That the Reformation caused tremendous changes in the spiritual and ecclesiastical conditions of Europe needs no emphasis. Its impact on politics is also indisputable. But its effect on philosophy and ethics no doubt requires some explanation.

During the early Middle Ages, philosophy (what there was of it) followed in general the principles of a Platonic Augustinianism. The spiritual realm was considered to be directly accessible to reason, while the sensible world neither provided the basis of knowledge nor contributed any great amount to its sum total. Philosophy in effect coalesced with theology.

In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas replaced Augustinian thought with that of Aristotle. Sensation became the basis of knowledge, and God’s existence was proved by a tortuous argument from physical motion to an Unmoved Mover. Here is not the place to discuss the theological results of abandoning Augustine, but the philosophical result was an intricate scholasticism that led Jerome Zanchius to remark that “Thomas Aquinas [was] a man of some genius and much application, who, though in very many things a laborious trifler, was yet on some subjects a clear reasoner and judicious writer” (Absolute Predestination, chap, iv, pos. 8, par. 4, footnote).

Although there is no evidence that the scholastics ever seriously debated how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, Aquinas did indeed discuss whether an angel is in a place, whether an angel can be in several places at once, and whether several angels can be at the same time in the same place. These things, along with arguments on the passive and active intellect, prime matter, and whether only boys and no girls would have been born if Adam had not sinned, can easily produce the impression that Aquinas was sometimes a “laborious trifler.”

Later scholastics, particularly Duns Scotus, increased the number of subtleties. Contrary to Augustinianism, the area common to philosophy and theology became less and less. William of Occam made the break complete: nothing theological could be proved by philosophy—Christianity is based on revelation alone. If now Occam’s philosophy can be shown to the skeptical, then there is a peculiar return to Augustinianism in which no knowledge is possible apart from revelation. Luther’s philosophy was in effect this type of Occamism.

In a very real sense the Protestant Reformation may be said to have had no effect whatever on the subsequent history of philosophy. The main line—Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, the British empiricists, Kant, and Hegel—would presumably have developed essentially as it did, Reformation or none. Leibniz was a Lutheran and Berkeley a zealous Anglican, but the few necessary adjustments to Protestant or even Catholic thought do not seem to have had any really basic influence at all. Modern philosophy stems from the Renaissance, not from the Reformation.

Protestant thought on philosophic themes, on the other hand, was a complete reversal of scholasticism. Not only was the point of view of a spectator in an ivory tower condemned as useless, as trifling, and indeed as impious, but also the existence of God, instead of being a conclusion to an intricate Aristotelian argument, became the basis of all truth.

In the first chapter of the Institutes, Calvin, disdaining even to mention physical motion and an Unmoved Mover, begins with a question of greater Augustinian flavor: Does a man first know himself and then learn of God, or does he know God first and later learn about himself? Briefly Calvin’s answer is: “No man can arrive at the true knowledge of himself, without having first contemplated the divine character, and then descended to the consideration of his own.… Though the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves be intimately connected, the proper order of instruction requires us first to treat of the former, and then proceed to the discussion of the latter.”

In opposition to Aristotelian empiricism, Calvin, far from basing this knowledge on experience, refers it to natural instinct. “Some sense of the Divinity,” he says, “is inscribed on every hear.… All have by nature an innate persuasion of the divine existence, a persuasion inseparable from their very constitution.… We infer that this is a doctrine, not first to be learned in the schools, but which every man from his birth is self-taught” (I, iii, 1 and 3).

This Reformation theory of innate or a priori knowledge was not uniformly maintained in later centuries. Both deism and its Christian opponents introduced more and more natural theology. This should be regarded as a deterioration from the original position of Luther and Calvin.

Rejecting the ideal of one universal corrupt church, the Protestants were neither willing nor able to enforce philosophic uniformity. Jonathan Edwards was staunchly orthodox in theology, but he was peculiarly influenced by the British empiricists. Rudolf Bultmann thinks the New Testament anticipated Heidegger and existentialism; but since Bultmann is not staunchly orthodox, he may be a poor example. At any rate, Protestant theologians have oscillated between Scottish common sense and Hegelian personalism. Today the Free University of Amsterdam is the center of a serious attempt to produce a comprehensive Christian philosophy. With Calvin’s rejection of natural theology these men have brilliantly criticized non-Christian systems. Whether their constructive work will long endure remains to be seen.

The effect of the Reformation on ethics may be separated into theoretical and practical aspects. Consonant with the rejection of natural theology, the Reformation based its ethics on revelation and discarded natural law. This is pure theoretical gain. The theory of natural law commits a major logical blunder when it tries to deduce a normative conclusion from descriptive premises. No matter how carefully or how intricately one describes what men do, or what the provisions of nature are, or how natural inclinations function, it is a logical impossibility to conclude that this is or is not what men ought to do. The is never implies the ought. This criticism applies to all empirical theories. Both Thomism and utilitarianism insist that man is morally obligated to seek, not just his own good, but the common good. This principle, however, cannot be justified empirically.

When the Thomists argue that it is a natural law to seek what is good, because as a matter of fact everybody seeks what is good, they reduce the term good to the several objects of human desire. When they further state, “No one calls in doubt the need for doing good, avoiding evil, acquiring knowledge, dispelling ignorance …” (Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 329), they simply shut their eyes to beatniks, the Mafia, the tribes of the Congo, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Tautology or falsity is their fate.

The Reformation’s ethical principles were the explicit commands in the Word of Cod. Of course this presupposes the existence of God—discussed above—and the possibility and truth of revelation. If revelation is false, then its ethical theory is false, too; but no one can accuse it of tautology.

The practical effect of the Reformation on ethics is more easily observed by the general public, and Jesuitical casuistry and Tetzel’s scheme to raise money for St. Peter’s provide the sharpest possible contrast with Puritan conscientiousness. The massacre of the Huguenots and the massacre of the Covenanters by the Catholic Stuarts are highlighted by the Presbyterians’ refusal to take revenge when they came to power. Even in the days of John Knox, after the martyrdoms of the early Reformation, the Presbyterians in power in Scotland did not execute a single person for religious beliefs. Contrast this with the Spanish Inquisition and the Jesuit intrigues.

On a less gruesome plane, but not less an important point of ethics, the Jesuitical disregard and the Reformation regard for truth gives content to the discussion. It was no doubt the violation of oaths that led the Westminster divines to include in their summary of Reformation and biblical doctrines the following paragraph:

“An oath is to be taken in the plain and common sense of the words, without equivocation or mental reservation. It cannot oblige to sin: but in anything not sinful, being taken, it binds to performance, although to a man’s own hurt; nor is it to be violated, although made to heretics or infidels” (XXII, 4).

We live today (so it is said, and, I regret, said with truth) in the post-Protestant era. The spiritual interests of the Reformation are no longer interesting. A materialistic attitude and a humanistic philosophy characterize our civilization. As Nietzsche said, “God is dead.” It is an age of increased war and crime. Murder and rape occur in public, on the streets, in the subways, and New Yorkers refuse to get involved. Legislatures abolish capital punishment; and instead of punishing the criminal, the state rehabilitates him so that in seven years the murderer is paroled, sometimes to kill again.

Such are the results of liberalism, of banishing God and Christian ethics from the public schools, of denying the Bible, its miracles, and its salvation. Under these conditions a return to Luther and Calvin, a return to Protestantism, a return to the Bible would not be the worst fate imaginable.

Major fruits of the Reformation have been in the inseparably related fields of evangelism and missions. Evangelism is seeking so to present the Gospel to men and women that through it they may be born anew. If they have entered into the wonder and joy of the new life made possible through Christ, men and women will inevitably seek to spread the Good News throughout the world, whether among their immediate neighbors or in other lands.

In its essence the Reformation originated among those who had experienced the new birth. Because Luther had learned through painful struggles the amazing truth that is at the heart of the biblical revelation and the New Testament, that salvation is achieved not by good works but by faith—“the just shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17); “by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8)—he sparked the Reformation. Many factors contributed to the spread of the Reformation, some political, some related to the ambitions of kings and princes to control the Church; but at the heart of it were men who were moved by God’s grace in giving his Son, by the willingness of Christ to follow his Father’s will and go to the cross, by the marvel of the Resurrection, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit. The new birth came in a variety of ways: to some, as to Calvin, in such a way that they were reticent about the details; to others, as to Menno Simons, by stages. But always it issued in the fruits of the Spirit and always it was contagious.

From time to time across the centuries, from the currents finding channel through the Reformation fresh streams of evangelism have issued. Such was Pietism. When, in Protestantism in the Netherlands and Germany, a deadening formalism seemed to have blocked the springs of the new life, preachers and pastors such as Spener spoke of the necessity and possibility of the new birth and gathered about them those who experienced it, cultivated it through fellowship in prayer and Bible study, and sought to win others. John Wesley was an outstanding leader of those, not alone in Methodism but as well in other circles, who experienced the new birth. As he described it, in an hour which was to him transforming he felt his heart “strangely warmed,” felt that he did “trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation,” and received an assurance that Christ had taken away his sins and saved him from the law of sin and death. In a way that was different and yet essentially the same, God’s grace gripped Jonathan Edwards, Charles G. Finney, Dwight L. Moody, and in our own day Billy Graham. From them, and thousands of lesser fame, flowed “rivers of living water” (John 7:38).

