The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, began with six members in 1830 and today claims more than 2,500,000. Many Mormon young people give two years of their lives to propagating the faith; there are currently about 12,000 of these missionaries actively at work.

Mormons claim to be the “restored” church of Jesus Christ and hold that all other ecclesiastical bodies are in error. They also say that they accept the Bible as “the word of God as far as it is translated correctly” (Articles of Faith, 8). Many people have the impression that the Mormon teachings are not basically different from those of historic Christianity. Is this true? Let us ask the Mormons ten questions, get answers from their own writings, and compare these answers with the teachings of the Bible.

1. Is the Bible the final source of authority for Mormonism? The answer is a decisive no. To begin with, Mormons claim that there are many translation errors in the Bible as we have it today—though they will not make the same admission about the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, felt he should revise the Bible on a number of points, and among the things he added to it is a prediction of his own appearance (Genesis 50:33 in the Inspired Version of the Holy Scriptures).

The inadequacy of the Bible is clearly expressed by a statement in First Nephi 13:28 (Book of Mormon) to the effect that many “plain and precious things” have been taken away from the Bible since it was first written. Accordingly, Mormons have added to it three other sacred books: The Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price. Joseph Smith once said, “I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 194). “Any other book” certainly includes the Bible. Doctrine and Covenants contains additional “revelations” allegedly given through Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, among them the “inspired” instructions about two practices that are very important in present-day Mormonism: baptism for the dead and celestial marriage. The Pearl of Great Price is a smaller volume containing the opening chapters of Smith’s revision of the Bible (“The Book of Moses”), the “Book of Abraham,” which is a polytheistic rewriting of the first chapters of Genesis, and other writings.

Mormon writers base their teachings primarily on the Mormon Scriptures rather than on the Bible, which they relegate to an inferior place of authority. They believe that the president of the church is able to receive further revelations from God, and that these revelations could conceivably alter even the doctrines contained in their Scriptures. It is clear, then, that Mormonism is not a part of the Christian Church, for its chief source of authority is books other than the Bible.

2. Does Mormonism teach the spirituality of God? No; it teaches that both the Father and the Son have material bodies. “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:22). In Articles of Faith, for many years a standard Mormon doctrinal textbook, Joseph Talmage says, “It is clear that the Father is a personal being, possessing a definite form, with bodily parts and spiritual passions” (p. 41).

This teaching implies that there must be female gods as well as male gods. John A. Widtsoe, a prominent Mormon author, puts it this way: “There are males and females in heaven. Since we have a Father, who is our God, we must also have a mother, who possesses the attributes of Godhood” (A Rational Theology, p. 69).

Surely scriptural teaching about the omnipresence of God (e.g., 1 Kings 8:27; Ps. 139:7–12; Acts 17:27, 28) rules out this view of Deity. Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman are plain: “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24, ASV).

3. Does Mormonism believe in one God? There has been a development in Mormon teachings on this point. The Book of Mormon, first published in 1830, clearly teaches the unity of God: “And now, behold, this is … the only and true doctrine of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, which is one God, without end” (II Nephi 31:21). But later Joseph Smith himself, the “translator” of the Book of Mormon, denied that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God; they are three distinct gods, he asserted. In fact, in a sermon he said, “I will preach on the plurality of gods.… The doctrine of a plurality of gods is as prominent in the Bible as any other doctrine: (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 370). Since, according to Mormon teaching, the latest “revelation” is the most authoritative, we conclude that Mormonism today teaches a plurality of gods.

Brigham Young, second president of the Mormon church, said, “How many Gods there are, I do not know. But there never was a time when there were not Gods and worlds …” (Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 22). From Widtsoe’s Rational Theology we learn that the gods are in an order of progression, that they vary in their stages of development (“God,” “angel,” and similar terms denote “beings of varying degrees of development”), and that God the Father is simply the supreme god—that is, the god who has reached the highest stage (pp. 66 ff.).

How can this be squared with biblical teaching on the absolute sovereignty and uniqueness of God? “Thus saith Jehovah the King of Israel … I am the first, and I am the last; and besides me there is no God” (Isa. 44:6). The entire Old Testament was directed against the polytheistic religions of Israel’s pagan neighbors; how can Mormonism justify its return to the polytheism so decisively rejected by the prophets?

4. Does Mormonism teach that men may become gods? Yes. To begin with, it insists that all the gods were once men. They first existed as spirits, came to an earth to receive bodies, and then, after passing through a period of probation on earth, were advanced to god-hood. The gods all moved through the cycle: spirit—man—god.

Man may pass through the same cycle. Joseph Smith once said, “Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves …” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 346). From Doctrine and Covenants (132:19, 20) we learn that men who marry according to the new and everlasting covenant whereby they are sealed to their wives for eternity will after this life become gods. Man first exists as a spirit creature without a body; he then comes to earth to receive a physical body from his earthly parents; and after a period of probation on earth he dies, only to be raised again. If he has faithfully observed the precepts of the Mormon religion, he will be raised as a god. Lorenzo Snow, first president of the Mormon church, put it succinctly: “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”

In Mormon theology, then, man is exalted to potential deity. All ultimate differentiation between God and man is wiped away. How utterly different from all this is the God-concept found in the Scriptures!

5. Does Mormonism accept the fall of man? Yes and no. It accepts the fall as a historical event but reinterprets it so that it becomes really a “fall upward.” In the Book of Mormon we read: “And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the Garden of Eden.… And they would have had no children.… Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy” (II Nephi 2:22–25).

How is this explained? Eve first disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit. At this point Adam found himself in a dilemma. God had previously commanded Eve and him to multiply and replenish the earth. But now, since Eve had fallen into a state of mortality and he himself was still in a state of immortality, they could not remain together. If they did not, however, they would not be able to fulfill God’s command to replenish the earth. But to yield to Eve’s request to eat the fruit would be disobedience also. Adam made his choice; he “deliberately and wisely decided to stand by the first and greater commandment; and, therefore, with understanding of the nature of his act, he also partook of the fruit” (Talmage, Articles of Faith, p. 65). Joseph Fielding Smith, current president of the Council of Twelve Apostles and a likely choice for next president of the church, puts it as follows: “The fall of man came as a blessing in disguise, and was the means of furthering the purposes of the Lord in the progress of man, rather than a means of hindering them” (Doctrines of Salvation, I, 114).

Obviously, such a view would have a great effect upon the rest of Mormon theology. By repudiating the deep seriousness of Adam’s sin, Mormons minimize the importance of the work of Christ. If man is not really a fallen creature, he does not need a Saviour.

How different is the Bible’s evaluation of Adam’s fall: “As through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin … through one trespass the judgment came unto all men to condemnation …” (Rom. 5:12, 18).

6. Does Mormonism teach equal opportunity for all races? As we have seen, Mormons teach that before men come to this earth, they exist as spirits. This pre-existent life is a time of probation, progression, and schooling, and not all spirits do equally well during it. Joseph Fielding Smith has this to say about the conduct of spirits in the pre-existent state:

There is a reason why one man is born black and with other disadvantages, while another is born white with great advantages. The reason is that we once had an estate before we came here, and were obedient, more or less, to the laws that were given us there. Those who were faithful in all things there received greater blessing here, and those who were not faithful received less [Doctrines of Salvation, I, 61].

Bruce McConkie gives a plain summary of what the Mormon Scriptures say on this matter:

Those who were less valiant in pre-existence and who thereby had certain spiritual restrictions imposed upon them during mortality are known to us as the negroes. Such spirits are sent to earth through the lineage of Cain, the mark put upon him for his rebellion against God and his murder of Abel being a black skin (Moses 5:16–41; 7:8, 12, 22). Noah’s son Ham married Egyptus, a descendent of Cain, thus preserving the negro lineage through the flood (Abra. 1:20–27).

Negroes in this life are denied the priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty (Abra. 1:20–27). The gospel message of salvation is not carried affirmatively to them (Moses 7:8, 12, 22), although sometimes negroes search out the truth, join the Church, and become by righteous living heirs of the celestial kingdom of heaven.…

The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence. Along with all races and peoples he is receiving here what he merits as a result of the long pre-mortal probation in the presence of the Lord [Mormon Doctrine, pp. 476, 477].

McConkie adds, however, that “certainly the negroes as children of God are entitled to equality before the law and to be treated with all the dignity and respect of any member of the human race” (p. 477). At this time Negroes may not be priests in the Mormon church; it may be, however, that a future revelation will remove this disadvantage and give them full equality. Many Mormon leaders have expressed the hope that such a revelation will be given soon.

7. Does Mormonism teach the unique incarnation of Christ? No. It does teach that Christ existed as a spirit person before he came to earth and that when he came to earth he received a physical body through Mary. However, this experience was not unique. All the gods first existed as spirits and then came to various earths to receive bodies. Christ’s experience was similar to that of every other god, and of many men.

It is important to remember that though Mormons may confess the deity of Jesus Christ, they do not mean by that confession what historic Christianity means by it. For them the difference between Christ and man is only a difference of degree.

8. Does Mormonism teach the vicarious atonement of Christ? Mormon writers do say that Adam’s fall required an atonement. Since the fall brought physical death into the world, Christ had to make an atonement to deliver us from death by providing for all men the right to be raised from the dead. This is a general salvation, a potential saving of all men from death through resurrection. When Mormons claim, as they sometimes do, that Christ died to save everybody, it is this salvation that they mean.

But Mormons also speak of individual salvation; by this they mean escape from hell and entrance into one of the three Mormon heavens. Since individual salvation depends on individual obedience, Christ’s atonement is not determinative for it (Talmage, pp. 86–91). Individual salvation is determined by meritorious action.

In this view, Christ’s death is a vicarious atonement only in a very restricted sense. Christ died to enable all people to rise from the dead. But his death does not save a person from sin; it only gives man an opportunity to save himself.

9. Does Mormonism teach the biblical view of the way of salvation? One of the great biblical doctrines is justification by faith; a man is saved from sin and adopted as God’s child, not because of his own works or merit, but solely by grace. Man “is justified by faith apart from the works of the law” (Rom. 3:28). But Mormonism rejects this. In fact, James Talmage calls justification by faith a “pernicious doctrine,” and adds, “The sectarian dogma of justification by faith alone has exercised an influence for evil” (op. cit., p. 479). Although Mormons admit that one must have faith in Christ, this faith must be accompanied by faith in Joseph Smith. Very revealing is this statement from Doctrine and Covenants (135:3): “Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer of the Lord, has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived in it.”

The main emphasis in Mormon soteriology, however, is on works. Individual salvation—entrance into one of the three heavens—depends on one’s merits. The more complete one’s obedience to the rules of the church, the higher place he will occupy in the life to come. Speaking of the highest degree of salvation, Joseph Fielding Smith says, “Very gladly would the Lord give to every one eternal life, but since that blessing can come only on merit—through the faithful performance of duty—only those who are worthy shall receive it” (Doctrines of Salvation, II, 5).

