A report prepared especially forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby Dr. G. Aiken Taylor, editor of the Presbyterian Journal:

“From Missions to Mission,” theme of the first joint assembly of the Divisions of Home and Foreign Missions of the National Council of Churches meeting December 8–11 in Atlantic City, implied to nearly 500 delegates the failure of the churches to recognize their supreme mission in the world in their preoccupation with the “missions enterprise”—pictured as an administrative “static ecclesiastical pattern” (in which some felt involved, some not).

More profoundly, the theme indicated the existential situation and the current theological pattern: churches being forced to reassess their mission by the pressure of revolutionary changes within their own enterprises at home and abroad. To keep pace with change (the theme suggested) the churches must themselves change or become lost in the shuffle. As one delegate saw it, “paternalism is becoming fraternalism because the formerly paternalized are demanding it.”

“Change,” and its sequel “unity” (for the first time superseding “cooperation”), were the conference big words. Speaker after speaker referred to “catastrophic changes,” “revolutionary changes” in social and economic patterns, in attitudes of nationals toward “foreigners,” in missionary concepts, in service concepts, in theology. And speaker after speaker saw the only solution in a deeper, more effective “unity.” One called flatly for “re-structuring” the NCC.

The most influential address was not delivered to the conference at all. Presented before the General Board of the NCC a week previously by Dr. Virgil A. Sly, chairman of the executive board of the Division of Foreign Missions, it was sent in advance to delegates as a guiding statement.

Dr. Sly declared: “The basic challenge is change itself. If we can meet the challenge of change, we can meet the emerging ideologies which are but effects. To do this we ourselves must change.” “The taint of colonialism still clings to mission work. Christianity is often known as the white man’s religion.” To offset this the missionary must become more closely identified with the people, “working under the direction of the church to whom he is sent.” “The role of the mission as the dominant body with sovereign control is passing out of the picture.” Our new relationship is from mission to church and from church to church,” not from denominational board to church.

“We must turn funds over to the native churches” for direct administration, he said, and delegate to the cooperative bodies we have created, such as the National Council of Churches, the International Missionary Council, or the World Council of Churches, creativity in leadership: “We should encourage the cooperative bodies that represent us to seek a creative role that places them in positions of leadership rather than merely a group that executes a responsibility allocated to it by boards or denominations.” It was clear to some delegates, though not all, that given such a development, the major ecumenical bodies would cease to be the servants of the denominations who created them, but the denominations would become the servants of a new centralized authority.

Dr. Sly referred to the “rising tide of non-cooperative missions.” In the year 1958 boards not associated with the National Council sent out about 55 per cent of all the missionaries from the U. S. “Surely in the spirit of Christ there must be some way to bridge this rift in Protestantism across the world.”

Finally: “We have been so busy discussing methods, structures, institutions and movements that we have often forgotten why we have them: to preach Christ …”

Well-chosen speakers enlarged upon Dr. Sly’s outline. Dr. H. Edwin Espy, associate general secretary of the NCC, introduced as the “philosopher of the NCC,” pleaded for “functional ecumenicity.” He declared: “The unity of the Church precludes disunity in its mission. We are called to one mission of the one Gospel.” Now “the unity of the Church’s mission requires a unitive approach to the church’s functions,” at home and abroad. Dr. Espy proposed no procedure, conference or committee, but pleaded “for an orientation, a point of view, a largeness of view.” “The unity of our mission must transcend our denominations … at the very least it calls us to make common cause in home and foreign missions.”

Dr. Jon L. Regier, executive secretary of the Division of Home Missions, confessed one indelible impression of the Home Mission enterprise: internal uneasiness. We must “help Christians in the whole fellowship to understand that when they joined the Church they agreed to be missionaries.” This involvement in mission, he said, will demand involvement in the decision-making processes of society (housing, legislation, civic planning, education).

Dr. Eugene L. Smith, executive secretary of the Methodist Board of Missions, in what many delegates considered the conference’s most significant address, called for a recognition of new dimensions overseas. The “old covenant of mission and responsibility,” the “western pattern” which overseas churches have had to accept, has been “cooperation at the fringe rather than at the center of the task.” Today we are challenged to “a radically different orientation.” “The power of decision belongs not with the mission board giving aid, but with the local church which is doing the evangelism” on the field. “Our calling is to make personnel and funds available to churches for their use in their missionary and evangelistic outreach under their own administration.”

In probably the boldest address of the meeting, Dr. Willard M. Wickizer, executive chairman, Home Missions and Christian Education, The United Christian Missionary Society of Christian Churches, called for restructuring of the NCC. For unified impact upon the world, the speaker pleaded for a program of: (1) Longer range and more comprehensive planning, setting sights 25, even 50 years hence. (2) More basic research, enabling the church, for example, to estimate what Christian family life will be like in America in 2000 A.D. (3) Enlistment of wider involvement of people in the National Council than now exists; not just board executives but church leaders at every level. Then: “I now propose that the National Council set aside the six-year period, 1960–1966 for comprehensive study.… That at the time of the 1963 triennial meeting there be a Convocation on the Mission of the Church in America. Out of such a convocation might come … a re-structuring of the National Council along more realistic and effective lines.”

Off in a corner another meeting was going on, not part of the assembly but in its own way perhaps of equal importance. For the benefit of board executives assembled at the invitation of Dr. Wallace C. Merwin, Secretary of the Far Eastern Office, Ellsworth Culver and Dr. Paul S. Rees were answering questions about the global strategy of World Vision. It certainly wasn’t an endorsement of World Vision by the NCC, but the exchange of views may have been significant. One denominational executive commented: “To me true ecumenicity … recognizes diversity. In the area of cooperation my ecumenicity embraces Billy Graham as well as Bob Pierce and World Vision.”

Not all members of the Division of Foreign Missions would agree with the “bold thinking” of the NCC. For some, the “missionary enterprise” is not quickly to be identified with a subsidy in funds and personnel offered churches abroad. Missions is not “foreign aid.” And the Christian pattern of authority advocates a spiritual “paternalism” if not a social one: the Apostle Paul thought of his churches as those he had “begotten” in the name of the Father and to whom he could speak as a father in Christ. But a large proportion of major denominational representatives in the Division of Foreign Missions have clearly fallen in line with the program of “cooperation” and subsidy, and are busily engaged in re-orienting their constituencies to the “new facts of life.”

The assembly was frankly oriented to implement the idea that the fragmentation of the missionary enterprise must cease. The cooperative body at home was implied to be the only valid body through which administrative contact may be established and maintained with the “younger churches” abroad. For several denominations this has already eventuated in a surrender of part, if not most, of their major board functions to the inter-church committees of the Division of Foreign Missions of the NCC. It was assumed, without question, that the “younger churches” are ready and able to take over responsibility and control of the Christian work within their bounds and that the function of the home churches will ultimately become that of bodies subsidizing the work abroad, upon demand, with funds and personnel. The strong implication, throughout, was that denominations really have no right to further existence abroad as denominations and the day may come when they will surrender their individual interests to the ecumenical body at home. One delegate deplored the disinterest of the people in his denomination in missions as “mission.”

Here was the General Staff of the Church at work: the Supreme Command efficiently briefing its field staff by lectures and carefully guided discussion groups for the execution of top-level purposes. Somehow it called to mind the Mass, in which the activity at the altar is for the benefit of the witnessing congregation which comes to see, to receive and to return home. The machinery of the ecumenical movement does not really think of itself as the servant of the churches. It tends to think of itself as the voice of authority speaking to the churches. Increasingly the denominations may turn to New York also for their theology and their polity. There is certainly little encouragement for them to turn to the Bible. The message is from the “ecumenical spirit” for a “mission” determined by men of sound judgment appraising the existential situation. One may see why Rome is increasingly in Protestantism’s doctrine of the church.

Worth Quoting

DR. C. MELVIN BLAKE, executive secretary for Africa, Board of Missions, Methodist Church: “The big issue … is ‘paternalism’ or ‘fraternalism.’ The world needs missionaries as colleagues, not as bosses. The African does not want the missionary to control things. In places he has said, ‘Unless you turn over your work to us we will take it from you.’ Another problem is posed by the existence of central administrative auspices exercising world-wide control.”

DR. A. DALE FIERS, president, United Christian Missionary Society, Christian Churches: “We instruct our missionaries to submit to the policies and programs of the churches under which they work, though this may result in differing missionary policies for different missions. It would be suicide for the ecumenical idea for us to feel a direct administrative responsibility for any part of the Church of Christ in Japan, for instance, under which our missionaries work. The natural administrative body in America would be the Japan Board Committee of the Division of Foreign Missions of the National Council. Ideally, in dealing with unified churches abroad, the inter-board committee of the DFM becomes the denominational board.”

DR. D. J. CUMMING, educational secretary, Board of World Missions, Presbyterian Church in the U. S.: “We have been moving towards the goal of autonomous churches on the field and we have attained that goal in several parts of the world. However, the ‘missions enterprise’ is distinct in our thinking from the ‘national church.’ Where we work alongside the younger churches we do so in cooperation with them but our evangelistic missionaries engage primarily in pioneer work rather than as workers of the younger churches. Our policy is based on three broad considerations: First, the younger churches may be ready for autonomy without being ready to take over all ‘missionary’ work. Then, it is doubtful that the churches will grow more rapidly under a subsidy system of foreign aid granted for them to administer. There is a practical difference between a grant made to a church for its general operating expenses and a grant made for a particular project such as the construction of a seminary. And, finally, there is yet missionary work which the younger churches are not ready to assume. This task is one primary reason for our being on the field.”

DR. JOHN W. DECKER, past secretary of the International Missionary Council: “Merger of the IMC with the WCC is coming. It will carry out on a world scale what has already occurred here in the United States with the unification of such bodies as the old Foreign Missions Conference and the Home Missions Council. We must recognize that the Church is increasingly being called to mission and to unity. To meet the objections to merger, there will be a continuing Commission on World Mission and Evangelism to which organizations may belong without committing themselves to WCC membership.”

DR. ORIE O. MILLER, associate secretary of Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities and of the Mennonite Central Committee: “Some of our boards are members of the Division of Foreign Missions, although none of our churches belong to the NCC. This membership is largely for accreditation, that is, for reference in the purchase of property, etc. In my opinion, there is more talk of unification here than there is actual implementation on the field. When you force a centralized structure, administratively, a ‘breadth of vision’ is lost which leaves vacuums in the work. Then God raises up his Bob Pierces and World Vision, for instance, to supply the deficiency.”

DR. ADAM W. MILLER, president of the Missionary Board of the Church of God: “At the present time we are granting workers to serve under the national churches. We are also granting funds to national churches to be administered at their sole discretion. However, there are dangers inherent in the evident trend towards the integration of boards and agencies at home. Some of us fear that if the IMC is integrated with the WCC … our own missionary work as a distinct, effective entity, might suffer.”

Jungle ‘Junk’

Hundreds of jeeps rust away in jungle junk yards while U. S. missionaries in nearby compounds plod about on foot.

Such lamentable juxtaposition of missionaries and materiel is common. Surplus goods at U. S. military bases overseas is valued in billions of dollars. While missionaries beg for equipment to minister more effectively, commanders worry about getting rid of their excess.

With the reconvening of Congress January 6, the U. S. Defense Department plans to press lawmakers for authorization to give away surplus property. Reportedly, it is cheaper to write the material off than to try to sell it.

Such giveaways pose distribution problems, however, and denominational representatives in Washington are open for suggestions from missionaries as to what advice they can provide Congressmen in formulation of the procedure. Who should determine recipients of the surplus? Should U. S. missionaries be given priority? Should the foreign government concerned have a say?

Other Congressional legislation of interest to church organizations:

—Federal aid to education proposals.

—Projects aimed at curbing juvenile delinquency.

—Bills to help the postmaster general crack down on obscenity in the mails.

—Bills to outlaw liquor advertising.

Postal Panel

Three clergymen are among nine prominent citizens appointed by Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield to aid him in reaching decisions “in matters relating to the mailability of books where questions of obscenity arise.”

Summerfield stresses that his new “Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Literature” “will in no sense of the word be a censorship body.” The committee:

Dr. Daniel Poling, editor of Christian Herald; Roman Catholic Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee; Dr. Julius Mark, senior rabbi of New York’s Temple Emanu-El; Dr. Erwin D. Canham, on leave as editor of the Christian Science Monitor while serving as president of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce; Roscoe Drummond, columnist; Dr. Shane McCarthy, executive director of the President’s Council for Youth Fitness; Miss Chloe Gifford, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs; Mrs. James Parker, president of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers; and Douglas Black, president of Doubleday publishers.

Boomerang!

A dramatic film built around Billy Graham’s 1959 campaign in Australia is slated for spring release.

Titled “Boomerang,” the film stars Georgia Lee and Dick Clark, both well known to the Hollywood Christian fellowship. An Australian actress who made a decision for Christ during Graham’s Sydney meetings also is in the cast.

Director Dick Ross of World Wide Pictures says the fall filming was done under a “continued spirit of revival.” Ross will accompany Graham to Africa to make a documentary and TV films.

Crusade in Africa

Evangelist Billy Graham is appealing to Christians to pray earnestly for the three-month crusade he and his team will conduct in Africa starting January 13.

Public rallies will be held in at least sixteen major cities in nine countries. In addition, special meetings are being arranged for missionaries, native pastors, students, business and civic leaders.

Graham will have the help of six associate evangelists, including the Rev. Howard Jones, Negro minister from Cleveland who during several years with the Graham team has been laying the groundwork for the coming crusade by making periodic trips to Africa.

Besides Graham and Jones, Africans will hear, through interpreters, evangelists Grady Wilson, Leighton Ford, Joe Blinco, Larry Love and Roy Gustafson.

Here is the complete Graham team schedule for Africa:

The Sultan’s Praise

The Sultan of Sokoto, Sir Abubakar, head of all West Africa’s orthodox Muslims, praised the medical work of Christian missionaries in a message of good will sent last month to 195 patients discharged from the Sudan Interior Mission’s Leprosy Isolation Centre at Moriki.

The Sultan urged the ex-patients to spread “the good news” of their cure so others would come for help. Leprosy sufferers, afraid of social stigma, sometimes do not seek treatment until the disease is in advanced stages.

Work among Nigeria’s estimated 750,000 lepers provides an open door for evangelism, reports the Rev. John C. Wiebe, supervisor of the SIM Leprosy Service. Serving full or part time among the 28,000 patients now under SIM treatment are 6 doctors, 32 nurses, 67 other missionaries, and 416 Africans.

Wiebe says 29 per cent of the leprosaria patients have recorded decisions for Christ, apart from others making such spiritual commitment through follow-up after discharge. At least 12 ex-patients now are full-time pastors or evangelists, spreading the “good news” of both their physical and spiritual healing.

People: Words And Events

Deaths: The Rt. Hon. John Edwards, 55, president of the General Assembly of the Council of Europe and a leading Anglican layman, in Strasbourg … Dr. Percy H. Harris, 37, president of London (Ontario) Bible Institute and Theological Seminary … Dr. Harris J. Stewart, 75, retired United Presbyterian missionary to Pakistan.

Appointments: As professor of biblical history and literature in the University of Sheffield, England, Dr. Aileen Guilding (first woman ever to be named to a professorship in biblical or theological studies in any British university) … as director of the Chicago office of Protestants and Other Americans United, the Rev. James M. Windham … as associate secretary of evangelism for the Board of Church Extension, Presbyterian Church in the U. S., Dr. Lawrence A. Davis.

Retirements: As general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, Dr. Arnold T. Ohrn, effective next summer … as pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Dr. Robert G. Lee, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Resignation: As vice president of San Francisco Theological Seminary, Dr. Jacob A. Long, (he will remain on the faculty as a professor of Christian social ethics).

WHAT AM I?

Introspection can become an unhealthy pastime, but true searching of the heart can bring great blessing.

The Psalmist says: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

We ought to ask for and welcome the searching light of the Holy Spirit, and let him show us the many things in our hearts that find expression in our daily lives, yet are displeasing to our Lord.

In the New Testament there are to be found four distinct groups of men to whom our Lord spoke clearly and forcefully and would speak today with equal concern.

We should search our own hearts looking for those things which destroy the joy of salvation or which stand between us and a clear witness to our faith. In this there is no thought of self-reformation. Rather it is a recognition of sin, regardless of the guise in which it may appear, and a submitting of oneself to the cleansing, forgiving, healing ministry of our risen Lord.

A Pagan? We like to think of America as a “Christian” nation and of paganism as something far removed from our shores. But the influences of paganism are all around us, and we are confronted every day with the temptation to capitulate to a way of life from which God is excluded and in which are found the pagan gods of lust, greed, and materialism.

Indifference to the claims of Christ is a form of paganism. The putting first of secular interests is idolatry. The exclusion of the sovereign God from his rightful place in this world and in our personal lives depicts an ignorance and perversity probably more displeasing to God than the overt acts of those who have never come under the influence of the Gospel.

It is not for us to point the finger of scorn at twentieth century paganism. Rather we should look to see whether we are unwittingly living in ways or following standards other than those which honor Christ. Wherever we compromise beliefs or behavior in deference to the unbelieving world around us, we are in danger of being engulfed by a philosophy that is at enmity with our Lord.

Pharisee? Some of us learn only too late that rigid orthodoxy does not make a Christian. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father, which is in heaven,” is a verse we are inclined to think speaks of someone other than ourselves.

The strict religionists of Christ’s day were the Pharisees, and to them he directed some of his most scathing words. These men knew the Law and were valiant to defend the letter of the Law and the man-made accretions and interpretations of the Torah. But they had missed entirely the spirit of divine revelation and had set themselves up as judges of righteousness, even to denouncing the righteous One himself.

Pharisaism is very much alive today, and any Christian with true convictions must guard against this spirit which denounces fellow Christians.

One does not move in theological circles for long before he discovers that criticism is a besetting sin of all too many. Some Christian becomes a leader, and immediately there are those who criticize him because of what he says, what he does not say, the company he keeps, his concern over some particular issue, and his lack of concern over another issue.

Pharisaism is pride and ignorance combined. It eats one’s soul like a canker, and leads to unbelievable lengths in “defending the faith.”

Whereas love is a characteristic of true Christianity, suspicion and hate go hand in hand with Pharisaism. It should be the prayer of every Christian that he be delivered from this evil spirit and filled with the Holy Spirit, from whom proceeds virtues that commend the Gospel we profess.

Sadducee? Valiant defenders of the law of Moses, and repudiating the later traditions, these influential men were of the priestly class and have their counterparts today in those who rule out the miraculous or the supernatural, and look upon religion as something only for this world.

In this day of scientific emphasis we are constantly confronted by the claims of a form of religion which has lost its spiritual power. Religious leaders reject the idea that any true interpretation of nature, personality, history, or social relationships must be primarily spiritual. Spiritual reality is considered by many to be a delusion.

To the modern Sadducee the faith of a little child is credulity and the supernatural manifestations of the supernatural God are carried off to the laboratory for analysis and rejection.

While the Pharisee may be so obnoxious as to defeat his own purposes, the Sadducee is often attractive in person and so sophisticated in his approach that we have a secret urge to follow his ways and warm our hands at his intellectual fires.

Here again our task is not to denounce the Sadducee but to search or own hearts to see whether we too have been infected by cynicism which rules out as true anything that cannot be scientifically demonstrated.

Christian? The seed in our Lord’s parable fell on four kinds of soil, but only one kind was good and permanently productive.

A Christian is one who hears the Good News and with a willing heart accepts the person and work of the Son of God. Having taken then this vital step, he ought to grow not only in spiritual perception but also in likeness to the One who has redeemed him. This process of Christian development must increasingly show itself in righteous living and in effective witness to the new life that is ours.

We do not become mature Christians overnight. A new born babe is a real personality, but he is a babe. Growth and maturity come with nourishment, exercise, and time. So too we must grow both in faith and witness, and God has placed at our disposal the means of grace whereby this is accomplished.

As we ask ourselves the question, “Who am I?” we must fix our eyes on Christ and look at ourselves in the light of his beauty and perfection. Then in true humility we may ask for his help in our lives.

Pagans, Pharisees, and Sadducees can all be very religious, but only those who believe in Christ and his redemptive work are Christians.

It is not our responsibility to place men in a particular category. That is God’s business. The Apostle Paul admonished: “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth.”

Our responsibility is a personal one to our God. In the light of his revealed truth, “What am I”?

L. NELSON BELL

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

In Philadelphia a police magistrate sobers up his daily haul of drunks with a big mirror on the station house wall. They don’t like what they see, and most of them are ready to take the pledge after one good look. If this mirror trick works, we can expect most of our metropolitan station houses to be renovated along the lines of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Anything to cut down on the hordes of smashed, schnoggered inebriates who clutter the magistrate’s blotter—more than 10,000 this year in the station which now has the mirror!

No doubt we will soon have some psychological studies on mirror therapy. Perhaps the psychoanalyst’s couch might be equipped with a mirror on the ceiling. Short of Cinemascope, there is nothing like a mirror to see yourself as others see you.

There seems to be one difficulty, however. Long before the station house had a mirror, most of the bars were lined with them. Somehow the mirror seems to work better when a hangover has made a man more reflective. The behavior of certain Hollywood citizens who have a maximum installation of bedroom mirrors suggests that plate glass alone is not the answer. If Narcissus had been furnished with modern mirrors he might have perished of self-love on the spot. The daily mirror reveals one’s least secret admirer.

There has been one substantial improvement on mirrors for spiritual therapy. The women who ministered at the door of the tent of meeting brought their brass mirrors to Moses, and he cast them into a laver, according to the pattern he received in the Mount. A mirror never flatters; a morning-after mirror may bring the truth of despair. But only a laver cleanses.

James exhorts us to look into the mirror of the Word, not as idle spectators, toying with a vanity glass, but as doers, obedient to the law of liberty. There is one mirror where a man may see himself as God sees him. The shock is greater than at the mirror in the station house. But God’s mirror is a laver where his sin is cleansed and where the reflected image at last is like Christ.

EUTYCHUS

CRITICS OF CRITICS

The article “Higher Critics and Forbidden Fruit” by Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon (Nov. 23 issue) was particularly stimulating. I was exposed to the JEDP biblical interpretation while in college where it was offered as the last word in biblical scholarship. I had misgivings about it then, for to my mind it destroyed the unity and authority of the Word. Dr. Gordon’s article is packed with evidence that the JEDP hypothesis was wrong. It is good to know that the Bible, in the light of discoveries made in archaeology and “taken on its own terms,” is coming to be viewed by more and more scholars as factual and authoritative.

PAUL L. SALANSKY

United Presbyterian Church

Reinbeck, Iowa

The popularity and general acceptability of this hypothesis accounts for the fact that so many current books and commentaries in recent decades have been basically committed to this theory.… Too often the serious and intelligent student of Scripture has been disheartened by the ambiguity of so-called “scholarly” division of the Bible into JEDP documents. It is high time that the layman is made to realize that this theory is not the consensus of all Old Testament scholars.

SAMUEL J. SCHULTZ

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

Surely a timely article by Dr. Cyrus Gordon on the absurdity of the higher critical position.… Dr. Fritsch in the new Layman’s Bible Commentary uses the JEDP junk, but soft-pedals it.

J. W. TALMAGE

Bellaire, Tex.

Your editorial on “Isaac and Rebekah” is brilliant satire. And, Cyrus Gordon has spoken simply and well on “Higher Critics and Forbidden Fruit.” The tragedy of it all is that these eminently sensible words on the integrity of Scripture had to come from the pen of an Orthodox Jew. We who name the name of Christ stand doubly condemned for our failure to speak with greater force in defense of his Word.

BELDEN MENKUS

Nashville, Tenn.

Your editorial “Isaac and Rebekah” … was satirical, and I suppose you meant for it to be. But I charge that you satirize a situation which in the main is not as you picture it.

EUGENE V. SMITH

Taylor, Neb.

SOMETHING OF WORTH

Thank you for the … article by Bishop Dibelius (Nov. 9 issue). I am glad that you are broad enough to print anything worthy, even by the European President of the World Council.

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD

Philadelphia, Pa.

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHE

I appreciated the emphasis in your issue of November 9th on relations between Christianity and psychiatry. Your editorial and the articles which appeared on the subject reflected a deep understanding of the importance of the field and the need of those of us in the ministry to understand the power of our deep emotional life to influence our spiritual life.

GEORGE C. ANDERSON

Director

Academy of Religion and Mental Health

New York, N. Y.

I am convinced by experience that psychiatric principles applied in pastoral counseling will be the most rewarding ministry for any preacher.

… Naive pastors who are confronted by a saved individual who cannot release his own creativity due to emotional conflict must rationalize the situation thusly: “The abundant life is a post-mortal-life promise.” … Our most learned theologians could easily see that Jesus used counseling techniques in his very own person to person contacts.…

If the Gospel of most of our pastors is the all-sufficient panacea, and you really believe that, don’t check your congregation to see how many have had and still are seeking psychiatric help; it’ll destroy you. Why? The only answer you have left is that you have left out most of the Gospel!

Now I suggest that you take your pride and chuck it away. Destroy your self-image of the infallible pastor. Get yourself to some individual who will help you to know your personality structure. Study, restudy, think and apply knowledge more than you ever have before—and if you are man enough and intelligent enough, you might someday make a pastoral counselor.

NATHAN ALTHOFF

Morrison, Ill.

May I issue a strong warning … advising against the sending of any Christian to a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst? It is most important that further “rape of the mind” be prevented.… May I stress the importance of procuring and distributing copies of a brochure entitled Brainwashing (write Kenneth Goff, Box 116, Englewood, Colorado). This booklet gives in detail the horrible lectures of the late Beria, former Secret Police head among the Soviets. What they said they would do, they have done, right here in America, to an alarming extent. Inform yourselves of the way the Communists have infiltrated through the channels of psychiatry, social-work, law, and teaching. The deliberate, calculating methods used I know to be all too real. I have been victimized by these people, and I know what we are up against. Urge your membership to look to Jesus for Divine Healing.… The “psycho-political operatives” were especially instructed to work against all faith healers. I see no reason why the children of God should endure further persecution at the hands of Communists in this country.…

LILLIAN A. PETERSON

Portland, Ore.

CONVERSATION INVITED

I am presently making a study regarding the needs in the area of training mentally retarded children on a custodial basis, and am greatly interested in hearing from parents and others interested in this field.

THOMAS G. ATKINSON

Saint Andrew’s United Presbyterian

11401 East 47th St.

Kansas City, Mo.

HEIRS OF THE REFORMATION

I have been much impressed by articles in the issue of October 26. I especially am pleased with three articles, “American Protestantism: Does It Speak to the Nation?”, “The Essence of the Church,” and your editorial on “The Sons of the Reformation.”

W. H. GREEVER

Columbia, S. C.

I especially appreciated your emphasis (“The Sons of the Reformation”) on the fact that evangelicals rather than liberals or the neo-orthodox are the true heirs of the Reformation. Your pointing up so clearly the differences which Protestants have with Roman Catholics as well as what they have in common was most helpful.

EARLE E. CAIRNS

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

BOVINE BEWILDERMENT

Page 22 in your Oct. 26 number says Boniface VII issued a bull “Unum Sanctum.” It should of course be Boniface VIII and Unam Sanctam. This is a bad bull indeed! (Strange, but a papal bull is feminine!)

PAUL H. ROTH

Minneapolis, Minn.

A good Catholic is under the leadership of the priest, and a good priest is under the leadership of the cardinal, and a good cardinal is under the leadership of the pope and his influence.

Now the great question is, does this country want to come under the leadership of Rome? If [folk] are not loyal to their church and its doctrine, do we want [them] … in office? How can they be true to Rome and Washington at the same time?

J. D. FRISBEE

Andes, N. Y.

ANYWAY, NO LITIGATION

In reply to Eugene Ivy (Eutychus, Oct. 26 issue):

I started with anticipation

Reading through your dissertation

On Martin Luther’s separation

From the Roman situation.

But I must say in consternation,

Without a bit of hesitation,

There is no consubstantiation

Stemming from the Reformation.

You have roused my irritation

With your trite elucidation

On “days of church consolidation,”

And “worthies of the Reformation.”

I feel that you have separation

Of the mind, and dissipation

Of your supposéd education.

Yours, with infuriation,

WILLIAM J. MOULD

St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

Mt. Pleasant, S. C.

READY TO LIVE

In the October 12th issue … 25 scholars’ views of the most vital issues of the day are presented. I am not a scholar, but when I read the different views, I tried to express my own view in a few words—and here it is: What this world needs more than anything else is saints—great Christians filled with God’s Holy Spirit—men and women who are obeying God’s command—men on fire for Christ and his cause, ready to live for him who died for us. What we do not need is more theological champions—but men and women with eternity in view—saturated with the glory of another world—reflecting to a dying world that love that offered itself for us on Calvary’s cross.

JOHN BOLTEN, SR.

Andover, Mass.

FILM EVANGELISM

I just finished reading with a great deal of interest the editorial on page 20 (Oct. 12 issue). Dr. Smith … does not go far enough in covering the agencies which are furthering the Gospel. Naturally, we refer to his complete omission of films—especially evangelistic films.… We consistently have 400 to 500 recorded decisions for Christ each and every month of the year as a result of showing our films.

BRUNSON MOTLEY

World Wide Pictures

Hollywood, Calif.

NONPROFIT, NONCOMMERCIAL

Some may understand from your “Protestant Panorama” (September 28 issue) that Union Seminary anticipates operating a commercial broadcasting station.… The Seminary has no intention of operating its radio station on anything other than a nonprofit, noncommercial educational basis. The facts are that a $9,000.00 antenna given our station by Richmond Radio Station WRNL, will not operate in the educational part of the FM band. In order to use it, it was necessary for us to request of the FCC a frequency allocation in that part of the FM band that carries with it the right to operate commercially. However, we have never considered exercising that right, and to the best of my knowledge, shall not consider it.

ROBERT W. KIRKPATRICK

Union Theological Seminary

Richmond, Va.

IT’S AN IDEA

Now that the TV morals are under fire, would some move to drive beer and cigarette advertisers off TV be in order? Maybe CHRISTIANITY TODAY might lead a movement to get evangelical pastors to circulate protest petitions in their congregations. The undersigned would affirm that they would not listen to any program sponsored by beer or cigarette advertisers. Maybe other evangelical denominational and interdenominational publications will help promote it.

FARIS D. WHITESELL

Northern Baptist Theologcial Seminary

Chicago, Ill.

If those invisible rebel spirits of the lower world should suddenly reorganize as socialist legions, and if one materialistic demon then were specially assigned to our world and charged to subvert the Christian churches, what strategy would he use? What ideas and ideals, what particular goals, would best advance his collectivistic cause?

Should this query seem amusing, perhaps even ludicrous, it need not therefore be irrelevant. A bit of disciplined imagination, in fact, may prove highly instructive in appraising Protestant social welfare programs.

A SPECTACLE OF LOVE

Let us call this particular demon Erape (a hybrid of eros and agape—a double dash of “love” as it were). Since Erape arrives as a spirit of love, anyone who dares to dispute his claims would face an immediate handicap of seeming to scorn love or to condone lovelessness. (Strategically, the Erape-label would excel Agros as a mark of identification, since [being three-fifths ag ape] it implies honor for the biblical view, although giving priority really [Erape] to speculative traditions. Forwards or backwards, however, Erape spells socialism on the move.)

In courting Christians, Erape’s major obstacle would be their attachment to the notion that Christ’s Church has been commissioned for a specific world task, evangelism and missions (Matt. 28:19, 20). This Christian preoccupation would be weakened, of course, could one discredit the Gospel as the message of “supernatural redemption from sin.” With one eye on evolutionary theory, and the other closed to “salvation by atonement,” liberal theologians professed to find in Jesus’ teaching a “social” exposition of the kingdom of God. “Real core” Christianity was equated with the Master’s teaching about “sacrifice,” while the substitutionary quality of his life and death was obscured. The “good news” lost its ancient soul and from rational secularism gained a modern mascara. The churches were then easily drawn to a new world mission. But critical theories no longer convincingly effect a revision of Christian supernaturalism. The “social gospel” no longer sparkles with John Dewey’s enthusiasm over the efficacy of environmental changes to remake human nature.

Since Erape’s interest lies mainly in economic secularism, and not in redemptive religion, his influence would register most fully were the churches encouraged to separate their financial vision and investment from their spiritual mission—that is, were they no longer to identify their stewardship overtly nor symbolically with the divine revelation of redemption. Charity would then cease to be a commentary on the Gospel, since it would no longer reflect to others the believer’s own unmerited participation in “the redemptive grace of God.” Instead of its performance truly “in Christ’s name,” social welfare activity would then become simply an appendage to the Gospel. This ambiguous relation of charity with redemptive love (agape) would also weaken its connection with supernatural justice and justification. In short order, charity could thereafter gain a relatively independent status, and merely secular considerations could soon govern public welfare activities.

This separation could be furthered by arguing that modern life requires new economic principles not comprehended in biblical religion and that neither the temporal ethical rules nor permanent precepts of the Bible provide formulas appropriate to our modern economic situation. The Industrial Revolution (and especially automation), it might be held, has so changed modern conditions, that one can no longer expect from biblical ethics answers to contemporary social problems differing in kind. This emphasis even seems to take modern history “more seriously” than those who gauge the differences simply as a matter of “degree,” and therefore hold that sociological changes, however extensive, do not contravene controlling biblical premises applicable still to the whole of life. The newer emphasis, that the Bible relates to only part of our social predicament, is soon combined with another: that failure to accept modern social theories in dealing with mass situations not only impairs the relevance of Christian ethics, but imperils the Christian religion itself!

Even after gaining a status independent of revealed theology and ethics, welfare work would nonetheless retain a modicum of Christian devotion because of the inherited and almost intuitive generosity of the Christian community. If enthusiasm flickers momentarily because the fires of religious particularism now burn low, the Church’s enlarging participation in cooperative community programs of benevolence should soon revive the glow, until finally the Christian community experiences the warmth of a merely humanistic social vision. Mounting support for community chest and other civic programs might provide a psychological transition for the ultimate use of all church benevolences for general purposes. In the one world of “togetherness” Christian brotherhood will politely assume its place within the larger brotherhood of the human race without raising provocative and ungentlemanly distinctions.

REVISING THE CHURCH’S TASK

Sooner or later, however, the reaffirmation of evangelism, rather than of direct social change as the immediate responsibility of the Church, may stifle ecclesiastical enthusiasm. In order really to carry the day, Erape must therefore popularize the notion that secular welfare rather than spiritual regeneration is the very heartbeat of the Christian mission. This exchange of mission calls for more than merely altering the nature of Christian charity. It requires the substituted notion that the economic imbalances of society are inherently sinful, that it is wrong for one person to have less than another, and that it is wicked for some people to have more than others. Of course all people believe in democracy; hence, economic democracy! The thesis that Christian love requires the human leveling of material possessions therefore supplies Erape’s strategic propaganda weapon.

How may this economic doctrine be introduced most compellingly? By stressing that poverty is obviously an evil, and by citing cases of destitution that—in the post-Christian era—would stir even a pagan conscience. Next, churches are called to condemn, not only the misuse of riches and the exploitation and neglect of the poor, but the very idea of economic disproportion. The clergy are urged to badger the wealthy into sharing their possessions voluntarily with the poor, or to promote the multiplication of their tax burdens as a means of involuntary equalization.

To establish this economic mission as legitimate and as indispensable, a ringing appeal is made to the “social indignation” of the ancient prophets, and then—to vindicate the details—a further appeal is made to “modern social insights.” The prophets assuredly were concerned about man’s exploitation and neglect of the poor; they stressed that wealth is a divine entrustment to be responsibly used; they even implied God’s special awareness of the needy (the rich so often think they are self-sufficient). The Old Testament clearly teaches love for neighbor, and Jesus lifted love for stranger, even for enemy, to new importance. There are prophetic warnings against plundering the poor (cf. Isa. 3:14, 15), apostolic judgments against the oppressive rich (cf. James 5:1–6), biblical denunciations of social injustice. And although they nowhere espouse equalization of possessions, or community of property, as a divine ideal, the sacred writers are invoked propagandawise to provide leverage for modern redistribution of wealth. A ministry to the poor that levels earthly riches, while neglecting the supernatural gifts of revealed religion is thereby advanced as a Christian economic duty.

WHAT OF THE HERITAGE?

Any attempt to vindicate the universal elimination of poverty as an authentic Christian mission indubitably faces troublesome obstacles in the biblical data. The first century Jew is not the problem; like some twentieth century Gentiles, he had become possession-minded, and interpreted personal poverty as implying God’s rejection, and personal riches as implying God’s special favor. Hence it seemed incredible to him that Jesus actually addressed “good news” to the poor. It would, of course, be easy for us, though unjustifiable, to distort Jesus’ words, “The poor ye have always with you” (John 12:8), into a controlling principle to justify social indifference to material needs—although the statement indicates that poverty is part of the risk, if not of the structure, of our present state of life. Yet the Gospel was not essentially a message of economic readjustments. Jesus’ own acts and deeds imply that universal elimination of poverty is an objective extraneous to the Christian mission.

For one thing, the disciples of Christ gained no reputation for handouts of their material belongings and redistribution of wealth. Jesus assuredly fed the five thousand, but he expressly repudiated the multitude’s clamor for a bread-and-butter ruler. Instead, he identified himself as “the Living Bread,” that is, as the Redeemer who assuages man’s spiritual hunger. Nor do the Gospels depict Jesus as preoccupied with physical wants of the poor. He did, indeed, heal the sick and raise the dead—but only a few, comparatively speaking (cf. John 5:3, 8), and these only in connection with forgiveness of sins. He gave alms to the needy, and that consistently—but it would be difficult even for many good Bible students to supply chapter and verse to support the fact. So unobtrusive were his gifts to the poor (he would instruct Judas on occasion to reach into the moneybag and contribute to some needy person) that the fact itself stands only in the shadows of the record. On one occasion, the disciples mistakenly think he is aiding the poor, and from this misreading of his intentions we learn of his custom (John 13:27–29). The sacred records reveal Jesus’ almsgiving to the needy as voluntary and private, in contrast with that ostentatious almsgiving of the Pharisees condemned in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6:1–4), and they simply leave us to infer that he made frequent distributions to the poor. Equally important, they nowhere erect the redistribution of wealth into a motif of Jesus’ ministry.

To ground an “equalize the wealth program” in the example of the apostles is fully as difficult. The so-called “communist experiment” in Acts—apart from the fact of its failure—was voluntary. It sought to implement a spiritual ministry, not the universal leveling of individual belongings. Nowhere do the apostolic letters view equality of possessions as something non-Christians have a right to expect; nowhere do they enjoin Christians to demand from society the communizing of property. As the apostolic age opens, Peter, in the company of John the apostle of love, greets the long-crippled beggar seeking charity at the temple gate with these words: “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee: in the name of Jesus of Nazareth rise up and walk” (Acts 3:6). Although the memory of Jesus’ words, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35), rings fresh in their minds, the apostles nowhere recall any doctrine that riches are wicked and that elimination of economic inequalities is a primary, indispensable, or authentic task of the Church.

THE BIBLE AND ECONOMIC VICES

The Bible grades as vices all inordinate use of riches, exploitation of the poor, and indifference to destitution (privation which reduces men to hunger and beggary). But neither man’s possession of wealth nor the predicament of poverty is viewed as intrinsically sinful. Doubtless many of the Church Fathers view riches with suspicion. They regard the wealthy as spiritually obliged to justify their use of their possessions, and they criticize luxury or extravagance beyond one’s station in life. Although viewing the rich as under special moral and spiritual obligation, neither the Bible nor Christian tradition condemns riches as such, and neither supports equality of wealth or of income as an ethical ideal.

The fact, moreover, that Jesus Christ in his advent renounced “the riches of glory” voluntarily to become poor for our sakes held striking fascination for the Middle Ages. Instead of the modern notion that wealth is wicked, however, this great drama yielded the medieval discovery that poverty can mediate special spiritual values. The Church Fathers regarded poverty as within God’s particular providence, as covered by special promises of divine solicitude, and as carrying both possibilities of eternal reward in the future (recall the Communist caricature of “pie in the sky”) and of spiritual consolations and compensations in this present life. These spiritual rewards were not simply negative benefits—such as the poor man’s freedom (alongside his exposure to the sin of covetousness which he shares with the wealthy) from the temptations peculiar to the rich (recall 1 Tim. 6:10 on the love of money, and the numerous passages on greed). Jesus’ beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor … Blessed are the poor in spirit,” if not suggesting actual virtue in poverty, at least imply its contribution toward a virtuous attitude more difficult of attainment in the climate of abundance.

Modern churchmen may scorn the idea of “holy poverty in an opulent society,” but the Middle Ages did not hold poverty in such contempt. Indeed, Christian leaders found spiritual value not simply in involuntary poverty, but even in voluntary poverty. Doubtless medieval ecclesiasticism carried its vindication of the propriety and spirituality of poverty to unjustifiable extremes, at times seeming to idealize poverty as a state, but it avoided the fallacious modern equation of poverty with sin.

This strangely unmodern view of poverty did not imply, however, that biblical religion regards the plight of the destitute with indifference nor that it silently condones the sins of the wealthy. Indebted to the biblical outlook, the Middle Ages came to view benevolences to the poor as a loan to the Lord. The rich, moreover, were obligated to justify spiritually, by way of accounting to the Lord, both their possessions and their use of wealth. The rich are stewards, guardians of God’s wealth, especially in relation to the poor, particularly to brethren in Christ. While the Bible views poverty neither as a blessing nor an evil, it commends relief of poverty as a virtue, and deplores indifference to destitution as a vice.

MATERIALISM AND MODERN DISCONTENTS

Before the influence of Karl Marx and John Dewey, who shared the romantic notion that human nature can be intrinsically revised by environmental changes, the modern Christian movement reflected the traditional understanding of its mission in economic affairs. Universal removal of poverty was no announced objective of the corporate Church. The doctrine of redistribution of wealth as a social imperative was not part of the biblical heritage. Was not Job the richest man of his day? Although Eliphaz rebukes Job for economic injustices to others, none of his philosopher “friends” traces his affliction to a failure to level his wealth. Were not Abraham, Jacob, Solomon, and David wealthy, and does not the Scripture say that God loved them? Nor do the Christian writings advocate or look for the effectual elimination of poverty in the present course of history. In fact, poverty was not, as by Marx, regarded as immoral. The modern condemnation of riches and of poverty depends upon a prior assumption of an ideal equality of possessions which historic Christianity does not share. It is part and parcel of a philosophy of “equality of condition” that any sound Christian theology must recognize as working inevitably, through its radical alterations, a great injustice upon society. For the spiritual vision of righteousness and redemption sustained by the Christian religion, it substitutes the illusion of a terrestrial Utopia, nourished by the dream of universal prosperity, and promoted by material means and earthly weapons. Seldom, if ever, is the warning of the Christian moralists heard that “the world is too much with us” and that, virtuous as it is to satisfy legitimate needs, it is also virtuous to reduce our wants. Equally, it betrays an unspiritual philosophy of possessions, one sure to arouse man’s desire for material possessions by catering to the false notion that true happiness lies in a stipulated quantity of things. Contemporary American life, in which the scope of poverty is much reduced, bears full testimony by its personal discontents—its drunkards, divorcees, drug addicts, and neurotics—that plenty no less than poverty corrupts the spirit in the absence of a spiritual vision of life. In these dimensions, the prevalent philosophy of poverty serves to inflame the passions of avarice, and its implication that no life can be blessed in the absence of a proportionate share of this world’s goods makes a basic concession to materialistic views of life.

Dr. Russell Kirk, editor of Modern Age, recently remarked—and with pointed relevance—that no era has held poverty in more contempt than ours, and that the twentieth century, having discarded the decency and respectability of poverty, has sought to abolish it. Needless to say, it has sought to abolish wealth also. Both “leveling” movements—although sometimes piously promoted under the canopy of “Christian social ethics”—may well prove destructive of Christian charity also.

CHRISTIANITY AND CHARITY

Does Christian charity then idealize poverty, and does it then regard human suffering and pain with indifference? The total impact of Christian humanitarianism through two thousand years condemns the thought. From the beginning the Christian churches have distributed material alms as a function of the churches, and devout leaders in all ages have emphasized that not only do the needy suffer, but the Church herself declines spiritually whenever this responsibility is neglected. Whoever would impugn Christian missions and extol Communist revolution is blind to the past history of the West and to the signs of our age. If anything characterizes Christianity but not communism, as Evangelist Bob Pierce often reminds Christians throughout the Orient, it is compassion. In the Western world today, welfare work is carried on in larger proportion than in any earlier age; in a sense, ours is the century of philanthropy. Whatever may be said of the method and motive of modern almsgiving, there can be little doubt but that its historic inspiration and impetus have come mainly through the evangelical Christian religion.

Where is Methodism going? The writer does not really know where Methodism is bound. Like the mythical bird that flies backward, he only knows where he has been.

One might say that Methodism is going back to Wesley, for there are signs of renewed interest in its founder and increased emphasis upon doctrines that he taught. One might prophesy a great awakening among the Methodists, but so far evidences of such a development are slight. Many among us feel that our denomination may have gone so far along the road to liberalism that any movement now must be back to the fundamentals of our faith—or back to Christ. But others see Methodism beating a retreat from the evangelistic and theological renascence in favor of a new movement toward “liberalism.” It is probable that most Methodist ministers and laymen, like their counterparts in other denominations, look for nothing more than a continuance of the “status quo” which, in the words of a country preacher, “is the Latin for the fix we is in.”

With this disclaimer of superior insight and prophetic foresight, I shall say frankly what I think I see. But before we peer into the future, we must look at the past. I do not know for a certainty where Methodism is going, but I do know where she has been.

THE LIGHT OF HOPE

John Wesley had come into St. Paul’s Cathedral of London a broken and a defeated man. He had failed as a missionary in far-off Georgia where he had gone as chaplain to the colonizer, General Oglethorpe. Despite education at Oxford and holy orders as a priest in the Church of England, and despite the fact that under his leadership young men of Oxford had founded the Holy Club in attempt to bring back primitive Christianity to a dying organization and had succeeded in making religion real to themselves and many others—he himself was not satisfied in his own soul.

He came in defeated but went out with the light of hope in his eyes, for in the words of the psalm, De Profundis, God had spoken to his heart on that day.

That was, I think, the beginning of the Methodist revival which resulted in a reformation in English morals and manners and a movement of vital religion which not only spread around the world as a denominational effort but influenced other Christian groups to an extent seldom realized. Today Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and others are acknowledging their debt to this man and to the new understanding of evangelical religion and personal salvation which he taught.

Down the street from St. Paul’s the little priest walked, praying in his heart for more light; and as he wandered he found himself led in the direction of Aldersgate street where a little group of German refugees were holding frequent prayer services. It was only a hall, not a church, although it belonged to the Established Church; and those who gathered there must have been Moravians, followers of Count Zinzendorf. There was no preacher and no choir—only a poor man whose name no one knows, who read to his friends Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans in which the great Reformer described the change which took place in the hearts of those that truly trusted in Christ for salvation.

Wesley did not want to go there. He says that he went unwillingly, but he went nonetheless; and there the change took place in his own life which shook the world again even as it happened with the little priest of Wittenberg.

Later John Wesley wrote in his Journal that he had felt his heart strangely warmed. He described the meeting there in a few words:

“I felt,” he said, “my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

Here, in these words, as he understood them, is the secret of Methodism—a personal faith in a personal Saviour. Here, too, is the Reformation basis of Methodist belief. The distinctive Methodist doctrine of the witness of the Spirit is the outgrowth of Wesley’s experience, for he believed and taught that while experiences varied in different individuals it was always possible and desirable that each one should have a “know-so” religion based not upon feeling (as some of his followers later taught) but upon simple faith in Christ.

METHODIST ORGANIZATION

Fundamental to the understanding of modern American Methodism is a study of its organization, for Methodists have been leaders in that field. Wesley during his lifetime exercised autocratic control over his preachers, and modern Methodists are still the most supervised people outside the Roman Catholic church. We have no pope, no man who can control the church. Bishops supervise, energize, and seldom apologize; but they are controlled by the General Conference made up of elected representatives from the smaller units called Annual Conferences.

Where are we heading in this matter of organization? Like all denominations and all organizations today we are becoming more and more centralized and supervised. In some sections, bishops still exercise their right to make the appointments; and although they must consult with their assistants, or district superinendents, they can take any appointment into their own hands. In other sections, especially in the northern states, the bishops have largely delegated appointments to the superintendents, and these in turn have given more voice to representatives of the congregations. In some cases a congregation has demanded and obtained the man they wanted despite the disapproval of bishop and cabinet.

In the matter of appointments, Methodism is rapidly coming to consider the laity. As a usual thing, all ministerial appointments are discussed with the pastoral relations committees of the local churches, and wherever possible their wishes are respected. (However, as in other denominations it is impossible to give every church a young minister, married but with no children, who can sing like an angel, pray like Elijah, preach like Paul, and manage affairs of the church like a bishop.)

The future seems to hold promise of enlarging democracy in this regard, but such a development will cause more and more headaches and dissatisfaction on the part of congregations. Methodists have for more than a hundred years been accustomed to accepting whoever was sent and blaming the “system” when things went wrong.

INTERNAL PROBLEMS

The Methodist Church is composed of a union of three denominations, all springing from the original Methodist Episcopal Church founded in 1784. A split over the slavery question in 1844 gave rise to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Controversy over lay representation and the opposition of some to the episcopal system had already resulted in the formation of the Methodist Protestant Church.

In this union lay problems which have not been solved. The northern group (Methodist Episcopal Church) had held to a conception of the powers of the General Conference which were rejected by the southern church. In the North, the General Conference had the power of electing bishops and, if necessary, dismissing them for grave cause. In the South, the General Conference elected the bishops also, but these general superintendents were not controlled to such an extent by the General Conference. The philosophy of the North with regard to federal authority in the time of the Civil War still permeates the church in that section. Southern Methodists gave large authority to the General Conference; but when confronted by the question of whether that body was to be always and in every way superior to the Annual Conferences, they usually found it difficult to assent to such a proposition. In other words, the South, in church affairs as well as in politics, believed in “States’ Rights.”

The past few years have added to the tension between the groups, yet there is no tendency toward separation in the church, taken as a whole. Small groups of southern Methodists, largely laymen in Texas and Mississippi, are at present promoting a “secession” movement, but with little success. Most southern Methodists recognize the fact that the church has united three groups with slightly different theories of church government, and that the northern group cannot be expected to agree with them on matters such as integration and the jurisdictional system. Outvoted usually by the larger group, former southern Methodists and Methodist Protestants have been encouraged by the brotherly charity of northern Methodists who usually are willing to compromise.

JURISDICTIONAL SYSTEM

There is disagreement, confessedly, and it may reach the stage of argument at the next General Conference in Denver in 1960. Many northern Methodists are pressing for elimination of the Jurisdictional System introduced as a compromise measure at the time of union. This system divides the church into five geographical and one racial jurisdiction. Each jurisdiction elects bishops for its own section, but these are for the church as a whole and they may, under certain conditions, be allowed to cross jurisdictional boundaries. Many leaders of the former M. E. Church (northern) wish to abolish the entire jurisdictional system; some want only to do away with the Central Jurisdiction. Delegates from southern states are expected to insist upon retention of the entire system, but already, at the preceding General Conference in 1956, they had agreed to legislation making possible the abolition of the Central Jurisdiction whenever all Conferences belonging to it had been absorbed into other jurisdictions. Undoubtedly, this agreement was gained because of the southern group’s belief that such absorption would not be possible for many years.

Southerners point out that their opposition to abolishing the Central Jurisdiction stems from something more than a desire to keep Negro Methodists separate. They contend that doing away with the present system would completely abandon one of the principal bases of union, for the jurisdictional system was a part of the constitution of the united church. Methodists in the North, also thinking along traditional lines, see in the dividing of authority between General Conference and Jurisdictional Conferences the same problem which caused the Civil War. They favor strong central government in church as well as in State. Lack of understanding of the South’s problems regarding race and political system is a danger to union, but there are indications of growing awareness and greater sympathy. Leaders in the North are really not unsympathetic toward the South, and no tension arises between sections in the church when they come together for their various meetings. Methodism bids fair to weather this small storm without damage.

THEOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS

Methodism has never been fond of theological controversy; troubles have stemmed generally from arguments about organization and polity. A few splits have occurred where there seemed to be an element of theological division, but on further analysis the quarrel has usually been over some question of authority. The Church of the Nazarene, one of the finest of the several small groups which went out from the parent body, based its opposition on the indifference of Methodist leaders toward what its adherents considered the distinctive Methodist doctrine of Perfect Love; but what actually caused the loss of many Methodist members was a feeling that the church was too autocratic in its actions.

The theology of Methodism can be found, in part at least, in Twenty-five Articles of Religion, taken and condensed from the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. These articles are still printed in the Discipline and officially counted as binding upon Methodists. In practice, however, they have not been emphasized much though Methodists in general agree with them.

Modern Methodism is not the Methodism of yesterday. Where once it was made up of small groups of believers converted to a way of life, it is now largely composed of members who accept church membership as a part of life. Once Methodists were all first generation Christians, having found an experience of salvation which gave meaning to their nominal allegiance to the State Church. While thousands of other men in England loved the Church as an institution and gave lip service to its doctrines, Methodists found in those same doctrines a whole new concept of life and went out to tell the world of their discovery.

PERSONAL SALVATION

Early Methodism did not start out by formulating a creed. That had been done long before, and Wesley found no fault with the Articles of Religion of the Church of England. He saw no need for a new theology and always contended that he was only preaching what he had learned as a priest in that church. Thus no great amount of theological argument was stirred up by the Methodist movement, except in the matter of Arminianism versus Calvinism. By and large, Methodists were more concerned over personal salvation and evangelism than with the arguments of the theologians. Certainly they felt that they were on firm ground so far as orthodoxy was concerned, for they only proclaimed what they read in the Bible and found reflected in the Book of Common Prayer.

As in the past, Methodist ministers are seldom found among the great theologians, although some certainly are capable of clear thinking and writing on theological matters. The truth is that up to now we have been notorious for lack of interest in systematic theology. We have turned from thinking about faith to a consideration of how to make faith work in the world. In doing so, it may be argued, we have lost contact with the foundations of our faith and may be likened to the man who spends his days perfecting his gun and then finds that he has no ammunition.

SOCIAL SALVATION

Perhaps because of this lack of theological training and interest, Methodism so easily turned to schemes of world betterment and social uplift as a substitute for the declining evangelistic urge. During the twenties a large segment of the church held a confused faith in God and Christ, and turned to faith in social progress. We espoused the cause of prohibition with fervor and dedication; we accepted the idea that sin was tied up with poverty, and we believed that eradication of one would do away with the other. Liberalism became the shibboleth in some sections of the church; in others a conservatism was almost equally devoid of spiritual life. But Methodism weathered the storm of controversy over Modernism without any split in the ranks, possibly because of a lack of interest in theological controversy.

There is hope that the turning point has been reached, and that we are now beginning to understand that sound faith must be based on theology. There are signs of a new attitude toward theology on the part of our younger men, and Methodist seminaries are no longer primarily concerned with preaching methods and promotional schemes.

There is a growing disposition of young people to turn to theology for an explanation of the ills of the world. They are asking why the teaching of amelioration and social progress has not succeeded in abolishing sin and its effects—why all our efforts to make people better by law and prosperity have failed to give us a perfect world.

Where once rather formal programs of revivalism were a set part of Methodist life—with a “revival” every year in every church, no matter what the incentive or the outcome was—the emphasis now is upon a more positive evangelism which depends upon Christian witness in an effort to win people to Christ. Methodists have in large part supported the mass evangelistic crusades of Billy Graham despite past disillusionment with similar methods. Being pragmatists by nature, they are inclined to favor anything that will work.

A LITURGICAL REVIVAL?

If I were to say that a liturgical revival is underway in Methodism, I would be going too far. I say only that there are signs of it.

Methodism in America made up originally and by necessity a very informal church. This was not so in the days of Wesley in England, for Wesley used the Prayer Book, exalted the Sacraments, and had little patience with those who tried to get along without systematic forms of prayer and worship. He felt that he needed only to infuse a bit of divine fire into the bare bones of churchly ritual to make it live. But Methodists then were only a religious society within the Church of England. They depended upon its ministers for the Sacraments and carefully scheduled their services of prayer and preaching so as not to conflict with the Church.

THE TRADITIONAL ORDER

From these extra-liturgical services American Methodists took their pattern, for it fitted well the simple needs of the frontier. American Methodists deprived of the services of ordained clergymen and forced to rely upon local preachers, could not carry on the pattern of church life which was a part of life in England. Thus they got into the habit of making the Sunday morning service a simple hour of preaching and singing which, while undoubtedly acceptable to the Lord as true worship, lacked the elements of liturgical worship in the best sense. When this was formalized into a pattern and when the old time fire of evangelism had died down, little was left.

Modern Methodists are recovering the understanding of the centrality of worship and are making use of liturgical patterns which have been used in the Church since early times. A recent article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY called attention to the efforts of the Methodist Order of St. Luke in fostering a liturgical revival. As president of that Order since its founding, I am rather surprised at the attention it has received outside the denomination. Actually, it is not too well known among Methodists, although its membership includes many leaders in the church, and it has had some influence in a quiet way.

We are happy to see that Methodist churches are no longer being designed as mere preaching halls or places for social gatherings. They seldom resemble, as they once did, public libraries, court houses, or Mohammedan mosques; and inside it would be hard to tell the difference between them and the sanctuaries of the Lutherans and Episcopalians. The old prejudice against the wearing of clerical garb is passing away, and the gown has replaced the sport clothes as garb for Sunday morning ministries.

WESLEYAN SACRAMENTALISM

But all of this is merely superficial and has little bearing on the matter of liturgical worship. If there is no inner certainty and inner compulsion to preach the Gospel by word and deed, then the above is mere window trimming. Far more encouraging than the trend toward liturgical worship patterns and more beautiful churches is the growing awareness on the part of the clergy that there is something they can do for the people besides preach at them. Remembering the need for comfort and consolation, for strengthening and building believers in the faith, the minister is turning more and more to the Sacraments of the Church and considering himself in terms of priest as well as prophet. Along with the movement toward a Wesleyan type of sacramentalism (not sacramentarianism), he is feeling impelled toward evangelism of a new type, a giving of himself as servant to God and to the people, while still maintaining a confidence in the historical doctrines of the Church.

Methodism shows signs of becoming weary of the ever-increasing demands of organization and special programs. (We still have far too many ministers serving tables than serving the altar.) Methodists have become disillusioned with the promises of the Utopians, and are more and more convinced that they are workers together with God in telling the story of salvation, of seeing hearts transformed and lives amended through the power of the Gospel.

Still in danger of becoming more of an institution and less of a movement, Methodists nonetheless sense the life that is within the institution and blow upon the fire which once warmed them. Perhaps in time it will become again a mighty flame.

R. P. Marshall served as Pastor and Editor within the Methodist Church since 1932. Presently he is Editor of The North Carolina Christian Advocate and President of The Order of St. Luke (Methodist). He has lectured in various seminaries.

The redeemed community of the New Testament is dynamically related to that community of the Old. There can be no true understanding of the Church of the New Testament apart from the realization that the new community has a definite continuity with the past. It is more important, however, to recognize that the community of God was completely transformed by the coming of Christ. This was the decisive event of revelation which forever separated the new community from the old. In the words of Jesus, it was the new wine that could not be poured into old wineskins.

The transition between Israel and the Church had not been understood clearly by the disciples of Christ. The transformation which provided the living link between the promises of God and their fulfillment in the new community was effected by the coming of the Holy Spirit.

In order to develop a sufficient grasp of this situation, we might recapitulate the circumstances which led up to it. Only after much misunderstanding on their part had God been able to reveal to the disciples that the humble and lowly Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah. So fixed had become the expectation of a mighty and exalted deliverer, and so persistent was the expectation for a terrestrial kingdom, that the passion and death of Christ actually served to shatter the initial faith of the disciples. Only the appearance of the risen Christ sufficed to restore their confidence. With the re-establishment of faith, the anticipation of an earthly theocracy became even stronger. The question of the disciples recorded in Acts 1:6, “Dost thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” indicates this hope. The ascension, however, decreeing the end of the physical presence of Jesus, may have placed this whole expectation in doubt.

FULFILLMENT OF PROMISE

The fulfillment of Christ’s promise of the Holy Spirit provided the means for removing all this confusion. In the experience of Pentecost the disciples realized that they had been reconstituted as the redeemed community of promise. God had fulfilled the hope of Israel. Only because Jesus had been exalted at the right hand of the Father was he able to send forth the Spirit according to his own promise. Thus God declared by the resurrection and ascension that Jesus was both Lord and Christ, the Son of God with power (Acts 2:36; Rom. 1:4).

In the death and resurrection of Christ the remission of sins had been accomplished (Acts 2:36; 5:31). Salvation was now a reality (Acts 2:38); the New Covenant, the new theocracy foretold by Jeremiah and Joel, was now in full effect (Acts 2:16; 3:24). Realization of these facts brought decisive changes in the understanding of the disciples. One of these was the recognition that there were two advents between which intervened the time of the new community of the redeemed. The divine timetable now was made clear. First, there had been the time of the past age, the time of Israel. Next was the climactic revelation of God in the earthly ministry and passion of Jesus which culminated in the Resurrection. This introduced the present age—the messianic exaltation of Jesus who now reigns in heaven at God’s right hand and on earth through his Spirit in the community of the redeemed. Finally there would be the restitution of all things when Jesus Christ would appear in his glory. All things would then become subject to him, and he would reign until every knee should bow and every tongue should confess him as Lord. Then would come the end when the kingdom of the Son would be delivered up to the Father.

Insofar as Christ was now seated victoriously at God’s right hand, the decisive victory over sin and death had been won. Judgment now had passed into the hands of the Lord Christ. Henceforth the disciples would believe through him, pray through him, preach through him, live through him. Moreover, the presence of the Spirit gave assurance that Christ was himself present in the midst of his followers. “We know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he gave us” (1 John 3:24; cf. 1 John 4:13). To the extent that he was present through his Holy Spirit the promises made to Israel of Old (Acts 2:39), to Abraham (Acts 3:25), to Moses (Acts 7:17), to David (Acts 13:33), and to all the prophets (Acts 10:43) were being fulfilled. The messianic community of the New Covenant was now in operation.

A REDEEMED COMMUNITY

The means of entrance into this community of the redeemed is the possession of the Holy Spirit. The believers on the day of Pentecost were all filled with the Spirit; there was no distinction between male and female, between young men or old, between slaves and freemen. Receiving the Spirit brings the assurance that sins have been forgiven and that salvation has been received. It is the inward reality which corresponds to the outer symbolism of baptism, and is the supreme proof of belonging to Christ (Rom. 8:9).

Though everyone receives the Holy Spirit individually, the fact still remains that the Spirit is in a unique sense the possession of the community. This fact differentiates the New Testament community from the Old, where the Spirit was bestowed only on particular individuals for specific occasions.

The essence of the existence of the Church is life in the Spirit. “The kingdom of God is not in word, but in power,” Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 4:20). The preaching of the disciples is “not in persuasive words of wisdom but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Cor. 2:4). The Galatians’ experience of the ministration of the Spirit in miracles and gifts (Gal. 3:5) led Paul to conclude: “Since we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25). The Spirit empowers the Church (Acts 1; 2), accompanies the witness of the disciples (Acts 5:32), and directs their missionary work (Acts 8:29; 10:19, 20; 13:2; 16:6–8). The united possession of the Holy Spirit explains the “togetherness” which the Church experienced, the willingness to have all things in common, and the bond of fellowship which marked their gathering. They could not be other than one in the Lord.

The implications of this power of the Spirit are incalculable. The early Church possessed a dynamic directly from God which resulted in the conversion of souls, the opening of prison doors, the judgment of sin within the Church, the ability to withstand opposition and persecution; a dynamic, in short, which the gates of hell could not withstand. Sadly enough, this dynamic is missing in great measure from our churches today. As Brunner expresses it, “In any event, we ought to face the New Testament witness with sufficient candor to admit that in this ‘pneuma,’ which the ekklesia was conscious of possessing, there lie forces of an extrarational kind which are mostly lacking among us Christians of today.”

The Holy Spirit’s relation to the Church was not simply an external power coming from without, “shaking” or filling the Church. The Spirit baptized every member of the Church, with the result that each one became specifically endowed or equipped to perform special service. As Paul states to the Corinthians: “To each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit to profit withal” (1 Cor. 12:7); to one is given a “word of wisdom; and to another the word of knowledge … to another faith … to another prophecy … but all these worketh the one and the same Spirit, dividing to each one severally even as he will” (1 Cor. 12:8–11). “But unto each one of us was the grace given according to the measure of the gift of Christ … for the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:7–12).

The gifts of the Spirit are a direct challenge to the ecclesiastical temper of our day with its distinction between clergy and laity, as if the clergy possessed the gifts of God and the laity were dependent upon their administration of the gifts. Rather, all members in the same body, irrespective of what official capacity they may or may not be called to fill—all members are called to minister to the body “till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Through the recognition and exercise of these individual endowments, the human tendency toward separation within the body of Christ is overcome. Because each possesses a full share of the Holy Spirit, and because each in turn is directed by the Holy Spirit according to his apportionment, envy, malice, or jealousy need not and should not exist. He who has received the Holy Spirit will walk in the confidence of His love, will speak in love, and will submit to another for Christ’s sake. Only where this mutual subordination exists, and where the church, in turn, is subject to Christ, can the Holy Spirit “fill” the church and make manifest the unity of the Body of Christ.

During the Wheaton College centennial Oxford University Press on January 9 will publish The Word for This Century (Merrill C. Tenney, editor). It is refreshing, a century after its beginnings, to find a Christian college dedicated still to spiritual priorities that marked its founding, and gratifying to find its faculty and alumni distinguished still by their world witness to the faith of the Bible. Contributors include Dr. Kenneth S. Kantzer, on “The Authority of the Bible”; Dr. Stuart C. Hackett, on “The Person of Christ”; Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, on “Man’s Dilemma: Sin”; Dr. T. Leonard Lewis, now deceased, on “Redemption by Christ”; Dr. Billy Graham, on “Christ in the Believer”; Dr. Glenn W. Barker, on “The Church of God”; President V. Raymond Edman, on “Christian Ethics”; and Dr. John F. Walvoord, on “The Hope of the World.” CHRISTIANITY TODAY prints a portion of Dr. Barker’s essay, simultaneously with the appearance of the centennial volume, by permission of the publishers.

We Quote:

ECUMENICAL IDOLS: “The National Council is fast becoming Protestantism’s Sacred Cow, and, in the minds of many, to attack it is close to blasphemy.”—The Rev. THOMAS N. LEIBRAND, First United Presbyterian Church, Lexington, Ohio.

“Western civilization,” “North Atlantic community,” “the unity of the free world”—such phrases are employed nowadays by our publicists and our politicians so frequently and loosely that, to a good many of us in America, the words have ceased to signify much. Yet the United States of America is engaged in a tremendous defense of an ancient culture in which our country participates. We sense that, in this time when the fountains of the great deep are broken up, we are resisting as best we can a barbarous force: the power of a totalitarianism which would put an end to our civilization. It is high time, I think, that we began to come to a better understanding of the cause which is ours.

Nearly a generation ago, in “The Revolt of the Masses,” José Ortega y Gassett wrote that American civilization could not long survive any catastrophe to European society. Ortega was right. American culture, and the American civil social order, are derived from principles and establishments that arose in Europe. We are part of a great continuity and essence, bound up with an ancient culture. In conscience and in self-interest, we dare not abandon our fellow-sharers in that cultured inheritance.

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

The principal elements of this common patrimony of American and European civilization are the Christian faith, the Roman and medieval heritage of ordered liberty, and the great body of Western literature. It is a legacy of belief, not a legacy of blood. So far as race and nationality are concerned, the continuity between Europe and America is very confused and imperfect.

The most valuable thing in our common inheritance is the Christian religion. As one of the most perceptive of American philosophers and critics, Irving Babbitt, wrote more than two decades ago, economics moves upward into politics, politics into ethics, ethics into theology. This is no less true in the United States of America than in ancient Egypt or modern India. And the United States is a Christian nation, notwithstanding the opinion to the contrary expressed by Thomas Jefferson in his message to the Bey of Tunis. The church attendance figures seem to confirm this, in our time; but it is not the statistics which really signify. What matters, so far as the civil social order is concerned, is that the great majority of Americans voluntarily subscribe to the faith we call Christianity. In the things which most nearly concern the private life and the public good, they draw their moral and intellectual sustenance from the Old World. The prophets of Israel, the words of Christ and His disciples, the writings of the fathers of the Church, the treatises of the Schoolmen, the discourses of the great divines of Reformation and Counter-Reformation—these are the springs of American conviction on the most important of questions, as they are of European conviction. They underlie even the beliefs of those Americans and Europeans who deny the validity of Christianity.

In its immediate influence upon culture, perhaps the most important aspect of the genius of Christianity is its account of human personality: the doctrine of the immortal soul, the belief in the unique character of every human person, the concept of human dignity, the sanction for rights and duties, the obligation to exercise Christian charity, the insistence upon private responsibility. Both European and American civilization have been erected upon the foundation of the dignity of man—upon the assumption that man is made for eternity, and that he possesses dignity because he has some share in an order more than temporal and more than human.

Christianity has always been an immense moving force among Americans. The student who endeavors to ignore the role of Christianity in European and American culture is as foolish as a physician would be if he endeavored to ignore the patient’s personality. Christianity, with its Judaic and Greek roots, is the core of our civilization—its vitality, indeed. Even the virulent totalist ideologies of our century are influenced by Christianity—inspired by a misunderstanding of Christian doctrines, or a reaction against Christian principles; hate it though they may, the ideologues cannot break altogether with the Christian religion.

LAW AND JUSTICE

The second article in our common patrimony is our theory and practice of ordered liberty: our system of law and politics. This is derived from Roman and from medieval Christian sources—and more remotely, through both the Roman and Christian traditions, from Greek philosophy. To the Roman and medieval ideas of justice, and to the Roman and medieval experience of society, there has been added a modern body of theory and experience—although too often we moderns, including the scholars among us, exaggerate the importance of “liberal” contributions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of which latter contributions have not very stoutly withstood the severe tests of our twentieth-century time of troubles. The doctrines of natural law; the idea of a polity, a just and balanced commonwealth; the principle of a government of laws, not of men; the understanding that justice means “to each his own”; the whole complex of reverence for the reign of law—these passed directly from Europe into American theory and practice. Cicero, more than any other single figure, influenced the theory of both European and American politics—and through theory, our political institutions. The fact that Cicero is little read in our schools nowadays does not destroy the work his writings accomplished over the centuries.

To this general European heritage, the English added their common law and their prudent, prescriptive politics; and the English experience became directly part of the American social order. The founders of the American Republic, especially the lawyers and colonial representatives among them, took for granted this English pattern of politics, only modifying it slightly to suit the new nation—and even then modifying it not in favor of some newfangled obstract scheme, but rather on the model of the Roman Republic. So America has in common with Europe a coherent legacy of justice and order and freedom, a balancing of things public and things private, derived from Greek and Roman philosophy. Roman jurisprudence, Judaic moral law, and the Christian and medieval understanding of personal freedom and personal responsibility. The principle that power must be effectively counterbalanced and curbed and hedged, for instance, exists throughout Western Europe and America, however much it may be violated in practice from time to time. It has been so in America since the beginning of civilization in this continent.

A NOBLE LITERATURE

The third principle article in our common heritage is the body of literature of our European-American civilization. The great works of imagination and reason join us in an intellectual community. They, far more than the endeavors of the United Nations Organizations, transcend the barriers of nationalism. The philosophers and the poets of 3,000 years have formed the mind and the character of Americans as well as Europeans. The most influential of all books, of course, has been the Bible. Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, the Schoolmen, Dante, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bossuet, Cervantes, Milton, Johnson, Goethe, Coleridge, and all the rest are the general property of civilized people in the West. The best of American letters is part and parcel of the achievement of European literature. Novelists like Hawthorne, and historians like Henry Adams, though possessing characteristics distinctly American, nevertheless stand in the grand tradition of our common Western literature.

CIVILIZATION IN DOUBT

In all essential respects, Europe and America have a common faith, a common history, a common system of law and politics, and a common body of great literature. They make one civilization. Until the terrible events of our own century, at least, a native of Romania and a resident of Alaska, let us say, had more in common than two Indian villagers—supposing one to be a Hindu and the other a Moslem—living within a few yards of each other. The general assumptions of the Romanian and the Alaskan concerning the nature of things, the character of man, and the principles of justice have been, in essence, much the same.

So it was in the Western world for some centuries: these cultural ties outlived dynasties, empires, and even philosophies, injured now and then by war or fanaticism, yet rising with renewed vigor after each period of violence. We cannot be confident, nevertheless, that our common civilization will endure forever. It is possible to exhaust moral and intellectual capital; a society that relies entirely upon its inheritance soon finds itself bankrupt. With civilization, as with the human body, conservation and renewal are possible only if there is healthful change regularly. It is by no means certain that our present common civilization is providing for its own future. We moderns pay a great deal of attention to material and technological means; we pay very little to theological, moral, and social ends, or to the cultural instruments by which any generation must fulfill its part in the contract of eternal society. Twentieth century man, in Europe and in America, tends to be contemptuous of the past; but he contributes little enough of his own, except in applied science and technology, toward the preservation of culture, let alone its improvement.

Here, then, I venture some words of misgiving as to the future of our common inheritance of civilization. The facile optimism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is much diminished in Europe and America nowadays; but this does not mean that naive notions of inevitable Progress have been replaced by much serious reflection on the problem of how to conserve and renew our common cultural patrimony. The present threat to our civilization comes as much from indifference, apathy, and selfishness as it does from the totalist powers; and pessimism for pessimism’s sake is as bad as optimism for optimism’s sake. It seems to me that there are grim symptoms discernible of an absolute decline of the higher culture in both America and Europe; and also symptoms of a decay of the ties that join together the civilizations of Europeans and Americans.

AMERICAN IDEALS

Although for a good while it has been the fashion of European intellectuals to sigh or snarl over the allegedly increasing barbarism of America, I doubt very much whether the decay of the higher culture is proceeding faster in America than in Europe; indeed, in a number of respects the contrary seems to be true. The average American workingman, for instance, has much more knowledge of, and respect for, religious teachings than has his English or French counterpart. The average American scholar is less liable to be swept away by ideology than is the European intellectual. The American people at large, in our time, are much more strongly attached to their inherited political institutions than are any other people in the world, even the English.

In any age, there are a good many people in rebellion against their cultural inheritance. In our time, the number of such persons has become alarming. A spirit of defiance or harsh criticism which may be healthful, when confined to a creative minority, can become perilous if it is taken up by a popular majority. To the people who rebel against their cultural inheritance, that legacy seems a burden, rather than a foundation. I doubt whether there are more of these rebels in America than elsewhere in the world; but cultural restoration, like charity, begins at home; and so I venture to touch here upon some signs of the American neglect of the common inheritance of civilization.

So far as our Christian heritage is concerned, there exists little danger that Christianity may cease to be popular in America. The peril, rather, is that Christianity may become altogether too popular for its own good. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, there is a tendency in the American democracy to re-fashion religion on a “democratic” pattern—to deny all intermediary powers between God and man, and to emphasize the social virtues of religious faith at the expense of salvation through grace. Atheism, agnosticism, and anti-clericalism, even at the height of their nineteenth-century vogue, never exercised much real influence in America. These attitudes now are confined principally to eccentrics and to certain members of university and college faculties of the sort that the Irish call “sp’iled praists” and the Scots call “stickit ministers.” And financially, at least, the American churches are in a healthy condition.

THE QUALITY OF FAITH

Yet the quality of American religious faith is another matter. Many of the clergy tend markedly toward a sentimental and humanitarian application of religious doctrines to the reform of society, at the expense of the supernatural element in religion and the personal element in morality. There also exists a tendency toward making the church into a club and a means of communal self-praise. Christian hope and Christian charity both suffer under this attitude. Yet a healthy reaction against this sentimental and convivial excess seems to have set in: there is a revival of orthodox theology and Christian discipline in the seminaries. America never will build her equivalent of the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, nor will the American churches ever be so much the center of all life as were the medieval churches. But Christian theology and Christian morals probably are not going to yield much more ground to twentieth-century indifference and apathy and vulgarization.

DECLINE OF LAW

As for our legacy of ordered liberty, however, I think there is cause for misgiving among us. I do not refer to the laments of the anti-anti-Communists, nor to certain foreign criticisms of American politics. Representative government and civil rights are in no really immediate danger. The disturbing symptoms which I have in mind are a growing disregard of the first principles of justice and jurisprudence, even among judges and lawyers; and the tendency toward concentration of power in Federal and state executive branches and bureaucracies.

The cause of this drift may be found, in part, in the gradual substitution of “practical” standards for the doctrines of natural law, in jurisprudence, and in political theory. Our schools of law, with few exceptions, have encouraged this tendency. We may yet see the triumph of what Professor Eric Voegelin calls “theoretical illiteracy.” This affliction exists at every level of American society, and the ascendancy in this century of the bodies of doctrine called instrumentalism and positivism has something to do with the trouble. With this is joined a tendency of our jurists to substitute their own notions of social expediency for the reign of authority and precedent. Certain recent criticisms of Supreme Court decisions by Judge Learned Hand and Dr. Edwin S. Corwin describe this latter drift better than I could.

According to a lawyer-friend of mine, passion, prejudice, and private interest exert an increasing influence upon our courts. These are the consequences of theoretical illiteracy and lack of respect for precedent and tradition. This decay of understanding of the reign of law extends to obscure quarters. A university student of considerable natural intelligence recently inquired of me why all American checks and balances in politics were desirable. Why could we not simply train up an elite of governmental administrators, he asked, trust to their good-will and ability, and let them manage the concerns of the nation—diplomatic, domestic, and economic?

This growing naivete, which amounts to an ignorance of the essence of European and American political theory, too often is unchallenged by the pragmatic and technical approaches popular in many of our schools of public administration and governmental research at our universities. It also reflects a wondrous ignorance of human nature and statecraft. It is the attitude which the late Lord Percy of Newcastle called “totalist democracy”—a trust in an abstraction called The People combined with an unquestioning faith in The Expert. It amounts to the negation of many centuries of historical and political experience.

Our theoretical illiteracy in politics and jurisprudence, produced in part by the failure of twentieth-century American schooling, is paralleled by a decline of appreciation of humane letters. We have not succeeded in reversing this drift: not by the “Great Books” movement (which has serious faults of its own), not by the amorphous “survey of humanities” and “world literature” and “survey of civilization” courses in our colleges and universities.

DETERIORATION OF LEARNING

The study of great literature, in our Western culture, has aspired to an ethical end through an intellectual means. The improvement of the private human reason for the private person’s own sake, and the incidental improvement of society thereby, was the object of the traditional literary disciplines. Both the aim and the discipline itself are badly neglected in twentieth-century America. An obsessive vocationalism has done mischief to the higher learning—and, for that matter, to secondary schooling; while the “Progressive” aims and methods injured in other ways the old disciplines. Such slogans as “education for living,” “learning by doing,” “schooling for social reconstruction,” “life adjustment,” and “schools to serve the community” have been employed for a generation as weapons against any genuine training of imagination and reason. Among the consequences has been the steady reduction of leadership—moral and intellectual talent—in America. The founders of the American Republic learned the first principles of human nature and society from the Bible, Cicero, Plutarch, and Shakespeare. But the present generation of school children is expected, instead, to “learn to live with all the world”—through a rash of scissors-and-paste “projects.”

When poetry is replaced by “communications skills,” and narrative history by doctrinaire social generalizations, the whole intricate inheritance of general culture is threatened. There are professors of education who seriously argue that no young person ought to read a book more than fifty years old. The imaginative and rational disciplines, so painfully created over centuries, can be immeasurably injured by a generation or two of neglect and contempt.

I repeat that these disquieting signs of the decay of our common culture are not peculiar to the United States. Despite our American liking for material change, we never have had much taste for novelty in morals, politics, and the fabric of civilization. An able Scottish editor writes to me that in his opinion—and he had traveled in this country—America still is characterized by vitality, diversity and simplicity of life. I think this is true, and that we need not despair for our culture.

CHANGE AND CONTINUITY

Yet we live in an age in which the expectation of change seems to be greater than the expectation of continuity. The patrimony of a civilization can be lost at the very moment of that civilization’s material triumph. In any culture worthy of the name, men must be something better than the flies of a summer; generation must link with generation. Some men among us are doing whatever is in their power to preserve and reinvigorate our common heritage. This is not a work that can be accomplished through positive law or the creation of international commissions. Yet if a people forget the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods, the consequences soon will be felt in the laws and in international affairs. Without cultural community between America and Europe, there is little point in political alliance. If we have no real civilization, no enduring cultural bonds, to unite us against Soviet totalism, we may as well let the alleged Communist culture have its way with us.

Russell Kirk is Editor of Modern Age, author of The Conservative Mind and The American Cause, and is known internationally as a lecturer. He is a direct descendent of Puritan ancestors who landed in 1623 in Massachusetts, and lives in Mecosta, Michigan, in a home built by his great-grandfather. He holds the B.A. from Michigan State College, M.A. from Duke University, and Litt.D. from St. Andrews. This essay is taken from a lecture series at Alabama College.