A signal to the choir from ebullient emcee Cliff Barrows and the Greater London Crusade was under way. Billy was back, at the invitation of a group of laymen who thought “God has given him special gifts.” It was Graham’s biggest British effort since the famous Harringay meeting twelve years ago.

The opening-night crowd at the Earls Court indoor stadium was 19,000 (the hall holds 27,000), 2,000 of whom were in the choir. Oddly symbolic was the announcement that a lost and found department was operating. The meeting followed the familiar Graham pattern until he invited listeners to make a commitment or rededication by coming forward. Where the music ought to have started up, the choir and organ remained silent.

A lithe young Negro came first; then from all over the arena a steady stream of people: well-dressed, shabby, flamboyant, young, old, Oriental, European, African, at least as many men as women. They overflowed the platform area until the line was halfway up one aisle, 447 of them. It was three times the first-night response in 1954.

The second night’s meeting, aimed primarily at youth, drew 15,000, who heard a remarkable testimony halfway through from weight-lifter Paul Anderson, called the world’s strongest man. Once again, Billy Graham’s appeal was given without musical accompaniment. There were 734 inquirers, three-fourths of them under twenty-five.

Two newsmen watching such scenes were baffled. Finally one muttered a shade uneasily, “At least none of us are going forward.” “How do you explain it?” whispered the other. Answer came there none, but they had a whole month to pursue their inquiries.

The press reception in general has been more favorable than in 1954. Some news hawks have moved into Graham’s hotel, and others follow him and his team around constantly. One zealous photographer burst into Graham’s hotel room one morning and got a picture of the evangelist in his pajamas.

The British Broadcasting Corporation invited Graham to appear on a current affairs program but didn’t tell him until two minutes before air time that two of his most implacable enemies had been lined up for a confrontation. Graham went through with the program.

In other pre-crusade activities, Graham preached to the students at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. And at Southampton, he said he had come to present the Gospel, the good news, to people with a guilt complex, to the lonely, to those unable to find fulfillment in life.

He stressed that the crusade is a British one, run by a British committee. As if to underscore the point, the platform on opening night contained a brace of bishops, Major-General D. J. Wilson-Haffenden (executive committee chairman), and Viscount Brentford, who read the lesson.

The American preacher seemed well prepared for the continuous press probings. Asked about his “total world following,” Graham immediately responded: “I hope, none.” He termed himself a proclaimer, and not a leader of a separate movement but a churchman who does his work within the church.

Since Graham is a Southerner, his ideas on race also rated close scrutiny. Graham said the South has no monopoly on bias. The point was soon driven home when one of Graham’s Negro associates, Howard O. Jones, was asked to leave a rented flat at Drayton Place, Earls Court, after only one night.

Mrs. Gilda Jago, director of the dwellings for Langton Property and Investment Company, which owns the flat, said flatly, “We do not allow Negroes here.” When she took the booking she had no idea any of Graham’s colleagues would be colored. “With a name like Jones, for all I know he could have been Welsh,” she remarked. Two other team members, Danny Lotz and Irv Chambers, left the flats in protest,

Graham’s publicity in the States calls the London effort “the most carefully planned crusade we have ever led. Several of our team members have been in London nearly two years. The city has been organized block by block.…” Along with the central Earls Court effort, team members are holding scores of meetings all over town. Considerable TV and radio time also is being purchased.

All this is costly, and crusade treasurer Sir Cyril Black, M. P., will have about $840,000 in bills to meet. But the salaries of Graham, twelve other evangelists, and fifteen other staffers will be met by contributions to his American organization.

Graham told the press the crusade “costs about what Cassius Clay got for less than three minutes in the ring with Sonny Liston. It costs about one-fourth of one fighter plane that is used to destroy life. It costs one-fifth of what Elizabeth Taylor got for playing Cleopatra. It costs about what Julie Christie can now demand for one movie.”

Scotland: Pomp And Circumlocution

For hundreds of years, ministers and elders have made their annual trek to Edinburgh for the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, one of the more democratic of the world’s forums. Money is always in short supply, but debate is as profuse as ceremony.

The Lord High Commissioner, installed as Her Majesty’s representative, emerges—in the tight little streets where Montrose was executed and Covenanters driven to slaughter like sheep—with an entourage in which all centuries contribute their particular dress and custom. He meets the city fathers, clothed in scarlet and ermine; they rendezvous with the moderators and fathers of the church, splashed in black, white, and scarlet, Siege is laid to the ear by a Highland pipe band.

And once begun, what does the assembly speak about? According to one editor, “about everything and anything except God.” Rhodesia, women in the eldership, the minimum stipend, industrial chaplains, the return of the Birch—you mention it and you will find it in the Blue Book.

The minutiae of organizational affairs are not without significance. In an assertion of individuality at this year’s assembly, the ranks closed in opposition to a move to require all congregations to accept the Model Constitution for “efficiency and unity.” Some of the churches still have their own constitution and rights over property, a legacy of former years.

In deliberations on church union, more divisiveness was inevitable. Conversations with Anglicans and Methodists were reported as hopeful, but slow and dangerous. On balance, it seems the Presbyterians are more “open” than Anglicans. The 245-to-223 vote to continue church union discussions showed the sharp feelings on the topic.

Meantime, a lively ecumenical diversion was provided by protesters, led by a Baptist minister. They infiltrated the assembly and, at a given moment, opened their coats to reveal canvas vests with such slogans as “No Bishops.” The same ploy was used by others when the Archbishop of Canterbury went to the Vatican recently.

If the Presbyterian-Anglican breach is unbridged, the gap with Roman Catholics is wider still. A major cause of offense is the odious ne temere policy—children of a mixed marriage must be pledged to the Roman Church—essentially unchanged despite Pope Paul’s recent “new” policy on the subject. Delegates recalled a recent instance in which a Presbyterian minister was unable to officiate at the marriage of his own daughter to a Roman Catholic.

On the floor, the church complained to broadcasting authorities about programs that more and more lapse into vulgarity and obscenity. The Scots are concerned with the “remote control” of programs from London, which some nearly equate with Sodom and Gomorrah. In another item, the church came down against “breathalisers” to check alcoholic consumption by auto drivers as an “invasion of liberty.”

The commissioners, conditioned to suspicion about Scottish weather, filed into the capital with umbrellas and mackintoshes, but the sun took over. At one outdoor session, a grueling, all-day sitting was necessary to deal with the crowded agenda. Summer heat, augmented by television arc-lamps, had the Scots melting in their tweeds.

GEORGE NICHOLSON

Conservative Baptist Splinter

All the talk at the Conservative Baptist Association’s annual “fellowship” this month was about unity, but this troublesome fact remains: after a year of internal struggle, the CBA has been unable to placate its small strongly conservative wing, and peace now appears impossible.

The breakdown became clear during the CBA meeting in Philadelphia. At an almost simultaneous meeting in Indianapolis, dissident churches that were represented at last year’s CBA meeting in Denver but have since pulled out of the association formed a new organization.

The new group, the New Testament Association of Baptist Churches, was first proposed at that Denver meeting in a separate session attended by about 200 delegates, but it then failed to materialize.

Since that meeting, according to this year’s annual CBA report, forty-four churches have withdrawn from the association. Most of them were represented at that private meeting in Denver, and form the core of the new organization.

The differences between the two associations are not so much doctrinal as operational. Leaders of the new group fear a “mood of tolerance” in the CBA that they claim will first tend toward more centralized power and eventually lead to doctrinal compromise. They claim a decline in financial support and in new membership in the CBA as evidence of grass-roots sympathy with their criticisms.

The CBA, which had an average annual increase of seventy churches and reached a total of more than 1,200 in 1963, has since lost ninety churches. Finances increased until 1963 but have since remained constant.

To counter charges, CBA officials point first to their two mission groups, which have grown to a combined yearly budget of almost $3.5 million and which this year appointed twenty-one new missionaries, the largest class in more than ten years.

As for the CBA itself, loyalists say its present decline is the result of two factors: dissatisfaction and suspicion stirred by the right-wing element, and a natural leveling-off period after twenty years of expansion.

The guess among Baptists in Philadelphia was that Baptists in Indianapolis had picked up about as much support from CBA ranks as they could expect.

WILLIAM FREELAND

Christian Science And Redevelopment

The Christian Science Church may have a “wholly spiritual” mission, but 15,000 of Mary Baker Eddy’s disciples who convened at the Mother Church this month witnessed the beginning of a church-sponsored redevelopment project that will alter the Boston skyline.

As Erwin D. Canham, editor-in-chief of the Christian Science Monitor, took office as church president for the coming year, wrecking crews began to make way for an $8 million church center, including a twenty-six-story headquarters building.

Canham told the Scientists—who filled the Mother Church sanctuaries and overflowed to the nearby War Memorial Auditorium in observance of the hundredth anniversary of Mrs. Eddy’s healing—that the threats of nuclear war, population growth, and “sensuality and licentiousness” could be countered only “as individuals strive to understand God’s laws … the truth of being.” With Christian Science’s special insight into spiritual healing, he said, “there is no problem facing mankind today which cannot be solved.”

At a news conference, the veteran editor said that while his church has no interest in church union, it welcomes “all aspects of this new atmosphere” of ecumenicity. Informal explorations of matters of common interest have been held with Presbyterians. Responding to a question on whether Scientists were seeking recognition as Christians, Canham said, “I didn’t know we were not.… Was there any serious doubt?” At last year’s annual meeting, the five-member Board of Directors offered fellowship “to every true Christian, to every adherent of any God-centered faith.”

In its report to the assembly, which was closed to non-Scientists, the board called for renewed spiritual discipline to bring “to the world a higher concept of God as divine Principle, in the realms of business, government, social service, the political sphere, and in every phase of human thought and action.” It also announced a new international department and a new youth division to meet growing demands. Four hundred campus organizations and 1,200 informal student groups have been established.

The board also took heart from the “God is dead” movement, which meshes neatly with its own ideas of the “nature of God as infinite Spirit, which Christ Jesus declared Him to be; as omnipresent divine Mind, that mind which was also in Christ Jesus.…”

After the one-day business meeting (which was not deliberative, since the board makes all decisions), the visitors divided their remaining 2½ days between standing in line at restaurants and sharing in workshops. Unlike most denominational meetings, the Christian Science assemblies are devoted more to education and inspiration than to issuing pronouncements on social issues. A Mother Church staffer explained that the church’s social outreach comes chiefly through spiritually healed individuals.

Faced with image problems outside the church, Christian Scientists are often lumped together with “positive thinkers,” but they refuse the label. Within the church, said a member of the Committee on Publications, there are difficulties in getting information between the Mother Church and the branches and individual members.

The redevelopment program planned by famed architect I. M. Pei will renovate and expand the Mother Church area and include high-rise offices and apartments and middle-income housing.

JOSEPH MORTENSEN

Unitarians Write Off God

God really is not controversial enough to merit our attention, some 1,500 delegates and observers at the Unitarian Universalist Association assembly seemed to agree.

The Creator was written off by one of the first speakers, along with outmoded concepts of order, reality, and morality. He was barely mentioned again in the six-day annual session at Hollywood, Florida, the first UUA meeting in the South. The group concentrated instead on treating the world’s social ills with thousands of pungent words in a multitude of up-to-the-minute, though repetitious, resolutions.

The Rev. Jack Mendelsohn of Boston’s Arlington Street Church put the gathering at the swank, beachside Diplomat Hotel in motion by observing that “the Christian mind [which he equates with the Middle Ages] assumed that reality, though beyond man’s ken and really beyond his proper concern, was controlled by a personal and beneficent God. The modern mind assumed that reality is ordered and that it is man’s glory to search it out and use it. The post-modern mind assumes that reality is not ordered in any way that man’s mind can comprehend.”

The result: “We will probably never again speak meaningfully of reality, morality, or God as existing by themselves apart from us.… I, for one, can hardly wait to see what divinities, what moralities … await us round the bend.”

From there, the Unitarian Universalists moved to more controversial subjects such as civil rights and Viet Nam. Most of the debate in the smoke-filled Regency Room and around the cocktail tables in hotel lounges centered more on the choice of words for the many resolutions than on the actual stand to be taken.

The closest thing to real controversy appeared in divergent views expressed by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the annual Ware Lecture, considered the highlight of the annual assembly, and by Harvard theologian James Luther Adams in the principal worship service.

Adams insisted that persistent, violent civil rights agitation is necessary if the United States is to “become an authentic democracy”—“sweet and slow persuasion” won’t accomplish needed changes. But King defended his philosophy of non-violent action and pleaded that violence never be used as a weapon to fight for racial equality.

The UUA members responded quickly to King’s plea for support, adopting a 3,500-word statement that, among other things, urged a federal open-occupancy law.

The civil rights resolution was one of many which reiterated past stands by the denomination. Others urged negotiations with “any and all principals” in Viet Nam, a U.N. seat for Red China, and more federal impetus for birth control. A call for investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency was turned down for technical reasons.

ADON TAFT

The Sex Conference

A Roman Catholic observer was surprised that the Second North American Conference on Church and Family was “80 per cent sociological-psychological and only 20 per cent theological.” Joan Lark, theologian and staff member of the Grail Movement, said that in a similar Roman Catholic conference, the percentages would be reversed.

She also was surprised that sex led the delegates into so many other fields of social life. As if bent on proving Freud right, the more than 600 delegates meeting at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, led off with sex and, without ever really leaving it, branched out into economic, political, religious, educational, legal, and cultural matters.

Some few voices thought there was nothing really new in American sex life. But the majority of delegates and speakers spoke of a “sex crisis” and of a “sexual revolution.” The crisis was attributed to reaction against a Puritan ethic, the fluidity of modern society, and the tensions of modern life. Many delegates said these tensions result because Protestant American capitalism lives and sets its values not “by grace” but by the norms of a “work-achievement ethic.” Seeking antidotes, Alvin Pitcher of the University of Chicago Divinity School said “we ought to have a guaranteed family income for everybody,” and contended American family life would also be stabilized by public health clinics (including mental health services), legal aid services, consumer credit protection, and cooperative credit unions.

Several delegates wondered how such environmental factors relate to the good life. One reminded the conference that some of the finest Americans come up out of culturally deprived ghettos. Another responded to Pitcher’s call for a fixed guaranteed income by pointing out that many children from a good environment have no initiative, and added, “I wish some of these kids had a little capitalistic spirit.” One confessed adherent of “liberal Christianity” called for a full discussion of environment. He said “evangelicals challenge liberal Christianity at this point,” and admitted, “I do not know the answer.” No one challenged Pitcher’s application of the Bible’s description of the Church as a “body” to society in general.

The conference was marked by deep-seated differences over the question of law, love, and freedom.

Dr. Gibson Winter, another professor at Chicago, said “personal responsibility is going to be the essence of any morality of sex in our time.… We will have to determine appropriate rules and relevant sanctions. We may spend a lot of time in our deliberations talking laws, sanctions and obligations to external authorities—human or divine—but this will be rhetoric largely for our own gratification and quite irrelevant to the issues at hand. Rules of the game are needed, but we shall have to seek them as guides and supports for personal responsibility. Hence, our basic task is to grasp the criteria of personal responsibility.”

Cynthia C. Wedel said it is “presumptuous” to ask about “the place of marriage and family in God’s plan for his children,” since “none of us can pretend to comprehend the wisdom or the plan of God,” but then went on to show she did comprehend a considerable amount of biblical wisdom on family and marriage. Dr. Harvey G. Cox looked to Christ for the norm, contending he is the “new man” from whom a “new community” is emerging. Cox lives in a Negro ghetto in Roxbury, Massachusetts, by a choice he described as “Christological,” for he sees emerging in the suffering of the ghetto that new community which is “the miracle of God’s grace.”

Dr. Pieter de Jong, visiting professor of systematic theology at New York Theological Seminary, was even more explicitly Christocentric than Cox and called for a “new living style.” He said we must “get back to the story of Jesus and his relation with his family.” De Jong asked what many regarded as extremely indiscreet, intimate questions about Jesus’ sexual life. The sudden embarrassed silence was not broken by answers, presumably because of the Bible’s silence and because Jesus neither courted women nor took a wife.

Dr. Lester Kirkendall, professor of family life at Oregon State University, countered De Jong’s appeal to biblical teaching authority by warning against “dependence on revelation for authority,” alluding to what Romans (ch. 1) has to say about the homosexual. The Rev. Dr. George Johnston, professor of New Testament theology at McGill University, said he did not see “how a Christian could say he could approve of any homosexual act,” but added that the Church should ask itself whether its judgmental attitude toward the homosexual has done “more harm than good.”

Dr. Mary S. Calderone, executive director of the Sex Information and Education Council of the U. S., said, “People don’t have to marry today to get a housekeeper, or for sex—so what do we marry for? Shall we have marriage in twenty-five years?” At the same press conference she asserted, “Men and men can live together—and women can live together—as decent, God-fearing people,” for it is the “general view” of psychiatrists, sociologists, clergymen, and businessmen who make up the SIECUS board of directors that “homosexuality can be as constructive as marriage can be destructive.”

