At 3:13 A.M. (EDT) today the summer of 1968 begins. Longstanding predictions say it will be “long, hot”—euphemisms for riotous, bloody.

Racial discussion in the American and Southern Baptist Conventions took the spotlight the first week of June (see page 39), but the same topic was prominent in the councils of most Protestant groups. Black caucuses formed within many.

The National Council of Churches had already urged its churches to replace regular Sunday-school classes with study of the urban crisis. Some 200 black militants and community organizers joined churchmen at a closed meeting in Washington, D. C., to set up a “communications network” for the summer.

In New York, church and community agencies quietly formed an Urban Crisis Task Force to help Mayor Lindsay in case of riots. In riot-scarred Detroit, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese began a $1.5 million fund-raising drive, with most of it to go to urban ills. The church council in Portland, Oregon, decided to find at least 1,000 jobs for Negroes.

Here is a sampling of what the denominations are doing:

United Methodist Church—Last month the national division of the mission board allocated $680,000 for ecumenical, UMC, and community groups dealing with racial and poverty problems. $400,000 of the total wiped out a fund that had been put aside for such an “emergency.” The mission board has also set aside a $3 million fund for loans to ghetto enterprises, with the first $100,000 loan going to a Pittsburgh housing project.

Information packets keyed to the NCC’s urban-crisis program went out last month, but the Methodists have developed a more distinct educational effort. They are producing a nightly telephone talk show on racial issues over a network of two dozen radio stations. Host of “Night Call” is Del Shields, head of the Negro announcers’ association. The guest on the first program June 3 was Poor People’s campaigner Ralph Abernathy.

Episcopal Church—Twenty-seven grants to community organizations May 21 raised the total of gifts this year above $500,000. Projects must be efforts to develop power for the poor, rather than just services, and the money is given with no strings attached. In addition, the denomination has given $200,000 to a national community-organization group, with $500,000 more on its way. Earlier this year, $50,000 was set aside for emergency grants to local Episcopal efforts.

United Presbyterian—A new Council on Church and Race led by the Rev. Edler Hawkins will preside over race and poverty efforts, which got major attention at last month’s national assembly (see previous issue, page 39).

Presbyterian Church, U. S.—The Southern denomination’s education board, following the NCC suggestion, is urging all churches to replace regular Sunday-school curricula with an eight-week course whose materials include the Kerner Commission report.

American Lutheran Church—The educational drive led by new urban-crisis executive H. ManfordKnudsvig to “rout out racism” among church members was to climax with congregational meetings and sermons this month.

Christian Churches (Disciples)—The denomination is seeking to raise $2 million in the next two years to meet urban problems; the project will be directed by a new five-member steering committee. At its August convention, the Negro convention within the Disciples is expected to plead that most of this money be channeled through black congregations.

Seventh-day Adventists—A spring council meeting voted a $100,000 emergency fund for the denomination’s educational, welfare, and evangelistic efforts in the inner city this summer. Funds will go on a matching basis to local conferences.

MISCELLANY

The government of Israel has agreed to pay for damage to all Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Roman Catholic church property in the 1948 and 1967 wars—whether Israel or Jordan did the damage. The amount of compensation will be fixed later by a panel of experts, Religious News Service reported. The representative of Vatican property rights in the Holy Land, the Franciscan Custody, will give the government two acres of land along the old city wall as part of a parks and beautification program.

Five American missionaries taken by the Viet Cong are reliably reported to be alive and in reasonably good health. Three of them have been in Viet Cong hands for six years. The other two were seized early this year.

The Church of God with headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee, dedicated a new office building last month. The lobby of the four-story structure features a mural of Venetian mosaic tile portraying the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.

A new association of evangelical nationals and missionaries was formed in Japan at a meeting April 29 in Tokyo. Known as the Japan Evangelical Association, the group is said to embrace about 1,000 churches and pastors and more than 800 missionaries. Leaders hope for stepped-up cooperation aimed at church growth.

The largest “faith promise offering” in the history of Toronto’s Peoples Church, $341,504.84, climaxed the church’s fortieth annual world-missions conference. Park Street Church, Boston, which conducts a similar conference, reported $293,531.04 this year.

Seven hundred persons professed faith in Christ in three stadium rallies that concluded American evangelist John Haggai’s campaign in Djakarta, Indonesia. Final night attendance was 8,000.

A Franciscan custodian complained that an improvised service held by some 300 Pentecostal pilgrims in the Cenacle or Upper Room on Mount Zion “did not seem to be quite kosher.” The service, held on Pentecost Sunday, included songs and prayers in a number of languages. A protest was expected to be lodged with the government.

Two groups that have been seeking to influence the American ecclesiastical scene announced their dissolution last month. One was the Fellowship of Concern, an organization of liberal Southern Presbyterians begun in 1963. The other was the six-year-old National Committee of Christian Laymen, a conservative, interdenominational group with offices in Phoenix, Arizona.

The National Council of Churches is temporarily suspending several of its publications and replacing them with a weekly newspaper called Approach, which is to be devoted exclusively to information about the urban crisis. The consolidated publication will be put out jointly with the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.

New York Mayor John Lindsay came under fire for recommending elimination of 47 of the 129 chaplains employed by the city. New York is the only major American city with paid fire, police, and sanitation chaplains. Their average salary is $5,000 a year.

The Upland School of Social Change at Crozer Theological Seminary is being renamed after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King is a graduate of the seminary, an American Baptist institution in Chester, Pennsylvania.

A campaign is under way to raise $800,000 to endow a program in black-church studies at Colgate Rochester Divinity School.

Funeral services were held at Washington Cathedral for Helen Keller on June Miss Keller, 87, one of the world’s most admired women because of the way she overcame both blindness and deafness, was a Swedenborgian. Her ashes were interred in the columbarium of the Cathedral beside her friend and teacher, Mrs. Anne Sullivan Macy.

William H. Crook, 44, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, was named U. S. ambassador to Australia. He is a graduate of Baylor University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and also took graduate work in Edinburgh. He has been working in antipoverty and VISTA programs.

Deaths

DANIEL L. MARSH, 88, Methodist churchman who was a former president and chancelor of Boston University; in St. Petersburg, Florida.

WARNER SALLMAN, 76, artist whose Head of Christ painting was reproduced more than 100 million times; in Chicago.

VICTOR E. CORY, 74, who founded Scripture Press, independent evangelical publisher of church educational materials; in Wheaton, Illinois.

PERSONALIA

Dr. John C. Bennett says he will retire in 1970 from the presidency of Union Theological Seminary, New York. Bennett, who has headed the school since 1964, will be 68 in July of 1970.

Dr. Thomas J. J. Altizer, around whose death-of-God theology a storm raged, is leaving Emory University (Methodist) to become a professor of English literature at the University of New York at Stony Brook.

Actor-clergyman R. Gary Heikkila was elected president of the Finnish Congregational Mission Conference of America.

G. M. Kuitert is succeeding the noted European evangelical theologian G. C. Berkouwer at the Free University of Amsterdam. Berkouwer is going into semi-retirement.

Dr. Bernhard W. Anderson, former dean of the School of Theology at Drew University, will become professor of Old Testament theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a Methodist clergyman. Princeton is also adding a Lutheran to its faculty: Dr. Karlfried Froehlich, a layman who has also taught at Drew.

Dr. Wendell G. Johnston has been named president of Detroit Bible College.

The Rev. Frederik Herman Kaan was appointed chief executive officer of the International Congregational Council.

Government officials in the nation’s capital called upon a member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to mediate a labor dispute. He is the Very Rev. Msgr. George G. Higgins. The dispute centers on the refusal of Washington bus drivers to carry change money at night because of numerous holdups. One driver was recently shot to death.

Evangelist Jack Wyrtzen attracted a total attendance of more than 30,000 for six rallies in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Crusade sponsors reported 794 recorded decisions for Christ.

HenrykCiszek, 51, a Pennsylvania-born evangelist of the Churches of Christ, was indicted in a Warsaw court last month on charges of illegally organizing churches and spreading slander against the government. The slander accusations grew out of a tape recording about alleged discrimination against Christians. Ciszek was said to be planning to take the tape to North America.

The Rev. Franklin Clark Fry had a busy June and July ahead of him. Early this month he was to receive his thirty-third and thirty-fourth honorary doctorates. Then on to Atlanta June 19–27 for the biennial meeting of the Lutheran Church in America, of which he was president. He would then spend most of next month as outgoing chairman of the Central Committee at the key assembly of the World Council of Churches.

On May 20, the 67-year-old churchman abruptly ended his speech to the Michigan Synod meeting, returned to New Rochelle, New York, and entered the hospital, where he was reported to be “gravely ill” of an unspecified ailment. A week and a half later, the LCA issued a statement in which Fry resigned as president of the denomination because “my own prospects are not sanguine.” He died June 6—of cancer.

Fry was America’s best-known Lutheran churchman. The church he headed is North America’s largest Lutheran body, with some 3,288,000 members.

He was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the son and grandson of prominent Lutherans. He himself left a son who is a clergyman, the Rev. Franklin Drewes Fry, pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in York, Pennsylvania. Another son, Robert C., is a business developer in Pleasantville, New York.

By coincidence, Fry’s speech at the Michigan Synod was delivered in Trinity Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the Rev. Richard I. Preis, the husband of Fry’s daughter, Connie, is pastor.

Fry graduated from Hamilton College and the Lutheran seminary in Philadelphia. He was a pastor in Akron in 1944 when he was elected president of the United Lutheran Church. Fry continued as president when the ULC merged with three other bodies into the Lutheran Church in America in 1962. In his last major public appearance, Fry did one of the Scripture readings at the nationally televised Morehouse College service for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as the representative of the WCC.

A lifelong Democrat, Fry had been a political liberal. He was known, however, to have been deeply disturbed over the revolutionary drift of both the World Council and the National Council of Churches. He skipped meetings of the NCC General Board in protest of leftist trends and wrote letters to NCC officials questioning their granting of free office space to Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam.

Fry specified that a successor be chosen at this month’s convention to fill out the unexpired two years of his final term as president. The number-two man at LCA headquarters is Secretary Malvin Lundeen, who was president of the Swedish-background Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church, the second largest body to become part of the LCA. But Lundeen is now 66, and the convention might prefer a younger man. Since Fry was from the ULC, the convention might favor another former Augustana figure. A possible choice from the former ULC ranks is the Rev. Robert J. Marshall, president of the Illinois Synod and former Old Testament professor at the Lutheran seminary in Maywood, Illinois.

THE CHURCH FOR GUERRILLAS?

Missionaries must be free to support guerrilla movements because they are often “the only humanizing force in developing countries,” according to a United Presbyterian official.

The Rev. Ralph Chandler, secretary of international affairs for the denomination, was quoted by Religious News Service as saying that “naturally, as Christians we prefer non-violence, but violence is already part of the established order in these countries. It is the institutionalized violence of starvation and illiteracy inflicted on most of the population.”

Chandler, 34, formerly with Naval Intelligence and a foreign-service officer with the State Department, recently spent several days with guerrilla forces in Guatemala.

“We need a new kind of missionary, one who is enough aware of the institutionalized violence in these countries to want to become active in changing existing structures—by whatever means necessary. In some countries that means guerrilla uprisings,” he said.

SOLIDARITY DAY

Church people, answering a nationwide call, added their support to the Poor People’s Solidarity Day march scheduled for this week. The National Council of Churches urged representatives of religious groups to “illustrate by their physical presence in Washington support for the goals of the Poor People’s Campaign.” The plea came in response to march coordinator Bayard Rustin’s “Call to Americans of Good Will.”

Within a few days of the NCC call, church people around the country indicated their interest in participating. Mass mailings to church councils, denominations, and individuals elicited further response. The death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy added a new dimension to the concern, but legislation pending in Congress threatened to evict Resurrection City residents.

Participants were “limited to those who support the concepts of integration, democracy, and non-violence,” said Dr. Charles S. Spivey, director of the NCC’s social-justice department. Marchers were asked to supply their own transportation, food, and bedrolls. Church groups were to be permitted to carry identifying banners, though political groups were barred from displaying slogans.

NCC officials hoped for greater response than that for Selma or the 1963 March that brought 250,000 supporters to Washington. But Mr. Rustin, who also organized that march, predicted, “If we get 100,000 on June 19, it will be a howling success.” The civil-rights worker cited a potential drawback in addition to the short planning time: “In 1963 we were asking people to march for dignity. Now we are asking them to march for jobs that will cost the nation billions of dollars.”

This march is more serious than the one in 1963, said an NCC official who came to Washington for the campaign. He felt it might be the nation’s last chance for a creative, nonviolent solution to its problems.

Throughout the campaign the NCC maintained direct contact with Resurrection City. A shelter there housed an office and its staff members, volunteers from the Church of the Brethren who had committed themselves to go to jail if necessary.

EVANGELICAL ‘EXPOSURE’ ON RACE

True or false: the black race has had to serve the white race because of the Lord’s curse on Ham. White and black evangelicals met at the University of Chicago with black militants the last week in May to confront this question (answer: false) and others more immediate.

Roosevelt University political scientist Charles Hamilton, co-author with Stokely Carmichael of Black Power, said, “A society which has been color-conscious all its life to the detriment of blacks cannot simply become colorblind and expect the blacks to compete with an equal chance for success.” One black discussion leader said whites have to forget “the myth that Jesus Christ was white.”

The white participants—professors, students, businessmen, professionals, housewives—were cautioned not to “run out and do something.” Racial attitudes are more deeply rooted than even “aware” evangelicals realize; some were more interested in “the Negro problem” than in the problems of Negroes.

White participants suggested two action steps: admit that racism in America is a moral issue, and use white churches as places for the races to get together.

The conference of 134 Chicago area participants, called “Double Exposure on Race,” used effective audio-visual and group-involvement techniques. It was produced by an informal group called “Conversations on the City,” a dozen Christians, black and white, who are seeking ways to fulfill their urban responsibilities.

FRED PEARSON

COFFIN’S COUNSEL

Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., sandwiched two baccalaureate sermons into his busy and well-publicized draft-subversion trial in Boston. One was an impromptu speech to thirty Wellesley College seniors in the courtroom corridor. Unable to travel to Wellesley, Coffin made use of a recess to speak to the girls, who traipsed in dressed in cap and gown.

For the other, Coffin travelled south to address Princeton Theological Seminary graduates on a Sunday afternoon. Coffin—accused of preaching moving sermons to induce young men to turn in or burn their draft cards—counseled the ministers-to-be non-controversially: “Be aflame with faith and free.”

Coffin, baby doctor Benjamin Spock, and three others are charged with conspiracy to counsel, aid, and abet young men to avoid military service. Coffin admitted goading the government into prosecuting him but denied any conspiracy. The landmark case is considered a test of the outer limits of anti-war protest.

A four-page publicity release on Coffin and Presiding Episcopal Bishop John E. Hines, Princeton Seminary’s commencement speaker, gave extensive background on Pilgrim descendent Coffin, once an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, but nary a word about the trial. Seminary President James I. McCord introduced Coffin as the “voice of conscience” on race and Viet Nam, mentioned the trial, but said it would be “inappropriate” to comment while it’s in progress.

Coffin, handy with witticisms, evoked laughter when he quipped: “What do you do when the world, instead of being civilized, is being Los Angelized?¹Coffin delivered his speech three days before Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angels. One answer is to become a Presbyterian minister.” He charged the class to “act as men of God” and said that the Church today is less pressed on the intellectual than on the ethical front. “People don’t find fault with Christ, but with Christians.” In his opinion, only a “small but passionate remnant” is able to “translate personal problems into social action.”

