A great weakness is apparent in the modern pattern of the Christian churches. Local churches have become so institutionalized that many members think of their responsibility only as sustaining and promoting the institutional church. Running the machinery has become the foremost concern of both clergy and laity, and little time or energy is left for going out beyond the church walls to reach non-Christians personally. A typical church member will think he is doing his job adequately if he invites a non-Christian to his church, then waits patiently for the minister or the evangelist to do the converting.

The thinking that underlies this modern pattern might be called a “fortress mentality.” The local church is like a fortress. There Christians are secure and everything is orderly. Christians hold dress parades within the fortress, impressing themselves and visiting dignitaries with their successful interior build-up. Often they have lost the will and the courage to venture out to battle in the secular wilderness.

The average pastor has this fortress mentality. His first concern is membership, program, edifice, and finances. His second is his denomination. If he longs for fellowship with his peers, he finds it among his fellow ministers. If he is frustrated by the limited opportunity within his own church, he finds expression in the denominational program. Many ministers spend very little time evangelizing non-Christians and devote more and more time to board meetings, committees, denominational gatherings, and ministerial fellowships.

As the pastor goes, so goes the congregation. The laymen too become church-minded. When they rise to positions of responsibility within the local church after years of minor service, they usually have not developed the desire or the ability to evangelize. And they resent newcomers who have. Evangelistic zeal and ability on the part of new Christians calls into question the dedication of complacent church members. Therefore, if zealous members begin to go out to call on non-Christians, complacent members criticize their efforts. If the pastor decides to go out to call on non-members, the old guard are likely to complain of being neglected. Presumably their pastor is wasting his time on people who don’t support the church.

To avoid being misunderstood I must clarify my position at two points. First, I am not making a sweeping judgment of all pastors and all laymen. Many notable and glorious exceptions are free of the fortress mentality. Many local churches are world-directed. Second, I am not against the local church but against the local-church fixation. I am not against the fortress; I am against the fortress mentality. Local churches are ultimately established by the Lord and not by men, and Christ is pleased to dwell in them, bless them, and establish his witness through them in the world. But it is certainly presumptuous to think that Christ is satisfied with the state of the local churches today.

How can we overcome the fortress mentality? The answer can be found only through prayer, diligent study of the Scriptures, and faith that expresses itself in persistent experimentation.

I have a concrete suggestion—“paratroop evangelism.” The name comes from the military maneuver of dropping soldiers by parachute into the midst of the enemy as advance units to capture and hold strong points beyond the front line. The principle in paratroop evangelism is to send laymen out into the world outside the church walls to win those who would never step inside.

These men should give this task top priority in their lives and commit themselves to winning specific people. They should forego all activities within the local church except corporate worship, prayer, and Bible study. Four or five such men should meet once a month in an evangelistic workshop to pray and to share their experiences in personal evangelism. Attendance at these monthly meetings must be given top priority, above all other responsibilities. When one of these men has led someone to Christ, he is to guide him closely in prayer, Bible study, and training in personal evangelism, so that the new convert immediately becomes another “paratrooper” working in the secular world.

In due time paratroop evangelism will bring into the local church new Christians with fresh dedication to build the church and to continue the evangelistic outreach.

No doubt many pastors will hesitate to set aside their few key laymen for such a program. They will say that these laymen are indispensable for jobs within the church. But this is a sure road to stagnation. In this situation, very few new adult members come into the church. The same few people are asked to serve over and over again until they are spiritually and physically exhausted. Many resign. Those who do stay on for decades become the old guard, resistant to any change.

Although the temporary sacrifice of the presence of key men in the church may be great, the only alternative to an evangelistic outreach in a church is stagnancy.

After the 1967 Presidential Prayer Breakfast, a group of newspaper correspondents and religion writers in Washington, D. C., met for a symposium. They discussed the special duty of laymen whose vocations engage them influentially in the mass media in a time of moral crisis.

Participants were Leland A. Bandy, Washington correspondent of the “Columbia (S. C.) State”; Mrs. Lillian Brooks Brown, TV-radio program coordinator, American University; Louis Cassels, religion editor, United Press International; Miss Ella F. Harllee, president, Educational Communication Association; David E. Kucharsky, associate editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY; Edmund B. Lambeth, Washington Bureau, Gannett Newspapers; Al Manola, editor, NAHB “Journal of Homebuilding”; Caspar Nannes, religion editor, “Washington Evening Star”; and William Willoughby, Washington correspondent for Religious News Service. Moderating the discussion was Editor Carl F. H. Henry ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Henry: Everyone here presumably has a spiritual commitment and is related to the world of the mass media in a time of moral crisis in world history. A few years ago when I was interviewing Charles Malik, former chairman of the United Nations General Assembly, he said in the course of the interview, “Jesus Christ is the hinge of history.” Now, if we are church-related, and vocationally engaged at frontiers of the mass media, in a time of ethical and spiritual crisis, does some special obligation accrue to us to give visibility to Jesus Christ as the hinge of history? And if so, how? Again, over and above being skillful journalists in respect to all that good journalism implies as a vocation, do we have any responsibility of putting the right questions to our generation, of forcing upon it a struggle for answers to the right questions? Is it our duty to force a critical examination of accepted values and unconscious assumptions?

Lambeth: This is the first time that I’ve ever really attempted to answer this question—not from an individual point of view, because we’ve all sweated out stories, asking ourselves how we should handle them, and whether we are being honest, in reporting—but in a corporate sense, having to sit down with colleagues and thresh around the problem.

Kucharsky: It might be well to look back in history and see how people in related professions have done. So far as journalists go, the only monumental case that I can think of is Milton’s Areopagitica, which does a tremendous job of relating faith to a current problem—a problem that was current then and is even current now. Certainly in the field of literature and art, people were creative as a result of their Christian commitment in a way that we’re not seeing today.

Lambeth: The thought that lodges in mind this morning as an obvious opener is that some of the most responsible and hard-hitting daily journalism comes from non-Christians. I think that needs saying, first because Christians obviously have no monopoly on editing or reporting skill. Neither do Christian journalists have any corner on commitment to solving the problems that plague us now, twenty centuries after the time of Jesus. But most importantly, I think the point needs to be made because one of the significant contributions a Christian reporter can make may lie in an area that is rooted in but goes beyond his daily duties.

Bandy: I agree that our moral obligation extends beyond our professional lives. I think it extends to our own private and personal lives.

Cassels: But anybody who tells you that you can do Christian service only “after hours,” in a part-time way, when explicitly talking about what the Bible says, does a great disservice. For Christ spoke of the believing community, the community of faith, as a leaven that is most effective when it is lost into the loaf. It doesn’t stand up and say, “I am the leaven, look at me.” It just does its work. I think you are most truly discharging your Christian vocation when you are being a good newspaper man. If I understand it correctly, Martin Luther’s doctrine of vocation, which is one of the unsung glories of the Protestant heritage, says precisely this. It is not only when the cobbler is on his knees praying that he is being a Christian, but also when the cobbler is on his bench making a good pair of shoes. From what I heard, you are discharging your Christian vocation now, and I’ve no doubt you’re doing it tremendously well. You should know this, and have the satisfaction of knowing that your nine-to-five work is a true Christian vocation.

Henry: Let’s agree that at the very least Christianity has implications for everyone’s private morality, and for a spirituality that requires personal commitment. But the cobbler who doesn’t make a good pair of shoes can do as much harm to his Christian testimony through his vocation as all the time that he spends …

Lambeth: I couldn’t agree with you more. I don’t deny that. If I had to weigh the two in the balance, I would probably say being a good reporter is the more important on a percentage basis. But when the question is asked, what special obligation is on our shoulder by relationship to the media, then over and above that I feel that Martin Marty hits on a valid point. Let me quote a review of Marty’s work by Time magazine (Dec. 7,1964): “Marty speculates that the embattled Christian minority—now 28 per cent of the world population—will continue to shrink under the advance of hostile systems and because of its own internal weaknesses. Only those Christians who are ‘heavily oriented toward Biblical interpretation, historical thought and contemporary analysis’ can, in Marty’s view, minister to a changing world. ‘It may be questioned,’ he writes, ‘whether the churches have really taken seriously the possibility that the believing community might virtually disappear.’ ” I don’t accept the view—and I don’t think many do—that only those Christians heavy on biblical training and contemporary analysis can minister to today’s world. Far from it. But Marty seems very close to the mark when he says that such persons are sorely needed in a world that increasingly challenges the idea of Jesus as Lord. It would seem that a source of such talent, perhaps neglected, is the daily and weekly press. Certainly no group has a better window on the “real world”—of poverty amid affluence, of rapid technological change and scientific promise, of bureaucracy, both public and private.

Bandy: We as journalists should report these problems—poverty, civil rights, and so forth. But as individual Christians I think we sit back, and while aware of these problems, all we do is sit around and discuss them. I think there is a question of involvement as individual Christians which comes up here.

Nannes: I’d like to put it in the press frame, as far as I’m concerned. Your question here is, What duty does the fact of our vocational relationship to the mass media impose upon us in this time of moral and spiritual crisis? I think we should divide our jobs, particularly those of us directly concerned with newspapers, into two areas. First, there is the area of just reporting a meeting. I think one would satisfy his Christian responsibility by reporting the meeting honestly, fairly, and completely; I don’t think one has any right to go beyond that when meeting such as we did here today [the Presidential Prayer Breakfast], The other aspect is when a writer has a place where he can express himself with some allowance for subjectivity, as one does when writing a column. And in that sense one can bring out Christian convictions in relation to the questions that are affecting and plaguing the world today. But as working newspaper men I think we must clearly differentiate those two areas.

Henry: Do you all accept the premise, if I represent it rightly, that interpretative reporting is allowable only in the writing of columns and doesn’t in any way intrude into news?

Cassels: Interpretative reporting shouldn’t get subjective. There might be a middle ground between the two.

Manota: Everybody who works in Washington and knows anything about the newspaper business recognizes how far the Washington Post, for example, has gone beyond the bounds of what was normally considered interpretative reporting when its news stories express opinions.

Willoughby: I have serious misapprehensions about the religious press falling unwittingly into the trap I choose to call ecumenical overkill. By that I mean the practice of ascribing, often to the point of ludicrousness, the flavor of the ecumenical spirit or ecumenism to anything and everything, regardless of how insignificant or fabricated the interfaith aspect of an event might be. For instance, Francis Cardinal Spellman and Billy Graham were invited to the White House for lunch with the President. United Nations Ambassador Arthur Goldberg also was there. I played the story straight, for what I saw it was worth, and noticed afterwards that the wire services had done the same. But a rewrite man encased the whole thing—not at all designed as an ecumenical encounter by the President—in the overworked language of ecumenism: the Catholic archbishop, the Baptist evangelist, the Disciples President, and the Jewish ambassador. It mattered only secondarily that the real concern was front-line reports by the religious leaders on the war in Viet Nam. A thin, tawdry veneer of “ecumenical spirit” was made the illicit carrying force of a story that moved along well on its own legitimate merits. Ecumenism and manifestations of the ecumenical spirit are legitimate forces at work in the world today. The faithful newsman, naturally, is fully aware of that and reports it for what it is. But he also is able to see behind the scenes. Much that, on the surface, at least, appears to be genuine interfaith, ecumenical concern is but a thinly disguised promotion gimmick under the label of a peace rally, a congressional hearing, or a rights protest. Public relationists know full well that if in some manner they can get the interfaith aspect across, they’re going to get much more space in the news media than if they did it denuded of the banner of ecumenism. As I see it, ecumenism is a powerful force at work among the religionists of our day. But it can carry its own weight. Newsmen need to discern the props planted by enthusiasts and at the same time not add props of their own. Ecumenical overkill only garbles the real message.

Lambeth: I want to second what Caspar Nannes said about a rigid line between news stories, interpretative stories, and columns of opinion. The point I am trying to make will be completely missed if I leave an impression that biblically based interpretation of events is something I recommend for the daily or weekly press in this country. Indeed, there are compelling professional and other reasons to keep the daily or weekly press secular. Readers, it should go without saying, are entitled to objectivity. Interpretation, when it is needed, should be free from a reporter’s theological leanings. But in the nation’s magazines of opinion and perhaps on the air waves, a newsman—committed, yet not a zealot—can make an important contribution. None of this is to downgrade the daily, nine-to-five work of a journalist attempting to be a Christian. The story—accurate, objective, and fully told—is a good day’s gift. Some will say, for good reasons, that this is enough. Yet I think an obligation—no, I should say opportunity—exists for the Christian journalist to enter a larger dialogue. It is not so much that he has any special corner on “truth” as it is that he moves in orbits that can contribute uniquely to the placing of modern life in a Christian context.

Henry: My impression is that the line is not to be drawn between interpretative and non-interpretative reporting. All history is selective, and probably no one has to be more selective in the reporting of facts because of pressures of space and time than the journalist writing a news story. He has to distinguish between what he thinks is important and what he thinks is unimportant. And isn’t the difference between interpretative reporting and objectionably subjective reporting a recasting of material to reflect highly subjective prejudices? Isn’t the wisdom of the ages a proper climate for all interpretation? Doesn’t it lead us again to the question of raising the right issues or pressing upon our generation the need to answer certain basic questions about the values and uncritical assumptions of our time? Would this in any way intrude upon our proper journalistic role?

