Dear Observers of the Diabolique:

The American religious bazaar is well stocked with the bizarre. A prime example is Anton LaVey and his Church of Satan. When I last wrote about him, I chuckled at his ridiculous rites and banal appeals to lust. But now my grin is gone as I note the many people taking his absurd hocus-pocus seriously. Lately he has received national TV exposure (indecent?) on “The Tonight Show” and Art Linkletter’s “The Lid’s Off.” As a result LaVey claims he was “deluged” with letters requesting information and even membership of his church. He’s now also proud to be listed in Concordia’s latest Religious Bodies in America.

Our man in San Francisco, the Rev. Edward Plowman, reports that LaVey recently conducted a military funeral with full Satanic honors for a young Oakland sailor killed in a Bay Area auto accident. Previously active in evangelical groups, the sailor and his wife, a former Jehovah’s Witness, joined the Satanic church after seeing the smooth-talking, black-horned LaVey on TV. The Navy man’s shocked parents and Baptist pastor in suburban Chicago couldn’t understand why he was attracted to Satanism. The father blamed it on his son’s widow. She said, “He felt deeply about this church. This is how he would have wanted his funeral. This is the only honest religion.”

Flanked by black candles and carnations and by black-robed acolytes, LaVey intoned over the casket, “Satan, Satan, brother Satan, fill his soul with fire; carry him on the Ebon River into the night. By all the powers of Satan and Hell, you will walk this earth to which I bind you forever and ever. And may this plot of ground lie all the way to Hell.” He also offered incantations in the “lost pre-biblical language of Enochian.” He concluded with the words, “Ham, Shem, Forash,” which he later said meant, “Okay, it is done.”

Afterward, at the Playboy Club, LaVey explained his view of death: “We believe it’s no fun to leave the party; it’s life we’re enthused about, not death. We don’t want to go into the Cosmos or Heaven. We want to be bound to earth.” The self-styled high priest of Satan sees life as “one great indulgence” and believes “man is an animal who must serve his own comforts.”

To serve the comforts of this naked ape, wouldest thou get thee behind me, Anton?

EUTYCHUS III

Ham, Shem, Forash

ONE IN THE LIST

The article “False Prophets in the Church” by Dr. Billy Graham (Jan. 19) is just one more in a long list of much-needed reading. It reminds me of what Paul wrote to the Corinthians: God is not the author of confusion. Yet these would continue to muddy the spiritual water and mislead many through confusion.

EDWARD C. GOULD

Director

Christ’s Way For Life

Greenwood, Fla.

I am sorry to find in your two lead articles by Dr. Graham and Dr. Huey evidence that even the most biblically grounded among us use God’s word to arrive at predetermined judgments. I hasten to add that I have little more sympathy for ecclesiastical rabble-rousers than these gentlemen, but the formula for proper Christian response to the events and signs of the times is not so simple as they draw them.

ROBERT N. YETTER

Westminster United Presbyterian Church

MifHintown, Pa.

Permit me first to make a declaration of long-standing esteem for Billy Graham. Having said that, however, I must respond with mixed emotions to his article.…

I could wish that the urgency of Christian responsibility in the face of unjust social conditions were stressed with a passion at least equal to that reflected in the frequent denunciations of the “social physicians.” But true to the usual form of most such postures, Mr. Graham has rightly denounced the false prophets, made an impassioned plea for the proclamation of the Gospel, and then vaguely and scantily dealt with personal Christian responsibility for correcting social evils as if it were a matter of only small consequence.

EDWARD L. FOGGS

Sherman Street Church of God

Anderson, Ind.

If the prophets of the Old Testament still speak God’s Word, then Dr. Graham’s argument is a half-truth, and an emotional reaction based on a semi-Marcionite version of Scripture.

HOWARD WALL

Buckingham, Va.

HALF-TRUTHS AND PROFIT

I was greatly amused at the way Dr. Hoekema categorically castigates the Mormons (“Ten Questions to Ask the Mormons,” Jan. 19).…

Much of the article was good, but for the most part it was quite unfair. Half-truths make convincing arguments except to those who know better. If your magazine is interested in asking those ten questions of the Mormons, why not give the Mormons a chance to answer?

VAL D. GREENWOOD

Rexburg, Idaho

I am a deaconess in the United Church of Christ (Congregational). I feel very strongly that we Christians can learn a great deal from the Mormons.… Let us be broad-minded enough to see that we can profit by the way of life of these wonderful Mormon people. After all, who can be sure of theology?

MRS. LESTER W. COOCH

Abington, Mass.

THANKS TO SCHOLARS

I was sitting down when I read Mr. Lowell Raymond’s recent article, “For an Effective Ministry” (Jan. 19), but it had an effect which left me standing and fuming.

I’m a seminary graduate. The place mat he referred to just might be my alma mater (California Theological Seminary, Covina, California). Even though I may not have published one of those “erudite editions,” I thank God there are dedicated scholars today who still find the necessary time and discipline to “preach the Gospel” through this medium. As a student, scholars gave me my theological foundation. Now, as a pastor, their books keep me current on many matters (including personal evangelism) and in a sense in “seminary” while pastoring.

SAM HOCHSTATTER

First Baptist Church

Phoenix, Ariz.

INTELLECTUALS OPTING OUT?

The review of Bishop Robinson’s Exploration into God (Jan. 19) prompts this letter.…

In all probability the answer to the question I shall pose is more than obvious. But as a “garden variety” parish minister who must present “plain Christianity to plain folks” (if I may paraphrase my denominational mentor John Wesley) and who has trouble spelling “existential,” never name understanding it and its employment by Bultmann, who just doesn’t quite tune in on Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity,” and who feels that “ground of being” is a terribly unattractive description of the divine (take a breath now), I ask: Why are so many men endowed with intellectual equipment in goodly quantity engaged in rewriting Christianity rather than interpreting it? Why are so many preferring the course of changing the message to fit the desires of modern sophisticated minds (self assumed) rather than making clear to the modern mind what the basic Gospel is?

Is the answer that it is an exercise in opting out from under the judgment of a Gospel they cannot stand? Or is the matter more complex than that?

RICHARD NOBLE

First Methodist Church of Marinette

Marinette, Wis.

OBSTACLES IN ‘OBSTACLES’

As a Catholic who generally admires your magazine for its defense of traditional Christianity, I would like to make a few comments concerning “Obstacles to Belief Within the Church of Rome” (Jan. 5).

First of all, Mr. Fortier should recognize the fact that a great many converts to the Catholic Church consider that they were led there by “the liberating light of Truth,” and they have found precisely what they feel to be Christian liberty within the Church.

Further, Catholics certainly have “direct personal access to the merciful Saviour,” and they are quite accustomed to falling at Christ’s feet to confess their sinfulness. This is what they do in sacramental confession, and in their private prayers.…

I must explain, however, that when I use the word “Catholic,” I refer to the devout, believing Catholic, and not to the nominal Catholic who has adopted a secularistic view much like that of the liberal Protestants. The believing Catholic knows Christ died for him personally; he does accept Christ as his Saviour; and he looks forward to eternal life.

E. O. PERRET

Jeanerette, La.

Although Mr. Fortier exhibits a certain understanding of the Catholic personality, what I find disturbing is his suggestion that Catholics are not saved.…

Just because the Catholics have a special attachment to authoritarian church structures and to statues, rosary beads, holy water, and incense does not mean that Catholics necessarily reject Christ’s Saviourhood or are as yet unsaved—as Mr. Fortier seems to say.…

The greatest challenge to Protestant evangelicals today is, not the Roman Catholic Church, but the unbelieving “new breed” within the Protestant churches. Sooner or later, we are going to have to look at our believing brethren in the Church of Rome, not as enemies, but as friends and allies.

DALE VREE

Berkeley, Calif.

THE FORM OF LITURGY

Thank you for Dr. Bloesch’s article, “What’s Wrong with the Liturgical Movement?” (Jan. 5). I, too, am concerned about the “wrongs” of the current liturgical emphasis. I am sympathetic with much of what he wrote.

As a low churchman I fear ritualism and form for form’s sake. It is obvious to me that some who no longer hold to the truths of our historical Christian faith are anxious to cover their apostasy with a veneer of historical-traditional forms.

But I think that Dr. Bloesh … does not understand why we who face the altar in prayer do so.… A Lutheran pastor faces the altar when he prays because he speaks to God for his fellow Christians. When the pastor faces the congregation, he is speaking as God’s representative to his fellow Christians.

JAMES T. CUMMING

Missionary-at-large

Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Potsdam, N. Y.

As an Episcopalian priest I found Donald G. Bloesch’s article both interesting and surprising. My surprise was to find the liturgical movement blamed for such things as elaborate ceremonial, Gothic architecture, more formal prayer, and unsingable hymns, because within the Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and Lutheran Churches it is just these things which the liturgical movement is seeking to discard.…

I suspect that non-liturgical churches identify liturgy with form, and think that by becoming more formal, they are participating in the liturgical movement. Nothing could be further from the truth. The basic concern of liturgy, which Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and Lutherans are discovering, is with order; i.e., the setting forth of the essentials of worship in clear and logical sequence with opportunity for real congregational participation. This has led to the recovery of the ancient pattern of Christian worship which had long been obscured. Liturgy began with Jesus’ command to do as he did in (a) taking bread and a cup; (b) giving thanks; (c) breaking the bread; and (d) sharing the bread and cup. The liturgical movement seeks to provide an order where these steps are clearly followed, and where the language makes their meaning clear also. Early in the Church’s life, a Service of the Word was prefixed to the Lord’s Supper as a necessary preparation for the sacrament. This also had its logical sequence of Scripture reading, preaching, commitment-response, and prayers, which is by and large the sequence of evangelistic crusades. The liturgical movement has sought to restore the ministry of the Word to this pattern. The new Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper has Scripture, sermon, creed, and prayers. It is tragic indeed if Protestants in seeking to be liturgical see only the form, and miss the biblical pattern to which the form should bear witness.

W. FRANCIS B. MAGUIRE

The Church of the Good Shepherd

Bonita, Calif.

SPEAKING OF DIAMONDS

Amid all the stuff written on sex, “A Minister’s Wife Speaks Out …” (Jan. 5) stood out like a “diamond among rhinestones.”

WAYNE JOOSSE

Dir. of Guidance and Counseling

Huntington College

Huntington, Ind.

The one redeeming feature [of the January 5 issue] was that delightful, festive, gay, uproarious, and altogether judicious outburst of sensibility by that blessed minister’s wife Opal Lincoln Gee, who can tell the difference, through personal experience, between a diamond and just a rhinestone.

VICTOR F. SCALISE

Calvary Baptist Church

Lowell, Mass.

By 1968 about half the people in the United States will be under twenty-five. One-fourth of all psychiatric clinic patients are now adolescents. The National Institute of Mental Health has calculated that if the present rate of increase continues, the number of young people in mental hospitals will double in the next decade.

The diagnosis of emotional disorders in young people requires considerable discrimination. Adolescents often present a fluctuation of moods that may resemble incipient or active psychopathology. Anna Freud has warned against the tendency to identify common adolescent phenomena as forms of mental illness: “The adolescent manifestations came close to symptom formation of the neurotic, the psychotic or dyssocial order and verge almost imperceptibly into borderline states and initial, frustrated or full-fledged forms of almost all the mental illnesses.… Such fluctuations between extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life” [“Adolescence,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, XIII (International Universities Press, 1958), p. 275].

The evanescent mood swings of adolescence must be differentiated from the lingering, more sinister alterations of personality that may signify more serious disorder.

The concept of identity crisis elaborated by Erik Erikson has widely influenced adolescent psychology. He regards the search for identity as one in a series of developmental crises in the growing person. As one crisis is resolved, growth proceeds in healthy fashion to the next. The establishment of a sense of identity he calls “the great task of late adolescence.” As long as the establishment of identity is incomplete, identity-confusion is said to exist at a conscious level. Failure to resolve the quest for identity may lead to pathological disturbance at a deeper level; this Erikson calls identity-diffusion.

The philosophical assumptions of Erikson’s writings are important both to the adolescent who takes them as his vade mecum on the identity quest and to those who aspire to be helpers along the way. Erikson describes his theory of ego-identity as being “safely anchored in systematic clinical investigation and in psychoanalytic methodology,” adding, “We can use it as a platform for going in either direction when the need arises.” That psychoanalytic theory is based upon psychopathology—accepting “deviations as the measure of all things”—is a weakness Erikson well recognizes. The tie to psychoanalytic theory is a methodological option he has taken to provide a theoretical framework. But the salient aspects of the adolescent struggle were well known long before the advent of psychoanalysis and, as Erikson seems to say, are readily available to clinical investigation without it.

An authoritative study of personality development in college students has identified the four factors that most frequently cause conflict during adolescence (Report No. 32 of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1955);

Dependence-independence. Erikson says that college education fosters “extended childishness” by encouraging dependency. He calls college a “psychosocial moratorium” that postpones adulthood and prolongs adolescence. Dependency may be manifested either by submissiveness and compliance, or by rebellious behavior brought on by the resentment of dependency. A young person’s need to show himself capable of independent decision and action may stimulate all kinds of defiance and insurgence.

Love and hostility. Home and family relationships during early years are believed to determine the adolescent’s capacity to give and accept love. The amount of resentment and hostility he experienced in childhood may determine how much of this he feels in adolescence.

Sexuality. Sexual feeling and drive are prominent in adolescence and are often poorly understood and restrained. Crumbling standards of morality, with confusion among adults as to what the standards ought to be, leave the adolescent puzzled at a time when he most needs help in controlling and directing his sexual urges.

Development of value standards. When a young person goes to college, he is likely to carry with him the value system he has acquired in home and church. As ideological ferment occurs, he will probably modify or discard these childhood values, especially when they are challenged by new ideas and authority figures. Science and philosophy are usually blamed for this shift in values, often correctly described as “loss of faith.”

Besides these four frequent causes of conflict there is a fifth, the choice of a vocation. Superimposed upon the patterns already imprinted in the home are external pressures that cause conflict in this choice. The complexity of today’s vocational possibilities, in contrast to the apprenticeship system of a generation or two ago, heightens the difficulty of selection.

The university student, standing at the threshold of young adulthood, embodies in some degree all these conflicts. They all are included in the broad concept of identity crisis.

Varieties of Adolescent Psychopathology

For some late adolescents this transition may produce anxiety or depression, perhaps with impairment of interpersonal relations. Persons displaying this group of symptoms are likely to be diagnosed as psychoneurotic. For others, the transition into adulthood may be delayed as they cling to childhood reaction patterns in adult situations. This group is likely to be classified as manifesting personality disorder. These two categories include the great bulk of psychiatric problems in the adolescent, according to an analysis of nearly 4,000 late adolescents who sought psychiatric help in the mental health service of a Midwestern university over an eight-year period. Nearly half of the students asked for psychiatric consultation on their own initiative; another third were referred by university physicians.

