Anglican primate initiates ‘serious dialogue’ with Pope Paul in historic visit to Vatican

Forty-three Popes and thirty-two Archbishops of Canterbury have held office since the last time an English primate paid an “official” visit to the Vatican. In welcoming Dr. Arthur Michael Ramsey to Rome last month, Paul VI spoke of the bridge being rebuilt between their two churches.

“Your steps,” the pontiff told his visitor, “do not resound in a strange house. They come to a home which you, for every valid reason, can call your own.”

Though a joint declaration following the encounter reflected symbolic rather than practical results, the archbishop evidently was delighted at the inauguration of “serious dialogue founded on the Gospels and on ancient common traditions.” Regarding the validity of Anglican orders, Ramsey said both sides recognized the importance of this subject; however, he said, they agreed not to discuss it in isolation but in the general context of discussions. On the papal decree on mixed marriages last month, the archbishop said he had indicated clearly in Rome that it would not satisfy the consciences of Anglican Christians. He expressed hope that this was not intended as a final settlement.

One of the meetings with the pontiff was in the Sistine Chapel, where popes are elected and where dead popes lie beneath Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” the night before their burial. Here, said an English Jesuit, “it is easier to grasp that ecumenism means neither bargaining nor power politics, but the death of pride and humble submission to the Gospel.”

Upon returning to England, Ramsey enhanced his reputation as an artful dodger of pointed questions. Asked if he would like to see the pope visit England, he replied that he did not advise the pope on where he should make his visits. Just as neatly he ducked questions on the supremacy of the pope and papal infallibility.

The trip to Rome did not go unprotested. Five British Protestants, members of the International Council of Christian Churches, traveled on the plane with Ramsey. The result was a certain edginess and emphasis on security that did no good for the ecumenical cause. Neither did an incident in which two of the five dissidents, both Ulster Presbyterians, were refused permission to enter Italy, ostensibly because of a 1962 incident in which they were found distributing Bibles there.

“We are Protestant ministers,” said the Rev. Brian Green, a Baptist from

London. “There does not seem to be any liberty here to state our convictions.” He was one of the three allowed to stay. All three were later ejected from an Anglican church in Rome when Ramsey was celebrating communion.

“We did not shout nor did we interrupt the service,” Green said. “But as soon as we took off our coats to reveal our protest waistcoats, detectives pounced.”

The waistcoats carried inscriptions condemning the visit as a betrayal of Protestantism. The men were detained at a police station for 3½ hours.

The two expellees, as they were being led away earlier, had shouted: “Rome is opposed to the Bible. You will have to tear these shirts from us. Do you want us to take off our trousers? Hallelujah, we are being thrown out because we are Protestants. What a blow for the Vatican Council.”

The protesters represented a tiny minority. More typical of evangelical reaction to the archbishop’s visit was the comment of Anglican Canon Thomas C. Livermore: “The whole point of the Reformation was the difference between Catholic dogma and Bible truth, and these differences remain. Nothing more can be done until they are resolved.”

Highlights Of The Encounter

The meeting between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Paul VI was regarded as historic in a special sense. Not since 1397, when Pope Boniface IX received Archbishop Arundel, had an Anglican primate conferred officially with a Roman Catholic pontiff. Dr. Michael Ramsey’s predecessor, Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, saw Pope John XXIII in 1960, but that visit was regarded as “a courtesy call.” By contrast, Ramsey greeted Pope Paul “in my office as Archbishop of Canterbury and as president of the Lambeth Conference of Bishops.”

In their initial meeting in the Sistine Chapel, Paul and Ramsey embraced in what was described as a “kiss of peace.” Then they read formal statements stressing the desirability and great difficulties of Christian unity. Millions of Europeans watched via television. Later, the two talked privately for sixty-five minutes.

The archbishop and the pontiff met again the following day in a joint prayer service at the Basilica of St. Paul’s-Outside-the-Walls. They issued a joint declaration that was read at the con-conclusion of the service. The declaration indicated plans to establish a mixed commission of Roman Catholics and Anglicans to work for Christian unity.

On his way back to London, Ramsey made a twenty-five-hour stopover in Geneva to confer with officials of the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical organizations headquartered there. He was welcomed at the airport by Dr. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, retiring general secretary of the WCC.

Prior to his trip, Ramsey issued a qualified endorsement of the efforts of evangelist Billy Graham, who plans a month-long crusade in London in June. In the April issue of his Canterbury Diocesan Notes, the archbishop wrote:

“I should explain that the Church of England and the diocese in the London area had no official share in the invitation to him, and it is well known that there are different views about Dr. Graham’s methods and the nature of his message. But many people from a variety of parishes are likely to be going to the campaign meetings and it is the wish of Dr. Graham that persons who have been influenced by his message shall be commended to the ministry of the church which they attend or of the parish where they live. It is important that the clergy of every tradition should be ready to welcome those who may be referred to them in this way, and should help them to fulfill their new resolves in the service of God and in the fellowship of the church. Whatever we think of the theology and methods of mass evangelism, we must with thankfulness and love help those whose hearts and consciences have been moved. We shall pray that God will bless and use all that is done, both in campaigns and in the constant witness of Christian people, to bring people to the knowledge of Christ.”

The Dirksen Amendment

“Nothing contained in this Constitution shall prohibit the authority administering any school, school system, educational institution or other public building supported in whole or in part through the expenditure of public funds from providing for or permitting the voluntary participation by students or others in prayer. Nothing contained in this article shall authorize any such authority to prescribe the form or content of any prayer.”

These are the words proposed as an amendment to the Constitution by U. S. Senator Everett M. Dirksen. In introducing the legislation last month, Dirksen cited Supreme Court decisions against classroom devotional exercises. “I do not propose to reverse the court,” he said. “I do propose a clarification so that these decisions and their possible implications will not hover over every teacher, principal, and educator.”

Sunday School On Monday

United Presbyterians plan to eliminate the traditional Sunday school by 1968, replacing it with two separate sessions during the week.

The denomination’s Board of Christian Education says its major new program also will introduce philosophical concepts at an earlier age, play down rote memorization, encourage new training for teachers, and stress lifetime study of Christianity to counter teen-age dropouts.

Ecumenism, Baptist Style

How can Baptists, that much-fragmented branch of Christians, get together? Joint evangelism was the method most often mentioned last month at the first meeting of the North American Fellowship of the Baptist World Alliance.

Baptists are very skittish about authority, and this new “fellowship” has no power of its own. But a continent-wide agency under the Baptist World Alliance is a significant advance in Baptist cooperation. And since 85 per cent of the world’s 27 million Baptists live in North America, it represents potential for an important religious force.

The fellowship presently includes six bodies with 12.8 million members. If the four other North American groups in the Baptist World Alliance also join, the constituency will be 21 million.

The organization grew out of the Baptist Jubilee Advance, a 150th anniversary observance that first broke walls of separation between most Baptist groups. Southern Baptists tabled participation in 1964 but signed up last year. The initial meeting in Washington, D. C., was friendly in tone.

A spokesman for one group presently outside the fellowship, Gunnar Hoglund of the Baptist General Conference, said Chicago Baptists of various conventions and races had never cooperated until Billy Graham came to town. Discussions about Red China and other political problems are all very interesting, he said, but “the mission of the Church is theological, and evangelism is primary.” He added that “there is no room for clannishness, especially when we are all in allegiance to Christ,” and that if adults don’t “build bridges” among churches, young people will.

The Rev. J. T. Ford, a Southern Baptist from Alexandria, Virginia, said that just coming together for “fellowship” doesn’t work. “Fellowship improves by participation in action; it is a byproduct of something in which you share.… Evangelism seems to be the thing that brings us together easiest.”

Manifesto In The Making

A major statement of evangelical consensus is being developed this week by some 1,000 influential representatives of the Protestant missionary task force. An initial draft of the document chides evangelicals for often neglecting to cooperate and challenges their failure to develop biblical approaches to the problems of war, racism, poverty, and the population explosion.

Leaders of an unprecedented eight-day Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission hope to sharpen the draft document after extended discussion and to win official approval of it from congress delegates. It is tentatively tagged the “Wheaton Declaration,” since the congress is being held at Wheaton (Illinois) College.

The first draft covers twenty-one typewritten pages, single spaced. It seeks to set forth a common evangelical view on crucial contemporary issues that affect implementation of the Great Commission.

The congress is the biggest and most representative meeting of evangelical missionary leaders ever held. It was called jointly by the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association and the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association. These two groups represent about 100 missionary boards with some 13,000 missionaries. An additional fifty evangelical societies and 125 evangelical schools received invitations.

The proposed declaration asserts that evangelicals have shied away from biblically based social concern for fear it would lead to a social gospel. The draft affirms the Bible as inerrant and calls the evangelistic mandate the supreme task of the Church. It encourages prayer for the blessing of God upon all Roman Catholics as they study the Scriptures.

This drew accord from the executive secretary of the National Baptist Convention of Mexico, the Rev. Roberto Porras Maynes, who suggested that the fellowship back the 1969 “Crusade of the Americas” proposed by Brazilian Baptists. Later, the plan got an impassioned boost from the Rev. Wayne Dehoney, president of the Southern Baptists, who had visited Brazil earlier this year. He reported that in two years, 250,000 Baptists there secured 100,000 professions of faith and started 300 new churches and 3,500 new mission stations, and that they expect a doubled enrollment in their four seminaries.

General Secretary R. Fred Bullen of the Baptist Federation of Canada said his group of three geographical conventions decided in February to join in the hemisphere-wide evangelistic drive if other North Americans did. The fellowship committee then voted to recommend the 1969 project to member denominations.

After the vote, the Rev. Edwin H. Tuller, general secretary of the American Baptist Convention, said that at the risk of being misunderstood, he wanted to explain that the ABC would be cautious about joining such a crusade. Tuller said the Jubilee Advance and other cooperative ventures had stressed evangelism to the near-exclusion of the Church’s other tasks. “We’re not opposed to evangelism,” he said, “but it is a very limited diet. I wonder if we can ever get beyond this one thing.”

First Stop: Watts

The nation’s 20 million Negroes are winning a host of new freedoms, but spiritual oppression still hangs heavy over the ghettos. The National Negro Evangelical Association, born out of the civil rights revolution, aims to battle that oppression from a biblical base.

A Long Island radio preacher challenged the NNEA this way: “President Johnson is trying to give the world what they want. We have what they need.”

In a survey of American Negro need, the invariable first stop is Los Angeles and Watts, scene of bloody riots last August. So NNEA has chosen Watts for its first major project. A counseling center is to be established there with help from the National Association of Evangelicals, with which the NNEA is affiliated. There has also been talk of an evangelistic crusade in Watts this summer, but the idea thus far has failed to attract enough support. The NNEA seeks to promote evangelism among Negroes and to encourage missionary recruitment.

NNEA leaders keep close tab on Watts, inasmuch as their organization has its roots in the Los Angeles area. The NNEA was founded there three years ago, and five of its fifteen directors are from Los Angeles or nearby, including Executive Secretary Jeremiah Rowe, Jamaica-born pastor of an Evangelical United Brethren church.

The NNEA’s scope, however, reaches from coast to coast and even abroad. Fourteen states were represented among the more than eighty influential Negro evangelicals who registered for the third annual convention last month. They met for five cordial days in Cleveland’s Union Avenue Alliance Church, home of the famed Cleveland Colored Quintet. Delegates were told that sixty missionary boards had responded favorably when asked whether they sought Negro candidates. The convention was highlighted by an inspirational missionary rally before an overflow crowd.

The Rev. Howard O. Jones, an associate of Billy Graham, was named president of the NNEA. Jones, author of a new book relating evangelical convictions to the race question, feels many a Negro minister has neglected preaching of the Gospel in favor of civil rights action. He says that as a result the civil rights movement has created a spiritual vacuum.

“We are sympathetic to the civil rights movement,” he says. “But you can’t feed the soul on civil rights manna. Our first mission is redemptive.”

Jones succeeds Marvin Printis, 34, who chaired the NNEA’s first board meeting and has served as president ever since. He was born in Illinois and graduated from Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary. A diligent administrator, Printis is credited with having done much of the spadework in bringing the NNEA into being. He is a bachelor currently living in San Marino, California.

Printis observes that for many years the old saw was that Negroes needed to be educated. Now, he says, it is the white segregationists who need to be educated to the fact of the Negro’s equality.

‘Bad Faith’ By Realtors?

Realtors oppose “fair housing” laws; religious leaders generally favor them as essential for ending racial bias in sale and rental of housing. But both agree that voluntary, educational efforts are needed to break down residential barriers. An effort to have both sides join in a “Statement of Accord” on voluntary approaches has been shattered.

Representatives of the National Council of Churches, National Catholic Welfare Conference, and Synagogue Council of America last month charged “bad faith” by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, the giant of realty, which proposed negotiations six months ago.

The “Accord” proposal was written January 21, but two weeks later the Cleveland Plain Dealer got hold of a confidential letter from NAREB’s chief negotiator, James B. Morris, in which he urged quick NAREB approval of the “Accord” because it “commits” religious leaders to voluntary action and “could be a powerful force in stopping the drive for either federal, state, or local legislation in this field.”