The Reformation was late in giving rise to foreign missions. One reason was the belief of some of the early Reformers that the Great Commission was given only to the apostles. Another was that the Reformers were so engaged in the transformation of the Church in their own lands that they had little time for spreading the faith outside Europe. The major reason, however, was that for nearly a century after the start of the Reformation Protestant peoples had little contact with non-Christian peoples. The great exploring and colonizing powers of the sixteenth century were Spain and Portugal. Significantly, the great surge of Catholic missions that accompanied and followed their exploits was the fruit of the fresh awakening in the Roman Catholic Church which we sometimes inaccurately call the Counter-Reformation. That awakening arose through great spirits who wished the Catholic Church purified. Like Ignatius Loyola, a contemporary of Martin Luther who had had a profound and transforming experience of Christ and who founded the Society of Jesus dedicated to “the greater glory of God,” they were moved by a passion for souls. They planted the Gospel as they understood it in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, attempting to win the nominal Christians among their fellow countrymen to a vital faith and to protect the non-Europeans against exploitation and bring them into the Church.

Protestants planted missions wherever they had colonies and commerce. That was true of the early settlers in Virginia, of John Eliot and the Mayhews in New England, and of the Dutch in Ceylon and the East Indies. Those missions were minority enterprises; the majority of the settlers and merchants were not interested in them and even opposed them. Yet they were early fruits of the Reformation.

The major Protestant missions arose from Pietism on the continent of Europe and the related evangelicalism in the British Isles and America. The great pioneers were the Moravians. Refugees from persecution in Bohemia, they settled on the estates of Count Zinzendorf, who was a godchild of Spener. Zinzendorf saw in the little company of refugees, with their center in Herrnhut, instruments for fulfilling his dream of carrying the Gospel to all mankind. Under his initiative the Moravians founded missions in some of the few parts of the world to which Protestant peoples had access—among them Greenland, the Thirteen Colonies, and the Danish West Indies. German Pietists were the first Protestant missionaries in India, sent by the King of Denmark to a Danish trading post in Tranquebar. Out of the Great Awakening in New England came missions to the Indians, with David Brainerd as a famous figure. A prospective son-in-law of Jonathan Edwards, Brainerd died of tuberculosis contracted during heroic labors among the red men.

William Carey, rightly esteemed the major pioneer in modern Protestant missions, was converted in his youth. In 1795, three years after the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society which sent Carey to India, evangelicals of several denominations inaugurated the London Missionary Society. In 1799 evangelicals within the Church of England began what is known as the Church Missionary Society, to this day the largest missionary society supported by Anglicans. Out of what was known as the Second Awakening came the lads who at the Haystack prayer meeting in Williamstown, Massachusetts (1806), formed themselves into the Society of the Brethren with the purpose “to effect in the persons of its members a mission or missions to the heathen.” Through them came the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), which, except for an earlier Moravian society, was the first in the United States to begin missions in other countries. This Protestant missionary effort of the last decade of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth century sprang from evangelicals at a time when Europe was racked by the French Revolution, with its religious skepticism, and the Napoleonic Wars. It showed that, in the darkest days, from the minorities of evangelical faith can come movements that will bless the world.

Significantly, too, the missionary awakening came when the British Empire was beginning the expansion that in the nineteenth century opened much of the world to Protestant missions. In 1815, just at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, German and Swiss Pietists opened a seminary in Basel. For a time its graduates went out under British societies, but in 1822 it began sending missionaries under its own auspices. Before the middle of the century several other German missionary societies were organized, some of them the outgrowth of Basel.

In 1865 J. Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission. The son of warmly evangelical parents, Taylor had been converted in his teens. He soon determined to be a medical missionary in China, then only beginning to be opened to the foreigner. While studying medicine, through discipline and prayer he taught himself to depend completely on God for his physical needs. He continued that reliance during his initial years in China. Invalided home, he resumed his medical studies. The weight of China’s millions, dying without hearing the good news of Christ, became a crushing burden. He believed that God wished none of them to perish but all to come to a knowledge of the truth. He also believed that God must be waiting for someone to offer to be the instrument through whom the Gospel could be brought to the Chinese. With no organization behind him and no influential friends, he undertook, in faith, to be that instrument. The China Inland Mission was the result. Its program was to send its members to the interior where no other Protestants were at work, to depend entirely on God for personnel and funds, to have no fixed salaries, and never to go into debt.

Taylor found great strength in such biblical words as Ebenezer and Jehovah Jireh, carrying the assurance “hitherto hath the Lord helped us” and “the Lord will provide.” He accepted “willing, skillful workers,” regardless of their denomination. At the end of its first half century the China Inland Mission had more than 1,000 missionaries on its rolls. Wide attention was brought to it when in the 1880s it was joined by “the Cambridge Seven,” athletically and socially prominent converts of Moody in that university. Affiliated organizations sprang up in several countries, and other “faith” missions were inspired by it.

Marked reinforcement to Protestant missions came from the United States through the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. That movement began in 1886 in a conference at Mt. Hermon, Massachusetts, led by Moody. Its members signed the “declaration”: “It is my purpose if God permit to become a foreign missionary.” By its “watchword,” “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” was meant, not that the world was to be converted in that generation, but that it is the obligation and privilege of each generation of Christians to make the Gospel known to everyone in the world of its day. The movement spread to other countries, and through it thousands of students were enlisted for missions. The Laymen’s Missionary Movement, begun in 1906, had as its object the raising of the funds needed to fulfill the watchword.

From the Student Volunteer Movement came a great enlargement of the missionary enterprise. John R. Mott, one of the original hundred who at Mt. Hermon inaugurated the movement, became the chairman of its executive committee. He himself had made his full commitment to Christ through contact with one of Moody’s Cambridge converts, Kynaston Studd, who was a brother of one of the Cambridge Seven and who later was knighted and became Lord Mayor of London. Mott succeeded Moody as chairman of the annual student conferences at Northfield, Massachusetts, in the buildings of the girls’ school founded by the evangelist. He became an evangelist to students and held evangelistic meetings in many of the universities of the world.

From the conviction that students were to be the future leaders of their peoples and, if won to Christ, would be the best means of giving the Gospel to their nations, Mott organized, in 1895, the World’s Student Christian Federation. In 1910 he and J. H. Oldham, a leader in the British affiliate of the Student Volunteer Movement, organized the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. Mott presided and became the chairman of the Continuation Committee of the conference, and later the chairman of the International Missionary Council which followed. He saw in that council a means for coordinating all Protestant foreign missions in such a way that the dream of “the evangelization of the world in this generation” could be realized and churches planted and strengthened in every land. From former members of the World’s Student Christian Federation came most of the initial leadership of the World Council of Churches. Fittingly, Mott, then in his early eighties, became the first honorary president of that organization.

In light of such a record, of which this is only the barest outline, something of the contribution of the Reformation to evangelism and missions can be discerned. The original impulse from which the Reformation sprang—the joyous recognition of salvation through faith in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ revealing the love of God—has had global repercussions that are still mounting.

The Reformation was not born on a particular day in a given month and year, It did not come into history as a finished act: it will not be completed until the end of time. It had its historical background and its crucial events, and has had a continuing influence.

The Reformation was not the millennium. Not everything done in its name can claim our wholehearted approval; it reflected the original sin of its chief proponents. Yet when it is viewed in its totality, and through the transformations to which it led and the continuing vitality and influence it has had, none can deny that the Reformation was the greatest movement in Christian history since the days of the apostles. Whatever its shortcomings, it bequeathed to all ages an imperishable heritage of which we need to be reminded again and again. It is true that this heritage has, at times, been squandered and impoverished by the unfaithfulness of Protestant churches to Reformation principles. Sometimes there has even been a repudiation of what the Reformation stood for. Yet this neither detracts from the heritage nor invalidates the principles undergirding it.

What, then, are the imperishable principles that were rediscovered in the Reformation and passed on to succeeding ages?

1. The uniqueness of the Bible, the Word of God, as the only rule of faith and practice. Church and tradition were subordinated to Scripture, which was looked upon as the court of final appeal for all questions. Moreover, the Bible could not be a useful criterion for men unless it was available to them in their own tongues. Thus the principle of translating the Word of God into the languages of the people has been a Reformation constant.

2. The justification of the believer by faith alone, without works or anything else. In one stroke this principle cut through all the accretions of the centuries: priestcraft, indulgences, penances, auricular confession, and the like. The Reformers enunciated afresh the biblical norm that men are justified by the merits of Christ through his vicarious atoning sacrifice. This justification is granted to the believer only by faith.

3. The universal priesthood of all believers. No man, hierarchy, or intermediary of any kind stands between the individual and Almighty God. This principle swept away, as Preserved Smith says, “the vast hierarchy of angels and canonized persons that made Catholicism quasi-polytheistic” and represented a return to pure monotheism.

4. Religious liberty. The Reformers insisted that human conscience can never be coerced, that a man has more than the right to religious toleration—he has the right to full liberty to embrace or to reject the Christian faith. And he must have this freedom of choice without being subjected to outside restraints, threats, inquisitions, or authorities. Today the Vatican Council is wrestling with the principle of religious liberty, one that the Roman Catholic Church has resisted for many centuries.

5. The strengthening of the state and its deliverance from subservience to Rome. It was in the name of this principle that post-Reformation developments reached the ideal of the separation of church and state. It has found its most extensive expression in America, where religious authority and political control have been divorced.

6. The ethical value of this life and the sanctity of daily labor and of marriage, children, and the home. This contravened the monastic ideal of celibacy, solitude, and mortification of the flesh. Preserved Smith wrote: “The man at the plough, the maid with the broom, said Luther, are doing God better service than does the praying, self-tormenting monk.”

7. The sanctity of human vocation, whether clerical or lay. Some men are called to mend shoes; others are called to preach and teach. One vocation is in itself no more spiritual than another, for all are sacred before God. Every man in his vocation belongs to the Lord God and must fulfill the obligations of his stewardship within the vocation to which he has been called.