The war critic closed with a quotation from Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: “May God deny you peace but give you glory,” the same benediction he pronounced at the abbreviated courthouse baccalaureate.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

PRIEST GETS 6 YEARS

Josephite Father Philip Berrigan was sentenced to six years in federal prison last month for pouring blood on Baltimore draft files. Fellow defendant James L. Mengel, a United Church of Christ clergyman, was given a “technical term” pending a three-month study of the case.

A week before the sentence, Berrigan was arrested after he and eight companions seized more than 600 files at a suburban Baltimore draft office and burned them in a nearby parking lot with “homemade napalm.”

Baltimore’s Lawrence Cardinal She-han, who said he had kept silence to avoid prejudicing the ruling, said, “I cannot condone and do not condone the damaging of property or the intimidation of government employees.” He favored free speech and protest by clergymen short of property damage.

Adopting Babies: An Evangelical Medium

The two-year-old son of a New York family sang his favorite chorus for a visitor and quoted a verse he had learned in Sunday school. The scene would not be unusual except that this child was the first placed for adoption by Evangelical Family Service, Inc.

His story recurs throughout the files of the agency, itself little more than two years old. Evangelical Family Service was the dream of a group of Christian lay people who saw the need for a professional social-service agency with statewide operation and an evangelical commitment. Last year, New York State approved the agency for permanent status. Similar evangelical agencies operate in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California as arms of city rescue missions and other local evangelistic works.

EFS places children only in homes where both husband and wife indicate their personal Christian commitment. So far, the agency has been able to place all the children available to it and to find children for all the couples who qualify.

One couple, a little older than most adoptive parents, received a four-year-old girl who had never been to church. Before adoption proceedings were completed, the child was saying grace at family meals and had become an enthusiastic member of a Sunday-school class.

“The most satisfying experience of this pioneer venture,” says Miss Rachel Braker, who heads the agency’s social work, “has been to go into homes where little children freely sing and talk about their love for Jesus. We know they probably would never have learned about him if they had not been placed into Christian homes.”

Most of the babies placed by EFS are born to unwed mothers, many of whom came to EFS for aid. Often the girls are from evangelical environments and while they live in foster homes renew their Christian commitment. Others have made first-time decisions. Those who release their babies for adoption often are pleased to know that the child will have a Christian family.

In addition to serving unwed mothers and adoptive parents, EFS counsels couples, families, and individuals who wish professional help. Miss Braker does much of the counseling herself, though at times the volume of requests or type of need requires reinforcements.

She and the agency’s director, the Rev. L. J. Isch, Jr., look forward to establishing branches of the Syracuse office in New York City, Albany, and Buffalo and to setting up similar state-approved agencies across the country.

THE DURABLE MR. MANNING

Ernest C. Manning last month celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as Premier of Alberta, Canada. On week days, the 59-year-old politician governs his province and leads the Social Credit Party. On Sundays he dons the hat of evangelist for Canada’s “Back to the Bible Hour” radio broadcast.

Manning’s government career began when at age 26 he became the youngest cabinet minister in British parliamentary history. In 1935, with William (“Bible Bill”) Aberhart, his mentor from Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute and “Back to the Bible Hour” director, he founded the Social Credit Party. In its thirty-three-year history the party has never lost an election, though its national significance is limited.

CHANGE AT ‘CHRISTIAN CENTURY’

When the Rev. Dr. Alan Geyer’s first book came out five years ago, the Christian Century didn’t even review it. Now the 37-year-old social scientist has been named editor of the magazine.

Geyer’s book criticized such major Century crusades as its support of the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1929, which “outlawed” warfare, and its hands-off attitude toward the European war in the late 1930s. Geyer rejects the ecumenical weekly’s historic pacifism, favoring the “political realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr, who started his own magazine in 1941 to counteract the Century.

Geyer, currently the international-relations director for the United Church of Christ’s Council for Christian Social Action, takes his new post September 1. The title will be shared with the Rev. Kyle Haselden, Century editor since 1964, who spent four months in the hospital after a December brain operation and faces a long recuperation.

When he was in high school, Geyer worked part-time for the Newton, New Jersey, weekly Herald. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in sociology at Ohio Wesleyan, then earned an S.T.B. and a Ph.D. in Christian ethics at Boston University. He has been pastor of inner-city Methodist parishes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Newark, New Jersey, and spent five years as political-science chairman at Virginia’s Mary Baldwin College, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. He is married and has four children.

Geyer will serve as an international-relations advisor at next month’s assembly of the World Council of Churches. He read the manuscript of Paul Ramsey’s Who Speaks for the Church? before publication and shares Ramsey’s criticism that WCC social pronouncements are often “rather heedless of considerations of competence and technical issues.” But he thinks that things are improving and that Ramsey’s plea for more general ethical statements would make them “too irrelevant and abstract.”

In fact, Geyer’s book Piety and Politics urges establishment of a cadre of church experts in Washington to advise the government on foreign policy, and advocates more attention to the field in church and seminary curricula.

As an international expert in an era of domestic turmoil, Geyer is “disturbed” at the “neo-isolationism” of activists who forget that poverty exists outside the boundaries of the United States. He favors a “reordering of priorities to satisfy the minimum demands of black justice” through politics and economics. He had “no comment” on whether the Century would endorse a presidential candidate this year. Previous involvement in politics threatened the journal’s tax exemption in 1964.

Unlike Wayne Morse and others, Geyer was not against U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia at first, but he has come to oppose the war policy during the last three years. If the Paris talks break down, he said, “further initiative rests with the United States,” such as more cuts or an end to bombing.

In theology, Geyer said he has been influenced both by the liberalism of his Ph.D. mentor, Dr. Walter Muelder, and by the “Christian realism” of Niebuhr and John C. Bennett. He offered no opinion on the new morality, saying he has been immersed in foreign-policy discussion in recent years and is not up on ethical literature and discussion.

In a January Century article, Geyer spoke of “a dying Christianity.” What he meant, he explained last month, was the decline of churchianity, in which Protestantism was a majority religion. Thus he hopes for “a kind of death that precedes the resurrection of a new Church.”

Geyer thinks CHRISTIANITY TODAY “has helped to relieve the parochialism” of conservative Protestants and is “a welcome participant in the dialogue.” But he doesn’t like the “cult of personality” around Billy Graham and thinks he draws energies away from “the issues which matter the most to me—domestic justice and international order.” In a sociological word, he calls Graham’s evangelism “disfunctional.”

FIGHTING FUNDAMENTALISTS

Things are cooking again at Pillsbury College. When President B. Myron Ce-darholm recently demanded more power, trustees of the fundamentalist Minnesota school not only refused but also reversed his decisions in some student discipline cases referred to them by irate parents. Cedarholm quit, pleaded his case in a chapel and a faculty meeting, and fired off a letter to the constituency. Eight of the twenty-seven teachers resigned. Others asked the board for reconciliation, but it refused to listen. More resignations are expected.

“This is a board-controlled school,” insists board Chairman Richard Clear-waters, pastor of, Minneapolis Fourth Baptist Church and key figure in the 100-church independent Minnesota Baptist Convention, which operates Pillsbury.

During the school’s eleven-year history, the board has ridden out such storms as resignation of the entire faculty when President Monroe Parker was forced out three years ago. Some observers fear a split in ranks will affect payment of the school’s $1,500,000 debt. Cedarholm is trying to raise money to start a new college on the campus of a former Roman Catholic academy in Watertown, Wisconsin.

One thing is clear: The 700 troubled students do not run Pillsbury. Student government is banned, as is dissent. “If a student expresses himself contrary to administration opinion,” says Cedarholm, “we expel him. This way we have no demonstrations or riots.” Students inclined to question policy are told “to go off somewhere and pray.” Despite such strict rules, enrollment has doubled under Cedarholm.

“Maybe,” reflected one student, “the administration and board ought to go off somewhere and pray.”

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

SANCTIFIED OR SALACIOUS?

Two prominent Protestant clergymen testified on opposite sides in a legal case involving the Swedish film I Am Curious—Yellow. A federal jury ruled it obscene after it was seized by U. S. customs.

The Rev. Howard Moody of the avant-garde Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village appeared as a witness for Grove Press, which had acquired the film for distribution in the United States. Dr. Dan Potter, executive director of the Protestant Council of the City of New York, appeared as a rebuttal witness for the prosecution.

Potter was asked if he found the movie “sanctified” in a religious perspective. “The most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” he replied.

Lawrence W. Schilling, an assistant U. S. attorney who was prosecutor, said the film was “a series of bizarre sexual episodes, designed to shock, and linked together by what can charitably be described as a soap opera.”

A GESTURE FOR UNITY

The Rev. Dr. William Fitch of Toronto, under “great pressure,” reversed his earlier decision not to accept the presidency of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

Fitch had been elected to the post after delegates rejected a nominating-committee choice at the recent national meeting, which Fitch did not attend (see April 26 issue, page 44). In the ensuing ill will, Fitch, pastor of Knox Presbyterian Church, declined the office.

But he has changed his mind, he told the Toronto Star, because Canadian evangelicals need a strong, united voice which he hopes the EFC can provide. Fitch has one of the keenest minds among Canadian evangelicals and doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind on controversial issues.

Ancient animosity with religious roots flared anew this month in the brutal assassination of one of America’s most admired citizens, Robert F. Kennedy. Aside from the sheer horror of the deed, there was particular significance in the identity of the assailant, the motive, and the timing.

It happened in the city named for the angels, and it vividly recalled the eleventh-century secret order of Muslims known as the Assassins (from hashishin, a taker of hashish). The Assassins terrorized eleventh-century Christian Crusaders and other enemies while under the influence of hashish, a narcotic derived from hemp.

The history is relevant because a suspect in Kennedy’s killing was identified as a pro-Communist Arab, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, born in Jerusalem and apparently bent on revenge for the war in which his native Holy City passed from Jordanian to Jewish hands. The assassination occurred on the first anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Notes said to be Sirhan’s reportedly spoke of the “necessity” of slaying Kennedy by June 5, 1968. Kennedy, the junior U. S. Senator from New York, where most American Jews live, had expressed support of Israel, most recently in a nationally-televised debate with Senator Eugene J. McCarthy three days before the shooting.

Sirhan was brought up in a Greek Orthodox family and attended a Lutheran grade school in Jerusalem. He was brought to the United States shortly after the Suez crisis of 1956.

Kennedy died in a Los Angeles hospital named for the Good Samaritan, the rescuer described by Christ who took pity upon a victim of thieves on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. Kennedy had aspired to be an American president—the second Roman Catholic to hold that office and at 42 the nation’s youngest chief executive. Instead, he suffered with his late brother, the first Roman Catholic president, the fate of an assassin’s bullet.

Like the accused assassin of President Kennedy, Sirhan, now 24, comes from a broken home. He lived in Pasadena with his mother, Mrs. Mary Sirhan, who has been employed as housekeeper in a nursery of Westminster Presbyterian Church. Mrs. Sirhan also attended the church a few times and lately had also visited a Seventh-day Adventist church. The Rev. Warren C. McClain of Westminster described her as “a deeply religious woman,” quiet and unobtrusive. He knew she and the family had been devotees of the Greek Orthodox faith when they lived in Jordan.

The First Baptist Church of Pasadena sponsored two of the Sirhan boys’ immigration to the United States. They joined the church and for a time attended with their mother and sister. During that time, the Rev. Charles R. Bell, Jr., was “closely identified” with the family, counseling them and helping one of the boys find a job. Bell was not well acquainted with Sirhan and knew of no religious affiliation for him.

Arab-Israeli tensions stem from the time of Abraham, whom both nationalities claim as a patriarch. Mohammed taught that Ishmael, the child born to Abraham and Hagar, was heir to God’s promise to make of Abraham “a great nation” (Gen. 12:2) with descendants “as the stars of heaven and the sand which is on the seashore” (Gen. 22:7), The Israelites, Mohammed claimed, had stolen the promise for their ancestor Isaac. The Koran records the Old Testament story of Isaac’s mother, Sarah, sending Hagar and her child into a desert. But it does not add that God had specifically promised the blessing to the son of Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 17:15, 16). Israel has been claiming the heritage as Jews move into Palestine, but in the process millions of Arabs have been left homeless.

News of the Kennedy shooting broke in on a number of important religious meetings. In Houston, 14,000 messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention stood in prayer for the stricken Senator. While he was still alive they sent a telegram to Mrs. Kennedy, expressing sympathy and hope for recovery.

In New York, a meeting of the National Council of Churches General Board opened on the morning Kennedy died. Baptist executive Edwin H. Tuller read from Exodus 20; Matthew 5, and Psalm 103, then prayed, “We lift unto thee the family of this man who has been a leader among us and has devoted himself to what he has felt best for our country.”

Churchmen from all over the world issued statements of compassion for the bereaved family and expression of concern for law and order. Evangelist Billy Graham said he learned of the tragedy when a friend called him at four in the morning. Graham said he then spent several hours in meditation and prayer.

“I don’t weep often,” the evangelist declared, “but today in this beautiful sunshine I wept … for the country that has declined so much in its morality and spirituality.” Graham said the Kennedy shooting “is symbolic of what is happening throughout the country and much of the world.” He voiced reluctance toward gun-control laws, however, despite many threats he has faced to his own life.

General Secretary Eugene Carson Blake of the World Council of Churches said the recurring assassinations demand “a new beginning of and a new commitment to civil justice and civil order.”

In Washington, President Johnson set aside Sunday, June 9, as a special day of prayer and national mourning. In Los Angeles, police who at first said the shooting appeared to be the work of a single individual subsequently announced they were looking for a possible woman accomplice.

CLEAVAGES IN A.B.C.

Race, the hydra-headed dominant theme of church agendas this year, unexpectedly posed a major crisis for the racially liberal American Baptist Convention at its annual meeting in Boston.

The “Black American Baptist Churchmen,” a newly formed group led by Seattle pastor Samuel McKinney and sparked by Virgil Woods, a radical firebrand from Boston, delivered a list of twelve “demands” to a preconvention session of the policy-pacing ABC General Council. Demands included: BABC clearance of ABC appointments and staff hiring; more scholarships for black students; 10 per cent of ABC investments for underwriting black business development; “complete overhaul” of the ABC monthly newspaper Crusader (editor Paul Allen was denounced for alleged anti-black “antagonism”); and a black ABC president. The BABC threatened to disrupt the convention by unleashing Boston militants “on standby alert” if the council did not “immediately affirm” the demands.

The council was granted twenty-four hours to hammer out a “response” of accessions, compromises, and referrals, which were termed “satisfactory” next day by the BABC. Major agreements: BABC “observer consultants” will assist nominating committees; a new post of associate general secretary will be created and will be filled by a black; ABC communications media will be reviewed “with a view to eradicating any lingering vestiges of racism in any of its forms”; ABC boards and agencies will be “urged” to hire blacks and to provide more funds for black self-help use. In addition, Mrs. A. A. Banks, Detroit teacher-author and ABC first vice-president, a Negro, will be in line for the presidency of the 1.5-million-member denomination next year.

Some delegates, uninformed except by newspaper accounts, charged the council with a “sell-out to power-bloc scare tactics.” The Rev. John Paul Pro, speaking for the ad hoc “American Baptists Concerned for Democratic Processes,” rebuked the council’s bypass of delegate approval. But ABC General Secretary Edwin H. Tuller insisted the council “had a right to do what it did; there were risks in acting but greater risks in not acting.”