Although some churchmen thought the “Accord” didn’t go far enough, chances for approval looked good until the Morris bombshell. Both sides said some future cooperation is possible.

The National Association of Evangelicals, which joined the other three religious bodies on an “exploratory basis,” was wary of joining in the “Accord” because of its own emphasis on individual conscience.

Room At The Top (For Protestants?)

The federal government, which has long enforced racial equality in firms holding U. S. contracts, is now watching out for religious discrimination. The New York Times last month revealed this new drive in Social Security and the Labor Department, sparked by a complaint last fall from the American Jewish Committee.

The AJC contends that major defense contractors favor Protestants over Jews and Roman Catholics in top executive positions. Also under study are the forty-eight large insurance companies chosen to distribute Medicare funds.

Most companies do not even record the religious affiliations of their employees, so the government is planning polls of employees that will provide such statistics while insuring anonymity.

The quiet government check is based on executive orders against discrimination. Title VII of the 1964 civil rights act also bans religious bias, both by employers and by labor unions; the few complaints involving religion since the law went into force last July have been conciliated privately.

During a short sojourn in Geneva recently I got the impression that a terrific amount of overtime had been worked at the Ecumenical Centre prior to the World Council of Churches’ Central Committee meeting. I do not know whether it is true that the ecumenical movement is losing momentum; I do know that it seems to be losing its private vocabulary. That someone had become aware of this bedeviling factor was evident in the departmental reports, many of which were splendid literary pieces free of wordy obscurity.

It would be rash to suggest a connection here with the intriguing fact that for the first time some reports mentioned conservative evangelicals. It looked for all the world as if people had suddenly awakened to our existence. The reference to “this largely amorphous but highly active group” (a description later amended) were generally both sympathetic and accurate. There was no repetition of the appalling blunder at the Nottingham Faith and Order Conference in 1964, when conservative evangelicals were graciously invited by the British Council of Churches, graciously came, and then after an auspicious beginning were subjected to a brusque lecture on what a prickly lot they were. We in Britain still await from the BCC such a friendly and understanding statement on conservatives as the WCC’s Eugene L. Smith made three years ago in the Ecumenical Review.

At Geneva the WCC’s Department of Ecumenical Action reported on an informal consultation at Bossey last May on “basic questions of the understanding of the Church as raised in church groups inside and outside the World Council of Churches.” Evangelicals there mentioned frankly the differences and suspicions customarily advanced against the WCC. The differences included “the charismatic and spiritual versus the organizational and institutional aspects of the Church”; questions of Christian involvement in the political and economic life of the world; and standards of personal holiness. It was pointed out, however, that many of these differences exist within the membership of the WCC itself.

Evangelicals’ suspicions involved relations with the Roman Catholic Church, expressed usually in the form: “Is the WCC leading its member churches towards Rome?” Standards for WCC membership were questioned: “Are we not too latitudinarian in accepting so many ‘nominally’ Christian churches into our membership? Do we ever refuse membership to anyone who applies?” The report also admitted that another objection often advanced is: “Are we not watering down the missionary and evangelistic emphasis?” (The WCC is often good on questions but sometimes curiously shaky on answers; in this case no answers were attempted.)

This recital of differences and suspicions sounds like a fair statement of the case. The devastating candor continues with an admission that the conservative evangelicals who had been willing to confer on ecumenical matters were those who already were at least “not totally unsympathetic” to the WCC’s work. But then came a significant sentence in the report: “It was perhaps due to the courtesy of the participants that questions like the nature of biblical authority were not raised in any great detail.” No one, moreover, was churlish enough to utter potentially explosive words like “modernism” or “liberalism.” So much for courtesy …

At some point, however, the courtesy has to stop. The Orthodox had evidently come to this conclusion too, for at other sessions of this Central Committee their representatives were at pains again and again to emphasize Tradition and “the Church” over against the Bible. The Metropolitan of Carthage insisted there was a Church long before parts of the New Testament were written. Archbishop Iakovos of New York questioned Dr. Visser ’t Hooft’s stress earlier on the Holy Scriptures, and meaningfully demanded how they could be understood unless they were interpreted. Archpriest Vitaly Borovoy, who now holds a key post on the WCC staff, declared baldly that “a biblical theology cannot be a basis for our unity, because … we have no common consensus in our understanding and our interpretation of the Holy Scripture.” Disunity here could hardly be the foundation of our calling to unity, said the fifty-year-old Russian. He went on to summon every church “to draw progressively nearer to the One Ancient Church” in whom alone unity could be found.

The only immediate response to this from the Central Committee was Professor Berkhof’s reminder that even in Borovoy’s tradition there had been differences of interpretation right from the beginning. “Uncriticized tradition,” said the Dutch theologian, “can produce a sterile church.”

While this is true, it was not the word we might have hoped to hear against the Orthodox denigration of the place of the Bible. In fact, that hoped-for word never came. As so often happens, a prudent silence followed the Orthodox outbursts—and it is the silences of the WCC that are most eloquent today. Ecclesiastical diplomacy aside, this tacit policy of let’s-not-be-nasty-to-the-Orthodox is difficult to justify. Even at the 1964 Christian Peace Conference in Prague their more outrageous statements were sharply challenged. One might wish that some WCC sessions were as turbulent and to such good purpose.

Nevertheless, one department is convinced that there are “many misunderstandings” of WCC aims and purposes. No one is likely to deny it. While evangelicals are given to sweeping condemnation of that of which they have imperfect knowledge, there are some who understand the issues very well—and to know all is not to forgive all.

Some of our evangelical brethren feel it is right for them to participate in the ecumenical movement. We dare not question their motives in doing so; there are times when a Christian must engage in controversy, preferring to risk being called heretic by uncomprehending friends than hypocrite by his own conscience. For those who do actively support the ecumenical movement we ought to be faithful in prayer, that they may be ready to defend and to speak in season that Word which is able to make “wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

But Supreme Court is confused and divided on definition; ‘intent’ test added in fourteen opinions on three cases

The “free press” protection under the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution still does not apply to obscenity. The U. S. Supreme Court said this as emphatically last month as it had nine years earlier when it affirmed a five-year prison term for Samuel Roth, veteran New York City pornographer.

The court confronted the constitutional issue head-on and upheld another five-year term, this one for Ralph Ginzburg, publisher of Eros magazine, a smutty newsletter called Liaison, and the widely advertised book The Housewife’s Guide to Selective Promiscuity.

The vote against Ginzburg was 5–4, and the court upheld 6–3 the sentence of Edward Mishkin, New York City book dealer who specialized in lurid paperbacks. But the court also reversed, by a 6–3 vote, a Massachusetts conviction that held Fanny Hill to be obscene. The court thought there might be redeeming historic or literary merit in John Clelands classic story about an English prostitute, written in 1750.

The court was clear and forceful only on the central ruling against absolute freedom of the press. The court is still divided and somewhat confused in defining obscenity. However, its guidelines may help stern the tide of filth on American newsstands and book stalls, if prosecuting attorneys use the weapon it affords and lower state and federal courts give clear-cut interpretations.

Dissenting Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo L. Black believe Congress cannot restrict press freedom, regardless of how disgusting published material may be to the average person. They took this stand on Ginzburg as they had in Roth, but in the intervening years they have won no court converts to their cause.

The other seven justices feel, to varying degrees, that obscenity can be punished, just as they believe libel laws can restrict freedom of the press. Two men usually counted among court conservatives, Justices Potter Stewart and John Marshall Harlan, didn’t think Ginzburg’s publications sufficiently lurid to be proscribed. Stewart would punish only “hard-core pornography,” such as photographs or drawings of lewd and revolting sexual acts. Harlan would allow state courts great latitude, since he believes that under the federal system such guardianship of morals is subject to local jurisdiction under broad federal standards.

Justices Tom C. Clark and Byron M. White apply a stern rule against pornography. Justice William J. Brennan, who wrote the majority opinions as he had in the Roth case, stands in the middle of the road with Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice Abe Fortas, certain that obscenity can be punished, but giving a definition of it that their six colleagues still believe inadequate.

The vote of Fortas, most recent court appointee, was of particular interest, since his law firm had represented Playboy magazine when its cartoons were under attack. Fortas cast the deciding vote that sent Ginzburg to prison for five years.

From fourteen separate opinions filed in the three cases, one new test for conviction emerges: the intent of the publisher as reflected by advertising and promotion. The court majority adopted a dictum similar to that of the late Judge Learned Hand: A medical text on sexual deviations is acceptable if addressed only to doctors but obscene if directed to citizens generally, with emphasis on lurid subject matter. Hand observed that the interest of such persons was obviously prurient, not scientific.

Brennan rephrased the point: “When an exploitation of interests in titillation by pornography is shown with respect to material lending itself to such exploitation … such evidence may support a determination that the material is obscene even though in other contexts the material would escape such condemnation.”

On Fanny Hill, however, Brennan said “three elements must coalesce,” repeating the tests he had enunciated in the Roth decision: “It must be established that (a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it offends contemporary community standards relating to the description of representation of sexual matters; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value.”

White considers the third requirement ridiculous. He complains it would make obscene material immune, “however far beyond customary limits of candor … if it has any literary style, if it contains any historical references or language characteristic of a bygone day.… Well-written, effective obscenity is protected; the poorly-written is vulnerable.” He predicts great difficulty in applying a standard as vague as “social value.”

To SUMMARIZE: Only Warren and Fortas agree with Brennan on the requirement that pornography must be “without redeeming social value.” Clark and White would be stricter. Harlan would leave local courts wider discretion. Stewart would prosecute only “hard core” material. Douglas and Black would allow complete license. This is as close as the justices could come to agreement.

Clark issued a scathing denunciation of Fanny Hill: “Though I am not known as a purist—or a shrinking violet—this book has been too much for me.” He couldn’t see the novel as a work of art and took sharp issue with Douglas on whether obscenity can be proved to incite sex crimes and other misconduct. Clark said the overwhelming majority of law officers, social workers, and clergymen see such danger (see editorial, “The Forgotten Child,” March 18, 1966 issue, page 24) and that in view of these dangers to society, he would outlaw all obscenity, with or without literary merit.

Another point that emerged: a bookseller with a rack full of paperbacks featuring cover pictures of nude girls being whipped or otherwise sexually abused knows what he’s selling, even though he hasn’t read all the books. In jurisprudence this is called scienter—does the defendant have reason to know he is violating the law? The court had little trouble deciding that bookdealer Mishkin knew he was handling pornography. It also decided that material on whipping, masochism, sadism, and other bizarre practices is not only disgusting to normal groups but also designed to arouse prurient desire among special groups of deviates to whom it is directed. Thus its intent renders it obscene.

Intent will become a much more important test for obscenity than it was before. Lurid advertising may risk an obscenity conviction even though the product doesn’t live up to its billing. Significantly, one of the first prosecutions following the rulings came in Richmond, Virginia, where the proprietor of the Lee Art Theater may experience some difficulty contending that in showing the film The Erotic Touch of Hot Skin, he sought an audience interested in cinema art rather than titillation.

While the “redeeming social value” standard may give prosecutors trouble with books like Fanny Hill, it shouldn’t hinder cases against the torrent of cheap paperbacks, which some hack writers grind out at the rate of two a month.

The jailing of Ralph Ginzburg, who was very confident the court would let him off, will sober many of his fellow publishers.

Personalia

Dr. L. Nelson Bell, 71, executive editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, was hospitalized March 27 with a fourth coronary attack in eighteen years. Five days later he was listed in satisfactory condition at an Asheville, North Carolina, hospital.

In Fullerton, California, the Rev. Albert C. Cohen and his wife said last month they were yielding to harassment in giving up a two-year-old Negro orphan they had adopted last year. Cohen, a white Protestant college chaplain, cited repeated telephone threats and the hostility of neighbors as the reason for their decision to return the youngster to an adoption agency.

Harold Lovestrand, 40, lay missionary under The Evangelical Alliance Mission, was released from prison in Indonesia after being held seven months without charge (see Oct. 8, 1965, issue, page 59).

Miscellany

The Securities and Exchange Commission charges the Rev. Yancey Anthony and officers of his tiny Collegiate Baptist Church in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, with fraudulently seeking to sell $14.5 million worth of unregistered bonds.

A new tax law for persons over 72 who are not under Social Security provides benefits of $35 per month for individuals, $52.50 for couples. It affects many ministers who retired before 1955, when Social Security was extended to cover clergymen.

Florida’s Stetson University, related to the Southern Baptist Convention, rushed in where some SBC angels have feared to tread by accepting a $501,926 federal grant for a science building. Federal aid is under intensive study within the denomination, which has traditionally opposed it.

Four Chicago area seminaries—McCormick (United Presbyterian), Chicago (United Church of Christ), Garret (Methodist), and Seabury-Western (Episcopal)—will pool faculty and library resources under a Chicago Institute for Advanced Theological Studies. Roman Catholics are pondering participation.

