How is the bible to function in the Church? This is one of the urgent questions of our time. The way the Bible works within the Church is another matter than the Church’s confession about the Bible. Whether the Bible functions powerfully in the Church is not decided by a traditional acknowledgment by the Church that the Bible is the Word of God. There is a genuine confession of the Word only where there is biblical action in the life of the Church. We are “doers” of the Word if our “hearing” of the Word is genuine (Jas. 1:22).

The Church has sometimes lived by “excerpts” from the Word and missed a living and constant contact with the Bible. People have relied on memories of passages learned long before and have failed to listen to the Word itself, to listen anew each day to the Word. The result was an inner estrangement from the Scriptures.

People have dealt with the Bible like a student preparing for an examination. A student will make a digest of a book once and then before taking the examination will simply refer to his own digest rather than re-read the book. He leaves the book closed and opens his own notes. This is the way people have sometimes dealt with the Bible. But the Bible will not let itself be used in this manner.

The Book and our listening to it are bound together in holy matrimony. The Bible cannot really be for us what it is in fact unless we close our notes and listen to the Bible. The history of the Church’s relation to the Bible discloses some fascinating facts to support this statement. The Bible’s function within the Church is not a thing to be taken for granted. Confessions about the Bible do not always mean that the Bible is the center of the Church’s attention.

The early days of the Church saw the Christians living out of the Bible. We always recall the believers of Berea, who eagerly accepted the Word and daily searched the Scriptures (Acts 17:11). Much later, especially in the twelfth century, all that changed. The Church of the Middle Ages was not at all sure that it was good for individual believers to be in close contact with the Bible.

One reason for the hesitant and nervous attitude of the Church was its fear that personal contact with Scripture was dangerous. Think of the possibilities of arbitrary and heretical interpretations! One could, it was thought, far more safely leave Bible reading to the Church—that is, to the officials—and then let the Bible come to the people as it was filtered through the teaching office.

We find this attitude reflected in a discussion that took place at the Council of Trent. The issue was the translation of the Bible into the language of the people. Spanish Cardinal Pedro Pacheco argued that such translations were a misuse of the Bible. A people’s Bible, he contended, was the mother and origin of heretics. The historian of the council (H. Jedin) tells us that this argument was supported by the fact that 150 doctors of the Sorbonne had pleaded for a prohibition of translations of the Bible into the vulgar languages.

Another cardinal at the council (Madrusso) indignantly fought this point of view. He contended that no one had the right to withhold the Bible from people in their struggle against the enemies of the spirit. (This, by the way, is Calvin’s contention in his comments on Ephesians 6:17.) Although the Council of Trent did not accept the argument against the people’s Bible, it had many supporters. And the fear of the open Bible lingered in the Church for a long time. We can rightfully speak of an anxiety response stimulated by the sight of the power of the Word in the hand of the Reformers.

Much later, changes set in. In the nineteenth century, there was still a good deal of criticism in the Roman church of Protestant Bible translation and distribution societies. But the twentieth century produced a new insight into the significance of the Bible and its function in the church. Catholic writers began to say that although the church was perhaps justified in its attitude during previous eras, what was necessary in the past may be injurious now. They spoke of an estrangement between the Church and the Bible.

In fact, most recently, Catholic writers have spoken of a reactionary viewpoint of the church that was disastrous for the Bible’s rightful place in the Church. The Catholic New Testament scholar Schelke said that Rome sometimes appears to have forgotten that the Bible was, after all, the Word of God. And he added: “God’s Word, we may be sure, will be able to make itself clear to the listener; it will reveal itself clearly.”

We must say that the intense concern among Catholics for the Bible and for translations of the Bible is a reason for rejoicing. That the Catholic Church has changed its response to the Bible is not due to a lessening of the dangers of arbitrary interpretation. These dangers were present in the early days and are alive today. Personal contact with the Bible is always dangerous.

But we may not take it on ourselves to “protect” the Bible from heretical or arbitrary interpretations. What Paul says in Second Timothy 2:9 about the Word of God not being bound has relevance for the function of the Bible in the Church. We are not allowed to limit the entrance into the Bible to the officials of the Church. The Word has gone out to all men, and it calls us to trust its own efficacy.

The Bible itself warns us against arbitrariness, against the possibility of its being misinterpreted to the reader’s own ruin (2 Pet. 3:16). But this is a warning that the whole Church must heed; it comes to individuals, to the theologians, and to the congregation. The possibility of misuse offers no reason for withholding the Bible from anyone.

If Protestants have no problems on this point, they do have to ask whether the Bible actually does function as the whole Bible among them, genuinely function in the entire life of the people, creating faith and love, service and sanctification, and hope.

This is a critical question that hits us all in times when it is easy to undergo a gradual secularization of our fives. The question has nothing to do with intellectualism or with a worship of the letter of Scripture. But it has much to do with the fact that the Bible is indeed useful for instruction, and for refuting error, “for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be efficient and equipped for good work of every kind.” (2 Tim. 3:16, NEB).

Woe be to the Church if the Word of God is thinned down to digests and outlines that keep us from the living words of Christ, words that are spirit and fife. That Church is no longer the listening Church. And if the Church no longer really listens to the Word, how can it truly be the Church of the Living Word?

State and local tax exemptions for church property were left standing by the Supreme Court in one of its first actions after the new term opened this month. The high court refused to hear appeals of Maryland decisions that upheld the constitutionality of the exemptions in that state.

The court set no legal precedent; it merely refused to get involved in the issue for its own undisclosed reasons. However, the practical effect will be to discourage other efforts to challenge church tax exemptions.

Complaints were brought by the Free-Thought Society of America, Mrs. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, former president of the society, who got the high court to overthrow official school prayers, and Mr. and Mrs. Lemoin Cree (Cree is president now). FTSA is publisher of the American Atheist.

O’Hair Cuts

“There is not one shred of historical evidence outside the Bible that attests to even the existence of such a person named Jesus Christ,” said atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair in a three-hour radio debate with the Rev. John Streater, of San Francisco’s First Baptist Church, last month.

