley and his group from the British Isles.… This group represents a fanatic attitude which I have not met in earlier ICCC congresses.

This fanaticism also was demonstrated in … the protest by this group against the WCC at the Uppsala Assembly in July this year. Let me give the following information:

Mr. Paisley and his friends came to Uppsala for this protest without informing me, the representative of the ICCC in Sweden. When they came, I tried to convince them to give up their plan, since such demonstrations are a shame and a scandal in this country. They paid no attention to my objections and had their demonstration. Mr. Paisley walked round outside the WCC meeting hall with the text: “WCC crimes: I was imprisoned for 90 days.” Everybody must understand that this accusation had no basis since the WCC can put nobody in jail. The Swedish Radio asked for my comments on this action, much noted in the press. I had to tell the radio public that I considered the action sheer foolishness. But at the ICCC Congress, the spokesman for this group emphasized this protest as being a great victory!

International Council Vice President of Christian Churches

Uppsala, Sweden

It seems that Richard N. Ostling is to be numbered with those who delight in continually sniping at men of God like the Rev. Ian Paisley.

I am not a member of Mr. Paisley’s church, nor of the ICCC, and know that we would differ on many points of doctrine. For thirty-five years I lived in Ulster and was acquainted with Rev. Paisley and his ministry, and know him to be a humble man of God.…

Why all the criticism of Mr. Paisley? He takes his stand for Christ and speaks out against error. He preaches the old-fashioned Gospel. He lives in a Protestant province, and desires that it should remain Protestant. He refuses to compromise, and will not have fellowship with the unprofitable works of darkness. We need more men like this.

Calgary, Alberta

Reclaiming Art Leadership

Dr. Frank Gaebelein’s article on the arts (Aug. 30) answered brilliantly the schism many Christians feel about the subject. If the church ever reclaims its rightful leadership in the fine arts, it will be because of such influential journals publishing such cogent articles.

Atlanta, Ga.

Keep Trailblazing

I want to congratulate Dr. Lindsell on his new position, and offer my encouragement and prayers that he will continue to keep CHRISTIANITY TODAY blazing the trail for biblical religion. I must say that this magazine has been of great help to me in my Christian walk.

Staatsburg, N. Y.

God has certainly called him to a most strategic opportunity and has wonderfully equipped him to do a good job with it.

Director for North America

Overseas Missionary Fellowship

Philadelphia, Pa.

Smoothing The Eden Path

For a long time, I, a layman, have been reading your magazine, which is obviously intended for ministers. I have noted sometimes with amazement, often with amusement, but always with interest, the problems of the pastors.

One of the problems that seems to keep turning up frequently is the short attendance at church and the lack of interest in the church.… If I interpret correctly the commandment to keep the Sabbath Day holy, God intended that we should lay aside the work of the sweat of the brow and for a little while each week return to Eden and enjoy and glorify him. Some church services make it very difficult to do either. For instance, you come a little early to meditate, and all of a sudden the organist tries to shake the bats out of the pipes with a ninety-decibel blast—not very conducive to meditation.

As to the preaching, I do not doubt that the ministers are very learned. The words they use prove that point. But a great many couldn’t pass a high-school public-speaking course. It seems to me that if they would use tape recorders and polish their sermons and shorten some of [them], everybody would benefit. If a minister wonders if he is one of those who would flunk public speaking, let him record one of his sermons, let it get thirty days stale, then sit down on a wooden box in a room that is too warm and listen. He will know by the end of the sermon if he would pass or not, or his wife would anyway.

One other point is worth considering. The cheapest theater in town has seats that a person could sit in comfortably and give full attention to the show, no matter how horrible. But try to get theater-type seats in a church—my, the howls that you get! They cost money; it would be wasteful; the place wouldn’t look like a church; and other arguments, ad infinitum.… I have long contended that a minister’s chief job is to preach salvation and feed his flock, and if the place did not look exactly like a church, who would care a whole lot? Church furniture, as it exists today, is something right out of the Inquisition, designed by the devil to torture Christians and keep non-Christians away from church.… It is real hard for the mind to absorb more than the seat can endure.

Colorado Springs, Colo.

Much is being written and said these days about the Church in mission and about what God expects of believers as they confront such problems as poverty and racism. Many Christians, hardened by their own affluence, pressed by busy schedules, and even insulated by church programs, drift into a state of indifference or at least inaction in regard to these pressing problems. This has produced a credibility gap between the Gospel of compassion they profess and its application in life. There is a social dimension to the Gospel that no Christian dare ignore, and God wills that the Church, which is Christ’s body on earth today, show the same compassion and concern for the human predicament that characterized Christ’s own ministry.

But God expects more of the Church than social action. As part of Christ’s body every member has a function, though not all parts have the same function. All must face up to one clear expectation that the Apostle Paul sums up in First Thessalonians 4:3: “This is the will of God, that you should be holy” (NEB). The King James Version uses the word “sanctification.”

“Sanctification” is a term that has fallen into disuse in the contemporary Church. The Hebrew word in the Old Testament is qadosh, which conveys the idea of otherness or separateness and was used to describe the holiness of such things as the Ark of the Covenant, the vessels of the Temple, the sabbath, priestly garments, and sacred feasts. Generally speaking it was applied to externals. A broader meaning could be implied in Psalm 96, however: “Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.” The expression “beauty of holiness” may refer to inward character rather than external trappings. If it does, the psalmist here anticipates the New Testament emphasis.