Minnesota’s Supreme Court upheld the legality of the 1963 merger of the Lutheran Free Church into The American Lutheran Church. Dissidents who held that the merger violated the church constitution and led to deviation from literal interpretation of the Bible were prohibited from using the “Lutheran Free Church” title.

The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada met in Toronto last month and adopted its first constitution. Membership is on a personal basis, rather than by denominations. The interchurch group aims to stress evangelism by both ministers and laymen.

Protestant, Roman Catholic, and other relief agencies in India established a Joint Food Development Organization after a three-day meeting (see April 1 issue, page 52). Under it, teams of technicians will work for basic agricultural improvements in soil, irrigation, fertilizer, machinery, and education.

The city government in Nazareth, Israel, fell apart last month. Mayor Abdul Zuabi, third-party councilman backed by Communists, said seven non-Communist councilmen would not cooperate with the seven Reds in handling a $1 million municipal debt (see Dec. 17, 1965, issue, page 35).

Roman Catholic refugees in Uganda report that government troops in Southern Sudan fired on farmers near Okaru Junior Seminary, killing three, and then burned the seminary.

The government of Burma reportedly has asked foreign missionaries who entered the country after 1948 to leave by the end of this year.

Andrew W. Blackwood

Dr. Andrew W. Blackwood, 83, dean of American homileticians, died last month in Lakeland, Florida.

Blackwood, a Presbyterian minister, wrote nearly two dozen books. He was professor of homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary for two decades and head of the school’s practical department for fifteen of those years. He also taught for a time at Temple University.

A contributing editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY since its inception in 1956, Blackwood contributed to the magazine’s “Ministers Workshop” feature for two years.

“The greatest theological event in the Western Hemisphere in our times.” Thus the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C. S. C., president of the University of Notre Dame, acclaimed the International Conference on the Theological Issues of Vatican II, held on the South Bend, Indiana, campus March 20–26.

There leading Catholic theologians who had worked on the constitutions, decrees, and declarations of the recently concluded Second Vatican Council met with 350 foremost Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish theologians to study the meaning of the council’s final statements. Simultaneous translation of major addresses into French and German (by United Nations translators) was provided for European scholars.

The tone of the conference was that of the “open door” Catholicism that emerged triumphant (but not triumphalistic) at the council.

The council’s most important document was Lumen Gentium, the Constitution on the Church, and the conference used nearly two days and several of the best theologians to discuss its eight chapters.

Canon Charles Moeller, recently appointed undersecretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office), said council fathers had refused to identify the institutional Catholic Church with the Mystical Body of Christ. Two words repeatedly described as the most important in the whole document define the Church as a society that “subsists in” rather than “is” the Roman Catholic Church. This subtlety makes possible the full-fledged entry of Catholicism into the mainstream of the ecumenical movement, an entry that was clearly evident at Notre Dame.

Catholic Boom, Protestant Spasm

While Vatican II produces a “theological boom” for Roman Catholics, Protestantism enters a theological slump, in the view of Dr. Albert C. Outler, a Methodist leader at the Notre Dame theological conference.

In the “aftermath of a time of titans,” he said, Protestants have the “death of God hullabaloo,” which is “a noisy spasm of theological colic.” Outler also suggested Protestants have reached the end of sola scriptura as their authority. The Church, he said, has become the matrix of truth as well as redemption.

Marked proof of the tremendous variety within Catholicism today emerged in discussion of the people of God and the hierarchical structures of the Church. The well-known French Dominican Yves Congar stressed the recovery of a more dynamic view of the Church as the elect people of God and gradual elimination of a view with juridical overtones. In contrast, Bishop Carlo Colombo of Italy provoked widespread reaction with his somewhat wooden, traditional exposition of the hierarchical offices of priest, bishop, and pope as relatively independent from the people of God.

Youthful Lutheran George A. Lindbeck, a Yale professor, criticized “irresponsible use of Scripture” in treatment of episcopacy and primacy and of the Virgin Mary. He said there were better Catholic ways of discussing many Vatican Council topics.

Among the most moving and “Protestant” papers were one on the laity by Congar and one on holiness in the Church by Bernard Häring. German Redemptorist who is a visiting professor of theology at Brown University. Vatican II has been called the council of the laity because it clearly emphasized that the laity as the people of God is, above all, the Church. “I am not saying this because I am speaking in the United States,” Congar said. “I am saying it because it is true.”

The open revolt against legalism is a dominant characteristic of the young American Catholic today. Häring said holiness stems from the Holy Spirit, who delivers men from a false legalism and allows a “dangerous” variety of charismatic gifts: a legalistic stress on ascetic self-perfection is less dangerous only because it is “close to the graveyard.” Several theologians protested that it is hard for laymen to appreciate such an emphasis on love, grace, and the Holy Spirit when they are regularly confronted with a whole battery of laws.

The conference frequently echoed the clash between traditional Greek philosophical categories and a revival of biblical categories, as in the debate over static dogmatic absolutes and the relativism of history and sociology, and over the opposition of an ascetic otherworldliness to a “passionate devotion to this world.” Secularization was welcomed as a great opportunity for Christianity rather than a threat. The Syllabus of Errors mentality of Pius IX is clearly a thing of the past.

On revelation, the Abbot of Downside, Christopher Butler, said it is a combination of word and deed. Similarly, Passionist Father Barnabas Ahern said that “the I-and-Thou dialogue of living faith … means more than merely intellectual assent to doctrinal truth.” Insisting on the “truly historical value of the saving realities of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection,” he also said “the history of Jesus, like salvation history in the Old Testament, differs from history in the modern sense of the word.”

He described biblical faith as “the people of God responding to his voice with the self-committal of living faith,” and he proposed “soteriological inerrancy” to avoid defining biblical inerrancy in a merely negative way.

Dr. Paul Minear of Yale made a deep impression by pleading for a concept of divine revelation and inerrancy that stressed more “the life-giving act of God” than the “objectified concept.” Minear’s “Protestant view” of the revelation schema referred to the “intricate complex of problems” centering in what he called the “quadrilateral” of revelation, Scripture, tradition, and the magisterium.

Minear criticized Vatican II for encouraging “an accent on the words rather than the life-giving fellowship with God on the ‘deposit’ of Jesus’ teaching rather than the living presence of the Crucified Lord.” His questions focused on what one listener called the danger of “creedless spirituality.” Minear replied he would reject both the Scylla of non-verbal spirituality and the Charybdis of highly verbal dogmatics, but his suggestion that “faith conveys its own certitude and is not based on a prior certainty” seemed not to eliminate a non-verbal spirituality.

The man responsible for much of the work on Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the Rev. Godfrey Diekmann of the Benedictine Major Seminary, Collegeville, Minnesota, discussed possibilities for joint celebration of the Eucharist with non-Catholic Christians. Although Diekmann maintains that the sacrament is a sign of unity achieved, several other Roman Catholics said that in the New Testament it is also a means of achieving united public declaration of a shared faith. Diekmann replied that central questions of the visibility of the Church and ecclesiastical orders also are crucially involved.

A full house greeted the Rev. John Courtney Murray, S. J., of Woodstock (Maryland) College, as he discussed the Declaration on Religious Freedom. Seeming tired and worn out from his years of work and suffering for this cause, Murray lamented that the church took a step forward that had long ago been taken by the rest of the civilized world. In a press conference, he said the next step will be freedom within the church, especially for priests whose vows of obedience have been abused by the hierarchy.

German Jesuit Karl Rahner, probably the most widely respected Roman theologian, spoke of the impact that “a pluralistic, scientific, technically-oriented society” will make on future Christian theology. Unless the Church wants to become a “historical relic of the sociological past,” Rahner said, it must formulate a theology of atheism, a Christology that embraces all humanity, and an ecclesiology that “aims at union and not at a more and more subtle justification of the separation of the churches.”

The conference concluded with an analysis of the impact of Vatican II on the theologies of various Christian traditions. The Rev. John Meyendorff of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary gave a speech that bristled with the hurt of nine centuries of separation, but was also able to conclude that “Vatican II has begun a new era.”

The Notre Dame conference brought together the greatest “constellation of theologians” America has ever seen. To confront the modern world, Roman Catholicism unquestionably has let in the fresh air of biblical thought. At the same time it feels the impact of historical relativism. If it does not do so already, Catholicism will soon contain almost as broad a spectrum of theological outlook as Protestantism. The result for the ecumenical movement will clearly be increasing cooperation and perhaps even union.

Conference Sidelights

Anglican Bishop John Robinson dropped in on Notre Dame’s big theological conclave last month. The controversial churchman had no official part on the program but made an unscheduled appearance and brought a brief greeting.

The conference itself got under way with the announcement that Notre Dame plans to establish a new graduate school of theology and a new institute for advanced religious studies.

The conference was held in the university’s newly opened Center for Continuing Education, built with a grant of $1,543,000 from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Twenty top religious scholars were awarded honorary doctorates in a special ceremony.

Bishop Robinson Veers

In a panel confrontation with American theologians at Wabash College last month, Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson yawed and rolled on several facets of his “new theology.” Robinson indicated he has now abandoned the term “ground of being” as too subject to misunderstanding. He said he believes in supernaturalism after all (although he still proceeded to define this largely in terms of Tillich’s antisupernatural transcendence!).

On the panel with the controversial English bishop, author of the best-selling Honest to God, were Professor J. V. Langmead Casserly of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary; Professor David H. Kelsey of Yale Divinity School; Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY; and Professor Martin E. Marty of Chicago Divinity School, moderator.

“It would be helpful if you would define supernaturalism the way other people do,” Dr. Langmead Casserly counseled Robinson. In another appearance on the Crawfordsville, Indiana, campus, Robinson said he is not committed to Tillich’s ontology: “on the whole I’m veering away from it.”

Henry expressed “great relief” that Robinson now avoids the “ground of being” formulation, and asked whether in abandoning this notion the bishop “now returns to the supernatural, self-revealed God of the Bible, or has some other alternative to offer as the object of Christian worship.”

In a luncheon with Episcopal clergymen, Bishop Robinson said that while he considers the “death of God” phenomenon “a bubble that will soon burst,” he thinks “this is the kind of protest we should listen to.” But he said Altizer’s view is “heretical, and difficult to square with anything I find in the New Testament.”

The bishop was less ambivalent when he turned from theology to interpret ecumenical trends in Britain. Ecumenical conversations are in the last phase before intercommunion between Anglicans and Methodists, he reported.

The method of union is still debatable, Robinson said, and none will be perfect. Enthusiasm has now passed from “top ecumaniacs” to the level of the pew, hastened by the conviction that “if we don’t live together we shall hang separately.”

“There’s going to be a hell of a row from a lot of people if things get held up,” he said.

Robinson stressed the “remarkable change from a generation ago when two sides existed in the Church of England, one looking hopefully toward Roman Catholics and the other toward Protestants.” With the exception of Baptists, he said, there is “a real chance of further merger in Britain in the next generation and a new open front toward the Roman Catholics.”

Asked about Anglican “establishment” in England, he remarked that “establishment is a bastion we should not batter against, but sooner or later it will fall.” Robinson added that he does not want to see “disestablishment for its own sake” and “dreads the Church of England becoming a sect,” but thinks a strategic stance similar to that of the Church of Scotland would not be unwelcome.

The “new development,” Robinson reported, is that “for the first time the real opposition to union is being led by the low church rather than the high church,” with evangelicals in the ecumenical movement and conservatives in the free churches standing together against episcopacy.

“This won’t stop it going through,” he said, and “it won’t seriously split the Church of England, but it may leave divisions in its wake.”

Robinson was highly critical of the reading habits of his fellow British clergymen. “On the whole the clergy of the Church of England do not read, and have not read since they left theological college, and are dying on their feet.” He conceded, however, that “some real dialogue” is going on.

Robinson expressed real doubt that the “new Reformation” will be “born in song or whether we shall be a ‘hymnsinging generation’ at all. We are in a transient culture, and we shouldn’t expect new hymns to last for a century. It will be enough if they last for a few years.”

American theologians generally found Robinson disappointingly ambivalent and evasive of “long term” responses, and his continuing failure to state his criterion of religious truth raised the question whether, as Langmead Casserly put it, “the Bishop had done his homework.”

But Robinson replayed his now routine remarks: “So much of our God-language has become irrelevant to the deep chords of our spirit that we must strive to make these words become resonant again with depth of meaning.”

CARL F. H. HENRY

In months ahead CHRISTIANITY TODAY will strengthen its editorial reserves by several significant staff additions.

Coming in August as editorial assistant is Dr. Robert L. Cleath, professor of English at California State Polytechnic College in San Luis Obispo. Dr. Cleath holds his Ph.D. in speech from the University of Washington in Seattle. He has also taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Westmont College, and Whitworth College. He holds the B.A. degree from Northwestern Schools and the M.A. from the University of Oregon. A lifelong Presbyterian, he was graduated from San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Two distinguished writers will spend most of the month of June with us, serving as editorial associates during part of our staff vacation period.

One is Dr. George S. Bird, chairman of the Graduate Division of the School of Journalism at Syracuse University. Dr. Bird is a specialist in communications theory and has written four books, numerous articles, and a score of monographs. A revised edition of his Modern Article Writing and Editing is soon to appear.