With studied restraint, Streater aimed historically oriented refutations at the wild charges. His opponent’s standard reply: “I simply can’t accept that.”

When a telephone participant entered the talk show on KCBS, reporting a radical transformation of his life after conversion from atheism, Mrs. O’Hair replied, “Nothing but mental gymnastics.”

Mrs. O’Hair showed mild surprise when Streater agreed with her opposition to “government-forced prayer edicts” and tax exemptions for church businesses.

“I don’t think you really mean it,” she retorted. While the cleric shook his head in bewilderment, the announcer switched to a life-insurance commercial.

They contended exemptions are an indirect subsidy to religion and are thus prohibited by the First Amendment to the Constitution (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). But the Maryland court said that “a major part” of church work is charitable and that sixty other types of charities hold tax exemptions.

A related case, also from Maryland, awaits U. S. Supreme Court action. It seeks to reverse a lower-court ruling that public grants to church-related colleges are unconstitutional, even though the money is used for secular purposes.

In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, about a dozen church properties, mostly parking lots, were recently returned to the city’s real-estate tax rolls. Under Pennsylvania’s constitution, church property is tax exempt if it is used for worship.

Another tangled church-state issue is the Johnson administration’s war on poverty. Current disputes involve appropriations for the Office of Economic Opportunity and treatment of a church-related project in Mississippi.

Such groups as the Inter-Religious Committee Against Poverty, the National Council of Churches, and the National Catholic Welfare Conference appealed to President Johnson and Congress to increase OEO’s budget during the current fiscal year.

But the House of Representatives passed an appropriation of $1.75 billion for OEO—no increase over the previous year. At one point, the Senate’s OEO bill went as high as $2.4 billion; but this was cut down in committee, and the House version won out.

During debate, Rep. John Buchanan of Alabama, a Baptist minister, failed to get an amendment stating that OEO “shall make no grant to, and shall not contract with, any establishment of religion, church, or other religious body.”

Meanwhile, churchmen less worried about church-state cooperation were waging war on the war-on-poverty office over its suspension of funds for a “Head Start” pre-school training organization, Child Development Group of Mississippi. CDGM, formed with the assistance of the National Council of Churches’ Delta Ministry, was administered through Mary Holmes Junior College (United Presbyterian).

In suspending the funds, OEO charged that about $500,000 was not properly accounted for, that parents were too involved, and that Negro control was emphasized to the point of excluding the white community. The church groups accused OEO of bending to political pressure, particularly from Senator John Stennis of Mississippi.

A United Presbyterian news release quoted experts who said CDGM’s accounting system “does afford a complete and accurate accounting of all funds.…” The Citizens’ Crusade Against Poverty—which is headed by auto-union leader Walter Reuther and includes many churchmen—commissioned a fifteen-member “board of inquiry” to investigate the fund cutoff. The board reported that “allegations of mismanagement were a thin mark for a politically dictated decision” that “represents a yielding to those forces which have stood in historical opposition to progress for the poor and underprivileged of Mississippi.”

When OEO tried to decentralize the program, five denominations that have colleges in Mississippi vowed they would not sign contracts with OEO without clearance from the National Council of Churches’ Division of Christian Life and Mission, hoping thus to make it difficult for OEO to bypass CDGM.

Unperturbed, OEO managed to scatter almost $12 million across Mississippi in just five days early this month. The Washington Post reported that Rust College, a small Negro institution at Holly Springs, was granted $1.2 million before it had even completed an application explaining how the money would be used. An OEO staffer had been dispatched to Holly Springs with orders to draw up preliminary plans and a budget within eighteen hours. The budget amounted to $600 per child more than OEO’s recommended maximum.

President Ernest A. Smith of the Methodist-supported school expressed misgivings as the din of controversy rose. “We’re sorry we got caught by a situation we weren’t aware of,” he lamented. “We weren’t aware of all these political undercurrents.”

Miscellany

Reports from the Java, Sumatra, and Sumbawa islands of Indonesia tell the same story: a surge in Christian converts and revivalism this year. Observers say the nation’s repudiation of Communism and government opposition to animistic paganism have helped.

Pocket Testament league plans to field a Vietnamese evangelist who can travel freely through Communist-held areas to distribute Scriptures.

In line with the Viet Nam build-up, more Methodists are on duty as chaplains with U. S. armed forces (540) than at any time since World War II, and the Army has increased Methodist chaplain requests for 1966–67.

The departure of U. S. troops from France has caused closing of nearly all that nation’s English-language Baptist churches.

In Ceylon, a union proposal involving Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and the Church of South India failed to pass at the annual Methodist conference.

Methodists in Sydney, Australia, have established the nation’s first treatment center for drug addicts.

A wide-ranging ecumenical magazine sponsored by the United Church of Canada will begin publishing early in 1967. It will be aimed at theologically trained readers ranging from Pentecostals to Unitarians. No editor has been named.

Kentucky’s Western Recorder proposed a master file on Baptist preachers known to be adulterers and homosexuals, to protect unsuspecting congregations.

Presbyterians raised $10 million for a 310-bed hospital in Dallas and another $10 million for a 300-unit apartment house for persons over 62, now under construction in San Francisco.

Financial problems have forced the National Council of Churches’ Broadcasting and Film Commission to close its Hollywood office.

A merger between two Newark, New Jersey, congregations produced the nation’s first predominantly Negro Episcopal cathedral.

Roman Catholics and Protestants joined in a psychological counseling center opened in New York City’s Harlem last month by the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry. The center is directed by the Rev. Frederick E. Dennard, a Baptist.

Twelve Protestant monks from the famed Taizé, France, community and five Roman Catholic monks from Canada and the United States will open a “reconciliation” center in Chicago’s West Side Negro ghetto.

Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute plans to build a new twenty-story dormitory and other facilities.

Surveying Surveys

An Ohio State University study of rural towns shows churches have less effect on community decisions than Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs. And the Gallup Poll discovered for Catholic Digest that the number of persons who say religion is “important” in their lives is declining.