In the New Testament the word translated sanctification is derived from the Greek hagios, which also means otherness or separateness. The basic difference from the Old Testament usage is that in the New Testament the term is applied to men rather than things. Christians are called saints or hagioi, and Paul makes a point of telling the Corinthians, “Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you” (1 Cor. 6:19). In the Old Testament, sacrifice was made to God by the offering of external gifts in the sanctified ritual of the temple; but Paul told the Romans that Christians must sacrifice, not by offering things, but by giving themselves. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Rom. 12:1).

Sanctification, then, has to do with personal holiness. To be sanctified is to be set apart and dedicated to Christ. It is to long for and appropriate to oneself the righteousness of Christ. It is to become a holy vessel fit for his service (2 Tim. 2:21). Sanctification is rooted in the character of God and is made possible for men by the sacrifice of Christ (Eph. 5:26). It is essential to the Christian life, for without holiness we can neither please God nor fulfill his will.

But holiness must not be thought of as the caricature common among many Christians who emphasize sanctification. It does involve otherness or separation unto Christ, but it is neither irrelevant otherworldliness nor a narrow, negative legalism. Withdrawal from the world is not necessarily evidence of holiness; it may only indicate neuroticism. Nor are we holy because we refrain from certain practices—though we may refrain from some things because we are holy. Jesus never feared contamination by the world. He was completely set apart to do his Father’s will, but he associated with sinners and drew the fire of the Pharisees for doing so. After all, they said, a holy man would have no dealings with sinners. The holiness of the Pharisees was external. Christ likened them to “whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness” (Matt. 23:27). The holiness of Christ emphasizes not only the deed but the thought; not only the action but the motive; not only the package but its contents. The holiness God wills for us is principle put into action, faith at work, and love of Christ expressed in daily conduct.

God’s expectation of holiness among his children disturbs many Christians. When they see the contrast between his righteousness and their own imperfection, they wonder how they can ever hope to fulfill his will. Their plight is like that of Charlie Brown in the comic strip “Peanuts,” to whom Lucy says: “Discouraged again, eh, Charlie Brown? You know what your trouble is? The whole trouble with you is that you’re you!” Charlie Brown replies, “Well, what in the world can I do about that?” And Lucy’s answer is, “I don’t pretend to be able to give advice.… I merely point out the trouble!” Sanctification seems beyond the reach of many, an impossible dream, because they are themselves.

But Paul not only points out the trouble with men and reveals that God wants them to be holy; he also declares that believers are holy already by virtue of their faith in Christ. To the Corinthians he said, “but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). His letters are usually addressed to the church in a particular place and then the phrase is added, “called to be saints.” But the verb “to be” is not present in the Greek; this implies that a Christian is in fact already a saint or a holy person. In Hebrews we read of God’s will in the death of Christ and then are told, “We are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.… For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Heb. 10:10, 14).

Sanctification accompanies salvation. If we are saved, we are sanctified. We may not feel or look different, but we are different. The fact comes first, the feeling follows. Mark Twain wrote about a slave who lived in Missouri on a narrow neck of land that jutted out into the Mississippi River. The current ran very swiftly at that point and gradually cut through the neck of land. One night it completely severed it. According to the law, as soon as the land was cut free from Missouri it became part of Illinois. Hence this man who had gone to bed in Missouri awakened in Illinois. But best of all he went to bed a slave and awakened a free man, for Illinois was a free state. This is what God does for us in Christ. We come to him defiled and unclean, but when we claim his salvation we are “made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21).

God’s will for the believer, then, is not so much that he be sanctified as that he live out the sanctification he already has as a result of salvation. When Paul tells us that God wills our sanctification, he means that God wants us to appropriate the gift he has already given. The Westminster Shorter Catechism defines sanctification as “the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.”

It is with the latter part of this definition that we are concerned when we say that God wills that we be sanctified. He wills that we “more and more … die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.” This is similar to Paul’s charge to the Philippians: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling: for it is God which worketh in you …” (Phil. 2:12, 13). If we are saved, we must work our salvation out in life—we must live it! As a musician must express the music within him, and an author express his thoughts in writing, so the Christian must express his salvation in life. This is what sanctification is all about. We grow into the likeness of Christ. We progress in sanctification, not toward it.

The secret of progress is our relationship to Christ. What we cannot do ourselves, we can do through his strength at work in us. There is nothing we cannot do through the strength he supplies. As Paul said, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13). But we must claim the strength. We must present our bodies as living sacrifices and make our life a series of surrenders to him. In the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky near what is called the pulpit rock, there used to be a sign, “Keep close to guide.” That is the secret for Christians who would become like Christ. Paul told the Corinthians, “Bad company ruins good morals” (1 Cor. 15:33, RSV), but the opposite is also true, and it is the crux of sanctification. If we keep company with Christ, we will become like him.

Holiness of life is not ascetic withdrawal from reality. It is practical goodness. It is the necessary corollary of saving faith, for as Paul asked the Corinthians, “What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? what communion hath light with darkness?” (2 Cor. 6:14).