During the same period Dr. Leon Morris, author of several important theological works, will also join us. An Anglican churchman, he is the well-known principal of Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia.

Rome And Freedom

Freedom Today: Theological Meditations, by Hans Küng (Sheed and Ward, 1966, 176 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

One would have to do a lot of reading of both liberal and evangelical writings to find, in the present state of theology, as satisfying a book as this of Hans Küng. I dare say that Küng, a Roman Catholic professor of theology at the University of Tübingen, comes closer to clarifying the meaning of Christian freedom than most authors of either liberal or evangelical persuasion. He struggles with the concept of freedom as expressed in the biblical assertion that “for freedom did Christ set us free.”

Küng illustrates true Christian freedom in a delightful essay on Sir Thomas More. He shows that More, in his whole life—and death—demonstrated that a saint who is freed by Christ is, as a saint, free to live and work in the secular world. He then shows that the Church is the community of those who live in freedom, for it is for freedom that the Church has been set free by Christ. But if the Church is the community of the free, then its theology must also be a theology of freedom, and a theology of freedom can only arise from and be carried forward by theologians who are free to develop such a theology.

The chapter entitled “Freedom of Theology” is one of the finest in a very fine book. In it Küng suggests that the churches of the Reformation—Calvinist, Lutheran, and Free—which often assert that only they hold to ecclesia semper reformanda, do in fact often act as if the Reformation of the Church happened once and for all time. They also sometimes insist that the Roman Catholic Church does not change, but this, asserts Küng, is simply contrary to history and to contemporary fact. “Which theology is going in the long run to be representative of the Church?” Küng answers, “Not the one that claims to be specially modern. Nor the one that claims to be specially traditional. But the one that is backed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself … that theoiogia, in fact, which speaks of God only insofar as it hears his Word and responds to his Word, orientated to it and measured by it.”

In this chapter Küng says many interesting things. With one eye on some dead-weight conservatives in his own church, and the other on some Protestants who join them and say that the Roman Catholic Church does not change (at least, not for the better) and who take tactical refuge in the contention that any theological movement within the Catholic Church occurs only on the periphery—with his eyes on these two segments, Küng asserts that the current renewal and reform in his church is proof that both are wrong. In this chapter he also suggests that a better word than “infallible”—as it relates to the church and the pope—may be found, one that will express “at once the strictly binding character and the profoundly fragmentary character of the Church’s formulations of the Faith.… There is a vast work to be done here by Catholic and Protestant theology.”

Küng has studied Karl Barth. How much has he been influenced by Barth? Who can tell with any exactitude? In any event, in a significant chapter on “The Freedom of Religions,” in which he makes extended appeal to the Bible, Küng discusses Christian universalism. Here one is reminded both of Barth and, more significantly, of many often ignored elements of biblical teaching. Because of what God has done for the whole world in Christ, the freedom wrought by Christ on behalf of the whole world extends also to the non-Christian religions and their adherents. Küng denies that there is no salvation, and no grace of God, outside the Church. The whole question of the truth and validity of the world’s religions must be raised, he says, not from the perspective of the Church, but from the perspective of what God has done for the world of men—though they may not know it—in Christ.

Küng advocates no cheap universalism; but he recognizes a dimension of the freedom of the work and grace of God in Christ that is not bound by the historical limitations of the reality and ministrations of the Church. The Church, as the community of those set free by Christ for service to the world, does not constitute the boundaries of the freedom of God in Christ for the world. There is a kind of cheap universalism that both Küng and Protestant evangelicals necessarily disclaim; yet it will scarcely be overcome by a disclaimer that derives its force from a reduction of the objective work of God in Christ that makes its efficacy ultimately dependent, in Arminian fashion, on subjective individual response.

This book and its author demonstrate the new wind of freedom that is blowing through Roman Catholicism; the free spirit in which Küng writes keeps him from being either a belligerent or a sniveling apologist for his faith. The book and its author also demonstrate that the Church is a community of free men, called to a free pursuit of a theology of freedom—one in which Roman Catholics and Protestants have some common problems and tasks.

Neither superficial nor moralistic, this is theological writing that is devotional, and yet is theology indeed.

JAMES DAANE

Notoriously Difficult

The Anglican Hymn-Book (Church Society, 1965, 8s. 6d. [words only]), is reviewed by J. M. R. Drummond, music master at Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, Sussex, England.

This book is described in the preface as the first “completely new hymn-book” for use in the Church of England to have appeared for some years. It is, therefore, a special attempt to produce a hymn-book entirely modern in both conception and design. This does not mean that traditional material is excluded—indeed, it forms the foundation of the book. It has, however, enabled the compilers to draw freely from varied sources, and several good hymns are included as a result, notably some attractive folksong melodies and carols and some lesser-known hymns by famous writers like John Newton and Isaac Watts. There are also several new hymns by present-day composers, as well as numerous arrangements of and descants to old ones. Despite some excellent contributions, I found these the least satisfactory aspect of the book, with the ghost of Victorian hymnody all too often lurking in the background.

Many of the new tunes achieve only an appearance of modernity by the inclusion of some ill-chosen discords and angularities in the part-writing, and several of the descants and arrangements resort to archaisms like the flattened seventh (see R. Sinton’s descant to hymn 160), which sounds a bit self-conscious when fitted to traditional tunes.

There is a wide selection of the more familiar hymns. The words of the 663

hymns are generally good, and care has been taken to avoid ecclesiastical fulsomeness: the last verse of “Alleluia, sing to Jesus” has been replaced by a repeat of the first verse, presumably for doctrinal reasons. Evangelical clichés have not been so rigorously excluded, however, and the less inspired efforts of such writers as Frances Ridley Havergal have occasionally crept in.

Some fine Victorian hymns have been included, but attempts to improve some of them harmonically are less welcome. The original version of Dykes’s “Dies Dominica” may appear unadventurous, but its modulations lose much of their directness in Sheldon’s more wordy version. It is also regrettable that we cannot have the authentic version of Gibbons’s wonderful Song 13, and something else instead of “Innsbruck New,” which is an affront to the dignity of “Innsbruck Old”! However, we are given several fine examples of chorale harmonizations by Bach, which should please discriminating choir masters! The only serious omission is in plainsong melodies (where is “Jesu, dulcis memoria”?).

The final section of the book contains a selection of choral amens and numerous indexes, including a list of Scripture references and a particularly valuable metrical index that gives the first line of each tune as well as its name. For those who want to know whether “Old Commons” would fit the same words as “Oswald’s Tree,” this will save a lot of time and trouble.

This book merits serious consideration by all those in search of a new hymn-book, and should amply meet the needs of most congregations. Over and above the traditional material, there is much that will provide new scope for adventurous choirs and not too conservative congregations. Occasionally, the magic word “modern” has subverted contemporary composers and arrangers

into rather self-conscious and fruitless intricacies of harmony and rhythm that will, I fear, render their work too complicated for congregational use. But writing music for church is a notoriously difficult task, and this book certainly contains some new successes in this field as well as a great deal that has already established its right to a place in the Anglican hymn-book.

J. M. R. DRUMMOND

It’S Been A Long, Long Time

Amazing Grace, by Robert Drake (Chilton Books, 1965, 156 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Roderick Jellema, assistant professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park.

Anyone looking for a really good piece of fiction among the thousands of titles streaming from the presses gets to feel like a boy at a muddy rapids looking for a trout among rushing schools of spawning bullheads. It is too much for the eyes. If the thing he is looking for is surprisingly there, he is almost certain to miss it. Unlike the boy, however, the reader can come back, prompted by the reports of other readers, and still find what he sought.

1965 produced such a book: Robert Drake’s Amazing Grace. Those of us who missed it ought to go back. It is still available. And it is the best piece of fiction to come out of evangelical vision, not just in 1965, but in a long, long time.

Talking about “religious literature” is dangerous; it is like talking about “political literature” or “therapeutic literature.” That noun literature bristles with anger at the encroachment of any adjective that would modify it. To modify, after all, is to alter, to limit. A modified literature is less than literature as surely as the social gospel is less than the Gospel or a Salvationist church is less than the Church.

Drake’s book is not “religious literature” in that popular and limiting sense. Still, it is religiously oriented, religious in spirit and in its concerns. And it is literature. It is not contrived to be in the service of something else. It is written naturally and unself-consciously out of a sensibility that is essentially Christian. In our secular society, with religion pushed off into a separate compartment, such poise is rare.

As a young professor of English (Tennessee) and a committed Christian, Drake knows the problem of harmonizing the literary and the religious for a world which holds them apart. He is careful not to violate either for the sake of the other.

Amazing Grace does not capture its harmony with formula or calculation. The book’s most impressive device is its honest simplicity. With unabashed warmth and nostalgia, Drake recreates the scenes and thoughts of a boy growing up in a close Methodist county in western Tennessee. The structure is casual. The eighteen sections (tales and sketches—not quite short stories and not quite novel-chapters) can be read independently. But they do at the same time fuse into a cumulative and subtle unity that increases the simple force of the book.

Within this simple format, Drake focuses on the boy’s concern with the meanings of things from within his simple, evangelical outlook. Woodville, Tennessee, loses its fundamentalist oddity because Drake can transform it into something downright normal. Unity is achieved by the dramatic repetition, at different stages of the boy’s growth, of words from plain old Methodist hymns. It is achieved more subtly by the tones of the boy’s voice as he tries to live with the words. He sounds a little like Huck Finn and a little like Holden Caulfield because he is a boy-narrator in the same tradition. But his voice is his own. And his situation is unique: he is not in quest of a community or a father, but is sensitively alive to the fact that he has a community and a father—that he has, in fact, in some growing sense, two of each of them.

Everything in the book works by quiet tones, innocent viewpoint, understatement, deceptive simplicity. There are no moments of high-pitched despair or exultation, no outbursts of eloquence, no grand encounters. Drake’s tender sketches and muted tones create their own kind of power.

Amazing Grace is too good to talk about in the abstract. It is finally the boy who must promote the book. Here he is, for example, writing about the steel engravings that illustrate a fierce and loveless Bible story book:

Whoever made the pictures seemed to be real fond of showing angels coming down to straighten people out and make them mind, like the one that was leading Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.… You could tell how he felt about it all by the way he looked.… He just looked like he was gwine where he gwine, as my nurse Louella used to say.

And as for the author of the same book,

Somehow I felt like she wouldn’t ever have suffered anybody to come unto her, unless it had been her duty, and then she would have looked just like that angel with Adam and Eve.

Such tones are an excellent vehicle for Drake’s theme: the spiritual growth of a boy through and beyond his quandary about “those hymns where you had to low-rate yourself and say you were a worm” to a ripened spiritual awareness of the grace of God, “always ready to reach out for you and bring you finally to Himself, not for any reason, but simply because it was His good pleasure.”

This is a rare little book: genuinely human, warm and simple, almost brilliant, unself-consciously Christian.

RODERICK JELLEMA

All In One

Exploring Evangelism, by Mendell Taylor (Beacon Hill, 1964, 620 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Kenneth L. Chafin, professor of evangelism. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.

Although this book is not a major work in evangelism, it has a number of commendable aspects. First, it is the product of a denomination—the Church of the Nazarene—that believes in evangelism and has created a denominational structure to aid and encourage the churches in the work of evangelism.

Secondly, the book bases its understanding of the nature of evangelism on the biblical revelation concerning the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ and the need for a response of faith.

Thirdly, it brings together an amazing amount of helpful factual material on the history of evangelism. True to his purpose of tracing evangelism through the centuries, the author begins at A.D. 100 and concludes with twentieth-century America. Parts one and six are an introduction to evangelism and theology and to the principles of evangelism. The center four parts are history. Mendell Taylor is a distinguished professor of church history in his denomination, and the historical sections, especially the one on the Reformation, are the best parts of his book. He attempts to arrange the historical periods around evangelistic methods (Finney is treated under “cooperative evangelism,” Moody under “team evangelism,” and Graham under “evangelistic association evangelism”) but understandably seems uncomfortable with this rather wooden method of labeling men and movements.

Fourthly, the author is an evangelical. In a day when some are embarrassed at any discussion of evangelism that does not have a sociological orientation, it is good to be reminded that the Gospel still speaks to the deepest needs of persons.

The book has a number of problems. First, the great amount of material collected from many sources often lacks unity. One gets the impression that the author failed either to evaluate the material or to relate it.

Secondly, Taylor’s preoccupation with finding an unbroken chain of persons or movements that have had the evangelical understanding of evangelism causes him to include some rather questionable movements and to omit others that have been significant in the history of the Church.

Thirdly, very little fresh material is presented. This is an excellent reference and resource book, but the person who has even a small library in this field will find the only advantage of this work to be that it is all in one volume.

Fourthly, the book shows little awareness of the contemporary crisis in evangelism. Taylor did not intend the book to be merely an academic history of evangelism. He gives his objective as: “May the Lord of the harvest make each reader a fruitful reaper in a world where the fields are ripe.” The book would have been strengthened immeasurably had he written with the awareness that the evangelical understanding of evangelism in our day has many obstacles to hurdle, both inside and outside the Church.

