Dear Heresy Hunters:

Another mention of this headline-grabber may nauseate certain readers, but I can’t resist one more verbal peek at Bishop Pike. Any cleric who wears a button at his church convention stating, “I Believe in Life After Birth,” and fends off some of Carl McIntire’s practitioners of religious picketry by extending a handful of purloined posies deserves the publicity he seeks.

The censured bishop emerged from the latest Episcopal convention fragrant as a rose. Fearing the stir of a heresy hearing, the paper-tiger House of Bishops not only appeased Pike by changing the procedure in censure cases but also made it nearly impossible to hold a heresy trial. Fortunately for him, however, they did not entirely eliminate the “anachronistic” charge of heresy. Had they done so, Pike’s new book, If This Be Heresy, would have been passé. Now its sale is assured.

The controversy prompted publication of two Pikean analyses prior to the convention. William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne in The Bishop Pike Affair contend that opposition to the bishop is an ultra-right-wing plot. They scream that growing conservative power in church councils “makes a rightist, racist, anti-ecumenical, traditionalist coup d’église a realistic, and imminent, possibility.” Maybe the leftists’ “galloping paranoia” has subsided since Pike tamed the tigers.

New York Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan poses the Great Question of Our Day in his booklet, Bishop Pike: Ham, Heretic, or Hero? He concludes that Pike is a fascinating combination of the three and has rendered a service in calling us to rethink the Faith. My view is that Pike’s theological bill of fare is something like a hero sandwich of ham on wry stuffed with pickled heresy. The heroic element lies in the underpup’s boldness in declaring his convictions and facing down his peers. The ham on wry is in quips like his tale about the disadvantage of preaching trinitarian doctrine in polygamous societies: It’s a matter of offering three gods and one wife against three wives and one god. The pickled heresy is that Pike’s errant ideas about the Trinity, Christ, and the Resurrection are all adaptations of old heresies argued more impressively and as futilely centuries ago.

Now Pike’s spiritualistic séances are arousing more controversy. Did medium Arthur Ford really put him in contact with his deceased son? I can prophesy one thing for Episcopal bishops: their House will continue to be haunted by Pike for many years to come.

Clairvoyantly,

EUTYCHUS III

WATCHING THE TREND

After reading the editorial “The Urgency of Personal Conversion” (Oct. 13), I am constrained to give my personal endorsement. I fully concur in every word of it.

I have watched this tendency [away from emphasis on personal conversion] gradually grow in practice in the churches of which I have been a member since my own conversion in 1888. While it has not been so pronounced in my own denomination as in some others, I can but feel that some of our own pastors have been somewhat affected.…

I am a layman myself and hesitate to be critical, but I think this to be a grave departure from New Testament doctrine.

D. P. CARTER

Brownfield, Tex.

ACCREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE

“Two for Philadelphia” (News, Oct. 13) states that the Philadelphia area has three conservative seminaries that are non-accredited. Westminster Seminary is mentioned as one of these. You are right about our conservative position but wrong about our lack of accreditation. Westminster Theological Seminary is accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools and has been since 1954. We have never sought accreditation by the American Association of Theological Schools, for reasons related to our conservative theological position.

EDMUND P. CLOWNEY

President

Westminster Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

ANSWERING HIS QUESTION

Milton D. Hunnex, in his article, “Have the Secularists Ambushed God?” (Oct. 13), answers his own question very emphatically. Dr. Hunnex is surely a great Christian philosopher. Men like him … will make for stemming of the tide of atheism.

EPHRAIM D. CONWAY

Jacksonville, Fla.

PIQUED FOR PIKE

We are particularly “turned off” by your very biased attitude toward the person of James Pike. We feel it is not your duty to judge men or to ridicule their integrity. Needless to say, we found such a “Christian magazine” a little short of Christian brotherhood and love.

We would appreciate it if such shallow reflections as the ones concerning James Pike published in your October 13 issue (“The Pike Side Show”) would stop laughing at and start caring for [him], as the unconditional Father-of-us-all would have it. Then we would be as full of praise for your magazine as I’m sure James Pike himself would be.

MR. AND MRS. JACK BRADFORD

Fort Worth, Tex.

I will be the first to voice the opinion that, to me, Bishop Pike has done irreparable damage to his church, and that furthermore he is the world’s number-one heretic today. Yet, in spite of this fact, I do not feel it in good taste to hold him up to ridicule in magazine cartoons (Eutychus and His Kin, Oct. 13). He is still a human being, entitled to his individual dignity. Even though he seems hell-bent upon destroying his own dignity, dare we, as professing Christians, go so far as to dangle his failings and foibles before the reading public?

K. G. HENDRIX

Sunman Evangelical Parish

Sunman, Ind.

WORD FOR THE DAY

Thank you for L. Nelson Bell’s article, “That Day” (Oct. 13).… There is very little preaching left in which men and women are presented with the challenge to put their trust in him who by his death and resurrection in history saves them from the wrath to come.

May Christ have mercy on his people and on a sin-cursed world.

CORNELIUS VAN TIL

Professor of Apologetics

Westminster Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

SAILING, SAILING

We especially appreciated your latest [Eutychus] production as it related to a proposed Bible conference cruise (Oct. 13). Good for you, Ancient Mariner! Keep those lower lights burning.

JAMES A. NELSON

Trinity Baptist Church

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Eutychus’s comments on the Christian Herald revival cruise were surprising, to say the least. Is he suffering from an advanced case of sour grapes or just deadline strain? As a totally impartial observer (by virtue of ignorance of the subject), I was more puzzled than entertained.

DIANE BRADLEY

Pasadena, Calif.

FIRST WORDS OF DIALOGUE

There was one note which I found missing from the extraordinary, and I am sure undeserved, coverage you gave to my book Who Speaks for the Church? (“A Challenge to Ecumenical Politicians” and “An Ecumenical Bombshell,” Sept. 15). This was my endorsement of a suggestion made at the Geneva Conference by the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding, that we in the United States need to open a serious dialogue between the liberal church opinion represented in the NCC and those who call themselves conservative evangelicals. The ritual of Billy Graham’s appearance at the Miami Beach meeting of the NCC is not what Boulding meant.

If I may draw this to the attention of your readers, I said:

… In the United States conservative and liberal religious opinion is the same thing as conservative and liberal secular opinion—with a sharper edge. In short, the polarization of public debate on most issues is simply aided and abetted by the polarization of the religious forces. There is little “other-ing” yet reconciling dialogue. Our particular points are too important for that. Few would really want a major effort to be put forward to see whether there are not better ways to be or try to be the church speaking. That might threaten some cherished particular policy we most urgently want to be sure is spoken to the church and to the world. So we say that these others have “dropped out of the dialogue.”

With this goal and task before us, I imagine you can understand my belief that neo-Protestant ecumenism may be as capable of reform as evangelicals are likely to discharge the proper role you describe for them, namely, enunciating theological and moral principles that bear upon public life and saying to the world a proper and relevant word about social justice.

What each of us stands most in need of is colleagues. Since I was only proposing a program for bringing into being a truly ecumenical Christian social ethics, it is no wonder you found my sketch of the possible results somewhat obscure and disappointing. The lively word will continue to escape us, so long as one party speaks of asserted concepts of social justice and not in the same breath of scriptural truth and another party speaks of that truth but not in the same breath of norms of justice.

True, I do not believe that a proper Christian ethics will be “confined” simply to the truth of Scripture. But I do not want to “go beyond” this—certainly not beyond “Scripture and sound reason.” We do need to search out together every entailment of this truth for the world of today, and to prolong this into our lives.

PAUL RAMSEY

Professor of Christian Ethics

Princeton University

Princeton, N. J.

• CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorialized that Dr. Ramsey’s dismissal of evangelical social ethics as simply a secular counterview to secular liberal ethics was too sweeping and unjustified. But his beginning of a response to the possibilities of fruitful dialogue is welcome. The American religious scene would have been vastly different had not the Federal Council and National Council, despite large evangelical constituencies, committed themselves officially to non-evangelical positions, as has the WCC, both in conferences and in pronouncements. The ecumenical pattern in recent years has been one of increasing private dialogue with evangelical leaders (particularly with unaffiliated evangelicals) and of increasing public suppression of evangelical positions. This has given evangelical Christians a feeling that ecumenical dialogue tends to exhaust their time and is futile. But ecumenical structures apart, Dr. Ramsey’s plea for discussion is worthy, and his appeal to Scripture and sound reason is formally the place to begin.—ED.