(Tuller told CHRISTIANITY TODAY that most of the council’s moves were previously “in the works” and that the BABC pressure only helped speed their implementation, a promptness that saved the ABC from “serious disturbances.”

Southern Christian Leadership Conference chief Ralph D. Abernathy flew in from Resurrection City in Washington to address delegates and lend support to the BABC. Their cause was also backed by some two hundred dissident students led by Andover Newton seminarian Terry Smith, who complained that youth were excluded from participation in ABC decision-making. He asked that the ABC “reorder its priorities along the issues of war, race, and poverty.” Woods and Smith attempted unsuccessfully to have ABC presidential nominee Culbert G. Rutenber, Andover Newton Theological School professor, decline the nomination in favor of Dr. Thomas Kilgore of Los Angeles, who later also refused to participate in the Woods-Smith plan to create a black-versus-white floor confrontation.

Philadelphia Negro pastor and civil-rights leader Leon Sullivan urged creation of a million-dollar ABC “crisis fund” for blacks, a call later put forth in an amendment but voted down—along with proposed ABC endorsement of the Poor People’s Campaign—by maverick-minded delegates.

The race issue overshadowed other significant action. Continuing controversy over ABC evangelism tendencies flared into the open during council sessions. A long-awaited report of the “Special Study Committee on Evangelism” recommended that “constituents recognize our American Baptist pluralism of theology and methodology” and that the American Baptist Home Mission Societies “consider making structural changes which will demonstrate American Baptist concern for enlisting and conserving the individual person in a redemptive relationship with Jesus Christ and for building up the local church.” Former ABC President Carl Tiller said he “deplored” the ABHMS evangelism staff’s “seeming inability to recognize our pluralism,” and he censured the unliberal attitude at this point of ABC evangelism head Jitsuo Morikawa. Outgoing ABC president L. Doward McBain, a Phoenix pastor, reported that “the rank and file are further to the right than most of our leaders” and that “the evangelism problem demonstrates a sharp cleavage between the majority of the people and the emphasis of our national program.” ABHMS executive William H. Rhoades replied that committee findings were in accordance with ABHMS trends, that no ABHMS action was ever contrary to ABC policy, and that a gap between leadership and constituency was essential. The council asked the recently organized American Baptist Evangelism Team to report on future evangelism matters.

At Tuller’s recommendation, the council again turned down an invitation to join the Consultation on Church Union.

In other action, the ABC:

• Adopted a stand that abortion should be permitted upon “request” prior to the thirteenth week of pregnancy (a statement described by one of its supporters as “the most progressive” of any denomination);

• Urged churches to establish draft counsel centers, but referred a controversial eight-page resolution on Viet Nam to next year’s convention;

• Initiated merger talks with the Progressive National Baptist Convention;

• Acknowledged continued talks with the Church of the Brethren;

• Reported topping its $20 million world-mission campaign capital-funds goal by more than $2.2 million;

• Adopted a $13.3 million operating budget for 1969;

• Committed itself to implementation of the Kerner Report and to study of proposals for a guaranteed annual income.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

The Choices

Dr. W. A. Criswell, pastor of the 12,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention. The 58-year-old Criswell was chosen even while Robert F. Kennedy lay dying. “It broke my heart,” Criswell said. “This is a sad day.”

Criswell voiced support of a progressive statement on race relations and the urban crisis adopted by the convention’s 14,000 messengers. The statement was approved by secret ballot “by a clear majority.” The actual tally was not immediately announced. The statement had been drawn up by seventy top executives, editors, and board heads in the convention.

Dr. Culbert G. Rutenber, elected to a one-year term as president of the American Baptist Convention, is professor of philosophy and social ethics at Andover Newton Theological School. He previously taught at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

MORE THAN A NOSTALGIC STROLL

The decision to permit women to enter the ministry; support for the rising tide of Scottish nationalism; the resolve to invite a Roman Catholic to next year’s assembly; a changed attitude toward homosexuality and the law; and a strongly worded protest to the government over the supply of arms for use against the Biafrans—these were among the topics that provoked the liveliest debates when the Church of Scotland General Assembly met last month in Edinburgh. For nine days at assembly time the Scottish flag flies over the ancient Palace of Holyroodhouse, the regalia is brought out, and Auld Scotia’s former glories are recalled.

This year, however, it involved more than a nostalgic stroll down memory lane, for after sweeping victories in local elections the nationalist party is for the first time a force in the land. A visitor to the assembly was British Premier Harold Wilson, who was welcomed and invited to speak, not as party politician but as leader of the government. Mr. Wilson made no bones about his rejection of the Scottish Nationalist Party (which three days earlier had won yet another significant seat in Edinburgh itself), warning against those who “preach a future based not even on the present divisions of nationalism but on still narrower, still more inward-looking, Nationalist concepts.”

Three days later, the assembly took up consideration of what Mr. Wilson had condemned. The premier can take no comfort from the outcome. Point after telling point came in a statesmanlike speech by the Rev. E. G. Balls, convener of the Church and Nation Committee: parliament at Westminster too cluttered with business to give adequate attention to Scottish affairs; the fallacy that what suits England suits her nothern neighbor, so that legislation is passed (Mr. Balls gave some examples) that for Scotland is “ill considered and inappropriate.” It was not simply a matter of economics. “The political center of power in London,” continued the convener, “inevitably attracts to itself other centers of power, industrial, financial, scientific and social, to the swelling of the tide of emigration from Scotland … and the mood is mounting that the time has come to call a halt.…”

His committee advocated, not complete separation from England—“in a shrinking, competitive and dangerous world our interests are and will remain too closely woven together; nor … would the people of Scotland wish for an independence that would weaken or impair in any way the role of Britain in the world”—but the setting up of a royal commission that would, within the framework of the United Kingdom, consider the degree and direction that a measure of self-government should take.

This substantially was what the assembly accepted, despite a flurry of counter motions and addenda.

The debate was responsible and cool-headed—a notable triumph of grace on the part of 1,340 commissioners crammed into an absurdly small space that knew nothing of air conditioning to discuss something on which Scots feel keenly. Many of them, moreover, had stayed the pace the previous evening when the assembly did not adjourn until 11:13.

On the first day, there had been the customary pomp and ceremony attendant on the entry and presence of the Lord High Commissioner (this year again Lord Reith represented the Queen). The stately procession heralding his appearance caught the Archbishop of Canterbury unawares, and the most prominent nonconformist visitor present was halted in mid-step before he had gained his seat in the throne gallery. In bringing a message from the Queen, Lord Reith assured the assembly of Her Majesty’s resolution “to maintain Presbyterian church government in Scotland.” Quite properly, Dr. Ramsey displayed solemn interest in this pronouncement.

When the question of women in the ministry came up, it was reported that forty-two presbyteries approved their admission, seventeen disapproved, two were equally divided, and two expressed no opinion. The Rev. A. M. Giles of Broughty Ferry was not satisfied, and pointed out that the figures on how individual presbytery members had voted would show that 1,817 had approved, 1,030 had disapproved. He asked that the matter be referred to Kirk sessions and congregations. In the ensuing debate, it was pointed out that no congregation would be compelled to call a woman as its minister.

If Mr. Giles was for delay, the Rev. Eric Alexander of Newmilns, a prominent Keswick speaker, was not: he asked the assembly to reject the scheme. This was not a matter of sentiment or expedience, he urged, but an issue of doctrine. While the Bible upheld an equality between men and women, it was an equality of status, not of function. Not the changing patterns of the times but the eternal authority of the Word of God must determine their view of the ministry. The assembly evidently had no yen for theological debate; both these speakers were clearly defeated on the vote, and the eligibility of women for ordination became a standing law of the Kirk.

Another thorny problem reappeared in discussion of the report of the Moral Welfare Committee when the convener touched on homosexuality. He said that many ministers, doctors, and others had told his committee that they were “profoundly distressed, even ashamed” at the Kirk’s attitude as the only major British church that disagreed with the Wolfenden Report on the subject (that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private ought not to be penalized by law). An elderly minister, supported by an elderly layman and abetted by some unguarded remarks from the flogging’s-too-good-for-them school, did less than justice to their own case, and the General Assembly, “whilst not condoning or approving homosexual acts,” urged more sympathetic understanding, regretted the comparative lack of psychiatric and medical treatment, commended homosexuals to ministers for “special pastoral concern … that they may know that the Gospel of Redemption through Jesus Christ is for all,” and asked the government to consider whether such acts by adults in private “should continue to be an offence under the Law of Scotland” (the English have already removed it from the statute book).

The government then came in for a clobbering over the supply of arms to Nigeria. In an astonishing display of unity on such a controversial theme, exmoderators and committee conveners joined with the Kirk’s missionaries present from Biafra in condemning the British decision to continue to permit the export of unknown quantities of arms to one side in the struggle.

The most effective speech came from Dr. R. R. Burnett, a medical missionary who had treated hundreds of wounded people in Biafra during a civil war in which arms were being used by the Nigerians not for defense “but for senseless butcher.”

The assembly also:

asked the Panel on Doctrine to consider the place of the Westminster Confession as the Kirk’s principal subordinate standard;

approved in principle an alteration in the law that, with certain safeguards, “would allow designated hospital authorities to remove vital organs from a dead body for therapeutic purposes” and instructed its committee to watch future developments, “particularly where these might affect human personality”;

approved the appointment for four years of Professor John McIntyre as principal of New College, Edinburgh.

In his closing address, the new moderator, Dr. J. B. Longmuir, said he had returned “a little depressed” from the World Council of Churches’ New Delhi meeting in 1961. “It seemed to be accepted as axiomatic by so many people,” he stated, “that all religions were valid, that each contained sufficient of the truth.…”

Dr. Longmuir made it very clear he did not believe this but rather agreed with Dr. James Denney’s words to his students: “Gentlemen, we must realize that any man who does not know God in Jesus Christ is in a very definite sense lost.” The moderator reminded the fathers and brethren of what was probably the 289th General Assembly since 1563 that “our commission is from God and it is to preach Christ, Christ crucified and Christ risen—when we do this we lose our fear, men listen, for this is what they have been waiting to hear, and the Church becomes militant again.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

C.B.A. MILESTONE

A former Harlem gang leader last month told 1,200 Conservative Baptists that “the most unreached community on the North American continent” is the Negro community. “An overwhelming number of black people,” the Rev. Tom Skinner said, consider Christianity “a white man’s religion.” He exhorted the Baptist leaders to “go back to your own communities and churches and fight racism.”

Delegates to the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Conservative Baptist Association of America responded with resolutions “to seek to eliminate sinful prejudice and racial exclusiveness” and “to encourage our churches to include in their memberships believers from every racial, cultural, and economic group.”

The CBA and its allied home-and foreign-mission groups have no governing authority over participating churches. But many of the “messengers” from 1,400 congregations were pleased with the expression of a new attitude toward Negroes.

The Chicago meeting also celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the association’s Foreign Mission Society. National leaders from Ivory Coast, Brazil, and India addressed the group, and thirty-seven new missionaries were commissioned.

In other actions the Baptists:

• Urged prayer for “an early cessation of hostilities” in Viet Nam and “complete military support of our armed forces as long as they are engaged in this struggle.”

• Deplored the increase of crime and violence and called for “such legislation as will strengthen the hands of those who are charged with maintaining law and order, while protecting the rights of all persons.”

• Installed Dr. Russell A. Shive of Portland, Oregon, as general director and re-elected Dr. Lester Thompson of Prescott, Arizona, as president.

ALLITERATIVE ISSUES

Merger, marriage, and mission confronted the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, at its meeting last month in Wilmington, Delaware. The denomination, formed when the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and the Reformed Presbyterian Church merged in 1965, is continuing union talks with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. During the thirties, both churches left what is now the United Presbyterian Church because of theological liberalism in that denomination.

What has divided the RPCES and the OPC is a difference of attitude toward the Christian life. Traditionally, RP’s have maintained certain taboos while OP’s have allowed greater individual freedom. In committee meetings prior to the synod, both churches gave a little and called for “temperate and proper enjoyment of the things of this life.” The synod readily adopted the document, which also declared the division of the churches regrettable and unfortunate.

“We dare not oppose the unity of Christ’s true church,” said Dr. Edmund T. Clowney, an OP minister. “Our dissent from what we judge to be a false ecumenism demands a proportionate zeal for a true ecumenicity.” Clowney, who is president of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, asked why the denominations should remain separate since they both preach the same inspired Bible and endorse the same confession.

The union of races in marriage also concerned the 200 churchmen. In 1966, the RPCES had adopted a general statement on racial questions but had asked for further clarification on inter-racial marriage. The revision—accepted after long discussion—declared that Scripture admonishes believers only to marry believers and does not prohibit marriage across racial lines. But because of social difficulties, the statement warned, interracial marriage “should be approached with caution.”

The Church’s mission was the subject of Dr. Arthur F. Glasser’s evening address. “In our day,” said Glasser, director of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, “the Church is abdicating its responsibility toward the nations.” He challenged his denomination to work for greater relevance and better methods of evangelism.

Laymen were elected to the denomination’s top posts. Retired Dupont executive Dr. Wesley G. Vannoy was elected moderator, and Dr. Marion D. Barnes, president of the denomination’s Covenant College in Tennessee, was elected vice-moderator.

BLACK LOBBY WINS

A three-week-old Black and White Action group advocating integrated action on urban problems cried “betrayal” after the Unitarian Universalist Association’s seventh annual General Assembly voted 836 to 327 to recognize a Black Affairs Council.

BAC, made up of six Negroes and three whites, grew out of a black Unitarian Universalist caucus held last winter, according to Religious News Service. The caucus was called by Hayward Henry, Jr., 25, a doctoral student in biochemistry now on leave from Boston University.

The association’s board of trustees endorsed BAC as the urban-affairs agency in the printed agenda that assembly delegates received before coming to the meeting in Cleveland.

Under pressure from those who felt that the 180,000-member denomination’s traditional principle of brotherhood and its racially integrated program were threatened, the trustees issued a new recommendation just before a vote on BAC recognition. The new effort was to have ghetto programs placed in the hands not only of BAC but also of BAWA, a group inspired by members of the integrated Community Church in New York City. The vote on BAC thwarted action on the alternative.

BAWA members met after the vote and elected officers. Later, they called a press conference to charge that “an injustice and a tragedy” had been committed by the delegates.

“We were outmaneuvered by a juggernaut of power committed to racially exclusive action,” said co-chairman Glover Barnes, a Negro professor at the University of Buffalo Medical School.

Henry did not indicate specific efforts that BAC would launch, but he noted interest in a “black lobby in Washington” that might use one-tenth of the association’s $2,500,000 annual budget.

Delegates turned down a trustee recommendation to close one of two theological schools, Meadville in Chicago or Starr King in Berkeley, California. They also urged Tufts University to continue its Crane Divinity School, at least for students in Christian education. Tufts has said it is closing the school.

The Engineers Of Merger

A Southern Presbyterian pastor heads the fourteen-member commission assigned the task of drafting a plan of union for nine denominations. He is the Rev. William A. Benfield, Jr., minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Charleston, West Virginia.

The plan of union is to be presented to the Consulation on Church Union by 1970, or perhaps earlier.

Named to the commission along with Benfield were the following:

African Methodist Episcopal—Bishop G. Wayman Blakeley, Philadelphia.

African Methodist Episcopal Zion—Professor John H. Satterwhite, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington.