In spite of these shortcomings, however, anyone who buys this book will find himself going to it for information again and again.

KENNETH L. CHAFIN

Weighty Book

The Church’s Educational Ministry: A Curriculum Plan, by the Cooperative Curriculum Project, Ray L. Henthorne, chairman (Bethany, 1965, 880 pp., $18.75), is reviewed by Frank E. Gaebelein, co-editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This massive volume weighing 3½ pounds is a result of years of study on the part of the Cooperative Curriculum Project, an interdenominational effort in which the following groups participated: Advent Christian Church, African Methodist Episcopal Church, American Baptist Convention, Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ), Church of the Brethren, Church of God, Church of the Nazarene, Cumberland Presbyterian Church, The Evangelical United Brethren Church, Mennonite Church, The Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church in Canada, Presbyterian Church in the U. S., The Protestant Episcopal Church, Southern Baptist Convention, United Church of Canada, and the National Council of Churches. The administrative committee was headed by the Rev. Ray L. Henthorne of the Disciples of Christ and contained members from the participating groups. A total of 125 persons were engaged during the four years of the project.

This is clearly a resource book, not an outline of any particular course of study, and it should be so judged. It applies itself to principles and seeks unifying factors in planning programs of Christian education in church schools. What the committee has produced after long study is a tool that should help and interest many Christian educators.

The broad spread of theological conviction represented in the cooperating groups is necessarily reflected in the volume. In certain disputed areas of theology and scholarship, the book is neutral or silent. Some may find it at various points lacking in doctrinal explicitness. On the other hand, its avoidance of dogmatism allows room for the expression of theological distinctives by the particular groups that will use it as a help in developing their own programs of Christian education. Therefore, one should not seek in this volume strong denominational distinctives. It makes little use of technical theological and educational terminology and is thus well within the layman’s comprehension.

As a source for curriculum planners at various levels in the churches, the work represents a worthy effort to present principles of Christian education.

The book is well printed and attractively bound. The price, while very high, probably reflects the restricted circulation of a volume of this kind.

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN

Toward Rationalism?

The Religion of Israel, by Henry Renckens, S. J. (Sheed and Ward, 1966, 370 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by J. Barton Payne, professor of Old Testament, Graduate School of Theology, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

The book jacket of The Religion of Israel praises it for “insights of the biblical theologian.” The author himself demurs, because he prefers to emphasize Israel’s institutions and practices (p. 50). But the blurb is the one to believe. In Protestant circles at least, these historical phenomena are normally included within Old Testament theology; and Renckens reiterates his significant belief that Israel’s religion possesses “authenticity” (pp. 49, 305) as “revealed” and “unique” (pp. 10, 24, 53, and so on) and that the Old Testament is “standard or canonical” and represents what God said in the past (pp. vi. 49, 241). Such a stance is what the Catholic scholars De Vaux and Dulles sought a year ago to preserve for Old Testament theology, in opposition to the merely historically descriptive definition of Krister Stendahl, at the 100th meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (see The Bible in Modern Scholarship, ed. by J. Philip Hyatt, pp. 210–16). The Jesuit Renckens’s Religion of Israel appears to say more about normative revelation than does the liberal Protestant’s biblical theology.

But while Renckens’s study is “aimed at believers” as “an appeal to our faith” (pp. 3, 11), it also demonstrates the negative side of Rome’s modern sacrifices to harmonize profession and practice. Let me explain. Catholicism previously professed two bases of authority, tradition and Scripture, but in practice it tended to disregard the latter. Now we see a change, as lay Bible reading is advocated and Roman professionals are making serious contributions to biblical scholarship; witness this author’s penetrating sections on monotheism and the character of God (pp. 33, 127), the centrality of the covenant (pp. 67–71, 183–86), and the development of “church” within Israel (pp. 39, 223–26, 309–312)—disregarding careless Arabic and Hebrew (pp. 80, 84, 86, 87, 220, 248).

Yet this harmonizing has been achieved through a downgrading of theoretical profession as well as an upgrading of practice. Thus while evangelicals have rejoiced in Rome’s retreat from certain traditions, whether Latin liturgy or Mariolatry, we are given pause by its similar withdrawal from former professions of biblical commitment. John McKenzie. first Catholic scholar to be elected president of the Society of Biblical Literature, has advertised his biblical criticism, opposing “theologians who have tried to tell … others how to do their work” and concluding simply that “intellectual liberty … is limited by the truth as the scholar perceives it” (Myths and Realities, p. 10); this with a nihil obstat! Little wonder that Renckens feels free to disparage “improbable things” in Scripture, such as its view of life after death (pp. 12, 90), and to espouse JE, D, and P as separate strata of religion, each of which has read its own understandings back into Moses (pp. 44–46, 68). One wonders, however, whether, if “scholarly perception” is made the ultimate criterion. Altizer and Van Buren could not rate a nihil obstat too.

Rome’s ecumenical Bible study thus arises from its increasing abandonment of both tradition and Scripture in favor of this third rationalistic alternative, cf. liberal Judaism and Protestantism. But Rome is tardier. Renckens, for example, still combines sections of JE, D, and P into one chapter entitled “Patriarchs.” Evangelicals can therefore maintain commitment to Genesis, believe that the whole is true, and reap positive insights from Renckens’s “revealed” Religion of Israel.

J. BARTON PAYNE

715 Or 728?

The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (New, Revised Edition), by Edwin R. Thiele (Eerdmans, 1965, 232 pp., $6), is reviewed by Gleason L. Archer, professor and chairman, Old Testament division, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

When this study of the chronology of the Divided Kingdom of Israel was first published in 1951 by this outstanding Seventh-Day Adventist scholar, it was almost immediately recognized to be the most adequate treatment of the subject yet produced. One proof of its wide acceptance is the frequency with which it is referred to by writers of varied persuasion, both liberal and conservative. Another is the fact that a second, revised edition has been published to meet the continuing demand of the public. The revision was so minor, incidentally, that the author himself makes no mention of it in his introduction. He says only, “No evidence has been forthcoming that has given me cause to change my views on any item of major importance.”

It is interesting to note that Dr. Thiele assumes a militantly defensive posture in this “Preface to the Second Edition.” Mentioning that both left-wing liberals and some right-wing conservatives have condemned portions of his work, he explains that they both represent “an a priori bias.” “The common factor in both these categories,” he says, is a prejudgment of the questions at issue. Rather than permitting truth to be determined by the results of objective investigation, precursory judgment is pronounced. Such, however, is not the attitude of true scholarship in its finest form, nor is it in accord with sound principles of religious faith and practice” (pp. xii, xiii). Perhaps this very severe judgment upon all and sundry critics of his work may indicate a hyper-defensiveness, stemming from the fact that his position is basically vulnerable. This reviewer, at any rate, must risk incurring the charge of bias, prejudgment, and lack of scholarship by venturing to raise some questions about some important details in what is otherwise a very fine and solid piece of work.

The most questionable portion of this book has to do with the chronology of King Hezekiah. Thiele holds to 715 as the date when his reign began, even though Second Kings 18:1, 2 affirms that his rule began in the third year of King Hoshea of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Thiele rightly dates Hoshea’s reign as beginning in 732/1, and this would point to 728 as the beginning of Hezekiah’s reign, a good thirteen years before 715. Again, Second Kings 18:9, 10 states that Shalmaneser of Assyria began his siege of Samaria in the fourth year of Hezekiah, and captured it in his sixth year. Since Samaria fell in 722 (as Thiele himself proves in chapter 7), this means that Hezekiah began in 728. But to this date Thiele objects that Second Kings 18:13 states that Sennacherib invaded Judah in the “fourteenth year” of Hezekiah’s reign; and since the Assyrian invasion is firmly datable in 701, this would point to 715 as the commencement of his rule. Unless we resort to the rather improbable explanation that the “fourteen” refers to the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s second reign (i.e., the extra fifteen years granted him on the occasion of his near-fatal illness—Second Kings 20:6), we are left with a clear contradiction between this verse and the other passages cited above, which unmistakably point to 728.

Thiele’s solution to this contradiction is to conclude that the Hebrew historian committed an error. “He was a man who was deeply concerned about truth but who did not understand all the truth” (p. 140). In other words, we have here a demonstrable error in the original autograph of Holy Scripture; but if this is so, we are compelled to surrender belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, and are left with all the grave consequences ensuing from a partially erroneous Bible. Fortunately there is a much simpler solution, which the author does not even mention or discuss. That is to say, in the original spelling of the numerals fourteen and twenty-four in Hebrew, a scribal error in copying a single letter (substituting a he for a mem) would cause “twenty-four” to become “fourteen.” If we accept this textual emendation, there is no difficulty in reconciling this statement with the rest of the data in Second Kings. If the twenty-fourth year (according to the emended reading just suggested) is reckoned from 725, the year of the death of his father Ahaz (with whom he was co-regent for three years—cf. Second Chronicles 27:1, 8), the result is 701 B.C., the date of Sennacherib’s invasion.

To support the 715 commencement of Hezekiah’s reign, Thiele has to assume other errors in connection with the reign of Hezekiah’s father, Ahaz. Thus, he rejects the statement of Second Kings 17:1 that Hoshea of Samaria began his rule in the twelfth year of Ahaz (p. 120), since this would involve a twelve-year co-regency with his father Jotham. But actually, if Hoshea’s reign began in 732, and this year was both the twelfth year of Ahaz (2 Kings 17:1) and the twentieth year of Jotham (2 Kings 15:30), the co-regency would amount to only seven or eight years, for Jotham ceased ruling in 736/5, and apparently lived on in retirement until 732. If he began as co-regent with his father, Uzziah, in 751 (as Thiele maintains), then Jotham’s sixteen years (2 Kings 17:1) of rule ran from 751 to 736/5, and Ahaz began as co-regent with Jotham in 743. Since Ahaz reigned for sixteen years, this means that he ended his active career in 728/7, although he lived on for three more years (cf. 2 Kings 18:1), until 725. By this interpretation all the data can be harmonized, and there is no need to assume that any of the statements made in Second Kings are erroneous, apart from the one point (2 Kings 18:13), that seems to require the textual emendation suggested above (and this is not chargeable, of course, to the original manuscript itself).

On the credit side, it should be pointed out that Thiele’s solution of the puzzling data about Pekah is very convincing and in harmony with all the facts recorded: that Pekah had set up a rival dynasty in Gilead back in 752 (for he reigned twenty years [2 Kings 15:27]) and spent his earlier years there (2 Kings 15:25) but did not succeed in overthrowing Menahem (752–742) or his successor Pekahiah, who ruled in Samaria, until 740/39. Hence it is accurate for Second Kings 15:27 to state that Pekah began his rule (i.e., as sole ruler of all Israel) in the fifty-second year of Uzziah, i.e. 739 B.C. It was only natural for Pekah to maintain that he had always been the only legitimate king of Israel, even from 752, once he had established himself as supreme over the whole realm. As for the date of the fall of Samaria, and the claim of King Sargon to have accomplished this feat in the first year of his reign, Thiele shows quite compellingly that the destruction of Samaria must have occurred in 722 B.C., and that Shalmaneser V deserved all the credit for this victory. It may well have been, however (although Dr. Thiele does not mention this possibility), that Sargon was the commanding general under Shalmaneser’s authority at the three-year siege of Samaria, and thus may have felt justified in claiming the glory for the achievement.

One final comment is in order concerning Thiele’s argument that Hezekiah’s Great Passover, to which worshipers came from such northern tribes as Asher, Manasseh, Ephraim, and Issachar (2 Chron. 30:11, 18), could scarcely have been held during the reign of Hoshea (say, in 725), who had sternly forbidden any such pilgrimage from his territories, especially when the returnees from Jerusalem are said to have destroyed the images and altars of the Northern Kingdom on their way home (2 Chron. 31:1). Thiele therefore prefers to date this event 715/4, after the fall of Samaria, when there was no longer any ruler over the Ten Tribes (p. 151). Yet he fails to mention the far greater difficulty of supposing that there were any significant number of North Israelite inhabitants left in the land after their extermination and exile by the Assyrian power in 722. It seems to this reviewer far more likely that the last-minute panic that must have gripped the hearts of the North Israelites as they saw the inexorable vise of Assyria closing in upon them may have rendered them especially open to Hezekiah’s invitation to worship at Jerusalem and to overthrow the idols and false sanctuaries in which they had vainly put their trust. Conditions in Hoshea’s dominions may have been so unsettled and confused that he was not able to maintain perfect control over all that his subjects cared to do along this line. More powerful evidence than this is necessary to demonstrate the fallibility of the scriptural record.

GLEASON L. ARCHER

Book Briefs

The Magnificent Defeat, by Frederick Beuchner (Seabury, 1966, 144 pp., $3.50). Devotional essays, by a man who can both think and write, on Christian surrender, the triumph of love, and the mystery and miracle of grace.

Documents of Lutheran Unity in America, by Richard C. Wolf (Fortress, 1966, 672 pp., $2.50). Documents that show the pursuit of unity among Lutheran churches in America between 1730 and 1965.

