It was a little old lady who said it (and sometimes little old ladies are better to have around than children when you are looking for something to the point), but it was a little old lady who said, “Sometimes, you know I just don’t understand God.” Me too! It’s pretty hard to say ahead of time just exactly how things are going to turn out. And if you will think along such lines for a little while, let your mind run from Amos to Bultmann—the whole gamut from A to B.

What ever happened to that wonderful preaching of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.? There can be no argument that we have in Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah four of the greatest preachers that ever lived. And the end product of all their preaching, by the success standards of our own day, was nothing but failure. They came to preach the truth of God to the existential situation, they preached with skill and with a desperate zeal, and the end of the matter was that the people were not converted and the nations north and south were not saved, and about the only thing left was gruesome suffering all around. Did they need instruction in methodology? Did Hosea fail somehow to identify? Was there something wrong with interpersonal relationships? Did they need group dynamics? (What has happened to that term?) Was it a failure of mimeograph machine? Maybe they should have organized. God moves in mysterious ways, so there came a root out of a dry ground. It was not quite the way we would have figured it.

It is almost impossible to open up a discussion with lay people on the subject of religion without the moot question of predestination coming out in the first two or three questions. This is as true of college and university students as it is of the after-meeting inquirers in the local church. “What about predestination?” they say. “What about it?” you counter. “Well, if God does everything, every little thing, do we have to do anything, does it matter what we do, are we only machines?” the questions tumble out. It seems pretty difficult so long as you keep the question an academic discussion to evade the conclusions they are pressing. The only trouble is that predestination works its way out a different way. Paul was a predestinarian thinker and tried endlessly to make everything different. Think about the Puritans, the Beggars, the Covenanters, the Huguenots; believing as they did surely that God is absolutely sovereign in the small things as in the large, that times are always in God’s hands, that no man comes to Christ except the Father draw him, they nevertheless gave themselves up to change people and to change events. Says Fairbairn in The Cambridge Modern History and very bluntly, “Calvin saved Europe.” Why work so hard at things when God does it all? Somehow as the discussion moves into action, true Calvinism remains predestinarian and at the same time bears no relationship to Kismet or Fate. It’s not what one would expect, but there it is.

There are other things which never cease to give me wonder, just little things which are full of suggestion. Why for example do the same people like new versions and old liturgies? They read Phillips, but they announce a Gregorian chant and recite a prayer from an ancient prayer book, and all in one service and all quite proudly from all appearance. Conversely, why do the exponents of the King James Version keep feeding us the modern jump tunes in the same service? Whatever they may think is especially pious about reading the KJV they immediately cancel out by getting me to sing (always under the leadership of the O-so-personable song leader) “I’ve got the peace that passeth understanding down in my heart, down in my heart.…” ad nauseam. How can anyone sing about “the peace that passeth understanding” to that kind of tune? Apparently because he has never really experienced it.

Take time to ponder the conservative liberals and the liberal conservatives. Have you ever been abashed and astounded to find a liberal completely illiberal especially in an argument with a man he thinks is a conservative. He acts as if he had forgotten all about loving the unlovely, that agape core to his theology. And it isn’t just a question of his attitude, it is also a question of his ignorance. In Wilbur Smith’s Wherefore Stand (and one would expect this from a man of his wide reading), every liberal is given his due. In books from liberal authors I search in vain for recognition of, understanding of, or plain dealing with the whole tradition from Hodge to Henry. If there is an answer to James Orr’s Problem of Old Testament History or Oswald Allis on the unity of Isaiah, I haven’t found it yet; but I have found sneers, jeers, and catcalls. Or try the conservative arguments proving that Song of Solomon is an allegory and that Jonah is sober history, and then try the liberal arguments proving that Song of Solomon is to be taken at its face but that Jonah is an allegory. Now reverse the arguments and it looks as if you have been dealing with movable parts, cut to fit any problem.

If this weren’t such a rainy, slushy, dull day, I could do better, but just as a parting shot, let me ask this: Is there anyone in the field today who quotes Scripture more than Bultmann does and in suspiciously proof-text fashion on occasion too? When he gets us finally to his basic kerygma, when all the demythologizing is over, will that kerygma be, just maybe, just possibly, just perhaps, a CREED?

The Church And Social Action

Politics and Evangelism, by Philippe Maury (Doubleday, 1960, 120 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Edward L. R. Elson, Minister, National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C.

Here is a book which ought to be read by every social action “expert” and by all who are unhappy over the absolutisms of the social action “cults.” Philippe Maury, French Protestant layman, now General Secretary of the World Christian movement, stakes down his case on the premise that both evangelism and political action, for the Christian, arise from the Word of God and the eternal gospel of Christ. “For the Church,” says Maury, “the meaning of history is the history of salvation, and no historical event can be understood outside this perspective, and especially that of the coming kingdom of God.”

Maury contends that the Church can and must speak, but must be certain that it is the Word of God which is spoken. The Church should be courageous but also prudent. It should always be cause for alarm when there is not a large concensus when the Church is disposed to speak. Prudence is also a form of courage, and to be silent when there is not a large concensus is more eloquent than speech. It must never be forgotten that the Church speaks by simply being the Church. Her very existence has a prophetic meaning, a missionary dimension.” Political, economic, and social declarations are derivatives; they are not the Gospel nor are they necessarily prophetic. The Church is a divine institution, but the Church is not God. To her has been committed one specialty—the proclamation of the gospel of redemptive love made known in time for all time by Christ Jesus our Lord.

EDWARD L. R. ELSON

New Phase Of Old Quest

Jesus of Nazareth, by Günther Bornkamm (Harper, 1960, 239 pp., $4), is reviewed by Everett F. Harrison, Professor of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary.

For many years the so-called quest of the historical Jesus has challenged German scholarship. Schweitzer made him out to be an apocalyptic dreamer. Bultmann retained the eschatological emphasis but stressed also the ethical imperative in Jesus’ teaching. In his attitude toward the possibility of precise knowledge concerning our Lord’s person and ministry, Bultmann was highly skeptical on the ground that we depend for our knowledge upon the testimony of the early Church, which has pictured Jesus in the light of her own situation rather than as he was.

Bultmann’s disciples have been somewhat disturbed that he held so lightly the importance of establishing a solid connection between the kerygma and the historical Jesus. Now, 30 years after the appearance of Bultmann’s Jesus, one of his circle has written on the same theme and opened a new phase of the old quest. Bornkamm is obviously in debt to Bultmann for his basic approach, which is theological and existential rather than historical in the usual sense of the word. He frequently sets aside the testimony of an Evangelist on the ground that it has been shaped or distorted by the early Church and therefore does not portray what Jesus said or did with reliability. “The extent to which the Church’s faith and theology have formed and added to the tradition of the history of Jesus appears most clearly in the legends and in a story’s legendary embellishments, as these increase from one evangelist to another” (p. 19).

What, then, it may be asked, is new in this presentation as opposed to Bultmann’s? One thing is the concern for grappling with the historical data instead of dismissing such data. Consequently there is a chapter on “Period and Environment” as well as one on “Discipleship” and another on “Jesus’ Journey to Jerusalem.” But the main thrust is to deal with Jesus’ teaching and seek for indications of the actual man embedded there. Bornkamm finds a solid bit of historical reality in the sovereignty and independence with which Jesus deals with persons and situations, as for instance his frequently acting contrary to people’s expectations and hopes (pp. 58–59).

The author comes to grips with the tension between the future hope of the kingdom of God and its present reality in the teaching of Jesus. Dismissing several attempts to handle this, including realized eschatology, he adopts something which has affinity with the latter viewpoint. “The future of God is salvation to the man who apprehends the present as God’s present, and as the hour of salvation. The future of God is judgment for the man who does not accept the ‘now’ of God but clings to his own present, his own past and also to his own dreams of the future” (p. 93). Jesus came to a people who had no present, who were preoccupied either with their traditions which recalled the past or their apocalyptic hopes for the future. “To make the reality of God present: this is the essential mystery of Jesus” (p. 62).

Bornkamm differs from Bultmann in placing the transition of the aeons between John the Baptist and Jesus rather then between Jesus and Paul. “The way to Christ and into the kingdom of God did not merely lead at one time—in a moment of past history—through John the Baptist, but it leads once and for all only along that path of repentance shown by him. Faith in Jesus Christ is only there where the believer, for himself and within himself, lets the shift of the aeons take place in his own life” (p. 51).

Bornkamm sweeps away the Messianic titles of our Lord as imposed on him by the early Church. In their stead he puts his own reconstruction, “that the Messianic character of his being is contained in his words and deeds and in the unmediatedness of his historical appearance” (p. 178). No answer is given to the ultimate question, Who is Jesus of Nazareth? None is attempted.

EVERETT F. HARRISON

One-Worldism

In Place of Folly, by Norman Cousins (Harper, 1961, 224 pp., $3), is reviewed by Dr. Howard E. Mather, Minister, First Presbyterian Church, Amenia, N. Y.

The publishers assert, “Now Norman Cousins brings together in a single book the essential facts concerning the present danger …;” and they call attention to his continuous writing in advocacy of a “sane nuclear policy” since 1949. That is exactly what this book is: A compendium of all Cousins’ previous cliches in advocacy of “one world government” and the bromides of the pseudo-pacifists who “even in self defense, will not engage in a war that would destroy the world” but would use the force of federal world government, “from which no state could withdraw or be expelled,” to coerce the nations.

The author’s chapters on the horrors of nuclear, biological and germ warfare are considered by many scientists in the “know” as exaggerations. The summary to every chapter is the same: The answer to all our racial and cultural and ideological problems, is federal world government. That powerful and unscrupulous forces might and would sieze tyrannical dictatorship of such a government never seems to occur to the proponents of “the human commonwealth of the whole.” Cousins’ “check list of enemies” includes the selfish and ignorant who do not go along with his “one world” ideology; the politicians and statesmen who do not accept his philosophy of “freedom under world law”; and the clergymen who interpret their religious obligations and responsibilities as spiritual rather than political.

The one supreme and controlling thought that is missing in this pessimistic evaluation of the world order is that of God who “holds the whole round world in His hands.”

HOWARD E. MATHER

Values Underscored

Scientism and Values, edited by Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins (D. Van Nostrand Co., 1960, 270 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by Arthur F. Holmes, Associate Professor of Bible and Philosophy, Wheaton College (Illinois).

The advent of the nuclear age brought to focus perhaps the keenest problem posed by modern science. Industrialization, technological advance, organization man, and the threat of human annihilation have stressed anew the urgency of conserving the uniqueness of man and his values in a scientific age. A respectable body of literature on the subject is rapidly accumulating, the present volume being one of the most significant.

Two philosophers, four sociologists, two literary figures, an economist, an historian, a political scientist, and a biologist present a colloquium on the subject. In particular they attack the “unity of science” thesis that the study of man can be conducted with the same methods, presuppositions, and supposed objectivity as are employed in the physical sciences. The term “scientism” is used to denote such a fallacy. It does not connote any antiscientific attitude; rather it underscores the uniqueness of man, the value-centric predicament of the investigator, and the creativity of the free human spirit. It exposes the over-simplified generalizations of those who treat human values as purely natural phenomena.

The criticism and evidence presented provide both a cogent case and refreshing perspectives. The reviewer gains the impression, however, that insofar as the volume poses a constructive view it is closer to a Neo-Kantian Kulturphilosophie than to a distinctly theistic view of man and his values.

ARTHUR F. HOLMES

Pacifism Defended

Christian Attitudes to War and Peace, by Roland Bainton (Abingdon, 1960, 299 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by W. Stanford Reid, Associate Professor of History, McGill University, Montreal.

The title of this work adequately explains its purpose. It provides an historical exposition of various Christian views on war including those of both Old and New Testaments. Professor Bainton holds that Christians have accepted one of three views: the just war, the crusade, and pacifism. He then applies these three categories throughout history although, from the reviewer’s point of view, not always with adequate authority.

As one might expect, the work mainly sets forth the claims of pacifism. Professor Bainton believes that now if ever, pacifism must establish itself, but this he feels will be possible only if a world government arises. His plea to Christians to push for nonresistance in an atomic age has much on its side. On the other hand it seems clear from the Scriptures that because of sin, wars will continue to the end. Perhaps the desire for peace through world government will help bring in the kingdom of antichrist. This book needs much careful study in order that nonpacifists may re-evaluate their position.

W. STANFORD REID

Ministry For The Times

Making the Ministry Relevant, ed. by Hans Hofman (Scribner’s, 1960, 169 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Andrew W. Blackwood, professor emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Harvard’s able young director of the University “Project on Religion and Health” has done well his work as editor. After his own able Introduction, setting forth the difficulties and the outlook, Paul Tillich stresses the difficulty of appealing to our secular age, and the call for vastly more of “the vertical dimension.” To me this is the ablest of all the provocative chapters. Reinhold Niebuhr stresses things ethical. Other experts deal with Depth Psychology, Psychiatry, Pastoral Counseling (Seward Hiltner), and “Theological Education after Ordination.” This last, by Reuel Howe, a specialist on Pastoral Studies, opens up a field of deep concern.