On the last day, Professor J. C. Wynn of Colgate Rochester Divinity School spoke of the conference’s self-pity and tried to comfort the delegates, reminding them that they were not “orphans,” but stood in the long moral tradition of the Church. He said there is no reason to believe that the “only alternative to heavy-handed legalism is moral anarchy.” He also told the delegates it is a mistake to think that “sexuality depends on complete candidness”; there is a mystery, he said, about “our sexuality which is hidden in God.”

Dubbed by newsmen as a “sex conference,” the May 30-June 3 gathering was co-sponsored by the Canadian Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches.

The conference, in its Message to the Churches, complained that those professionally working “with family members have not been heard seriously by theologians.” The Message avoided any specific, substantive stands on family or sex issues, but called for budget and personnel to clarify the relationship of “love, law, and freedom,” a broad program of education, and greater research into family disintegration, abortion, homosexuality, and social responsibility. The final message spoke of a “sexual revolution” demanding “as radical a call to ministry and involvement as the civil rights movement,” and concluded, “We welcome the ferment of this hour … and its reaffirmation of God’s creative action.”

The conference as a whole moved uneasily and with little sure-footedness on the question of the objective moral standards within which authentic love and freedom move. A telling sign of the critical uncertainty was the often asserted, and rarely challenged contention that today’s sexual rebellion stems from the fact that the moral norms of our society confront us as decisions already made, in whose making we have had no part.

JAMES DAANE

Churchmen at White House Conference ponder strategy once laws are passed; question guest list, U. S. policies

There was one complaint after another about this month’s White House Conference “To Fulfill These Rights”—the procedure was wrong, the pre-fab legislation wasn’t specific enough, the wrong people were invited. But some steam was let off and some eyes were opened during two days of discussion by 2,800 invitees (200 of them from religious organizations).

Largely because of church pressure, the hottest issue at last November’s planning session for the conference—the stability of the Negro family—disappeared (see December 17, 1965, issue, page 38).

The Washington Post contended editorially that civil rights is a dead issue, since legal rights are established. But several Southern pastors at the capital conference found some unfinished business on this agenda. The Rev. James McRee of Canton, Mississippi, said that as long as federal school funds are channeled through his state government, Negroes will continue to get second-class education. The Negro is free to attend an all-white school, he said, but if he does he will be harassed constantly.

The ambush shooting of James Meredith days later was a graphic reminder of the remaining problems in law and order.

But such Southern eddies off the mainstream of American democracy seem quaint at a time when the civil rights movement is increasingly concerned with the North, with jobs, and with housing.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a blue-ribbon front including many religious leaders, held a press conference to back President Johnson’s national fair-housing bill and other 1966 civil rights proposals. The President made a surprise visit to the White House conference and attempted to soothe dissidents by saying one man can’t work miracles.

Vice-President Hubert Humphrey said churches and other community groups are “among the most potentially effective agents,” but he noted that some local congregations are still segregated and “many more do not speak out affirmatively on urgent questions of racial justice which arise in our communities.”

The conference was blander than expected, partly because militants tended to boycott it. Stokely Carmichael, new head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who has been accused of reverse segregation and black nationalism, was among those who hovered around the edges of the meeting and talked to reporters but didn’t participate. Significantly, a group of Negro protesters who considered the meeting at the President’s request a “sellout” refused to let whites join their picket line.

Inside, the protest was led by Floyd McKissick, national director of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He tried to get a resolution stating that the United States should get out of Viet Nam and spend all those millions at home, and thus make equal opportunity “the number one priority.” But his discussion committee voted this down ten to one.

As set up, the conference would have forbidden motions from the floor, but the uproar about “rigging” was so great that conference planners changed policies in midstream.

The dozen discussion groups made significant additions to the block of recommendations prepared in advance by the 29-member planning council.¹Council members included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Robert Spike of Chicago Divinity School, and J. Irwin Miller, industrialist and former NCC president. They backed home rule for Washington, D.C., stronger enforcement of existing civil rights laws, an emergency conference on law enforcement (Watts and Los Angeles were much in the air), and a revision of the council’s report to add such specifics as cost, timetables, and priorities in national efforts in human rights.

Dr. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, one of the more outspoken representatives from the National Council of Churches, was so disappointed she wants the NCC to send the President an official protest. Her main criticism was that “the NCC clergy” and churchmen in general got the short end of representation, and those not left out were added at the last minute.

Among the missing were top officials and race experts from the Episcopal and Methodist churches, long active in the field. Dr. Benjamin Payton, NCC race director, sent a list of fifty key denominational staff people in the area, but only a handful were invited.

The long list of those inside had an unusual flavor: small-town Americans who admitted little concern with civil rights, funeral directors, mayors and governors, and such personalities as McGeorge Bundy, Sammy Davis, Jr., Theodore Bikel, Marlon Brando, Duke Ellington, and Jimmy Brown.

And there was Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Negro comedienne who has made good on off-color jokes, who opined that schools—whether segregated or integrated—will never be great until the “Bible is returned.” She urged those who “outlawed the Bible from the schools to law it back.”

Delta Ministry Wins Reprieve

Not since the widely disputed Cleveland conference of 1958²Reflecting on adverse reaction to the conference’s bid for Red China recognition, ecumenist Eugene Carson Blake observed, “Boy, did we get clobbered!” has anything piled so much grief upon the National Council of Churches. The Delta Ministry, a two-year-old effort to relieve the plight of Mississippi Negroes, costs NCC nearly half a million dollars annually and an untold measure of good will among race-conscious Southerners. Militant DM staffers complain, meanwhile, that “northern churchmen who were originally enthusiastic about the concept now find their interests monopolized by newer or more highly publicized concerns.”

While digging into reserves because most of its member denominations have refused to support the Delta Ministry, NCC set up an “evaluation committee” headed by Baptist layman Brooks Hays and President A. Dale Fiers of the Disciples’ United Christian Missionary Society. The committee’s report to the NCC General Board this month lauded achievements of the DM, but charged that it was fiscally irresponsible and too freewheeling. A stringent overhaul was recommended to curtail DM voter registration drives, political workshops, and relief efforts in a dozen or so counties of western Mississippi where the soil is rich but the people are poor.

At the General Board’s two-day meeting in New York, an attractive young Negro lawyer pleaded emotionally for the DM. The board, with fewer than 100 of its 250 seats occupied, was left in no mood for a full-dress debate. It put off consideration of the report and merely reaffirmed the “purpose and direction” of the DM.

Left hanging was the question of where the money is to come from. One of the board members suggested that they each try to raise $100 by July 1. None rose to the challenge.

Meredith And The ‘Fringe’

Churchmen around the world issued statements deploring the act that sent Mississippi marcher James Meredith to a hospital with shotgun wounds.

One of the first to speak up was Arthur Thomas, 34-year-old head of the Delta Ministry (see box), who denounced Mississippi politicians for “encouraging the unbalanced fringe.” Thomas said the shooting of Meredith, first Negro admitted to the University of Mississippi, was “only one of thousands of harassments of voters.” He charged that the Rev. Clint Collier, seeking a seat in Congress for the Freedom Democratic Party, has been “continually harassed by law enforcement officers in Neshoba County ever since declaring his candidacy.”

Thomas also asserted that “in the last few months, the state legislature passed, without protest from ‘white moderates’ and without notice of the national press, numerous laws to wipe out Negro votes. Congressional districts have been gerrymandered, qualification dates hastily moved up, and election procedures changed.”

“When they encourage such circumvention of the Constitution, the state’s leaders cannot escape responsibility for encouraging the unbalanced fringe who use more violent means to the same end.”

Thomas, a native of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, is an ordained Methodist and a graduate of Colgate University and Duke Divinity School, where he specialized in the relation of economics and ethics. He offered Meredith “full support in your efforts to increase the participation of the Negro people in democratic procedures.”

Religious News Service reported that the Delta Ministry had already assigned all staff members as poll-watchers when word of the Meredith shooting came, the day before the June 7 Mississippi primary. Meredith was felled while on a 225-mile march to encourage Negroes to vote. One of his co-marchers was the Rev. Robert H. Weeks, an Episcopal priest from Monroe, New York.

Also in the state, as poll-watchers, were Dr. David R. Hunter of New York, deputy general secretary of the National Council of Churches, and the Rev. James P. Breeden, assistant director of the NCC Commission on Religion and Race.

Meanwhile, Dr. Benjamin Payton, director of the NCC race commission, declared that the “treacherous attack” on Meredith “reminds us once again that we have only just set out on our halting march as a nation toward justice and equal opportunity.” Payton pointed to an urgent need for vigilance by federal and state governments in the Mississippi primary and called on Congress for prompt action on the 1966 Civil Rights Bill with its protective features: “The shotgun pellets that wounded James Meredith, it is hoped, will have stung our Congress into performing quickly the duty set so clearly before it.”

In London, evangelist Billy Graham led nearly 18,000 Britons in prayer for Meredith’s recovery. The Southern clergyman said, “We hope God will see in our hearts the solution to this problem.”

Negro Rights At Church Assemblies

Church conventions may become a target of civil rights groups if delegates are chosen in a manner that Negro leaders believe discriminates against colored parishioners.

This new development may confront, in particular, the Protestant Episcopal Church’s triennial convention in Seattle next year. A resolution recently adopted at the National Negro Republican Assembly gave strong support to the independent Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU), which plans to challenge the seating of delegates from dioceses in which Negro members allegedly suffer discrimination.

The church convention challenge could be a trial run for the national political convention. The Negro Republicans resolved that their organization should keep close contact with ESCRU because “in spite of anticipated difficulty [at Seattle], much can be learned to prepare for an effort to prevent the seating of delegates elected on a racially discriminatory basis for the 1968 Republican National Convention.”

In another move of interest to churchmen, the NNRA resolved to “set up a close working relationship with ESCRU and similar organizations in the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths, so that the Republican Party may have the benefit of and experience of friends and sympathizers in various religious movements as we join in the effort to clean up the next Republican convention.”

The NNRA was addressed by Michigan Governor George Romney, a Mormon. Elected chairman was former baseball star Jackie Robinson, an active layman in the United Church of Christ.

GLENN D. EVERETT

“Chaplain, sho am comfortin’ to see you there!” The young paratrooper, hugging the sun-baked ground, had spotted his chaplain close by. The entire company lay flat on their faces eating red dust. The Viet Cong, out of sight somewhere beyond, pulled pins on clamore mines extended from bushes and trees. Deadly shrapnel ripped up the area. Automatic weapon fire cut the air. Stand up and you’d die.

Here crouched men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, one of the first full combat units to enter the Viet Nam war. The chaplain was 34-year-old Major John B. Porter, a Southern Baptist from Cordele, Georgia. The assignment: a routine search-and-destroy mission that had penetrated a VC domain. The chaplain was there. He carried no weapon, not even a sidearm, but his presence was indeed a “comfort.” Ask the men—they’ll tell you.

While en route to Viet Nam with the unit last year aboard the troopship U.S.S. “Mann,” Porter found himself with seventeen days at sea—plenty of time, and a restless congregation. He pondered, “What would the Apostle Paul do if he were in my combat boots? He’d preach, no doubt!” Hold number five, a busy thoroughfare deep below, became the “sanctuary.” Seventeen nights, seventeen decisions for Christ.

A one-night liberty at Subic in the Philippines gave cause for concern. How would the new converts fare ashore? One rugged new believer, determined to live for Christ, spotted another new Christian “sinning.” He walked and talked him back on board ship, straight to the chaplain. A bit embarrassed at this kind of brotherly concern, Porter nonetheless knelt with them as the man confessed his sin to God. He took a peek as they prayed. There was the husky trooper, right arm over the shoulder of his penitent buddy, left arm bracing the deck. His rolled-up sleeve revealed a gaudy tattoo with just two big words: “RAISE HELL!” On arrival at Quinhon, eight of the seventeen waded into the surf for baptism.

The 173rd Airborne’s assignment was sprawling Bien Hoa Air Base near Saigon, sometimes mortared by the VC. The airborne troopers are to secure the base and provide a defense against the continual probing actions of the Viet Cong. Jungle brush must be cut back to make camp. Night after night flares illuminate the sky. Harrassing fire by friendly forces rocks the air from sunset to dawn. Periodically the VC attempt to penetrate the air base. A savage firelight ensues, and under cover of darkness they pull off their dead and wounded. The vast jungle beyond the perimeter is constantly probed for enemy infiltration. Search-and-destroy operations cause the most casualties, for wary VC patiently await the patrols, laying mines and booby traps along their path.

It’s a dirty kind of war, and a long year for the combat men.

One sight stands out in all this turmoil. Amid the tents and bunkers, artillery positions, and barbed-wire barricades, a modern A-frame chapel towers above all else, with a colorful French tile roof, stained glass windows, a quiet green garden, a reading lounge and the chaplain’s office. It can be spotted from miles away, and the question is invariably asked, How did it come to rise above these grim scenes of war?

The answer is a simple story of the sincere faith of many American soldiers and their determination to express that faith in tangible terms.

After the company’s arrival at Bien Hoa, Porter conducted worship wherever he could. Scorching sun, torrential downpours, powder-fine dust, or hot winds were common companions to a Sunday morning service. Low-flying helicopters or the roaring blast of a jet fighter on take-off would often drown out the words.

One afternoon, Porter suggested a permanent chapel to the men of the second battalion. A command-provided chapel might be long in coming. The paratroopers, noted for aggressiveness and determination, reacted quickly. Within a few days they raised $3,500 for the project. Then the men volunteered to construct the building. This had to be done on free time between operations. Because some of these men never came back, the task became a kind of sacred obligation.

Many months and many operations later, the final nail was driven. The chapel’s bell was a gift from a group of men in Odessa, Texas. A Vietnamese Christian craftsman designed and donated the large wooden cross suspended above the altar. An Episcopal church in Atlanta, Georgia, presented a beautiful silver chalice, inscribed with one Latin word, pax (peace). The chapel had found its name.

Peace Chapel is of symbolic design. The lectern, pulpit, and altar are of triangular shape, and the lines point upward toward God. Men can kneel near the cross, a silent, vivid reminder that true peace comes only through Christ and Calvary. Above the altar the mid-day sun sends shafts of gold, blue, and amber light across the quiet interior as men kneel. Sent to fight for peace, these men—many with two, three, even five Purple Hearts—kneel, pray, and leave to fight again with the hope that someday soon it will all be over.

The chapel brings memories of the past and hope for the future. Chaplain’s Assistant SP/4 Raymond Bowen of New York eagerly anticipated its completion. But on an operation deep in VC territory he was killed by a mine while assisting a wounded buddy. Others remember SP/4 Robert P. Gibson of Georgia, who on his last Sunday in camp sang the morning solo. He was killed as he rushed ammunition to the front during an enemy attack a few days later.

While visiting casualties in the field hospital after one particularly heavy encounter, Porter approached one young GI who had had both legs blown off. Before he could speak, the young soldier asked eagerly, “Chaplain, how is our new chapel coming along?”

The chaplain, himself up for the Purple Heart, has had four young assistants, three wounded and one killed in action. Yet he recalls the providential care of God on more than one occasion.

Porter will return to the States this summer with many memories—memories of brave fighting men, some who won’t come back, others who will come carrying the terrible scars of war, still others deeply thankful to be alive and untouched. If Peace Chapel survives bombing, it will remain a symbol of that peace which Jesus Christ promised, peace he gave, peace the world desperately needs but cannot provide.

The Cross On A Stamp

For the first time since 1892, a United States postage stamp will depict the Christian cross.

The stamp will be issued July 30 to commemorate the birth of the Polish nation and the introduction of Christianity to the Polish people.

It will be the first U. S. commemorative to honor a specific religious event, although it follows by a year the stamp honoring the Salvation Army on the hundredth anniversary of the founding of its welfare work in the United States.

The stamp, to be printed in red, will feature a shield bearing the Polish crowned eagle, ancient symbol of the Polish kingdom (which the present Communist regime has tried to replace with the hammer and sickle). Above it will be the cross, with the inscription, “Poland’s Millennium 96 6–1966.”

The U. S. stamp originally was to have been issued on August 15 (Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and national feast day of Poland), to mark the arrival in the United States of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, primate of Poland, for a two-week visit. Apparently, however, Polish authorities will not permit the cardinal to make the projected U. S. tour.

American observance of the millennium will be climaxed August 28 at Soldiers Field, Chicago, by a service at which the cardinal was expected to offer Mass. The Catholic bishops of the United States are sponsoring the rites, at which Archbishop John J. Krol of Philadelphia will preside, whether or not the cardinal can attend.

Postmaster General Lawrence F. O’Brien, in a move to play down religious aspects of the stamp, has moved up the first-day-of-sale ceremony to Washington, D. C., July 30, a date with no particular significance.