The Church today needs to understand that the world will not take notice of buildings and budgets, plans and programs. It will be challenged by Christlike lives. It does not need institutionalism; it needs Christ. Christians must remember their calling: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9, RSV). This is God’s will for each of us.

“Sheep counting,” wrote Claire Cox, “is an age-old remedy for insomnia, but not when it comes to clergymen. It only serves to keep them awake” (The New Time Religion, p. 25). Not since the Depression have ministers had so much cause for sleepless nights as they have in 1968. Like Little Bo Peep they are wondering where all the sheep are. According to surveys conducted by Dr. Laurus B. Whitman of the National Council of Churches, last year’s gain in church membership was 9 per cent, the lowest figure in three decades. “The churches had better begin to run scared” was Whitman’s interpretation of the facts; “the overall image suggests that the church really has to begin to think of herself in danger.” Protestantism is in an “evangelism crisis.”

This is surprising, because many of the Protestant churches of America developed from evangelistic movements. The Disciples trace their ancestry to the revival preaching of the Campbells; the Methodists originated in the Wesleyan Awakening in Britain and America; the Baptists owe their strength to missionary labor along the American frontier; the Society of Friends emerged through the inspired witness of George Fox; and the Lutherans, Anglicans, and Reformed stem from what was perhaps the mightiest evangelistic movement of modern times, the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

The Reformation was an eminently successful spiritual movement. It started in Europe’s most heavily populated region, the Empire; it swept the large cities and urban areas; it captured the imagination of the young generation; it transformed all aspects of social life; and it resulted in a reformed and renewed Church. There is much for the twentieth-century Church to learn from this evangelistic movement. What, then, would be more appropriate this year than to observe October 31, the anniversary of the Reformation, as an “Evangelism Festival”? This observance could remind us of five factors that caused the Reformation to succeed.

First, the Reformation shows that evangelism begins in a rediscovery of the Gospel. Nearly all the Reformers started their careers with a conversion experience born out of a direct confrontation with Scripture. Luther lingered in doubt over his salvation until he read Romans 1:16, 17. Then he could write that “at this I felt as though I had been born again, and had gone in through open gates into Paradise itself.” Zwingli had a similar experience in 1519, when for months he hovered near death during the Great Plague that swept away nearly one-third of the population of Zürich. Professor Preserved Smith reported that “suffering and the fear of death made the claims of the other world so terribly real to him that for the first time he cried unto God from the depths and consecrated his life to service of his Savior” (The Age of the Reformation, II, 122). In 1533, after reflection upon the Scriptures, John Calvin experienced what he described as a “sudden conversion.” Menno Simons, the patriarch of the Anabaptist movement, recorded how in 1535 his “heart trembled” as he “prayed to God with sighs and tears that he would give to me, a sorrowing sinner, the gift of his grace.…” Through such personal appropriation of the gospel promises, the Reformers were reborn as men with a message for a needy world.

Second, the Reformation reveals that evangelism requires a revival of biblical preaching. The rebirth of preaching was one of the outstanding features of this great spiritual movement. Luther and Calvin restored the sermon to its rightful place in Sunday worship. Luther also replaced the eight daily canonical hours of monastic devotion with matins and vespers observed as preaching services. In Calvin’s Geneva, preaching took place in all the churches every Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and after 1560 there were daily services and sermons. Calvin himself preached daily every other week.

Preaching, though frequent, was quite popular. Luther’s sermons attracted large crowds. In 1522 at Zwickau, more than 25,000 people heard him preach four sermons, one of them from the Rathaus window. When Luther preached in Erfurt, the old Cloister Church was so crowded that a cracking sound was heard in the balconies, and many, fearing the church was about to collapse, began to scramble out the windows. Luther calmed the congregation by assuring them that they heard only the devil playing pranks. William Farel, the fiery red-haired associate of Calvin in the reforming of French-speaking Switzerland, turned whole towns into his church as he preached in the marketplace, at the city gates, and through the streets. John Knox, father of the Church of Scotland, drew enormous congregations as he preached in the open air under what were later named “gospel oaks.” The English preacher Chaderton once spoke for two hours and then decided to stop, fearing he would tire his congregation. Instead the cry arose, “For God’s sake go on! We beg you, go on!” So he preached for another hour.

Sermons, even of three hours’ duration, were well received because they dealt with basic biblical realities. Luther’s sermons followed the Epistle and Gospel selections of the historic church year. Zwingli’s were textual expositions of the New Testament books in sequence. Calvin developed his sermons around the skillful exegesis of biblical texts. By returning to revelation, the Reformers preached sermons that were relevant to man’s eternal problems: sin, fear, death, and guilt. The common people heard them gladly, because in these sermons they found a Word of the Lord that uplifted their hearts.

Third, the Reformation shows the interdependence between evangelism and education. Evangelism and education do not compete with each other but are instead complementary aspects of a total Christian witness.

Through the ages many have felt that there is some incompatibility between Christ and culture, inspiration and intellect, zeal and knowledge, church and school. Back in the third century Tertullian asked what connection there could be between Jerusalem and Athens, and this question has often been present among American evangelicals. Too often they have assumed that good intentions can suffice in the absence of instruction. This assumption has no basis in the history of the Church or the Reformation.