While not easy to read, all of these chapters should prove rewarding. To us of the older orthodoxy they show that we have much to learn from experts with different ideologies. Some day, we hope, such a symposium will include a chapter on making the ministry relevant by basing everything on the Bible.

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD

Reformed Point Of View

The Way of Salvation, by Gordon H. Girod (Baker Book House, 1960, 157 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by John R. Richardson, Minister, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia.

One of the best books to appear in 1958 was Girod’s The Deeper Faith. It exhibited remarkable theological insight into the Reformed faith. Two years later Dr. Girod contributes another outstanding work pertaining to salvation from the Reformed point of view. The ten chapters deal with the historic Ordo Salutis or the Way of Salvation.

Beginning with the sovereignty of God, the author continues with logical progression of thought till he comes to the subject of glorification which he calls “complete redemption.” God is sovereign but he is specifically sovereign in the area of the salvation of man. With this biblical presupposition, the author proceeds step by step in the explanation of the content of Christian salvation. A cogent argument is presented to show that man is powerless to bring about his own salvation from death unto life, and that he is saved by Grace alone.

Without apology the author insists that election is the sine qua non of salvation. In the exposition of Election, he follows the Canons of Dort. Election is shown to be a matter of practical importance. The author observes, “Only when you realize that you owe God everything will you give to Him the glory. Then you will honor Him as we all should. Then you will accord to God all the glory in your salvation.”

The engaging synopses of the great truths pertaining to our Christian salvation set forth in this volume constitute some of the finest theological and homiletical literature that has come from the press in a long time. The living convictions offered here with such marked simplicity and sound logic should be of tremendous value in today’s life. Laymen seeking to understand the content of the Reformed faith will be enlightened by this work and stimulated to further study in this sphere of Christian theology. Ministers will discover this work to be fresh and moving.

JOHN R. RICHARDSON

History Of Translations

The English Bible, by F. F. Bruce (Oxford, 1961, 234 pp., $4), is reviewed by Merrill C. Tenney, Dean of the Graduate School, Wheaton College (Illinois).

With deft hand and discerning analysis, Professor Bruce has traced the long and complicated history of the English Bible from the first Anglo-Saxon interlinear paraphrases of the Latin Vulgate to the New English Bible which has not yet been released for publication. He has covered adequately the early translations of Tyndale, Rogers, Coverdale, and the Geneva Bible which were the immediate ancestors of the familiar and currently dominant King James Version. The subsequent versions produced by committees, such as the Revised, American Standard, and Revised Standard Versions, and the private translations like those of Moffatt and Williams are discussed at some length. Two chapters on Roman Catholic versions complete the account.

For evangelical Christians the question of translation is singularly important, because the faith of the individual believer rests ultimately on his personal comprehension of the Word of God rather than in ecclesiastical traditions and dogma. Since he is not equipped to read Hebrew and Greek, he is dependent on the versions made for him by scholars. In the multiplicity of these there may be safety, for each will supplement or correct the deficiencies of the other, but the reader may be perplexed by the variety and occasional contradictions that he finds in their renderings.

Dr. Bruce’s excellent review of the history of these translations sets them in their historical perspective, and evaluates them with moderation and keen insight for accuracy, style, and usefulness. Those who have never undertaken to translate the Scriptures, and who consequently have no practical understanding of the difficulties entailed, can profit greatly from the account of the early translators. They risked their lives to give the Bible to the people in their own tongue. Later scholars in more peaceful times struggled with lexical and hermeneutic problems to make the meaning of the first century intelligible to the present day.

One or two translations are not mentioned at all, such as Ballantine’s and Helen J. Montgomery’s. Since these were American products, with rather limited circulation, they may not have been considered important enough to mention. The book is scholarly but not tedious, critical but fair and dispassionate, and occasionally lightened by flashes of humor. The layman will find it informative and enjoyable reading, and the scholar will gain from it new material for reflective thought.

MERRILL C. TENNEY

Steward Of Truth

Expounding God’s Word, by Alan M. Stibbs (Inter-Varsity, 1960, 112 pp., 4s.), is reviewed by Herbert M. Carson, Vicar of St. Paul’s, Cambridge.

This is the third volume of a trilogy, the earlier volumes being Understanding God’s Word and Obeying God’s Word. In the latest book we move from exegesis, with which the author dealt earlier, to exposition; but his contention links the two together, for any exposition worthy of the name is rooted in a faithful exegesis. Thus in expounding, the preacher is endeavoring to declare and apply to his hearers the meaning of the Word before them.

There are two ways of teaching men how to preach, namely, by giving them general principles and by showing them illustrations of these principles. This is the method adopted here. After his valuable emphasis on the importance of faithful exposition, in which the preacher is simply the steward put in trust with the truth of God, he gives illustrative expository outlines dealing with varied types of scriptural exposition. Beginning with six outlines on John 2:1–11, with different audiences in view, he goes on to deal with expounding narrative short statements and longer passages.

This is a valuable book for men in training for the ministry, and for lay preachers. Indeed, it may be that some who are already in the ministry and who are retracing their steps from the barren cul-de-sac of what the author calls “imposition,” rather than exposition, may find here an introduction to a truly expository ministry.

H. M. CARSON

Man Of God

Eivend Berggrav: God’s Man of Suspense, by Alex Johnson (Augsburg, 1960, 220 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by E. E. Ryden, Editor of The Lutheran Companion.

Most of us know something about the heroic role that Eivend Berggrav, Bishop of Oslo, played in the resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War II, but we have little knowledge of the formative years of this man and of the spiritual struggles that helped mould a man of God who in the day of crisis stood firm as a rock.

It is this period in the life of Bishop Berggrav that forms the most illuminating portion of Alex Johnson’s fascinating book, the English translation of which has been done in unusually lucid style by Kjell Jordheim, a Wisconsin pastor.

After eleven long years of doubt, during which he refrained from holy communion, it was the Lord’s Supper itself that furnished the final solution to the many questions that troubled the future bishop’s soul. Says the biographer, “When Berggrav came to realize that Christ was Christ, unique in Himself, and that He was, if not the Son of God, nevertheless the one in whom God was and worked, then he could refrain no longer from the sacrament. For Christ Himself had said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ Berggrav had to obey.”

“The whole maturing process,” the author goes on to say, “had been a gradual resolving of the tensions within him. All the sentiments, thoughts, discussions and experiences had unconsciously united into something organic within him, so that he did not sense his faith until it had become a reality. Thus it seemed clear to him that faith is neither thought, nor emotions, nor intellect, nor sentiment, but activity—a function within the soul, accomplished not by oneself but by God.”

After light had dawned on his own soul, Berggrav became particularly helpful to those who were “searching.” However, he could never quite forget that he himself had doubted so long, and that the “eager ones” had never been able to help him. He never, therefore, tried to “push others into faith. He drew them—slowly.”

How he finally became a country parson, then a bishop, and finally a spiritual leader to all of Norway during the dark days of World War II forms an intriguing story that makes for fascinating and profitable reading.

E. E. RYDEN

Soul Winning

You Can Win Souls, by C. E. Autrey (Broadman, 1961, 160 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by Faris D. Whitesell, Professor of Practical Theology, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

A deeply compassionate spirit of evangelism pulsates through this book on personal evangelism written by the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board’s director of evangelism. The reader can easily see why Dr. Autrey holds his present position and why Southern Baptists are spear-heading the Protestant thrust to evangelize America.

In thirteen chapters the author discusses the urgency for personal evangelism, qualifications and equipment of the soul-winner, approach and techniques, and how to deal with the anxious, the indifferent, the Jews, Roman Catholics, Spiritists, doubters, those with false hopes and the fearful.

While the book is orthodox, practical, clear and inspiring, yet it adds little to older books on this subject by such men as Torrey, Evans, Sellers, Scarborough and Wilson. The best chapter is that which deals with the Jews. There is need for a book on personal evangelism combining all the good and true in the older writers with the new insights and techniques of psychology, psychiatry, personality research, and social science.

FARIS D. WHITESELL

Book Briefs

When We Worship, by Robert T. Fauth (Christian Education Press, 1961, 88 pp., $1.50). A guide to effective worship.

Prayers for All Occasions (Baker, 1960, 80 pp., $1.95). Sixty-six evangelical leaders offer guidance in public prayer.

The Patience of Hope, by Spiros Zodhiates (Eerdmans, 1960, 299 pp., $4). Third in a stimulating and searching study of the Book of James.

Selections from Early Christian Writers, by Henry Melvill Gwatkin (Revell, 1961, 196 pp., $3). A Cambridge historian’s compilation of Christian writings (with original text) to the time of Constantine. Happy choice for a reprint.

The Eucharistic Memorial, by Max Thurian (John Knox, 1961, 117 pp., $1.75). An essay on “liturgical theology.” Seventh book in a series of Ecumenical Studies in Worship.

This Faith We Live By, by James H. Jauncey (Zondervan, 1961, 157 pp., $2.50). Practical insights into the real meaning of Christian living. Inspirational without being sentimental.

Introduction to Dogmatic Theology, by E. A. Litton (James Clarke, 1960, 608 pp., 27s. 6d). A new edition of a valuable and scholarly survey of Systematic Theology by a last-century Anglican evangelical.

“When the religious history of the twentieth century is written, perhaps one of the events of lasting importance will prove to have been the intervention of the Roman Catholic bishops in Puerto Rican politics.”

So says Dr. Val Clear, who has prepared forCHRISTIANITY TODAY the following interpretative report on Church-State tensions in Puerto Rico with special attention to the now-famous pastoral letters issued by Roman Catholic bishops prior to last November’s election. Dr. Clear is chairman of the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Anderson College, Anderson, Indiana, on sabbatical leave for 1960–61. He is currently teaching at El Seminario Evangélico de Puerto Rico and also serves as planning consultant for the National Council of Churches Division of Home Missions.

The Puerto Rican legislature is investigating alleged irregularities in the 1960 election campaign which saw widely-publicized but unsuccessful intervention by Roman Catholic bishops. Target of the investigation is the Christian Action Party, closely linked with Puerto Rican Catholicism. In mid-January, both legislative houses voted unanimously to unseat two Christian Action Party members. The government is now trying to establish that their candidacies were fraudulently obtained.

[Roman Catholic Bishop James E. McManus of Ponce charged last month that the joint legislative inquiry was an attempt by the Popular Democratic Party of Governor Luis Muñoz Marin to destroy the Christian Action Party, supported by McManus and the island’s two other Roman Catholic bishops.

McManus made his charge in a memorandum to Roger N. Baldwin, adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, who testified at a series of hearings being conducted in connection with the legislative investigation. The bishop questioned the authenticity of witnesses who testified that their names and fingerprints were falsified on registration petitions.

Earlier in the investigation, a Catholic party member of the legislature had issued counter-charges of fraud against the Popular party.

The Catholic party had received an eleventh-hour approval to appear on last November’s ballot after registering 80,000 petitions in three months. In the election it received only 51, 109 votes.]

The reverse-field running of the hierarchy last fall left the Puerto Rican Roman Catholic uncertain as to his soul’s condition from one edition of the paper to the next.

The action of the bishops in the campaign, although crushingly repudiated at the polls, was a warning to the governor that the Roman Catholic hierarchy inintended to oust him.

Clouds had been gathering for some time, portending an ecclesiastical storm.

An agile statistician has pointed out dramatically that if continental United States were as heavily populated as Puerto Rico it could contain every person now living on earth. To tackle this problem of over-population the politically and socially liberal Popular Democratic Party of Governor Luis Muñoz Marin has set up a governmentally sponsored program of birth control. And when the Roman Catholic church sought by legislation to get released time for religious instruction, the government successfully resisted the move. The church subsequently decided to purge the incumbent government, the Popular Democratic Party, which is the unofficial but unmistakable Puerto Rican wing of the Democratic Party of the American mainland.

With the unofficial but obviously indispensable approval of the bishops, a political party was organized to promote “Christian” principles in government. Although it is often referred to as “Catholic Action Party,” its official name is “Christian Action Party.” It is more familiarly known by its initials, “PAC.” By indirection on several occasions the bishops have endorsed the formation of the party, but this approval still remains unofficial.

Three weeks before the election the three Roman Catholic bishops of Puerto Rico (two of them born and reared in American Catholicism) issued a pastoral letter commanded to be read in all churches the following Sunday. It attacked several specific paragraphs in the Democratic platform, but attention in succeeding weeks was to be centered on the objection to the section of the platform which said, “The democratic philosophy of our party implies that only those acts which the general consensus of Puerto Rican opinion considers immoral can be officially prohibited, such as murder, robbery, etc.; but that it is not proper that a government of liberty officially prohibit those acts toward which a considerable part of the population sustains a judgment that they are not immoral.”

This, said the pastoral letter, “is anti-Christian and anti-Catholic and it is based on the modern heresy that the popular will and not the divine law decides what is moral or immoral. This philosophy dispenses with the Ten Commandments of God and permits popular and human judgment to replace them.”

