Is Any Religion True?

Religions in Four Dimensions: Existential and Aesthetic, Historical and Comparative, by Walter Kaufmann (Reader’s Digest [dist. by Crowell] 1976, 490 pp., $30 hb, $8.95 pb), is reviewed by Richard Fox Young, doctoral candidate in Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Walter Kaufmann, the well-known Princeton philosopher, claims to have done something more original in this book than anything yet done by other writers on religions, that is, present readers with material on not just one but four dimensions of religions: the existential, aesthetic, historical, and comparative. But Kaufmann neglected to inform readers that a fifth dimension is prevalent in the book, the evaluative (not to be confused with the comparative). His “unexamined absolute,” which he deplores in others, seems to be himself, not a specific religion or philosophy. It is his methodology, even more than his ungracious allegations against Christianity, that disturbs me. Because the Reader’s Digest is the publisher, the need for a review is even more compelling.

The book does have a promising beginning. Kaufmann deplores our paralyzed age, which, when confronted with resurgent Oriental religions, prefers to sidestep the real issue, viz., truth, saying, “One refuses to see the major religions as alternatives that challenge us to make a choice. Yet Moses and Jesus, Zarathustra and Muhammad presented this challenge in the clearest terms, and we cannot begin to understand the religions of the East as long as we shut our eyes to the ways in which most teachers and scriptures condemn some ways and recommend others” (p. 13). Although Kaufmann does think that the differences between religions are real, not apparent, he does not make it clear to readers that decisions about the truth of these differences are vital to their existence rather than of mere academic interest. He has taken great pains to demonstrate that no particular conception of deity is universal, but his sentimental, yet despairing conclusion undercuts the necessity to choose between conflicting religious concepts: “Now the gods, too, have died, leaving us songs and music. There are those who try officiously to keep the gods alive in a state of suspended animation; but they do neither them nor us a favor. A century ago some people thought that once the gods were dead all would be well. We know better” (p. 456). After that, only stubborn academics could continue to examine religions; most readers will forget the whole question of truth once they shelve the book.

Kaufmann’s chapters on Judaism are probably the best. He is an unpredictable thinker, and amidst the scissors work of literary criticism I was surprised to find a vigorous defense of Moses’ authorship of the Decalogue. Unfortunately for readers, prophets such as Amos and Hosea are depicted only as proponents of social reform rather than as “announcers” also. His selection of subjects suggested to me that readers are presented more with what Kaufmann himself likes in Judaism (he is a former Lutheran who converted to Judaism) rather than with how Judaism has been conceived over time by its major groups of believers.

A central Hindu concept, maya (illusion), which is used so much by this generation that it is now included in Webster’s, is unfortunately misrepresented: “… the Indian mystic says that the world of diversity is less important and in that sense ‘illusory,’ while the unity which he experiences sometimes with great intensity is infinitely more important and in that sense ‘real’ ” (p. 223). But maya is only secondarily a doctrine of value. Hindu doctrines frequently do not sharply distinguish between epistemological and metaphysical concepts. Epistemologically, maya is the doctrine that all empirical phenomena are false (i.e. sublated by knowledge of Brahman); metaphysically, it is the doctrine that nothing besides Brahman exists. Strictly speaking, this is non-duality, not pantheism. The attitude mentioned by Kaufmann springs from this conception, but he has shifted the emphasis and thereby softened the radical purport of maya.

The book’s methodological flaws are most vivid in the comments on Christ: “… according to the Gospels, Jesus believed … that the end of the world was at hand; he believed … that the mass of men was headed for eternal torment; and there is no evidence that this conviction troubled him” (p. 116); “… [Jesus] takes pains to keep people from being saved” (p. 118); “It seems plain that the Buddha was worlds removed from the shrillness, the vituperation, and the hatefulness that the evangelists associated with Jesus” (p. 307). So hollow are these poisonous allegations that it would be foolish to attempt to refute them. What disturbs me most is that Kaufmann’s presentation is based more on the conceptions of Christianity’s detractors, like Voltaire and Russell, than upon Christianity’s adherents, which one would expect such a book to reflect. It would have been a better book if Kaufmann had followed the basic presupposition of the study of religions suggested by Brede Kristensen that “Every religion ought to be understood from its own standpoint, for that is how it is understood by its own adherents” (The Meaning of Religion, 1971, p. 6). However, Kaufmann has flagrantly violated this principle and his book is therefore an unreliable one.