Psychosis, the most serious form of mental illness, in which there is some loss of contact with reality, was uncommon, making up only 6 per cent of the total. Psychophysiologic disorders, more popularly known as “psychosomatic,” were diagnosed in 7 per cent. A third category, transient situational disorder, accounted for an additional 18 per cent. This diagnosis is applied when the stress of external conditions produces maladjustive symptoms. Its use implies that the symptoms are expected to recede or disappear when the stress diminishes. These three less common conditions accounted for 31 per cent of the series. The remaining 69 per cent was divided almost equally between personality disorder and psychoneurosis.

Personality disorders, 35 per cent of the total, make up a broad category signifying immaturity in the life pattern. The distinguishing mark is some attitude or behavior inappropriate to adult life, traceable to faulty relationships during the development of the person. Anxiety or depression may be present as a by-product of the basic maladjustment.

Psychoneurotic disorders were second in frequency, making up 34 per cent of the total. The distinguishing mark in this category is the predominance of anxiety or of some equivalent of anxiety, such as conversion reaction, in which anxiety has been “converted” into a physical symptom. Anxiety is a kind of psychic alarm reaction that signals the presence of conflict or maladjustment in personality, the exact nature of which is concealed from the sufferer himself. The anxiety may be minor, or it may be strong enough to disturb interpersonal relations or impair productivity.

Discovering the cause of a psychiatric disorder may require persistent search, for the cause is sometimes unrecognized by the person himself. Therefore, the psychiatrist pursues exploratory inquiry from his earliest contact with the patient and records all data that may contribute to an understanding of the problem.

The process of understanding is made more difficult by the fact that the same symptom may have varying significance in different persons. Scholastic underachievement may express resentment toward a parent in one student and a sense of futility in another. Depression may signify either the loss of a loved object or a sense of guilt. The psychiatrist’s task is to discover for each patient the meaning of a particular symptom by studying it in its context and in its combinations.

When the broad category of personality disorder is subdivided, two variants are found to account for almost the entire group. These are the passive-aggressive type and the passive-dependent type, roughly equal in number.

Passive-aggressive personality is diagnosed when latent hostility or resentment is being expressed in passive ways, such as by obstructive neglect, idleness, procrastination, or pouting, rather than overtly. The term “personality” signifies that in the course of the individual’s life history this reaction pattern has become a habitual way of meeting everyday problems and relationships. Passive-dependent personality is diagnosed in persons who find it difficult to assume responsibility or to make decisions, preferring to lean upon or cling to other persons.

What findings led to the diagnosis of fixed immaturity in these students? Nearly half were in running conflict with their parents. Nearly half were in academic difficulty. Over half showed excessive dependency. These primary maladjustments were accompanied by anxiety or depression in a large proportion.

While aggressiveness and dependency are quite different in their external manifestations, the two conditions often have a common origin. The person who is dependent upon others usually resents his inability to stand alone, and his resentment is especially strong toward those who are responsible for his dependency. Hence, angry and aggressive feelings can often be traced to an underlying dependency. This may be caused by overprotection in the home, where parents fail to relinquish control to encourage the development of self-reliance and autonomy, or where a child is kept dependent to satisfy the emotional needs of a parent.

The dependent student may react to separation from home by frantic efforts to maintain the relationship, or he may establish new dependency relationships with the persons around him to take the place of the old. Much academic underachievement is the expression of resentment toward parents, and may result in sabotage of a given program when the student is dropped from the university. A student may work hard in a course he likes and “goof off” in others he is being pushed to take. The son of a physician, who was being prodded into following his father’s vocation, failed all his science courses but was superior in his chosen subjects, philosophy and French horn.

Leaving the parental roof has an emotional counterpart in graduation from college. The same inclination to cling and to postpone separation, the same lack of self-confidence for independent action, are seen every year in the clutch of anxiety symptoms known to university psychiatrists as “senior syndrome.”

Other immature personality types were found in smaller numbers, such as the socially withdrawn, the emotionally unstable, and the sociopath. However, the majority of the personality disorders making up 35 per cent of all patients were passive-aggressive and passive-dependent types, usually traceable to early defective relationships in the home.

Causes of Psychoneurosis

Of the 34 per cent of students who were diagnosed as psychoneurotic, a sampling showed more than two-thirds manifesting anxiety, the alarm reaction that signifies some inner conflict or maladjustment. What were the causes underlying the symptom? More than a third expressed conflict in values, lack of meaning, or concern over religion. A similar number expressed sexual guilt. These two underlying causes stand out as the basis for much of the neurotic anxiety: guilt and existential concern. Both are a notable expression of the broad conflict in values that is such an important part of the identity crisis.

Time magazine’s description of the current decade as “an era in which morals are widely held to be both private and relative … in which self-denial is increasingly seen as foolishness rather than virtue” (January 24, 1964) applies to many on the university campus. Students have insisted upon greater freedom of housing arrangements and night hours, and they have gained widespread modification of traditional rules. A recent examination of the problem comments: “Current experience on the campus … indicates that. sexual activity has become almost as common among girls as boys as postponement of sexual activity until marriage is less pronounced. This apparent shift in feminine attitudes is one of the clearly revolutionary elements in the current sexual ‘revolution’” [Report No. 60 of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1965, p. 25].

The campus shift toward freer sexual indulgence reflects the moral laxity in society. If conscience is socially derived, the relaxing of social sanctions against premarital sexual freedom should relieve young people of their guilt. This survey shows, however, that many adolescent patients have some sense of guilt about sex. The prevalence of guilt in the midst of today’s widespread permissiveness argues anew for the biblical idea that every person has an innate sense of oughtness that will not be silenced. Anxiety and guilt signal emotional conflict. As Paul Meehl has put it, “The phenomenal experience and the associated behavior dispositions called ‘anxiety’ (of which guilt is a special sub-case) would not exist if man were in proper relationship to God” (What, Then, Is Man? [Concordia, 1958], p. 217).

The Christian concept of agape has been appropriated and perverted, not only to describe the work of the psychotherapist, but also to serve the new morality as a kind of ethical touchstone to supplant biblical standards of morality. Nevertheless, violation of conscience continues to exact its toll as guilt, anxiety, and emotional conflict follow illicit sex.

The idea that guilt is responsible for much neurotic anxiety is almost as old as the concept of neurosis itself. Stekel, one of Freud’s inner circle, described neurosis as “the disease of bad conscience.” Freud’s pupil, the Protestant clergyman Oskar Pfister, believed that all neuroses can be traced to moral conflict. Putnam, Freud’s influential advocate at Harvard, maintained that neurotic conflict is basically ethical in nature. More recently, Rudolf Allers wrote, “I pointed out as far back as 1929 that ‘at the bottom of every neurosis there is a metaphysical problem.’ ” The efficacy of religious faith in the resolution of guilt was obliquely acknowledged by Freud in 1909 when, in writing to Pfister, he recorded the observation that “religious piety stifles neurosis.”

Existential Concern

Students with emotional difficulty frequently show existential concern. Eleven in a sample of 100 were preoccupied with death. Others were deeply concerned over religion. The following comments quoted from student records are typical:

What is the purpose of existence?

What do I want out of life?

I have no long-range goals in life.

I am not doing anything worthwhile.

I am empty and rootless, without purpose.

I do not know what I am living for.

My religion has begun to seem meaningless.

I do not believe the dogma of my church.

I have given up my religious faith after a psychological discussion.

These existential concerns focus upon the most important aspect of the identity crisis: the would-be adult’s confrontation with the question of ultimate meaning. This question qualifies and transcends all lesser questions. Without some coherent world view into which all proximate issues can be fitted, the major source of anxiety remains.

B. Bettelheim well describes the quest: “They are in a great hurry to get started toward their goal; but this goal is elusive, and so they are people lost in their search, so lost that they no longer know which direction to take. Worse, they doubt that there is any direction. Therefore, their search for only an unknown goal becomes empty roaming. As long as they are on their way, they feel alive. If they stop, they fear to die. Therefore, any and all kinds of spurious activities will do, to keep from recognizing how lost they are” [Youth: Challenge and Charge, ed. by E. Erikson (Basic Books, 1961), p. 79].

What Philosophy of Life?

Religious faith has long provided such a basis for faith and commitment. The Judeo-Christian heritage has served as a foundation for what Parsons has described as “the conception of man’s role as an instrument of the divine will in building a kingdom of God on earth.… the building of the ‘good life,’ not only for the particular individual but also for all mankind” (ibid., p. 97).

Freud chose to adopt the position of Feuerbach—that is, that God is only the product of wishful thinking—and aligned himself with Comtean positivism. Erikson has followed closely. “Man’s creation of all-caring gods is not only an expression of his persisting infantile need for being taken care of, but also a projection onto a superhuman agency of an ego ideal” [Insight and Responsibility (Norton, 1964), p. 132].

Farther on, he agrees with the idea that “religion exploits, for the sake of its own political establishment, the most infantile strivings in man.” While he repeatedly affirms the importance for the adolescent of “the fervent quest for a sure meaning in individual life history and in collective history,” Erikson discredits religion and rejects its contribution to a coherent world view. Thus, even as he deplores the “acute lack in ideological nourishment during adolescence,” he pledges allegiance to naturalism and arbitrarily eliminates alternative philosophical options.

This is a too easy disposition of the mature record of human religious experience, and it suggests that naturalism itself may be one of the “rationalizations and repressions of changing civilizations” Erikson describes. As Pfister recognized in “Illusion of a Future,” the affirmation of faith in science may itself be underlaid by a process of wishful thinking.

The widespread repudiation of the transempirical in our time tends to produce an ideological vacuum. Many university students surrender faith in transcendental reality under the pressure of naturalistic or positivistic views. A few “cop out,” to abandon the conventions of society for the immediate gratifications of sensual experience, new as well as old. Adolescent rejection of conformity only produces a new variety of peer conformity.

Many students are seeking a cause that merits their commitment. The success of such projects as the Peace Corps points to the vast backlog of devotion and loyalty among young adults that awaits challenge. Today’s disparagement of Christian faith and commitment often shatters vocational purpose and alienates the loyalty of students.

Sir Walter Moberly indicts the university for betraying the student by failing to help him formulate a working philosophy of life: “Some sort of embryo of a working creed he must have; no one out of an asylum can live without it. But his version is uncritical and mainly unconscious, it is picked up at haphazard, and it is muddled and incoherent” [The Crisis in the University (Student Christian Movement Press, 1949), p. 61].

By leaving God out, Moberly says, we have taught with tremendous force that he does not count. Alexander makes a similar charge:”It is not only that extreme specialization threatens the cohesion of the university as a community of scholars, but it finds itself straightly charged with failing to provide those under its tutelage with the ingredients of valid decision, far less a coherent ‘philosophy of life’” [Faith and Learning (Association, 1960), p. 29].

These criticisms strike hard at two features of the contemporary university order: (1) the exaltation of a spurious objectivity, and (2) the tendency to eliminate religion as an optional curricular resource.

Speaking of the first, Moberly declares:”so-called academic objectivity is a fraud; and the fraud is none the less disastrous and reprehensible because its perpetrators are commonly also its victims and deceive themselves as successfully as they deceive others” [Moberly, op. cit., p. 59].

The psychiatrist as well as the professor respects neutrality. He knows that it is important to free his patients for autonomous choice while he is helping them recognize their own neurotic distortion and compulsion. Ideally, therefore, he tries to hold in check his own inclination to indoctrinate, whether he is on the side of Christianity or of atheism. What is ideal for the psychiatrist is no less ideal for the professor; the shelter of the classroom and the immunity of academic freedom ought not to be misappropriated to allow doctrinaire force-feeding. Yet, even when the psychiatrist and the professor punctiliously refrain from indoctrination, they still subtly convey their own life philosophies to those under their influence. They cannot be wholly neutral in these relations any more than in their own minute-to-minute life choices.

An empirically based psychiatry can help the student understand why he is anxious, but the philosophical context will inevitably be colored by the psychiatrist’s own world view. The professor can set in order and perspective the data of his discipline; in so doing, however, he reveals his own philosophy. The student’s mind cannot remain long in an “open” position, where ultimate decisions are indefinitely postponed in a posture of “objectivity.” Anxiety occurs not only when new value systems are offered in place of old but also during the time that choices are delayed. Ultimate questions of life philosophy are linked to urgent practical questions that demand answers.

As the efforts of the conscientious psychiatrist or professor to maintain a neutral stance are limited by the inevitable obtrusion of each one’s personal philosophy, so the university’s claim to neutrality is similarly qualified. The university is an assemblage of committed persons, each of whom has given homage to this or that metaphysical system. As each man’s neutrality is relative, so also is that of the university. Its professed openness in the quest for truth is qualified by the commitments of its constituent individuals, who have made affirmations of faith to a variety of gods.

The Church’s voice should be clearly heard in this cacophony of commitments. As Christian theology competes for a hearing in the ideological market place, it lacks the burgeoning prestige of science and may have shabby treatment at the professorial rostrum. Still, its doctrine of man has impressive maturity and far-reaching support. The system of values mediated by the Church not only illuminates the complex problems of man’s existence but also offers forgiveness for guilt and meaning for life. It is the antidote for much of man’s anxiety.

For several generations evangelical Christians have attempted to penetrate the secular university with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And with few exceptions the success of their efforts is diminishing.

Many of us remember with nostalgia the deep spiritual foundations of the earliest colleges. We proudly recall the nineteenth century’s determination to found hundreds of church-related colleges as the frontier moved west. We still are thrilled by the story of the unprecedented thrust for world evangelism made through the Student Volunteer Movement. Yet today, faced with the greatest student opportunity we have ever known, we discover that the combined efforts of conservatives and liberals, denominational and non-denominational groups, are losing effectiveness in the university world of students, teachers, and the increasingly important sectors of administration and research.

I believe that the underlying reason for this is the failure of campus religious groups to take either the whole university world or the whole of Christianity seriously. The size of modern universities, their complex structure, their involvement in industry and government, the great varieties of interest and academic levels—all this seems to be ignored in the programs and plans of the religious organizations. And we also seem incapable of presenting the Christian faith as a whole. Campus Crusade concentrates chiefly on evangelism, Wesley Foundations on social issues, Inter-Varsity on Christian maturity, and so on. No wonder the image of campus religion is one of confused irrelevance.

Not since the period around 1910 has an entire institution been the object of Christian witness. That was the heyday of the intercollegiate YMCA, and various denominational foundations were established then also. Unfortunately, the continuing result was not what was expected. Attention was turned away from the university as a whole to the life of the individual student organizations. The result was fragmentation of the witness of the Church and its outlook. The vision of the whole university has never been recovered.

As a result of this fragmentation, several major problems arose that are very evident today. First, denominational foundations normally speak only to students within their own orbit, and their constituency in proportion to the entire student body grows smaller each year. Each group looks after its own health. Now even student chaplains question the validity of this lesser objective. When these groups were founded, their intention was to supplement the great work being done by the student YMCA. Their turn to isolation robbed the Y of the cooperation it needed.