So, the bishops said, aware of their duties, they were obliged to condemn this philosophy and to forbid Catholics to give their votes to such a party. It was not their intention to impose Catholic morals on the government or the citizenry, but merely to tell Catholics that they could not vote for the PPD or any other party with such a philosophy.

The storm which accompanied the first pastoral letter was intense. Without exception all newspapers opposed the bishops editorially. A retired Supreme Court Justice, university professors, mayors—all said the action was not only bad religiously but indefensible politically. The Bar Association had a heated nine-hour session terminating in a 417–188 vote to disapprove the pastoral letters “most energetically.” The general initial reaction appeared to be overwhelming disapproval. Later the support for the letters was organized efficiently and the effect of generations of preconditioning in this Catholic society produced its result.

Confusion was general, however, as to the nature of the prohibition. The first letter forbade any Catholic to vote Democratic. Did this mean it was a sin to vote Democratic? Yes, said Bishop McManus. No, said Archbishop Davis, it is not. Well, said Bishop McManus, it is a sin but without punishment. No, said Cardinal Spellman, it is not a sin to disobey a pastoral letter if no penalty is attached.

To dispel initial confusion the bishops issued a second pastoral letter four days later. It reiterated the position taken in the first but served only to perpetuate the confusion. However, the complete text of the second letter was reproduced in a full-page advertisement one week before the election in such a way as to remove ambiguity. In huge letters the ad was headed, “To Vote for the Popular Party Is a Sin.” The implication was unmistakable. The ad was signed by PAC.

The people of Puerto Rico thought the affair was all over when election results were tallied. Governor Luis Muñoz Marin and the Popular Democratic Party won comfortably by a margin of 200,000, getting 58 per cent of the vote. His party carried the entire senate and practically all town contests.

After the election came revelations of numerous intentional irregularities in the subscriptions to the petition to place PAC on the ballot. The wife of a missionary in El Guacio and other ministers’ wives were included in those who had “signed” the petition, according to the record. But the most glaring falsification was the name of the Rev. Alberto Espada Matta, a Nazarene minister who had been living in New York for two years! Someone had signed Espada’s name in the presence of a court official and had dutifully entered fingerprints as required!

After a brief lull Roman Catholic authorities renewed their campaign against the government. The stinging defeat which the church party suffered, polling only six and a half per cent in a nation which claims to be 85 per cent Catholic, was a clear repudiation of the bishops.

Ecclesiastical business carried each of the bishops from the island for part of the time during and after the election and their inability to confer undoubtedly accounts for some of the confusion. Whatever the cause, Father Thomas Maisonet of the cathedral announced that all who had publicly sinned at this point would have to repent publicly before being served communion. Reporters became specific in their questions: Did this mean that Doña Felisa (popular mayoress of San Juan) would not be served communion? Yes, since she had sinned on TV, radio, and through the press, she would have to repent her sin and recant by TV, radio, and through the press before she could be forgiven and be served communion by any priest. And genuine repentence includes a sincere promise not to do it again, he added.

This aim at the 1964 campaign created a new consternation. Was the battle to continue for four more years? Was the PPD to be under a virtual interdict?

A controversial case was then publicized. Felix Melendez Rosado, who had worked as a diligent Roman Catholic layman, had been a member of the Holy Name Society and of the Legion of Mary, voted for the PPD shortly before he died of a heart attack. The parish priest, said the family, refused him the rites of the church, explaining to them that it was because the deceased had refused to obey the pastoral letters. Conflicting reports absolve the priest on the basis that he had to keep an appointment in the city that afternoon.

Whether the priest did or did not do as accused, it is significant that the public believed the family. The previous month had conditioned the people to expect from their church even such extreme castigation as burial without church rites, the most serious penalty conceivable to a devout Catholic.

A few days later Archbishop Davis, attending a meeting in Chicago, announced that no one would be punished for having disobeyed the pastoral letters. El Imparcial, an afternoon tabloid, hit the streets with red headlines covering half the front Page: “THE CHURCH WILL NOT PUNISH DEMOCRATS.” Political leaders expressed joy that the battle had closed, being carefully neutral about who had won.

It is significant that despite the numerous accusations and demands made by the church throughout the struggle, the PPD has not changed one line of its program or platform. It did not make one concession. It won a clear victory.

Governor Muñoz’ percentage of the vote fell in 1960 from its previous level. How much of the decrease was due to the attack by the church and how much to the population’s growing acceptance of the statehood issue pushed by his main opponent is hard to say. But it is extremely clear that only six and a half per cent of the population thought the church had the best answer to the political needs of the island.

Summer Campus

Fuller Theological Seminary of Pasadena, California, will acquire the Indiana campus of the Winona Lake School of Theology. The campus at Winona Lake will hereafter be the Summer School Division of Fuller Theological Seminary.

The acquisition agreement provides that Dr. John A. Huffman, Winona Lake president, will serve as director of the Summer School Division, whose academic program will now lead to Fuller Theological Seminary degrees. For new students, degree stipulations will include a minimum of one-year in residence at the Pasadena campus.

Winona Lake School of Theology was founded in 1920 by Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, noted British Bible expositor, and it has since served as a summer theological training center for pastors, missionaries, teachers, and Christian workers. It is known for annual “flying seminars” to Bible lands which will be continued, as will the school’s affiliation with the University of London on the external doctorate program.

Fuller Theological Seminary was founded in 1947 by Dr. Charles E. Fuller and won accreditation from the American Association of Theological Schools in little more than 10 years.

The Summer School Division will be staffed by faculty members from both the Pasadena and Winona Lake campuses, as well as from other seminaries. Visiting professors for this summer’s three-term session will include evangelical scholars from Canada, England, and Japan.

Canadian Selection

Dr. Thomas B. McDormand, executive vice president of Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, will become president of Eastern Baptist College, St. Davids, Pennsylvania, and its theological seminary in Philadelphia in September. He is to succeed Dr. Gilbert L. Guffin, who has tendered his resignation to become dean of religious education at Howard College in Birmingham, Alabama.

Korean Inauguration

Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, inaugurated its seventh president last month in Dr. Yyung Kan Koh, M.D. His installation ended six months of student and faculty unrest following violent demonstrations and the resignation of the former president, Dr. George Paik, who now heads Korea’s House of Councillors, the national senate.

Dr. Koh, a Presbyterian elder and physician, brings to the interdenominational university a distinguished record in Korean education. He has served as vice minister of education and president of Kyung Pook University in Taegu.

Stanley High

Stanley High, 65, author of a best-selling biography of Billy Graham and one-time editor of the Christian Herald, died in New York last month.

High was a theological student in his youth, but turned to writing and became famous for articles on religious topics. He was a senior editor of Reader’s Digest at the time of his death.

Following a two-year stint as editor of the Christian Herald (1928–1930), High became a speech writer for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He held that Roosevelt’s early aims were good, but later he broke with the New Deal and became a member of the Presidential campaign staffs of Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 and 1948 and of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952.

A memorial service for High was held in the Norton (Connecticut) Presbyterian Church.

Freedom Awards

Two members of the CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorial staff shared in Freedoms Foundation honors announced last month. The foundation also cited FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for his three-part series on communism which appeared in CHRISTIANITY TODAY last fall.

Hoover was awarded a George Washington honor medal, as was Dr. L. Nelson Bell, Executive Editor, and Dr. James DeForest Murch, Managing Editor.

Dr. Bell was cited for an editorial in the Presbyterian Journal, “Surrender to Fear.” He received a $100 cash award. A limited number of reprints of his prize-winning editorial are still avilable. This was the fifth consecutive year in which he has won a Freedoms award.

Dr. Murch was cited for a series of newspaper columns in the Cincinnati Enquirer, “Churchman Views the Issues.” He also won a similar award for an article, “How High Must We Build the Wall?,” which appeared in Christian Herald magazine in 1958.

People: Words And Events

Deaths:Dr. Emanuel Frederick Poppen, 86, former president of the American Lutheran Church; in Columbus, Ohio … Dr. Reginald Herbert Owen, 73, retired Anglican Archbishop of Wellington and Primate of New Zealand; at Paraparamu, New Zealand … The Right Rev. Norman Spencer Binsted, 70, retired Protestant Episcopal Missionary Bishop of the Philippines, in Hendersonville, North Carolina … Dr. Frederick Keller Stamm, 77, Congregational minister who was a popular radio preacher in the thirties; in Plumsteadville, Pennsylvania … Dr. H. D. A. Major, 89, former principal of Ripon Hall, Oxford, England, and one-time editor of the British Modern Churchman … Metropolitan Makarius, 78, head of the Orthodox Church in Poland; in Odessa.

Elections: As president of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, Dr. Kurt Scharf, East Berliner who will succeed Bishop Otto Dibelius.

Appointments: As commandant of the Army Chaplains School in Fort Slocum, New York, Chaplain (Colonel) Charles E. Brown, Jr.… as executive director of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, Dr. Walter F. Wolbrecht.

A more tragic cleft within Protestantism than that of denominationalism is the “deepening cleavage and complete lack of communication between that segment of American Protestantism which adheres to what one of its intellectual leaders has described as ‘classical orthodoxy’ and, on the other hand, that segment to which most of us belong, which might be described as a more ‘liberal orthodoxy.’ ”

The speaker was Dr. James E. Wagner, president of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and co-president of the merging United Church of Christ; his forum was the February meeting of the General Board of the National Council of Churches in Syracuse, New York; and he had a newsmaking proposition:

“I would like to see the National Council seek to initiate with devout and competent representatives of our avowedly more orthodox brethren a series of quiet, unpublicized, prayerful consultations aimed at restoring confidence and communication between those whose differing from one another is really one of degree of adherence to what all would recognize as the great Christian tradition.”

Stretching to retain for his NCC fellows both liberal and orthodox values, Dr. Wagner asserted, “We believe we are true to the historic Christian faith, but we interpret that faith in the light of the historical circumstances which have marked its development through the centuries.”

He identified the classical orthodox group as being represented “in the better element in such organizations as the National Association of Evangelicals, just as we find ourselves at home in the National Council. The ‘orthodox’ group now has an influential journal, respectable in its literary and intellectual quality [Dr. Wagner did not specify CHRISTIANITY TODAY by name], just as ‘liberal orthodoxy’ has found its voice in The Christian Century. The very effectiveness of these journals and the competent scholarship to be found in both segments of American Protestantism really tend to aid and abet a deepening of the cleavage between the two groups.”

Dr. Wagner told of another concern close to his heart: that NCC pronouncements “be so clearly grounded in the Bible and in biblical faith, so patiently interspersed with pertinent Bible references” to make evident to all that “we in the National Council family are no less committed to the Scriptures as our ultimate authority in faith and practice than are our brothers and sisters who tend to claim that they and they alone are ‘true to the Bible.’ ”

In a subsequent interview with this magazine, Dr. Wagner indicated his growing concern that something be done about the “spectacle” before the nonbelieving public of responsible Christian leaders from the “two major segments of denominational Protestantism” at times “sniping at each other” and generally “holding aloof” from each other. He feels that there is common ground between “classical orthodoxy” and “liberal orthodoxy,” that their differences are intellectual (matters of doctrine and biblical interpretation) and not spiritual. “We both trust the same Saviour. We both call Jesus Lord.”

Dr. Wagner confessed a certain wariness about articles in liberal periodicals where the “commitment” of the author “to Christ as Saviour and Lord” is in question. Professing to be “no extreme liberal,” he mused over his own background in the conservative Churches of God in North America, which emerged out of a revival movement among Pennsylvania Germans in 1825. Among this group, Dr. Wagner preached his first sermon at the age of 16, a year after making his profession of faith in an interdenominational evangelistic meeting.

Having maintained friendships from his more conservative days, Dr. Wagner seems nothing if not deeply sincere in his desire for quiet consultations across theological lines. Though a member of NCC’s General Board since its establishment and a past vice-president, he asserts that his remarks were made entirely on his own initiative and without previous planning with NCC leadership. Membership reaction was very favorable, he reports, and he is ready to push the matter if desirable, from his new position as chairman of the General Constituent Membership Committee. He believes the substance of his remarks should be a “major portion” of NCC concern in its second decade of existence.

As to the nature of the proposed consultations, Dr. Wagner denies he is thinking along ecclesiastical lines (in quest of church mergers) but rather declares his concern to be “in terms of theology and mission,” the latter being defined as “outreach for the unsaved here and abroad.” “My concern is not in any sense with any possible absorption of NAE or any other organization by NCC.”

General Board Pronouncements

Here are actions taken at last month’s meeting in Syracuse of the General Board of the National Council of Churches:

• Use of artificial birth control methods was approved as morally acceptable for planned parenthood. The board’s pronouncement on “Responsible Parenthood” was approved by a vote of 83 to 0, with Orthodox delegates abstaining because their communions recognize sexual abstinence as the only method of limiting families. Although the vote was technically unanimous, the pronouncement had the recorded support of only a third of the board’s 250 members, only about 115 of whom turned up for the Syracuse meeting (many were absent because of the airlines’ strike). The pronouncement opposed legal prohibitions against dissemination of birth control information. Abortion was condemned, except when the mother’s health is endangered.