8. The virtues of thrift and industry. Success and prosperity are not in themselves right or wrong. God has ordained thrift and industry, and any consequent success or prosperity must be used for the glory of God.

Some of these essential elements of the Reformation are discussed in the following essays.

A few days ago I walked along the wall that divides Berlin and symbolizes the split in the Western world. Luther’s Saxony, heartland of the Reformation, now lies in the lap of Communist overlords.

One of the paradoxes of this generation is that alongside a revival of Luther-research and of Calvin-research, ecclesiastical leaders too seem to be sealing off the modern world from the Protestant Reformation. In fact, some unity-questing churchmen have virtually narrowed the image of the Reformation to an ill-advised division in the ranks of Christendom. The great blessings of the Reformation to its generation and to ours seem all but forgotten. A fresh glimpse of this heritage will surprise many readers.

So vast a benefit has come to the Western world through the Reformation that, at a time when many non-evangelical Christians seem to have forgotten it, the Pope who is now calling so ardently for renewal in the Church would serve both Protestants and Catholics well were he to commend the faith and initiative of the Reformers.

To attempt to generalize about the religious and spiritual scene in a land as dynamic and diverse as present-day Germany is to invite the criticism of being superficial. The most that one can hope to do is to report what he himself has felt and observed, and to recognize continually that he sees in part and reports in part. A number of elements of significance have come to the attention of this writer during the past summer, spent in the German Federal Republic and in West Berlin.

It is noticeable, first, that the question of church and slate is by no means resolved in West Germany. The problem assumed prominence again this year in relation to the Roman Catholic Church, which has no national school system as such in the Federal Republic. The courts have ruled that education is a province of the Länder or states, and thus the Roman hierarchy is compelled to deal directly with each state in educational matters.

This year, the matter has reached what seems to be a critical stage with the preparation of a draft concordat between the Holy See and the state of Lower Saxony. The aim of the concordat is to increase the amount of Catholic religious training in the public schools. Lower Saxony is approximately 80 per cent Protestant, and thus the members of the predominantly non-Catholic state teachers’ association are disturbed. Some have said they will refuse to teach any classes in religion if the concordat is ratified. At present, the attempt is being made to prove the proposed draft unconstitutional.

What is significant in the entire affair is that the national Christian Democratic party, which is largely Catholic-based, opposes the concordat—for political reasons. Chancellor Ludwig Erhard seems to fear that its ratification will confirm some of the concern of anti-clericals and swing their votes to the Socialist party in the forthcoming national elections.

The problem is a thorny one, especially since the basic relations between the West German government and the Vatican are governed by pacts negotiated with the Hitler government. It would seem that both West Germany and Italy could afford to insist upon a renegotiation of their respective agreements made with the Holy See during the days of the Rome-Berlin Axis. Rome may, of course, feel that she could not hope in this decade to secure such favorable terms as she secured in the late twenties and early thirties.

To the outsider, it seems ironical that Germany, with her proud Christian heritage, should today be regarded with special interest by non-Christian religions. Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims seem to consider West Germany their primary missionary territory in Europe.

Laborers are brought into the country from Muslim lands, notably Iran and Turkey, and there are now some 120,000 Muslims employed in Germany, with another 10,000 in the Federal Republic as university students. At least eight mosques operate in the land; and their services are attended, not only by foreign students and Muslim laborers, but also by Germans, who seem to be seeking for something not found in their own religious institutions. The most successful center of Muslim worship is in the town of Schwetzingen, and services are also held regularly in Frankfurt-am-Main and Nürnberg.

Buddhists from both Ceylon and Tibet are also active in Germany. There is a well-staffed Buddhist mission for Germany that claims 3,000 members among the German population. This figure does not tell the entire story, for there seems to be a wide interest in the investigation of Buddhism as a religious option within German intellectual circles. To many, this seems to be “the thing” for the fashionable intellectual to pursue.

This same interest in the exotic quality of Oriental thought is inclining some German intellectuals toward the more sophisticated varieties of Hindu thought. There are said to be nine schools of Yoga in the country. These use the cultivation of the cultic physical exercises as a means to introduce students to the beliefs of speculative Brahmanism. Emphasis is laid upon the technique of interweaving Indian religious thought with the psychology of the West. What is significant in all this is that there is a spiritual hunger and spiritual quest which German Christianity is not satisfying. Adherents of missionary movements from the East capitalize upon this.

Another factor noticeable in the mentality of many West Germans is spiritual neutralism. This writer and his wife had an earnest conversation with a well-educated young man who had very recently been married. When asked whether the wedding was solemnized in the Church, he replied matter-of-factly but firmly that it was not. He emphasized that he was neither for nor against the Church, but that to him it was essential to regard such matters in total and detached objectivity. Neutrality toward faith was to him a sort of a dogma.

When questioned a bit further about what filled the frame of his life, he made it perfectly clear that getting and furnishing an apartment and maintaining a comfortable manner of life were to him the essence of living. He revealed no antipathy to faith, Christian or other; to him, faith was simply redundant, the Church irrelevant.

Informed Christians feel that this attitude is widespread in the Federal Republic. It is, viewed from one angle, more difficult than avowed atheism. Although a short conversation with this man did not disclose all the ingredients of such a way of thinking, one thing seemed clear. The mood of detachment and non-involvement was mingled thoroughly with materialism. The young man’s values were exclusively material.

A final observation has to do with the current theological mood. Any attempt to generalize in this area involves the peril of oversimplification. But certain trends seem evident. First, the supreme reign of Rudolf Bultmann in German theological matters is drawing to a close. No longer can a frown or a negative comment from this theologian condemn the opinion of another capable thinker to oblivion or outer darkness. True, the tendency to form “schools” and the mechanics of filling professorships in German universities do serve to give abnormal power to strong personalities. But the dogmatic “quest for the existential Jesus” is no longer regarded as above criticism.

Again, there seems to be emerging a renewed emphasis upon the historical element in revelation. This may be an outgrowth of the stressing of Heilsgeschichte (salvation-history) by Oscar Cullmann and others. Thus, there seems to be a discernible trend toward acceptance of a possible continuity between the events described in the biblical revelation and the events of general history. It is too early to predict Whether or not this will finally bring to an end the mania for demythologizing in Continental theology. The trend may be the harbinger of a day in which first-line theologians will at least entertain the possibility of some factual validity and some propositional accuracy in the historic written Revelation.

America’s three major Negro Baptist groups reacted differently as the smoke and shame of riot hung over the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles last month.

The three met simultaneously in different cities three weeks after Watts. The most activist denomination on civil rights, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, convened at Los Angeles’ Zion Hill Baptist Church, on the fringe of the riot zone. But the riot seemed just as near at meetings in Jacksonville (National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc.) and Houston (National Baptist Convention of America).

Two of the conventions are offshoots of the third and largest Negro body, the “Inc.” organization personified by its president of thirteen years, Chicago’s Dr. Joseph H. Jackson. He and his convention have been branded “Uncle Tom” by militant civil rights workers for their conservatism.

The “unincorporated” National Baptists stand somewhere in the middle on civil rights. Their president for eight years, Dr. C. D. Pettaway of Little Rock, Arkansas, has been cautious, but this year’s convention implied support of direct action and civil disobedience.

If the three conventions ever got together, they could represent a bloc of nearly nine million Negroes.¹Current membership claims: National Inc., 5.5 million; National unincorporated, 2.8 million; Progressives, 500,000. But union is unlikely, despite lack of doctrinal differences. The two National conventions are more friendly now than in the past, but their schism dates to 1916. The Progressives left National, Inc., in 1962 after great turmoil at the latter’s 1961 convention (see News, September 25, 1961).

The Progressives pressed a stronger civil rights stand and repudiated the one-man image they felt National, Inc., had developed under Jackson.

These undercurrents continued in Los Angeles as the Progressives put tenure limits on their presidency. Dr. Cardner C. Taylor, who ran against Jackson for president in 1961, said the new convention is “cause-centered, not man-centered.”

He said Progressives also recognize “great restlessness at the mild commitment of the old conventions to the civil rights struggle.” Progressive ministers include Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other rights activists. The Progressive resolution on Los Angeles abhorred the violence but considered it a symptom of widespread racial injustice.

In Jacksonville, the approach of the Nationals, Inc., was to condemn Los Angeles lawlessness. Their type of direct action was a milk fund for suffering children in Watts. A resolution asserted that civil rights laws have been passed and should now be given a chance to work.

Jackson, who has always been doubtful about boycotts, picketing, and sit-ins, said “We must … be most critical of all efforts that may not be in harmony with American ideals and with the objectives of our struggle.”

A pre-Watts statement by Jackson, which the convention board adopted June 16, said “all unlawful demonstrations” tend to create disrespect for the law and law officers, establish demonstrations as “the only method of correcting the evils of society,” and “disregard the rights of others and seek to punish the innocent while attempting revenge on the guilty.”

Jackson also contends that “togetherness” among Negroes is not segregation but common sense: “It is no sin for nationalities and races to support each other in business; it is their privilege and their right.” This may have been an answer to those who see Negro churches practicing discrimination in reverse, with leaders striving to protect their places in a one-race hierarchy.

The Nationals “unincorporated,” by contrast, said this “new day” requires a “reexamination of the structure of the church serving the Negro community,” particularly the “issue of segregation and discrimination in its effect upon the structure.…”

On civil rights, the “unincorporated” convention endorsed a report that provided a brief history of rights demonstrations and praised participants for their devotion and sacrifice. “The committed witnesses of Christ must be at work, ‘Where the action is,’ ” it said.

Turning to Los Angeles, the statement analyzed the climate “charged with racial hostility” which neither white nor Negro churches have confronted.