The only other American stamp on which a cross was significant was a two-cent commemorative—the first ever issued by the United States—that showed Columbus planting the cross in the New World. It was issued October 12, 1892, on the four-hundredth anniversary of the event. Crosses have appeared in the background on other U. S. stamps, on church steeples and the like, but not as part of the central design.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Protesting Priests Suspended

Two young priests in Moscow were suspended last month for writing a letter of protest against alleged infringement of religious liberties in the Soviet Union. Patriarch Alexei, the nation’s top-ranking Orthodox churchman, said it was a coincidence that the suspensions were handed down at just about the same time—late May—that the National Council of Churches in the United States made public the letter.

The priests, Nicholas Eshliman and Glebe Yakunin, both 35, wrote that Soviet authorities had closed at least 10,000 churches. Their letter, addressed to Soviet President N. V. Podgorny, accused government leaders of repeated violations of laws which are supposed to allow churches to run their own affairs.

Patriarch Alexei says the pair will not be reinstated until they stop what he called their campaign against the government.

College Aid Showdown

A showdown legal test of government subsidies to church-related institutions moved past Maryland’s highest court this month. The case is designed to get a ruling ultimately from the U. S. Supreme Court, which has never set any guidelines for the use of public money by religious schools and other agencies.

The Maryland Court of Appeals, overturning a lower-court decision, said church-affiliated colleges are not entitled to state grants. The judges, in a 4-to-3 decision, declared unconstitutional grants of $750,000 each to St. Joseph’s College and Notre Dame of Maryland (both Roman Catholic). A $500,000 state grant to Western Maryland College (Methodist) was also ruled invalid, but a similar amount to Hood College was held constitutional because the school’s legal relationship to the United Church of Christ is tenuous.

The case against state grants has been pressed by the Horace Mann League, a non-profit educational organization, and thirteen private citizens. Chief attorney for the plaintiffs was Leo Pfeffer, special counsel for the American Jewish Congress. An amicus curiae (friend of the court) action was filed by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Commented Americans United Executive Director Glenn L. Archer, “Since the constitutionality of all such grants is now in question, it would seem advisable for church college administrators to hold requests for federal aid to their institutions in abeyance until there is a final determination of this issue.”

Religious Rumble At U.S.C.

With graduate studies in religion at secular universities the coming thing, a tug-of-war at the University of Southern California will be watched closely. Three of six graduate-religion staffers plan to quit because of the university administration’s handling of a merger of graduate with undergraduate religion studies.

Under the dissidents’ interpretation, the higher-ups not only made this major academic decision without consulting the faculty but also did it to force out their dean, Geddes MacGregor, 56, a Church of Scotland clergyman and noted author.

MacGregor has led the department since it was organized in 1960, following the departure of USC’s professional seminary staff to form the School of Theology at Claremont (Methodist). Enrollment rose to 100 by 1962 but is now half that, perhaps because of rigorous requirements in Hebrew, Greek, and other fields.

Academic Vice-President Tracy Strevey, who broke the news to the faculty in February, says USC’s undergraduate religion department (two fulltime teachers plus University Chaplain John Cantelon) teaches “hundreds,” while MacGregor’s department draws a “handful.”

Since the graduate faculty boosted a grad-undergrad merger two years ago and the administration showed no interest, it considers the current move a ploy to unseat MacGregor, who has been offered a “distinguished professorship” in the merged department.

The grad teachers thought Cantelon, a Presbyterian, was the university administration’s choice for the new dean. In the wake of their protest, a study committee was named. Strevey says the complainers “jumped the gun,” because the new dean has not yet been named and could be MacGregor. A report on the whole controversy is due this summer.

Matters of budget, enrollment, and academic requirements might be at issue, but not the general orientation of the departments. Both the graduate and undergraduate programs espouse an objective, detached study of religion. As MacGregor puts it, “We are purely academic, pursuing our disciplines in a purely scholarly way. We have individual allegiances but they do not affect our academic work, nor do we ask students for information on this.”

Publicity Slams A Door

Several highly placed evangelical churchmen are withdrawing from a so-called consultation with ecumenical leaders following its public disclosure.

The evangelicals say they had been guaranteed, as a condition of their participation, that the meetings would be conducted with utmost secrecy. They charge that the public disclosure, although it did not identify any of the evangelical participants by name or organization, was a violation of the original agreement.

The consultation has embraced a dozen or so well-known evangelical leaders in a very general dialogue with three churchmen of strongly ecumenical persuasion. The meetings have been held each summer, several days at a time, for at least five years. Participants insist that no new ecumenical alignments were discussed and that the sole purpose of the talks was better understanding of one another.

General Secretary John Coventry Smith of the United Presbyterian Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations referred to the talks in a published report to his denomination’s General Assembly this spring. Kay Long-cope, United Presbyterian publicist, expanded on the disclosure in a widely circulated four-page news release.

Miss Longcope’s release identified the Presbyterian official as one of the ecumenical participants. She named the other two as Dr. Eugene L. Smith, U. S. executive secretary for the World Council of Churches, and Dr. Frank Price, retired missionary and former moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

The release was interpreted by some as heralding a possible shift in the traditional conservative Protestant opposition to the ecumenical movement.

Christianity’S Prodigal Son

Christianity in World History, by Arend Th. van Leeuwen (Scribners, 1966, 487 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by John H. Kromminga, president, Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This book, which Hendrik Kraemer called an “event,” is a big book indeed. Subtitled “The Meeting of the Faiths of East and West,” it does deal with that theme in admirable fashion. But it is at the same time an approach to a theology of history, a critique of mission methods, and a consideration of the global problems faced by Christianity in a technological age.

If anyone wishes to sample the flavor of this book before investing his time in it, I suggest that he turn not to the end, which when taken by itself is somewhat vague and uncertain, nor to the beginning, which sometimes plods, but to pages 34 1–48. Here he will find a series of brief characterizations of Communism as “The Islam of the Technocratic Era.” The section contains such pithy and challenging statements as the following:

Communism is a Christian “heresy” which has achieved independence and stands, as it were, on its own authority.… When Christianity stoops to a sterile anti-Communism, at once defensive and aggressive, it does indeed show itself to be that very caricature of the prophetic, biblical message … which Communism has rejected with justifiable indignation.

Now, however, Christianity finds itself up against an ideological power armed with a messianic consciousness of an infallible and universal truth and proclaiming its belief in the victory of an atheistic technocratic society.… Christianity is thrown back upon the naked weakness of the Gospel or on the naked force of its own latent but extremely virulent technocratic atheism.

This Communist “theology” is indeed nothing other than anthropology.… To call it a “religion” looks suspiciously like running away from the confrontation which Communism is forcing upon Christianity in facing it with the atheist character of modern science and technology, twin-brothers of the Christian faith and nurtured in the womb of Christian civilization.

It would be grossly misleading, however, to leave the impression that this is nothing but an anti-Communist tract. The author wrestles with the whole complex of problems facing the Christian faith today, in the hope of aiding the discovery of a theology of history that will be as adequate for our day as Augustine’s was for his. Whatever faults his treatment may manifest, he cannot be accused of oversimplifying the problem. Take secularization, for example. This is seen as an irreversible force that confronts every religion in the world with a civilization that has made a radical break with the religious pattern. But Christianity’s problem with secularization has an added dimension in that secularization has arisen out of Christian forces.

The author’s contention throughout the book is that Christianity is a unique force in the world. Mankind, says he, is to be understood in the light of the history of Israel. All of the great civilizations of the East have been ontocratic, that is, “founded upon an apprehension of cosmic totality.” The Bible alone rejects ontocracy flatly in the name of theocracy. This contention is persuasively documented in a sweeping survey of Old and New Testaments. Then it is brilliantly applied to the civilizations of East and West, in themselves and in their confrontation with each other. This is the high point of the book. A closing chapter, somewhat fragmentary and groping, seeks to suggest ways in which Christianity must face this challenge, the challenge of a new technocratic age that is a product of Christianity’s own forces. This does not come as a challenge posed by Eastern civilizations; rather, it is posed equally to East and West. And neither East nor West can return to the state of affairs prevailing before that challenge.

All who are concerned with the welfare of the Christian Church stand in the author’s debt. He has drawn together the questions facing Christianity and shown how staggering a challenge they present. It must be added, however, that the delineation of the problem is far superior to the solution proposed. To a certain extent, the author would undoubtedly admit this. But some of his readers will question even items on which he is confident. Despite his very high evaluation of the uniqueness of Christianity and the Bible and his constant emphasis on the necessity of preaching the Gospel, the questions that trouble Christian theology from within are abundantly present here. Is the Bible’s uniqueness to be explained by exceptional human insight or by divine revelation? Must the Church indeed subject its message to such radical demythologizing that it is no longer able to say, “Man shall not live by bread alone”? The answers to these and similar questions do not basically affect the analysis of Christianity’s past course through the world, but they seriously affect the procedures suggested for its future.

Kraemer is probably correct. The appearance of this book is an event. But if its potential is to be realized, it must be realized through lively discussing and exploring of the sort for which the author asks, rather than through pursuing the particular direction which he suggests.

JOHN H. KROMMINGA

And Laugh A Little?

History and Theology in Second Isaiah: A Commentary on Isaiah 35, 40–66, by James D. Smart (Westminster, 1965, 304 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by Meredith G. Kline, professor of Old Testament, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

Within the narrow limits tolerated by modern critical thought concerning the Book of Isaiah, Smart seeks to establish a distinctive position. He accepts the unity of chapters 40–66 including the Servant motif, plus chapter 35 and minus certain notable strands, and he locates the prophetic author’s ministry in a Jewish community in-Palestine during the exile. The assessments by Torrey and Noth of the continuing sixth-century Jewish population in Palestine are thus accorded preference over the biblical chronicle’s allegedly distorted interpretation of the exile.

The “Second Isaiah’s” career terminated, we are informed, with his expulsion from the community because of his opposition to a temple building effort in 538 B.C., the project that, according to Ezra 4 was begun under Zerubbabel but was soon interrupted by the opposition, not of a prophet of God, but of foreigners earlier introduced into the land by the Assyrians. Smart, however, judges the biblical history tendentious and assures us that it will be sounder methodology for us all to discard the biblical data that specifically purport to tell us about these events in Jerusalem in 538 and to reconstruct the episode from clues derived from Smart’s own peculiar exegesis of Isaiah 66—sounder, because the author of Isaiah 66 lived at that very time and place, according, that is, to the novel theory Smart is spinning (and that involves of course, the scrapping of the biblical testimony on this subject too). Marvelous the conceit of modern higher criticism—infinite, eternal, incorrigible! Perhaps we bewail it too much; we should also laugh a little.

With crusading fervor Smart addresses himself to the restoration of “Second Isaiah’s” prophetic stature. It has been woefully obscured, he laments, by obtuse interpreters who still insist that the prophet regarded the Persian king Cyrus as playing a significant, positive role in the fulfillment of Israel’s redemptive destiny. What blindness, after Torrey has shown the way! We have only to remove the references to Cyrus and to the restoration he permitted and “Second Isaiah’s” eschatology emerges in its pristine non-political spirituality and universality. Recognition of the common Old Testament use of Israel’s restoration as a figure for the eschatological deliverance, similar to the exodus typology that Smart does recognize, might have spared him from resorting to drastic textual expedients.

The type of commentary offered is expansively homiletical rather than solidly grammatical. Smart restricts his dialogue even with his own camp to Duhm, Volz, Torrey, and Muilenburg, and favors the orthodox only with a view of his unecumenical back. Interestingly, though, he backs toward the traditional position in his strong reaction to the more extreme divisive analyses of the text and in his tracing of the geographical provenance of the work to Judah—a bull’s-eye.

MEREDITH G. KLINE

There Was A Man

Monganga Paul: The Congo Ministry and Martyrdom of Paul Carlson, M.D., by Lois Carlson (Harper and Row, 1966, 197 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by E. H. Hamilton, a missionary to the Far East for forty-two years.

Paul Carlson not only died for his faith—he lived for it, too, as anyone can tell who reads of this man’s quiet determination to live, and if need be to die, for Christ, and for those in the Congo to whom he had been sent by Christ.

A Belgian fellow prisoner said of Paul Carlson, “There was a man!” And as we read of how Paul Carlson saved others and refused to save himself, we are reminded of the words of a Roman governor long ago, about another prisoner: “Ecce Homo!”

Lois Carlson, writing with quiet restraint the story of her husband’s service and suffering and sacrifice, displays the same quality of faith that was his. “In this age,” she writes, “when so many still doubt the existence of Christ and a God who rules the universe, there also are untold numbers of us who believe that God is the Supreme Ruler, and He uses men who are committed to Him to speak to those who do not believe.”

Paul Carlson, “being dead, yet speaketh” to us all. A non-Christian who reads this book will think twice before speaking of the “post-Christian era”; and a Christian reader may well be brought into closer fellowship with the living Christ, whom Paul Carlson loved and served and for whom he died.

E. H. HAMILTON

Looking Back

A Short History of the Ancient Near East, by Siegfried J. Schwantes (Baker, 1965, 191 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Elmer B. Smick, professor of Old Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

Understanding the Old Testament is sometimes hindered by students’ lack of historical perspective from which to view the Old Testament picture. The teacher often finds little appreciation of the fact, for example, that Egypt’s fabulous history, extending over nearly 2,000 years, was in a stage of permanent twilight by the time Israel had a monarchy. Few recognize that many eras and areas of the Ancient Near East are better documented than the history of some modern periods. Professor Siegfried J. Schwantes of Andrews University has produced a very useful tool for the Old Testament history classroom. In fewer than two hundred pages he gives a fact-packed political survey in which he rarely misses a subject of any importance. He handles wisely those questions on which scholars still seriously disagree. And he avoids encumbering the account with long arguments of opposing schools of thought, yet does give the latest archaeological or literary evidence. This he does particularly well in discussing the date of the Exodus.

Such a survey of political history cannot become very involved in the finer points of art, religious and social institutions, and the like, but it is unfortunate that our author perpetuates James Henry Breasted’s popularized notion that Akhenaten’s cultural revolution was a “monotheistic faith.” John A. Wilson in his Culture of Egypt has made it clear that the very same supposed monotheistic terminology was used of the god Amun at an earlier date. The revolution was indeed “too advanced” for any age in Egypt; but it was the revolt from long-standing canons of religion and arts, and especially the ousting of the priests of Amun, that made Atonism a short-lived cult.

This “short history,” which starts at the origins of history in Egypt and Mesopotamia and goes down to the beginning of the Persian Period, should be widely useful, especially in college and seminary courses. This reviewer, for one, plans to use it as required reading in his Old Testament classroom. Yet one needs only a proper motivation, not a position as teacher or student, to benefit from the book.

ELMER B. SMICK

May It Not Die In Vain

The Gospel of Christian Atheism, by Thomas J. J. Altizer (Westminster, 1966, 157 pp., $3), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This book goes a long way toward clarifying what is meant by the death of God, and what radical theology is asserting in its attempt to formulate an atheism within the possibilities of the Christian perspective.

God once existed; but he created a world, became incarnate, and died in our history, and this divine self-annihilation for the sake of man was not followed by a resurrection. There is, therefore, no longer a transcendent sovereign Lord above and beyond the movements of life and history, no God to whom we can return, no Eternal who is our eternal dwelling place. He once was, but he actually died and is no more. This is the meaning of the name of Jesus, which the radical theologians want to retain. The traditional idea of a Christ who is God, who rose again from the dead, and who by granting forgiveness of sin and guilt returns us to God and to the primordial state of innocence, carries with it a No-saying to the movements and vitalities of life and history. This Christ must therefore be surrendered. But the name of Jesus, which bespeaks an incarnation, an authentic kenosis, and the death of God, releases us from that repressive sense of a fall from an initial state of innocence and opens up the possibility of a Yes-saying both to the self and to the vitalities and movements of the history and world in which we live.

Altizer, of course, has no true knowledge or hearty confidence that God has actually died, and he admits it. One must assume the risk of life, he says, and take a chance either on the classical Son of God, the Christ of the historical Church, or on the Jesus who bespeaks the actual death of God. Altizer takes his chance on this Jesus. Why? Does his sense of guilt, of damnation and hell become more bearable if the final Judge is dead? This is not a facetious question, for Altizer is no smiling liberal who sees no evidence of hell and damnation. He recognizes that artists and poets today speak more about damnation and hell than do most men of the pulpit—a fact he bitingly adduces to show that even the Church does not take seriously the old view of God and the world. Altizer, however, wagers on the Jesus-of-the-death-of-God as the more likely winner, since the Church’s image of the traditional Christ returns man to an antecedent living God and to a primordial state of innocence, thereby demanding a negation of life and of the forward movements of history.

Altizer urges that mankind’s historical consciousness is only two hundred years old and that the awareness of what this consciousness means has progressed from Blake, Nietzsche, and Hegel to the point where today men are beginning to see that God is truly dead and that traditional Christianity is utterly meaningless to the modern man. “Ours,” he says, “is the first form of consciousness and experience that has evolved after the full historical realization of the death of God.” The Christian who today “chooses the orthodox image of Christ is making a wager in which he stands to forfeit all the life and energy of a world that is totally alien to the Church’s Christ.”