• An advisory was prepared for local churches cautioning against use of the controversial “Operation Abolition” film without supplementary facts. The advisory questions whether the film accurately represents student demonstrations at a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in San Francisco last spring.

• A pronouncement was adopted recording opposition to the use of public funds to aid sectarian and other private schools.

Dr. Wagner’s remarks to the General Board were a commentary on the report of Dr. Roy G. Ross, NCC general secretary. He noted Ross’s expressed regret “that there are still a considerable number of Protestant and Orthodox communions which are neither engaged in conversations regarding organic unity nor joined together in the fellowship and witness of this Council of Churches.” TO CHRISTIANITY TODAY Dr. Wagner said: “Some of us look forward hopefully to the day when communions like Assemblies of God, Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), Churches of God in North America, to say nothing of Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans, will share more closely in the life, work and witness of the National Council.” But this, he said, was not the aim of his proposed consultations.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY elicited the following reactions:

The Rev. Thomas F. Zimmerman, NAE president: “It is evident that Dr. James E. Wagner’s statement was not hastily conceived. Therefore, I feel that it is inappropriate for me to hastily set forth an official reaction from the NAE viewpoint.” He said the statement would be discussed at a regular meeting of an NAE policy committee March 13.

Dr. Ramsey Pollard, president of the Southern Baptist Convention: “We would not give up any of our deep-seated convictions about the Scriptures … and there is no basis for fellowship unless people are agreed.”

Dr. John W. Behnken, president of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod: “In last December’s NCC General Assembly, there wasn’t any concern, from what I read, about doctrinal matters. We are already talking with other Lutherans on doctrine.”

Dr. Carl McIntire, president of the International Council of Christian Churches: “It is impossible to negotiate with men who are denying and compromising the Word of God.”

Dr. Reuben R. Figuhr, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church: “We … believe that clearer communication between various groups and all attempts to increase Christian fellowship are beneficial.… However, we … would not want to comment … unless it materializes as a definite plan that can be carefully studied.”

Evangelical Comments

NCC’s bid for intimate conversations with unaffiliated evangelicals has evoked varied reactions from conservative leaders:

Sympathetically, some say that:

1. The evangelical witness of conservatives should be lifted into face-to-face ecumenical confrontation.

2. The witness of evangelical forces within theologically-inclusive ecumenical agencies should be reinforced.

3. The fragmented witness of Protestantism calls for patient pursuit of wider church unity on a regenerate basis.

Critically, some say that:

1. The strong conservative contingent already within NCC is constantly penalized by ecumenism’s overall commitment to theological inclusivism. (Specially cited are WCC’s power-thrust for control of world missions, which is meshing IMC into WCC over the protests of evangelicals; and the open ecumenical sympathy and undercover support given the liberal Christian Century which, hard-pressed by CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S gains, has announced a $500,000 revitalization program, with NCC’s wealthy lay president, J. Irwin Miller, an ardent supporter [Time recently said of Miller that “he was for years sole angel of the Christian Century, still meets most of the magazine’s deficit”].)

2. Conservative positions are constantly ignored by organizational pronouncements (for example, NCC’s violated assurances to the National Lay Committee, of which J. Howard Pew was chairman, against promulgation of partisan politico-economic programs for which church leaders have no special competence or mandate; also the Cleveland “pro-Red China” positions; even in Syracuse, positions were taken approving artificial birth control—with Greek Orthodox participants abstaining—and cautioning churches against showing the film “Operation Abolition” without supplementation).

3. The NCC encourages conversations, while simultaneously promoting programs that penalize the free opportunities of non-related agencies (for example, NCC’s widening control of Protestant religious broadcasting and telecasting opportunities).

4. The “brotherhood versus bigotry” technique is now widely successful as a sheer political tactic.

5. The alternative to inclusive ecumenism is evangelical ecumenism, and any conversation should be biblically-oriented, examining present structures in the light of the nature and authority of the Church.

C.F.H.H.

Protestant Panorama

• United Presbyterian congregations in the Philadelphia area will be asked to sign “Covenants of Open Occupancy” as part of a campaign against race discrimination in residential housing. The Philadelphia Presbytery’s social action committee will ask church members to pledge that they will not discriminate against neighbors of other races.

• Southern Baptists showed gains in 1960 in all major categories except one, according to statistics released this month. Baptisms of converts fell from 429,063 for the previous year to 386,469 for 1960. Baptist leaders attributed the decline to “normal fluctuation” and to a simultaneous revival campaign in 1959 which was not repeated last year.

• Bishops in Sweden’s State Lutheran Church are appealing to King Gustav Adolf for the right of clergymen to refuse to perform marriage ceremonies for divorced persons. Their petition grows out of a court decision in which a pastor was fined for declining to officiate at a second marriage for a divorced person.

• Twenty Cleveland pastors representing fourteen congregations are conducting weekday morning worship services on a cooperative basis for those unable to attend church on Sunday. The services are held at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Ministers of the cooperating churches take turns in officiating at the services.

• The Christian Century, undenominational weekly, is appealing for financial support from readers to undergird a projected expansion program. According to a statement in the March 1 issue, trustees of the Christian Century Foundation seek to increase its development fund by $500,000, half of which has been promised by an unnamed Christian philanthropic organization contingent upon the raising of the other half from additional sources. The trustees say they believe that the weekly’s circulation (currently about 35,000) can be doubled in five years.

• Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, minister emeritus of New York’s Riverside Church, is donating his entire library of theology and resource books to two overseas seminaries. Some 1,400 books will be divided equally between the Seminario Evangelico de Puerto Rico and Dondi Seminary in Angola, West Africa.

‘Question 7’

More than a third of the world’s inhabitants, if they would serve God, must contend with Communist resistance. Many find that limited liberties present a far greater dilemma than outright suppression. The artistic portrayal of this theme makes “Question 7” one of the most significant films of our time.

A 110-minute drama set amidst the Church-State conflict in East Germany, “Question 7” exposes the subtle Communist strategy of attempting to exploit religious channels for Communist ends. Actual incidents in East Germany, as documented over the last four years by scenarist Allen Sloane, form the basis for the film, which had its world premiere March 2 in Washington, D. C., and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It promises to be well received by Christians in the free world, and should serve to instill gratitude for the opportunity to worship without fear of reprisal.

The absorbing story concerns a 15-year-old pastor’s son who aspires to be a pianist. He must choose between assuming the role of a “radish, ‘red’ but only on the outside,” or standing for his faith and thereby inviting oblivion. The plot raises questions as to the nature of the Gospel’s social relevance (whether on the spiritual or political level), and drives home the point that real freedom is something Christ alone creates.

An international, professional cast is led by British actor Michael Gwynn and Christian de Bresson, a French youth who has lived in America for a number of years. Almut Eggert, charming 21-year-old German actress who plays the young pianist’s girl friend, knows the film as a true-to-life situation: she has an uncle who, like the “Question 7” pastor, volunteered to forsake free Germany for a parish in the East Zone.

The title of the film refers to a questionnaire issued by Communist authorities. Commissioned by Lutheran Film Associates, Inc., “Question 7” was produced by Lothar Wolff and Louis de Rochemont Associates, all of whom collaborated similarly on “Martin Luther.”

Mission to Canada

A team of noted evangelicals are conducting a four-month “Mission to Canada” which has the blessing of top denominational leaders.

The 22,000-mile evangelistic tour led by Tom Rees, Anglican lay preacher, was formally begun at a commissioning service in Toronto last month. Among those who took part in the service were Anglican Archbishop Howard H. Clark, Primate of all Canada, the Rt. Rev. Hugh A. McLeod, moderator of the United Church of Canada’s general council, the Rt. Rev. Robert Lennox, moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s General Assembly, the Rev. Gerald M. Ward, president of the Baptist Federation of Canada, and Commissioner W. Wycliffe Booth of the Salvation Army.

Musicians for the team are Frank Boggs of Atlanta, Georgia, and Lex Smith of Glasgow, Scotland. Clergymen include the Revs. A. LeDrew Gardner, Arthur Rose, Alan Stephens, and Maurice A. P. Wood.

This month the team is touring the Maritime provinces and Quebec. Meetings in Ontario will be held from March 28 to April 25, and the team will then proceed to Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. Final meetings will be held in Whitehorse, Yukon, in July.

Cult Research

A new quarterly devoted to the study of cults made its debut last month under the name Religious Research Digest. Editor is Walter R. Martin.

Religious Giving

Total religious giving in 1960 for all faiths reached an estimated $4.18 billion, compared with $3.9 billion the previous year, according to the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel.

Oberammergau Film

A filmstrip worship service, based on photographs of the 1960 Oberammergau Passion Play and designed for use at the Easter season, is being released in the United States through the Christian Education Press of the Evangelical and Reformed Church. More than 200 U.S. bookstores are handling distribution.

Barabbas on TV

Hallmark’s “Hall of Fame” color television series will present an original drama, “Give Us Barabbas,” over the NBC-TV network on Palm Sunday, March 26. James Daly, veteran actor who starred in Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning verse drama, “J. B.” will play the leading role. “Give Us Barabbas” was written by Henry Denker, who produced and directed the radio series, “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

Crime Increase

Serious crime showed a 12 per cent increase in 1960 over the previous year, according to a preliminary survey made public this month by the FBI.

Aid to Education

Official Roman Catholic reaction to President John F. Kennedy’s plan for federal aid to education scores the multibillion dollar proposal on grounds that it excludes help to private and parochial schools. The plan does provide for scholarships in church-related colleges.

In a statement released by the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington, Bishop Lawrence J. Shehan, chairman of the conference’s department of education, expressed “keen disappointment” that the plan “denies even the least bit of help to five million children in non-public elementary and secondary schools.”

At Lenten devotions in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, Bishop Joseph F. Flannelly called upon some 2,000 persons to write their Congressmen to protest the Kennedy plan.

Another issue in New York state is Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller’s tuition-aid program. Last month the State Council of Churches withdrew its opposition to the program in a statement saying it no longer considers the plan unconstitutional. It was emphasized, however, that the council is not endorsing the plan or expressing preference for it over other higher education proposals. The American Jewish Congress reaffirmed its opposition.

Upholding Bus Rides

The U. S. Supreme Court upheld last month the constitutionality of public school bus transportation for parochial school students.

In a seven to two per curiam (by the court) order, the nation’s highest tribunal declined to hear an appeal from a group of Newtown, Connecticut taxpayers.

The court’s opinion noted that Justices Felix Frankfurter and William O. Douglas felt that the case should have been heard. However, four of the nine justices must vote to take a case, before a hearing is granted and the other seven members of the court apparently agreed with the motion to dismiss filed by Connecticut’s Attorney General, who said the constitutional issue had already been resolved by a 1947 decision which held that it was legal for New Jersey to pay for transportation of children to private schools.

Churches Under Castro

The Cuban government wants to establish two national churches—one Roman Catholic and the other Protestant—according to refugees interviewed by Religion Editor Adon Taft of the Miami Herald.

“Severing the Cuban Catholic Church from its ties with Rome and setting up a Cuban ‘Pope,’ with Communist leanings” says Taft, “appears to be the first aim of the present government.” He went on to add that harassment of Protestant churches has begun and “half a dozen clergymen working in the government are being groomed to become the ‘hierarchy’ of the national Protestant church, with one of them slated to become boss of the church with cabinet rank.”

Brazilian Incident

Seven missionaries and three children from the interdenominational New Tribes Mission were jailed at a remote Brazilian army guard house last month. U. S. State Department intervention prompted their immediate release.

J. B. Knutson, general secretary of the mission, termed “homicide” charges against the missionaries as ridiculous. Their arrests were reportedly made at the urging of Roman Catholic authorities. Reports said that the missionaries had been jailed at Manaus, an Amazon River town 1,000 miles inland, after having been arrested by soldiers at Bobope, 900 miles northwest of Manaus. The missionaries were allegedly accused of “teaching Christians to poison people, prohibiting them from planting their farms and raising chickens and pigs, and instructing them to burn Roman Catholic churches and break their images.”

Those arrested were Mr. and Mrs. James Curtis and their two children, Mr. Walnie Kliewer, and Miss Myrtle Rehn, all of whom are Americans; also Mr. and Mrs. Henry Loewen, their son, and Miss Elizabeth Koop, who are Canadians.

Reaching the Moros

A missionary to Bolivia is reported to have made successful contact with the fierce Moro tribe.

The missionary, William Pencille, has spent a month with the tribe in the Salinas de Santiago region of Bolivia, according to Mennonite Brethren Church headquarters in Hillsboro, Kansas. Mennonites and other missionaries have been trying for years to establish relations with the Moros, who live in the jungle border area of Bolivia and Paraguay. Not only have their efforts failed, but the Moros have killed and wounded a number of colonists in sporadic attacks.

Kornelius Issak, a Mennonite missionary, was killed by Moros in 1958 while trying to visit them in Paraguay.

Pencille’s contact included talks with the Indian chief whose son is thought to have been Issak’s murderer.

During Pencille’s stay, another tribe with whom the Moros had long been at war came to the village and agreed to a peace treaty.