Jesus, the Master Evangelist, was also the world’s greatest Teacher. Paul, who labored more than all others to spread the Gospel in the ancient world, taught the intellectuals on Mars Hill, Athens, and lectured for three years in the School of Tyrannus at Ephesus. The monastic missionary movement of the Middle Ages created academies, and the university was born in the Church. The Great Awakening in colonial America produced schools such as Princeton. Many of the nation’s denominational colleges owe their origin to frontier revivals.

In return, Protestantism was born in the university. Luther became a Protestant as he struggled with the Scriptures while preparing lectures in his tower study. He always linked prayer and study, saying, “Prayer begins the study of Theology, meditation continues it, and experience confirms it.” Protestantism was first taught in the lecture hall and was disseminated by professors and students. Wittenberg University, with such teachers as Luther and Melanchthon, drew students from all Europe. It was so popular that Shakespeare presents Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as a Wittenberg student.

Calvinism gave birth to many universities, including Harvard and Geneva. To Geneva came persecuted Protestants, as John Knox from Scotland, the Marian Exiles from England, and the Huguenots from France, who eventually returned home devout Calvinists. The process of instruction became formalized with the founding of the Geneva Academy by John Calvin and Theodore Beza. From this school educated evangelists went out to Italy, France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles. Its influence cannot be measured.

The Reformers also stressed education for the clergy. Because they taught the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, they could not minimize the importance of a professionally trained corps of ministers. For if every believer was a witness, then the laity needed instruction from well-trained pastors as never before. Luther became more convinced of the need to educate the clergy after the Saxon Visitation of 1529 revealed that some preachers were so religiously illiterate that they were delivering sermons on such topics as how to brew beer. Calvin emphasized education in Geneva by restoring the office of doctor or teacher in the church alongside the roles of pastor, elder, and deacon. Both Zwingli and Calvin delivered “extension course” biblical lectures to the clergy. In the sixteenth century, therefore, education and evangelism worked together to give a positive witness to all Christendom.

Fourth, the Reformation discloses that evangelism must use every available means to spread the Gospel. The Reformers, alert to the communications revolution of their era, made full use of the printing press. Tracts, pamphlets, sermons, Bible translations, hymnals, catechisms, broadsides, and confessional texts flowed from the presses. The recently literate middle class was supplied with suitable spiritual literature. Debate, dialogue, sacred drama, paintings, drawings, and stories were used to spread the message of the Reformation. The Reformers were creative and adventuresome in their witness. Have evangelicals today been good stewards of the fruits of the technological and electronic revolutions?

Finally, the Reformation shows that evangelism means every believer is an evangelist. The Reformation succeeded because it rested on the loyalty and labors of the laity. Philip Melanchthon, author of the fundamental witness of the Lutheran Church, the Augsburg Confession, was a layman. It was laymen—princes and statesmen—who presented that document to Emperor Charles V, prefacing it with a text from Psalm 119, “I will also speak of thy testimonies before kings, and shall not be put to shame.” Calvin was still a young law student when he wrote the first edition of his Institutes. As the Reformation spread, men of widely varied occupations gave their testimony—such men as Hans Sachs, the cobbler-singer of Nuremberg; Nicholas Manuel, the poet of Bern; Albrecht Dürer, the artist; and Gustavus Adolphus, the soldier-king. Thousands across Europe bore witness to their faith. Every Christian became a priest, an ambassador of God to his brother.

Some early Protestants celebrated Reformation Day on the Sunday after Pentecost to follow the birth of the Church with the anniversary of its rebirth. In 1968 we could observe an Evangelism Festival on Reformation Day, to beseech God to give us a revived Church in our century.

An article on the reading of literature by Christians A (that is, the reading by Christians of literature) is odd in that there are certainly no reasons for reading literature peculiar to a Christian’s case. Furthermore, the thing that Christians see to be supremely important about life does not attach itself to culture.

If there are reasons why any human being ought to trouble himself with literature (and by literature I mean humane letters—serious poetry, drama, fiction, essay—and not philosophy, panegyric, tracts, journalism, and rubbish), they apply neither more nor less to a Christian than to anyone else. A Christian is, first of all, a human being. This sounds like heterodoxy at first, perhaps, in that we incline to feel that the call of God to us is away from human existence to a spiritual realm where we will be free of these old evil selves. But that is exactly the point: redemption is the redemption of human nature. It is not God’s will to make us seraphim, or rainbows, or titans. It is men he seeks. Human beings. Beings who will exhibit what he had in mind to begin with—this particular kind of creature, neither angelic nor animal, this excellent thing whose glory would be to choose to love him, and to serve him under the special mode of flesh and blood. Indeed, his supreme unveiling of himself was under that mode. And there is to be no shuffling off of these dragging bodies in the end. The biblical description of the Last Things is of a resurrection—a reunion of flesh and spirit (form and content) from that grotesquery we call death, that obscene disjuncture of flesh and spirit that spoils God’s creature man, and into whose bailiwick the Son of Man ventured, and whose spoliation he spoiled. So that a Christian is wrong to suppose that grace calls him away from human existence. It is precisely to authentic human existence (the kind announced and embodied in Jesus Christ) that he is called, so that he may embody for men and angels the special glory of his species. He is called away from evil, not human existence. It is evil—disobedience, pride, greed, gluttony, perfidy, cynicism, cowardice, niggardliness, and so on—that wrecks human nature, and God calls men to return to the glory first seen in one Adam, then lost, then restored by another Adam.