Yet Kaufmann had correctly perceived that the existential nature of other religions cannot be properly disclosed by mere research. His remarkable photographs help readers overcome the limitations of definitions of what a Hindu or a Buddhist is. But without being told about Hinduism or Buddhism in terms of believers themselves, how can even these breathtaking photographs evoke intelligent empathy?

It would certainly be a mistake to think that Kaufmann’s book is just methodologically unsound. He finds Christ abhorrent because he does not take sin seriously enough. But what disappoints me most about the book is that like so many others, it conveys the author’s own concept of a religion, which, if read by one of its own believers, would be unrecognizable. Christians, especially, require more reliable books on other religions if we are to properly carry out the task of “Elenctics,” i.e., to call men to responsibility, as J. H. Bavinck says, for what they have done with God.

Facing Up To Doubt

In Two Minds, by Os Guinness (InterVarsity, 1976, 299 pp., $4.95 pb), is reviewed by James M. Houston, principal, Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Os Guinness, formerly on the staff of L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, has written a powerful book. It is the fruit of much counseling with young people. Through it throbs the mind of a deeply reflective author, writing with the sensitivity of personal experience. It is perhaps significant that a former associate of Francis Schaeffer, the apostle of contemporary evangelical certainty, should provide us with this important study on doubt, a subject that our evangelical culture dare not suppress, but must deal with openly and with honesty.

“Christianity places a premium on the absolute truthfulness and trustworthiness of God, so understanding doubt is extremely important to a Christian,” says Guinness. Moreover, argues the writer, the need to choose among the variety of alternatives and the need to prepare for future testing of the Christian in our world make it necessary for the Christian to take his doubts seriously. The unreflective Christian tends to repress doubt or to view doubt as an enemy, so that those who could be helped most by this book may not read it. Popular Christian literature, alas, generally swings with the cock-sure or those anxious for easy certainties. But those who follow Guinness’s closely argued book and reread it reflectively will be rewarded by the friendship of a good book, whose primary objective is to deepen and mature faith in God.

The author divides his study into three parts: the nature of doubts, an outline of seven categories of doubt; the care and counsel of those in doubt; and finally two specific types of doubt. The author distinguishes doubt from unbelief, the former as only the suspension between belief and unbelief, the latter as willful refusal to believe or to disobey deliberately. Three basic misconceptions of doubt are described: that to doubt is wrong; that doubt is a problem of faith not of knowledge; and that doubt is something to be ashamed of. Then he describes six categories of doubt resulting from the following causes: ingratitude; a faulty view of God; weak foundations; lack of growth; unruly emotions; and fearing to believe. The writer then devotes three chapters on counseling the doubter, in listening, in discussing the nature of the doubts, the appropriate response, and the need to warn against critical doubts. In conclusion he deals with doubts arising from insistent inquisitiveness and from impotence or the spirit of resignation.

The book is an excellent presentation of the pathology of doubt. What is less well described is the therapeutic values of doubt. Doubts at the bottom of the heart are deadly. Doubts at the top of one’s head are essential for any exercise of thought or judgment. Doubt can also relieve us of the excess baggage of over scrupulousness, of unexamined beliefs and customs. Doubting doubt is an emotional entendre that is necessary for certain temperaments. Indeed, the author could have related doubts to temperamental traits of personality. What the writer is most concerned about is the exercise of doubt as an obstacle to the deepening of Christian life—to those doubts that are traceable not merely to the working of the mind, but to the obstinacy of the mind. For doubt that is emotionally based is not intellectually soluble. It is a symptom of the deeper issues of pride, of insensitivity, of non-commitment. Faith undercuts the emotional need of doubt.

Os Guinness has written a book that will help the needs of young people especially. It prepares them for the critical transition from a sheltered faith and the intellectual seductions of, though perhaps unexamined, non-commitment to anything. For many scholars boast of their scholarship as just that, non-commitment as a way of life. I recommend In Two Minds as a book every thoughtful Christian should possess and read carefully.