The Lagos Outburst

Nigeria has been one of the most fruitful fields for mission work in Africa, largely because of its favorable attitude toward other races. Acceptance of the white man has given an open door, generally speaking, to the Gospel. Missionaries were therefore carefully noting reaction to the Congo chaos, especially following the announcement of Patrice Lumumba’s death. Pro-Lumumba riots were expected in Ghana, Guinea, and the United Arab Republic. But an unheralded outburst of anti-white feeling in Nigeria came as a shock to missionary forces in Africa’s largest—and most stable—state. Whites were stoned, and wild demonstrations took place in Lagos.

Some church leaders and missionaries at first feared that further violence might follow, and that, as in the Congo, missionaries would not be differentiated from other whites in the racial fever.

But reassurance came from the Federal Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who officially condemned the “acts of hooliganism.”

The Minister of Information, the Hon. Theophilus O. Benson, although a member of one party which had issued an anti-white manifesto, also denounced the demonstrations, and they have been largely dismissed as isolated otubreaks by a few left-wing youth leaders.

W.H.F.

A Diverted Gift

A sleek pleasure boat which former President Eisenhower had planned to present to Soviet Premier Khrushchev will be used instead to take the Gospel to a remote part of Ethiopia.

The boat was returned to the manufacturer after cancellation of Eisenhower’s trip to Moscow last spring, and it was subsequently purchased by the West Allis (Wisconsin) United Presbyterian Church to be given in turn to their denominational mission in Ethiopia. The craft’s destination is a region accessible only by river during the rainy season. Even then the river is only a few inches deep.

The 19-foot boat, which operates on a jet principle (ejecting water to propel it), is particularly useful in very shallow water.

The Rev. R. Byron Crozier, pastor of the West Allis church, will fly to East Africa to make an official presentation.

Can the Church ever get too big? Can she spread herself too thin? Can she become more things to more people than her Lord intended? Questions like these need to be asked and they need to be answered. For many churches are drifting into a new definition of themselves, a definition which can involve basic change in their task and structure. Before this has altogether taken place and only rationalization is left, we should ask whether we want it to happen, and if not, what we can do to keep it from happening.

The changing concept of the Church is due in part to a changing concept of the State. The welfare State with its plethora of services to individuals has necessitated wider utilization of private groups. The potential of the State’s bureaucracy is enormous but it is not unlimited. Confronted with a continuing demand for services, the State has hit upon the device of hiring private groups to perform many of these activities. Private groups, including churches, can be engaged to minister to the ill; to care for the aged, orphans, and indigent; to distribute relief; to do research; to educate, to administer foreign aid, and so on. The government pays these groups out of taxes for the social services they perform. It is sometimes argued that the more of these services that can be assigned to churches the better.

Big Government and Big Church

This development in government has been paralleled by a like development in the churches. We may call this the concept of the “Big Church.” Recently an official of a denominational board of hospitals was boasting of the empire he ruled. He martialed statistics of beds, patients, nurses, doctors, technicians with obvious relish. All he needed was a few more of this and a few more of that to round out his domain. Here, I thought, is the unthinking exponent of clericalism. Here is the advocate of the Big Church. Society would be better off—it could even be saved—if only church institutions could be bigger and more numerous. The concept of the Big Church would of course get an enormous boost if tax funds were available. Indeed, what could God not do if he had the money!

A Methodist bishop writes an article pleading with his church to take more tax money for the performance of spiritual tasks. His thesis is simple: the Lord has set the Church here to do good works. The Church is doing them, but her endeavors are limited by lack of funds. Where is the greatest source of funds available for spiritual and humanitarian endeavors? The State! Therefore it is the State’s duty to provide and the Church’s duty to accept all the funds that can be made available through this channel.

Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen went before a Congressional committee studying foreign aid to urge that all aid programs in the categories of relief and welfare should be assigned to the church. The church, he felt, would do a more “spiritual” job. A number of church officials recently appeared before another Congressional committee asking that all military surplus abroad be turned over to the missionaries for use in their programs. They argued that this was the best possible use that could be made of these enormous stocks of goods and equipment.

Some leaders of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States are vigorously advocating a new plan for education of the young. They urge that we forego our traditional program of public education controlled and administered by the people acting through their duly chosen officials. They urge that we substitute instead a plan by which education would be turned over to clerics and other private groups who would be subsidized by the government to do the job.

Roman Catholic Bishop Lawrence J. Shehan of Bridgeport, Connecticut, preaching at a Red Mass in connection with the American Bar Association, lectured Chief Justice Earl Warren and two associate justices of the United States Supreme Court who were present on how wrong they had been in their interpretation of the First Amendment. He accused the United States government of being unfair to Catholics by levying such high taxes that they could not pay for their denominational schools. He called for a new interpretation of the First Amendment in which government would cooperate with the church by extending subsidies for the work the church was doing in educating the young. Cardinal McIntyre charged that school aid programs which did not include Catholic schools are “discriminatory.”

The Task of Christ’s Followers

What is a Church? This is a highly pertinent question. It is our contention that the Church is a unique society and, because unique, limited. She has a mandate from her Lord to proclaim the Gospel. She is charged to bear witness to what God has done in Jesus Christ. The Church is the only group on earth which has this mandate and this is the only mandate she has. As she is true to her founder and herself, she is to do this one thing.

The Church is not primarily an educational institution. She is not a healing agency. She does not consist of homes, orphanages, relief headquarters, or social agencies. She may be all these things incidentally, but she is not any or all of them basically. The foundational function of the Church is worship and her basic task is evangelism, including missions. In the practical conduct of this enterprise, education certainly is necessary; healing, relief, care of the unfortunate are necessary as well. But these services are means to the end of the authentic Christian enterprise. They are never ends in themselves so far as Christians are concerned.

The Church is caught in this dilemma between the “small” and the “big.” Is the Church a colony of heaven, a unique society founded by Jesus Christ with but tenuous roots in the passing cultural scene? Or, is she primarily a social institution, a convenient form of organization for the performance of social servises? If she is the latter, the Church should seek all the aid from tax funds that she can obtain. She should become frankly competitive with other non-profit groups and openly strive for the lion’s share of the State’s welfare dollar. If the Church is a welfare agency existing for the purpose of performing social services, then she should be this to the hilt.

A Note of Warning

It is only fair to sound a note of warning as the Church seems to move in that direction. If the Church succumbs to the lure of the State’s gold and becomes merely one of many social functionaries, her loss will be irreparable. Certainly she will forfeit whatever claim she may exert as a unique society. Under such circumstances the Church becomes, in effect, another secular institution. That is to say, she ceases to be the Church and becomes something else. She has no reason for survival beyond the performance of immediate temporary tasks.

A Guide for Action

The Church would be well advised to hold fast to her heritage as Christ’s own society with her sole mandate for Him. As such, we would recommend that the Church avoid involvement with the State and refuse the support of all funds collected by taxation. If the Church should follow such a course, we offer the following guide for her educational, social, and welfare programs:

1. Such programs should avoid interlocking with the State.

2. Financial grants from the State should be rejected.

3. Participation in such programs should be limited to pioneer projects in which the Church could blaze a trail or open a new vista—the kind of enterprise that conventional groups might hesitate to sponsor. The Church should avoid routine forms of welfare activity.

4. The Church’s social and welfare programs should be geared to worship and evangelism.

5. They should be limited to those enterprises which the Church can herself support through voluntary gifts of adherents.

Associate Director

Protestants and Other Americans United

Washington, D. C.

God’s attributes cannot be separated from his Being. God and his perfections are one. We may not think of love and righteousness as incidental aspects of God’s character; on the contrary, God is with his whole Being love and righteousness, grace and holiness. Because this is so, one attribute cannot be limited by another. We may not say, for example, that God is not infinitely righteous because he is love. Though the attributes are many, God is one. While we distinguish the attributes for purposes of study, we can never separate them.

This essay will concern itself with the so-called communicable attributes of God. We may define these as attributes to which some analogy is found in man (the incommunicable being those to which no analogy is found in man). It should be remembered, however, that the difference between these two groups of attributes is relative. God possesses all his communicable attributes in an incommunicable way. Whatever we find in man by way of analogy is but a faint reflection of these perfections as found in God.

The following division of the communicable attributes has been adapted from Berkhof’s Systematic Theology: 1. intellectual attributes: knowledge and wisdom; 2. moral attributes: goodness, love, grace, mercy, longsuffering, veracity (including faithfulness), holiness, righteousness; 3. volitional attributes: the sovereign will of God and the sovereign power of God.

Intellectual Attributes. Under the intellectual attributes we note first the knowledge of God. Scripture tells us that “God is light and in him is no darkness at all” (John 1:5—all quotations from ASV). This designation tells us that God knows all things (1 John 3:20). God knows himself thoroughly and completely. Further, God knows all that exists outside himself. To this attribute we give the name of God’s omniscience. It includes the minutest details, even the numbering of the hairs of our heads.

God’s wisdom, though related to his knowledge, is to be distinguished from it. Wisdom means the application of knowledge to the reaching of a goal. God’s wisdom implies that God uses the best possible means to reach the goals he has set for himself. The Old Testament Psalmist was impressed with the evidence of God’s wisdom in creation: “O Jehovah, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all” (Ps. 104:24). Joseph in Egypt saw the wisdom of God revealed in the providential ordering of his life (Gen. 50:20), whereas Paul particularly saw that wisdom displayed in the plan of salvation (1 Cor. 1:18, 24).

Moral Attributes. Under the moral attributes we list first of all the goodness of God. By this we understand “that perfection of God which prompts Him to deal bountifully and kindly with all his creatures” (ibid., p. 70). This goodness is spoken of in such passages as Psalm 145:9 (“Jehovah is good to all”) and Acts 14:17. By some theologians this goodness of God is called his “common grace,” in distinction from his special grace shown only to his elect people.

The love of God is very prominent in Scripture, especially in the New Testament. The three persons of the Trinity exist in an eternal fellowship of love (John 3:35; 17:24), but in and through Christ, God reveals his love to man. In this connection John 3:16 comes to mind, as well as many other memorable New Testament passages. All the blessings of salvation are the fruits of God’s love: “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God” (1 John 3:1).

One of the major questions in the area of the attributes today is: How can we properly relate the love and the righteousness of God? The liberal theology of the nineteenth century virtually cancelled out the righteousness of God. Ritschl, it will be recalled, said that there was no such thing as the wrath of God, and that anyone who thinks so is laboring under a delusion. In contemporary neo-orthodox theology this old liberalism has supposedly been repudiated. As we examine the doctrine of the attributes, however, noting what neo-orthodox theologians teach particularly about the love and righteousness of God, we shall have occasion to ask ourselves whether the liberal rejection of the wrath of God has really been abandoned by these men or whether it has simply been restated in a different form.

Contemporary theologians describe love as the center and core of God’s revelation. Karl Barth, in fact, divides God’s attributes into “The Perfections of the Divine Loving” and “The Perfections of the Divine Freedom,” insisting that we must not begin with attributes which concern the being or essence of God and then go on to speak of his love, but that we must begin by discussing the love of God (Church Dogmatics, II, 1, pp. 348 ff.). When Barth goes on to define God’s love, he includes in its scope all men and all of creation: “God is He who in His Son, Jesus Christ, loves all His children, in His children all men, and in men His whole creation” (p. 351).

Emil Brunner, like Barth, stresses that love is the very nature of God (The Christian Doctrine of God, p. 185) and quotes with approval Luther’s statement that God is “an abyss of eternal love” (p. 168). Brunner describes this love as Agape (love poured out on those who are worthless, love which does not desire to get but to give) in distinction from Eros (love of someone because he is worthy of being loved). At this point Brunner acknowledges his indebtedness to Anders Nygren (pp. 185 ff.).

These men have much to teach us. However, when we note Brunner’s insistence that, for Paul, the righteousness and mercy of God are identical (p. 301), and when we look again at Barth’s definition of love, we begin to wonder whether both of them do not assume that agape requires God to treat all men alike. Our Lord Jesus Christ, however, clearly taught that there is a wrath of God which is to be revealed against those who reject God and refuse to believe in his Son. Christ speaks of the outer darkness, of the place where the fire is not quenched, of a hell into which one may be cast, and of the disastrous consequences of losing one’s soul.

Associated with God’s love are his grace—God’s love shown to those who have not deserved it, but have rather deserved its opposite; his mercy—God’s love shown to those who are in misery or distress; and his longsuffering—that aspect of God’s love whereby he endures evil men in spite of their disobedience, and seeks to lead them to repentance.

By the veracity of God we mean his truthfulness. God is the source of truth, true in his revelation and true in his promises. In this connection it is particularly the faithfulness of God which is to be stressed: he keeps his promises, and is ever faithful to his covenant people (see 2 Tim. 2:13).

We come next to the holiness of God. The origin of the Hebrew root QADASH (the Hebrew word for holy) is obscure; its basic meaning, however, seems to be that of apartness. Thus God’s holiness means first of all that he is other than the creature, infinitely exalted above his creation. In this sense the holiness of God is not so much a separate attribute as a qualification of all that God is and does. As an attribute, however, God’s holiness means, negatively, that he is “of purer eyes than to behold evil” (Hab. 1:13); that he is free from all that is impure and hates all sin. Positively, God’s holiness denotes his moral excellence—the fact that he perfectly embodies all that is pure and good.