Manola: It seems to me that you’re trying to force us to say that people in the communication media should use their position to get across either the wisdom of the ages or their own personal wisdom. The Washington Post for thirty years had a city editor who was a devout Catholic. If a robe slipped off a bishop, there was a big story in the Washington Post. Down South, if an editor happens to be a Southern Baptist, the front page is full of it. This is absurd.

Cassels: I think the biggest danger of all in our business is succumbing to the temptation to be a propagandist instead of a reporter. The people who do succumb to that temptation invariably believe they are doing it for a righteous cause. They’re always sure God is on their side.

Bandy: Well, I’m not involved in religious writing as such on Capitol Hill, which is 100 per cent pure politics. But I feel that as a Christian I have a moral obligation to report the news honestly, fairly, and objectively. And as a Christian I do not think my life is divided between the secular and the sacred. I feel that everything I do is sacred. But that doesn’t mean I have to be a crusader in my hard news copy for theology or religion. I think I am setting an example as a Christian by reporting the hard news honestly, fairly, and objectively.

Henry: I just don’t yield the premise that anyone is wholly objective in reporting information. If those of us now gathered around this table were reporting the events in the New Testament Gospels, or the Acts, some very illuminating material would likely be deleted or recast.

Cassels: I would much rather have these people reporting it than somebody who thought that he should put the stamp of what he deeply believed to be right and true upon whatever he expressed. The most wicked, essentially unchristian, and sinful thing a reporter can do is to smuggle into his treatment of a story his own deep convictions, because the person who is most certain of his own righteousness is precisely the one who is most likely to do a propaganda job.

Nannes: Every once in awhile we’ve gotten into discussions with some of our people whose meetings we are covering. They become quite indignant about the fact that we may report something which is unpleasant to them. I feel very strongly that newspapers must not be propagandists for religion or any religious body. But 96 per cent of what religion and religious bodies do is good, and just the solid reporting of it is doing a service without our going out of our way. On the other hand, we should not be asked to gloss over errors—and worse—that sometimes occur among church people. To do that is not honest reporting, or being an honest Christian or religious man, at all. Now as to the question: sure, no man can be completely objective, because in his selection of what he is going to write about, his own personal evaluation must come in. But there is all the difference in the world between somebody who is trying as hard as he can to be objective and somebody who is trying to slant a story so as to reflect his own particular views.

Memo To Missionaries

You can’t find a single evangelical magazine in the United States on the average newsstand, not a single one. As a matter of fact, you can’t find any religious periodical of any kind, evangelical or otherwise. And with all the millions of magazine pages printed in this country each week, covering everything from stamp collecting to skiing, not one publication is used primarily for newsstand evangelism. Spiritually hungry souls have no publication readily available to help them find Christ. How can we address another culture when the culture that we’re most familiar with has no such medium? At this all-important phase of modern communication, we’re closed off from the world, hiding our light.

Another major point on which our communications breakdown occurs is the lack of liaison with the secular press. What kind of contact do you have with the foreign correspondent in the area that you serve and the people that work even with the national newspapers, people who are the professional communicators and who will reach the mass audiences? How many of you have ever called upon a foreign correspondent in your work overseas, just for any reason at all—to befriend him, perhaps, or to give him a tip?

Don’t worry about getting your work publicized; that’ll come in time, because he’s after stories much more than you’re after getting your work publicized.

People want to read about what’s going on in the foreign missionary enterprise. And yet CHRISTIANITY TODAY receives less missionary news than any other kind. We’re flooded with other news, but it’s hard to come by good missionary news, to find out what’s going on in foreign countries where Christians are proclaiming the Word of God. Then you good missionaries, for some reason or other, sit on the news until it’s too stale for us to use, or you fail to give us the substance of the story. I sometimes despair. Why can’t we get at least a few people overseas to write some engaging copy with color and clarity?

I believe the work of the Lord would be enhanced if all persons connected with religious work would be prepared to recognize a news story.

I think we need people today who are bold and who are willing to be guided by the Holy Spirit and pioneer in new territory, and I commend it to you in the area of literature.—DAVID E. KUCHARSKY, associate editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, in remarks to Evangelical Literature Overseas regional conference in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.

Willoughby: A news writer on religion needs to be careful that he does not carry his own bias on religion into his stories. I, personally, am of conservative Protestant persuasion in religion and of liberal persuasion in politics and social implementation. Others of you, I know, are of liberal theological persuasion. It is easy for you and me, if we are not extremely careful, to approach religious news with our own biases, through jaundiced eyes. I do not mean that we would editorially distort our reporting, but we could editorialize either by emphasis or by underemphasis. For instance, a writer of liberal theological persuasion or with a theologically libertarian viewpoint might tend to downgrade a Billy Graham or an “old-time religion” oration by Senator Everett Dirksen—or, at the other extreme of the conservative spectrum, what might be a perfectly valid statement made by Carl Mclntire on a timely and pertinent topic. On the other hand, anything a Malcolm Boyd, Harvey Cox, or even Bishop Pike might say would get top billing. In other words, if the liberal writer thinks Boyd or Cox or Pike is more relevant to today’s needs (and the writer must make this evaluation on what he personally thinks the needs of man and the Church are), he will give him the copy, no matter what he says (or how). Another man on the other side of the religious scene, regarded in the writer’s eyes as not sophisticated in his view and therefore less relevant, will be passed over or toned down. The conservatively oriented writer, on the other hand, might look askance at Boyd or Cox or Pike and tend to give them the same treatment. But, in the final analysis, so far as the public is concerned, does one man’s pronouncement necessarily carry more validity than the other’s? Are, too, the views of a Bishop Pike any less irresponsible than anything a Carl Mclntire might say? Does it necessarily follow, carrying the argument a step further, that merely because the religion editor of a newspaper happens to be a Unitarian, the most extensively quoted messages appearing in the Monday columns are those of Unitarians, when there are hundreds of ministers in the same city each Sunday who are saying something at least as significant?

Manola: Reporters should not be judges. They are onlookers; they have a responsibility to let people know as factually as possible what they see and what is happening. The thing that I’m afraid of is that in order to bring one’s Christian commitment into his work, and show it in his work, one is going to have to judge and evaluate people and actions from the standpoint of that commitment.

Willoughby: There exists among some writers on the religious aspect of the news the foregone conclusion that religious and quasi-religious organizations are always the “good guys” in a dispute, and that, for example, any government agency involved is to be numbered among the “bad guys.” Since much of the news on religion that has strong religio-political bearings originates in Washington, it is unfortunate that this news is still so loosely probed. Many times the real significance is occluded because a writer or editor is carried along on the spur of some potshot at a government agency or individual.

Henry: Must religious reporting cover movements and events only within the assumptions of the particular groups that are making the news? It ought of course to reflect those assumptions faithfully, to give visibility to the assumptions on which the work is being done. Can it with propriety set these assumptions alongside other long-range assumptions in assessing the distinctiveness of any movement? Does the discussion of long-range concerns from the lively perspective of history involve a reporter in any objectionable manifestation of subjectivism?

Harllee: Could I ask, in the field of journalism here, what the function of the denominational newspaper is as opposed to the secular newspaper? Is there a special justification in the denominational newspaper, let us say, for this type of approach?

Nannes: Of course, the denominational newspaper, by the mere fact that it is a denominational newspaper, has—I don’t know whether the word bias is too strong—but at least a point of view which we accept, just as when we read a column. We know a certain columnist will reflect, let us say, a liberal point of view, and when we start reading his column we accept that premise immediately. It’s the same with denominational newspapers. They completely justify their existence, and I like to read them. But their approach is completely different from that of the ordinary newspaper.

Brown: How far do I carry personal commitment and how far do I carry professional mandate? I’m a television producer at the American University. I’ve just put on a new show which I’m sure I put on because I’m a Christian. It’s going to be called “Communicate!” The thirteen shutters will each feature a chaplain of a different faith, and each chaplain will bring interfaith students to the cameras in one of our major television stations simply to kick around the ideas that they have—in other words, to communicate with each other. My personal commitment has made me do something in the field of religion. But my professional mandate from a commercial station is that I make it interfaith and hold no jurisdiction over the chaplains as to subjects and over what students say.

Manola: I can sympathize with you because I’m a member of the executive committee of the Radio and Television Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. We have produced programs which they tell me resulted in $3.5 million worth of free time, including the network slice. Our radio and TV programs include the “sell,” but it’s “soft.”

Brown: I think that kids are beating their brains out to figure out who they are, whether they’re Christians or whether they’re beatniks or what. Giving them a chance to talk this over with a responsible person helps them sort out all their opinions. Making it totally interfaith and giving it no mandate at all is really maybe the best you can do. But my show is not a religious show.

Harllee: It’s so frustrating in a sense, because the whole issue is raised here in the broadcasting field. My experience has been that we really have a terrible dilemma. From our mail we keep discovering that religion has yet to be a personal thing as far as reaching the man where he is out there in the television audience or radio audience. You can theorize, you can be impersonal, you can try to be impartial; but it seems to us that the need of people remains a real need. They look to a personality who can interpret this.

Bandy: I think the problem of shrinking Christianity is that we’ve got too many professionals and not enough laymen working at it.

A Princeton professor protests the worst incursion of churchmen into political affairs since the Middle Ages

THE EDITOR

The 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society fanned into a crackling fire the long-smoldering discontent of many churchmen and laymen over the political activity of the World Council of Churches. Last week this criticism gained strength through the publication of a sharply worded book entitled Who Speaks for the Church? (Abingdon, $2.45). In it Dr. Paul Ramsey, a well-known Princeton professor, turns a piercing spotlight of condemnation upon the ecumenical establishment’s involvement in political policymaking.

Professor Ramsey not only castigates the WCC hierarchy for procedures and conclusions of the Geneva Conference but also declares that neo-Protestant political incursion shatters all Reformation precedent and the modern Roman papacy in welcome contrast.

Ramsey was an invited observer who as “co-opted staff” attended background discussion sections barred to other observers in Geneva. His bold rejection of WCC procedures and policy pronouncements therefore greatly embarrasses conciliar spokesmen who recently have dismissed all protest as an unworthy reaction either of right-wing extremists or of ecumenical malcontents. Ramsey’s brilliant, hard-hitting critique of ecumenical ethics is more important, and more authentic, than any volume yet to emerge from the Geneva Conference on Church and Society.

“As a Protestant,” he writes, “I, at least, am resolved to stand with Luther against both pope and council, or the pope in council, Visser’t Hooft in council, or Blake in council, unless I can be shown from Scripture and sound reason.”

Ramsey’s criticisms of conciliar political involvement are not unlike those appearing in recent years in CHRISTIANITY TODAY and in this writer’s volume on Aspects of Christian Social Ethics. Ramsey asserts that: (1) the list of policy-making specifics is both beyond the competency of the Church and beyond the facts; (2) the right of church bodies to take a particular stand on controversial secular issues is questionable; (3) there is no “common” mind in the Church and among churchmen on the meaning of a “responsible society”; and (4) rather than prolong the pretense that the Church is a maker of political policy, the Church should nourish, judge, and repair the moral and political ethos.

As he calls contemporary Christianity to clarify the Church’s message about the meaning of Christian life in the world today, the Princeton professor vigorously criticizes the NCC and WCC for wrong methods and wrong goals. Since his volume appears on the threshold of the NCC Study Conference on Church and Society, to be held October 22–26 in Detroit, Michigan, it inevitably raises the question whether that program as it stands will perpetuate the errors of Geneva, or whether its procedures will be altered. Detroit seems to presuppose that the Geneva report, which engages the churches in world economic involvement, has Christian warrant. Actually, as Ramsey states, “the Geneva Report cannot be made the basis or a basis for future discussion.”

Ecumenical discussion of socio-political matters, Ramsey insists, is currently being deflected to specific policy questions, and the institutional church is hurriedly being mobilized behind a staggering number of resolutions that support particular positions. The appeal to “what God is doing in the world” to promote ad hoc positions camouflages a “distintegrated Christian understanding” (p. 21) resulting from the secularization of the Church, says Ramsey; moreover, the repeated WCC appeal to the Old Testament prophets ignores the fact that the Church is not related to the state as was Israel.

Ramsey, a cautious supporter of U. S. involvement in Viet Nam and a critic of pacifist pleas for unilateral withdrawal, concedes that his personal views on many important social issues differ from those of the ecumenical establishment. His criticism, however, is not that the ecumenical movement has endorsed wrong particular positions (and that it should have endorsed his own alternatives) but rather that the Church has advocated positions that cannot be adduced from Christian social ethics as such.

“Identification of Christian social ethics with specific partisan proposals that clearly are not the only ones that may be characterized as Christian and as morally acceptable comes close to the original and the New Testament meaning of heresy. It introduces divisions into the life that may properly be a confession of the faith of the church.”

An authentically “ecumenical ethics,” Ramsey insists, will mean that churchmen “will no longer be able to speak as if there is a closer identification between Christian social ethics and the policy making of the Secular City than was asserted even in the Middle Ages.”

Ramsey’s criticism reaches back to the Sixth World Order Study Conference (St. Louis, 1965), a conclave that in addressing the political scene exceeded what could clearly be said “on the basis of Christian truth and insights.” Such statements adopt “a pose of being prophetic in criticism of present policy and in support of some alternate policy” although they involve churchmen beyond their competence and arrogate to the Church decisions that belong to the state. What these churchmen offer to modern statesmen is not the “political wisdom” of the Church but a biased reading of the issues in the interest of some particular line of action.