Excitement For Missions

Don’t Go Overseas Until You’ve Read This Book, by Neil Gallagher (Bethany Fellowship, 1977, 123 pp., $2.95 pb). The Great Commission for Today, by David M. Howard (InterVarsity, 1976, 128 pp., $2.25 pb), Don’t Just Stand There!, by Martin Goldsmith (InterVarsity, 1976, 128 pp., $2.25 pb), A Theology of the Church and Its Mission: A Pentecostal Perspective by Melvin L. Hodges (Gospel Publishing House, 1977, 185 pp., $3.95 pb), Mission in Ferment, by Russell A. Cervin (Covenant Press, [3200 W. Foster, Chicago, Illinois 60625], 1977, 128 pp., $3.50 pb). Declare His Glory Among the Nations, edited by David M. Howard (InterVarsity, 1977, 162 pp., $3.95 pb) and Evangelical Missions Tomorrow, edited by Wade Coggins and E. L. Frizen, Jr. (William Carey, 1977, 194 pp., $5.95 pb), are reviewed by Cecil B. Murphey, pastor, Riverdale Presbyterian Church, Riverdale, Georgia.

Don’t Go Overseas Until You’ve Read This Book contains a chapter I wish I’d written and another chapter I wish I’d read before going overseas. Right from the start, Gallagher warns us: be prepared to be misunderstood. And when he writes on the cultural shock we can expect, this was for me the high point in the book. Since I can’t make this book mandatory reading for every Christian who applies for a passport I would urge you to at least get this book into your church library.

Don’t wait until you’re ready to be a missionary or have a friend who becomes one before you read The Great Commission for Today. Howard begins with a good look at the passages in each of the four Gospels and Acts that cite the great commission. He contends that Jesus actually gave the mandate at least three times. He also sets the great commission in its context and shows how the wording relates the message of that particular book. The result: not only a fine piece of exposition done in such a way that the material is neither dry nor purely didactic, but replete with illustrations from the mission fields. Howard makes a heavy point that the great commission is an imperative, not an option. He is readable and brief; the book ought to be widely circulated.

Martin Goldsmith’s Don’t Just Stand There! offers a readable and theological primer on missions. Starting with the Old Testament and working through the New, he gives the basis for missions—because it’s God’s will. Although the book is not lengthy you might want to just skim the early parts of it if you’re already aware of what’s happening in missions today. But don’t put this down as purely a primer. I’d also call it a practical book on missions. Goldsmith does a good job of assessing missions and social involvement, giving helpful insight and a fair analysis for anyone interested in the mission field.

In A Theology of the Church and Its Mission: A Pentecostal Perspective, Hodges documents that 65 per cent of all Protestants in Latin America today are Pentecostal. Why this phenomenon? The Pentecostalists, this book asserts, endeavor in both preaching and experience to give the Holy Spirit the place they feel the New Testament gives him.

Although many people will disagree with his emphasis on the Spirit, they will agree with most of the rest of this book. I liked it because Hodges produces exactly what he purports to do: he writes a theology of the contemporary church and its mission.

Hodges provides an excellent summary of the current thinking in the area of social activity and then concludes with an examination of the “theology of liberation,” which is being widely talked about these days (and which most of the other books either don’t mention or only give it the briefest nod).

I found it interesting to read a positive approach to missions from an unapologetic Pentecostal missologist who knows his material. Once snubbed by major evangelical missions, Pentecostals have earned the right to be heard if for no reason other than their phenomenal growth.

Although written primarily from the perspective of the Evangelical Covenant Church, Cervin’s Mission in Ferment yells must for anyone who wants a realistic view of contemporary missions. What about continuing to send missionaries to the emerging Third World nations? Can white missionaries still minister effectively in black Africa? Can evangelicals cooperate in the ecumenical movement? This book is well-written, well documented, and the writing carries the conviction and authority of a man who knows what he’s saying. Cervin nicely covers the theology of liberation, humanization, and what he calls “contextualization.” Each chapter is prefaced with provocative questions, which he attempts to answer. If you really want an overview of missions today by a man who knows what’s going on, buy this compact and popularly written book.

Declare His Glory Among the Nations is different from those already mentioned. Edited by David Howard, this thick paperback contains addresses by missionaries, students, and others to the 1976 Urbana Conference. Although each article carries the thrust of missions, Howard includes several essays not specifically missionary in scope. John Stott has four theological chapters on the biblical basis of declaring the glory of God. Other well known people include Elisabeth Elliott, Billy Graham, and Festo Kivengere. This is probably the most inspirational book here reviewed and the presentations are all extremely well done.