Christian Methodist Episcopal—Bishop E. T. Murchison, Birmingham, Alabama; and W. A. Soloman, Columbia, South Carolina.

Disciples of Christ—The Rev. George G. Beazley, Jr., Indianapolis; and Oliver Schroeder, Jr., Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Episcopal—The Rev. Stephen F. Bayne, New York.

United Church of Christ—The Rev. James O. Gilliam, Mercer Island, Washington; and Mrs. Vernon W. Newbold, Denver.

United Presbyterian—Stated Clerk William P. Thompson, Philadelphia: and Mrs. Ralph Stair, Waukesha, Wisconsin.

United Methodist—Professor John Deschner, Perkins Theological School, Dallas; Bishop Paul Washburn, Dayton. Ohio; and Professor Paul Hardin, President, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Flying Saucers In The Bible?

The Bible and Flying Saucers, by Barry H. Downing (Lippincott, 1968, 221 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Albert L. Hedrich, assistant director of research and development, Page Communications Engineers, Washington, D. C.

The credibility of the Bible and the authenticity of flying saucers are both subjects of controversy today. The Bible has successfully withstood attack for centuries and continues to be accepted as the authority for Christianity. During the past several years, flying saucers have been the subject of several books and many articles, both pro and some con; today there is little unanimity of opinion on their origin or even their existence. Therefore it seems strange indeed to find a defense of the Scriptures based on the existence of flying saucers.

The Bible and Flying Saucers could be judged worthless but harmless were it not for the distortions it contains and the credentials of the author. He holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Edinburgh.

Downing’s purpose seems to be to show that introducing the idea of flying saucers or unidentified flying objects (UFOs) makes certain events described in the Bible more “realistic” or believable. Some of the events to which he links UFOs are:

1. the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night during the Exodus;

2. the parting of the Red Sea (here the UFO uses an “anti-gravity” beam);

3. the taking up of Elijah;

4. the bright cloud at the transfiguration of Christ;

5. the Spirit’s descending on Jesus at his baptism;

6. the ascension of Christ;

7. the bright light at the conversion of Paul.

One finds it hard to imagine how the author expected to accomplish his purpose, for he himself doubts the existence of flying saucers. He asks why no study like his has been made before and then answers: “One obvious reason is that the existence of flying saucers is highly suspect.” He estimates that the “degree of probability” which he “emotionally feels” about the existence of UFOs is 70 per cent.

Downing begins on a defensive note and maintains it throughout the book. He anticipates the reader’s reaction with his first words: “Before you become either extremely angry or even more extremely amused because someone is attempting to link together the Bible and flying saucers, consider the following.… “Then in the next paragraph he states: “I think, however, that it is no more ridiculous to talk about the relation between the Bible and flying saucers than it is to describe God’s funeral.” This is a rather weak justification for the subject, particularly when the author later goes to some pains to declare himself opposed to the “God is dead” concept. Indeed, I find it difficult to imagine a weaker argument for the reliability of the Scriptures. The effort expended in writing the book could certainly have been put to some better use.

Downing attempts to make the resurrection of Christ seem “realistic” by suggesting that men from some other world participated in it and that the associated earthquake was caused by a UFO’s “anti-G” beam. He seems to be saying that belief in this most vital event demands some physical explanation of it. We can agree with his disavowal of attempts to demythologize the Bible and to see its main value as literary; as the Apostle Paul asserts in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, our faith rests on the Resurrection, and if it is myth, we are to be greatly pitied. But the attempt to counter the charge that the resurrection is myth with an argument based on the existence of flying saucers—an existence he himself admits is “highly suspect”—is not only ill advised but also dangerous. To associate the vital event that lies at the heart of our faith with something as controversial and, to many, improbable as a UFO is to diminish, rather than enhance, its credibility.

Space does not permit a complete account of the scientific distortions contained in the book. In the preface Downing states that he “is not an authority on Einstein or on heaven.…” This does not deter him, however, from devoting a chapter to the question, “Where is heaven?” He admits that his discussion “reads very much like science fiction” and “is not necessarily true”; but it may, he says, “help to set our minds free from the somewhat depressing agnosticism we now find ourselves in when we even being to entertain the idea that we might live eternally—as part of God’s plan.” He then proceeds, with complete abandon, to do violence to both Einstein and heaven with over twenty pages of pure speculation.

I have spent a number of years in the pursuit of truth, both in the Bible and in the study of God’s creation (science), and have found no substantive contradictions. When force is applied to bring science and the Bible into apparent agreement in areas where there is no valid connection, distortion of one or both must result. This only reinforces barriers between the Bible and those people tending toward naturalism. Those of us who have been working to break down these barriers through a rational approach to the subject can only hope that this book has a very limited circulation.

Handing Down The Bible

A Literary History of the Bible, from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, by Geddes MacGregor (Abingdon Press, 1968, 400 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Bruce M. Metzger, professor of New Testament, Princeton Theological Seminary, and chairman, Committee on Translations, American Bible Society.

In his Literary History of the Bible Dr. Geddes MacGregor, distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, weaves an instructive and fascinating account of the transmission of the Scriptures in Western Europe from about A.D. 500 down to our day. Rather than presenting merely a chronicle of the personalities of translators, the author fills his account with interesting and wide-ranging information on cultural, political, and theological currents that influenced the interpretation and use of the Scriptures.

About one-fourth of the volume deals with the Bible as it was interpreted in the Middle Ages, when there was no printed English Bible. Here MacGregor relates in a lucid and lively manner information about Hebrew scholarship, the Thomist hermeneutic, and vernacular manuscript Bibles. Each of the half-dozen great English Bibles of the sixteenth century has a chapter devoted to it, and the seventeenth-century King James Version receives detailed treatment in five chapters. One of the five is an interesting account of the typographical curiosities in subsequent printings of the KJV. For example, in 1643 the Westminster Assembly of Divines complained, in a report to Parliament, about editions that contained some atrocious printers’ errors, at Genesis 36:24, for example, “found her rulers” displaced the correct reading “found the mules”; at Ruth 4:13, instead of “the Lord gave her conception” there appeared “the Lord gave her corruption”; and at Luke 21:28, “your redemption” was printed “your condemnation.” In the following century the university presses of both Oxford and Cambridge, seeking to eliminate the shocking accumulation of errors, regularized the spelling and punctuation in what came to be regarded as standard editions.

Among modern English versions MacGregor naturally devotes considerable attention to the Revised Standard Version (1952) and also the New English Bible, of which only the New Testament has thus far been published (1961). It is strange that he makes much of Nelson’s Catholic edition of the RSV, which was issued in 1965 as a common version for Protestants and Roman Catholics but has sixty-seven alterations from RSV text, but says nothing of the Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha (1966), which, without one alteration in the RSV text, received Cardinal Cushing’s imprimatur and approval for Catholic usage.

Amid an almost encyclopedic coverage of his subject, MacGregor enlivens his pages with many a salty and forthright comment. Thus, of John Reynolds, at whose suggestion the King James Version was undertaken, he writes:

He was able to command the respect even of opposing camps.… Reynolds’ combination of noble character and great erudition, which elicited respect from his enemies, caused his friends to have a saying that it was hard to decide whether it was his scholarship or his piety that ought to command the greater admiration. Churchmen today do not often confront their friends with the necessity of making such a decision. Sometimes the decision has to be, rather, which is more forgivable, the lack of character or the deficiencies of learning.

Reformers’ Stand Still Valid

Principles of Biblical Interpretation in the Lutheran Confessions, by Ralph A. Bohlmann (Concordia, 1968, 144 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by J. A. O. Preus, president, Concordia Theological Seminary, Springfield, Illinois.

Ralph Bohlmann has done a great service for his own Lutheran church and for all confessionally minded theologians interested in the connection between the confessional statements of their churches and modern hermeneutical methods and problems. Bohlmann tests the hermeneutical principles that guided the authors of the Lutheran confession to see whether these principles of biblical interpretation are still valid; the same kind of testing can be done by other denominations with doctrinal statements coming out of the sixteenth century.

His conclusion is that the Reformers hermeneutical principles are still substantially correct, and that the confessions are therefore not merely historical oddities but valid doctrinal statements to which the Church of today can subscribe as confidently as did the Reformation church.

In Part I Bohlmann deals with the confessional view of Scripture, pointing out that in form the Scripture is the Word of God and that in function it is the norm and source of doctrine and life, with the purpose of pointing to Christ as Saviour. He continues by showing that the confessions assert the clarity and intelligibility of Scripture, and that the central message of Scripture is justification by faith in Christ, the Law, and the Gospel.

Then, in Part II, he actually gets down to the confessional principles of biblical interpretation. The Lutheran confessional writers assumed that we should deal with the Bible on the basis of grammar, derive the meaning of a passage by ordinary exegesis, and seek the intended sense of the author. Scripture interprets itself. At length and with great insight Bohlmann discusses the currently popular Law-Gospel dialectic as a touchstone of biblical interpretation; he concludes—quite correctly—that this single principle will not answer all questions or tell us how to understand all passages of Scripture.

This book is refreshing and helpful and will be of use far beyond the borders of Lutheranism.

A Glimpse Of Gladden

Washington Gladden: Prophet of the Social Gospel, by Jacob Henry Dorn (Ohio State University, 1967, 489 pp., $8), is reviewed by Lee M. Nash, associate professor of history, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff.

That Washington Gladden should have lain half a century in his grave before his first biography appeared is a measure of the historical neglect of American liberalism and the social gospel, movements he so prominently represented. Dorn’s book, based upon careful research in rich sources, is objective and readable and deserves space in every American church-history collection.

Most of Gladden’s fifty years of pastoral ministry were spent at the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, where in 1902 his influential flock included one-fourth of the Ohio State University faculty. He published more than forty books, most of them sermon collections, popularizations of current thought rather than original scholarship.

Profoundly influenced in early life by Horace Bushnell, Gladden saw the organizing focus of faith in a divine-human Christ, whose life and teachings provided a model for all and a standard by which the Bible, creeds, and social issues should be judged. He accepted theistic evolution and the moral-influence view of the Atonement and commended the higher criticism to laymen in Who Wrote the Bible? (1891). Yet his expressions that we are “being saved,” that truth is unified, that the Bible is not a book of science, and that “Protestant monasticism” is to be resisted, suggest talk by some neo-evangelicals in the 1960s. His piety was such that he could counsel seekers nightly at a Moody meeting in 1878, cooperate with J. Wilbur Chapman, and compose “O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee.” Lines commonly omitted from the hymnals hint that even a pious liberal excited controversy:

O Master, let me walk with Thee

Before the taunting Pharisee.…

Thus he might have described his bitter public quarrel with Billy Sunday during Sunday’s 1913 Columbus campaign, an incident that helped to begin the long era of modernist-vs.-fundamentalist warfare.

For decades Gladden devoted his Sunday-evening sermons to social questions. The creative gamut of his concerns from the 1860s included the promotion of recreation (in one article he playfully ridiculed President Blanchard of Wheaton for prohibiting croquet on campus), labor unions, help for the urban poor, honesty in city government (he served a model term on the Columbus city council), modest Negro civil rights (a rare stand among social gos-pelers), and opposition to church acceptance of “tainted money” from dishonest millionaires.

Dorn fails to credit the revivalist-reformers of the 1850s with contributing to Gladden’s early social concern, and identifies liberalism too closely with social Christianity before 1900. Not only were many evangelicals much interested in reform; many liberals espoused “gospel of wealth” social conservatism. But Gladden’s lifelong interest in social issues was always articulated in a liberal theological setting, providing important preparation for Rauschenbusch’s subtler, more socialistic rationales for the mature social-gospel movement after 1907.

Happily, today’s evangelicals are beginning to see again the social dimensions of the faith after over-reacting to the liberal takeover of the social gospel. Still, it is difficult enough in the average city to find a ministry with a sound evangelical message that also demonstrates an empathetic understanding of persons in material and social distress. This understanding Gladden had in eminent degree.

Reading For Perspective

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

• Jesus—God and Man, by Wolfhart Pannenberg (Westminster, $10). The English translation of a scholarly work in Christology that contends for the historical resurrection of Christ and sheds light on Jesus’ deity and humanity.

• The Biblical Doctrine of Heaven, by Wilbur M. Smith (Moody, $4.95). This significant work draws together scriptural teaching and scholarly judgments on many facets of a glorious but often neglected doctrine. Recommended.

• Dying We Live, edited by Helmut Gollwitzer, Kathe Kuhn, Reinhold Schneider (Seabury, $2.75). Touching and inspiring letters and other writings of faith and courage by Germans who valiantly resisted Hitler and suffered triumphant martyrdom during World War II.

A Harvard Dean’S Final Book

Religion in a Technical Age, by Samuel H. Miller (Harvard, 1968, 146 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by William Edmund Bouslough, professor of biblical studies, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

The late dean of the Harvard Divinity School here presents a selection of his addresses to a variety of audiences relating more or less to the need for American religion to “come of age,” that is, to come to grips with the technological culture in which it is immersed.

As an administrator in an institution that produces men for the American ministry, Dean Miller was particularly concerned with the ingredients that go into the product. Six of these twelve essays speak specifically about the preparation of the minister—the man and his schooling—and all of them speak about the minister’s message to modern man.

Miller defines religion as the sum total of the images, symbols, rites, and myths that give modern life meaning and purpose. He finds constant need for pushing “into the depth where man feels and feels deeply, where he is himself involved, where things mean something to him, and he either fights them or defends them.” He hungers to have the men who have been influenced by his school keep their vision open to “the acts of God in the secular circumstances of common history.”

I never heard Dr. Miller speak, but these messages suggest that he must have thrilled his audiences. Often his expressions are beautifully apt, his descriptions vivid and poetic. He alludes frequently to modern authors, Camus and Jaspers being two of his favorites.

His message is this: Our world is in a mess. There is more freedom and more fear; so much prosperity that it smothers us; “more power but the humble joys of the skillful hand go unfulfilled”; more free time but less true leisure; “more information but less wisdom; more speed but less direction”; more ambition but less satisfaction; and so on. The task of religion in this deficient world is to give us discernment, depth, and personal definition:

It is for religion to declare in unmistakable terms, both of insight and of compassion, the sin and the sublimity which constitute our nature as men. In the freedom we cannot escape, try as we will; we must take this world in all its disturbing newness and bewildering size and frightening power, and shape it until at last it manifests our meaning and reflects our purpose.

When Was The Spirit Given?

The Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles, by J. H. E. Hull (World, 1968, 202 pp., $6), is reviewed by Howard M. Ervin, professor of Old Testament and assistant dean, Graduate School of Theology, Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

At a time when the charismatic renewal is commanding attention in the so-called historic churches, this volume by the professor of New Testament in the Northern Congregational College, Manchester, England, comes as an important contribution to the charismatic dialogue. Presented originally as an M.A. thesis at the University of Manchester, it is characterized by meticulous documentation, mature reflection, and logical argumentation.

I heartily agree with some of the author’s points, such as the integrity of Luke as a historian and the dominant evangelistic theme of the Acts. However, I have a few complaints, mainly on matters of method.

Hull’s reliance upon source criticism leaves many of his conclusions suspended in the dialectical tension inherent in the hermeneutics of this criticism. More than once, he resolves his evaluation of exegetical options solely by a reliance on subjective a prioris. An example is his claim that “in the synoptic Gospels … only six sayings about the Spirit are attributed to Jesus before His death.… Only three of these sayings have the ring of authenticity …” (italics mine). And in discussing the “Paraclete sayings of Jesus inserted from an independent source into the Farewell Discourse because John felt the occasion propitious,” the author faults John’s integrity: “One cannot but feel that even John was mistaken in his sense of appropriateness” (italics mine).