Ramsey scorns the notion of some leading ecumenists that their “specific-policy-making exercises are events in salvation history.” The Church and Society Syndrome, as he depicts it, assumes that “satyrlike statements of moral fact” are “within the scope of prophecy and precise preaching, and within the competence of Christian deliberation.… Unless statements of ethico-political principle are distinguished from specific applications the integrity of the secular office of political prudence is clouded.”

“Protestantism, especially, has today conjoined assertedly momentary prophetic response to God’s will and action with concrete political decision making, to the confusion of all distinctions concerning what can and what cannot be said in Christ’s name. This is confusion of terms and of competencies that has replaced … the various mixtures of ‘church’ and ‘state’ that formerly prevailed.”

The shrewd device of declaring that a select group of churchmen speak only for themselves and not for the Church encourages irresponsible utterances, Ramsey says; what churchmen say to the Church and to the world ought to be governed, rather, by Christian truth. What impresses the communications media and the public is not preliminary NCC General Board disavowals that it speaks for all Christians but the specific proposals about military strategy and political specifics. As Ramsey puts it: “What goes out to the world is a particular statement that will have the same actual or aspired influence on public policy as if it had been unanimous, and as if it had been asserted to be the Christian thing to do.”

Behind The Scenes At Geneva

Professor Ramsey’s critique surveys both the theology and the methodology of the Geneva Conference on Church and Society and evaluates its specific commitments on Viet Nam and on nuclear war. Were the procedures adequate for reaching responsible conclusions? In what was billed as a “study conference,” he remarks, the “major miracle” occurred that 410 people in two weeks drew up 118 paragraphs of conclusions—and precisely the conclusions, moreover, that would provide the “American curia” with apparent world ecumenical support for promoting its predetermined prejudices.

The Geneva “study conference” procedures, Ramsey states, actually were largely a revision of WCC policy conference procedures in New Delhi, and only a “semantic distinction” may be drawn between reports sent to the churches for study, resolutions to the churches, and conclusions. President John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary insisted that rather than simply transmitting reports to the WCC for study, consideration, and consequent action, the conference adopt conclusions to publicize its statements (press coverage was prearranged for the final plenary sessions).

Ramsey notes “the prima facie lack of adequate deliberation” to sustain the numerous findings. By the time subsections were less than midway into their discussions, they had to devote their sessions to preparing reports for correlation with conclusions. “The conference was simply not a deliberative body.… There was nothing very dialogic about it.” In discussing 118 complex and often specific judgments on crucial world problems, the 410 participants managed to produce 160 single-spaced mimeographed pages of material. In the actual sessions, debate was limited to the most controversial issues, and a five-minute time limit for comment was soon cut to three. Never did more than half the registered participants vote on such issues.

Ramsey does not raise the question why these 418 participants were assembled in Geneva, and not others. He does assert, however, that the American curia made its weight felt in the political pressures of the conference, and that observers readily noted the atmosphere of a political convention. Although more laymen than churchmen were invited, the uninvited included precisely those Christian laymen who are decision-makers in the middle echelon of government.

The shallow commitments hurriedly pushed through Geneva, from the plea for inclusion of Red China in the United Nations to the plea that the U. N. place Rhodesia under economic siege, are unworthy of being labeled serious Christian reflection, Ramsey adds. “That the section … or conference plenaries said anything after deliberation is a chimera and a procedural hoax. No one should even cite the authority of Geneva 1966.”

The Geneva verdict that U. S. military engagement in Viet Nam is unjustifiable was inspired, says Ramsey, by certain American churchmen and others of like sympathy. The initial draft committee even included an observer hostile to American policy. Of the committee draft Ramsey remarks, “One can discern … the fine hand of John Bennett in these paragraphs taken as a whole.” The four members of the committee were: President Bennett of Union Theological Seminary; Metropolitan Nicodim of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church; a Lebanese lawyer; an Indian businessman (an observer).

Ramsey, in fact, gives such penetrating criticisms of the Geneva commitments and provides such balancing factors that one wonders why this point of view was denied effective platform presentation by the Church and Society engineers and was unrepresented on the committee. Not only does he critically analyze a one-sided telegram sent to President Johnson by Geneva participants; he also deplores a telegram sent to the foreign minister of North Viet Nam over the name of Jon L. Regier, NCC associate general secretary for Christian life and mission (this division supervises the Department of International Affairs as well as a special action-for-peace group led by Robert Bilheimer). This telegram to North Viet Nam, which was signed by seventy-five Americans at the Geneva meeting, protested U. S. involvement in Viet Nam and any escalation of the conflict.

Ramsey On Political Ecumenism

The oddity is that contemporary ecumenical social ethics evidences less acknowledgment of the separation between the church and the office of magistrate or citizen than was clearly acknowledged by the great cultural churches of the past—except perhaps by the claims made by the bull Unum Sanctum (Boniface VIII, November 18,1302).

This is, indeed, the most barefaced secular sectarianism and but a new form of culture-Christianity. It would identify Christianity with the cultural vitalities, with the movement of history, with where the action is, with the next and even now the real establishment.…

We should be resolved to say no more about responsibility in society until we have done something about responsible deliberation, and the procedures necessary for this to be made possible, at conferences sponsored by the churches, the NCC and the WCC. I at least would not be able to sleep nights if I thought that decisions of my government concerning problems of middle-range importance and urgency were resolved as rapidly and carelessly and necessarily with as little debate as the Geneva conference presumed to teach particular conclusions of earthshaking importance—which with unnoticed irony often implied irresponsibility on the part of one or another government.

As a Protestant, I, at least, am resolved to stand with Luther against both pope and council, or the pope in council, Visser ’t Hooft in council, or Blake in council, unless I can be shown from Scripture and sound reason.

There is nothing wrong with “dialogue” except that this is not the way to promote it; nor responsible deliberation either, except that this was not it.

A Christian theologian or ethicist would have to be out of his mind to regard the working group paper on “Theological Issues in Social Ethics” produced at the Geneva conference as the basis (or even a basis) for future discussion in any other than the trivial sense that it may on occasion be useful to start talking.

Unless it can be made clear in what way Christian teaching can as such substantively and compellingly lead to these conclusions then this is simply to put the engine of religious fervor behind a particular partisan political point of view which would have as much or as little to recommend it if it had not emanated from a church council.…

The shrewdest device yet for accomplishing this purpose is the reservation that the resolutions and pronouncements on all sorts of subjects advising the statesman what he should do which issue from church councils (or from groups like the Clergy Concerned over Vietnam) in fact do not represent “the church” (or Christian morality) but only the views of the churchmen who happen to be assembled.… They are not in the position of the statesman who has to correct one policy by another and to bear the responsibility for any cost/benefits he may have left out of account. One can scarcely imagine a situation that to a greater extent invites irresponsible utterance.…

Radical steps need to be taken in ecumenical ethics if ever we are to correct the pretense that we are makers of political policy and get on with our proper task of nourishing, judging, and repairing the moral and political ethos of our time.

To pay attention to the distinctive and basic features of Christian social ethics … would make for a proper hesitation in faulting the consciences of our fellow Christians.…

Some may say, this critique of ecumenical social ethics is directed against an abuse of a basically correct undertaking in and among the churches. My thesis, however, is that the abusus (policy directives) has become usus—it has become the fashion—and that one will not sense the strength of the case for a radical reformation in the aims of church social teachings unless he begins by acknowledging this to be true.

Their task should be the nurture of a Christian ethos within the autonomies of the modern world, and not by manifold thought and action to attenuate that ethos still more by eliding it into worldly wisdom.

Prudential political advice comes into the public forum with no special credentials because it issues from Christians or from Christian religious bodies.

Does the older ecumenical movement hope to transcend the peoples among whom Christians are mingled in this world, not in the direction of clearer statement of Christian action-relevant perspectives upon the world’s problems, but in the direction of a universal view of concrete political policies for the world’s statesmen?

For ecumenical councils on Church and Society responsibly to proffer specific advice would require that the church have the services of an entire state department.

The Geneva condemnation of nuclear war (“nuclear war is against God’s will”), asserts Ramsey, does not “push very far into the nuclear problem or the responsibility of governments in the use of power for peace and justice in a nuclear age.” The condemnation, he points out, could be read as a sweeping indictment not only of unlimited destruction but of any use of nuclear weapons in any war, even for deterrence—and that, says Ramsey, “would be impossible and morally wrong.” Geneva stressed proportion of force to rule out nuclear power; the Vatican Council by contrast stressed discrimination.

Ramsey reveals that in the formulation of the Church’s point of view on peace in a nuclear age, not a single participant from any of the world’s four nuclear powers was included among the conference speakers on this theme. The only positive analysis was by the West Berlin theologian Helmut Gollwitzer, champion of nuclear pacifism, who declared that there is “general agreement” that the tests of justice in war have lost validity (their validity was apparently presupposed, however, says Ramsey, when it came to condemning the U. S. role in Viet Nam).

Ramsey characterizes the theological working group at Geneva as “a homeless waif.” He criticizes the paper on “Theological Issues in Social Ethics” on both procedural and substantive grounds and deplores its “mini-Christian analysis” of world problems. Speakers, he observes, had more to say about revolution and its relevance than about theology. What theology there was, was mainly a “truncated Barthianism”—Christological-eschatological dynamic monism, to use the lingo of the professionals. On the one hand, “creation” was reduced to the processes of historicized “nature”; on the other, Christ’s “ever coming present triumph over the powers” was emphasized. The “contextual revolutionary-Christocentric eschatologism” of Geneva collides with mainstream ecumenical theology and with Roman Catholic theology, contends Ramsey, which emphasize the sequence of Creation-Law-Gospel and look for Christ’s triumph over all powers only at the end of the age.

The Decline Of Ecumenical Ethics

So radical has been the shift of orientation in ecumenical ethics that today, Ramsey says, not only do the NCC and WCC alter their own traditional stance, but they also relate to an authentic Christian ethic far less constructively than does the church of Rome. “Not even the ‘magisterium’ of the Roman Catholic Church has in recent centuries, if ever, gone so far in telling statesmen what is required of them.”

Even the older “Faith and Order” models are far superior to the present “Church and Society” image. During the past fifteen years, Faith and Order discussions have experienced a kind of renewal through a concern with basic questions that determine the whole of theology, says Ramsey. But Dr. W. A. Visser’t Hooft, in his farewell address as general secretary of the WCC, defended the right of church bodies to take a specific stand on controversial social and political issues.

Ramsey approves the way in which Vatican Council II and also John XXIII spoke with socio-political relevance; they pointed directions without ecclesiastically binding the conscience of statesmen, quite in contrast to neo-Protestant ecumenists’ practice of addressing specific directives to political leaders. He commends the social encyclicals of John XXIII, the addresses of Paul VI, and the affirmations of Vatican II for not presuming ecclesiastical competence in policy-making. Although many ecumenists proclaim the end of the Protestant era, they display less ability than Rome, Ramsey suggests, to distinguish church from state, and assume competence to formulate detailed answers to all public questions.

The Church’s attempt to avoid mere “counsels of perfection” by adducing particular policy formulations, Ramsey continues, not only leads to a miscarriage of Christian ethics but also betrays churchmen into supporting bare abstractions. The Church’s pushing of a specific course of action upon a statesman, in the absence of a comprehensive framework of political policy, is as much a matter of useless advice as is political generality: “A bag of specifics is still a generality in relation to actual policy” (p. 29). Equally useless is the alternative of specifically condemning a present course of action and then offering only some indefinite generality as an alternative—advice to “end the bombing,” for example.

But an even worse prospect, warns Ramsey, is that ecumenical politicians may view the Church as “a surrogate world political community” with its own “shadow state department” that tells the governments of the world what to do. Some churchmen, in fact, contend that the Church’s stature in political involvement should be improved through the drafting of more “experts” to address ecumenical specifics to the world. But “it is the aim of specificity in the church’s resolutions and proclamations that should be radically called in question.” And even if the Church were to draft experts, says Ramsey, since the experts themselves disagree, the ecumenical curia could still be expected to protect its own prejudices.

For many years ecumenical politicians have demeaned as deficient in social conscience all evangelical critics of their policy-making intrusions into secular affairs. Professor Ramsey speaks not only from within the conciliar movement as an active Geneva participant but also as a member of the American Society of Christian Ethics and as an author of numerous books in the field of morals. Already one spokesman for the WCC hierarchy has privately remarked that Ramsey lacks the humility to conform his views to the weightier opinions of fellow ecumenical theologians. What neo-Protestant Christianity may now be expected to witness, therefore, is either a bolder assertion of the infallibility of the ecumenical curia or a deeper testing of the ability of ecumenical politicians to foist their personal biases upon secular leaders in the name of the Protestant churches.

Twice each year, in February and September, we devote an issue to religious books. Good books, like good friends, add vision and zest to life; to live without them is like inhabiting a windowless house.

To my amazement my own library has grown to almost 10,000 volumes. Now crowding my office, they will enhance study and basement at home when shelves are ready.

This literary reserve is an incomparable treasure that I began searching out as a college student. Ransacking used book stores here and abroad for the best of the past, I annually added some of the best of the present also. During long years of seminary teaching, the routine included reading a new book weekly in my field.

Books sometimes come alive in unexpected ways. On my shelves Machen and Renan stand sentry a few feet apart, and Barth and Brunner and Bultmann, and Plato and Dewey and Augustine. Their ideas clash loud as thunder on the Potomac, but their personal silence is like judgment morning. This destiny is a sobering invitation to any author to meditate long, silent weeks on what needs most to be said to our time. A spigot that refuses to be turned off does not always make the profoundest contribution to the watershed of words.