A Christian, then, is a human being, subject to all the laws (physical, political, moral, psychological) of that species, so that what is good for any man (vitamins, protection, fidelity, calmness) is good for him. The reading of serious literature is good for a man; hence it is good for a Christian.

This raises the other point mentioned in the opening paragraph—that the thing Christians see to be supremely important about life does not attach itself to culture (I mean culture in the humanistic, not the anthropological, sense—a man’s intellectual cultivation, not his tribe). That is, a Christian sees the great and only issue in human life, to be man’s movement toward the perfection of love—what St. Paul called being sanctified, or transformed into the image of Christ. This is the only thing that really matters finally, so that a Christian sees every single thing in life—success, pain, fame, loss, education—as secondary to that. Why, then, it will be asked, are you talking as though literature were something important for a Christian? We’ve got our hands full with this business of sanctification and serving the Lord. We’ve no time for cultchah. We’re people of one Book, and it’s a book that contains all we need to know about life. Don’t siphon us off to primrose byways of poetry and novels. Nobody ever needed that sort of thing to make him holy. You’re not suggesting, are you, that an educated man has a better chance to be holy than an uneducated man? Whom did Jesus call? The philosophers? You have a rather sticky wicket to defend.

It is sticky indeed. These objections are convincing, and there is truth in them—namely, that it is, in the end, irrelevant whether a man is a scholar or a sailor. The City of God will be populated by men who, whatever else they happened to be doing on earth, learned the way of caritas. The credentials asked at the gate will not be books written, kingdoms conquered, or research accomplished. They will be obedience, purity, humility, faith, love. The shepherd, the duke, the housemaid, the tycoon, and the professor will stand, unshod, side by side, clad either in soiled rags or in the one garment of righteousness.

Why then, an article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY crying up the merits of literature? Haven’t you just destroyed your own case? Isn’t it, in fact, irrelevant and maybe even dangerous?

No connection, it seems to me, can be established between culture and holiness. The following comments do not tend toward that idea. Certain rewards come to the man who will read serious literature. If those rewards commend themselves to the Christian’s imagination, good. They are certainly no less applicable to him than to any other man, and they may, like any other equipment (muscle, money, brains), be brought to the service of either altar, God’s or Satan’s.

In the first place we need to be clear about the nature of literature. Literature addresses the imagination, which is the faculty in us that enables us to organize the random tumble of experience into some sort of form and hence to manage it and savor it. Imagination is the source of all ritual. We shake hands, or set the table for breakfast, or lower our voices in a museum, or stand up for a woman: these are ritual formalizings of experience. Imagination is the image-making capacity in us, so that we speak of feeling like a wrung-out dishrag, or of a man’s brow as looking like a thundercloud, or of the Kingdom of Heaven as being like a man planting seeds. And imagination is what makes art possible, because art is the transfiguration of the abstracts of experience (perception, emotion, ideas, and so on) into special forms (marble, melody, words), the idea being, not only that it is legitimate to handle human experience in this way, but, oddly, that in this way something emerges about human experience that is hidden from all the discursive analysis in the world.

There is a sense in which the imagination works in an opposite direction from the analytic faculty in us: it tends always toward concretion (the image), while analysis tends toward abstraction (the dismantling of the thing in question—blood, granite, neurosis). A Christian, of course, would see this tendency as enormously appropriate in a universe whose tendency is also toward concretion. The original creative energy, the Word, uttered itself in rock and soil and water, not in equations. And again, the ultimate utterance of that Word was in the shape of a man. Even the book given by that Word was not mainly expository and analytic but narrative and poetic and parabolic. Indeed, one suspects that the whole post-Baconian methodology (the sort of thing that leads us to think we are saying something more true about the solar system when we speak of gravity and centrifugal force than when we speak of Atlas holding the earth on his shoulders) may be leading us, ironically, away from the way things are. For its tendency is toward depersonalization and abstraction, whereas the Christian understands the original creative energy as moving always toward personhood and concretion.

In any case, literature addresses this imagination in us. It hails us with vivid cases in point of otherwise blurred and cluttered experience. Homer’s heroic handling of jealousy, rage, bravery, cynicism, love, and endurance in the figures of Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Paris, Ulysses; Dante’s cosmic geography of hell, purgatory, and paradise—what modern categories would reduce to abstractions like alienation, discipline, bliss; Shakespeare’s probing of overweening pride in Macbeth, or of jealousy in Othello; Milton’s shaping of the human experience of evil and loss into the Paradise Lost. These are familiar to us. We read them in school. And perhaps we remember a stirring in us, or a brief glimpse of something that arrested us, or even a tidal wave of new awareness of what was at stake in human existence.