The Philosophy of Religion, by Thomas McPherson (Van Nostrand, 1965, 207 pp., $5.95). Essays for the scholar only.

Protestantism in America: A Narrative History (Revised Edition), by Jerald C. Brauer (Westminster, 1965, 320 pp., $3.95).

Glauben unci Verstehen, Vierter Band, by Rudolf Bultmann (Mohr [Allemagne, Germany], 1965, 198 pp., DM 18). Essays in which Bultmann continues to prove his “decision philosophy,” which is that human existence is historical existence, the key of which is “decision.”

Shaw and Christianity, by Anthony S. Abbott (Seabury, 1965, 228 pp., $4.95). Excessive in its admiration for Shaw’s oldhat liberalism, this book unintentionally makes Bultmann a dull late Victorian. Shaw is a sharp one. Excellent grist for the apologists’s mill.

The Lure of the Horizon: Poems of Aspiration and Vision, by Marion Gerard Gosselink (W. A. Wilde. 1965, 119 pp., $4.50). Conventional verse about “aspiration and vision,” somewhat stiff and mannered but mildly pleasant.

Henry VIII and the Lutherans: A Study in Anglo-Lutheran Relations from 1521 to 1547, by Neelak Serawlook Tjernagel (Concordia, 1965, 236 pp., $6.95).

Al-Anon Faces Alcoholism (Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters Inc., 1965, 285 pp., $4.50). A series of essays dealing with the fact that alcoholism is the problem not only of the alcoholic but also of those who live with him.

Religion and Politics in Burma, by Donald Eugene Smith (Princeton University, 1965, 350 pp., $7.50).

Modern Varieties of Judaism, by Joseph L. Blau (Columbia University, 1966, 217 pp., $6). Historical essays on Judaism in the last two centuries.

Paperbacks

Neo-Orthodoxy: An Evangelical Evaluation of Barthianism, by Charles Caldwell Ryrie (Moody, 1966, 64 pp., $.95). A flutterby treatment that quickly comes to the conclusion that “neo-orthodoxy is a theological hoax.” Recommended to all the theological despisers of Barth.

History of Church Music, by David P. Appleby (Moody, 1965, 192 pp., $1.95). Even more than the title suggests.

Two Confessions: The Westminster Confession of Faith and the Proposed Confession of 1967 Compared and Contrasted, by J. Marcellus Kik, Mariano Di Gangi, and J. Clyde Henry (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1966, 56 pp., $.50).

American Quakers Today, edited by Edwin B. Bronner (Friends World Committee, 1966, 111 pp., $1). A presentation of the uniting and divisive elements of the five groups of Friends.

A Hungry World, by Paul Simon (Concordia, 1966, 100 pp., $1). The author, an Illinois state senator, speaks as a Christian about the poor and hungry.

Formative Ideas in American Education: From the Colonial Period to the Present, by V. T. Thayer (Dodd, Mead, 1965, 394 pp., $3.95).

Wildfire: Church Growth in Korea, by Roy E. Shearer (Eerdmans, 1966, 242 pp., $2.95).

Kierkegaard’s Pilgrimage of Man: The Road of Self-Positing and Self-Abdication, by Harvey Albert Smit (Eerdmans, 1965, 193 pp., $3). An extensive analysis of Kierkegaard’s thought that is a worthy addition to the Kierkegaardian literature.

Not By Might: The Story of Whitworth College, 1890–1965, by Alfred O. Gray (Whitworth College, 1965, 279 pp., $3.50).

Contemporary Currents of French Theological Thought, by Georges Crespy (Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1965, 36 pp., free). An informative survey of recent French religious literature, and of some of its central concerns.

Crisis for Baptism, edited by Basil S. Moss (Morehouse-Barlow, also SCM Press, 1965, 189 pp., $3). Essays on baptism by men of diverse religious traditions.

One can’t play the bishop’s tune on Gabriel’s horn

Bishop John A. T. Robinson has been visiting American campuses trying, with limited success, to tell the academic community precisely what he disowns in biblical Christianity, and precisely what he would put in its place. The longer the dialogue continues, the more it appears that precision is not one of the bishop’s gifts. Those who take hold of his position are reminded of the man who, according to Stephen Leacock, mounted his horse and rode off in all directions. In his latest appearances, the bishop has said that he is not bound to Tillich’s ontology (see News, p. 43) and that he is a supernaturalist after all, and yet he continues to spell out his view in essentially non-supernaturalistic Tillichean terms.

An Indiana clergyman put the issue neatly when he asked Robinson, who objects to a God “up there” and “out there” as mythological and prescientific, whether the man in the pew can be expected to have any less difficulty with the philosophical niceties of the theology of the immanent ground of being than with a theology of celestial navigation and divine postal zones. We can hardly think of a more comprehensible view of God than the biblical representation, nor one subject to so much misunderstanding—as Bishop Robinson has already conceded regarding the ground of being—as the ambiguous alternative he proposes in Honest to God.

We remain wholly unconvinced that Robinson’s new medium for communicating the Christian faith can achieve this objective as clearly and surely as the Scriptures do. We do not regard his view as a revised version of biblical theology in the modern idiom. If one prefers a modern house with biblical landscaping, that is his privilege; but he should not so readily assume that Moses and Jesus are eager to move into this theological suburbia. One cannot play the bishop’s tune on Gabriel’s horn.

We are troubled by Dr. Robinson’s oversensitivity to public opinion polls. What the world thinks is always of Christian concern and is a proper stimulus to evangelistic passion and apologetic engagement; but it ought not to dictate the content of theology. If the prophets and apostles had bent to these winds, multitudes in the past would not have turned from polytheism or turned to Christ. In his letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that sinful man has a natural antagonism to the Gospel of the Living God; all the more imperative it is, therefore, that the Christian vanguard proclaim the supernatural God who has revealed himself, the living God supremely manifested in Jesus Christ. If the bishop’s alternative is especially acceptable to modern man (not the Communist man, certainly; nor the Asian or African man either; but the Western secular man, presumably)—and in our generation this sales pitch has already been made for the widely varying formulas of Barth and Bultmann and death-of-God deviants—we must not forget that any view mainly distinguished by attachment to, rather than transcendence of, the mentality of a particular period is a sure candidate for early obsolescence. Theologians indeed ought to not add incredulity to revealed religion; but neither ought they to diminish the truth of God addessed to all ages, our own included.

As a result of his statistical orientation of theology, Bishop Robinson’s views reflect an ambiguous approach to the nature of truth. We can well share his stated positive concern, that of “removing that which removes God, at any rate for a lot of people.” But the merely functional reality of God is repeatedly stressed above and to the exclusion of his ontological reality. We have searched Bishop Robinson’s writings in vain for any sure indication of what genuine cognitive or conceptual knowledge of God man has or can have on the basis of God’s self-revelation. In the bishop’s view, do we have any universally valid knowledge of God, and revealed truths about God that bind men in all ages and places? In Honest to God one finds statements in which Bishop Robinson seems, with Tillich, to view all affirmations about God as symbolic rather than literal, and this sword is wielded with great vigor against the biblical revelation of God as supernatural, personal, and independent of the universe. But this sword is double-edged. If Bishop Robinson wields it, we shall require its use against any statement he himself makes about the Unconditioned, whose reality and immanence are no less a matter of faith than that of the supernatural, personal God of the Bible; we shall require its use even when he says “God is Love,” and when he speaks of the function of God no less than when he speaks against his existence. If our affirmations about God are not universally valid cognitive truths, if they are merely symbolic, we see no reason for taking Bishop Robinson literally whenever he speaks about God, and particularly not when he seems to want us to understand him literally.

In short, we should value a clear statement of the epistemological ground on which the bishop proposes that all of us base our affirmations about God. What reason controls his rejection of the reality of a supernatural, personal God, other than its unacceptability to modern unbelief? Over and above appeals to modern consensus, or apart from God’s intelligible self-disclosure and an authoritative Bible, which Bishop Robinson disallows, is he saying that sensory verification is the arbiter of all knowledge, or that modern science excludes the reality of the supernatural, or that experience is the final test of truth, or that whatever coincides with his emotive preferences is theologically admissible? Or just what?

In the Bible, God is self-revealed as literally the Living God, whose transcendence as the supreme personal Spirit means that, however closely related to the universe, he is free of all external limitations and distinct from man and the world, and in some ways even opposes his fallen creation. The biblical view contains no trace or taint of pantheism; none of the forces of nature or of man is assigned a divine function or power. But the notion of a non-supernatural deity, of a wholly immanent deity, has specially attracted speculative philosophers who doubt whether God made the universe. In the biblical understanding, it is an abuse of the name of God to refer this to the abstract idea of the Unconditioned, to the idea of our own limits; this postulation has no sure connection with the Living God who reveals himself personally and intelligibly. This mythological humanism or naturalism is a time-bound, twentieth-century speculation about God that substitutes systematic mythology for systematic theology, and postulation for revelation.

We are greatly relieved, therefore, that Bishop Robinson now avoids speaking of the “ground of being” because it too is subject to misunderstanding. But our question, then, is whether, in abandoning the notion of this ground of being, he now returns to the supernatural, personal, self-revealed God of the Bible or has some other alternative to offer as the object of Christian worship. Many of us think that, despite all talk about the Unconditioned, anti-supernatural theology trapped God in nature and put him on a leash, and that he has been so long coming of age—until the day of Tillich as the new Moses, Bonhoeffer perhaps as John the Baptist, and Bishop Robinson as the apostle to the Anglicans—that we are very eager to learn what the modern secular mind is right now demanding by way of theological substitution. Who are the theological troubadors now energetically blowing God’s trumpet?

Assuming that the bishop still rejects the supernatural personal God of the Bible, it will be well to recall the New Testament strategic situation. Stoic philosophy, which was in existence more than three centuries before the ministry of Jesus, denied that God is personal and supernatural (or independent of the universe). Now, Jesus in his prayers almost invariably addresses God as Father; in the Gospels the title is on his lips 170 times. Jesus’ life is centered in God as a supernatural personal reality; and we affirm that the person and work of Christ are the supreme revelation of God. Matthew 11:25 f. and Luke 10:21 f. indicate that Jesus’ knowledge of the Father was grounded in a special divine relationship transcending that of all other men. If the philosophy of the non-supernatural, impersonal unconditioned had been propounded to Jesus, would he have indebted himself to it, or would he have repudiated it as pagan idolatry? In brief, was Jesus mistaken about the nature of God, despite his unique relation and communication with him? And when the Apostle Paul encountered the Stoic philosophers, and on Mars Hill propounded a supernatural creator distinct from the world and man, ought Paul instead to have followed them to the Stoa (the colonnaded porch from which the Stoics taught in ancient Athens) and struck a theological compromise with them?

Clouded Judgment

There was a strange paradox in one of Dr. Eugene Carson Blake’s first major addresses in America after his election to leadership of the World Council of Churches. In the first James J. Reeb Memorial Lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary last month, Dr. Blake described the “militant Christian faith” and said “conservatives among us” are properly and legitimately worried about the drift from the historic Christian faith. Although he contended that these fears had more ground fifty years ago than today, which is debatable, he affirmed a theology that undergirds all Christians—Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic—including “a transcendent God, who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ.” But in a curious inconsistency, Blake, when he got to the topic of the day, said that James J. Reeb, a Unitarian, “was a martyr of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

The question whether Unitarian humanism has a place in the Church of Jesus Christ and in the ecumenical movement has been raised from time to time. At the local level, many councils of churches have admitted Unitarian churches into membership; this has led to the formation of evangelical councils of churches, since conscientious convictions kept some evangelicals from becoming part of ecclesiastical organizations that included Unitarians. Those who had been concerned about the theology of the World Council of Churches and who thought the Unitarian issue had been settled by its trinitarian doctrinal commitment were astonished at Blake’s remark.

James Reeb was martyred in Selma, Alabama, little more than a year ago. He died for a constitutional issue in which he believed. We honor him for the courageous expression of his deepest convictions. No one can justify or excuse his brutal murder, from which there are lessons still to be learned. But Blake’s address raises important questions that pertain, not to civil rights, but to the heart of present-day theological dialogue and to the posture of one of the leading ecumenical spokesmen.

Blake said that Reeb, who left the Presbyterian Church to become a Unitarian minister, entered a ministry “that at a critical point of Christian theology is at sharp variance from the system of theology taught here [Princeton Seminary].” The difference in theology between the Unitarians and the historic denominations is indeed “sharp”—so sharp that Unitarians are not members of the National or the World Council of Churches. The trinitarian standards of the WCC exclude them from membership. Yet Blake called Reeb “a martyr of the Church of Jesus Christ.” That he was a martyr no one will deny. That he was in the Church of Jesus Christ is another matter.