After five days of whooping at the thirteenth annual German Protestant “Church Day,” I made a solemn vow over my Wienerschnilzel: never would I attend another ecumenical clambake (to change the gastronomic figure). Naturally this was a precipitous vow, and as the effect of the Kirchentag wears off in a few months, I shall doubtless find myself panting at a registration booth for the next extravaganza.

For the time being, however, the Kirchentag has given me more than I can take. During the multitudinous sessions in Hannover from June 21 to 25 (for news coverage, see the July 21 issue), I kept recalling Alice’s experience with the Cheshire cat who gave her advice and then faded away except for a smile. “I have often seen a cat without a grin,” mused Alice, “but a grin without a cat! That’s surely the strangest thing I’ve ever seen!” The Kirchentag was precisely such a phenomenon, and it well represented the German theological scene: a reassuring smile of piety and churchiness without any substantive biblical or theological foundations.

My negative response was not based on externals, though these certainly helped. Participants were engulfed by an appalling circus-like atmosphere in which venders hawked badges, buttons, souvenirs, books by the speakers, and food. Everywhere there were banners, flags, and uniforms (members of youth organizations directed the human traffic—some 30,000 people in attendance each day), uncomfortably suggesting the mass rallies of the National Socialist era and the classic line in the film version of Is Paris Burning?: “Les allemands aiment beaucoup les uniformes.” And there was the lack of foresight that put Friday evening’s boring “Social World Peace” session (with Niemöller and Visser’t Hooft) into much too large an auditorium, while numerous eager people were turned away from simultaneous musical sessions (Negro spirituals, gospel songs) and Helmut Thielicke’s preaching.

All this I could tolerate. What I could not take was the ideological atmosphere—the heart-rending contrast between spiritually hungry laymen (many brought up in centers of dynamic evangelical piety) and Olympian theologians (whose mini-beliefs leave the German church without any substantial biblical or confessional underpinnings).

It was precisely this ideological tone that led to the (unsuccessful) boycotting of this year’s Kirchentag by the two major conservative “protest” movements in Germany: the broadly evangelical “No Other Gospel” group and the more distinctively Lutheran Kirchliche Sammlung. For pastors and laymen in these loosely organized movements, participation in the union activities of the Kirchentag, which included ecumenical communion services, was tacit admission that the liberal and radical theologians offer a legitimate option in German church life.

Perhaps the protest movements were at fault for not actively defending historic Christianity at the Kirchentag. But they were right in predicting the character of the Church Day. True, there were some stellar speakers, such as distinguished physicist C. F. von Weizsacker (author of History of Nature) and U. N. leader Ralph Bunche. But the strictly theological presentations were at best mediating and at worst out-and-out heretical. It was quite significant that the most orthodox systematician on the program, Wolfhart Pannenberg of Mainz (see Time, July 14), who, in spite of his critical approach to the Bible, holds to a fully historical resurrection of Christ and has struck decisive blows at Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian existentializing of the Gospel, was scheduled late in the afternoon and drew weak and sporadic clapping from a relatively small audience.

In sharp contrast, the prime-time morning lecture by Ernest Käsemann pulled in a gigantic crowd, including many young people (over half the fulltime Kirchentag registrants were 17-to 35-year-olds) whose frenetic clapping demonstrated that, even if they didn’t understand Kasemann, they regarded him as a hero-radical. Käsemann, who in Kirchentag discussions categorically refused to commit himself on the question whether the empty tomb was in fact empty, is one of Bultmann’s most prominent disciples. Although he wishes to go beyond Bultmann’s minimal “thatness” of the historical Jesus, he accepts Bultmann’s enmeshing of biblical event with the interpreter’s situation (the “hermeneutical circle”), castigates the fundamental tenet of confessional orthodoxy that the Gospel is nothing less than objective truth, and encourages Christians to “test the spirits even within Scripture itself” (Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen, I2 [1960], 232 f.; see my just published Crisis in Lutheran Theology, Vol. I).

Morning Bible studies, led for example by post-Bultmannian popularizer Heinz Zahrnt (Es begann mit Jesus von Nazareth), were largely a farce—and drew minuscule attendance in comparison with the “Politics” sessions (significantly, the only sessions with simultaneous translation into French and English). The study I attended was incredible. We began by singing “We Shall Overcome.” The text—Ephesians 1, with its stress on remission of sins through Christ’s blood (v. 7), appropriation of this by faith in him (v. 15), and his glorious resurrection and ascension (v. 20)—became nothing but a pretext for asking the question: In our time, what are the liberating events for which we give thanks, and the liberating tasks which we face? Not a single participant mentioned the proclamation of the Gospel or its effects (e.g., on the Aucas); we were treated to such examples as black power, potential reconciliation with Red China (leading a wild-eyed Canadian to rant about the “murdering” of North Vietnamese by the United States), and (I kid you not) the increased use of fertilizer by uncivilized peoples who previously resisted its introduction!

The final Kirchentag assembly, attended by 75,000, featured WCC General Secretary Eugene Carson Blake. In a simplistic message translated sentence by sentence into German, Blake well summed up the entire week. He obliquely slapped the confessional movements (“it is a scandal that in Germany one confession is so uncharitable to another”)—drawing applause for it—and reiterated ad nauseam his theme: “You cannot hear the Word of God without your brother.” True, said he, the Word and belief in it are at the heart of the Church; but you cannot even understand the Word unless you are in ecumenical relationship with other Christians. The proof-text given for this ghastly inversion of biblical teaching (the community has priority over the Word) was “where two or three are gathered, I am in the midst”!

The sign of the Kirchentag was the Crusader’s cross, representing the spread of the Gospel to the four corners of the earth. Speakers frequently appealed to Luther’s name and to the grand tradition of the Reformation. The hymnody of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, used in juxtaposition with tasteful and striking contemporary musical settings, provided a stirring reminder of the theological resources of the historic Christian faith. What a pity that all this lay on the surface. What a tragedy to see the smile without the cat.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

Several new Christian schools open their doors for the first time this month. Plans are moving ahead for still others. A summary of developments follows:

Richmond College

The following interpretative report was written forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby Dr. William Fitch, minister of Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto:

Evangelicals in Toronto are on the horns of a dilemma, and the cause is Richmond College, an evangelical liberal-arts college scheduled to open this month.

It is fair to say that the problem was not of Toronto’s choosing but was thrust upon it. A disciplined, single-minded team descended from the west with crusading zeal, affirming that “Canada’s foremost institutional need today is for the founding of a strictly Conservative-Evangelical liberal arts college.” In tones reminiscent of an aroused John Knox, the visitors warned that “our Canadian churches are going to suffer irreparable damage from the beleaguering and sinister forces of atheism and that our beloved land could well fall prey to a godless totalitarianism which at this moment is planning the overthrow of our freedoms” if we did not immediately take steps to establish a college in which all teaching would be in accordance with the tenets of orthodox Christianity.

Our friends from the prairies proved to be not only disciplined but also close-knit—and that in a special way. The central triumvirate consists of two brothers in the flesh and a brother-in-law. That their plans are well advanced became apparent when we learned that one was to be a chancellor, another president, and the third dean of faculty. What is more, since one of them is an honorable member of the Billy Graham evangelistic team, many assume that the mighty organization of our twentieth century’s greatest prophet will in some way be behind the dream.

At the time of their advent in Ontario, the team had no charter from the Ontario Provincial Government. Previously, however, the Manitoba government had granted them a charter authorizing establishment of an evangelical group for higher education with power to grant degrees; and through extra-provincial license registered under Ontario law, the group secured the right to continue in Ontario under the Manitoba charter. The stage was accordingly set for the establishing of a college where all subjects, whether biology or economics, philosophy or English literature, would be taught “from a strictly conservative-evangelical point of view.” At this statement, one of the less reverent of our news columnists splurted the headline: “Evangelical Physics!—God Forbid!”

It has been made very clear that the proposed college will not become a school for proselytization: “Students must be able to come to us without fear that they will be de-Calvinized or de-Arminianized, de-Episcopalianized or de-Pentecostalized, or say re-baptized.” Clear also is the edict that “the campus atmosphere and conduct will be that of the separated Christian life, in keeping with those standards subscribed to by most Canadian evangelicals.” This has subsequently been spelled out as meaning no smoking, no drinking, no dancing, and so on. Censorship of conduct will, it seems, be complete, investigative, uncompromising.

Inevitably, there has been much discussion, some of it restrained, some acrimonious. The Graduates Fellowship of the IVCF analyzed the foundations of the college in a thirty-two-page journal and gave it something like a C-minus rating. Peoples Church, on the other hand, responded with a special edition of the church newspaper, hailing the new center of learning as an answer to many prayers and an answer also to the evangelical brain-drain to the United States. All of this was very confusing, to say the least, to the humble evangelical worshiper occupying his usual pew in the sanctuary on Sunday.

An initial fund-raising campaign had a target of $100,000 Canadian. The first 1,000 persons to contribute $100 were to become charter members of the school. After several months of special pleading, about one-third of the goal had been attained.

Despite the lack of general evangelical support, Richmond College plans to open with night classes September 18 in this Canadian centennial year on property leased from the government. Some thirty full-time students, all freshmen, are expected, along with thirty or more part-timers. Five courses are to be taught initially by a part-time faculty said to include three Ph.D’s.

Whether Richmond represents the dauntlessness of faith or the blindness of folly remains to be seen.

Eisenhower College

Initially scheduled to admit its first students this month, Eisenhower College in Seneca Falls, New York, has postponed its opening until July of 1968. The school, tenuously related to the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., is being built on a 265-acre site in the resort-famous Finger Lakes region of central New York state. Construction delays forced a delay in the widely publicized opening, a spokesman said.

The school, named after former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, got its initial financial impetus through a pledge of $100,000 from the First Presbyterian Church of Seneca Falls. Since then the college has been “approved” by the United Presbyterian Synod of New York, and $500,000 is being earmarked for construction of a chapel. A prospectus states, however, that “no special set of convictions may be imposed” upon the college. It is designed to be “Christian in attitude.” The only clergyman among the charter trustees is Dr. W. Eugene Houston, minister of a Presbyterian church in Harlem.

Some $6,660,000 reportedly has been invested thus far in buildings alone. Three hundred students will be accepted at first, with an ultimate enrollment of 1,500 envisioned. The school is the outgrowth of an idea of a Seneca Falls physician, Dr. Scott W. Skinner, a Presbyterian layman.

Luther Rice College

Opening day for Luther Rice College, which was organized by a group of Baptist pastors and laymen, will be September 5. One hundred full-time day students will attend classes at Franconia Baptist Church, Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, D. C. A thirty-two-acre site adjacent to the church grounds is being purchased for the campus, with initial construction scheduled to begin in a year.

Dr. John S. Nichols, dean, says the plan is to make Luther Rice a fully accredited four-year liberal-arts college as soon as possible. Nichols, who holds a doctorate in education from the University of Virginia, says the idea of the college grew out of the idea of an “international Baptist university” spearheaded by a U. S. foreign-service officer several years ago.

So far, Luther Rice College has had no recognition from any Baptist convention. Southern and American Baptist publications also have been giving it the silent treatment. Nichols, undismayed, predicts they will eventually come around.

The school has a seventeen-member board of directors, five of whom are Southern Baptist pastors. Its philosophy is distinctly Christian, and a course in Bible will be required of all freshmen. Daily chapel attendance will be mandatory. Courses will be offered in art, biology, chemistry, French, Spanish, history, math, music, and physical education. There are no denominational or racial bars to enrollment; a number of non-Baptist and non-white students have already been accepted.

Personalia

The leading spokesman for the National Association for Pastoral Renewal, an organization of Roman Catholic priests that opposes the celibacy requirement, was married in June, the St. Louis Review reports. He is the Rev. Robert T. Francoeur, who teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University. The Review said Francoeur plans to attend this month’s NAPR conference on celibacy at Notre Dame.

The Rev. Joseph W. Drew, one of the four priests in charge of Catholic student work at Southern Methodist University who were ordered to leave the Dallas diocese, received the top community award from the Southwest Region of B’nai B’rith. Drew was selected for the honor before the bishop ousted him.

The Rev. J. Paschall Davis, chairman of Nashville’s anti-poverty agency, changed his previous testimony for a U. S. Senate investigation and admitted some agency money had gone to a “liberation school” that allegedly stirred up racial hatred among Negroes. Later, the Episcopal diocese ordered the school to vacate church property.

Lois Fiedler, 30, a Dallas divorcee, has been approved as the first woman ministerial candidate among Texas Presbyterians. She says the divorce is a “left-handed asset” that will give her greater understanding in counseling. She will get some church aid for seminary study.

President Johnson nominated Brigadier General Francis L. Sampson, 55, a Roman Catholic with a distinguished combat record, to be chief of Army chaplains, replacing Methodist Major General Charles E. Brown, Jr.

Colonel Roy M. Terry, a Methodist and a law-school graduate, has been named Protestant chaplain at the Air Force Academy.

The Rev. Timothy Reeves of First Methodist Church, Evergreen Park, Illinois, was appointed imperial chaplain of the world’s 851,000 Shriners.

Former Army Chaplain and Job Corps religious coordinator Herman J. Kregel has been named the first religious coordinator of California’s state division of alcoholism. He is a clergyman of the Reformed Church in America.

The Rev. William H. Vastine, Methodist chief executive of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Council of Churches, is on leave to be rural coordinator for the Economic Opportunity Commission in three Pennsylvania counties.