When we take up the righteousness of God, we touch upon an attribute which is the object of much contemporary discussion. The basic idea of righteousness is that of being conformed to a rule or law. God may therefore be called righteous because he acts in accordance with law—not a law above him but a law which is within him, of which he himself is the Author. By God’s rectoral justice we mean God’s rectitude as the ruler of the universe, particularly of his moral creatures. By his distributive justice we mean his rectitude in the execution of his law. In this connection we think first of God’s remunerative justice, which distributes rewards—not on the basis of merit but solely by grace. Paul speaks of this in Romans 2:6 and 7: “Who will render to every man according to his works: to them that by patience in welldoing seek for glory and honor and incorruption, eternal life.” By retributive justice we mean God’s infliction of penalties upon those who disobey him—this justice is an expression of his wrath. Paul speaks of this in verses 8 and 9 of Romans 2: “But unto them that are factious, and obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, shall be wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that worketh evil …” (cf. also Rom. 1:32 and 2 Thess. 1:8). Although it is true that in Scripture the righteousness of God is generally applied to the salvation of sinners (think of what Paul says about justification in Rom. 3:21–28), the Bible teaches unequivocally that there is such a thing as retributive righteousness or the wrath of God (see Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, I, pp. 380 ff.).

Since this is a matter of crucial importance, let us see what contemporary neo-orthodox theologians teach about the righteousness of God. Barth treats God’s mercy and righteousness together, as “Perfections of the Divine Loving.” Citing both Luther and Anselm, he stresses the identity of God’s righteousness and mercy (op. cit., pp. 377 ff.). For Barth the great message of the Bible is: “There is no righteousness of God which is not also mercy and no mercy of God which is not also righteousness” (p. 380). In distinction from Ritschl, Barth maintains that there is such a thing as a punitive righteousness in God (pp. 382, 391). In a discussion of the significance of Good Friday, Barth goes on to show that God’s retributive or punitive righteousness is wholly satisfied by the crucifixion of his Son (pp. 395–406). While appreciating the profound insights offered here, we look in vain for any suggestion that God’s retributive righteousness is also to be expressed at the the last day in the punishment of the lost. In fact, Barth asserts that it is characteristic of heathen but not of scriptural eschatology to put “these two ways” before our eyes: the way of eternal glory and the way of everlasting fire (p. 293). The conclusion seems inescapable that, for Barth, there will be no final punishment of those who are lost. Barth’s teachings on election, in fact, have led Brunner to designate Barth’s views as “the most thoroughgoing doctrine of universalism that has ever been formulated” (Brunner, op. cit., p. 314).

So far as Brunner’s own teachings are concerned, he quotes approvingly Luther’s affirmation that the revelation of God’s wrath is his “strange work,” whereas the revelation of God’s love is his “proper work” (ibid., p. 169). Like Luther, Brunner holds that the wrath of God reached its climax on the cross, but that here faith sees God’s love behind his “strange work” (p. 173). When, however, we ask about Brunner’s view of retributive justice culminating in eternal punishment for the lost, we get an equivocal answer. Brunner, while sharply critical of Barth’s view of election (pp. 348 ff.), joins Barth in rejecting double predestination (pp. 345 ff.). Brunner firmly rejects universal salvation (p. 352) and says that we cannot eliminate a final judgment of wrath from the New Testament (p. 349). Yet he expresses his doubts about eternal punishment (p. 353) and elsewhere suggests that to die without Christ is equivalent to being annihilated (Faith, Hope, and Love, p. 56).

We see that, in this respect, Brunner is not as radical as Barth. Yet Brunner hesitates about eternal punishment—a doctrine which Nels Ferré decisively rejects (The Christian Understanding of God, pp. 217 ff.). As we reflect upon the views of these contemporary theologians, we cannot suppress the following questions: Does God’s retributive righteousness and particularly God’s wrath really come into its own in the views of these men? Or do we have here a repetition of the liberal subordination of the wrath of God to his love? Does not this contemporary treatment of God’s wrath rob the Gospel message of its deepest earnestness? Does it do justice to the teaching of our Lord, who spoke some of the sternest words about the wrath of God?

Volitional Attributes. Coming finally to the volitional attributes, we distinguish between God’s sovereign will and his sovereign power. By God’s sovereign will we mean his directing of the events of the universe and of the actions of his creatures in accordance with his plan. Needless to say, this sovereign will is the final cause of all that happens (“who worketh all things after the counsel of his will,” Eph. 1:11). To suggest that things may happen which are not under the ultimate direction of God’s will is to detract from his sovereignty and thereby from his majesty.

What do we mean by God’s sovereign power, also called his omnipotence? To say that God can do all things is to open the door to all kinds of foolish questions, such as: Can God sin? Can God make a stone too heavy for himself to lift? It is better to define omnipotence as that power by virtue of which God can do whatever he wills to accomplish (see Matt. 19:26).

God’s omnipotence must not be so conceived as to leave no room for human decision, or to reduce man to the dimensions of a radio-guided missile. Divine omnipotence does not eliminate but rather establishes human freedom and responsibility. It is precisely this fact which makes the sovereignty of God so deeply mysterious that man cannot fathom it.

Bibliography: In addition to standard systematic theologies by H. Bavinck, L. Berkhof, C. Hodge, and W. G. T. Shedd, I suggest S. Charnock, The Attributes of God. References to neo-orthodox works may be found above.

Professor of Systematic Theology

Calvin Theological Seminary

Grand Rapids. Michigan

I SAY IT NOW

In one sense this is a “last will and testament.” In another it is a letter to old friends, acquaintances, and to thousands of others it shall never be my privilege to meet.

This is written in an effort to make up for the multiplied times I should have spoken a good word for my Lord and failed to do so.

It is written because of an impelling desire to share with others some of the blessings which God in his goodness has poured out on me through His Son—blessings that are current and that will last through eternity.

“But What Is the Hurry?” you ask. The hurry is that this is the most important thing I can ever say to you.

Because, in my frequent contacts with you where banter, trivialities, or idle chatter have been the usual thing, I have failed to mention the most important subject in all the world.

Although I may never have shown it as I should, I love you as a friend of long standing, or as a casual acquaintance, or as one of millions I have never met but for whom I have a genuine concern.

Where personal friends are concerned, I have so often hidden the Christ who means everything behind my own facade of pride, selfishness, and trying to “sell” myself instead of the One who is my Saviour.

And because I have done this, you have seen a sinner (saved by grace—yes, but nonetheless a sinner) who should have led you to see Him, the sinless One.

I say this now because you may at times have imagined you saw in me some measure of “goodness” when as a matter of fact that goodness was, in God’s sight, nothing but “filthy rags.” Anything which is truly good and right is the radiant goodness of my Lord which he gives to his own and for which all of the glory and honor are his own.

The prophet Isaiah speaks to the veneer of “goodness” in these words: “But we are all as an unclean thing, and our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.”

I am writing to you because in my own heart I know there have been times when I have tried to steal God’s glory and in so doing have denied and dishonored him. Our Lord has warned us about this: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16).

In our contacts we have seen each other, but I want you to see God as revealed in his Son. How fatal it is if we fail to appreciate this fact—“I am the Lord, and there is no other, beside me there is no God.”

I write this now because sooner or later I will die and then it will be too late for me to bring these things to your attention. Others may do so but I will have failed in my duty and privilege of witnessing for my Lord.

I also write this because for me there is no fear of death. I know that through the love, mercy, and grace of Christ who died for my sins, cleansing me by his life’s blood, and rising again from the dead for my justification, I am thereby saved to live with him for all eternity.

The Bible is full of words of promise and assurance, none more familiar than the words of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” I know I am included in the “whosoever,” that I believe in him and that as a result I have eternal life.

And I write this because I want you to have this same hope, peace, and assurance in your heart, and you may have these through a simple act of faith—accepting what Christ has done for you.

God’s way of salvation is so vital to know.

For all men—yes, you too—are sinners in the sight of God, sinners by birth, by choice, and by practice. The fact that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23) is just as inclusive and real as is God’s offer of forgiveness and salvation to all who will believe.

Again, whether you or I like the idea or not, the consequences of sin are death—eternal death with separation from God—because God is holiness personified and it is impossible for anything sinful to come into his presence. “The wages of sin is death,” and these wages are always paid.

But there is a glorious alternative to death, and that is eternal life. The same Bible verse which tells us that the wages of sin is death goes on to say, “but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).

This alternative, eternal life instead of eternal death is based upon the love of God. He knows our sinfulness and its consequences, and he did something about it (John 3:16).

Fortunately for us, God has not told us to do something to save ourselves; he has told us to believe what he has done for us. “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us,” and, “by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God,” remind us that salvation is not a matter of human merit but of humble believing.

The Apostle Paul and his companion were asked by the frightened Philippian jailor, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And their answer was not that he should go out and start leading a good life, important as moral rectitude is. Rather their reply to him was, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.”

How was this accomplished? When Christ the eternal Son of God died on the Cross, he made a perfect atonement for sin. The holiness, righteousness, justice, love, and mercy of God were vindicated and revealed. We cannot explain all that took place, nor can we understand all of its implications; but this we can know and believe—Christ died for our sins, in our place, and opened the way for us into God’s holy presence. If only the death of the Son of God could solve the sin problem, how great then was that problem!

All of this is background for my telling you the effect of knowing Christ as my Saviour.

I have peace in my heart—peace with God and the peace of God.

Fear of death is gone for death will be nothing but a transition into his glorious presence.

Faith in Christ brings assurance, confidence and hope. In my soul there is the witness that it is true. With the Apostle Paul I can say, “For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day” (2 Tim. 1:12).

And finally, because of this assurance of my Saviour in my heart, I am no longer worried about the contingencies of life. I know that Romans 8:28 is true: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.”

L. NELSON BELL

EARS TO HEAR

Your magazine’s interest in evangelical preaching is most commendable, but when are you going to have a series on evangelical listening? For a starter you might ask each of your chosen preachers to select his most effective listener (not counting his wife). Those outstanding evangelical listeners might then write up last Sunday’s sermon as they heard it, or, better yet, tell us what they did about it.

Preaching may have fallen on evil days, but it is semi-millennial when compared to listening. Why are there no audiophiles at sermon time? Churches are wired for sound, but so are the listeners: they have an ingenious short-circuit that channels the word in one ear and out the other. To evaluate the G.H.Q. (genuine hearing quotient) in your church, ask your preacher to apply the Eutychus Test. This is done by inserting smoothly in the sermon three test phrases such as “Beware the jabber-wock, my friends.” Posted observers then number the heads or eyebrows that come up. (This test may be inconclusive if the observers miss the key words.)

This problem concerns me. I have never fallen from a window sill in church, but it’s been a near thing from many a pew. What will help me to wake up and listen? Should the preacher punctuate his points with the ringing of a liturgical bell? Could I sip unobtrusively from a thermos of coffee?

At Pastor Peterson’s suggestion, I am now reading Are You Listening? by Ralph Nichols and Leonard Stevens. This book is for men only. It quotes damaging statistics to show that 95 out of 100 men are better listeners than women and that grown-ups listen less than children. It also explains that, since we think faster than anyone can talk, one real problem in listening is what to do with our spare time. You can’t slow the hare of thought to the tortoise-pace of speech. But good listeners keep the hare awake, out of the woods, and in the race by making sprints of anticipation, review, and reflective encirclement.

The pastor says that we are hard of hearing in church because we are hard of heart. There is no hearing aid to substitute for the Holy Spirit. But he also warns that hearing takes work as well as prayer. No activity is more profitable for that hare-brain than running circles of reflection, soul-searching, and praise around a biblical sermon.

EUTYCHUS

CATACLYSM IMPENDING

I FEEL THAT WE CHURCHMEN ARE FACING A DILEMMA. IF WE CHRISTIANS CONTINUE TO IGNORE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS AND THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT THE UNITED STATES MAY SUFFER FROM A SOCIAL REVOLUTION BACKED BY RUSSIANS.… ON THE OTHER HAND IF WE FOLLOW JESUS’ TEACHINGS THE GREAT MAJORITY OF US BUSINESSMEN TOGETHER WITH THOSE LIVING ON DIVIDENDS AND INTEREST WOULD BE FORCED TO A LOW STANDARD OF LIVING. EVERY 250 YEARS THERE HAS COME A PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT WHEN THOSE WHO HAVE ARE FORCED TO GIVE UP SOME OF OUR SPECIAL PRIVILEGES TO THOSE WHO HAVE NONE. I FEEL THAT WE ARE NOW APPROACHING ONE OF THESE GREAT SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS.

ROGER W. BABSON

LAKE WALES, FLA.