Fragmentation of the Christian witness has prompted the rise of various conceptions and methods of student work. The training of professional student workers and the development of programs on a national scale has institutionalized these ideas and techniques. If greater efficiency through increased specialization had resulted, the Christian witness would have moved forward. In actual practice, however, institutionalization has meant that each group tends to exclude students who do not share its major concerns. For example, unless a student is vitally interested in liturgy, he is a fish out of water in many Canterbury Clubs. If he is concerned with personal spiritual problems, he may find that his own denominational group’s absorption in social problems seems completely non-religious. Unless he enjoys inductive Bible study, he will probably find Inter-Varsity groups uninteresting. If he is not enthusiastic about personal work, he will avoid Campus Crusade.

A second problem concerns the Christian professional groups, for these suffer indirectly from the fragmentation of witness. Such groups as the Faculty Christian Fellowship, the American Scientific Affiliation, and the Evangelical Theological Society face issues in their various fields that are obviously related to the entire university world and to the entire Christian faith. They are not merely Inter-Varsity issues, or Wesley issues, or Westminster issues. Unfortunately, professional societies find it hard to channel their interest in students through any one organization, and their potential for contribution to student work is unrealized.

The same can be said about the potential of other parts of the Christian community for undergirding the witness. In general the churches are ignored, except as a source of financial support. Even within a denomination there is often friction between the campus work and nearby churches. I believe that most of us who are in student work are guilty of considerable pride in downgrading the work of the churches. And pastors know it. Objective consideration would show that the churches are in key positions for penetration of the university world.

We are guilty of the same attitude toward the Christian colleges. In evangelical circles, only Campus Crusade’s recruitment program has taken these colleges seriously, even though over half of the theologically conservative faculty members in secular universities come from Christian colleges.

Today it is agreed that on any campus all the organized student work is not adequate to do the job of communicating the Gospel to the university, and that it is becoming less and less adequate each year as the campus grows. We shall never know whether the single intercollegiate YMCA could have been the answer. But we can be sure that the indefinite multiplication of present forces holds dim promise of success.

A third difficulty on campus, and a blight on student initiative, is an unmistakable protectionism on the part of workers and faculty members. Each student worker is responsible for the “success” of the groups in his care, often in a context of competition with his colleagues. Naturally he must try to demonstrate or protect his own position. There is a certain efficiency in a closely directed group; but where spiritual maturity is at stake, such a commitment can be stunting. In the present student unrest, for student workers to assume a caretaker role is self-defeating. A comprehensive witness will not get far until the average Christian student (as well as faculty member and pastor) is equipped and trusted to do the job required of him.

A fourth problem is the tendency of younger movements to look upon the university as the enemy, with the faculty and administration the entrenched opposition. It seems to take several student generations before a student movement realizes that the university provides a remarkable framework for Christian witness and action, if one is prepared to play according to the rules.

Finally, high-school youth movements such as Young Life, Youth for Christ, Hi-BA, and church youth fellowships generally fail to feed graduating members into their counterparts in the universities. Many students go from these groups to the university without any serious intention of identifying themselves with any witness there. I suspect that one reason is the superior, critical attitude of many university workers toward their high-school and church colleagues.

Having started on the road of fragmentation, we can expect it to continue as long as great areas of the university are unreached by existing groups. The League of Evangelical Students came to fill a gap in 1924, Inter-Varsity in 1939, Campus Crusade in 1952, the Church of God (Missouri) in 1959, and the Conservative Baptists in 1963. We can expect the formation of other groups that will find ample scope for their work.

If the university world is to be reached with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we must find a new method.

1. The new approach must take into account the complexity and the character of the new universities. Schools that fifteen years ago had 1,500 students now have 25,000 and more. Student passiveness has given way to a demand for responsibility.

2. The new approach must include an awareness that each student group has a distinctive contribution to make and that each must be helped to become more effective in sharing its particular strength. For instance, Inter-Varsity can help Campus Crusade with its Bible-study program, and Campus Crusade in turn has a contribution to make to Inter-Varsity.

3. Methods developed by various campus and non-campus groups must be applied to the problem of penetration. The new approach must take advantage of all available resources. Finance is only a small part. Total mobilization must involve pastors, church leaders, researchers, laymen, athletes, academic groups, doctors, and many others.

The first step in arriving at a new approach would involve work at the national level. Leaders of evangelical student movements and others who work with students must share with one another their spiritual burden for the work of God in the university. This group should include the leaders of Christian colleges, seminaries, denominational youth programs, and the Christian professional societies. If in God’s goodness there came out of such a gathering a mutual commitment to the task of university evangelism, leaders could make available the resources of their various organizations. They could work out ways to share facilities and training programs, exchange personnel, coordinate conferences, develop literature programs, combine efforts in such areas as evangelism, missionary emphasis, work projects, and overseas ministries. This group could set up a larger planning-advisory board that would include representatives of missionary boards, seminaries, Christian magazines and publishing houses, camps and conferences, home-mission projects, and so on.

The second step would be to establish a coordinating body for each major university. This group should consist of student representatives of campus groups, faculty members, pastors, laymen, graduates, student workers, and all other evangelicals able to help. For fifteen years an unofficial body like this has existed in Sydney, Australia, and also in Melbourne. No wonder membership in one student group there now tops seven hundred.

The next decade holds great possibilities for evangelical advance, and the alternative to this advance is frightening. In view of the world-wide influence of American universities, for us to shun our responsibility by merely continuing what we are now doing would be tragic. Perhaps God is trying to teach us the complexity of his university world and the fullness of his Gospel. Certainly he wants us to learn how to complement, rather than compete with, one another.

Problems of witnessing to the saving power of Jesus Christ on the campus of a secular university are numerous enough and fierce enough to have made many a Christian, including myself, quail before them. Let me briefly present the five areas of difficulty I consider most important: technical problems; intellectualism; rebellion; the difficulties occasioned by a society whose value structure, like Mrs. MacGurdy’s hat, is noticeably slipping; and the problem of time. Later I will say something about the value of faith on a modern university campus, and what seem to me to be the strongest arguments for accepting the Gospel.

The technical problems vary from historical questions to socio-psychological efforts to explain away fives changed by Christ. I shall speak only of the historical problems here; my last points will include what I know by way of answer to sociologists and psychologists.

In considering the technical problems posed by history, some disagree with the assertion that we cannot prove that man’s earliest religion was monotheistic. Allowing for nearly anyone’s dating system—and I am happy to hear that Ussher is absent from the pages of Genesis in the new Scofield edition—man’s religious patterns were well established at least thousands of years before the appearance of our earliest literary hints of what he was actually thinking about. Through that vast period, which most recent studies expand to millions of years, what record we have begins with propliopithecus and the problems of fossil hominids. Fossil water and pollen analysis catalogue the progress and recession of oscillating glaciers. During the last glacial stages, now in the Mesolithic period, Gravettian decorations give way to the ghostly mysteries of Magdalenian cave-art. The Neolithic village revolution itself offers many problems, for by the seventh millennium B.C. it had produced towns, fortifications, elaborate burial ritual, apparent cultic paraphernalia such as Jericho’s plastered skulls and the horned chambers of Alaca Hüyük—all possibly 4,000 years before the development of writing. And from the literary sources (now at least 4,300 years old) that finally did appear to show what man was thinking about, we learn that by then he was thinking of many gods.

The scale of arguments about primitive monotheism is easy to load, harder to balance. When we consider that the classical Sumerian pantheon lists nearly 5,000 deities in a descending order beginning with Anu, we can argue, if not prove, that Anu was first and goes back to earliest recollected time. And so on one side of the scale we can place this fact of an ascending order of Sumerian deities culminating with Anu. When we read of the war of the gods against Ti’amat in Enuma Elish and note that the protagonists were a younger generation of gods, we can add Anu’s recessive characteristics to the scale. The logic of Mrs. Frankfort’s personified environmental factors in the book Before Philosophy offers an attractive explanation of multiplying deities, and we can throw that in, too. Personification thus rationalizes the notion of proliferating gods as a cultural index beginning from unity, so we can include that. As a climax we can add Paul’s scorching account of this process in Romans 1.

But the scale has another pan as well, and in it must go animal dances, fertility figurines, mammoth-hunting H. neanderthalensis, and the whole series of Neolithic cultural assemblages already mentioned. Honesty requires that on this side of the scale we also include the problems of demonstrating a personal God, in any case. The weights of these arguments vary with the inquirer. Faith alone will tip the scales, however resoundingly.

If monotheism as man’s first religious form is difficult, chronological problems with the Old Testament also present a barrier. It is not as popular now as once it was to speak of the documents of the Pentateuch. I have heard a noted Hebrew scholar refer to the whole business as “alphabet soup”! But his reasons for doing so were ominous, for he sees Genesis and the Law as the end of a long and fully established mythic and legal system in North Syria, fully capable of supplying one person, Moses, with the precedents he needed for most of the Pentateuch. We escape one problem to land in another.

To move on: to see that a prophet was moved by the Spirit to write of an event before it transpired requires the eye of faith; the eye of scientific historical scrutiny, blind to faith by definition, sees no such thing. Warned away from the documentary analysis of the Pentateuch by most recent scholarship, it still must arrange ideas in an assumed epistemological order. It thus serves up scrambled Judges, Isaiah on the half-shell, and skewered Daniel. And so are they taught on campus after campus in courses in Near Eastern history.

Besides the problems with primitive monotheism and Old Testament dating, there is the problem of the resurrection of Christ.

F. F. Bruce in The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? effectively discusses the evidence. By all canons of historical judgment save one, we are more sure—and have greater testimony to it by a factor of several hundred—that Christ rose from his grave than we are that Caesar conquered Gaul or even knew that it was divided into three parts. The one argument that gives Caesar the edge because it dominates scientific history is that, until someone does it under laboratory conditions, the dead do not rise. The world must contend with the “resurrection faith”—a point to which we shall return—but Christians must contend the resurrection fact; their witness depends upon it. The point here is the difficulty of proving it as fact.

The problem of the resurrection leads directly to my second area, the matter of intellectualism, the notion that man can better the human condition (to use a greatly overworked phrase) by taking thought. So taught Plato and Aristotle, followed by Cynics, Cicero, Stoics, and others who managed to reach the ultimate in turgidity in the pages of Plotinus. But this was the part of ancient thought Petrarch and others resurrected in developing the humanism of the Renaissance. Man himself, humanists said, rewards study as he is. The assertion quickly led to humanly defined goals, standards, and means of attainment. After humanism, the Philosophes, the Enlightenment, the Age of Expansion, another of Progress, and still other ages of global war, man now stands with head bloody but unbowed, the master of his fate and the captain of his soul. Vituperative asides to the effect that he stands unbowed but on crumbling feet of clay may be personally satisfying and even true, but they fail to negotiate the impasse between the Gospel and all that modern education represents.

Higher education primarily stresses freedom of thought on any subject, the duty of analyzing all experience, and self-reliance in vocational super-training. Its instructors are men and women who, by and large, have tried very hard to solve the problems of their fields. They have had to hack their way with pen or typewriter through the tall grass of departmental and professional intrigue, knowing that to falter means banishment—before tenure to the bush leagues, and after tenure to the genteel poverty of isolation.

This is intellectualism armed to the teeth, its practitioners self-made men, its greatest fear lack of self-confidence. It would be hard to suggest a more obvious conflict with the Gospel. Scripture says Christ came to heal the sick; the committed faculty member claims above all that he is well. Christ said that he who would be greatest among us should serve all; the intellectual serves, if at all, because he is superior. But the greatest offense is the assertion that these efforts to which our colleagues now, and our best students in the future, devote their lives are to God filthy rags—and even that only when they purport to have moral implications, which they rarely do.

Salt—a freighted word in this context, neatly stressed by our Lord—salt is rubbed into that wound by an insult so supreme only God could have devised it. My sin is so great that his Son resigned his position in glory to come to be abused for his acts of infinite grace, to teach what can be learned only in submission; to drip blood and water into the bright dust of an ugly Judaean hill, and to hang there bleeding and slowly asphyxiate because of my rebellion. And so I’ll never forget the price. I am constantly reminded that it is the Cross of Christ that is my only glory, not a Ph.D., not history, not books, not administration. The Gospel is an offense.

Another problem is rebellion. This word is one of those most used on campus these days. Rebellion has touched the lives of many a student from what we probably had better call a Christian background. Trained on someone else’s faith to a religion of behavior, these young people are not so dull that they cannot see pale, pursed lips and braided hair sitting beside a nodding head and glazed, drooping eyes. They do not fail to draw comparisons with the gossip, the reviled “brethren,” and the unfeeling grunts about how different things were when father was a boy. The results, I weary to say, frequent my office. They also are ripe for propagandizing. God is dead, only Watts, Selma, and Viet Nam are real, they hear; and these rebels fall for slogans not as true and twice as cheap as what an Arab malcontent would stoop to throw as he incited yet another escapade into Israel to embarrass King Hussein.

And they sometimes actively join that greater number in rebellion against a society whose value system seems to grow less relevant and comprehensible with each day. The affluent materialist rushes out to buy a car, a camera, a boat, another car, a swimming pool, an airplane, a Cook’s Tour, another car, a bigger house—and each in turn fades from mind as its novelty wears away. His longhaired teen-age son slouches in the living room, the only one in the family who is deaf to the blaring of the Monkees, and almost alone in his acute irritation at the crashing silence when they’ve been turned off. Longhair looks at his camera-draped father inspecting his latest acquisition while erupting cigar smoke, and wonders what it all adds up to.

Those of us who are parents are occasionally brought up short by the realization that we teach our children what we believe more than what we say. Tax-evasion, hostilities, unconcern, come through louder than pronouncements about making something of yourself. Longhair, told to get ahead but shown inconsistencies, has some understandable difficulties differentiating between admissible tax-evasion and inadmissible sex, liquor, and vandalism.

Nor does the rest of the world offer much help. Poverty amid affluence, conflicting accounts of Viet Nam, the credibility gap, racial riots right at the time of enlightened federal legislation—these do not offer a social value structure of unalloyed clarity. Comfort and conflict, without personal experience of the hard knocks the world offers those who are alone in it, provide poor defense against slogans and the appearance of commitment to a cause. And to bring the problem close enough to discomfit us, I could mention the young and extremely successful businessman I know in Indianapolis who two years ago decided that if making money was all life had to offer, he’d sell out. And he would have, except for the influence of a friend who showed him how to channel his success into avenues of Christian service. Another case is the young Inter-Varsity student on the Indiana University campus who is so enamored with the notion of government-imposed, socialistic solutions to the problem of poverty that she seems to be forgetting the importance of changed life to changed lives.