Dr. Ramsey’s polemic was long overdue. It is, in a sense, unfortunate that the very basic theology which causes many of us to disagree with almost all of the pronouncements of ecumenical politicians also causes us to abhor the very act of making pronouncements on socio-political issues. Therefore, we cannot, in good conscience, retaliate.…

I, for one, have long resented the fact that when an ecumenical VIP or council speaks “as from Sinai,” the world around me, not knowing any better, considers that voice to speak for all—including me. To speak so, within the Protestant context, displays irresponsible churchmanship and colossal conceit. I’m glad someone is putting this word out.

STACY L. ROBERTS, JR.

Chaplain, U. S. Navy

Gulf of Tonkin, Viet Nam

CALL THE GREAT PHYSICIAN

The editorial “We Are Sick” (Sept. 29) is an eloquent and forceful analysis which deserves wide attention.

I hope that this statement will summon many of our citizens, and in particular our political leaders, to a reappraisal of our current social crisis. I hope also that evangelicals will respond to the challenge by making an even more effective penetration of the inner city in order that the saving and healing power of the Great Physician may be made available to those who so desperately need his touch upon their lives.

HUDSON T. ARMERDING

President

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

It’s easy to get sick over what killed the patient, especially when it might have been prevented.…

I’m sick of the loud, wounded, indignant voice of the Church about wrongs that could have been prevented by a bold, decisive Church taking the leadership to nip the problem in the first place.… Don’t you think “judgment begins at the house of God”? How about a line or two … about the Church’s responsibility in all this? And then maybe some solid points on what the Church ought to do now? The horse is out of the barn—got any suggestions about corralling him?

JIM JOHNSON

Wheaton, Ill.

A great big “thank you” and a hearty “thank God” for your editorial. It makes me sick, too, to realize that there are apparently so few of our American people who are “sick” of the prevailing conditions in our nation and in our churches.

S. G. POSEY

Executive Secretary Emeritus

Southern Baptist General Convention of California

San Diego, Calif.

‘EWE’-NITING THE FLOCK

I found “Canada’s Fragmented Evangelicals” (Current Religious Thought, Oct. 13), another most interesting ‘interpretive report” from Dr. Fitch on the Canadian scene.… It seems to us that Canada’s evangelicals are fragmented in many instances in a most positive way: like the bread in the hands of the Master. The Lord in fact has his witness permeating our fragmented national society. Probably not more than 3–4 per cent of our population are living disciplined Christian lives, but that witness, co-ordinated by God’s “idea man,” the Holy Spirit, is making a most impressive mark in our society.

The witness of that 3–4 per cent may not have much lobbying power, but maybe that’s not in the Spirit’s scheme of things. After all, our commission is “as sheep among wolves.” The very idea of seeking to “ram” our views down the unwilling jaws of the wolf-pack makes some of us feel a bit more “sheepish” than usual.

KENNETH CAMPBELL

President

Campbell-Reese Evangelistic Assn., Inc.

Milton, Ont.

Dr. Fitch’s observations are tragically inaccurate. He begins by saying, “You travel far in Canada before you find any evangelicals making a good effort to cooperate with their fellows. The bitterness of evangelical unity above the forty-ninth parallel is tragic and inglorious.” This is simply not the case!…

1. Within the past month a great National Sunday School Convention was held in Toronto. More than 3,000 delegates were registered from practically every Protestant denomination.…

2. A ministerial fellowship encompassing almost all of the evangelical pastors of Greater Winnepeg has been functioning for close to twenty years. These men have a wonderful record of cooperation in evangelical crusades, Sunday school conventions, and other such ventures, with much blessing and success. This is being duplicated in Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, and many other Canadian cities.

3. One of the most glorious triumphs of the Gospel in our history has recently been written in the success of the “Sermons from Science Pavilion” at Expo ’67. Close to three-quarters of a million dollars was raised for this effort; hundreds have professed faith in Christ. The editor of the liberal United Church Observer exhorted his readers to have nothing to do with this “divisive” exhibition either by contribution or attendance. In a wonderful display of united faith and effort, the evangelicals of our country rose to the occasion and today give God the glory.

4. Our land has been greatly blessed by the Bible-college movement; there are fifty-four across the dominion. The heads of these schools have organized into the “Christian Educators Conference” and in a very fine Christian spirit meet regularly to discuss matters of common concern. The same spirit of unity prevails amongst the leaders of the faith missions. Consequently, the number of young people being thrust out into missionary service per capita can scarcely be equaled by any other country in the world.

Our churches and leaders who are remaining true to the Word of God are not without fault. However, the generalizations of your correspondent … should be documented or retracted.

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada holds great promise as an agency to speak unitedly for the evangelicals of our land. The movement is in the infancy stages. Many of us had hoped that its development would be more rapid. Premature criticism however is of no constructive value.

God has been good to this land. The united efforts of evangelicals have been far-reaching and will continue into the future. Your correspondent states, “One of the greatest barriers to an organizational form of cooperation is the reluctance of evangelicals to become involved in anything other than the preaching of the Word and the saving of souls.” This is meant no doubt as a criticism; I think it should rather be accepted as a commendation. Our liberal churches have become involved in Viet Nam, birth control, the United Nations, and have forgotten to a great extent the great commission to “preach the Gospel to every creature.” On the other hand, the above statement is only part of the truth. Evangelicals are building Christian schools and colleges, they are prominent in the political life of our country. They are involved and becoming increasingly so in many areas of the social life of our nation.

It would indeed be refreshing in the future if in the interests of fair play and objectivity you would print some comments from the many outstanding evangelical leaders across our nation.

ELMER S. MCVETY

Editor

The Evangelical Christian

Willowdale, Ont.

GOOD NEWS ON THE STANDS

“Memo to Missionaries” (Sept. 15) made two significant points. The first was in the first paragraph, where you dealt with the lamentable lack of evangelical material on the nation’s news stands. There are probably two thoughts which come immediately to mind: first, that the quality just isn’t there to merit sale on the stands; and second, that the Billy Graham paperbacks become truly outstanding by comparison. The challenge, of course, is to produce more volumes with the appeal and quality of the Graham books—or even to produce a quality periodical.…

The second point is one very near and dear to my heart. I have tried to persuade pastors of the very thing you were talking about to the missionaries. I wasn’t very successful, and perhaps you won’t be either. But don’t give up!

JERRY BEAVAN

Palos Verdes, Calif.

It should be appalling to the clergy—certainly it is to me, a lay journalist—that there is not one single evangelical magazine on the newsstands and, furthermore, that there is no liaison between foreign missionaries and foreign correspondents. In a free country such as ours, the clergy and the laymen can blame only themselves.

Such a gap between truly religious people and the secular press seems incredible in an age that is supposedly one of advanced techniques in communication.

I … would like to suggest that religious people “go ye forth” into their own “jungles” to see if they cannot interest the media in broader news coverage. After all, editors are supposed to be fairly, objectively, tolerantly interested in covering news activities in all walks of life, and it would seem to me that a little good news along the way would balance some of the bad.

Why doesn’t CHRISTIANITY TODAY spearhead a project to make up “press kits” for foreign missionaries?… If missionaries know what kind of stories interest editors, they are better able to furnish these stories and act as their own foreign correspondents. They should actually be a veritable storehouse of good stories—after all, the story of Stanley and Livingstone was a great missionary story before it was anything else—and it was made into a movie.

MIDGE SHERWOOD

San Marino, Calif.

FRONT-LINE NOTES

I am translating the Scriptures for a small tribe of Indians in the Amazon Basin. I want you to know that your magazine is my favorite reading material.…

What do I do when I wonder if it is worthwhile to learn such a different language from Indo-European languages in order to give God’s word to two thousand Indians who run around in rags and survive on manioc and game, who don’t know the days of the week, much less that men are going to the moon soon, who think that Karusakaybü created the world and that he and his son have accomplished just as wonderful feats as anything we tell them about God and Jesus Christ? I read CHRISTIANITY TODAY … and am reminded that God is bringing people in similar circumstances to his Son in a thousand spots around the globe.

MARJORIE CROFTS

Manus, Amazonas, Brazil

For many, many years now I have had to observe the West from the perspective of the East: my missionary work demands this. I fear that whilst the East is imbibing Western customs the West is imbibing Eastern concepts. Our decline of the West is because it is being philosophically devoured by the East. Much in modern theology is more Oriental than biblical in its outlook.…

If the Gospel is to advance, theology must rethink itself; it must apply the famous Ockham razor to the peripherals and get back to the heart of theology: God was in and is in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. If you can, please give us more meat.