The world is full of such works of the imagination, all of them trying to see and utter and shape the human experience. There is Boethius’s lovely De Consolatione, in which philosophy as a lady visits the discouraged man in his prison (Boethius was, in fact, thrown into prison). There are the dark and simple and noble Anglo-Saxon poems, from the huge Beowulf to the winsome Dream of the Rood (spoken by the Cross about its own experience of Christ’s crucifixion), to the sad Deor’s Lament (about the passing of everything dear), to the fragmentary Battle of Maldon. The Middle Ages are full of magnificent dreams and allegories, giving us powerful images of beauty and sin: The Pearl, about a man who lost his little girl and found her in paradise; The Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman, one of the most overpowering allegorical descriptions of society, evil, virtue, and nearly everything else, written in the fourteenth century about that century but true in every point about our own. The sixteenth century produced the greatest drama our language knows (Shakespeare and his contemporaries), as well as unsurpassed lyric beauty in the work of Spenser, Sidney, and again Shakespeare. For someone who is looking for specifically Christian experience in his literature, the seventeenth century is the pot of gold. Virtually every major poet was Christian, and made it his entire poetic business to shape his religious experience into verse: Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, and of course Milton. There were some naughty “cavalier poets” whose amorous verse is really very good, too.

The list could go on, of course, but it would be just that—a list—and would do little good. The point is that our language is full of works of the imagination, each of them uttering something of the human experience of life, each of them throwing some light onto experience, each giving some shape to it all. And for the man who will give himself to the austere luxury of reading it, there is that high guerdon of art, the heightening of consciousness.

By participating in the noble fictions of the human imagination, we enlarge our capacity to apprehend experience. There comes a sense both of the oneness of human experience and of its individuality. The figures of myth and fiction—Ulysses, Beowulf, Roland, Don Quixote—are not cards in a computer, but their experience is a paradigm of all human experience. As a man becomes familiar with the follies, sins, and troubles of the great characters in fiction and drama—Tom Jones, Henry V, Jane Austen’s Emma, George Eliot’s Dorothea, Hardy’s Tess, James’s Isabel, Tolstoy’s Anna—he realizes that here are profound probings by noble minds of the ambiguities of human experience, and his own appreciation of these ambiguities is sharpened.

Along with this heightened consciousness of human experience there comes an awareness of what was at stake in redemption. Minds that have been schooled in humane letters have been those that have often spoken eloquently to us of God: St. Paul, Sir Thomas More, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Pascal, Newman, Mauriac, T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis. There is in them none of the stridence or flatulence that often marks the biblical exposition of men who have brought only their own myopia to the Word of God. (The point here is not that the Holy Ghost does not at his pleasure pick out someone whom scholars would call an ignoramus and through his mouth bring to nothing the wisdom of men. He does. But his freedom to do this has led altogether too many ignoramuses to assume that divine mantle and bleat their foolishness abroad in the name of the Lord; it will not do.)

The reading of serious literature, then, may increase our sense of participating in the human thing. It may enrich our sympathies, sharpen our focus, broaden our awareness, mellow our minds, and ennoble our vision. And it may energize that faculty in us by which we apprehend the world as image (which it is), the imagination.

As the current teaching of history emphasizes, secular factors—indeed, an extraordinary conjunction of mundane circumstances—played a great part in bringing about the Reformation. But all these together fall short of being its principal cause. That event of enormous enlightment, liberation, renewal, cleansing, revivification, and empowering was primarily a spiritual one. And, since it surely is a valid transposition of Christ’s words to say that what is spirit is born of the Spirit, as primarily a spiritual event, the Reformation must have had primarily spiritual causes.

The critical breakthrough of the Reformation lay in its reassertion of the conditions in God and in man that lead to salvation and in its location of the supreme authority for doctrine. God’s part in salvation, the Reformation declared, is on account of grace alone; man’s is through faith alone. The certainty of this, as well as of all other doctrine, it declared to be on the basis of Scripture alone. These classic three sola’s (sola gratia, sola fide sola scriptura) are primarily spiritual assertions. They were addressed to the souls of the age, and in those souls they accomplished the Reformation.

These souls were almost incredibly benighted about evangelical truth, considering that they had the Word and the sacraments. For despite recourse to these, there was virtually no vision of the real Christ. And since the Word was active in Christendom but there was no perception of the real Christ, there was profound distress, deepening in the more serious spirits of the age into an agony of despair. Upon this darkness of unrelieved guilt-consciousness, the proclamation of by grace alone and through faith alone broke as unmitigated high-noon gospel splendor in a way unmatched in any other period of church history. The Apostle Paul said the same things, with originality, full clarity, and the authority of apostleship and inspiration; but apparently the Galatians, when he addressed to them the Epistle that Luther came to love and to expound so well, were so unaware of the hardness of the yoke of legalism that he had to threaten them and almost cajole them into stepping out from under it. While much of the work of the Reformers as well was to persuade men to accept freedom from the Law through Christ, nevertheless in land upon land and in thousands upon thousands of hearts, the effect of the first proclamation of the three sola’s was exactly what Charles Wesley suggests in his exuberant verse,

Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb,

Your loosened tongues employ;

Ye blind, behold your Saviour come;

And leap, ye lame, for joy.