Census Bureau samples show that of the 5.3 million new American households since 1960, only half are headed by a married man and wife.

United Nations figures indicate there are 200 million more illiterate persons in the world now than in 1960.

A study by Moderator magazine estimates that 1,000 college students will commit suicide during 1966 and that ninety times that many will attempt it.

San Francisco’s death rate from liver cirrhosis is nearly six times that of the United States as a whole, its health department reports; the disease is the city’s fourth leading cause of death.

After comparing church-growth figures, the daily Australian predicts Roman Catholics will surpass Anglicans as the largest group in that nation’s population within a few years.

Personalia

New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman, 77, offered to resign under Pope Paul’s new policy of retirement after 75 (Sept. 30 issue, page 14). But the Pope turned him down and apparently does not plan to apply the age limit to cardinals.

Sister Therese Castonguay, new nursing education supervisor for Saskatchewan Province, is reported to be the first nun to hold a Canadian civil service post.

Thousands of London, Ontario, fairgoers stared skyward as the helicopterriding Rev. Jonas Shepherd, a Presbyterian, married via loudspeaker two professional aerialists dangling on a ladder under the ’copter.

While some of the faithful walked out, comedian Dick Gregory told a Sunday congregation at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Methodist Church that “Watts was legal.” Indicating the pulpit Bible, he predicted, “Kids today are going to test the Bible. It’s not going to stand up.” Glide’s pastor, who worries about “dull” worship, said Gregory was just the beginning.

Carmen Armenti, the new Roman Catholic mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, got permission for back-to-back wedding ceremonies for his marriage this month to a Greek Orthodox communicant.

Stephen Brimigion, General Electric executive, is now treasurer of Methodist home missions work.

The Rev. Beverly A. Asbury, Presbyterian minister at Wooster, Ohio, will become chaplain of Vanderbilt University.

The Rev. Art Wilson of Wichita Baptist Tabernacle was re-elected president of the Baptist Bible Fellowship International, which lists a constituency of 1.5 million.

The Rev. Ephraim Kayumba, a Pentecostal minister and member of the Congo (Kinshasa) parliament, was elected a bishop by his church council.

Finnish author Hannu Salama was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for “deliberate blasphemy” in his new novel Midsummer Dances, but the sentence was suspended because Finland’s blasphemy law may be abolished. Copies of the book were confiscated.

In Jerusalem’s Imperial Hotel on October 7 at 3 P.M., Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, 73, head of one branch of the Pentecostalist Church of God, was crowned by his followers as “King of All the Nations of Men.”

Deaths

MARQUIS LAFAYETTE HARRIS, 59, bishop of the Methodists’ Atlantic Coast Area (Central Jurisdiction) and formerly president of Philander Smith College; in Atlanta.

ALFRED ALONZO GILMAN, 88, Episcopal missionary who went to China in 1902, became an editor, educator, and bishop; active in refugee relief during World War II and a prisoner of the Japanese; in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.

WALDO FARRINGTON CHASE, 104, believed to have been the oldest Episcopal priest in the United States; in Alhambra, California.

HAROLD W. SEEVER, 54, former chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee who resigned as pastor of his large Alabama church this year because of near-total blindness; in Mobile, of an apparent heart attack.

During the summer a bill was introduced in the Turkish parliament to force out of the country the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul and to close the Orthodox theological school on the nearby island of Halki (Heybeli).

Greek newspapers charged that the bill threatened to mark a tragic final chapter in the long harassment of the patriarchate by the Turks. It was submitted for consideration by Resad Ozarda, a deputy said to be independent of the major parties. Ozarda told fellow parliamentarians that the patriarchate stood as “a symbol of Greek imperialism” and a “torch of self-deceit for the re-establishment of the Byzantine Empire.”

The patriarchate was said to have been “a poisonous nest of traitors for 513 years” (i.e. since the fall of Constantinople). “For centuries it was the center of political penetration of the Russian Czars, but now, supported by the United States, it aims to become a state within a state.”

The bill stipulates that within ten days of its acceptance, Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras must leave Turkey and the Halki school must close. There is little chance, however, that this will go through.

In a letter to German Bishop Otto Dibelius, who had expressed concern for the Patriarch’s position, the Turkish Ambassador to the Federal German Republic stressed that in Turkey freedom of religious practice has always been guaranteed. “If this is indeed a constitutional principle,” said a British observer just returned from Turkey, “one might wish it were more widely known throughout the ambassador’s homeland.”

Meanwhile, Greek Orthodox communities on the Turkish-owned islands of Imroz and Tenedos (Bozcaada) are being subjected to “unbearable oppressive measures,” according to reports reaching Athens. Harsh strictures, for which the Cyprus dispute is blamed, involve expropriation of lands held by Greek nationals, as well as cultural and religious restrictions.

“Livestock face starvation,” said the reports, “because grazing is prohibited.

Many people have been compelled by the authorities to leave their homes and are being panicked into selling their properties at very low prices. Meanwhile, Greeks are denied employment at the urging of the Turkish authorities.”

“Greek education,” the reports continue, “has become a principal target of the Turkish persecution. All lessons must be taught in the Turkish language. Greek Orthodox schools have been forbidden and Greek children are forced to attend Turkish schools.”

Turkish authorities are accused of hindering Orthodox church services and of destroying ikons and other religious symbols. At Easter, it was said, the Metropolitan of Imroz was forced to go to the cathedral in civilian clothes.

The reports charged also that the Turks had transferred 480 convicts to Imroz and allowed them to wander about the island freely in an attempt to provoke the Greeks into compromising incidents. Many of the inhabitants, seeing no future there for themselves and their children, have left the island and gone to Greece or to Australia.

In Turkish eyes, the Greeks are often still seen in terms of Greece’s ancient dreams of expansion to the east. Persecution of them is in some sense regarded as an extension of the old Holy War against the infidel—and the new Turkish government has shown itself aware of the voting potential of the pious rural areas that have always resented the idea of the laic state. It is to this resurgence of Islam that some foreigners attribute Turkey’s odd neglect of its undoubted tourist potential.