This world, so devoid of appealing values in the eyes of the younger generation, is also without its own self-evident order. The conflict of chaos and order has demonstrably occupied man since the beginning of writing. Sumerian myth, explaining the disruption of storms and politics when both were supposed to be secured by appropriate attention to the proper gods, came to view the natural world plus the affairs of men as being in the hands of a divine cosmos. Gods could argue, come into conflict, and best each other in a system that had no reference to lowly and subservient man. Thus the best of prayers and sacrifices could still result in conquest, disruption, and decay. So used, the internecine quarrels of the divine cosmos could justify, if not explain, the arbitrary intrusion of chaos into a world of order sought but not realized. The same search for order, with gods excised, motivated the pre-Socratics in their search for a mechanistic order of natural events. And so it has dominated philosophers since Thales began the search for his “First Principle.” The effort is still with us as our science seeks to determine whether the world is simply 200+ sub-atomic particles and all their possible combinations, or man’s intellectually imposed structure of institutions and classifications, or a combination of these. And our philosophers ask, What, of all this, is real? These questions are still being asked, as they always were, in the presence of nature’s cruelty and of man’s inhumanity. The world remains order and miasma, a swamp in which one must find a path, or anesthesia, or escape.

Permanent order cannot be found; it must be imposed. The imposition of order demands some kind of value system, and today’s campus youth are poorly equipped in this area. Slipping to a common denominator of experience in search of order without values, many of our young people are descending to the neo-cannibalism of the so-called other culture, abetted by Burroughs’s bible, Naked Lunch.

The situation is not improved, from our standpoint, by the fact that religion is one of the items from which these youngsters are rebelling, without being able to detect a difference between religion and the Gospel.

The last of the difficulties I must mention is qualitatively different from all the others. It operates among Christian young people contemplating a path of service, as well as among those seeking a realistic solution to the quandary of purpose. This enemy is time.

Of all psychedelic and narcotic drugs and all the other reasons for not coming to grips with the reality of the moment, time is the most insidious. Next year I shall get on top of myself and really pitch in with my witness, says the Christian. Someday I’ll consider responsibility as well as rebellion, says someone else. Both allow themselves continually and almost imperceptibly to go on exercising the muscles of delay, failure, avoidance of issues. And all the while the slogans, the half-truths, the “rudiments of this world” in Paul’s phrase, do their work. Witness is blunted, concern is tempered, confrontation with the demands of the Lordship of Christ for Christians, and with Christ himself for listening but unaccepting inquirers, is set aside. If I were required to state the single greatest obstacle to Christian witness on the campus, I should hazard the suggestion that it is the enervation of delay on the part of the 70 per cent who ought to know but fail to speak of their Lord and his demands. If all the 300 who come to Indiana University certified one way or another as Christians would stand up and be counted instead of the mere eighty or so who do, the impact of the Gospel on this campus of over 25,000 students would be multiplied. A decision put off can never be made at a later time as the same decision, for it will occur in different circumstances and be made by a different person. One of my greatest difficulties is in getting Christian young people to see that the time is now. Now is the day of salvation, and more.

Lest I present too grim a picture—for it is not grim but joyful to work with students who really want to understand—let me not end with problems of historical proof, personal offense, rebellion, disordered values, and the narcosis of time—particularly since there is in the matter of values a key that I, at least, have occasionally found effective.

The point is that no amount of study and attempt to understand the world of physics, biology, or society will reveal any natural order of affairs. Mathematics and philosophy have alike been charmed by the order of logic. Many have been impressed by the sophistication of engineering design that holds those 200+ atomic particles in their various known combinations. However, static design is one thing; ultimate fact and an order in action are something else—perhaps they do not exist, beyond relativism. Certainly they have not been demonstrated in human affairs. If they had been, philosophy would have been curtailed, sociology completely mechanized, and departments of religion exterminated.

Since order has not been demonstrated, the student, confronted with slippery questions of values coupled with an exponentially growing index of knowledge, and unable to discover a rationale, must ultimately impose his own rationale, his own order. To do so is an act of faith, for it asserts that in the face of disorder there is reason in ultimate ends. Whether human perfectability, ultimate social reform, Marxism, Zen Buddhism, or a firm determination to realize one’s own fulfillment—whatever the means—is the issue, the vehicle is faith that a certain volitional pattern is feasible. The result is a rationale imposed by a faith. It is as clearly present with the atheist as with the theist. I have occasionally been successfully tempted to assert that rationale, withdrawal, or mental disorientation are man’s only choices.

Within this broad view of faith, however, many alternatives exist. Of all these alternatives, the best in my view is historic Christianity with its insistence upon the fact of sin, which usually, if not always, is demonstrable. Christianity has a clear statement of human need that is abetted by the hollow searching of our charges, as noted long ago by Augustine. It has a drastic solution for a desperate problem at Calvary, and above all—or, more carefully, on top of all these other things—it has a challenge to serve others indiscriminately and without cause other than the love of Christ. Presenting the Gospel as one alternative in a world whose lack of structure demands faith of some sort has often seemed to me to be a way to start Christian witness. As an alternative, it seems to make sense to all who are not specifically and willfully set upon one of the other alternatives. This last problem aside, it appears relatively easy to make a case for the Gospel as the superior alternative, and I have found it effective both in group presentation and in personal counseling situations.

This may get youngsters listening; the remaining question concerns the viability of the Gospel. The only way to prove Christ is to meet him. Regeneration depends upon the Spirit of God doing his work in the heart of the sincere seeker. This demands a miracle, and I would not wish to minimize the way this fact burdens Christian witness. We must tell our audiences that God will meet them. The first requirement for doing so is that we believe such a modern miracle will occur and bring with it the assurances our arguments cannot prove. Beyond that central fact and largely subsequent to it are the aids to assurance that can come from a number of things. The experience of personal change is one. The historically demonstrable changes brought about by the Gospel in the fives of believers is another. Here, once possessing Christianity is separated from professing Christendom, the resurrection faith that transformed the Roman Empire, reformed the medieval church, informed the Wesley Revival, and conforms the fines of modern mass evangelism can stand out in bold relief. Its results can be tested against the fruits of atheism in murder and bloodshed in the Congo, Viet Nam, China, Stalinist Russia, and so on. The comparison, to the believer, is devasting.

Finally, and most personally, I find the greatest sustaining proof of the Gospel in the pages of Scripture. The clear majesty of Romans and the incisive demands of its final chapters, the insights from Mars Hill, the wisdom of the gospel parables, to mention but a few portions, reinforce again and again, and stronger and stronger, the absolute assertion that God is the divine Inspirer of Scripture and that the absolute fact of existence is “Christ in me, the hope of glory.”

My title may strike you as odd, whimsical, even wrong-headed. Surely education is a “good thing.” It is by its very nature beneficial, not harmful; promethean, not mephistophelean; our saviour, not our destroyer. The more of it the better.

But every one of these popular beliefs is doubtful. It all depends on what kind of education we are talking about, and what kind of people receive the education.

Let me say at once, therefore, that I am speaking of that kind of education which is secular, largely technological, and chiefly aimed at teaching people how to do things. This is, I believe, the public image. Every member of a liberal-arts college has at one time or another confronted bewildered or irate parents who demand to know what, after an expensive liberal-arts education, their newly furnished offspring are trained to do—what kind of a job can they get? It is difficult to convince them that the purpose of a liberal education is to develop mental powers, to sensitize one’s response to beauty and goodness, to expand and lengthen one’s outlook, to teach civilized emotions, and the rest. (It is particularly difficult because, in all conscience, these jobs have often not been done by the liberal-arts college. But that is another story.)

The menace of modern education is quite easy to define: Never have so many people, groups, and nations been able, because of education, to do so many things—and we are all afraid that they will now start doing them. To narrow it a bit: The menace is that of incalculable power (the product of knowledge) in the hands of bad or foolish men. The agonizing question now is not whether we can possibly learn how to do this or that, but which of the things we have the tools to do we should, by an act of will, choose to do. The question, in short, is one of conduct, not of knowledge. With this, education, to its own peril, has little to do.

And yet it is the most anciently recognized of problems. Adam faced it, and chose wrong. His problem, like ours, was not knowing how but knowing what. And the corrective was early stated: “Thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the LORD: that it may be well with thee …” (Deut. 6:18). With the spirit of this commandment, modern education has even less to do. Education’s answer to man’s problems is more education—as if Hitler would have been made a better man if he had taken a couple of degrees from some good university.

I submit that modern education presents increasingly the fearful aspects of Frankenstein’s monster because of the prevalence of five fallacies or myths.

1. The myth of automatic human progress. The general tendency of ancient thought was that man had fallen from high estate, whether from some Golden Age or from the bliss of Eden. Not until the eighteenth century and the rise of that strangely irrational epoch called the Age of Reason were doctrines of inevitable human progress widely disseminated. Partly, this was the result of a sort of provincial complacency, and partly ignorance of history. How easily in eighteenth-century writing flow the condescending remarks about the barbarism of the ancient world, the primitive grotesqueness of gothic cathedrals, the ignorance and ineptitude of Shakespeare!

But it remained for the nineteenth century and the rise of theories of evolution for the views to become the dogma that all environments tend inevitably toward perfection. Why this is so was never clearly stated. There simply is faith that the universe is so constituted. “Chance” will see to it. But chance is simply a non-term, identifying the absence of reason, purpose, intention, and will; it is odd that reason should put its faith in that which is, by definition, non-reason.

Reasonably or not, however, the cult of inevitable progress has, in education, placed improper emphasis on novelty, change for its own sake, the gimmick. True, in the world of technology the view that the latest is the best is usually sound—we properly prefer the up-to-date typewriter, automobile, washing machine. But technology advances automatically, so long as we do not forget the practical lessons of past experimenters. Every engineer begins at the point where the last one left off. Advancement is due not to any improvement in the human brain, but to the mere accumulation of experience. The ancient brains that measured the diameter of the earth, that worked out the basic principles of force, leverage, hydraulics, and construction, were almost undoubtedly greater brains than our age possesses. But the modern technologist stands at the topmost height of achievement of all previous craftsmen. He may himself be a dwarf, but he can see farther than they, for he sits on their shoulders.

Not so in the area of human conduct. Here it is not technology but wisdom that governs. No man becomes virtuous because of the virtue of another. He may be inspired by the wisdom and virtue of others, but he must make that wisdom his own possession. He cannot start out as wise as they simply because they have recorded their wisdom. Every human being, as a moral creature, begins from scratch. Not the novel but the true controls here.

Julian Huxley once observed that evolution seemingly has not worked in recorded history. Even within the view of evolutionary progress, therefore, there is no ground for believing that the wisdom residing in the most ancient minds was not as great as that held by the latest recipient of a Ph.D. Indeed, in all honesty, most of us would agree that there probably is not alive this day any human being whose wisdom can match that of a Moses, a Job, a Paul, a Marcus Aurelius, an Aristotle, a John—make the list as long as you wish.

And it is precisely this storehouse of ancient wisdom that the Cult of the New denies to the student. How they flock to the latest course presenting results of “an unstructured learning experience bearing upon upward mobility desires in terms of motivational elements in adjustment to a work situation”—but how few choose a course in the ethical teachings of Jesus.

And yet, as we have seen, it is precisely in the matter of choosing wisely what we should do, not in mastering more tools of power, that our future security—if any—consists. Bertrand Russell has written: “If human life is to continue in spite of science, mankind will have to learn a discipline of the passions which, in the past, has not been necessary …” In other words, the upward curve of virtue must parallel that of knowledge.

Professor Ginsberg of the University of London in his book The Idea of Progress correctly states that progress cannot be defined in terms independent of ethics. One can scarcely call it progress if a murderous maniac is progressively handed a stick, a club, a sword, a pistol, a cannon, and finally an H-bomb.

Education must deal with that which has never changed: the human heart, its passions and ideals. There are the wellsprings of human well-being or human catastrophe. In an address to the Royal Society, Laurence Oliphant, Australia’s top atomic scientist, declared: “I can find no evidence whatever that the morality of mankind has improved over the 5,000 years or so of recorded history.”

2. The myth of the natural goodness of man. This is a delicate subject. One sometimes feels that this dogma is simply a corrective to the reverse obnoxious doctrines of extreme puritanism (the sort seen in medieval asceticism and seventeenth-century extremism) that every impulse of man is totally and inherently evil. (In passing, some even conceive this to be the Presbyterian doctrine of total depravity. Actually, of course, the view declares that the total man was touched by sin, that no part of his being remained unaffected. It does not attribute total evil to every impulse.)

But the cult of sensibility, as the eighteenth century termed it, is not a corrective; it is an extreme, untenable, and unreasonable dogma that shows up in modern education all the way from first grade to graduate school.

Simply, it may be called the philosophy of “doing what comes naturally.” At the intellectual level, for example, it is held that there is some magic value in the uninhibited and uninformed opinion if freely expressed. And so discussion groups are held in the grade schools and the high schools on such subjects as “What do you think about the atom bomb?” or “teen-age morality” or “banning Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “implementing freedom among underprivileged nations” or what not. The poor little dears have scarcely a fact to use as ballast. But no matter. The cult of sensibility believes that continuing, free, uninhibited discussion will ultimately release the inherent goodness of natural instincts and impulses. The fad for “brainstorming” has passed, but not the philosophy behind it.

Now, of course we must encourage discussion. The young need to be encouraged to think and to speak—the former, anyway. But the deadly assumption underlying this sort of thing is that goodness is not a difficult matter of study, discipline, learning, mastery of tough masses of fact, but just a kind of game. It’s fun to do what comes naturally. (On reading about the uninhibited conduct of certain grade-school classes, with free discussion, finger painting, group games, or whatever the youngsters want to do, an older man said: “That’s not a new feature of education. They had that when I was a boy. They called it ‘recess.’ ”)

Ultimately, this view of ethics believes that there is no objective standard of morality or ethics. If there were, then what one wanted to do would be either right or wrong according to whether it reflected or violated the absolute standard. Rather, it is the view of the cult that society determines morality. The vote of the majority determines the ethical value. To refer to Bertrand Russell again, one remembers his assertion that there is no rational basis for determining ethics. Man, as the random product of an eternal flux of atoms, feels certain things—chiefly, that he exists; or rather, he experiences an experience he arbitrarily names “existence.” Thus what are “ethical standards” to one may be unacceptable to another. There is no objective basis for deciding between them. One can only hope, therefore, that he lives in a society in which the majority of the people happen to like the same ethical standards one does oneself.

The idea that man is basically good and infinitely capable of self-improvement has ramifications in every area of modern life. It is ardently preached by Freudian psychologists, to whom restraint of any natural desire is bad; by dreamy-eyed social and political theorists who believe that “freedom” is the sovereign remedy for the ills of every primitive tribe and nation; by aesthetic theorists who teach that art is an unplanned eruption occurring when the “artist’s biography makes contact with the medium of the art”; and by educationists who teach that what Johnny wants to do is what he must be permitted to do. No concept is more widespread, more taken for granted by millions who have never troubled really to think about it.

It is important to realize that members of the cult of natural goodness believe primarily in the goodness of the non-rational faculties—instinct, emotion, impulse, sub-rational urges. They are not so strong on the natural goodness of the intellect. (The high priest of the cult is D. H. Lawrence.)

There is, consequently, a prevalence of anti-intellectualism in educational circles that manifests itself in a marvelous jargon largely incomprehensible to the rational intelligence. Jacques Barzun gives a fine analysis of this malady in The House of Intellect.