C. VICTOR BARNARD

Immanuel House

Uttar Pradesh, India

BARNUM AND BABEL

Here it is folks, the greatest show on earth since Babel! The church come of age! The church is putting on the greatest side-show since Barnum to cover up the well-known fact that professional “religion” did not work in biblical times, is not “working” now and never will “work” for the church magicians.… Laymen are told that God does not “exist” because existence is the property of mortals.… The next step was obvious: the church could run the whole show if it could get rid of God! But with the proclamation of God’s demise, God’s grave has proved to be the church’s Pandora’s box. Since the disputed funeral the “religious” world has been going to hell! The mediums chirp and the wizards mutter but God is not consulted. Maybe God’s job was bigger than the church bargained for! Maybe in the process of self-election the church accepted too many commissions! Without God the church doesn’t have much of an act going for it. Be still, O churches, and let God put the show on the road!

JOHN TRAVERSO

Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd

Indianapolis, Ind.

BABY FOOD FOR LAYMEN

We enjoy reading CHRISTIANITY TODAY. It is useful in our work. However, it is often necessary to strain it like baby food for the layman’s digestive tract.

LLOYD T. HAYES

Wire Editor

Daily Express

Newport, Vt.

Protestant theology in the 1960s is characterized above all by the God-is-dead phenomenon. Although this movement, as represented particularly by Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, has inherent instabilities that will doubtless shorten its ideological life, one must not underestimate its importance. The death-of-God phenomenon reflects the increasing secularization of our time, which will certainly go on whether or not the theothanatologists retain their popularity.

Even more significantly, the God-is-dead movement demonstrates the consequences of the weak view of Holy Scripture that has prevailed in Protestant theology since the advent of rationalistic biblical criticism. By noting the connections between God-is-dead thinking and destructive criticism of Holy Writ, we can see quite plainly how evangelical Christianity’s belief in a totally authoritative Word has maximum relevance in a time of general theological collapse.

Christ and the Bible

In an unpublished paper delivered at a program on radical theology sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Office of Religious Affairs (October 28, 1966), William Hamilton unwittingly provided a laboratory example of how the demise of one’s bibliology results in the demise of one’s God. In answering the question, “Can you really maintain a loyalty to Jesus without a loyalty to God?,” he said:

Professor Altizer solves the problem more readily than I by his apocalyptic definition of Jesus, more Blakean than biblical, as the one who is born out of God’s death. I am not yet ready to give up sola scriptura (!), and thus my answer must be more complex and tentative.… Early in the nineteenth century, we had to face, under the early impact of historical criticism, both that Jesus was firmly committed to demon-possession as the meaning of mental and physical illness, and that we were not so committed and needn’t be. But obedience to Jesus was not destroyed. Later, at the time of Darwinian controversy we had to face another instance of Jesus’ full participation in the thought forms of his day—the three-story, primitive cosmology. But we do not go to the Bible for science, we were rightly told, and obedience to Jesus was not hurt. At the close of the century we had to face an even more disturbing fact—the fact brought before us by Weiss and Schweitzer that Jesus was completely committed to the apocalyptic views of the Judaism of his day.… If Jesus’ demonology and cosmology and-eschatology were taken as first-century views, appropriate then, not so now, needing reinterpretation and understanding but not literal assent, what is inherently different about Jesus’ theology?

The significance of this argument for the current theological situation cannot be overestimated, for it explicitly maps the progressive demise of Christology through the consistent application of rationalistic biblical criticism. For over a century, orthodox Christians have vainly reminded their liberal confreres of the Reformers’ conviction that the “material principle” (the Gospel of Christ) cannot possibly survive apart from the “formal principle” (divinely inspired Scripture). “Fiddlesticks!” has been the reply: “Of course we can distinguish the true theological core of Scripture and the central message of Jesus from the biblical thought-forms of the ancient Near East.” But in point of fact, as Hamilton well shows, stripping the cultural thought-forms from the “true” teaching of Scripture is like peeling an onion: when finished, you have no teaching at all, only tears (unless you happen to be a constitutional optimist like Hamilton, who finds mankind a satisfactory God-substitute).

Either Jesus’ total teachings (including his full trust in Scripture as divine revelation) are taken as God’s word or, as Luther well put it, “everyone makes a hole in it wherever it pleases him to poke his snout, and follows his own opinions, interpreting and twisting Scripture any way he pleases.” The Bible has become, to use Spurgeon’s phrase, a “nose of wax,” so that even a death-of-God theologian claims to follow sola scriptura. This is the inevitable outcome of rationalistic biblical criticism that refuses to distinguish between straightforward grammatical-historical explication of the biblical message and pre-suppositional judgment upon it. Has the time perhaps come for the Church to recognize that aprioristic biblical criticism has brought theology to the bier of Deity?

The way back is the doctrine of total biblical authority as taught by Christ himself, at once the Lord of Scripture and its central figure. Kenneth Kantzer gives us weighty testimony in this regard from the critics themselves:

H. J. Cadbury, Harvard professor and one of the more extreme New Testament critics of the last generation, once declared that he was far more sure as a mere historical fact that Jesus held to the common Jewish view of an infallible Bible than that Jesus believed in his own messiahship. Adolf Harnack, greatest church historian of modern times, insists that Christ was one with his apostles, the Jews, and the entire early church in complete commitment to the infallible authority of the Bible. John Knox, author of what is perhaps the most highly regarded recent life of Christ, states that there can be no question that this view of the Bible was taught by our Lord himself. The liberal critic, F. C. Grant, concludes that in the New Testament, “it is everywhere taken for granted that Scripture is trustworthy, infallible, and inerrant.” Rudolf Bultmann, a radical anti-supernaturalist, but acknowledged by many to be the greatest New Testament scholar of modern times, asserts that Jesus accepted completely the common view of his day regarding the full inspiration and authority of Scripture.

If Christ did in fact “show himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs” (Acts 1:3), thereby validating his claims to Deity as he had predicted he would (Matt. 12:38–42; John 2:18–22), how can the Christian possibly rationalize a view of Scripture inconsistent with that of the Lord Christ? It will not do to argue in terms of modern “kenotic theory” that Jesus was limited or limited himself to the thought-forms of his day, for (as Hamilton has well demonstrated) such hypothetical limitations have no boundaries and are logically capable of reducing everything Jesus said to meaninglessness; moreover, as Eugene R. Fairweather concludes, after examining the whole kenotic question in detail: “It can hardly be claimed that Kenoticism is explicitly contained in the New Testament picture of Christ; rather, it depends on a complicated deduction, involving highly debatable presuppositions.… The Kenotic theory does not in fact vindicate the religious meaning of the Christian Gospel. On the contrary, in the severe words of Pius XII, it ‘turns the integral mystery of the Incarnation and of redemption into bloodless and empty spectres’ ” (see Fairweather’s appendix to F. W. Beare’s Philippians).

Nor does one accomplish anything by trying to maintain that Jesus stamped with approval only the “substance” or “message” of the Bible, not its “form” or “medium” (the former being absolute while the latter is culturally conditioned and therefore lacking in normative character). As contemporary communications specialist Marshall McLuhan has shown in his epochal works (The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media), “the medium is the message”: it is impossible to separate a message from its medium, since the medium makes an integral contribution to the very nature of the message. Orthodox Christianity has always recognized this in respect to Scripture: no “detail” of the Bible is unimportant; the literary form must itself be inspired in order for it not to detract from the message conveyed; every word of Scripture—every “jot and tittle” of the text—has an impact, however slight, on the totality of the Bible, and this impact must, if Christ spoke truly, be for good.

Relevance in a Disenchanted Era

The stir produced by the death-of-God movement is a genuine reflection of the loss of God by vast numbers of people in the twentieth century. In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, the leading characters are typical of modern man, waiting in darkness and addressing himself to the unknown god who never appears. At one point Vladimir says:

We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.

Elsewhere in the play, Estragon remarks:

Yes, now I remember, yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That’s been going on now half a century.

Chancel Music

Whether whistle, bell, or chime

from marble campanile,

I do not know,

but I shall recognize its signal.

In a lightning-splintered moment

sounds of earth gone … gone…

I shall leap! sing! soar!

trading fleshly inhibition

for eternity’s vast space.

Through the stained-glass eyes of love

draw me softly, chancel Dove.