More serious is a fundamental philosophical mind-set that comes from an over-reliance on source-critical methodology. The limitations of critical judgment in appraising the content of Scripture must be recognized. In my opinion, the human mind can sit only in negative judgment upon Holy Writ. It cannot sit in positive judgment. It can say what cannot logically be included in Holy Scripture; but it cannot say what must be included. This is a limitation that Hull does not accept when he writes: “Had Jesus referred to the coming of the Paraclete that night [i.e., of the Lord’s Supper] as John alleges, His words would have so burned themselves into the memory of those who were present and, through them, into the tradition of the Church, that they could not have been omitted from any of the Gospels” (italics mine).

An example of the unsatisfactory results achieved by Hull’s hermeneutical approach is his suggested reconciliation of John’s “insufflation” of the Spirit on Easter Sunday with Luke’s “effusion” of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Accepting C. H. Dodd’s view that “there was a moment in history when men received the Spirit as they had not received it before,” Hull concludes that “one must agree with John in ascribing that moment to Easter Sunday. One may still doubt, however, whether the disciples realized so early that they now possessed the Spirit. Historically, one may well believe, that realization came at Pentecost or thereabouts and it is this truth which is preserved for us by Luke.”

This is the author’s drastic reinterpretation of Luke’s description of the Pentecostal phenomena. He dismisses the empirical nature of these phenomena by remarking that “Luke’s greatest weakness was the importance he attached to objective reality. Nowhere is his interest in the outward and visible signs of the Spirit’s presence more clearly displayed than in his account of the baptism of Jesus … and his account of Pentecost.” But Luke is not alone in this preoccupation with objective reality. At the beginning of his first epistle, John states his intention to write of “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life”; and Paul offers objective and empirical proofs of the resurrection of Christ in First Corinthians 15.

In characterizing “the importance he attached to objective reality” as “Luke’s greatest weakness,” Hull seems to have seriously prejudiced his own view of the integrity of Luke as a historian. Surely the factual reporting of “objective reality” is a primary responsibility, not a weakness, of the historian.

Despite the shortcomings of this book, I recommend it as an important contribution to the charismatic dialogue.

Confusing Musings?

WHO TRUSTS IN GOD, by Albert C. Outler (Oxford, 1968, 160 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Cornelius Van Til, professor of apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Do you think God is either dead or absent? If you do, says the author of this book, then you are perhaps less interested in the death of God than in the triumph of man—over God’s dead body, so to speak. Without a firm faith in God’s reality and sovereign grace, “you find that for you questions about Christology are finally meaningless.”

Then let us chat about your problem. I grant at once that the existence of God is not the real problem. The real “problem of God” is that of the “credibility” of his “active presence in this world.” And this is the question of providence. I would like to present to you “in ruminative fashion what I take to be the gist of traditional affirmations of God’s provident presence in creation and history.…”

Please do not fear that I will weary you with the claims of the “museum-guards of fossil-Christianity.” But though I am not a fundamentalist, “I still hold to the Anselmian formula (fides quaerens intellectium).” Have you ever “discovered any significant inquiry (quaestio) into matters that lie close to the human heart that does not begin with a faith-commitment”? Let us be open-minded and critical and then look at the evidence together.

You will agree, I trust, that man is “both a problem and a mystery to himself and to others.” Surely, too, you will allow me to say that man is free and in this sense supernatural. Man is a “mysterious reality that reaches out beyond the boundaries of time, space and the causal order.” But if you agree with me on this, then why should you not also agree when I add that “as spirit (self-hood) … man is in concourse with the Creator Spirit—and with his fellow human spirits.”

We must conclude, then, that “all finites … are set in a matrix that is encompassed by the Eternal Mystery.”

With this broad traditional view of God and his presence in the world we are safe from all molestation by fundamentalists. In our perspective, “nature … is not threatened ‘from beyond’ by episodic intervention or disorder.” “By the same token, however, nature is not fully autonomous and not at all explanatory.” You may think of nature “as a sort of ‘parenthesis,’ the full meaning of which is supplied ‘from beyond’ without negating the significance of what lies ‘inside.’ ”

This, in short, is Outler’s argument in this book of “musings on the meaning of providence.” What shall we say of it?

If the views of such men as Luther and Calvin may be said to have any connection with the traditional view of God’s presence in the world, then Outler’s does not. Our author might as well have left his God-is-dead protégé where he found him. Why take the trouble to convert a man committed to an overt expression of human autonomy to belief in a “god” who is but a more inward projection of the same human autonomy?

Such men as Hamilton, Van Buren, and Altizer ought not to feel challenged by Outler’s argument to forsake their position. They, and with them Outler, ought rather to be challenged with what is in fact the traditional position, the Reformation view of God’s presence in the world; for without this God it doesn’t even make sense to say that God does not exist. The “presence” of Outler’s god is identical with the “absence” of Altizer’s god; in both cases there is the attempt to repress the presence of the God of Paul and of Christ. The argument is doomed in advance.

Salt And Pepper

AFTER YOU’VE SAID I DO, by Dwight H. Small (Revell, 1968, 251 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by C. W. Brister, professor of pastoral ministry, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas.

Dwight Small’s discussion of communication between husbands and wives grows out of his twenty-five years of counseling and lecturing on marriage. He now is pastor of Peninsula Covenant Church in Redwood City, California.

The “heart of marriage is its communication system,” he says, and he addresses couples of all ages who want to discover new ways of reaching each other in marriage. The seventeen pithy chapters—with pop titles like “Are You Listening—Really?,” “Buttoned Lips and Boxed-in Lives,” and “Don’t Forget Feedback!”—deal with ways of improving communication and dealing with difficulties when they arise.

A sermonic quality characterizes the initial discussion. Small tells us that the “deepest satisfactions of … life are found in marriage or not at all,” and that a couple’s communication is a learned process. Their greatest security, he says, is the “development of dialogue in depth,” and their “only ultimate failure is not doing what appears necessary when a breakdown comes.” No one would argue with that.

To his credit, Small tries to maintain reader interest with appealing topics, though they tend to promise more than they deliver. He examines countless semantic problems, citing the writings of specialists rather than clinical evidence from counseling. A considerable part of the material, in fact, is adapted from semanticists like Jurgen Ruesch, ethicists like Helmut Thielicke, sociologists like Talcott Parsons, and behavioral scientists like Carl Rogers and Erich Fromm. One chapter contains twenty-five documented quotations; elsewhere, Small quotes extensively without giving data on sources.

Readers who bog down in his disorderly logic may give up before reaching the practical help to be found in the book’s closing chapters. Although his argument is coherent, it is not always cohesive or convincing. One’s reading is retarded by a mishmash of other people’s ideas. The gross product here is an uneven, salt-and-pepper mixture of semantic principles, biblical ideals, psychological trivia, and sermonic advice.

Book Briefs

First Century Gnosticism, by G. Van Groningen (E. J. Brill, 1967, 209 pp., 24 guilders). An examination of Gnostic documents from the first and second centuries A.D. that reveals the spirit of scientism in existence then. Van Groningen claims that early Christian teachings basically opposed Gnostic thought and motifs and were not influenced by them (as Bultmann claims).

The Stranger in the Mirror, by James William Russell (Harper & Row, 1968, 215 pp., $4.95). A former minister writing under a pseudonym describes his psychological disturbance in which he dressed as a woman and committed grand theft and his later restoration to health and usefulness.

History of Dogma, by Bengt Hägglund, translated by Gene J. Lund (Concordia, 1968, 425 pp., $9.95). This English edition of a useful standard Swedish work on the development of Christian thought includes a brief section on the theology of nineteenth-century revivalism and a short but penetrating chapter on early twentieth-century theology and recent trends. The approach is more objective than that of Hamack, who sought to vindicate a presumably primitive Gospel from supposedly Hellenistic speculation, or of others who give to contemporary interpretations of Christianity a validity equal to or surpassing that of the scriptural revelation. Hägglund assumes that the substance of the Christian “rule of faith” was fixed from the outset by originally given truths of faith and by the content of Scripture, and that only its form is variantly expressed in many of the traditional verbal formulations. But he sketches the development of Christian thought as part of the realm of ideas without giving an obtrusive dogmatic critique.

My Flickering Torch, by E. Jane Mall (Concordia, 1968, 176 pp., $3.50). A Christian woman’s victorious story of her experience after her chaplain husband died and she was left with five adopted children.

Lutherans in Conceit, by Frederick K. Wentz (Augsburg, 1968, 221 pp., $5). Cooperative efforts by Lutherans, 1918–66.

The Conscience of the State in North America, by E. R. Norman (Cambridge, 1968, $6.50). In this comparative study of separation of church and state in Britain, the United States, and Canada, Norman contends that the three nations, contrary to popular belief, are similar in this relationship.

Just as I Am, by Eugenia Price (Lippincott, 1968, 184 pp., $3.95). Genie supplies her own spiritual interpretation for each line of the familiar Victorian hymn.

The Invitation of God, by Adolf Köberle, translated by Roy Barlag (Concordia, 1968. 238 pp., $5.95). Challenging sermons of biblical substance by a professor of theology at the University of Tübingen.

Nationalism and Christianity in the Philippines, by Richard L. Deats (Southern Methodist University, 1967, 207 pp., $5.95). Deats’ Study of the work of the Philippine United Church of Christ and Roman Catholic, independent, and Methodist churches points to the need for an indigenous church, which should prosper under a “healthy nationalism.”

The Spiritual Journey of Saint Paul, by Lucien Cerfaux, translated by John C. Guinness (Sheed and Ward, 1968, 236 pp., $5.50). A solid biblical work by a Catholic scholar that introduces one to the life, thought, and spirit of St. Paul; extracted from Cerfaux’s trilogy on Pauline theology.

Thinking Faith, by Fritz Buri (Fortress, 1968, 100 pp., $3.50). An existentialist theologian from Basel considers the way to a philosophical theology.

God Up There?, by David Cairns (West-minister, 1967, 111 pp., $2.95). A Scottish scholar assesses contemporary theologians’ views of God’s transcendence and favors Brunner’s thought that divine transcendence is disclosed both in historical revelation and in creation. Brief but astute.

Jesus and the Gospel Tradition, by C. K. Barrett (Fortress, 1968, 114 pp., $3.50). This post-Bultmannian professor claims Jesus was mistaken in many details (belief that his disciples would suffer with him, that the kingdom of God would come and world history would end immediately after his sufferings, that God had forsaken him) but was right in all that really mattered. The Son of God will be glad to know that Barrett doesn’t hold his mistakes against him!

Profession: Minister, by James D. Glasse (Abingdon, 1968, 174 pp., $3.75). An effort to solve the identity crisis of the parish clergy without an adequate exposition of the ministerial “calling.”

Sixty-one Worship Talks for Children, by Eldon Weisheit (Concordia, 1968, 134 pp., $3.50). A Lutheran pastor offers short and lively examples of how to communicate the Gospel to children.

The Holy Spirit in Five Worlds, by Wayne E. Oates (Association, 1968, 123 pp., $3.95). Explores the Holy Spirit’s role in the psychedelic, nonverbal, articulate, new-morality, and administrative realms.

Studies in the Four Gospels, by G. Campbell Morgan (Revell, 1968, 1,288 pp., $13.95). One-volume assemblage of work by the “Prince of Expositors” on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition, by James Hastings Nichols (Westminster, 1968, 190 pp., $5). A historical survey of the formation and characteristics of Reformed worship by a Princeton Seminary church-history professor.

Paperbacks

Questions on the Christian Faith Answered from the Bible, by Derek Prime (Eerdmans, 1967, 128 pp., $1.45). Brings the teaching of the Bible to bear on basic questions of God and man. Ministers will find the topical Scripture references helpful in preparing sermons.

The Great Awakening in New England, by Edwin Scott Gaustad (Quadrangle, 1968, 173 pp., $2.25). Paperback edition of a superior account of the religious revival in the American colonies, 1740–42.

The Life of Christ Visualized, by Ray E. Baughman (Moody, 1968, 256 pp., $.95). A biblically sound, easy-to-use book for church groups studying the life of Christ.

Revelation, by Charles Caldwell Ryrie (Moody, 1968, 127 pp., $.95). A clear and concise futurist interpretation of the Bible’s last book that views the prophecies of chapters four through twenty-two as yet to be fulfilled.

Are You for Real?, by Larry Richards (Moody, 1968, 160 pp., $1.95). A lively book for teen-agers that stresses the need for Christian values.

Mandate for Mission, by Eugene L. Smith (Friendship, 1968, 157 pp., $1.75). The WCC’s executive secretary for the United States attempts to strike a balance between witness and service in church mission. He commends antipoverty and civil-rights efforts, criticizes “revival services.”

Social Ethics, edited by Gibson Winter (Harper & Row, 1968, 266 pp., $3.50). Readings from contemporary writers reflecting diverse approaches on issues in ethics and society.

The Theologian at Work, edited by A. Roy Eckhardt (Harper &Row, 1968, 253 pp., $3.50). An exposure to the variety of views held by recent thinkers in theology.

Contemporary Religious Thinkers, edited by John Macquarrie (Harper & Row, 1968, 285 pp., $3.50). Reprints of significant essays by scholars representing the great diversity of religious thought in the recent past.

The New Testament: An Introduction for the General Reader, by Oscar Cullmann (Westminster, 1968, 138 pp., $1.95). Dr. “Heilsgeschichte” introduces the general reader to the history of the New Testament text, its writings, the formation of the canon, and its theology. Worth buying and reading.

Best Church Plays, by Albert Johnson (Pilgrim Press, 1968, 180 pp., $3.95). A comprehensive bibliography of religious drama arranged by subject. Lists publisher, cast, set, theme, price. Valuable for church program directors.

Good News: A Christian Folk-Musical, compiled and arranged by Bob Oldenburg (Broadman, 1967, 95 pp., $2.95). A good try at working a gospel appeal into Moral Re-Armament’s successful “sing-out” format. Eighteen songs, mostly upbeat, in basic scoring for teen chorus, plus staging hints. Recording available for $3.98.

He sits in his chair and just looks out into space. He sees what is happening in the room, and when someone speaks to him he answers. But the old spark of interest is gone. He confessed to me that he has difficulty in following my conversation. He loves Christ and the Church and spent half a century in the ministry, but now even this seems to be of only passing interest. Radio and television mean nothing to him. He seems very lonely.

This man, my father, is only eighty-six. (I say “only” because with each passing year thousands more people are living beyond that age.) When the pastor comes to call on him, how shall he deal with him? Every pastor faces this challenge of ministering to elderly people.

A few years ago the then president of the American Medical Association reportedly told an audience that within the lifespan of some of them, the average life expectancy for Americans could well reach 100. Then he went on to say that the problem is not so much keeping the body alive as it is keeping the mind functioning.

We who have the privilege of ministering to people need to take care that in this increasingly youth-oriented society we do not forget the aged. They have some very particular needs. First, they, like everyone else, need to be treated as individuals. They do not want to be lumped into a group and classified as “old people” or “the elderly.” I remember very vividly a time when my mother, then in her eighties, said with gusto, “I don’t want to move into that home and live with all those old people!”