Although nonviolence and love have been major tactics in the civil rights struggle, the report continued, there are many not committed to these ideals and many resentful Negroes unaffected by the nonviolent organizations who lash back at “those they believe responsible for their condition.”

The convention appealed for a new aggressiveness by churches, urging them to take the Gospel from the institutional churches into “the market places.”

The Nationals, Inc., in choosing Jacksonville, held their first meeting in the South in a decade, and an official said there were few problems getting rooms for the 20,000 visitors, many of whom stayed in public hotels and motels. An “unincorporated” spokesman said Houston presented no problems at all on public accommodations.

Protestant Panorama

Representatives of the American Baptist Convention and the Church of the Brethren are engaged in exploratory union conversations. The first meeting took place July 8, according to American Baptist News Service. A second meeting, scheduled for December 3 and 4, will feature presentation of a “working document.”

Commissions on union from The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church adopted a proposed constitution and plan of union last month. They suggested that the new denomination be known officially as The United Methodist Church.

Presbyterians in the Caribbean islands and British Guiana created a joint assembly during a conference in Trinidad. In Jamaica, meanwhile, Presbyterians and Congregationalists agreed to establish a new United Church of Christ.

Miscellany

Two Swiss Protestant missionaries were murdered on August 21 at Bangante, Cameroon, according to Ecumenical Press Service. The victims were identified as Madame Gerard Markhoff, mother of five children, and M. Roland Waldvogel, a young teacher who had been in the Cameroon only a few days. Police had no immediate clues as to the motive.

The U. S. Senate, in a voice vote without opposition, approved a resolution to designate 1966 as “The Year of the Bible.” An identical resolution in the House was expected to win similar endorsement. The resolution singles out the American Bible Society’s 150th anniversary next year.

Anti-American literature disguised as Scripture is flooding South Korea, according to the Rev. James Roe of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Roe asserted in London following a trip to Korea that he had secured a book composed entirely of anti-American cartoons bound in a standard cover of the Gospel of Luke.

The Internal Revenue Service overruled a local office decision that Dallas Theological Seminary could not give ordained staff members non-taxable housing allowances because it is not church-affiliated. The national office said such an interpretation discriminates against independent seminaries.

The weekly voice of British Methodism, The Methodist Recorder, will no longer record opposition to merger with the Church of England in its advertising columns. Editorial sections will continue to discuss the issue, the editor said, but the paper’s first loyalty is to official Methodism, and it cannot accept “paid pressure advocacy” that seeks to “overturn the mind of the Church.”

Roland Gammon is syndicating a column through the North American Newspaper Alliance called “Faith Is a Star,” which will discuss the personal faith of a motley assortment of personalities including: Pablo Casals, U Thant, General Nasser, David Ben-Gurion, Harry Truman, Carl Sandburg, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, and Mickey Mantle.

At a Washington memorial service, Gabon’s Ambassador Aristide Issembe said Albert Schweitzer’s “paternalism was the paternalism that any doctor exhibits toward his sick patients.” To people in Gabon’s primitive forests, he said, Schweitzer was the first European to treat them as people of equal worth.

Samples of a new biweekly magazine, expanse, went to 100,000 ministers last month. Lutheran Wilfred Bockelman and his staff plan to read 100 religious and secular journals and offer 60- to 100-word descriptions of major articles. Bockelman said the magazine will not be a digest but will just describe articles so ministers can decide whether they want to read them.

A concert by Duke Ellington’s jazz band at Grace Episcopal Cathedral, San Francisco, was introduced as “an offering to God,” inasmuch as the musicians wailed at base union scale instead of their usual premium fee. For the 3,000 attendants, seats cost up to $25. Duke, who is 66, called the religious compositions his “most important statement.”

The Rev. John M. Norris, Bible Presbyterian minister who runs radio station WGCB in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, filed a suit in Washington’s Federal District Court asking a temporary injunction against the Federal Communications Commission’s “fairness doctrine” on balance in political programming, and $5 million damages from the Democratic National Committee for alleged harassment.

Five young men faced trial on charges growing out of a mob attack on Christians in Haifa, Israel. The five, described as Orthodox zealots, were accused of assault, damage to property, unruly behavior, and threats. Reports from the coastal town of Ashdod, meanwhile, indicated that religious peace had been restored there following attacks from the agitated Orthodox. Police were credited with speedy action and cooperation with the national ministry of religion.

Dr. E. S. James, editor and general manager of the Baptist Standard of Texas (circ. 400,000), says he has begun plans to retire “in about a year.” James, 65, is noted for his outspoken views on issues relating to Southern Baptists.

They Say

“Five years ago a Norwegian statistician set a computer to work counting history’s wars. The machine quickly, competently and a bit contemptuously announced that in 5.560 years of recorded human history there have been 14.531 wars, or, as the computer pointed out, 2.6135 a year. Of 185 generations of man’s recorded experience, the machine noted with a touch of sarcasm, only ten have known unsullied peace. And even as he always has, man these days is fighting man.…”—Time.

Deaths

DR. WILLIAM STRANG TINDAL. 66, professor of Christian ethics and practical theology at New College, University of Edinburgh; in Edinburgh.

DR. WILLIAM HEALEY CADMAN, 73, former professor of theology at Mansfield College, Oxford University; in Devon, England.

THE REV. RICHARD PYKE, 91, former president of the British Methodist Conference; in Bristol, England.

Vatican Council liberals flexed their muscles in a lopsided preliminary vote on religious liberty, just one week after Pope Paul opened the 1965 session by announcing a new “synod” of bishops that could counterbalance bureaucratic conservatism.

Final wording of the stand on liberty and implementation of the synod depend on Paul, a soul who has been called reticent, hesitant, and enigmatic in the midst of liberal-conservative battles.

The reformers took heart not only from the synod plan but also from the pontiff’s pleas for world peace and his extraordinary plan to visit the U. N. (see the opposite page). Traditionalists were reassured by Paul’s pre-council statements urging caution, his stinging rebuke of Communism, and the encyclical on the eve of the council’s opening that affirmed transubstantiation and other eucharistic traditions.

In the months after a liberty vote was canceled at the last session, 218 proposed changes were considered, but the sides were virtually unchanged. Spain’s Cardinal y Castro asserted, “… only the Catholic Church has the right to preach the Gospel. Proselytism … must be repressed not only by the church, but also by the state.…”

The moment of high drama belonged to the other side, in the person of durable little Josef Cardinal Beran, who suffered the denial of religious liberty by both Nazis and Communists. He said Catholicism in Czechoslovakia “seems to be expiating past faults and sins committed against freedom of conscience,” such as the torch execution of John Huss.

The vote of 1,997 to 224 reportedly came after the Pope interceded to end the repetitive debate and get a statement prior to his U. N. trip. The carefully couched motion made the draft “a basis for the definitive declaration,” subject to amendment but not major revision. The rewriting will be done by the largely liberal corps of Augustin Cardinal Bea.

The editor of the Catholic World had carped that the draft “brings us up to date with Roger Williams”; but once the vote was taken, liberals beamed with praise.

Among Protestant observers, Methodist William R. Cannon said conservatives cannot alter the basic principles, but he foresees some “conscientious objection.” Congregationalist Douglas Horton said, “Now we know that the strength of the negative forces is minimal”—the “guesswork” is over. C. Stanley Lowell of Americans United said “the Protestant Reformation has succeeded”: Rome, which failed to restore Christian unity with persecution, will now “recognize and deal with what could not be destroyed.”

The new synod of bishops becomes the liberals’ hope for a wedge into church policy councils.

In his keynote address to the council, the Pope said he would convene the synod “according to the needs of the church … for consultation and collaboration.… And in a special way it can be of use in the day-to-day work of the Roman Curia.…”

Last year’s church constitution endorsed in principle this collegiality of bishops in ruling the church with the Pope. It appears that the conservative Curia will remain independent from the synod, answerable only to the Pope and still able to act in his name. The Pope, who was a Curia official for three decades, will determine the synod’s real power and ideology. He will pass on the election of all members, name up to 15 per cent of them himself, and decide how often the synod meets and what it discusses.

But the synod will be “permanent” and roughly representative of the more than fifty national conferences. This is in marked contrast to the gerrymandered College of Cardinals and heavily Italian Curia.

Paul has yet to begin reform of the Curia itself, which he promised two years ago.

The tone of the Pope’s third encyclical, Mysterium Fidei (Mystery of Faith), was widely interpreted as a hint of conservatism to come. In it Paul reaffirmed that in the Mass, bread and wine are miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Christ, although they appear unchanged to the senses. Protestants hold varying views of the meaning of the elements but deny transubstantiation. The Pope also said public Mass should not be emphasized to the disparagement of Mass celebrated by priests in private.

A sharp exchange between the Italian press and the Netherlands’ liberal Bernard Cardinal Alfrink after the encyclical showed the potential for Catholic discord. Transubstantiation has cost the church some intellectual believers, and liberals have talked recently about “transignification,” that is, change in the elements’ significance, not substance.

Paul’s encyclical said that he did not want to deny investigation but that such opinions involve “grave dangers.” The Pope has been careful to balance the two sides of academic freedom in his typical “but … and” style. He told a recent Thomistic Congress that the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, backbone of traditional college thought, should not discourage further research by theologians and philosophers. The saint is “not to be considered as an exclusive exponent of God’s truths,” he said.

With the religious liberty discussion ended for the time being, the bishops have turned to other items. First in line was debate on the wide-ranging “Church in the Modern World” document, which drew immediate criticism on style. A spokesman for twenty Italian bishops said the much-belabored document was pedestrian, and he called for a forthright stand on birth control.