Surely this is not the Christian Gospel. It is the Galatian heresy all over again—that is, that a man is saved by faith plus meritorious works. About this heresy Paul uttered some of his strongest words: “Ye are severed from Christ, ye who would be justified by the law; ye are fallen away from grace” (Gal. 5:4).

10. Does Mormonism teach that all men will be saved? Very nearly. Mormons do believe there is a place of final punishment; but very few people will go there, only the so-called sons of perdition, whose sins have placed them beyond the “present possibility of repentance and salvation” (Talmage, p. 409).

The highest of the three Mormon heavens, the celestial kingdom, will be for those who have been most faithful on earth; here those who were celestially married on earth (married for eternity in a Mormon temple) will continue to live with their spouses and will continue to procreate children. The second heaven, the terrestrial kingdom, is for those who were less earnest and valiant in their service of God. This kingdom has room for those who reject the Gospel while they are on earth but who later accept it when Christ preaches to them in the spirit world. In other words, those who reject Christ in this life have a “second chance” to accept him after death. The lowest of the three heavens is the telestial kingdom, for people who live wicked lives on earth and are cast into hell when they die, but who are released from punishment after a period of suffering. Hell is thus seen as a kind of purgatory, with a door at each end.

The Bible does not permit the view that people who have deliberately rejected the Gospel in this life will be given a second chance. “It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment” (Heb. 9:27). Neither does Scripture let us think of hell as a school from which one may graduate into heaven. Jesus said with finality, “These shall go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt. 25:46).

On each of these ten questions the teaching of the Mormon church is contrary to Scripture. Although there is much in Mormonism that we may admire—the tremendous welfare program, the ability to get members involved in the work of the church, the willingness to sacrifice—we cannot classify Mormon teachings with those of historic Christianity. The Christ of Mormonism is not the Christ of Scripture.

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.”

What priorities do seminaries maintain in training ministers? Do scholarly concerns eclipse spiritual values and curtail evangelism?

While dining at a religious conference one day, I was startled by what I saw on a place mat. It was an advertisement for a prominent Protestant seminary, and in big print it said, “For a Learned Ministry.” As I read further I found out that this seminary was preparing men and women for a vocation that is “scholarly and effective.” The advertisement pointed out the academic qualifications of faculty members, boasting that they had “written fifty-eight books and numerous scholarly articles” and that they “lecture frequently at conferences.” Then came the climactic tribute, apparently intended to be overwhelming: “Their creativity has already made a significant impact on the theological thinking of this age.”

Now I am certainly not opposed to scholarship in the seminaries. There have been great scholars in the Church—Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Hodge, and many more—and the product of their minds blessed by the Holy Spirit has been invaluable in the proclamation of the Gospel and in the progress of Christianity. What disturbed me about this advertisement was that there was no reference to spiritual values, to the faith and dedication of students and faculty, nor was there any suggestion that these things are important. There was no hint that this seminary tries to prepare students to witness for Christ or to preach the Gospel. One must conclude that its objective is to turn out learned graduates well trained by teachers who write scholarly books and lecture frequently.

As I reread the place mat, I remembered a letter I had recently received from another seminary; it stated that the seminary had no creed, and the accompanying brochure said, “It is time to reaffirm that the very core of the seminary is its concern for the scholarly pastor.…” All this brought a barrage of questions to my mind. What do they mean by a “learned” ministry? By an “effective” ministry? What does a trophy case filled with fifty-eight books and numerous scholarly articles prove about a faculty’s fitness for preparing students to proclaim Christ’s message of salvation? And what kind of books and articles were these? Did they have spiritual as well as scholarly value? Do “published” teachers rate higher in this seminary than those who might witness for Christ in less erudite ways?

What does “creative activity” include? What kind of “significant impact” has it made on theological thinking? Has it been good or bad? Have the faculty members of this seminary, directly or indirectly, led fifty-eight people to Christ? Have they led one? Have they tried to? Do they believe in apostolic evangelism and preaching the Gospel? Or are they trying to substitute scholarship for the gospel message proclaimed in the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit? Do they use their learning for the honor of Christ and the extension of his kingdom?

While pondering these questions, I remembered that the greatest teacher of all time never went to college, never wrote a book or an article, never delivered a formal lecture. When he talked about God to a little child or to a politician, he didn’t use five-syllable words and hundred-word sentences. Most of the apostles he chose were amazingly successful evangelists who went everywhere preaching the Gospel courageously and wisely. None of the twelve would be considered “learned” or “scholarly”—yet they certainly were “effective.” What was their primary qualification? It was this: They knew what they proclaimed, and they proclaimed it in the power of the Holy Spirit. The rulers and elders at Jerusalem, “when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, … marvelled; and they took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

A minister’s scholarly attainment is of great value when used for the glory of God and for the forthright proclamation of the Gospel. Many great preachers were scholars. And many scholars witness very effectively for the faith they hold. But scholarship must never be considered the most important qualification for the ministry, or the primary goal of the seminaries.

What a wave of evangelism would cleanse this country if every Protestant seminary gave top priority to turning out those who clearly “had been with Jesus.”

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.”

Rebellion, not obedience, is characteristic of our jet-age generation. This spirit is evident in our art, literature, and morals, in the revolt against law and authority, in the talk of the death of God. To be honest, even the most sincere Christian would have to admit that the word “obedience” irritates just a little. After all, he might be tempted to think, isn’t obedience an Old Testament teaching that has been superseded by a new relationship based on faith?

No one questions the emphasis on obedience in the Old Testament. Its teaching on the matter can be summarized: “Obey and you will be blessed. Disobey and you will be cursed” (cf. Deut. 11:26–28). Although sacrifices were important to the Israelites, the prophets continually reminded the people that “to obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam. 15:22).

Hearing the word of God is the basis for obedience in the Old Testament. In fact, hearing and obeying were so closely related that the Hebrew language uses the same word to convey both ideas. James Smart has observed that the verb “to hear” in Hebrew “significantly denotes not any passive receiving of words into the mind but the response of a man’s whole being” (The Old Testament in Dialogue with Modern Man, Westminster, 1964, p. 11). The Israelite needed no psychological or philosophical explanation for the doctrine of obedience; for him, hearing the word of God was tantamount to obeying it.

Someone has observed that Israel was in the kindergarten stage of religious experience. Since God had to deal with his people as with children, there was special emphasis on obedience. A child who refuses to obey parents and teachers never learns as rapidly as one who listens carefully and then tries to carry out the instructions. A child who refuses to learn the multiplication tables is not likely to become a mathematician; a seminary student who refuses to master Greek and Hebrew paradigms is not likely to become a Bible linguist. Israel’s story has often been called a “history of failure” because the people disobeyed God and thus thwarted his plan to bless the nation and use it as he desired.

Anne Sullivan very quickly learned the importance of obedience when she began to teach Helen Keller, who was then about six years old. Said Miss Sullivan to a friend, “I saw clearly that it was useless to try to teach her language or anything else until she learned to obey me. I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of a child” (Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, Dell, 1961, p. 265).

One might be tempted to think Miss Sullivan mixed the order of her words and really meant to say, “Love is the gateway through which knowledge and obedience enter the mind of the child.” The more carefully one considers this teacher’s words, however, the more one realizes that she expressed a profound truth, a truth significant not only for children but everyone else.

If we apply this observation to Israel, we can readily see why obedience is emphasized so strongly in the Old Testament. Israel could not really know or love God until it learned to obey him.

Obedience is also emphasized in the New Testament. That grace has taken the place of law does not mean that disobedience has replaced obedience. Jesus summarized the hundreds of laws that Israelites were required to obey into two simple commandments: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.… Thou shalt love thy neighbor …” (Matt. 22:37–39). He did not supersede God’s laws; rather, he clarified and simplified them.

Love is a distinctive emphasis of the New Testament, but Jesus links it inseparably to obedience. We read, “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me” (John 14:21a); “not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21); “if a man love me, he will keep my words” (John 14:23a). Jesus makes it clear that love is demonstrated by obedience.

His own obedience is expressed in Philippians 2:8: “… he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death.…” That this passage links humility and obedience is significant; obedience, whether divine or human, requires self-negation.

If we are completely honest, we will admit that obedience is the biblical doctrine most difficult to put into practice. We preach, teach, give a tithe or more, go to the mission field, may even be willing to die for the faith; but how many of us will at the end of this life be able to say: “I led every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (cf. 2 Cor. 10:5)? Total surrender is often talked about, but it is far easier to preach than to practice.

To obey God, man must step down from the throne of self and permit God to take his rightful place as Lord. But submission to another is contrary to man’s nature. “I am the master of my fate,” he likes to say. “I am the captain of my soul.” Paul insists in Romans 6, however, that one who thinks this deludes himself. No one is really his own master. He is the servant either of obedience unto righteousness or of sin unto death (Rom. 6:16).

The doctrine of obedience can shed a great deal of light on some of man’s most pressing problems. Human suffering, for example, especially the suffering of Christians, has always been among the most enigmatic facts of our experience. It can be partially understood in relation to the doctrine of obedience. Although Hebrews 5:8 (“Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered”) can never be understood fully, it does cause us to realize that we cannot expect any better treatment in this world than our Lord received. Some of us do not learn obedience unless we suffer, whether physically, mentally, or spiritually. If suffering produces obedience and if obedience is the gateway to knowledge and love (as observed by Anne Sullivan and demonstrated in the history of Israel), then trials can be the means of spiritual growth.

The doctrine of obedience also is related to the breakdown of modern family life. Do not most problems in the home stem from lack of obedience to responsibility? Family responsibility is summarized in the New Testament. The husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church (Eph. 5:25). The wife is to be submissive to her husband (Eph. 5:22; Tit. 2:5). Children are to obey their parents (Eph. 6:1). And parents are to avoid unreasonableness in their demands upon their children (Eph. 6:4). If each family member fulfilled his obligations in the spirit of these verses, problems in the home would largely disappear.

The alarming statistical decrease in conversions in recent years is partly explained by the lessened insistence upon obedience of children in the home. A well-known evangelist has pointed out that it is very difficult to win to Christ people who as children never learned obedience. If a person does not respect his earthly parents, how much more difficult it is for him to obey the Father in heaven. Parents who teach their children the importance of obedience are preparing them for salvation.

The doctrine of obedience can speak also to the Church today, which is charged with being irrelevant and no longer entitled to leadership. Some say that the Church’s primary need is guidance. But an even greater need is obedience—obedience simply to what we already know we ought to do.

Against the background of the riots and destruction that have convulsed our nation in recent months, it is well to recall that the New Testament emphasizes obedience to constituted authority (Rom. 13). The civilizations that have grown and prospered are those that have developed an elevated concept of law and order. When the people of a nation lose respect for its laws, when they take the law into their own hands, the result is always decadence and ultimate downfall.