Needless to say, the Christian atheism of the radical theologians does not emerge in continuity with the Christianity of the past. Altizer’s radical theology is as new as the affirmation within Christianity that God is dead. It is essentially anti-Christ, a quite new, free-wheeling, and impulsive syncretion of psychology, oriental mysticism, and an inverted definition of Christianity’s kenotic incarnation. Altizer’s point of departure is not revelation but wager, a wager dictated by the current common error of allowing human existence to formulate the questions to which revelation must perforce give the fitting answer. Evangelicals should realize much more than they do that this method, made impressive by Paul Tillich, is followed not only by today’s radical theologians but also by those confessed Christians of the pulpit who reduce Christianity to nothing more than a remedy for human need.

In classical Christianity, God came in the form of a servant to serve human need but in becoming a servant remained God. In radical theology, God serves man and in so doing dies and ceases to be. In some liberal versions, Christianity is merely something that meets all human needs and solves all human problems. Some more “orthodox” versions say that man must first learn to know that he is a sinner before Christianity’s Saviour has relevance. In both kinds—as in the radical theology of Altizer—God is meaningful only within a life-situation and must therefore be reduced to the terms of the situation’s demands and needs. In Altizer, and in these liberal and conservative views, God must serve man, even if he must die to do so.

Robert McAfee Brown says that The Gospel of Christian Atheism is neither gospel, nor Christian, nor atheism, and that its attempt to celebrate the death of God only demonstrates the “death of the ‘death-of-God theology.’ ” But before it dies one could wish that liberal and conservative ministers and theologians who have unwittingly succumbed to its method would see the reflection of this method within their own theologies. Its balder expression in Altizer could serve to enlighten both. If it does, the death-of-God theology will not have lived in vain. For all who reduce the truth of God in Christ to a mere remedy for human need are unwittingly committed to a theological method that leads to the death of God. For the God who is no more than a servant of human need is not God.

JAMES DAANE

Publication Justified

The Quest Through the Centuries, by Harvey K. McArthur (Fortress, 1966, 173 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Everett F. Harrison, professor of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Another volume takes its place on the library shelves alongside the many others on the historical Jesus. The problem is essentially twofold: how to know Jesus as he really was, and how to resolve the tension between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. The author defines the Jesus of history to be “Jesus as he would have been described by a secular historian had such a person been present in first-century Palestine.” The Christ of faith is “that same historical figure as described or defined by the professional or popular theology of the church.”

Since so much has been written in our day on this subject, the prospective reader may well ask what there is about this book that justifies its publication. Two things may be said here. It is valuable for its clear and condensed presentation of the modern debate and will be a useful handbook for those who want to grasp the essentials without having to make their way through a mass of detail. This feature alone would warrant its publication. The other aspect is the perspective given the reader for assessing the quest. Instead of starting with modern times and the growth of the critical spirit, the author covers the whole subject from the days of the early Church to our own time, as the title of the book suggests.

He begins by distinguishing history, kerygma, and record. To the first belongs the Christ-event, to the second the proclamation of the Church’s convictions about Christ, and to the third the report of the Church concerning Jesus’ life and ministry, whether in the form of oral tradition or of documents. It is difficult to establish the facts of the history because of variability in the records; even if a neutral observer had been on hand to tabulate everything that happened, he would not have been able to arrive at the kerygma. In the records we possess (the Gospels), no sharp line is drawn between the history and the kerygma. The two are woven together.

The early Church narrowed the quest by its acceptance of the Four Gospels. Modern research affirms the wisdom of this limitation, as little has been gained by a study of other sources. Attempts to resolve difficulties in the Gospels by leaders of the ancient Church, including Augustine, were handicapped by the notion that the Evangelists were independent witnesses to what they record. Views of literary dependence had not yet been worked out. But at least the early Church made a start by working at the problem of gospel harmony.

It is in chapters three and four that the author makes his most unusual contribution, for here he describes three Lives of Christ dating from the fourteenth century that proved influential, and then discusses the rash of gospel harmonies that appeared in the sixteenth century. Some of these were integrated, resembling in this respect the second-century Diatessaron of Tatian; others were parallel harmonies that were especially useful for those interested in the problems presented by parallel accounts.

Chapter five is devoted to a review of the modern quest from Reimarus onward; the author traces the stages whereby the search became concentrated on the Four Gospels, then on the Synoptics, then on the two-source theory of the origin of the Synoptics, and at length on the period of oral tradition in terms of the molding influence of the Christian community as seen through the eyes of the form critics. Of these latter figures, Bultmann has special significance because of his tendency to make the Gospels sources for the understanding of the Church and only slightly for the understanding of Jesus. Though Bultmann is much more radical than Kähler, he has this in common with him, that the point of main interest is in the Christ of the kerygma rather than in the historical Jesus.

A brief review of the New Quest is undertaken, with special reference to the work of James M. Robinson, together with the reaction of British scholarship to the Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian developments, and the reaction of certain Scandinavian and German scholars who are much more optimistic about the gospel records as sources of reliable information about Jesus than the post-Bultmannians.

Not content with a historical review, the author concludes with a statement of options, choosing for himself the position that “what is necessary is confidence in an essential continuity and commensurability between the Gospel portrait and the Jesus of history.” This is a sound and positive note, but it would be more so if it were supported by inclusion of the witness of the Spirit, by which that essential portrait is impressed on the continuing Church from age to age.

EVERETT F. HARRISON

Not Like A Bomb

The Morning Star: Wycliffe and the Dawn of the Reformation, by G.H. W. Parker (Eerdmans, 1965, 248 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by W. Stanford Reid, chairman, Department of History, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario.

This volume is the third (but the fifth to appear) in the series “The Advance of Christianity Through the Centuries,” edited by Professor F. F. Bruce. In it Professor G. H. W. Parker of Canterbury University, New Zealand, deals with the century and a half of European church history prior to the appearance of Luther, in an effort to explain the origins of the Reformation.

Although the period with which Professor Parker deals is very interesting because it is very like our own day, it is extremely difficult to analyze and to reduce to manageable size, since many different trends and movements appeared within it. The strands of the tapestry become so intricately intertwined that one almost despairs of understanding the pattern. The author begins with John Wycliffe in England and, after three chapters on him and his followers, goes on to explain what was happening in the rest of Europe and even outside Europe. Generally speaking, he gives a comprehensible account of events down to the time of the rise of the Erasmian program for reform in the sixteenth century.

The main subject of the book is really ecclesiastical reform, a theme upon which, as Professor Parker shows, many men played somewhat different variations. While he deals at considerable length with Wycliffe and Hus, the two best-known reformers of the period, he also takes up some of those less well known, such as Standonck of Paris and Zerbolt of Zutphen. He shows quite clearly that the Protestant Reformation did not burst like a bomb upon an unprepared world but had strong links with the reform movements of the Middle Ages. Medieval evangelicals had for a long time been crying out for radical changes in a church that was becoming increasingly corrupt. If Christianity was to survive, the Reformation was inevitable. The author does well to stress this.

One of the book’s particularly good points is its expositions of the views of the various intellectual leaders from Wycliffe to Erasmus. These are clear, concise, and readily understandable even by those with little theological training.

Yet the book is somewhat disappointing. For one thing, the author gives what seems to be disproportionate space to the Church in England: four of fifteen chapters. The ecclesiastical situation in fifteenth-century England hardly seems to have warranted that concentration. One of these chapters might well have been given to the important economic and social developments taking place in Europe at the time, which undoubtedly had a profound influence upon the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, Professor Parker paid little attention to this aspect of the story. And one might also complain that at times the writing becomes somewhat pedestrian in the presentation of a plethora of facts.

Nevertheless, the author has used the results of modern scholarship to good effect, and his work will be very useful to those who seek to understand the background of the Reformation.

W. STANFORD REID

Paul And Myth

The Eschatology of Paul in the Light of Modern Scholarship, by Henry M. Shires (Westminster, 1966, 288 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by William W. Buehler, professor of New Testament, Barrington College, Barrington, Rhode Island.

Contemporary biblical studies often manifest an antipathy to the idea that the first task is to understand what Scripture itself is saying rather than to impose one’s own presuppositions upon it. In such a context, a book like this is refreshing. The professor of New Testament at the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has set before himself the task of formulating a “faithfully Biblical eschatology” in order to rediscover for the Church “a forgotten or misunderstood dimension of the Gospel.” In studying the major categories of Paul’s thought—the Parousia, resurrection, judgment, life to come, spiritual body, and sacraments—Shires makes every effort to do justice to Paul by dealing forthrightly with the Scriptures.

In such an endeavor, the problem of the language used and of the relation of the text to history stands in the foreground. While some Christians are satisfied with an uncritical literal approach to the Bible’s eschatological teaching, many are looking elsewhere for clarification. What do these symbols mean? What is Paul saying to us today? Is demythologizing the answer?

Shires responds with an emphatic “No.” What he proposes is a remythologizing, i.e., an “attempt to understand the background of … [Paul’s] symbolism so that by it his meaning … is clarified.” Paul may use mythological language, but this does not mean that his beliefs belong only to an earlier age and have no abiding truth or relevance for us today. Bultmann’s reinterpretation of eschatological statements in terms of religious experience is rejected on two counts. First, his approach does not do justice to “the time-category in which we are saved,” and secondly, he is too arbitrary in his altering of and subtracting from the text. Shires rightly argues that “the relationship between revelation and its medium is so close that neither can stand without the other.”

According to Shires, myth is a legitimate means of describing religious objects. Its purpose is to “present that which lies beyond the descriptive power of words.” This transcendental imagery does not, however, disallow the reality of the historical process. Bultmann is wrong when, standing in the Hellenistic tradition, he says that “history is swallowed up by eschatology.” Shires insists that early Christian eschatology is firmly anchored in the facts of history.

Many conservatives will not wholly agree with the author’s understanding of what is literal and what is symbolic in Paul’s eschatological language. For instance, he rejects J. A. T. Robinson’s notion that Paul was mistaken in expecting Christ’s imminent return but agrees with R. Niebuhr that “the symbol of the second coming of Christ can neither be taken literally nor dismissed as unimportant.”

The reader will quickly note that Shires’s basic orientation is that of Oscar Cullmann. God’s redemptive processes have taken place in time, and in the Bible there is no antithesis between time and eternity. For Paul all history is chronological progression, and his eschatology has the same tension between present and future as does that of Jesus. In this age the Messianic Kingdom of Christ is already present, and many of the blessings of “the age to come” are available for the believer now.

This is a worthwhile book. Whether or not one agrees with all of the author’s conclusions, he can only benefit by entering into the dialogue. Interpretations are buttressed with Scripture, footnotes are copious, Bible passages fully indexed. The extent to which modern scholarship was consulted is indicated by a bibliography of 149 entries. Well over half of these scholars are dealt with in some degree in the text. This necessitates, of course, treatment that is often frustratingly brief. Rather than being an in-depth study of key men or schools of thought, Shires’s book is a survey of many viewpoints. But this approach does have its place. For the person who wants a solid exercise in biblical theology as well as an introduction to the current discussion of Paul’s eschatology, this book is recommended.

WILLIAM W. BUEHLER

Retrial For John Hus

John Hus at the Council of Constance, translated from the Latin and the Czech with notes and introduction by Matthew Spinka (Columbia University, 1965, 327 pp., $8.75), is reviewed by Jerome Ficek, associate professor of church history, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

It is unfortunate that the name of Peter of Mladoňivice, a translation of whose Account of the Trial and Condemnation of Master John Hus in Constance makes up the bulk of this volume, does not appear in its title. This translation is the only complete one in English of the Latin account by this contemporary admirer of Hus. It is supplied with copious explanatory notes by Dr. Spinka, emeritus professor of church history of the Hartford Theological Seminary, who is the outstanding American authority on Hus and Hussitica. Besides the translations of relevant documents, including thirty-five letters of which the majority were written by Hus himself, Spinka has supplied a long introduction in which he shows how Hus rose to leadership of the Czech reformist party and became the popular preacher of the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague. Much of what Spinka says in this introduction he said in his 1941 study, John Hus and Czech Reform (University of Chicago Press); namely, that Hus was not completely dependent on the English reformer Wycliffe, that the accusations made against him were based upon distortions of his position, and that he was an “orthodox” Catholic holding a realist position on philosophy, transubstantiation, purgatory, penace, and the veneration of Mary.

This volume was published in commemoration of the 550th anniversary of the martyrdom of Hus as part of the Columbia series “Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies,” and it supplies important source material for the current discussion centering on Hus. Recently Otto Feger, Catholic archivist for the city of Constance, circulated a petition for a retrial on grounds that while the Czech reformer priest did profess some heretical ideas, his conviction was based upon accusations of heresies that he did not actually hold. Feger’s proposal, signed by many Catholics, requests that Hus be exonerated “so that his strict moral life and his sacrificial death would be to all Christians, even Catholics, an example.”

During the debate on religious liberty at the fourth session of the Second Vatican Council, Josef Cardinal Beran of Prague, recently released after sixteen years of Communist confinement, said: “In my country the Catholic Church at this time seems to be suffering expiation for sins committed in times gone by.” He made specific reference to the burning of Hus and to “the forced reconversion of a great part of the Czech people to Catholicism in the seventeenth century.” “History warns us,” the cardinal declared, “that in this council the principle of religious liberty … must be enunciated in very clear words. If we do this, the moral authority of our church will be greatly augmented for the benefit of the world.” As the Catholic scholar Joseph Lortz has written appreciatively of Martin Luther, so the French Benedictine Paul de Vooght at Saint-Germaine-en-Leye, author of L’heresie de Jean Huss and Hussiana (both Louvain, 1960) praises Hus’s moral earnestness and evangelical concern while denying his view of the church and the papacy.

In this volume Spinka supplies documentary evidence that Hus did not in fact hold the views he was accused of holding. Hus denied Wycliffe’s view of the remanence of the bread, i.e., that the consecrated bread remains bread as it was, even after the pronouncement of the words, “This is my Body.” He also repudiated Wycliffe’s denial of transubstantiation. Though he deplored the immorality of many of the clergy, he did not share the English reformer’s radical view that the work of these priests was invalid. Such priests did not perform their duties “worthily,” he said, but their churchly acts were nevertheless valid. Accepting tradition as the secondary source of dogmatic and canonical authority, he subordinated it to Scripture. The Bible is the rule of faith and practice, according to the interpretation of the Fathers. “If I am in error,” he was constantly saying, “prove it to me from the Bible.” He honored the saints, preaching special sermons about them on saints’ days, though warning against an excessive veneration coming close to the worship that belongs to God alone. Unlike his opponents D’Ailly and Gerson, who espoused the new nominalism, Hus remained a realist in philosophy. Not anti-papal, he opposed only the abuses and excesses of the papal theory. It must be remembered that he lived during the conciliar period in late medieval times, when there was much criticism of the papacy in high places and great hope was expressed that the councils would succeed in healing the papal schism, i.e., deciding between the Roman pope and the Avignon pope or naming a new one, and reuniting and renewing the church.

From Hus’s letters, written to his friends from prison while he awaited a hearing, we learn that the crux of his problem was that he was being asked to recant views he had never preached, held, or asserted. To do so seemed to him to assert that once he held such views. Some told him that to abjure is only to renounce heresy either held or not held. Others said that to abjure means to deny attested charges, whether true or not. It was a matter of great concern to Hus how his “recantation” would be used by church officials, and what harmful effects it would have on the faithful. Like John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, he refused to let his name be used to secure a cheap victory for the authorities. And like Sir Thomas More of England, who had no desire to become a hero, he was tempted to give his name to something that went against the dictates of his religious faith and refused to do so. By following his private judgment, Hus became the prototype of all who in the name of a higher authority, a conscience bound to the Word of God, chose to defy the authority of men, yea, even of the church.

We are indebted to Professor Spinka for gathering, translating, and interpreting this immense body of historical data. Soon Dr. John Marek, graduate of Loyola University, who is collecting data of the trial and translating it into English, will publish his findings from the Roman Catholic point of view. It is extremely unlikely that his work will do anything but support the analysis of Spinka, which will stand for a long time as the opinion of scholars concerning the rendezvous with history of Jan of Husinec in the meadow outside Constance, July 6, 1415.

JEROME FICEK

Book Briefs

The Bible, Science, and Creation, by S. Maxwell Coder and George F. Howe (Moody, 1965, 128 pp., $2.95). A vindication of the Bible against error and misinterpretations.

Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, by T. H. L. Parker (Eerdmans, 1965, 369 pp., $6). Calvin in excellent modern English.

The Bible Story, retold by Stefan Andres, illustrated by Gerhard Oberländer (McGraw-Hill, 1966, 446 pp., $7.95). A fascinating story version of the Bible that takes very considerable theological and literary liberties—with exceptionally fine art work.

The Estranged God: Modern Man’s Search for Belief, by Anthony T. Padovano (Sheed and Ward, 1966, 300 pp., $6). As seen in recent and contemporary literary figures; with a concluding chapter on how Rome understands God.

How to Read a Dirty Book, by Irving and Cornelia Süssman (Franciscan Herald Press, 1966, 139 pp., $3.95). A serious book written by Roman Catholics.

