The Friday before Easter, Britain’s century-old evangelical weekly The Christian will add and Christianity Today to its title. The new, merged periodical will be edited by CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S British Editorial Director, Dr. J. D. Douglas.

The Christian and Christianity Today will be, not a satellite of our American magazine, but an independent newsmagazine edited by and for Britons. Its weekly publication and London locale will make possible a wider range of national news and editorial content than our American-based fortnightly can provide its British subscribers. These will now join The Christian’s readership, although Britons will be able to receive the American edition on request.

Under terms of the merger, the British and the American magazines will have access to each other’s editorial content. Dr. Douglas will continue to be our editorial and news representative in Britain. Our four-year-old Fleet Street office will be closed as operations consolidate at The Christian’s Bush House offices.

The editor of this new weekly of evangelical information, interpretation, and inspiration has not only an excellent academic background but also a facile, whimsical pen and sharp insights into religious trends of our day. We consider this new venture internationally significant in evangelical journalism and congratulate our colleague Dr. Douglas on the exceptional opportunity for journalistic leadership that lies before him.

City’s biggest event dramatizes irony of Billy’s outspoken, Bible-believing opponents

The great irony of Billy Graham’s career is that his most vehement opponents are fellow Bible-believers. The rift was dramatized last month when Graham conducted a ten-day evangelistic crusade in Greenville, South Carolina, home of hard-shell Bob Jones University.

Although the Graham team has grown from BJU origins like honeysuckle along a Carolina fence, school President Bob Jones, Jr., 54, blackballed Graham the night before the crusade opened. He charged on local TV that the evangelist “is doing more harm to the cause of Jesus Christ than any living man.” Jones Jr. then left for a month in the Holy Land but left behind longtime Graham foe G. Archer Weniger as campus chapel speaker. Graham was also boycotted locally by a dozen fundamentalist ministers and statewide by fifty-seven independents in the South Carolina Baptist Fellowship.¹Other non-sponsors: Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Seventh-day Adventists, Unitarians, Christian Scientists, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The evangelist expressed bewilderment at this opposition, but Jones Jr. had made his reasons clear in a famous chapel speech a year earlier. Nothing personal, he said, but Graham sups not only with publicans and sinners but also with Roman Catholics and leaders of the National and World Council of Churches; co-operates with churches that do not believe in biblical inerrancy and other basic doctrines; and refers converts to these “modernist” churches.

Another worry, specified by the clergymen but not by Jones Jr., was that Graham’s crusade was the first important racially integrated meeting in the city’s history. It also proved to be the biggest public event the city had ever seen. Down the road a piece from Bob Jones University, the overflow crowds at vast, warehouse-like Textile Hall forced Graham to expand to two services a night, the first time this has happened in America. The ten-day attendance was 278,700. The 7,311 who made decisions for Christ included five among pre-release prisoners who sat in a special section at several meetings.

Graham stressed repeatedly that in the South, churchgoing is as automatic as eating a meal, and that often people get “inoculated with just enough religion to keep them from getting a good dose of Jesus Christ.”

No BJU partisan could have criticized Graham’s preaching of the old-fashioned Gospel. He waved his Bible aloft repeatedly and called the Book an “instrument panel” necessary to prevent “spiritual vertigo.”

This doctrinal accord was one reason Graham turned the other cheek and avoided answering BJU criticisms. Other factors were the support he gets from the school’s alumni in many cities, and his acknowledged spiritual debt to Bob Jones, Sr., now 82, who founded the college in the midst of a long, illustrious career as an evangelist.

Graham went to Bob Jones College in 1936, when it was in Cleveland, Tennessee, but left after three months because of the restrictive atmosphere. In 1948, Jones Sr. invited Graham down to Greenville to get an honorary doctorate and take up his evangelistic banner. Several years later the Joneses broke with Graham over what they call “ecumenical evangelism,” and the war reached its height during the 1957 crusade in New York City.

Graham’s team includes two BJU alumni, Cliff Barrows and T. W. Wilson. Barrows was so “separated” when he went to BJU he wouldn’t darken the door of a Southern Baptist church, Jones Jr. recalls, but “now he goes anywhere to any kind of church—orthodox or heretic.” Barrows, crusade song-leader and broadcast-film director, lives in Greenville. Wilson was BJU student president and almost got shipped home. Years later his brother Grady was expelled a few months before graduation. Graham’s crusade arrangements are handled by Willis Haymaker, a veteran who did the same for Jones Sr. during his evangelistic career.

Jones Jr. charges that the only reason Graham chose such a small city (66,100) for his sole U. S. crusade this year was to attack and embarrass BJU. Graham says Greenville has the biggest indoor arena in the Deep South, and Barrows was anxious to bring a crusade to his home town. It was Graham’s first Carolina crusade since Charlotte (1958), and things had a homey atmosphere, with his family getting a rare chance to watch the breadwinner at work.

BJU students were told they would be expelled if they attended the crusade, and Jones Jr. also warned in his basic sermon against Graham a year ago, “I say to anybody who attends a church in Greenville that supports this crusade that he ought to get out of that church.”

Although most of the students agreed with the school’s anti-Graham stance, there was some unrest on campus. Fearing reprisal, the minority expressed their feelings in knowing glances, quiet conversations with trusted friends, and letters to the outside world.

Jones Jr. created quite a stir locally by suggesting that a Graham supporter recite the following mock prayer:

“Dear Lord: Bless the man who leads Christian people into disobeying the Word of God, who prepares the way for Anti-Christ by building the apostate church and turning his so-called ‘converts’ over to infidels and unbelieving preachers.… Bless this man who has the heretic Bishop Kennedy as the Chairman of his crusade in Los Angeles, who shares his platform with men like Martin Luther King and World Council church leaders.

“Anoint him with the Holy Spirit to disobey the Holy Spirit’s clear instructions in the Word of God. Increase his power to deceive good people and deliver them to the Apostasy and the Church of Anti-Christ under the pretext of winning souls.

“Bless the man who flatters the Pope and defers to the purple-and-scarlet-clothed Anti-Christ who heads the church that the Word of God describes as the ‘Old Whore of Babylon’.…”

Jones Jr. won’t forgive Billy for having Bishop Pike on his platform once in San Francisco, even though this was before Pike’s wholesale denial of Christian doctrines. Gerald Kennedy is labeled “a rank, unbelieving, agnostic, Christ-denying Methodist bishop”; but the official dossier against him has only one religious point, a twelve-year-old quote playing down the Second Coming. The other data concern such political issues as Kennedy’s opposition to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Graham’s camp claims he is like Jones Sr. and other great evangelists of the past in seeking wide support. Although the city-wide scope is similar, Graham has gone much further in cooperating with those who do not share his conservative beliefs, so long as they give him complete freedom to preach the Bible. But critics are wrong in charging that he refers Jewish converts to rabbis and fails to attack Protestant liberalism.

Graham has two other distinctions: his strict financial and auditing system, and an elaborate follow-up and counseling system that Haymaker considers a major improvement over the good old days.

The fundamentalists in Greenville who oppose Billy felt left out because they were not invited to the breakfast meeting a year ago where the crusade was set up, although they would not have supported the crusade anyway. The Rev. Harold B. Sightler, whose robust independent Baptist church is one of Greenville’s biggest, said “the fundamentalists were just as carefully segregated as the colored were integrated.”

Sightler, who has been in town twenty-six years, said many churches backing Graham never cared about revival and would never again support an evangelist. Asked what churches he could not work with in the crusade, Sightler ruled out all Pentecostalists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Churches of Christ. He admits many Methodists preach the Gospel, but they are in the National Council of Churches and “I can’t mess with that crowd.” Sightler also charged that the city’s racial “peace and harmony” were endangered by Graham’s integration, and said “many colored pastors sitting on the platform are civil rights agitators.”

The experiment in interracial Christianity was harmonious as far as it went. Harrison Rearden, Negro life insurance man and crusade secretary, said Negro participation was slight because of apathy, lack of spiritual dedication, and “suspicion, which is understandable due to one hundred years of repression.”

At the final committee meeting, Rearden said that after Graham left town “I would like to see God enacted in practicality. We have a racial problem in this community. If the crusade does not change this community, it can’t be changed.… We must take that bold step before men.…”

In one sermon Graham came close to mentioning the BJU issue by saying, “the consuming passion of a true believer is love. The Bible says the sign of believers is that they love one another, which includes a willingness to believe the best about the other Christian.”

‘Drive Unto Others …’

“Highway safety is a spiritual problem,” says evangelist Billy Graham. “Most people do not associate careful and safe driving with spiritual living, but there is a definite connection.”

In a forceful radio address coinciding with the opening of his Greenville crusade, Graham called attention to the staggering automobile accident toll: nearly a thousand people killed and more than 75,000 injured each week in the United States alone.

“An automobile is one of the most deadly machines of destruction ever invented by man,” he said.

The evangelist told his “Hour of Decision” audience that the underlying cause of highway accidents is the breaking of the Golden Rule. He recalled that a few years ago a new highway slogan was coined, “Drive unto others as you would have them drive unto you.” As specific causes of accidents he cited selfishness, the urge to show off, anger, carelessness, neglect, and drunkenness, which he called “a national disgrace.”

Graham prescribed the new birth as the cure for slaughter on the highways: “Then and only then will the old things become new. Then, because we have the mind of Christ, love will replace selfishness, humility will replace pride, peace will replace anger, and we will live and drive as Christians should.”

The ‘Most Unusual University’

Bob Jones University has long called itself the “world’s most unusual university,” and few would dispute the claim. That’s not “world” in the Pauline sense, though, since BJU stands for strict separation from the secular world and from a large chunk of Christendom.

But fine arts are not included in this separatism. BJU has an exquisite museum of religious art, perhaps the finest in America,²Included are some very unbaptistic church icons and vestments, and paintings by such masters as Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Titian. puts on lavish operas and Shakespearean plays, runs one of South Carolina’s better radio stations, and offers good instruction in cinema.

Other elements of the Greenville campus chemistry are tight control of students, racial segregation and right-wing politics generally, and an evangelistic, Bible-based Protestantism.

“The Founder” is Bob Jones, Sr., one of the century’s great evangelists, but Bob Jr. became acting president (with an honorary doctorate) in his early twenties and formulated academic policy and artistic awareness (he is an accomplished actor). Now he is away from campus a lot, leaving day-to-day operations to son Bob III, 26, who also holds an honorary doctorate.

In the official school history Fortress of Faith (Eerdmans), loyal alumnus Melton Wright pours praise on BJU like honey over biscuits. He says the school would be accredited but the Joneses fear outside controls. Others reading the catalogue might wonder whether BJU would make it, since intellectual ingrowth runs high (nearly one-third of the faculty members have studied only at BJU) and only 16 of 158 teachers hold earned doctorates. But BJU products have proved successful at many graduate schools.

Like Fortress, the catalogue has a few omissions, such as the fact that Negroes need not apply for admission (some Orientals are accepted), the strict rules, the demerit system, reporting on classmates, and the possibility of dismissal at any time without specific infractions for harming campus “spirit.”

Tales of turnover abound in circles where BJU lore is perpetuated. Recent graduates estimate that 5 to 10 per cent of the student body leaves during each year. Of an entering freshman class of about 1,200, one-third remain four years later, although many students are encouraged to transfer for specialized training.

Physical contact between the sexes is forbidden, and the always-chaperoned dating is mostly restricted to a block-long room that looks like a department-store furniture display. Bob Jones, Jr., believes he has “the most contented group of students on the American continent.”

Faculty pay is low and is based on need rather than ability, a curiously communistic tenet for a school that holds “Americanism” conferences where speakers urge income-tax repeal and impeachment of Earl Warren.

BJU is now on its third campus, a modern, $26 million plant that draws aid from many loyal supporters, reportedly including the late Sophie Tucker. BJU people are quite courageous in criticizing whatever and whomever they please. Over the years, shafts have been aimed at the press; most denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention; most of the better-known evangelical organizations; and Greenville (during a zoning fight in recent years). The status of BJU board member and U. S. Senator J. Strom Thurmond is in doubt, since he appeared on Billy Graham’s platform and even praised the evangelist.

Arresting The Restless Ones

Promoters of the most recent Billy Graham film, The Restless Ones, say it is attracting much larger audiences than any of the previous evangelistic pictures. The film was first shown last October and by the end of March had been viewed by nearly 1,000,000 persons. More than 70,000 decisions for Christ have been counted.

In a marked departure from previous practice, The Restless Ones is being shown in theaters and public auditoriums rather than in churches, and a one-dollar admission fee is being charged. Spokesmen say it is drawing many from the black-jacket and beatnik crowds and confronting them with the claims of Christ. In San Marcos, Texas, some 2,500 Job Corps trainees saw the film.

Trained counselors follow up all inquirers, who are also given the opportunity to take elementary Bible study courses.

Toronto Fish Net

The church coffeehouse movement seems to have become less evangelism than a means for church people to get together without a high cover charge.

But Toronto’s latest, The Fish Net, is a $500-a-month evangelistic project of a youth group from Avenue Road Church (Christian and Missionary Alliance). Each night, from its basement location, the Net belts out the Gospel, mostly in music, to high schoolers and the college crowd, together with some academic dropouts.

The locale is Yorkville Street, known for other coffeehouses, art galleries, boutiques, beatniks, groups of roving teen-agers, and liquor and sex mingled with reefers and drugs.

Space in The Fish Net is tight. It holds forty comfortably, but people often jam in seventy strong, from 8 P.M. to long after midnight, and a doorman has to turn people away. The main room, in Palestinian decor with a palm tree and (of course) fish nets, holds a dozen tables, a piano, and an organ. Christian films are used occasionally, along with the staple diet of professional-quality, Christian musicians.

The music is the show, but the main attraction is conversation over a (free) cup of coffee. Young people talk to young people, not simply to indulge in some subjective dialogue, but to win souls for Christ. The church young people who run the place consider it a training ground in learning to communicate with the world.

Plans for The Fish Net began twenty months ago with the church’s slightly controversial pastor, Kenn Opperman, successor to the late Dr. A. W. Tozer. “The young people in the area are curiosity seekers—not nearly as rough and tough as we anticipated,” Opperman said. “The outstanding lesson we’ve learned is this: When you get people together who are not religious, and people who are religious, around a common table and a cup of coffee, they find they have more to communicate than they ever realized.”