Moreover, many of the Greek minority in Istanbul, with a highly developed commercial instinct, have prospered exceedingly, a fact by no means irrelevant to the recent expulsion of Greeks from the country. This is seen also as a reprisal for the Cyprus situation, where the 18 per cent Turkish minority has undoubtedly suffered cruelly from the regime of an Orthodox archbishop. That Makarios is not everyone’s dream of what a father-in-God should be has been exploited and exaggerated by the Turks. The traveler in Turkey today will be told candidly that Turkey would long since have invaded Cyprus but for American influence—a more potent factor than the presence of U. N. troops in the island republic.

The Turkish foreign minister has denied any intention of expelling the Ecumenical Patriarch, whose position is safeguarded by the Treaty of Lausanne. Nevertheless, the government is chipping away at his position by leaving him with scarcely any local constituency. (The patriarchate has, however, a measure of jurisdiction also over Mount Athos, Rhodes and the other Dodecanese islands, Crete, Western Europe, America and Australia.)

The present patriarch is 80, and it seems likely the Turks will play a waiting game till he dies or (most unlikely) resigns, before taking decisive action. Then they will probably refuse to acquiesce in a successor resident in Istanbul.

Turkish officials disliked intensely the new luster given the patriarch on his historic meeting with Pope Paul VI in Jerusalem, an event that might ultimately make it harder to dislodge Athenagoras. They dislike him also as the last survivor of that Byzantine power that revolted against the Turks last century in southeastern Europe.

It cannot have escaped Turkish notice, on the other hand, that should the patriarchate be removed from its historic base, the Patriarchate of Moscow, with its suspect political affiliations so detested by the Turks, might then aspire to be the international leader of Orthodoxy and become “a third Rome.” Even in an Islamic state, this factor might paradoxically prove decisive.

Ramsey Vs. Canadian Press

A storm of protest greeted the Archbishop of Canterbury, Arthur Michael Ramsey, this month as he returned from a month’s tour of Canada. The furor was over statements about Billy Graham, particularly this one in the Vancouver Sun: “I don’t think Billy Graham is what we really need. We don’t need his type of evangelism.”

After a protest letter in the Times of London from Lord Luke and other Britons, the archbishop replied: “Nor did I use any phrase about Dr. Graham not being ‘needed.’ I am very sorry that an incorrect story transmitted across the Atlantic should have given distress to many people.…”

But Vancouver reporters insisted they told the truth. In fact, the archbishop had said the same thing across the country. He told the Hamilton Spectator, “I don’t think Billy Graham’s kind of evangelism is needed in our time.” The Toronto Globe and Mail reported that Ramsey “didn’t think Mr. Graham’s type of evangelism was what was needed for the present.” A Calgary Herald article said: “Commenting on evangelists such as Billy Graham, Dr. Ramsey said he didn’t think they were ‘what we need for these days.’ ” Thus the leader of the world’s 44 million Anglicans seems to accuse the whole Canadian press of falsification.

Graham’s reply to the reported criticisms: “The archbishop’s statement is an interesting one in view of his ecumenical claims.”

Those claims were prominent in Ramsey’s visit to Canada, on invitation of Canada’s Anglican Primate Howard Clark. If it was just a courtesy call, some commissioners at the biennial meeting of the United Church of Canada thought it ill-timed. While the UCC debated working principles of union with Canadian Anglicans (see Sept. 30 issue, page 15), Ramsey was less than 100 miles away at Niagara Falls but put in no appearance.

Ramsey holds strong opinions on the ordination of women, a major unsolved issue in UCC-Anglican negotiations. The UCC seems committed to ordination of women (it now has sixty-five who have been ordained), and there may be no union unless the Anglicans accept this. In Calgary, Ramsey repeated his opposition to women priests and advised his Canadian brethren “to compare notes with Anglican churches elsewhere in the world.”

A real clash with Anglican apostolic succession will result if the UCC goes ahead with present plans to adopt episcopal government before union. Ramsey has stated Anglicans can unite only on the basis of the “Lambeth quadrilateral”: Holy Scripture, creeds, sacraments, and the historic episcopacy.

On these counts, Anglicanism has more in common with Rome than with the non-liturgical, non-sacerdotal, pro-Reformation United Church. In Canada, Canterbury saw his visit to Pope Paul as the greatest breakthrough yet toward a united Christendom, and he praised Anglican-Roman cooperation in Canada. “I think that in the united church of the future,” Ramsey mused, “the Bishop of Rome might have a place as a presiding bishop among equals.”

Although Canadian Anglicans turned out in large numbers to give a rousing welcome to Ramsey, it is unlikely that Mother Canterbury will have much influence on her daughter’s marriage on the other side of the Atlantic.

J. BERKLEY REYNOLDS

Protestant Panorama

Episcopal Trials. The Episcopal House of Bishops, meeting this week, will again consider heresy action against Bishop James A. Pike. When he resigned the leadership of the Diocese of California, Pike was named “Auxiliary Bishop,” but he revealed October 12 that he had asked to be downgraded to “Retired Bishop” to “disassociate” the diocese from the heresy issue. The two Floridians behind the anti-Pike move claimed support from twenty-eight other bishops.

One locus of Pike opposition is the Anglo-Catholic wing of the denomination, whose American Church Union met in Chicago this month and registered strong opposition to the “principles upon which the work of the Consultation on Church Union has been proceeding.” The ACU, which renamed itself just “Church Union” because of growing Canadian membership, favors work toward “a unity of mind” and then a “reunion” of “Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants and others, based on the faith of the New Testament church.”

Presbyterian Pact. If they unite, the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) and the Reformed Church in America would be called the Presbyterian Reformed Church in America. This agreement was reached by the joint committee from the two denominations, meeting earlier this month. The joint group also discussed a first draft of a constitution, which will be refined in Chicago November 7 and 8 and sent to local churches early in 1967. The denominations will meet together at their annual assemblies next June.