As this debate continued, voting began on final versions of other schemata. First ballots showed overwhelming approval of the new draft on revelation. Last in line for voting is the statement on non-Christian religions. On this issue, insiders report Paul has bowed to conservative and Arab pressures by watering down the key section on the traditional “deicide” belief concerning Jewish guilt in Christ’s death.

Sixty-nine delegate-observers and fifteen guest observers were registered at the opening of the council. Most significant of these was Metropolitan Emilianos, first Orthodox bishop to be a delegate. Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras sent a telegram to Paul expressing “fervent and prayerful wishes for the happy conclusion of the [council’s] deliberations for the welfare of the Church of Christ.”

The most critical voice was not among the religious observers. It belonged to the Rome correspondent of the Soviet news agency, who sensed “an atmosphere of pessimism, and even of a certain indifference.” He predicted “no sensational decisions” at the council’s fourth session.

Graham: Back On His Feet

Evangelist Billy Graham, who has suffered several serious illnesses in the past ten years, walked out of Mayo Clinic last month after his latest and apparently most painful ordeal. Graham was fifteen pounds lighter but in good spirits, and he looked forward to two weeks of rest and recuperation at his Montreat, North Carolina, home. An offending prostate seemed subdued.

Immediately following his ten-day Denver crusade, Graham entered the clinic for what was to have been a minor operative procedure and a four-day stay. Continued hemorrhaging, however, necessitated a blood transfusion and a second operative procedure five days later. This was further complicated by phlebitis in one arm.

Contrary to a flurry of rumors, there was never any question of malignancy.

Many friends joined in prayer on Graham’s behalf, and the evangelist was deluged with messages from all over the world.

Graham plans to proceed with a scheduled ten-day crusade in Houston, beginning October 15, one week later than originally planned. The meetings will be held in the city’s huge new Astrodome. Graham will preach each evening and Sunday afternoon but has canceled all other activities that were to be part of his Houston visit.

President Johnson, who telephoned the evangelist three times at the hospital, told a recent White House visitor he plans to visit one of the crusade services.

The Houston Catholic diocese has told its members they may attend the meetings but not “participate actively.”

A Bible For Evangelicals

Evangelical scholars at a recent two-day conference decided yet another Bible translation is needed. Though sobered by reports on how much toil was needed to produce existing translations, the twenty-six participants held that the project is feasible.

The consensus was that no present English version does justice both to the meaning of Scripture and to the requirements of idiomatic modern English. The Revised Standard Version drew praise for clarity but questions on Christology. The New English Bible, while fresh and idiomatic, was judged too often an interpretation rather than a translation. Previous evangelical versions were found lacking in consistency and style. The new version will not be cast in the King James mold, either.

Dr. Burton L. Goddard of Gordon Divinity School will head a group to name the continuing fifteen-man project directorate. The conference was the result of preliminary work by a joint committee drawn from the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Reformed Church.

The Rev. Mrs. Edwards

The Episcopal House of Bishops, at its September meeting, told Bishop James A. Pike of California he could not ordain a woman as a deacon. A “deaconess” was all right, but with more limited duties than those of a deacon.

Pike proceeded to ordain as deaconess Phyllis Edwards, 48, a grandmother who has been active in civil rights causes. Pike said that as a minister she was entitled to be addressed as “the reverend.”

That did it, said the Rt. Rev. Francis W. Lickfield, Bishop of Quincy, Illinois, and president of the “high” American Church Union. “Minister” means “clergyman” to most people, he said, and “an Episcopal deaconess is not an Episcopal clergyman.”

Said Pike in reply, “The Rev. Mrs. Edwards is a minister, a member of the fourth order of the Ministry.” He added that the Roman Catholic Church also has women as ministers.

High And Low

Officials at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary estimate that insurance policies will cover three-fourths of the heavy property damage caused by Hurricane Betsy. Contrary to early reports minimizing the effects of the hurricane, damage estimates now run to two million dollars.

Class time was drastically curtailed to enable seminary personnel to help in emergency relief work in the community.

The seminary’s 160 buildings have been hit high and low. The hurricane caused extensive roof damage and lower floors were flooded. Two years ago, the seminary had to shore up the foundations of its buildings because of extensive termite damage.

Missionary In The Middle

Neutrality is not enough for the Indonesian goverment. Apparently it wanted missionary Harold Lovestrand, 40, to provide more active support for the central government in its drive to win over inhabitants of West Irian, now part of Indonesia.

There was a separatist uprising recently in the jungle area around Manokwari, where Lovestrand and three others ran a Bible institute for natives sponsored by The Evangelical Alliance Mission.

Lovestrand was taken to Jakarta early last month by the military and put under house arrest. TEAM General Director Vernon Mortenson said that no charges had been filed against the missionary, but that he was considered “too passive” in his support of the central government. The forty TEAM missionaries in West Irian have tried not to get embroiled in the political dispute there, he said.

Christians found themselves in the crossfire of the war between India and Pakistan. Those in India seemed hardest hit. There were no immediate reports of injuries to missionaries, but a 100-year-old Anglican cathedral was bombed out and Christian-operated hospitals were obliged to care for wounded troops. A Roman Catholic cardinal was tapped for service with an emergency Indian defense committee.

Both India and Pakistan deny that their dispute over Kashmir is religious per se. India, however, invariably reflects the priorities of its predominantly Hindu population, while Pakistan champions the cause of Islam. India has the largest Hindu population in the world (some 85 per cent of its 450,000,000 inhabitants), and Pakistan is the biggest Muslim country (some 86 per cent of 99,000,000). The nations’ commitments to their respective religions can hardly be extricated from the basic conflict.

A measure of insight into the contrasting religious views could be found in a pair of ambassadorial luncheons at the National Press Club in Washington, D. C., last month. B. K. Nehru, Indian ambassador to the United States, asserted that Kashmir was not the cause of the trouble but “the effect and in a sense, the symbol. The conflict between India and Pakistan is a basic conflict of ideology as well as a conflict of power.” Nehru stated, “In the view of Pakistan, religion and religion alone can form the bond between peoples. Consequently the title of Pakistan is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and citizenship rights belong in fact, if not also sometimes in law, only to people professing the religion of Islam.” He charged that refugees have poured into India because of religious persecution in Pakistan.

The Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, G. Ahmed, told his Press Club audience that India’s charge of a theocracy in Pakistan is a myth. He said that in Pakistan, as in India, men of differing religious persuasions occupy high governmental office. He cited as examples the Pakistani chief judge, who is a Roman Catholic, and the Pakistani ambassador to Thailand, who is a Hindu.

Ahmed’s chief appeal was to allow a plebescite in Kashmir to determine religious as well as political preferences and to let these determine destiny.

There were no complaints from the Christian constituency in either country. From Dr. Kenneth Scott, director of the Christian Medical College and Hospital in Ludhiana, India, came a cable: “Everyone fine. All remaining in Ludhiana. Psalm 68:19.” The Scripture cited reads, “Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation.”

No missionary evacuations were reported. Korula Jacobs, secretary of the National Christian Council in India, said that more than sixty American missionaries were staying put on the plain of Punjab, where the fighting was concentrated.

The Ludhiana hospital was requisitioned by the government to care for the wounded. Said Methodist Bishop Mangal Singh of Delhi: “Our people are staying on to take care of them.” Clara Swain Hospital at Bareilly and Creighton-Freeman Hospital at Vrindaban also were treating the wounded.

In Pakistan, a Christian hospital at Lahore was turned into a casualty center at the request of government authorities.

Methodists had the biggest stake in the countries involved, with 195 missionaries in India and 46 in Pakistan. The Methodist Church in India claims 591,686 members. In Pakistan, 38,586 Methodists are reported.

The most extensive damage to church property appeared to be suffered by the Anglican cathedral at Ambala, India. It was struck by bombs from a Pakistani B-57 (American-made) jet. Observers indicated the building was a victim of its geographical location—a quarter-mile from an air force base. The cathedral has served as the Episcopal see for India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon.

Valerian Cardinal Gracias, Roman Catholic archbishop of Bombay, was named a member of a “Citizens’ Defense Committee” formed by the Maharashtra state government to mobilize voluntary efforts in the fighting. The committee was a reconstituted version of a similar group set up at the time of the Chinese Communist invasion of 1962.

Aid For Viet Nam

Christian relief work, spiritual as well as material, is taking a definite upturn in embattled South Viet Nam.

World Vision is stepping up its aid program to Viet Nam on a scale that may surpass its memorable efforts in Korea. Plans include construction of refugee centers at Danang, Qui Niton, and Quang Ngai, two orphanages, and a hospital for blind university students. Also in the works is the establishment of a vocational training school for the mountain people and a half-way house for disabled war veterans. Special help for amputees and support for evangelistic efforts such as literature distribution round out the program.

Pocket Testament League says it is beginning a campaign to distribute one million Scripture portions among Americans as well as Vietnamese, military and civilian. Some 200,000 Vietnamese Gospels were to be in print, and 10,000 were already available.

The Vietnamese government gave formal recognition to a special lay leadership aid project under the sponsorship of the United States’ National Association of Evangelicals World Relief Commission. The aim is to train Vietnamese laymen in an assortment of technical skills and develop their Christian character and witness. The project, primarily industrial and agricultural, is headquartered on twenty-five acres of land near the city of Hue. Two Americans and a Canadian will act as advisors.

Refugees in both North and South Viet Nam are receiving help from the East Asia Christian Conference and the World Council of Churches. The aid includes medical supplies sent to Hanoi. In the south, the relief includes supplementary food rations provided three times a week to some 30,000 persons, according to a WCC report.

Christian Democrats In Asia?