Opperman explained one of the main problems was selling “some of our own people on the idea that this was an important outreach for our young people.” Another was getting a lease in Yorkville, since landlords feared the Christians might scare away trade.

The skepticism of a few “isolationists” has been matched with high praise, the minister said. “I’d rather be criticized for doing something good than for doing nothing.” When someone charged that the management encourages smoking by providing ash trays, Opperman ridiculed the criticism. “It just keeps them from burning holes in our tablecloths,” he laughed.

KENNETH G. WARES

Sparks From A Genius

Old Testament Theology, Volume II: The Theology of Israel’s Prophetic Traditions, by Gerhard von Rad, translated by D. M. G. Stalker (Harper and Row, 1965, 470 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by William Sanford LaSor, professor of Old Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

On the dust jacket of this book, G. Ernest Wright calls it “the most original and one of the two most important treatises in the field of Old Testament theology to appear since the First World War,” and H. H. Rowley says, “It will stand alone among the spate of books on Old Testament theology.” Personally, I dislike book reviews based on dust jackets, and this review will not be such; but these two statements, made by cautious and well-read scholars, deserve to be quoted. This is indeed a great book. We are still too near to it to make such statements, but it may well be epoch-making in the field of Old Testament studies.

This is not to suggest that I agree with all the author says. But that is beside the point. Only a very few times in my life have I had the privilege of sitting under a true genius. (A genius, I would remind you, is one who strikes the sparks from which other men light their fires.) Professor von Rad’s work is the product of sheer genius. Whether other men will light many fires from it remains to be seen, but it is a pyrotecnic display of sparks.

Professor von Rad starts with the fundamental assumption that the prophets of the Old Testament were preeminently preachers of the “law.” This is a direct break with the critical position that the prophets were originators who were responsible for the creation of ethical monotheism. Professor von Rad also blazes a new trail in his concept of Old Testament theology, rejecting the approach through religious ideas and modifying the approach through “saving history.” In a postscript, which is additional to the German edition, he discusses these points at some length (pp. 410–29). It becomes clear that he is in effect following a living approach, which is basically drawn from the saving acts in Israel’s history, but which seeks at the same time to view them as they might have been viewed at any given moment in Israel’s history. This position is obvious in his outline.

In Part One of this volume the author takes up “General Considerations in Prophecy,” discussing such matters as “prophecy before the classical period (Elijah, Elisha),” “the oral tradition,” “the prophet’s freedom,” “the prophets’ conception of the word of God, and Israel’s ideas about time and history,” and “the prophetic eschatology.” This part is basic and should not be skipped over carelessly.

Professor von Rad has a habit of starting a chapter by stating the current view—unchallenged. The reader becomes aware that the author is attacking that position only as he reads the subsequent pages. For example, von Rad rejects the idea that the classical prophets were cult officials (p. 55), and stresses a call “through God’s direct and very personal address to them” (p. 57).

Part Two (pp. 129–315) deals with “Classical Prophecy” and takes up the prophets and their messages individually and chronologically. After each period there is a summary. For example, after considering Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, Professor von Rad discusses “the new element in eighth-century prophecy”; similarly, after Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Deutero-Isaiah, he takes up the new elements in the Babylonian and early Persian period. Readers who may be disturbed by the author’s assumption of a Second Isaiah should be prepared to meet also Trito-Isaiah, not to mention Trito-Zechariah (p. 297). However, it should be strongly emphasized that in general Professor von Rad has rejected much of the older critical position. For example, he has no sympathy for the “gloom-and-doom” school that removed any glimmer of hope from the pre-exilic prophets.

Part Three deals with “The Old Testament and the New.” It is in many ways the most exciting part of the book and offers the most striking of the author’s many brilliant insights. Professor von Rad pleads with the reader not to read this until he has first read what goes before, since these words “stand or fall according as what preceded them is valid” (p. vii). It is obvious that the author considers Jesus Christ to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament, and believes that this new event in saving history must influence our understanding of the Old Testament. The discussion of the use of the Old Testament by New Testament authors is important (pp. 330 f.).

Within the space limits of this review it is not possible to enter into a critical evaluation of this great book. I have already indicated my frequent dissent, but to attempt to point out what I find objectionable—and why—would run on for pages. Nevertheless, for what they are worth, let me make a few blanket statements. I feel that Professor von Rad has continued to hold some critical positions that have no firm support; for example, anonymous prophets (such as Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah) violate the author’s own statement against anonymity (p. 77). I feel moreover, that Professor von Rad has not sufficiently divorced his thinking from Greek thought (e.g., pp. 101 ff.), even though his basic premise is not to impose other thought-forms on the Old Testament. Then, too, I feel that the author has gotten himself into difficulties through his confusion of “eschatological” and post-exilic (cf. pp. 280–88). If the prophets, when speaking of the saving acts yet to take place, were thinking only of the return from exile—or better, if God’s revelation to them concerned only that return—we are indeed faced with many difficulties. The eschaton, even in the prophetic message, was a very complex idea that, it becomes apparent, had to extend far beyond the events of the return and the Second Temple.

This book deserves wide and careful reading. Scholars and teachers who are committed to positions based on older critical views should work over it and re-evaluate their position. Conservatives should use it for a similar purpose and. in addition, to add vitality and stimulation to a position that is too often lifeless and boring.

WILLIAM SANFORD LASOR*****************************

Moral Atheists

The Meaning of Modern Atheism, by Jean Lacroix (Macmillan, 1965, 115 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The French philosopher Lacroix of Lyons aims to understand rather than to disprove atheism, of which there is no scarcity in French life and literature. “For millions today atheism is a way of life” (p. 18).

The newest schools do not reject theism in order to pursue immorality but supposedly in the interest of ethics and responsibility. Just as belief in God is viewed as destructive of responsibility, so too is original sin.

When faith and prayer do not spur the Christian to action but survive as a mystique, this atheistic misunderstanding may be encouraged.

Yet the “moral atheist” has utopian expectations of the elimination of poverty, war, injustice. And Marxists champion the dogma that “all social action is ineffective in so far as it is spiritual” (p. 37). Besides political atheism, however, there are scientific humanism and ethical humanism. “The atheists of today are no longer libertines … and their ethical behaviour is hardly to be distinguished from that of Christians—a fact which poses some delicate questions for the latter!” (p. 41).

A partial reply is, of course, that modern atheists borrow more from the Christian outlook than their views consistently permit—including the vision of social justice and the sense of personal responsibility.

In the closing half of his book Lacroix seems to accept the naturalistic notion that all knowledge of God is permeated by inadequate representations (p. 55), and he praises negative theology. But he does not conclude his book without upholding the ontological capacity of reason and saluting the Vatican Council’s declaration that human intelligence can reach God by natural means.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Ecumenical Buildings?

Christ and Architecture: Building Presbyterian/Reformed Churches, by Donald J. Bruggink and Carl H. Droppers (Eerdmans, 965, 708 pp., $20), is reviewed by Scott Turner Ritenour, director, Division of Christian Life and Mission, National Council of Churches, New York, New York.

This compendium of data for “Building Presbyterian/Reformed Churches” seeks to interrelate theology and architecture through a scholarly text enhanced by photographs and charts. The illustrations, coming largely from the Continent—Holland, Switzerland, and Germany primarily—are well selected and help to unify a cumbersome (and physically heavy) volume.

The authors are well qualified. Dr. Bruggink, professor of historical theology at Western Theological Seminary, probes deeply into questions of history and theology in the first seven chapters of the book. Mr. Droppers, a practicing architect and assistant professor of architecture at Western Reserve University, puts those ideas into pictures and diagrams, and also expresses his views in words in the last six chapters. The resulting volume is one of the handsomest books on church design published in this nation.

In evaluating so rich a source book I have very mixed feelings. It is comprehensive within the limited circle of church groups rooted in the Reformed tradition. The essential basis for the whole is in Part I, where the theological and historical point of view is presented. On this are built the practical and technical issues. Although church leaders and architects may be greatly helped by knowing the background, I suspect that even very interested members of building committees would be receiving information that is beyond their ken, thus making a little knowledge more confusing than helpful. To put it another way, the first part is basic to all readers—clergy, students, builders, and architects—because theology determines liturgy, which in turn defines function and space needs for architecture. The second part deals primarily with technical matters, which are essentially the concern of the architect and builder. Such quickly gotten knowledge may cause committees to be more troublesome than helpful in the building process.

Although theology is of great importance in church architecture, I am not convinced that an approved formula—a series of well-stated criteria—ensures a successful building program. Theology can become sterile when it is not related to life, and I did not find any relevance of the theological position presented to the dynamic forces that are molding the life of churchmen today. (Incidentally, I was a little surprised that despite exhaustive research, the authors failed to cite such sources as “Towards a Theology for Church Architecture,” by Paul Chapman, which appeared in the May, 1959, issue of motive magazine, and an important essay by James Whyte, professor at the University of Edinburgh, entitled “The Theological Basis of Church Architecture,” in Towards a Church Achitecture, edited by Peter Hammond and published in 1962.)

Part I by Dr. Bruggink is based on the conviction that since the preached word conveys a message, the architecture of the church should proclaim in a sympathetic way the same living Word. Dr. Bruggink develops criteria in relation to space so that there will be a visual experience of both Word and sacraments. In describing the people of God, he differentiates the functions of the ministry, the elders, and the deacons, and sees the whole congregation as participants in the liturgy. In speaking about the choir, he defines its true function as communicating the people’s gratitude rather than showing God’s grace.

In “Heresy in the Sanctuary” Dr. Bruggink sharply criticizes the fact that often too many materials are used, too many things are assembled, too many flags are shown, too many decorations are employed beyond their symbolical significance, too many windows are used, too many memorial gifts are accepted, too many lecterns clutter up the worship area, and too many interruptions are permitted that have no relevance to Reformed worship according to the Word of God.

Part II is developed from the theological basis that has been laid, and Mr. Droppers seeks to encourage a fruitful relation between the client church and the architect. Therefore there are chapters on “Teamwork in the Church Building,” on “Economy …,” on “Expression …,” on “Structure …,” on “Shape of the Church Building,” and finally on “Programming.…” In these six chapters, twenty-one charts deal with such aspects as various “principles” for site selection, water supply, window operation, heating, lighting, and space and volume selection.

In general, I feel that Christ and Architecture does present the Reformed position, but that if it were more apologetic and showed an irenic spirit, then the true purpose of the Church would be better fulfilled. To be polemical at a time when the liturgical movement is expanding and deepening is most unfortunate. The churches that are built now and in the future should reflect their tradition, to be sure, but they not be so tightly authenticated that those of other backgrounds would be ill at ease in them. If the basis of the Presbyterian/Reformed position is to be encouraged and the truest in the liturgical movement is to be provided, then we should also seek an ecumenical emphasis rather than allowing our zeal to protect our rationale.

SCOTT TURNER RITENOUR

Ezekiel For Today

Ezekiel: Prophecy of Hope, by Andrew W. Blackwood, Jr. (Baker, 1965, 274 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by David W. Kerr, professor of Old Testament interpretation and dean, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

Many epithets have been applied to Ezekiel: apocalyptist, which he surely was: genius, which he may very well have been; cataleptic or pervert, which he surely was not. Dr. Blackwood sees him as an existentialist—not, of course, the agnostic who sees in life neither purpose nor hope, but the theist who knows God and lives his truth in the heartaches of existence.

Every interpreter of Ezekiel, because he is dealing with apocalyptic literature, has to decide over and over again how particular symbols are to be understood, where the line is to be drawn between the parabolic and the narrative, as in Ezekiel 4 and 5, between the figurative and the literal, as in chapters 37–39. The lines of distinction are well drawn in this book, and most of the author’s decisions are reasonably supported.

In adopting a “spiritual” interpretation of the difficult Gog and Magog passage in Ezekiel 38 and 39, and more particularly of the temple vision in chapters 40–48, Dr. Blackwood parts company with many conservative expositors. By so doing, however, he not only avoids the problems raised by literalism, such as the renewal of Levitical offerings in the millennial era, but also focuses attention upon the abiding lessons of the Spirit that the literalists so often miss. As the author says in connection with Ezekiel 3:22, Christians sometimes display a curious inconsistency when they act as if the spiritual were less “real” than the material. The “cords” were “real” enough, but Ezekiel could not have tied a package with them.

In the exposition of chapters 16 and 34 there is a fine recognition of the covenant idea, which appears as a thread of thought in several chapters. It would seem, however, that the same thread could have been detected more readily than it has been in chapters 36 and 37, where the covenant formula, “I will be your God, and you shall be my people,” is an emphatic promise.

I cannot help having some regret over two features of the introductory chapter of the book. One is that the reader is promised a message of hope in the prophecy if he is willing to endure the repetition, to face what is ugly, obscure, and disgusting. From one point of view, perhaps all these adjectives apply to Ezekiel. Nevertheless, one gets the feeling that he should hope for the best but expect the worst, even if this is God’s Word. The other disappointing feature is that the analytical school of such critics as Hölscher and Irwin is treated more kindly than scientific criticism demands. (Admittedly, this last comment reveals as much about the reviewer as it does about the author.)

Ezekiel’s essential message of hope in its Babylonian setting of the sixth century B.C. does sound forth clearly in this book, which is characterized by sound interpretation throughout. The language and style are attractive. Anyone who reads the prophecy of Ezekiel with this volume as a companion will have a better grasp of the entire biblical message and will see how the Spirit of God works through all kinds of people in all kinds of situations. I highly recommend the book.

DAVID W. KERR

Two Good Ones

Dialogue at Calvary, by John A. Holt (Baker, 1965, 79 pp., $1.95) and Listening to God on Calvary, by George Gritter (Baker, 1965, 143 pp., $2.50), are reviewed by Robert G. Rayburn, president and professor of practical theology and homiletics, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

Here are two small books that will certainly be a blessing to any who read them, no matter how many volumes they have read on the seven words of Christ from the cross. The work of John A. Holt is especially interesting, for it is a treatment of seven words addressed to the cross by those who stood on Calvary. In spite of a few unfortunate grammatical errors (e.g., “how could anyone put their faith in a man who was unable to preserve his own life”), the author has very definite literary gifts, and his work is also thoroughly biblical and intensely practical. The capable and conscientious minister will not copy the general plan of the discourses in this volume, but the work should be a good seed-plot for those who want suggestions they can develop in their own way. Holt has a stimulating and original approach to thinking about the cross.