Southern Baptist Soundings. A symbolic church exodus is in the works in Fort Worth, Texas. Pastor Frank Minton of the Evans Avenue Church says his all-white congregation is leaving its predominantly Negro neighborhood and merging with a white church seven miles away because of racial prejudice. The result: “a vacuum of witness.”

A different spirit was at work at the first Christian Ethics Workshop at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. John Claypool of the SBC Christian Life Commission said churches should move beyond such personal problems as smoking and drinking into “larger social issues like race, politics, and economics.” Rather than negative, authoritarian approaches or implying that “moral rules are the enemies of good times,” he said Baptists should explain their reasoning, and picture morality as “liberating.”

Meanwhile, the SBC’s invasion of the Northeast isn’t going as well as planned. At a meeting last month, SBC members from eight states dropped a January, 1968, target date for organizing a regional convention, because there will not be enough members by that date.

United Church Restructure. President Ben Herbster, in Cincinnati to lay groundwork for the United Church of Christ biennial meeting there next June, said restructure will be high on the agenda. “We recognize there are some things we do differently now than we did ten years ago when we merged. The day that the church is operating in is different and demands more flexibility.”

Anglican Burials. Prayers for the dead are now part of the Church of England’s official liturgy. Late last month the House of Laity of the Church Assembly approved the service previously passed by the Houses of Bishops and Clergy.

The new service is similar to one in the 1928 Prayer Book that, though widely used, was not legal because it lacked approval by Parliament. The book’s illegality was spotlighted in June when evangelicals led the Laity in rejecting the book’s confirmation service, which had been approved by the bishops and clergy.

Laymen would have votes in doctrinal legislation for the first time under recommendations of a special Anglican commission that issued a report last month. A General Synod would combine legislative and other powers now divided between the Church Assembly (which includes laymen) and the Convocations of Canterbury and York (composed of bishops and clergy).

Welfare From War To War

Church World Service, born after World War II, continues work within another war during its twentieth anniversary this month. It will provide $300,000 in 1967 to Viet Nam Christian Service, through which it works with Lutheran and Mennonite agencies. VNCS Director Atlee Beechy reports the deepest needs are among the one million refugees.

CWS is also a major contributor to National Christian Council of India relief, which will help feed one million persons this year. The Rev. Donald Rugh, a Virginia Methodist, is en route to India to assist the growing food program.

Thirty years after he earned a niche in history with a poignant appeal to the League of Nations, Haile Selassie I this month appears before another international forum with a much different purpose.

The short-statured Selassie, whose titles include “Emperor of Ethiopia,” “Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” and “Elect of God,” will be the ranking statesman among participants in the Berlin World Congress on Evangelism (see story, page 55).

At 75, Selassie has held his office longer than any other active national leader on earth. Most experienced and traveled leader on his continent, he is host and sponsor of the neophyte Organization of African Unity, whose $3 million meeting hall is in his capital city of Addis Ababa. Yet Selassie is a monarch in a democratizing age who traces his royal line further than any other ruler—3,000 years, through 224 other emperors, to the union of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, of which Selassie is titular head, is equally storied. From the conversion of the Ethiopian recorded in Acts, it developed to official status in the fourth century. The church survived the advent of an aggressive new world faith, even though Ethiopia has for centuries been, as Newsweek put it, “a medieval Christian fortress in a Moslem sea.”

Selassie took control of the fortunes of his primitive, isolated nation in November, 1930, after a struggle with two other regents, one of whom embraced Islam. The new emperor then adopted his present name, which translates, “Instrument and Power of the Trinity.”

The young monarch, who was raised in a French mission school, abolished slavery, wrote the country’s first constitution, and went on to other reforms that ground to a halt when the troops of the Fascist government of Italy invaded in 1935. On June 30, 1936, Selassie symbolized victims of aggression in this century as he appealed to the League of Nations for help:

“Apart from the Kingdom of the Lord, there is not on earth any nation superior to any other.… It is international morality which is at stake.” He predicted the league was “digging its grave” by inaction, and he was right.

After the Italians had been driven out, Selassie returned to a land where most of the educated elite had been butchered. There were only two doctors left in the nation, and malaria and syphilis were rife.

Although he still holds near-absolute power and liberal elements have agitated to overthrow him (most notably in 1960), Selassie is highly respected in Africa and credited with considerable reform.

The emperor’s relations with the official Ethiopian Orthodox Church are interpreted variously, but most feel he has drawn church-state distinctions, and non-Orthodox Christians have recently gained considerable freedom. The Ethiopian church ended its affiliation with the Coptic (Egyptian) Church in 1959 and established its own patriarchate.

Religious News Service Correspondent Jeff Endrst reported from Addis Ababa last month that the rich church is “completely apolitical,” in contrast to its campaign of resistance during the Fascist occupation. He estimates 40 per cent of the nation is Orthodox, another 40 per cent Muslim, and the rest pagan.

Though trinitarian, the Ethiopian church retains some customs from its ancient Jewish roots, such as circumcision, Sabbath observance, an ark in places of worship, and ceremonial sacrifice of goats or lambs. Its scriptural canon includes several books found in neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant Bibles.

Bridging Gaps For Evangelism

Church historians will probably be obliged to distill some conclusions from the World Congress on Evangelism which begins in Berlin this week. Rarely have so many come so far in the interests of gospel proclamation.

The most dramatic world figure on the program is Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (see story, page 54), an Orthodox believer who is scheduled to bring greetings and deliver an address. The emperor and world-renowned scholars will join humble grass-roots preachers from frontier churches. Besides such crosscurrents of culture and class, there will be a mingling of men from more than 100 nations. The congress is sponsored by CHRISTIANITY TODAY, an American magazine, but the great majority of the 1,200 participants will be from other continents.

Although delegates were chosen from within the framework of historic Christian beliefs, on other criteria they form perhaps the broadest Protestant assembly yet on a world scale.