The Philippine elections November 9 will test the mettle of a new move for political power by Catholic laymen. A drive for involvement among the church faithful in Asia’s only predominantly Catholic country coincides with the campaigning of the Philippines’ third party, the Progressives, under guidance of two well-known Catholic laymen.

The talk of Catholic bloc voting stems from a proposal on formation of a Catholic party and a subsequent poll in early 1964. This, in turn, was a response to new political zeal among the Church of Christ (Iglesia Ni Cristo), a strange mixture of nationalism and Protestantism (see “The Manalistas,” News, January 1, 1965).

Voters will choose one-third of the Senate (the upper house of the legislature) and a president and vice-president. The Progressives’ national candidates are its two present senators. Since the present Senate is delicately balanced between the island nation’s two major parties, the Liberals and the Nacionalistas, the Progressives could win important leverage.

Despite a silent campaign among Catholics to vote as one, it is unclear whether the vast numbers of the faithful will support the drive. The poll by Catholic leaders produced only spotty returns, although those who replied are reported to have represented the business and professional elite in the Philippines.

Two-thirds of the respondents said members of Catholic organizations should participate in campaigns, and 70 per cent expressed willingness to join a “lay Catholic organization patterned after the Christian Democratic movement in European countries.”

The results revealed two broad types of Catholic laymen. The majority was very partisan, dogmatic, argumentative, conscious of its Catholic rights. The minority, which has since provided much of the leadership, tends to be younger, more educated, and more tolerant of religious differences.

If the mass of Catholics were mobilized, the results would depend on the style of leadership. But despite talk of a “Catholic vote,” there are countless ways in which people align themselves in the Philippines, and monolithic unity would be extremely difficult to attain.

For the minute Protestant camp, the appearance of a Catholic third force in the nation’s politics is a haunting counterbalance to the Senate’s postponement of any action on a religious instruction bill that would authorize public schools to teach religion courses.

EUSTAQUIO RAMIENTOS, JR.

Birth Control And Public Policy

In Massachusetts, the only state with a birth control law still on its books, the stage was being set last month for a court test of the constitutionality of the 86-year-old statute.

State Health Commissioner Alfred L. Frechette began organizing legal studies to examine the law in the light of last June’s U. S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a somewhat similar law in Connecticut forbidding the sale and prescription of contraceptive materials.

Frechette, who says his concern is “solely the health aspects of the matter,” had two alternatives open. He could ask Attorney General Edward Brooke whether the court decision in the Connecticut case nullified the old law in Massachusetts. Or he could stand by while someone deliberately violated the law and created a test case.

This past summer, the Massachusetts House of Representatives on a 119–97 vote killed a bill that would have legalized distribution of birth control information and devices to adults. The action caught most proponents of the measure by surprise. An advisory commission had recommended passage, the bill had the 12–3 approval of a joint legislative committee, and Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, offered no opposition. The leading opponent of the bill was Representative Lawrence P. Smith, a Democrat and the father of fifteen children.

The Massachusetts legislature in 1948 also defeated a bill that would have liberalized the birth control statute. A year later the question was put on the state ballot as a referendum and was defeated by nearly 100,000 votes.

On the national level, the debate over the government’s role in birth control programs has been spotlighted in a series of Senate subcommittee hearings. The specific issue is a bill to establish federal agencies for promoting birth control in the United States and abroad. The bill has virtually no chance of passage during the current session of Congress, but it has nevertheless stimulated considerable controversy.

Official Roman Catholic spokesmen testified against the bill. But a Jesuit professor from Georgetown University allowed that “while I may deplore the private choice of citizens and feel that a particular choice may not be morally legitimate, the government may still permit and aid in this choice without approving it.”

On the international side, Roman Catholics are changing their attitudes toward birth control, according to claims presented last month in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, at the second United Nations World Population Conference. One report declared that one-third of all Roman Catholics surveyed used forms of contraception condemned by Catholic teaching. Another report noted that the birth rates in such largely Catholic countries as France, Austria, Luxembourg, Hungary, and Ireland have declined greatly.

This fall, the Vatican seemed to be faced with a hung jury on the question of the morality of various birth control methods. A new pronouncement had been rumored months ago, but the special papal advisory committee on birth control apparently found itself rather hopelessly split. Some observers felt that the issue could end up on the floor of the Vatican Council this fall.

Faubus On Evolution

In 1929, the Arkansas legislature decreed that evolution could not be taught in public schools. This sequel to Scopes is still on the books, and the executive secretary of the Arkansas Education Association, Forrest Rozzell, said recently it should be repealed. Teachers chimed in, saying they teach evolution anyway, since it is in the textbooks.

But the governor, Baptist Orval Faubus, says that “the Bible says man was created by God and put on earth. That is good enough for me.” He interprets the anti-evolution law as a ban on teaching evolutionary theory as a conclusion, not on discussion of the matter.

The latest of many legislative attempts to repeal the law was introduced in the House this year but never got out of committee.

The ‘Fair Bus Bills’

Those big yellow school buses are getting to be a national cause célèbre, replacing classroom devotions as the chief church-state issue.

State legislatures across the country found themselves bombarded this year with demands for “fair bus bills,” which require local communities to bring parochial school pupils under the umbrella of public transportation subsidies.

Largely responsible for the bussing drive is an organization known as Citizens for Educational Freedom. It is made up primarily of Roman Catholics, with a few Protestants holding high office. CEF boasts that twenty-three states now underwrite a measure of the cost of transporting parochial school students.

Americans United, leading proponent of church-state separation, points to Iowa, Indiana, and Missouri as states in which bus bills have been defeated.

Ohio is the latest state to enact a bus bill, but Americans United says its sponsors may have celebrated too soon. The bill requires school boards to provide bus transportation on an equal basis for children attending schools “for which the state board of education prescribes minimum standards.” One feature of the bill is to exclude any school that practices racial or religious discrimination in regard to “pupils, teachers, or employees.” Opponents of the bill have vowed to pursue litigation.

Legal tests are also in the offing for a bus bill enacted in Pennsylvania in June.

In Minnesota, a state-wide bus bill was defeated. Enacted instead was a measure deliberately framed to result in court action to determine its constitutionality. It applies to only two school districts, both heavily Roman Catholic.

As students returned to classes last month, a number of local bus disputes developed. In the Philadelphia suburb of Jarrettown, 125 parochial school children arrived unexpectedly to enroll in a public school on opening day as a protest against the local school board’s refusal to change a bus route. Pennsylvania Attorney General Walter E. Allessandroni had advised school administrators that they might take a liberal attitude in revising public school bus routes to accommodate parochial school students. Roman Catholic pupils in Jarrettown wanted the route changed to avoid a half-mile walk along heavily traveled Limekiln Pike, which has no sidewalk.

New Jersey may soon see its own showdown on parochial school bus transportation. The school board in beachfront Brigantine, where there is no high school, voted recently to authorize a partial payment for the cost of school transportation to Roman Catholic students attending a high school in neighboring Absecon.

The Pope At The U.N.

Was Pope Paul VI planning to unveil some dramatic new proposal for peace this week? Or was he relying upon the very fact of his unprecedented, historic visit to the U. N. to hitch up a sagging world?

In his own words, the Pope was traveling to New York on October 4 simply “in order to take, with respectful homage to the representatives of the nations there assembled, a message of peace.”

There was speculation, however, that he would use the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the U. N. to offer a new scheme for breaking the ideological impasse. The fact that President Johnson was also to be in New York that day added to the prospects. The White House confirmed that the President and the Pope would meet.

Bishop Fred Pierce Corson, president of the World Methodist Council, suggested a summit meeting of U. S. religious leaders with the Pope as “a gesture of unity of the church for peace.” The immediate reaction from the Vatican seemed favorable.

Dr. Fredrik A. Schiotz, president of the American Lutheran Church, took a dim view of such a summit meeting. He said it would be “open to misinterpretation—as though the churches were seeking to coerce the governments of the world to act in conformity with ecclesiastically conceived plans for obtaining peace.”

The Pope planned a full day in New York. Following a morning arrival, he was to have lunch with Francis Cardinal Spellman before going to the U. N. for the address. A mass rally at Yankee Stadium was scheduled, plus a brief visit to the Vatican Pavilion at the World’s Fair.

Appropriate to the purpose of his U. N. speech, Pope Paul chose to travel on the day on which Roman Catholics commemorate the Feast of St. Francis of Assissi (1181–1228), the “Saint of Peace.”

After scientists profess their faith, further questions are raised

Something Old, Something New

Just after he retired from high office George Washington wrote a brief letter to Dandridge, who had served as one of his personal assistants. In it he said, among other things, “Only integrity can hold a man or a nation.”

It was Patrick Carnegie Simpson who recommended in one of his lectures, “There are some things a man ought to die for rather than do and some things a man ought to die for rather than not do. Just be sure, gentlemen, you don’t have too many of them.” He was expanding on Kant’s Categorical Imperative: the sense of “ought” any man has at any level of life which to deny is to destroy him.

In the long run I suppose that what a man is willing to do and what a man is not willing to do tells us some very important things. We all believe in salvation by grace or by faith; but early in the game the Church discovered the danger of antinomianism, the kind of lawlessness that tempts a man when he thinks that after all every man is a sinner, and that the point of emphasis therefore ought to be grace rather than works. As James says, “I will show you my faith by my works.” There is a place for Christian character based on Christian assurance.

Even Polly Adler, in A House Is Not a Home, was careful to set before her public the standards by which she herself operated. They were not everybody’s standards, to be sure, but she had them, and she refused to be overrun at such points. It was a constant theme of Damon Runyon’s that his nefarious characters always had their own standards.