One wishes that in considering the first word of defiance, “Ah, thou that destroyest the temple …,” the author had pointed out that it shows the complete lack of spiritual discernment typical of the man who refuses to believe God’s Word. Although Holt makes it clear that the answer to the defiance was the resurrection, the non-believer would be no more persuaded by the resurrection than by the other miracles.

Listening to God on Calvary concerns the seven words that Jesus spoke from the cross. Because these have received very extensive treatment by many preachers and scholars, I was tempted to give this book only a casual reading. I soon discovered, however, that this was no ordinary book of sermons. George Gritter’s deep spiritual insights are unquestionable. He writes with beautiful style. He is a master of unaffected alliteration that gives force to his treatment.

The flyleaf indicates that these were sermons. The one thing I find lacking in them is a direct, personal application of the striking truths so clearly presented. The preacher can never assume that those in his congregation will apply God’s truth to their own needs.

Both these books are heartily recommended, especially for the Lenten season.

ROBERT G. RAYBURN

The Ministry’S Many Faces

Ministry, by Robert S. Paul (Eerdmans, 1965, 252 pp., $5), is reviewed by Herbert Giesbrecht, librarian, Mennonite Brethren Bible College, Winnipeg, Manitoba.

“The Protestant Ministry is perplexed, and it does not quite know why.” These are the opening words of Robert S. Paul’s new book, and they express succinctly what many Christians (ministers and laymen alike) feel.

This rather pessimistic mood has been expressed in recent studies of the shortcomings of seminary training, as well as in recent pleas for greater participation of the laity in the essential “ministry” of the Church. The disquietude of sensitive Christians and their earnest questioning of the very nature and purpose of the Christian ministry compels us to examine the matter once again.

This author’s full and forthright work is probably the only contemporary study in America that seriously grapples with the basic issues from the standpoint of biblical theology and exegesis. Paul is acquainted with the views of M. Luther and J. Calvin, Richard Baxter and Cardinal Newman, T. S. Manson and A. M. Ramsay, W. D. Davies and John Baillie, P. S. Minear and D. T. Jenkins, D. Bonhoeffer and Hans-Ruedi Weber, and he draws effectively upon their thought. Yet he is fundamentally concerned with the scriptural evidence.

The author’s theological discernment impresses one immediately and repeatedly. It is revealed in his observation that all questions “concerning the Church are at root theological” (p. 181). It is also revealed in his reiteration of the truth that all questions about the Christian ministry must ultimately be referred back to “the source of the Church’s own ministry and of all ministry in the Church, and to the place where the only valid theology of ministry can begin, to the redemptive ministry of Jesus Christ himself” (p. 100).

But his discernment is most evident in his discussion of what seems to be his central thesis, that the ministry of the Church finds its continuing justification and its continuing pattern in the ministry of Christ himself, and not anywhere else. Paul’s clear and convincing exposition of this thesis and of its connections with specific aspects of the doctrine of the Church and its ministry makes his work intriguing and a genuine “theology of Christian Ministry.”

Among the many aspects and issues discussed are: the call to the ministry; the ordination of ministers; popular conceptions of the ministry; church structure and government; church worship and church sacraments; church work and its problems and perils; church unity (ecumenicity); the minister’s responsibilities and relations to family, church, and the secular world.

Besides theological discernment, the second main quality of Paul’s work is its spirit of Christian charity and tolerance. While he often expresses deeply held convictions in emphatic language, his discussions of divergent views are never marred by ill-humored argument or sarcastic wit. This irenic quality is especially apparent in his comparison of high-Anglican and free-church conceptions of the ministry (pp. 114 f.), in his discussion of the various forms of church government and church worship (pp. 216 f.) and of the various attitudes of divergent views about the final source of spiritual authority in the Church (pp. 166 f.), and in his sane comments on whether the minister ought to be a “scholar-preacher,” an administrator and counselor, or something of both.

I might speak of other merits of this author, such as his shrewd and practical understanding of human nature, and his sense of balance. But I must conclude my comments with a reference to the book’s literary style, which is refreshingly plain and colloquial and often suggests the simple and fluctuating movements of excited speech among “student-friends.” Often the discussion is imaginatively colored by anecdotes and images culled from history, literature, and legend.

HERBERT GIESBRECHT

It’S In The Title

Jesus and the Son of Man, by A. J. B. Higgins (Fortress, 1965, 224 pp., $4.25), is reviewed by Andrew J. Bandstra, dean of students and assistant professor of New Testament, Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The conjunction is important in the title of this book. The author, professor of New Testament at the University of Leeds, attempts to show that although Jesus did use the phrase “Son of Man,” he did not think of himself as the Son of Man nor as one destined to become the Son of Man. Thus it is not correct to say that Jesus is the Son of Man or that he thought he was the Son of Man: rather, one should speak of the correlativity of Jesus and the Son of Man.

A crucial passage is Luke 12:8, 9: “Everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; but he who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God.” This passage is crucial, according to Higgins, because, first, it reveals that Jesus made a clear distinction between himself as he spoke and the future Son of Man, and secondly, it illustrates the only way in which Jesus himself ever spoke of the Son of Man, namely, in terms of his future glory.

Through his form-critical study of the Son of Man passages, Higgins is constrained to hold that all references to the Son of Man that speak either of his earthly activity or of his sufferings are, in that form, not authentic sayings of Jesus but are rather expressions of the faith of the early Church. The author’s position on Mark 10:45 is instructive. Jesus said: “I shall give my life as a ransom for many.” The earliest stage of the church tradition put it: “The Son of man came to give his life a ransom for many.” The present form with the insertion on serving is the third and final stage of this tradition. Thus, for Higgins, Jesus knew himself to be the Son of God in a unique way; he also considered himself to be fulfilling the role of the Suffering Servant on earth (of which he spoke in the first person); but he never designated himself the Son of Man.

How does Higgins give meaning to the conjunction in the expression, Jesus and the Son of Man? Basic to his understanding is the position that “the Son of Man” was never an objective reality but an idea in the mind of certain Jews. Jesus took this idea and adapted it to denote himself as the Son of God he already believed himself to be, reinstalled in his heavenly seat. The concept Son of Man is used to describe the Son of God exercising his intercessory or judicial functions. This is the connection—and the only connection—that Jesus himself made between himself and the Son of Man. It is from this authentic base that, according to Higgins, the Son of Man Christology of the early Church was developed in the post-resurrection period, as reflected in the Son of Man passages in John, in most of those in the Synoptic Gospels, and in those in the rest of the New Testament.

To someone, such as this reviewer, who holds that Jesus himself made the synthesis of the Suffering Servant and the Son of Man concepts, Higgins’s argument will not be persuasive. What seem to the author to be assured results of critical studies are often simply the collective judgments of subjective opinion. On the other hand, the “obvious” fact—to Higgins—that Jesus knew himself to be the Son of God is really an expression of faith on the part of the author that will not be shared by all. Jesus, as portrayed in this book, is made a bit more “understandable,” but somehow in the process something of the mystery of the Incarnation is obscured and the reality of the serving, suffering, and glorified Son of Man is replaced, in part, by the early Church’s proclamation of and justification for her faith.

This does not mean that the book has no value for the scholar not holding the author’s view of the New Testament and its Christology. On the contrary, the book can serve many purposes. In the first place, it is a good exhibit of a competent scholar “doing form criticism” on one specific subject. Again, it is a good exhibit of one line of the “new quest of the historical Jesus.” Higgins is convinced that the Jesus who proclaimed the good news of the Kingdom and the Jesus who became the subject of the post-resurrection Church’s own proclamation are identical. Finally, this book will serve to illumine certain problems and facets of the Son of Man passages with which the New Testament scholar, irrespective of his position, must deal responsibly.

ANDREW J. BANDSTRA

How To Help

Help Your Minister to Do His Best, by Owen M. Weatherly (Judson, 1965, 156 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Paul R. Gilchrist, pastor, Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Levittown, Pennsylvania.

This is a fascinating and thought-provoking book written in an easy-going style, by a man who “as pastor and educator … has experienced both sides of the relationship he sensitively describes in this book.” He puts the point of his title across. From the first chapter, where he introduces the pastor as the one who is often responsible for finding extra ping-pong balls, to the last chapter, which closes on a very serious note of advice to the congregation that is about to call a new pastor, Weatherly’s book is exceedingly well written. Those who sincerely want to help their pastor do his best will find a treasury of helpful information.

The author shows his practical wisdom in such passages as these:

But, if he devotes all of his time to pastoral care and church administration and gives no thought to sermon preparation, he will necessarily come to the pulpit on Sunday morning with nothing to offer you but a full heart and an empty head. And I don’t have to tell you that a combination like that is poor fare for a hungry soul [p. 30].

People aren’t defeated because their problems are too big or too complicated to be solved; they are defeated because they won’t seek and accept the help that is available to them until their lives have already been ruined. Take your problems to your minister no matter how far advanced they are; but, if you want to get the maximum in help, take them to him as early as possible [p. 111].

You can keep your minister busy swatting flies all week if you want to. But it would make more sense to let him help you clean up the garbage pile of ethical ignorance and moral ineptness where the flies are breeding. Systematic group instruction in the principles and practice of Christian ethics is the “preventive medicine” of the pastoral ministry [p. 115].

Weatherly offers much helpful advice on marriage, evangelism, pastoral counseling, church administration, and community leadership, and his book has tremendous value.

There are, however, elements to which I take exception. The liberal theology underlying the book is seen in such a statement as: “Worship is man accepting all men as his brothers because God is the Father of all men” (p. 40). To say this is to fail to recognize the clear teaching in John 8:42 and 44, where Jesus says: “If God were your Father, ye would love me,” and adds, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.”

Furthermore, there is an evident lack of biblical orientation. The de-emphasis on Scripture is expressed, for example, when, speaking of the pastor’s visiting the sick, Weatherly says, “He will certainly want to pray with you and possibly read some Scripture …” (p. 53, italics mine). The Scriptures ought to be the primary source of comfort and blessing to the sick. Again, this lack of a biblical foundation is shown when the author tells of a girl who sought the advice of her minister because the young man whom she wished to marry “happened to have a religious and cultural background completely different from her own”: this fact, says Weatherly, “posed no problem which could not be overcome if the parties to the potential marriage had the love and determination and strength and temperament and personal resourcefulness to seek a solution” (pp. 74 f.). This runs counter to the Apostle Paul’s warning about the unequal yoke with unbelievers (2 Cor. 6:14), which is especially important in such a bond as that of marriage.

The book is weak in that it lacks a solid biblical foundation. Yet, with this caution clearly stated, I would nevertheless recommend it to the Christian public, and to seminary students as parallel reading in pastoral theology courses.

PAUL R. GILCHRIST

Book Briefs

Teaching the Troubled Child, by George T. Donahue and Sol Nichtern (Macmillan, 1965, 202 pp., $5.95). A radically new approach—tested in experience—to the education of hundreds of thousands of emotionally troubled children through existing community facilities.

Helping Youth Avoid Four Great Dangers: Smoking, Drinking, VD, Narcotics Addiction, by Hal and Jean Vermes (Association, 1965, 157 pp., $3.95).

Song of Songs, by Watchman Nee, translated by Elizabeth K. Mei and Daniel Smith (Christian Literature Crusade, 1965, 155 pp., $3). An interpretation that sees Song of Songs as a portrayal of the union between Christ and (not the church but) the believer.

The Feminine Crisis in Christian Faith: The Bible’s Challenge to Today’s Woman, by Elizabeth Achtemeier (Abingdon, 1965, 160 pp., $2.75).

Protestantism in Transition, by Charles W. Kegley (Harper and Row, 1965, 282 pp., $5.75). This well-written book makes the author appear a dilettante rather than a scholar. Book and author are theologically liberal, naïve, unscholarly, glib. The book touches many things but really grasps nothing. Kegley’s disregard of books, magazines, and men commonly called evangelical these days does little to commend his understanding of Protestantism. Until he recognizes it, there is little chance he will see it move.

Ten Fingers for God, by Dorothy Clarke Wilson (McGraw-Hill, 1965, 247 pp., $5.50). The true story of a surgeon’s quest for an end to the ravages of leprosy.

Farrar’s Life of Christ, by Frederic William Farrar (World, 1965, 427 pp., $6.50). A new edition of Canon Farrar’s classic work on the life of Jesus, illustrated with full-color reproductions of famous paintings.

Record of Revelation: The Bible, by Wilfrid Harrington, O. P., (Priory Press, 1965, 143 pp., $3.95). A very lucid discussion by a Roman Catholic of the text, canonicity, and inspiration of the Bible, and of textual, literary, and historical criticism. The validity of the latter is not excluded, and the inerrancy of Scripture is affirmed but in such a way as not to exclude biblical scientific and historical inaccuracies.

The Study of the Synoptic Gospels: New Approaches and Outlooks, by Augustin Cardinal Bea (Harper and Row, 1965, 95 pp., $3.50).

Guidance from Men of God: Fifteen Inspiring Messages about People You Know in the Bible, by John A. Redhead (Abingdon, 1965, 144 pp., $2.50).

An Introduction to the History of the Christian Church, by Wilfred W. Biggs (St. Martin’s Press, 1965, 238 pp., $4.95). A lucid and compact history of the Church.

Join Your Right Hands: Addresses and Worship Aids for Weddings, edited by Arthur M. Vincent (Concordia, 1965, 143 pp. $3). A general discussion of what makes a biblical wedding address, followed by twenty-four such addresses.

Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Fourth Edition), by Frank S. Mead (Abingdon, 1965, 272 pp., $2.95).

Dictionary of the Bible, by John L. McKenzie, S.J. (Bruce, 1965, 976 pp., $17.95). The kind of book that gives a cross section of Roman Catholic views.

Horace Bushnell, edited by H. Shelton Smith (Oxford, 1965, 407 pp., $7). The writings of Bushnell that show his theological method and his theological reconstruction. With extensive introductions by the editor.

Concilium, Volume 8: Pastoral Reform in Church Government, edited by Teodoro Jimenez-Urresti and Neophytos Edelby (Paulist Press, 1965, 184 pp., $4.50). A presentation of Roman Catholic “church polity.”