The Rev. Joseph C. Grandlienard, formerly of the New York State Council of Churches, will direct the Church Plan Commission sponsored by ten denominations and state and local councils in the New York City area.

The Rev. David W. Preus, a Lutheran, was elected president of the Minneapolis School Board.

The Rev. Ben Haden. speaker on the network radio “Bible Study Hour,” moves from a Presbyterian pulpit in Key Biscayne, Florida, to the First Church of Chattanooga, which leads Southern Presbyterian churches in missions giving.

David R. Enlow, publications director of the Christian Business Men’s Committee for fifteen years, will become associate editor of the Alliance Witness, Christian and Missionary Alliance magazine.

The Rev. Peter Pascoe, United Presbyterian pastor from Kenmore, New York, was named pastor at Taylor University, Upland, Indiana.

The Rev. Elisa Mushendwa, 33, headmaster of a Lutheran secondary school, was named Tanzania’s secretary for political education.

The Rev. Walter Kloetzli, former urban-church planner for the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A., was named a social-services director with the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Oscar Cullmann, the renowned professor of New Testament and early church history, will be rector of the University of Basel, Switzerland, for 1968.

Miscellany

Voters in Bavaria, West Germany, may vote next spring on a plan to replace state-supported religious schools with non-sectarian schools that include segregated religion classes, the Washington Post reports. At present, nine out of ten children attend “confessional schools,” a hangover from the concordat between Hitler and the Vatican.

The U. S. Agency for International Development gave $450,000 for construction of a hospital wing at Ludhiana Christian Medical College in northern India, which is sponsored by twenty-three mission boards.

Ninety-nine physicians, dentists, and medical assistants spent two weeks at their own expense in Nuevo Leon state, Mexico, providing free health care for 5,279 patients. The project was organized by the Christian Medical Society.

The Pentecostalist “Teen Challenge” centers founded by David Wilkerson (The Cross and the Switchblade) are now operating in twelve cities. Latest to open are in Denver, Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Bayamon, Puerto Rico.

Seventy-nine Southern Baptist churches in the Dayton, Ohio, area sponsored an evangelistic drive, with central services in Welcome Stadium. More than 2,000 decisions for Christ were reported.

Washington Watch

The U. S. House passed a bill similar to one from the Senate to organize a commission on law to control pornographic literature. The search for a new legal definition of obscenity is a reaction to recent Supreme Court rulings.

An advisory committee on alcoholism made its first report to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, with an estimate that alcoholism affects between 16 and 20 million family members. The committee asked stepped-up rehabilitation services, with federal aid.

Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon has introduced a bill that would ban radio-TV advertising for alcoholic beverages between 3 P.M. and 10 P.M.

Meanwhile, the National Highway Safety Agency reports that excessive drinking is a factor in nearly half the 53,000 highway deaths in the United States each year. And the Federal Aviation Agency, after post-mortem examinations of 900 of the 2,084 pilots killed in private airplane crashes between 1963 and 1966, said one-third of them had been drinking.

Hawaii’s Board of Education voted transportation subsidies for certain students whether they attend public or parochial schools. At a hearing opposite sides were taken by the American Civil Liberties Union and Honolulu Catholics.

Faced with dwindling student enrollment, Catholics in Oklahoma City opened the modern facilities of the former St. Francis de Sales Seminary as a “Center for Christian Renewal” for rent to any church group.

With the next issue, the National Council of Churches’ quarterly Christian Scholar ceases publication. The interdisciplinary intellectual journal has had financial problems, and circulation dipped to 2,000. A new quarterly with a less explicitly Christian orientation, Colloquy, will be started next year by the Society for Religion in Higher Education. The editor will be Mrs. Sallie M. TeSelle, who teaches Christianity in contemporary culture at Yale Divinity School.

Ministers’ median annual salary (excluding parsonage allowance) has risen from $5,029 to $5,914 since 1962, according to a survey of 1,800 clergymen by Ministers Life and Casualty Union.

The newly merged Lutheran Church in Australia has proposed pulpit and altar fellowship to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, most conservative Lutheran group in the U.S. At last month’s convention, Wisconsin voted for a link with the small Evangelical Lutheran Synod and re-elected the Rev. Oscar J. Naumann of Milwaukee to his eighth two-year term as president.

Denominational leaders who belong to the troubled Swarthmore (Pennsylvania) Presbyterian Church arranged a compromise to win the resignation of the Rev. Dr. D. Evor Roberts: affluent members are giving him $20,000 for a sabbatical year. Roberts had claimed publicly that he was being forced out for civil rights activities; members said they were just dissatisfied with his work as a minister.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “black power” civil rights group once aided by many Jews, sides with Arabs against Jews in its current newsletter. Besides statements akin to Arab and Soviet policy, the publication carries old photos of alleged Zionist atrocities similar to those in Ku KIux Klan literature.

The Food and Drug Administration ordered long-range animal tests of all contraceptive pills as a precautionary measure after tissue abnormalities developed in some monkeys being tested.

It wasn’t planned that way, but Expo 67 mirrors surprisingly well the state of today’s Christian Church, its big theological cleavage, and its relation to the world.

Dozens of pavilions boast of man’s achievements with scarcely a reference to spiritual forces. Not even the dominant U. S. Pavilion finds a place for religion’s role in its national life. The pedestrian Soviet and glamorous Czech pavilions, however, manage to preserve a little corner to reflect their countries’ Christian heritage.

Somewhat off the beaten path on Notre Dame Island is the $1,300,000 Christian Pavilion, a valiant effort of major Canadian church bureaucracies to present a solid front. Its message, projected via a glorified photo exhibit, wallows in the sea of subjectivity. As an experiment in indirect communication it emphasizes questions and minimizes answers.

Much more in the mainstream of Expo traffic is the Sermons from Science Pavilion featuring the well-known Moody evangelistic films based on natural wonders. Although it is an independent effort, it draws significantly from Canada’s old established churches for support. It doesn’t raise many questions, but it zealously promotes the Answer to man’s most basic problem.

The pavilions of Israel and Judaism unashamedly exhibit their spiritual histories. The pride of the white stucco Pavilion of Judaism is a 440-square-foot model of the Temple of Jerusalem built by Herod. The building also contains the only chapel on the fairgrounds; Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform congregations take turns conducting services nightly.

The Expo visitor might well interpret the fair’s religious flavor as strikingly similar to what he finds in the world: an uncertain church leadership that champions relevance but seldom achieves it, an aggressive movement from evangelical sectors of the grass roots, and a reclaiming of its past by Jewry. Conspicuously underplayed in this microcosm, as it is in the world, is Christian confrontation on the intellectual, ideological, and cultural levels.

“Perhaps it is time that Church planners and executives came to terms with the Church’s greatest problem,” says the Canadian Churchman, the national Anglican paper of Canada. “It does not lie in the area of techniques—but in the area of content.”

Churchman editors say the Christian Pavilion reminds them of a war-time chaplain who had ten minutes to speak to his troops and chose to talk of sin and redemption: “He got so enthusiastic as he warmed up about sin that the ten minutes were gone and he never did get around to redemption.”

The reaction is typical. Easily the most common criticism leveled at the pavilion is that it depicts human alienation (see April 28 issue) but pretty much leaves the viewer to find the way out himself. A spokesman for the pavilion says the implicit hope is that the questioning visitor will seek a clergyman for further details. Staff members are prohibited from answering theological questions posed by visitors. Observers have noted that more Christianity is depicted in the Pavilion of Judaism than in the Christian.

A Popular Photography reviewer asserts that photographic exhibits at Expo “have suffered in the hands of clever designers who have no respect whatever for the medium as such,” and calls the Christian Pavilion “the worst offender.” “You will hunt far and wide for a more unchristian presentation,” the critic says. “Photographs of the most sordid and unpleasant scenes are forced into the cubes of a pipe construction that would be more appropriate as a jungle gymn in a playground than in an exhibit of announced inspirational nature.”

In defense of the Christian Pavilion, some observers have wisely noted that the negative impression is a corrective influence for the exaltation throughout the rest of the fair of what a great job man is doing with the world. Severe criticism leveled at the Christian Pavilion at the outset of the fair has tapered off considerably, and long lines of people await admission each day. Soon the pavilion will have counted 1,000,000 visitors.

The Sermons from Science Pavilion, with a smaller capacity, is also handling capacity crowds. About 500,000 persons have been through the building to see a film or witness a science demonstration with spiritual applications. As of mid-August, approximately 2,500 commitments to Christ had been recorded. These are being followed up through coast-to-coast contacts. Sermons from Science teams have trained about 6,000 counselors throughout Canada and the northeastern United States, and the names of inquirers in these regions are forwarded to counselors living near their homes. Elsewhere in North America and abroad, the names are given to Moody Bible Institute to follow up through Christian training correspondence courses.

A big problem in the Sermons from Science Pavilion is finding enough French-speaking counselors. Two-thirds of the persons counseled are French Canadians.

The Sermons from Science message is simple and direct and uses the four-spiritual-laws approach popularized by Campus Crusade. It is geared to the common man, pre-set to average conditions. Everyone going through the pavilion gets the American Tract Society’s leaflet, “The Prior Claim.”

The crowds aren’t as great at the Pavilion of Judaism, but the model of the temple is nonetheless the most interesting religious exhibit at Expo 67. The model is the work of Lazare and Suzette Halberthal, a Rumanian couple who came to Canada in 1952. It took them an estimated 15,000 hours to build it.

Visitors to the pavilion are forbidden to take pictures of the model, but they can purchase photographs there at nominal cost. Admission to the pavilion—and to all others—is free, once an Expo “passport” is purchased.

Missions Exodus

Mission leaders and the U. S. State Department are watching closely developments in Assam State, India, where three American missionary couples and missionaries from Canada and the Netherlands were expelled recently on charges that they helped rebel uprisings.

Religious News Service says that nearly eighty missionaries have been informed that their residence permits will not be renewed when they expire—some within a few weeks—and that many other persons apparently have been ordered out.

Thirty-five Missouri Synod Lutherans have been evacuated from eastern Nigeria, which is in revolt against the central government. Federal troops reportedly have been warned against desecrating churches in the east.

In the Philippines, new interest in foreign missions is evident in a new gospel team that made its first trip abroad last month. The group, led by the Rev. Max D. Atienza, was invited by Christians in Indonesia. Now under the new evangelism division of Far East Broadcasting Company, the team wants full support from Filipinos.

Learning In Splitting

Church splits, long considered a scourge, may actually strengthen young Christian communities. Cambridge-educated J. B. A. Kessler concludes from an exhaustive study of Protestantism in Peru and Chile that Christians there have learned from their mistakes. Though they have experienced some sixty-six divisions, the church has been growing phenomenally. Lessons have been learned, especially in cases in which there have been organizational weaknesses.

Kessler, missionary to Peru, documents his arguments in a dissertation for the University of Utrecht, Holland. Professors praised the work as a model for histories of young churches and awarded Kessler a doctorate cum laude. His thick tome has been printed in English.

Among the points he makes is that Christians in Chile have learned more from their own mistakes in churches which have no missionary connection than in those which retain a link with foreigners. Kessler also contends that young churches in which missionaries didn’t want to share in the exercise of authority themselves often experienced the most internal problems.

Missionaries should give nationals great freedom to experiment and find their own ways, he adds. But strong growth is seen partly as the result of authoritarian forms of church government, which may have been dangerous, but which were better understood by the nationals than the democratic processes most Protestant missions were trying to introduce.

Kessler studied physical sciences at Cambridge, and while there came into contact with Inter-Varsity Fellowship and committed his life to Christ. Subsequently he volunteered for missionary service and was accepted by the British faith mission, Evangelical Union of South America.

Kessler is the son of a millionaire former president of the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company. His decision to become a missionary greatly distressed his father, and relations were strained for years. More recently the father committed his life to Christ.

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

When To Pull The Plug

It was bound to happen in this day of medicine’s miracle machines. Somebody asked, “When is the patient dead?”

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation decided that a panel of doctors and clergymen could surely provide the answer. But at last month’s AAMI convention in San Francisco, no definitive answer came forth.

Catholic Chaplain John Ring of the University of California Medical Center cautioned doctors against emphasizing “mere length of life at the expense of transcendent values.” The center’s Episcopal chaplain, Charles Carrol, spoke of a woman who, though in a coma since January, recently gave birth to a healthy daughter. He suggested she was more an organic test tube for scientists than “a mother in the human sense.”

Medical philosopher Otto E. Guttentag offered, “Death has come to humans when there is irreversible loss of spontaneity—freedom to choose and move according to choice.” But psychiatrist Michael Khlentzos scolded fellow panelists for being less than Freudian in equating life with consciousness. He argued that the “vegetable” in the resuscitator who gives no electric signs to the EEG machine and whose dilated, staring eyes bespeak a dead brain may nevertheless be living on the unconscious level. Since unconscious factors underlie all conscious behavior, the Freudian asks, “Who is dead?”

As for the difficult moral decision of when to pull out the electric plug on the machine, Guttentag proposed that each person have a “guardian ad mortem”—a friend or relative with express legal power to say, “Stop everything; let him die in peace.”

Generally, the clergymen favored pulling it sooner than the doctors.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Spain: Protestants Say No

The Evangelical Defense Commission, which represents all Protestant churches in Spain, has sent a letter to the Department of Justice announcing that Protestants will not apply for legal recognition under the nation’s new religious-liberty law.