WILMA W. BURTON

How has such a cultural malaise come about in our time? Someone has sagely noted that in the eighteenth century the Bible died, in the nineteenth century God died, and in the twentieth century mankind has died. This sequence is not accidental. The rationalistic criticism of Scripture during the eighteenth-century deistic “Enlightenment” removed the most solid foundation for belief in God; and after Nietzsche and other nineteenth-century thinkers had proclaimed God’s demise, it was no longer possible to substantiate man’s individual worth. No longer a creature of God, man could only regard himself as a clever, evolving animal, and the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century are the inevitable result of stronger animals’ subjugating the weaker to their own ends. Without an eternal value system, available only in a veracious revelation from God, man is at the mercy of his fellows. Might makes right; to use Lord Acton’s well-known aphorism: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Orwell’s 1984 takes on nightmarish reality.

Among the “secular theologians,” however, an optimistic note is presently being sounded. We are informed that the “secular city” offers revelatory possibilities for acquiring a “new name” for God (see Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and also The Secular City Debate, edited by Daniel Callahan); and one writer (Gibson Winter) goes so far as to speak of “the New Creation as Metropolis.” An axiom of the day, expressed by Cox and Altizer, is that “God is where the action is”: in the dynamic social movements of our day, in the struggles for racial justice and human freedom. We are told that the “fully hidden Jesus” is now to be experienced in such movements, and that “a whole new era in theology” is opening up through stress on the Spirit—“the God of the present” (so wrote President James McCord of Princeton Seminary in Time, August 5, 1966).

But what is the actual situation? The urbanization of life is, as the greatest living phenomenologist of religion, Mircea Eliade, points out, desacralizing life by separating it from the cyclical, God-given patterns of nature. In the city we create our own environment and are therefore easily led not to God but to ourselves. We become convinced that we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul, and we quickly reach the point where we try to justify any “action” that we create. Much of the social action of our day is indeed God-honoring, for all races are “one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28) and “there is no respect of persons with God” (Rom. 2:11); but apart from a revelatory, absolute ethic (as we saw earlier), supra-cultural standards of justice cannot be established. This means that without an authoritative Scripture the “secular theologian” can as easily find himself embroiled in the demonic, racistic, fascist activism of a Third Reich as in the contemporary freedom marches in behalf of minorities. Only a firm Word of God, coming from outside the flux of contemporary action, can serve as a map to an honorable and just future. And as the Reformers properly observed, talk about “Christ” or the “Spirit” apart from an objective Word is a waste of breath; for without a stable criterion, each man can build a demonic Christ—an Antichrist—in his own image, and deceive many. The spirits, most definitely including the spirits of the age, must be tested (1 John 4:1); and the only touchstone remains the inscripturated Word.

Sham

Reluctantly, perversely braced,

I raised my cross with great distaste;

Beneath it let my spirits sag,

And petulantly felt it drag.

But I exhibited that cross,

Talked much of it, and thought my loss

Was rather gain for Christendom;

Sidling eyes askance at some

Who seemed unseemly light. How blind

And foolish, I, to be resigned

To humbug, when reality

Is borne by Christ, and not by me.

HELEN S. CLARKSON

The instability of current “action” philosophies and theologies is becoming evident as our contemporaries, à la Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary, simultaneously seek answers in Eastern mysticism and reality-avoiding psychedelic drugs (see my article, “The Gospel According to LSD,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, July 8, 1966). Unconsciously, modern man recognizes that, whether in the metropolis or in the wilderness, whether in action or in silence, his heart—to recall Augustine’s great truth—is restless till it rests in God. But to rest there, it must know who God is and what he has done for sinful man, and that can be learned only in the pages of Holy Writ.

Like the little lost creatures in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, we long, each one of us, for “the piper at the Gates of Dawn.” How desperately we need to hear the clear piping of eternity as century twenty-one approaches! Well did a great theologian over a hundred years ago (William Henry Green, The Pentateuch, 1863) point disenchanted modern man to that clear voice of God recorded in the most relevant Book of all:

Who can tell us whether this awful and mysterious silence, in which the Infinite One has wrapped himself, portends mercy or wrath? Who can say to the troubled conscience, whether He, whose laws in nature are inflexible and remorseless, will pardon sin? Who can answer the anxious inquiry whether the dying live on or whether they cease to be? Is there a future state? And if so, what is the nature of that untried condition of being? If there be immortal happiness, how can I attain it? If there be an everlasting woe, how can it be escaped? Let the reader close his Bible and ask himself seriously what he knows upon these momentous questions apart from its teachings. What solid foundation has he to rest upon in regard to matters, which so absolutely transcend all earthly experience, and are so entirely out of the reach of our unassisted faculties? A man of facile faith may perhaps delude himself into the belief of what he wishes to believe. He may thus take upon trust God’s unlimited mercy, his ready forgiveness of transgressors, and eternal happiness after death. But this is all a dream. He knows nothing, he can know nothing about it, except by direct revelation from heaven.

The question, therefore, is one of life or death. We will not, we can not give up our faith in the Bible. To do so is to surrender ourselves to blank despair. It is to blot out the sun from the heavens and extinguish at once the very source of light and life and holiness. “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away; but the Word of the Lord endureth forever.”

He who has ears to hear the piping, let him hear!

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.”

Reflections on the occasion of the 300th birthday anniversary of an expert in exaggeration

Gulliver’s Travels is today probably the most widely read literary work of the eighteenth century. Usurping the prominence that Pilgrim’s Progress shared with Paradise Lost in the nineteenth century, it has become a staple ingredient of college literature courses.

Its currency is not difficult to explain. The book is mainly satire, and our age is sophisticated and disillusioned enough to like satire better than simple biblical allegory or epic elegance. Although Gulliver’s Travels is but one of several satirical or disillusioned works that contend for a place in college courses, nothing else quite matches it in charm and challenge. Once merely a children’s story, it has now become a required intellectual experience for college students. For the most part, this timely book—whose author was born November 30, 1667—is a subtle, richly diversified, ostensibly comic study of human depravity and its various alternatives.

The last and most imaginative section of this four-part work is more often admired than understood. It is about the Houyhnhnms, who are a society of horses, and a depraved race of men called Yahoos. In the first part of the work, the traveler Gulliver, in Lilliput, becomes mildly disillusioned by human vices. In Part II the king of Brobdingnag calls Gulliver’s fellow human beings “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Part III castigates the human race for an assortment of academic, scientific, and political absurdities. Then in Part IV Swift portrays the Houyhnhnms and the loathe-some, much belabored Yahoos, and here he seems to exceed all bounds of truth and decency.

For literary study, however, there was no way to sidestep Part IV. This last part is the climax, and in it the accumulated meaning of the previous episodes comes to a jarring and well-sustained finale. In the candid twentieth century the Yahoos are still revolting, but they seem too real to be dismissed as malicious libels on the human race.

Swift’s protean talents were all too adequate for the overwhelming effects he sought. Gulliver in Part IV, now captain of his ship, is the quasi-capitalistic victim of a mutinous crew who put him ashore on an unknown island in order to seize the ship and become pirates. Once ashore, he encounters the Yahoos. After his first disgusting misadventure with them, he eagerly welcomes the kindly Houyhnhnms as paragons of sweetness and light; he is overjoyed by their benevolent mildness, their grave reasonableness, and their plain “horse” sense about death, sex, and other highly affective realities. The Houyhnhnms are superior to human beings, he decides.

For generations most readers have shared his admiration of the Houyhnhnms, and quite an embarrassing proportion of literary scholars have incautiously joined in the extravagant applause. Today, however, a number of the most competent Swift specialists, after thoroughly investigating their author’s unusual life and complex psyche as well as Gulliver’s Travels, have converged in a relatively new interpretation, growing out of what A. E. Dyson calls “Swift’s ironic trap.”

Gulliver, like millions of readers who identify with him, is surprisingly uncritical; several scholars have suspected that his name derives from “gullible.” He swoons and sinks to the depths of despair when the Houyhnhnms reject him as a Yahoo, unfit for their society. Morosely he returns to England, but he finds reconcilement with his fellow Yahoos (as he styles them) impossible. Unable to endure his wife and children because of their odor, he comforts himself by sitting in the stable, conversing with the two horses he bought as solace.

The average reader sadly shares Gulliver’s despair. Thus he falls into the ironic trap, not realizing that Swift was fonder of literary pranks than any other English writer. What Gulliver and the naïve reader fail to see is that the Houyhnhnms, whatever their charms, are actually subhuman. They get along with each other well, as human beings ought to do, and they have superhuman sense; but they have no crafts, no books, no culture, no arts except poetry. Their political system works well enough for horses, but they are appallingly uncreative, and their society could hardly make a human being envious.