Some think that to obey is to lose personal liberty. Actually, however, man achieves true liberty only through obedience—obedience to God. The angry young man, the rebel, the non-conformist, never really finds happiness. The only one who achieves that elusive goal of inner peace is the one who accepts the invitation of Jesus to put on his yoke, a yoke that he promises is easy and not burdensome (Matt. 11:28–30). The image of Christ is formed in the one who submits himself to Christ and obeys him.

Does this mean the Christian is to be a passive, weak milquetoast? Not at all. In fact, the Christian is the only one who has the right to be a rebel—not a rebel against God, as some confused contemporary theologians advocate, but a rebel against man and the world. Peter summed up the true spirit of Christian rebellion in Acts 5:29: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” Our generation tends to think that social and economic revolution is an invention of this century; it fails to realize that Christianity, which deals with the source of the ills that plague society—namely, the human heart—has always been the greatest revolutionary movement of all.

Obedience to Christ is the clearest expression of confidence in him. A person who says he has faith in Christ proves or disproves his words by his obedience or lack of it. To refuse to obey a request, whether of a friend, a parent, or someone in authority, is to say that we lack confidence in that person. The youngest child often learns more rapidly than his brothers and sisters. Why? Because of his confidence in them. He believes that what they do is right and good, and so imitates them readily. He who obeys God’s commandments demonstrates his confidence in God.

The neglected doctrine of obedience is contrary to the spirit of the times. Nevertheless it is a biblical emphasis, and it needs to be restored in our teaching and practice.

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.”

To escape political entanglement in Washington is not the easiest thing in the world. Ask Andrew Hobart, genial president of Ministers Life and Casualty Union in Minneapolis. For lunch we hurried to the nearby Willard Hotel (where Lincoln sometimes lodged) and made our way through a hearty conversation and too much food. Then we were asked for our membership cards, of all things. And thereby hangs a tale.

Between now and election-time, it seems, the Willard’s Crystal Room has become a private Democratic Club serving only the one-party elite.

Everybody had a good laugh—even if our interest in election was avowedly non-political. In fact, it was more institutional then theological; Ministers Life was inviting me to become a board member. I consented gladly, since the company has served the clergy well for two generations, and our family for a quarter of a century.…

Russell Chandler, CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S most recent religious-journalism Fellow, just certificated by the Washington Journalism Center, has joined the reportorial staff of the Washington Evening Star.…

Our February 2 issue is designated the spring book issue. It will feature an appraisal of significant religious volumes published during 1967, a forecast of spring publications, and a list of choice evangelical books.

As deep winter settled over Washington, D. C., last month, gardeners—hoping for a riot of color when flowers bloom next spring—were planting seeds.

Meanwhile, down in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was sowing seeds for a massive camp-in at the nation’s capital this April. But it’s anybody’s guess just what will sprout.

Billing the drive as “a poor people’s campaign for jobs and income,” the Nobel Peace Prize-winning civil-rights leader says he will recruit 3,000 persons from ten major Northern cities and five Southern rural areas and bring them to the capital. “Militant non-violent action” will be exerted, say King spokesmen, to focus national attention on the problems of the poor and powerless and, it is hoped, to wring major financial appropriations from Congress in order to “stem the tide of despair in the ghettos.”

Washingtonians are worried. The religious community is divided. Negro clergymen in the District don’t know which way to jump; the solid support generated for King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the August 28, 1963, civil-rights demonstration in Washington is lacking now.

With the “tent-ins and sit-downs” less than four months away, most ministers were taking a wait-and-see attitude, and neither the National Council of Churches’ Department of Social Justice nor the Council of Churches of Greater Washington had adopted a position for or against King.

Maybe that’s the way King wants it, because his critics say his following is dwindling and his influence—especially in the black community—ebbing.

Although King and his aides would not disclose particulars of the camp-in strategy, they declare the intended disruption may include blocking the entrances to government buildings, shutting down public transportation, and civil disobedience. Recruits are being trained “for jail if necessary,” a spokesman said.

King swears there will be nothing “damaging to property or persons.” But one activist white bishop, who upon occasion has supported a more radical rights position than King’s, fears the protest could get out of hand if King’s efforts are “perverted into an angry thing.”

Interestingly, some District Negro clergymen think King has gone too far. Dr. E. C. Smith, a director of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, who previously has supported King and marched in Selma, says the intended Washington protest is “not at all a good tactic.… I will not participate. The vote is the answer.”

King’s demands reportedly will include consideration of family allowances, guaranteed income and a negative income tax, more postal jobs, and employment of slum residents to rehabilitate their own neighborhoods.

Another PNBC District ghetto minister, John Bussey, is against civil disobedience and says most conservative ministers in the convention “are of the same opinion.” But he—like most clergymen interviewed—is reserving final judgment until King elucidates exact plans.

New Washington City Council vice-chairman Walter Fauntroy, a PNBC pastor and former King aide, is all for the April onslaught: “The issues he [King] raises are vital to the survival of this country.” Nor does he see any conflict between his position on the council—dedicated to law and order—and civil disobedience. “No one who follows King will take part in violent disorder,” he reasons. “If the situation requires I demonstrate, I may do it.”

Fauntroy, who has connections at the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the ghetto, thinks that if officialdom heeds King, a repeat of the last two summers of violence may be avoided in most cities.

Because Fauntroy wears so many hats, King has chosen the Rev. Bernard Lafayette, Jr., a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to steer the Washington campaign.

Some radical church leaders think that King’s aggressive non-violence is “almost dead” and that nothing short of revolution will rally the Negro. Yet Lincoln Temple’s Channing Phillips, who had Stokely Carmichael speak in his church last spring, still backs King.

And Episcopal Suffragan Bishop Paul Moore of the Diocese of Washington told a suburban congregation across the Potomac River that the “country may be facing a choice between non-violence which might get across, or more Rap Browns, Stokely Carmichaels, Detroits and Newarks.” The question, he said, is not “do we want Dr. King or don’t we?,” but “do we want King or Brown?”

“Riot can be a form of communication,” maintains the National Council of Churches’ Charles Spivey. He said the NCC’s general policy is “to come down solidly on issues which contribute to accelerating change positively and favorably.” But he hastily added that the Department of Social Justice had taken no position on King’s drive yet and would not endorse violence.

Then again, Spivey suggested that violence may sometimes be the “only recourse.” Bishop Moore put it: “King has spent as much time as anyone with Congress and nothing has happened.… So what can he do?”

A few churchmen wonder out loud whether King’s capital-crippling campaign will get off the ground. “After all, Carmichael said he was going to ‘raze the city,’ but he didn’t set foot here,” reflected Washington’s NCC lobbyist James Hamilton. Then Carmichael said he’ll move to Washington. The campaign could make or break King as a civil-rights figure.

But the major concerns seem to center on (1) Can King keep it cool? and (2) Will Congress listen?

An explosive incident in the tense confrontation could set off violence in this city of 800,000 persons, 63 per cent of whom are Negro, far beyond King’s control. “You can’t line up the tanks around the ghetto forever,” one worried churchman said nervously.

There also is gnawing anxiety among some who concur with King’s goals but not necessarily with his methods that Congress will respond to a camp-in by tightening—not loosening—its purse strings for urban renewal. Moore says it would take “six or seven billion dollars of federal money a month to really get at the problem” in the nation’s cities.

Sinking vast sums of public money into jobs and income for the disadvantaged doubtless will not be a panacea for all urban ills, comments a conservative who thinks King’s reasoning is “simplistic.” Now and again a minister, like the National Presbyterian Center’s Executive Director Lowell Russell Ditzen, speaks about the need for a “vertical relationship to Christ” and regeneration as well as social action.

An Episcopal layman responded to Moore’s talk by chiding King for “practicing cruel deception” with Negroes. King never says “control your family size” or “go to work so you can afford better housing,” he charged.

When spring flowers push through the sod next year, Congress will decide whether Martin Luther King has a capital idea or a boondoggle. In the meantime, the religious community must make up its mind whether it will risk reaping whatever crops up in Washington.

PERSONALIA

Monet’s “La Terrasse à Sainte Adresse,” one of the finest impressionist paintings ever put on auction, was sold for $1,411,200 last month in London by the Rev. Theodore Pitcairn of Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. The retired Swedenborgian pastor, son of the founder of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, bought the painting for $11,000 in 1926. Proceeds will go mainly to a charitable foundation he established.

Paul-Emile Cardinal Leger, former Roman Catholic archbishop of Montreal, left for Dakar, Senegal, December 11, to begin mission work among French—speaking African lepers.

The White House East Room is “the poor man’s wedding chapel,” said President Johnson on the eve of daughter Lynda Bird’s marriage last month. “You can have a wedding here in the house and no one thinks its cheap.” Actually, he jested, “we decided to have the wedding here because of one of my most recent experiences in church”—a reference to the Williamsburg sermon against his Viet Nam policies.

Father Bernard F. Law, editor and publicist for the Mississippi diocese, will be executive director of the Catholic bishops’ ecumenical committee, succeeding Monsignor William Baum.

The Roman Catholic Liturgical Conference chose as executive director James Colaianni, former managing editor of the freewheeling monthly Ramparts. In one piece, Colaianni described church missions as “probably one of the greatest charity frauds of all time.”

Donald Bolles, former public-relations director of the National Council of Churches, took a similar post with the American Lutheran Church’s projected international university in the Bahamas.

The Rev. W. H. Hecht, Lutheran student pastor at the University of Oklahoma, was named executive director for Missouri’s Republican Party.

Christian Century Editor Kyle Haselden underwent a brain operation last month and was confined indefinitely to a Chicago area hospital.

Deaths

RICHARD R. WRIGHT, JR., 89, oldest bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; editor and historian; former president of Wilberforce University; one of the first U. S. Negroes to earn an honorary doctorate (University of Pennsylvania, 1911); in Philadelphia.

THOMAS H. SPURGEON, grandson of Charles Haddon Spurgeon who was principal of Irish Baptist College for four decades; in Dublin, after a long illness.

HENRY H. SAVAGE, 80, Conservative Baptist pastor in Pontiac, Michigan, and director of Maranatha Bible Conference; of cancer.

Wheaton College President Hudson Armerding was named by Governor Kerner to lead the committee on acquiring a 6,800-acre site in Weston, Illinois, for the world’s largest atom-smasher.

C. Dorr Demaray, 66, will resign as president of Seattle Pacific College (Free Methodist) on June 30.

New president of Miami Bible College is Larry Poland, former assistant to the president of Indiana’s Grace College.

PROTESTANT PANORAMA

“The nation’s oldest foreign missionary board is being forced to curtail its program because of a lack of funds,” reports Everett C. Parker of the United Church of Christ, in the Christian Century. The 1968 budget is down $177,000, and the UCC agency will have to draw more than $1 million this year from endowment funds.