Under the law, the churches must register like secular organizations and report on membership and finances. The letter, sent in July, says this violates statements on religious freedom by the United Nations and Vatican II. Last month the Southern Baptist mission near Bilbao was closed by police for refusal to register. A meeting of most of the nation’s 500 Protestant clergymen next month will act further on the situation.

N.Y. Aid Ban Fades

Forces opposing state aid to religious schools—led by New York City Unitarian minister Donald Harrington, who is Liberal Party chairman—lost a major battle on August 16. New York’s Constitutional Convention voted 132 to 49 against retaining the flat aid ban that has been in force for seventy-three years.

It appeared likely some aid would be allowed, but the specifics were unclear at mid-month. One plan was simply to repeat the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. But the vote might mean many Jews and Protestants will now oppose the final state constitution.

More Sisters Secularize

The swinging Glenmary Sisters, one of America’s youngest orders, early established a reputation as a “can-do” group who often worked with sleeves rolled up at their training-center farm. Now sixty-five of the eighty-five sisters have asked Cincinnati Archbishop Karl Alter for a dispensation from their vows by this week so they can form a church-affiliated lay organization.

Sister Mary Catherine Rumschlag, superior of the society and supporter of the change, said the new organization will focus on “religious and social needs,” primarily among the poor of Appalachia.

The order got national attention a year ago when National Catholic Reporter revealed that Alter had put the sisters under restrictions concerning books they read, hours they kept, and their conduct with the opposite sex. The trouble reportedly started when five sisters complained that the order was too liberal in interpreting the role of nuns in the post-Council era.

JAMES L. ADAMS

No sooner was Bishop Pike’s If This Be Heresy off the presses than the emergency theological committee of fellow Episcopalians announced that the concept of heresy is out of date. James A. Pike’s latest flinging down of the theological gauntlet, and the report from the blue-ribbon committee asked to decide how much Pike and others may disbelieve, converge on the verge of this month’s Episcopal General Convention, which meets every three years.

The convention will be asked to approve the committee’s conclusion that “the word ‘heresy’ should be abandoned” except in relation to the losers in the great theological debates of the early centuries.

In this key recommendation, the committee quotes a discussion of history by J. V. Langmead Casserley of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, one of four experts (Pike was another) who testified before the committee in April.

But Casserley disagrees with the committee’s conclusion. He is willing to keep things flexible for men struggling with “new theological questions.” But he objects “very violently to reformulation of ancient heresies and pretending that this is a new contribution.” To him, the Pike affair is not as much a case of heresy as “gross incompetence.” “If we are to have a serious theological debate, it can only be with real theological knowledge.” Thus, he opposes a heresy trial for Pike, which would also be “widely misunderstood by the public.” “The real heretics were great men,” he says, and Pike doesn’t deserve the compliment.

When the committee was formed in January, Pike tabled his move to force an investigation of his views to “clear my name.” He sought this study after the House of Bishops gave him a knuckles-rap last year. In his new book, Pike says he’ll have to wait and see what the committee and the General Convention do before he decides whether to force the investigation. One committee member believed that “nothing the committee said would have satisfied” Pike, and predicted that a publicity-garnering investigation was inevitable. But Pike said later he will call off the investigation if the General Convention accepts the committee recommendations.

Besides fears about dissension and damage and an Episcopal urge to keep things cool, another reason for the effort to avoid a trial may be the fact that other church leaders share some of Pike’s ideas. For instance, Pike says “a leading American bishop” urged him not to put his controversial views in print, saying, in effect, “We know these things, Jim, but don’t let ‘the little people’ know.”

The study committee was chaired by Bishop Stephen F. Bayne, Jr.,¹Other members were Bishops Everett H. Jones of West Texas and George W. Barrett of Rochester (who this year Organized a service in honor of Algernon S. Crapsey, removed from the priesthood for heresy sixty years ago); Professors John Macquarrie of Union Theological Seminary, Albert T. Mollegen of Virginia Theological Seminary, George A. Shipman of the public-affairs school at the University of Washington, and Paul S. Minear of Yale Divinity School (a member of the United Church of Christ); parish clergymen Theodore P. Ferris of Boston and Charles P. Price of Harvard University; Editor David L. Sills of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences; and Louis Cassels, religion editor of United Press International. former executive officer of the Anglican Communion, now chairman of the church Overseas Department, and a leading figure in the Consultation on Church Union. Bayne, relatively conservative in theology, was on last year’s Dun Committee, which proposed the censure of Pike. Bayne says his committee was “representative” of the denomination and unanimous in its report.

The trouble with the word heresy, the committee says, is that “it too often conjures up a picture of a static fortress of propositional theology that requires to be, and can be, defended by appeal to the letter of a theological statement.” The word implies inappropriate “theological pre-judgment” and “a set of theological categories unconditioned by their historical and cultural period.”

While concerned with encouraging theological experimentation, the committee recognizes that there are limits. The Church should do everything it can to hold its errant sons, but if they persist, “dis-association” of the Church from particular views is the way to handle it. Thus, they propose making it even harder to get a heresy action off the ground than it is now. “Heresy trials are anachronistic,” the committee decided.

The question arises, of course, who should be in the Church and who shouldn’t. The committee says “as much as humanly possible, the decision to maintain or sever the relationship” should be made by the individual critic of church beliefs. As for the Episcopal Church, membership does not involve “thinking alike,” but “doing the Christian things, including the liturgical acts.” So the normal test of membership proposed is “the willingness of a person to share in the worship of the Prayer Book with a consenting mind.”

The twenty-page committee report says the Church “first of all” has an obligation “to be related to, in constant communication with, the world.” It “also has an obligation to its Creator.” “The controlling motive in theological debate” is said to be “obedience to the Church’s mission.…”

The procedure of beginning with the horizontal rather than the vertical is even more explicit in If This Be Heresy, in which Pike struggles to say as much as he can about a personal God and life after death from an anthropomorphic base, rather than a revelational one. He is able to affirm both God and life after death from empirical data, though the stress on God’s becoming rather than his being, in the mode of certain Continental theologians, obscures whether God in fact existed in the past and raises the possibility that man created God.

The latest from Pike’s pen is by and large rather bland compared to some of his previous utterances.

Point by point, Pike attacks the authorities Episcopalians have traditionally used for doctrine: the Bible, the early church councils, the ecumenical creeds, liturgies, confessions of faith, and consensus. On the last point, he marshals opinion polls to justify his “sense of responsibility and pastoral sensitivity” to the “majority of Church members” who face a “growing sense of hypocrisy as the credibility gap is fast widening between unqualified Prayer Book statements and what seems to them plausible.” His main source of data is the Glock-Stark survey on anti-Semitism, but some polls are poles apart. Last month, Gallup reported that 83 per cent of Americans over 18 years of age believe in the Trinity.

In a sweeping generalization, Pike contends that “except for the very active and devoted members of the Fundamentalist sects, Christians as a whole read or hear very little more of the Bible than is read on Sundays in church.”

As a companion to the Pike book, Harper and Row is issuing The Bishop Pike Affair by “lay theologian” and lawyer William Stringfellow and poet Anthony Towne. The book, likely to ruffle some feathers within the House of Bishops, seems a tip-off to the approach Pike may take if the investigation proceeds. It discusses the development of dogma and authority, due process in the Church, and the history of charges against Pike. (The first one, according to Pike’s book, was sparked by a 1961 editorial in CHRISTIANITY TODAY criticizing views Pike had expressed in a Christian Century article.)

The most important new defense put forth by Stringfellow and Towne is that the Pike case is intricately bound up with his liberal socio-political views, and is an episode in the attempt of a “rightist, racist, anti-ecumenical, traditionalist” faction to take over the Episcopal Church. The authors consider such a takeover “a realistic, and imminent, possibility.” Similar alarums were sent abroad in the Nation earlier this year by the Rev. Lester Kinsolving, at that time a full-time diocesan lobbyist seeking to liberalize California’s abortion law. The Right is gaining fast in the Executive Council and the General Convention, the book contends. Thus:

“In such a context it becomes quite secondary whether James A. Pike is, in any rational reference, a heretic or not.”

Synod Speculation

He will. He will. He will. He won’t. That’s what “informed sources” said respectively to Newsweek, United Press International, St. Louis Review, and Religious News Service about whether Pope Paul would issue that birth-control encyclical in conjunction with this month’s Synod of Bishops in Rome.

Rumors were running that the Pope would moderately reaffirm current bans on artificial methods, but Newsweek said some fine theological distinctions would be made to permit some leeway.

Synod speculation centers even more on theological controversy in the Netherlands. There Father Robert Adolfs, an Augustinian prior, has unleashed an attack on the church’s aspirations to worldly power and pomp. Without reform, the church will dig her grave, he contends, and with it The Grave of God. Publication of his book with that title continues, despite a ban by the order’s superior.

Conservatives are also upset about the new catechism approved by the entire Dutch hierarchy (see November 11, 1966, issue, page 56). Some rephrasing was made after a special meeting with Vatican theologians. Now the reports are that new theology will be the first and major topic of the synod, where such matters as the celibacy requirement and social issues have been ruled out. Three weeks ago the Pope issued another of his warnings against post-conciliar types who “question fundamental doctrines.”

In other Catholic events:

• The Pope made his first important step toward reforming the Italian-dominated Curia (Vatican administration) by directing that each of the twelve major offices add seven bishops chosen from throughout the world.

• Father Patrick O’Connor reports for National Catholic News Service that Communists are “strangling” religion in North Viet Nam, particularly in towns and villages. Even in Hanoi, where churches are still open, church schools have been taken over by the regime and the seminary has been closed.

• A new catechism used in Chicago Catholic schools is under attack from a group called “Concerned Parents,” because it praises Martin Luther King.

• The “acting” top public relations man for the U.S. hierarchy since June, layman Jerry Renner, left in a huff and criticized the “mystique of secrecy” and antagonism toward the press among bishops. He was then named chief publicist for the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

John Courtney Murray

John Courtney Murray, 63, leading American Jesuit theologian, died in New York August 16. Murray played a major role in the Vatican Council II, through his work on its religious liberty decree. He was a professor at Woodstock College and director of the La-Farge Institute, a religious dialogue center in Manhattan.

“Dialogue is a contemporary way of presenting the Gospel,” Murray contended. He was a friend of many Protestant churchmen and well known for his efforts to reconcile traditional Roman Catholic views with American culture.

Free Church Ecumenism

The Baptist Unity Movement conference may have fizzled, but even so this was quite a summer for free-church ecumenism. It began with the Conference on the Concept of the Believers’ Church in Louisville, called “one of the most significant” meetings in the history of the free-church movement by Baptist Press veteran W. Barry Garrett.

It closed last month with a significant session of the Executive Committee of the Baptist World Alliance and a concurrent Baptist World Convocation. These meetings took place in Nashville, a city where various breeds of Baptists tend to run various offices in parallel isolation. Despite racial violence earlier this summer, the major rally featuring William R. Tolbert, BWA president and vice-president of Liberia, drew 6,000 persons in the city’s first major convergence of Negro and white Baptists.

Tolbert said Christians must replace “black” and “white” power with the power of love and seek “the salvation of the world.” “Then selfishness, intolerance, impatience, bigotries, prejudices, and hate and violence will disappear,” he said.

Participating in the one-day convention were the Southern Baptist Convention, biggest Baptist body in the world; the two separated National Baptist Conventions, which employ many Nashville Negroes in publishing operations and rarely get together; and the Nashville-based Free Will Baptists, a mostly white body not in the BWA that rarely gets together with anyone else.

Leaders of the four bodies issued a call for the convocation in the wake of rioting in a host of U. S. cities. They said, “In the face of racial disorders that are among the worst the nation has seen since the Civil War, we call upon our people for a demonstration of the power of Christ to change our prejudices.”

During the BWA meeting of subsequent days, the Rev. Joseph H. Jackson, president of the larger National Convention, said, “There is no way we can solve the nation’s racial problems by turning from law and order, and by burning, looting, and killing.… The Negro must return to the principles upon which this land was founded.”

Although all Americans share some blame for the riots because of limits on freedom and justice for Negroes, said Jackson, he also blamed Stokely Carmichael and other agitators, the press that builds such men up, public officials who wait too long before taking action, and churches that shun discussion in favor of picketing and “use of force to change society.” He said that “the Church must risk now its budgets, its fine buildings, and its power for the cause of racial justice.”

But the Rev. S. B. Kyles of Memphis said Negroes have made gains they wouldn’t have made if they had not resorted to violence: “For ten years we’ve been saying violence won’t work, and the Negro people finally got tired of waiting. When they tried it, it did work.”

Foy Valentine of the SBC Christian Life Commission said violence and anarchy are “tragic reflections of white racism tracing back for hundreds of years. Black-power racism has fed on discrimination, prejudice, unemployment, poor housing, poverty, deprivation, and all kinds of social disadvantages to create an explosive situation.”

At the end of the meeting, the executives issued an appeal to Baptists of all nations to work for world peace, racial justice, relief of suffering, and freedom for preaching the Gospel. After considerable discussion, the conferees decided to open up next year’s meeting for more consideration of current issues.

The Louisville conference was an unofficial assemblage of scholars from various denominational families in the free-church tradition, including members of eight Baptist groups, Pentecostalists, Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ, Quakers and Mennonites, Church of God (Indiana), Church of the Brethren, and Brethren in Christ.