Elaine Cumming and William E. Henry in Growing Old (Basic Books, 1961) speak of the “disengagement theory,” in which the process of aging is understood in terms of the degree of relationship to people and events that a person maintains. Withdrawal may be initiated by either the elderly person himself or by others. It may, the authors say, be accompanied by an increasing preoccupation with the self. They go on to point out that although one does not suddenly grow old, yet we tend to speak of youth, middle age, and old age as well-defined periods. Our approaches to pastoral counseling and care often follow the same pattern. A pastor must take into account the physical limitations of the person, of course, but his pastoral care should never merely confirm the situation; rather, he should help the patient reach up a little, never unrealistically high but just a little higher.

The recently retired, many very vigorous and still going full steam, need pastoral attention as they try to find a satisfying way of life. A great many women of retirement age will still be busy for many years in the work of keeping a home. But many men, and some women, need counseling and assistance to begin a new life—and that is just what it should be. Fortunate is the retired person who discovers that now he can devote himself to the most rewarding occupation—helping others.

A second need of elderly people is a sense of personal integrity. By “integrity” I mean an undivided, unbroken state, one of completeness. Aging does not necessarily limit the ability to feel joy and sorrow, to experience temptation or victory, to become interested and involved in people and projects. But too often society gives the impression that to grow old is to be put on the shelf. One certainly does not feel “complete” if he feels left out. He does not feel loved, no matter how comfortable the retirement home, if he longs to hear the laughter of children or to share the problems of a friend or loved one.

Someone has said that we begin life being carried and pushed and end life the same way. But most elderly people do not want to be carried and pushed. Physically, it may be a necessity, but not psychologically and spiritually. This is what I meant by saying that our pastoral care should foster personal integrity. Most pastors can recall being asked by a well-meaning son or daughter to speak to a parent and persuade him to do a particular thing. If the older person is not capable of making a decision, then it must be done for him. But if he is capable, then he has the right and the responsibility to make the decision himself.

A third great need is an emphasis on today, not tomorrow. Too often, pastors perform an obituary-type ministry for older persons. They feel it appropriate to talk much about heaven and little about this earth. Certainly the pastor must be greatly concerned for the salvation of elderly parishioners. But he must not stop at that.

When someone in his seventies asks, “What have I got to look forward to?,” chances are the minister has not met his need if he tells him only, “Heaven.” But if he says “today” and sets about helping him become engaged with today instead of in retreat from it, he has made today much more satisfying and the anticipation of heaven happier. The older a person becomes, the less future-oriented he is. In counseling and in pastoral care, the emphasis should be on the immediate. Elderly persons may also become overly wrapped up in the past. The pastor’s redemptive emphasis on the present will help in the acceptance of the full grace of God.

Most people, regardless of age, want to live. It is the responsibility of the pastoral counselor to help stimulate people to find meaning and purpose in whatever type of life situations they find themselves in. As long as life lasts, people need other motives for living besides the anticipation of heaven.

A final need of the aging is to know that someone is listening and cares. This need, present in all of us, increases with age. The older person wants very much to feel he is being heard and loved, rather than forgotten.

“Caring” involves much more than providing for physical needs. We may well ask, Do we really listen in our pastoral visitation? It is particularly easy to be impatient with elderly people; real listening takes time and concentration. But if the minister cannot give himself in this manner, he will leave lonely people feeling even more lonely. We should use every resource of pastoral care to show that we both hear and care.

Pastoral counseling is more than a one-to-one encounter for the purpose of meeting a particular problem. Success in dealing with critical incidents is largely dependent upon a successful continuing pattern of pastoral care.—KENNETH R. STROM, assistant to the director, Chaplain Service, Veterans Administration, Washington, D. C.

Recently i was the guest in a home where there are three children, ranging in age from six to eleven. These children are blessed with parents who devote a great deal of time to them, who are interested in all their friends and their school activities, and who take every possible occasion for short trips together, picnics, and other little things in which children delight. These children are secure, know they are loved, and are as happy as any I have ever seen.

But these devoted parents have also demanded and received obedience from their children. There is never any argument when they tell a child to do something, only the expectation that the command will be obeyed without question. Corporal punishment, though rare, is applied without hesitation if necessary. The parents recognize the truth found in the Book of Proverbs: “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him” (22:15).

America is suffering from a generation of permissive parents who, by not requiring obedience from children, have produced teen-agers and young adults with little respect for either God or man. These undisciplined young people are proving themselves a disruptive force on many school campuses, and they are a source of embarrassment and great concern to the nation. Although they are only a small minority, they are jeopardizing the entire structure of society.

Unfortunately, permissiveness is not confined to the home; it has also infected the attitudes of some who have been given the authority and power to control lawlessness. The failure of police officials to enforce law strictly during the April riots in Washington, so that in numerous cases looting continued unhindered, is a case in point. Moreover, stern measures taken by police in Miami and Chicago brought words of severe condemnation upon those who insisted that law and order must be maintained.

In past generations the Christian home was the bulwark of the nation. There children were cherished, trained, and required to be obedient to parental authority. Have we drifted so far the other way that the future is hopeless? No, not if we are prepared to take a firm stand in training our children as they should be trained, rather than leaving them to their own devices.

In bringing up children according to God’s precepts there is no room for harshness; the Bible clearly warns against this attitude. After Paul has admonished children in Ephesians 6 (“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother … that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth’ ”), he immediately speaks to parents: “And now a word to you parents. Don’t keep on scolding and nagging your children, making them angry and resentful. But bring them up with the loving discipline the Lord himself approves, with suggestions and godly advice” (v. 4, “Living Letters” translation).

How can parents determine how to train their children rightly? Children can be brought up “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” only when parents recognize the Bible as the ultimate source of reference for life. And coupled with obedient faith in God’s clearly revealed truth parents must have a yearning love that softens discipline and illumines instruction, a love that the child can sense. This love is a gracious gift of the Holy Spirit.

Let no one say that the Ten Commandments are “no longer relevant” for child-rearing today. In them one finds God’s moral law, which speaks precisely to us and the problems we face in a world that grows steadily more pagan. Nor is there any irrelevance in the great Bible stories, which children need to know and ponder. The story of David and Goliath, for instance, carries a compelling message of faith in God.

Give the Bible its rightful place in your home. It is from Scripture that children will learn about good and evil, right and wrong, God and Satan, Christ and redemption, heaven and hell. There they will find moral and spiritual standards on which to base convictions that will last them through life.

The Bible is plain in its teaching about morality and immorality, about purity and impurity, about honesty and dishonesty. When biblical standards are given their rightful place in the training of children as well as in the behavior of parents, one may be sure that the foundation for a Christian home has been laid.

The permissive parent and his opposite, the harsh parent, can look forward to a day when their failures will rise up to smite them. Some time ago a young woman was murdered in sordid surroundings of her own choosing. Confronted with the tragedy, the grieving parents said in bewilderment, “We gave her everything she wanted”—not realizing that this itself might have been part of the cause of their sorrow.

Obviously there can be no Christian home without faith in God and in his Son. In this faith there must be evident a priority. God must come first in everything.

And because God comes first, prayer must be given its rightful place—unceasing, importunate prayer for the children and parents alike. Prayer is necessary for guidance in decision-making, not only for the seemingly “big” problems but also for the routine tasks out of which many lifelong practices and opinions proceed.

A home of stern discipline and required obedience should be a place of obvious love—love for God, of parents for each other, of parents for children, and of children for parents.

Children are amazingly astute. They can sense what parents want for them above all else. They also know whether parents are requiring of them moral and spiritual standards that they themselves do not practice. How greatly parents need the presence of the living Christ in their own lives! The greatest heritage any child can receive is the privilege of being raised in a godly home where Christ is supreme.

In a day when permissiveness has spread from careless homes into the life of our nation, even infesting the area of judicial procedures, it is the duty of every Christian to pray for a reversal of the trend. At the same time he should be setting an example of right living that can carry weight far beyond the confines of his home.

Permissiveness and disobedience breed unhappiness for all concerned, perhaps more for children and young people than we dream. Many disobedient and lawless acts are actually pleas for strict discipline.

Parental authority is a responsibility ordained by God, one for which he will give the necessary wisdom and strength. In its right exercise there is blessing for all concerned.

On the other hand, permissiveness breeds lawlessness, with tragic results for all concerned.

The wise will take heed to these words from the fifteenth chapter of First Samuel:

“Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,

and to hearken than the fat of rams.

For rebellion is as the sin of divination,

and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.”

Dear Friends of Billy Graham:

It’s hard to believe that Billy Graham is now pushing fifty. After twenty years of crusading as the world’s best-known evangelist, he still has the lean and handsome appearance and zestful spirit that mark him as a man of perpetual youth. His dedication to Christ, faithfulness in proclaiming the biblical Gospel, love for people, and effectiveness as a communicator have resulted in his preaching in person probably to more people than any other man in history. A sampler of his thought has been compiled by Bill Adler in The Wit and Wisdom of Billy Graham (Random House, $3.95). Along with many of Billy’s stimulating observations on God, man, the Church, and the world, Adler presents dozens of anecdotes that have enlivened Graham sermons. Here are condensations of a few.

♦ To stop rascals from raiding his watermelon patch, a man put up a sign: “One of these melons is poison.” He got up the next morning and sure enough, no melons were missing. Everything was the same—except the sign. It now read, “Two of these melons is poison.”

♦ A woman said to her minister, “This morning I stood in front of the mirror for half an hour admiring my beauty. Do you think I committed the sin of pride?” The minister replied, “No, I don’t think you committed the sin of pride. It was more the sin of a faulty imagination.”

♦ After reading about transmigration of souls, a man asked his wife, “Does that mean if I die I will come back to this world in a different form?” “Yes, that’s what it means,” she replied. Said he, “Do you believe, for example, I would come back as a worm?” She answered, “Sweetheart, you are never the same twice.”

♦ A fellow told his friend, “Boy, my wife is an angel.” He replied, “You’re lucky; my wife is still living.”

♦ “I was coming down on an elevator with some friends,” said Billy, “and a man got on about the fifth floor. He said ‘I hear Billy Graham is on this elevator.’ One of my friends pointed in my direction and said, ‘Yes, there he is.’ The man looked me up and down for about thirty seconds and he said, ‘My, what an anticlimax.’ ”

To those who know him, Billy Graham is anything but an anticlimax. And it may well be that the climax of his amazing ministry still lies ahead.

May the Lord bless you—and Billy—real good,

EUTYCHUS III

FINE NOTE

Many thanks for your “Editor’s Note” in the May 24 issue. Fine!

DONALD C. STUART

Asheville, N. C.

CHURCH DEFECTORS

Mr. Jones may be relatively valid in his indictment about “the power-wielding role of the Church” (“The Church’s Defection from a Divine Mission,” May 24). The Church must work independently of political power.

However, to assume that some rather anemic religio-political “weapon” is responsible for the disruption in local parishes is rather naive and hypocritical. Most of the people who leave the Church do so because the Church (or at least that particular pastor and congregation) is taking seriously biblical admonitions to “seek justice,” to “love your neighbor,” to “welcome the stranger” (be he black or white).

RICHARD L. ERICKSON

Grace Lutheran Church

Belview, Minn.

JOY READING

I just finished reading Eutychus on “So-kagakkai” (May 24). How interesting to know of the “In” religion of California. Your man Eutychus writes so well. It is a joy to read.

MRS. E. STANLEY PEDERSON

Omaha, Neb.

With keen interest and frequent smiles, I read Eutychus and his kin. The “preface” is the best reading of all.

C. W. KIRKPATRICK

Housatonic Congregational Church

Housatonic, Mass.

POSITIVE-NEGATIVE PAINS

I cannot refrain from pointing out the unfair implications of the single sentence, “The union process began in 1957, and in 1962 only 3,933 out of 5,458 Congregational Christian churches were in the merger” (“Dissent in the Churches,” May 24). The inference is that a very sizable minority acted negatively.… My study of the yearbooks shows that many of the churches which did not vote … or which voted negatively were not very active in positive support of the mission of the denomination even before.

It pains me to see certain positive aspects of CHRISTIANITY TODAY undercut by a negative response to the potentials of church union such as evidenced by your editorial.

But the slant seems quite different when applied to the National Association of Evangelicals.

CHARLES S. SANGREE

The First Congregational Church

Holliston, Mass.

N.A.E. RESPONSE

I must confess to a bit of surprise and disappointment at your report of the recent convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Philadelphia (May 24).

From the story I get the impression of some difficulty on the part of your correspondent in understanding the perspective of the convention that its leaders would almost unanimously have described as constructively evangelical.

A bit more serious, the story puts together material covering only one aspect of the convention relating to social concern. This is understandable, since a reporter can attend only one of a dozen or more meetings running concurrently and hear the response to papers presented. Consequently, some of his statements appear out of context, convey a distorted picture of the whole, and leave the impression of a reporter’s preoccupation with social activism rather than the actual picture of the convention’s preoccupation with the relevancy of the Gospel.

CLYDE W. TAYLOR

General Director

National Association of Evangelicals

Washington, D. C.

APT CAPTION

How well captioned was your article “Methodist Militants Bid for Power” (May 24). The Methodist “pink fringe” has followed the well-known pattern of socialist-Communist action, with its emphasis on social concerns and ecumenical one-worldness. I see no particular merit in the bigness of a Church, when you lose your values and identity in accepting the dictates of the “militants.”

ELEANOR DURR

Lakeside, Ohio

HELPING THE HELPLESS

“Nobody’s Nothings” (May 10) was indeed heart-searching. I wish it could be read by all pastors and Christians. As a Christian nurse, I have experienced the joy one receives when an abused or neglected child responds to love and understanding.… Every human being wants to feel “wanted” by someone.… Mr. Rote is carrying a heavy burden. I appreciate and understand his love and concern for these helpless bits of humanity.

ESTHER FROSTAD

Bentley, Alberta

You are to be commended for publishing “Nobody’s Nothings.” It is easy for the Church to forget about the spiritual and other needs of the mentally retarded.

In an otherwise excellent article, however, the author has made some inaccurate statements about mental retardation.… “Mental retardation” refers only to persons whose IQ’s are lower than 70. This comprises 3 per cent—not 20 per cent—of the population. Persons with IQ’s between 70 and 90 are below average, but usually able to live productive and useful lives. Furthermore, the causes of this condition are not limited to brain damage and cultural deprivation. Mental retardation is often caused by inherited genetic factors and other physiological conditions. In almost all cases, mentally retarded persons canmake some improvement in response to treatment.

GARY R. COLLINS

Associate Professor of Psychology

Bethel College

St. Paul, Minn.

STUDENTS SEEKING

Congratulations for once again attacking the problems of higher education (May 10).… The nation’s colleges and universities are undergoing great stress during these trying times. They are filled to capacity with students seeking truth and direction. The tragedy is that higher education, and we who are involved in it, fail miserably in guiding the student. Until we realize that only Jesus Christ can show us the truth and guide us, we will not succeed in our task.

My special congratulations to Dr. Reid for his penetrating and refreshing article pointing the way to knowledge only through our Saviour and Lord. Somehow we must become aware of the fact that we can only find “the unity of truth in Christ.”

MARVIN J. PETROELJE

Chairman, Div. of Social Sciences

Northwestern College

Orange City, Iowa

I read with great interest and some despair the article by Mr. Allison on “The American Campus as a Spiritual Force” (May 10).… Mr. Allison despairs of the fact that the “American campus” is no longer a “positive spiritual force” and derides the fact that church-related students go to college to discover “answers to life’s problems” and find that they get only “more questions.” Yet in Allison’s own words, “perhaps more than any other, this generation recognizes injustice and wants to do something about it.”