Virtually every denomination is represented. Anglican bishops in vestments will confer with such contrasting figures as Pentecostal faith-healing evangelist Oral Roberts. The session will also transcend affiliation or non-affiliation with the World and National Councils of Churches and with organic-union plans. Competing and divisive affiliations will be sidelined as a wide variety of independents break rarely crossed boundaries to stress evangelism with ecumenical Christians.

Ecumenical representatives who specialize in evangelism will include Walter Hollenweger of the WCC, Ralph Holdeman of the NCC, and home and foreign missions executives from major denominations.

Among observers will be reporters from New York, Washington, London, Jerusalem, Saigon and other major world cities. Besides reporters, Roman Catholic observers include Father William Joseph Manseau, a 30-year-old Boston priest particularly interested in evangelical Protestantism. A Jewish observer will be Rabbi Arthur Gilbert, expert in interfaith relations and religious freedom for the National Conference of Christians and Jews and, more recently, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

An effort was made to draw delegates from every nation, but late word from Poland and Burma is that Christians there are unable to get passports. Congress planners held out hope that some Communist Bloc believers will be able to attend.

The congress is to start October 25 with a half-night of prayer. At the formal opening ceremony the next morning, the Bible-bearer will be Bishop Alexander Mar Theophilus of India’s Mar Thoma Church, regarded by many as the oldest Christian communion in existence.

From there, the congress is to follow a general daily pattern: reports on evangelistic conditions around the world, “position papers” on theological aspects of evangelism, committee sessions, and plenary assemblies.

Besides Selassie, major speakers at those assemblies will include Chairman Carl F. H. Henry; Honorary Chairman Billy Graham; Dr. Kyung Chik Han, minister of the 8,500-member Young Nak Presbyterian Church in Seoul, Korea; Dr. Ishaya Audu, vice-chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria; the Right Rev. Chandu Ray, Anglican bishop of Karachi, Pakistan; Dr. John R. W. Stott, Anglican rector in London and a chaplain to Queen Elizabeth; and Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, “Lutheran Hour” preacher.

Delegates and observers were to be kept busy with a packed program of activities. But Henry has stated publicly that no attempt is being made to determine what will come out of the congress. “It is completely in the hands of the delegates,” he says.

Overture In Berlin

Although the World Congress on Evangelism (story above) has not been called to ratify Billy Graham’s efforts, the climate for planning evangelistic strategy should be set by Graham’s third crusade in Berlin.

Graham was scheduled to speak nightly October 16–23 in the 13,000-seat Deutschlandhalle in the western sector of the divided city. The services won the blessing of the city’s most respected churchman, retired Bishop Otto Dibelius. A street meeting was planned for the heart of the city. Few East Berliners were expected in view of current border restrictions.

Reviewing difficulties involved in the Berlin locale, Graham’s Decision magazine this month adds these notes: “Affluence has lifted the material standards of the Berliners and has rendered some indifferent to the spiritual aspects if life. And the teachings of Rudolf Bultmann and other German theologians, seeking to ‘demythologize’ the Bible, have deeply influenced some of the 500 state church pastors and even some of the 150 free church pastors in Berlin. Letters from overseas critics have also sought to discredit the Crusade.”

President Johnson made important overtures to the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites October 7, but the international thaw is complicated by such factors as Communist treatment of religion. After touring the Ukraine, heartland of Soviet Protestantism, News Editor David E. Kucharsky wired this report October 13:

From a park-like slope in Kiev, a floral portrait of Lenin glares at the Ukrainian Council of Ministers, housed in a nine-story building across the street. “That,” said a Communist guide to touring Americans this month, “is so they will not forget him.”

Frost will soon smite the begonias marking Lenin’s profile. But no one is likely to forget him, least of all the 125,000 Protestants in the Ukraine. On the eve of the fiftieth-anniversary year of the Soviet Revolution, they just manage to hold their own in the discouraging milieu of a political system hostile to religion.

Right now, spirits are buoyant following a rare four-day congress in Moscow this month of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (see following story). The meeting provided pastors from throughout the Soviet Union a chance for mutual encouragement and discussion of problems. The All-Union Council is said to embrace only 500,000 of the two million Protestants in the Soviet Union, but it is the only non-Orthodox religious organization with official stature.

Among the fifteen Soviet republics, the All-Union Council is strongest in the Ukraine. But even here its social impact is small. The once-dominant Orthodoxy has been reduced to a remnant. Two generations of Communism have left a largely religionless society.

This decline of religious activity is well known in the West. Not so widely reported is the relatively high tone of personal and social behavior in this secularized culture. Moral conduct is respected—and expected.

In Kiev, the Ukraine’s sprawling capital city with a population of more than one million, women and children walk safely at night through the many parks. Tourists are not subjected to propositions of prostitutes. Newsstands and bookstalls are free of pornography. Drunks are at least out of sight.

All this is in embarrassing contrast to the heyday of Orthodoxy, which was scarred by scandal and exploitation of the masses and little apparent manifestation of fruit of the spirit.

“At its first entrance in Russia,” wrote church historian Philip Schaff, “Christianity penetrated deeper into the life of the people than it did in any other country, without, however, bringing about a corresponding thorough moral transformation.”

Kiev, where the Dnieper River emerges from the forest and moves across rich Ukrainian grain fields, is the cradle of ancient Russian civilization. The Russian monk Nestor, a medieval historian, tells of mass baptisms in the Dnieper as priests read prayers from the palisades. The name of Kiev’s main street still means “to Christianize by baptism.”

Credit for the introduction of Christianity to the area called Kievan Rus in the tenth century goes to Prince Vladimir, whose statue, cross in hand, still graces a Dnieper overlook at Kiev. The rich religious heritage of Kiev is also recalled in picturesque Saint Sophia Cathedral, one of the oldest churches in the world, and the sprawling Kiev Perchersk Monastery, whose catacombs rival Rome’s. Saint Sophia is now a museum for ecclesiastical artifacts; since 1961, the monastery has also been for exhibition purposes only.