Drake University’s Divinity School, a Disciples of Christ seminary that has become ecumenical in recent years, will disband this summer. The seventeen students who will not have graduated by then must transfer.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans upheld a ruling from Mobile, Alabama, against constitutionality of a state law permitting congregations to hold church property when a majority of 65 per cent votes to pull out of the parent denomination. The suit involved Trinity Methodist Church in Mobile.

MISCELLANY

The first recorded case of a deformed baby of a woman who took LSD during pregnancy is reported in a British medical journal published in Boston. Dr. Hans Zellweger and his associates say the baby, born in Iowa last summer, had a severely deformed right leg. The 19-year-old mother had taken the “mind-expanding” drug four times during her pregnancy.

Lester Breslow, head of California’s public-health department, says that though people don’t die of divorce, it raises the death rate through such side effects as suicide, emotional illness, and alcoholism. Divorced men and women in every age group die at a faster rate than married persons, he told the Los Angeles Times.

A promise of a probe of the Presbyterian-aided anti-poverty agency, Child Development Group of Mississippi, removed a roadblock to adjournment of Congress last month. Also on the shelf at the deadline was the Senate bid for judicial review of aid to religious groups.

The Little Rock, Arkansas, Conference on Religion and Race called in a policy statement for “a new orthodoxy of human equality,” with “the same involvement of Negro Americans and of white Americans in every human endeavor.”

After a meeting at Greenville College, evangelicals who have met informally at American Historical Association conventions decided to form a new group, the Conference on Faith and History, to help integrate their faith and scholarship.

When the National Council of Churches closed its Hollywood film-broadcasting office, Methodist Bishop Gerald Kennedy proposed a new agency to advise producers on Protestant reaction to films.

Four of the fifty Southern Baptist Brotherhood Commission staffers meeting in a Memphis motel subdued and disarmed a gunman who tried to shoot his former wife and himself.

Cuban President Fidel Castro attended a reception for the Vatican representative in Havana, perhaps indicating a softer government line toward churches.

The number-two man on the Vatican’s Christian unity secretariat traveled to Moscow to meet Russian Orthodox leaders. His team included Monsignor George Higgins of the U. S. Catholic Conference.

An Arab underground group threatened foreigners that their safety could not be guaranteed during visits to Christmas shrines now under Israeli control.

The Baptist hospital in Gaza, its staff depleted after the Arab-Israeli war, issued an emergency appeal for nurses.

Nigeria’s interchurch “New Life for All” evangelism program is being considered by Christians in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Rhodesia, Mali, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, and Ghana.

At the first major evangelistic crusade since 1928 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, attendance reached 30,000, and about 500 persons made public Christian commitments. Obstacles the crusade faced included heavy downpours, tension over demonstrations in nearby cities and currency devaluation, and bad acoustics at the stadium. The Asian Evangelists Commission team represented six Asian nations.

The latest compilation in Germany shows 2,812 priests and ministers were imprisoned at Dachau during World War II, 1,856 of them from Poland. Among the prisoners, 1,106 Roman Catholic priests died in the camp.

The Church of God, edited by “World King” Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, has set October, 1975, as the time for Christians “to be ready for the Second Coming.”

This review is by Ray E. Robinson, acting director, Conservatory of Music, Peabody Institute, Baltimore:

An event of religious as well as musical significance took place in Indianapolis December 14 as Jerome Hines’s opera on the life of Christ, I Am the Way, received its first full-scale performance, at beautiful Clowes Hall. The biblical drama was part of the regular subscription series of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Izler Solomon. Hines himself sang the role of Christ.

The choice of site was fortunate. Clowes Hall is ideally suited, both acoustically and aesthetically, for opera on a grand scale. The orchestra added that final touch of professional quality so necessary for a satisfying musical experience. And a near-capacity audience—largest Thursday-night turnout of the season—viewed the production.

In composing a religious drama, Hines revived a tradition that dates back to the Greeks. Biblical drama, common in the Middle Ages, apparently began with performances of parts of the liturgy in a dramatic setting; the priests actually represented the characters rather than merely narrating the events. This approach was first applied to the Resurrection story, later to the Nativity, then to other scenes.

During the Renaissance, an antipathy developed between the Church and the theater, and composers turned to secular dramatic works. Since then, except for the cantata, oratorio, and passion, the field of religious dramatic music has been left to such vaguely religious works as Parsifal and Amahl and the Night Visitors.

Although Hines’s musical idiom might be considered somewhat outdated and commercially spectacular, the impact of his opera upon the listener is unquestionable. This is more than a religious drama with an historical setting; it is an inspirational biblical drama with a strong, evangelical message, offered in a spirit of deep reverence. The listener is left with a greater understanding of the purpose of Christ’s ministry on earth.

It is not, however, a “singer’s opera” in which the dramatic element is subservient to the singer’s personality and virtuosity. Its success depends on many factors, of which music is only one. The listener cannot approach it merely as a spectator. He must participate in the aesthetic experience in much the same manner as he would identify with a work of Lully, Rameau, or Wagner.

Hines sketched the plot and characterization in broad outline, rather than in detail, around a series of episodes from the life of Christ. The plot is simple, the events few. Continuity is found, not in the music, as with the Wagnerian leitmotiv, but in the Christian message.

The three-act opera, not yet in final form, has eight scenes: “Behold, God Is My Salvation,” for chorus alone; “John the Baptist,” a new scene added for this performance; “The Woman at the Well”; “Eliakim and the Magdalene”; “At Bethany”; “The Resurrection of Lazarus”; “The Betrayal”; and “The Last Supper.” Eventually the composer hopes to cover all phases of Christ’s life and ministry.

The libretto, written by Hines, is based primarily on the Gospel of John, though some scriptural sketches are from the other Gospels and the Old Testament. Hines took poetic license to introduce humor into the biblical account, especially in the dialogue between the disciples. Scriptural passages are the texts for several arias, among them “The Lord Is My Shepherd” and “The Lord’s Prayer.”

For the most part, the text is faithful to scripture. In only two scenes is there anything questionable: that in which Judas discusses his political affiliation with the movement to establish Jesus’ immediate kingdom on earth, and the Last Supper scene in which Jesus washes the disciples’ feet before partaking of the elements.

The music is conceived on a grand, nineteenth-century scale. At times one is reminded of Parsifal, at other times of a religious film spectacular. The compositional idiom is quasi-modal, with a decided tendency toward major-key tonal centers. Ralph Herman’s orchestration is sometimes brilliant, especially at scene changes and transitional passages. At no time were the voices of either the soloists or the chorus covered by the orchestra—a remarkable feat, since the entire orchestra was used.

Hines’s own rich, full-bodied voice, deep conviction, and rugged eloquence made him commanding—at times electrifying—in the role of Christ. He was beyond question the dominant figure on stage, though the supporting cast of singers was fully professional. Lucia Evangelista (Mrs. Jerome Hines) sang impressively as both Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Martha. Equally competent were Antonio Scotti as Judas, Richard Parke as John, Pablo Elvira as John the Baptist, Calvin Marsh as Peter, and Ted Harris as Eliakim the High Priest.

The opera was produced in cooperation with Christian Arts, Inc.; the American Bible Society; and the Lilly Endowment, which provided generous financial help. Another presentation is scheduled for Palm Sunday at New York’s Lincoln Center.

GRANDMA’S GROOVE

It was Sunday afternoon in the Half Note, a small club in New York City’s West Village. The band barely fit on a platform stretched over the bar. The day was dull and rainy, and only the dim lights on music stands interrupted the darkness. A tall, stocky, bearded young man climbed up in front of the musicians and gave an emotive down-beat, and the Manhattan Brass Choir burst through the gloom with Grandma’s favorite hymn tunes done up in the glorious jazz of the sixties.

This December appearance of the brass choir gave New York jazz buffs a chance to hear one of the most musically competent religious ensembles that exists today. The group is the child of its soft-spoken conductor, Mark Freeh. He sees it as a natural step in the growth of modern religious music. His musical roots are the Salvation Army’s brass-band program, and his earliest religious training came from his father, a Nazarene clergyman.

Freeh holds that most churches are not progressive enough musically. “The modern man listens to modern music all day long—on TV commercials, on the radio, in movie scores,” he says. He thinks man needs to have religious music speak to him in the same idiom. “We do not go far out,” says Freeh, “but we present music as it is today, by arrangers who are doing today’s television commercials and Broadway scores.”

Freeh likes the gospel tunes of the past. “They are good tunes. They are, if you will, the popular tunes of the Church, even though they are not usually looked at from that perspective.”

The ensemble plays numbers like “In the Sweet By and By” and “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” in arrangements reminiscent of the original intent of the music, but at the same time pleasing to the modern ear. In other selections, taste makes waste.

The choir’s new record album, “Praise to the Living God,” was described by Saturday Review as “startling, without mock piety.” The joy the choir radiates contrasts sharply with the gloom that permeates today’s talk about the death of the Church. “We are not ashamed of the fact that we play only religious music,” says Freeh. “Music that is done well never gets put down.”

The choir, using standard jazz band instrumentation with French horns subbing for saxes, is made up of professional musicians. Says Freeh, “It is only with professionals that we can achieve this degree of musical competence.” Some are regular studio players in New York, others are music teachers, and others are members of the Salvation Army’s New York staff band. All volunteer their services for rehearsal time and some church dates but must receive union scale for recordings and concert performances.

Freeh is organizing college concerts for the spring that will illustrate the history of sacred brass music. Also this year, the group will be heard with Duke Ellington at Carnegie Hall. As Nat Hentoff, New York jazz critic, has said, “Certainly in these arrangements with this choir … the venerable pop tunes of the Church are being reborn and the groove is now.”

JOHN EVENSON

Passing The Pierce Torch

A doctor may well diagnose Bob Pierce’s ailment as a broken heart. For two decades Pierce has criss—crossed the world in behalf of suffering humanity. And always in his suitcase there has been a tattered Bible with these words on the flyleaf:

“Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God.”

Now the strain of setting up orphanages and hospitals, of speeding relief goods to war-ravaged and disaster areas, of organizing pastors’ conferences for discouraged nationals, and of preaching countless evangelistic sermons, has become too much. Pierce, 52, announced last month that, for reasons of health, he has resigned as president of World Vision, Inc., the organization he founded and built into a leading missionary force with an annual budget of more than $6 million.

“Throughout the past four or five years,” he says, “I have had a diminishing amount of time for ministry in the United States. Because of this, and my concern over an apparent decreasing interest here in the total mission of the Church throughout the world, I plan within the bounds of my health to devote a major part of my time to speaking in churches, missionary conventions, colleges, seminaries, and universities in North America.”

More than anyone else since World War II, stocky Robert Willard Pierce has awakened in North American evangelicals a sense of Christian social responsibility. Hundreds of thousands of believers have sent in ten dollars a month to support in Korea or Viet Nam an orphan fathered by an immoral and irresponsible American soldier. The money has come from a well-distributed base of Protestantism, from Presbyterians to Pentecostals—ecumenical in the best sense of the term.