The Mystery of Death, by Ladislaus Boros, S. J. (Herder and Herder, 1965, 201 pp., $4.50). A searching analysis of what death is and what it means. For the serious reader with a very lively mind.

Telling a Child about Death, by Edgar N. Jackson (Channel, 1965, 91 pp., $2.95). A good book on a difficult, rarely written-about subject.

The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, by Alan Cole (Eerdmans, 1965, 188 pp., $3.25). Volume 9 in the New Testament series of the “Tyndale Bible Commentaries.” A sturdy little commentary, both reliable and brief.

The Anchor Bible, Volume 14: Ezra and Nehemiah, translated with introduction and notes by Jacob M. Myers (Doubleday, 1965, 267 pp., $6). The author says that Nehemiah, “the master international politician,” “tended to the body of Judaism,” and Ezra “ministered to its soul.”

The Continuing Search for the Historical Jesus, by Jacob Jervell, translated by Harris E. Kaasa (Augsburg, 1965, 106 pp., $3). A good popular introduction to the old and “continuing” quest for the Jesus of history.

Twentieth Century Catholicism, No. 2, edited by Lancelot Sheppard (Hawthorn, 1965, 251 pp., $6). All about the liturgical changes which are occurring in Roman Catholic worship because of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy.

The Faith of JFK, edited by T. S. Settel (Dutton, 1965, 127 pp., $3.50). Reflections, mostly oblique, of the faith of John F. Kennedy.

This We Believe: The Background and Exposition of the Doctrinal Statement of The Evangelical Free Church of America (revised and enlarged), by Arnold Theodore Olson (Free Church Publications, 1965, 376 pp., $4.95). A churchman in a church that allows no official creed writes a book about the credo of his church.

Paperbacks

Miracles: Yesterday and Today, True and False, by Benjamin B. Warfield (Eerdmans, 1965, 327 pp., $2.25). Originally published under the title Counterfeit Miracles in 1918.

Church Library Manual, prepared by Charlotte Newton (self-published [892 Prince Avenue, Athens, Georgia], 1965, 22 pp., $1).

Questioning Christian Faith, by F. R. Barry (Seabury, 1965, 192 pp., $1.65). Stimulating writing that informs the mind and makes it think about the deep problems of the heart.

Life in Christ Jesus: Reflections on Romans 5–8, by John Knox (Seabury, 1966, 128 pp., $1.25). A very thoughtful and provocative discussion.

Christians and Jews: Encounter and Mission, by Jakob Jocz (S.P.C.K., 1966, 55 pp., 6s. 6d.). Short essays by a competent theologian.

Speaking with Tongues, by Stuart Bergsma (Baker, 1965, 26 pp., $.85). Some physiological and psychological implications of modern glossalalia.

The Mark of Cain: Studies in Literature and Theology, by Stuart Barton Babbage (Eerdmans, 1966, 157 pp., $1.95). Delightful reading.

Sermon Suggestions in Outline, Series I, by R. E. O. White (Eerdmans, 1965, 78 pp., $1.45). Sermonic material rather than sermon outlines, and sometimes more moralistic than theological.

The Epistles of John and Jude, by Ronald A. Ward (Baker, 1965, 102 pp., $1.50). A study manual.

Toynbee, by C. Gregg Singer (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1965, 76 pp., $1.25). An evangelical evaluates Toynbee.

His Only Son Our Lord, by Kent S. Knutson (Augsburg, 1966, 113 pp., $1.50). A luminous discussion in down-to-earth language. Many a lay reader will be surprised at how much theology he can understand.

The Life of John Birch, by Robert H. W. Welch, Jr. (Western Islands, 1965, 128 pp., $1). Only about half the book is about Birch, and the few pages on Birch as a preacher reflects a total misunderstanding of Christianity.

O Sing Unto the Lord: Music in the Lutheran Church, by Henry E. Horn (Fortress, 1966, 156 pp., $2).

Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume III: John Duns Scotus, 1265–1965, edited by John K. Ryan and Bernardine M. Bonansea (Catholic University of America, 1965, 384 pp., $6.95). A major tome on the life, works, and influence of a too much neglected medieval thinker whose emphases on voluntarism contrasts with Aristotelean-Thomistic intellectualism.

Christ Encountered: A Short Life of Jesus, by Roger Tennant (Seabury, 1966, 135 pp., $1.45). The author writes as one who has taken a deep draught of the new wine of the Gospel.

The Christian Case Against Poverty, by Henry Clark (Association, 1965, 128 pp., $.50).

Marriage Customs Through the Ages, by E. O. James (Macmillan, 1965, 254 pp., $1.50). By an author who believes that the family unit has always been the basic unit of human society. First published as Marriage and Society.

The German Church Conflict, by Karl Barth (John Knox, 1965, 77 pp., $1.75). Republished for the light it throws on the ecumenical situation today in Britain and the United States. First published in German in 1956.

The Future of John Wesley’s Methodism, by Henry D. Rack (John Knox, 1965, 80 pp., $1.75). An attempt to show the original nature of Methodism and why and how it should merge with Anglicanism.

Youth Considers Parents as People, by Randolph C. Miller (Nelson, 1965, 93 pp., $1.50). A view from the other end.

The Light of the World: A Reconstruction and Interpretation of the Life of Christ, by Greville Cooke (Icon Books, 1965, 352 pp., 5s.). A well-written but often highly imaginative account. First published in 1949.

One sure way to escape the temptation to be a sounding board for the babel of modern voices

One of the most difficult homiletic questions a preacher faces is, “What is the message the Lord wants me to deliver to his people at this time?” Dozens of issues are dinned into our minds by way of the air-waves and the papers every day. National and international crises so capture our attention in this exciting era of world history that it is hard at times to hear “the still small voice.” It is even harder to know what words to use in the pulpit to get people to listen to that “still small voice.”

One of the great temptations of the day is to degrade the pulpit by making it a sounding board for every brand of political, economic, and social philosophy, from the extreme right to the extreme left. When ministers yield to this temptation and set themselves up as self-appointed purveyors of omniscience, they insult the intelligence of the better-informed members of their congregations. Worse, they send their people out to face the spiritual battles of the week completely undernourished, having been fed stones instead of the Bread of Life.

God’s Word has been given by the Holy Spirit to the Church, and the Church and society made their greatest advances when the Bible was taken seriously as “the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” The Church recognized that it was to bring society into conformity with the Word of God rather than to accommodate God’s Word to society.

Consequently I preach only on biblical themes and depend upon prayer, the Scriptures, and the Holy Spirit to lead me to what the Lord would have me declare in any particular sermon.

It is remarkable how the Holy Spirit directs. Sometimes his guidance does not come as promptly as I might like, but he never fails. Sometimes he leads to an isolated text that demands attention because of a spiritual problem in the church or community, sometimes to a theme related to a special day on the church calendar (though heaven forbid that we respond to every suggested special day we asked to observe), sometimes to a whole book that must be expounded over a period of many weeks or months. I discuss the major doctrines of the faith periodically, and every sermon points to Christ and calls for a choice.

After the all-important selection of a subject comes the sermonic preparation. From the moment the theme has been determined, it becomes one of the primary thoughts occupying my mind during the day and often in the night. While driving from home to home, while engaged in some manual occupation or recreation, as well as in special preparatory reading, I keep the theme in mind and pray for illumination and guidance.

A day or so before the sermon is to be preached I sit down with a large pad of paper and write on it every thought on the subject that comes to mind. A concordance, a Bible dictionary, a few reliable commentaries, a half dozen or so Bible translations, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Roget’s Thesaurus, and a file of illustrations I have built up over the years offer their assistance. The Thesaurus provides synonyms and expressions that not only aid in conveying shades of meaning but also enable one to avoid wearisome repetition. Of course, when the subject is one that requires technical analysis, historical data, or scientific research, the proper source books must be consulted.

The sheets of paper multiply. Then the next step is to assemble out of this mass of disjointed ideas a progression of thought and an outline. This often requires re-reading the sheets a number of times, but eventually the form takes shape and an outline emerges. Then, with the outline in mind, I go over the mass of material and beside the various thoughts jot “Int” for introduction, a “1,” or “2,” or “3” for points of discussion, or “C” for concluding thought. I also cross out much that is extraneous. Then, after I have put the various thoughts in proper sequence, putting flesh on the skeleton and dressing it up with illustrations is comparatively simple.

My favorite source of illustrative material is the Bible itself. Not only does reference to biblical incidents familiarize the people with the contents of the Bible, but the use of one part of the Scriptures to throw light on another part also points out the unity of the Bible and the consistency of its message. It has been said that the Bible is its own best interpreter. I believe that it is likewise its own best illustrator.

In delivery, I believe that one should endeavor to speak as plainly and naturally as possible. I abhor the affected “holy sabbath day voice,” and the meaningless rhythmic inflections that ignore thoughts needing emphasis and emphasize words of no special significance. How terribly unreal and unconvincing a vital message can become if given in an affected or sing-song voice. I shall always be grateful to Dr. Wheeler at Princeton Seminary, who drummed into the heads of us students his admonition, “Let’s not have any el-o-cu-tion! You are supposed to voice ideas.” I try both to speak in a natural voice and to project my voice so that the person on the back row can hear. If the message cannot be heard, why bother to deliver it? And I also try to remember that articulation is as important as volume.

For many years I boasted of “preaching without notes,” but there came a time when I realized I was using more mental energy trying to remember what came next than in giving convincing voice to the thoughts I wanted to communicate. Indeed, there were times when, weary of mind, I found that I was preaching not only without notes but also without ideas. With notes that can be used inconspicuously, I am more relaxed and maintain better contact with the congregation. After all, according to the Chinese proverb, “The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory.”—THE REV. IRVIN SHORTESS YEAWORTH, pastor, Covenant-First Presbyterian Church, Cincinnati, Ohio.

The foundation of the Christian faith is the Lord Jesus Christ, and the foundation of our knowledge about him is the Written Word of God, the Bible. This is true of the Old Testament as well as of the New; the Apostle Paul reminded Timothy: “From childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15, RSV).

The persistent, all-out attacks on the integrity of the Bible are to be expected. Yet Christians must also guard against subtle insinuations, often seemingly plausible, that if permitted to take root will inevitably bring disaster.

Whether man admits it or not, the Holy Scriptures are the only infallible rule of faith and practice. They are what they claim to be, a divinely inspired revelation of truth that man could never discover for himself.

To accept and defend the complete integrity and authority of the Bible is no longer popular. Yet I am convinced that the faith of individual Christians and the future of the Church depends on whether we accept the Scriptures as the unique revelation of divine truth, in which are to be found the answers to man’s problems in this life and the knowledge of his ultimate destiny.

The Bible is above all our source of knowledge of Jesus Christ. This is interwoven throughout the Old Testament and is in full fruition in the New.

Without the Bible we would have no more than a speculative knowledge of God, based on his works of creation and providence. But through the Bible we know that he is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe and the Redeemer of those who believe.

With the Bible we can know God, his will and laws, his love, mercy, and grace offered in the person of his Son. As we read the Bible we become aware of his presence and help, his guidance and strength, his sufficiency for every situation.

The Holy Spirit uses the Bible to look into our souls and spirits and show us ourselves as God sees us. Who, while reading the Scriptures, has not experienced the searching of the Holy Spirit?

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews expresses this function of the Bible perfectly: “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do (Heb. 4:12, 13).

It is the Holy Spirit, the divine author, who makes the Bible distinct from all other literature. In its pages there exists a power stronger than any X ray devised by man, a power that reaches down into those areas of life hidden from man-devised equipment or methods.

Hardly a day passes that newspapers, magazines, and news commentators do not refer to the plight of a world steeped in lawlessness and tragedy that defies human solution. The Bible gives both the diagnosis and the cure.

Ignoring the Word of God, politicians, sociologists, and economists fight a hopeless battle. The world’s tragedies, ailments, bitterness, conflicts, and crime are all symptoms, not the disease itself. The Bible makes it plain what the disease is—sin in the human heart—and offers the cure in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

We are confronted by a brazen attempt to reject God’s revelation of man’s nature, need, and only hope. Going hand in hand with this is man’s ignorance of the nature, love, and perfect provision of God, who alone has in his hands the solution to it all.

The substitution of human opinion for the divine revelation to be found solely in the Word of God is sinful presumption and arrant foolishness, and it leads to certain disaster.

Human opinions are fallible; God’s truth is infallible. Men’s opinions change, but God’s truth does not. The devices of men are unreliable; God’s word remains sure. Men’s opinions are shot through with their own inherent weaknesses; but the Scriptures are strong and eternal in truth. And the wisdom of men is foolishness in God’s sight—that is, in the sight of the One with whom all men must ultimately have to do.

Let us never forget: wherever human opinion runs counter to the divine revelation, it will some day be dashed to pieces on the reality that God is true and cannot change.

Within the last few years, even months, denials of God’s Word have increased. Non-Christians, already confused, find themselves even more so because of these denials, some of which originate within the Church. Christians are also being confused and discouraged, for they feel the foundations being shaken.

Stand firm, like the pastor of a large city church who was chided for preaching a sermon on Jonah and the whale. His reply was, “I had rather be found on the side of faith than of denial.”

Don’t make the first compromise! When informed that new textual discoveries and the advance of science make it impossible to accept the Bible at face value, take comfort in this fact: not one new manuscript and not one discovery of science has discredited or altered any doctrine of the Christian faith.

On the contrary, new manuscripts and new archaeological findings are confirming the truth of the Scriptures. Furthermore, science, busy discovering the things God created and placed in his universe, is only confirming the divine revelation. We think of our age as the “space age,” and it is. Nevertheless, the Bible is filled with allusions to space, and nothing has been discovered that is contrary to the truth therein revealed.

Not for one moment would I imply that the Bible is primarily a book of science. But when the curtain of time comes down and we see God’s creation in the light of eternity, some will be amazed to see how accurate the Bible is. Even today scientists cannot go behind Genesis 1:1, and few go that far.

As for the “errors,” “contradictions,” and “discrepancies” in the Bible, many of these variations can be accounted for in the line of transmission of the text. There are places where we are undoubtedly left to accept by faith what we cannot understand. Yet in almost every instance the difficulty is more apparent than real.