• Distinguished economist Roger W. Babson seems to us right in pronouncing the Christian ethic (vitalized by spiritual regeneration, we would stress) the only real alternative to the Russian revolution. What Christianity needs is more than ecumenical consolidation-in-retreat; it needs a spiritual counteroffensive alive with the supernatural initiative and spontaneous virtue of the apostolic age. Victims of Communism’s disregard of property rights, who lose their property involuntarily, some day will sense that profound judgment is now also being passed on many professing Christians. Rightly emphasizing human rights (including property rights), the Christian community tends to neglect voluntary stewardship, and gives more ground to secular materialism than to Christ and his cause.

—ED.

CHRISTIAN HEALING

I have read William Henry Anderson’s article, “Sacramental Healing” (January 30 issue) and am convinced that Dr. Anderson “has a bear by the tail.” However I am of the opinion that his idea has marvelous promise.

REX D. KELLY

The Methodist Church

Basehor, Kans.

The statement that “Some ministers of the Episcopal Church … have adopted anointing …” is inaccurate in that ministers is a generic term including deacons, who are clergy but who are not privileged to administer this sacrament. Only bishops or priests may anoint. Second, to state that some have adopted this practice is misleading since it is not a question of individual clergy adopting the practice, but rather administering what is provided in the Book of Common Prayer.

CHARLES I. KRATZ, JR.

St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church

Baltimore, Md.

That this constitutes a “substitute for the Roman sacrament of unction” is quite in error. The Roman sacrament is termed extreme unction. Rather than a ministry for healing, it is a rite for those in immediate danger of death. You will note that this is not the spirit in which St. James commends the practice. Further you observe that this is “faith healing.” In part this is true. The efficacy of this rite is not solely dependent on the recipients’ faith: otherwise we should not require the attendance of presbyters, vocal prayer, oil, or laying on of hands. The very performance of the rite is calculated to strengthen faith.

EDMUND W. OLIFIERS, JR.

St. Boniface’s Episcopal Church

Lindenhurst, N. Y.

We do not see today, as far as I can find out, any healings such as our Lord carried out in the days of His flesh.

ARTHUR C. HILL, M.D.

Sherbrooke, Que.

STRIKES AT THE CORE

Of especial value is your editorial “The Predicament of Modern Theology” (Jan. 16 issue) which strikes at the core of the problem of modern liberalism.

J. THEODORE MUELLER

Concordia Seminary

St. Louis, Mo.

Your editorial … states that Protestantism must return to Christ and Scripture. Yet your insert on the following page says: “The invisible God truly became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth,” although scripture everywhere states plainly that: “No man has seen God at any time; [the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him].”

E. A. GOODE

Vancouver, British Columbia

Is it not possible that some varying theological viewpoints may have some merit, and enter into a meaningful dialogue with them?

EUGENE H. TENNIS

First Presbyterian

Hector, N. Y.

Only the Episcopate speaking the mind of the whole Church through ecumenical council will preserve the wholeness of the Faith once delivered to the Saints and save us from the “sad predicament of modern theology” which you have so ably depicted.

T. A. HEERS

St. James Church

Texarkana, Tex.

I felt a lift for the convictions that are based on God’s Word.…

Unity is good. We are unified if we proclaim the incarnate Word from the inscriptured Word. I belong to a denomination that has gone head over heels for ecumenicity. We may as well say we have been absorbed by the Methodists. It’s not formal, but it’s so cut and dried that it’s negativism in our ranks to talk against it. A few young ministers of the E. U. B. church, educated in a seminary that left the faith years ago, were warned that to be negative about everything (everything means Methodist merger and the National Council of Churches) will be dangerous—and by no less than one of our Bishops. But is it negative to obey God rather than men?… I believe that our basis for union is in honoring Christ with a more evangelical message to this lost world, but all I see is merger merely to attain status. We are told the benefits are better pensions, bigger churches, but as well, and this they won’t tell us, there are more ecclesiastical powers to which to bow.

CLIFFORD M. BERGLAND

Evangelical United Brethren Church

Revillo, S. Dak.

REJOINDER TO REJOINDER

Walter F. Martin (Dec. 19 issue) stated that the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church came “in the wake of the Millerite Movement,” and added: “When [William] Miller’s calculation [as to the end of the world] was proved false, after a second guess, October 22, 1844, he manfully admitted his error and dissociated himself from the movement.” The context makes clear that the Millerite Movement, of course, is meant. From this Martin goes on to discuss SDA’s. You published (Jan. 30 issue) my documented letter that revealed that Miller did not dissociate himself from “the movement,” with all the unfavorable implications for SDA’s that obviously reside in the claimed dissociation.

To my letter you appended Martin’s reply. He begins: “F. D. Nichol attempts to evade the issue under discussion, namely William Miller’s repudiation of the ‘new’ views of those who became the founders of the Seventh-day Adventists.” But the “issue” discussed by Martin in the opening paragraphs of his Dec. 19 article, was Miller’s alleged dissociation from “the movement.” Let us stay by the point I raised. Why evade it? Martin irrelevantly quotes LeRoy E. Froom, SDA writer of standing, as though Froom were with him on this item of Miller versus SDA teachings, and against me. But see Froom’s comment below.

SDA writers have always said that Miller opposed our distinctive theology. There is therefore no “issue” here for me to attempt to “evade.” I stated that I was confining my comments to a “grievous historical error,” namely, that Miller “dissociated himself from the [Millerite] Movement.” In addition to the historical evidence I presented … let me add: All church historians agree that the true continuation of the Millerite Movement, after Oct. 22, 1844, consisted of those who subscribed to the Albany Conference, convened April 29, 1845, which the principle Millerite leaders attended. To the views of this Conference, with its appeal to unity, Miller heartily subscribed, and died in 1849 within the circle of the Movement. Not Miller, but those who were soon to become founders of the SDA Church, “dissociated” from the Movement after Oct. 22, 1844. They were not even present at the Albany Conference.

Naturally I take exception to the charge of evasion—anyone would. But why should I be charged with evading “the issue” … when I addressed myself directly to the very first issue he created in his article, and stated the reason why I confined myself to it? It’s a bit startling to be charged at this late date with evading something no Adventist writer has ever even desired to evade, Miller’s relation to SDA’s. Did Miller, or did he not, dissociate himself from the Millerite Movement? There seems to be evasion on this point, but not by me!

F. D. NICHOL

Editor

Review and Herald

Takoma Park, D. C.

To the foregoing by F. D. Nichol I subscribe unqualifiedly. I can not understand why Mr. Martin seeks to set me against Mr. Nichol—thus attempting to create an “issue” that has no foundation in fact. Nichol and I are in complete agreement.

LEROY E. FROOM

Takoma Park, D. C.

TO STRETCH THE SINEWS

I have received CHRISTIANITY TODAY for several years, and my interest in it increases each issue. You are to be commended for attempting to stretch the sinews and tissues of your readers’ minds with the series on Basic Christian Doctrines.

JOHN LEWIS GILMORE

Miner Congregational Church

Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

I believe your efforts will provide one of the important links in the revival of orthodoxy among American Protestants.

DONALD D. HEACOCK

Chaplain

USAF

Hampton, Va.

NEW ERA FOR THE BRAVE

Recently while at lunch with an old seminary classmate of mine, Soff O. Klees, our minds turned to things past and present, such as who would take care of the tip. Talk turned to another classmate, R. Garland Chatham, whom we knew as Rufe, now second vice-president in charge of program in his organization, with office located in the new church bureau building in upper Manhattan.

Klees, an astute observer, told of his recent visit with Chatham and because it bears somewhat on current religious topics I shall try to repeat the whole incident.

After finding his way to Chatham’s inner office and after the usual greetings, talk turned most naturally to the recent proposals for church mergers, which, incidentally might affect Chatham most intimately. I shall let Klees take over as Chatham replies:

“These proposals, coming from such church statesmen, cannot be ignored. On the other hand, there are some very important factors.…”

I interrupted. “What do you think of Dr. Ryke’s proposal for bishops in the new setup? Even with his suggestion that their annuity payments after retirement be based on the salaries of the lowest paid ten percent of the clergy?”

“The suggestion reminds me of the original meaning of the word bishop—servant, or was it inspector? It’s asking a lot of a man to cut his annuity funds into one-quarter of what they were. But if you only knew a few of the bishops as I do, you wouldn’t be surprised to know that Dr. Ryke’s proposal on this point actually came from them.”

“This isn’t for quotation, Rufe, but is it true that in the new proposed setup all the denominational brass now holding office would resign and take rural pastorates and foreign mission posts so that the new church could start off with a clean slate minus any juggling or jealousy? This is just a rumor. Or is it?”

Rufe took a long look through the huge window overlooking the Hudson. He replied. “Yes, it is true, Soff, but it’s not for release yet. I’m glad you mentioned it. And it just goes to show what men will do when they are on fire for something. In a way it reminds me of the early church, the first century Christians. What’s that verse—in honor preferring one another?”

“You don’t have to answer this one, Rufe, but in the new united church is it really true that there are plans for a single, sliding salary scale for pastors, with all salary checks mailed monthly from headquarters?”

Rufe glanced about for hidden mikes. Not for nothing have New York reporters been called the most aggressive in the world. He cleared his throat.

“I can tell you this, Soff, but don’t quote me. In fact, don’t mention it outside this room. Yes, it is true. And it indicates to me, at least, the quality of men we have in our larger churches. There will be no such thing as ‘local salaries’ any more. All monies previously paid out for this purpose will be sent by local church treasurers to headquarters, along with funeral, wedding, and other pastoral fees. Royalties from articles and books will be sent in by the pastor himself. Then the whole pie will be divided by a certain formula—living costs in the various areas, number of children, children in college, and so forth. In other words, the same kind of arrangement, more or less, that our foreign missionaries have worked under for more than a hundred years, and you can’t say there’s a more dedicated group in the world. Best of all, the suggestion for this plan came in a petition from some of the better paid men right here in the metropolitan area.”

“I don’t get it, Rufe, robbing the rich to pay the poor, or in some cases, robbing the industrious to reward the lazy.”

“Not at all, Soff. It might, on the other hand, be called a belated, two thousand years belated, attempt to practice the New Testament aim of sharing equally.”

“Still, when a man’s worked hard, and all.…”

“So what? Don’t most ministers work hard? And you know yourself that nobody has a harder job than the pastor of a four point charge out in Podunk Center.”

He had me there.

“True, but just one more thing.…”

Rufe’s ever so sly glance at his desk clock indicated another appointment coming up. “What’s that, Soff?”

“I just can’t go for one feature of the Ryke’s proposal. I understand that in the new structure no man will be in an executive position of any kind, presbytery, conference, diocese, or national office, for more than six years. It seems like an awful waste—just as a man’s getting oriented, so to speak, and really effective in his job, to shove him out again on his own—bishops, superintendents, and all.”

“Waste? Not at all. On the contrary, it’s saving our best men for longer service. Soff, nobody knows the strain some of these guys are under. Their work puts them through the wringer. Nobody will welcome the change more than they will. As a matter of fact, and you can quote me on this—this suggestion came from a self-appointed committee of bishops and superintendents who call themselves ‘Longer Life for Connectional Workers, Inc.’ You can imagine the rumpus this thing will cause when it hits the floor—the idea of the church’s most valuable men actually being shoved back into the pastorate. Yet, I think these fellows will push it through. They’re determined. But you ought to hear of some of the other proposals.”

“Radical?”

“That’s not the word. Way out, man, way out. But they’ll be released within a short time.” He glanced at his watch.

“I’ve got to go, Rufe.” We parted.

Here Soff stopped.

As we went out the front door of the restaurant much of my previous reservation about current ecumenical proposals seemed almost irrelevant. Plans like these do give one hope and should be shared. Which proves that things will be different when men want them to be. The Church’s future looks brighter to me now.

GRAHAM R. HODGES

Emmanuel Congregational Church

Watertown, N. Y.

Mark 1:1–3, 14–15

The Preacher:

Since 1953, when he completed doctoral studies there, Wayne E. Ward has been Associate Professor of Theology in Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville. Born in Piggott, Arkansas, in 1921, he was licensed to preach in 1941 and ordained the following year. From 1943–46, as air navigator with the United States Air Transport Service, Lt. (j.g.), he flew hospital and air rescue planes in the Pacific Area from the West Coast through Hawaii and Guam to Japan. He holds the A.B. degree from Ouachita College and the B.D. and Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas.

The Text:

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger before my face, who shall prepare thy way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight—”.…

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”

(RSV).

The Comment:

The homiletician nominating Dr. Ward’s sermon as representative of Southern Baptist preaching is Dr. H. C. Brown Jr., of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, whose evaluative comment appears on page 15 of this issue.

That’s what I call really preaching the Gospel!” Amid such comments and a chorus of “Amens,” a renowned preacher concluded a conference address and had taken his seat. His eloquent and forceful attack upon sin in high places and low was, doubtless, a much needed and effective indictment of wrongdoing, and was, for the most part, true to the facts. Yet, though it was received as a glowing example of gospel preaching, it never touched one tiny note of the Gospel! How can men who are “called to preach the Gospel” be so careless about what the Gospel is? Surely our time would be well spent if we went back to the “beginning of the Gospel” and learned something about it from the One who brought it to us.