Evangelical Missions Tomorrow is an insider’s book, written primarily by mission leaders about the state of world missions and what they see in store for the future. Although I don’t expect this book to find a wide audience, the material is enlightening, if a little technical. The articles are edited from papers read at a joint conference of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, and the Association of Evangelical Professors of Missions, held during the fall of 1976. Unless you’re heavily involved in missions, you’ll probably pass this one by—and yet it contains several excellent articles that could stand alone and be reprinted in magazines.

Briefly Noted

VALUES EDUCATION. Development of values and morality does not come automatically even in schools under Christian auspices. The need for Christians to try to influence any secular values curricula is obvious, but evangelical publishers do not seem to be bringing out many books to help. Paulist, a major Catholic publisher, issued a collection of essays, edited by Thomas Hennessy, a Jesuit, Values and Moral Development (234 pp., $7.95 pb), a monograph by Brian Hill, president of the Center for the Exploration of Values and Meaning, The Development of Consciousness: A Confluent Theory of Values (268 pp., $5.95 pb) and a programmed learning workbook on understanding Kohlberg’s theories by Susan Pagliuso, Understanding Stages of Moral Development (151 pp., $5.95 pb). Education for Justice: Pedagogical Principles (Orbis, 145 pp., $4.95 pb) is by Brian Wren, a British churchman and socialist. He focuses on methods of teaching youth and adults to be sensitive to such problems as famine and racism. Other viewpoints need to be represented with this kind of book.

SECTS. Information on aggressive proselytizing groups is sometimes needed in a hurry. The following books should be in seminary and Bible college libraries, and many church libraries will want some of them: The Broadway to Armageddon by William Hinson (Religion in the News [Stahlman Bldg., Suite 330, Nashville, TN 37202], 234 pp., n.p. pb) is by a former minister in Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God; What Is the Baha’i Faith? by William McElwee Miller (Eerdmans, 151 pp., $3.95 pb) is an abridgement of a 1974 book; They Followed the Piper by Lee Hultquist (Logos, 162 pp., $2.95 pb) is how one girl was won back from the Children of God; The American Children of Krsna by Francine Daner (Holt, 118 pp., n.p. pb) is an anthropological study of the Hare Krishnas; The God-Men: Witness Lee and the Local Church by Brooks Alexander, et al. (Spiritual Counterfeits Project [Box 4308, Berkeley, CA 94704], 80 pp., 95¢ pb) is on an aggressive outgrowth of the ministry of the well-known writer Watchman Nee; TM: Ado About Nothing by William Petersen (Keats, 106 pp., $1.95 pb) and Transcendental Hesitation by Calvin Miller (Zondervan, 185 pp., $1.95 pb) expose the Hindu basis for the professedly secular technique.

CHRISTIAN TESTIMONY IN ASIA. Although it is by far the most populous and least Christian of the continents, Asia and the adjacent islands are nevertheless the scene of considerable Christian activity. For popularly written accounts of some of what God has been doing in Asia we mention the following titles: Anointed for Burial by Todd and DeAnn Burke (Logos, 259 pp., $2.95 pb) about evangelism in Cambodia shortly before the tragic conquest of that country by brutal Marxists; Indonesian Revival: Why Two Million Came to Christ by Avery Willis, Jr. (William Carey, 263 pp., $6.95 pb), a documented study of the widely publicized awakening; Fire In the Islands! by Alison Griffiths (Harold Shaw, 208 pp., $3.95 pb) on the beginnings of evangelism in the Solomon Islands in the last century; Search for Salvation by John G. Strelan (Lutheran Publishing House [205 Halifax Street, Adelaid, South Australia], 119 pp., $4.95 pb) on a rival to Christianity in the Solomons and adjacent areas known as the “Cargo Cults”; Courtyard of the Happy Way by Norman Cliff (Arthur James, Ltd. [The Drift, Evesham, Worcester, WR11 4NW, England], 144 pp., n.p. pb) on the first twenty years of the author’s life, including the time when he was imprisoned by the Japanese along with his classmates from the Chefoo Schools that served the children of members of the China Inland Mission; The Unlisted Legion by Jock Purves (Banner of Truth, 199 pp., $2.95 pb) about the period from 1926 to 1930 when valiant missionaries were seeking to win converts on the borders of Tibet and Afghanistan; a Japanese Christian and best-selling novelist, Ayako Miura, whose novel Shokari Pass has been made into a film by World Wide Pictures, tells how she became a Christian in The Wind Is Howling, an autobiographical account (InterVarsity, 190 pp., $3.95 pb); three accounts of western missionaries to India are Granny Brand: Her Story by Dorothy Clarke Wilson (Christian Herald, 222 pp., $6.95) about one who ministered among the southern hill people from 1913 until her death in 1974; Snake Temple, An Indian Diary by H. Earl Miller (Carlson, 193 pp., $6.95) about the author’s ministry in South India from 1928 to 1954; and The Compassionate Touch by Douglas Wead (Creation, 163 pp., $3.50 pb) about one family’s ministry in recent years to some of the wretched citizens of Calcutta.