This in and of itself is the strongest possible reaffirmation of the spiritual force which is upon the campus, and it is precisely here that colleges serve as a training ground for the secular church of the future. In our “post-religious” age, verbal affirmation of Christ will be displaced by concerned action in the field of recognized injustice.… Only committed action on rather unpopular fronts is a way to show positive spiritual force. In this context, the college generation is far ahead of ours.

IGOR I. SIKORSKY, JR.

Hartford, Conn.

IN PERSPECTIVE

I want to express my admiration and appreciation for the group of editorials in the May 10 issue which I consider to be of unparalleled relevance and insight. The evaluations of these key contemporary issues were profoundly placed within proper perspectives—both historical and eternal.…

I must particularly applaud your suggestion that truly concerned civil-rights leaders “would do well not to stage a useless tent-in but to organize a program for economically deprived Negroes to work together to remove the rubble and rebuild many facilities destroyed by rioters in past weeks”.…

Those who clearly have the greatest need possibly render themselves the greatest harm by sitting, marching, or rioting. In fact, the nation’s attention becomes focused on these disruptive elements of so-called corrective action to such an extent that the actions themselves become major social issues, further delaying progress on the basic needs and problems.

THOMAS E. MCCABE

Valley Forge, Pa.

MOVING TO UNITY

I read with great interest your reporter’s account of the ecumenical stirrings within Wesleyan conservatism (“Other Wesleyan Ecumenics,” May 10).…

Methinks there are thousands of anxious on-lookers who applaud the trend and pray for the day when Wesleyan factionalism shall be done with in favor of a singular, united force. Christian holiness deserves no weaker a voice than such a movement most certainly would possess. Its “future effectiveness” may indeed be at stake!

DAVID GLENN GROSSE

Chaplain, Captain, USAF

Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

AS A DOG BITES

Someone has said that as every dog is entitled to one bite, so every man should be allowed one far-out theory.

If John Warwick Montgomery’s “Cry-onics and Orthodoxy” (Current Religious Thought, May 10) is his only “far-out theory,” he may be allowed to have it. Granted, that truly progressive evangelical theologians will develop serious theologies of cryonics, but not in the direction that he suggests.

May I say that the Bible does imply the possibility of a resuscitation of one who has been clinically and unquestionably dead (Rev. 13:3). So remarkable will be the event that the whole world will marvel.

My own serious theology of cryonics is that it is not impossible that some misguided evangelical may stumble upon the very means of resuscitating an archenemy of Christ and of God, the destroyer of the saints—the Antichrist.

WILLIAM G. LOWE

Berlin Bible Church

Narrowsburg, N. Y.

Dr. Montgomery overlooked a possible difficulty confronting the space-age voodooism of cryonics. A scientific observer of an earlier age pointed out: “There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding” (Job 32:8). Will this spirit and inspiration congeal at the temperature of liquid helium and be revived by the glorious science of the future?

Despite the intriguing prospect of being among the first orthodox zombies, most evangelicals will opt for the kind of restoration proposed by the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians 15.

OVERTON W. BROWN

Chiapas, Mexico

AFFLUENT PROTEST

It is not possible for this minister to longer keep his silence about the misuse of the term “affluence” by all too many ministers of all denominations. “Affluence” is a respectable word. It means prosperity flowing in a fluctuating manner. However, the way this word is misused it means that every affluent person is a crook, dishonest, and downright unchristian.

This, ministers imply, certainly characterizes the thousands of church members in their parishes. They condemn affluence in their speeches, in their conventions, and in their newspapers.

We would remind them that everything in America is affluent. And of all people who should be careful of the manner he uses “affluence,” it is the minister. He is a man of affluence, especially the ministers who are serving on denominational staffs. Most of them work in “affluent” buildings. They have affluent offices; in fact most of them look like they are presidents of banks or oil or steel corporations. They get affluent salaries, compared with most of their church members. They receive affluent privileges, such as part of, if not all, free tuition in schools and colleges for themselves and their children. They are so affluent that they are exempted from military service. They get affluent discounts from the department stores, special discounts from their doctors. They travel on railway trains with affluent discounts. Yet they vilify their parishioners who contribute generously to support ministers in their affluent kind of living.…

All of us Americans are affluent. We even have “affluent poverty,” compared to the poverty in Haiti, India, China, Russia, and even South America.…

Some time ago someone sent me a press release which quoted an editor who declared, “The velvety affluent ought to get mugged.” … Such declarations do not solve our problems. They make more of them.…

GORDON PALMER

Los Angeles, Calif.

A FEW LEFT

I find your magazine stimulating. It is an encouragement to know that there are a few evangelical magazines left on the market.

OTTO T. ZEEB

Good Shepherd Evangelical Lutheran Church

Dover, N. J.

Knowledge of New Testament background has undergone what amounts to a revolution since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This revolution involves both history and vocabulary. It does not call in question the basic New Testament faith in the risen Jesus as God’s Messiah and God’s Only-begotten; rather, it is one of knowledge and perspective.

Inevitably this revolution has overturned a great deal of the work done by New Testament scholars in the past hundred and fifty years. Most of this work was honest and painstaking, and much of it was perceptive, even brilliant. But it was limited by a lack of the assured controlling evidence now available in such large measure. How unfortunate it is that many of the giants of the new Testament field worked and died before the dramatic discoveries at Qumran.

One must say also, however, that some New Testament work has been capricious, based on philosophical presuppositions that ought never to have been applied to any discipline claiming to be based on historical evidence. At times such work has even been done against a background of ill-concealed anti-Semitism, on the assumption that the Old Testament and the history of Israel are not truly a “word of God” to this or any other generation.

A Jewish Environment

Only those who still resist the evidence can fail to realize that the whole background of the New Testament is thoroughly Jewish—Jewish in assumptions and in habits of thinking—and is derived from the basic concepts of the Old Testament and its faith in the active intervention of God in human history.

The known historical background of the New Testament was far from simple before the Qumran discoveries of 1947. Iranian dualism, astral determinism, the revolt of many of the “pious ones” (hasidim) against the idea of a secular state, a great upsurge of apocalyptic literature, inroads of Greek hermeneutics into Jewish thought—all these things were known to have had a profound influence on Judaism prior to New Testament times, to have been reflected in the New Testament writings, and to have influenced attitudes of various groups within Judaism to one another and to the Gentile world outside. But before the Qumran discoveries, scholars were without firm control evidence.

Perhaps the most striking reappraisal of the New Testament literature has been that of the distinctive vocabulary of the Johannine writings, with their reiteration of pairs of opposites: life and death, truth and falsehood, light and darkness, the world of good and the world of evil. Far from representing a late pattern of Hellenistic Gnostic thought, as was often erroneously supposed, this vocabulary now is clearly seen as theological material belonging precisely to a southern Palestinian tradition in the time of Jesus and already in that time well rooted in at least one important stratum of Jewish thinking. So too with the apocalyptic material of Second Peter; its vocabulary and manners of expression are now well known to us from the Essene writings of Qumran.

Important for all future study of Matthew’s Gospel (and now the subject of an important work by Robert H. Gundry, The Use of the Old Testament in St. Matthew’s Gospel, Leiden, 1967) is the commentary material from the Essene sectarians. Matthew did not use Old Testament quotations as “proof texts” or draw from some ill-defined “book of testimonies”; it is clear that he worked along lines of which we now have abundant examples. Matthew’s model was pesher (commentary), in which whole blocks of Scripture are set against commentary on them. This method is in complete contrast to the rabbinic method of halakhah, with its rigid attention to the precise meaning of words and phrases so familiar to us from the writings of St. Paul. Halakhah, based on Greek rules of hermeneutics, was introduced into Jewish thought by Hillel the Elder, grandfather of the Gamaliel who was Paul’s teacher in Jerusalem. (It is worthy of incidental notice that “proof texts” were an impossible device until the imposition of chapter and verse divisions for liturgical purposes much later on.)

Thanks to the seminal work on Samaritanism by the late Professor Abram Spiro, we find we must examine afresh the allusions and implications in many of the New Testament writings. For example, the so-called speech of Stephen in Acts seven seems a clear instance of the scrupulous care taken by the author of Acts to preserve the form of a Samaritan-Christian apologia or tract. In the light of Spiro’s work, we are likely to find that the book we know as the Epistle to the Hebrews was addressed to a group of Christians who had at one time been members of a sect that owed much to John the Baptist (to Essenism) and were more than likely Samaritans in origin (cf. Appendix V in Johannes Munck, The Acts of the Apostles, New York, 1966).

Varieties of Messianic Hope

One important result of the Qumran discoveries is the new knowledge of sectarian Judaism available to us. Although scholars knew that the picture of Judaism as being fairly uniform, with groups such as the Pharisees and Sadducees occupying more or less well-defined positions, was always too simple, they are now confronted with evidence of a far richer diversity than was thought possible before 1947. It is not simply that archaeology has added Essenes to a list of groups exercising influence within Judaism. That again would make the over-all picture too simple. Scholars already knew of the Essenes (the “monastic” variety) through Josephus. Now, however, they have a much fuller portrait. Pharisees, Samaritans, and many others were affected by, or made common cause with, the piety that produced communities like that of Qumran. And even there, it is clear that Essenism was itself divided into what might be described as “pietist” groups, who sought no identification with the wider world of political life and conflict, and those whom we might call “activists,” who looked with eagerness to the resolution of national and religious life in an apocalyptic messianic war.

All this knowledge makes for a far greater degree of complexity in what is known as the “messianic hope.” The expectations of a Deliverer, a champion of Israel’s cause, bore the complexion of the group that held them. Sometimes they seemed to point to a kingly ruler of the Davidic line, sometimes to a Servant identified with the sufferings of his people, sometimes to a “Righteous One” belonging more closely to the post-Exilic, orthodox tradition (cf. Acts 7:52). All the portraits are found in the New Testament interwoven around the person of Jesus, and all are found explicitly or implicitly in the sectarian literature of Qumran. In the face of the evidence available, we need no longer posit any kind of “messianic secret” to explain Jesus’ reluctance to be called “Messiah” publicly. Too much was at stake to allow the ministry to be compromised by any one of the many-faceted interpretations of the messianic vocation. The impressive thing is the manner in which the New Testament writers see all interpretations fulfilled in Jesus.

New Windows on Textual Criticism

For the textual critic of both Old and New Testaments there is abundant work for many years to come. Since the background of the New Testament is now demonstrably Jewish, the state of the Old Testament text in the period prior to Jesus’ ministry is of considerable importance. Not only has the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Septuagint) been immeasurably enhanced in stature, with the result that it is now an absolutely indispensable tool for the biblical scholar; it has also become clear that the Hebrew text was in a quite fluid state, with considerable variation in rendering. It is now possible to speak of an “Old Palestinian” textual tradition, older than either the Septuagint or the medieval Hebrew text. And this means that direct quotations from the Old Testament in the New Testament documents, as well as innumerable allusions in scattered phrases, may often depend upon very ancient Hebrew originals or even upon free renderings (cf. Frank M. Cross, Jr., The Ancient Library of Qumran, New York, 1958, p. 120 ff.). The notion, widely entertained by some New Testament scholars, of finding and establishing a fixed and formal Hebrew text is now discovered to be a chimera.

Indirectly, textual criticism, coupled with the larger quantities of commentary material, bears eloquent testimony to the strength and vitality of the oral tradition in the period immediately before the time of Jesus. The ease and rapidity with which oral tradition shaped and formed material makes it unnecessary to assume the plethora of editors—armed with scissors and paste (and unlimited expensive parchment)—so beloved of some New Testament higher critics.

Two further comments are in order. First, the Dead Sea discoveries, allied with archaeological evidence, have effectively established the tri-lingual character of Palestinian life in the time of Jesus. Hebrew, far from being a dead language as was formerly thought, was actually being increasingly cultivated. It was Aramaic that was being eroded by dialect variations.

Secondly, enough is already known of the intense social upheavals of the years after A.D. 60 to make any late first-century date for most New Testament material increasingly untenable. It becomes more and more unlikely that Christians in Palestine had to await the writing and dissemination of a Roman Gospel by Mark (c. A.D. 65) before embarking on their own collections of tradition.

Faith in Jesus

The speed with which the infant Church, especially in Jerusalem, achieved a degree of organization and assumed that this pattern would also serve for missions much farther afield, seems to argue that tested and proven models that could easily be adopted and adapted were already available. It is interesting in this regard that during the past fifteen years several New Testament scholars have called attention to the parallels between community organization at Qumran and the Jerusalem church as depicted in Acts. Both Catholics and Protestant may have to take a fresh look at the presuppositions they have brought to the study of early church history. Incidentally, the early history of Christian monasticism, both hermits and community groups, may also have to be reworked in the light of the Essene literature.

It is well to end as we began. For all the illumination that the Qumran discoveries can provide, for all the parallels that can be drawn, and for all the debts that the New Testament writers manifestly owed to sectarian Judaism, it needs to be said with emphasis that the New Testament is based wholly on the faith that in Jesus alone—suffering, dying, risen, ever-living—all messianic expectation had its goal.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

We Christians have a particular interest in the past of the Near East, because our religious and cultural roots lie there. Our beliefs are guided by an ancient book, the Bible, that was produced in its entirety in lands strange to us by people who did not speak our tongue and whose customs were not ours. If the message contained in that ancient book is to have meaning for us moderns of the Western world, we must understand it and have confidence in its authenticity, its veracity, its timelessness, and its eternal values.

During the last two centuries, the Old Testament more than the New has been subjected to much critical investigation. We know it was written in Hebrew by Jews 2,500 years ago and more. It contains accounts of miracles that cannot be verified, events that seem unreal or fantastic, and prophecies in a symbolism that requires special study to be understood. Little wonder that many thinking people have questioned the value of the Old Testament for this modern age and have subjected it to a scrutiny that no other book, ancient or modern, has ever experienced.

Many fields have undergone revolutions during the last few centuries. In the space of 150 years, traveling has been accelerated from 4 to 17,000 miles an hour. Electronic computers now make calculations with breathtaking speed. Electric and atomic power has been harnessed and can be released at will. The worlds of the Arctic and the Antarctic, of the deep sea, of the air that surrounds us and of the empty space beyond our atmosphere—all these have been explored. No wonder the inquisitive mind of modern man began also to question traditional religious beliefs, when he saw that values changed in many areas and that the views of his forbears in many fields of knowledge proved false. It is only natural, then, that the basis of our Christian faith, the Bible, has been subjected to careful scrutiny.

For some the results of this investigation seemed to threaten doom for the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. The culmination Was reached at the time of World War I. Scholars did not yet know that a Hebrew alphabetic script existed before the eighth or ninth century B.C.; therefore they thought that the Pentateuch could not have been produced any earlier than the period of the Hebrew kings. Since ancient parallels for the strange customs described in the patriarchal stories had not been discovered, practically all scholars of standing in Europe and America considered these stories fictitious. Furthermore, the earliest known Hebrew Old Testament manuscripts came from the tenth century A.D. and thus were less than a thousand years old. This strengthened the suspicion that the Bible text had undergone substantial changes during its transmission from one generation to another over a period of many centuries from which no witnesses seemed to have survived.