The safest rule is to believe that no man knows enough to challenge God’s Word successfully. The Word is its own best defense. A difficulty at one place is cleared up at another, leaving unimpaired the conviction that we have in the Bible a marvelous book that speaks to the hearts of those who hear and obey.

Despite the attacks of unbelievers outside and sophisticates inside the Church, the Bible stands sure and tried by all who have put their trust in it. Christians who “defend” the Bible should take comfort in the knowledge that the Bible is its own best defense.

Read it. Study it. Believe it. Obey it. In it is the Way of Life.

The Gospel and Social Problems

Under The Sun

I see we now have another writer getting news space because he has said that Jesus didn’t really die. If he is right, this goes rather hard on the God-is-dead boys. Anyway, his theory is that Jesus fainted away, and that he revived in the cool of the tomb.

Something clicked when I read this. I looked up an old textbook of mine and was surprised to discover that it really is old—published in 1912. The book is Vollmer’s The Modern Student’s Life of Christ, and I refer you to page 326. There Vollmer sets before us the various views of the Resurrection and answers them briefly. This is not to say that he is a final authority on these matters but rather to point up that the newest idea on the Resurrection is a pretty old one at that.

Vollmer discusses the swoon theory, the theory of fraud, the spiritual resurrection theory, the legendary theory, and the subjective vision theory. One of his answers is significant; namely, that whatever support any one of these theories may have, each in turn undercuts the other theories. We can’t have it all five ways even from the critics, and what one says is a criticism of all the others.

This sort of thing is rather entertaining to observe in all our new theology. In an article in Christianity and Crisis last October written by George D. Younger, one of their contributing editors, we have a study of Karl Barth over against Cox and The Secular City. In discussing The Secular City, Younger says that “one of the primary faults of the social gospel was overreliance upon the categories of immanence.” This should take care of the death-of-God boys, but this is only a touch. You can’t have both Barth and Altizer, and you can’t have both Barth and Bultmann; and if God is dead, everything that anyone ever said in support of the existence of God, even Tillich’s “ground of being” or “ultimate concern,” no longer stands up.

Some people think we have a clear line from Barth to Altizer. As a matter of fact, when we accept one, we dismiss the others. It is an old, old story but not the old, old story.

EUTYCHUS II

The Bulkley—Bell Debate

No similarly concerned person could miss the deep sense of honesty and urgency evinced in Robert D. Bulkley’s letter (Mar. 4 issue). I am sure my Presbyterian compatriot wrote out of the depths of “a good heart and conscience undefiled.” For this reason, I am the more hopeful that he will seriously consider the question I would like to ask.…

Did you, Dr. Bulkley, first gain your passionate concern for our unfairly disadvantaged brethren through some change in social structure based upon legislative process? Or did you come to that position of concern through hearing and heeding a Gospel which changed your own heart and outlook?…

The priorities suggested by L. Nelson Bell seem to me to give only added power and focus to the social concern we share with all men of good will, by providing our efforts with a common, Spirit-directed imperative.

R. NORMAN HERBERT

First Presbyterian Church

Waukegan, Ill.

“Priorities First!” was an excellent answer to Dr. Bulkley’s letter. With all due respect to Dr. Bell, however, I believe Howard Kershner’s “The Church and Social Problems” (Mar. 4 issue) is probably the best article on this subject that I have ever read.…

WILLIAM A. REDMOND

East Taunton, Mass.

The issue which Dr. Bulkley and Dr. Bell debate is surely one of the most significant in American Protestantism today. To me there is an inconsistency in Dr. Bell’s approach which leads me to believe that even the churchmen whose position he articulates quite readily use coercive efforts and political activity to achieve their ends when certain issues are involved.…

Are not most of us quite ready to express political convictions and use the coercive power of the state when the issues are important enough to us? Is the difference between Mr. Bulkley’s position and Dr. Bell’s really where their articles seem to indicate?

ROBERT S. BUSEY

Grace Covenant Presbyterian

Asheville, N. C.

Bulkley, Bell, and Kershner all made valid points in their contributions to the debate over the legitimacy of political and social activity on the part of Christian leaders, but they all weakened their cases by the usual errors of overstatement and by falling into precisely the either-or, all-or-nothing thinking they condemn.

Bulkley, while professing to believe in the primacy of individual regeneration, in effect condemns it for not bringing converts to instant perfection, forgetting that the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit takes a full lifetime. Bell, in presenting the other side, seems to want to imprison the minister in a rigidly defined role that leaves little room for specific guidance from the Holy Spirit. Kershner, in keeping with the philosophy of the journal he represents, lumps all government programs for social relief and welfare under the emotionally charged label of socialism.…

Let us as Christians approach our serious responsibilities in the social and political arenas with some measure of logic and restraint. Where God has spoken, let us be unequivocal. Where He has not spoken, let us be more reticent.

CHARLES R. TABER

Hartford Seminary Foundation

Hartford, Conn.

Dr. Bell’s answer amounted to a sidestepping of the letter’s main charge: that the Church has proved incapable of influencing its own people to practice the virtues of brotherhood and love.…

True, social concern is not all of Christianity, but there can be no Christianity without it.

SOLOMON M. LANDERS

Chapel Oaks, Md.

I have been a conservative, evangelical Christian for about fifty years with most of them spent in rescue mission work.

Personal commitment to Christ and a genuine salvation is necessary, but that alone does not erase injustice and prejudice. I intend to continue to preach salvation through Christ, but I am also going to strive for equality of citizenship enforced by law.…

RALPH R. PARCE

Chicago, Ill.

Neither “either/or” nor “individual conversion, first; social change, second” seems to me the best way of approaching this debate.… For to begin with the Bible, I do not find either the spiritual/secular or individual/social distinction made by these men made so strongly there. I do find the Word of God, sometimes spoken to individuals (John 3), sometimes addressed to social situations (Isa. 5).…

As a Christian man, then, I begin with the Word.…

HENRY V. HARMAN

Memorial Church

York, Pa.

You are to be commended for your strong stand on evangelism and the evangelistic effort that brings forth answers of protest like that of Dr. Bulkley of our United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. His attitude toward evangelism, conversion, the new man in Christ, we have known from his kind in our denomination for a long time.…

I am … tired of … social visionaries who infest our higher administrative areas and … who sneer habitually at all who profess to believe in conversions.…

S. J. THACKABERRY

Second Presbyterian Church

Altoona, Pa.

Won’t you … help the evangelical world to see what constructive expressions of social concern should characterize those of us who have no intention of neglecting, disparaging, or relegating to second place evangelism and personal spiritual growth?

TOM STARK

Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship

Chicago, Ill.

Birth Control

The thoughtful article on “How to Decide the Birth-Control Question” (Mar. 4 issue), by John Warwick Montgomery, seems to be saying what the Anglican Bishops said at Lambeth in 1958.…

GEORGE W. BERSCH

Camp Webb

Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee

Milwaukee, Wise.

Vicarious Response

Thomas Howard’s essay, “Arts and Religion: They Need Not Clash” (Jan. 21 issue), brings a much-needed emphasis to a subject too often ignored by otherwise well-informed Christians.…

MRS. HAROLD F. SHAW

Western Springs, Ill.

Last year as I completed my M.A. in English literature, I knew vicariously the artist’s experience with “beauty, ambiguity, and tragedy.” My responses to T. S. Eliot, John Donne, Pope, and the rest, would be difficult to convey. I can only thank God for the artist, out of whose struggle comes such profound, and sometimes terrible, meaning. And that there is ultimate meaning surely all art declares, even when the artist’s aim is quite otherwise.…

Perhaps the burden of Mr. Howard’s remarks can somehow be impressed upon the evangelical mind of today.… Salem, Ore.

BARBARA J. BELLIN

Mcintire Replies

Have you, too, joined the vultures? Your report of the Harrisburg meeting and my picture (Mar. 4 issue) indicates that I am having the same trouble with you that I am having with the ecumenical press. You report I was “censured” without giving the substance of Resolution #160. You make the issue operational control of Station WXUR while the issue of the Harrisburg Convocation for Religious Freedom was a transgression by a state legislature of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and similar provisions in the Constitution of the State of Pennsylvania. The entire content of the resolution was an attack upon my religious ministry, activity for thirty years, “ousted from the clergy,” my ideas were declared to be dangerous to the country and equated with extremism. The American Council of Christian Churches was reflected against and the National Council of Churches aided by the judgment that I made “vicious attacks” upon the NCC.

Sir, if you are devoted to religious liberty in this country your editorial columns should come alive regardless of what you may think about me, my ideas or activities in support of our heritage of religious tolerance and the free exercise of religion. A political unit under the control of the liberal Democrats sought to defame a religious movement, the ACCC, and come to the assistance of the ecumenical cause. The vultures are gathering, Sir, and they will pick you up next. Incidentally, there were 8,000 to 10,000 people present at the Harrisburg Convocation.

CARL MCINTIRE

President

International Council of Christian Churches

Collingswood, N. J.

Rethinking Rethinking

I have to take sharp issue with Dr. Frank E. Gaebelein (“Rethinking the Church’s Role,” Feb. 18 issue) on the matter of “dual enrollment, or shared time”.…

Every one knows that there is a deep and fundamental difference between the Roman Catholic system of government and our own American system. Witness Spain and Colombia, to name but two countries under the Roman Catholic system.

Any support given to the Roman Catholic parochial school, therefore, is support given to the support of a system of government that is both alien and foreign to our democracy in its inmost nature.

The American taxpayer cannot be expected or required to contribute to the support of an educational system which trains its pupils in principles of government so totally different from those principles set forth in our basic documents of government.…

GEORGE L. TAPPAN

Binghamton, N. Y.

The article surely is most challenging. Why should such a condition or attitude toward Christian teaching exist today? Is it possible we have tried to “intellectualize Christ?” …

MAURICE A. HYDE

Lincoln, Neb.

I am sure that your emphasis on a renewed and revitalized education program by the Church is a valid one.…

ROBERT C. FREDERICH

Galilee Baptist

Denver, Colo.

More Questions?

It is to be hoped that Dr. Anthony A. Hoekema (“Ten Questions to Ask Christian Scientists,” Mar. 4 issue), will have a condensation of the other three cults in your magazine, which he so ably exposed in The Four Major Cults.

MARY L. LYONS

West New York, N. J.

It is good to begin to consider the views of groups other than those of Protestants and Catholics who take the name of Christ.…

Dr. Hoekema’s questions are challenging, but he stops short of raising the all important question: “What are the fruits?” … Are people being healed through Christian Science? Are there men and women finding their way to Christ, the Word of God, through Mary Baker Eddy’s preaching? Do Christian Scientists read and study the Bible? Are there signs of good following their Church’s efforts?…

We need the facts. For the record, could we not have a serious study of Christian Science to bring to light the truth concerning their fruits? Surely God would bless the effort made if the study were made for the sake of truth.

CHARLES SLOCA

New Sweden Methodist Church

Fairfield, Iowa

They Didn’T Dodge It

In “Church Channel to Homosexuals,” by Jerome F. Politzer (News, Mar. 4 issue), it is stated, “Religious journals, excepting a few of the avant-garde, have dodged the issue.”

Almost a year ago (May, 1965), Together magazine dealt with the church’s ministry to the homosexual as an example of how Christian trailbreakers are busy on what our editors term “today’s frontier,” the large cities.

Associate Editor Carol D. Muller was one of two staff members who reported on the aims and outreach of the Glide Urban Center in “Engaging the City—With Love”.… She cited the work of ministers in promoting communication with San Francisco’s 50,000 “untouchables”.…

What we believe is worthy of note is that Together is not avant-garde but is a general-interest magazine for Methodist families.

HERBERT E. LANGENDORFF

Director

Church and Press Relations

Christian Advocate and Together

Park Ridge, Ill.

From Cover To Cover

It is very seldom that I as a parish pastor find a theological publication that I feel is worth spending the time to read cover to cover. This issue I did, (Christian Education issue, Feb. 18) for every article has struck home.…

LEE R. MENTINK

Lutheran Church

Luverne, N. D.

Close to twenty years ago, I observed that the International Bible lesson arrangement of selected Scriptures is a disconnected, fragmentary, screened patchwork that removes many passages out of their biblical context. This hodgepodge of Scripture makes systematic Bible teaching with reasonable continuity severely difficult for the trained teacher, and more so for the large number of untrained teachers.…

Personally, I have conscientiously abandoned the International lesson plan. And I teach the Bible by books with nothing added and nothing subtracted.

BENJAMIN F. KRANICH

Drayton Plains, Mich.

May I most sincerely congratulate you. Many of our men—all ministers met yesterday—spoke well of it [the editorial on Sunday school curricula].…

GEORGE SIMPSON

Temple Baptist Church

Brantford, Ont.

Your [editorial] should be required reading for all to whom the Christian education of children is of moment. It is very high time for all who have the souls of children and the community of saints at heart to realize that not all Sunday school materials are scripturally sound. The child taught uncertainties today will be the adult of tomorrow who falls for, “Yes, hath God said?,” and not know the answers.…

MRS. R. S. ELLENDER

Ashley, Ill.

Intriguing But Unjust

I was greatly intrigued by your editorial “What About the Sunday School?” (Feb. 18 issue).… This editorial does great injustice to at least one, and I suspect to most, of these curriculum efforts. I speak particularly of the Covenant Life Curriculum, which you have simply lumped together with hundreds of other books from all denominational sources. There are five conclusions, or innuendos, which I believe do injustice to the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, the Moravian Church in America, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, and the Reformed Church in America. The five supposed conclusions which you reach and to which I object are as follows:

1. That the curriculum is based upon the view of a “fallible Bible.” You say in your editorial that “these views grow out of theologies ranging from liberalism through neo-orthodoxy to a position that, while holding classical doctrine, does so within the context of a fallible Bible.” This simply is not true of the Covenant Life Curriculum.

2. That the newer curricula adopt uncritically the results of higher criticism. You say, “Most of the newer curricula adopt critical results with little if any acknowledgment that not all scholars agree and that archaeology and linguistic studies have overthrown some important critical conclusions.” Your own sentence destroys your argument. The results of higher criticism are not uniform. No two scholars fully agree. The fact is that the new curricula very carefully sift and evaluate the views of scholars who have worked within the past half century. The fact is that Covenant Life Curriculum is thoroughly conservative as far as all the major doctrines of the Church are concerned.