At the other end of the architectural scale are the Ukraine’s 1,037 Protestant churches, many of them converted dwellings. Most towns have one, though Kiev and Kharkov have three each. Kiev’s biggest draws about 300 persons—including those who stand at the back or peer through the windows from outside, as they often do because of the press of the crowd. When the congregation is not meeting, the church from the outside looks like just another house, painted in the popular terra cotta color with brown trim woodwork. Inside, the neatly kept sanctuary has a blue and white motif, with curtains at each window. There is no piano, but the church has an old-fashioned, American-made foot-pump organ with fifteen stops. Most of the congregation are old women wearing babushkas. Only a few teen-agers go to worship these days.

Among Protestants throughout the Soviet Union, there is such a demand for Bibles that tourists are besieged with requests. Christian visitors to the Soviet have taken to bringing in several Bibles per suitcase. Some have tried to smuggle in large quantities only to have them confiscated at the border.

Apparently sensing the demand for biblical literature, the Soviet government publishes occasional books about the Bible that come close to reproducing the text, along with discrediting commentary based on higher and form criticism (see Sept. 2 issue, page 56). The latest of these, called The Ancient Judaistic and Christian Myths, is due shortly.

Like Protestant churches everywhere, those in the Soviet Union are experiencing internal problems. Some laymen, apparently dismayed by the failure of pastors to assert themselves, took things in their own hands and ended up in jail. Grass-roots elements feel leaders of the Protestant clergy are not using all the latitude available under the Soviet constitution to push the government for more favorable treatment.

In a long Novosti Press Agency report last month, Vladimir A. Kuroyedov, chairman of the government’s Council on Religion, said dissidents who constitute one-twentieth of the Soviet Baptists have called Soviet religion laws Satanic and demanded repeal to allow unrestricted public preaching. The dissidents spread leaflets, tried to organize street protest marches in several cities, held public prayer meetings, and gave religious education to children (prohibited under current laws).

True to the Slav temperament, they got carried away with their brinkmanship. When they ignored warnings, Kuroyedov notes curtly, “a number of the leaders were prosecuted.”

Soviet Baptists Rap ‘Modernism’

This month’s thirty-ninth national convention of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in Moscow drew 705 delegates elected in sixty-three regional conferences across the Soviet Union. Information on the meeting was provided CHRISTIANITY TODAY by the U.S.S.R.’s Novosti Press Agency.

The council reaffirmed its basic beliefs, codified in 1913 by Ivan Kargel. The re-elected secretary-general of the council, Alexander Karev, said Soviet Baptists reject “modernistic” attempts by some Baptists in the West to replace faith in the deity of Jesus Christ by worshipping him merely as a divine man. Karev also noted that U.S.S.R. Baptists do not practice national or racial separation as U.S. Baptists do.

The council adopted a new charter which encompasses as full members the “Evangelical Christians,” “Fiftieth Day Evangelical Christians-Baptists,” and Mennonites, under union plans previously negotiated. Besides members of these groups, speakers included “Apostolic Christians” and members of the “Initiative Groups” or “Sponsors” which split from the council in 1961. The Soviet Baptists looked to the world ecumenical movement for “the rapprochement, not the merger, of churches.”

On closing day, October 8, the council called on all the world’s Christians to pray to the “Prince of Peace” for an end to the Viet Nam war, and added:

“We address the U. S. government as well as the governments of all other countries whose troops are in Viet Nam. In the name of Christian love, cease fire in Viet Nam, withdraw troops from that country, and give the people of Viet Nam the opportunity of deciding their internal affairs by themselves.”

No Hush For Harold Wilson

A generation has grown up in England that knows nothing of A. A. Milne and his sense of the sacred. “Hush, hush, whisper who dares—Christopher Robin is saying his prayers” is apparently no longer an English attitude, as England’s Prime Minister discovered during a church service in Brighton this month. The service in Dorset Gardens Methodist Church had begun sedately enough, and most of the 1,000 persons attending were unaware that among them sat some thirty representatives of the Viet Nam Action Group and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Present also were Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Foreign Secretary George Brown, and other senior ministers, in town for the Labour Party Conference.

It was Wilson the infiltrators were gunning for, but an unhappily chosen Old Testament lesson goaded one of them into premature action. As Mr. Brown concluded his reading from Micah, about nation not lifting up sword against nation, a young man shouted, “Hypocrite!” He was ejected. His colleagues, one account has it, sneered. The congregation sang “Father, Let Thy Kingdom Come,” and Mr. Wilson went forward to read from the New Testament—another unfortunate passage, under the circumstances, this time from Matthew 7, including the words: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”

He did not get far. Interruptions came from all sections of the congregation. “Wilson for ex-Prime Minister!” shouted one girl. A man called: “How dare you use the House of God for your political ambitions, you hypocrite!” Scattered parts of the church took up the chant of “Hypocrite! Hypocrite!”

After several unsuccessful attempts at continuing the reading, Mr. Wilson went back to his seat in a front pew. White-helmeted policemen who had been on duty outside the church entered and removed the demonstrators, who resisted noisily. Host minister Leslie Newman later said, “In the forty years of my ministry, I have never witnessed anything like it, and I cannot imagine that it will reflect any credit on those who took part in it.”

It was reported later that four women and five men would face charges of obstructing the police and unruly behaviour in church.

T. D. LENTON

Looking Back At Geneva

The chairman of the World Council of Churches’ summer Conference on Church and Society (Aug. 19 issue, page 42), is in America for a year of follow-up meetings, between teaching chores at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

At the first such meeting, in the nation’s capital this month, the Rev. M. M. Thomas, who directs South India’s Christian Institute for the Study of Church and Society, said the Church’s major responsibility at present is not evangelism, but framing questions about human personality and existence in an age of social and technological revolution.

“M. M.,” as the slight, witty, middle-aged scholar is called within the ingroup, drew sizable crowds and talked with the quiet ease and eloquence usually reserved for men with a passionate belief that they have made history.

During the mostly-secular discussions, Thomas stated the theological basis for social action as “the common humanity of all men in creation and redemption. If you deny this, you are lost.”