In his biography of Reeb, No Greater Love, Duncan Howlett examines his subject’s theological pilgrimage. He describes Reeb’s visit to a denominational official who told him: “Well, if you don’t believe in God, I don’t see how you can be a minister, and I think you had better get out” (p. 89). Reeb said, “I discovered my integrity was being undermined by the very confessional nature of the [Presbyterian] Church” (p. 98). And “I have clearly progressed in my views until I am much more of a humanist than a deist or theist” (p. 87). “He was,” says Howlett, “no longer troubled by the fact that he did not believe the doctrines set forth in the Westminster Confession” (p. 86). A Presbyterian minister friend told him: “Stay in the church. There are many who believe as you do. I myself am one. You are not expected to take the Confession literally. Few of us do. The winds of change are sweeping through the church today. Stay and help us change it. The church will be bogged down in its ancient theology if all who outgrow it abandon it” (p. 87). But Reeb chose the course of honesty by becoming a Unitarian.

The church’s answer to Reeb’s action was given by the Philadelphia Presbytery when in June, 1960, it “deposed him because he ‘had renounced the jurisdiction of the United Presbyterian Church and joined an heretical body’ ” (p. 131).

By placing James Reeb in the category of a “martyr of the Church of Jesus Christ,” Blake may have opened a Pandora’s box. By recognizing as within the Church one who unequivocally denied the Christian faith and who would not be admissible to any historic denomination holding to its confessional standards, including the United Presbyterian Church, Blake is at variance with action of a presbytery of his own church, of which he is still the stated clerk, and with the trinitarian formula of the World Council of Churches, of which he is shortly to become secretary general.

In recent years, the World Council has sought dialogue and fellowship with “conservative evangelicals” outside its membership. Again and again the “conservative evangelicals” have expressed their reservations about the doctrinal fidelity of the WCC. It was a cause for rejoicing when the WCC enlarged its doctrinal commitment with respect both to the Trinity and to the Scriptures. Now it is regrettable that the new secretary general has cast a shadow over the basic doctrinal commitment of the ecumenical movement.

Dr. Blake has let his admiration of Reeb’s devotion cloud his judgment. But let him speak for himself: “Yet this seminary … honors one of her sons by establishing this lectureship in his memory. Some would say that this is an embarrassment both to the seminary and to the Presbyterian Church. And so it is.”

A Bursting Bubble?

There are rumblings that the “death of God” camp is fragmenting, despite the fact that Thomas J. J. Altizer of Emory University and William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School have collaborated on a new book, Radical Theology and the Death of God, scheduled for publication April 18 by Bobbs-Merrill. In it they contend that the new theology strives for both “a whole new way of theological understanding” and “a pastoral response hoping to give support to those who have chosen to live as Christian atheists.”

Some of the radical theologians have been seeking to isolate Altizer as a liability. Even the controversial Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson, who recently visited Hamilton, Harvey Cox, and other theological extremists, told Indiana Episcopalians last week that he considers Altizer’s notion that God died in A.D. 29—in its emphasis that God ceased to be transcendent and through death became immanent and secular—“heresy,” and that he had urged Hamilton to move away from close identification with Altizer.

Robinson predicted that the death-of-God theology is “a bubble that will soon burst. It is unstable; it does not have a future.”

At Temple University, Paul van Buren is reportedly already taking a somewhat more cautious line. He increasingly disowns the phrase “the death of God” and instead emphasizes that “the word of God has died; the God of Christian tradition is not subject to death.”

He May Also Kiss The Bride

The easement of Roman Catholic mixed marriages issued recently by Pope Paul will do much to resolve a great pastoral problem within the Roman Catholic Church. Few people realize how many Catholics involve themselves in mixed marriages. In 1964, according to the Official Catholic Directory, nearly one-fourth (24.9 per cent) of the marriages performed in the Catholic churches of twenty-seven archdioceses were mixed—40,000 out of 161,000. The recent declaration that those who engage in such marriages are no longer under threat of excommunication will ease a serious situation.

Pope Paul’s Matrimoni Sacramentum will do little, however, to ease Roman Catholic—Protestant ecclesiastical tensions. It allows the Protestant minister at the mixed wedding ceremony to be there, like the bridesmaid. After the marriage has been celebrated by the priest, the minister is permitted to make some appropriate remarks and join in common prayer. 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 facade.

Nor will the Pope’s new declaration do much to ease the conscience of the serious Protestant considering marriage with a Roman Catholic. He must still “openly and sincerely” promise to place no obstacle in the way of the Roman Catholic education of his future children. If he cannot do this in good conscience—and how can he?—the case must be referred to the Holy See.

Thus the Vatican has issued easements for the solutions of its own internal pastoral problems but has made no concession of any substance to non-Catholic Christians or non-Catholic churches.

Lift The Standards

The Tuesday morning quarterbacks are reviewing the recent Supreme Court decision that sent Ralph Ginzburg and Edward Mishkin, purveyors of pornography, to jail. News media have both cheered and jeered.

Having left its intentions unclear by its earlier Roth decision, the court apparently sought to provide some curbs. It did—even though nine justices, in three decisions, wrote fourteen opinions and decided against Ginzburg by a 5–4 vote.

The court has given the community a standard by which to take action against salesmen of filth. For this we should be grateful. It has ruled that the manner of peddling and advertising, and the intention of the seller, can be grounds for conviction. Although manner and intention cannot be defined without risks, cities and towns can move vigorously to clean up newsstands and bookstores.

Behind the divisions of the Supreme Court, and the acuteness and complexity of the judicial decisions, lies the fact of which Christians should be aware—a major cultural change has taken place in America and much lower moral standards prevail.

Ultimately the solution of the obscenity problem will not come from court decisions, for wherever there is liberty there will be license. It is license that tests liberty. However, just as freedom of speech does not include the right to cry “fire” in a crowded theater, neither does it include the right to poison men’s minds with unbridled obscenity. We need not change the test set forth in the 1957 Roth decision, whether “to the average person, applying contemporary standards, the dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.” What we need to do is lift prevailing standards to higher levels that censure the anything-for-profit vultures and prevent decadent and immoral people from publishing their filth.

It has been done before. The Evangelical Awakening of the eighteenth century profoundly changed the moral and spiritual climate of England. Today also the Gospel accompanied by the Christian ethic, vigorously applied to a decadent society, can bring renewal.

A favorite phrase of the day is, “Where the action is.” Some people and places appeal to many because they are centers of activity.

The constant source of comfort and joy for the Christian is that Jesus Christ is always found where the need is, and that he makes full provision for that need.

At the very beginning let us make clear the distinction between “using God” for our own purposes—a reflection on our concept of God and of Christianity—and appropriating the things God has made available for those who trust in him.

If a person in need refused to make use of something that was his for the taking and that would meet his need, he would seem foolish, to say the least.

While the world has no right to demand for itself blessings that accrue only to believers, Christians owe it to themselves to appropriate all that they have in Christ. No Christian, having received by faith forgiveness of sins and the redemption offered in the Gospel, should continue to live as a spiritual beggar.

First of all, we need daily cleansing. The world tarnishes, the flesh besmirches. On every hand we are confronted by the allurements of Satan. Sometimes we succumb, and the result is a soiling no earthly detergent can remove. Day by day we need cleansing and forgiveness, a renewing of spiritual concepts and perspectives. All this is available through the Holy Spirit.

There is not a day that we do not also need guidance to lead us out of uncertainty. The promises for such help are found all through the Bible. For example: “In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Prov. 3:6, RSV). And from James: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives to all men generously and without reproaching, and it will be given him” (1:5).

Besides cleansing and guidance, God offers the Christian help for specific problems. Impatience! How common, and how detrimental to the Christian’s witness! God supplies serenity in the midst of pressures, quietness in turmoil, to those who seek it. For the Christian, the meaning of the phrase “inner resources” should be experienced and exhibited.

Who has not experienced an overwhelming sense of weakness when confronted by the many temptations and problems which are a part of living in the world? God supplies strength to those who are weak. Realizing this, the Apostle Paul was able to make the paradoxical statement: “For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10).

Few indeed are the Christians who do not have a lack of genuine love for others. This lovelessness has one cure, an infilling of the Holy Spirit, who brings love. It is a discredit to Christians that so few obey the Lord’s command: “This I command you, to love one another” (John 15:17). He will supply this love that we need.

Never in the history of the world have people been subjected to such tensions as they are today in this contracted, complicated society. What a glorious opportunity for Christians to demonstrate quietness of spirit and of heart! But this is not something we contrive for ourselves. Rather, it is a blessing God grants when we rest in him and avail ourselves of such promises as, “Thou dost keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusts in thee” (Isa. 26:3); or, “In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for thou alone, O Lord, makest me dwell in safety” (Ps. 4:8). Idealistic? Theoretical? Impractical? Try it and see!

For some, doubt is a problem. Satan raises questions about the validity of faith, through a book, perhaps, or a conversation, or a sermon. However it happens, the experience is disturbing; but our Lord is very willing to settle it for us. Faith is the answer to doubt. To those who are willing to receive it, God gives the assurance of the reality of himself and his promises. Faith should be so firm that with the Apostle Paul we can say, “What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though every man be false, as it is written, ‘That thou mayest be justified in thy words, and prevail when thou art judged’ ” (Rom. 3:3, 4).

When one has caught a vision of the reality of God and the finality of his revelation, faith rests in him regardless of what may happen.

Often going hand in hand with doubt is discouragement. Thank God for the words of encouragement in his Word. God is sovereign, faithful, able, willing. We have only to appropriate what he has provided for us, and our discouragement will be replaced by a renewed joy as we realize the truth of Paul’s affirmation: “What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Rom. 8:31, 32).

Nowhere is our need more evident than in the temptations that confront us continually. And for this need also God has a clear answer: “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13). How it helps to realize that our Lord “was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin”! He knows. He understands. He delivers.

Sorrow is a part of this life. At times it can become so overwhelming that life hardly seems worth living. But for sorrow Lord offers comfort; for mourning he gives joy. There may be sorrow for sins, which should bring repentance. There may be sorrow over personal loss or over the actions of others. But there is no sorrow that a loving Lord cannot heal.

Some suffer from a sense of inadequacy. This is a psychological matter that can be met in the presence of our Lord. Paul spoke to this problem when he said that we are not “sufficient of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our sufficiency is from God” (2 Cor. 3:5). A feeling of our own adequacy is dangerous. But when we realize the complete adequacy of our God and put our faith in him, what a difference, and what a sense of his overwhelming power!

How often we go down in defeat before the enemy of souls. Yet how wonderful that defeat can be changed into victory. The words of the old hymn, “Each victory will help you some other to win,” can prove a reality. We all are in a continuing battle, but the victory is assured if we use the resources God offers.

God’s provisions are to be found at the point of the believer’s need. There is no circumstance for which he has not provided.

Some may be eager to be “where the action is.” Christians have the privilege of being where the needs are met.

Send this skeptic the living Liz

What The Fool Said

They tell me it is one of the basic rules in the legal profession that when one is engaged in cross-examination he should never ask a question unless he is sure what the answer has to be. Otherwise the argument might just get out of hand.

This is an equally good rule when you are dealing with youngsters. Never ask them a question unless you know what the answer has to be, or they might just lead you down the garden path. I remember one time giving a children’s sermon on light, and I kept switching the light on and off to illustrate my point (whatever the point was). At the very end I switched the light off and asked the youngsters, “Now where has the light gone?” A big bass voice far beyond its years answered from the front row, “Out in the hall. I can see it out there.”

One time at a boys’ camp I had a Mason jar full of beans of various sizes. My point was that if you shook the jar of beans long enough, the big beans always came to the top. “See,” said I, “the big beans always come to the top; so remember that, if you have a big bean, no matter how much shaking up there is, you will always come to the top.” Whereupon one of the more helpful boys in the audience asked, “What if the jar is full of nuts?”

Considerable shaking has been going on in theological circles recently, and the question before the house is whether the big beans or the big nuts are coming to the top. This is not just an academic question.

One of my readers (how do you like that?) wrote in to suggest that in the death-of-God controversy we have an interesting parallel with the late Vatican Council. After centuries the Romanists have condescended enough to say that the Jews are not “Christ killers.” Now what will they do in Protestant circles with those men with the big beans who have killed God? Maybe they aren’t big beans. “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.”

EUTYCHUS II

Who Wins The $5,000?

I am both amused and astonished at Louis Berger’s $5, 000 offer to you (Eutychus and His Kin, Mar. 18 issue) for “irrefutable and realistic proof that there ever existed a supernatural person named Jesus Christ.” Of course, two absurdities underlie the offer. First, the supernatural nature of our Lord is not empirically demonstrable.… Secondly, proof of our Lord’s deity cannot be purchased with money. That comes only through self-commitment to him as divine Saviour and Lord.…

DANIEL W. WARD

Temple Baptist Church

Ellsworth A.F.B., S. Dak.

Two letters in your issue for March 18 should be brought together. Louis Berger offers you $5,000 for “a single irrefutable and realistic proof that there ever existed a supernatural person named Jesus Christ.” Eutychus II mentions Gert Behanna, who wrote the book The Late Liz. Since Berger doesn’t like books, send him the living Liz. He will have his proof, and possibly get converted at the same time.

THOMAS R. TEPLY

Aldrich Avenue Presbyterian Church

Minneapolis, Minn.

If Mr. Berger … can furnish me with a single irrefutable proof that his judgment will be irrefutable, I will furnish him with an irrefutable proof that Jesus Christ existed (no books).