Responsible Government in a Revolutionary Age, edited by Z. K. Matthews (Association, 1966, 381 pp., $5.50). New understandings of the critical issues confronting the church where societies are in transition. The viewpoints given are those of leading theologians from many countries and communions. This is one of four preparatory books for the World Council of Churches’ conference on “Christians in the Technical and Social Revolution of Our Time.”

The Congregational Way: The Role of the Pilgrims and Their Heirs in Shaping America, by Marion L. Starkey (Doubleday, 1966, 342 pp., $5.95).

Those Most Important Years: Christian Training in Early Childhood, by Ottar Ottersen, translated by Gene J. Lund (Augsburg, 1966, 170 pp., $3.95). Sane and sagacious discussion.

Charles Péguy: A Study in Integrity, by Marjorie Villiers (Harper and Row, 1965, 412 pp., $6.50). A study of an interesting man.

The Illustrated Bible and Church Handbook, edited by Stanley I. Stuber (Association, 1966, 532 pp., $5.95). Poor illustrations, poor printing, poor text.

Essays in Modern English Church History, edited by G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh (Oxford, 1966, 227 pp., $5.75). Essays on matters very English.

The Lord’s Supper: A Biblical Interpretation, by Scott McCormick, Jr. (Westminster, 1966, 126 pp., $3). A scholarly production in which the fruit, not the scholarship, comes up front.

Old Testament Quotations in the Gospel of John, by Edwin D. Freed (E. J. Brill, 1965, 130 pp., 18 Gld.). A scholarly work.

Washington and Lee: A Study in the Will to Win, by Holmes M. Alexander (Western Islands, 1966, 114 pp., $3). Washington won because he had the will to win. Another book in the how-to-succeed tradition.

Torah and Gospel: Jewish and Catholic Theology in Dialogue, edited by Philip Scharper (Sheed and Ward, 1966, 305 pp., $6). A product, reflection, and continuation of current Roman Catholic-Jewish theological dialogue.

Parables and Instructions in the Gospels, by Heinrich Kahlefeld (Herder and Herder, 1966, 174 pp., $3.95). A basic study conducted by a Roman Catholic within an awareness of Protestant scholarship on the parables.

The World of the Judges, by John L. McKenzie, S. J. (Prentice-Hall, 1966, 182 pp., $5.95). As seen within its surrounding history.

He Died as He Lived: Meditations on the Seven Words from the Cross, by James T. Cleland (Abingdon, 1966, 80 pp., $2). Excellent.

Concilium, Volume XI: Who Is Jesus of Nazareth?, edited by Edward Schillebeeckx, O. P. (Paulist Press, 1966, 163 pp., $4.50). Essays by Roman Catholics.

War and Conscience, by Allen Isbell (Biblical Research, 1966, 221 pp., $3.95). One man’s moral and intellectual struggle with the ethics of war.

Concilium, Volume X: The Human Reality of Sacred Scripture, edited by Pierre Benoit, O. P., and Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm. (Paulist Press, 1965, 212 pp., $4.50). A fine Roman Catholic study of a “catholic” Christian problem.

Paperbacks

Creation and Evolution, by D. C. Spanner (Falcon Books, 1965, 61 pp., 3s. 6d.). A brief but interesting evangelical discussion.

This Jesus … Whereof We Are Witnesses, by D. T. Niles (Westminster, 1966, 78 pp., $1.25). Short essays with substance, in a devotional mood.

A Pattern for Life: An Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, by Archibald M. Hunter (Westminster, 1966, 127 pp., $1.65).

The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, by Paul M. Van Buren (Macmillan, 1966, 205 pp., $1.95). The book that made Van Buren famous in the secular-Christianity hue and cry. A scholarly work that shows the character of the movement. First published in 1963.

The Last Things, by Romano Guardini (University of Notre Dame, 1965, 118 pp., $1.75). Good essays on death, sin, and resurrection.

The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance, by William R. Hutchison (Beacon Press, 1965, 240 pp., $1.95). A good treatment of an important sector of the life of the Church in America.

Das Evangelium und der Zwang der Wohlstandskultur, by Wolfgang Trillhaas (Verlag Alfred Töpelmann, 1966, 82 pp., DM 12). Essays dealing with Christians in modern society with its leisure, changing morals, and mass culture.

The Drama of Comedy: Victim and Victor, by Nelvin Vos (John Knox, 1966, 125 pp., $1.95). A theological study of comedy as found in playwrights Eugene Ionesco, Thornton Wilder, Christopher Fry. Worth reading and study.

Situation Ethics: The New Morality, by Joseph Fletcher (Westminster, 1966, 176 pp., $1.95). Exposition of an ethic which asserts that when its time is come, anything is moral.

Frontiers in Modern Theology, by Carl F. H. Henry (Moody, 1966, 160 pp., $1.45). A critique of current theological trends and developments. First published in CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Human Spirit and Holy Spirit, by Arnold B. Come (Westminster, 1966, 208 pp., $1.85). A fine-combed study. First published in 1959.

The Finality of Jesus Christ in an Age of Universal History: A Dilemma of the Third Century, by Jaroslav Pelikan (John Knox, 1966, 71 pp., $1.75).

Gott existiert: Eine Dogmatische Studie, by Carl Heinz Ratschow (Verlag Alfred Töpelmann, 1966, 88 pp., DM 12). Against the whole question reflected in Bultmann, the author discusses the possibility of metaphysics and human knowledge of the metaphysical. For serious students only.

Fifteen-round fight-to-the-finish bout

Swift Is A Ham

Tom Swift was descending the steps of the theological seminary, his handsome, youthful brow knit studiously. It was a big assignment, this government grant preparing him to be a missionary to the moon. As if it were not enough to get his plasma-powered, mercury-cooled rocket ready, there was all this new theology to master; he had never known religion could be so complex. He sometimes wondered how the moon men could ever get it.

Tom’s faithful pal was faithfully waiting for him at the bottom of the steps.

“Hi, Ned,” Tom said jocularly, laying aside his worries as he greeted his faithful friend.

“Hello, Tom,” Ned said. “My, Tom, you look as if you had just come from a brown study.”

Tom smiled broadly at this fresh sally.

Suddenly Ned seized Tom’s arm and pulled him into a handy doorway.

“Hark,” Ned expostulated. “I see Andy Foger skulking in front of an abandoned store front. If you are to meet Mary Nestor, this is no time to engage in vulgar fisticuffs.”

Soon Andy skulked on. Then Mary came breezily around the corner, her pretty face beaming with excitement and glowing with health and mirth.

“O Tom,” she said.

“O Mary,” said Tom.

Good old Ned, sensing the situation, excused himself to go back to the garage to check the needle valve in the plasma threader.

“And what did you learn today?” asked Mary eagerly, her eyes sparkling.

“I learned how to love,” said Tom earnestly.

“Tell me more,” Mary’s eyes sparkled even more.

Tom grew thoughtful. “Well, it’s like this, Mary,” he said. “You are the object of my love, and so I must think what is the very best for you before I love you. What does the existential situation call for in a given moment of our love? What does the total situation demand? I must think of your heredity, your environment, the traumas of your childhood, your sense of self-identity, your concern for self-preservation. I must try to see in you nothing but the best, overlooking your faults. Love, you see, means that I must learn to love the unlovely, love the unworthy. Love is a command.…”

Mary interrupted him, “O you kid,” she said, and she headed toward home, her poor tired eyes swimming in tears.

EUTYCHUS II

It Packed A Punch

“A Reply to the God-Is-Dead Mavericks” (May 27 issue) packed a tremendous punch in the current fifteen-round fight-to-the-finish championship bout between secular theology and evangelical Christianity! The logical arguments against the “death of God” and lucid apologetics for our belief in a living God were enough to call for the praise of Christ and the accolade of his Church.…

If these theologians are correct in their assumptions that God is dead, they are out of work! If theology is “the study of God” and we have now discovered that there is no God to study, then these men must vacate their chairs of teaching and return to the university for studies in some other field where there is something to talk about!

LES WOODSON

Beechmont Methodist Church

Louisville, Ky.

Your panoramic yet focused presentation of the issue is excellent.

CHARLES WISDOM

University Baptist Church

Wichita, Kan.

Your “reply” is a welcome echo of the prophetic voice with its rebuke of false prophets. I have for some time thought that your periodical (even though taking its position on the side of historic Christianity) had, under the cloak of academic freedom, become so tolerant and polite toward acts of treason against the historical understanding of Christianity, that it considered as improper to the Christian principle of love, any denunciation of such subterfuge. Your essay will undoubtedly be criticized as narrowness. It is rewarding to those of us who are not “wise, mighty, or noble” to read the clear thinking of giants in the faith.

HARVEY W. MEHLHAFF

Director of Christian Education

First Baptist Church

Lodi, Calif.

I think someone with authority should ask the death-of-God experts point-blank to list exactly the “proofs” they would accept to be convinced that there is really a living God. I think that no normal man exists, even the most dedicated atheist on the order of Bertrand Russell, who would not confess he would be overjoyed to find that a living God really does exist in this universe; it follows they would be bound to accept sure proofs. But once they tried to actually list such proofs that would satisfy them, I think their proofs would turn out to be so unrealistic, illogical, impossible, and even ridiculous that they would end by being laughed out of the court of thinking men. But they simply cannot announce that God is dead, or even non-existent from the beginning, unless they are willing that the opposite be demonstrated, if possible. Just exactly what would they accept as proof?

I think their chief trouble and stumbling block (as it is for most of us at one time or another) is a strange kind of pride: they consider that they are mature enough and worthy enough and even righteous enough that God ought somehow to let at least them in just a little bit on the way he is running this universe; and when all is silence, they take it for absence.…

WILLIAM A. GILFRY

Winston-Salem, N. C.

Theological thought has followed a curious pattern in the last few hundred years, and it may be that a trend has started from which there is no recovery until it has run its course. It will be necessary to coin a few phrases that are suggested by a new phrase recently minted, namely the “God is dead” idea instituted by Altizer and others. The first “dead” movement, as we see it, was the “Christ is dead” movement, postulated by the German cynics and the liberals. Now comes Altizer with the discovery that “God is dead” (Jesus Christ is back, however). The next logical step is “the Holy Spirit is dead,” while Jesus Christ and God are revived. The final phrase of this thinking would be the “man is dead” school, which would revive God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. This is the only theory worth exploring.

The idea of the Trinity being intact and only man being lost or dead while the Trinity tries desperately to reach him is a cogent thesis. Man of our generation is as spiritually dead as he could ever be. Insulated from great virtue or deep vice, he is mired in a bland, homogenized womb (is he dead from being unborn?). Only a small portion of the civilized population is involved in hard contact with the world’s jagged realities; these people are the combat military, the Peace Corps, some medical and social welfare workers, some missionaries, and so on. Only these see a portion of the reality of the world, and they keep it to themselves, mainly because nobody really wants to hear all the hard dirty facts.

I then do hereby found the “man is dead” school. The one logical corollary of this is the “man is unborn” school, which would allow an open end for progress in our spiritual development.

WARREN C. WALITZER

Lowell, Mass.

Pungent And Timely

“These Things I Believe,” by Charles H. Malik (May 13 issue), was pungent, incisive, timely, and eloquent. As one who has spent thirty years with the Bible, as a student and minister and teacher, I am simply enthralled by the spiritual and biblical insight of this noted layman.… I’m not afraid of what tomorrow holds as long as we have men of Malik’s caliber leading international affairs.

C. SPURGEON PASCHALL

Belmont Baptist Church

Charlottesville, Va.

Dr. Malik’s thoughts and testimony are sorely needed when the teachings concerning Christ are being watered down to a concept of mere man and the “God is dead” philosophy is so prevalent among educational circles. To have an educator speak with such convictions is good.

BLANCHE KINGSLEY

Columbia, Mo.

What a refreshing statement of faith.

N. J. DEIN

Snyder, N. Y.

Dollar Response

Here’s my dollar for the Institute of Advanced Christian Studies. Maybe I can’t be the first from Latin America, so how about West Virginia?

STAN FRANKLIN

First Baptist Church

Kenova, W. Va.

Enclosed is my vote for the institute.

M. J. BUERGER

Lincoln, Mass.

May I become the eighty-first (or is it eighty-second) to join in support of the institute?

THEODORE C. LONNQUEST

Rear Admiral, USN (Ret.)

Chevy Chase, Md.

• Admiral Lonnquest’s dollar is the one hundredth given by evangelical Protestants since the proposal of an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies.—ED.

Enclosed please find my dollar, one from my wife, and one from each of our three sons (whom we trust will be evangelicals). May God bless this most exciting project.

WILSON G. PARKS

United Congregational Church

Los Angeles, Calif.

Enclosed is my “brick.”

ROBERT L. WENDT

Winston-Salem, N. C.

I think the idea is an excellent one.…

JOHN M. BAKER

Parkway Heights

Free Methodist Church

Detroit, Mich.

Poor Public Relations

In the light of Gordon Ferrell’s comments (Letters, Apr. 29 issue), one must be humbly aware that in the 122 years of their separate existence, Seventh-day Adventists must have done a very poor job in the field of public relations. Evidently, many of the more vocal exponents of our faith have managed to give the impression that they believe they are obtaining salvation by “law-keeping.” It must be so for the error to be so widespread and so persistent. Were this true, we should indeed be cutting ourselves off from the salvation that Jesus alone can give, as effectively as though we were the veriest pagans.…

DOROTHY WHITNEY CONKLIN

Calistoga, Calif.

It seems almost amusing to one that the charge of legalism should always be brought in connection with law-keeping or be hurled at those that intend to keep the law, that is, of course, the Ten Commandments.…

REINHOLD L. KLINGBEIL

Yorba Linda, Calif.

Concerning our “teaching a false gospel,” may I quote from Donald G. Barn-house in Eternity, November, 1956: “Whatever else one may say about Seventh-day Adventism, it cannot be denied from their truly representative literature and their historic positions that they have always, as a majority, held to the cardinal, fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith which are necessary to salvation, and to the growth in grace that characterizes all true Christian believers.”

MERLIN G. ANDERSON

Yakima, Wash.

• What readers are objecting to are such statements as the one in Lesson 24 of the Bible correspondence course “Faith for Today,” that “those who have willfully persisted in using the unclean things [i.e., oysters, ham, and other food called unclean in the Old Testament], to their bodily harm, will suffer death and miss heaven.” Readers say this is being “kept by works.”—ED.

Household Word

Both my husband and myself receive tremendous help from CHRISTIANITY TODAY. It seems to me the magazine does for us what Matthew Henry did for my great-grandfather in Scotland many years ago. M. H. became a household word. Similarly, C. T. has become just that!

MARY D. FARMERY

St. Martins, New Brunswick

Understanding Catholic Marriage

Writing about the recent mixed-marriage decree from Pope Paul, your editorial writer said (April 15 issue), “As long as the Roman church regards marriage as a sacrament and the priest as its only valid celebrant, and the Protestant clergyman is little more than a member of the wedding party with the right to make some remarks just before kissing time, the public image of ‘getting together’ is little more than a façade.”

There is a misunderstanding here. The priest is not a celebrant of the sacrament of marriage at all in the Catholic Church. He, too, is a member of the wedding party, the difference being that in the Catholic ceremony he is the official witness.

The celebrants of the sacrament are the two parties involved, the man and the woman; in a mixed marriage, the Protestant member is as surely a celebrant as is the Catholic member.… It seems to me important to make clear that from a Catholic standpoint this is a sacrament administered by the bride to her husband, the husband to his wife, and that it is a continuous sacrament, the grace of which is administered by husband and wife in every act of love toward the other, from bringing home the pay check to cooking the evening dinner.

When the sacrament of marriage from the Catholic viewpoint is properly understood, it is seen that the only essential difference between the role of the Catholic priest and the Protestant minister is that the one is the official witness and the other an unofficial witness. Since the priest rarely makes any remarks, only reading the words of the ceremony, the Protestant clergyman actually is given an opportunity for a role far beyond that of just an unofficial witness.

DALE FRANCIS

Executive Editor

Our Sunday Visitor

Huntington, Ind.

• We are grateful for this correction. But surely the Roman Catholic priest does more than merely witness. Even we Protestants do not allow a couple to marry themselves.—ED.

Who Says So?

Re “Teaching the New Testament,” by Ronald A. Ward (May 13 issue): Who says there is no theology of the Cross in the Gospel of Luke? Let him read Luke 22:20: “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” The Lord’s Supper pictures the suffering and death of Christ on the cross for us.

R. HAYES MCKELVY

Lochiel Reformed Presbyterian

(Covenanter) Church

Glen Sandfield, Ontario

Standing Foursquare

CHRISTIANITY TODAY is doing more to help promote the historic Christian faith than any other publication. In this day when our denominational papers are so full of trivia, it is refreshing to read a paper that stands up foursquare for biblical Christianity.

H. A. HANKE

Professor of Bible

Asbury College

Wilmore, Ky.

Picking Up The Pieces

Whether or not you “get off your big, fat high horse” (Eutychus, May 13 issue), please send me the remainder of angry Robert A. Crain’s canceled subscription. I am always delighted when I can get hold of a second-hand copy of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. While recuperating from hepatitis, I have found time to read them cover to cover.