O. WILSON OKITE

Texas Tilt: Nuns In School

Two Benedictine nuns are in the middle of a legal battle in Boerne, Texas (population 2,200), because they wear religious habits as they teach in the public school.

In a crowded courtroom October 7, District Judge Charles Sherril, Jr., took under advisement a petition complaining about the practice. He will set a hearing date after lawyers file briefs, and a long hassle is expected.

The furor erupted when the Rev. George McWilliams of Boerne’s First Baptist Church protested the “silent, yet striking and unmistakable teaching of sectarian religion in the wearing of the religious symbolic garb.” Aided by a Church of Christ minister and two retired Army officers, McWilliams and his two lawyers seek permission to ask the nuns in court if the garb is peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church, if they are wholly religious persons, and if they have taken oaths of obedience to poverty.

San Antonio lawyer Pat Maloney, representing the nuns, says, “We feel the constitutional right of freedom of religion is involved.” He thinks complaints are aimed not at the garb but at the Roman Catholic Church. Through Maloney, the nuns filed a statement arguing that state law forbids schools to ask prospective teachers about their religion.

The town school board had hired the nuns despite opposition, citing a shortage of qualified teachers.

McWilliams said many friendships had cooled in Boerne, although both Catholics and Protestants have “tried to hold down prejudice.”

MARQUITA BOX

Pointers From Hunters Point

Moved by the worst racial riots in San Francisco history, Bay Area churches are pondering as never before their role in the face of increasingly severe urban problems.

The violence was triggered by a sixteen-year-old Sunday school dropout’s death at the hands of a policeman September 27. The boy, Matthew Johnson, was one of several youths who bolted from a stolen car when a patrolman approached the run-down Hunters Point public-housing district. The officer spotted the fleeing teen-ager, ordered him to stop, fired three warning shots over his head, then felled him with another.

Bitterness over the shooting was the first reaction among Negroes, even ministers. They demanded that a civilian review board be established; some angrily insisted that the officer be charged with murder.

Visibly distressed, the patrolman (also named Johnson), father of four, told reporters, “I didn’t want to kill that boy. If only he had stopped when I told him …”

As rage gave way to reason, the local chapter of the National Association of Evangelicals scheduled a meeting this month with Negro pastors. The purpose: “to explore how evangelicals can work together to assist churches on location toward a more effective ministry among the unemployed and uneducated.”

Bi-racial groups of pastors ventured into the strife-torn areas day and night “to offer counsel and plead for peace.”

Baptist Victor Medearis, a leading pastor in the Hunters Point area, offered his perspective: “This was not really a race riot. The rioters were mostly unemployed young adults and frustrated teen-agers. Tensions run high always, and rumbles occur often, usually with invading gangs from the Fillmore (another Negro district). Our church people deplore what has happened, and they are as afraid as anyone else when violence breaks out. We need to do something as churches to get these kids off the streets.”

The monthly meeting of the Economic Opportunity Council, the city’s anti-poverty organization, fell on the second night of rioting. During a heated exchange, EOC’s public-relations officer, Raphael Taliaferro, scored Roman Catholic and Council of Churches representatives on three counts: failure to help lobby for more federal funds for the unemployed, failure to interpret effectively the EOC program to parishioners and thus involve their support, and failure to approve plans for activist projects. This neglect, he declared, was responsible for the outburst.

Major interfaith officials later met and vowed to carry the call for wider church social involvement to their congregations.

In an interview, Taliaferro laid much of the blame for “the social mess” upon Negro churches, especially Baptists (“they represent half of this city’s 80,000 Negroes”). He is himself a member and the music director of the city’s largest Negro church, the 5,000-member Third Baptist Church.

He spoke of the lack of an educated ministry, of storefront fly-by-night operators, of irrelevant and excessively emotional sermons that fail to appeal to intellect or will, of the small number of teen-agers and young adults active in churches, and of failure to use facilities efficiently. (Third Baptist, in the heart of the Fillmore district, has one of the best gymnasium buildings in the city; it stands unused much of the time).

The civic leader outlined a three-point educational program aimed at changing “basic Negro values.” He hoped churches would act soon to:

1. Sponsor remedial and adult education classes (“for example, churches can teach neighborhood residents how to read, write, and speak correct English”);

2. promote cultural development;

3. (“most important”) provide family-life education and counseling services (“the prevailing concept of ‘family’ among Negroes must be drastically changed; the church is in the key position to do this”).

“We are generations late,” commented one Negro clergyman. “We need to move into these areas of need, and now.”

Another minister, white, seemed to summarize the newly aroused concern of many Bay Area Christians when he said, “We all, really, had a hand in that boy’s death and in the violent venting of hostility that followed.”

The product of a broken home, Matthew Johnson lived in Hunters Point sometimes with relatives, sometimes with his father and stepmother. With the latter, members of the Evergreen Baptist Church, he attended Sunday School and services “regularly” until two years ago, according to the Rev. R. Johnson, pastor. At that time he went to Louisiana to live with his mother for one year. On his return he only “rarely” visited church; occasionally he attended mass with Roman Catholic friends. His pastor and Sunday school teacher can recall only that he was “a quiet boy.”

In a gardening job under the city’s anti-poverty program during summer months, he was rated by his supervisor as a “very good and dependable worker” who was “neat in appearance” and “obeyed all orders.”

But when, because of family moves, he was transferred to another high school at the beginning of the fall term, he refused to cooperate. He became a neighborhood drifter with other truants and unemployed older youths. His last day of life was in their company.

It took 1,000 police and 2,000 National Guard troops to quell the violence and destruction of property that erupted in the wake of his death. Ironically, the rioting brought a curfew that forced cancellation of revival services at Evergreen Baptist.

In a shocking footnote this month, Rev. Johnson said in his funeral sermon for the youth that if he were a policeman, he wouldn’t arrest children, but “parents who have not lived up to their responsibilities.” Matthew Johnson’s mother walked out.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN