Those who wish to be abreast of what is happening in the Roman Catholic church today could hardly do better than turn to a book recently published by Macmillan titled Modern Catholicism, by Walther von Loewenich. The author, a member of the German Lutheran Church, is professor of church history at Erlangen University. His is an authoritative work, written with admirable clarity and organization, and showing him to be thoroughly versed in the movements and documents which go to make up the contemporary Roman Catholic scene. He achieves with distinction his aim “to combine sympathetic understanding with critical acumen.”

“Modern Catholicism” is defined by Professor von Loewenich as meaning “Catholicism since the first world war”; but he rightly takes us back to the sixteenth century Council of Trent as the starting point for its study. In the current debate it must not be forgotten that the edicts and anathemas of that Council against the doctrines of the Reformation have never been rescinded. By the nineteenth century an important milestone is reached in the promulgation by Pope Pius IX in 1864 of the Syllabus Errorum, “Ultramontanism’s most impressive document, a study of which is indispensable for the understanding of Catholicism today.” The intransigence of its condemnation of “indifferentism” shows that the papacy is “opposed at every turn to liberty of worship and freedom of the press.”

This was followed by the momentous event at the close of 1869 of the summoning by the same Pope of the Vatican Council, at which, during the following year, the dogma of the Infallibility of the Pope was proclaimed. As Dr. von Loewenich pointedly observes, “since 18 July 1870 the Church of Rome has never held a general council. There is no need for one.” The Vatican Council “represents the final victory of papalism within the Church of Rome,” and a lamentable result of its decrees is that “the gulf between the Churches has been immeasurably widened.”

In discussing the question of the sources of Catholic truth, Dr. von Loewenich aptly points out that “in practice the equating of Scripture to tradition results in the subordination of the former to the latter.” The correctness of this observation could not be more plainly attested than in the promulgation by Pope Pius XII on 1 November 1950 of the new dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, for it is acknowledged even in Roman circles that scriptural proof in favor of this dogma cannot be found. Furthermore, as is the case also with other doctrinal definitions from the papal throne, the evidence of tradition is neither unequivocal nor primitive. But an infallible church (and now an infallible pope) can decree pretty much what suits the mood of the moment without being overscrupulous about the evidence of Scripture and tradition. The authoritarian church “has given itself an absolute status. So far from standing under the truth, it controls it, and in so doing advances the further claim of infallibility.” This means, moreover, that “the Catholic idea of the Church excludes all possibility of reformation.”

Professor Loewenich points, however, to “two movements which can be regarded as positive signs of vitality and devotion in modern Catholicism.” These are the biblical and liturgical movements. There are indications, on the one hand, of a desire to turn to the Bible once more and of an increasing (though officially guarded) availability of the Scriptures in the languages of the people, and, on the other hand, of a demand for forms of worship which are more congregational and more suited to the conditions of modern life, such as the celebration of Mass in the evening and in the vernacular tongue, the substitution of tables for altars, and a new emphasis on hymn singing. But the liturgical movement was rebuffed by Pius XII’s encyclical, Mediator Dei, of November 1947, by which its liberty was drastically restricted. The Church was not to be turned into “an experimental laboratory.”

Two other movements which have come up against the restraining hand of authoritarianism are the so-called “New Theology,” representing a determined attempt to break away from the shackles of medievalism, and the “priest-worker” movement, which was an imaginative approach to the problem of reaching the unchurched masses of the world of industry. The former has been narrowly confined and the latter surely halted.

In the modern era of Roman Catholicism nothing has been more notorious than the advancement of the cult of the Virgin Mary, bolstered by the extravagant dogmas of 1854 and 1950, the popular pilgrimages to places like Lourdes and Fatima, and the utterances of contemporary popes which have assigned her a place and a function not inferior to that of Deity. It requires no flight of fancy to predict that in the foreseeable future a further dogma defining the Co-Redemptorship of Mary with Christ may be expected. This whole trend is not only unscriptural and irrational but also uncatholic, and there are many in the Church of Rome who are deeply disturbed by it. Indeed, Dr. von Loewenich asserts that “a devastating picture could be drawn of the searchings of heart now going on among catholics.”

“We are convinced,” he says, “that the Catholic Church is not only out of touch with the modern world, especially in the concern for truth, but has actually fallen away from the Gospel itself.” At the same time, the fact that there is evidence of genuine unrest within the hearts of many and yearnings for something better, not least among the intellectual leaders, represents an opportunity for Protestant witness.

I venture to advise that Reformed theologian Dr. G. C. Berkouwer’s excellent work The Conflict with Rome should be studied in conjunction with this book by Church historian Dr. W. von Loewenich. Theological strength will he added to historical acumen.

Romanist View Of Redemption

Redemption Through the Blood of Jesus, by Gaspar Lefebvre, O.S.B. (The Newman Press, 1960, 233 pp., $4), is reviewed by Emile Cailliet, Stuart Professor of Christian Philosophy Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Only with a sense of awe fraught with an inward shuddering may a reviewer attempt to evaluate a book written under the above title. The physical presentation of the volume immediately suggests a work of love. The scarlet and gold binding, the quality of the paper, the fine ancestry of the linotype face in which the text is set, convey the preciousness of the matter at hand. The opening pages confirm that first impression as the Benedictine author approaches his subject through liturgy. The reader is reminded that the liturgical cycle centers around the Eucharistic sacrifice, thus establishing the entire life of the faithful as a Calvary-centered life. Ample quotations from the Roman Breviary invite participation in the sensible symbols of the hidden realities pointed to by the anniversaries of the liturgical year. The very words of patriarchs, prophets, and New Testament witnesses are put on the lips of worshipers. To open Dom Lefebvre’s book is to be led into the sanctuary, to be ultimately confronted by the Holy of Holies where the Crucified One of Calvary is offered on the altar in a sacramental way. The meaning therein invited is that the Redemption can be viewed in two ways: objectively it is the realization of man’s salvation by the Father through the Son without any participation on our part; subjectively, it is the application of the objective redemption to our souls through the mediation of the Church. It is noteworthy that there is no controversy whatsoever in these pages.

Although the author’s purpose is to inspire rather than to convince, the whole structure of this well-articulated work is grounded in a tradition guarded and fostered by the teaching authority of the Church Fathers, the Councils, and the Popes. What we have here is a masterly introduction to the Roman doctrine of redemption within the larger context of the divine economy of salvation. Dom Lefebvre is obviously aware of the fact that only he who is theologically informed can be truly devotional, and this persuasion is shared by Edward A. Maziarz, C.PP.S., if we may judge from his flawless translation from the original French.

What then does a Roman Catholic mean when he asserts that the various aspects of the Redemption obtain on both the Cross of Calvary and the Eucharistic altar? Essentially this: The redemptive work accomplished on the Cross for man’s salvation is continued on the altar. A re-presentation of Calvary, the Mass stands for the fact that what the Redeemer did there and then, He is still doing through the mediation of the Apostolic Church here and now—namely, shedding his Blood, the Blood of the New Covenant, as material ransom, as a sacrifice for sins, as instrument of atonement for us men and for our salvation. Hence the great importance of devotion to the Precious Blood. Although the expression “precious blood” is only used once in Scripture (1 Pet. 1:19), its equivalent and clarification is found in 1 Corinthians 6:20, “You have been bought at a great price.” The word “precious” then indicates the incommensurable price of our redemption. It is carefully pointed out that while the blood of Jesus constitutes the price of our salvation, it is not its source. The source of its redemptive value is God. It is God alone who saves us.

The reason I have devoted so much of the space allocated to me to an objective presentation of this reverent and well-documented book, is that it gives our readers a unique opportunity to familiarize themselves with the Roman Catholic view of redemption at its best. In so doing, they are likely to feel ill at ease, more perhaps with reference to the context than to the text. The truly “Roman” language of the Catholic hierarchy will give them the impression of a climate forever foreign to them as they read, for example, that the Sacred Congregation of Rites has “improved upon” the scriptural phrase, “precious blood,” by the use of the superlative as it instituted the Mass and Office of the Most Precious Blood, a feast fixed on July 1 and destined to be elevated by Pope Pius XI to the rank of “a double of the first class” (p. 151)—whatever that may mean. Again, even the beauty and relevance of many a page in Part One will hardly reconcile Protestants to a thesis presented under the general title, The Person of the Redeemer and His Helpers (italics mine), and according to which the Virgin Mary is singled out as “our Co-Redemptrix.” The author knows not only that she was preserved from original sin by the merits of the Passion of her Son, but that “this was in view of her divine maternity” (p. 22). In so doing he obviously heeds Pope Pius IX’s declaration by the bull Ineffabilis Deus, that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception “must be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.” Again he insists with Roman Catholic theologians, that only by utilizing the notions of merit and satisfaction (or reparation) can one “fully (italics mine) explain why and how the sacrificial death of Christ redeemed us” (p. 163). “God wished His Son to become man in order that He might be the cause of our deliverance in the four ways (italics mine) which have been discussed” (p. 173). These four ways, incidentally, are those distinguished by St. Thomas (p. 171). We Protestants shrink from such final definiteness. It is our view that the saving power of the cross of Christ can hardly be reduced to theoretical concepts fully accessible to our human infirmity, and as such likely to betray the possibility of human infiltration. To us, the basic assertion that the sacrifice of Calvary is continued and made effective by its representation in the Eucharistic sacrifice, amounts to an implicit denial of the once-for-allness of the work of Christ. Not only is the evangelical element lost in the Roman Eucharistic view, but so is, by the same token, the nature, personality, and true operation of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s alter ego. On the one hand, then, we have the Roman assertion that the apostolic succession through the Popes is the medium of continuity between what Christ did two thousand years ago, and my present plight as a sinner. On the other hand stands the fact of the continued presence and ministry of the Holy Spirit—of Him who is the true Vicar of Christ, and re-presents to my soul being penitent the good news of its salvation. Between these two there is no point of contact.

Redemption Through the Blood of Jesus makes it crystal clear that the Roman tradition and the Reformed tradition are forever incompatible. Their true call is to live side by side in peace, charity, and mutual respect. In approaching the mystery of the Atonement as a loyal, devout son of his own tradition, our Benedictine brother seems to have challenged whom it may concern to go and do likewise.

EMILE CAILLIET

Church History

Early Christian Doctrines, by J. N. D. Kelly (Harper, 1958, 500 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by William C. Robinson, Professor of Historical Theology, Columbia Theological Seminary.

Principal Kelly of Oxford has placed the student of early church history greatly in his debt by this careful and judicious presentation of Early Christian Doctrines. The work covers the period from 100 to about 455. It distinguishes the thinking of the Eastern from the Western parts of the Church, and that from the period of persecution from that after Constantine. The philosophical background in Stoicism and Platonism is exceedingly useful. The work is divided in its treatment so as to present in separate chapters different themes or loci of theology. Such matters as the Church, the sacraments, and eschatology receive fuller treatment than in other texts.

If one dared to offer criticism of a work which he expects to draw heavily upon, it is that the understanding of Hennas Christology ought to be drawn more from the clear parable of the Tower than from the secondary interpretation of the parable of the vineyard, and that Tertullian’s Trinitarianism could be somewhat better understood with a richer treatment of his usage of the Fourth Gospel. The student of patristics will not be without this work.

WILLIAM C. ROBINSON

The Minister’S Handbook

The Minister and His Ministry, by Mark W. Lee (Zondcrvan, 1960, 280 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Faris D. Whitesell, Professor of Practical Theology, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Do you wish to be more efficient and up to date in the pastoral ministry? If so, you will be glad you read this book. If you are a young theological graduate beginning your first pastorate, this book will save you numerous mistakes.

Designed as “the minister’s complete handbook of professional guidance,” the professor of speech at Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington, also an experienced pastor and preacher, has assembled a vast amount of sound, sensible, solid material on all areas of ministerial life.

To the reviewer, the most helpful chapters were those on the minister in his study, on performing weddings, and on conducting funerals. These chapters are studded with specific information and valuable suggestions. The 21 chapters of the book also cover the minister’s ethics, his relation to the Master, his message, professional growth, dealing with people, handling social problems, the church board, the budget, the church building, conducting services, youth work, special problems, and books.

Professor Lee has slanted his material to pastors of all evangelical denominations, but especially to the nonliturgical groups. His discussions are comprehensive and detailed though somewhat heavy. His style is clear but lacks rhythm, warmth, and fervor. More illustrations from successful ministers would help, and perhaps a few more biblical quotations would add spice.

FARIS D. WHITESELL

Positive Proclamation

The Old Testament Speaks, by Samuel J. Schultz (Harper, 1960, 488 pp., $7), is reviewed by Clyde T. Francisco, Professor of Old Testament Interpretation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

It is refreshing to read a book written by someone who not only respects the faith of Israel but loves its Scriptures. The author clearly takes the position that the original manuscripts of the Old Testament are inerrant, if one understands that often they were written with a world view that was valid at the time of writing. Therein do the biblical writers teach truth without error. Although many scholars would not agree with such a view, and would insist that God can use an imperfect instrument to communicate his word (and man is certainly such a being), it cannot be denied that the result of Schultz’s approach is a positive proclamation of the spirit and purpose of the Old Testament.

One could wish that he had given more credence to the work of literary criticism over the last few centuries. His use of the discoveries of archaeology is extensive, but he cites the work of literary critics only to identify himself with the traditional views of authorship. He allows for no canonical writing after 400 B.C. To him Isaiah is a unity, and no discussion is given to the problem of the authorship of the Pentateuch. Conservative scholars should not fear the discoveries of biblical criticism. The essential battleground is not what human wrote a certain book but the authority of God in the message of the book, whenever it was written. To be sure, Dr. Schultz observes this in his treatment of the Book of Job, but he would do well to recognize the same truth in some of the other more controversial areas.

It appears to the reviewer that the book could profitably be used in our colleges, for it presents basic facts to the student and is carefully documented as a guide to further study. It will not undermine the reader’s faith, although it will give him little help in resolving his doubts.

CLYDE T. FRANCISCO

The Humanist Answer

Literature and Religion: A Study in Conflict, by Charles I. Glicksberg (Southern Methodist University Press, 1960, 265 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Calvin D. Linton, Professor of English Literature and Dean of Columbian College.

This is an excellent and an appalling book. Excellent, because Warsaw-born, United States-educated Dr. Glicksberg (Professor of English at Brooklyn College) writes with such perception and learning of the haunted condition of modern man, the rebel, the alien, the doomed; appalling, because the picture of despair is so pitilessly painted, and because the dubious light of an outdated humanism is the only alternative at which the author hints.

As stated in the first chapter, the purpose of the book is to study, as it appears in literature, the “dilemma of modern man … who remains alone and apart, marching without a sense of God or direction on a journey the meaning of which he cannot comprehend.”

Drawing on his deep reading and keen critical faculties, Dr. Glicksberg quietly (and somewhat repetitively, since several chapters are overlapping essays previously printed separately) presents his evidence. Sartre, Kafka, Auden, Céline, Colin Wilson, Tennessee Williams, Camus, Jeffers (to pick a handful of names at random) all come forward, with many others, to testify to the lostness of man, to the fact that “never in the history of his race have the intellectuals been so affrighted by the specter of non-being.” After viewing the evidence, Dr. Glicksberg can properly ask, “Is it any wonder that in our time writers, convulsed with fear of the great god Thanatos, have joined in the collective danse macabre?”

It does not suggest a flaw to say that the book, although flavored by humanism, presents no solution. (It is the jacket, not the book, which speaks confidently of a “reasoned humanism.”) The author’s purpose is the Arnoldian one of seeing “the object as in itself it really is.” For himself, he assumes, without argument, that “Christianity … cannot be revived as a practical measure of salvation.” Indeed, theism in any form is unacceptable: “The conception of God fails radically to fit the complex facts of modern experience, to explain why we exist, why there is a universe and not a nothing.… To rely on God and to invoke his sacred name—that is to indulge in a species of fairy-tale magic.” Naturalism has long since taught that “man stands alone and his destiny is at the mercy of time and fate and circumstance. He is a victim, not an immortal soul; a creature of earth and death, not a dweller in eternity; a biological organism doomed to extinction, not a child of God.”

It is in this environment that the writer of the twentieth century must live, and from this doomed air draw his breath. We had not thought that death had undone so many.

CALVIN D. LINTON

World Missions

A Glimpse of World Missions, by Clyde W. Taylor (Moody Press, 1960, 128 pp., $1.50), is reviewed by Harold Lindsell, Professor of Missions, Fuller Theological Seminary.

This is a quick summary and personal report on the mission fields of the world. Taylor is in the Washington office of the National Association of Evangelicals. He has traveled widely and has acquired a stock of information which is not generally available to the average reader. The book is synthetic, interpretative, and statistical. The maps which show the population figures, missionary personnel, and compare the number of workers to national populations are of great help to ministers and laymen generally. For anyone who wants a quick, popular, and fairly reliable summary this is a fine volume.

Unfortunately the book is marred by grammatical defects and poor English, as well as questionable phrases. These should have been corrected by the editors. Examples are legion: here are some: (1) “Korea has been a prime example to the world in the indigenous church development” (pp. 75, 76; (2) “… many of the Japanese are not only Buddhists but worship Shinto (??) as well” (p. 76); (3) Concluding sentence on Formosa, “They have an excellent staff to do the work” (p. 74) has no discoverable antecedent and to whom the author makes reference cannot be determined.

Despite the criticism the volume is readable, interesting, and has valuable insights and information.

HAROLD LINDSELL

Effective Commentary

The Letters to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, by William Barclay (Westminster, 1959, 253 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by Ralph A. Gwinn, Associate Professor of Religion, Knoxville College.

Thanks to Westminster Press, Dr. Barclay’s unusual combination of scholarship and popular appeal is becoming as well known in this country as in Scotland where he lectures in Trinity College of the University of Glasgow.

The introductions to each of the biblical books in the volume make exciting reading. In the introduction to the Thessalonian letters, for example, Barclay speaks of Alexander the Great’s divine sense of world mission. “He was almost the first universalist. He was more a missionary than a soldier.…” As Paul approached Macedonia for the first time, an area so impregnated with memories of Alexander, again he “must have thought, not of a country, not of a continent, but of a world for Christ.”

One of the very strong points in Barclay’s comments (the translation of the biblical text is his own, and it is good) is his explanation of Greek words used by the Apostle. Indeed, a defect of the volume is that there is no index of these terms provided for reference.

Many commentaries deal with the text from one particular point of view. Barclay combines effectively the explanation of the text and an application of the text to the reader’s life.

RALPH A. GWINN

Isaiah Speaks?

Isaiah Speaks, by S. Paul Schilling (Crowell, New York, 1958, 148 pp., $3), is reviewed by Edward J. Young, Professor of Old Testament, Westminster Theological Seminary.

The title of this popular work would seem encouraging. Modern negative criticism has so divided Isaiah’s prophecy and denied so much to him that one wonders if it is possible to hear any of his words. One scholar even tells us that we cannot obtain the original words of the prophets. Hence, when we open this book we expect to be confronted with the message of Isaiah, a prophet who lived in Judah in the eighth century before Christ.

But the title is somewhat deceptive, for not only does Isaiah speak but so do other people—a so-called second Isaiah and a third Isaiah. In other words here we have a popularization of the results of a certain type of scholarship. And that is frankly discouraging. If anything in this world is sublime and grand, it is the message of Isaiah the prophet. If anything in this world is dull and trite, it is the book of Isaiah after certain critics have finished with it. And so the little book which we are now considering misses much of the deep and rich truth of Isaiah because it has followed the teaching of a certain type of negative criticism.

Fortunately, the author does not follow consistently the “critical” principles to their logical conclusion, and consequently offers many useful and helpful comments. He writes in a pleasing style and says much of value. At important points, however, one feels that he often misses the true meaning of the prophet. One glance at his treatment of some of the Messianic prophecies proves the case. Isaiah 7:10–17 is not taken as a specific foretelling of the birth of Jesus. We are told that the Hebrew word almah is correctly given in the Revised Standard Version as “young woman.” But if Isaiah had wished to speak of a young woman, why did he not employ the common word na-arah? And we are told that there is a perfectly good Hebrew word, even bethulah, which means “virgin.” Again we must demur. Bethulah would not have been a good word to use at all. Also the wondrous titles of Isaiah 9:6 are said not to designate a “king who is himself divine, but one who, because he is endowed for his task by the Lord, is the human embodiment of God’s kingship” (p. 55). True enough, that is the interpretation of certain critics, but the prophecy calls the Child “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God.” There is no reason for departing from the true meaning of the text at this point.

The servant songs are not a prediction of Jesus Christ but “an inspired portrayal of the true meaning of the history of the covenant people” (p. 118). Nevertheless, their deepest meaning is fulfilled in Christ. At this point the author is simply following the present line of criticism which talks much about the servant passages being fulfilled in Christ yet not being direct predictions of him. But the question of the Ethiopian eunuch is still relevant: “Of whom speakest the prophet this?” (Acts 8:34). And there is only one answer. The prophet speaks of Jesus; he was uttering predictive prophecy.

There is much that is good in Schilling’s book, but the author shows no evidence of having grappled with the great problems that abound in Isaiah. He gives no evidence of having worked carefully through the great commentaries. His bibliography contains references only to “liberal” works, with the possible exception of Kissane’s commentary. This is not satisfactory. We want to hear Isaiah speak.

EDWARD J. YOUNG

On Philippians

The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians, by R. P. Martin, (Eerdmans, 1959, $3), is reviewed by Merrill C. Tenney, Dean of the Graduate School, Wheaton College (Illinois).

Compact, concise, and popular is this new addition to the Tyndale series of Bible commentaries by R. P. Martin. Beginning with an introduction to the church at Philippi, the author sketches adequately and lucidly the circumstances which led to the establishment of the church at Philippi, and traces the history of Paul’s relations with the church until the writing of his letter. Although brief, the introduction is full and clear, and its footnotes contain the references that the professional student will want for further investigation.

The body of the commentary is based on an orderly outline which is quite faithful to the text. Comments are given verse by verse, with numbered headings so that any passage can be easily located. The author is acquainted with modern theological and exegetical literature, and makes good use of it. He explains the Greek usage underlying the English translation in such a way that the reader unfamiliar with Greek can profit from his comments.

In treating Philippians 2:5–11 he suggests that the Incarnation means that Christ “could have grasped at equality with God by self-assertion, but declined to do so and embraced rather the will of God in the circumstances of the incarnation and of the cross.” This is a more satisfactory interpretation of harpagmon (2:6) than Lightfoot’s explanation of it as “a thing to be grasped” or retained. Martin is not, however, an Adoptionist in theology, for he says, “In His preexistent state Christ already had as His possession the unique dignity of His place within the Godhead.”

This commentary should have a wide field of usefulness. It is readable, scholarly, and yet not too technical.

MERRILL C. TENNEY

A Gospel Of Despair

The Devil and the Good Lord, by Jean-Paul Sartre (Knopf, 1960, 438 pp., $5), is reviewed by Edward John Carnell, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, Fuller Theological Seminary.

This book contains three brilliant plays by France’s leading existentialist. Sartre uses the legitimate theater as a medium to develop the thesis that man’s “being” and “becoming” amount to the same thing. Man does not exist (inwardly and responsibly) until he chooses to out of an autonomous sense of deliberation and ownership. This means that God, like other objective criteria, is a hindrance to selfhood. If God exists, man must choose what God has already chosen for him. Sartre wall have none of this. “You see this gap in the door?” asks Sartre, through one of his main characters. “It is God. You see that hole in the ground? That is God again. Silence is God. Absence is God. God is the loneliness of man. There was no one but myself; I alone decided on Evil; and I alone invented Good. It was I who cheated, I who worked miracles, I who accused myself today, I alone who can absolve myself; I, man. If God exists, man is nothing.…”

If the reader can stomach the blatant irreverence, the wholesale lust, and the cultural and political extremes that are laced into these plays, he will enjoy a rare glimpse into both Sartre’s creative genius and the destructive outworking of a philosophy that disregards the laws of God, and that pictures man as a creature who stumbles through life crying “Invictus!”, but who is bereft of grace and forgiveness, and thus of personal hope. Sartre’s man can only be saved by deliberately remaining lost. This is a gospel of despair, not joy.

EDWARD JOHN CARNELL

Apostle Of Literacy

Thirty Years With the Silent Billion, by Frank C. Laubach (Revell, 1960, 383 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by William A. Smalley, Associate Secretary for Translations, American Bible Society.

Dr. Frank C. Laubach has been called the apostle of literacy. Thirty Years With the Silent Billion is the account of his missionary journeys.

The first eight chapters of Thirty Years With the Silent Billion (nearly one-half of the book) is reprinted with minor changes from an earlier book, The Silent Billion Speak. These chapters portray the development of Laubach’s early experiments with literacy, his early success among the Moros (a greatly feared Muslim group of the Philippines), and the spread of his techniques into India, parts of Africa, and Latin America. The story of these first eight chapters is an absorbing one, the personal account of a great man wrestling through enormous problems to find a workable solution to the need of people around him to learn to read.

The rest of the book is disappointing. It gives the impression of having been hurriedly put together from the diaries of Dr. Laubach’s extensive journeys. It is the year by year itemization of his travels and activities which become more and more routine as they go along. The picture of the missionary grappling with the literacy problem and gradually evolving a technique of operation fades and is replaced by the picture of a globe-trotting promoter chronicling his day by day activity with little selectivity as to what is trivial and what is important. Dr. Laubach describes literacy campaigns, such as the one held in Haiti (p. 141 ff.), with glowing optimism. Actually this campaign was a dismal flop and left the missionary and government forces which were interested in literacy utterly discouraged. Dr. Laubach mentions, for example, that the “American Bible Society furnished 20,000 copies of the Gospel of Mark in Creole, and has asked to provide a second edition of 70,000 copies.” Actually the book involved was Luke; 85,000 copies were printed, and very few have ever been used. Since then a new writing system has been developed, a new translation prepared, and a much more carefully planned literacy campaign is to begin soon.

Literacy has been called the handmaiden of Protestant Christianity. Its apostle is a great man, but unfortunately his sweeping vision of the need of humanity does not always take into account his own limitations. The techniques which he has developed have not been universally applicable in the rigid way he seems to try to make them, although they have been enormously stimulating to workers who have experimented with them. The help which he has given to some literacy campaigns has been pathetically superficial to the point where it has aroused great hopes which have later been dashed to the ground with failure. After the first few chapters (which have been previously published anyhow) the apostle’s followers will get little help from his book.

WILLIAM A. SMALLEY

Evangelical Apologia

The Story of the Church, by A. M. Renwick (I.V.F. London, 1958, 222 pp., 4s. 6d.), is reviewed by Owen J. Thomas, Lecturer at London Bible College, England.

This small volume by Professor A. M. Renwick is more than welcome. It serves two purposes. First, it gives a comprehensive picture of the development of Christianity from Pentecost to the present day, under an aegis and with an emphasis which will reassure evangelical readers that here they have a thoroughly reliable and fair view of it—fair, that is, to evangelicals. Every writing of “history” must have some bias; otherwise it is reduced to a mere reporting of news”—and very stale at that. History, and especially Church history, makes it impossible for us to be impartial observers of it, if only because we are part of it, as inalienable legatees of the past. Merle D’Aubigne is surely right when he criticizes Ranke’s handling of the history of the papacy as, in certain instances, too favourable, though written from a Protestant point of view, simply because he is overanxious to be impartial. There is a polarity about the truth which forces us to be either for or against it. This is above all true in recounting the history of biblical Christianity in the world. We welcome therefore a Church history which is quite unashamed in its conservative evangelical bias.

Then there is another purpose to this excellent little compendium. It serves as an apologia for the evangelical faith, especially in Professor Renwick’s treatment of the modern period. Nonevangelical readers, after they have overcome their initial reaction to its bias, will discover that the evangelical movement is far from being just a coterie of small-minded deviationists. Here it is shown to be as broad as the Church itself in true catholicity, and as intensely loyal to the Word, Written and Incarnate, in true apostolicity.

As for style and method of presentation, we are well served. Such a wide survey in such a small compass demands terseness and clarity. We also behold an admirable example of restraint in the fact that only half as many pages are devoted to the Scottish as to the English part of the Reformation. Moreover, the author’s well-known gentleness of character comes out clearly in his treatment of what to a Calvinistic Scot must be a most distasteful subject. Of Mary Queen of Scots he writes: “The truth is that the young and charming Queen, who could dissemble so easily, was held from childhood in the grip of an evil system. She was a martyr to what she had been taught.” Her life was “surrounded with a pathos which will never be forgotten” (p. 145). His sound judgment is displayed in his brief treatment of the Al-bigenses (p. 98) and the Anabaptists (p. 115).

His treatment of the modern scene is excellent in its perspective. Here the reader can gain a well-balanced view of the main lines of development in the World-Church of today. His analysis of the reason for the Church’s loss of grip on the people is striking. It is refreshing to read a sacred historian who faces up to the evils of the protean complexion of modern Christianity. “Doctrinal chaos,” and “revolt against dogma” are claimed to be responsible for recession in church life. On the other hand, the picture is by no means unrelieved by a vigorous evangelical movement and, above all, as his final words proclaim, by the fact that “the Lord has not forgotten His believing Church in these modern days.” One cannot help adding “and the emphasis is on believing!”

A pocket Church history which all should possess.

OWEN J. THOMAS

A serious and concerned band of 992 United Presbyterians from 50 states, one commonwealth (Puerto Rico) and three foreign countries (Cuba, Chile and India) sat down in Cleveland’s Public Auditorium May 18 for their 172nd General Assembly. After eight days of singing, worship and debate, they adjourned with some problems overcome and other solutions seemingly more distant than ever.

The Presbyterians were troubled initially by the world political crisis, for the summit meeting had just erupted in disaster and incoherent Russian frothing still filled the skies. A sober audience gathered that first Wednesday to hear Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations, ask, “How can there be coexistence with incalculable forces beyond the scrutiny of mankind, that may suddenly erupt without pretext?” He called for “Presbyterian coolness” in viewing the crisis, for “closing of ranks,” and added, “If these events mean that the scales have fallen from the eyes of some people who are now waked up to the realities of life, they have done a great service.”

Ethiopian Challenge

The Presbyterians were soon acquainted with an acute situation of their own. A heartening invitation from Emperor Haile Selassie to begin new missionary work among tribes in western Ethiopia (where Russia has just imported 1,000 technical experts) ran into a boar’s nest of budgetary troubles. The record $42,950,838 budget for 1961 (one-third of which lies beyond the expected operating funds) would allow for expansion in Ethiopia, Brazil and Indonesia, where conditions are ripe; but last year only $24,713,340 came in. To meet the challenge of these “unmet priorities,” and to accept Haile Selassie’s bid, a special November offering was approved. However, skyrocketing costs of maintaining a world-wide mission establishment, plus ever-expanding theological seminaries, had the 992 commissioners shaking their heads in puzzlement.

The uneasiness was not limited to material problems. After a stout speech by Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, formerly of South India, and now general secretary of the International Missionary Council, the Presbyterians wondered whether their word “fraternal worker” was really an adequate substitute for the time-honored term “missionary.” Newbigin maintained that missions and missionaries were needed more than ever; that it was as wrong to say that the Church’s task was all “mission” as to say it was all “education” or all “evangelism” or “stewardship” or “worship.” He pointed out that Asian churches have already sent out 200 missionaries and are planning an Asian mission to western Europe.

Too, the Presbyterians were bothered about their evangelistic emphasis. They sounded what may be death knell of the annual pre-assembly evangelism conference by voting to permit “other phases,” notably Christian education, to move into the spot alternately. One commissioner asked whether the very fact that the church had to parade its evangelistic interest did not reveal “how sick we are.” The assembly subsequently amended the evangelism committee report to strengthen its doctrinal content, and voted to continue to emphasize evangelism.

Problem of Bigness

Another concern of the United Presbyterians was their church’s growing tendency toward institutionalism. Dr. Arthur R. McKay, president of McCormick Seminary of Chicago, asked, “Does the church not suffer from the same ailments as the society it is called to serve: sleek and prosperous, popular as never before, proud of its possessions, revelling in its status …?” And Dr. Newbigin added, “There is a dangerous question whether after we get all the churches together—after all our ecclesiastical joinery, we will still have an evangel left to proclaim.” He concluded it could happen “only when our egotism—including our fierce and terrible ecclesiastical pride—has been broken in the presence of the Crucified.”

In one area, however, the United Presbyterians showed confident and aggressive convictions to wit, social education and action. They expressed “horror” at the results of South Africa’s apartheid; called for “continued efforts to achieve an honorable understanding with the Soviet Union” and for disarmament “with adequate inspection and control.” They approved “peaceable and orderly disobedience” and “disregard” of such “laws and customs requiring racial discrimination” as “are, in our judgment … serious violations of the law of God,” thereby recognizing most Negro student demonstrators in southern lunchrooms and libraries as having conducted themselves in ways “consistent with our Christian heritage, the Federal Constitution, and the moral consensus of the nation.” They declared it “an act of irresponsible citizenship” to support or oppose a candidate for public office “solely because of his religious affiliation.”

The General Assembly found itself thwarted in continued conversations with the (southern) Presbyterian Church, U. S., regarding merger, and had to content itself with proposing official committee meetings when the officers could jointly “begin some new work together.” Proposals for opening merger negotiations with the new United Church of Christ were tabled for the present, out of respect to the latter Church.

A comprehensive report on faith and health criticized Christian Science and Unity, as well as faith healers who “open themselves to the danger of a self-aggrandizing career in which sensationalism replaces spirituality and healing is emphasized out of all proportion to the other important aspects of the gospel ministry.”

The assembly elected as its moderator Dr. Herman Lee Turner, pastor (for 30 years) of Covenant Church, Atlanta, and author of the “Atlanta Manifesto” urging peaceful racial integration. In the closest election in history, Dr. Turner defeated by two votes his Negro opponent, Dr. Edler G. Hawkins, pastor of St. Augustine Church in the Bronx, New York. The tally was 471 to 469. Dr. Hawkins accepted Dr. Turner’s invitation to become vice moderator.

Worship Revision

The assembly also dealt with some unfinished racial business of its own: a Negro church in Alexandria, Va., which has yet to be brought into Washington City Presbyter, and a Sioux Indian Presbytery (Dakota Presbytery) which still overlaps the synods of North and South Dakota and Montana. Final action remains to be taken.

A revised directory for worship was accepted, paving the way for a coming revision of the Book of Common Worship. The assembly rejected, however, a liturgical move to establish the proper place for morning offering and pastoral prayer after the sermon, rather than before as is customary.

Moderator Turner and Stated Clerk Eugene Carson Blake wired the assembly’s encouragement to the President.

The assembly noted that membership in the denomination increased by 50,120 to a total of 3,209,682 during 1959. Ordained ministers increased by 240 to 12,041.

Next year’s General Assembly will meet in Buffalo, New York.

Exodus: How Many?

So the whole number of the people of Israel, by their fathers’ houses, from twenty years old and upward, every man able to go forth to war in Israel—their whole number was six hundred and three thousand five hundred and fifty.

—Numbers 1:45, 46 (RSV)

Israeli rabbis rebuked Premier David Ben-Gurion last month for questioning the Scriptural account of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. The ultra-orthodox Agudath Israel Party introduced before the Knesset (Parliament) in Tel Aviv a non-confidence vote on grounds that Ben-Gurion had forfeited his right to lead the nation when he voiced the theory that only 600 Jews left Egypt, instead of more than 600,000 as recorded in the Bible.

The move was defeated 61 to 6, but observers suggested that the parliamentary test may have strained the premier’s coalition of socialist and religious parties.

Ben-Gurion originally advanced his views in a Bible discussion circle which met regularly in the home of President Itzhak Ben-Zvi. He contends that there had been Hebrews in the land of Canaan before Abraham and that only a few besides Joseph’s relatives migrated to Egypt during the great famine. He observed that the Scriptures record that 70 males went down to Egypt. Noting that the Bible names all the male descendants of Levi up to the generation of the Exodus, he pointed out that 25 males were born to this tribe in Egypt. By doubling the figure to account for females and multiplying the result by 12 to account for other tribes, he obtained the total of 600.

Zionist Lobbying

Jewish leaders are up in arms over Democratic Senator William Fulbright’s attitudes toward Zionist lobbying.

“We think that Senator Fulbright owes the U. S. Jewish community an apology,” said the National Jewish Post and Opinion last month.

Fulbright, in the course of Senate debate on foreign aid, charged that U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East “is being directed by minority pressure groups.” The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned against annoying Arabs by taking sides with Jews in the U. A. R.-Israel dispute.

The Arkansas senator incurred further criticism in commenting on charges of Democratic Senator Russell Long of Louisiana to the effect that “one of the principal causes of the overthrow of the [Korean] government appears to have been local dissatisfaction with the management of the $200 million a year we have been spending there.”

“If this is the cause of corruption,” replied Fulbright, “then Israel ought to be the most corrupt of all nations, because the total of our aid—Government aid, not private aid—has been $310,304,000 for a population of approximately 2 million.

“It is estimated that private sources have provided—and these amounts are tax exempt for those who give them—approximately the same amount.”

The National Jewish Post and Opinion, in a lead article, subsequently reported this inaccurate inference: “The Jerusalem Post called Senator William Fulbright’s remark that Israel is one of the ‘most corrupt of all nations since Israel had received so far some $600 million for only two million people’ something ‘unprecedented in the annals of the U. S. Senate.’ ”

Largest Crusade?

Evangelist Billy Graham and his associates are studying the prospect of a crusade in Tokyo, world’s largest city, in 1963.

An invitation which is perhaps the most challenging of his career was presented to Graham last month at the Southern Baptist Convention. Shuichi Matsumura of the Japan Baptist Convention travelled to Miami Beach to present the invitation personally. Meetings would be held in a huge stadium which is also scheduled to be the site of the 1964 Olympics. Graham accepted the invitation “tentatively,” saying he must confer with his team about it.

Graham’s next major campaign is in Washington, D. C., June 19–26. Meetings are scheduled for Griffith Stadium, home of the Washington Senators baseball club, Sundays at 3 p.m. and nightly at 8 p.m. The evangelist also plans to address special gatherings in the Pentagon and elsewhere. Crusade leaders are hoping for wide radio and television coverage.

Next month Graham will speak at conferences in South America and Europe. In August and September, he and several associate evangelists will conduct crusades in Switzerland and Germany.

Fire Losses

Church losses from major fires rose sharply in North America during the past year, according to a report from the National Fire Protection Association. Ten major church fires in 1959 caused some $3,000,000 damage. Only four major fires were recorded in 1958, with damage totalling $1,170,000.

Neglected Warnings

Churches of Hilo, Hawaii, the city hardest hit by last month’s seismic sea waves, miraculously escaped damage. The Rev. Paul Toms, CHRISTIANITY TODAY news correspondent who lives in Hilo, says no churches are located in the coastal area which suffered the most severe pounding.

Toms said that the heavy loss of life was largely attributable to neglected warnings. Tidal wave alerts were broadcast just before residents retired for the night. Some chose to ignore them. The first wave struck at 1:25 a.m. Others followed soon after.

Churchmen’s Appeal

Thirteen prominent Protestant church leaders¹Signers of the petition: Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.; Dr. Edwin T. Dahlberg, president of the National Council of the Churches; Dr. George L. Ford, executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals; Dr. Herbert J. Gezork, president of the American Baptist Convention; Bishop Gerald H. Kennedy, president of the Council of Bishops of The Methodist Church; Dr. Louie D. Newton, minister of the Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta; Dr. Harold John Ockenga, minister of Park Street Church in Boston; Dr. Norman V. Peale, minister of Marble Collegiate Church in New York; Dr. Daniel Poling, editor of The Christian Herald; Dr. Ramsey Pollard, president of the Southern Baptist Convention; Dr. Fredrick A. Schiotz, president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church; Dr. Ernest Trice Thompson, moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.; Dr. Thomas F. Zimmerman, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and general superintendent of the Assemblies of God. are asking Congress for “immediate action” on proposed legislation to ban drinking on commercial aircraft.

“It is difficult to understand why no decisive action has yet been taken to eliminate the service and consumption of alcoholic beverages on commercial airlines,” said a letter from the clergymen. They urged the lawmakers to close this “glaring gap in air safety.”

Within a few days after the letter was made public, a Senate commerce subcommittee favorably reported a bill which would make illegal the serving of alcoholic beverages on aircraft in flight. This action brought the bill before the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, where similar measures have repeatedly been stalled in recent years.

Short-term Missionaries

A California obstetrician’s decision to spend a year in Africa exemplifies a growing trend within the Christian missionary enterprise.

Dr. William H. Wickett, Jr., leaves with his wife and five children this month for a remote missions hospital in Southern Rhodesia. Already another doctor in the Los Angeles area has expressed an interest in relieving Wickett next year. Methodist missions officials say a pattern might be established whereby specialists can serve at overseas missions for short periods. The missions hospitals could use the arrangement to best advantage by timely scheduling of treatment and surgery. Chest operations, for example, might all be scheduled for a month during which a thoracic surgeon is anticipated.

Wickett is setting a “tremendous example,” says his pastor, Dr. Winston Trever of the First Methodist Church of Fullerton, California. “We are beginning to see that the church has a great, untapped asset in laymen with professional training and experience in medicine, agriculture, education, and engineering. Many might be able to serve overseas on a short-term basis where they could not give three to five years.”

Protestant Panorama

• A record distribution at home and abroad last year of 17,650,917 portions of Scripture was reported by the American Bible Society at its 144th annual meeting in New York last month.

• The Assemblies of God plan to erect a new $2,500,000 headquarters building in Springfield, Missouri.

• Establishment of compulsory dancing courses in Norwegian public schools is being protested in a number of Protestant quarters.

• The Southern Baptist Convention’s Sunday School Board will begin publication next October of a monthly magazine in Braille for use by blind teen-agers.

• The Central Methodist Mission in Sydney, Australia, will use a newly-acquired $250,000 site in the downtown section for expanded facilities.

• An African Anglican clergyman from Mombasa, Kenya, the Rev. Edwin Adinya, is beginning a year’s duty as assistant to the rector of St. Peter’s, one of the most select Church of Ireland parishes in Belfast.

• The Knoxville (Tennessee) Presbytery is resolving a race controversy over its new $243,000 camp ground near Watts Bar Lake with a program of one integrated session and two segregated sessions this summer.

• Anglican Bishop Frederick H. Wilkinson of Toronto says his diocese, largest in Canada, will make special efforts to befriend the large number of Italian immigrants who have recently arrived in the area. Most of the newcomers are said to be unchurched.

• American University, burgeoning Methodist school in Washington, D. C., is launching a 10-year campaign to raise $40,000,000 to prepare the campus for an anticipated enrollment of some 12,000 students by 1970. The campaign got its initial impetus with a $1,000,000 appropriation for the next four years voted by the Methodist General Conference in Denver.

• The Council of Churches of Greater Houston (Texas) is changing its name to the Association of Churches of Greater Houston. Officials say the change was made to stress the autonomy of the group, which is nonetheless affiliated with the National Council of Churches. The officials admitted privately that recent charges of Communist infiltration of the NCC was a factor in the name change, Religious News Service reported.

• The all-Negro National Christian Missionary Convention was merged with the United Christian Missionary Society last month. Both groups have been associated with the Disciples of Christ brotherhood.

• The Soviet Embassy in Washington is releasing 8,000 feet of film showing worship services in Moscow’s First Baptist Church. The films were taken by the National Broadcasting Company and the Southern Baptist Convention for 30-minute telecasts in this country. Another 2,000 feet of film was withheld by the embassy.

• A dispute over segregation prompted the resignation last month of the Rev. Philip Gresham, rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Virginia. Gresham favors racially-integrated church functions. A number of his vestrymen have been opposed.

• Ground will be broken this month for a $150,000 fine arts building on the campus of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. Cost of erection is being borne by an anonymous Santa Barbara resident. The gift is the largest in Westmont’s history.

• The first volume in a series of newly-translated Calvin commentaries was released last month by the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, which is observing its 50th anniversary year.

• A call for 300 new missionary candidates came out of The Evangelical Alliance Mission’s 70th annual conference in Chicago last month. The mission, commonly referred to as TEAM, now has 807 missionaries in active service.

Celebrity Tyme

When H. P. Sconce, 54-year-old Baptist minister, died last December, he bequeathed an unusual asset to the radio broadcasting industry: some 300 15-minute tape recordings in which he had interviewed noted personalities in government, industry, sports, and other fields as to their Christian convictions.

Each of the tapes is a complete radio program ready to be aired under the title, “Christian Celebrity Tyme” (Sconce applied old English spelling for effect). One of the most remarkable aspects of the program is that no appeal for funds is made. Support is raised privately.

“Christian Celebrity Tyme” began six years ago this month while Sconce was a pastor in Hermiston, Oregon. He subsequently moved his family to Sun Valley, California, where his wife still coordinates distribution of the tapes to radio stations across the country.

Musical theme for “Christian Celebrity Tyme” is “Just for Today.” Following the theme, Sconce introduces the guest (a different person for each program) and asks for a Christian testimony. The scope of the interviewing is such that some are more Christian than others. The program closes with the playing of the guest’s favorite hymn.

Merger on the Left

Governing assemblies of the American Unitarian Association and The Universalist Church of America, meeting simultaneously but separately in Boston last month, approved a merger to become effective in May, 1961. The Unitarian vote was announced as 725 to 143, and the Universalist as 365 to 65, meeting a two-thirds majority requirement in both cases. The consolidated organization, to be known as the Unitarian Universalist Association, will have a constituency of some 200,000.

Judicial Council

The 36th quadrennial General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which attracted nearly 2,000 delegates to Buffalo, New York, last month, voted to create a judicial council to interpret church law and to consider appeals between sessions of the General Conference. Establishment of such a council—which would include five elders and four laymen—must first be ratified by the 49 annual conferences of the AME Zion Church.

Four new bishops were elected: Dr. Felix S. Anderson of Louisville, Kentucky; Dr. William M. Smith of Mobile, Alabama; Dr. William A. Hilliard of Detroit; and Dr. S. Dorme Lartey of Liberia.

The church’s Board of Bishops urged the United States to take immediate steps “to integrate the Negro into every phase of American life at all cultural and skilled levels.”

Among speakers at the 15-day conference were Vice President Nixon and Dr. Edwin T. Dahlberg, president of the National Council of Churches. The keynote address was delivered by Bishop Herbert B. Shaw of Wilmington, North Carolina.

The AME Zion Church has more than 3,000 congregations with a total membership of approximately 780,000.

Hailing Integration

The 17 bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church hailed increasing progress toward racial integration and church unity in a statement presented to the 36th session of the denomination’s quadrennial General Conference, held last month in Los Angeles.

Some 5,000 delegates and visitors heard the statement read by Bishop Joseph Gomez, secretary of the church’s Council of Bishops. The 144-year-old denomination has nearly 6,000 churches and more than a million members.

The statement said the time was not yet at hand for union of the AME body with The Methodist Church, whose “jurisdictional feature involving Negro Methodism … grows less satisfactory to a large and growing Methodist liberalism.”

In a resolution, delegates called for a “Universal Year of Human Rights” to coincide with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. Delegates also voted to subsidize salaries of 700 ministers who serve small parishes with amounts ranging from $600 to $1,800 a year, depending upon scholastic preparation and tenure of the ministers.

Two new bishops were consecrated in ceremonies conducted by Senior Bishop Sherman L. Greene: the Rev. Joyn D. Bright of Philadelphia and the Rev. George N. Collins of New Orleans.

The conference opened with a sunrise service in Pasadena’s famed Rose Bowl.

Missions and Theology

The 63rd General Council of the Christian and Missionary Alliance voted to establish a graduate school of theology the location of which is yet to be determined. The Alliance now operates undergraduate schools in Nyack, New York; San Francisco, California; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Regina, Saskatchewan. A graduate school of missions is scheduled to begin classes in Nyack this fall.

The council, held annually, drew 694 delegates to Portland, Oregon, last month. The delegates approved a record foreign missions budget of $3,876,000, used to support 824 active missionaries in 22 foreign countries. In North America, the Alliance has 1151 churches with a combined membership of about 60,000.

People: Words And Events

Deaths:Professor Hans-Joachim Iwand, 60, one of Germany’s leading Lutheran scholars, in Bonn … Bishop L. L. Baughman, 61, of the Evangelical United Brethren Church; in Wellington, Kansas … Dr. Thorvald Olsen Burntvedt, 72, retired president of the Lutheran Free Church; in Minneapolis … Dr. Francis Shunk Downs, 74, former secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.; in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania … Dr. Wade C. Smith, 91, associate editor of the Presbyterian journal; in Weaverville, North Carolina … Dr. William A. Phillips, 69, retired Baptist missionary; in Denver.

Appointments: As dean of Wittenberg University’s Hamma Divinity School, Dr. Bernhard Hillila … as dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, Dr. Jerald C. Brauer … as academic dean and professor of church history and New Testament at Pacific Bible Seminary, Harold W. Ford … as president of Shelton College, Dr. Clyde J. Kennedy … as dean of women at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Mrs. Andrew Q. Allen … as minister of evangelism for the Reformed Church in America, the Rev. Herman J. Ridder … as executive secretary of the Council of Churches of the National Capital Area, the Rev. Virgil E. Lowder.

Resignations: As president of Cascade College, Dr. Edison Habegger … as president of Shelton College, Dr. Jack Murray … as executive director of Christ’s Mission and editor of Christian Heritage, Dr. Walter M. Montano.

Citation: To George W. Cornell of Associated Press, the fifth annual Faith and Freedom Award for excellence in religious newswriting by the Religious Heritage of America.

Mild-mannered Methodist

Korea’s Acting President, Chung Huh, who already has popular approval, is a devout, mild-mannered Methodist.

The new national leader, who is also Korea’s Foreign Minister, comes from a non-Christian family background. His introduction to the Gospel, he recalls, was in a tiny Australian Presbyterian missions school which he attended as a boy.

Later baptized in The Methodist Church, he is now, with his wife, a member of the Ehwa University Methodist Church in Seoul and also serves as vice-chairman of the board of directors of the Seoul YMCA. During his years in America he helped to found the Korean Methodist Church in New York City.

Declined Appointment

Dr. Albert G. Huegli, academic dean and director of the graduate division of Concordia Teachers College, is turning down an invitation to become executive director of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. He reportedly prefers to remain on the educational “front line.”

Southern Baptists, meeting in Miami Beach during the somber Paris summit crisis, reviewed a record year in membership gains and stewardship and chartered further advances in evangelism and missions.

Goals for 1961 include 600,000 baptisms and a $2,100,000 budget increase (to $20,013,000). However, such strides will be relatively meaningless, speakers warned, unless churches begin to weigh members as well as count them, seeking quality along with quantity.

The outstanding personality at the sessions was evangelist Billy Graham, who drew the week’s biggest crowd to the weakest program spot. Graham also helped set the mood of the meetings by calling the summit smash-up perhaps the most serious crisis civilization had ever faced. “This is no time for business as usual,” he declared.

News dispatches from the superb new Convention Hall were dominated by a flurry over veiled charges of heresy in at least one seminary and a lengthy debate over the religion-in-politics issue.

The seminary issue flared up during the annual address of President Ramsey Pollard, a blunt pastor-evangelist who recently succeeded Dr. R. G. Lee as pastor of the second largest Southern Baptist church, Bellevue in Memphis. Pollard loosed a broadside against any professors who doubt the miracles of the Bible or water down its inspiration. “If you don’t believe … get out!” he thundered as hundreds of messengers applauded.

The fat was really in the fire when Pollard added that he had suspicions about one professor in a seminary he did not name. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but when I am sure I’m going to the president and the board of trustees.” The blaze was fanned next morning when a Miami newspaper quoted a local pastor as “indicating” that the suspect is at Southeastern Seminary, Wake Forest, North Carolina. The story also said a general inquiry into theological soundness at the seminaries is planned.

Convention leaders quickly scotched the story that a general inquiry is in the works. A survey of seminaries and other institutions is under way, they said, but it is confined to organization and procedures, looking to a manual to avoid overlapping. However, it was reliably reported that certain members of the study group had intended to cock a weather eye for heterodoxy.

President Syndor Stealey of Southeastern Seminary told the convention it is news to him if any member of his faculty is suspect. The newspaper reporter stuck by his story although his informant denied having told him anything to justify the implication that Southeastern was the target. President Pollard told a press conference meanwhile that he had not intended to attack any of “our five seminaries” but merely wanted to stress the need for “eternal vigilance” against the inroads of unbelief.

A Virginia Baptist editor, Reuben Alley, challenged Pollard’s entire assumption that one Baptist can call another a heretic. “Where is our creed?” he asked at the press conference. Pollard started listing some “fundamentals,” such as the Virgin Birth and the miracles. A reporter helped him by recalling a quasi-creed adopted by the Convention in 1925. Another bystander asked if the Baptists’ creed is not still the New Testament.

Editor Leon Macon of the Alabama Baptist asked seminary presidents for a plain and simple answer to the question whether unbelief and mythology are being taught. The reply was twofold: 1. All the seminaries have orthodox statements of faith which professors are sworn not to contradict and 2. “We can trust our seminary presidents.”

Macon noted the claim, by some, that the American Association of Theological Seminaries was involved in the situation as a potential supporter of “liberal” professors who might be fired. The seminary presidents unitedly indicated they would reject any such AATS pressure. None has been experienced, they said. But one seminary president indicated that a new and supplementary accrediting agency might be needed as a cushion in case AATS affiliation should become untenable.

Resentment against Pollard’s statements bubbled up on the convention floor. A Texas pastor introduced a resolution calling it inappropriate and inadvisable to express “vague and generalized doubts and suspicions concerning the integrity” of Baptist professors. Scores of messengers applauded. The resolutions committee, however, declined to report out the motion, holding that it tended to limit freedom of discussion.

Later, a handful of messengers almost succeeded in preventing publication of the convention president’s address. They objected when the question arose at a time when unanimous consent was required. A special order of business was then set and a motion to print the address passed handily.

The resolutions committee took some of the force out of a blow aimed indirectly at any Roman Catholic candidate for the presidency. The resolution was further watered down from the floor. The implication that any candidate is inescapably bound up in his church’s stand on public issues was challenged on the ground that Baptists have no dogmas. The resolution as passed said a candidate is suspect when he is bound by a church which denies freedom. Thus a Catholic who breaks with the hierarchy in this area might be approved The resolution reaffirmed support for the constitutional ban on religious heads for public office.

At a press conference arranged by convention officials, Billy Graham declined comment on the religion-in-politics resolution. Citing a recent opinion poll which indicated most Catholics would support any Catholic candidate, Graham said this was “just as bad” as voting against a man solely because he is a Catholic. The evangelist said he agreed generally with a recent Look article by Eugene Carson Blake and G. Bromley Oxnam.

The real issue, said Graham is the seriousness of the world situation. The nation’s leader should be a man of experience and world stature. “This is no time to experiment with novices,” he commented. Some reporters, ignoring Graham’s direct statements that he was not taking sides and that both parties have experienced candidates, interpreted his statement as an endorsement of Vice President Nixon.

The convention took no direct action on the racial issue. Several speakers said Southern Baptists’ numbers and position give them a special responsibility in the field. The Christian Life Commission, whose pronouncements often have been challenged, was given a small budgetary increase. The commission’s report, which was received as information, called on Baptists to use every opportunity to help Negroes obtain equal rights, especially the right to vote, and to “thoughtfully oppose any customs which may tend to humiliate them in any way.”

A proposed resolution against federal grants to schools of nursing was referred to the Public Affairs Committee after it was pointed out that its phraseology might be in conflict with the current policy of some Baptist institutions to accept low interest rate government loans.

The question of moving the convention’s executive committee headquarters out of Nashville was postponed by committee action. Members are divided over where to go. In the background are two factors: Nashville’s efforts to tax denominational properties and a desire to underscore the executive committee’s neutral, supervisory role by separating it physically from major agencies which it guides or evaluates.

A new procedure designed to forestall development of a clerical hierarchy began going into practical effect at the convention. Adopted last year, the new rule requires that at least one-third of the members of each board must be laymen.

A proposed resolution asking the Sunday School board to sever alleged ties with the National Council of Churches died aborning after a vigorous statement by executive secretary James Sullivan, who said the board had no more affiliation with the NCC than with the Atomic Energy Commission. It is true that the board pays copyright fees for use of a uniform lesson plan, but all Baptist lesson materials are written by Baptist editors and participation in the lesson plan does not involve membership in the council, he said.

The two greatest cohesive elements in Southern Baptist life are the foreign mission board and the Sunday School board. As usual, foreign missions night was a major convention attraction. The Sunday School board’s unlimited offer to be open to inspection enhanced its already high standing. A wordy, dull presentation of home missions was rescued by fresh testimonies from converts and grass roots workers and by Bev Shea’s singing and Billy Graham’s preaching. Seminaries are generally conceded to be doing a good job but there are rumblings of discontent and not all of them can be dismissed as age-old differences between scholars and country preachers.

President Pollard was renamed without opposition to an expected second term. Two pastors, W. O. Vaught of Arkansas and John Slaughter of South Carolina are the new vice presidents. The pastors’ conference elected Roy McClain of Georgia, who was in a run-off for the convention presidency last year.

The convention, which already had 19 boards and commissions, got another when the stewardship committee of the executive committee was given independent commission status. The Relief and Annuity Board became the Annuity Board with the dropping of part of its name.

Nearly 10,000 new churches and missions have been established since 1956, but new life is needed for a “30,000 Movement” if its goal is to be reached by 1964.

New satellites have opened a golden age of communications, making world-wide radio and television realities instead of possibilities, according to Paul Stevens of the Radio-TV Commission who said “Southern Baptists must be alerted and must prepare themselves adequately to make use of these facilities at once.” The convention rushed passage of a resolution calling for Christian patience and an emphasis on spiritual foundations and moral regeneration in world peace negotiations.

Gathering 350 pastors and workers from Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, an epochal World Vision conference May 9–13 prodded evangelical forces to a deeper sense of their spiritual task in a time of unrest in Latin America. In the newly completed auditorium of the Interamerican Mission Seminary campus in Medellín (second in size to Colombia’s capital city in Bogotá), delegates heard Dr. Bob Pierce, Dr. Paul Rees, Dr. Kyung Chik Han of Korea, and Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY press the burning relevance of the Gospel to the plight of modern man and contemporary culture.

Colombia has been a center of Romanist repression, and not infrequently of persecution, of Protestant missionary effort.

Chafing under press reports of Romanist intolerance, spokesmen for the U. S. Catholic church, steadily expanding a drive for political power, have commented ambivalently. Some have waved aside the accounts as “mere propaganda”; others have deplored the tendency of Protestants to identify Romanism with “Spanish Christianity” (without themselves repudiating it); others have spoken of religious liberty as a proper expectation by non-Romanists.

Evangelical workers in Latin America have steadily sharpened their evangelistic focus, aware that Roman strategy changes frequently. Colombia today has the fastest growing evangelical population in the world. In Medellín the 350 delegates included 30 from Western Venezuela and 30 from Ecuador; the others were from Colombia (50 missionaries, 240 nationals). This was more than four times the number of full-time Protestant workers ever gathered in assembly in Colombia. Roman Catholic persecution has purified the Church and stimulated growth. Baptized church members increased 51 per cent during the five worst years of persecution, and the Protestant community now numbers about one per cent of the population. A survey of evangelical work in Colombia by the Evangelical Confederation and the National Pastors’ Conference now shows 192 organized Protestant Spanish-speaking churches, 401 congregations with regular services, 119 Protestant-sponsored schools, 22 hospitals, dispensaries or clinics, and 13 seminaries or Bible institutes. But there is still only one worker for every 24,000 inhabitants.

World Vision arrangements were implemented by the Rev. Robert W. Lazear, Jr., of Bogotá, executive secretary of the Evangelical Confederation, and the Rev. Bert Biddulph, rector of the Interamerican Seminary in Medellín. Following the conference, the seminary dedicated its new building—a gift of World Vision—and carried on another week with study courses. The background, education and intellectual level of Colombian pastors are extremely varied, from rural worker to city pastor. Cultural background too is varied, with diverse mixtures of Spanish, Indian and Negro blood. Almost all denominations active in Colombia were represented, Southern Baptists largely remaining aloof.

Larger in size than Texas and California combined, Colombia has 13,500,000 inhabitants, mostly Spanish-speaking. The nation has maintained a high cultural level, mostly Spanish in orientation, its colonial foundations having been laid by Dominican, Franciscan and Jesuit priests. Secondary schools are still largely private, the majority being maintained by Roman Catholic religious orders. The Constitution of 1886 confers civil rights and social guarantees upon all residents of Colombia, including the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of conscience, and the liberty of all “cults” (provided they do not contravene Christian morality or the laws). Religious teaching in all educational institutions was made compulsory by a concordat signed with the Vatican in 1887.

No direct pressures were put upon the conference. Medellín province is the center of Colombian Catholicism, supplying two-thirds of the nation’s priests. A news report in El Tiempo said that Protestants were meeting to discuss the Holy Father’s invitation to them to return to the church of Rome. The final night a priest dedicated an image of the Virgin directly in front of the second Interamerican Church and fanatics then stoned the church.

In Nutibara Hotel, the World Vision team heard a documented report on Roman Catholic persecution and intolerance in Colombia. In the past 12 years, 116 Protestants were killed, 66 Protestant churches or chapels were destroyed by dynamite or fire, and 200 Protestant schools have been closed. Since 1948 there have been several thousand cases of persecution. A summary of 2000 statements signed by victims and eye-witnesses shows that Roman Catholic priests participated directly in 30 per cent of these cases. Believers have been beaten, made to move by threats against their lives, deprived of civil rights (civil marriage opportunities particularly), ejected from hospitals when in need of care, denied burial permits for deceased loved ones, their homes arbitrarily searched, their children discriminated against in schools, their church services interrupted by priests and police, and their cause publicly condemned by civil officials as well as priests using loud speakers stationed at Catholic churches.

A poll of the evangelical workers at the conference yielded its own sordid story of Romanist intolerance and persecution aimed at their pastoral activities. Sixty-two pastors have been imprisoned, 26 shot at, for preaching the Gospel. Twenty-three members of their congregations have been martyred. Many reported that churches they had served were set afire or dynamited. The Christian and Missionary Alliance Bible Institute in Armenia, Caldas, will soon graduate as pastor-evangelist a lad who is the only survivor of an evangelical family of seven whose lives were brutally stamped out.

The strategic situation has improved somewhat with the election of President Alberto Lleras, a compromise candidate serving until 1962. Lleras’ personal sympathies are with the liberal party (which is mildly anticlerical, favors a disestablished church, decentralized government, popular education). The conservative party has the support of the Roman church, and favors centralized government, an established church, and the great landed interests. But as the head of a coalition government, Lleras’ personal power is limited, and his championing of civil rights does not come to full expression.

After 50 years of conservative power, the liberals won in 1930 and during the next 15 years Protestantism moved ahead. In 1946 the conservatives won. From 1948–58 Colombia was in a state of siege. Persecution of Protestants coincides with this period of conservative political control. In 1950 harassed Protestants formed the Evangelical Confederation, uniting 16 denominations and missions, which then regularly issued press information when the government ignored many memorials and it was evident that police in many places were working with the clergy to suppress Protestantism. These persecutions left orphans, suffering, and hardship, but they united the Protestants.

A turn for the better is seen in the recent advocacy by the Bishop’s Council of a “soft policy” toward Colombian Protestants. Some spokesmen are championing an “ecumenical” attitude, urging prayer that the “separated brethren” will return to the fold. Some 35 Indian territory churches, shut down by Catholic demand, have been reopened. The “stick and stone” era seems to have come to a halt.

Yet the basic causes of persecution remain, so that the peace is an uncertain one. These basic causes are the Concordat of 1887 (Colombia is the only country in continental South America bound by such a concordat), and the mission treaty of 1953 (a personal agreement between an acting president and the Vatican, never approved by the Colombian Congress) which gives Catholics exclusive rights to evangelize vast areas. Quasi-legal means of repression are used. In the past four months a dozen visas have been refused Protestant missionaries and teachers by a Jesuit-trained immigration officer. Most of these are staff replacements. At the peak of Protestant effort there were 300 missionaries in Colombia; the number is now down to 200. Meanwhile, Colombian priests freely get visas in great numbers for many activities in the United States.

Colombia is more Roman Catholic than the other 20 Latin American countries. There is one priest for every 3,750 of the Catholic population. The Jesuits were the apparent intellectual authors of the persecution of Protestants in what seemed a thoroughly prepared and fomented assault. Their articles in the press charged that Protestants are bringing in communism, or unwittingly serving it (by destroying religious and national unity); that Protestants favor a loose morality, are advance agents of U. S. imperialism, and are allied with revolutionaries; that Protestantism is an exotic movement which uses foreign funds to buy converts. They even proposed annual observance of an anti-Protestant day. Their main premise was that Protestantism is a heresy that must be stamped out.

More recently both Catholic and secular writers have questioned the spiritual (in contrast with political) strength of Romanism in Colombia. One leading Romanist estimates that 25 per cent of the population is “practicing Catholic.”

En route to Colombia, the World Vision team held a five-day conference on Barbados, where 325 workers from 29 denominations gathered from 20 nearby islands. The program was implemented by the ministers of Barbados, one of the tiniest but most populated of the islands of the British West Indies. In an area of isolated islands, with scattered missions and many independent and non-cooperating churches (130 denominations are listed), the sessions served as a reminder of the unity of evangelical purpose as well as an encouragement to workers in lonely outposts. Many workers seemed largely uninformed and unconcerned about the destiny of the Christian movement elsewhere in the world, but they seized their opportunity before the conference closed to present an offering to Dr. Han for the Christian churches in Korea. Delegates represented Methodist, Pentecostal and holiness groups in strength, these being most active in this missionary theater.

‘I’LL SEE YOU IN THE MORNING’

“And … it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27).

Before us there unfolds the drama of death. Men in history meet their death, whether they be great or small, and become names memorialized in art and literature perhaps but no longer in flesh and blood.

New drugs and techniques in surgery, improved diets, and higher living conditions are of course contributing to lengthened life expectancy; but the added years are nothing in comparison with the eternity that lies ahead and in which all of us should be concerned. Death may be postponed, but it is still unavoidable.

A Christian, in the words of the Apostle Paul, can know, however, that it is better to be “absent from the body, and present with the Lord.”

Not that many of us really want to die. But, we can face the certainty of the event with the absolute assurance in our hearts that we belong to Christ, and he has done for us the thing which makes death a transition from faith to reality.

There are some who look on Christianity as a movement designed to make the world a better place in which to live. But such is not the case, although the more real Christians there are the better the world will be, for it will have more “salt” to preserve the social structure and more “light” to show men the way of eternal life.

Our Lord makes perfectly plain in his words, “should not perish” the reason God sent his Son, and the transition from death to life that is conditioned on one thing alone—faith in him.

The central thought in the story of the Prodigal Son is not the betterment of the “far country” but the return of the son to his father. This is the central theme of the gospel message. The question, after death what? is answered when we know him whom to know aright is life everlasting.

Is it morbid? Not the least bit. It is with privilege of every Christian to live with assurance, hope, and peace.

Is it realistic? Yes, for internal collapse or external violence is possible to any of us at any time; and if it is not disaster, then the slow, inexorable process of physical deterioration will lead to the same end.

Some of us have lived part of our lives with the knowledge that any moment could be the last. Is the thought frightening? No, not if one knows he is ready to meet God because he personally trusts in the finished work of Christ and thereby belongs to him.

Death is going to happen to everyone of us. Those who are Christian will pass immediately into the presence of the ever-living Christ who has redeemed us unto himself. The cocoon of earthly existence will be transformed into the butterfly of eternity; the body of our worldly existence will be changed into the likeness of his glorious resurrection body, and we will see him as he is.

With the Apostle Paul every child of God can say, “For I know whom I have trusted, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

Whom shall we meet at death? Few of us stop to realize that in meeting Christ we shall meet our Creator and Redeemer. All things were made by him, and it is the same Christ who is our Saviour. The unbeliever will meet him, but he will be his Judge. The Christian’s judgment has been met on the Cross, and he is thereby safe and free.

We so often complicate the gospel truth by unbelief or foolish imaginings.

But why do we need a Redeemer? The nature of sin, its universality and fatal consequences, can never be overstated. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” is the statement of fact in Holy Scripture. We are also told, “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

What does this have to do with death? The unrepentant and therefore unforgiven sinner will meet the Christ whom he has rejected as Saviour and is to be his Judge.

Faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour from sin and Lord of life makes all the difference in this world—and in the world to come. To a believer, there accrue blessings which are possible to no one else.

For one thing, there is security—eternal security.

We live in a day when security is almost a fetish. Men want it more than freedom itself. We have social security which lasts until death—with some $200 additional to assist in burial expenses. Men may amass fortunes, but the security of money is only for this life.

The security we have in Christ is eternal and nothing can take it from us. Jesus said: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any (man) pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand. I and my Father are one.”

Another blessing which the Christian has is peace. We live in a world of turmoil. All about us there is unrest and uncertainty. No one knows even the immediate future. But in the midst of darkness the Christian can have absolute peace, for he knows who he is and where he is going. He knows that nothing can happen to him which is outside the will of Cod. He lives in the certainty that: “All things work together for good to them that love God,” and there is infinite peace in that assurance.

Not only does the believer have security and peace, but also has righteousness. Such righteousness is not of his own endeavor or achievement, for human goodness is as filthy rags. Rather, it is the imputed righteousness of Christ which, for the Christian, becomes a spiritual garment. Only then can he come into the presence of God, the Holy One. Knowing that God the Father accepts us for his Son’s sake, we have assurance to the fullest extent.

A third blessing of the Christian is hope—the hope of heaven itself.

The Bible tells us: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Neither our present experience nor that of others—not even our wildest imagination can picture the glory which will be ours in heaven. We do know that heaven will be a place where there is no sickness, sorrow, or death; and we know we shall be in the presence of God himself forever.

One final blessing which is ours is freedom from fear.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me” was David’s assurance and one which is ours through faith in the living Christ.

Like Peter Marshall we can contemplate death and say to all who are Christ’s: “I’ll see you in the morning.”

L. NELSON BELL

HAVE FUN!

Pastor Peterson often quotes from CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He was impressed by your coverage of the recent White House conference on youth, and cited one educator who favored developing the fun attitude in all living as over against the disagreeable motivation of a sense of duty.

As usual, he lapsed into verse on the subject:

In conference at Washington

An educationist observes,

Americans must have the fun

That every grown up child deserves.

No sacrifice can be too great

To subsidize our teaching staff:

We must learn how to recreate

Our carefree, happy way of laugh.

In classroom frolic every day

The droll instructor leads the way,

Or joins the party when it’s gay,

For all must learn that work is play.

And soon in shops and factories

While music sounds and foremen sing,

The most reluctant boss agrees

That in production play’s the thing.

In government the men of fame

Will find that paper work enthralls

When they can make it all a game

And fill the file with paper dolls.

What morbid fear of missile-lags

Can chill that patriotic son

Who bubbles with the latest gags?

The nation’s greeting is, “Have fun!”

But when this romping has begun,

A single issue is at stake—

If all the job is really fun

Then who will want a coffee-break?

I warned the pastor that, considering his position, he should have a more positive message. Besides, isn’t “Rejoice evermore!” rather close to “Have fun!”? He began to explain the difference between having fun and rejoicing in the Lord. When I left him he was busy with his concordance. No doubt a sermon is in the making.

EUTYCHUS

U.S. PROTESTANT PRESS

Your publication of this letter in the reader’s column of CHRISTIANITY TODAY would be greatly appreciated:

I would like to congratulate Prof. E. Brunner for writing, and your magazine for printing, the splendid article “The Cleveland Report on Red China.” Prof. Brunner’s article shows him to be well informed.…

Unfortunately those refugees who were lucky enough to escape annihilation at the hands of the communists, do not find the proper understanding and attention in leading American Protestant circles. They are seldom, if ever, consulted on matters concerning communism and problems that it creates. It seems to me that people who lived under communist rule would be able to tell us the truth about actual communism, for they experienced this hell and could be beneficial to humanity by exposing it and in this way fighting it.

I can give as an example the activities of the Ukrainian Evangelical Alliance of North America. All of our press releases and resolutions which were passed during our conventions were ignored by most of the American Protestant press.…

We have not even been able to persuade leading American Protestants that Russia is only a part of the USSR, and that the USSR consists of many nationalities which are enslaved by communist imperialism and colonialism. The present communist government in the USSR favors the Russian people, language and culture, and is trying to impose that … language and culture on other nationalities that are living there. Czarist Russia had a similar policy.

The Ukrainians, who number about forty million and are the second largest nation in the USSR, have been struggling for their independence and national survival since 1917. They suffered terrible consequences in the struggle against this inhuman oppression. Millions of them died during an artificial famine, others in concentration camps, prisons, some in deportations, and many were just shot.

How often have we read in American Protestant magazines about this heroic nation, its religious life, history, culture, etc.? About two million Ukrainians live in North America. They are considered to be Russians by most American Protestants, in spite of the fact that these Ukrainians take this as an offense. How many Americans really know that these people have their own highly developed language, which is much older than the Russian language?

It is time to seriously consider the matter of understanding the present conditions in the countries which are under the communist yoke, and to start to appreciate those people who became victims of communist oppression, but never made a compromise with it. This also calls for a new approach in the missionary work among these people. A need arises for using their languages in the preaching of the gospel to them.

WLADIMIR BOROWSKY

Exec. Secy.

Ukrainian Evangelical

Alliance of North America

Detroit, Mich.

Brunner fails to point out a greater danger than an atomic holocaust or even world Bolshevism—viz., a world which may have escaped both of these horrors only to go to hell leisurely in the luxury of Western freedom and democracy. We need above all to be warned again: “Fear not them which kill the body … rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

The threat of bolshevism is Satan’s feint.… Not even the advent of America alters the fact that Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world.… Those of us attempting to follow Christ may still have to suffer the loss of all things—even democracy—to find Christ and be found in Him.

MARLIN JESCHKE

Evanston, Ill.

I could not help being somewhat frightened with the article by Emil Brunner, a profound and recognized theologian, who could write [such] an article … and never seem to take God into consideration in his estimation of the power of “bolshevism.”

W. J. MCGETTIGAN

Portland, Ore.

As a brilliant man of words, Professor Brunner seems fascinated with ideological systems and verbal abstractions—so fascinated—that he often overlooks practical realities and possibilities for change which are quite obvious to less gifted men.

GEORGE KOSKI

Lutheran Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

It does hardly anything to show how granting a seat on the U.N. would further the cause of communism.

MELVIN W. LANG

Faith Evangelical United Brethren

Freeport, Ill.

Thanks for the Brunner article; it’s a thoughtful statement on a question others of us have (perhaps too quickly) assumed to be closed. But is there not something of an anomaly in using as an insert for Brunner’s article the dubious appeal of Sen. Nelson S. Dilworth of California for what appears to be a decisive attack on our system of free education? Or was it your intention to present a foil to Brunner’s eloquent defense of human freedom?

SCHUBERT M. OGDEN

Perkins School of Theology

Southern Methodist University

Dallas, Tex.

Let me express our deep appreciation for Emil Brunner’s excellent article.… Your indispensable journal has from the very first issue (I have them all!) printed the facts concerning the satanic nature of communism and its malevolent march toward the enslavement of every mind, soul, and body on this planet. Thank you for your alertness and vigilance!

RUSSELL F. BLOWERS

East 49th Street Christian Church

Indianapolis, Ind.

Mr. Brunner’s article should be brought to the attention of the government officials responsible for the formulation of the United States’ policies on such matters. Citizens who agree with Mr. Brunner would do well to inform their congressmen that there are American church people who do not subscribe to the Cleveland Message.

BRUCE A. ELLINGSON

Wheaton, Ill.

I hope it is reproduced in the Congressional Record.

EWING E. CLEMONS

Tracy, Calif.

You publish a quotation from Professor J. L. Hromadka and you state that he is a “President of the World Council of Churches.” He has never held such an office.

He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee of the WCC. The undersigned has been a member of the Central Committee of the WCC ever since its organization, having previously served on the Provisional Committee.

At the New Haven committee meeting I strenuously opposed the election of Professor Hromadka as a member of the Executive Committee. He was nevertheless elected by a minority vote, because so many abstained from voting.

His membership in the Executive Committee has only one explanation. It is felt that there should be at least one representative of the churches behind the Iron Curtain and, so far, no one else has been discovered who is both representative and available.

The members of the Executive Committee must be elected from the membership of the Central Committee composed of men whom the member churches have themselves accredited.

Personally I have consistently each year voted against the election of Professor Hromadka because of his unchristian defense of the Russian rape of Hungary in 1956.

P. O. BERSELL

President Emeritus

Augustana Evangelical

Lutheran Church

Minneapolis, Minn.

RITUAL AND METHODISM

“Will Ritual Save Methodism?” (Apr. 25). The answer is “no,” for only a personal experience of Christ as Lord and Saviour can do that. But, an intelligent, well-ordered service—conducted by a dedicated minister—can certainly do more to lead people to that experience than can some hodge-podge spiritual free-for-all, designed only on individual whim.

ARNOLD POPE

Roanoke Rapids, N. Car.

The present spiritual and biblical revival in Methodism is going hand in hand with this “high-church” movement.

REX D. KELLY

The Methodist Church

Basehor, Kan.

The word “ritual” as used in the article is incorrect. “Ritual” means the Order of Service, and Methodists already have a rite or ritual in their Book of Discipline, taken mostly from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. What the Rev. Mr. Phipps means is “ceremonial”.…

There is great danger, which Anglicans call “spikery,” in introducing symbolic movements (ceremony) and other symbolism only for the sake of atmosphere or churchliness. It becomes a superimposition without basic requirements of apostolic faith and order.…

It is too often said that our Lord’s practice of religion was “simple” in the sense that He was puritanical. The reverse is true, as can be seen by any student of the Bible who will take the trouble to enumerate the myriad of references to Jewish worship in which our Lord Himself engaged as a devout Jew.

I have no knowledge of the “simple form of liturgy” [Wesley] drafted in his younger days, but this would not have affected Methodism, for as an Anglican Wesley continued to use the Prayer Book, and the Methodists upon separating from the Anglican Communion took much of the Prayer Book with them.… Liturgies is not primarily a question of ceremonial, but is first concerned with ritual—an ordered service containing all the elements of public prayer with seasonal variation.… Adoption by Methodism of ritual and sacrament is devoutly to be hoped for, when one understands the basic principle of liturgies, which is the science and art of worship of Almighty God—the principal job of the Church.

ROBERTS E. EHRGOTT

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Mount Prospect, Ill.

It has been my experience through a long and fruitful ministry that the basis for the liturgical revival for the most part is in revealed Orthodox Faith. Liturgical worship and evangelism are not generally, need not be (that is sure), antagonistic but rather supplementary and complementary.

HOWARD E. MATHER

First Presbyterian

Amenia, N. Y.

As the Episcopal Church has long been torn over the problems of ritual, I know something of the values as well as the dangers on both sides. There are many people who lay great stress on elaborate ceremonial but there are those, equally as worthy, who care little about it. However, so many who do not like ceremonial go to the extreme of conducting very sloppy and undignified services, and ceremony and pageantry can be and often are used as a shield behind which men of small ability will hide. They try to make up in show for what they lack in depth. But ritual does not destroy though it may be used to conceal spiritual death. It is like a pall which does not kill the victim but is used to cover him after he is dead.

The services from any good service book are superior in expression and thought to the average extempore ones. The great leaders of the Reformation were inspired men but they were all men whose foundations had been laid on one or another of the ancient liturgies. They knew how to express themselves but could not pass on their background of worship. There are rare souls in the Church today whose scope of worship is broad enough to meet the spiritual needs of people, but generally speaking, extempore prayers follow a definite pattern expressing the spiritual outlook of the person who is praying and the congregation is merely listening to a devout man saying his prayers out loud.

JAMES M. STONEY

Retired Bishop

Diocese of New Mexico and Southwest Texas

Albuquerque, N. Mex.

When ritual becomes too heavy, it is time then to revise, to throw out that part of it which has become a burden. The weight of ritual should be to worship what the weight of wings is to a bird.… Perhaps Methodism will save ritual.…

FRED E. STINSON

St. Paul’s Methodist Church

Eau Gallie, Fla.

“Trends in Modern Methodism” (Jan. 4 issue) points up … weakness in the theological structure in The Methodist Church. The great stumbling block centers [on] the person of Jesus Christ and his relationship to God. This stumbling block will continue to be the major weakness of The Methodist Church just as long as the personnel directing the educational programs continue to circumvent the Saviour of the world. When The Methodist Church begins to focus attention on Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, rather than Jesus Christ, the good example, the Holy Spirit will once again witness with power.

ROBERT ERICSON

Shelton, Conn.

R. P. Marshall made a mistake often made by those not familiar with the history of the Church of the Nazarene. He refers to the Church of the Nazarene as “one of … the several small groups which went out from the parent body.”

The Church of the Nazarene is not a “split” from the parent body (The Methodist Church). It came into being through the merging of several independent groups over a short period of years which finally culminated in the Church of the Nazarene in 1908.

B. P. RUSSELL

Redwood Falls, Minn.

Third in a Series

In the view of Reality held by the post-modern mind, we suggested, one possible pattern of action is dictated by the Self’s search for security in a world wherein only the Self and the Unpattern are Real. This implies conformity in order to gain emotional security, and such conformity is likely to involve deference to a Group which still retains many of the forms of (vanishing) modern society. But we may also expect Groups which increasingly reject many of these inherited forms and “values,” scorning the first Group as “phony,” ignoring “the Cheshire Cat smile” or remnant of the once formidable body of modern values, and approving modes of action more directly centered around the Self as Reality.

CRAZY, MAN

There is some evidence for such an attitude among many teen-agers, and sub-teen-agers (that is, those who know Hiroshima only as “something which happened before they were born”). The late Robert Lindner, well-known psychiatrist and a consultant to Maryland’s state prison system, concluded that “The youth of today is suffering from a severe, collective mental illness … has abandoned solitude in favor of pack-running, of predatory assembly, of great collectivities that bury, if they do not destroy, individuality. Into these mindless associations the young flock like cattle. The fee they pay for initiation is abandonment of self and immersion in the herd.… The youth of the world is touched with madness, literally sick.… It is not youth alone that has succumbed to psychopathy, but nations, populations.…! From loss of identity has come insecurity, and this has bred the soul-destroying plague we know as mass psychopathy.… Mutinous adolescents and their violent deeds now appear as specimens of the shape to come, as models of an emergent type of humanity (Time, Dec. 6, 1954). And, elsewhere, “We are entering an era which will be dominated by primitive emotional appeals rather than reason.… If society continues its present course, we will unquestionably enter another dark age” (New York Times, Apr. 16, 1956).

Such analysis presupposes, of course, the values of the modern mind (or of the Christian mind). For the view of Reality held by the post-modern mind implies that the things which so alarm Dr. Lindner are really quite sensible and consistent. One man’s Dark Age, after all, may be, from another view of Reality, another’s Golden Age.

Joost Van Meerlo, one of the West’s top experts on brain-washing techniques, speaking of mass participation in rock-and-roll, mentions “prehistoric rhythmic trance … mass ecstasy … Duce, Duce, Duce … as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away … depersonalization of the individual … ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity … infantile … vicarious … pandemic funeral dances” (New York Times, Feb. 23, 1957). To the extent that we deal here with a mind differing from the modern mind, perhaps there is some point to these remarks.

THE BLIND WORSHIPPERS

When rock-and-roll idol Elvis Presley appeared in Oklahoma City, he needed police protection from adoring teen-agers, who proceeded to mob a reporter who had interviewed Presley: “Touch him!” cried one girl, “maybe he’s touched Elvis!” (Time, May 14, 1956).

RCA alone sold over 13 million Presley records in one year. Over $20 million worth of Presley-approved products were sold to teen-agers (New York Times, Feb. 23, 1957).

Three thousand Florida teen-agers battled police and National Guards who tried to stop a teen-age hot-rod drag race down the main street of a resort town (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Feb. 26, 1956).

In New York, crowds of sobbing teen-age girls flocked around disc jockey Alan Freed, fired on suspicion of receiving payola (Time, Dec. 7, 1959).

Bill Haley, rock-and-roll idol, was mobbed by shrieking teen-agers at Waterloo Station when he arrived for an English tour (Time, Feb. 25, 1957).

West Germany’s leading rock-and-roll artist, “Conny,” age 15, has some 10,000 enrolled in her fan clubs, and sold nearly a million and a half records in one year. Twelve-year-old “Gabriele” and nine-year-old “Brigette” also have had major rock-and-roll hits (Time, Dec. 8, 1958).

Hundreds of teen-age girls battled Glasgow police in a rock-and-roll riot, trying to get to the dressing room of “Livin’ Doll” Cliff Richards (New York Times, Oct. 1, 1959).

West German disc jockey Werner Goetze described teen-agers as “clannish addicts … whose god is Elvis Presley, whose idols are their own stars, whose encyclopedia is the comics” (Time, Dec. 8, 1958).

In Sydney, some 700 shrieking teen-agers broke chairs and pushed down music stands in a wild effort to get near rock-and-roll singer Crash Craddock (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jan. 24, 1960).

Japanese teen-agers go ape over American rock-and-roll; a rockabilly (rock-and-roll plus hillbilly) troupe drew 50,000 teen-agers in Tokyo in one week (Time, Apr. 14, 1958).

American-influenced Japanese younger generation are characterized as stressing deep cynicism and abandonment (Time, Dec. 17, 1956). Suicide is the leading cause of death in Japan’s 15–24 age group (Time, Jan. 26, 1959).

Soviet Culture, a Russian newspaper, denounces “stilyags” (juvenile delinquents), who are becoming a serious problem, as influenced by Western rock-and-roll ethos (New York Times, May 4, 1955). A Moscow “stilyag,” caught robbing stores, denounced work and study as “useless” (Time, Nov. 3, 1958).

The trend has become so significant that it is now reflected by the movies and other mass media. Movie critic Gerald Weales, speaking of stars such as Jimmy Dean (whom many teen-agers believe did not die but lives on), Elvis Presley, Sal Mineo, and others, sums up his impressions thus: “The glorification of the immature has finally hit Hollywood.… The new hero is an adolescent. Whether he is 20 or 30 or 40, he is 15 and feels excessively sorry for himself. He is a lone wolf who wants to belong, but even when he is a member of a gang or group he is still alone.… He can only communicate through a random kind of violence.… The extent to which the sad-boy hero has taken over contemporary culture (is due to) a kinship between himself and the times in which he operates” (Reporter, Dec. 13, 1956). Harrison Salisbury, in an authoritative treatment of New York gangs, concludes that “gang boys perceive the gang as a source of security” (New York Times, Oct. 19, 1958).

It should be noted again that (if our suggestions about post-modernity are correct) this behavior pattern makes “good sense” within the newer outlook, with its definition of Reality as only the Self and the Unpattern, with any values not created by the Self being unreal. Sociologist H. Shibusawa holds that “rockabilly singers are the preachers of a strange new faith: the lowteens are the faith’s blind worshippers” (Time, Apr. 14, 1958).

BEATNIKS AND SUCH

We have been considering the type of ethic resulting from the search for the Self’s security by conforming to the Group. But such an ethic (perhaps dimly related to the philosophy of Dewey) is not the only possible ethic within the framework of the post-modern mind’s definition of Reality as Self and Unpattern.

An attempt can be made to find value for the Self in its freedom—its creative freedom from the Unpattern (the blind world of unfree Being)—as by Sartre.

Or, value for the Self may be sought in contemplation of, or intuition of, the world of Unpattern as something which is mysterious and wonderful, as by Heidegger.

In either case, the Group is regarded as a hindrance to the finding of value within the cosmos of Self and Unpattern. The Group becomes, then, a false road, something to be avoided, and indeed denounced. The Group is a “phoney” answer, a “square” answer, a “false” answer, which stifles the true answer. That is, the Group entangles the free Self, and prevents intuition of the Unpattern.

The attack on the Group as a false way of approach to Reality, whether by the philosopher, by the writer, or by the disciple, is often extreme and angered. Sartre can write a play about nausea; Kerouac writes shouting novels; Ginsberg writes frenetic poems. And this anger has, in a sense, a “religious” concern, for it is basically dealing with the nature of Reality. Thus Kerouac can speak of the “holyboy road,” Ginsberg of the “madman bum and angel,” and of “angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection …” (Howl), Lamantia writes “Come Holy Ghost, for we can rise out of this jazz” (Time, Feb. 3, 1958), and Camus insists with religious intensity that “man must admit that life has meaning only when he admits that it has no meaning” (Time, Oct. 3, 1955). Kerouac has referred to “beat” or “a great revival of religious mysticism,” which “believes in love (of) everything,” which holds that “we are all empty phantoms … and yet, all is well.… We’re all in Heaven now, really” (Time, Feb. 3, 1958). And, if Reality is the Self and the Unpattern, this is sensible enough; indeed, as he continues, when asked whether God exists: “We can give it any name … god … tangerine.…” Such an approach emphasizes (in our analysis) one alternative: finding value for the Self in the intuitive, wondering acceptance of the Unpattern (note, for example, Kerouac’s prose: “grayscreen gangster cocktail rainyday roaring gunshot spectral immortality B-movie tire-pile black-in-the-mist Wildamerica”). Some existentialist philosophers also propose this. In the philosophy of Heidegger, for example, meaning and value in the old (objective) sense have died with the death of “the old God” and the Weltnacht which follows; but “meaning” and “value” in a new sense may emerge from the World of Being, the wondrous Everything-Nothing, the Beyond-all-values—the Unpattern, in our term. We must always act so as to remain “open” to this world of Being. If we do not, the Self lives “unauthentically,” as when it conforms to a Group, and closes itself off from the Beyond-all-categories. Or, in more popular form, the same emphasis appears in Zen Buddhism, now undergoing a minor boom in this country especially among the “beatniks”: Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums is a novel about Zen’s glories. Zen holds to a passive emptiness (a “being open”) in the face of Reality, which is Unpattern. To impose logic on Reality (Unpattern) is nonsense. Does life have meaning, is Christ God, is history true, is there life after death?—these become nonsense questions. The purpose of Zen training is to shock the student into a realization of this. This satori (roughly, explosion of enlightenment) is produced by various means, such as the koan (roughly, shock-question). And it is not far (if our suggestions are correct) from the koan to the shock-answers given by “beatniks” Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlovsky at a plush Chicago cocktail party in their honor: “don’t shoot the wart-hog!” or “Fried shoes! Like, it means nothing,” or “my mystical shears snip snip snip” (Time, Feb. 9, 1959). Or, the shock-language used by Ginsberg in a fairly good poem (Howl): “Real holy laughter in the river … the wild eyes! the holy yells!… our own souls airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside.”

SECURITY IN THE SELF

If the Unpattern is seen as wonderful and glorious, the Self may find security in it. If not, the Self must find security in itself. The most consistent exponent of this position is Sartre, who (with his followers) has also had a notable influence on the “beat” group. The Self finds security in itself, for it is alone in the world of Unpattern, the blind world of unfree Being, the threatening world of the Determined. The Self is defined by its non-Being; it is Existence, not Being; it is Free. It must maintain this Freedom at all costs against the world of Being (Unpattern), and conformity to the Group is a threat to this Freedom. Man is condemned—it is the human condition—to the glorious though perhaps illusory attempt to be completely Free, to be God, to deify the Self. All pattern is created by the Self, and the Self cannot be bound by what it creates. We are not bound (for example) by History; it is true (that is, “accepted by the Self”—for only the Self and Unpattern are Real) only if we accept it. (Norman Mailer, a semi-“beat” novelist, defines a hipster [“beat”] as “a man who has divorced himself from history, who does not give a … about the past,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jan. 28, 1960.) Even death is a triumph, for we then escape completely from the power of the world of Being.

The literature of Self and Unpattern, particularly in the anti-Conformity type of post-modern mind, is expanding and indeed going beyond such “elder statesmen” as Sartre and Camus. American “beats” are experimenting with movies (“Don’t Pull My G-String,” with Kerouac and others) and lines like “Is alligators holy, Bishop? Is everything holy? Are we all in heaven now?” (Time, Dec. 14, 1959). In France, the “New Realists” (Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and others) are writing novels in which, as Robbe-Grillet puts it, “the world is neither significant nor absurd. It simply is” (Commonweal, May 8, 1959). And Andre Gorz’s current The Traitors (with an ecstatic introduction by Sartre) describes the author’s attempt “not to be here; to be only a transparent, ineffable and therefore invulnerable presence” (Time, Jan. 11, 1960).

If only the Self and the Unpattern are Real, and since Truth and Morality in any objective sense are thus obviously nonsense, it follows that any means to “dig” Reality (whether understood as Unpattern or Self) are “true” and “good” so long as they do not limit the Freedom of the Self (in one formulation) or the Openness to Unpattern (in another formulation). Thus, the “beat” will consider it “good” to try narcotics, sex, poetry, or whatever else he wishes in his search for the Unpattern (Self’s Freedom).

The Reverend Pierre DeLattre, who runs a mission to the San Francisco “beats” for the Congregational Church, has made some of the same points in a different context. The “beats,” he says, are “trying to gain a more direct insight into reality through emotional and intuitive forms of experience … through poetry, jazz, various narcotics.… (Their community is) one of the most sexually disinterested places I know and one of the most pacifist communities I have ever lived in.… There is a search here for spiritual vitality …” (New York Times, Jan. 31, 1960). The Reverend Robert Spike, Congregational minister and NCC official, suggests that there are “real affinities between this American type of existentialism and the Christian faith” and that the beat world “is a caricature of Christian society” (Christianity and Crisis, Apr. 8, 1958). And indeed, this we should expect, for the “beats” or the existentialists or the Conformists (if our suggestions are correct) are all adherents of a new view of Reality, and thus in a sense are adherents of a new faith.

Fragmentum

We are a people striving anxiously

and with an unparalleled vigor

for things we neither need

nor want

nor can explain to God.

TERENCE Y. MULLINS

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

The first phase of the “storm over Africa” has reached the Union of South Africa. For a long time it was evident that something serious was bound to happen. Then suddenly one afternoon, while the sun was shining as brightly as ever over the Great Karroo and the Highveld of the Transvaal, sad incidents occurred at Sharpeville near van der Byl Park. (Sharpeville is in the heart of the new industrial areas along the Vaal river.) Seventy Africans were shot by policemen and more than 200 were wounded after a vast crowd of Africans congregated and became menacing. A well-planned country-wide “protest” or near-rebellion, led by the Africanist movement, was immediately launched.

Many of the whites oppose the government’s general policies of enforced apartheid or specific measures, but in a national emergency they prefer law and order to anarchy. Christians in other countries probably do not realize that the leaders of African nationalism are with very few exceptions not Christians but enemies of the Church and the Gospel. We who have great sympathy with the Africans and their aspirations and often feel gravely unhappy about some measures taken against them, and about the political status quo in general, fear that if some of the new “leaders” succeeded in their plans the first and the worst sufferer would be Christianity itself. Such is the dilemma many Christians in South Africa, who have a deep interest in the well-being and future of the African masses, face today. We realize that changes must come, that Africans have legitimate grievances, and that their aspirations cannot be suppressed permanently without violent reactions; but we also realize that too much sentimentalism has taken hold on certain personalities and on certain circles of white “sympathizers” in South Africa and overseas. Much in the emerging African nationalism is legitimate and deserves the sympathy of responsible Christians, but much of it is bad and is rooted in paganism, personal ambitions, and hatred. The Church cannot be too sentimental about these movements and their leaders. She must evaluate them with responsible objectivity.

CHURCHES DESTROYED

One of the most disturbing factors that has come to light in South Africa during recent weeks is the number of churches and schools that have been destroyed.

If the destruction amounted only to the churches of a particular denomination, as was the case in the Belgian Congo, it could be explained by political factors. But in South Africa the churches of different denominations were destroyed. Besides the Dutch Reformed churches even Methodist and Anglican churches were set afire, in spite of the fact that Anglican bishops and divines (Reeves, de Blank, and Huddleston) are known to be among the main spokesmen for the Africans!

If we analyze nationalism, we will not be surprised at the situation. The African nationalist, like the nationalist of all ages and all conditions of men, grasps back to his national past and his cultural heritage.

The African past and cultural heritage are a pagan past and a pagan heritage. Christianity itself is part and parcel of that “Western imperialistic burden” of which he must rid his people! I do not imply that there are no Christians among African nationalists, but they are in a small minority.

BIBLE AND RACE

The Bible is not race-conscious; it is not sensitive to race as such. Whether the Bible says anything definite about race at all is doubtful at least in the modern biological sense of the word. The really prominent category in the Old as well as the New Testament is faith. In the Bible the decisive categories are believers and unbelievers, not racial units. Even the injunction to Israel not to intermingle with the surrounding peoples has no racial basis in a biological sense, for all of the surrounding peoples belonged to the same race as the Israelites. They were also Semites, but they served other gods. The injunction was not racial, therefore, but religious.

Through her whole history Israel made proselytes from the ends of the earth. The numbers of other races who accepted the God of Israel in the course of time became true Israelites, and were integrated into Israel. But Israel as the people of the Covenant was forbidden to intermingle with the surrounding pagan people of the same race so that they would not be drawn away from Jehovah to serve other gods. To use Israel as an argument for racial segregation in the modern world makes no sense.

In some quarters much is made of the Tower of Babel and the delusion of tongues whereby the people of the day were divided into different linguistic groups or “nations.” By God’s act, the sinful unity of man was broken, and humanity was divided by the barriers of language. I believe Babel still has significance. It reminds us that humanity, as a result of sin, is a broken humanity. We must, however, guard against the tendency among many Christian people to argue that God at Babel divided humanity into nations and races and that the obligation rests on us to respect these God-given divisions and that even today all race-mixing is against the will of God. The line of argument rests on the misconception that the division was static and not dynamic. Actually the original “nations” which came into being at the division at Babel no longer exist. Out of them has developed through the ages, under God’s guidance, a great diversity of new peoples mostly as a result of racial mixture.

If racial mixture were against God’s will, the development of all modern nations (including my own and that of the United States) must be sinful and against God’s ordinances. All modern nations would then stand under the judgment of God because the original divisions of Babel were not conscientiously adhered to. But such a view does not make sense, and ignores the fact that the diversity is dynamic. There will always be different nations and races; it is part of God’s common grace to control sin and lawlessness. But God takes care of the diversity. New nations or peoples are continually called into being under God’s guidance as the result of the merging of two or more existing national or racial groups.

The Tower of Babel reminds us that God broke a sinful unity through an act in history. But we must not isolate Genesis 11 from the succeeding chapter, the call of Abraham in whom all the generations of the earth would be blessed. Genesis 12 actually points to the real unity of believers in Christ Jesus. Babel was not God’s last word.

BARRIERS DROP AWAY

After Babel many stupendous things happened. God became flesh and dwelt among us. Following his ascent to heaven, there was a day of Pentecost. Later Ephesians 2 was written by the Apostle Paul, and we get deep insight into the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ and of the Church, the people of God, constituted from Jews and heathens. In Christ all barriers fall away. However, in Christ we do not lose differentiation, which is something different from isolation.

In the New Testament all isolation between peoples is in principle broken down forever. Now the basic division in the midst of all diversity is the division between those who are for Christ and those who are against him. Diversity may never erroneously be substituted for division or apartheid, as is too often done in most unexpected circles. The two concepts are widely different. Has the Church any mandate to keep races intact or “pure”? I doubt it. The Church has the clear responsibility to seek and to demonstrate the unity of God’s people in spite of racial or cultural diversity.

The Church as the body of Christ, the communion of the saints, the people of God, is based not on racial or ethnic factors but on faith. Standing in the midst of a world of rich human diversity, she may not neglect or ignore this God-given diversity. On the other hand, the Church, as the break-through of the Kingdom into this present sinful dispensation, must be true to her character and high calling in uniting believers from all nations and races, and in her own life overcome the artificial barriers that divide believer from unbeliever.

Where practical considerations of language and cultural background make it desirable to have separate churches for different groups of believers, the churches may not be exclusive. The moment a Christian church becomes exclusive, and certain groups are refused admission or fellowship in worship on account of race or color, it is sinful.

Any policy of exclusiveness clashes with the very character of the Church of Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, in any discussion of the problem, we immediately have to face the fact that we live in a world broken by sin, and every man and every church is part of some concrete situation in this broken world where the human family is divided into nations and races. Although we believe that the diversity has come about under God’s guidance, and that nations and the Bindungen (bonds) they create serve God’s purpose in limiting sins and lawlessness among men, we also realize that nationhood is tainted by sin, and infested by the seeds of disorder, death, and rebellion against God. Christian citizens are often confronted therefore by a clash of loyalties between God (or Church) and nation.

GOD AND NATIONALISM

Frequently Christians are called upon to give their supreme loyalty to the state or nation and not to God. Christian believers of our own century have time and again been called upon to come to a personal decision about the question, “Will my Christian beliefs be determined by my nationalism or will my nationalism be fashioned by my Christian beliefs)” In some countries the issue is as real today as it was for Germany two decades ago. Believers in almost every century in the history of the world have had to face situations where they were denied the right to give their supreme loyalty to God alone.

Any policy of separation based on cultural, linguistic, or color lines calls for utmost vigilance and searching of conscience. Evil motives may easily slip in and take command, so that the formation and continuance of separate churches may spring not from a sense of Christian responsibility and love but from a desire to get rid of the less developed brother on grounds of race and color. Such an atitude can only be a blatant denial of the reality of the Christian Koinonia. Any church placed in a critical racial situation will continually have to guard against evil exclusivist tendencies and educate her members, in the light of our deep and fundamental unity in Christ, to respect and love every one of her household irrespective of race or color. On the other hand, separate churches for different racial groups need not under all circumstances be condemned, as they can have beneficial and positive results. I therefore believe that separate churches can exist only on condition that real Christian brotherhood is not denied in theory or in practice.

Some people have made much of the concept of eiesoortigheid (sui generis)—that the different races show different aptitudes and characteristics, and that this diversity is valuable enough to be retained intact.

The point of view constitutes the basic approach of those who look with disfavor on the tendency to leveling and equalization noticeable all over the world and which threatens to destroy the distinctive and unique character of specific peoples and races.

Here there is deep distrust on the part of non-white races of the intentions of the white race, and one of the consequences of the distrust is that any attempt to retain distinctive racial character in education or in any other sphere, and to do so by constraint, is branded as imperialism. The handling of this concept calls for the greatest circumspection. “As far as the Christian Church is concerned this eiesoortigheid, this fact of a group being sui generis, is important and may not be ignored.” No sane person even in South Africa would dream of refusing any German or English-speaking person normal or regular admittance to an Afrikaans church, but an Afrikaans-speaking colored person would be refused regular attendance in almost any white Afrikaans church and even occasional attendance in at least most Free State and Transvaal churches. In how many English churches would the same thing happen? Within the Church, as the communion of God’s people, the stress on the differences between the ethnae can be only a relative stress. If the Church fails to realize the fact, and white Christians follow practices of exclusion, the Church has no future in the Africa of tomorrow.

While we thus affirm that the Church transcends every nation, we do not thereby deny that nation and race can have real significance in the practical organization of the visible church. By virtue of her character, the Church is called continually to bear witness to the coming Kingdom, and in her own life to be a manifestation of the Kingdom that is to come as a break-through of the new world into the old. Continually and progressively, therefore, the Church must work towards the elimination of “walls of partition” between believer and believer. It is part of her calling in obedience to Christ her Lord and Master.

Reflection

Our garbage man comes twice a week—

(City law forbids the reek)

In summer, every day.

But, Oh, I ask: does He forgive

That somewhere little ones could live

On what we throw away?

MILDRED R. BENSMILLER

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.