There is great power in Pierce’s compassionate pleas—few can listen without digging into their wallets. But this approach has been a major breakthrough in sophisticated promotion, too. Dramatic films, well-designed advertising, touring orphan choirs, and promises of hand-written letters from orphans have made a big difference. Here and there evangelicals have grumbled over Pierce’s projection of his own personal image. But few realize that he bears the responsibility as well as the glory, and that the material reward is minimal. On the other hand, he has paid the price of being away from his wife and three daughters most of the time.

Pierce was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, the son of a carpenter who ministered first as a Methodist and then in the Church of the Nazarene. Pierce went to Pasadena College and was ordained in 1942 in the First Baptist Church of Wilmington, California.

After the war he traveled to mainland China in evangelistic work and soon was burdened by the great needs of the Orient. His interest in children began when an infant was thrust into his hands by a distraught missionary who already had too many to care for. He became a correspondent, but soon realized he had to be a participant rather than just a chronicler. Today World Vision cares for more than 23,600 orphaned and needy children in nineteen countries. In addition, it has offered a myriad of services to evangelical causes, ranging from a subsidy to Evangelical Press Association to financial help for the Evangelical Foreign Mission Association purchasing agency, which offers consumer goods at discount prices.

Pierce will be succeeded, at least temporarily, by Richard C. Halverson, minister of Fourth Presbyterian Church, Bethesda, Maryland. Halverson, long a World Vision board member and friend of Pierce, has been named acting president.

ONE MAN’S ‘SPECTRUM’

Bob Jones, William Hamilton, Bishop Pike, John Montgomery, and Carl Henry on the same platform? Sure enough.

The “platform” is a 102-page book, Spectrum of Protestant Beliefs, in which each of the five churchmen speaks about a variety of theological and social issues ranging from the Virgin Birth to Viet Nam. The Rev. Robert Campbell, a Roman Catholic priest, edited the book for Milwaukee’s Bruce Company.

“Most Catholics are quite unaware that the significant divisions in Protestantism no longer are along denominational lines, but rather depend on the orientation of the individual in the liberal-conservative spectrum,” Campbell notes. “The average Protestant layman seems not much better informed.”

Jones represents the fundamentalist band of the Protestant spectrum, Hamilton the death-of-God movement, Pike the liberals, Montgomery the confessional position, and Henry the “new” evangelicals.

Campbell said he did not include so-called developmental theology, identified with Martin Marty, Robert McAfee Brown, and Jaroslav Pelikan, because it is “not typical of a large identifiable segment of popular Protestant beliefs and attitudes.”

Jones is straightforward and quotes Scripture extensively. Henry gives the best philosophical rationale for a biblical perspective, and Montgomery proves to be both incisive and entertaining (“Someone has defined sin as the thing that causes us to look up our own name in the telephone directory as soon as it is delivered”). The three agree on the inerrancy of Scripture.

Pike’s opinions are typified by his reply to the question, “What must a man do to be saved?”

Says the controversial Episcopal churchman: “Man is in the process of being saved, that is being made whole, through responding positively to encounters, through not clutching at the idols, and being open to change.”

The one who gains the dubious distinction of having uttered the most intense invective is Hamilton:

“The doctrine of inspiration seems to me to be a dishonest attempt to live the Christian life without risk, and really, a very demonic attempt as well.”

EVANGELIST SIDELINED

Billy Graham has been fighting bugs of one kind or another for much of the last two years. Last month the evangelist’s doctor ordered him to cancel all public appearances for four months because of his slow recovery from pneumonia.

The major canceled engagement is the series of March and April meetings in New Zealand and Australia. Planners are hopeful Graham can handle the closing meetings the last week of April at the Sydney Showgrounds. The other city committees must decide between going ahead as planned with a Graham associate, or having Graham himself come in 1969 or 1970. Graham is still planning on three American crusades later in 1968.

After he was hospitalized during a team meeting November 26, Graham went to Jamaica for rest and treatment. He returned to his North Carolina home in time for Christmas.

FALLOUT ON THE RIGHT

The American Council of Christian Churches meeting in Santa Monica, California, bristled with the usual complaints about other conservative Protestants such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Conservative Baptist Association, the Baptist General Conference, and “new evangelicals” generally.

But now the list includes Billy James Hargis, who’s a right-wing broadcaster just like ACCC founder Carl McIntire. A unanimous ACCC resolution attacks Hargis’s drive to get radio listeners to join his temple in Tulsa. Says the ACCC, “Such a ‘paper’ church is both unscriptural and subversive of the separated churches.…”

While most Americans frantically pursued the good things of life in the weeks preceding Christmas, scientists and doctors made headlines by preserving life and unlocking its most elusive secrets.

In South Africa’s Groote Schuur Hospital, where a surgical team headed by Dr. Christian N. Barnard had been anticipating the breakthrough for weeks, surgeons performed the first transplant of a human heart in history. In an operation lasting nearly five hours, the heart of Miss Denise Darvall, an accident victim, was implanted in the chest of grocer Louis Washkansky, 55-year-old victim of progressive heart failure. But eighteen days later Washkansky died, and a study of the causes was begun.

In Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center a similar operation was performed three days later on a 19-day-old boy, who died inexplicably after only 6½ hours. As an interesting sidelight to the story, journalists learned that the donor of the heart, an arencephalic child who lived only a few days, was the grandchild of Carl McIntire, well-known radio preacher. (McIntire commented perceptively on the theological implications of the transplant: “The fundamental Christian glories in all modern scientific advances,” for these unfold “the design and the wisdom of the Creator.”)

Exciting as these developments were, the best was yet to come. The same week brought news that scientists in Palo Alto, California, had manufactured from inert laboratory chemicals the active, inner core of a virus. Since the virus material DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) was able to perform as a virus—reproducing itself by invading living cells and altering their normal functions to produce viruses—scientists rightly hailed the experiment as the creation of a “primitive form of life.”

By implementing the natural ring-shaped DNA molecule as a template, or pattern, on which to build their molecule, researchers headed by Stanford professor Dr. Arthur Kornberg first formed a complementary chain of natural material; this they joined into a ring by adding a polynucleotid enzyme. The new strand was now identical with the molecule that would have been produced naturally in an infected cell, except at one point. Kornberg had substituted a heavier chemical, bromouracil, for the thymine that would have been formed in nature. The alteration made no difference biologically, but it altered the weight. Hence, the natural DNA could be separated from the man-made substance by means of a centrifuge.

At this point the scientists paused to test the properties of the man-made viruses by injecting them into cultures of living cells. The new rings reproduced themselves by giving rise to viruses just like the natural virus.

So far the experiment had produced synthetic rings that were complementary to, but not identical with, the natural DNA material. Kornberg now repeated the process using the artificial DNA as his template. The final experiment produced a new set of artificial rings, this time identical in every detail with the DNA rings that occur in nature. These rings also proved infectious and gave rise to viruses indistinguishable from the natural virus Phi X 174. The total experiment meant that man had used inert chemicals to fashion the fundamental stuff of life.

In the wake of the achievement some qualifications seemed called for, and Kornberg was among the first to give them. Shortly after news of the experiment had been released to the world, he expressed reservations about saying that he and his team have created “life” in a test tube. So did his assistant Dr. Mehran Goulian: “Different people mean different things by life; if you grant a virus is alive or that naked DNA is alive, then this was a creation of life.” He was alluding to the fact that though viruses are able to multiply, they do so only by infecting living cells whose reproductive capacities they divert for their own ends.

Birth-Control Pangs

While scientists around the world were investigating the frontiers of life last month (story above), the Roman Catholic Church was limping behind on birth control—though not without progress. In Rome, two groups urged modifications of the church’s traditional postures prohibiting any but natural means of contraception. Vatican sources reported the recommendation as the substance of a report to the Pope by the new commission of “super periti.” An independent group of forty Italian bishops voiced a similar recommendation.

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, Professor John T. Noonan, a consultant to Pope Paul’s original commission, revealed his belief that a change in Roman Catholic rules is imminent. Taken with the other announcements, Noonan’s remarks increased speculation that the Pope would soon speak to the problem.

It is also a question whether scientists have created life or merely copied a normal reproductive process. The Stanford experiment was certainly not a creation of life ex nihilo, the way in which the subject was debated a century ago by Pasteur, Pouchet, and Huxley. Nor was it conducted entirely independently of life, for natural DNA was used as the template upon which the synthetic material was fashioned. At the same time the Stanford achievement was, if not the actual manufacture of life, at least the most significant step to date.

For scientists themselves, the greatest excitement comes from the medical rather than the metaphysical implications of Kornberg’s experiment. But metaphysics is important nonetheless. If one virus can be duplicated, so can others. And if the DNA molecule can be modified at will, genes can presumably be modified also. Thus the Stanford experiment foreshadows, on the one hand, a gradual victory over genetic diseases as well as control of certain kinds of cancer. On the other hand, it also points to the possibility of manipulation of the birth processes for totalitarian ends.

As recently as 1933, Anglican theologian E. W. Barnes contended that “the mystery of life is unsolved and probably unsolvable.” Today physical solutions to the problems of life are just around the corner. But the ethical problems live on. Without ethical controls, manipulation of heart transplants could verge on homicide. And the creation of test-tube life will yield results for evil as well as good. The use of such achievements will depend very little on the scientists and doctors. It will depend on churchmen, politicians, and other national leaders, as well as on the moral tone and ethical commitments of mankind.

EYES ON GREECE

Young King Constantine’s flight to Rome after his unsuccessful bid to oust the ruling junta in Greece left hanging the role of the monarch as “protector” of Orthodoxy there. Archbishop Ieronymos pled for national unity after swearing in the junta’s stand-in for the king.

Observers watched for effects upon religious freedom. Something of a crackdown on non-Orthodox activity came after the junta’s April take-over but many restrictions were later eased.

The Rev. Spiros Zodhiates, president of the American Mission to Greeks, has been a staunch defender of the new government. He says that “all religious groups, including the minorities, enjoy as much freedom today as they ever did, if not more.”

Zodhiates notes that there are “some isolated exceptions” but blames them on previous governments.

From Thessalonica, Religious News Service reported in December that two Jehovah’s Witness women were arrested for trying to prevent the Greek Orthodox baptism of a child of one of the women. In Tripolis, a Seventh-day Adventist was said to have appealed a four-month prison sentence on charges that he was proselytizing in the town square.

PACEM TERRIS VIET NAM

Assailing draft evaders who use pacifism as a mask for cowardice, Pope Paul VI called on “all men of good will” to celebrate a worldwide Day of Peace January 1 and every New Year’s Day thereafter. World Council of Churches leaders in Geneva responded by stressing man’s right to freedom of conscience: “… men of conscience differ as to the rightness of methods to be followed and the obligations they should accept.”