GENERAL EDUCATION. The co-directors of the Public Education Religion Studies Center at Wright State University in Ohio. Nicholas Piediscalzi and William Collie, have collected essays on Teaching About Religion in Public Schools (Argus, 258 pp., $3.95 pb). The sixteen essays are mostly on religious aspects of the arts, literature, and social studies and on the study of various religions. There are also key essays on the legal basis for teaching about religion, on science and religion, and on the role of religion in values education. Focusing on one Christian couple’s attempt to improve textbook quality in Texas is Textbooks on Trial by James Hefley (Victor, 212 pp., $6.95). One hopes that less combative means can be used when Christians learn to show concern from the earliest stages of textbook adoption. Teachers in schools under Christian auspices will want to consult A Christian Approach to Education: Second Edition by H. W. Byrne (Mott Media, 378 pp., $6.95 pb) and Education for the Real World by Henry Morris (Creation-Life, 192 pp., $3.95 pb). Byrne teaches education at Asbury Seminary, and Morris, after many years as a teacher of engineering in secular colleges, is now with Christian Heritage College. Both books treat the integration of biblical doctrine with the various academic subjects, with Morris, as expected, denouncing any vestige of what he calls evolutionism.

MORMONISM. People become Mormons (at the rate of 350 per day), and their descendants remain faithful, for many reasons besides (or in spite of) official doctrine. Nevertheless, one should have some familiarity with the doctrines in order to help those who are attracted to Mormonism (usually because of its ethical and family patterns). Three fairly reliable books are Is Mormonism Christian? by Gordon Fraser (Moody, 192 pp., $1.75 pb), a revision of two earlier works by perhaps the leading evangelical authority on American Indians; Will the “Saints” Go Marching In? by Floyd McElveen (Regal, 175 pp., $3.50 pb) by a Baptist pastor from Mormon country, and The Mormon Papers by Harry Ropp (InterVarsity, 118 p., $2.95 pb), an expansion of a masters thesis on the Book of Mormon and the other purported inspired Scriptures by one who is now a missionary to Mormons.

He was happily greeting people at the door when a lady from the congregation spoiled the morning. She asked: “Pastor, why did you preach that sermon?”

She wasn’t being critical; it was an honest question. But as she stood there waiting, people lining up behind, the minister couldn’t think of an answer. Like many others who stand in the pulpit, he assumed that the sermon communicated its message. But it hadn’t. Inside, he started to be defensive: “If she had been listening she would have known.” But she was listening.

The reason for his sermon wasn’t obvious. If he was aiming for something, preaching for some result, it was not understood. He was giving information, that’s all, and he hadn’t thought through the “why” of it.

Why did you preach your sermon last Sunday? Why are you planning to preach the sermon that you are preparing now? The answer to that question is not in the sermon; the answer is in the mind of the preacher. Does the person who stands before the congregation have a reason for what he is preaching? If he doesn’t, he’s going nowhere. As a pastor explained, “We can give out information without edifying.” And John A. Broadus, in On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, described what happens: “It is melancholy to think how large a portion of the people, even in favored communities, really do not understand most of the preaching they hear” (Harper, 1944, p. 95).

Try something.