The Houyhnhnms have little to offer human beings because they lack imagination. This is the gift that raises man above the animal level and enables him to know good and evil. Human beings alone can conceive of “the thing which is not” and then create it, for good or for bad. The Houyhnhnms who have no knowledge of evil and not even a word for it, are in fact subhuman.

Gulliver never suspects this, however. He is well educated, well traveled, well balanced, and in a sense quite intelligent. Unfortunately, like the Houyhnhnms he lacks imagination, and thus he is unable to picture a fully realized human utopia. Instead of collapsing in despair when the Houyhnhnms dismiss him, he should thank God that he is a man and not a horse.

How can Gulliver be so gullible? And how can most readers identify with him so readily? They follow him home and share with him the solace of his two horses. It does not occur to them that the stable must smell considerably worse than his wife and children, or that there is something wrong with a man who has so little affection for his family.

Another important recognition most readers never achieve is that Gulliver is not really a Yahoo with clothes on, as the Houyhnhnms conclude after examining him with ludicrous scientific solemnity. Here Swift is making a point that is especially relevant today. The truth is that Gulliver is a gentleman who at no time behaves like a Yahoo, though, as several Swiftian scholars have pointed out, he does turn out to be a pride-powered stoic or deist. In Lilliput he remains loftily superior to the petty jealousies and animosities of the Lilliputians, disdaining to punish their treachery. He distinguishes himself in Brobdingnag by his judicious moderation and objectivity, thus making himself an impressive contrast to the conniving Englishmen as he described them to the King. He does nothing discreditable in Laputa or among the Houyhnhnms. Surely he deserves to be accepted by the Houyhnhnms for what he is.

The Houyhnhnms, however, never show their lack of perceptivity more clearly than by rejecting Gulliver, simply on the basis of physical appearance. Yet, because they cannot make subtle distinctions between appearance and behavior, the comedy accumulates, and their failure suggests the very tragic way in which modern Houyhnhnms fail or refuse to see that man is more than an animal with clothes on.

Excerpts From Jonathan Swift’S Observations

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Positiveness is a good Quality for Preachers and Orators, because he that would obtrude his Thoughts and Reasons upon a Multitude, will convince others the more, as he appears convinced himself.

All Fits of Pleasure are balanced by an equal Degree of Pain or Languor; ’tis like spending this Year, part of the next Year’s Revenue.

The latter Part of a wise Man’s Life is taken up in curing the Follies, Prejudices, and false Opinions he had contracted in the former.

No Preacher is listened to but Time, which gives us the same Train and Turn of Thought that elder People have tried in vain to put into our Heads before.

When a true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by his Sign, that the Dunces are all in confederacy against him.

One of the ironic facts about the ironic trap is that Swift made his intentions reasonably clear. In a letter to Alexander Pope dated September 29, 1725, he stated that his purpose in writing Gulliver’s Travels was “to vex the world rather than divert it.” And in a letter two months later he said, “I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animale rationale [the rational animal] and to show that it could be only rationis capax [capable of reason].” The treatise is Gulliver’s Travels, and the letters indicate that for Swift true man is a via media between the Yahoo and the Houyhnhnm.

It is not surprising that Swift admired the Houyhnhnms in an ambivalent way. He realized how naïve persons like Shaftesbury were in believing that men could live by reason alone or by a natural religion that assumed the innate goodness of men. But he also knew, as he said in his letter to Pope, that the Houyhnhnm kind of life was unattainable. He found too much of the Yahoo in man, even in himself. He could not forget, for example, that one young lady half his age and more than half Yahoo whom he had befriended in London became so aggressive in her passion for him that she followed him to Ireland, hounded him for years, and finally blamed him for the misery that later led to her unhappy death. Swift knew the Yahoo side of humanity as well as its Houyhnhnm-like distortions.

The startling thing about Part IV today is its “prophetic” dimension. This is not to say that Swift felt any desire or competence to predict the future, but only that the world does not change as much as most apostles of progress would like to believe. Swift’s Houyhnhnms may be a caricature of the eighteenth-century deists. Yet they persist today and proliferate in numerous varieties of vaguely theistic humanism, a humanism that would have men live, like the Houyhnhnms, by reason alone in self-generated good will founded on enlightened selfishness. Such thinking is inevitably confused. It accepts human limitations in a realistic and often unimaginative way while it theoretically and idealistically denies them. And it reduces God, by whose grace man can transcend these limitations, to an impersonal abstraction or at best an absentee landlord.

At the same time the Yahoo element in man also continues to be conspicuous. It flourishes in gruesome crimes almost without precedent. Science, in one of its most familiar stances, acknowledges man as merely a beast and labels his most shocking deviations as illness that psychiatry can cure and environmental manipulation will in time be able to prevent. Yahoo behavior is the shameless and often blatant material of much of the most publicized twentieth-century fiction. Yahooism has also invaded art to a degree that is disturbing if not degrading; and the Yahoo spirit is more conspicuous in social behavior than it was in Swift’s day, more overt and less restrained. It takes prettified Playboy forms that lure many a hypnotized pilgrim into its polite perversions of lust and regression.

The result is ever the same for cultivated Gullivers. Horrified by the Yahoo aspect of man, they eagerly embrace the Houyhnhnm antithesis in all its meretricious simplicity, only to learn (perhaps too late) that the concept of man as animale rationale is a mirage. In fact, unless Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven” at length subdues a man, he is bound to sink in mortal despair, just as Gulliver did. This despair is the inevitable and eternal result of meeting the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms without Christian insight. Its victims go to their graves unsalvaged, never imagining what the Creator can make of man’s Yahoo impulses and Houyhnhnm dreams.

Swift did not explain this via media. It must have seemed obvious to him, and perhaps it was obvious in a day when all schoolboys learned the catechism and the basic theology of the Christian faith. Anyway, a writer of Swift’s genius respects his readers too much to be unduly explicit.

Was Swift a misanthrope? He is often summarily convicted by his own words, when he says, for example, in the same letter that clarifies his view of man as merely capax rationis: “I hate and detest that animal called man.…” It is easy to overlook the other half of his statement here: “… although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth”—a sentiment to which Gulliver could hardly have subscribed.

It is not generally known that the Irish people came to revere Swift as their beloved dean (he was for a few years dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin), partly because his self-advertised saeva indignatio is the kind of righteous indignation a preacher should display at times and because he wielded it for many years on their behalf in writings such as “A Modest Proposal.” Few of his critics were aware that during the latter part of his life he was giving a third of his income to charitable causes. Indeed, they use this last part of his life to discredit him. The insanity into which he lapsed has been represented as a case of poetic justice or well-merited retribution. Actually it was not violent insanity but rather the senility into which many elderly persons drift.

Swift lived too long. He was a man of scintillating wit and unusual physical vigor who found emotional outlet chiefly in his friends and in his writing. When these failed him (after 1730, when he was sixty-three), loneliness became the painful accompaniment of longevity, and he found an outlet only in letters and in bitter, cynical, or misanthropic outbursts.

“Life is a comedy to him who thinks, a tragedy to him who feels.” This familiar aphorism of the eighteenth century helps one understand Gulliver’s Travels. Swift saw clearly the absurdity of man’s animalistic behavior in the light of his proud pretensions. He saw no less clearly the more subtle absurdity of man’s frantic, futile, misguided efforts to make himself a rational being. This contrast heightens the comic “vision” that dominates his best literary work.

At the same time, as a dedicated clergyman he sincerely loved individual men and felt the tragedy of their condition and his own disappointments deeply. Thus, his gullible Gulliver becomes a tragic figure for those who feel as well as a comic figure for those who think. In this strange paradox is a key to the enduring power of Swift’s most influential work.

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.”

Modern theologians offer a deceptive choice

Theology today often offers a choice between Christ and the Bible, as if this were a legitimate option. The alternatives are stated in such a way that if a person chooses the Bible, he has denied Christ and is guilty of bibliolatry; indeed, he may even forfeit his right to be called Christian! The charge of bibliolatry suggests that conservative Christians have brought back the “Black Mass” in Protestant form and made a black leather book an object of devotion.

This offer of a choice between Christ and the Bible is not only misleading—it is downright deceptive. It is certainly not suggested by the Scriptures themselves. Shortly after Christ’s resurrection, he chided his disciples for not knowing what the Old Testament had to say about his crucifixion and resurrection. It was by means of the Bible and not without it that he discussed these saving events (Luke 24:25–27). If our Lord had been as set against the Bible as some theologians imagine, he could merely have revealed himself as the resurrected Christ without taking on the bothersome task of expounding at length the Old Testament.