Chairman James Leo Garrett, professor at the host Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the meeting was not “ecumenical” in the formal sense of having official representation and discussing merger possibilities. The approach to unity of his colleague Dale Moody, like that of several other speakers, was less rigidity on the matter of baptism and communion and more emphasis on the authority of the Scriptures. “The teachings of Scripture need to be put above all denominational traditions. Scripture is our one authority,” he said.

The Old Country Has Changed

The Mennonites of the world returned home to Holland this summer to visit their birthplace, but it was hardly a return to the past. The old Dutch mother church is by far the most liberal of all the daughters of Menno Simons, even though in recent years Karl Barth again drew its attention to the Word of God.

Nearly 4,500 guests from thirty-two countries gathered at the eighth Mennonite World Conference. They listened to eighty speeches and made a sentimental journey to Witmarsum, the hamlet in the Frisian dairy country where Menno was born.

The conferees formed a diversified group of conservatives and liberals, of separatists and conformists. Dutch Mennonites were amazed to see that many American women still cover their heads, but their own mini-skirted daughters must have shocked others. Yet the Amish Mennonites didn’t turn up, and the extreme Dutch liberals hardly spoke.

One Dutch newspaper labeled the conference a mini-ecumenical gathering. Much was said about the place of Mennonites in the world, little about their place among fellow brethren. Only two of the represented groups were members of the World Council of Churches, and there was little interest in ecumenical questions.

Responsibility in the world was the real theme. Speakers called for a stronger witness and stronger service. Reuben Short, secretary of the Congo Inland Mission, asked conference guests to evangelize. The same day, Elmer Neufeld called for service and personal sacrifices for “a world in need.” Little was done to combine these two calls; each stood on its own. The days are past, however, when Mennonites could be labeled as other-worldly separatists.

The most extreme voice was that of Negro leader Vincent Harding, an associate of Martin Luther King. He wanted a new conference, not somewhere in the West, but where the revolutionaries are, to study the problems of the Viet Cong, the Negroes, and other freedom fighters in the world who have lost their faith in peaceful resistance. But he spoke too late. The conference itself already had closed with a quiet message asking the governments of the world to give freedom and righteousness to their people in a peaceful way.

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

Quakers: One Peace

The 200,000 Friends (called Quakers by just about everyone) held their first world conference in fifteen years this summer in Greensboro, North Carolina. To no one’s surprise, pleas for peace were in the air.

By far the most publicized was from United Nations Secretary General U Thant, who rarely makes public appearances, much less speeches to religious gatherings. Thant presented one of his harshest critiques of U. S. policy in Viet Nam and urged a halt in bombing the North as a needed first step toward peace. Later, the delegates quietly reached a similar “consensus.”

The Greensboro meeting favored all efforts to get medical aid to all of Viet Nam, a policy that has created conflict between some Quakers and the U. S. Treasury Department. Soon after the meeting, Royal Canadian mounties seized some Hanoi-bound aid packages at the border. American Quakers have been sending aid to North Viet Nam by way of Canada. They earlier had been refused U. S. export permits at the border. Treasury is still talking about prosecuting a crew that sailed a shipload of aid to Hanoi earlier this year. Two of the crewmen participated in a protest vigil at the Pentagon in August. The Philadelphia group plans a return visit.

Retired federal Judge John Biggs, Jr., 71, of Wilmington, Delaware, quit as presiding clerk of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting because aid-Hanoi activities were taken officially rather than by individual action.

Meanwhile, Quaker refugee-aid worker David Stickney, returning from eighteen months in South Viet Nam. charged that civilian casualties are three to eight times more than military-casualties there.

The Pulpit Comes Alive

The Pattern of Christ, by David H. C. Read (Scribners, 1967, 94 pp., $2.95), and The Parables, by Gerald Kennedy (Harper & Row, 1967, 213 pp., $1.60, paperback), are reviewed by Donald Macleod, professor of homiletics, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.

These two books of sermons, each by a preacher of unusual reputation in his own denomination, are representative of the output of men who believe in the efficacy and integrity of the Christian pulpit. Here the similarity ends, for in their source materials and interpretative methods these two homileticians are of very different genres.

In an age in which the integrity of preaching is questioned (especially by those who have never experienced it) and the aim of being a great preacher is suspect (particularly among those who cannot do it), David H. C. Read continues to accept the claim and discipline of what seems to him to be eminently worthwhile. His first book, Prisoner’s Quest (Macmillan, 1945), introduced him to America, and the promise this volume showed has been realized in the five titles that have followed. A recent questionnaire circulated among discriminating sermon-tasters placed Dr. Read consistently at the head of the list of highly effective preachers in the United Presbyterian Church.

In this latest book, Dr. Read, who for ten years has been senior minister of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York City, deals with six beatitudes from the sermon on the Mount and one from John 20:29. He interprets the significance of these great sayings for the twentieth century in sermons that show the fruits of a classical education, exegetical know-how, and reading in depth in good literature. He discloses nuances of thought and interpretation that not only give freshness to his message but also accent the disturbing character of the beatitudes. This preacher never fails to be interesting as he explores the unseen dimensions of these sayings and makes germane to our day the transcendent character of Matthew 5–7.

Read is right in saying that the beatitudes “cannot be understood without the framework of the total Gospel in which they are set.” If a criticism may be made, however, of an otherwise excellent book, it should be directed against the handling of this point. There is need for either an initial chapter or a fuller preliminary discussion. Long ago Percy Ainsworth, in his Blessed Life, developed this idea fully under a chapter on “Blessed …” before he launched into the beatitudes. The traditional peril to the beatitudes has been the tendency among the biblically illiterate, the politicians, and the pseudo-statesmen to handle them as pious slogans or as maxims for ethical action. In reality they are proclamations. As John Dow put it so well: “Grace is always in the field ahead of Christian endeavor.… The beatitudes do not frame a command to be lowly, meek, peace-loving: they describe the fact that those upon whom the Spirit of God has come with benediction are and shall be lowly and meek and peace-loving” (This Is Our Faith, p. 201).

Gerald Kennedy, bishop of The Methodist Church, Los Angeles Area, is one of America’s most popular preachers and the author of an ever-increasing list of books and articles. Moreover, he is an omnivorous reader and a careful collector of illustrations and things worth saying from an amazing range of sources. If interest and exciting ideas were the only criteria for judging preaching, Bishop Kennedy would claim distinction with ease.

Here in fifteen engaging chapters the bishop deals with fifteen parables, which he calls “stories Jesus told.” Books on the parables are legion, and most of them are either exegetically dull or prettily superficial. Kennedy’s effort is midway. Few American preachers are so intensely human, so charged with immediacy, and so enthusiastically Christian as he, and he has no equal in making wide and varied reading tributary to his sermons.

His error in this book is that of not remaining at his own métier. He is a topical preacher par excellence; he should not presume to be an expositor. These sermons on the parables have no interpretative method. The parables in the Gospels cannot be interpreted properly unless one takes careful account of the context in which each occurs and the eschatological framework and tone of Jesus’ whole preaching and witnessing ministry. Otherwise, the parables, apart from who said them and when and why, are merely human-interest stories, of which Aesop was equally a master.

On the positive side, let it be said again that few preachers can afford to overlook the techniques and principles of rhetoric that make Bishop Kennedy a pulpit and platform speaker of such unusual competence.

Reading for Perspective

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

• Deeds and Rules in Christian Ethics, by Paul Ramsey (Scribners, $5.95). A Princeton theologian offers trenchant criticism of the “new morality” and insists on some form of “rule-agapism” for a viable Christian social ethic.

• Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Volume IV, edited by Gerhard Kittel (Eerdmans, $22.50). The fourth installment of a monumental eight-volume work provides invaluable research on key New Testament words.

• Crisis in Lutheran Theology, by John Warwick Montgomery (Baker, $1.50). An analysis of new emphases within Lutheran theology seen in the light of historic doctrinal foundations. All Lutherans should read this.

Freedom Through Surrender

Freedom in Modern Theology, by Robert T. Osborn (Westminster, 1967, 273 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Frederic R. Howe, dean, Graduate School, and associate professor of theology, Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, Portland, Oregon.

This work, written by the associate professor of religion at Duke University, is a critical appraisal and comparison of one major aspect of the theological approaches of Bultmann, Tillich, Barth, and Berdyaev. Osborn uses the control factor or touchstone issue of theological freedom to evaluate the specific theologies of each of these major voices that he has chosen as representative of central options for shaping an ecumenical theology. His analytical ability is keen.

The study is of necessity limited to the freedom of the Christian man and the depth of meaning in the biblical concepts dealing with the “freedom for which Christ has set us free”—to the freedom of the self in its vital relation to Christ. Osborn begins by defining two areas in this kind of freedom, the Hellenistic and the Christian. In the Hellenistic view, freedom is a condition resulting from salvation or liberation. To the Hellenist, freedom, as this resultant condition, meant a true return to one’s self, a regaining of self-control. But the New Testament attacks the problem of man on a different basis. On Biblical ground, says Osborn, we find that the self is seen as fallen, unfree, and thus in need of commitment or surrender to a redemptive and creative force.

The author analyzes in great detail the four major theological positions he has selected and concludes essentially that a combination of Barthian concepts of freedom with added insights from Berdyaev should be basic for building an adequate theology of freedom.

The evangelical reader will appreciate the scope and depth of this study but will be concerned about the basic approach. Osborn rejects the idea of building a system of theology, and thus abandons what vital orthodoxy believes is the imperative task of theological studies—uncovering the depth and true versatility of a biblical system. To Osborn, theology, seemingly, is only an approach. To the evangelical, it is surely more. Osborn’s orientation apparently fails to balance biblical mysticism with biblical realism. He says:

Faith is also mystical, inasmuch as it knows its object in a manner for which it can give no good account, except in its own terms. It knows, as does one in personal relationships, that in its true existence and depth the reality of its object transcends the experienced meaning, the consequent life, or the acknowledged facts. There is no a priori critique of reason that establishes its epistemological possibility. It is, in this sense, mystical.

Osborn feels that a theology of freedom will incorporate these principles or ideas: First, it will be nonsystematic; second, it will be Christological; third, it will be uncommitted philosophically.

I appreciate the depth of Osborn’s study but would seek for a systematic trinitarianism and its dynamic balance of all the biblical factors leading to an exposition of the freedom of the believer in Christ.

The Two Cannot Be Separated

The Christian Life and Salvation, by Donald G. Bloesch (Eerdmans, 1967, 164 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Walter Mueller, rector, St. Mark’s Reformed Episcopal Church, Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.

Ever since the Church held its first council in Jerusalem, theologians have debated the relation of faith to works in man’s experience of salvation. Unlike the many theological issues that die with time, this one will always be very much alive. The Christian Life and Salvation is a mid-twentieth-century contribution to the ongoing debate.

Bloesch’s approach to the problem may be stated as a question: “In order to come into the experience of salvation, must a man submit to Christ as Lord as well as trust him as Saviour?” He answers, “Yes!,” implying that though we should distinguish between Christ’s offices as Lord and Saviour, the two cannot be separated. A struggle with words follows. On the one hand, Bloesch seeks to maintain the Reformation principles of sola gratia and sola fide while avoiding the heresies of monergism and antinomianism. On the other hand, he tries to emphasize the unbreakable connection between salvation and a life of submission to Christ without falling into the errors of synergism and legalism.

To accomplish his purpose, Bloesch introduces the Kierkegaardian concept of “paradox.” The paradox of salvation is that “there is a sense in which God does all. Yet in another sense man is active too, … but only through the power of God’s Spirit.” In a day when “cheap grace” is all too prevalent, Bloesch’s emphasis on submission and obedience to Christ as Lord is welcome. There are, however, dangers in this emphasis. Bloesch recognizes these and tries to guard against them with such statements as, “Our position is that only the merits of Christ have intrinsic worth, and only these merits can be regarded as the basis for God’s acceptance of our works.”

Evangelicals will appreciate Bloesch’s position on the person of Christ, the centrality of the Cross (“The foundation of the Christian life is not an existential decision nor a mystical experience but the decisive, irrevocable work of God in the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ”), and the nature of Christ’s death (substitutionary, sacrificial, propitious, and so on). They will not feel, however, that his definition of sin as ignorance, bondage, and estrangement adequately expresses the scriptural teaching on this subject. Most disappointing is his flirtation with universalism and his acceptance of the doctrine of a second chance.

One comes from reading this book newly impressed that though the way of salvation may be understood by the simple, it is not simple to understand.

New Commentaries On Acts

Anchor Bible, Volume 31: The Acts of the Apostles, translated with introduction and notes by Johannes Munck (Doubleday, 1967, 318 pp., $6), and The New Clarendon Bible: The Acts, introduction and commentary by R. P. C. Hanson (Oxford, 1967, 262 pp., $5), are reviewed by David W. McIlvaine, Subject Cataloging Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.

The posthumously published volume by Johannes Munck shows the work of an able scholar. In an introduction of ninety pages, Munck defends the Lukan authorship and the historicity of the book. “The historical events related may be influenced by the author’s purpose in writing his work; but on the whole they bear the stamp of reality which is the property of history, rather than of the historical novel.” He dates the work in the first half of the sixties. Munck’s main interest is to reconstruct the historical situation of the primitive Church.

The biblical text is an original English translation from a Danish text prepared by Munck. The translators have done a good job; the text is free-flowing and readable. For each section of the text there are notes on specific points and also a section called “Comment.” Usually this comment is merely a summary of the biblical text. Most of the meat is in the notes. There is no map and no general index.

The appendix contains articles on (1) Luke’s ethnic background, (2) “eyewitnesses” in Luke, (3) Pentecost in Acts (in the commentary Munck takes a traditional position, but C. S. Mann, the writer of this appendix article, takes a different view and says only that something “paranormal” happened), (4) the organization and institutions of the Jerusalem church in Acts, (5) Stephen’s Samaritan background, (6) “Hellenists” and “Hebrews” in Acts 6:1, (7) Simon Magus as “The Great Power of God,” (8) Paul’s education, and (9) the customary languages of the Jews. These articles, written by W. F. Albright, C. S. Mann, and Abram Spiro, are in many ways the most valuable part of the book.

The “Clarendon Bible” Acts follows the text of the RSV and has notes below the text in smaller print. Hanson gives many more references to the primary sources than Munck does, but even these are sparse. The book contains also an introduction of fifty-six pages, a map, and an adequate index.

Hanson’s volume suffers from an unstated presupposition—that miracles cannot happen. He consistently attempts to dispose of miracles through contrived explanations. His explanation of Acts 16: 16 is worthless: “No doubt this girl was trained to tell fortuntes by means of ventriloquism practiced in a pretended trance.” Just how would a rebuke by Paul cause her to lose this acting ability? And why would her owners not find another actress who could play the part convincingly? In other places Hanson just skips over a miracle in the biblical text without comment.

Both Munck and Hanson feel that much in Acts is pure fiction. In the matter of Gamaliel’s speech, they both accuse Luke of historical blunders. Neither offers the least suggestion that Josephus could be wrong and Luke right.

The reader who wishes to buy only one of these two new commentaries should choose Munck’s.

The Eloquence Of The Cathedral

The Heritage of the Cathedral, by Sarted Prentice (William Morrow, 1966, 307 pp., $6), is reviewed by Carl H. Droppers, associate professor of architecture, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.

Sartell Prentice slashes through the pages of history and permits an inanimate object, the cathedral, to speak as it once did. The cathedral speaks eloquently of Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance times, as well as the periods between, but only a skillful historian like Prentice can interpret its language. He has a clear understanding of the environment that molded the people and, in turn, the cathedral. In fact, this book might be considered a kind of first book on environment and its effect on the people and the civilization it creates.

The author traces the means of communicating the Word. In time the cathedrals became so vast that the voice could no longer be heard; only the actions of the priest had meaning. He tells of the need to instruct hundreds of new converts with the picture language of the mosaic, the painting, and later the beautiful stained-glass windows; to tell an entire Bible incident in one piece of sculpture; to illustrate a whole book with a few carefully chosen figures and their actions.

He records the influence of transportation on environment, from the castles on the rivers that controlled the movement of ships to market, to the Roman roads that made possible rapid movement of troops, to the seas and overland routes that brought in new ideas from distant countries.

We see the influence of taxation on environment. Heavy taxes made the land sought in the Hundred Years’ War an almost worthless prize. We feel with the peasants the futility of tilling land that was sure to be taxed or plundered. We understand why they moved from the coastal areas, where they had no protection from plunder and could never meet the taxes imposed.

We discover how the philosophies of kings and popes fashioned the environment, and how in turn the wars, crusades, invasions, and counter-invasions shaped the people, their trades, their towns, their communities, and the buildings in which they lived and worshiped. We see how their beliefs and fears were recorded in the stones of their cathedrals. We see their triumphs and defeats carved in stone for others to “read.” We are stirred by a people who as a team willed great cathedrals into being—and as we tour the cathedrals we are still amazed at the unlettered men, men of spirit, who built them. They were men of vision, for they lived in what we would call slums but went forth and built to the honor and glory of God.

Sartell Prentice leaves us with an unwritten question: If we can see these influences on environment in past generations, why not look at our own? Might we not shape our environment rather than let it shape us?

An Illicit Love Affair

A Christian Critique of American Culture: An Essay in Practical Theology, by Julian H. Hartt (Harper, 1967, 425 pp. $8.50), is reviewed by Melvin G. Williams, assistant professor of English, American International College, Spring-field, Massachusetts.

It is regrettable that most readers will put down Julian Hartt’s A Christian Critique of American Culture after reading only the first few chapters. For in spite of his annoying reliance on the abstract jargon of the philosopher, he has a message of interest for more than simply “persons of philosophical-theological speculation.”

“Once it had become clear that the apocalyptic appearance of the Kingdom of God was not imminent,” Hartt begins “the people of the church had at least to modify their concrete relations with the ‘world’ if not their feelings and opinions about it.” Today, too, Christians must continue to evaluate the culture within which they live. But in doing so, Hartt says, the Church will have to disengage itself from its “fitful and illicit love affair with the world.”

With this awareness, however, come two major hazards for the Christian critic of culture: self-justification and irrelevance. The Church runs the risk of trying to establish its own empire above the heads of the tarnished world, or of becoming sophisticated beyond the reach of “everyday.” Liberal Christians whose passion for relevance obscures the divine foundation of their faith come under fire here. But so do the revivalists, whose message, Hartt asserts, “invariably reinforces anxiety even if it reduces guilt momentarily.”

Christians, themselves, however, are not the ultimate focus of Professor Hartt’s study. For though he points out that “Christian criticism of … culture must begin with the life of the church itself,” the most interesting part of the book is the third section, the practical applications—to the arts, to politics, and to mass culture. On politics he counsels his readers to seek out the truths that are so often hidden behind the blurred “syllabus of illusions” of Jonathan Wesley Sunday III, his imaginary representative of “everyday.”

How unfortunate that Hartt’s penetrating insights so often get buried under heaps of turgid sentences like these:

The structures [of being] have no inherent powers of existence; and so far as they are incorporated into actuality they wholly depend on God the Spirit. A generic ontological principle is exemplified in this assertion: structures are everywhere dependent upon the power of actual agents. This perhaps amounts to saying that existence precedes essence, but only if precedes means ontological rather than chronological priority, that is, in the order of being as such.

Any questions?

Resuscitating An Old-Style Liberal

The Reality of Christianity: A Study of Adolf von Harnack as Historian and Theologian, by G. Wayne Glick (Harper & Row, 1967, 359 pp., $7.50) is reviewed by Robert H. Gundry, associate professor of biblical studies, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.

Adolf von Harnack was the embodiment of old-style liberal theology. This study of him is third in the series “Makers of Modern Theology,” edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. Despite a repetitious and sometimes turgid style, the book provides valuable information about both Harnack himself and the history of Continental theology during his career.

Glick portrays Harnack in a variety of poses—theologian of Kantian ethics; historical researcher of amazing erudition; conservative critic against the history-of-religions school and the radical form critics; pious apologist for Christianity to cultured materialists; Ritschlian rebel against unprogressive Lutheran orthodoxy and ecclesiasticism; Marcionite rejector of the canonicity of the Old Testament—but never as a heretic, despite his denials of Jesus’ physical resurrection and of other major features of biblical and historic Christian faith. In fact, Glick finds it odd that a conference in Mecklenburg entertained a formal proposal to place Harnack under the anathema of Galatians 1:7–9.

The title, The Reality of Christianity, is a translation of the title of Harnack’s most famous book, Das Wesen des Christentums, and refers to the heart of Jesus’ message. For Harnack, this was (1) the (uneschatological) kingdom of God and its coming, (2) the fatherhood of God and the infinite value of the human soul, and (3) high ethics, with special emphasis on love. Thus Harnack denatured the New Testament kerygma by removing its eschatological and Christologically redemptive features and provided a base for the social gospel in Jesus’ ethical teaching.

Glick traces Harnack’s pilgrimage from a slightly pietistic orthodoxy to liberal theology via Ritschl, with influences from Engelhardt, Baur, Hegel, and Goethe. Then come summaries and critiques of Harnack’s major works. The author faults Harnack for reducing the Gospel excessively and for failing to see that his own theology was determined by factors other than open-minded historical investigation. But the orthodox reader will wonder whether the proof of Harnack’s unself-conscious subjectivism really helps matters; so long as a high view of Scripture is considered hopelessly out of date (so Glick), the theologian is adrift whether or not he is aware of his subjectivism.

The tone of the critiques is theological throughout. The author makes no attempt to evaluate the many contributions of Harnack to textual, higher critical, and historical studies apart from their theological implications—except for laudatory remarks about the breadth and depth of his scholarship and the prolificness of his writings. One also feels that Harnack’s antisupernaturalism, which predetermined the direction of his historical and theological pursuits, should have received more critical attention, especially in view of Pannenberg’s recent attempt to show that acceptance of the possibility of the supernatural does not foreclose valid historiography. Leaning the other way, Glick draws the moral that modern theology must learn from Harnack ever to be assiduous in rigorous historical research and to be subject to the strictures of historical criticism.

Toward A Responsible State

Protestant Faith and Religious Liberty, by Philip Wogaman (Abingdon, 1967, 254 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by Graham L. Hales, pastor, University Baptist Church, Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

This book is a lucid and valuable contribution to the debate on religious liberty. Large government programs in education and the War on Poverty, along with recent Supreme Court decisions, have caused deep confusion. The inevitable complexities of our highly inter-related society make strict separation of church and state no longer possible.

Wogaman is looking for a solid foundation from which Christians can advocate religious liberty as public policy. Although he admits value in each of five major positions now supported in Protestant and Roman Catholic circles, he considers none adequate in itself.

In his own position, built on the basic Protestant principles of critique of idolatry and openness to truth, he seeks a mediating point beyond skepticism and relativism. But his argument only partially succeeds. One cannot help feeling that too much of Christian certainty is compromised. A sounder basis for religious liberty can be found in the earthly ministry of our Lord, who, while he made absolute claims, granted aboslute freedom of rejection. God’s choice of the cross prohibits coercion to faith by external authority, either of church or of state.

After building his case, the author discusses the applications and limitations of a public policy of religious liberty. The Christian desires a “responsible state,” he says, and should seek to bring this into being, individually and through political pressure from church blocs.

Wogaman’s position, when applied in specific areas of public concern—e.g., public and religious educational systems, political action, and religious establishment—will seem radical to those who object to any Christian social action in the public sphere. Moderates would draw the limits tighter than he does. Nevertheless, his conclusions are well reasoned and help to clarify the main elements of the problem of religious liberty.

Wogaman concludes with a call for Protestants to engage in open dialogue with all Christian groups, with Marxists, and with secular humanism. He sees this as the best way to gain supporters for the principle and practice of a universal policy of religious liberty.

Read this book. The issues raised are The issues. And the answers given will prod you to develop your own.

Book Briefs

Call to Adventure: The Retreat as Religious Experience, edited by Raymond J. Magee (Abingdon, 1967, 160 pp., $2.25). Twelve enlightening essays on how the Christian retreat can advance people spiritually.

Recent Homiletical Thought, A Bibliography, 1935–1965, edited by William Too-hey and William D. Thompson (Abingdon, 1967, 303 pp., $4.75). Scholars will greet enthusiastically this excellent annotated bibliography on preaching.

Yearbook of American Churches, 1967 Edition, edited by Constant H. Jacquet, Jr. (National Council of Churches, 1967, 258 pp., $7.50). Authoritative, indispensable data on all religious organizations.

The Century Bible: Leviticus and Numbers, edited by N. H. Snaith (Nelson, 1967, 352 pp., 50s.). Uses the documentary hypothesis to dissect the third and fourth books of the Pentateuch.

Salute to Sandy, by Dale Evans Rogers (Revell, 1967, 117 pp., $2.95). Dale’s touching description of the life of son Sandy, the third child in the Roy Rogers family to die, conveys the power and greatness of God’s love in the lives of those who trust him.

To Understand Each Other, by Paul Tournier (John Knox, 1967, 63 pp., $2). Understanding—particularly between marriage partners—requires openness, courage, love, realization of differences, and primarily mutual submission to Jesus Christ. Helpful advice, says this Swiss physician, is incomplete without spiritual renewal.

At the Lord’s Table, by Ralph G. Turnbull (Baker, 1967, 141 pp., $2). Sermon-meditations from a Presbyterian minister on twenty-one aspects of the Lord’s Supper.

Herod: Profile of a Tyrant by Samuel Sandmel (Lippincott, 1967, 282 pp., $5.95). A detailed history by a Jewish scholar of Herod the Great, the ambitious and cruel despot best known for his slaughter of the innocents at the time of Christ’s birth.

Augsburg Historical Atlas of Christianity in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, by Charles S. Anderson (Augsburg, 1967, 68 pp., $7.50). Colorful maps and helpful explanations that trace a millennium of Christianity from Pope Gregory through the Thirty Years’ War.

Paperbacks

Are You Going to Church More But Enjoying It Less?, by Gary Freeman (R. B. Sweet, 1967, 260 pp., $2.95). Many of these concise, clever essays get right to the point of Christianity in contemporary life.

Christ’s Ambassadors: The Priority of Preaching, by Frank Colquhoun (Westminster, 1967, 93 pp., $1.45). The case for clear, biblical preaching incorporating both kerygma and didache is presented convincingly in this new addition to the “Christian Foundation Series.”

The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue (Inter-Varsity Press, 1967, 96 pp., $.95). A complete transcript of the “death-of-God” debate between Thomas J. J. Altizer and John Warwick Montgomery at the University of Chicago, February 24, 1967.

Team Teaching in Christian Education by Frances M. Anderson (Evangelical Covenant Church of America, 1967, 92 pp., $1.25). The author says that team teaching—which requires greater effort from the teachers—stimulates pupil interest and participation and actually extends from koinonia (Christian fellowship).