So a professor of theology has written to the editor of Playboy, “It would be really tremendous if Playboy were to establish, for example, in this theological seminary, the Playboy Chair for American Church History and Ethics. Personally, I would be delighted beyond measure to occupy such a chair.” The new morality marches on.

EUTYCHUS II

Suffering From Psychology

I was impressed by the cogent remarks made by a number of scientists in the August 27 issue. It is reassuring to be reminded that science and evangelical faith are not at odds but that they may readily coexist in concert.

I was both surprised and dismayed by the absence of any remarks by behavioral scientists. While I am aware that there are a number of evangelical scholars in this field, such as those who are members of the American Scientific Affiliation, it is noteworthy to suggest that evangelical faith suffers more from psychological and/or sociological explanation than it does from the more traditional sciences. The very nature of behavioral science poses a perspective of man and his relationships which is in considerable contradiction to spiritual experience.

It would appear that those scientists who are involved in the physical sciences may readily suggest that “science tells us what we can do, but it cannot tell us what we ought to do,” while the behavioral scientist is acutely concerned with moral and emotional behavior—the quest of man, his interpersonal relations, his “groupish” activities, and so on. He is, in fact, directly concerned with the psychological and sociological nature of religious experience. While to this point much of his discovery lacks empirical status, the evidence is sufficient to suggest that the traditional evangelical perspective has not been strengthened. However, it is my opinion that the evangelical message may well be aided by the insights of these and related disciplines if evangelicalism is prepared to discard non-biblical inconsistencies and other antiquated traditions of contemporary irrelevance. In this spectrum, behavioral science and the evangelical tenets of biblical faith as well as the experience of the new birth and associated God-man relationships are complementary rather than contradictory.

LYLE E. LARSON

Graduate Teaching Asst.

Dept. of Sociology

University of Oregon

Eugene, Ore.

Regarding the [article] “What Some Scientists Say about God and the Supernatural,” it is true, as you say, that science cannot disprove God’s existence. But the intellectual community, which has long recognized that the methods of science neither prove nor disprove God, now asks the further question: “If empirical methods do not allow you to know of God’s existence, how do you know?” This is the question of most immediate relevance; let’s answer it more clearly and forcefully than we have in the past.

DAVID C. LINDBERG

Asst. Prof. of History

University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Mich.

The editor speaks of the transcendent God and “man’s rational competence to know the transempirical realm” (“Modern Theology at the End of Its Tether,” July 16 issue).

According to my dictionary “empirical” means (1) “depending on experience or observation alone, without due regard to science and theory”; (2) “pertaining to, or founded upon experiment or experience” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary). Accepting this it would appear that the writer is saying that Christian faith deals with that which cannot be experienced or confirmed by experiment. Surely Christians deal rather with the empirical realm. How could we experience God if we did not do so empirically?…

J. C. AMY

First Baptist Church

Delhi, Ont.

• The Christian view is that the truth of divine revelation is not a product of man’s experience but rather is authoritatively addressed to man. To say that man must personally know truth in order to know it settles nothing, since that is his epistemological predicament as a knower. The critical issues are whether all truth arises from experience, or whether experience itself is made possible by transempirical factors, and whether truth transcending man’s experience is addressed to him. Here revealed religion leaves no doubt: God is self-revealed, both in general revelation in nature and conscience and in special revelation in Holy Scripture.—ED.

The place to start is, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” To this must be added the understanding that the Creator is still at work carrying out his purposes, and that the Bible tells us how he has in the history of his people made those purposes evident. The Judeo-Christian tradition begins with God’s call to Abraham to leave the idol worship of Babylon and travel to the Promised Land, where he would find the one true God. From then on the Creator has continually intervened in the affairs of his children to teach them, guide them, and save them. What we call miracles are more truly God’s intervention for us. We rightly recognize that the Creator’s laws are dependable; otherwise we could not cooperate with him in improving our farming, building bridges, and harnessing the atom. But we must also understand that there is infinite possibility of variation in the limitless combinations and interrelations of these forces.

JAMES H. BURCKES

Reading Center, N. Y.

Lazarus, Calvin, And Billy Graham

Re “The New Birth,” by Billy Graham (booklet insert, Sept. 10 issue): It fails to proclaim the absolute sovereignty of the Holy Spirit in applying the redemptive work of Christ to the souls of men, a truth stoutly maintained by such men as Luther, Calvin, Whitefield, and Spurgeon. The author states: “The context of the third chapter of John teaches that the new birth is something that God does for man when man is willing to yield to God.” This is not quite correct. Man’s willingness to yield to God is rather a fruit of the new birth. And the new birth is a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit whereby a new principle of holiness is implanted in the soul. In the new birth man is passive. He is no more active in regeneration or prepares himself for it than Lazarus was active in or prepared himself for his resurrection from the dead.…

HERBERT W. BUTT

The Evangelical Library

Portland, Ore.

‘Crude’

“Do-It-Yourself Religion” (Sept. 10 issue) indicates again that CHRISTIANITY TODAY considers the greatest danger in Christianity something it calls “liberalism,” though the views of the minister outlined in the article represent a crude caricature of any responsible liberal.… Articles like this overlook completely the great dangers of extreme fundamentalism. Numerically, the danger from this side of the fence is much greater than from a radical liberalism.

How many churches are there that emphasize escape from a literal, burning hell, an escape that is available only by believing a certain way?

EMORY BURTON

Thorntown, Ind.

‘Salaried Housekeeper’

Isn’t the most significant part of the Rev. Mr. Pitts’s article its title, “If I Were a Church Member” (Sept. 10 issue)? It suggests that the minister is not a church member; he does not have a part in the fellowship of the church, nor does he come under its discipline. He is rather like the salaried housekeeper who runs the household, and whose thoughts often naturally turn to how she would act if she were a member of that family. I don’t know if it is a pity that Mr. Pitts became a minister, but is it not surely a pity that he did not remain a member of the church?

GEORGE I. MAVRODES

Dept. of Philosophy

University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Mich.

On Target

William Butler Yeats once said of Benedetto Croce’s “Philosophy of Spirit,” in which was presented the view that philosophy and history are identical, “I am now deeply in Croce.… I find this kind of study helps my poetry which has I believe been at its best in the last few months.”

My response to the splendid article, “Guidelines to a Christian Interpretation of History,” by Roger Rusk (Sept. 10 issue) is that I find this kind of study helps my preaching and teaching. While Croce identified history and philosophy, Rusk, going deeper, has identified history and the purpose of God. He has escaped the ensnaring Hegelian view of the dialectical process as determining history and has given us an “arrow flight” view, that there is a target at which the divine purpose is aiming.

HAROLD F. DAMON

Huntington Baptist Church

Huntington, L. I., N. Y.

I think you have really touched the crux of this thought and truth. I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agree with you in your reasoning and in your theology.…

EVERETT H. VIVIAN

Chairman, Chapel Committee

Anderson College

Anderson, S. C.

The Proportion Problem

I have just finished reading your fine editorial entitled “What Is the Church For?” (Sept. 10 issue). You went right into the confusion of my own heart these days as I constantly struggle to proportion my ministry properly between proclamation of the Gospel and service to the needy.…

SHELTON SIMMONS

First Baptist Church

Hamshire, Tex.

Speak Up, Preacher!

Blissfully at his ease the minister delivers his sermon and blissfully unaware that facing him are many who are not at ease—those who are tense from trying to hear what he says, those who are frustrated because missed words make his sermon meaningless.

I belong to a club of retired business and professional men, where I have walked out on the speaker several times because I could not understand him. When I had to make a speech there, knowing how bad the acoustics of the dining room was, I asked a retired minister to go in with me ahead of time and help me find out how to speak so I could be heard.…

Would it not be rewarding to a minister and his congregation, if he would take an old intelligent friend with him into the church to listen while he spoke at the altar, the lectern, and in the pulpit, and then make the necessary changes so all could hear him in every part of the building? What a difference such a simple experiment could make!

Last summer I was back at the factory for a retirement banquet for an old friend, where many speeches were made through a speaking system. When my turn came I shoved the microphone away with the remark that if my forefathers, the old Vikings, could see me using such a contraption they would turn over in their graves. In olden times they could make their voices heard from France to Scotland.

BERTEL SKOU

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Malaysia And Indonesia

I have much enjoyed reading the Asia issue (July 30). I felt it gave a very good picture of the situation in the Far East. I think however that there are one or two points that need clarifying.

In the article on “Continental Southeast Asia,” the statement is made that “religious instruction is prohibited in [Malaysian] mission schools.” This needs to be qualified with the explanation that in both mission and government schools, Christian students may request religious instruction after regular school hours. At a Teachers’ Christian Fellowship conference in Penang I met with over fifty teachers from fourteen different places who were having wonderful opportunities teaching the Scriptures. These Scripture courses are in preparation for their school exams, and they receive credit for the work they have done.

Muslim students in Christian schools cannot be invited to attend chapel services, but they are allowed to be present if they come on their own initiative and their parents do not object.

There is even greater freedom in Indonesian government schools, where if there are as many as ten Christians they may request instruction from a Christian teacher. In Christian schools even if the majority of the students are Muslims there is full freedom to preach the Gospel. For three consecutive days I addressed the whole student body in a high school in Malang, Java. Most of the students came from Muslim homes, and a large number stayed for a follow-up meeting for those who desired to become Christians. Later they joined Bible study groups for new believers. The fact that there is not so much religious fanaticism in Indonesia as in Malaysia is due to the mixture of beliefs to be found among the Indonesian Muslims. The family next door to the home where I was staying resorted to animistic practices when there was a birth, marriage, or death in the home, but they were regular in their attendance at the mosque and also belonged to the Communist party.…

DAVID H. ADENEY

Assoc. Gen. Sec. for the Far East

International Fellowship of Evangelical Students

Kowloon, Hong Kong

If the Creator was wise and good, how do you account for the brilliant mess in which we find the world today? How do you explain the fact that in the last fifty years after so many generations of civilization and learning and progress there have been three of the most terrible wars in history? Why is it that in this so-called enlightened age, with all the advantages of modern science and the healing arts, man is still the most miserable and frustrated of all God’s creatures?