3. The myth of egalitarianism. This is an even more delicate subject. To seem to question the equality of men is to raise questions about one’s attitude toward home and mother and the American way of life. Actually, of course, the situation is not hopelessly complicated. It is simply a matter of identifying those areas in which all men are equal and those in which they are not.

To the Christian, every soul is equal before God. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God; all need grace; none is good before God. None can claim social status, investments, political office, or ecclesiastical affiliation to separate him from his absolute equality with all other human souls.

To the believer in the Western tradition of rule by law, every man is also equal before the law. The protection of the law, the responsibility for obeying the law, and the duty of understanding the law are equal in distribution and force, without regard to any circumstances save legal age.

But to declare that all men are equally gifted, equal in force of character, equal in abilities and talents, equally deserving of a share of the world’s goods, equally deserving of esteem, respect, and admiration, equally deserving of rewards, equal in cultural heritage and contribution—this is irrational nonsense.

No concept has had a deadlier effect upon modern education than this. It has hindered the identification and encouragement of the exceptionally gifted; it has lowered educational standards to a point where no one, no matter how dull, can fail to hurdle them; it has confused the right of every man to seek an education with the fallacious belief that every man has a right to receive a degree. It has stifled initiative by refusing to grant exceptional reward to exceptional effort. It has encouraged mediocrity by withholding the penalty of mediocrity.

An illustration: A university with which I am very familiar undertook a program to encourage better English in the high schools of the city. The basic idea was competition—the best writers, the most skilled in grammar, the clearest thinkers would be singled out through public contests for reward.

The professional secondary-school counselors were horrified. This clearly amounted to “discrimination”—it discriminated between the able and the unable student! In the modern doctrine this is the deadly sin. In sum, the university was permitted to put into effect only a watered-down plan that carefully provided rewards for everyone. Needless to say the program was of only modest effectiveness. Needless to say, too, that high-school graduates come to us scarcely sure whether writing is the white or the black part of a page.

I was recently told by a professional-educator colleague that the terrible alternative to belief in complete equality in all dimensions is the inculcation of an inferiority complex. From that, he told me, come resentment, insecurity, antagonism, maladjustment, psychoses of various kinds, rebellion—in short, a wrecked society.

This, too, is nonsense. The thing works both ways. Almost everyone has some talent or ability that could be developed beyond the average level. If he properly receives acknowledgment for this superiority, he will be willing to grant superiority in other fields to other people. Is this not inherent in life itself? Do we feel resentful or guilty because we have not the mental equipment of a Pascal or an Einstein? Physically inferior because we cannot bat home runs like Mickey Mantle? Artistically inferior because we cannot play the piano like Rubinstein or Richter?

On the contrary, one of the keenest pleasures of life is to be in the presence of a superior person—and to be very still.

That sort of pride which cannot, without infinite anguish, acknowledge the superiority of any other living being is quite literally Satanic. From it flowed all our woes.

4. The cult of scientism. Again, careful qualification is needed. No one can, in the first place, be other than grateful for the marvelous strides science has made in increasing human comfort, controlling disease, providing relief from soul-killing labor. Nor, in the second place, can anyone doubt the validity and effectiveness of the scientific method—in its proper place. What I refer to is the religion of scientism, complete with dogma, faith, ethical system, and ritual.

“Science” is a wonderful word. It means “knowledge.” Thus the old term for what we today call “science” was “natural philosophy.” The study of nature—physical; perceived by the senses; capable of instrumentation. Indeed, modern science may be called the application of instruments to matter for the purpose of gaining understanding of material forces and thus of gaining control over them for our own purposes.

The cultic aspect arises when (1) science is viewed not as one way man has of knowing things (and a sharply limited one) but as the way that embraces everything man can, at least respectably, come to know; and (2) when the teachings of its priests are accepted without question by a faithful congregation.

These cultic aspects are perhaps most perceptible in the development of “mysteries” of the faith, open only to the initiated, not to be comprehended by non-scientists. Writes the great Norbert Wiener: “The present age of specialization has gone an unbelievable distance. Not only are we developing physicists who know no chemistry, physiologists who know no biology, but we are beginning to get the physicist who does not know physics.” As a consequence, the mysteries known only to the specialists are accepted without question by those without the necessary knowledge to judge for themselves.

Anthony Standen, distinguished British chemist who is editor of a huge encyclopedia of chemistry, writes: “What with scientists who are so deep in science that they cannot see it, and non-scientists who are too over-awed to express an opinion, hardly anyone is able to recognize science for what it is, the great Sacred Cow of our time” (Science Is a Sacred Cow, Dutton, 1950).

“Is the universe,” he continues, “to be thought of in terms of electrons and protons? Or … in terms of Good and Evil? Merely to ask the question is to realize at least one very important limitation of [science].”

The biologists, he says, try to define “life,” with ludicrous results. “They define stimulus and response in terms of one another. No biologist can define a species. And as for a genus—all attempts come to this: ‘A genus is a grouping of species that some recognized taxonomic specialist has called a genus.…’ ”

The scientist, says Standen, has substituted is for ought. “That is why,” he concludes, “we must never allow ourselves to be ruled by scientists. They must be our servants, not our masters.”

The cult has many imitators, all of them injurious to true education. The ritual words of the worship services have been adopted by areas of knowledge where no physical instrumentation is possible: psychology, sociology, aesthetics, morality. When the modern psychologist asks, “What motivational elements predominated in this behavioral manifestation?,” he is still simply asking, “Why did he do it?” And the real answer lies far beyond the reach of the cleverest electronic computer or microscope.

In general, the attitude fostered in modern education toward science is unthinking worship. As a consequence, as Martin Gardner states in his recent book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, “The national level of credulity is almost unbelievably high.”

The menace of this scientific gullibility obviously goes far beyond the classroom. It is the malady of our age, and one of which we may perish. But my immediate point is simply that an environment of anti-intellectual materialism has seriously hampered the development of students’ awareness of the moral and spiritual stature of man, by which alone he stands erect.

Writes René Dubos, a world-famous bacteriologist:

Today, as every day, I have heard of ugly, congested cities, with polluted atmosphere; of planes … colliding in mid-air; of overpopulated continents and starving populations; of mechanized, regimented, dehumanized life; of brainwashing and nuclear warfare. As a member of the scientific community, I am awed by the thought that these social nightmares are to a large extent the products of industrial civilization—born out of science.… There is no longer any thoughtful person who believes that the conversion of science into more power, more wealth, or more drugs necessarily adds to health and happiness or improves the human condition. Indeed, haphazard scientific technology pursued without regard for its relevance to the meaning of life could spell the end of civilization [Horizon, July, 1961].

Most paradoxical is the cult’s dogma that there is no room for faith in any true search for truth. The notion is palpably false. Let me quote Warren Weaver, vice-president for the natural and medical sciences of the Rockefeller Foundation: “I believe that faith plays an essential role in science just as it clearly does in religion.” He goes on to list six basic faiths of the scientist, including the faith that nature is orderly, that the order of nature is discoverable to man, that logic is to be trusted as a mental tool, that quantitative probability statements reflect something true about nature, and so on (“A Scientist Ponders Faith,” Saturday Review, January 3, 1959). In sum, he says: “Where the scientist has faith that nature is orderly, the religionist has faith that God is good. Where the scientist believes that the order of nature is discoverable to man, the religionist believes that the moral nature of the universe is discoverable to man.” Dr. Weaver rejects the well-known aphorism of Sir Richard Gregory:

My grandfather preached the Gospel of Christ,

My father preached the Gospel of Socialism,

I preach the Gospel of Science.

But many others accept it with fervor. “God has ceased to be a useful hypothesis,” writes Julian Huxley. The problem of the nineteenth century, says another, was the death of God; that of the twentieth, the death of man.

Any humanist who speaks in these terms must be extremely careful, lest he fall into mere carping, deeply tinged by envy of the prominence and prosperity of science. Nothing could be more foolish—or more ungrateful. The lament over the low estate of the humanities in the public mind would be more touching if those responsible for the preservation and dissemination of humanistic studies had something of positive value to say, if they had a Path, a Way of Truth to declare.

5. The cult of biologism. I admit that this is a poor term, and perhaps the topic itself were better considered a subheading of the previous one. Essentially, this cult is an outgrowth of materialism, the faith that man is only biology, that he not only has glands but is glands.

As a consequence, whole segments of educational theory consider man precisely as a physicist considers an atom—one purely objective item among others of its kind, clothed with identity only as it is part of a group, the properties and motions of which are to be determined statistically, in terms of average behavior. (Years ago, Irving Langmuir, speaking of the “burden of irrationality” in science, pointed out that the laws, say, of the expansion of gases tell us how a mass of molecules behave under certain conditions of heat and pressure, but that no one can predict how a single one of the molecules will behave.)

To treat man merely as a capacity for response to stimuli, as totally the product of the forces that impinge upon him, without will or conscience, is to divest him of personality, individuality, and dignity. But the whole science of human engineering is based, more or less, on this concept. The only variation is the difference of opinion among the practitioners as to whether there remains in man some slight indeterminate center of being, inviolate to stimulus or statistical confinement, or whether he is totally susceptible to manipulation.

Among the many ramifications of this cult let me mention only two. First, the dogma that all human actions are social in their implications, to be judged purely by their effect on society. And, second, the dogma that emotions, feelings, are not essentially moral in their nature, nor the product of individual, unique, and sovereign personality, but are merely the conditioned reflexes of quivering biology.

The first, the social dogma, conceives of the individual as the physician thinks of the cells of the body—part of an organic whole, subject totally to the welfare of the organic unit (the state, in the social and political parallel), and to be excised through surgery if a cell rebels.

It is within this belief that a nationally prominent psychologist has defined education as “the engraving of desirable behavior patterns.” Through conditioning, teaching machines, Pavlovian devices of various kinds, the individual is created in the desired image. Undesirable behavior patterns are to be eradicated by a form of brainwashing and a new engraving superimposed. Dismissed as utterly outmoded is the view of each human being as a living soul, created in the image of God, with primary responsibilities as an individual to the God of his creation.

And who is to determine what kind of behavior pattern is “desirable”? That’s the hitch. The persons who most ardently would like to impose their own behavior patterns on me are the very ones whose patterns I would least like to have engraved.

At worst, this view of human existence is both irrational and evil. It is irrational because it must believe that those who impose the patterns of desirable behavior must be as totally the product of external influence, as completely a consciousness-produced-by-environment, as those who are to be manipulated. It is evil because it denies human dignity and reduces the individual to a cipher.

The second menacing product of the cult of biologism is the belief that emotions and feelings are as purely biological as the purely physiological activities of man. In other words this view denies that the quality of a person’s feelings is a measure of his moral stature, of his culture, of his civilization. It denies that the teaching of right feelings is a vital part of true education.

The “natural” emotions of a child are pretty fearful, until they have been civilized, associated with moral values, enriched with culture. Most notably, the child—and the savage—is instinctively delighted by cruelty. A child will pull the wings off a fly. A recent account of life among certain savage South American Indians describes the pleasure of the community at the antics of chickens plucked alive, with perhaps a leg or wing pulled off for good measure.

This may be the “natural” feeling of sin, and it may be an instinctive expression of the savage as biology. But it is the work of civilization, of culture, and above all of religion, to eradicate it. “Natural” man must learn the right emotions—what to laugh at, what to smile at, what to frown at.

Show me what makes a man laugh, what makes him weep, and I know the man. It is ultimately a matter of morality, not biology. Education divorced from moral values cannot teach right feeling.

The deepest and most significant emotion of all, the one this world most desperately needs to be taught, is compassion—the emotion most readily associated with the love of God for sinful man. “The tender mercies of the heathen are cruel,” says the Bible. Commandments that we deal gently, forgivingly, tenderly with each other are “unnatural” in biology. They are natural only to the regenerated spirit.

Now, this is a broad indictment. I do not pretend that I have said anything new, or that these problems are peculiar to education. They are maladies of our age. They break into dozens of major subheadings, scores of topics, hundreds of subject headings, thousands of instances.

But the correction is magnificently simple: True education, as Milton said three centuries ago, is to relearn to know God aright. Education divorced from God is capable of infinite and endless complexities and confusions. He alone is the motionless Center that gives meaning to all motion. What he is, not what man is, determines what should be and shall be.

Let me end with a quotation from that rough-mannered philosopher Carlyle (Sartor Resartus, Chapter IX):

“Cease, my much respected Herr von Voltaire,” thus apostrophizes the Professor: “shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth. Alas, were thy six-and-thirty quartos, and the six-and-thirty thousand other quartos and folios, all flying sheets or reams, printed before and since on the same subject, all needed to convince us of so little! But what next? Wilt thou help us to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live? What! thou hast no faculty in that kind? Only a torch for burning, no hammer for building? Take our thanks, then, and—thyself away.”

Somewhat modified, these words might be addressed to the kind of dangerous education I have been describing.

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.”

Most essays in this issue—that by Charles Troutman is the exception—were prepared for a Consultation of Christian Scholars sponsored by CHRISTIANITY TODAY some months ago under a Lilly Endowment grant. During a three-day conference at Airlie House, that refreshing “think tank” in northern Virginia, the conferees discussed the obstacles to Christian belief and commitment on American university campuses. The Troutman essay considers problems of campus witness not from the professors’ standpoint but from that of students.

Among the two dozen consultation participants were directors of the newly formed Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, who, incidentally, will soon announce their funding of the institute’s first research scholar.

One heartening sign of the world missionary thrust is the increasing concern among Asians for the evangelization of Asia. But a heavy hush fell over plans for the Asian Congress on Evangelism, scheduled for November, when coordinator Stan Mooneyham was felled en route by a heart ailment. After successful surgery in Houston, Texas, he is now bound for Singapore “happy to get moving again, without pain and fever, both of which have kept me at half-capacity.” Stan’s well-wishing friends know that his half-capacity is enough to stagger an ordinary mortal. When we visited Majorca together a year ago, he bought a pair of shoes and a pair of pony-fur boots to guarantee replacements on the road ahead.

“It is unfortunate,” said A. J. Balfour, “considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.” Another British prime minister, George Canning, made similar pessimistic comment on things not always being what they seem, when in New Morality (sic—and 150 years ago) he spoke of someone who “finds with keen discriminating sight, black’s not so black—nor white so very white.” The ability to recognize and cope with grays might be considered one of the marks of maturity.

Peculiarly appealing, nonetheless, is the challenge of a clear-cut issue. In our youth many of us responded sympathetically to words such as those of Miss V. H. Friedlaender: “When we are grown, we know it is for us to rend the flowery lies from worlds foul with hypocrisy; to perish, stoned and blinded in the desert, that men unborn may see.” Few of us have not at some time gone further, and felt that if only we could fix the circumstances of our own martyrdom, there would be no sacrifice we would not be prepared to make for our faith.

Love of spectacular activity is not, of course, exclusive to the Christian. Long before the days and dreams of Walter Mitty, Naaman showed he had anticipated something very different when he was referred humiliatingly for his cure to the Jordan. Yet the words of the Syrian’s servants have lost none of their ringing relevance down through the centuries to our own age of headline-hitting demonstrations. “If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it?”