3. Your complaint that the biblical supernatural is watered down. Again, quoting from your editorial, “But instances of watering down the biblical supernatural could be multiplied.” Evidentally … you did not read the basic core book on the Bible entitled “The Mighty Acts of God” in which (pages 300–307) is a most excellent description of the miracles and a resounding affirmation of belief in them.

4. The insinuation that the decline in Sunday school attendance is due to weak doctrinal teaching. Without any kind of documentation you say, “Does the doctrine reflected in the curricula have anything to do with the decline? The answer would appear to be yes.” In the first place, the Covenant Life Curriculum is not weak in doctrine. In the second place, we do not find through the use of Covenant Life Curriculum that there is loss of enrollment in the church school.

5. The complaint that the call to dedication is less insistent in the new curricula. In your editorial you recognize that not every lesson is susceptible to an evangelistic appeal to pupil and teacher to receive Jesus Christ. Such an appeal does not need to come in set phrases and old formulas. In fact, such appeal to dedication to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour ought to be brought with freshness and vigor from beginning to end. The Covenant Life Curriculum sets forth from beginning to end the Lordship of Jesus Christ in our lives. It magnifies the Scripture as the Word of God to be heard, studied, accepted, and lived by, from the beginning of life to the end of it. It is the only way to salvation, both for the individual and for the Covenant community. In that deep sense every lesson is evangelistic.

I am in no position publicly to evaluate the work of other denominations, but I do share in the representation of five conservative denominations who have developed together a curriculum which is conservative, based upon the Bible, honest in its presentations, and trusting in the Power of the Holy Spirit to work through the Word in the hearts of mankind. Its purpose is “that all persons may respond in faith to the call of God in Jesus Christ and be nurtured in the life of fellowship with Him, that they may face all life’s relationships and responsibilities as children of God.” While no curriculum can perfectly fulfill this noble purpose, we believe that the Covenant Life Curriculum is the finest tool that our five denominations have for fulfilling our God-given teaching responsibility to the constituency which we serve. For you to undermine this confidence is no service to the Kingdom.

CHRISTIAN H. WALVOORD

Executive Secretary

The Board of Education

Reformed Church in America

New York, N. Y.

• The purpose of the editorial was to discuss Sunday school materials in a fair and irenic way.

The view of inspiration is indeed a watershed. There are many who are not willing to give up the classic doctrine of a Bible that is verbally inspired and thus inerrant. The one reference to the Covenant Life Curriculum concerned the question of inerrancy. But at once the good points of this curriculum were acknowledged and a fair estimate of it given—that it “contains much good teaching material, upholds the doctrines of salvation [which are of course supernatural], and assumes certain critical positions [which it does].” Personally the writer of the editorial rates it high among the newer denominational materials. But to return to the view of Scripture, if we are wrong and if the Covenant Life Curriculum does hold to biblical inerrancy, we should like to know this. “Fallible” means “liable to be erroneous”; and if the view that Scripture is inerrant is given up, then the Bible must be considered fallible.

We know that the denominational curricula do not adopt all the critical positions. The editorial does not say this but uses enough qualifying words—“some,” “many,” and the like—to avoid generalization. (Although the sentence Dr. Walvoord quotes does not use “some,” it must be read in the context of the whole editorial, which establishes qualifications.) Some critical positions as are mentioned are important to multitudes of evangelical Christians who are not persuaded of the “mythical” or non-historical nature of the early chapters of Genesis, the documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch, the dual authorship of Isaiah, or the non-historical character of Daniel. It is significant that the beginning of this paragraph cautions against the tendency of some conservatives to lump the newer denominational curricula together as wholly bad or to consider independent materials uniformly good.

About watering down the biblical supernatural, the statement is not made specifically of Covenant Life Curriculum but rather refers to instances throughout various curricula.

Dr. Walvoord complains that we link the decline in Sunday school attendance to weak doctrinal teaching and at this point quotes two sentences from the editorial. Again these sentences should be taken in context. We wrote, “The answer would appear to be yes” [italics added], following this with a conditional sentence and then going on to say that to make this matter of doctrine the only reason would be oversimplification. This paragraph is, of course, editorial opinion.

Regarding the call to dedication, it is true that, in the light of comparative examination of materials, independent curricula are more persistent in evangelistic emphasis and more insistent in their challenge for pupils to receive Christ. We do not say that the denominational materials never stress personal commitment to Christ. We know they do and are happy that they do.

We object to the approach that indiscriminately condemns as “atheistic,” “un-Christian,” and the like those who hold certain critical and doctrinal positions. Therefore, we spoke against “de-Christianizing” those who, while holding to the Gospel, differ from us in certain matters. The final sentence of the editorial is important: “Therefore, on pastors and local churches rests the inescapable obligation of knowing and evaluating what is being taught in their Sunday schools and of choosing spiritually as well as intellectually qualified persons to teach it.” What more could any of us desire than for pastors and churches to evaluate Sunday school materials for themselves?—Ed.

It was a marvelous issue, and I particularly appreciated the editorial on Sunday school curricula.…

KENNETH O. GANGEL

Chairman

Dept. of Christian Education

Calvary Bible College

Kansas City, Mo.

A Continuing Crisis

I was … interested in the analysis of Dr. Hutchison in “Can the Christian College Survive?” (Feb. 18 issue) on the continuing crisis in recruiting faculty members for the Christian college.… But I think salary-lag is only part of the reason why Christian Ph.D.’s hesitate to enter Christian college teaching. There is a very real sense in which the Ph.D. is asked to surrender his academic training when he enters a Christian college. A Ph.D. degree is a research degree, and a man with that degree should be motivated to work at the frontiers of knowledge in whatever field he has specialized. Research requires grants for equipment, extensive leave time, and a large library. The Christian college is usually unable to provide any of these necessities in any meaningful quantity.…

There may be a way out of this unfortunate situation. In the fact that they need primarily teachers and not researchers, the Christian colleges are on common ground with many secular institutions which are also teaching-oriented. Could not the Christian colleges unite with these secular institutions with like personnel needs to demand that the major universities institute doctoral programs that are both research and teaching oriented? The University of Michigan, I know, at one time offered (and perhaps still does) an Ed.D. degree in several fields; for example, one could take his doctorate of education in literature, or history. The dissertation process was considerably curtailed as was the number of fields required for a candidate’s general examinations. And this program of training in a specialty was combined with courses in higher education, so that the candidate was well versed both in field content and in teaching methodology. This kind of program … offers a middle ground.… The Ohio State

MARVIN R. ZAHNISER

University Asst. Prof. of History Columbus, Ohio

Cup Of Blessing

On a Good Friday evening, I stood beneath the starry dome of heaven. As I meditated on the sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ, I observed in a preoccupied way that the “Big Dipper,” Ursa Major, hung upside down in its giant swing around the North Star, drained and empty, as it were. It seemed almost to be trying to speak, but I was too cast down in mind and heart to heed what it might be saying.

Sad thoughts of Passion Week overwhelmed me. Oh, if only one might go straight from the Hosannas of Palm Sunday to the Hallelujahs of Easter without the heartbreak of the week between. The sufferings of my Saviour seemed all the more poignant when reviewed in the loveliness of that soft April evening. Snatches of Handel’s Messiah, to which I had been listening, kept bringing back the words of Isaiah: “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief … wounded for our transgressions … bruised for our iniquities.… All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

Again I glanced upward at the Dipper. Once more I recalled the Passion Week: our Lord’s foretelling his death, his agony in Gethsemane, the betrayal by Judas, the trial, the spitting, scourging, mocking, Pilate’s craven surrender of his prisoner at the insistence of the inflamed mob with its cries of “Crucify him! Crucify him!”—and then the cross itself. Why did it have to be that way? Could not God have done it differently?

As if in answer to the unhappy questions, the stern words in Hebrews came to mind, “Without shedding of blood is no remission [of sins].” Without quite realizing it, I looked hard at the upside-down Dipper. And suddenly its message reached me. “Behold in heavenly symbol,” it seemed to say, “behold, the cup of wrath which the Son of God thrice besought the Father might pass from his lips but which he drained to its bitterest dregs to redeem his lost creation.”

Yet another event of Passion Week flashed to mind—our Lord’s institution of the Holy Communion. “He took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” So this was the cost of my redemption, the precious blood of God’s own Son. What an incredible price God had to pay to ransom me! As I dwelt upon the sacrament and its vicariously sacrificial meaning, lo, the cup of wrath and desolation which the Lord Jesus Christ had drunk on that Good Friday long ago became a veritable cup of blessing, and indeed a sign of his boundless love. Heavenly chalice! Gone now all heaviness from my heart, as soaring it sang in Easter triumph:

Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness

My beauty are, my glorious dress;

’Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed.

With joy shall I lift up my head.

This spotless robe the same appears,

When ruined nature sinks in years;

No age can change its glorious hue,

The robe of Christ is ever new.

MARGARET MCLESTER

Richmond, Virginia

Jan was the eldest of four children. Her rather well-to-do parents had moved to a small college town in the East in order to give their children the best educational opportunities. Jan was a pretty girl, well-liked by her high school friends. With her family background and personal qualities, her future was bright.

But Jan is dead. One November morning she boarded an airplane to visit a friend in the South. As the plane soared high over Maryland, a large bird hit the stabilizer. The pilot lost control, and the plane plunged to the earth. There were no survivors.

I saw the grief in the eyes of Jan’s parents and knew they were asking in their hearts, “Why did God allow this to happen?” And having known this charming young girl, I could not help wondering with them.

Why do men suffer so much in this world? Day after day the news brings reports of human suffering—tornadoes in the Midwest, carnage in Viet Nam, starvation in India, the able and useful felled by cancer, crimes of violence, homelessness, poverty. Why does God allow such things to happen?

This oppressively difficult question has puzzled some of the keenest minds throughout history. The writer of Job depicts the predicament of a godly man who is sorely afflicted, raising the question, Why do the righteous suffer? The Stoic philosophers also wrestled with this problem: If God is all-good and all-powerful, why does he allow evil and suffering? Augustine too searched for an answer. He saw Rome fall into the hands of ruthless barbarians who violated Christian maidens and forced a walled city to surrender by herding captives against the walls and there massacring them in droves, so that the stench of their decaying bodies made the city uninhabitable. And just as Augustine taxed his mind with the problem of suffering, so analytical philosophers today are struggling with this question.

But the problem still remains to shake faith and disturb sincere seekers. Can we find a solution? No, not a final, absolute one. But we can consider a few ideas that shed some light on it.

In considering the problem of suffering, it is important to keep in mind that the Bible shows that something is radically wrong with God’s good creation. There is a destructive, negative, chaotic, almost demonic perversion of God’s world. This perversion is called sin.

Now sin is not, as some Christians think, simply things like failing to attend church, not tithing, drinking, using foul language, or casting hungry glances at sexy pictures. To speak of such things, deplorable though they may be, is to fall far short of describing the essence of sin. Nor is the perversion in creation merely an inadequate socio-economic situation, as the Marxists think. For the Marxist, man’s problems are rooted in the fact that many persons produce goods that are appropriated and exploited by only a few. But sin is much more radical.

Sin is not primarily a deed or a social condition. It is an inner disorientation. It is something inside man, the resolution to center life in the finite rather than in God, and it results in the perversion of all human relations (see Rom. 1:18–32).

Like the spider at the center of its web, sinful man tries to center the world in himself. That is pride. Like the spider, he sits at the center of his world and thinks he has it all under control. He is the arbiter of destinies. That is ignoring God. Finally, like the spider, sinful man—self-centered and supposedly self-sufficient—lurks, waits, and watches for some thing or person to pass within his sphere of influence, so that he may consume it, or possess her, or exploit him. That is greed, and greed leads to injustice and human suffering.

If men repented—if they gave up their self-centered pride, their ignoring of God, and their consuming greed—then a good portion, if not the major share, of human suffering would be abolished. For true repentance roots out sin and implants sin’s opposite within man. Now the opposite of sin is the love and service of God, and a man cannot love and serve God if he is warping, injuring, and disfiguring the lives of others. It is important to remember that this uprooting of sin and implanting of love is a lifelong process. Many Christians think that it is complete once they walk down the aisle, shake the pastor’s hand, and are baptized. By no means! We must pray daily that God’s love will be in our hearts and in our deeds. Then we may bring healing instead of suffering.

If a wave of Christian love should flow over Viet Nam, what would happen? Citizen after citizen would lay down his weapons. He would beat his bullets into ploughshares and his guns into pruning hooks. Blood would cease to wash those streets. Or suppose that our Christian homes experienced a fresh surge of Christian love. Some men would stop courting the affections of other women and would instead be more devoted to the wives for whom they thanked God at the marriage altar. Some women would spend less time attending tea parties and dub meetings and more in building godly, peaceful, and clean homes for their families. It is no secret that scores of American homes are breaking apart daily. Adultery and irresponsible wedlock seem to have become hallmarks of our way of life. Many homes have become hells because of sin.

Or suppose that the Church were to evidence a rebirth of Christian love. Surely the Church would then be far less concerned about building new sanctuaries or changing from central pulpits to split chancels. Instead it would be more anxious about the people who are starving right now in our city slums.

Why do men suffer? They suffer because we are sinners; because we do not and will not repent; because we just do not care about the other man.

Sin, then, may account for the brutalities in Viet Nam and the hell in homes. But what about Jan, who died in the plane crash, and those who die from cancer, and the hundreds killed yearly by cyclones and tornadoes? Here the problem of suffering becomes most bewildering.

Some sincere thinkers have proposed that God permits such things as disease and cyclones because only in such an environment can responsible and mature personalities be developed. But this explanation is hardly acceptable. It is certainly true that suffering often produces stronger, more mature persons. But who will say that God intended or caused suffering from natural causes so that we might mature? I could never say to Jan’s mother, “God intended your girl to die, so that you would gain moral and spiritual stamina.” Nor could I say to a mother clutching in her arms a baby dying of cancer of the throat, “This is God’s will. He has a purpose in all this suffering. Be patient, and you will understand.” He who said “Suffer the little children to come unto me” cannot possibly be the source of a baby’s affliction.

Why, then, do people suffer? The passion of our Lord sheds some precious light on it.