Neither statement mentioned Viet Nam. But preoccupation with that perplexing problem was clearly implied. Lack of consensus in the world religious community is driving wedges:

One hundred and one American missionaries in the Philippines signed a resolution supporting U. S. policy in Viet Nam and criticizing twenty-three dovish colleagues who had urged the United States to cease hostilities. Another 100 missionaries were non-committal. The hawkish group—mostly from evangelical faith missions—expressed impatience with the United States for not escalating bombings of North Viet Nam. The dovish missionaries are largely in ecumenical and conciliar groups.

Meanwhile, in the States, Union Theological Seminary in New York squared off against Selective Service Director Lewis B. Hershey’s hardline policy on draft-law violators and draft protest-leading clergymen. In an unprecedented move, the Union faculty rapped Hershey for using the draft “as a punitive measure against students exercising … freedoms of speech and assembly.”

As of last month, at least five clergymen had been reclassified 1-A delinquent because they turned in their draft cards. Some thirty Boston-area students were believed to have been reclassified after participating in a church antidraft demonstration. Hershey promised more draft-obstruction prosecutions, already at an all-time high of 1,306 in the past year.

In other Viet Nam flak, New Zealand and Japan Baptists, the International Council of Pax Christi (a Roman Catholic student movement), the American Friends Service Committee, U. S. Catholic magazine, Seminarians for Peace in ’68, an informal Lutheran Laity Conference in Chicago, and Harvard Divinity School student leaders all attacked U. S. policy or called for an immediate end to the war.

But New Jersey Episcopal leaders and Washington, D. C., Baptists (American and Southern) voiced strong support for the Johnson Viet Nam policy.

The Seminarians for Peace group, which has attracted students from thirty schools, wants to elect a U. S. president who “offers a constructive and humane solution to the conflict in Viet Nam.” An advisory council includes Yale Divinity School Professor Emeritus Kenneth Scott Latourette and Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, a Roman Catholic presidential hopeful.

AID TO HANOI

The World Council of Churches and Caritas, the international Roman Catholic relief agency, plan to send $85,000 in medical equipment to the Red Cross in North Viet Nam, according to the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Caritas stresses that it sends only equipment, not money, because it has no supervision over its use in the North.

The CPF has been campaigning to get Catholics to aid war victims in the North by giving to Caritas, rather than Catholic Relief Services, the agency of the U. S. hierarchy. After a report in Ave Maria that official church aid was going to Hanoi, Bishop Edward Swanstrom said that no direct aid has been sent but that the bishops’ relief money goes to the Pope, who may have channeled it to Caritas.

Catholic liberals have also attacked the bishops’ aid to members of the South Vietnamese army and their families. Swanstrom has replied that this is not aid to the American war effort but aid to needy persons.

Previous reports that Caritas would build a $1.5 million hospital in North Viet Nam were incorrect, though the agency’s aid to various hospitals there may eventually total $400,000.

MULTI-COLORED POWER

A paramount question before whites and blacks today is whether to press for integration or to develop separate, segregated power structures. In Charlotte, North Carolina, an interracial group of fifteen ministers last month mounted a campaign to increase the state’s Negro political power through the Carolina Ford Fellowship in Action. Spokesmen vowed CFFA would pressure mayors and the governor to hire Negroes and said it would boycott firms that won’t cooperate.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, former Black Muslim Albert B. Cleage, Jr.—unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate against George Romney in 1963 and pastor of Central United Church of Christ—proclaimed Negroes “will go it alone.”

Cleage took Negro parents to task for “failing black children” during a recent racial incident in Detroit. “You should have been down there breaking windows,” he scolded.

Joining Cleage’s church last month was Episcopal urban-work director Nathan Wright of the Diocese of Newark, New Jersey. Wright, who will retain Episcopal membership, organized the first National Black Power Conference last summer (see August 18, 1967, issue, page 43).

Expressing a moderate position, seventy-five American Baptists of both races met in Green Lake, Wisconsin, last month to “hammer out a strategy for … a color-blind society.” Mt. Zion Baptist Church pastor Samuel McKinney of Seattle urged white churches to “join in affirming the legitimacy of the black power movement.” In another form of black power, conference Chairman James Holloway later became the first Negro president of the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches.

Many conscientious white churchmen who have attempted to work with Negroes are stunned now to find their efforts rejected. Another Green Lake speaker, Milwaukee NAACP President Walter B. Hoard, outlined new tactics for the youth commandos in Milwaukee’s downtown business district during Christmas week.

Speaking of the commandos and their marches to dramatize Father James Groppi’s drive for open housing, Hoard said “a lot of people apparently are afraid of them. We hope to take advantage of that.” The marches were expected to discourage downtown shopping. Negroes and their white supporters were urged not to buy Christmas gifts from stores owned by white persons (few are not).

Although the Milwaukee city council last month voted a limited open-housing ordinance identical to Wisconsin’s law, Groppi termed the action “tokenism” and “crumbs.” The militant white priest said demonstrations—which had been held for 107 consecutive days by the time the measure passed—will continue.

The only Negro alderman, Mrs. Vel Phillips, voted against it and rebuked the council: “Thanks for nothing—you are very much too late with very much too little.”

EPISCOPAL YESES AND NOS

The Episcopal Church Executive Council wants the National Council of Churches to forget a proposed policy statement urging consumer boycotts against businesses that practice racial discrimination, and to favor instead “constructive” programs to use church money to aid equal opportunity.

An official said four-fifths of the $2 million Episcopal urban crisis fund will go “directly into the hands of the poor.” Some $8,000 of it was given to Washington, D. C., activist Julius Hobson to help pay legal costs in his successful suit to end de facto school segregation and the “track system.” But the local bishop and others protested to headquarters because city Episcopalians weren’t consulted about the grant.

CRIME UP

Everything is rising these days: miniskirts, death, and taxes. And a lot of the death is homicide, according to last month’s Uniform Crime Report issued by the FBI.

Hemlines and taxes can only go so far, but crime seems to lack a limit. Among the most startling statistics for the first nine months of 1967 is a 27 per cent increase in robbery over the parallel period of last year, and a 16 per cent increase in murder. Overall, crime increased 16 per cent. Bank robbery increased at a rate four times the general average.

Some of the gains are explained by population increase, but only a small proportion. Since 1960, U. S. crime has soared nearly nine times as fast as population, with no sign of a downward trend.

SEMINARY UPSWING

Protestant seminary enrollment, on the slide since the late 1950s, shows a marked upswing this year. The 142 members of the American Association of Theological Schools report an increase of 927 students over 1966–67, for a total of 24, 817. In the face of the overall increase of nearly 4 per cent, enrollment at seminaries of three major denominations declined: Anglican Church of Canada, United Church of Canada, and Lutheran Church in America. Harvard was the only major independent seminary with a decrease.

The AATS said there is a continuing decrease this year in the percentage of students in the basic B.D. program for the regular ministry, coupled with a marked 10 per cent increase in students at the master’s and doctor’s levels.

Listening For Divine Revelation

Handbook to the Old Testament, by Claus Westermann, translated by-Robert H. Boyd (Augsburg, 1967, 285 pp., $5.95), Introducing the Old Testament by L. A. T. Van Dooren, translated by G. P. Campbell (Zondervan, 1967, 192 pp., $4.95), and Introduction to the Bible, by Pierre Grelot (Herder and Herder, 1967, 448 pp., $7.50), are reviewed by Clyde T. Francisco, John R. Sampey Professor of Old Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.

These three works from the European Continent present an intriguing picture of the unity and divisions of modern Christianity. They portray the viewpoints of an eminent Protestant scholar, an entrenched fundamentalist, and an eloquent Roman Catholic. There is agreement among the three that God speaks to man in the Bible, and with equal commitment to the word of God they listen for divine revelation.

However, they find this in quite diverse ways. Van Dooren finds the final authority of God in every word, even asserting, with some hesitation, that since the genealogies of Genesis depict twenty-three centuries, from the creation of man until the death of Joseph, the believer is bound to the same conclusion. Both Westermann and Grelot assume the critical position that the Old Testament accounts are based on traditions handed down for centuries and must be sifted for authenticity. The word of God in such passages is the truth taught by the biblical writers in their use of these ancient materials. To Westermann, the guide through the maze is science, reason, and faith. Grelot agrees, so long as the guide stays within the limits prescribed by the Church: “To read the Bible in and with the Church is the only sure method.”

The approaches of the three writers are obviously influenced by the audiences they are addressing. Van Dooren speaks to a pietistic group largely unacquainted with critical work and concerned primarily with devotional response to the Bible. Westermann appeals to a university audience acquainted with the scientific approach to life but largely ignorant of the Bible. Grelot writes for Catholics who respect the Bible as the infallible word of God but who have little knowledge of critical research and need to see it in the context of their faith.

All three interpreters succeed in their efforts to find a word of God. Indeed, it is the same word that they ultimately find! Van Dooren concludes in his study of Malachi:

It is significant to observe that the first book of the Old Testament closes with a reference to a coffin and the last book of the Old Testament closes with reference to the curse—both the curse and the coffin coming as the direct result of the sin of man. Throughout the Old Testament there is the story of man’s sin and failure, but ever there is the promise of the coming of the Second Man, the last Adam, the Lord from heaven, who came to give life and life more abundantly, so that there might be no more death and no more curse.

Westermann, using critical tools and a different vocabulary, eventually comes to a similar observation:

In the midst of this human race God initiates a way by means of Abraham and this way is supposed to become a blessing someday for everyone. Here the first fundamental correspondence between the Old Testament and the New Testament appears. Even as God became flesh for everyone’s salvation in the one man, Jesus of Nazareth, so he here calls forth this one family out of the nations in order to bless by it all families of the earth. The blessing beginning here points beyond the entire history of this family that became a nation even to the words of the New Testament, telling of the time of fulfillment. The opening part of Gen. 12 directs one to John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.”

Father Grelot will say:

From one end to the other, the Bible is the witness of the acts of God in human history, that is, revelation, with its century by century progress; the preparation of Israel for the Gospel, throughout the vagaries of its destiny; the coming to earth of the Son of God, who completed revelation and saved men by his redemptive sacrifice.

Regrettably these men who so closely agree in their reverence for Scripture and in their ultimate conclusions are led by their methodological differences to disdain one another’s camps. Grelot says of those with Van Dooren’s position:

On the other hand, certain spirits, frightened by the Modernist danger or disturbed in their intellectual ruts, confused the dogmatic tradition of the Church with the conservative positions of yesteryear’s exegetes and clung without profit or serious argument to their obsolete and scientifically valueless solutions.

The British writer replies that scholars who hold critical views like those of the other two authors, who date a book in a way different from the generally accepted tradition, “claim by profession to be preachers of the word” but are using a method that “springs from Satan.”

To the credit of Westermann, he does not engage in such skirmishes. He makes no reference at all to the fundamentalist position. But what is more disturbing than to be ignored?