One of the most beautiful words in the English language is the word “gospel.” It comes from an Anglo-Saxon root meaning “God’s story” and serves as an effective translation of the New Testament word for “good news”—the good news of the saving work of God which culminated in the cross and resurrection of Christ. From the Greek word for “gospel” we get the words “evangel” and “evangelist,” terms which denote the thrilling story of God’s redemptive love, in which he took upon himself our humanity and bore our sins on Calvary’s Cross. Many Christians refer to themselves as “evangelicals,” because they consider it their highest calling to proclaim to a lost world the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Yet, as often happens, a word that is so well known is almost never really understood. Its very familiarity breeds careless ignorance of its meaning. Could anything be more unfortunate than the loss or impairment of the true meaning of the greatest news in all human history, simply because it was buried under a commonplace term? Would not this indeed violate the commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” (Exod. 20:7)? If God’s act in Jesus Christ is the greatest event in all history, if we rightly divide our calendar in such a way as to make this the central point in time, it should be worth spending the time necessary to strip away the crust of the commonplace and seek to penetrate the inner meaning of the Christ-event. What is the Gospel by which Christians have always lived?

INCARNATION

The heart of the Gospel is found in a straw-filled manger. The Gospel is the good news that a baby was born in Bethlehem long ago. Perhaps someone is saying, “News, indeed! We have heard this all our lives; we sing about that old story every Christmas.” Yet, this is the most earth-shaking, incredible news that has ever come to the ears of men; and it is always news. Earth has certainly had one “visitor from outer space.” But we have heard it until we no longer listen to its meaning. We are so sure we know this story that we do not ask what God is trying to say to us. If once this good news could break in upon us as it did upon the shepherds, if once the angel song could come down out of the Christmas sky and strike the lost chord in our hearts, its message would overwhelm us. What does the coming of this baby mean? It means no less than this: that the living God who made this universe, who put the stars in their places, who “pushed the mountains up and hollowed the valleys out” (from “Creation” in James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones), who made your life and holds it in his hand—this living God came down to earth, took upon himself human flesh, cradled by the lowly Virgin of Galilee, became bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Forevermore, lost humanity can hear the most glorious news which ever reached earth’s ears: Our God has come to us, to live with us, to share our human plight, to fight our tempter, to bear with us our burdens. He is not far away, a God transcendent, untouchable! He has drawn near in Jesus Christ for “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).

This is the most overwhelming good news lost sinners ever heard. We do not walk this rocky road alone; there are the footprints of Jesus, going on before, men of every religion, and men of no religion, are, in the depths of their being, waiting for this gospel word.

One small group of Christians will never forget the earnest young Moslem guide who displayed the glories of the Citadel of Saladin in Cairo, Egypt, and revealed a justifiable pride in the simple beauty of the ancient mosques. On every side were helpless supplicants, calling upon a God who was always far away, who could never be “touched with a feeling of their infirmities.” Allah was the unmoved, distant deity—Mohammed, his somewhat unaccountable prophet. But the young Moslem beamed, “We all seek the same God. You Christians may call him God; we call him Allah. You follow his prophet Jesus, we follow his prophet Mohammed. Does it not all come to the same thing?” But one Christian in that group could not let this pass unchallenged: “No, Abou, you have misunderstood us Christians; we do not follow Jesus simply as a prophet. We believe Allah himself came down! We believe God came to this earth as a man among men: He lived, he died, he rose again—and Jesus of Nazareth is his name!” To this devout Moslem it was blasphemy. “Allah come down?” What sacrilege! And yet this wonder-working message wrestled with his mind and heart. What a glorious, incredible thought! Because man could not climb the long road to a holy God in a far-away heaven, the God of love came down to man. In such a gracious act there was hope—even for the guilty sinner. Later that evening Abou came to say, “Yes, Professor, I have checked on you. Other Christians do believe what you said. It is surely the most wonderful thought that ever came to me. If only it could be true!”

With what soul-searching wonder this devout Moslem heard the thrilling news of the Incarnation, for the first time; with what carelessness some Christians leave this good news untold, unsung, unheard.

ATONEMENT

Furthermore, the Gospel is the good news that on the hill called Calvary, God was in Christ pouring out his life for the sins of the world. He bore our sins in his own body on the old rugged cross. How can sinful men be unmoved by such news as this? Estranged from God, rebellious in sin, men would not come in order that they might have life. But God came to men, and he who knew no sin was “made to be sin” for us. We like sheep had strayed from the fold of God, but the Good Shepherd came out into the wilderness of sin and gave his life for the sheep. At the crossroads of the world stands Calvary. It represents the highest point of man’s prideful rebellion, because God, in coming to man in righteous love, was by man rejected, beaten, and pilloried there. The Cross marks also the depth of the divine humiliation: To this unthinkable shame he would come, in the love that would not let men go. Who can stand before this Cross unmoved or feel self-righteous in this place?

When I survey the wondrous cross,

On which the Prince of Glory died;

My richest gain I count but loss

And pour contempt on all my pride!

In one of the great Southern cities, an all-Negro cast of players once enacted its own free version of “Green Pastures.” To some Christians sitting there, the careless language and the unorthodox portrayals, such as “de Lawd” with the long black “seegar” puffing smoke rings around his head, bordered on the sacrilegious. But near the last scene of the play, a bolt of heavenly light broke through. The Lord was sitting on his great white throne, high and lifted up. Before him marched a blustering angel, up and down the golden balcony of heaven; in his hands was a silver trumpet with a golden bell! Now and then, impatient Gabriel would lean far out over the golden balustrade pleading, “Lawd, let me blow this here trumpet! Look at them poor, mizzable sinners, a-fightin’, and a-killin’—Lawd, they’s in an awful shape. Let me blow one toot on this born and wind up the whole shebang.” But the Lord protested, “Hold on, Gabriel: de Lawd am thinkin.’ Do you reckon all that suffering down there might jus’ mean de Lawd himself gotta get down there an’ suffer, too?” In shocked disbelief Gabriel remonstrates, “Lawd, you suffer? Why, Lawd, you ain’t no mizzable sinner; you is the King of the whole creation.”

And then it happened! Blinding streaks of lightning flashed, and thunder rolled across the scene. Slowly darkness fell over the shuddering earth. Far in the distance “the shadow of a cross arose, upon a lonely hill.” Above the muffled roaring of a crowd and the whistling of the wind came one piercing woman’s cry: “Oh, Lawdy, look at ’em! Look at ’em nail him to dat cross!” Back to the center of the scene came one light to play upon the face of “de Lawd” upon the throne. Gone was the golden crown and, in its place—a crown of thorns! Down the agonized face came the livid streams of his own blood. His lips moved: “Yes, Gabriel, that’s jus’ what it means. It means de Lawd himself gonna suffer most of all!”

God is the greatest sufferer! God was in Christ, bearing your sins, and mine, on that old rugged cross. Did ever burdened sinners hear such news as this?

RESURRECTION

But no presentation of the Gospel would be complete without the greatest victory of all. The preaching of the early Church does not leave the Saviour on the Cross.

The supreme note of the Gospel is the glorious news that on that third morning after Calvary there was in Joseph’s garden an empty tomb! Let all heaven and earth join in this greatest song of triumph: “He is not here: He is risen!”

Every grave this world has ever seen was filled, or just about to be, with the body of a mortal—a loved one, a friend. Every pastor knows that this world is one big graveyard. As he winds his way, day by day and week by week, to the last resting place of a church member, a friend, he ponders the grim fact of suffering and death—the lot of every man, great or small. At long last, each must come to this—this grave which is so final. But the good news of Easter rings with the assurance that one grave is empty. One grave could not hold its prey! Death itself was dealt a fatal blow that Easter morning: because He lives, we shall live also. Did ever a weary and dying world hear such news as this?

The Resurrection is God’s glorious vindication of the ministry, the life and death of his Son. We know that God is truly “well-pleased” with his Son because through the Resurrection he is exalted and given the “name which is above every name.” This is the life upon which sin and death can make no claim—this is truly eternal life. Who is the man that would hesitate to give everything for such a life as this? And yet men stumble on through sin toward death—as if such news had never come. Have they never heard? Can it be that they do not understand what this news means? Are they afraid to believe it—this mind-staggering news? Do they need more proof than his insistent knock at their heart’s door, and his words “I am the way, the truth, and the life”?

Comment On The Sermon

The sermon “The Gospel of Jesus Christ” was nominated forCHRISTIANITY TODAY’SSelect Sermon Series by Dr. H. C. Brown Jr., Professor of Preaching in Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Brown’s overcomment follows:

This sermon by Dr. Wayne E. Ward is representative of Southern Baptist preaching at its best. It demonstrates a quality, tone, and spirit which Southern Baptist preachers desire to have and strive to attain.

“The Gospel of Jesus Christ” possesses deep evangelical loyalties. It is the story of a miraculous birth, a tragic Friday afternoon, a gloomy Sabbath, and a glorious Sunday morning. Certainly this theme is one of the centralities. As the late W. E. Sangster reminds us, the preacher who would have power in preaching must deal with the vital themes of our faith. This sermon does. The message will indeed “make a difference” to the one who hears. It is the “good news.”

The message has heart power. It is warm in spirit, dynamic in impact, and forceful in meaning. It meets the people’s constant demand that the minister preach with feeling, with unction, with warmth—with heart power. Although the best sermon is often flat and insipid when reduced to black marks on a barren piece of white paper, this is not true of “The Gospel of Jesus Christ.” The warmth of the written message is evident in spite of the fact that paper is usually a “poor conductor” of thought and feeling.

Moreover, this message demonstrates a reverent respect for Scripture. While not an expository sermon in the usual meaning of the term, it is a biblical sermon. Its spirit, outlook, perspective, and theme are biblical. The text and the Scriptures used for supportive and illustrative material are accurately used.

Again, this message has burning relevance to our day. The theme is theologically current and homiletically and evangelistically practical. The sermon expresses both the theological and the practical with valid intellectual coloring.

Again, this message is honest. No exaggerated claim, no false perspective, no hyper-emotional outburst, no easy plan of salvation, and no irrelevant theological discussion are made. The presentation is fair, balanced, and objective.

Finally, the message demonstrates effective homiletical style. It scores high on the three stem tests of good style: clarity, attractiveness, and force. It is well written, well illustrated, and well documented. It is a sermon, not a lecture. It has oratorical qualities appropriate for the pulpit without sacrificing didactic content and qualities. In short, it is a true sermon.

Upon first glance at the subject and major divisions, one feels: “I have read all this before.” Wait! Read on! Yes, you have heard all this before, but not exactly like this. Notice the fresh way in which the sentences are written. Notice how aptly the illustrations illuminate thought. Notice how warm is the feeling of the preacher. Notice how your heart bums “to tell” others about the Gospel—the “good news” about Jesus Christ!

H.C.B.

When a young couple moved into an old tenant house on my church field, I went to invite them to church. In answer to my knock, as little feet came running toward the door, the mother called out from the kitchen, “Jimmy, come back from that door! Don’t you touch that door!” Not often do I pray for little boys to disobey their parents, but this morning I slipped. I found myself praying, “Lord, let this boy open this door; I need to talk to these people. They need Jesus, and they need the church.” I was counting on the prayer, and a little boy’s curiosity, and, sure enough, in a flash he grabbed the door and swung it open.

“Hi, Mister,” he said, with a smile that would melt an iceberg.

“Hi, Jimmy,” I responded to his expansive greeting. “I’m the Baptist preacher at the red-brick church up the road. We want you to come with the other boys and girls and hear stories and sing songs about Jesus.”

“You’re the what?”

“I’m the preacher.” Imagine my shock when he turned around abruptly and called back to the kitchen, “Mommy, what’s a preacher? There’s one at the door.”

Mommy and Daddy never came. But five-year-old Jimmy was there almost every Sunday that fall—and always smiling. The Sunday before Christmas he did not come. Two days before Christmas, about five o’clock in the morning, the phone rang: “Hurry, preacher, to the hospital!” There I found (in the oxygen tent) Jimmy, slipping away. Before it was discovered, pneumonia had done its deadly work. And the doctor was lamenting, “If only you had brought him a little sooner.”

There was snow on the hillsides that Christmas Eve as we laid the little body to rest. When we returned to that humble home, I remember seeing the calendar behind the kitchen stove with the red letters “Dec. 25th,” mocking the box of toys in the corner—toys which Santa had already brought for a little boy who would not be there to play with them. Have you ever gone home with such hopeless sorrow as this? I knew that Christmas could not come to that home, that year. But would it ever come? I knelt on the kitchen floor and prayed about the babe of Bethlehem.

It was the month of April when, one Sunday, the father and mother came down the aisle to give their lives to the risen Lord! By their request I baptized them in a river—in a beautiful setting of trees and sparkling cold water. Their baptism witnessed to their faith in the crucified, buried, and risen Saviour. We came back to kneel by a little grave now turning green in the springtime and thanked God for the Resurrection!

This is the Gospel: a Manger, a Cross, and an Empty Tomb! God’s good news! How can we rest until we have told this glorious news to every person on earth?

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.