In working out his purposes, God may call and deal with his people in ways that surprise us. (There is something basically misleading about singing “It Is No Secret What God Can Do.”) God guides some along paths that we cannot understand, and that we may even dislike intensely. One man is called to pacifist protest against the evil of war, another to witness for Christ in an army camp. Here as always it is dangerous to try acting as another’s conscience.

Yet in Britain at the present time, that is precisely what is happening in the renewed discussion among evangelicals about separation. Some are prescribing for their fellows a course of action in terms of “This is the way—walk ye into it”—or, more accurately, “That is not the way—come ye out from it.” Evidently inseparable from a frightening dogmatism, the appeal is not new. What is new is an appallingly bad argument that condemns as “guilty by association” those evangelicals who continue to exercise their ministry within a denomination involved in what is referred to disparagingly as “the ecumenical movement.” (Why depreciate a reputable expression like this one, when what is really meant is the World Council of Churches and allied industries?)

While we honor the man who follows God-given conscience in breaking much-loved church links, we might honor him rather less if in doing so he impugned the motives of his colleagues with no clear call to secession. There is no virtue in secession in itself (why is it somehow thought there is?). Some pastors are called, not to sacrificial secession, but to sacrificial continuance in situations calling for steady preaching of the evangel amid heretics and apostates, publicans and sinners. That such pastors could adduce good biblical warrant for doing so shows how “guilt by association” is a thoroughly irresponsible charge.

Those who uphold such a charge (and it has weighty support in England) must inevitably, if they are consistent, cope with the sort of question the seventeenth century knew all too well. Is it lawful, for example, to have fellowship with those who have fellowship with Church of England clergy? How many degrees removed from “association” must you be before you are accounted “innocent”? Just as pertinent, who will do the accounting? The whole solemn and agonizing case for secession must not be brought into disrepute through faulty advocacy.

Moves towards separation are usually grounded in a desire to defend the faith by exalting the Word of God and glorifying the Christ of the Scriptures. The aim itself is laudable; our misgivings are directed at some of the conclusions and attitudes that emanate from it. The language of separation is necessarily dogmatic, tempting to a censoriousness wherein the unity of the Spirit is easily quenched. True believers are separated from one another. Concerned for the safety and purity of its movement, separation demands the erection of thicker and higher hedges for self-protection. The absurd lengths to which Taylorism has gone in recent years, leading to questions in Britain’s Parliament, is stark illustration of this tendency. Man-made appendages to the Gospel become all-important, constituting a test for fellowship. Burdens grievous to bear are set on other men’s backs by those who ironically are given to violent denunciation of authoritarian Rome.

Throughout the world we find the same thing: the evangelical scene continually bedeviled by minor skirmishes that break out on the periphery of the battle, engaging the time and attention of those whose proper place is in the thick of the fight to be fought for the souls of men. The energies of some of our ablest colleagues are all too swiftly diverted to areas of arid controversy and uncivil war against fellow Christians. A recent 300-page book was based on a rebuff allegedly received by its American writer at the Berlin World Congress on Evangelism.

One of the tragedies of Covenanting Scotland was that half a century of godly and learned men produced nothing still read today except Rutherford’s Letters. The “little fair man who showed the loveliness of Christ” showed also a strain of healthy self-criticism not always apparent in his contemporaries. In his dying testimony he freely admits that the Covenanters had weak points, and laments that sometimes they had concentrated on church government to the detriment of the spiritual. “Afterwards,” he remarks, “… in our Assemblies we were more bent to set up a state opposite to a state, than concerned with the meekness and gentleness of Christ.”

The political and ecclesiastical circumstances of the Covenanters were somewhat different from those confronting British evangelicals today, but the principle remains unchanged. The important thing surely is that Jesus Christ be preached in every way to those who do not know him.

The same Samuel Rutherford saw straight to the heart of the matter when he wrote to the Earl of Cassillis in 1637: “Your honourable ancestors, with the hazard of their lives, brought Christ to our hands, and it shall be cruelty to posterity if ye lose Him to them.” Whatever our religious affiliations, and whether we have a call to secede or to remain within our own churches, this is still a word for today.

Should American taxpayers be required to support church-related schools?

More and more public money is being appropriated for sectarian education, but a legal test may finally be at hand.

Last October the U. S. Supreme Court agreed to rule on whether taxpayers have standing to bring suit against state agencies that subsidize church related schools. A decision is pending.

Now the high court has also agreed to decide on the constitutionality of a New York law requiring the state’s public-school systems to lend textbooks to parochial-school students.

“If it should permit taxpayers to challenge federal spending programs on church-state grounds, and if the justices should strike down the New York school book law, the entire federal program of aid to pupils in church-related schools would be placed in jeopardy,” said a report in the New York Times.

The latest action by the Supreme Court was to hear an appeal by the school board of East Greenbush, New York, a suburb of Albany, and other upstate school officials. New York is one of seven states that lend state-owned textbooks to parochial-school students. The New York law directs school districts to lend fifteen dollars in textbooks each year to each pupil in grades seven through twelve in private schools. About $25 million is spent annually.

The New York Supreme Court declared the textbook law unconstitutional. But the Appellate Division reversed that ruling, and the East Greenbush case was appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court.

The federal government now spends about $60 million a year to purchase textbooks and provide specialized instruction for pupils in church schools.

The money line separating church and state has deteriorated steadily in recent years. Government agencies on local, state, and national levels have grown increasingly open to the idea of budgeting money for hard-pressed religious institutions. This is a throwback to the old European system of state subsidy, under which the established churches have grown stagnant.

The champions of a continuation of the successful American experiment in church-state separation have watched its deterioration somewhat helplessly. Because taxpayers have not had a standing to sue, there has been no way to arrest the trend in the courts. A judicial-review bill sponsored by Senator Sam Ervin, which would give taxpayers such legal standing, has languished in committee.

PROTESTANT PANORAMA

Latest figures released by The Methodist Church show a loss of 21,405 members across the United States over a period of a year. The Methodist constituency now totals an official 10,289,214.

Southern Baptists report gifts to world missions during 1967 amounted to a record $45 million. The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board got $27.8 million. Twenty other agencies shared the rest and applied it to such things as home missions, theological education, and radio and television projects.

The American Lutheran Church is being urged to put stronger administrative authority at regional and national levels. A report issued by the ALC Long Range Study Committee also calls for a regrouping of program functions and a new method of electing general officers.

PERSONALIA

Ben Hartley, editor of Presbyterian Survey since 1959, turned in a letter of resignation last month in a policy dispute with directors. Hartley, 43, reportedly complained that he had not been given sufficient authority and editorial freedom to run the Survey, which is the official monthly magazine of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. Strong appeals to Hartley to reconsider were expected.

The widow of a Methodist chaplain killed in Viet Nam has joined the Army Nurse Corps and plans to serve in Viet Nam. Mrs. Ambrosio S. Grandea of Baltimore was sworn into the service by a chaplain who helped to conduct her husband’s funeral last year. She volunteered for duty with the provision that she be assured a Viet Nam assignment.

The Rev. Norman Shepherd was named dean of the faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary. He succeeds Dr. Paul Wooley, who resigned as dean for health reasons but will continue to teach.

Governor David F. Cargo of New Mexico disclosed that he has been baptized a Roman Catholic. Cargo, who grew up a Methodist in Michigan, says his decision was a gradual one following his marriage to Ida Jo Anaya, a Roman Catholic. He came under criticism last year for appointing a Catholic priest to head the state’s war on poverty. The priest has recently been reassigned.

The Rt. Rev. John Cyril Emerson Swaby, 62, was elected Anglican bishop of Jamaica. Swaby’s election after six ballots became secure when another candidate withdrew.

Harley Fite, president for twenty years of Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, plans to retire July 31. The Southern Baptist school has enjoyed steady progress under Fite and now has an enrollment of 1,727 regular students.

A German Lutheran pastor was wounded and hospitalized after he and his party were ambushed by tribal warriors in a wild region of West Irian. An American woman missionary was found safe in Malaysia after she and three children became lost during a hike.

The United Christian Council in Israel elected Robert L. Lindsey as its chairman. The council, largest Protestant organization in Israel, is a cooperative agency in which some thirteen denominations participate.

Former Dean Arthur Foster will leave Berkeley Baptist Divinity School to become “professor of theology and personality” and director of a Center for Theology and the Study of Man as part of Chicago Theological Seminary’s doctoral program. Veteran BBDS teacher Maurice Jackson was named top aide to new President C. Adrian Heaton, who also heads California Baptist Theological Seminary. Leaders of a campaign against the previous BBDS administration have urged full support of Heaton.

A year-long mystery over a Byzantine Catholic bishop was climaxed with the announcement of a major reshuffle in the Ruthenian rite hierarchy. The Most Rev. Nicholas T. Elko was elevated to a titular archbishopric after a Vatican inquiry and an unexplained exile in Rome. Die Ruthenian rite recognizes the Pope but has its own Latin customs and liturgies.

MISCELLANY

“Herald of Truth,” a radio broadcast of the Churches of Christ, makes its debut February 4 on the NBC network. John Allen Chalk is the preacher.

A violent explosion wrecked the ancient Church of St. Vincent in the northern Italian town of St. Vincent. Most of the church’s crypt and its art treasures dating back 800 years were destroyed or badly damaged. Police said vandals had placed sticks of dynamite against a basement window.

Communist Albania officially abrogated all laws dealing with church-state relations. The action is apparently aimed at delivering the coup de grace to formal religious institutions in Albania, Religious News Service said.

The legislature of the central Indian state of Orissa approved a law imposing penalties of up to a year in prison or a $1,000 fine for missionaries convicted of coverting minors, women, or untouchables. The penalties can be doubled, according to the law, for attempts to win converts by “force, fraud, or exploitation of poverty.”

French President Charles de Gaulle reportedly has taken pains to correct a reference to Jews as domineering. The French word “dominateur,” which de Gaulle applied to Jews in a speech November 27, can be translated in either a neutral or pejorative sense. According to informed sources, de Gaulle has told a key rabbi in Paris that he had meant his remarks as praise for the accomplishments of the Jewish people.

The Baptist Unity Movement went out of existence on December 31, 1967. Chairman Howard R. Stewart said the group’s charter was allowed to expire because of “the inability of the group to meet the financial responsibilities involved in the growth of the movement.” He said that about 1,000 persons have been associated with it during its five years of operation.

Deaths

PIERRE VAN PAASSEN, 72, Unitarian clergyman who wrote Days of Our Years, a best-seller published in 1939 about the Jews in Palestine; in New York.

JOSEPH C.CLAPP, 51, president of the University of Corpus Christi (Southern Baptist); in Corpus Christi, Texas.

JOHN B.HIPPS, 83, retired professor of missions at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

The Supreme Court of the state of Washington upheld the constitutionality of a college course dealing with the Bible as literature. Two Bible Presbyterian ministers had sued the University of Washington, charging that the course tended to have adverse religious effects upon students. They vowed an appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court.

The Japan Baptist Convention began a special prayer movement for peace in Viet Nam. Executive Secretary Yoshikazu Nakajima in Tokyo appealed to Baptists around the world to join the movement. A convention statement acknowledged Japan’s “responsibility for World War II” and asserted that “War is evil and contrary to the will of God.”

A Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, was ordered to fire its pastor or face foreclosure of a mortgage. The Rev. C. Donald Pfotenhauer, 37, whose pastorate has been characterized by a charismatic emphasis, wonders whether “there is room in the Missouri Synod for the charismatic gifts of the Spirit.” The Rev. Martin Lieske, president of the synod’s Minnesota South District, which holds the mortgage, says he has failed to see the fruit of the Spirit manifested in the congregation.

The death of Bob Jones, Sr., at age 84 last month closed the era of hard-hitting evangelists of the Billy Sunday ilk, which reached its peak between the two world wars. During the height of his career, Jones preached an estimated 12,000 down-to-earth gospel messages, laced with folksy maxims, to more than 15 million people. He bridged the gap between old-time fundamentalism and the post-war evangelical resurgence.

This was the era when Jones founded his most memorable monument, Bob Jones University. From a small start in Florida, the school moved to Tennessee, then Greenville, South Carolina. It is the world’s largest fundamentalist college, with an enrollment of 4,000 and a modern campus valued at $50 million.

Jones was born in southeast Alabama, the eleventh child of a farmer and Confederate army veteran. As a youth he tried out preaching in the barn and by age 14 had held his first evangelistic meeting. The next year he was licensed to preach by The Methodist Church, which he left years later, charging theological liberalism.

One of the converts during those early years in Alabama was an old blind man who turned out to be the physician who had brought him into the world. Both of Jones’s parents died when he was a teen-ager, and his first wife died of tuberculosis ten months after the wedding. Two years later he courted and married the former Mary Gaston Stollenwerck, who is still living. He attended college in Alabama.

Three years after he received an honorary D.D. from Muskingum College (United Presbyterian) in Ohio, Jones decided to start a college to promote unflinching fundamentalism. Bob Jones University is well known today not only for its conservative, biblical theology but also for its strict discipline and student turnover, a “six-inch rule” to keep the sexes apart, strictly monitored dating, plus the sort of smoking-drinking-dancing ban still common at many conservative Protestant schools.

The school has also supported right-wing politics and segregation of Negroes. In his pamphlet, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” Jones answered yes. Although the booklet spoke often of “colored friends,” in everyday speech Jones slipped easily into common stereotypes.

Jones also believed in what has been called “second-degree separation,” that is, separation from fellow conservatives who are friendly with more liberal Christians and Roman Catholics. This led to a famous split with Billy Graham, who went one year to Jones’s school and later got an honorary doctorate from it, but who then carried the Jones-type message into an ecumenical era.

The school has earned a good reputation for film teaching and Shakespearean drama productions and has amassed one of the finest collections of religious paintings in North America. Each year a large group of Jones’s “preacher boys” graduate, and many have moved into good pulpits and important missionary jobs. Other graduates have earned good-paying positions in education and industry, even though the school has never been accredited.

Jones died quietly at the hospital on campus. His death followed several years of declining health, which had led him to resign as university board chairman in 1964. His only son, Bob Jones, Jr., succeeded him as chairman and has been president since 1946. Jones is also survived by his grandson, Bob Jones III, who is university vice-president, and by two other grandchildren. After a January 17 funeral attended by more than 5,000 persons, Jones was buried in a small plot in front of the campus auditorium.

YALE CHAPLAIN FACES TRIAL

The life of William Sloane Coffin, Jr., seemed till recently a circuitous quest for a cause. But at 43 Coffin has found a cause, one big enough to win him national distinction. And now his indictment by a federal grand jury promises to make him the first prominent American clergyman in decades to face public trial.

Coffin, the chaplain of Yale University, is accused of conspiring to encourage violations of the draft laws. Named with him were four non-clergy including Benjamin Spock, well-known baby doctor. They were to be arraigned in Boston this week. If convicted, they could receive maximum penalties of five years in prison and $10,000 fines.