PAUL W. CROSS

Missionary to Honduras

The Central

American Mission

Dallas, Tex.

Ever A Virgin?

It is difficult to reconcile what appear to be differences in some of the articles that I read.… For instance, “These Things I Believe,” by Charles Habib Malik (May 13 issue), says in the first paragraph, “… though Mary remained ever-virgin.” Yet, William Childs Robinson, in “Abba: The Christ Child’s Word for God” in the same issue, tells us the names of four brothers of Jesus and mentions his sisters.

RODNEY ROSE

Kansas City, Kans.

I am interested to know your explanation, if any, how Dr. Malik’s magnificent statement can be consistent with the last sentence of the first paragraph, in which he declares the belief that Mary never had any other children than Jesus. This position appears to me to be entirely unscriptural.

THOMAS S. BUNN

Los Angeles, Calif.

• As a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, Dr. Malik believes in the perpetual virginity of Mary, a doctrine traditional to his church but not held by Protestants in general. His witness to the deity and saving work of Christ is nevertheless a powerful one, as his article shows.—ED.

Pike Is A Prod

I consider the obvious glee with which your paper reports the resignation of Dr. James A. Pike to be in very bad taste.

One of the meanings of the word “pike” is “prod.” Yes, Bishop Pike has prodded all of us in many ways. Paradoxically, it may he said by the historians of the future that Bishop Pike was one of the great interpreters of the classical Christian faith in our day. The Church of Jesus Christ needs people of his caliber. If he expresses his honest doubts along with his “articles of faith,” let us confess that really all of us do this though we are not always verbal about it. Let it be understood too that faith without skepticism is often mere credulity.…

ERNEST O. NORQUIST

Director

Commission on Religion and Race

Synod of Illinois

United Presbyterian Church

in the U. S. A.

Springfield, Ill.

Let me congratulate you on the comprehensive May 27 issue. However, I regret your brief editorial on Bishop Pike.… It may be that more time will have to elapse before he can be properly appreciated; but he has stood for the essentials of the Christian faith at a time of breathlessly rapid change in theology and we are all deeply in his debt.…

ROBERT B. PERRY

University Methodist Church

Redlands, Calif.

Certainly Not Lutheran

While it can be said that the recently published Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church is “a great work” (Book Reviews, May 27 issue), it appears to me that your reviewer should have mentioned that a good number of articles in this encyclopedia are anti-scriptural and therefore certainly not Lutheran.

HERMAN OTTEN

Editor

Lutheran News

New Haven, Mo.

Rome And The Pill

Roman Catholics can now freely and legitimately use the birth-control pill without any sin at all, nor need they confess its use in the confessional. This statement is based on the accepted Roman Catholic theological system of probabilism. It is not necessary for the Pope or the hierarchy to change their traditional condemnation of “artificial” birth control in any formal statement or decree.

The change in the church’s doctrine, or rather moral discipline, has already been made, and there is nothing the Pope can do about it except eventually accept it. In the meantime, Catholics can, without sin, use the birth-control pill, even if the Pope or the bishops with their Catholic press should openly condemn it. It is not likely that Pope Paul will do this. The issue is now theologically beyond his control.

The moral theological process of Roman Catholicism is a system that can within the church change or abolish the sinfulness of certain actions completely, apart from the public decisions of the Pope or the hierarchy. The change takes place through the changing opinions of theologians, not the Pope, and of priests at the “grass roots” level actually making specific decisions for specific people in the confessional.

This change has already taken place with regard to birth control, even though the Vatican has not yet publicly acknowledged it. However, the more liberal Catholic lay press has been quoting many Catholic theologians and historians, some of whom state that the application of “probabilism” has probably already changed the traditional doctrine on birth control. Others openly say so.

Roman Catholic theology is twofold. Dogmatic theology is the teaching of beliefs—what is true or false. Moral theology teaches whether an action is right or wrong. Moral theology attempts to classify not only all actions, such as stealing, but all circumstances surrounding actions—such as the difference in stealing from a stranger, one’s father, one’s husband, a poor man, a rich man, or the General Motors Corporation.

The Roman Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sin causes further complexity. A mortal sin plunges a soul into hell forever unless forgiven at the confessional. A venial sin dips the soul into temporary purgatory.

There are graduations of guilt in the same basic sinful act. Stealing a small amount is a venial sin—a large amount is a mortal sin. But what constitutes a large amount? This can vary through the years with the variation of nations’ monetary systems and increase or decline in the value of money. Thirty years ago priests were taught that $40 was a large amount and its theft a mortal sin. Now with inflation, the textbooks permit a Catholic to steal $99 without going to hell. The theft of $100 constitutes a mortal sin.

But who determines the changes in “exchange” from $40 to $100 and how? The moral theologians do it, based on some consensus among themselves as to the gravity or levity of an action. As times change or their moral reasoning changes, the sinfulness of actions change. Priests are taught accordingly, and they advise penitents in the confessional accordingly.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, “systems” of morality began to develop in the Roman Catholic Church. The most widely accepted for a long time was “probabiliorism.” According to “probabiliorism,” teachers and priests were obliged to follow the theological opinion (e.g., on the amount necessary for a serious theft) that was “more probable,” and, therefore, accepted by the bulk of the theologians. The number of the concurring opinions was the deciding norm for priests and teachers.

But in the sixteenth century, a Dominican theologian, Bartholomew Medina, propounded the theory that if the licitness of an action were simply probable, not more probable, it could be done with a safe conscience and need not be confessed. Jesuit theologians took up this opinion enthusiastically. It gave them greater freedom in condoning the actions of their penitents, especially those in royal families.

This teaching was developed into “probabilism,” which is now, and for centuries has been, a completely acceptable Roman Catholic system of morality. It considers an action lawful and permissible just as long as there is a “reputable” teacher who says an action is “probably” lawful, even though the bulk or the majority of other theologians’ opinions are against it. This explanation can be verified in the lengthy treatise on probabilism in the Catholic Encyclopedia, or in Latin or English current moral theology textbooks of H. Noldin, S. J., Henry Davis, S. J., Heribert Jones, and scores of other Roman Catholic authorities.

Two clear applications of probabilism to Roman Catholic morality within the last generation were in the cases of ectopic pregnancy and the rhythm method.

Catholic seminarians were taught thirty years ago that surgery could not be performed upon diagnosis of an ectopic pregnancy—that would be murder—but only after the Fallopian tube had ruptured. So many women died because of the virtual impossibility of determining the exact time of rupture of the Fallopian tube that the theologians took another hard look. Some reasoned that the mere fact that the impregnated ovum remained in the Fallopian tube proved that the tube itself was pathological. The removal of pathological tissue is permissible without sin. Therefore, the opinion was, at first, only probable; but according to the system of probabilism it became legitimate, and the operation is now routinely permitted in Roman Catholic hospitals.

When the rhythm method of birth control was propounded many years ago by Dr. Ogino of Japan and Dr. Knaus of Germany, its use by Roman Catholics was condemned as mortally sinful because the couple’s intention was the same as those using other methods—the prevention of conception. Gradually a few theologians reasoned that emphasis should be placed, not on the intention, but on the means of contraception. Now with probabilism again opening the door, the Roman Catholic Church strongly endorses the rhythm method. Similar alterations or complete reversals of teachings within the church have taken place on such divergent subjects as stealing, drunkenness, slavery, usury, and human evolution.

In recent years the blasts of Catholic theologians against birth control have been leveled at “mechanical” contraception—the use of such devices as diaphragms and rubbers, that “frustrate the law of nature.”

The pill is not “mechanical.” Furthermore, the pill offers the church the opportunity of getting off the hook on two points. The first is Roman Catholicism’s ridiculous and intellectually untenable position on the population explosion. The second is the certain loss of millions of its own members because of their constantly vocal and rising demand that they be permitted to practice effectual birth control (not the bothersome, unreliable rhythm method) or they will quit the church.

The system of probabilism postulates that if one reputable theologian states that an action is “probably” not sinful, then all Catholics in the world can perform that action without sin and without having to confess it.

The theologians of Europe have been more outspoken that those of the United States in calling for a change in the church’s attitude on the pill. Many agree with outspoken but logical Archbishop T. D. Roberts, S. J., who argues that the Catholic position that contraception is against the “law of nature” (the only real argument Catholic theologians use) is completely invalid. The theologians Louis Janssen and Van der Marck and Bishop J. M. Reus have taken the position that the church’s condemnation of birth control is wrong. Only three Catholic theologians in all Europe disagreed with them, according to an article by an Italian priest, Father Ambrozio Valsecchi.

The Roman Catholic press carried the story during the Congo revolutions that three recognized theologians in Rome had concurred in an opinion that nuns in the Congo missions could legitimately take the pill to prevent pregnancy in case they might be raped. In this decision, the theologians, with the apparent approval of the Vatican, decided that the use of the pill was legitimate for the prevention of an unwanted pregnancy. The logical deduction is that the use of the pill is, therefore, licit in Rome, London, Berlin, Paris, New York, or Los Angeles, if for any personally important reason a pregnancy is undesirable. Again, the moral system of probabilism makes birth control legitimate. If the theologians decided that threatened pregnancy by rape in the Congo made the use of the pill licit (which they did), then its use in other circumstances is “probable” and therefore permissible.

An American Jesuit theologian, Father Richard A. McCormick of Bellarmine School of Theology, who is a conservative, reasons that the system of probabilism has already “probably” made birth control legitimate for Catholics and that it may be too late for the Pope to hold the line. According to the National Catholic Reporter, he stated that principles of the moral system known as probabilism will apply. The practical effect will be that priests will have to tell inquirers that the morality of using progesterones (the pill) for contraception is controverted among theologians, and therefore it is not possible simply to forbid their use. In other words, every priest must permit the use of the “pill” if the penitent asks a direct question.

Father McCormick had stated that the Pope must act “soon” if he wants to continue the prohibition of the pill. Inquiring priests wanted to know when “soon” is.

“I don’t know,” he told an interviewer. “I can’t predict when it is coming or what ‘soon’ means, but at some point I’d probably be able to say we have passed the point. Some theologians would say we have passed it.”

In more simple language, it is “probable” that the use of the pill is allowable—therefore, it is allowable.

In January the NBC “Today Show” hosted Planned Parenthood in a two-hour show. One question and its answer must have strained the fuses of the whole network. Requests for reprints were received in record volume. The question: “If an individual follows his conscience in deciding that birth control is best for his family, what happens when he goes into a confessional?” A professor at Fordham University, Rev. Joseph D. Hassers, S. J., answered for all the disturbed Roman Catholics in the world: “Well, if a person had come to the conclusion, in terms of a sincere and informed conscience that what he was doing was good and right, there would be no reason to take it to the confessional. One takes to the confessional only what one is convinced is sin.” In other words, if there is a reasonable doubt, there is no sin, and there need be no confession.

Many Catholic theologians, most of whom are afraid to let their identity be known, feel that the Pope is deliberately saying nothing for three reasons. He does not want to contradict the strong condemnations of contraception by Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII. Also, he realizes that, because of the acceptability of the system of probabilism, it is too late for him to stop the theologians and the growing change in the Catholic moral conscience. Futhermore, he can save the papal face by saying nothing and letting the theologians and the Catholic conscience solve the issue.

As the Catholic Benedictine theologian Gregory Baum says, “There will be no definitive statement now. The mere fact of an open debate will create a de facto situation of change. When this condition becomes sufficiently concretized, then perhaps in five years or so, the Pope will finally make a statement that this is what we’ve been saying all along.”

But while the cumbersome machinery of Roman Catholic theology and bureaucracy grinds ponderously through the next five years, Catholic couples do not need to wait. The recognized system of probabilism teaches that it is perfectly legitimate for them to use the pill now with a clear conscience—and with no confession of any guilt.

EMMETT MCLOUGHLIN

Administrator

Memorial Hospital

Phoenix, Ariz.

Let us speak the truth in love, and be sure it is the gospel truth we speak

In this terrifying world where a thousand voices are clamoring each for its own viewpoint, the Church too is in ferment. This is not new. For the Church lives “between the times”—between its beginning at Pentecost and its consummation in Jesus Christ at his Second Advent. On the one side, the Church is pressed by the dramatic impact of the ecumenical movement, outwardly pressed in the most visible way by agencies like the World Council of Churches and in lesser ways by the World Evangelical Fellowship, the International Council of Christian Churches, and other groupings. Added to this are such things as the effects of Vatican Council II on the Roman Catholic Church, the recent visit of the Anglican primate to the Pope, and the Consultation on Church Union in the United States, which proposes a new denomination numbering more than twenty million people.

In all this, a recurring question is: What is the role of the evangelical in the midst of the great confusion caused by rapid change, and in the search for solutions to spiritual needs?

The evangelical surely has his own problems, and the weaknesses of his witness have been identified many times. He has often been written off as one who has no social conscience, who is not interested in improving the social, economic, and political structures of society. He is sometimes labeled divisive because he opposes avant-garde ecclesiastical leaders who think denominations are intrinsically sinful. He is characterized as loveless—and sometimes he is, especially in the heat of battle when issues are being determined, tempers flare, and swords swing. He is called a champion of the status quo because he appears to fear that change will lead to socialism.

Anyone must grant that such characterizations of the evangelical are not wholly unfounded. One will find vast differences among evangelicals who share one main commitment—loyalty to the Word of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

A well-known leader in the ecumenical movement, speaking from his own heart to the heart of the evangelical, counsels him to “speak the truth in love” (Eugene L. Smith, executive secretary of the United States Conference of the World Council of Churches, in Sermons to Men of Other Faiths and Traditions, edited by Gerald H. Anderson, Abingdon Press, 1966). This is good counsel; indeed, it is biblical counsel. In love, however, the evangelical cannot sweep his own uneasiness under the rug or surrender his deep convictions about the faith once delivered to the saints. He feels he cannot “join the club and then talk about our differences”; he wants first to know what he is joining and what membership commits him to.

In love, the evangelical must ask the WCC leaders for clear-cut, unambiguous answers to questions of great importance. Is the Bible the authoritative Word of God? Is the Church’s primary function, not to build a splendid organization, but to proclaim the Gospel so “that the world may believe”? Why do many in the ecumenical movement stress service at the expense of proclamation, and leave men to die in their sins though their temporal condition may have been improved? How can the evangelical ignore the ecumenical voices loudly proclaiming that all men are already reconciled to God and that they need only be informed of their divine adoption? Why do churches in the ecumenical movement do nothing to silence blatant spokesmen for unbelief within their midst—indeed, why do they often grant such persons significant places of leadership? Is there room within the ecumenical movement for the theology of—for example—a Bishop Pike or a Bishop Robinson? The evangelical’s problem, even in the midst of love and truth in Jesus Christ, is whether to compromise his conscience by joining men and movements that do not effectively discipline those who deny ordination vows and who preach what the Word of God condemns.

In love the evangelical asks these questions and presses for honest answers. He does not want to be divisive. He seeks a common ground on which to unite; but it is not enough to tell him that the Bible is the common ground, when so many so often play fast and loose with its authority and openly repudiate what it clearly teaches. If the Bible measures man and not man the Bible, then the Bible stands above and beyond man, and man’s learning must be aided and informed by faith.

The evangelical in a bewildered world, when the challenge to the Church is greater than ever, is simplistic enough to say that Jesus Christ is the only answer to the world’s need. He starts with the truth that is in Jesus Christ as set forth in the Scriptures, and this truth he must speak in love to a lost world “as a dying man to dying men.” He will join hands with men of like faith from every race and color, for he earnestly seeks the unity that, while it is concerned with man’s temporal needs, has for its focus the true end of all unity—“that the world may believe.”

On The Evangelical Horizon

Scores of letters are coming our way to support CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S proposal for an Institute of Advanced Christian Studies, and 122 readers have already invested their dollars. If all 250,000 readers of this magazine would respond similarly, the project could swiftly rise to reality.

Enthusiastic readers have given reasons for locating such a venture in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Denver, and Los Angeles. One evangelical campus has offered accommodations under its own roof, while a well-known evangelical student work has indicated the availability of land.

But until the grass-roots response justifies it (have you given your dollar?), specific planning must be held off.

Several prime considerations, however, must be kept in view. The institute should be located as near as possible to a first-rate secular university. And in order to preserve the highest creative opportunities, it should not in its public image be related to any established evangelical effort. Despite high academic priorities, moreover, it should emphasize from the outset the importance of personal Christian living as well as rational persuasion in encountering secular views of the world and life. Not all approved research projects need issue in a direct confrontation of the world of unbelief. But the contribution that evangelical scholars can make in refutation of modern speculative views and, equally important, in the persuasive and relevant exposition of the Christian view of God and the world is especially needed now.

We believe evangelical Protestants (of whom there are an estimated 40 million in the United States) are face to face with a remarkable opportunity, and we are hoping that they will respond to it eagerly and energetically.

Is The Gospel Too Simple?