No real choice can ever be made between Christ and the Bible, simply because the Bible centers in Christ and he submits himself totally to it. Christ is the chief content of the Bible and also the only key to its interpretation. Thus Luther could say, “No one can understand the Law without Christ, because no one knows what it demands and how it can be fulfilled.” On the other hand, Luther so exalted the Scriptures that he could also say, “Moses is the source of all wisdom and understanding, from which everything flows, as the prophets knew and said; even the New Testament flows out it and is based on it.”

In the Church, therefore, Jesus Christ and the Bible constitute one authority, neither part of which is greater or less than the other. The Reformers pointed to this twofold authority when they said that both sola fide (faith in Christ alone) and sola scriptura (all teachings based on the Bible alone) were at the heart of Christianity. To uphold one is to uphold the other also, and to deny the authority of one is to deny the authority of both. In the Church it is always Christ and the Bible, never Christ alone or the Bible alone.

This relation between Christ and the Bible was expressed more technically in the statement that Christ was the material principle of the Church and the Bible the formal principle. Here the term “principle” meant source. Jesus Christ, as the content or matter of the Scripture, was said to be the source of all truth in the Church, and the Bible, as the framework in which Christ alone could be found, was said to be the source also. Luther spoke of this dual authority in the Church when he said that anything that taught Christ was for him the word of God. For him, however, all the books of the Bible taught Christ.

Even though Christ, the material principle, and the Bible, the formal principle, constitute only one authority for the Christian Church, they must nevertheless be distinguished from each other. Those of neo-orthodox belief tend to exalt Christ at the expense of the Bible. Conversely, Rudolf Bultmann places a higher value on the Bible as preaching to the existential situation than he does on Jesus Christ. For Bultmann, Jesus is not the Jesus of Nazareth who died for sin but the “Christ” of belief who is found in preaching. The material principle. Christ’s atoning work as history, is inconsequential.

Unfortunately, Bultmann’s preoccupation with the “Christ of preaching” also leaves him with a Bible subject to his own existential interpretation. There is no objective person called Jesus Christ and hence no norm for his interpretation. Thus, despite his avowed devotion to Christ in the preached word of Scripture, Bultmann has neither a historical Christ nor an objectively reliable Bible.

Bultmann has failed to distinguish between Christ, the material principle, and the Scriptures as God’s Word, the formal principle. Just as in reading a newspaper account we distinguish between what we are reading and what has happened, so in reading the Scriptures we distinguish between the report itself, the formal principle, and the actual event, the material principle. For Bultmann, “Christ” is not an event of past history reported in the Bible; the report of the Bible is itself the “Christ event” for the reader. There is for him no difference between the “word” and “Christ.” Thus he has so confused Christ, the material principle, with the word about Christ, the formal principle, that he finds no real distinction between them.

Jesus Christ, the incarnate word of God, and the Bible, the written word of God, must be distinguished from each other, but together they constitute one single authority in the church, not two. Like love and marriage and the horse and carriage, they go together. Whoever worships a “Christ” not cradled in the Bible and swaddled in its words worships a false god and is guilty of “Christolatry.” If the charge of bibliolatry applies to anyone, it must certainly applies to Bultmann, whose Christ exists only in the Bible. His Christ neither lived, died, nor rose from the dead, nor is reigning with the Father, waiting to judge the world in righteousness. For him, “Christ” lives only in words as they confront man in the existential situation. The accusation of bibliolatry applies to Bultmann and not to those who through the Bible find Christ.

The answer to the question “Christ or the Bible?” is given when we substitute “in” for “or.” The answer is “Christ in the Bible.” This is the message of the Scriptures themselves, the Protestant Reformers, and the Church in all ages.

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.”

In the early days of the Christian Church, the supranational, one-world ideal founded by Alexander the Great and perpetuated in the Roman Empire was very much alive. Although Greece as a nation was eclipsed after it fell to the invincible phalanxes of the Roman army, the philosophy of Greece was revered even throughout the waning years of the empire and beyond. Thus, the libraries, museums, and general Hellenistic atmosphere of Alexandria made their impression on Clement and Origen just as surely as they did on Philo. And it was evident that as surely as the early Church Fathers were trained in the thought of their own day, so also would their ministries in the Church bear the impress of the thought and literature of Greece.

Not all the Fathers acquiesced in this Greek influence, of course. Tertullian, who is known for the rhetorical question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?,” labeled all efforts to reconcile pagan wisdom with Christianity a failure. Tatian, a great student of Justin Martyr (who was perhaps more dedicated to reconciling the Gospel with the wisdom of Greece than any other Father), betrays a hatred of all that belongs to Greek civilization, art, science, and language. And Valentine, too, distrusted the rationalism of Hellenistic thought and, in ecstatic vision, felt he had seen its fall.

It is notable, however, that each of these men was a heretic. The more orthodox Fathers used the wisdom of Greece for Christian ends. Hugo Rahner, taking the Odyssey as a prime conveyor of the Greek spirit and outlook, has shown at great length how the teachers of the Church availed themselves of this myth, adapting it to Christian interpretation (Die Griechische Mythen in Christlicher Deutung, Zürich, 1957). Since the words of Homer were well known, both within the Church and outside it, Christian writers found them to be convenient pegs upon which to hang Christian truth. And the method was largely successful, even though much of what was written seems forced to us today.

A famous example of the Christian use of pagan myths is found in the letter of Clement of Rome to Corinth. Chapter 25 of this letter uses as the crowning evidence for the doctrine of the resurrection the ancient myth of the Phoenix, the bird that was thought to be reborn at five-hundred-year intervals from its own ashes. Clement, however, speaks of this bird not as myth but as historical reality, and we may assume that in this belief, as in other things also, he was a true child of his age. Another example of affinity between the Fathers and Greek philosophy is the attempt by Justin and others to make “pre-Christian Christians” of Socrates and other outstanding pagan figures.

Clearly, then, the Hellenistic thought-world had some effect upon the early Church Fathers. But what was that effect? Hans F. von Campenhausen insists that the early Church had no true theology and never would have had without the influence of Greek philosophy. But can this be said of the teaching of the early Church or only of the system in which and the method by which distinctively Christian doctrine was organized? Was it doctrine that was borrowed or only structure?

The answer is found in the fact that the early Church subordinated what it borrowed to the authority of Holy Scripture. Adolph Harnack is no doubt correct in saying that when the Church broke with the Jews and turned to the Gentiles it was forced to adopt Gentile modes of expression and thought. Saul of Tarsus was indeed a Hellenist; but Paul was a Christian Hellenist who gave the remainder of his life to spreading the teachings of Scripture, and the content of his message came by revelation (Gal. 1:12).

It is undeniably true that the early Church used the great Greek epics. But the Fathers’ extensive use of Homer was possible because they interpreted him in the light of the Logos of John, not in the light of the logos of the Greek philosophers. John may have found the actual term logos in Greek philosophy, but the word was not merely adopted; it was adapted, given new and Christian content. Likewise, when Tertullian considered the then current use of the word quiescere to describe the state of the dead, he felt he should generally prefix a re-,thereby adding a sense of Christian eschatology, namely, that the end is a return.

It is often claimed that the Church borrowed not merely terminology and teaching devices but also the very beliefs of its contemporaries. But this is not easily demonstrated. The Fourth Eclogue of Vergil, written in the strife-ridden aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar, prophesies the birth of a child who would restore order, and important scholars have attempted to trace the birth narratives in the Gospels to this source. But to do this is to be more Hellenistic than the early Greek Christians were, for the early Church did not connect the Eclogue with the birth of Christ until the fourth century. Even then it was the Emperor Constantine who claimed it was a “prophecy of Christ.” This example actually shows that the Gospel reigned over the classics.

But did the opposite ever occur? Did myth and philosophy ever alter the content of the Gospel? This certainly happened in the apocryphal writings of the early church era and in the pseudo-Christian writings of the Gnostics. In fact, it was the appearance of such Gnostic writings as the “Gospels” of Thomas and Philip that necessitated official recognition of the canon. The early Fathers were never wholly able to subordinate their pre-Christian training to the word of Holy Scripture, either. And their writings, too, are rightly outside the canon. Even with respect to the very heart of the Gospel, the doctrine of grace, it is painfully evident how far even the earliest Church Fathers could drift from the New Testament (see T. F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, Grand Rapids, 1959).