What power to move the souls of men, including those who trace their ecclesiastical lineage through this very movement, does the great message of the Reformation have in our time? Let me put the question another way, though I am aware of the inherent illogic of the formulation: How much Reformation would the three sola’s bring about in 1968?

With the exhaustive use of all the mass media at our command, how much stir would the proclamation of by grace alone make in this our day? Very little, I fear. Who nowadays misses the grace of God? We still have some interest in his “blessing,” in whatever he can do to help us escape frustration and acquire a comfortable security (to use some high-frequency terms of our day). But grace as God’s yearning to forgive sins—how could that possibly be of interest when sin is not a concern? In Reformation and biblical theology, grace stands over against God’s judgment and wrath over sin (and sinners, Psalm 5:5; let’s be done with impunity by abstraction; it is the rebellious will that is the primary evil) and over against eternal destruction, inevitable but for that grace. Only when the sentence is crushing can grace be exciting.

Then how about through faith alone? In the current use of the great terms of the Reformation and of Scripture, faith has almost become, of all things, a work of supererogation. It is a work since it is part of that good management of one’s case whereby one merits success, and it is supererogatory because, according to the universalism of the times, practically all things will in the end work out to the good of absolutely everybody, faith or no faith. But though damnation is out of the question, faith as a dogged confidence in God’s over-arching benevolence, and the basic humanitarianism of the universe is awfully useful in helping one to come calmly and nobly through the rough spots.

In Reformation and biblical theology, salvation on account of grace and salvation through faith imply each other. God’s grace is boundless, and through his giving up of his Son to a God-atoning death on the cross he offers free salvation to all men; but this grace does not effect its end without an appropriate response in man. That response is faith. When the Reformers and Scripture say through faith alone, they say “On pain of death and damnation don’t mix the merit of works with your faith.” But they also say, “On pain of death and damnation, don’t leave out the faith! However beaten and robbed the devil may leave you, don’t let him snatch from you the confidence in God’s promise whereby you lay hold upon forgiveness, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, and full acceptance with the Father! If you draw back, his soul will take no pleasure in you!”

Obviously in any other intention there can be no urgency about getting men to believe, no jealous concern lest, after the acquisition of all the accouterments of Christian virtue, service, and worship, there might still be secretly “an evil heart of unbelief.” “O Galatians, I am afraid of you (lest you trust in the merit of observing a divine ordinance)!” How incomprehensible is this fear to our age! In any other context than the apostolic, by faith alone becomes just another partisan idiosyncrasy by which Christendom is plagued and bored, another of the cantankerous shibboleths that impede the easy run of ecumenism.

If, because of biblical disorientation and the universalism of the age, by grace alone strikes our times as an outcry of an excess of both enthusiasm and modesty, and if by faith alone seems an esoteric specialty of denominational exclusivism, then to assert the third sola, according to Scripture alone, must be like rolling out the equipage of Charles V. Nor is that all. If the other sola’s seem to be of very obscure relevance, this one must seem preposterously inhibiting, and a return to superstition and magic.

A striking indication of the radical shift in religious thought that has occurred since the Reformation is the change in meaning of the phrase according to Scripture alone. Curiously, for the Reformers and for their age, as indeed for virtually the whole of Christendom until a century ago, the phrase could mean no absolute elevation of the Scriptures, for by their universal acceptance as the true and infallible Word of God, they were incapable of further elevation. The phrase denoted rather, in keeping with the proper meaning of the words, the ascription of supreme authority to Scripture exclusively, and that by denigration of all other authority, most immediately that of the doctors and councils of the Church quoted in opposition to the evangelical truth. For this third sola, though logically prior to that of grace and that of faith—since questions of individual doctrines must be settled by the answer to the question of authority for all doctrine—was in point of adoption actually subsequent to the other two. To be sure, as always it was the entrance of the Word that gave light, and the Word that gave light in Luther’s case was particularly that of Habakkuk cited by Paul in Romans 1:17. But the Reformers were as yet unaware of the weight or wideness of divergence of the Church’s interpreting tradition from the evangelical truth. When confronted by this in the course of the debate, notably at Leipzig, Luther, pushed to the edge, took the incredibly courageous leap and came out unequivocally for the scriptural sola.

In our times Scripture and tradition have met together again, only this time they meet not on the level proper to Scripture but on the level proper to tradition, the latter rightly regarded as the fallible human thing that it is. In this situation, the Reformation and scriptural canon, according to the Scriptures alone, can no longer mean the denigration of anything—everything has already been denigrated except men’s thought about God and his Word! What it must now mean is the elevation of Scripture to the position of supreme authority proper to it alone as the true and infallible Word of God.

What a task that is! Luther’s denial of the right of tradition to override the plain and evangelical sense of Scripture and so to appear virtually superior to the very Word of God, his insistence that even the doctors and councils of the Church bow to Scripture—this was an act of gigantic courage, fortitude, and faithfulness. Now how equally great must be the courage and commitment of those who would stand against the glacier-like pressures of our age and contend for an end to that denigration of Scripture which is palpably the key to the uncontemporaneity of Reformation in the Church?