In his recent “Editorial Correspondence” in the Christian Century, Cecil Northcott calls the present London crusade of Billy Graham the “abdication of evangelism.” Because the crusade is not the whole answer to the problem of evangelism (something Mr. Graham never claims), Northcott wholly disparages it, and the implications of his critique are revealing.

The message, says Mr. Northcott, is “impeccably scriptural and full of the correct overtones of biblical literalism” and is also “unchallengeably controlled by the Bible itself.” But immediately he declares that the message “completely avoids being truly biblical.” Nowhere, however, does he give plain biblical reasons for this judgment, preferring simply to assert that “personal salvation is not the overwhelming fact of the Bible.” And he goes on to say, “Remove the labels and the package is pretty bogus in its contents”—a strangely paradoxical comment on the preaching of a man who so faithfully proclaims the Gospel set forth in the New Testament.

Then the attack shifts. “I know that thousands of lives have been changed through the Graham crusades and similar operations in various parts of the world.… The crusaders rightly claim they have a message, a method, and a man; but when it is all put together, is it evangelism for our time?” (italics ours). In other words, Graham’s message—i.e., the New Testament Gospel—was all right once but is now passé. According to Northcott’s ultimate paragraph, “In 1954 … his message was a simple one for simple people in simple times.” Yet back in 1954, did Northcott really find the times so simple?

“To be ‘saved’ at Earls Court is not the answer to the plight of mankind today, nor is it the answer for one’s own personal salvation.” Then what is the answer? To this Northcott offers no reply. Instead, he simply expounds the premise that nothing good can come out of Graham’s presentation of evangelical Christianity. And he even finds offensive the fact that the evangelist’s “entourage … moves round the universe in air-borne majesty,” though traveling ecumenists are apparently exempt from this charge.

It would be refreshing if Graham’s critics might have the simplicity of heart to thank God for those who will believe even at Earls Court, just as we should all thank God for those whose lives are changed through hearing the Gospel in a parish church, through the personal witness of a friend, or through reading the Scriptures. The thousands who are finding Christ in London should be allowed to tell their own story.

Not By Guns

Aubrey James Norvell, who is alleged to have shot James Meredith, was described by a woman who knows him well as “the kindest man I know … a quiet, Christian man.” Meredith, who knew his life would be in danger if he marched in Mississippi, decided against a gun and carried a Bible instead. After he was shot, his first impulse was regret for his decision, followed by immediate embarrassment for the regret, “for I would have knocked the intended killer off.”

These ambiguities point up the necessity for keeping cool heads in untangling the snarl of racial violence and for making the proper response to such violence. In this matter of criminal assault by shotgun and the right of Meredith, first Negro graduate of the University of Mississippi, to walk the land, the issue is plain. There is no defense for the fanatical attempt to destroy Meredith; and Meredith’s right to march in Mississippi in order to encourage Negroes to dare to vote cannot be denied.

Negroes’ fear of exercising their constitutional rights as free Americans prompted Meredith’s long walk, which might have been a death walk. The displaying of the Confederate flag in places in the South, sometimes officially, doubtless encourages such senseless attempts to solve the racial issue with an act of murder.

The death of Meredith would have been a national as well as a personal tragedy. Every American, Negro and white, may thank God that the assailant was a poor executor of his way of solving the racial problem. And every American may also thank God that Meredith in his moment of regret, carried no gun. Not a gun but the truth that Meredith carried in his pocket unerringly points the way to the resolution of this tragic national problem.

Down-To-Earth Citizenship

It is said that during the McKinley-Bryan presidential campaign, Dwight L. Moody asked a brother evangelist, “What do you think of the political outlook?”

“I don’t know anything about the political outlook,” was the reply, “because my citizenship is in heaven.”

“Better get it down to earth for the next sixty days,” said Mr. Moody.

The incident reminds us that our democracy cannot prosper without responsible exercise of citizenship. In a time of expanding government, there is the inevitable tendency for many to leave to government much that they as individual citizens should be responsible for. Yet at the heart of democracy is the right of the private citizen to speak his mind about what the government does and to back his convictions not only by voting but also by letting public servants know what he thinks.

When the hidden persuaders flourish and propaganda of one kind or another influences us more than we realize, the best safeguard of our American independence is not only the voluntary participation of citizens in the last sixty days of a political campaign but also their alertness all the time. As Frank R. Barnett says in his book, Peace and War in the Modern Age, “The battle of propaganda, aimed at undermining U.S. national will and understanding, rages not only in the Socialist press in Europe and teahouses of Asia, but in this country as well.… Either we will create for ourselves a healthy climate of opinion based on facts, or we may have American opinion manipulated for us by conflict managers who have learned from Pavlov, Goebbels, and Lenin how to advance their goals through non-military warfare” (used by permission).

Independence Day is a good time to rethink the obligations of American citizenship, which include knowing what is going on and making up one’s own mind about what he reads and hears.

Two Tides In Theological Accreditation

When it began accrediting seminaries three decades ago, the American Association of Theological Schools included only Protestant institutions, and few of evangelical orientation. Last month’s biennial meeting gave evidence of radical changes in both these directions.

The AATS admitted to membership one Greek Orthodox and five Roman Catholic seminaries; what was purely Protestant has now become fully ecumenical.

Growing evangelical interest was shown by the fact that Gordon Divinity School gained full accreditation and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School became an associate member. On hand as observers were representatives of fundamentalist schools such as Dallas, Talbot, and Grand Rapids Baptist Bible seminaries.

There are hopeful signs that more and more conservative Protestants will take the AATS for what it is—an agency that accredits institutions on academic performance, not theological presuppositions, and that offers a framework within which men of differing persuasions can meet, talk with, and learn from one another. Evangelicals who become involved in AATS are to be commended.

The Ogre Of Inflation

Here in Washington, Great Society headquarters, the cost of living is steadily climbing, and the American dollar daily counts for less. But fares to the suburbs, raised a year ago, threaten to jump again. Our open-air parking lot, which asked $1 a day a couple of years ago, now wants $1.50. At lunch, our favorite corned beef on rye has gone up 13 per cent to 85¢ (tourists, please note!).

Suffering most from rising costs are the elderly whose savings, retirement funds, and Social Security income now go only part of their expected distance. The cost of living rose 3.5 per cent in April, while the first four months of 1966 showed the sharpest increase in the last fifteen years.

Several hundred liberal arts colleges are already in financial trouble, and educators who have long complained that rising taxation has reduced the number of millionaire patrons now grumble also that inflation is cutting into the value of some endowment funds.

The victims of inflation usually are deluded into tolerating it and awaken to its hurt too late to do anything about it. Inflation is, as we have often said, a moral evil. Financial stability will always be a virtue in a good society, and America had better learn the lesson soon.

Window In Philadelphia

Now that’s real relevance, we thought, as we walked past Presbyterianism’s Witherspoon Building in Philadelphia the other day. In bold type the question was asked: “If you were a German wife and mother in a Soviet prison camp—and you learned that the only way to be freed and reunited with your family was to become pregnant, by a guard …” what would you do?

The question was a come-on for Fletcher’s Situational Ethics. The show window was monopolized by stacks of books from the far-out school: Radical Theology and the Death of God, The Gospel of Christian Atheism—not an inch for those who hold the faith of Calvin and the Westminster divines. But doubtless this was the kind of message, we surmised, without which Moses could never have led the Israelites from Egypt, nor Paul have carried Christianity to Europe!

All publishers are interested in selling books. Yet ought not the publishing arm of a great denomination historically committed to the Reformation faith consider the confusion that results when it places its imprint upon books that attempt to demolish the very foundation of that faith? And if such books must be published, surely it is not too much to ask that better taste be used in their promotion.

‘Let the Church be faithful to its calling and its message, and the Holy Spirit will accomplish things for the glory of God.…’

A person who is losing strength, or who is experiencing pain or shortness of breath, will consult his doctor to find out the cause. The various manifestations of a disease are symptoms; they are not the disease itself. A conscientious doctor will through examinations, tests, and other diagnostic measures endeavor to determine what is producing the symptoms.

Any one who seriously considers the Church today and its impact on the world will inevitably conclude that all is not right. Here in America, and throughout the rest of the world, the Church does not have the influence it once had. The world’s biological birth rate far exceeds the spiritual birth rate, and a new generation is arising outside the influence of organized religion.

These facts are symptoms of a deep-seated disease, and, as is often true in the medical world, there is within the Church a divergence of diagnosis and therefore of recommended treatment.

Basic to these differences is the conflict in concepts of the nature and mission of the Church.

It is my earnest conviction that the Church is a spiritual organism with certain ecclesiastical functions. It has the duty to teach and preach the Christian faith as revealed in the Scriptures, and to do so not in the wisdom of man but through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. It is also my conviction that out of such Spirit-directed preaching and teaching, men are brought to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. They then become “salt” in a decaying society, “light” in a dark world.

On the other hand, there are many—and they largely control the philosophy and activities of the major denominations—who feel that the Church, in the name of the Church, is called to enter the world and exercise political and other pressures to transform society without necessarily redeeming the men who compose the social order.

Those who hold this position have increasingly used social action, in the name of the Church, in an effort to change society and rectify the injustices of life. Such people join the rest of us in admitting that the Church’s influence is on the wane. But instead of stopping to take a second look to determine whether their treatment is effective, they more frantically pursue a course that many of us think is the basic cause of the lowered prestige and power of the Church.

The Church is called by the Lord himself to make disciples of all nations, I simply cannot believe that God called the Church to become a pressure group, to make use of the government and political means to accomplish secular ends, the perfection of which would not save even one soul from “the wrath to come.”

Those who talk about making the Church “relevant” to our space-age world often seem to lose sight of the fact that God is the Creator and sustainer of space, and that man today has the same spiritual needs he has had in every generation. Advances in scientific knowledge and modern sophistication have not changed one whit man’s basic need to receive the forgiveness of sins.

Those who claim to have discarded “seventeenth-century Christianity” seem to forget that no one is concerned about preserving it. Many of us are earnestly praying, however, for a return to first-century Christianity. Civilization has made phenomenal progress since the early apostles went out in the power of the Spirit to turn a pagan world upside down. But spiritual progress has not kept pace with material progress. We need people in the Church with the same burning faith and zeal of those who had seen the risen Lord and who went out with a message that changed men.

That Christians have the responsibility to be concerned about morality and to minister to the sick and needy is unquestionable. Greed and oppression are to be condemned. But the agency of action should be redeemed men, acting as such, and not the Church as an organization.

In recent years, we have seen the Church, in the name of the Church, enter the lists on behalf of federal aid to education, urban renewal, admission of Red China to the United Nations, disarmament, higher minimum wages, forcible union membership, exclusion of Mexican labor from California, and various other secular and political issues.

Whenever the Church becomes involved in such matters, it is actually individual persons who control the Church who are in action. Therefore, we find those whose insights are not necessarily sanctified using the name and prestige of the Church to advance policies that other men of equal piety and conviction may oppose. Little wonder that the Church has lost prestige in stepping down from its calling—to redeem men through faith in Jesus Christ—into secular concerns, hoping to change society by political means.

Let those who are so engaged ponder whether the lost power so evident in the Church does not run a parallel course with the shift in emphasis from spiritual to secular concerns.

Furthermore, as ministers have lost their faith in the full authority and integrity of the Scriptures, the vacuum in their preaching has been filled by social concerns. Once our pulpits were filled with men who preached the Word of God with power and conviction, men whose consuming passion was to make Christ known to a lost world. But preaching has changed, and many people go away from the services—if they bother to attend—unfed and frustrated.

It would seem that cause and effect are there for all to see. Seekers need to hear men of God with a message for their souls, not specialists in secular affairs.

Contributing to the lost spiritual power of the Church are those theological seminaries that have trained men not so much to know and preach the Word of God as to become experts in the concerns of this world.

This does not mean that preachers should not thunder against specific sins from their pulpit. Nor does it mean that they should not personally engage in activities designed to lessen the power of personal and organized evil in a community. It does mean that when the Church, using the name and prestige of the Church, shifts its emphasis to social reform rather than personal regeneration, it abdicates its high calling and becomes but one of many secular agencies dedicated to the good of society.

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” This is not a rhetorical question but the expression of a truth we must heed.

Let the Church be faithful to its calling and its message, and the Holy Spirit will accomplish things for the glory of God and the fulfillment of his purposes.

A wholesome attitude toward sex is part of the good life

Sex is supposed to be a very sophisticated matter today. The new ethic is: There are no moral absolutes. In Sex and the College Girl, Gail Greene pointed out that although some areas (namely the South) have not yet gone as far as others (the North and Far West) in the new morality, the direction in all parts of the country is the same: toward a loose, more “sophisticated” attitude toward sex.

What follows will not be a sophisticated discussion. Its premise may be stated simply: Sex is moral, for sex is of God.

We are ever a part, not only of the present, but also of the future in terms of the past. We are always moving. A student of history must learn to evaluate the present in terms of the past. The wise student will also try to evaluate the future in the light of the present and the past. It should prove both comforting and alarming to know that, although we are very “sophisticated” in our present attitudes toward sex, we are not yet so sophisticated as we can get.

Consider Rome. For those of the Catholic faith, Rome is the religious capital, and it has indeed played a large part in the history of Christianity. Yet film director Fredrico Fellini flatly listed his own city of Rome as one of the most corrupt cities in the world today, stating his premise in La Dolce Vita. Few films have been so revealing and so depressing.

Fellini chose his characters from the elite set in today’s Rome and traced them through an average twenty-four-hour period of obscenity, lewdness, and debauchery. In the next-to-last scene, a dozen or so people sit in a room staring blankly at one another. They are completely bored, for they have run out of things to try in their game of sex. Every woman is so familiar with every man in the room that all sit silently in utter disgust. They seem to have reached the end of the line.

The final scene presents a parable that cannot be soon forgotten. It is the morning after, and the same people are on the beach looking at a fish that has been washed ashore. It is a peculiar fish, completely round. The group cannot decide which part is its head and which its tail. Thus Fellini describes the circle of illicit sex that moves from frustration to boredom and finally to despair. Standing apart from the group is a girl dressed in white, who symbolizes the innocence of the past. She keeps calling to the group, but the waves are so noisy and she is so far away that they cannot hear. As the film ends, they are still trying to determine where the head and tail are. The voice in the distance keeps calling, “Come back. Come back.” But they cannot hear. We are not yet so sophisticated as we can get.

What we have chosen to call “sophistication,” God in his holy Word still calls sin. After recording man’s repudiation of God, three times the first chapter of Romans says: “… and God gave them up” to carnal sin. Men “burned in their lust one toward another”; women “changed the natural use to that which is against nature.” Both men and women were “filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness.” God gave them over to a reprobate mind.

God has a morality of sex. And there are points beyond which he simply will not allow a society to go and still survive. In the eyes of God, sex, when used rightly, is wholesome and purposeful. But when it is misused, it is the deadliest sin with which a person can tamper. Pregnancy, illegitimacy, early marriage, forced marriage, and disease are nothing compared to the hostility, shame, and anxiety that come as a result of this sin.

What is God’s ethic of sex? Does the Bible present specific guidelines? Can a firm, clear sexual morality be found?

Sex, as far as God is concerned, primarily and basically involves marriage. “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall become one flesh” (Matt. 19:5). This passage does not say merely that, after two people marry, the sexual relationship is acceptable. “… they twain shall become one flesh” is not simply a phrase given to a preacher to say at a wedding altar. It does not imply that in that moment, at that altar, the two have become one. It is not a wedding pronouncement at all, but rather a statement of fact. In the eyes of God, two people become one in bed.

When one is joined to another sexually, in the eyes of God marriage takes place. This might help to explain why the only biblical ground for divorce is adultery. Ultimately, a marriage is violated in the same manner it is consummated—in the act of sex. As far as God is concerned, sex is immediately, primarily, and directly related to marriage.

Again, as far as God is concerned, sex involves responsibility. “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife.…” He shall subordinate all other responsibilities and assume primary responsibility for the person to whom he is joining himself.

It is at the point of responsibility that most extramarital and pre-marital relationships are doomed to failure. An “affair” can never have a happy ending, no matter how it begins or how long it lasts. For though a man can offer a woman his attention, money, time, and even love (he thinks) outside marriage, he cannot offer her what she primarily needs, and deserves—security. A woman craves the feeling that someone is responsible for her. Sex must be undergirded by responsibility.

A girl may say, “I know he really cares for me.” But what if tomorrow she were paralyzed from the waist down and had to be pushed around in a wheel chair? How long would he remain interested in the relationship? Sex involves the responsibility of a person to another person regardless of the circumstances.

THE LOOK OF HORROR

Cynically, boldly I gazed

At that from which all others shrank in horror—

But I fell back shuddering—dazed:

Repulsed by filth;

Sickened by rotteness;

Scared by naked evil—

But none of these convey my shock of horror

When I looked into God’s Law-mirror!

How much less can words express the black distress

That came of abandonment

When, in terror, I destroyed the mirror,

and turned my gaze nearer

To earth’s enchantments—

Only to see the same, self-sodden me

(whom I cannot flee).