Ramsey On Ethics

Deeds and Rules in Christian Ethics, by Paul Ramsey (Scribner’s, 1967, 245 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by John M. Bald, associate professor of Christian ethics, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Professor Paul Ramsey is a most able and stimulating protagonist of his point of view, and this book will enable readers to assess his contribution to the ongoing ethical debate. It is basically a republication of an essay that appeared in the Scottish Journal of Theology, No. 11; to this he has added three chapters: “Two Concepts of General Rules in Christian Ethics,” “The Case of Joseph Fletcher and Joseph Fletcher’s Cases,” and “A Letter to John of Patmos from a Prophet of the ‘New Morality.’ ” Ramsey introduces his discussion by adopting as a heuristic device terms William K. Frankena used to describe two ways in which the Christian ethic, defined as normative love or pure agape, expresses itself in practice. The terms are act-agapism and rule-agapism. In act-agapism the Christian ascertains as best he can the facts of the situation confronting him and then acts in the way that will be most expressive of Christian love. He does not refer to rules for action; he simply acts in love. In rule-agapism the Christian decides what he is to do by referring to rules that have been discovered to embody Christian love in certain circumstances.

Ramsey holds that the pure act-agapism that has become the vogue among theologians and Christian ethicists is not a viable approach to Christian ethics. Love and rules of action are not necessarily antithetical, he says:

Theologians are simply deceiving themselves and playing tricks with their readers when they pit the freedom and ultimacy of agape … against rules, without asking whether agape can and may or must work through rules and embody itself in certan principles which are regulative, or the guides of practice [p. 5].

At the same time Ramsey does not himself advocate rule-agapism as an alternative. What he says is simply that regulation of moral conduct by reference to love-embodying rules is a valid form of Christian life under the norm of agape, and that we must acknowledge this as a necessary aspect of Christian ethics without denying that in some situations act-agapism is appropriate. This is his general argument as he examines various ethical approaches based on some form of act-agapism—those of Bishop Robinson, Paul Lehmann, and Joseph Fletcher, in particular. He shows that none of them can avoid coming to a point at which there is a crucial need for rules to determine what moral action is expressive of love.

This brief notice cannot begin to describe the fullness of the argument and the penetrating criticism with which it abounds. It is well worth the careful study it demands.

In The Heat Of The Day

Run While the Sun Is Hot, by W. Harold Fuller (Sudan Interior Mission, 1967, 256 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by O. Wilson Okite, East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs, Nairobi, Kenya.

In the United States one says, “Make hay while the sun shines.” In Ethiopia one quotes an Amharic proverb, “Run while the sun is hot.” With this proverb Ethiopians counsel travelers to get moving along the trail while the sun is high; otherwise darkness will overtake them. And with this proverb W. Harold Fuller counsels the Church to say with Christ, “I must work while it is day; the night comes when no man can work.”

Run While the Sun Is Hot is part of the magnificent story of Christ’s continuing conquest of Africa. It is an account of the Sudan Interior Mission and its local churches—in Ghana after the fall of Nkrumah, in a Nigeria that is falling apart, in the torrid Islamic Republic of Sudan, in the Coptic Empire of Ethiopia, in Liberia, Upper Volta, Niger, Aden, and Somalia.

Fuller writes out of a rich experience and contact with Africa. He edited African Challenge, the continent’s widest selling Christian magazine, from 1952 to 1965, the period during which Africa made its decisive step into the mainstream of world history. Currently he edits Africa Now, house organ of the Sudan Interior Mission.

He traveled by mule, jet, horse, motorcycle, two-cylinder French Citroen, dugout canoe, camel, six-cylinder German Mercedes Benz; he was careful to ask for “gas” in Liberia, for “essence” in Ivory Coast, for “petrol” in Ghana, for “benzine” in Ethiopia, for “ghaz” in Sudan. He ate camel-burger and drank hot coffee trimmed with rancid butter and salt. He attended overcrowded churches, accompanied lone evangelists, listened to heart-rending stories of the persecution of Christians.

He saw Africa—its lush tropical forests, its endless deserts, its majestic mountains. He saw Africans—hot with tensions, changes, shortages, revolutions. He saw Communist literature on street corners, fetishes around the neck of a dying grandfather, a thirteen-year-old girl in childbirth, Muslims in robes and beads. He saw modern Africa with its contemporary architecture, sophisticated leaders, and well-planned, teeming cities.

Fuller presents his 12,000 miles of amazing diversity simply and sincerely. To an African reader, the book is not only challenging but surprisingly informative. To the American or European, it should be both enlightening and thrilling.

The Sudan Interior Mission is running while the sun is hot. And it realizes that the African sun is not only hot but also high. The Africa of our day presents immense and rapidly disappearing opportunities. Fuller makes it unmistakably clear that if ever Christianity is to seize the offensive in Africa, this is the time.

But that is as far as he goes. He leaves many of the burning questions only superficially discussed. What is the role of the “foreign” missionary in an independent Africa? Where is the line between “modernization” (sometimes called “Westernization”) and the normal spiritual development of a believer, the process one might call “Christianization”? What is to be the relation between the newly independent churches and home churches? What should the home churches understand about the “Africanization” of the African churches? What are the guidelines for leadership training in the new churches? How are individual believers to relate to the revolutionary changes occurring in their countries? What steps should evangelical leaders take to ensure the continuing centrality and lordship of Jesus Christ in the developing institutions?

But Fuller did not set out specifically to answer these questions. And from his illuminating report, one may gather data to begin formulating broad guidelines for the missionary enterprise in Africa. His account is penetrating and intelligent, the product of a heart full of love. It opens up a new style of “missionary talk” about Africa. May others follow!

Reading For Perspective

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

• A Question of Conscience, by Charles Davis (Harper & Row, $6.95). A brilliant English priest-theologian sensitively but forthrightly gives his personal, theological, and ecclesiastical reasons for leaving Roman Catholicism.

• The Wycliffe Historical Geography of Bible Lands, by Charles F. Pfeiffer and Howard F. Vos (Moody, $8.95). An informative text, excellent photographs, and useful maps highlight this reference work on ten Bible lands.

• Set Forth Your Case, by Clark H. Pinnock (Craig, $1.50). These studies in Christian apologetics offer solid evidence for the integrity of the historic biblical Gospel and show it to be rationally compelling and vastly superior to existential aberrations in contemporary theology.

The Empty Preacher?

The Empty Pulpit, by Clyde Reid (Harper & Row, 1967, 122 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Harry E. Farra, assistant professor of speech, Geneva College, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.

Reid immediately clarifies the idea behind his strangely titled volume: “The emptiness of which I speak is an absence of meaning, a lack of relevance, a failure in communication.” The Empty Pulpit traces the decline of preaching to two factors: (1) a change in the authority structure of the pastoral image, and (2) a change in the communicative structure, from the “monological illusion” of authoritarian speaking to a “dialogical” (two-way) involvement of audience and speaker. Reid charges that traditional preaching does not communicate, has been overemphasized, and does not lead to change in persons.

The significance of Reid’s book is its application of modern communication theory to the preaching situation. The Church’s appropriation of the more important aspects of the communication revolution is long overdue; which of its tasks would not be made easier by good communication? Reid’s communication concepts are based on theory well supported by experimentation and research, and his evidence comes from the standard volumes of theorists such as Berlo, Barnouw, and McLuhan. He describes in detail sermon substitutes and supplements that have been tried with varying degrees of success, such as small-group study, retreats, and sermon seminars.

The limitation of Reid’s book is his underlying assumption that a change in the communicative structure of the Church will produce “relevance.” He is dubious about preaching because not all men are skilled in preaching. But the other communicative approaches demand as much skill, if not more. “Dialogical” skills are much harder to control because they involve a greater number of people. Use of this method requires the training of laymen in these skills. Even then success is not guaranteed, for training does not insure talent. Where we had “monological” failures, we might now have “dialogical” failures.

Those who are convinced that traditional preaching is no longer serviceable will find much in Reid’s book to guide their reforms. Those who are not will nevertheless find a challenge to rethink the nature of preaching.

Categorically Sinful

A Catalogue of Sins, by William F. May (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, 209 pp. $4.95), is reviewed by Mark W. Lee, professor of speech and drama, Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington.

William F. May here examines Christian conscience. His examination is divided into four parts: the sins of man with his world, the sins of man with his neighbor, the strategy and atmosphere of sin, and the destiny of sin.

The result is readable, scholarly, orderly. He gives helpful summaries of main points and keeps his definitions clear. Generally, the writing style is interesting and forceful. About sin he says: “Like a Guerilla army, it can never be seen in its entirety.” “Sin is not one of the provisions of God, like stars, trees, and mother’s milk.” At times his attempt to maintain an economy of style succeeds too well; one wishes for further elaboration of some passages. His adoption of certain key phrases associated with modern theologians—“this worldly asceticism” (Weber), “Nonbeing” (Tillich), and “I and Thou” (Buber)—seems somewhat Unnecessary.

Often, though not always, May’s ideas are stated clearly and succinctly, so that the reader grasps them immediately. An example is the discussion of avarice. Traditionally, the miser sits behind a locked door greedily counting his possessions. But in our prosperous society, avarice may reveal itself in “conspicuous consumption”:

We have moved from a society of locks and thick-walled castles, vaults, and secret treasures, to a society of the open door, neon lights, and the picture window, with grain spilling out of silos, cars pouring out of factories, and paper glutting garbage cans. This is a society that no longer hoards—it burns up money, alcohol, raw materials, and natural resources, and it produces everywhere a stepped-up tempo. Instead of keys, we have keyed-up nerves. Too much drink, too much conversation in overcrowded rooms, a calendar jammed with obligations, phones ringing, overheated homes. The American experience of avarice is not like the anal experience of the recent European past, for which gold and dung, the images of inert weight, are appropriate. We should speak of avarice now rather as a veritable firestorm of activity, generated by the flickering, formless desires, and fears that leave a person burnt out and exhausted at the age of fifty.

In a word, May’s analysis is relevant. His criticism of Christianity is fair and incisive. Although his analysis of lust is non-judgmental (as is his overall approach to sin—apparently he leaves judgment to God), it is nonetheless a challenge to the easy sexual ethics and practices of our day.

A Critique Of Conzelmann

St. Luke: Theologian of Redemptive History, by Helmut Flender (Fortress, 1967, 167 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Ralph P. Martin, lecturer in New Testament studies, University of Manchester, England.

In 1960 Ernst Käsemann had reason to comment that the problem of Luke’s writings in the New Testament had suddenly become a burning issue, and in the following year C. K. Barrett echoed this judgment by remarking that “the focus of New Testament studies is now moving to the Lucan writings.” Both these assessments were largely occasioned by the appearance of H. Conzelmann’s highly original work, The Theology of St. Luke (E.T. 1960). This volume heralded a new era in the study of the gospel writers, whom the then prevalent form criticism had largely dismissed as collectors and editors of an evolving church tradition. Conzelmann, on the contrary, gave gospel study a new twist by taking seriously the claim that each evangelist (Luke in particular) was both a historian and theologian in his own right and that by his method of selecting and arranging his material he was the author of a distinctive contribution to early Christianity. This is the claim of Redaktionsgeschichte, and it has captured the attention of much Continental scholarship.