The disciples left Calvary dejected and bewildered. The best man who had ever lived had been nailed to a wooden cross. Hell had done its worst. Then, when the night seemed blackest, God split the darkness apart with the blazing glory of the resurrection of his Son. This mighty act of God has tremendous implications for the problem of suffering.

REMORSE

To have been the cup

His lips touched and blessed,

To have been the bread

Which He broke;

To have been the cloth

He held as He served,

Or water He poured

As He spoke;

To have been the road

He walked on the Way,

To have been His print

In the sand;

To have been the door

That opened the tomb,

But I was a nail

In His hand.

SUE FIFE

First, it means that our God is Sovereign Lord over suffering. Consider this amazing truth. God used the suffering of his own Son as the cord with which he wove the web of redemption. From the very worst he made the very best. Perhaps he is using our pain to work some miracle of grace.

Second, God’s mighty act at Calvary and at the empty tomb means that our God is a Suffering Lord. That, too, is amazing. When we cry out to him in the midst of our suffering, we are not calling upon a Buddha whose arms are folded and whose eyes are closed in eternal contemplation. Our God’s back is not turned toward his people. His face is turned toward us, and he knows what it is to suffer. In the person of his Son, he experienced hunger, loneliness, pain, and rejection. He wept. He died. Therefore, in our afflictions we have this comfort: our God knows what we are going through. That is great good news.

Finally, Calvary and the empty tomb mean that our God is the great Raiser of the Dead. Suffering in this life is not the final word. There is more to come—the new heaven and the new earth. As Christ was raised from the dead, so shall we who acknowledge his Lord-ship be raised to new life. That, too, is great good news.

Why, then, do men suffer? Some men suffer because of sin. And it is our job to go out into the world to help remove the suffering caused by sin.

Other suffering remains a mystery to us. Yet we have this confidence, that our God is Sovereign Lord over suffering; this comfort, that our God is a Suffering Lord; and this hope, that our God is the great Raiser of the Dead. All this is ours because the Empty Tomb followed the Empty Cross.

“The framers of the new confession have tried to move the North Star out of its place.”

Anyone who attempts to liberate us from seventeenth-century thought and to restate Christianity in terms of Jet Age thinking is assuming a task of no mean size. At first thought the reason for such an attempt seems plausible enough. When one reads the homilies of men like Chrysostom, St. Augustine, the Venerable Bede, or Jonathan Edwards, for example, one realizes that their styles of preaching would not gain an enthusiastic following in this reflective age of ours.

Yet while their homiletic methods may be unsuitable for the present day, their message is as relevant today as it was in their day. Chrysostom or St. Augustine in the fourth century, the Venerable Bede in the eighth, Thomas a Kempis in the fifteenth, John Calvin in the sixteenth, or Phillips Brooks in the nineteenth century—to all these men Jesus Christ was the power of God unto salvation, the incarnate Son of God, the crucified and risen Redeemer; and the Scriptures were the only infallible rule of faith and conduct, the authoritative Word of God. To say that the subjective method of presenting the truth of Christianity needs adaptation to later generations is one thing. But to say that therefore the objective realities of Christ and his salvation need similar altering is quite another. To claim that scriptural truth needs revising because philosophy or science has changed is to adjust the North Star to suit the compass.

This is exactly what has happened in the proposed United Presbyterian statement, the “Confession of 1967.” Its avowed purpose is merely to restate Christianity in present-day thought-forms. It does not claim to supplant the Westminster Confession but simply to supplement it. In reality, however, the new confession is a radical departure both from the Westminster Confession and from the Scriptures. And the result is a sad downgrading of the Christian faith. The framers of this confession have tried to move the North Star out of its place.

To begin with, for a great church to produce a new confession for these chaotic times without clear and adequate definitions of such great doctrines of our faith as the Trinity, the deity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the blood atonement for sin, the inspiration of the Scriptures, and the coming again of our Lord for his Bride, forces serious questions upon us. If the prevailing atmosphere of the new confession were otherwise strongly scriptural, such omissions could be excused on the ground that doctrinal discussion was not intended. This is not so, however. The confession does discuss doctrine, but the omissions are glaring.

Let us look first at its treatment of soteriology. The new confession speaks freely of “reconciliation in Christ.” Indeed, the entire confession is built upon this theme, to which it refers more than twenty times. But the word “reconciliation” is robbed of its full scriptural and doctrinal meaning.

“Reconcile” is a strong biblical word. It means to restore to favor or friendship those who were at variance, and it is used particularly to describe the atoning work of our Lord upon the cross. But when reconciliation is mentioned in the Scriptures, it has to do with God’s reconciling us to himself and not his being reconciled to us. This distinction is all important. God is the offended party, and we by our sins are the offenders. It is we who need to be reconciled to him, and not he to us.

The price of such reconciliation is crystal clear. Look, for instance, at Romans 5:9, 10. Here the Apostle is telling us that we are justified from the wrath to come by the merits of the shed blood of our Saviour, and that as a result we “were reconciled to God by the death of his son.” Again in Colossians 1:20 the Spirit has revealed to us how Christ, “having made peace through the blood of his cross,” made it possible “to reconcile all things unto himself.” Our reconciliation is purchased for us on the sole merits of the vicarious shedding of the blood of the Son of God.

The reason for this is plain to all those who accept the Scriptures as the infallible revelation of the will of God. In Leviticus 17:11, for example, God tells Moses, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” God was teaching the world that sin was such a heinous thing in his sight that nothing but a blood sacrifice, which represented the very life of the victim, could atone for the sins of the human heart.

The New Testament is equally positive about this point. “Ye were not redeemed,” said the Apostle Peter, “with corruptible things, as silver and gold … but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Pet. 1:18, 19). Salvation is through the atoning blood of our Lord Jesus Christ alone. “Without shedding of blood is no remission” (Heb. 9:22b). This is why our Saviour went to the cross to make reconciliation. He shed his own blood as the vicarious Lamb of God so that those who by faith accept his atoning sacrifice on their behalf could be justified and saved and then sealed by the Spirit “until the redemption of the purchased possession” (Eph. 1:14).

But how much of this vital truth is even faintly intimated in the new confession? There is not a hint about any atoning blood of our Saviour—and this in spite of the fact that there can be no reconciliation without it.

Think, then, of trying to explain salvation to a modern generation, lost if ever a generation was lost, by omitting the one and only fact that makes salvation possible. Think of trying to explain the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper with no reference to the blood of Christ. Our Lord distinctly says of the cup, “This is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many” (Mark 14:24). He wants us to remember, as often as we partake of the sacrament, the price he paid for our redemption: the shedding of his own blood in our stead. Yet the framers of the new confession seem not to have considered this profound fact worthy of mention. A religion that omits the atoning blood of the Son of God may still be a religion, but it is not the Christian religion.

How can the United Presbyterian Church grow in such a spiritual climate? We do not become Christians merely by becoming imitators of Christ. We become Christians when we turn from our sins and accept Jesus Christ as our divine Saviour and Lord. Then by the miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit we are born again to a new life that we did not have in the past. At the same time we are “justified by his blood” and “saved from wrath through him” (Rom. 5:9). We are free as Presbyterians to receive or reject these doctrines as we will. But we are not free to reject them and then to offer what is left to lost souls as the Christian faith.

On all these matters, the Westminster Confession is clear and strong and biblical. The sins of man “cannot be expiated but by the blood of Christ.” The sacraments point us to the shed blood of our Saviour-baptism teaching us “remission of sins by his blood” and the Lord’s Supper reminding us of how we “feed upon the body and blood of Christ” (Larger Catechism, pp. 152, 165, 170).

In compromising these great truths, the new confession has eliminated, of course, the “offense of the cross” (Gal. 5:11) and has made Christianity more palatable to the modern unregenerate mind. But it has done so at the expense of bowing the knee to Baal. Let the prophet Isaiah remind us of a very poignant truth before we leave this thought of reconciliation. If our thinking is contrary to God’s will as revealed in the Scriptures, “when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear” (Isa. 1:15). What counts is “Thus saith the Lord.” Let us not think that with one hand we can tear out the roots of our Christian faith and with the other hand serve up fruits of righteousness pleasing in his sight.

The second declaration I wish to examine, and one that strikes at the very foundation of the Christian faith, is part of the statement on the Word of God: “The words of Scripture are the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought-forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current, and the understanding of them requires literary and historical scholarship.”

There are here three areas of thought. First, the Scriptures are said to be the “words of men.” This is only partly true. Second, Peter 1:21 declares expressly that “the prophecy came not in old time by the will of men: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” As if to reassure us that this guarantee was not limited to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, the apostle added in Second Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” “All” Scripture is here included. All is equally inspired. Notice that the emphasis here is not merely on inspired men but on inspired words. The Scripture is given by inspiration. This is brought out in the Greek word for inspiration, theopneustos, meaning “God-breathed.” All scripture is breathed of God, its composition having been so closely guarded by the Holy Spirit that the human agents were preserved from error in their sacred task. This is what is meant by inspiration. Revelation has to do with the actual supernatural communication of truth from God to man, while inspiration is that working of the Spirit upon the minds of the biblical writers that guarded them from error in recording the revelation. Inspiration guarantees this revelation to be the infallible Word of God.

There is a striking analogy in another God-breathed product. In the beginning God took a lump of clay, formed it into man, and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). In like manner the Holy Spirit breathed the truth of God into the hearts and minds of men who wrote the Bible, so that it became “the word of God which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Pet. 1:23). It is this immortal quality that distinguishes the Bible from every other book. The Word of God is living truth. Like the soul of man it will never die. It is “quick [living], and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12). The inbreathing of the Holy Spirit makes it so.

TRANSFORMATION

The cross was such an ugly thing!—

A shape to make the heart afraid;

A beam of death for lawless men,

A gibbett for the renegade.

The cross is such a lovely thing!—

The lamp in night where people grope;

The emblem of eternal life;

The symbol of eternal hope;

The subject of a thousand songs;

The sign of truth and liberty.

The cross was such an ugly thing

Until it went to Calvary.

LON WOODRUM

The second part of the new confession’s declaration on the Scriptures is that they were “conditioned by the language, thought-forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current.…” This implies that research has shown that parts of the Bible hitherto accepted as inspired and historical are now proved to be myth, legend, allegory, or some primitive belief that was current when the Scriptures were written.

The portion of the Bible that is supposed to be the most vulnerable to the attacks of modern critics is the early part of Genesis, which records for us the story of creation and of the sin of Adam and Eve. These chapters are regarded by some modern critics as “a group of stories which convey the ideas of the Hebrew people concerning the creation of the world, the beginning of human life, the conditions of primitive humanity.”

As a fair sample of what these critics consider to be little more than legend or myth, let us take these first three chapters of Genesis, especially chapter 3, which concerns the origin of sin. Let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that these stories are nothing more than ancient folklore, and let us see where such conclusions lead us.

First of all, if the story of Adam and Eve is not real history, then we are without any knowledge of how sin entered the world. The Bible condemns sin and tells us that the reason God’s only begotten Son came into the world was to redeem us from sin that we might be cleansed from its defilement, be freed from its dominion, and escape God’s wrath. But if this story is not true, then the origin of sin must ever remain in obscurity.

If this story is not real history, then “all Scripture” is not given by inspiration of the Holy Spirit. This Genesis account is portrayed as actual history. Persons are named, their conversation is recorded, and their deeds are noted. If it did not happen that way, then here there is plain deception.

If this account is not true, furthermore, then the Apostle Paul was in error. Time and again he refers to this story as if it were real history (see, for example, Rom. 5:12–19; 1 Cor. 15:15–22; 1 Tim. 2:13, 14). If Paul is in error about the person of Adam and Eve, it takes neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet to see that Paul could just as readily be wrong about the person of Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, if this story is not actual history, then our Lord himself must have been mistaken. In Matthew 19 and in Mark 10:6 he definitely refers to the Edenic narrative as historical fact. If our Lord was wrong about that, then it is painfully evident that he was not omniscient; and if he was not omniscient, he was not what he claimed to be, the divine Son of God.

Finally, if this story is not true history, then the whole foundation of our faith is upset. There were two Adams, each of them the federal head of a new order of beings (1 Cor. 15:45). The first Adam was the Adam of our story; the second and last Adam was our Lord Jesus Christ. In Romans 5 we have a clear statement of the significance of each Adam. The first Adam brought sin and death into the world (Rom. 5:12), and the second Adam brought salvation and eternal life (Rom. 5:15). Even as condemnation passed to all men by the transgression of this first Adam, so does justification unto life pass to men by the righteousness of the second Adam (v. 18). Just as the first Adam’s disobedience made us sinful, so the obedience of the second Adam makes us righteous (v. 19). This is a remarkably clear statement of an important foundation stone of our Christian faith. But if the first Adam is only a myth, then this divine analogy breaks down and we are in darkness about our real position in grace.

I have gone into this in detail to show what happens when we begin to tamper with the plain declarations of Scripture. The revelation of God is not so mixed up with confusing myths and legends that one must be trained in Hebrew or in literary or archaeological studies in order to decipher the truth. Here is a story a child can read and understand when we take it for just what it is—a real, historical narrative about real people who walked and talked as we do today. Many of our doubts and fears would disappear if we would only follow them through to their logical conclusions. They shatter themselves to pieces by destroying, as in this instance, too much.

I have just a word about the third objectionable feature in the new confession’s assertion about the Scriptures. It is that “the understanding of them requires literary and historical scholarship.” This contradicts the declaration of our Westminster Confession (chapter 1, section VII) that “those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a clue use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”

This is as it should be. Over and again the Bible condemns sin and exhorts us to seek salvation from it. The reason why the eternal and only begotten Son of God came into the world was to “save his people from their sins.” Important as is reverent, evangelical scholarship to the proper understanding of the Scriptures, we must remember that God did not leave his revelation of the way of salvation so obscure and confused that understanding of it would require literary scholarship. He would have been remiss had he done this.

‛I Thirst’

After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst (John 19:28).

He made the oceans. He created all waters everywhere—the broad rivers in valleys and the little streams cascading in mountains. As the great chemist of the universe, he originated the pure and perfect taste of water. Yet now he was denied a single drop of it. He made the early and the latter rains. He created the riches of the hail and the inexhaustible glories of the snow. He set the rainbow in the heavens. He originated white clouds and the blue sky. He filled earth and heavens with life-giving moisture. Yet now he must beg his enemies for a few drops of water.

