The American Academy of Arts and Sciences devoted the Winter 1966 issue of its journal Daedalus to a symposium on “Religion in America.” Thirteen contributors, chosen from a fairly broad spectrum of our American religious scene, attempt to assess the status of both institutional and “spiritual” Christianity and Judaism, with a view to a possible projection of the nation’s religious future.

Giant problems stalk the terrain these authors seek to cover. These problems touch the center of our national scene: the relation of the Church to society, the inter-relationships among major religious institutions themselves, and the tendency of the Church to “establish” itself, whether legally or sociologically. Although the writers address themselves to many issues, they seem most concerned with the emergence of what may be called a “folk religion” and with the several elements that may combine to produce this. The tension between the sacralism of such a culture-religion and the New Worldliness appears in many guises and elicits a variety of responses.

A pivotal question is whether American culture is to continue to be shaped without reference to God. If so, then what will occupy the role theism left vacant? What symbols will replace the concepts of divine sovereignty, providence, redemption, and judgment? Some suggest that the figure of Jesus (often regarded as a paradigm for the Church, or for social service) will afford an integrating center, so that “God talk” will yield to a bold new symbolism in theological language, a symbolism deriving its content from secular and sociological sources.

It is suggested that the existential mood, which tends to be psychologically oriented, is giving ground to a new mood related to current social crises—race, economics, law enforcement, sexual morality, and the like. If this is correct, what shape may theological formulation be expected to take? There is no lack of contenders. Some, disillusioned with institutional forms of Christianity, will follow Bonhoeffer in his insistence upon some such category as “worldly Christianity.” Others will propose a sharpening of the now-blurred categories of classical theological liberalism, so as to afford a framework for a new formulation in which the frank involvement of theology with cultural surroundings will be accepted as given.

Looming large in the discussions is the alleged irrelevance of the churches to modern life, particularly in its urban form. The classic explanation is that traditional supernaturalism is alien to the thought-modes of modern man and that irrelevance thus lies in a failure to shed the trappings of historical Christian theological language. But one author ventures to quote the view, expressed recently by a critic of the God-is-dead movement, that ‘much of the churches’ social irrelevance stems from their tendency to dilute the categories of Scripture in a mindless accommodation to society.” To this the evangelical can assent heartily.

Major problems of approach concern the panelists. Most of them reject the view that the task of the churches should be understood chiefly in terms of the preservation of stable institutions. The choice seems to be between the activist minority, bent on revolutionary change, and the melioristic majority, more grateful to the past than the activists. No one seems willing or able to propose a final answer at this point.

The recurring question is, however, to what extent the Christian Church should try to adapt its theology to the kaleidoscopic movements in the current social scene. Those favoring a thorough accommodation seem to opt for the more promising path of conformity. Those contending for the validity of the essential core of Christian confessional truth face the staggering problem of teaching the thoughtful part of our world to understand the language in which this truth is expressed. Few, it seems, are willing to undertake this bold task.

A generation ago, a symposium of this sort would scarcely have included such a chapter as “Is There a Third Force in Christendom?” By a religious “third force” the author means an agency that is either indicative of or (possibly) causal to a significant shift in religious alignments. On the whole, this chapter is balanced in its treatment of the movements that stand between the avant-garde of the radical theology and the melioristic standard-bearers of the religion of the major denominations. What is new here is the stress upon the pluralistic quality of the “Third Force,” especially the inclusion within it of the younger and restless elements in the Roman Catholic Church.

The chapter contains its provincialisms. It mentions Wheaton (Illinois) College as “one of the very few accredited fundamentalist colleges” and makes no mention of accredited theological seminaries of evangelical commitment. Its author identifies—too easily, we think—the evangelical movement in America with the 1964 candidacy of Barry Goldwater, and speaks from a very limited inductive base when he writes that “the new evangelicals are the spiritual hard-core of the radical right.” It is the experience of this writer that his colleagues were far from being of one mind in October/November of 1964; and further, that thoughtful evangelicals today are far more charitable in their treatment of President Lyndon B. Johnson than many of those who in 1964 evangelistically endorsed his platform as embodying the Christian ideal.

Again, it appears naive to write, as the author of this chapter does, that the priority given by evangelicals to foreign missionary endeavor “unquestionably results from their alienation from their own culture.” One wonders whether this writer has any acquaintance with the biographies of such missionary leaders as J. Hudson Taylor, Charles Cowman, or C. T. Studd—to name a few.

The attempt to sever the motivation of the evangelical missionary societies (especially the “faith missions”) from that of the nineteenth-century missionary endeavors is related to a more general tendency—that of portraying the evangelical cause today as unrelated to the major evangelical trends within the established denominations prior to the period of the dominance of theological liberalism.

What is the probable future shape of religion in America? None of the authors ventures a definitive reply. Some see it shaped, in some part at least, by a rising pietism, derived from impulses parallel to those prevailing in evangelical Christianity, if indeed not in some measure determined by them. Some see activistic participation (perhaps identification) as the wave of the theological future. Yet others see the emergence of a sort of social-establishment Christendom.

Only one author seems to regard as a live option the possibility that the Holy Spirit may operate instrumentally to bring new light—and with it, new forms—to the spiritual life of the nation. It seems clear that, should this occur, the Spirit’s moving will come upon many who at the moment show little acquaintance with him.

American nuns are beginning to kick the habit. The evidence is unmistakable.

Last year the number of nuns decreased by 4,750—the first major decline in years. But more important than the nuns who quit are the nuns who stay and fight the system.

“Sweeping changes in the rules and practices of religious orders are on the way,” predicts Sister Aloysius Schalden-brand, a college philosophy instructor, with heady optimism. “Old restrictive rules are tumbling as the store of energy within the convents bursts its bounds, and nothing will stop that process now.”

Though she sounds more like a suffragette than a sister, her attitude reflects the spirit of a growing group coming to be known as the “new nuns.” Having vowed to be poor, chaste, and obedient, they are suddenly aware of a responsibility to themselves to be revolutionary as well.

“There has been a dramatic change in the involvement of the American sisters,” says Sister M. Audrey Kopp of Marylhurst College. “They want to be relevant.”

Predictably, the reaction of the hierarchy is mixed.

“Sisters are, or are rapidly becoming, the best educated, the most prophetic, the most dedicated and farthest out in front in their desire to implement the new mind of the church,” says Auxiliary Bishop Joseph M. Breitenbeck, vicar of Detroit’s 6,000 nuns. “Not to utilize fully this great resource of the church would be tragic.”

But to others in the church (probably the majority), the real tragedy is the new nun herself.

One mother superior who has had to deal with this new spirit in a convent says that the new nun represents an extremely small minority who are not so interested in relevance as in simple rebellion. “They want all the benefits of being a nun, without any of the restrictions.”

Whether for rebellion or renewal, however, the new nun is restless, and the focus of her attack is the complete control of her life by the convent.

There are now in this country 176,000 nuns scattered through 480 orders. Whatever her rank, each nun is regimented in her life—from dress to vocation—by a rigid chain of command that leads ultimately to Rome.

In the eyes of the church, a nun accepts her vows so she may more perfectly serve God. Any differences she may have with the system are to be resolved through simple obedience. The growing view in the convent, however, is that the system often produces suffocation and should be reshaped.

The search for a new role for religious orders dates from Vatican II and the church’s increased emphasis on social action. The council called for convents to be “modified according to conditions of time and place and outdated customs done away with,” and instructed each order to conduct a self-study.

The new nuns hope to translate this spirit into action. The convent, they say, should promote social involvement, not restrict it. Where there is a conflict, it must be the system, not the sisters, that change.

Catholic Growth Lag?

The official annual directory published last month shows record totals for U. S. Roman Catholics in membership (46,864,910, including children) and clergy (59,892) for calendar year 1966. But there were signs of a possible decline on the horizon.

The number of converts (117,478) was the lowest since 1953, and candidates for the priesthood dropped 6 per cent. While high school and college enrollment rose, the elementary school total dropped 122,108, to 4,369,845. There were 84,096 fewer infant baptisms in 1966 than in 1965.

The convert figures, watched by Catholic traditionalists, have dropped since Vatican II. But over the past decade, Catholic growth has amounted to an impressive 35 per cent, compared to a 15 per cent increase in Protestantism.

While the fight has not been without its minor victories, the new nuns still face the frustration expressed by Sister Claire Sawyer: “We are intelligent people, well trained in our professions, but too often we are treated like children.”

What nuns have on their minds is as important to the church as to the convent. Without the nuns, Pope Pius XII used to say, the work of the church is “almost inconceivable.”

If anything, he was understating the case. Nuns form the backbone of the labor force of almost every important church activity. More to the point, they do it inexpensively.

Nowhere is their presence more vital than in education. More than 100,000 nuns now work in Catholic education. The dollar replacement value of that contribution has been estimated at $200 million yearly.

With the increasing problems Catholic education is facing—a decrease this year of nearly 100,000 elementary and high-school students, for example, combined with fears of reduced federal aid to private-school children—a revolt among nuns could be devastating.

But while the power held by religious orders is great, the church’s hierarchy appears convinced that it is much more than they will ever use. As a result their demands often are treated as trifles.

Only reluctantly, for example, did church fathers invite a few women to attend the Vatican Council—and then only as voteless observers. In the convent, when nuns are able to enter into discussions on procedures, most often the talk is limited to secondary questions of dress or work conditions.

To many church conservatives, religious orders need to stay the same more than they need to change. If there is currently a revolt spreading among the nuns, the fault, they say, is more with the nuns who spread dissatisfaction than with the system itself. And they attribute the decline in the number of nuns to increased competition from other opportunities open to young people for social service, among them the foreign and domestic Peace Corps.

But to church reformers with their preoccupation for renewal, the question goes deeper.

“Open your eyes and count,” warns Rev. Blase Bonpane, vocational director for Maryknoll College. “They are quitting because they think they can be more Christian somewhere else. Does blindness have to be part of our life?”

The Protestant Nuns

The nun in Protestantism is rare. Only four major U. S. denominations have them, and the total number is probably under 2,000.

Known usually as “deaconesses,” they generally have no specific dress and few restricting vows beyond obedience. Often they are free to marry. Few live in convents.

The Methodist Church lists the largest group, with 390 now active. The Lutheran Church in America ranks second with 200. LCA nuns wear a uniform and are sworn to celibacy, unlike the 100 nuns of the third-ranked Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

The Protestant Episcopal Church has both deaconesses and nuns. The church’s forty-five deaconesses have no vows or uniform and are free to marry (though none ever have). The church also has an undisclosed number of nuns connected with fifteen independent orders. Like those in the Roman Catholic Church, Episcopal nuns live a convent life under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Women in Protestant religious orders work primarily in education and social service. Although all four denominations report recruitment campaigns, membership in orders has tended to remain constant.

Miscellany

The U.S. House of Representatives passed and sent to the Senate a bill to maintain federal aid for elementary and secondary schools. A controversial amendment to turn over control of funds to states (May 26 issue, page 44) was defeated, but a number of related compromises were incorporated. Several states forbid church school aid.

As a follow-up to the World Congress on Evangelism, one of the largest groups of French-speaking evangelicals ever assembled met in Lausanne, Switzerland, to discuss the theology and methodology of evangelism. Leaders were Scripture Union’s Maurice Ray and Jean-Paul Benoit, former evangelism director of the French Reformed Church.

The newsletter of the National Council of Catholic Men suggests that churches be required to pay taxes on unrelated business income. It recommends study of the issue by courts or Congress.

Militant Hindus are urging India to make conversion of Hindus to other faiths a criminal offense, as it is in neighboring Nepal.

The 124,000 Baptists in the western Congo are asking their government for legal recognition as a body independent of overseas control. Detroit Negro pastor Louis Johnson had complained to American Baptist missions officials about U. S. control and related policies.

The Lutheran World Federation plans to expand Radio Voice of the Gospel, its Ethiopia-based station, possibly to Angola, Mozambique, and Latin America.

Pope Paul ratified the four representatives U. S. bishops chose to go to this fall’s Synod of Bishops in Rome. They are Lawrence Cardinal Shehan of Baltimore, Archbishops John Dearden of Detroit and John Krol of Philadelphia, and Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh.

The Evangelical Press Association gave its “Periodical of the Year” award to This Day, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod monthly, and presented fifty-five other prizes.

The American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry is moving offices from New York to Chicago and will increase efforts to train clergymen in counseling.

In annual missions-giving marathons, The Peoples Church of Toronto raised $325,000, and Boston’s Park Street Church more than $300,000.

Georgia Presbyterians were told that the church’s well-heeled Thornwell Orphanage in Clinton, South Carolina, cannot be racially integrated because this would cause community discord, staff resignations, reduced contributions, and church conflicts.