It is against this background that Flender’s new treatment of Luke’s theology must be viewed. Indeed, without this warning much of it will appear enigmatic to the uninitiated! But once inside the magic circle of the pundits, readers will appreciate this fresh examination of Luke’s Gospel and Acts, and some will welcome his critique of Conzelmann’s position. Flender argues that a neat threefold scheme of Luke’s history embracing the time of Israel, the time of Jesus’ ministry, and the time of the Church is too speculative, and that Luke keeps past and present in dialectical tension. Indeed, a dialectical relation runs through his philosophy of salvation history binding together earth and heaven, the human Jesus and the exalted Lord, Israel and the Church, the Resurrection as an event in history and an existential encounter.

The book sparkles with insights and flashes of illumination; and even where the author compels us to part company with him, he never fails to stimulate.

Erosion In Lutheran Theology

Crisis in Lutheran Theology, Volume I, by John Warwick Montgomery (Baker, 1967, 133 pp., paper $1.50), is reviewed by Iver Olson, professor, Association Lutheran Seminary, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

This is the first of two volumes on the current state of Lutheran theology. Each volume has two parts, the first addressed to the theologically sophisticated and the second to lay readers. Volume I consists of five articles that previously appeared in religious journals. As a result, unity suffers somewhat; articles range from discussions of inspiration and hermeneutics to the author’s defense of his own views against criticism.

Montgomery points out that there has been an erosion in Lutheran theology in general, but he centers his attention on the erosion seen in American Lutheranism during the past decade. The heart of the problem is the doctrine of biblical inspiration. The question concerns, not so much the fact of inspiration, but the extent of it. Scripture is still held to be authoritative in spiritual matters, but is held to be considerably less than authoritative in details; here one must consider it at best as a witness to inspiration.

Montgomery acts as spokesman for the view that inspiration and inerrancy cannot be separated. If one cannot trust the Scriptures in small matters, what reason is there to trust it in the weightier matters of religion? He points out that archaeological discoveries in recent years have tended to undergird rather than undermine the inerrancy view. Furthermore, the parading of errors found in Scripture—a pastime of existentialist critics—reveals only examples of nineteenth-century criticism that have been adequately explained and answered many times. If Scripture is not inerrant, it is qualitatively no different from any other good religious book.

The author emphasizes that modern Lutheran hermeneutics is a far cry from Luther’s. The Reformer found objective truth in God’s Word; from this truth he was led to discover a Saviour. His modern counterparts are confronted by a Person; objective observations about him are of negligible importance. At best the propositions made about and by him are a witness to the truth, rather than the truth itself. Montgomery’s view is that without the objective truth there can be no real confrontation; the person by whom one is confronted in such instances is but a Christ of one’s own making.

The second part of the book is a discussion of the presence and expressions of this new orientation in the Missouri Synod.

I myself think that the crisis in Lutheran theology exists mainly among tenured theologians at the seminaries. Having once taken a stance, they cannot be converted and save face at the same time. What the next generation of theologians will bring out of their briefcases remains to be seen, but it probably will not be the same as what is delivered from the lecterns today.

Playing God

Christ the Representative: An Essay in Theology after the “Death of God,” by Dorothee Soelle (Fortress, 1967, 154 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Owen Onsum, minister, the Union Congregational Church, Shafter, California.

“Who am I? Am I replaceable? Unique? Representable?” In the opening chapters of her book, Dorothee Soelle attempts to answer these questions as she deals with the subject of personal identity. Technology answers that man is just a cog in a machine and is therefore replaceable. Yet science and machines enable men to do things once attributed to divine power. From this jumping-off point, the author goes on to show that the individual is not replaceable but is representable.

In the second section she discusses “Representation in the History of Theology.” The Egyptians, for example, placed little models of wood, stone, or clay in the tombs of their dead. These ushabti were believed to have the power to help the dead with their duties and problems in the abode of the dead. The basis of this belief was the idea that every living thing was represented by its image; whatever happened to a man’s image happened to the man himself.

Then the author moves on to the Old Testament and finds a parallel belief in Leviticus 16:20, 21:

Even the Old Testament, which elsewhere demagicized and de-mythicized so many elements common to all religious history, does not rise above this level, if we leave out of account the approaches to personal representation in Jeremiah, Hosea, and Second Isaiah. For example, the concept of the scapegoat does not go beyond the circle of imitative magic. Sin is presented as something physical. The priest identifies the sin of the people with the goat by laying his hands on its head and confessing over it all the sins of the people.… The goat … is driven into the desert.…

The important thing is not who removes the sin. What matters is that it disappears from the human sphere. In other religions, the remover can be a human being, another kind of animal, or very often some object, a stick or stone, which can be loaded with the sin and slung away.

In the third section Miss Soelle presents “Christ the Representative,” with the subtitle, “Sketch of a Post-Theistic Theology.” Christ is the “true teacher” because he identifies with us. Yet although he represents us, he does not replace us. He is provisional; his representation of us will continue until we can fulfill our own role. Christ also represents God, who “has changed”:

The progressive awakening of the consciousness has excluded [the possibility] of attaining certainty about God. In whatever way we may interpret the objectifications of God in the past—miracles, providential dispositions, channels of continuing revelation—such objectifications have been carried away by the flood of advancing critical consciousness. We are no longer under any necessity to attribute these objectifications to God.…

In this changed world, God needs actors to take his part. So long as the curtain has not rung down and the play still goes on, God’s role cannot be left unfilled. God’s leading player is Christ. Christ takes the part of God in this world, plays this role which without him would remain unfilled.

This is incarnation: Christ playing God in this world. And what he does, we can do also. We can “play the role of God in conditions of helplessness,” “claim God for each other.”

Christ’s representation of us is provisional; it is to last until we can play our own role. And even Christ’s representation of God is incomplete, for there is more of God yet to come. Likewise, our play-acting is provisional. Nevertheless, the important thing is that identification with God, in which Christ was the pioneer, is possible. “We, too, can now play God for one another.”

Another Look At Anselm

The Many-Faced Argument, edited by John Hick and Arthur C. McGill (Macmillan, 1967, 373 pp., cloth, $8.95, paper, $2.95), is reviewed by Gordon H. Clark, professor of philosophy, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana.

This high-priced book is better studied than reviewed, for it is a survey of recent historical studies in Anselm and of recent original forms of the ontological argument.

Part One, after reproducing the Proslogion, Gaunilo’s On Behalf of the Fool, and Anselm’s Reply (the latter two so arranged that each unit of the Reply immediately follows the pertinent passage of Gaunilo), consists mainly of reprints of articles by Beckaert, Barth, Hayen, and Stolz. Preceding these reprints editor McGill has a long survey of the opposing views.

In general, these views reject the traditional interpretation of Anselm, which Kant popularized by his refutation. McGill asserts that neither Kant nor Thomas Aquinas had ever read Anselm. Kant’s refutation is so obvious and devastating that a man of Anselm’s ability would never have made the blunder Kant exposes. Therefore new interpretations of Anselm are necessary.

The new interpretations vary: one makes Anselm a rationalist, another a fideist, and a third a mystic. Anselm is also pictured as a realist, as a Cartesian, as an analyst of the concept of possibility, as the user of a “reflexive” rather than a “representative” idea of God, as one utterly dependent on revelation, or as some combination of these. Editor McGill points out the textual difficulties these views must face, but he does not pursue any constructive solution very far.

Part Two takes up the use made of the ontological motif by a few modern philosophers. Here the chief figures are Ryle, Forest, Malcolm, and Hartshorne. In addition to reprints of articles by these (and also by Russell and Shaffer), editor Hick provides an elementary preface for readers “who are not already familiar with the philosophical issues,” and a concluding critique. The critique contains a very keen discussion of the difference between logical necessity and factual necessity, a distinction allegedly overlooked by Hartshorne and Malcolm. Its excellence causes us to regret that Hick wrote only sixteen pages.

A selected bibliography covers fourteen pages, and a good fifty philosophers are referred to in the book. A solid volume for study.

Book Briefs

The Dictionary of Religious Terms, by Donald T. Kauffman (Revell, 1967, 445 pp., $8.95). Definitions of 11,000 religious names, facts, symbols, and abbreviations.

Know Why You Believe, by Paul E. Little (Scripture Press, 1967, 96 pp., $1.25). Little wades into key issues of Christianity—existence of God, deity of Christ, the Resurrection, reliability of the Bible, possibility of miracles, relation of science and Scripture, the problem of evil—and offers satisfying, biblically sound answers.

The Economic Life of the Ancient World, by Jean-Philippe Levy (University of Chicago, 1967, 147 pp., $5). A French scholar examines economic development in Egypt, Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome from pre-Alexandrian times to the fall of Rome.

The Thousand Years in Both Testaments, by Nathaniel West (Kregel, 1967, 493 pp., $4.95). The Tabernacle, by Henry W. Soltau (Kregel, 1965, 474 pp., $4.95). Reissues of important nineteenth-century books.

Trustees and Higher Education, by H. Leo Eddleman (Christ for the World Publishers, 1967, 91 pp., $2). A seminary president advises trustees of academic institutions of their relation and responsibilities to the institutions they serve and the administrators they appoint.

Please Give a Devotion—For All Occasions, by Amy Bolding (Baker, 1967, 121 pp., $2.50). Continuing her series, this minister’s wife offers warm devotionals that incorporate many poems and homey anecdotes.

A Drink At Joel’s Place, by Jess Moody (Word, 1967, 125 pp., $3.50). With aphorisms and one-sentence paragraphs, a popular Florida pastor challenges Christians to live authentically and witness boldly. “The gut issue,” says Moody, “is, what will the church do to keep John, Mary, Billy, and Susie Doe lashed to the cross and made into happy servants of the Lord Christ.”

Social Scientific Studies of Religion: A Bibliography, by Morris I. Berkowitz and J. Edmund Johnson (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967, 258 pp., $7.95). A useful tool for scholars.

The Voluntary Church, edited by Milton B. Powell (Macmillan, 1967, 197 pp., $5.95). The observations of European visitors on American religious diversity and voluntary support, 1740–1860, provide insights into the national character. Includes writings by G. Whitefield, A. de Tocqueville, P. Schaff, fifteen others.

Jesus in Our Time, by James McLeman (Lippincott, 1967, 158 pp., $3.95). McLeman reflects the nonsense of much current theology that one can deny the virgin birth, miracles, and bodily resurrection and yet through faith and selective biblical historical data have a valid conception of Jesus Christ.