ROBERT H. THOMPSON

As far as God is concerned, sex involves love. The cry today is: “As long as we are in love, everything is fine. And love is what we have plenty of.” This is the new morality, in which sex is love.

How strange that a word can come to mean the opposite of what it was intended to mean. “Love” should describe a selfless devotion between two people. Instead, it has come to mean selfishness.

During the harvesting of fruit in the orange groves of Florida, a worker will occasionally take out a knife and cut away the top of an orange. He will then take the fruit in both hands, suck and squeeze until the pulp is dry, and cast what is left to the ground. “I just love oranges,” he may say. What he means is, “Oranges do something for me.”

How can a woman be so blind? How can she let a man take so much from her, simply because he said the magic phrase, “I love you”? What he meant was, “You do something for me, and 1 am going to take what I can get.” That is not love, not at all.

Genuine love involves respect, a respect that can be tested with the question: “Does he (or she) really look upon me as a person, or as a thing?”

In Rostand’s The Last Night of Don Juan, the devil comes for Don Juan dressed as a puppeteer. Don Juan pleads for mercy. “I am innocent,” he says, “because i sincerely loved all the Women I ever had.” He begs the devil to call the women back to testify in his behalf.

Satan does this. However, he has each one wear a tiny mask over her eyes. Each woman comes to Don Juan and speaks to him, and he is to respond by calling each by her name. But not once can he get the right name for the woman before him. He not only never loved the women he knew; he never really knew the women he knew.

He had lost all respect for each woman he was supposed to have loved. In so doing, he lost respect for himself as a person. That is why Satan came dressed as a puppeteer. Don Juan had lost control of his own life, lost his identity as a person. He had become a puppet, completely controlled by his own appetites.

Ultimately, as far as God is concerned, sex involves the love of God resting upon a relationship. The final test is whether the man and woman can say, “God’s blessing is resting on our relationship; we have sought God’s guidance and control in our lives.”

We all shy away from the word “control.” All of us want freedom—freedom from control, freedom from restraints. We do not have the foresight or insight to see that there is no such thing as complete freedom! Anything that is alive must, to remain alive, be tied to something else. A tree is fastened to the earth. If someone “frees” it by pulling its roots from the ground, it is free only to die.

To remain both free and living, we must be tied to something life-giving. We shall never be completely free. Basically, we have the choice of three sources of control: the people around us, our own passions and appetites, or the guidelines God offers us.

The way to achieve a wholesome attitude toward sex is to place oneself in an attitude of prayer and to search for God’s will in this deepest of all relationships.

The other clay I poked my head over the back fence and saw my neighbor, Bishop Golightly, that eloquent exponent of avant-garde Christianity, ruminating in his garden.

“Hi, there! Going to the university?” I said, for he was wearing his turtle-neck sweater.

He gave me a dreadful frown. “Yes,” he replied, quite unlike his usual expansive self. I sensed that some problem weighed upon his mind, and, never loath to offer advice, I leapt over the fence.

“What,” I asked, picking myself up out of his hollyhocks, “is the trouble?”

He let out a despairing sigh and as he steered me past the geraniums said, “Well, if you must know, it’s one of my students. He’s badgering me for some concept of the devil.”

“You mean Old Nick?” I said, taken aback. “Or something new and distinctive?”

“Who knows what the present generation wants?” grumbled the bishop, as we took a melancholy turn around the mulberry bush. “It isn’t easy to preserve one’s intellectual reputation these days, you know.”

“Well, then, did you try the agnostic silence bit?”

“I did. He won’t take that for an answer.”

We wagged our heads at the sheer gall of today’s youth. “But it seems to me,” the bishop went on, beating around the bush again, “that any approach to the problem must be experience-centered—one that the young student can incorporate into his being and reflect.…”

“You’re right!” I broke in joyfully. “Experience! That’s the ticket! Now supposing next Sunday you look down from the pulpit and find the devil sitting in the front pew. How’s that for an experience?”

The bishop looked stunned. “In my church?” he asked. “In the front pew?”

“Oh, he’d be down front all right. Not crowded in the back with the rest of the congregation. They say he’s a bold fellow, you know. Probably pleasant-looking, too. Shoes shined, good silk suit, handkerchief in pocket. But you’d know him, bishop. You’d sense the dark presence of evil, wouldn’t you?”

“I would?” said the bishop.

“And you’d denounce him for the terrible and ancient adversary that he is, wouldn’t you?” I cried, carried away by the grandeur of the spectacle. “And you’d chase him down the aisle and kick him down the front steps, wouldn’t you? Or cast him in the fiery furnace in the basement, wouldn’t you? Or put him in the lockup for a thousand years?”

Fortunately, at this point the bishop’s saner thought prevailed. “A situation such as you describe,” he said severely, “cannot be acted upon without thorough and prolonged study. In fact, any attempt to drive anyone out of the church would undoubtedly be taken as a rebirth of intolerance.”

“I never thought of it exactly that way,” I admitted, shamefaced. “Then what do you suggest?”

“Why, I should hope I’d be open-minded enough to invite him to a panel discussion with the Wednesday afternoon study group, or perhaps to the pulpit the following Sunday.”

“Marvelous!” I gasped. “Then the congregation can jeer and mock him! Or even throw tomatoes at him!”

“Of course not,” the bishop snapped, leading me down the garden path. “There will be no emotionalism! After all, if the devil thinks he belongs in the church, then he should be accorded the right to expound his theories as best he may in an atmosphere of restraint and calm. There is no denying that the devil is an able theologian, and one can think him mistaken without hounding him like a heretic.”

“You mean any attempt to heave him out of the church would hurt the church’s image more than the devil’s?” I said, picking a raspberry from a nearby shrub.

“Now you’re beginning to get the idea,” said he.

“But supposing,” I said, giving him the raspberry, “supposing the congregation decide they’d rather have the devil than you. That might do you out of a job.”

“Nonsense, my dear chap,” the bishop said, and he laughed so heartily I had to whack him on the back to bring him round. Then, wiping away tears of laughter, he walked toward his red sports car in the driveway. “You are assuming that my congregation will see no difference between the devil’s old heresies and my new and radical insights, which, as you know, are as fresh as the breezes in this garden.”

“I’m certainly glad they’re not cold blasts from outer darkness,” I said, greatly comforted. The bishop couldn’t hear me, however. He was off to the university with engine roaring and horn tootling like a loud but uncertain trumpet

—E. N. BELL, Vancouver, British Columbia.

A journalist aims a pointed pen at some ministerial fetishes

The tall, lean clergyman looked even more solemn than usual as he tentatively pushed open the city-room door of a large newspaper and asked a copy boy if he might see me.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, with the familiarity of long acquaintance. “You look as though you’d lost your last friend.”

“No,” he replied with a forced smile, “but you know how these things are; I’ve just had a h——of a row with my choir director.”

That was my first but by no means last experience with a type of clergyman who habitually uses slang, vulgarity, and sometimes actual profanity when talking to newspaper men—and to some other laymen as well. Clergymen of this type always have a “good story” to tell. The stories are usually earthy, to put it mildly. I have sometimes wondered whether such a preacher saves the stories he cannot use in the pulpit for occasions when he feels he must prove that he is a man among men, “of the earth, earthy.”

Of course, not all clergymen who use profane language do so to impress others. Some of them think that the language of the study and the pulpit is too exalted and artificial for ordinary conversation and that they must revert to “everyday” language to be understood. With others the occasional use of profanity is a genuine slip of the tongue, the result of years spent in circles where rough speech prevails, perhaps while working their way through seminary or serving as a wartime chaplain. Recently some poseurs among the clergy have adopted the use of four-letter words to prove their right to membership in the literary avant-garde.

Nearly half a century of association with clergymen of many faiths and various social strata has given me distinct impressions of the profanity-users and of other types. I have known scores of ministers who are a credit to their profession and, in my humble opinion, deserving of divine approval. These men are kindly, upright, dignified, dedicated. They give every indication of having a message from the God whom they serve and of having spent long hours in search of the precise words that would best convey that message. I have also known ministers who lack preaching ability but whose lives are an example and whose presence is a benediction.

However, there are others who are remembered for other characteristics. There are those who always speak with what they would like their congregations to believe is the “voice of God.” They appear to have forgotten that even the Apostle Paul remarked on occasion, “But to the rest speak I, not the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:12). One waits in vain for such preachers to qualify some statements with even so simple a restriction as “I believe.…” Surely they must know that they are subject to misinterpreting a Scripture text, or not having all the facts, or erring in their judgment.

The voice of absolute authority is irritating enough when it issues from a pulpit once or twice a week, but it is much more so when it makes itself heard outside the church. One’s daily newspaper will even contain pronouncements by some clergyman on such subjects as the proper depth at which a storm sewer should be laid and the kind of art that should be preferred by the current tenants of the White House.

There are other clergymen whom I should classify as politico-clerics. These men are thoroughly familiar with the political strategy not only of their own denomination but also of other major religious bodies that cooperate or compete with it. Such ministers know exactly how many votes are required to enact a piece of church legislation—and the most effective method of securing them. They are experienced in the use of such tactics as appealing to the order of the day to close debate on a ticklish subject. Those with a real bent for politics can predict with great accuracy both the time when a controversial issue will be allowed to reach the floor and its probable fate within a dozen votes.

Other clergymen are notable for adopting the fetish-word or phrase of the moment as devotedly as a teen-ager adopts the latest slang. For several years I attended a church whose minister had been charmed by “brave, new world.” The phrase dates itself, It was a by-product of the post-depression period, the early days of Social Security. For months not a sermon was delivered in that church that did not refer to the “brave, new world.”

One of the more recent fetish-words is “relevant,” which means “bearing upon, or applying to, the case in hand.” It is something of a stock to hear a preacher question whether Christ’s teaching is “relevant” to world conditions today and then reply in the negative, while declaring in the same sermon that Christianity should permeate every area of human experience. Another word now being bandied about with delight is “dialogue.” A dialogue is little more than a conversation, though perhaps a somewhat formal one; yet it is now used by many clergymen to mean something involving more controversy, a “debate.” Others use it with a less specific connotation. They no longer merely “talk” with people; they “have dialogue,” whether it be about the state of theology today or how often the church lawn should be mowed.

In contrast to the fetish-word addicts are the cliché-lovers, who are found in all faiths and at all levels of the ministry. Men who adopted some pet expressions in seminary are still using them thirty or forty years later. Often one suspects that the original definitions have been forgotten. At any rate, the users clearly have not bothered to seek out synonyms, or new ways of expressing old ideas. In a Vatican Council press conference, a Catholic theologian who used a cliché was interrupted by laughter. Said one of his fellow theologians, “We all learned that word in seminary, but what does it mean today?” There are preachers who still talk about “marching out to meet the foe” in an age when the youth of their congregations are thinking in terms of spaceships and satellites.

Another type of clergyman is the executive, who emanates more efficiency than sanctity. It is only fair to say that it is hard to know whether a minister is the executive type because he prefers to be or because his church board requires it of him. There comes to mind a spiritual crisis in which I sought the counsel of a prominent clergyman, only to be told by his secretary that I could have an appointment several days later. Perhaps it was unkind, but I could not refrain from asking, “Suppose I should die in the meantime?” The secretary could offer no solution.

Closely related to the executive type is the Madison Avenue man. In some parts of the country, almost every church advertisement in the Saturday newspapers contains a picture of the pastor. However, not every preacher has a face that will induce visitors to attend church. And the regular parishioners, of course, are very well acquainted with their pastor’s appearance. The array of ministerial photographs on some newspaper pages brings to mind the words of our Lord concerning John the Baptist: “What went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.”

The advertising bent manifests itself in various ways. There is, for example, the tricky or even deliberately misleading sermon topic. Almost any newspaper church page will yield examples. I remember a minister who announced as his topic; “The Man Upside Down.” I persuaded two friends who had abandoned church-going to accompany me to hear him. Not once during the sermon did he so much as mention the “man upside down.” My friends never went back to that church.

THE ALTAR AND THE GIFT

Who builds the altar?

Is it man, laying stone on stone

Like a Babel tower

That he might bridge the gap

And march with head erect

Or crawl wormlike, it matters not,

Into the Holy Presence?

Who presents the gift?

Shall we select the finest fruits

From our daily round of toil

And carry them to the sacred place,

And light beneath them

The fires of sacrifice?

Will this placate Eternal Wrath?

The altar is already built!

Aye, the sacrifice is made!

We did not build nor do we give.

The Eternal One has declared

The world the sacred place

And offered on its altar—

A barren hill shaped like a skull—

The Gift.

The Eternal One is first

In building and in giving;

Though immeasurable the cost,

He gives: Ours to respond and,

Set aglow, be driven sparklike

From the Fire we did not kindle.

B. L. BRYAN

A poor relative of the advertising-obsessed clergyman—who, after all, pays for his advertisement—is one known disrespectfully in newspaper circles as a “publicity hound.” A preacher of my acquaintance never sent the newspaper a copy of his sermon. He took the attitude that if the paper wanted to print his sermon, or parts of it, a reporter would have to sit through it. Then he went on vacation. On his return he rushed into the newspaper office waving a picture of himself and a friend with some twenty fish spread out on an overturned canoe. I refrained from quoting the words, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

Another annoying member of this group is the minister who thinks his church should have a special story when it does exactly what the denominational governing body has decreed each church in the denomination must do. His reasoning is that his church is large and important and that most of his people read the newspaper in which he wants the story printed. He brushes aside the argument that in all fairness thirty or forty other stories on the same matter should be printed. Yet this minister will inveigh against politicians who grant special favors to friends and relatives.

Two other types of clergymen are sure to be found in communities that have a considerable number of churches—the self-fancied intellectual, and the one who seems to have acquired an electronic computer.

The “intellectual” delves into history, quotes the classics, draws illustrations from the sciences, and leaves his hearers with the impression that he is sure he can solve the problems of the universe—even without God’s help, if necessary.

Sermons of the computerized preacher follow the same pattern week after week with predictable accuracy. No matter what the text, or where the sermon begins, he is almost certain to arrive at the same conclusion. Many years ago I wondered how this was possible. Now with the advent of the computer I have found myself conjecturing. If all the verses in the Bible dealing with a given subject were fed into a computer, would the result be a usable sermon as effective as many to which long-suffering congregations listen week by week?

Is The Cliche Here To Stay?

Last night I took that book from the shelf again and looked at the question hand-written inside the cover: “Would I come to church twice on Sunday to hear myself preach?”

I was preparing for the ministry when my former pastor, then quite old, wrote those words. We had been talking about preaching, and I was showing him a college textbook, The Preparation of Sermons, by Andrew Blackwood. Suddenly he took the book from my hands and wrote. When I read what he had written, I was startled. Since that day, I have often asked myself that question as I stood up to preach. It has had a profound effect upon my ministry.

“Would I come to church twice on Sunday to hear myself preach?” Would I actually make an effort to go to church Sunday after Sunday to taste my own pulpit fare? After a few times, would I finally make excuses to stay at home and watch television? Or, perhaps even worse, would I settle myself in the pew, stare blankly with a non-comprehending, hypnotic gaze (you know the kind), and wait for the benediction?

Volumes have been written about preaching. The experts have thoroughly scrutinized all kinds of sermons. But one area seems to have been overlooked: clichés. How easily these comfortable, often meaningless words roll from our lips.

How many times, for example, have congregations been introduced to “the Scripture lesson for today …” (not yesterday’s lesson, mind you, but today’s) by the roundabout statement: “I would like to call your attention to a verse of Scripture found in the Book of Matthew.…” Why “would like to”? “Why not simply, “Let us turn to Matthew’s Gospel …”?

Another pet phrase declares, “I would have you know.…” Why not say, “You should know …”?

“And so it is.…” Often this supposedly illuminating phrase is tacked on the end of a point as the voice of the minister, who is looking down at his notes to catch the next point, diminishes to a whisper. “And so it is” serves as a kind of weak transition. But does it really mean anything?

“Permit me to say.…” “And may I say …?” Don’t ask permission; go ahead and say it. They couldn’t stop you if they wanted to.

“I must hasten on.… This might mean (who knows?): “We’re on the main track now.” It most certainly means that the message is far from finished and it’s already past noon. Take heart, congregation, the end is in sight! Really, though, do you mean anything by it? You know (and so does the congregation) that you’re going to finish, even if it takes all day.

“Just this and I’m through.…” Is this another sign of hope for the longsuffering congregation? It should be, but it is often a false one.

“You’ve probably heard the story about.…” They probably have. If you’re going to use a story again with the same congregation, at least spare them the warning. Just go ahead and use it. Better still, keep track of your “stories” so you won’t bore them to death. (Note the cliché!)

“Are you listening …?” If they must be reminded to listen, they’re probably not doing it. And it probably isn’t their fault.

“I’ll never forget if I live to be a hundred.…” Does this add anything? If not, let’s leave it off.

“Bear with me …” For the life of me (another cliché), I don’t know what this means. I know what it is supposed to mean. Analyze the words. What does it actually say?—

ROBERT L. OWEN,

LeTourneau College,

Longview, Texas.