In reaction to open-housing demonstrations in Louisville, Kentucky’s Transylvania Presbytery urged cities in its area to adopt open-housing ordinances, citing national pronouncements from the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

Governor Buford Ellington signed on May 18 a bill that repeals Tennessee’s law against teaching evolutionary theories on the origin of man. Only Arkansas and Mississippi retain anti-evolution statutes.

For the first time, a Roman Catholic unit has been elected a participating organization in a National Council of Churches agency. The Maryknoll Missionary Society will have a seat on the board of the NCC education department.

The Centennial School District in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, decided not to appeal to the state Supreme Court a ruling against distribution of Gideons Bibles to pupils. The books can be used if they have a “reasonable relationship” to curriculum. A district near Pittsburgh plans to distribute New Testaments under the rationale that they are great world literature.

Personalia

A decision by the administration of Waynesburg College not to renew the contract of Religious Life Director Dennis C. Benson was backed by a faculty vote of 34 to 21.

The Rev. Rodger Harrison, an American Baptist Convention missionary to Sweden, will become the chaplain to English-speaking Protestants in Moscow, on behalf of the National Council of Churches.

Bishop Ruben Josefson has been chosen Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala and primate of the Church of Sweden’s seven million members.

Paul Fromer, editor of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s His magazine, was elected president of the Evangelical Press Association.

Evangelist Billy Graham joined War on Poverty chief Sargent Shriver for a weekend visit of poverty programs in Graham’s home region of western North Carolina.

The new president of Union Theological Seminary (Presbyterian) in Richmond, Virginia, is the Rev. Dr. Fred R. Stair, Jr., 49, pastor of Atlanta’s Central Presbyterian Church, who was assistant to the UTS president from 1948 to 1953.

Joseph Wightman was installed as the president of Erskine College, Due West, South Carolina, in ceremonies that included an address by Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Dallas Cowboys football coach Tom Landry, named 1966 National Football Coach of the Year, told a meeting of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes that “ultimate satisfaction rests in religious belief.”

Accepting a Catholic Press Association award for the “most distinguished contribution to Catholic journalism,” the Rev. John Reedy, editor of the national weekly Ave Maria, said that “the most important development in the U. S. Catholic press in the last ten years was the founding of the National Catholic Reporter,” an independent weekly.

The Rev. Martin Duffy, white pastor of the predominantly Negro Mountain Vernon Heights Congregational Church (United Church of Christ), Mount Vernon, New York, has resisted an attempt by a group of members to have him dismissed for his work in civil-rights causes. The congregation voted 50 to 40 to retain him.

Richard L. Riseling has been named director of international affairs of the American Baptists’ Division of Christian Social Concern.

Orley S. Herron, dean of students at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California, will become an associate professor of education at the University of Mississippi.

Gamal Abdel Nasser flexed his military muscle last month, and suddenly the world tottered on the edge of a major armed conflict. Americans were preoccupied in Viet Nam, the British in Hong Kong, where Communist-inspired rioting persisted. But the Middle East situation worsened so rapidly that the eyes of the world shifted anxiously to the lands of the Bible. There were no immediate religious issues in the crisis, but overtones of conflicting faiths and ideologies were quickly apparent.

Nasser, the Muslim president of the United Arab Republic (Egypt), touched off the global concern—perhaps at the provocation of Israel. He demanded withdrawal of a 3,400-man United Nations surveillance force from the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, where Israel and Egypt meet. United Nations Secretary General U Thant, a Buddhist, quickly acceded, and the border-watchers were evacuated.

Then Nasser announced a blockade against Israeli shipping at the Strait of Tiran. To the Israelis, who have been forbidden by Egypt to use the Suez Canal, it seemed a deliberate act of aggression. The Gulf of Aqaba had been closed to Israel from 1948 until after the Suez war in 1957. Part of the price for withdrawal of Israeli forces from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was the opening of the water access to the port of Elath at the southern tip of Israel. Israel used it to receive oil supplies from Iran and to send important cash exports.

The immediate ecclesiastical effect of the crisis was the threat that North American and British Christian missionaries would have to leave their posts in the Middle East. That seemed to be a virtual certainty if major hostilities developed. Archaeological research (see story below) could also be seriously affected.

Meanwhile, Jewish leaders in the United States brought pressure on President Johnson to assert himself on behalf of Israel. Irving Fain, head of social-action programs for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, called on the chief executive “not simply to reaffirm a general interest in Israel’s security—but to make the kind of statement which cannot be misinterpreted—i.e., a statement of intention to keep the Straits of Tiran open for international shipping; a stern warning to the effect that armed incursion by Arab aggressors will not be tolerated; and a systematic effort to persuade Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union to join in this quest for peace.”

General Secretary R. H. Edwin Espy of the National Council of Churches sent a telegram to U Thant saying “We … consider the U.N. presence in the Middle East as essential to the prevention of a disastrous conflict.” Another telegram, sent to Arthur Goldberg, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., asserted that the “failure to secure the U.N. peacekeeping function in the Middle East now will be a severe setback to peace.”

Britain and France delayed action on the Middle East crisis. But the Soviet Union, which has been supplying arms to Egypt, quickly lined up behind Nasser and blamed Israel for “aggravating the atmosphere of military psychosis” in the Middle East.

Nasser also got expected support from the University of Al-Azhar in Cairo, a famous seat of Muslim learning dating back to about A.D. 968. The rector of the university, Sheik Hassan Maamoun, called the situation a “decisive battle in the history of religion and Arabism.” He issued a statement appealing to the world’s Muslims to support Nasser in the face of the “Zionist menace” and to “strike hard at the aggressor.”

Elath, the Aqaba port of the Israelis, is at or near the site of the Ezion-Geber of Numbers 32:35, where it is recorded that the Hebrews encamped while traveling from Kadesh-barnea to Moab. In First Kings 9:26, King Solomon is remembered as having built a fleet of ships at Ezion-geber. The site was excavated in the thirties by archeologists Nelson Glueck and Fritz Frank. Large-scale copper refinery installations were found.

Digging Solomon’S Wall

The eventful spring archaeological dig in Gezer, Israel, this year may well have rediscovered the third city wall and gate built by King Solomon. Positive proof may come within weeks. Gezer, twenty miles west of Jerusalem, was one of the half-dozen most important cities in old Palestine, and one of the largest. It was conquered by Joshua and the Israelites. As a Philistine center, it rose against King David. Solomon got it as a dowry when he married Pharaoh’s daughter.

The rediscovery tale began in 1958, when the well-known soldier-archaeologist Yigael Yadin uncovered the gate Solomon built at Hazor, and concluded that the ancient mound at Gezer would reveal another gate of Solomon if the excavator’s pick were sunk in the correct spot.

How did he know? Yadin, Israel’s first chief of staff, and now a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found the gate not by picking through the twenty-seven acres at the site, but by reading two books: the Bible and a sixty-year-old archaeological work by Britain’s R. A. Stewart Macalister. Macalister had set out to turn over every foot of soil at Gezer, but time and money ran out before the job was completed. His three-volume chronicle of the effort, though it leaves much to be desired by current standards of scientific accuracy, inspired future archaeologists to re-excavate the area.

Macalister had discovered a casemate (double) wall and a four-entry gate, which he sketched and labeled “Maccabean Castle.” Yadin compared the sketch with Hazor and the wall found in the 1930s at Megiddo and theorized that they had been planned by the same ancient royal architect. And First Kings 9:15 affirmed the theory—it reports that walls were built at Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer.

The theory was tested in April by an expedition from Hebrew Union College under Harvard—trained archaeologist William G. Dever. They uncovered the “Maccabean Castle,” and it appears to be the Solomonic wall and gate Yadin had predicted.

A group of theological students from the American Institute for Holy Land Studies, working as volunteers with Dever, shared the general excitement as the entrance to the gate slowly came into view. The next day, the students were off to Megiddo, then Hazor, and one enthused, “We are probably the first in 3,000 years to view all three of Solomon’s gates which stood before his fortified cities.”

Positive proof on Gezer must await further work this summer, when archaeologists will seek undisturbed, datable pottery. From June 26 to August 4, the expedition will be joined by more than 100 students from the United States and Israel. Those following the prescribed course will get four hours’ credit for the summer of work. Besides digging, they will hear lectures from six scholars on the summer staff.

The Gezer work began in 1964 under Harvard’s G. Ernest Wright, assisted by Dever and another of his students, H. Darrell Lance. Dr. Nelson Glueck, who heads Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and its branch school of archaeology in Jerusalem, commissioned the work. Wright was succeeded by James F. Ross of Drew University, then Yale’s Marvin Pope, with Dever as field director. Lance, now with Colgate Rochester Divinity School, joins the group this summer as associate director.

Glueck said excavations will continue for the next six to eight seasons, to “salvage everything possible done by Macalister, published or unpublished.” The group also hopes to “excavate large areas of the untouched portion of the mound in order to fill in the gaps that exist in the history of the site.”

Macalister published so little evidence that most scholars had thought the mound was deserted during the tenth and ninth centuries B.C. Yadin’s hunch and the 1967 discovery that the structures do exist erases much of the doubt and opens the way for establishing positively that the area was occupied in Israelite times. The work of coming seasons promises to fill other historical gaps and add to the growing store of knowledge about the life and times of this land in the days of the Bible.

DWIGHT L. BAKER

India’S Muslim President

It took the United States 171 years to elect a Roman Catholic president. Last month, India chose a member of its Muslim minority as president (ceremonial head of state) just twenty years after the tumultuous religious partition with Muslim Pakistan.

Zakir Husain, 70, noted scholar and vice-president since 1962, defeated Hindu jurist Subba Rao both in the national Parliament and in the state assemblies. The Muslims—one-tenth of India’s 500 million population—apparently voted for Husain regardless of party. Though predominantly Hindu, India is officially a secular state under its 1947 constitution.

The third president of India is a great admirer of Gandhi and said after his election, “We have to talk less, quarrel less, work hard and ever harder, and hold together.”

T. E. KOSHY

Greece’S New Primate

The military junta that controls Greece has ousted highly conservative Archbishop Chrysostomos and replaced him with Archimandrite Jerome Kotsonis, a theologian who has worked with the World Council of Churches and supports closer ties with the Vatican. The new primate was elected by the Synod of Bishops, whose nine members had earlier been replaced by the junta. Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei later opposed the church changeover.

Internally, the move represents the success of the junta in bringing the church under its control—something that both the old government and Greece’s King Constantine had favored but were unable to achieve.

Internationally, the new archbishop raises hopes among ecumenically minded church leaders for more friendly relations between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

Preaching at his enthronement in Athens, Archbishop Kotsonis pointed to the need for Christians to put the basic principles of Christianity into effect regardless of doctrinal differences. “All of this can be attained,” he said, “only with the close cooperation of all the Christian Churches.”

At 62, he is exceptionally young to hold the church’s highest office. He is also the first non-bishop elected to that rank since 1920. He has been a chaplain to the royal family since 1949 and is a member of the central committee of the World Council of Churches and a professor of canon law at the University of Thessalonica.

Spain: Strings Attached

Protestants in Spain hardly know whether to feel happy or hurt about the final text of the religious-freedom law voted by a Cortes (parliament) committee last month. Final approval is scheduled at the July Cortes plenary session. “Private and public profession of any religion” is permitted, but only for those who accept a long string of regulations.

On the eve of the Cortes action, Protestant representatives held their yearly meeting in Valencia, and their verdict on the law was unanimous: Unacceptable, because the state will interfere with the affairs of the church. They decided not to accept the rules, even if it means loss of the new freedom the law promises.

Under the law, the 35,000 Protestants will be recognized on the same level as secular organizations. They must provide annual membership lists and financial reports to the government. The government must accredit new pastors and will tell seminaries how many new students they can accept. Church schools may be started only if congregations have the required number of children. No churches can accept foreign aid.

The new law says religious freedom is “based on the Catholic teaching and must be put in agreement in every case with the fact that Spain is a confessional state.” The Cortes discussion stressed that the Vatican had approved the law, and Protestants were mentioned only in a derogatory way. As Adolfo (named after Hitler) Munoz Alonso said, “This law will inaugurate a new political situation, and I must express my fears that a second step of the sects will be to ask for other liberties under the pretext of still being discriminated against.”

The law does not give Protestant ministers the exemption from military service granted Catholic priests. And Protestants will be required to attend the military Mass which accompanies the ceremony of loyalty to Spain.

Since non-Catholic worship, whether private or public, must be in places approved by authorities, Protestants fear the law could prevent even their private devotions at home. Also, most Protestant converts are won through home visitation and the law clearly forbids this.

Episcopal Bishop Ramon Sienes regrets that non-Catholic churches are considered “mere associations of private right,” and Jewish leader Don Samuel Toledano says, “We are considered to be second-class citizens of Spain.”

Come Down, Kingey

A version of the four Gospels in the “Scouse” dialect of Liverpool, England, will appear shortly. The cover will picture Christ on the cross, wearing a flat cap, open shirt, and dungarees, against a Liverpool background. The crucifixion scene reads:

“ ‘Come down, Kingey,’ dey yelled, ‘You’ve done some big talkin’. If yer de Son of God, get yourself out of this mess—den we’ll believe yer.’ ”

Liverpool’s Bishop Stuart Blanch says “it is a fine piece of work. In parts, it gets to the root of the real meaning of the Gospel, which may have been obscured in normal orthodox translation.”

The writer is the Rev. R. H. L. Williams, whose church is by the Liverpool docks. He was converted in 1949 under the ministry of noted evangelical Leith Samuel.

The Fatima ‘Obstacle’

Before he left for Fatima, Portugal, last month, Pope Paul admitted that “Marian dogma still constitutes one of the greatest obstacles to unity in one faith with the Catholic Church.” Even so, he said in an encyclical the same week that “all those who believe in the Gospel” are “obliged” to venerate the Virgin Mary, and that the church is entering a new “Marian era.”

The fiftieth anniversary of the reported visions of Mary at Fatima and the Pope’s interest in Mary are of great ecumenical significance (see “Fatima’s Fiftieth,” News, March 31 issue).

In his sermon during a low mass at the shrine attended by one million pilgrims, the Pope said “we have come to the feet of the Queen of Peace to ask her for the gift, which only God can give, of peace.” He meant not just a military ceasefire, it developed, but peace in the Roman church itself. The Pope issued a strong appeal against liberal theology:

“What terrible damage could be provoked by arbitrary interpretations, not authorized by the teaching of the church, disrupting its traditional and constitutional structure, replacing the theology of the true and great fathers of the church with new and peculiar ideologies, interpretation intent upon stripping the norms of faith of that which modern thought—often lacking rational judgment—doesn’t understand and doesn’t like.”

The sermon also remembered “all Christians, non-Catholics but brothers in baptism” and asked Mary for a “united church.” Earlier, the Pope had used mostly Bible texts in speaking about Mary to a group of Portuguese Protestants.

Besides multitudes of diseased persons visiting the shrine, the onlookers included famed Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who was visiting his Portuguese publisher. He said “it was a very impressive experience” and that he plans to write a poem about it.

The Pope’s five-hour Portugal visit included a nine-minute chat with dictator Antonio Salazar. The New York Times said the Pope has rarely been mentioned in Portugal’s government-controlled press since he visited India after it absorbed the Portuguese colony of Goa. But the papal audience was long enough to bring a protest from Algeria, which harbors several anti-Salazar rebel groups.

Besides Portugal and India, the Pope has visited the Holy Land and the United Nations in New York since his election in 1963.

The Fatima visit was seen on all three U. S. TV networks, in Canada, and in fifteen West European nations through Eurovision, which assigned two dozen cameras to the operation.

Everything was coming up roses in Portland, Oregon, last month, a week before the annual Rose Parade, especially for leaders of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. And if commissioners to its 179th General Assembly believed the roses had thorns, they raised surprisingly little protest.

The assembly adopted without alteration the controversial “Confession of 1967” and all but one report of the avant-garde Standing Committee on Church and Society chaired by Stanford’s Robert McAfee Brown. A report on “War and World Order” was approved after deletion of a provocative but non-essential section.

By accepting the “Confession of 1967,” the assembly gave final approval to the first major change in the denomination’s confessional standards in three centuries. The action to include the new confession along with eight other doctrinal statements¹The Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, the Scots Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Shorter Catechism, and the Declaration of Barmen. carried with it a far less publicized amendment of the ordination vows for ministers, elders, and deacons.

Candidates will no longer receive the doctrinal statements of the church—even the new one—as “embodying that system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.” They will promise only to be “zealous and faithful in studying the Scriptures, the Book of Confessions, and the Book of Order” (italics added). The presbyteries of the denomination had already accepted the alterations, 165 to 19.

Earlier, on recommendation of the steering-committee majority, the assembly had rejected a protest from four presbyteries that deletion of the Larger Catechism from the confessional standards of the church was unconstitutional. After an estimated four-to-one approval of the new confession, commissioners also rejected an amendment to delete the phrase “even at risk to national security” from a section urging peace among nations. The alteration had been proposed by the presbytery of Washington, D. C., which found the phrase “unnecessarily provocative.”

The practical thrust of the new confession is to engage the church in social concerns. And the church and society committee lost no time in claiming the assembly’s action as an endorsement of its efforts. Claiming that “the ‘Confession of 1967’ thrusts upon us a type of divine pressure,” committee chairman Brown added his own pressure on behalf of the committee’s resolutions, proposing that the commissioners adopt them without change. For the most part they did.

A crucial “Declaration of Conscience” on Viet Nam said the United States, “as the stronger nation,” has a moral obligation to take the initiative “leading finally to the negotiating table.” The first step: “an alternate to the bombing of North Viet Nam.” The statement also urged “renewed attempts to get all parties concerned to seek arbitration of the war through the United Nations” and “exploration of other alternatives, such as a purely defensive war behind the fortified Demilitarized Zone in South Viet Nam, with the subsequent pacification of the South Vietnamese countryside.” The assembly asked that its declaration be read from all pulpits on June 11. (Earlier, Princeton Seminary’s President Emeritus John A. Mackay had said the U.S. should never have gotten involved in Southeast Asia and that “we must withdraw.”)

Reminders from the floor that such proposals have already been tried by the United States provoked no comment from the committee. Nor did the suggestion that cessation of the bombing under present conditions may be as immoral as continuing it. A defeated motion would have qualified the recommendation for a halt to bombing by adding, “provided North Viet Nam gives evidence of its willingness to negotiate by cessation of hostilities.”

Adopted in a late-evening session were resolutions endorsing United Nations power “adequate to make, interpret, and enforce world law”; avoidance of anti-ballistic missile systems in the United States and the Soviet Union; increased aid to underdeveloped nations; economic protest against racism in southern Africa; Project Equality “as a responsible and effective ecumenical program to use the contracting and purchasing powers of churches in support of equal opportunity employers”; full diplomatic recognition of and a U. N. seat for Mao’s China; new emphasis on racial equality in housing, employment, and education; and a “rigorous evaluation” of the military draft, deferment for clergymen, and conscientious objection.

In other resolutions the General Assembly approved:

• Basic principles of a new plan for church education to replace many aspects of the Faith and Life Curriculum and methods. Union Theological Seminary Professor C. Ellis Nelson said many assumptions used in planning that curriculum “were not true.”

• A report on the marriage of divorced persons that stresses concern for the persons involved and removes the restriction requiring a one-year waiting period before remarriage.

• A special committee to study the feasibility of union congregations with members of other churches in the Consultation on Church Union.

• A policy statement defining the new evangelism, plus a conservative statement from the floor citing the Church’s obligation “to declare and explain what it means to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.”

Money Up, Members Down

United Presbyterians apparently are better at raising money than at winning converts, judging from statistics reported to the 1967 General Assembly (story above). A one-year drop of more than 10,000 was the first loss in total membership in recent history. Also down: number of churches, church school pupils, infant and adult baptisms, and ministerial candidates.

But total giving was $330 million, up $13 million from the previous year, and per-capita giving was $99.96, an increase of $4.21. The denomination’s much-publicized Fifty Million Fund, the biggest Presbyterian fund drive ever undertaken, substantially exceeded its goal.

“I have no easy explanation,” said Stated Clerk William P. Thompson. “We must face the harsh fact that our stewardship of the Good News has been faulty.” There was no discussion.

The assembly of 800 commissioners elected as moderator the Rev. Eugene Smathers, pastor of tiny Calvary Presbyterian Church in the Appalachian town of Big Lick, Tennessee. Smathers defeated Dr. William H. Hudnut, Jr., well-known national chairman of the Fifty Million Fund.

Before the assembly, with approval of the “Confession of 1967” almost assured, many delegates and visitors were asking, “Where does the United Presbyterian Church go from here?” Today the answer is clear. The church is moving toward increasing involvement in all social issues and a radical restructuring of its mission to “act” rather than “preach” the Gospel. Brown told a pre-assembly evangelism conference, “Politics is the vehicle through which the will of God is done in the world today.” Most commissioners were inclined to agree.

The A.B.C.S Of Evangelism

The American Baptist Convention’s General Council last month voted 23 to 15 to make a “study in depth” of the denomination’s evangelism program, even though the council has no authority over the ABC’s autonomous Home Mission Society and its controversial evangelism secretary, Jitsuo Morikawa.

As often happens, this General Council action was more important than anything that took place later in the week at the full ABC meeting in Pittsburgh. A middle-of-the-road resolution on evangelism, rewritten to the right after complaints from Ohio, got swift passage. Later, Oregon’s J. Lester Harnish failed by only six votes to get the three-fourths needed to reopen the evangelism debate. He sought an amendment endorsing the inter-Baptist Crusade of the Americas and urging American Baptists “at all levels” to cooperate. The General Council decision against the crusade is lamented by those interested in closer ties with other Baptists rather than with non-Baptist groups, and by those interested in traditional evangelism.

New ABC President L. Doward McBain, a flamboyant Phoenix pastor active in the National Council of Churches, said he wished the Harnish move had succeeded so that he could take it, rather than apologies, to the Southern Baptist Convention.

The crusade decision was a skirmish in the continuing war between ABC evangelicals and the headquarters emphasis on social action as evangelism. The most dramatic complaint among many in recent months was a petition from two-fifths of the ABC pastors in New Jersey.

In the General Council discussion, a series of state secretaries agreed generally with Pennsylvania veteran Wilbur Bloom: “We are headed for trouble. We must make some adjustments, regardless of how difficult it may be.”

In defense, home-missions chief William Rhoades, a layman who admits to no theological expertise, attacked the “divisive statements” from New Jersey and said it was “unfair to attribute emphases” to the national offices, because the planning involves state and local leaders. He said Morikawa’s program is “highly successful” and “offers a wide variety of options.” The Home Mission Society spokesman on the General Council, Mrs. Howard G. Colwell²Her son David, a United Church of Christ minister, is chairman of the Consultation on Church Union. of Loveland, Colorado, said she is as sure Morikawa is “a prophetic voice” now as when she introduced him as a new staff member while she was ABC president.

Morikawa believes, as he told the Pittsburgh Rotary Club, that “vast secular structures” should be part of the Great Commission “so that institutionally, men may respond to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.” Thus, much of his evangelism program involves social action—in New York City, Philadelphia, and Valley Forge (home of the ABC headquarters, known as the “holy doughnut”)—and “converting” the local church for secular mission.

In a panel discussion, President-elect McBain said that “in evangelism, we are confronting the individual with the claims of Christ. It begins with the individual. I would be delighted to discuss the Viet Nam war—it should stop today—but we must confront man with his need before God. If we leave him there, then we have left him in his impoverishment—moral as well as sociological.”

Layman Carl Tiller, in his last address as ABC president, said the denomination should “recapture a concern for souls” to reverse “our shameful twenty-year trend of fewer first decisions for Christ.” He noted that the ABC is the only one of the major Protestant groups in the United States to lose members since 1950.

Tiller and McBain see the ABC as a bridge between other Baptist denominations and the large U. S. denominations that are discussing merger.

The ABC is in no mood to review last year’s decision against joining the Consultation on Church Union. But delegates approved a general statement on Christian unity from the ABC’s new ecumenical executive, COCU-leaning Robert G. Torbet, that leaves the door open.

The ABC delegates rejected soft-toned statements from the resolutions committee, and urged the U. S. government to provide “contraceptive information and medically approved devices” to public and private agencies worldwide, to promote “effective population control.” They favored legal abortions in cases of rape, incest, mental incompetence, and danger to the mother’s health.

A carefully worded measure on “black power” cited the “legitimate need for disadvantaged groups” to organize as blocs to achieve “needed changes in society.” Curiously, ABC pacifists helped turn down by a slim margin an amendment that endorsed only nonviolent uses of power.

On Viet Nam, the doves managed to delete two statements commending President Johnson. Another successful amendment, from President Tiller’s son Robert, called for “mutual de-escalation” by the United States and North Viet Nam. A hard-to-oppose hawkish motion backed U. S. servicemen.

Moving With Cloud And Fire

How much should a 78,200-member denomination spend on higher education? For the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the question loomed large last month. Many have been wary of inroads upon the 85 per cent budgetary allotment for work overseas (currently about $5 million annually). They converged on Hartford, Connecticut, for the seventieth General Council ready for a full-dress debate.

The battle never came. Thanks to the work of a twelve-man study commission, a broad new education policy was adopted in a breeze. The commission’s fourteen recommendations were adopted virtually intact. The four CMA colleges’ primary responsibility—to train people for full-time Christian ministries—was reaffirmed, and a secondary responsibility was assigned: “to provide, as facilities and funds will allow, liberal arts training with a strong biblical emphasis.” A graduate school of theology and missions was authorized, and ground was laid for minimal educational standards for those commissioned by the CMA. The question of government subsidy for colleges was left open.

Credit for the policy formulation belongs largely to a soft-spoken 41-year-old Canadian who headed the study commission, Dr. Donald J. Trouten, academic dean of St. Paul (Minnesota) Bible College of the CMA. In drafting the commission’s sixty-six page report, Trouton drew liberally from his own 500-page unpublished Ph.D. dissertation for New York University, in which he traced seventy-five years of CMA educational changes. As if to reward him for the work, a delegate nominated Trouten for the post of general secretary of the CMA. Trouten withdrew his name after the Rev. William F. Smalley, who planned to retire, acceded to another three-year term.³In another election, Toccoa Falls Bible College President Julian A. Bandy was chosen CMA vice-president over the incumbent, Pittsburgh pastor K. C. Fraser, by a vote of 469 to 425.

The most interesting CMA educational innovation now under way is the bid of Canadian Bible College, Regina, to become an affiliated theological college of the University of Saskatchewan. Under a coordinated curriculum the student would get a B.A. from the university and the equivalent of a seminary education. It would take him six years, assuming he had had the Canadian thirteenth grade.

Officials of the Regina school feel their plan pursues the path laid down by an early Alliance educator, George P. Pardington, who observed back in 1912: “It cannot be shown from the Scriptures that the highest mental discipline and the deepest spiritual culture are to be divorced.” Pardington said God was challenging the Alliance to produce a race of intellectual and spiritual leaders. “The pillar of cloud and fire … is moving in that direction.”

Death Of A Newsweekly

The Sunday Times, interdenominational newsweekly that six months ago became the successor to the 108-year-old Sunday School Times, closed up shop abruptly last month.

The reason, according to a statement in its final issue, dated May 27: “The income … was not sufficient to continue publication beyond this date.”

As the Times’s board prepared to meet to decide its fate, Tyndale House, a publisher in Wheaton, Illinois, announced it expected to purchase the paper and merge it with the Christian Times, a smaller weekly Sunday School take-home it has been publishing since January.

The death of the Sunday Times represents the failure of the first attempt to establish a Protestant newsweekly in more than two decades.

Tyndale House said it would continue to publish the Sunday Times’s lesson material as long as there is a demand, but the paper’s tabloid news format will be absorbed into the eight-page, 8½–by-11-inch format of the Christian Times.

Bible Boom

The American Bible Society’s final figures for 1966 show a remarkable 50 per cent jump in U. S. distribution, to a total of 39 million Bibles, Testaments, and Scripture portions.

In the overseas reports, a 42 per cent increase was shown in the combined totals for India, Indonesia, Viet Nam, and Taiwan. The biggest increase was in Ghana, 319 per cent, because the government placed the biggest order in Bible Society history—520,250 Bibles for use in public schools.

The report showed the ABS spent $6.8 million in 1966.

Mobilizing The Poor

A major first step toward national coordination of church-backed social action was taken last month when ten interfaith groups created a non-profit foundation to develop and implement programs for mobilizing the nation’s poor.

The foundation, the Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organization,⁴Charter members: American Baptist Home Missions Society, American Jewish Committee, Board of Missions and General Board of Christian Social Concerns of The Methodist Church, Catholic Committee for Community Organization, Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, Board of Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ, National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, Board of National Missions of the United Presbyterian Church U. S. A., and Foundation for Voluntary Service. was launched, according to its president, Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, to “provide the poor with the help they need to develop control over their own destinies.”

With two staffers and contributions of nearly $100,000 for the coming year, the foundation is confronting two problems: undue duplication and proliferation of projects among its members, and inadequacy and ineffectiveness of federally sponsored development programs.

The foundation will survey programs currently being conducted by its members and coordinate them under a system of priorities.

It will solicit money from private sources and then channel it to individual members working on projects.

Formation of the foundation points to the growing emphasis religious activists place on direct action aimed at specific problems.

IFCA’s goals closely parallel those of the highly controversial organizer Saul Alinsky, who himself heads a foundation that previously was used by some groups now in IFCA to organize projects at the local level. Alinsky’s most recent activities involved work with a coalition of religious and civil-rights groups against the Kodak Company over jobs for Negroes in Rochester, New York. But the differences between Alinsky and IFCA are as striking as the similarities.

Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation works under contract and becomes directly involved in organizing activities. IFCA, however, will only certify and fund projects that its members then carry out. Also, IFCA hopes to evolve a broad strategy for social action under which a wide range of religious organizations can be associated. Its leaders also hope it will be able to appeal for funds to a wider audience.

The response to the foundation has been encouraging. At least four more organizations are considering joining. Even before its formation, the foundation received requests for projects whose cost totals more than $750,000.

Invitation To Catholic Learning

New Catholic Encyclopedia (McGraw-Hill, 1967, 15 vols., $550), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, editor, Christianity Today.

This treasure-trove of Catholic theology, tradition and biography—the first revision of the Catholic Encyclopedia in more than half a century—is an invitation to the world of Roman Catholic learning. Its 15,000 pages reflect in numerous essays—notably that on Luther—the changing mood of the Roman church. Some essays by Protestant and Jewish scholars are included.

Evangelical scholars will find here a vast amount of useful information, much of it within a more constructive view of the Bible than that of many contemporary Protestant critics. Essays on Jesus Christ, for example, are preferable to much of the. Christological material emanating from many Protestant seminaries.

Traditional Catholic emphases dominate the encyclopedia in the midst of its modernity. The numerous essays on Jesus fill sixty-one pages, and the Holy Spirit gets only six while the Virgin Mary gets fifty-two, including an exposition of “Our Lady’s Coredemption.” The truth that Christ alone redeemed the human race is rejected, and recent popes are cited as increasingly supportive of coredemption. Efforts to support this notion by Scripture (Gen. 3:15; Luke 1:38; 2:35; John 19:27) are likely to impress most evangelicals as barren.

There is a “new look” at Luther. Gone are those descriptions in the earlier edition that disparaged the Reformer as “psychopathic” and spoke of “sinister moods” and “exhaustless abuse and scurrility.” The evaluation now ends: “In Luther were clearly reflected the two central themes of the Reformation: the renovation of the fundamental message of the gospel and the establishment of a more practical and personal means of presenting it.”

The essay on the basic truths of Protestantism is remarkably objective and accurate, although a companion essay on contemporary Protestant theology wholly overlooks conservative evangelicals. In another essay M. B. Schepers depicts Protestant theology today as post-liberal and predominantly dialectical and existential in orientation. The essay lags somewhat behind the last decade; its assimilation of Cullmann into the dialectical camp is an oversimplification; and nowhere is there a reflection of the scholarly international and interdenominational support for evangelical perspectives. Except for past voices like Machen and Warfield, evangelical scholars are overlooked and their works largely unmentioned in bibliographies, while non-evangelical Protestants are presented. There are passing references to United Evangelical Action, the Christian Beacon, and the Christian Century (characterized as a Disciples’ publication that “seeks to implement the ideal of Alexander Campbell for a return to the Gospels without the encumbrance of confessional creeds”) while CHRISTIANITY TODAY—with a paid circulation exceeding 150,000—is unmentioned.

Two articles on “Fundamentalism” and “Fundamentalism, Biblical” needlessly overlap and do not really give a comprehensive overview of the present conflict between liberal and biblical Protestantism. Generous space is given, however, to the Pentecostal churches. Wesley, Whitefield, Moody, and Billy Graham are referred to in an essay on “Revivalism,” defined as a religious approach “appealing principally to the emotions” and little interested in social consequences. Graham’s crusades are said to be “highly organized along the lines of modern salesmanship.”

Aside from this failure to reflect their tradition in the contemporary theological milieu, evangelicals will find in these volumes much of significant historical interest. An important reference work by every criterion, this encyclopedia reflects Roman Catholic positions from the ancient fathers through Vatican II. Whether in the article by Avery Dulles on “The Theology of Revelation,” or in those by J. J. Hennesey and R. F. Trisco on Vatican Councils I and II, the reader will find much of religious value.

The essay on “Thomism” somewhat obscures the church’s official adoption of Aquinas’s teaching. For not only did the papacy declare him “the most brilliant light of the church” but Clement VIII said his work was inerrant and Benedict XIII called it “the surest rule of Christian doctrine.” Leo XIII said the fathers at Trent desired that Scripture and Summa stand together at the altar, and while this did not come about, the encyclopedia essay on “Thomas Aquinas” concedes that “for all practical purposes it might as well have.” Leo and his successors enthusiastically encouraged Thomism as offering “the soundest means of combatting modern errors and solving modern problems.” Aquinas was canonized as much for his doctrine as for his life, and the Code of Canon Law as late as 1918 prescribed that Roman Catholic priests should receive their philosophical and theological instruction “according to the method, doctrine, and principles of the Angelic Doctor.”

The volumes reflect something of the confused state of contemporary Catholic theology. Vatican I indicated that the natural knowledge of God’s existence includes also some knowledge of divine essence—at least valid judgments about God’s personal nature (R. J. Busch-miller, VI, 562b). One wonders whether the encyclopedia reflects a noticeable skepticism about Thomism in some Catholic circles. The revitalization of Thomism (by Mercier, Sertillanges, Maritain, and Gilson) is viewed as one of the main directions of twentieth-century Christian thought. B. M. Bonansea insists that the five-fold Thomistic proof for God’s existence is “still valid” (VI, 551b). But while Vatican I held to knowledge of what God is, Aquinas subscribed to the Neoplatonic view that man by reason alone can know that God is, but not what he is. And J. R. Gillis writes: “One can form true judgments about God and by a kind of circumlocution compose a concept that is literally true. And yet one does not know what God is …” (VI, 542c).

Evangelical readers will note how many long-range issues still need to be debated with Catholicism. The encyclopedia declares that “the title deed of the papacy as an institution in its claim to universality in the spiritual sphere of government is found in two crucial passages of the New Testament”—Matthew 16:18, 19 and John 21:17. The problem here is one not of weighty reliance on the Bible to erect a super-scriptural authority but rather of a highly dubious use of the texts.

The Mass is said to be “at the very heart of Christianity” and is depicted as the re-enacted sacrifice of Christ, and the whole scheme of purgatory and prayers for the dead is defended, although it is granted that the doctrine of purgatory is not “explicitly” stated in the Bible. Under “Protestantism,” Zwingli is curiously represented as a sacramentarian—an error avoided in the essay on Zwingli—and his influence is held to have worked against frequent observance of Communion.

The essays on “Vatican” disappointingly skirt the Reformation issue of the priesthood of all believers. Under “Priest and Priesthood” there is some reflection of recent interest in “a fuller concept of priesthood” than that affirmed by the Council of Trent, but there is no recognition that the laity are ideally in the priestly service of Christ. And under “Protestantism” it is questionably asserted that in Protestantism the idea “that all the people are priests came to mean … that anyone can preside over the worship of the community.”

While Tradition is as important as Scripture for establishing the norm of Catholic faith, evangelicals will be pleased with aspects of the essay on “Bible (Inspiration),” where the inerrancy of Scripture is affirmed. “The Catholic receives the Scriptures from the infallible teaching authority of the Church, but he believes them to be the word of God through the Holy Spirit who gives him the gift of faith. The Catholic doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy presupposes that God has given His revelation once and for all to chosen individuals and has so illumined their intellects that they may communicate it to others with infallible truth.” But inerrancy is then denied in matters of science and history.

The Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel is defended, with A.D. 90 as the probable date of writing. But Petrine authorship of Second Peter is disputed, and the book is dated at the end of the first century or early in the second.

Concessions to criticism are apparent in the ascription of the Genesis creation narrative to the “priestly writers”; Genesis is assertedly Mosaic in spirit rather than authorship. Building on the encyclical Humani Generis (1950), which permitted Roman Catholics to defend evolution as a scientific hypothesis, the essay on “Organic Evolution” views the Genesis teaching on science as “pious ideas” to be distinguished from theological truths.

“Human Evolution” grants the biological evolution of man and asserts that it “still continues in the human species.” What is affirmed is “at least some measure of psychic and moral discontinuity” with the lower animals. The article on “Creationism” notes that “if man evolved from lower forms … one would also expect a development of theology bordering on … original sin and Adam’s … integrity and immortality.”

“Evolutionary insights are more and more applied to theology.… The view is beginning to emerge … that revelation says less about evolution than evolution says about the theology of creation.” Such a mood would surely be good news to Marxists—although dialectical materialism is elsewhere criticized for gratuitous assumptions about man.

Reading for Perspective

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

• Know Why You Believe, by Paul E. Little (Scripture Press, $1.25, paperback). The Inter-Varsity Director of Evangelism compellingly presents Christian evidences that will help believers give reasons for the hope within them.

• Evangelicals at the Brink of Crisis, by Carl F. H. Henry (Word, $1.75). A hard-hitting overview, in the aftermath of the World Congress on Evangelism, of pressing concerns in theology, evangelism, social action, and ecumenism.

• The New Immorality, by David A. Redding (Revell, $3.50). A lively, informed consideration of biblical morality viewed against the backdrop of situation ethics and the varied moral decisions that confront men today.

The Priority Of Revolution

Containment and Change, by Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull (Macmillan, 1967, 248 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Edmund A. Opitz, staff member, The Foundation for Economic Education, coordinator, The Remnant, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

The sponsor of this book is an organization called the University Christian Movement, under whose auspices a meeting was held at Union Theological Seminary in New York at which Oglesby and Shaull voiced their opinions about revolution and the cold war. Each man has now expanded the remarks he made on that occasion. Oglesby’s have grown into a long and tendentious critique of American history and recent foreign policy, that includes a solicitous account of Soviet Russia’s benevolent actions on the world scene and her peaceful intent today. The business sector of society, Oglesby explains, is the real cause of America’s warlike career and accounts for our involvement in Viet Nam; the elimination of this sector in Russian society explains why Russian foreign policy is geared to defense, why Russia has never been the aggressor. If students of American history and world affairs hold contrary opinions, it is because they are victimized by pocket-book and power motivations; the power structure—church, school, business, military, government—keeps the truth from the people!

Oglesby is the recent president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most obtrusive of the campus New Left groups. He is now at Antioch College as “Resident Activist Scholar.” Surely the idea for this academic post and title was taken from some satire by Aldous Huxley! The campus radical has long been a fixture at many colleges; but now that revolutionary thought and action has achieved a consensus in academic circles so powerful and so widespread as to constitute a kind of status quo, it adds a dash of 1984 flavor to learn that some college has endowed a Chair of Revolution!

Shaull is professor of ecumenics at Princeton Theological Seminary. He has spent twenty years with student groups in Latin America, “in close contact with a revolutionary situation there … working for reform within the established order.” We are given to understand that Shaull feels himself outrun by events, “in the unenviable position of being caught somewhere between two worlds.” The result, he adds, is that “I am now obliged to give priority to revolution.” It is from this vantage point (!) that he proposes to shed some light on the nature of the revolution that is stirring up the world and agitating so many of our campuses. His explanation runs something like this: The processes of secularization have finally succeeded in eliminating the dimension of transcendence, and the traditional metaphysical world views reveal their irrelevance. With the departure of the old absolutes, the future is open and man is free to determine his own destiny: “Nation and community provide the context for human fulfillment.” The revolutionary surge moves toward the secular City of Man.

Shaull, a man of the Word, is somewhat hamstrung by the need to bring specious theological sanctions and interpretations to bear upon the revolution. Oglesby, a man of words, labors under no such handicap. His is a simplistic Marxian interpretation of history. His analytic tools are suspect, in the first place; his account is loaded with many unsupported assertions; his documentation is dubious. And he makes use of a curious ploy to “prove” his points. Here’s one example: The obliteration bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, and Hiroshima is cited as proof that America is “history’s most violent nation.” In reality, Communists, liberals, and the intelligentsia generally favored World War II and worked feverishly to get a reluctant America involved in the fighting. Once we were in, these same people nagged the Allies into fighting a ferocious war, over the protest of many Americans, and prolonged the war by demanding unconditional surrender. The left applauded the conduct of the war, except when its ferocity slackened. And now comes an intellectual heir of these Communist and liberal propagandists to charge the rest of us with the sins committed under the sponsorship of his leftist like-numbers of twenty-five years ago!

Similarly with the imbroglio in Viet Nam. The Viet Nam affair is a mixed-up mess, all right; but it is exactly the kind of foreign entanglement that we can expect to be precipitated at regular intervals by the insane foreign policy adopted a quarter of a century ago. The left loves everything about that foreign policy except its consequences; or, more precisely, they dislike its consequences in Southeast Asia, but they want to retain the policy and point the muzzle at Rhodesia and South Africa.

We know what the road to war looks like, and we know that the first steps along that road may seem innocent enough. If churchmen are to speak a healing word to the nations, they must learn to recognize those first steps for what they are. They won’t learn that in this book. But they will learn here something of what they are up against.

Are They Fundamentalists?

Fundamentalism and the Missouri Synod, by Milton L. Rudnick (Concordia, 1966, 152 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Robert Preus, professor of systematic theology, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

It is a pretty well established fact today that the term “fundamentalist” is pejorative. It is often used to describe a wooden, insensitive, obscurantist way of reading the sacred Scriptures, a reading that ignores history and the human side of Scripture. But sometimes anyone who believes and teaches the divine origin, authority, and inerrancy of Scripture is labeled a fundamentalist, and thus a cruel caricature results. The Reformation and post-Reformation doctrine of Scripture is branded fundamentalism by such theologians as Emil Brunner and Regin Prenter.

Not unexpectedly, therefore, a church body like the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod that has sought to remain faithful to the sola scriptura of the Reformation is often portrayed as fundamentalist, as having come under the “baleful” influence of the fundamentalist movement.

Dr. Milton Rudnick believed there was some truth in this charge and decided to investigate. After a thorough study of the beginnings and development of both the fundamentalist movement and the Missouri Synod, he arrived at a negative conclusion. Fundamentalism and the Missouri Synod had no influence on each other. Their dissimilarities were many and serious, and their similarities grew out of their common Reformation heritage.

In the first half of the study, Rudnick wisely tries to get at just what fundamentalism is and who the fundamentalists were. He shows that many conservative scholars like Machen, Allis, Van Til, and Robert Dick Wilson were not fundamentalists at all, even though they spoke out during much of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy; they were, like their precursors, orthodox Calvinists. The author also makes it clear that millennialism was an important and exclusivistic tenet of the fundamentalists. Although he dwells on the negative attitude of many fundamentalists and their bitter invective against modernism and liberalism, on the whole he is quite sympathetic to their theology and concerns.

Turning next to the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and its historical development, Rudnick shows that it would have been impossible for this church body to be influenced theologically by the fundamentalists. For the most part it was a German-speaking church, oriented toward the theological situation in Germany and reacting against the liberalism there, to a great extent unacquainted with and even uninterested in American theological trends. In its theology it closely followed Luther, the Luther confessions, and the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Lutheran theologians.

There is no evidence that the Missouri Synod theologians used fundamentalist sources; at least they almost never quoted from them. Their doctrine of Scripture agrees precisely with that of the old Lutheran dogmaticians. They were indeed aware of what many fundamentalists (at this point Rudnick calls Machen a fundamentalist) were writing against liberalism; but they were at the same time wary of the movement and frankly critical on many issues, e.g. unionism, the Reformed orientation, premillennialism, and even the preoccupation with anti-evolution legislation (a dangerous mingling of church and state). The Missouri Synod sat out the fundamentalist-modernist battle not only because it was untouched by liberalism but also because of its strong Lutheran confessionalism. Fundamentalism was not strict enough for the Missourians, who insisted on agreement on every article of faith before they could make common cause with other Christians.

I might make a couple of mild strictures. First, the statement that “a key characteristic of [Lutheran] Orthodoxy was its high estimate of human reason in preparing for and receiving God’s revelation” (p. 71), is too strong. Lutheran orthodoxy had the most negative estimate of the powers of reason of all the confessional groupings of the Reformation era (Calvinism, Romanism, Socinianism) and was aware of this. Second, the implication that Walter A. Maier held back in some of his radio preaching lest he lose financial support from many fundamentalists is, I believe, not quite fair. After all, regulations ruling all radio preaching precluded the possibility of certain direct polemics, polemics that Maier did not refrain from when he was off the air.

Ordinarily there seems to be little value in a book that proves a negative thesis (like showing that there is no relationship between the Southern Baptists and the Russian Nikonites); but this one is welcome, for it dispels a myth that was growing in popularity. It also opens up other questions that might well be investigated. Were other Lutherans in this country influenced by fundamentalism? Did neo-orthodoxy effectively defeat liberalism after the fundamentalists had failed to do so (as the author suggests, p. 64)? Offhand, I would answer the first question yes and the second no; but a thorough study of such pertinent questions might be very helpful.

The Minister And Espionage

Code Name Sebastian, by James L. Johnson (Lippincott, 1967, 270 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Clifford Edwards, associate professor of English, Fort Hays Kansas State College, Hays, Kansas.

In Code Name Sebastian, Johnson has accomplished the remarkable feat of bringing together somewhat successfully a suspenseful tale of international espionage with its inevitable subterfuge, danger, and violence; the story of the terrible ordeal of eight survivors of an airplane crash as they desperately cling to life on the cruel and pitiless Negev desert; and the story of a spiritually exhausted minister suffering from theological fatigue and the flabby muscles of an untried faith, who seeks spiritual renewal and a sense of commitment.

The center of consciousness is Sebastian, a sensitive, reflective minister unexpectedly thrust into the thankless role of leadership by an Israeli secret agent. With the exception of the protagonist, whose doubts, fears, anxieties, and frustrations are understandable and real, the characterization is weak, chiefly because each character is a foil made to represent various personality traits and attitudes—such as the skeptical empirical intellect or the Nietzschean man of powerful will—in conflict with Sebastian’s orthodox Christian conversations. Furthermore, the plot unfortunately often borders on contrivance and cannot avoid certain spy-story clichés.

The novel has much to recommend it, however. The desert wilderness with its echoes of Israel’s spiritual history and the crucial need for living water provide an apt metaphorical background for Sebastian’s trial of faith, as he staggers under the cross of unrequited personal sacrifices and compassion, and as he refuses to surrender to despair and to the voice of the Tempter. Most importantly, the ordeal enlarges his awareness of the need to share humanity’s suffering in order to minister to its needs. Although the novel has certain unexpected reversals, there are no sensational miracles, no last-minute conversions or serious concessions to sentimentalism.

Despite the well-timed criticism of the Church’s failure to penetrate the world with Christian compassion, the conclusion is disturbingly ambivalent: Sebastian’s new sense of spiritual commitment and involvement appears to owe as much to the rhetoric of Bonhoeffer’s indictment of cloistered Christianity as it does to a revitalizing encounter with the Holy Spirit in the Negev experience. Still, the novel effectively challenges the kind of piety that delicately segregates itself from the ugly reality of a godless world, and it does this in the framework of a unique and suspenseful narrative.

The New Party Line

The Converted Church: From Escape to Engagement, by Paul L. Stagg (Judson, 1967, 160 pp., $2.75, paperback), is reviewed by Harold Lindsell, associate editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

From the well of modernity this author has drawn a small cup of water that he pours on the fires of the “old evangelism,” hoping to extinguish it and then ignite his own “new evangelism.” He is administrative associate of the Division of Evangelism, American Baptist Home Mission Societies, and his leader, Jitsuo Morikawa, has written the preface.

As one would expect, the book follows the Morikawa party line. It is incipiently universalistic, and the author emphasizes social action as constitutive of the Gospel. The work is a curious medley of elements put together in such a way that the unsuspecting reader might think Stagg was presenting a case for orthodoxy. For example, he says that “the gospel (evangel) is God’s good news to men, his deed in his Word, Jesus Christ, by whom salvation was wrought for the world.” But then when he tells about working to desegregate housing, he says: “I told these people simply that the phony wall dividing the races had been broken down.… For me, I said quite plainly, this is the gospel, good news to all who are excluded, news that they are accepted.”

Stagg comes down hard against pietism as he approvingly tells of a churchgoer who said he could not understand or appreciate statements “such as ‘the Bible as the infallibly inspired word of God,’ ‘the blood of the Lamb,’ and so forth.…” The same churchgoer said that when “the discussion was about Christian responsibility in such areas as industry, public school, health, or leisure [it] had great meaning.…” This Stagg cordially accepts.

He also applauds Franklin H. Littell’s statement in From Church State to Pluralism that Dwight L. Moody’s kind of revivalism, which avoided “all references to social issues, was a betrayal of the great tradition of revivalism and mass evangelism.” Students of church history will question Littell’s observation. Few, however, will be able to question the fact that Stagg’s “new evangelism” bears no resemblance to the “great tradition of revivalism and mass evangelism”—but for wholly different reasons.

Stagg discerns the presence of God “in the Freedom Movement for racial justice; in the antipoverty crusade of the nation; in the Peace Corps working among underdeveloped nations; in the new openness between men of all sorts, Christian and Jew, white and black, outsider and insider.” This is not the ‘Word of God as it is attested to in the Bible,” according to Stagg. It is “the Word of God … spoken through the world.”

He has an insight that enables him to see how in specific historical events the “Word of God” is proclaimed—not verbalized, but acted out. He mentions the march to Selma, for example, and says that “the march over the Pettus Bridge … has some resemblance to the Exodus.… The word of God was proclaimed in a new way, in a way which made decision inescapable.” All this is but a continuation of the battle over proclamation versus service, with service elevated to the status of proclamation and the Gospel itself depreciated.

This volume is to provide the undergirding for the evangelistic outreach of the American Baptist Convention in the days ahead. I for one will watch with fascinated interest to see the results. If his guidelines work, it will be the first time; what he suggests has been tried unsuccessfully before. If the guidelines do not work—and I predict they won’t—then perhaps the current “new evangelism” will have run its course. Then the Church will be left to pick up the pieces and undo the damage.

Book Briefs

“The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible”: The Letter of Paul to the Galatians, by William Neil; The Letter of Paul to the Romans, by Ernest Best; and The Letters of Peter and Jude, by A. R. C. Leaney (Cambridge; 1967; 96, 184, and 144 pp.; $3.50 each; also paper, $1.65 each). Three stimulating additions to an excellent commentary series.

Shot to Hell, by Keith Bill (Revell, 1966, 93 pp., $2.50). The story of a Christian mission to dope addicts in London. Published in London under the title The Needle, the Pill, and the Saviour. Maybe the title writer is on the stuff.

Söderblom: Ecumenical Pioneer, by Charles J. Curtis (Augsburg, 1967, 149 pp., $4.50). A Lutheran pastor writes a sympathetic biography of the Swedish archbishop who helped lay the foundations of the World Council of Churches.

Forgive Them, by J. E. Church (Moody, 1967, 126 pp., $2.95). The gripping story of an African preacher who suffered martyrdom in 1964.

Current Philosophical Essays, compiled and edited by Frederick C. Dommeyer (Charles C. Thomas, 1966, 262 pp., $8.75). Students and associates honor Professor Curt John Ducasse with essays that tackle such problems as the commitments and function of philosophy, mind-body relation, verifiability, God and evil, and free will, the creativity of God and order.

The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake, by Thomas J. J. Altizer (Michigan State University, 1967, 226 pp., $8.50). The foremost death-of-God theologian attempts to show how Blake’s “radical and prophetic reaction to a non-redemptive God of power and judgment” led him to a vision of the omnipresence of Jesus’ passion.

Paperbacks

Biblical Studies Today: A Guide to Current Issues and Trends, by Edgar Krentz (Concordia, 1966, 80 pp., $1.75). A layman’s guide that identifies current trends in biblical studies: source and form criticism, the new quest for the historical Jesus, hermeneutical problems.

The Orthodox Pastor, by John Shahov-skoy (St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1966, 117 pp., $2.50). A treatise on the role and responsibilities of the Eastern Orthodox pastor that could be read with profit by Western Protestant ministers.

The Testing of God’s Son, by Birger Gerhardsson (C. W. K. Gleerup [Lund, Sweden], 1966, 83 pp., 12 Sw. Cr.). A study of Matthew 4:1–11 (the temptation narrative) that claims it is highly stylized early Christian midrash.

The Other Comforter: Practical Studies on the Holy Spirit, by Theodore H. Epp (Back to the Bible, 1966, 264 pp., $1.95). The director of the “Back to the Bible” broadcast offers helpful, scriptural teaching on the Holy Spirit.

Faith and the Physical World: A Comprehensive View, by David L. Dye (Eerdmans, 1966, 214 pp., $2.95). Seeks to show how a Christian world view may be developed and applied to the physical universe as well as to theological considerations. A helpful annotated reading list is included.

Many of us are convinced that it is impossible to reform the social order apart from personal redemption of individuals. We will be wise if we carry the same line of reasoning into our concept of the work of the Holy Spirit in individuals and in the Church.

We are inclined to think of his work in general and impersonal terms. We pray for an “outpouring of the Holy Spirit,” as if he worked in some nebulous way apart from the lives of people. True, he may use things and events for his glory and the advancement of God’s Kingdom; but he possesses and fills people and works through them.

The very heart of the Christian faith is man’s personal relationship with God. Man stands before God as an individual, and as an individual he is redeemed. The work of the Holy Spirit is personal. It is he who effects the new birth, who brings spiritual life from spiritual death. It is he who comes into the hearts and lives, wooing, speaking of the things of Christ, and instructing in spiritual truth.

When the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, there were supernatural manifestations that immediately became personalized. The “tongues of fire,” we are told, were “distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit …” (Acts 2:3, 4, RSV). And because this experience was personalized, these unlearned Galileans went out transformed.

The phrase “a Spirit-filled Church” can be misleading. It is the persons making up the Church who must be filled with the Spirit, and we cannot avoid this necessity by thinking or hoping that God works in some other way.

There is no doctrine more neglected than that of the Holy Spirit. Much is said about God the Father, and about his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of course none of us can fully understand or exhaust these subjects. But about the Holy Spirit there is abysmal ignorance and often a strange indifference. Yet it is he by whom alone we can believe in Christ and be prepared to witness for him. It is through the Holy Spirit that the Bible becomes an open book. The Holy Spirit is not an accessory to Christian faith and work; he is a necessity.

Most churches are today confronted with a depressing fact: the spiritual birthrate increasingly lags behind the biological. In desperation we turn to new programs and new methods. Some even attempt to jettison basic parts of the Christian faith in favor of ideas more acceptable to the unregenerate. How foolish can we get?

If there is to be a change—and there can be—we must search our own hearts for the cause of the trouble. Is there concrete evidence of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in us? There can be no improvement in the general situation in the Church until there is a change in the lives of individual Christians, in the pulpit as well as in the pew. An answer to the problem is a personal one; it affects you and me.

Confronted as we are with spiritual deadness in the Church, let us honestly admit that this deadness lies within us as individuals. The Church’s state is an elongated shadow of the state of its members. And the great omission in its members’ lives is the failure to recognize the absolute necessity of a personal experience with the Holy Spirit—an experience that transforms and quickens, not the organization, but the people who make up that organization.

We thrill at the story of Pentecost and perhaps are inclined to look on it merely as a phenomenon in history. But the coming of the Holy Spirit in mighty power in the lives of Christians should be a continuing experience within the Church.

The significance of the manifestation at Pentecost was not that rude fishermen were suddenly able to speak in other languages. Rather, it was that they were transformed into something they had not been previously. Only a few days before they had been scattered, and one of their number had denied his Lord before a mere servant maid. Then, when filled with the Spirit, this same man stood fearlessly before the Sanhedrin, who had condemned Christ, and boldly denounced them for their sin while pleading with them to repent. Even these enemies of our Lord recognized that the disciples had been with Jesus and, at this time, dismissed them with nothing more than a threat.

Obviously, the Holy Spirit changes the person in whom he lives. It is by his presence that men become “new creatures” in Christ. But how often do we see any vital change today? The lack of evidence of transformed lives rests as a dead weight on the Church and discredits the validity of the Christian faith in the eyes of an unbelieving world.

The change that takes place is a tremendous one. The fruits of the indwelling Spirit, enumerated by Paul in Galatians 5:22, 23, are the result of a supernatural work, contrary to man’s natural behavior. Do we by our own lives show these fruits to others? Do we have a consciousness of love, joy, and peace within?

These are questions we need to answer in all honesty. In the answer, either spiritual health or sickness—even to death—is indicated.

Our Lord described the work of the Spirit to Nicodemus as something to be felt. We cannot see the wind, but we feel its effect. So it is with the Spirit of God. There must be an effect of his presence in our lives, felt by us and seen by others.

This change and empowering is a constant work of the Holy Spirit, renewed day by day in the hearts and lives of those who turn to him. It is through such persons that the Christian witness is made effective.

Recently I heard a successful young minister speak about “communicating” the Gospel. He wisely observed, “I cannot communicate the Gospel, nor can any one else. It is the Holy Spirit alone who makes the Gospel intelligible to people.”

Perhaps many of our failures stem from misapprehensions about this vital matter. We are prone to depend on personality, education, organizational structure, and programs as the primary means of leading people to believe. Important and useful as all of these may be, they are useless unless surrendered to the leading and power of the Holy Spirit. God has used some very unlikely people and methods, while some grandiose, expensive, and sophisticated methods have failed miserably. The word of the Lord to Zerubbabel holds good today: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zech. 4:6).

The Holy Spirit is no longer the dominant reality in many churches because he is no longer the dominant reality in the members’ own personal lives. This is a serious spiritual situation, the cause of weakness and ineffectiveness.

Things do not have to continue as they are, however. There can be a tremendous change, a new surge of power and understanding, a new sense of urgency for a world that has gone far down the road to destruction.

This change must take place in a person’s heart and mind, and it is possible only by the in-filling of the Holy Spirit. God has promised to give his Spirit to those who ask him. His presence will open up an entirely new concept of what it means to be a Christian. We, and the Church, can then become filled with life and power—God living in us.

It will make all the difference!

Dear Members Of The Old Breed:

Bearded Harvey Cox waxes enthusiastic in Harvard Today about the “New Breed” of churchmen who, he claims, have changed the cartoon stereotype of an American clergyman from a pompous bore to an active proponent of social change.

Reluctant though I am to differ with such a widely heralded pop prophet, I must say that the New Breed is about as new as a retreaded tire. Scrape off the outer layers of soft, synthetic theology imbedded with steely bits of revolutionary fervor and you find the weakened old casing of a fuzzy-headed social gospeler. I hate to think of the blow-out that will result for the church and the nation if their movement increases its momentum and heats up under increased pressure.

For the past five years New Breed tactics have been a limp imitation of those of the New Left. After the avant-garde glamorized coffeehouses, New Breed churchmen created their own brand of coffeehouses. They even found their own poetry-spouting Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the person of the stool-sitting, jazz-accompanied reciter of hip prayers, Father Malcolm Boyd. As Johnnies-come-lately to the civil-rights and anti-Viet Nam policy protests, they soon became master practitioners of the march. And now, following the Greenwich Village—Haight Ashbury-Dupont Circle syndrome, they have developed their own “Happenings.”

New Breed churchmen at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington staged a four-day Happening last month. The first two evenings people saw and discussed the films Sundays and Cybele and The Red Balloon. On Saturday afternoon, gaily dressed moderns assembled for a “Be-In” to “celebrate life.” As the hi-fi reverberated with the Supremes’ rendition of “The Happening,” the mods painted cardboard boxes fuschia, orange, chartreuse, and periwinkle and decorated them with such stale slogans as “Make Love, Not War,” “Draft Beer,” “Keep the Faith,” and “War Is Ugly.” The whole affair ended Sunday with a colorful march around the block at which time message-laden balloons were sent aloft. Aside from providing a jolly good time for all, I’m not sure what the event accomplished. But it did show how hard the New Breed will work to emulate the pace-setting hippies.

A week later, the New Breed at Washington’s National Cathedral topped even St. Stephen’s. They staged a rock and roll festival with nineteen—count ’em—nineteen ear-shattering bands. Mini-skirted teeny boppers danced before the altar. The recessional was “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

At the rate the New Breed is going, it shouldn’t be long until they bring on the go-go girls. Ho hum.

Bored by the New Breed, EUTYCHUS III

Protestant Church Schools

It was encouraging to see in your pages a direct affirmation of the viability and vigor of both the idea and practice of the Protestant day school (“Will Protestant Church Schools Become a Third Force?,” May 12). Writers Buchanan and Brown are indeed right that “there is no indication that the movement will be short-lived or inconsequential. On the contrary, we see it as a growing movement.”

We represent a Protestant day school system which is not mentioned in the article but which, like Lutheran and Adventist schools, has been around for some time. It has been in existence for over seventy-five years and presently enrolls over 62,000 students in 282 schools. These are concentrated largely in the Northern and Midwestern states, but the system does embrace schools from coast to coast.

These schools are parental rather than parochial: they are operated by groups of parents, largely of Reformed and Calvinistic persuasion, and are served by the National Union of Christian Schools (865 Twenty-eighth St., S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49508). A growing number of teaching materials and publications are produced for the use of those who wish to make the Christian day school “become a powerful [third] force in the American educational picture.”

DONALD OPPEWAL

Chairman, Public Opinion Comm.

National Union of Christian Schools

Grand Rapids, Mich.

As I read the article, one question kept nagging me. Could one of the subtleties underlying this movement be another attempt on the part of white Protestants to avoid confrontation with the reality and necessity of racial inclusiveness in the public schools? If this be so, the church school is an immorality the Church cannot espouse.

L. CARROLL YINGLING, JR.

Saint Mark’s Church

Baltimore, Md.

I wonder what would happen to many of these private schools if a Negro child, qualified and money in hand, showed up asking for the blessings of a Christian education.

WILLIAM H. ANDERSON, JR.

Virginia Union University

Richmond, Va.

It would be interesting to know the source of the statistics. The Board of Parish Education for the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod provides a very reliable set each year. For the school year 1966–67 they list 4,300 Protestant-schools with 477,000 pupils. (The article claims 5,700 schools.) They also report over 13,000 Catholic schools. (The article reports 10,000.) If the Protestant-school enrollment continues to grow at 4 per cent per year and the Catholic schools lose enrollment at 1 per cent per year, in ten years we will have Protestant enrollment of 750,000 compared to Catholic enrollment of 5,000,000. How can it be said, “If these trends continue, Protestant schools will match Roman Catholic schools in ten years”?…

A second concern arises from the fact that three-fourths of the quotations used are made by Christian school men in the deep South. The growth of Christian schools is a national phenomenon, not just a regional reaction. The NACS has member schools in thirty-eight states. This geographical distribution should be emphasized.…

We regret that the article made no mention of the proposal that freedom in American education would be very effectively served by some form of tax credit for parents sending children to private schools. This proposal, which is resisted strenuously by treasury and administration officials, would provide parents who relieve the public-school rolls of the expense of educating their children with an income-tax credit for each child each year that these children were enrolled in private schools. Thus we would maximize parental freedom and minimize governmental bookkeeping (as well as regulation).

The forces opposed to Protestant schools as a “third force” in the American educational picture are powerful. The humanistic loyalties of American educators; the secular impact of unprecedented government expenditures; and the widespread assumption by denominational leaders and local pastors that Christian America does not need private Christian schools are all well-entrenched obstacles.

JOHN F. BLANCHARD, JR.

Executive Director

National Association of Christian Schools

Wheaton, Ill.

The Suspicious Specialist

I found the article “Is a Read Sermon a Dead Sermon?” to be of special interest … because of its authorship. I find it somewhat surprising that you would turn to a historian for practical advice on sermon delivery. On the other hand, my surprise should be tempered by my observation of current attitudes and practices prevalent in many seminary circles today. Normally, the various disciplines listed in seminary curricula are represented by academic specialists trained for their particular department. Thus, ideally, a Ph.D. degree in Old Testament studies would be a proper credential for teaching Old Testament, and a man who has specialized in language studies would be considered first for a language department.

The system appears to break down when it comes to speech training, however, and a brief survey of homiletics departments would seem to confirm the fact that the Church still looks with suspicion upon the specialist in speech and fears his sophistic influence upon young preachers. Some seminaries have “progressed” to the point where they allow a speech specialist to share in homiletical training, but he is mainly confined to advice and criticism related to sermon delivery. Homiletics appears to be of such a sacred nature that it can be entrusted to anyone save the rhetorician. Just where preaching differs in principle from any other kind of oral communication is a vague question which escapes logical consideration. While the content of preaching is sacred and the source of its effectiveness lies in the power of the Holy Spirit, the concepts used in communicating the Gospel of Jesus Christ are the very same as those used in other fields.

LORIN H. SODERWALL

Chairman, Speech Department

Azusa Pacific College

Azusa, Calif.

Dandelion-Digging

Wherever I reside, it seems that two things are unavoidable: dandelions in the lawn and CHRISTIANITY TODAY in the mailbox.

Perhaps your publication is well named, for it reflects the reactionary conservative, malinformed, backwardyearning spirit that is easy to find among Christians today.…

If I get the dandelions out of my lawn will you get CHRISTIANITY TODAY out of my mailbox?

EDWARD B. GREVATT

Emanuel United Church of Christ

Rochester, N. Y.

Saved By Suppression?

I am sorry that you are going to kill the discussion on baptism (“The Conflict Over Baptism,” April 14). It promised to be lively. The two essays were certainly not adequate, and the letters you published were insipid.

Of course since the Baptists are stuck with the idea that baptize means to sink the ship they stand upon a flimsy argument. I suppose you do have to cater to them.…

You can save the Baptists from the embarrassment of seeing their position destroyed if you wish. But you will do it not on the basis of the facts and reason and Scripture, but only by the suppression of the truth.

I trust that you will get enough mail on this subject to lead you to open the magazine to an open exchange of views, rather than the present “O, so gentle Evangelical” touch.

JAMES MILLER

Montclair Community Church

Denver, Colo.

It Hits A Basic Error

Thanks to Dr. Mikolaski for “Ecumenism and the Gift of the Spirit” (April 28). It strikes at a basic error to which the Church of Christ must give earnest heed. In this altogether too short examination, it is refreshing to read an argument that is biblically documented. There can be no doubt that the relationship between personal saving faith in Christ and the receiving of the Holy Spirit is scripturally undeniable. The Holy Spirit is certainly not hierarchically transmitted.

We welcome this brief, well-reasoned, scripturally orientated presentation. Give us more of them!

STUART E. MURRAY

Principal

United Baptist Bible Training School

Moncton, New Brunswick

I looked forward to reading [it] because ecumenism, as I have known it, is praying, working, talking together with men of all Christian faiths.

Since the Holy Spirit is poured forth upon all, it seemed to me that the title was indicative of a significant piece. I was stunned, however, by what the author called his main point, namely, “Whether bestowal of the Spirit can be confined to the action of episcopally sanctioned persons.” What Christian of sound mind could ever believe that the action of the Holy Spirit could even be confined to the action of episcopally sanctioned persons”? Surely not the Catholic Church, as is inferred. In its theology of the Holy Spirit, it teaches that, while the Spirit is particularly active in prayer, the reading of the Scriptures, and in any sacramental encounter with Christ, He sanctifies a person in every one of his conscious moments when there is faith and love.

MORTON A. HILL, S. J.

Church of St. Ignatius Loyola

New York, N. Y.

I consider myself open-minded and willing to listen to all views.… Having been a student of Dr. Mikolaski … I know his basic theological orientation; therefore I am not surprised at his unsympathetic attitude toward the Consultation on Church Union.… I do believe that he should better inform himself concerning COCU before he starts criticizing. In the first place, the only church in the group he called “successionist” that is involved in COCU is the Episcopal Church, and he failed to call it by name but referred to its counterpart, the Anglican church. With a minimum of reading, Dr. Mikolaski would find that one of the underlying assumptions of all the churches that are involved in COCU is that there is a chance that they may be wrong in some of their dogmatic beliefs. It is true that in a united church some of the members and maybe even some of the clergy may have the idea that the Spirit is given through the church, but that will not be made a test of fellowship. What church can claim that all its members believe the same thing concerning every doctrine?… It takes very little effort and no Christianity to criticize, but it takes real effort and real Christianity to swallow your prejudices and cooperate with your brothers in Christ.

RILEY W. SANSON, JR.

United Church of Christ

Lyons, Tex.

The author failed to avoid many of the pitfalls he accuses others of having fallen into. For instance, in opposing his own evangelical position to the “Catholics and Orthodox,” in each instance he blurs the pneumatology of the two church bodies, as if they were not distinct, even contrasting entities.…

It is the inadequacy of both Roman Catholic and Protestant ecclesiology that both need an external authority outside of the Holy Spirit at work in the Church as an ultimate appeal and criterion for truth, whether that authority be pope or Scripture. It is not Scripture that the Orthodox contrast to church tradition, obviously; rather, it is to a naïve assumption that Scripture will be interpreted uniformly outside of the Church, which is at the same time the place where the Holy Spirit abides. Witness the scattered “churches” of Western Protestantism, professing a unity in Scripture.

There can be no “private judgment” so naively proposed by the author, because it is precisely the witness of the Spirit that disallows it. The leader of the church assembly speaks with authority only when he expresses the truth of the faith in accord with the Gospels, and with the tradition as always witnessed by the Church; if that leader has a “private judgment” to contrast to the divine truth of the Church, it is the duty of the body of the Church, or any single member of that group, to expose such error, and that error will be manifest by the Holy Spirit that lives and dwells in the Church.

VLADIMIR BERZONSKY

Parma, Ohio

Who Or What Was Meant?

Your editorial on “The Spirit of Pentecost” (April 14) was well written. However, your remarks on subjectivity and excessive enthusiasm as characteristic of many Pentecostal-like movements, without your really calling names and making it clear just what you were trying to say, make it impossible to know who or what you meant by subjectivity or excessive enthusiasm.…

I am of the personal opinion that the Pentecostal-like movements are living closer to the Pentecostal Spirit of Acts 2 than the rest of the church world. Their services are open for examination by all, and I believe you will see as a result of this Pentecostal experience working in the lives of believers … Dynamic Vitality, Divine Illumination, Renewal, and Divine Liberation. However, it will never come about without Divine Subjectivity.

C. L. HARBIN

Church of God

Huntsville, Ala.

More I.A.C.S.

We would like to have you channel the enclosed dollar for the proposed Institute of Advanced Christian Studies, and it is our prayer that this may soon be a reality. In this day in which secularism is advancing on every hand, there is a pressing need for more institutions where Christianity is emphasized on the highest intellectual level for the glory of God.

VERNON G. BIGELOW, JR.

Things to Come Mission

Ozamis City, Philippines

The most important moments of our era occur when God’s Word is proclaimed

Preaching has always been the minister’s greatest opportunity and responsibility. History shows that preaching is a barometer of the life of the Church. When the preaching has been dynamic, the Church has been strong; when it has been insipid, the Church has been weak. P. T. Forsyth wrote in Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, “It is, perhaps, an overbold beginning, but I will venture to say that with its preaching Christianity stands or falls.” And Emil Brunner, in one of the most audacious claims made in our nuclear space age, said that “where there is true preaching, where, in the obedience of faith, the Word is proclaimed, there, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the most important thing that ever happens upon this earth takes place” (Revelation and Reason).

Both in the world and in the Church today, much preaching is considered trivial and irrelevant. The basic cause for this tragic condition must be our lack of a vital theology of preaching. Strong and effective preachers in every age have believed greatly in preaching. If the minister gives the gavel of primacy to any other hand in the senate of his interests—counseling, liturgy, visitation, group therapy, administration—his preaching will inevitably decline in power and relevance.

Thus one of the most pressing needs in the Church today is to formulate a theology of preaching. Helmut Thielicke’s plea is that “everything depends upon our gaining some standards for that which is ‘Theme Number One’ of the church—our preaching” (Encounter with Spurgeon). What might some of these standards be?

Protestants stand in the heritage of the Bible, and any theology of preaching must be anchored there. In the New Testament, seven Greek words, each translated “preaching,” share a truth that must enter into a vital theology of preaching.

1. Euaggelizō originally meant to bring or announce good news. Later it came to mean the good news itself, or the good news preached, as in the description of the work of Philip in Samaria: “But when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women” (Acts 8:12, RSV). A theology of preaching must capture the concept that preaching is the act of announcing the good news of Jesus Christ and his Kingdom.

2. Kataggellō is translated “preach” in the King James Version and “proclaim” in the Revised Standard Version. It is a heightened form of a simple verb that means to announce. Kataggellō means to tell thoroughly and to proclaim with authority, as one does who is commissioned to spread official news among other persons. The word is used in the vivid portrayal of the arrest of Peter and John in the temple after they had healed the lame man: “… the Sadducees came upon them, being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead” (Acts 4:1, 2, KJV). This “proclaiming with authority” implies that preaching has an authority behind it greater than the force of a man. Martin Luther, feeling the pulse of the Reformation to be preaching, declared, “In a word, if one would praise God to the uttermost, one must praise His Word and the preaching of it; for it is God’s Word, and the preaching of it is His.” And Karl Barth wrote: “Real proclamation as this new event, in which the event of human language about God is not set aside, but rather exalted, is the Word of God preached.… The Word of God preached now means … man’s language about God, in which and through which God Himself speaks about Himself” (The Doctrine of the Word of God). A powerful theology of preaching must see preaching as a proclamation of the Word of God with authority—nothing less than the authority of God himself.

3. Kērussō is to cry to proclaim as a herald. The kēruka is the herald. In the Homeric age, the herald partook of the character of an ambassador. He summoned the assembly and kept order in it, and had charge of arrangements at sacrifices and festivals. The office of heralds was sacred and their persons inviolable; therefore they were employed to bear messages between enemies. In later times, their position as messengers between nations at war was emphasized. Thus kērussō means to proclaim peace to warring peoples as the herald sent by God; as Paul declared, “… but we preach Christ crucified.… Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23, 24, RSV). Preaching thought of as the proclamation of a herald implies a call and commissioning to preach. Karl Barth’s powerful words in God in Action are, “This is that ‘other’ factor which makes one a minister of the Word, in contrast with all other ever-so-respectable examples of mankind … Jesus Christ as the Savior of sinners, as the Lord of the Church, as eternal Son of God in the midst of our temporal existence—He it is who calls, and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23, 24, RSV). No one and nothing else.” A vital theology of preaching must include the concept of the herald of God declaring the truth of the One who has called him.

4. Laleō means to talk, discourse, or assert something. It is used in contrast with or as a breaking of silence, voluntary or imposed. It was reported of Jesus that when “many were gathered together, so that there was no longer room for them, not even about the door, he was preaching the word to them” (Mark 2:2, RSV). Preaching is more than dialogue gone mad; it is a spontaneous assertion.

5. Parrēsiazomai strictly means to use boldness, to speak openly and fearlessly, to be utterly free in one’s speech. It was thus that Barnabas described Paul before the Jerusalem leaders, “how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus” (Acts 9:27, RSV). It is in this sense that Bishop Gerald Kennedy describes preaching: “Headline stuff blaring forth the news about a Man, a Life, a Way, an Answer.… Preaching is not going from door to door to sell a book on home remedies, but standing on a street corner shouting ‘Extra!’ ” (God’s Good News).

6. Plēroō means to fill or made full, and was Paul’s description of his preaching before the Romans when he reported, “… so that from Jerusalem and as far round as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ” (Rom. 15:19, RSV). Apparently, Paul took it as his God-given task to fill the Roman world to overflowing, to fill it up and over the rim, with the Good News concerning Jesus Christ.

7. Parakaleō is translated “exhort” in the King James Version but “preach” in the Revised Standard Version’s interpretation of Paul’s injunction to Timothy: “Till I come, attend to the public reading of scripture, to preaching, to teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13). Parakaleō is a compound of para, to the side of, and kaleō, to call or summon. It means to call to one’s side to help. Preaching in this sense is preaching the Word in exhortation and with encouragement, not just so it can be studied and understood but as a challenge to action.

A theology of preaching, if it is going to be true to the New Testament, must include the basic ingredients suggested by all these words. There must be a note of “good news” that is “proclaimed with authority” by a “herald sent by God” who “asserts something” “openly, fearlessly,” and “fully” in order to “strengthen, challenge, and exhort” others to Jesus Christ. Such a theology will tap the deep wells of faith for the drought of our twentieth-century preaching, will convict us in our lethargy, and will challenge us to action.

The Greek mathematician Archimedes, in the third century B.C., made a statement that has been quoted many times: “Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum strong enough, and single-handed I can move the world.” Joseph Conrad, however, answered him by saying, “Don’t talk to me of your Archimedes’ lever.… Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.” The “right word” needed by American churches today is “preaching,” preaching based on the “right accent” of a dynamic theology of preaching. With it, we can still move the world for Jesus Christ.

When Silas and Timothy arrived in Corinth, after traveling from Macedonia, the stirring account is that when they found Paul, he was “occupied with preaching” (Acts 18:5). This is the call to American pastors in this day of crisis and need: Be “occupied with preaching”!

Wife Charts A Sermon

That “a preacher’s most severe critic is his wife” is no empty truism; she has listened to enough sermons to be a master of constructive criticism.

Recently my wife “doodled” a road map of my sermon while I was preaching. After dinner she presented me with the facts: every detour I had taken, every curve and bump. Here are the labels she used:

Your Trip This Morning

Start. Introduction. You began too slowly, seemed uncertain which road to take.

Detour. Left the subject completely!

Bumpy Road. Had difficulty in expressing yourself.

Long Straight Stretch. Needless exposition; this section was monotonous, a few miles too long.

Back Track. You repeated yourself.

Too Many Curves. In trying to explain your point, you wound around too many Bible characters.

Breathtaking Scenery. Climax of the sermon. Most scenic part, but you covered it so fast we missed much of the beauty.

Destination. Conclusion. Like a frantic search for a motel. You finally found it and tumbled into bed completely exhausted. What a trip!—Jerry W. Hopkins, assistant to the president, John Brown University.

Does modern Christianity derail the Holy Spirit?

In a review of David J. du Plessis’ book The Spirit Bade Me Go, published in 1964, Bishop Lesslie Newbigin acknowledged that “the Pentecostal churches are almost certainly the fastest growing Christian communities in the world.” Today this is even more apparent. In America, Pentecostals appeal to an ever widening spectrum of the nation’s citizens. And in many countries abroad their growth in numbers and in influence is phenomenal. Why do they grow? Are their distinctive views on the nature of the Christian life truly Christian? What do they have to teach the churches? And what does their witness mean for Christian proclamation?

A major part of the reason for such rapid growth is the faithfulness and effectiveness of the personal witness given by the rank and file of the Pentecostal churches. Other churches have learned in recent years to place great emphasis on the responsibility of the layman to witness for Christ, but one might hazard a guess that the proportion of their members actually attempting to do this and the results they are able to achieve can hardly be compared with what is seen in the Pentecostal churches. Why are Pentecostalists eager and diligent in this work when so many others are not? The answer surely lies in the fact that they witness to what is real in their experience, to what they know is the most important thing in the world for themselves and for everybody else. Their witness is not simply a matter of duty or of belief. The constraint comes from within them, from something that has happened to them and that they know they must share.

By their own confesssion, that something is the presence of the Holy Spirit. They do not deny the work of the Holy Spirit in inspiring Scripture objectively, nor do they denigrate the value of an objective atonement and objective revelation. But they speak of something more, a subjective quality that has entered into their conscious experience. They claim to have experienced the Holy Spirit in an endowment of spiritual power—power to speak in “tongues,” to witness, to prophesy, to heal the sick, and so on—power that they perceive in themselves and that other people perceive in them also.

In other words, Pentecostals appear to witness diligently because they have something exciting and precious to witness about. And they witness effectively because that something lends penetration and authenticity to what they say.

Ii

The very success of the Pentecostalists’ mission and the distinctly Christian character of their claims compel the rest of Christendom to ask whether the experience that lies behind the great expansion of the Pentecostal churches is to be regarded as standard for all Christians, whether it is something that is peculiar to certain types of people, or whether, indeed, as some suggest, it is really a distortion that is rooted in purely psychological or emotional factors and does not belong to a sane, balanced Christian way of life.

The only way to answer that question is to return to the New Testament. And to do that is to take the Pentecostal view much more seriously than many are perhaps inclined to do.

One of the most distinctive things about the activity of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is that he manifests himself in the realm of human experience. He is, indeed, God entering into personal lives in such a way that men become aware of him, of what his coming means to them. This awareness is not totally unlike their awareness of other, ordinary factors that enter into conscious experience. God’s coming is something of which one is aware, as surely as he is aware of other things—the results of an injection, the effect of good news, the lifting of worry. This is perhaps the point of greatest significance in this whole matter.

One of the key words that begins to lay bare the outlines of the New Testament picture is that spoken by Peter on the day of Pentecost. When the people who heard him preach and were disturbed by his message about Christ asked what they should do, Peter replied, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38). They were to do two things: “Repent,” which in that context simply meant turning back to God and giving his Son, the exalted Lord, his due place in their lives, and “be baptized,” which carried as its central meaning the acceptance of God’s forgiveness of their sins through Jesus Christ. If they did these two things, God would do something for them. He would bestow on them the same gift that they had already seen bestowed on the apostles, the same remarkable spiritual power that had transformed them.

Moreover, this gift was for all who would believe. “The promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call” (Acts 2:39).

Now it is obvious that a remarkable change did come to those people who believed and were baptized on the day of Pentecost and thereafter. In the closing verses of Acts 2, Luke pictures a joyful people closely knit together, gladly sharing their possessions with one another, praising God, having “favor with all the people,” and making such an impression on the city of Jerusalem that their numbers increased daily. This was not their normal state. It was a mark of the change that had taken place in them, a change of which, without doubt, they were deeply conscious.

Similar results followed Philip’s preaching in Samaria (Acts 8). The change wrought by this gift was so marked and so apparent to onlookers that Simon the Sorcerer wanted to be able to wield this influence himself. It was not hidden and secret. It was open and obvious, a vivid part of the ordinary Christian’s experience.

So also with the group that heard Peter preach in Cornelius’s house (Acts 10; 11). The Holy Spirit was given to them without doubt and was given in such a way that the people themselves knew it. Peter and the others could see it also.

The evidence of the New Testament Epistles is no less significant. Paul’s words to the church in Corinth about the diverse gifts of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12; 14) certainly refer to something that was a well-known element in the life and experience of the congregation. To speak about God’s having given “the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts” (2 Cor. 1:22) could have had no meaning if the Spirit was not something they could discern and be aware of as part of their conscious experience. The Apostle’s references to the Spirit in the eighth chapter of Romans suggest the same truth. And the first Epistle of John argues, “Hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us” (3:24b).

These references indicate that the promise Peter cited on the day of Pentecost was amply fulfilled in the experience of the New Testament Church. The gift of the Holy Spirit was not confined to the apostles, nor to a special few, nor to the day on which he was first manifested in this new form. A personal awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit was a normal part of the experience of being reconciled to God. It was God’s response to all who turned to Christ in repentance and faith. It was God’s confirmation that they were accepted by him and had entered into the new life of his Kingdom. Moreover, it was a confirmation only because it was something they experienced. They did not just assume that something new had happened to them. They knew it had, for the evidence of it was plainly seen by themselves and others.

Iii

Both the teaching and the experience of the New Testament Church make it plain that there were certain marks of the Spirit’s presence that were common to all who believed, and there were other marks that were peculiar to individuals and were greatly varied.

This appears to be the distinction made by Paul when he speaks of the “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22, 23) and the “gifts and the Spirit” (1 Cor. 12). Fruit is that which grows naturally and inevitably on a particular tree. And wherever that tree grows, it produces the same fruit. The Apostle teaches, therefore, that whenever the Holy Spirit enters into a man and dwells there, invariably his presence will be revealed by certain results. These are: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.”

These are not hidden qualities. Their presence in a man’s life is known to him and to others as well. Who does not know when love wells up in his heart? Who is not aware of joy when it comes to him? Who is not conscious of peace when it steals into his soul? And who can have these qualities without their being sensed by other people?

So the universal mark of the coming of the Holy Spirit is the gift of such inward qualities as these, qualities that reveal themselves in the experience of those who receive them, and that arc evident to those who look on. This fruit is evidence of the Holy Spirit, a manifestation of spiritual power.

The gifts of the Spirit that Paul refers to in his letters to the Corinthians, and elsewhere, seem to stand in contrast to the “fruit” of the spirit. The fruit is singular; the gifts arc plural. The fruit of the Spirit relates to quality of character and spirit; the gifts have to do with men’s ability to serve the Kingdom of God among men. The fruit is common to all who receive the Spirit; the gifts are apportioned as he chooses. One man has the gift of inspired speech, another of healing, another of faith, another of administration, another of ecstatic experience.

Thus, in addition to the universal marks of the presence of the Holy Spirit in man’s lives, there are other marks that differ from person to person, so that the presence or absence of any one of them cannot be applied as a test of whether the Spirit has entered a man or not.

The significant point is that the power to serve the Kingdom of God effectively, in one way or another, either by the living of the Christian life, or by specific ecclesiastical or missionary activity, is to be expected as a consequence of the Spirit’s coming.

We are not reconciled to God merely for the sake of our own salvation. God’s will is that we should share in the work of his Kingdom on the earth. And when we are reconciled to him, the power of God to do his work is part of the gift that he bestows upon us. “Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witness unto me.…” (Acts 1:8).

In this sense, the gifts of the Spirit should be set alongside the fruit of the Spirit as one of the sure marks of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our life. We should find ourselves able to do things for the Kingdom of God that previously were beyond us. They may seem very small and unspectacular, or they may be enough to astonish ourselves and others. They will be capable of being interpreted in quite other ways. But we will know within ourselves that they are not simply our doing. They will have been accomplished through our efforts, but their effectiveness will be due to the touch of the Spirit of God upon us. We will not know the full range of what is accomplished. We will see only a little here and there. But it will be sufficient to confirm within us the awareness of God’s presence and God’s power.

Iv

Two practical things seem to spring out of all this. First, if the Holy Spirit is to be real in the experience of the Church and its members, all followers of Christ need to be given explicit instruction about his place in their lives. Jesus made sure that his disciples understood what to expect. He encouraged them to look for something special to happen. Those in the early Church laid special stress on the matter. And there seems to be a clear connection between the vividness of their experience and the thoroughness of their understanding.

No one would dream of suggesting that the Holy Spirit is not present in the life of the Church today, or in the experience of multitudes of its members. But it can hardly be denied that many are unaware of this because they have never been told the truth about it. They are unable to recognize what it is that has happened to them, or the greatness of what could happen to them if they only knew more if what it signified.

The second conclusion springs out of this: namely, that in the presentation of the Gospel to men in the work of evangelism, the promise of this gift of God should have its proper place alongside the call to repentance and faith in Christ. Peter’s reply to the people on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:38) would seem to supply the proper pattern of the evangelistic message, a pattern that, in the main non-Pentecostal churches at least, is often followed only in part.

If this is a true interpretation of the matter, then it is important to tell the inquirer not only what he must do but also what God will do to him and for him in response. Somewhere here lies the key that opens the door for the believing and obedient one and admits him into the joy and power of Christ’s Kingdom. And, if the Pentecostal churches’ experience is any guide, somewhere here also lies the key by which the rest of the Church may discover that effective and dynamic witness which makes our Pentecostal brethren so significant for our times.