Yet, for the most part, it was the early Fathers of the Church who successfully opposed heresy and the many attempts by Gnosticism to submerge the Gospel, and who also sought to gain a hearing for the faith by showing that it was compatible with much of what had been said by the great classical teachers. Perhaps it may be said that they exactly reversed the procedure of the Gnostics, who sought to blend Oriental myth with Greek philosophy, leaving only a small place for revelation.

Origen was well aware that Greek philosophy, if accepted as an all-inclusive system of truth, would contradict the Christian faith. But he was also aware that Christian dogma, though it has no base in philosophy, must be proclaimed in a way that is relevant to the existing philosophical climate if it is to get a hearing. Thus the Church wished to accommodate Greek thought while yet affirming the uniqueness of Christianity as the only way of salvation. It had abundant examples of what would happen if the word of Holy Scripture was not allowed to dominate in this relation.

Thus, against the mythology common to the day, the Church contrasted the opinion that the gods were historical heroes or kings who came to have deity ascribed to them with the biblical doctrines of monotheism, the Trinity, and Christ’s unique sonship and humiliation. And even though one today might be somewhat dismayed to find Clement of Rome relying on the Phoenix myth to bolster the doctrine of the resurrection or conceding supernatural powers to the oracles, a glance at the footnotes in a modern translation of his letter will amply demonstrate that Scripture was his prime authority.

It is striking that although almost all second-century Christian literature was written by Gentile believers, Hellenism can in no way be considered a dominant factor in it. The letters, addressed to Christians, as they generally are, seem totally independent of Hellenism and show an intense concern for the New Testament message. The apologetical writings that deal with Hellenism do so in order to show the superiority of Christian revelation.

The Church, then, was unwilling to receive truth from outside. And by the middle of the second century it had acknowledged the canon as the divinely given corpus of propositional revelation. It considered the Holy Scriptures sufficient, the only valid norm of thought and practice.

Tertullian was no doubt joined by many others in his opinion that Athens had nothing to offer the Christian, but Clement of Alexandria felt it best to try to preserve the Hellenistic breadth of thought and learning within the Church. He argued that the call of the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey was the call of classical mythology and thought. This Greek wisdom, if blindly followed, would lead to destruction. Yet the crew of the ship, whose ears Odysseus stopped with wax to spare them from temptation, were cowards. Odysseus was the hero, for he endured the trial, sailed by, and made his way to his home. Clement argued that to hear the wisdom of Greece is necessary for the full Christian experience but that to remain only with Greek wisdom is death. When the Greek word for siren was taken into the Septuagint (e.g., Job 30:29; Isa. 13:21, 22; Jer. 50:39) and when these sirens were exposited in Homeric fashion (in Jerome’s commentary on Isaiah, for example), the Homeric epic continued to convey Christian teaching for centuries.

The early Church considered itself totally bound by the authority of Holy Scripture and thought the worth of Greek wisdom relative and the worth of Greek religion non-existent. The Fathers drew upon their classical knowledge as a point of contact with their non-Christian contemporaries. Origen realized that he needed to study philosophy to see into the minds of the unchurched; like Clement of Alexandria, he studied it not primarily so he could teach it but in order to gain a hearing for Christian truth.

The classical culture that surrounded the early Church was not simply ignored. It was brought into subjection to Christ and the Scriptures he inspired. But then it was used as a point of contact for evangelizing Gentiles.

The implications for today are plain. Some forms of modern existentialism easily match Gnosticism in meaninglessness. Neo-platonic optimism about the power of reason finds its parallel in a scientism that thinks it has crowded the God of the Scriptures out of his universe. The spirit of Celsus—the platonist philosopher who was the author of the first notable attack on Christianity—is still with us, and it calls for many an Origen to reply. The times demand men who are truly men of the modern age but who bow before the words of God in 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.”

First of Two Parts

As an adjustment to the destructive biblical criticism of the last century and this one, much of Protestant theology has attempted to shift the Christian faith from an objective to a subjective footing. Christians have been told that the facts of biblical history do not matter for the life of faith, that our subjective understanding of Jesus is more important than historical knowledge of the events of his life and ministry. Many argue that theology and anthropology, not history, should be the concern of Christian thinkers.

This argument has an element of truth, for there is more to Christianity than historical facts; as a personal relationship with the living God, it has an indispensably large subjective element. But we cannot divorce the subjectivity of Christianity from its objective basis without destroying the nature and power of the Gospel. Christianity is a historical faith, and the events to which it refers are of its essence. Where the Church forgets that Jesus Christ actually lived and died in Palestine, that he demonstrated the truth of his claims to be the Son of God and Saviour of the world by his resurrection from the dead, there the force of the Gospel is lost and Christianity is inevitably swept away by the ebb tide of history.

On the other hand, where these events are recognized as true, there Christianity stands. For it rests upon the supernatural activity of the eternal and omnipotent God. The facts are essential for Christianity. Hence, the historical reliability of the Bible and particularly of the New Testament documents is immensely important for the advance of Christian faith.

The reliability of the New Testament is also important for the progress of theology, for theologies that do not regard the New Testament documents as trustworthy and authoritative inevitably decline into varying degrees of subjectivity. If the New Testament documents are not to be trusted, who is to say what happened in Palestine nineteen centuries ago and what did not? And if these events are unknowable or irrelevant for Christian faith, what is to keep that faith from merely conforming to or reflecting the cultural and intellectual thought-patterns of the theologian? Valid reasoning must have a valid point of reference. Hence, even the theological enterprise depends upon the reliability of the basic documents.

A purely historical approach to Christianity has its natural limitations. It cannot prove the theological significance of an event, for instance. Nor can it always deal adequately with what we know as miracles. It cannot establish the claim that the Bible is God’s revelation to men, or that it is entirely authoritative or infallible. Nevertheless, a defense of the reliability of the New Testament documents can emerge as a defense of the historical basis of the Christian faith and thus as a proclamation of those mighty acts of God which God himself sets before mankind.

Are the New Testament documents reliable? For over a century faith has answered its Yes in opposition to the adverse verdict of influential scholars. Today, however, thanks in large measure to advances in biblical and archeological studies, a significant shift is taking place in certain areas of biblical studies and scholars such as William Albright, Oscar Cullmann, F. F. Bruce, and Joachim Jeremias are arguing that the New Testament is in fact “what it was formerly believed to be: the teaching of Christ and his immediate followers between cir. 25 and cir. 80 A.D.” (William Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, p. 23). They are noting that much of the historical content of the New Testament is increasingly vindicated by archaeological research.

New postures in biblical scholarship are nowhere more apparent than in approaches to the Gospel of John. A generation ago all but the most conservative scholars gave John an exceptionally late dating, and few would credit the book with historical accuracy. For many writers, the Gospel of John was to be placed in a literary category of its own as something very much like theological fiction. Today, rejection of apostolic authorship is increasingly coming under attack as an inadequate explanation of the Gospel and its origins, and a renewed claim is being raised for the historical reliability of its narrative.

The so-called shift in scholarship has been pointed up by a number of authors, among them Cullmann, who speaks of “a new approach” to the interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Expository Times, 71, pp. 8–12, 39–43), and J. A. T. Robinson, who writes of the “new look” in Johannine studies (Twelve New Testament Studies, pp. 94–106). Comparing contemporary approaches to John’s Gospel, with the critical orthodoxy of the first half of the twentieth century, these scholars detect a tendency today to perceive a genuinely historical and even apostolic tradition in the Fourth Gospel and even to go so far as to recognize the evangelist (although perhaps not the author of the Gospel as it now stands) as a contemporary of Jesus Christ and an eyewitness of the events described. At least five factors have contributed to this new approach:

1. Increased knowledge of the New Testament period has led to general acknowledgment of the existence of a non-conformist Judaism in Palestine before the Christian era, a Judaism embracing genuine Hellenistic tendencies not far removed from the supposedly Greek elements that have always been noted in the Fourth Gospel. This increased knowledge is due in large measure to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and their publication in subsequent years. In particular, there is a growing readiness to recognize that the life and the literature of the Qumran community may represent the historical milieu out of which John the Baptist emerged with his message of repentance and baptism and also the historical background of the author of the Gospel.

An excellent illustration is to be found in the so-called Gnosticism of the Fourth Gospel, upon which much Johannine scholarship is built. This has often been considered a product of Hellenistic Christianity. Today it is increasingly recognized that the closest parallels to these Johannine themes are found, not in the thought of Asia Minor, but in what Bo Reicke, a Scandinavian scholar, calls the “pre-Gnostic” thought-forms of the Qumran community (New Testament Studies, 1, pp. 137–41). A. M. Hunter writes, listing K. G. Kuhn, Albright, Millar Burrows, W. H. Brownlee, Jeremias, and Reicke for support:

The dualism which pervades the Johannine writings is of precisely the same kind as we discover in the Dead Sea Scrolls; not physical or substantial (as in the Greek Gnostics) but monotheistic, ethical, and eschatological [Expository Times, 71, p. 166].

It is also to be noted that other themes apparently Hellenistic (the Logos, life, and light) are essentially the products of Jewish modes of thought.

This argument for the reliability of the Fourth Gospel asserts, not that the fourth evangelist himself emerged from the environment of Qumran—few would argue this—but that the Dead Sea Scrolls provide tangible evidence for the existence in Palestine, even in the southern and most Jewish sectors of the country, of a body of ideas perfectly adequate to account for the distinctive beliefs and thought-forms evident in the Gospel. Robinson, assessing the historical background, says:

I detect a growing readiness to recognize that this is not to be sought at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second, in Ephesus or Alexandria, among the Gnostics or the Greeks. Rather, there is no compelling need to let our gaze wander very far, either in space or in time, beyond a fairly limited area of southern Palestine in the fairly limited interval between the crucifixion and the fall of Jerusalem [Twelve New Testament Studies, pp. 98, 99].

He adds that the Dead Sea Scrolls “may really represent an actual background, and not merely a possible environment, for the distinctive categories of the gospel.”

2. The reliability of the Johannine topography, vindicated by recent archaeological discovery, also points in its own way to the author’s familiarity with southern Palestine and to the historical trustworthiness of the narrative. The evangelist mentions several places known to the Synoptic writers that might therefore be known generally through tradition: Cana of Galilee (2:1; 21:2), the Praetorium (18:28, 33; 19:9), and Bethany (11:18). But he also speaks accurately of Ephraim (11:54), Sychar, which is probably to be identified with Shechem at Tell Balatah (4:5), Solomon’s Porch (10:23), the brook Kidron, which Jesus crossed to reach Gethsemane (18:1), and Bethany beyond Jordan, which he distinguishes from the other Bethany only fifteen furlongs from Jerusalem (1:28). In recent years the reliability of the writer’s knowledge of Jerusalem has received additional verification by the discovery of an old reservoir with five porticoes near the sheep gate, undoubtedly correspond-to the Pool of Bethesda (5:2), and by identification of the Pavement of judgment, Gabbatha (19:13), as an area in the northwest corner of the temple enclosure bordering on the tower of Antonia.

The most striking of the archaeological discoveries is the probable identification of Aenon near Salim, where there were “many waters” (3:23), with Ainun (“little fountain”), lying near the headwaters of the Wadi Farah. The author’s accurate reference to such an obscure site indicates a remarkable familiarity with the area of the Jordan, and the general knowledge of Jerusalem and its environments he displays argues strongly that his information about Palestine was firsthand.

3. Of equal importance with the increased knowledge of conditions in Palestine during the Christian era is a greater sensitivity to the uniqueness in content of the Fourth Gospel, resulting from an intensified comparison of the text with the Synoptic narratives.

At one time the very uniqueness of the final Gospel would have been taken as an argument for its historical unreliability and as a sign of the distance in time between its composition and the events it describes. Today this is no longer so. With the shift in interest in New Testament studies generally from specific problems of authorship to the gospel traditions that the individual compositions represent, there has come a new awareness of the potential reliability of any independent testimony and a willingness to accept the unique Johannine traditions as being at least as old as the traditions represented by the Synoptics. Many scholars today regard the case for a literary dependence of John on the Synoptics as unproven and improbable. Some even consider the possibility of a dependence of the Synoptics upon John. The weightiest work in English to advance the case for literary independence is the exhaustive examination of Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel by C. H. Dodd. Although Dodd prefers to leave the question of authorship in abeyance, his whole work is designed to show that “behind the Fourth Gospel lies an ancient tradition independent of the other gospels, and meriting serious consideration as a contribution to our knowledge of the historical facts concerning Jesus Christ” (p. 423).

In this area of Johannine studies, few dismiss the theological nature or even the original character of John’s work; but many now regard his teaching to be at least as old as the Pauline theology and, in terms of the tradition, as historically reliable as the Synoptic Gospels on those points where the narrative is to be taken as a history.

4. The new recognition of the possibility of John’s authorship of the Fourth Gospel or of a genuine eyewitness experience as a basis of the traditions it incorporates has been given added stimulus by the attempts to find within the Gospel traces of Aramaic idiom or of original Aramaic documents that are supposed to underlie it. This area of research has been controversial. But though the case of Charles Burney and C. C. Torrey for an Aramaic original of the Fourth Gospel (in Torrey’s case of all four Gospels) has hardly met with general acceptance, it seems quite probable, nonetheless, that a strong Semitic idiom does underlie part of the Fourth Gospel, if not the whole. This may be indicative of a Hebrew- or Aramaic-speaking author who composed his narrative in Greek. Dodd observes that “the evidence for an underlying Semitic idiom is irresistible” and that “this in itself brings the gospel back into a Jewish environment, of which we must take account” (The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, p. 75).

In itself this factor may not prove the existence of an Aramaic-speaking author, but it does make it difficult to associate the Gospel solely with Hellenistic thought-currents or to locate its historical background exclusively in Asia Minor and see it as a representation of Greekspeaking Christianity. Taken together with the other items mentioned, this factor substantially increases the probability that the witness who stands behind the Gospel and to whom must be attributed a share of the actual composition, if not the authorship of the whole, was a Jew of Palestine and thus a possible eyewitness of the events of Christ’s ministry.

5. The final factor that has weighed heavily in an assessment of the Johannine authorship of the Gospel is the belated discovery by critical scholars that the so-called theological (Clement calls it a “spiritual”) interest of the Gospel does not militate against an equally serious attention to the facts.

Not many would doubt today that John is concerned with what has been called for lack of a better term “the Christ of faith.” He affirms indeed that “the flesh is of no avail” (6:63) and asserts repeatedly, as in the account of the post-resurrection appearance to Thomas, that belief must take precedence over sight. But for John the Christ of faith includes the Jesus of history, and belief, though it represents a step beyond the evidence, nevertheless is based upon it. In fact, as Robinson believes, the notion that the Christ of faith can be had apart from the Jesus of history is “exactly the error which, to judge from the prologue and the epistles, he was most concerned to combat” (Twelve New Testament Studies, p. 100). A recognition of these facts has led some scholars to speak of a twofold concern in John’s approach to history, a concern, as Cullmann expresses it, for “faith in the Jesus of history as the ‘Christ’ ” (Early Christian Worship, p. 38). Or as Edwyn C. Hoskyns writes, “The visible, historical Jesus is the place in history where it is demanded that men should believe” (The Fourth Gospel, p. 85). If these two interests are really interwoven, then it is hard to see how the spiritual interests could be maintained without an equally serious attention to the history and how the historical interest could be genuine without an equal concern for verified historical material. It is contributory to this line of thought that John places an exceptional importance on the facts and in particular upon verification of the facts by those who witnessed them.

It would be unwarranted, of course, to suggest that the question of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel is now receiving an answer radically different from that given by scholars a decade or two ago. Because of the opening up of these new interests, the question of authorship has actually assumed a less important place and has received much less direct discussion. At the same time, however, it is warranted to speak of a shift in Johannine studies according to which scholars more readily admit the possibility of apostolic authorship and speak even more surely of a primitive and reliable tradition underlying the historical material of the Gospel.

[To be continued]

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

We have received welcome notice that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has been elected for indexing in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, and that indexing of our 1968 issues will begin in the February 25 issue of the Guide. This recognition of broad general interest in the content of CHRISTIANITY TODAY should encourage the availability of the magazine on public library shelves throughout the nation. There are about 17,000 library subscribers to Readers’ Guide, one of the valuable reference works published by The H. W. Wilson Company of New York.

There is more good news. While most magazines, both secular and religious, are showing a marked drop in advertising, total advertising linage in CHRISTIANITY TODAY for 1967 will register a solid 15 per cent gain. Advertising manager Dave Rehmeyer reports that the current issue includes a record total of 732 inches of advertising copy. That is a very pleasant trend. But since not a single religious journal of significant size or influence on the American scene now pays its own way (all are subsidized either by interested individuals or by churches), the prospect of a self-supporting magazine remains as remote for us, in the foreseeable future, as for other religious publications.