He had been forsaken from above; now he was forsaken from below. He hung between heaven and earth and, for these hours, belonged neither to heaven nor to earth. Nature itself, like his other enemies, taunted him and revealed his human frailties. He came unto his own, but now not even his own things received him. The living water was at the threshold of death. He was about to be immersed in the stagnation of our sins, where he would drink from all the cesspools of man’s evil—from Adam onwards to the children of children’s children. The corruption he was now drinking would be sufficient to change into spotless purity even the vile water of Pilate’s hands.

Ever since Adam, the soul of man had felt an inconsolable secret thirst, a thirst as deep as life itself. It had longed, without knowing why, for the well of living water. Deep inside, it had really never longed for anything else. It had panted after the deep-flowing water-brooks that alone could wipe out the soul’s craving. Now our Lord was suffering the thirst that could assuage the thirst of the whole world—not simply assuage it but transform it into a great river of water flowing abundantly from time into eternity. He had caused the rain to fall on the just and on the unjust, and now his fevered throat and swollen tongue would become the source of streams in the parched and hopeless desert of the world. He was thirsty that the world might never thirst.

He died not one death but thousands—a death for every man coming into the world. Henceforth he could forever stand in the midst of all humanity and cry out, as he had cried out in that last great day of the feast of the Passover, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.”—DR. CLYDE S. KILBY, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Do Presbyterians need a new confession? No, we do not. Our Westminster Standards were formulated in an era of intellectual greatness, the era of the incomparable Shakespeare and the epoch-making Francis Bacon, of men of unsurpassed scholarship and piety like Dr. Twisse, moderator of the Westminster Assembly, and others who produced the King James Version of the Bible. The most profound minds of the last three centuries have paid tribute to the work accomplished by these men of learning and eloquence at Westminster. For its comprehensive grasp of scriptural truth, for its clarity and conciseness, for its eloquence of expression, the Westminster Confession stands greatest among the confessional statements of all time. It will answer our need today if we care enough about our faith to study to show ourselves approved unto God.

No, we do not need a new confession. And yet we do. As a church we need to confess our sins of lukewarmness, of disobedience, of spiritual indifference, of compromising the Word of God to conform to the mind of man. We have been turning our hearts away from the main mission of the Church toward the social gospel of rejuvenating a pagan society that persists in rejecting Christ. The mission of the Church is to save souls and to build them up in Christ. It will not do this by involving itself in politics, or by furthering ecumenical organizations to present a façade of unity while temporizing on the essentials of true Christian faith.

In these chaotic days we need more than ever to stand fast in the faith once delivered to the saints. Let us watch and be sober. Let us pray much. Let us preach the Gospel in all its purity and power without compromising the great doctrines of the person of Jesus Christ, his deity, his virgin birth, his blood atonement for sin, his bodily resurrection, his coming again. Let us get back to our churches and reverence God’s Holy Day.

Let us do more than that. Let us get back to the family altar where father and mother and children kneel reverently before God Almighty to render unto him their daily worship. Let us teach our children the Scriptures and the Catechism, and let us teach them also the authority and discipline of Christian home life. The spirit of premature freedom among our youth breeds revolt against all authority, both civil and moral.

The United Presbyterian Church has had an honorable history, and today we have a noble heritage to maintain. Let us not sell it for a mess of pottage.

My First Funeral

At the conclusion of a Sunday morning worship service about two months after I had preached my first sermon, a member approached me and said, “Pastor, I want you to funeralize my husband.” Now, I had never heard that word before and thought that she was confused. Perhaps her husband was afflicted with a contagious disease and she had meant to say “fumigate.” So I asked: “What’s the matter with him?” She seemed surprised and replied: “He’s dead!” Then, thinking that perhaps he had just been killed in an accident or had died away from home and that she wanted me to help arrange for his funeral, I asked, “Where is he?” She said: “In the cemetery. He died six months ago, and we buried him in the graveyard of our old home church in the country. It is thirty miles away, and you will have to hire a horse and buggy; but I will pay your expenses. I want you to funeralize him.” Then I concluded that she meant “eulogize,” and replied: “I am sorry; but I have to return to the seminary every Monday morning until vacation, and so I cannot fumigate … eulogize … I mean “funeralize” him until this summer.” “All right,” she said. (I later learned that “funeralize” is a colloquialism.)

Soon after I arrived for the summer months, we agreed on the date for the service. I hired a horse and buggy for ten dollars and drove out to the country church. As I drove into the churchyard, I saw large baskets of food on long tables which suggested that there was to be a kind of noonday wake or funeral feast. It was all very strange to me. This being my first funeral I was quite nervous and at a loss to know how to proceed. Nonetheless, I announced that we were assembled in memory of Mr.——and assured his devoted widow and other loved ones of our sympathy and prayers. I asked the choir to sing an appropriate hymn. Then I read a few passages of Scripture, spoke briefly, and tried to offer an appropriate prayer. That was all.

I had never “funeralized” or eulogized anybody before, and perhaps my efforts did not please the attractive young widow in deep mourning, sitting near the front of the church with a handsome young man at her side. Neither one seemed particularly interested in my words or showed any emotion. I waited at the side of the pulpit after the service, thinking that she would speak to me and also pay me the ten-dollar horse-and-buggy fee, but she and the young man went out of the church with the others.

Finally, I went out into the yard and visited at several of the tables around which people were eating. When I asked someone to help me locate the widow in the crowd, I was informed that immediately after the service she and the young man had driven off to the courthouse to secure a marriage license! I have never seen that woman since that day. I think that in my forthcoming book on “Ministerial Manners,” I will relate this incident to warn young preachers against “funeralizing” on credit the late husband of any attractive young widow.—THE REV. THOMAS V. MCCAUL, SR., pastor emeritus, First Baptist Church, Gainesville, Florida.

Amid cosmic despair man may sense that something is near to quench his thirst, but he remains without a positive relationship to God.

One of the functions of literature is to give the reader a sense of what it would be like to be another man or another woman in another time or place. To return from college to find one’s father dead and one’s mother married to his murderer: this is at least a part of what one senses in the plight of Hamlet. As the play unfolds, the spectator or reader is led into the labyrinth of a sensitive mind baffled by the consequences of what he feels he must do. The intelligent Elizabethan surely left the Globe with sympathy for the Prince of Denmark.

As the twentieth-century world continues to unfold in all its gore and splendor, it becomes almost impossible to understand that world, let alone to appreciate sympathetically what is happening to the minds and souls of men swimming in the flux of shifting ideologies. Yet there remains for us in the present century what the Elizabethans had in Shakespeare: there remains at least one important vantage point—the literature produced by artists swept up in the torrent. I should like to show how a few of the parables of Franz Kafka provide an insight into the plight of one important type of modern man: the man who has just grasped the notion that God is dead.

Franz Kafka, a German Jewish writer, was born in Prague in 1883 and died in Kierling in 1924, after living a fitful existence in which he was generally lonely even among his close friends. Kafka is one of the first major writers to grasp the emotional implications of the famous proclamation of Nietzsche’s madman: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?” Some commentators maintain that Kafka was not the atheist that Nietzsche was. They may be right. My point, however, is not that Kafka himself lived out the implications of Nietzsche but that in his works he depicts men who live out those implications.

In any case, the point that both Nietzsche and Kafka seem to be making in their parables is not philosophical but psychological. Men could not, of course, kill a real God; but for modern man, there is no God. The God men used to serve is now considered a creation of man’s over-powerful imagination serving his strong desire for an approving, loving father. Today men can no longer act as if such a God existed. Yet sheer atheism misses the point. Nietzsche also means this: men must live in the abyss created by the death of their notion of God. And this is difficult. For Nietzsche himself, the death of God clears the way for the superman: but for others, the mass, the “much-too-many,” there is the smell of “God’s decomposition” and the “breath of empty space.” As one writer puts it, what troubles man is not “the absence of the experience of God, but the experience of the absence of God.”

Kafka’s hero of his The Trial, for example, is just such a man. And Kafka’s parable world is peopled with men who can find fellowship neither with other men nor with God. They are lonely and exiled, frustrated in the desire to become a part of a meaningful whole, and too limited by nature to try to be supermen.

Consider as the first example this parable:

The Watchman

I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: “I ran through here while you were looking the other way.” The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. “I suppose I really ought’nt to have done it,” I said. The watchman still said nothing. “Does your silence indicate permission to pass?” [This and other quotations from Kafka in this essay are from Parables and Paradoxes: In German and English (New York: Schocken Books, © 1958). Used by permission.]

I suppose the first reaction to a Kafka parable is, “What! Is that all?” And, of course, it is. Some of Kafka’s parables are longer, but many are just like this one—exquisite miniatures pregnant with meaning. In fact, I’d be satisfied to say that my commentary here peels off only one layer of the multi-layered onion of meaning contained in a Kafka parable.

Perhaps one should read it again. What is going on in the parable? Who is the “I”? Who is the watchman? Why does he not reply? Kafka is, I think, showing us a man who up till now has believed that someone has been concerned with his actions. This man has thought that there is an emperor (a symbol for God) who has a watchman (a symbol for man’s conscience) who will make clear the emperor’s will. But though the watchman seems to be there, he neither prevents trespassing nor explains his presence in any way. I take it that Kafka is suggesting that there never was an emperor in the first place. When a man grasps this, then he discovers that his conscience has gone silent and that there is no tribunal to which a man can appeal, no way to know right from wrong. He is left totally to his own devices. Yet—and this is the psychological problem—man still desires an authority; he wants to be told, “Yes, you may pass by,” or “No, wait, not yet.” As it is, he is left completely alone. Unlike Hamlet, he has no Horatio to talk to.

Again, consider this parable:

Couriers

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other—since there are no kings—messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.

This time Kafka talks about “they”: he is including society as a whole in his picture. Men have been offered the chance to lead, to rule, to become governors; but what do they do, every last one of them? They all become couriers, and no one is left to make sense out of their missions or their messages. The only reason they do not end it all is that they have taken an oath to serve. But serve whom? Nobody. There is no one to serve—no king, no god. What a picture of modern man in a technological and bureaucratic society in which everyone is sworn to do his job but no one must meddle with ultimate problems! To live and not to ask what life is about is to hurry from place to place carrying meaningless notes and shouting nonsense.

In another parable of man in society, Kafka describes the erection of a beautiful temple:

The Building of the Temple

Everything came to his aid during the construction work. Foreign workers brought the marble blocks, trimmed and fitted to one another. The stones rose and placed themselves according to the gauging motions of his fingers. No building ever came into being as easily as did this temple—or rather, this temple came into being the way a temple should. Except that, to wreak a spite or to desecrate or destroy it completely, instruments obviously of a magnificent sharpness had been used to scratch on every stone—from what quarry had they come?—for an eternity outlasting the temple, the clumsy scribblings of senseless children’s hands, or rather the entries of barbaric mountain dwellers.

This vision shows the horror of recognizing that an amazing and apparently beautiful edifice, a temple for worshiping God, has been built with stones all of which have been defaced. Allegorically it pictures the horror of discovering that a society, a church, or even a brand-new utopia that has looked great in the planning stage, and has even gone together well at its initiation, is really a heap of ugly, sinful men.

The construction of the society was easy, but individual blocks of society were defaced from the beginning. Why? Kafka suggests at first a simple explanation—“the clumsy scribbling of senseless children’s hands.” But he dismisses this. The scratching is too deep, perhaps, too significant; it must have been done by barbaric mountain dwellers. It was they who made their “entries” on the stone ledgers of men’s hearts, and for an eternity outlasting the temple these marks will remain. No man may build well with those badly marred stones.

Kafka goes no further in his analysis, but a Christian might. The quarry from which these stones came is located in the Garden of Eden and the barbaric mountain dwellers are Kafka’s counterpart to Adam and Eve. The effects of Adam’s act as a stonemason are still present and will continue to be present. The image of God in man will remain defaced regardless of the kind of society man is put into.

We should not be so taken by this parable that we feel Kafka is a Christian in spite of himself. He makes it very clear in his own writing (and Max Brod corroborates the point in his biography of Kafka) that he is not even an orthodox Jew, let alone a Christian. But, as we can see from the parables, his particular religious beliefs do not prevent him from shrewdly analyzing man’s plight.

We can see this analysis even more profoundly in another and, for us, a final parable:

The Spring

He is thirsty, and is cut off from a spring by a mere clump of bushes. But he is divided against himself: one part overlooks the whole, sees that he is standing here and that the spring is just beside him; but another part notices nothing, has at most a divination that the first part sees all. But as he notices nothing he cannot drink.

This seems to me to be a graphic illustration of the problem Paul presents in Romans 7:13–25, without the solution Paul gives. Certainly this parable shows us a man separated from life-giving water by an insignificant physical barrier. The real barrier is in the man himself. For although one part of him recognizes the situation, recognizes his need, the part of him that informs his will is blind. Man’s reason has been severed from his will. He cannot act. Kafka’s man is left in the desert.

Indeed, one of the significant facts that strike a reader of Kafka is that so few of his works point to a solution of the situation man faces. Certainly none of them suggests the Christian concept of God’s grace. One of his parables even ends on a note of cosmic despair: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.” Thus for man as Kafka sees him there is no hope. In this world is the hurrying courier who may stop by the watchman to get his permission to pass and who may at times sense that something is near that may quench his thirst. But he will never know the certainty of a significant place in society nor a positive position in relation to God. All he can experience is the absence of God, the death of God.

What shall we moderns say, then, as we leave the theater of Kafka’s parables? If we have read Kafka carefully, I think we can begin to sympathize with the psychological experience of many modern men. The growing popularity of the theater of the absurd leads us to admit that many people are becoming aware of the chaos that underlies their life and the void that constantly threatens them. Often college students, for example, read Kafka and find his work an objectification of their own mental turmoil. As Christians we must see and sympathetically understand these men around us. Then we must witness to them as they are and where they are. We are called on to assert to them clearly and sympathetically that God is, that he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, and that he will reveal himself to a man who may now believe God is dead.

Speaking in our own parabolic form, we might say: The emperor does reign; he has sent his son to show us how to live, and then to die for us. Our task is to stand as watchmen and conscientiously direct men to the emperor’s throne via the cross of his Son.