The Book of Genesis gives the only feasible answer to such questions. The story of sin in the Garden of Eden throws light on the present condition of the world. And before we can deal realistically, either by legislation or by evangelism, with any of our basic problems, we must learn the meaning of this ancient record. A philosophy of law or a doctrine of evangelism that is based on any other assumption than those revealed in this narrative is shallow, because it has not faced honestly the nature of man, of sin, and of salvation.

Therefore, in order that we may deal helpfully with man’s predicament and with our own personal condition, let us examine the Genesis account of the fall of man.

The Nature Of Sin

The story of Adam’s fall reveals, first, something about the nature of sin. The Tempter, or Evil One, is likened to a serpent—a striking symbol. Sin, like a snake, moves quietly and stealthily. It strikes without warning, and in its bite is poison. In the narrative the Devil came to Eve and said, “Don’t listen to God. Do what you want. Don’t let anybody, not even God, tell you what’s right and wrong. Make your own rules. Write your own ticket. Swallow this and you’ll be like God.” What Satan did was to incite Eve to rebel against God’s government.

Thus the story reveals that sin at its core is a rejection of God’s authority. It declares that sin is not just ignorance or immaturity but a repudiation of the Creator’s right to command. Sin is rebellion against the way in which the world and man were created.

In the Genesis account God wanted Adam to do one thing, but Adam did another. Man did what he chose to do, not what God created him to do. And this is still the nature of sin today: to go our own way and to disregard God’s way. You and I still want to be god. We reject any authority above and outside ourselves. And Satan is still subtly inciting us to this rebellion against the Creator. The old snake still whispers, “Do what you want to do. You’re free. Make your own rules. The Ten Commandments were for another age. The Sermon on the Mount was never meant to be taken literally.” The Tempter still insists, “Why do you have sex drives if they were not meant to be gratified? Go on and indulge them. Then you’ll be uninhibited like God. You’ll be free from frustration and fear.” The irrational permissiveness of our society regarding sex morality reveals that many are still falling for Satan’s lie.

The story of Adam’s fall reveals also that basically all sin is selfishness. The Devil said to Eve, “Look at it. Isn’t it pretty? Do you want it? Take it. It’ll be good for you, will make you wise.” And we read, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate” (Gen. 3:7, RSV).

The story reveals further that it is the nature of sin to excuse itself, to encourage the sinner to justify what he has done. When God confronted Adam with his sin, Adam replied with a shrug. “The woman thou gavest me, she did it.” He said, “Oh yes, I ate the fruit, but it wasn’t my fault. It was hers or yours, but not mine.” And Eve whined, “It was the serpent’s fault, not mine.” It is the nature of sin to lay the blame upon someone else.

Today it goes like this: “The whole crowd was doing it. I was just the one who got caught, that’s all.” Or like this: “Sure, I did it, but I’m not responsible. I grew up in the wrong neighborhood. My parents didn’t love me. I never had a chance.” Or like this: “Yes, there was another woman, but don’t blame me. My wife drove me to it. She doesn’t understand me.” The hardest thing for proud man to say is “I have sinned.” It is the nature of sin to excuse itself.

The story reveals also that sin never quite delivers what it promises but leads inevitably to judgment. The serpent promised Adam and Eve knowledge, and they got it. Only it wasn’t the knowledge that led to happiness and freedom. It was the knowledge of their own nakedness, and it led to bondage and shame and to banishment from the Garden. For we read that Adam and Eve had to meet and reckon with God as he came walking in the cool of the day and calling them by name.

This is still God’s world, and he still walks in it. Foolish men may babble about “man come of age, not needing God any longer,” but there is Someone in this universe bigger than any man or nation. And soon or late we have to meet and reckon with him as he paces with easy strides in the cool of the day. Through the heat and hurry of the day we, like Adam and Eve, often forget and ignore God. But the evening comes unfailingly when the busy rush of life is over, and God comes walking and calling each by name.

Now the judgment on Adam’s sin was banishment from the Garden, for that is the nature of sin. It causes us to lose the joys and blessings of God. God put man into a paradise on earth, and as long as man obeyed God, he was happy. He was in harmony with the divine order of things. But when he sinned, he intruded an alien will into the world and thus spoiled the whole lovely picture. Man’s will opposed to God’s will created discord and ushered in frustration and anxiety. The world in which we now live with all its brutality and misery and fear is not the world God would have had us inhabit. Adam lost paradise, not for himself alone but for all his posterity. For when the children of Adam were born after Adam’s sin, they were born outside Eden.

This Minister’s Workshop is the last in the series of pages contributed for a number of years by Dr. Andrew W. Blackwood, Dr. Paul S. Rees, and, more recently, Dr. Charles W. Koller, who took Dr. Blackwood’s assignment on his retirement. In behalf of the many ministers who have been challenged and helped by the work of these eminent homileticians, CHRISTIANITY TODAY expresses its deep appreciation.

An entirely new series, also expressly for ministers, will carry on the Minister’s Workshop. Announcement of this feature will appear in a future issue.

The Nature Of Man

Thus the story not only reveals much about the nature of sin but also tells something about the nature of man. It declares that man, as we know him, is a fallen creature who is in a state of rebellion against God. It teaches that man, created for fellowship with God, refused to walk in the way God intended. Having chosen his own way, he is thereby out of harmony with God and God’s divine order. Adam’s sin brought dire results not only upon himself but also upon all the sons of Adam by natural generation. He willed to his posterity not only an evil example but his own twisted, rebellious nature. Thus you and I today are sinful, selfish, fallen creatures who stand in need of complete transformation.

This is not the popular view of human nature. Proud man does not like to admit that his very soul has been corrupted and that he is constitutionally selfish, rebellious, and egotistical. You and I cherish the illusion that we are basically moral—uneducated and immature, perhaps, but good at heart. Yet it is more realistic to acknowledge that all men are selfish, rebellious, and egotistical, for by this alone can we account for the chaos of our world. Only from a corrupt nature could such savage deeds proceed as our generation has seen. In the last twenty-five years we have seen millions of Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps. We have seen Communist brainwashings from which some men never recovered mentally or physically. We have seen Medgar Evers shot down on his own doorstep, a Columbia University professor beaten to death by teen-age gangs, a young woman stabbed in the streets of our largest city while thirty-eight neighbors turned deaf ears to her cries for help. We have seen massive public indifference to injustice, discrimination, and brutality. But many still refuse to admit that man is a fallen creature whose very nature is corrupted.

And this corruption is not merely a surface stain which can be washed off with a little education and culture. It is not something that the making of a few laws or the relaxing of a few old commandments will eradicate. Nor is it something that children learn from their environment; they are born with it. Children are the most selfish human beings because they are the most natural. Even a new-born baby is selfish. Imagine a baby waking in the middle of the night and saying to himself, “Now I’m hungry, but Mama had a hard day, so I’ll not disturb her. I’ll stick it out until morning.” No, if the baby wakes and he is hungry, he cries. He says in effect, “I am all that matters, and I want food.” You protest, “But that’s just the baby’s nature. He’s only following his instincts of self-preservation.” I reply, “That’s just what I’m saying: it is human nature to be selfish.”

The Nature Of Salvation

This truth about man has implications in the area of eternal salvation. The whole process of saving fallen man is not simply persuading him to desist from actual sins. It is not merely moral education. The process of salvation, as the Bible sees it, is the process of rooting out man’s innate tendency to sin, his selfishness, his rebellion, and of transforming his whole nature. In the process of salvation a man becomes God-centered instead of self-centered. As long as I am the center, discord and frustration inevitably follow, for I am at odds with everyone else, since each of them wants to be the center too. But, as I make God the center, then I am in right relationship with all others for whom God is the center. There is paradise for me, for I am in harmony with the divine order of things.

God did not abandon Adam when Adam sinned. Man received the results of his sin but God did not forsake him. Indeed, the rest of the Bible from this chapter to the last of the Book of Revelation is the record of God’s effort to bring man back into fellowship with himself and to restore man to paradise. God’s goal in the work of man’s redemption is to get man back into step with God and God’s divine order of things, to transform man’s selfish, rebellious nature, and to conform him to the divine image. This comes about only through what the Bible calls repentance.

This is the nature of biblical salvation. And this God accomplishes in Jesus Christ of Nazareth. In his Son God has revealed his own nature. And he gives that righteous nature to all who repent, believe him, and walk with the living Christ. In Christ men are restored to fellowship with the Creator and live once more in peace with him. Thus the paradise which was lost in Adam is restored in Christ through God’s saving activity and man’s radical repentance.

This is the nature of the salvation that we preach. This is the nature of the man to whom we preach it. And this is the nature of the sin that blocks man from that salvation. Until we realize this, we can never deal helpfully with man’s predicament. For any efforts based on different assumptions about salvation, man, and sin are doomed to ultimate disappointment.

But before we can deal with man’s predicament we must deal with our own personal condition. Before we can help to transform the world, our own sinful selves must be changed. Therefore, we are all called to confess our selfishness and rebellion, to recognize that this is our nature and the character of our sin. God’s Word invites each of us to take Jesus Christ as Saviour from this rebellion, to make him our constant companion, and to heed the voice of his Spirit within our hearts.