Consider also the degree of revolution that must take place in the modern mind if by grace alone and through faith alone are to be avidly seized again by a whole generation of men as the key to life in God. However dark the pre-Reformation night, what a magnificent capacity for Reformation the times possessed, as the event itself proves. This capacity was derived from a greatly biblical (albeit unevangelical) orientation of the mind, an orientation clearly derived from an extensive hearing of the Scriptures, not as fallible human testimony to God’s revelatory acts, but as God’s very words, written by men under his error-eliminating guidance. Having heard God speak his Law, they were terrified. When in the Reformation God spoke to them of salvation by grace alone and through faith alone, they believed and lived. The irrelevance of the Gospel to the modern mind is evidence of the absence of the preparatory action of the Word in modern hearts.

In deploring this absence of Scripture action upon the hearts of modern men, one must think of how little of God’s Word modern men ever hear, particularly as God’s Word. Nowadays one can travel a whole year visiting the churches and scarcely hear a single word about the sinfulness of sin as rebellion against a God that exacts absolute holiness, or the unforgivableness of unending unrepentance, or atonement by the God-propitiating death of the only-begotten Son. Even when we get orotund, celebrating the “mighty acts of God,” we are awfully weak on specifics. Did Noah ever live? Were the waters of the Red Sea ever separated miraculously? Did a look at the brazen serpent heal anything somatic? No, or we can’t be certain, but God surely acted mightily! We speak a lot about the cross. What did Christ do on the cross? Essentially, but on a grand scale, what you do when you get down into the ghetto. What’s that? You bear a burden. What burden? The burden of inability to live a full humanity. Was it also a substitutionary bearing of the guilt of the whole world, and so the ground for God’s being both just and the justifier of the ungodly man who turns to him in faith? That’s no longer meaningful! Did Christ rise from the dead? He rose again in the realms of faith, but not necessarily in the realm in which he was crucified. A camera might have caught his corpse lying in the tomb on Easter Day, but he rose for you if you believe the Easter story! But don’t you by making the truth of the Gospel dependent on faith invert the Gospel and common-sense order of valid faith—that it comes by hearing true news of great acts? What of it, for this is the new understanding of the Gospel!

We have a long way to go to catch up with pre-Reformation Europe. How lucky Luther was. He fought his battles before the days of trench warfare, when positions were clear and comprehensible.

We may not be inordinately hard on preachers. They reflect their theological training. The bulk of academic theology these days denies that Scripture is in any supernatural sense the Word of God. God could not speak anything unreservedly true through fallible men; or if he could, we cannot know when he succeeded. Pity the limp product of this eisagogical brainwashing and mourn the homiletics it entails! The graduate emerges less inclined and less equipped to say “Thus saith the Lord” than when he was enrolled. Having exchanged the truths of the Bible for the enfeebling and detheologizing theologies of the day, what does he have to say in the pulpits of God? What wonder that the public cannot without much biblical groundwork take in the significance of such words as “grace,” “faith,” and “salvation” in the radically biblical conception?

Again, what a long way we have to go even to acquire a capacity for Reformation!

If, then, our preaching must be biblical, where shall we begin?

Since the age is unresponsive to the pre-eminently evangelical note of the Reformation, it must be readied for the Gospel. The biblical prescription for such preparation is Law. “Through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20). “If it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin” (Rom. 7:7). To preach the Law biblically is, among other things, to represent it as spiritual and unrelenting, as Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount. I have wondered why Northern and Western ecclesiastics happily involved in one way or another in the conversion of Africa do not get up on a chair in Stockholm, New York, or Chicago and denounce the pagan morals of the times. Certainly it takes no unusual acuteness to relate the sixth, the fourth, the seventh, indeed any of the Commandments, including the first, to our society. We know our society; don’t we know the Word? When sin is known for what it is, the issue of salvation or damnation becomes a burning reality, and the Gospel will get a hearing.

Now obviously one’s acceptance of the truths of the Bible is conditioned by one’s estimate of the nature of the Bible. There is therefore an unprecedented scope and need in our day for a vigorous and scholarly apologetic for Scripture. But one’s acceptance of the truths of Scripture is not absolutely conditioned by one’s prior estimate of the nature of Scripture. Scripture has an extraordinary power of self-authentication, and its authority is wonderfully self-assertive. Here in East Africa hunters don’t consult the lion and buffalo to know their estimate of the guns they carry. They just shoot, and they get their game. The Law faithfully proclaimed as God’s Word exerts an unlimited power to break the pride of man and to put him in that distress in which the Gospel becomes the sweetest news in the universe.

In all this, we on the mission fields of the world have, despite the weaknesses of our work, a distinct advantage. On the whole our national preachers believe that what the Bible says is true. This is reflected in their preaching. I have seen national preachers in central China lead scores of their hearers to mourn over their sins, many of them with tears. Now in Tanzania I witness preaching of the same order. In a recent preaching crusade in the Arusha football stadium I heard speaker after speaker—Ugandans, Kenyans, and Tanzanians—preach with fascinating freshness and power, out of the Word and Word-related experience. Assuredly, some of them have great forensic powers. But to a man they accepted the whole of the Bible at face value as unequivocally the Word of God. And the movement in which they are involved is powerful to bring conviction of sin and to effect glorious deliverance by the message of by grace alone and through faith alone.

The spirit of the Reformation is not absent from our planet. Oh, that the wind of 1517 might blow with power in 1968!