Not surprisingly, many scholars therefore abandoned belief in traditional views about the Old Testament. Friedrich Delitzsch, a great German Assyriologist and Old Testament scholar, wrote in 1921 that “the books of Moses, Joshua and Judges suffer under the fault that history is indiscriminately mixed with legends and fairy tales, as is also the case in the Book of Kings” (Die grosse Täuschung, I, 10). He also asserted that “the Old Testament works, the alleged Word of God, has been transmitted in a much more faulty and careless way than we can comprehend” (II, 5). Julius Wellhausen, the famous higher Bible critic, proclaimed unchallenged his idea that the conditions of the later Jewish monarchy were retrojected into the hoary past, and that the patriarchal stories were no more than a transfigured mirage of unreality. He was so fully convinced of the unreliability of the biblical narratives that he exclaimed: “If it [the Israelite tradition] were only possible, it would be folly to prefer any other possibility” (Komposition des Hexateuch, p. 346).

But thanks to archaeological discoveries made during the last forty years, this situation has changed completely. In 1917 Alan Gardiner, noted British Egyptologist, made the first decipherment of the Proto-Semitic inscriptions found at Mt. Sinai by Flinders Petrie more than ten years earlier. These inscriptions, written in a pictorial script by Canaanites before the middle of the second millennium B.C., prove that alphabetic writing existed before the time of Moses. Numerous other inscriptions in the same script have since that time come to light in Palestine and near Mt. Sinai, showing that the art of writing in an alphabetic script was already widespread in the patriarchal age.

The discovery of a whole archive of legal and social texts at Nuzi, a small place in northeastern Iraq, has revealed that the social and legal background of the patriarchal age is reflected accurately and in great detail in the Old Testament patriarchal narratives. Nothing has done more in recent years to restore confidence in the reliability of these narratives than the humble Nuzi texts. Scholar after scholar has testified that “there is today no reason to doubt the authenticity of the general background of the patriarchal narratives” (E. A. Speiser, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, XIII, 43). To the discoveries at Nuzi must be added the finding of several law codes from the early second millennium B.C.that have revealed the legal background for many strange customs encountered in the patriarchal period.

Since 1929, annual excavations carried out at Ras Shamra in northern Syria have given us a large mass of Canaanite literature, written in an alphabetic cuneiform script that was deciphered in an incredibly short time, chiefly through the ingenuity of two scholars, one German and one French. These texts have illuminated the religion as well as the moral and social conditions of the ancient Canaanites and have provided much linguistic help for a better understanding of the poetical sections of the Old Testament.

Excavations of numerous sites in Palestine, Syria, and other Bible lands have brought to light many bits of evidence that have made major or minor contributions to a better understanding or verification of the Bible stories. Professor W. F. Albright, the greatest living Orientalist, made the following significant remarks in 1958 when he reviewed the archaeological accomplishment of the recent past:

Thanks to modern research we now recognize its [the Bible’s] substantial historicity. The narratives of the patriarchs, of Moses and the exodus, of the conquest of Canaan, of the judges, the monarchy, exile and restoration, have all been confirmed and illustrated to an extent that I should have thought impossible forty years ago [The Christian Century, November 19, 1958, p. 1329].

Then came the culmination of all discoveries in the field of biblical archaeology: the finding of Hebrew scrolls in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, scrolls that have given us samples, dating from the period from the third century B.C.to the second century A.D., of all Old Testament books save one. The few well-preserved documents as well as the tens of thousands of fragments of worm-eaten and rotten Bible scrolls, which patient scholars have deciphered and published, have already done much to restore confidence in the reliability of the Hebrew text. One can find scores of published testimonials by reputable scholars who as the result of their studies of the Dead Sea scrolls have declared their surprise that the changes the Masoretic Hebrew text experienced in the course of transmission were so few and so insignificant. Professor Albright said in this respect that the Dead Sea scrolls prove “conclusively that we must treat the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible with the utmost respect and that the free emending of difficult passages in which modern critical scholars have indulged cannot be tolerated any longer” (Recent Discoveries in Bible Lands, 1955, p. 128).

Having taken this general look at the phenomenal changes in the evaluation of the reliability of the Old Testament, let us turn to some concrete examples of illumination and verification of the Old Testament by archaeological discoveries. First, in the patriarchal stories we find several strange accounts of a barren wife who asked her husband to produce a child for her by her maid servant. Sarah did this, and later also Jacob’s two wives, Rachel and Leah. Today we know that this practice was not unusual during the patriarchal age. The laws of that period as well as ancient marriage contracts mention it. For example, in a marriage contract from Nuzi, the bride Kelim-ninu promises in written form to procure for her husband Shennima a slave girl as second wife, if she fails to bear him children. She also promises that she will not drive out the offspring of such a union. In no other period besides the patriarchal age do we find this strange custom.

Another example is the sale of Esau’s birthright to Jacob for a dish of lentils. It is hard to believe that that status of an older brother or sister could ever have been attained by purchase. However, a Nuzi text deals with this very custom. In a written contract between Tupkitilla and Kurpazah, two brothers, Tupkitilla sells his inheritance rights to his younger brother for three sheep. Esau sold his rights for food in the pot, while Tupkitilla sold his for food still on the hoof.

Other texts show that a bride was ordinarily chosen for a son by his father, as the patriarchs did; that a man had to pay a dowry to his father-in-law, or to work for his father-in-law if he could not afford the dowry, as poor Jacob had to do; that the orally expressed will of a father could not be changed after it had been pronounced, as in Isaac’s refusal to change the blessings pronounced over Jacob even though they had been obtained by deception; that a bride ordinarily received from her father a slave girl as personal maid, as Leah and Rachel did when they were married to Jacob; that the theft of cult objects or of a god was punishable by death, which was why Jacob consented to the death of the one with whom the stolen gods of his father-in-law were found; that the strange relationship between Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar is vividly illustrated by the laws of the ancient Assyrians and Hittites. These are only some of the many parallels to customs reflected in the patriarchal stories that archaeologists have discovered. Such evidence shows clearly that these narratives were written soon after the events described had occurred, when these strange customs either still existed or had not yet been forgotten.

Leaving the patriarchal period, let us see how archaeological material can illuminate biblical records without providing a scrap of written material. The excavations at Shiloh by Danish scholars provide an example. The early chapters of the first book of Samuel describe the story of Eli and Samuel at the tabernacle located at Shiloh. This city was at that time the seat of the desert sanctuary originally constructed under Moses’ direction at Mt. Sinai. Its greatest treasure was the Ark of the Covenant. Then we read that the Ark was captured by the Philistines in the battle of Aphek and held by them for some time. Finally it was returned to Israel, but not to the city of Shiloh. For many years it remained at Kirjath-jearim, until David transferred it to Jerusalem, his capital. Moreover, when we read again of the family of Eli, the Ark resides not at Shiloh but at Nob; nothing is said about the fate of Shiloh and its sanctuary.

What happened to it? In the book of Jeremiah, references are made to some great disaster that befell Shiloh at some unspecified period of Israel’s history. Nothing in Jeremiah’s references suggests that this disaster had occurred in the distant past. However, scholars have long supposed that the Philistines destroyed Shiloh and its tent sanctuary after they defeated the Israelites and took the Ark at the battle of Aphek. When the Danes excavated Shiloh, they found evidence that satisfactorily answers the question. The broken pieces of pottery discovered there provide a means for reconstructing the ancient history of Shiloh. This pottery evidence shows that there was a break in the city’s history from the eleventh century B.C. until the sixth century. From biblical evidence we know that the early eleventh century B.C. is precisely the period of the Philistine defeat of Israel and the capture of the Ark; hence we have proof that at that time the city of Shiloh and the Tabernacle must have been destroyed.

I want to inject a personal note about the discoveries at Shechem, for I have participated in its excavation. Our 1960 work at Shechem revealed that the city and its great temple of Baal were destroyed in the twelfth century B.C. That is exactly the time indicated in the Bible for the destruction of Shechem by Abimelech, the bastard son of the judge Gideon. The archaeological evidence—broken pieces of pottery—sets that date at about 1150 B.C. The agreement between the two dates, one obtained from biblical evidence and the other from archaeological data, could hardly have been closer. This is certainly a source of great satisfaction for us biblical archaeologists.

For another illustration of the value of archaeological evidence for a better understanding of the Old Testament, let us go to Jerusalem. Archaeological explorations have shed some interesting light on the capture of Jerusalem by David. The biblical accounts of that capture (2 Sam. 5:6–8 and 1 Chron. 11:6) are rather obscure without the help obtained from archaeological evidence. Take for example Second Samuel 5:8, which in the King James Version reads: “And David said on that day, Whosoevergetteth up to the gutter, and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the blind, that are hated of David’s soul, he shall be chief and captain.” Add to this statement First Chronicles 11:6—“So Joab the son of Zeruiah went first up and was chief.”

Some years ago I saw a painting of the conquest of Jerusalem in which the artist showed a man climbing up a metal downspout, running on the outside face of the city wall. This picture was absurd, because ancient city walls had neither gutters nor downspouts, although they had weeping holes in the walls to drain water off. The Revised Standard Version, produced after the situation had become clear through archaeological discoveries made on the spot, translates the pertinent passages: “And David said on that day, ‘Whoever would smite the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, who are hated by David’s soul.’ ” “And Joab the son of Zeruiah went up first, so he became chief.” What was this water shaft that Joab climbed?

Jerusalem in those days was a small city lying on a single spur of the hills on which the large city eventually stood. Its position was one of great natural strength, because it was surrounded on three sides by deep valleys. This was why the Jebusites boastfully declared that even blind and lame could hold their city against a powerful attacking army. But the water supply of the city was poor; the population was entirely dependent on a spring that lay outside the city on the eastern slope of the hill.

So that they could obtain water without having to go down to where the spring was located, the Jebusites had constructed an elaborate system of tunnels through the rock. First they had dug a horizontal tunnel, beginning at the spring and proceeding toward the center of the city. After digging for ninety feet they hit a natural cave. From the cave they dug a vertical shaft forty-five feet high, and from the end of the shaft a sloping tunnel 135 feet long and a staircase that ended at the surface of their city, 110 feet above the water level of the spring. The spring was then concealed from the outside so that no enemy could detect it. To get water the Jebusite women went down through the upper tunnel and let their water skins down the shaft to draw water from the cave, to which it was brought by natural flow through the horizontal tunnel that connected the cave with the spring.

However, one question remained unanswered. The excavations of R. A. S. Macalister and J. G. Duncan some forty years ago had uncovered a wall and a tower that were thought to be of Jebusite and Davidic origin respectively. This tract of wall ran along the rim of the hill of Ophel, west of the tunnel entrance. Thus the entrance was left outside the protective city wall, exposed to the attacks and interference of enemies. Why hadn’t the tunnel been built to end inside the city? This puzzle has now been solved by the recent excavations of Kathleen Kenyon on Ophel. She found that Macalister and Duncan had given the wall and tower they discovered wrong dates; these things actually originated in the Hellenistic period. She uncovered the real Jebusite wall a little farther down the slope of the hill, east of the tunnel entrance, which now puts the entrance safely in the old city area.

David, a native of Bethlehem, four miles south of Jerusalem, may have found out about the spring and its tunnel system in the days when as a youth he roamed through the countryside. Later, as king he based his surprise attack on this knowledge, and made the promise that the first man who entered the city through the water shaft would become his commander-in-chief. Joab, who was already general of the army, did not want to lose that position and therefore led the attack himself. The Israelites apparently went through the tunnel, climbed up the shaft, and were in the city before any of the besieged citizens had any idea that so bold a plan had been conceived.

This water system, constructed more than three thousand years ago, is still in existence and can be examined by any tourist. Some good climbers have even climbed the shaft in modern times, though it is not easy to do so because the rock walls are smooth and slick and give little hold for hand or foot. The shaft is also a little too wide for a comfortable climb, as I learned in my unsuccessful attempt to climb it.

Among many other illustrations of how archaeology clears up disputed points of biblical history, I want to mention one more, involving the conquests of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II. Various biblical records mention three conquests of Judah’s capital by the Babylonian king, first in 605 B.C., in the third year of King Jehoiakim, then in 597 after a three-month reign of Jehoiachin, and finally in 586 in the eleventh year of King Zedekiah. For a long time scholars did not doubt that Nebuchadnezzar had taken Jerusalem, for the biblical statements seemed quite clear on this point. However, many scholars became somewhat suspicious when a hundred years of excavations in Babylonia failed to turn up one single text of Nebuchadnezzar referring to any one of these conquests of Jerusalem, though numerous texts written by this monarch had come to light during these hundred years. Also, the city of Babylon, which the Germans excavated during a long campaign of eighteen years, failed to provide a single document to show that Nebuchadnezzar had ever been at war with the kingdom of Judah or had ever taken their capital, Jerusalem. A number of well-known scholars began to doubt that Nebuchadnezzar had ever taken Jerusalem during his reign. But today these doubts are groundless; at least one of Nebuchadnezzar’s three conquests of Jerusalem is well attested by several pieces of archaeological evidence, of which I shall mention two recent ones.

Shortly before the last war, Professor Ernst Weidner worked in the Berlin Museum on unimposing tablets that had been found in some storerooms of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace in Babylon many years ago. These tablets contained day-by-day records of the issuance of grain and oil to dependents of the royal palace, such as workmen engaged in royal building operations, musicians employed as entertainers, and hostages from foreign countries. As Weidner studied these somewhat dry records, he suddenly came upon the name of King Jehoiachin of Judah as recipient of royal rations of grain and oil. The tablets mentioning the king were written in 592 B.C., five years after he had been taken captive, and his five sons and their tutor are mentioned also. Jehoiachin received twenty times as much foodstuff as any other person listed, an indication that he was still considered an honorable personage and may have been allowed to keep servants for his use. His imprisonment, to which the Bible also refers, seems to have begun at a later time, probably when efforts were made during a rebellion (described by Jeremiah) to put him back on the throne of Judah.

The second interesting discovery bearing on this subject was made in 1955 by Donald Wiseman of the British Museum. Among tablets that had been in that museum for many decades Wiseman discovered one that chronicled several years of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign. This tablet describes briefly the military campaign of Nebuchadnezzar against Judah in 597 B.C. and the capture of Jerusalem on March 16 of that year—the first exact date of a biblical event obtained from a factual non-biblical record. The tablet also states that Nebuchadnezzar deposed King Jehoiachin and replaced him by Zedekiah.

These two discoveries teach us a valuable lesson. That some excavations from which we expect some information seem to shed no light on biblical events should not be taken as evidence that the biblical records are at fault. We should never forget that all our evidence is fragmentary and incomplete, spotty in some parts and more full in others. Conclusions based on incomplete or negative evidence can be entirely misleading, as this illustration clearly shows. Time after time, after a long period of patient waiting, solutions to our problems have been found. There are still many points awaiting clarification, which may come as more archaeological evidence comes to light.

Many more examples could be given of how archaeological evidence has shed light on interesting details of biblical history. The unpretentious castle at Gibeah, King Saul’s residence, has been excavated, and Solomon’s copper and iron mines in Edom have been rediscovered and in part are being exploited again by modern Israelis. The Assyrian cuneiform documents mention nine of the thirty-six Hebrew kings that reigned during the period of Assyria’s existence and give us much valuable information about the history of the divided kingdom. Egypt has produced welcome historical evidence, both in documents and in other material. There are records of King Shishak’s invasion of Judah and Israel after Solomon’s death, recorded in two Old Testament books. A large existing archive consists of scores of papyrus documents written by Jews of the post-exilic period; these have illustrated many obscure points of that interesting time we glimpse in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.

The archaeologist’s pick and hoe have produced for the biblical scholar an abundance of auxiliary material that enables him to understand and defend the historical narratives much better than before. And we can assume that there is more to come.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”