Coffin has been a leading critic of the Viet Nam war and has urged resistance to the draft laws. His participation in numerous peace demonstrations last year marked an abrupt reversal of the promilitary outlook of his earlier days. Coffin was an Army captain and paratrooper during World War II and worked for the Central Intelligence Agency as a specialist in Soviet affairs during the Korean War.

He was born in New York City of a well-to-do family. His father was an executive of a firm that retails fine furniture. Young Coffin studied music briefly at Yale after his graduation from Phillips Academy and before his service stint. Between his Army and CIA days he put in some study at Union Theological Seminary, New York, and got a B.A. from Yale. But he didn’t get his B.D. until 1956. Also in that year he was ordained a United Presbyterian minister and married a daughter of pianist Artur Rubinstein.

Coffin’s first chaplaincy job was at Phillips, the second at Williams College; then in 1958 he was named to the Yale post. In 1961 he became a social activist in joining the Freedom Riders, who were demonstrating for integration in Alabama. As the civil-rights campaign lost its steam, Coffin became increasingly interested in Viet Nam. Last October he urged Yale undergraduates to turn in their draft cards and was criticized for that by Yale President Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Two years ago Coffin got into a mild dispute with evangelistically minded Pentecostal students at Yale whose activities threatened to disrupt the interreligious status quo. At that time he was quoted as having decried the emotionalism of the student evangelists and the “devious methods” of another evangelical group on campus.

During 1967 Coffin came to Washington from time to time as part of various protests against the draft and the Viet Nam war. He has apparently been seeking a showdown arrest to dramatize his dissent and was visibly indignant last October 20 when Justice Department officials refused to arrest him. He had turned in a briefcase full of what he said were draft cards and said he wanted to be arrested to precipitate a “moral, legal confrontation” with the government over the draft.

The Justice Department did not act as quickly as Coffin desired, but the ax finally fell last month. Interestingly, the government cited, not the Washington incident, but one in Boston on October 16, a rally at the Arlington Street Church (Unitarian). A number of draft cards are said to have been collected there and several other acts of an alleged conspiracy perpetrated.

VIET NAM: AN URGE TO WORSHIP

This story was distributed recently by the public-relations office of The American Lutheran Church:

Fifty men “squatted in the chapel-of-the-bombed-out-bunker” and in a husky voice sang the Doxology, transforming the terror of artillery blasts into personal praise of God—and peace.

“One moment of time had been redeemed, and only God knows how many men.” So writes Chaplain Lt. Edward A. Olander in one of his regular reports to the Rev. Orlando Ingvoldstad, Jr., director of service to military personnel for The American Lutheran Church.

Twenty ALC chaplains serving with U. S. forces in the Viet Nam area fill Ingvoldstad’s mail regularly with vivid descriptions of the gospel ministry’s effect under the stresses of armed conflict.

Instead of vestments that day, Olander wore a flack vest and helmet. Exploding cannon near this perimeter camp provided a ghastly cadence, in perfect rhythm with the liturgy, he wrote. “Lord have mercy. BOOM! Christ have mercy. BOOM! Lord have mercy. BOOM!”

The lesson for the day spoke of “time running out.” There was a lull in the bombardment. “The eerie stillness of the pockmarked hills haunted our thoughts. Perhaps for us time had run out. As we lustily ‘off-keyed’ our vocal response, this thought became embroidered with terror.”

Olander’s stirring experience deep in the Viet Nam jungle was unusual. He serves in the U. S. Navy and is assigned to five destroyers on the Tonkin Gulf.

The call came by ship radio: “Can you send your chaplain to coordinate ‘Mustang’ by 1100 hours? Will send Holy Helo by 0930. Confirm.” The chaplain confirmed. “Holy Helo” is military lingo for a helicopter carrying a chaplain.

“The First Cavalry Air Mobile at Dong Song was now in this area and American boys on the perimeter, half dead with fatigue, wanted to worship. Mustang was the point farthest out and could be reached only by air,” the chaplain’s letter said.

“The morning liturgy for me began as we chattered over the river bed snaking up the valley heading due north. To my amazement I looked up at the trees for most of the trip.

“The pilot, from Tacoma, Washington, patiently explained this was for security reasons. Higher up we could be spotted, plotted and exterminated. Down here, moving at 100 miles per hour, we were ‘there’ and gone before even being seen.

“I confessed my sins as evil-looking ground rushed by.

“Later, as we climbed higher I saw the crater holes and rusting tank skeletons of several years ago, when death also ruled, but the blood name was French.”

Olander’s more normal routine puts him aboard one after another of the five destroyers, with an occasional call to conduct services on the U.S.S. “Oriskany,” an aircraft carrier.

Olander, a native of Chicago, attended high school and college in Minot, North Dakota, where his mother, Mrs. Alice Olander, still resides. The chaplain is a graduate of Luther Theological Seminary, St. Paul. He served five years as a missionary in Brazil, and was pastor of Crown Lutheran Church, Seattle, before being commissioned.

DIALOGUE IN THE CHILL

With the temperature reading zero along Chicago’s lakefront, the Rev. Francis A. Sohaeffer, head tutor at L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, met Bishop James A. Pike for a dialogue January 6 in the city’s newly renovated Auditorium Theater. Lake Michigan’s chill winds seeped into the opulent theater, and the dialogue never loosened up.

The two dialecticians, perhaps having skidded about in Chicago’s first heavy snow of the season, preferred to stay on safe ground. Their topic was, “What Relevance Has Historic Christianity for Modern Man?” They agreed about the relevance but disagreed about “historic.”

Schaeffer referred to his experience at L’Abri, a mission he founded to reach intellectuals and twentieth-century dropouts. The relevant part of Christianity for these people, he says, is its insistence on a personal triune God who cares, and who makes loving and communicating possible. This God has spoken through the Bible and—in a way that Schaeffer did not elaborate—became particularly involved with the Reformation culture in Western Europe.

Pike was more concerned with the future: “We are called to make things come to pass with God in history.… I do not believe in faith in faith, but faith in a living God, and faith which of course changes with culture and history.”

Although the moderator advised the audience at the outset to pay attention to what was said rather than who was saying it, there was no doubt that Pike was cast in the role of antagonist to “historic Christianity.” Schaeffer took pains to avoid direct debate, confining himself to philosophical lecturing. The moderator said he was “inspired and confused” by Schaeffer.

Pike, on the other hand, digressed freely about his own involvement in current theological and social issues. He warmed to his work when discussing demonstrations against government war policies. “Christians have a reputation for being sore thumbs,” he said. “But when we sprinkle holy water on the status quo we nauseate people.… It is man and God who are forever; nations come and go.”

A scattering of applause greeted this last statement. The audience, however, was weighted in favor of the evangelical “side” and sat politely quiet through most of the three hours of talk. Schaeffer, despite his modish riding boots and long hair, does not excite his listeners; yet most of those present did not care to be seen publicly clapping for Pike.

The only overt sign of enthusiasm was reserved for Schaeffer’s definition of a Christian: “To be a true Christian, a man must bow twice. Once metaphysically, to acknowledge he is a creature, and again morally, to acknowledge that he has sinned and must cast himself on Christ.”

Both speakers said modern man can “affirm life,” because God is there. But while Pike stressed the transcendence of God over culture, including modern European and American culture, for the purpose of confronting it with its sins and changing it, Schaeffer warned against using Christian concepts such as transcendence to mask potential idolatries and dictatorships. This issue was not pursued.

The dialogue was sponsored by a three-man corporation named Christian Communications, or ChrisCom, which operates in Chicago. Its purpose: “to promote a better understanding of evangelical Christianity among the general public, and particularly among members of scholarly intellectual circles.” While in Chicago, Schaeffer had a chance to carry ChrisCom’s appeal to the area’s major radio talk show and Irv Kupcinet’s TV conversational.

FRED PEARSON

TREK FOR PEACE

A move “to bring temple, church, mosque and synagogue in meaningful support of the United Nations and other regional structures for peace” took a group of churchmen to major religious capitals last month. Fifteen American clergy were in the group, which made stops at Geneva, Rome, Jerusalem, and Istanbul. They ended up in New Delhi, India, for the International Inter-Religious Symposium on Peace, where it was announced that a world conference on religion and peace was being planned for 1969.

THE NEW MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

The renowned Malcolm Muggeridge, for eleven months the rector of Edinburgh University, Scotland, resigned last month in protest of a student demand for contraceptive pills. Muggeridge has been a leading British journalist and articulate social critic.

The 64-year-old former editor of Punch, who ten years ago would have been considered something of a skeptic, now looks more and more like an exponent of orthodoxy. His resignation came while he was speaking from the pulpit of John Knox in the High Kirk of St. Giles, Edinburgh. He spoke to more than 2,000 at a university beginning-of-term service.

Muggeridge said that “there is practically nothing [students] could do in a mood of rebelliousness in fighting against our run-down way of life which I would not sympathize with—including the blowing up of this edifice we are in. How sad, how macabre and funny it is, that all they put forward should be a demand for pot and pills.”

The view of the Edinburgh Students’ Representative Council, according to Muggeridge, was that the rector and his assessor had to pass on to the university court whatever the SRC decided. This, he said, was an unacceptable tenet, so he tendered the resignations of himself and of the assessor, Edinburgh barrister Allan Frazer. It was believed to be the first resignation of an Edinburgh rector since the university was founded nearly four centuries ago.

“I have no wish to check any fulfillment of your life,” said Muggeridge. “But whatever life is or is not about, it must not be expressed in terms of drugs, stupefaction, or casual sexual relationships. The road to the future is not on the plastic wings of Playboy magazine or in psychedelic fantasies.” He commended to his listeners the beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Other parts of the address reflected how far Muggeridge has traveled along the path to Christian orthodoxy. Although he specifically disclaimed “any puritanical attitude,” he said some things that no thundering puritan could have disagreed with or improved upon.

“No doubt,” he declared, “we shall go on raising the school age, multiplying and enlarging our universities, increasing public expenditure on education until juvenile delinquency, beats and drug addicts, and general intimations of illiteracy, multiply so alarmingly that, at last, the whole process is called into question. In the same sort of way, the so-called permissive morality of our time will, I am sure, reach its apogee. When birth pills are handed out with the free orange juice and consenting adults wear special ties and blazers, and abortion and divorce … are freely available on the public health, then at last, with the suicide rate up to Scandinavian proportions and the psychiatric wards bursting at the seams, it will be realized that this path … is a disastrous cul-de-sac.”

STRIDES AMID ADVERSITY

Christian witness is bearing fruit in places where opportunities are limited, according to a series of reports from European Baptist Press Service. In Poland, Baptist churches are said to have baptized 120 converts during the past year. In Madrid, the city’s fifth Baptist church was organized on New Year’s Day with thirty-four charter members. In Lisbon, Baptists were getting ready to inaugurate a new bookstore on one of the main thoroughfares.

EBPS quoted Wort and Werk, an East German Baptist newspaper, as reporting that eight young people came forward for public commitment of their lives to Christ’s leadership at the final service of an interdenominational youth week in Lichtenstein.

MORE GREEK UNREST

Under a ruling from the Greek military government, two leading Orthodox Church figures face indictment before a church court and possible expulsion. The newly constituted Holy Synod decided last month to try former Greek Primate Iakovos (no relation to the North American primate) and Archbishop Panteleimon of Salonika.

Charges were not revealed, but the action stems from a law passed in December that calls for dismissal of priests who have “lost their good reputation and necessary prestige.” Informed sources told newsmen the pair had refused to resign, thus necessitating the trials.

Conwell Names New Board

Philadelphia’s old Conwell School of Theology is taking a new lease on life these days. It promises to make a strong bid for a major role on the academic frontier. That the new thrust will be biblically oriented seems assured with an announcement of a new slate of trustees. The eleven-member Conwell board now includes evangelist Billy Graham and several associates, “Bible Study Hour” preacher Ben Haden, pastor Stephen Olford, and author Walter Martin. Conwell’s president, appointed last fall, is Stuart Barton Babbage, also a well-known evangelical.

QUAKERS IN LEGAL BATTLES

Quaker groups took to the courts last month in an effort to strike down U. S. government restrictions against relief shipments to Communist-ruled areas of Viet Nam. The first suit was filed in Washington, and related litigation was to be initiated in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The American Friends Service Committee is also initiating court action to relieve religious organizations from having to withhold tax from employee earnings. The committee’s objection is that much of the money is used for military purposes.

ODDS ON MIXED MARRIAGE

Yeshiva University sociologist Victor Sanua advises parents and religions to encourage their young people to marry persons of their own faith, a decreasing practice among young people.

Basing his opinions on thirty-five years of observation, Sanua says that “the intermarried have a high risk of divorce” but that “those unwilling to identify with any religion had the highest divorce rate.”

Sanua says pledges made by non-Catholic marriage partners that children will be raised Catholic are ignored in half the cases, which often produces interference from in-laws.

Among Jews, only 17 per cent marry outside the faith. The percentages come from a study in Iowa, where religious preference is requested on marriage and divorce forms.

WHERE CHRISTIANITY VANISHED

Remains of an ancient Christian civilization in the Nubian region of the Nile Valley have recently been found but will soon be flooded by Aswan Dam waters. Religious News Service says pioneer archaeologists from the African Missionaries of Verona (Roman Catholic) found an entire cathedral with frescoes, in excellent condition.

The find supports the theory that a Christian civilization flourished in the area from the fifth century on—100 years earlier than previously thought. Islam and Christianity apparently lived side by side for many centuries. The archaeologists think Christianity disappeared from the area not because of Muslim pressure but for internal reasons.

LONELY OPPORTUNITY

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel is looking for an Anglican to serve as chaplain in Tristan da Cunha, often called “the world’s loneliest island.” The Rev. W. P. S. Davies, a Welshman who has been at Tristan for two years, is returning to England. There are about 200 people to be ministered to on the island, which lies in the Atlantic about midway between southern Africa and South America.

The Roman Catholic Church, plagued in recent years by a host of criticism from within its own ranks, showed a bent last month for recovering its traditionally monolithic character. In significant but unrelated actions, bishops in the United States and in South Viet Nam issued collective statements that set precedents.

So many dissidents have emerged and so many conflicting voices have been raised within Roman Catholicism since the Second Vatican Council that the hierarchy apparently feels an urgent need to reassert the church’s unified front. It may be a futile effort: both priests and laymen are finding less and less upon which they can agree. Some are basking in the truths of newly opened Bibles, but many are falling victim to unwarranted presuppositions of higher criticism and are jettisoning the authority of both Scripture and tradition.

The statement by U. S. bishops came in the form of a 25,000-word pastoral letter, the first ever in American Roman Catholic history. In theory at least it was representative of the views of the more than two hundred bishops in this country. Entitled “The Church in Our Day,” it was described as a “major doctrinal statement,” the first in a series designed to interpret actions of the Second Vatican Council.

The letter is largely devotional in tone and abounds in personal admonition. It steers a delicate course between conservative doctrine and progressive methodology and is openly critical of heretical tendencies.