If, however, he cannot guarantee that his judgment is irrefutable, how will he know that my proof is irrefutable? Philadelphia, Pa.

PAUL SEELY

It is obvious that this correspondent is an avowed atheist or he would not write as he does!…

JOHN F. PALM

Port Charlotte, Fla.

To prove to you that he is a dream—or a myth—I agree to donate $5.00 to your library fund for books published at Tübingen from 1825–1875 if you will furnish me with a single irrefutable and realistic proof that there ever existed a natural person named George Washington (no books).…

JAY C. ROCHELLE

Ascension Lutheran Church

Pittsburgh, Pa.

The letter … reminds me of a question asked by one of our X-ray students … “Can you prove to me there is such a thing as an X-ray?” Sometimes you can’t see the woods for the trees.…

The very existence of the Church is a miracle that could satisfy [Berger].…

JAY W. MACMORAN, M.D.

Penn Valley, Pa.

I am sure you will get numerous replies to Louis Berger’s $5,000 offer, but I thought the offer so tempting I would take him up on it—just in case.

There is only one condition to his whole proposal which will have to be cleared up first before anything is proved or gained. Mr. Berger has to prove first that he himself exists as well as his $5,000, and if he can do that and will grant the same privilege of his basis for proof to us in proving Christ existed—supernaturally—then I know he can be taken, and I am sure you know this, too.

It becomes more amazing to me each year in the ministry how those who attempt to refute Christ and Christianity bear the burden of proof themselves; God’s revelation has been that unique! I hope you claim the $5,000.

HOWARD C. MOELLER

Lutheran Church of the Resurrection

Waterville, Me.

A Great Contribution

“God: His Names and Nature,” by Harold B. Kuhn (insert, Mar. 18, issue), is an outstanding contribution to the science of theology.

I have presented the previous essays in our “discussion period,” and they have been well received by our people.…

JAMES B. BUTLER

Palestine Baptist Church

Jackson, Miss.

We read [it] with joy and profit.… Oak Lawn, Ill.

D. KORT

Tit For Tat

I was very grateful for your publishing the article “The Church and Social Problems,” by Howard E. Kershner (Mar. 4 issue).…

MRS. J. W. PATRICK

Harrington Park, N. J.

It disturbs me a great deal.… His article … is a perfect example of the reason why many of my fellow ministers and I have stopped our subscriptions to his magazine.…

ROLAND MULLINIX

Minister of Education

First Methodist

Charlotte, N. C.

Your decision … to select such a miserably inept and theologically faulty article to represent a viewpoint is inexcusable on your part.…

The greatest crime is yours for reprinting it and doing great injustice to a problem that needs scholarly treatment. Alexandria, Va. EUGENE W. WIEGMAN

Praise From A Pacifist

I want to express my warm appreciation for “Problems for Pacifists” (Mar. 4 issue). This is a more thoughtful and more accurate treatment of Christian pacifist matters than has usually been the case in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and I am most grateful for it.

EDGAR METZLER

Executive Secretary

Mennonite Central Committee

Akron, Pa.

Baptists And Cocu

In re Eugene Carson Blake’s comment on the American Baptist Convention’s avoiding joining COCU (News, Mar. 18 issue): Hoorah! Dr. Blake understands Baptist polity better than many American Baptists—he realizes one association or convention of Baptist churches cannot extend the alliances of those churches. Maybe our constituency will hear him.

T. R. SISK, JR.

Highlawn Baptist Church

Huntington, W. Va.

Daniel Still Lives

“Come Alive, Daniel!” (Mar. 4 issue) is a very unique approach in answering the “Critics,” and I am in favor of coining a medal for Dr. Grider, to honor and hold in commemoration this re-criticism.…

ELBERT R. CEARFOSS

Calvary Baptist

Drayton Valley, Alberta

In my book Daniel is more alive than he has been for more than two thousand years.…

JAMES MCD. CRAVEN

Brooklyn, N.Y.

I appreciated the article.… If Dr. Grider has any more such articles, I think they ought to be in print.…

BERNARD GILL

South Flint Church of the Nazarene

Flint, Mich.

[The article] very adroitly scathes the higher critics and the modernists with their “new morals”.…

MCKINLEY ASH

Executive Director

Miami Rescue Mission

Miami, Fla.

More On Christian Science

Thank you for the splendid article, “Ten Questions to Ask Christian Scientists” (Mar. 4 issue). This is as a complete article as I have ever read on this subject, logical, truthful, and to the heart of the matter.

CHARLES R. BEITTEL

Harrisburg, Pa.

Mr. Hoekema has not studied the writings of Mary Baker Eddy; if he had he could not possibly have reached the conclusions he set forth.…

This letter is not to clarify the opinions of Mr. Hoekema … because I’m sure that the Christian Science Committee on Publication has already taken care of that by this time as they are very alert to such matters.…

FERN M. PERIN

Middletown, Ohio

I have received sufficient blessings from my experience with students of Christian Science and their teachings that I cannot sit idly by when I feel that they are being totally misunderstood if not maligned.…

No, I’m not ready to give up my Reformed faith for the teachings of Christian Science; but I have the feeling that much of our difficulty is with language, and that too many of the critics of Christian Science pass quick judgments without trying prayerfully to understand. I am proud of the fact that Presbyterians have met for discussion. The body of Christ cannot be severed, and I for one will never attempt it.

Mrs. Eddy was the beloved pastor of many sincere, devout students of the Word of God: people who love God, and their neighbors. I am a pastor, a student of the Word, who also tries to love God and his neighbors. That rather puts us all on the King’s Highway.…

CHARLES W. BATES

First Presbyterian

Titusville, Fla.

Greatest Since Denney

Thanks for such a wonderful periodical as yours. Of all the things you have ever published nothing compares with Leon Morris’s “The Centrality of the Cross” (Mar. 18 issue). In fact it is the greatest theology on the death of Christ since James Denney’s The Death of Christ. I can hardly wait to get the book. Kingsport, Tenn.

F. M. BROWN

Leon Morris stated, “It comes as something of a surprise, for example, to find that, apart from the crucifixion narrative and one verse in Hebrews, Paul is the only New Testament writer to speak about “the cross.’ ” Although the word “cross” is not specifically used by Peter, it is certainly implied in First Peter 2:24, “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.” Likewise there are three references to “the tree” in the Acts of the Apostles (5:30 and 10:39, spoken by Peter; 13:29, spoken by Paul).…

RALPH GIANNONE

Wyckoff, N. J.

One Man Or Two?

On page 33 (Mar. 4 issue), is not Stacey E. Woods, general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, really C. Stacey Woods?…

PEGGY JEAN TOWNSEND

Darlington, Pa.

• He really is.—ED.

Those Cartoons

The “What If …” cartoons are wonderful. They are satirical without being bitter, and funny but not overdrawn.…

M. DUNCAN MURRAY

Occidental College

Los Angeles, Calif.

A ‘Snap’ For Ridicule

Your report on “McIntire at the Capitol” (Mar. 4 issue) is not as we in Pennsylvania understand it. Also, the picture of this man looks as though your photographer, no different than many of our secular reporters and photographers, went out of his way to “snap” for ridicule.…

If one of your little reporters must ridicule or belittle someone, send him in the direction of Bishop Pike, who sounds [like] Anti-Christ.

I, for one, would appreciate a full and true report or story on Carl McIntire by an unbiased person.…

I do trust your magazine will not come under the influence of the NCC or WCC.…

ELSIE A. GLASS

Fayetteville, Pa.

After reading your article, I would not have your magazine. Dr. McIntire is one of our great patriots who is trying to save America from the takeover by Communism and stands for the Bible as a real part of our American heritage. He is working hard to preserve your freedom too.…

PETER RUF

Santa Cruz, Calif.

Readers Say …

I still find the “Deaths” section the only section I can trust. I commend you for it!

HENRY ERVIN

Richardson, Tex.

As a Bible professor in a Methodist theological seminary (its name is not really germane!), I reject much of what I read in your journal. Yet I am richly stimulated by its many well-written articles and editorials, and my judgment is that the quality of your publication is steadily improving. The January 1 issue was a superb example of the same.

J. ROY VALENCOURT

Hood Theological Seminary

Salisbury, N. C.

Your paper becomes the only rallying point for level-headed, emotionally sound, evangelical, and scholarly men to share.…

PAUL M. MUSSER

Pioneer Memorial Church (United Presbyterian)

Solon, Ohio

I credit your magazine with making a major contribution in keeping Christianity out of the twentieth century.…

DONALD E. INLAY

Keolumana Methodist

Kailua, Hawaii

A Bold Effort

Recently I have been disturbed by [your] … permitting the Orthodox Presbyterian Church to use such Christian ethics as [is] in evidence in its advertisement “A new confession—or a new faith?—the Presbyterian predicament.” This seems to be a bold effort to confuse, disturb, and proselyte.…

ZION ROBBINS

United Presbyterian

Cedarville, Ohio

Whose Blake?

It amazes me … that CHRISTIANITY TODAY favorably presents … the new [general secretary] of the World Council of Churches, Dr. Eugene Carson Blake! Isn’t he known on an international scale as being in sympathy with Bishop Pike and his denials of basic Bible truths? How can you, an evangelical, present Dr. Blake in a favorable light as a trustworthy spiritual leader?

ERNEST A. HOOK

Pennsylvania Avenue Baptist Church

Warren, Pa.

I am appalled by the vicious attacks (implicit and explicit) on both the World Council of Churches and Eugene Carson Blake.…

A. H. HARRY OUSSOREN

Toronto, Ont.

The Continuing Debate

In his column, “Priorities First” (Mar. 4 issue), L. Nelson Bell aptly answers the letter of Robert D. Bulkley (“Not Either/Or”), contending that the Church must hold to its central mission: the conversion of individuals to Jesus Christ. Bulkley, in his emphasis on changing social structures, obviously wants to assure us that he still believes genuine conversion is basic. But it seems equally obvious that his own priorities lie elsewhere and that he regards as “superficial” the conversions of those Christians who do not happen to hold his own enthusiasm for the present-day civil rights movement. There are tens of thousands of dedicated Christians who share a vital social concern but who cannot endorse much of the current civil rights movement with its disturbing exhibitionism, frequent defiance of law, and pseudo-Christian overtones.

At the same time I wonder if Nelson Bell has not sidestepped Bulkley’s very legitimate charge that conversion does not necessarily always bring the change in social attitudes which should follow. Especially has this been true in the area of race and segregation. Racial prejudice still holds sway in too many Christian hearts. Worse yet, some have even appealed to the Scriptures for support of their segregative views. The majority, of course, simply have gone along with the status quo. Thus when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, some evangelical Christians found themselves jumping onto the bandwagon at the last minute because it would have been too embarrassing to do otherwise. Their social conscience had been awakened not so much by inner Christian conviction as by the long overdue social legislation that finally gave the Negro his voting rights as an American citizen. The tragedy that many Christians have been the last to face such social issues head-on will hurt the evangelical cause for years to come.

These facts, while they must be acknowledged, in no way undercut the main thrust of Bell’s reply. Bulkley says that “there is no evidence that the kindest and worthiest motives are what emerge from what we label the conversion experience.” Has he never heard of the dramatic social changes that swept England following the Wesleyan revivals, or the social concern that grew out of the First and Second Great Awakenings? Has he forgotten the roots of the Salvation Army, the YMCA, the rescue missions, and a hundred other works of their kind?

If society truly is to be transformed, let alone souls saved from eternal loss, the priorities of which Bell and the Scriptures speak must be kept. Otherwise, the social reforms which Bulkley so earnestly desires will be as “superficial” as the conversions he would like to invalidate.

ROBERT G. FLOOD

Chicago, Ill.

Evangelism and evangelists that make the winning of converts the prime mission of the Church sometimes remind me of the efforts of the Pharisees which were so roundly condemned by Jesus (Matt. 23:15). To insist that the Church as the Church has no responsibility to speak and work to promote justice, righteousness, and peace in the earth is to deny the testimony of the Scriptures.… The principle enunciated in the Constitution does not forbid mutual interests and concerns of church and state; [it was only intended] to prevent any one church or combination of churches becoming a state church.

H. GLENN STEPHENS

United Presbyterian

Adena, Ohio

Although Dr. Bell says it is all a matter of priorities—first, the Church must change the hearts of men through the proclamation of the message of redemption in Christ—I find it difficult to see a second priority clearly. My guess is that he doesn’t really have one.…

We still wait for some explanation why so often “born-again” Christians dramatically change their attitudes toward the use of Sunday, toward tithing, drinking, smoking, dancing—but not toward the racial prejudice and injustice that secular (and Christian?) society tolerates and perpetuates all around us.…

Although he too is much afraid that the liberal church leadership today is promoting socialism, Howard Kershner, in his article in the same issue, “The Church and Social Problems,” at least has a clearer answer to my dilemma: “… reborn men and women go out and remake society.…” Can we believe him? Does Dr. Bell agree?

GEORGE A. HODGKINS

First Congregational Church

Stratford, Conn.