“A new Pelagianism seeks salvation in the correction of structures rather than in conversion to God,” the letter declares. “A new Gnosticism places all its hope in the apt phrase or the esoteric formula rather than in Jesus Christ Crucified and Risen.”

The bishops leave no doubt about where they feel ultimate authority for the interpretation of doctrine rests:

“The Catholic Church sees infallibility as Providence, as grace, a gift she receives in humility for the sake of her Master and for the salvation of her sons and daughters. It is not in arrogance but in wonder that she claims infallibility for her substantive teaching and guidance.”

The letter was prepared by a committee of bishops under the direction of Bishop John J. Wright of Pittsburgh. It was approved for January release by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops at their meeting in November.

Initial reaction among Catholic commentators was generally favorable. But the National Catholic Reporter voiced reservations, complaining that the document failed to break any new ground.

The letter was said to have been drafted for the bishops by a 35-year-old theologian, the Rev. Anthony Padovano, of Immaculate Conception Seminary, Ramsey, New Jersey.

In South Viet Nam, Roman Catholic bishops issued a surprising statement after a three-day meeting. They called for a halt to the bombing of the north and an end to the infiltration of arms into the south. Even more startling was the bishops’ unprecedented criticism of “laziness, hypocrisy, and corruption,” which could hardly be interpreted as anything but an indictment of South Vietnamese officials who are themselves Catholics.

The bishops appealed for negotiations to end the war. This was ironic in that some observers contend that highly placed Catholic prelates had a lot to do with the events that precipitated the war. While Roman Catholics make up less than 10 per cent of the population of South Viet Nam, they have long dominated the public life of that country. President Nguyen Van Thieu is a Catholic and so is a large bloc that consistently supports him in the national legislature.

In the past, the bishops have generally refrained from criticizing the government. Their influence has been indirect, and it was generally associated with a hard line against the Viet Cong.

The new statement on the war quotes Pope Paul VI extensively, and it may be that it is the pontiff who is responsible for the shift. Vatican sources greeted the statement favorably. One was quoted as saying that the Vietnamese hierarchy had finally gotten the message.

The Shelves Are Sagging

A new medical center is being established in northwest Congo by the Paul Carlson Foundation on land donated by the government. It’s located in an area where an estimated 88,000 persons are afflicted with leprosy and will be used as a rehabilitation facility for leprosy patients.

The Paul Carlson Foundation is named after the American medical missionary who died in the Stanleyville massacre of 1964. Its program for the center also calls for a specialty and research program in various phases of medicine as resources permit and medical personnel became available. First workers are Dr. and Mrs. Wallace Thornbloom.

The foundation recently sent to the Congo drugs valued at more than half a million dollars. The drugs were donated by drug companies and sent with the aid of the Congo Protestant Relief Agency and the Medical Assistance Program.

“The shelves are sagging,” said Jody LeVahn, who worked as a nurse under Carlson. “Dr. Paul would really be thrilled to see this.”

The new center, called “The Loko,” is located on a 5,000-acre tract on a picturesque plateau. “Included also are python and elephant in the wooded areas for food for patients,” said the foundation’s announcement.

“There are no government doctors north of the Congo River,” a foundation spokesman said. “This is a strategic time for us medically and spiritually.”

REVAMPING THE CURIA

The resignation of Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal watchdog last month signals the most important turn in Catholicism since Vatican II adjourned. His replacement, Franjo Cardinal Seper, 62, of Yugoslavia, could hardly represent more of a change:

• Ottaviani’s office handed the recent Synod of Bishops a negative catalog of doctrinal errors (see October 27 issue, page 38). Seper was elected by the bishops to head the group that prepared a more moderate, “pastoral” document on belief.

• Ottaviani is one of the strongest anticommunists in the Curia. Under the coexistence-minded Seper, church relations with the Tito government have warmed remarkably, leading to the first concordat with a Communist regime. Two days after he appointed Seper, Pope Paul met with Yugoslav Premier Mika Spiljak.

• At Vatican II, Ottaviani was virtual floor manager for the traditionalists and Curia administrators against the religious-freedom decree and other changes. Seper spoke in favor of religious freedom, as well as decentralized authority and the declaration on Jews.

• Ottaviani has hardly been regarded as an ecumenical figure. His office a year ago forbade Catholics in Rome to join Christian unity services with Protestants—a decision later overruled by the Pope. Seper has spoken for limited liberalization on concelebration of the Eucharist. Last year his diocese was the site of Billy Graham’s first preaching service in a Communist nation.

• In doctrine, Ottaviani personified the disciplinary spirit of his agency, once called the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition. His office has disapproved work by such eminent theologians as Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, the late John Courtney Murray, and—perhaps with more cause—the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In recent years, procedure has mellowed so that accused thinkers have a chance to defend their work, and the Index of Forbidden Books has disappeared.

Seper, by contrast, is considered “fairly open” in theology, Religious News Service said. He has favored an approach to atheism that shows more understanding of its causes, and more freedom for bishops to handle localized theological disputes.

Although Ottaviani has been branded as the Curia conservative (his campaigns against birth control and against psychoanalytic research by Mexican priests last year are cases in point), he has urged total condemnation of war and establishment of “one world republic.” Nearly blind for several years, the 77-year-old cardinal is considered a warm and gracious man in person. He spends much of his limited free time with orphans.

Ottaviani was the tenth of an Italian baker’s dozen children. He joined the Curia in 1929 and has served there ever since. Such long terms are less likely under Pope Paul’s Curia reorganization plans. Ottaviani not only headed the Congregation of the Faith but is a member of six of the other congregations (major offices). As conservative strategist during Vatican II, he won many tactical battles but lost the war. Vatican speculation is that he was a major candidate for the papacy when John was elected, and he was the man who crowned Paul in 1963.

The career of Seper (pronounced Shay’-pair) has been more obscure. He is a Croatian who has lived most of his life in Zagreb, the cultural center of Yugoslavia. He spent much of the 1950s in the touchy job of assistant to Cardinal Stepinac, who was under house arrest. Since Seper became primate in 1960, Yugoslavia has exchanged ambassadors with the Vatican, approved mass pilgrimages of Slavs to Rome and the Holy Land, and revived suppressed church publications. Last year the government permitted the return of émigré priest Krunoslav Draganovic, who had been pursued as a “war criminal” for twenty years.

Catholic liberals were worried when Pope Paul postponed for three months the Curia reorganization that was supposed to begin this month. The Seper appointment was balm, but some were worried again the next day when aging Cardinals Larraona and Lercaro resigned their potentially competing posts as heads of two Curia offices on liturgy. Lercaro’s office was created in 1964 to carry out Vatican II worship reforms and, apparently, to circumvent Larraona. But “new Mass” experiments under Lercaro were criticized at last fall’s Synod of Bishops. The two agencies will now be merged under Benno Cardinal Gut, 70, a Benedictine abbot in Switzerland who has been a cardinal only seven months.

With the advent of Seper, two of the three major posts in the doctrinal office are held by non-Italians. (The number-three man is Monsignor Charles Moeller of the University of Louvain, Belgium, regarded as a liberal.) And the reorganized Curia will be led by three Italians and eight non-Italians, a remarkable shift from the traditional Italian domination. Besides that, several other top Curia figures are expected to resign shortly, particularly Secretary of State Amleto Cardinal Cicognani, 84. Under the reorganization (see September 15 issue, page 47), the secretary of state becomes virtual prime minister, Curia terms are limited to five years with reappointment up to the pope, and a retirement age of 75 is set.

NEW STATISTICS FROM N.C.C.

The 1968 edition of the Yearbook of American Churches, published last month by the National Council of Churches, omits the customary total of U. S. Protestants and provides only a figure for the constituency of the NCC. Also missing are inclusive totals for Eastern Orthodox and for Catholic churches not in communion with Rome.

The new Jewish membership is 5,725,000. The Roman Catholic total, 46,864,910, represents a growth rate slightly faster than that of the population, while Protestants and religious groups as a whole run slightly behind the population increase.

Another change in the first Yearbook edited by Lauris Whitman is separate lists for “current” statistics for 1966 and for the 117 groups with “non-current” reports, perhaps an NCC nudge to keep them up to date. The ranking of the largest denominations on the current list is:

Of these groups, membership losses from the previous year were reported by the Methodists, United Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, and Christian Churches.

The 1966 reports from north of the border were Anglican Church of Canada, 1,292,762 members, and United Church of Canada, 1,062,006.

Major groups not supplying 1966 reports ranked as follows:

BRIEFS FOR OPEN HOUSING

The National Council of Churches, in a brief filed with the U. S. Supreme Court January 17, asks that refusal to sell homes to Negroes be made illegal. A group of two dozen Roman Catholic cardinals and bishops said they would also file. The court is currently considering the case of an interracial couple who say they were victims of racial discrimination when they sought unsuccessfully to buy a home in suburban St. Louis.

The NCC friend-of-court document said “Jim Crowism” in housing is “a badge of slavery,” and the Catholic brief said the “constitutional right to purchase a home without discrimination” is grounded in “the very nature of man.”

TRIPLE DEBUT

Two new religious periodicals appeared in January. A third was due February 1.

The Presbyterian Layman, a monthly published by the Presbyterian Lay Committee, Inc., had a six-page first issue, Life-sized but in tabloid newspaper format. It features conservative commentary on current church issues.

The United Church of Christ began publication of Colloquy, described as “an ecumenical magazine to explore, clarify, and criticize church education.” Its first issue abounds with pictures of Negroes in ghettoes. Text matter is liberally salted with profanity.

Religion and Society, Inc., a nonprofit organization in Bayport, Minnesota, announced it would unveil a new magazine “to state the religious presuppositions of society.” Writers for the magazine will be such conservatives as Howard F. Kershner, Russell Kirk, Irving E. Howard, William F. Rickenbacker, Samuel J. Mikolaski, and Edmund A. Opitz, the announcement said.

STRUGGLING WITH A DEBT

The Rev. J. Paul Driscoll founded Mid-City Baptist Church in a New Orleans barber shop back in 1943. “On the first building,” he recalls, “we dug the ditches ourselves.”

Now the church has 4,700 members and is the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the city. Latest statistics showed the church ranked third in baptisms in the whole Southern Baptist Convention, second in total property value, and third in missions giving. But 1968 dawned with a cloud over Mid-City: The Securities and Exchange Commission has court action pending against the church, charging fraudulent sale of bonds. The SEC complains the church used money from bond sales to make payments to previous investors.

Driscoll attributed the church’s problems to “doing business with people who proved to be unreliable.” Mid-City is among twenty-two churches that have filed suit to recover several million dollars for bonds delivered to two Texas companies that are in receivership. The two firms held four million dollars’ worth of bonds that Mid-City had issued to finance a high-rise apartment building and hotel. The original plan was for the church to construct a sanctuary or auditorium on the ground level and to conduct intensive evangelism among the hotel-apartment tenants. Mid-City is strongly evangelistic.

Driscoll says “it looks like almost twenty-five years of hard work might be lost. But even if we have to dig ditches again and have to work twenty-five more years, I’m convinced the Lord will see us through.”

Riot Report To Hit Churches

America’s churches, which are getting blamed for most everything these days, apparently are in for more of the same—from the government.

Katherine Peden tipped off a Louisville audience last month that the country’s religious organizations will get a going over when the President’s Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders issues its report soon.

“I think we are going to hear some uncomfortable things, and I think some of you will squirm when you see what we have to say about the service or lack of service of our nation’s churches,” said Miss Peden, prominent Kentucky political figure who is one of the eleven members of the commission.

Although she refused to elaborate, Miss Peden implied that she thought that the churches were not doing enough to stem urban unrest.

The problem of black power and urban unrest promises to be in the forefront of the churches’ concern this year. In Washington, Martin Luther King made plans for a mass demonstration in the capital during cherry-blossom time. Stokely Carmichael also was making plans there for a new coalition of Washington Negro leaders.

A group of Negro churchmen, the Committee of 100 Ministers, promptly denounced Carmichael’s plan as “an unholy alliance.” A day later Carmichael attended services in a Baptist church whose pastor is chairman of the committee. Dr. E. C. Smith greeted him publicly and explained later that the criticism of the coalition “was nothing personal” against Carmichael.

It turns out that Carmiobael had taught a youth group at the church while attending Howard University several years ago. Actually, however, Carmichael allowed, he’s a Methodist and not a Baptist.

In Detroit, black power took on a more ominous note when the Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr., turned down a $100,000 Ford Foundation grant because he claimed conditions put on the grant were a denial of self-determination. The rejection may have triggered an end to the coalition of black and white leaders formed to rebuild the city after last summer’s riots. Cleage, pastor of Central United Church of Christ, which worships a “black Jesus,” was offered the money for a black separatist group he heads. The group has pulled out of the coalition because “whites have tried to absorb blacks paternalisticailly and then on terms set by whites.”

INCENSED AT INCENSE

The air of peace and good will was temporarily suspended during Eastern Orthodox Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem.

A midnight procession in the Basilica of the Nativity was attended by Dr. Angus Campbell MacInnes, Anglican archbishop in Jerusalem, in an ecumenical gesture said to have drawn much favorable comment from Orthodox leaders.

But the Monophysite churches had a brief, sharp dispute on Christmas afternoon at the Altar of the Circumcision, which is owned by the Armenian Church. Priests of the Syrian Church, chanting evensong at the altar with the permission of Armenian authorities, complained that their fellow Monophysites of the Coptic Church at a neighboring altar, also owned by the Armenian Church, had offered incense beyond what is considered the dividing line. The Armenian Chief Dragoman Darabit, on whose permission both ceremonies depend, quickly settled the issue.

An Israeli military officer reportedly was overcome by the heavy odor of incense in the Grotto of the Nativity and, near to fainting, had to be given first aid by a Greek Orthodox priest.

AFGHANISTAN: A CHURCH IS BORN

In Afghanistan, a remote Asian land with a population of 15,000,000, there are probably fewer Christians than in any other country on earth. But under Prime Minister Mohammed Hashim Maiwandwal, policies against Christians have eased somewhat, and the government is giving permission for construction of a Protestant church in the Afghanistan capital of Kabul.

The church, planned to go up this year at a cost of $255,000, is the dream of J. Christy Wilson, Jr., a United Presbyterian minister who has been in Afghanistan for fifteen years. Wilson is the government-appointed chaplain to Protestant embassy personnel. The new building will house his Community Christian Church (forty-six members, weekly attendance of 200) as well as smaller congregations of German-speaking Lutherans and of Anglicans, who get periodic clergy visits. There are three other Protestant congregations in Afghanistan for foreigners, but none has ever had a building of its own.

Although several Christians from Muslim lands have been assigned to embassies in Kabul, Wilson knows of no citizen of officially Islamic Afghanistan who publicly professes Christ. A few Afghans attend his services out of curiosity. Many more learn about Christianity from Radio Voice of the Gospel, the Lutheran shortwave station in Ethiopia, which provides the only Persian-language Christian broadcasting available.