Write down, in one sentence, the reason you are preaching next Sunday’s sermon. If you can’t do it in one sentence, chances are you’re going to be preaching in vague generalities and the listeners won’t really understand where you’re going or what you expect. Oh, they might pick up one or two interesting illustrations or recall a summary point, but there won’t be much in the way of specific results because you weren’t aiming for any. Again, it was Broadus who said: “Something worse may happen than that the discourse should not be understood; it may be misunderstood, utterly, and with deplorable results. We must strive to render it not merely possible that the people should understand us but impossible that they should misunderstand” (p. 96).

A pastor, realizing this, said that because he is now consciously thinking about why he is preaching on a particular theme or text, he finds himself consciously clarifying as he goes along. He keeps his preaching direct—concentrating more on his audience than on his delivery. Communication has become important because he has something specific that he wants to say. With that kind of preaching, his parishioners are responding.

Salesmen know this too. They spend time before each phone call or visit to a prospect’s office honing their presentation and making sure they know the direction that they want to go. Some professional sales trainers even expect their trainees to know where they want to be at the end of a minute’s conversation so that they will aim to be there and not talk around their subject.

Are you that concerned about where you are going? As you pray about next Sunday’s sermon, do you know what should be happening to the congregation by the end of the first minute of the sermon, or the tenth? Will you quickly awaken a need? Will your hearers realize right away that “this is for me?” By the end of the first minute will you and the congregation be moving forward together?

Of course, God is free-wheeling. He won’t always be bound by our plans and can always break out of a sermon outline. Every experienced minister knows that. But that’s the exception. God uses thoroughly planned sermons and will give direction to our messages as we pray for their proclamation and reception right from the earliest stages of preparation. God honors prayed-for goals.

There should be a warning given here. It is unrealistic to expect that every goal in a sermon will be accomplished immediately. No clergyman will see all of the results that he would like to see. Those who expect too much too soon quickly become frustrated. Some parishioners will not hear and many who hear will not heed the promptings of the Holy Spirit. No person in the congregation will understand everything all the time. But each week many people will respond, and that number will increase week by week. The minister who wants results and preaches for realistic results will see those results, whether his message is meant to encourage, instruct, convince, challenge, or bring people to put their trust in Jesus Christ as personal Saviour. The focus will be clear, the people will understand, and they will be grateful to God.

But some ministers will argue, “This doesn’t apply to me. I’m not a topical preacher; I’m a Bible preacher; I expound the Word of God.”

Still the question has to be asked, “What results do you want from your Bible preaching?” A minister can preach without direction, even with the Word open before him, with the result that his parishioners can parrot “good Bible teaching,” yet show no change in their attitudes or actions.

Just as some salesmen address the value of their product, not the wants of the buyer, and lose sales, so some expositors of Scripture are simply addressing texts. The listener wants the text to address him.

What is it in that passage of Scripture that you want people to understand? What is the text saying that they need to hear? Why did you choose that particular passage and not another? Even if you are preaching through an entire book of the Bible, that question still has to be answered each week.

When you can put together that single sentence about why you are preaching each message, type it at the top of your sermon notes or outline. Then all week long as you think about the message, and on Sunday when you preach it, keep checking that sentence; it will keep you on target. It will make you restate, clarify, and emphasize the theme. Your hearers will know where you are going because you will know where you are going. They will appreciate that and understand your point better. Otherwise you risk taking an exciting book and making it very dull, and preaching right past the people who are asking, “Is there any word from the Lord for me?”

After all, that’s part of the reason they come to church. They want to hear what God is saying to them. God’s Word, because it is inspired, is meant to bring results. Every preacher should be able to say, at least to himself, “God gave me this sermon to preach because.…”

Are you preaching for results?

Then know the result you want as you prepare for this coming Sunday. When you know and can state it, the congregation will know it too. And you will see results.—ROGER C. PALMS, editor, Decision, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It was dark when we came home and we were grateful to step into the shelter of our chalet, glad to be back in the familiar surroundings. We thought of looking out of our windows the next morning at the leaves turning such wonderful shades of bronze and copper and the autumn frosts turning the mountainsides and gardens into a short but breathtaking period of warm color mixed with the dark green pines and the greys and browns of rocks. Suddenly Franky burst in: “There is something I need to tell you about immediately,” he said. A tale poured forth of how he had just happened to walk into our garden before going for a picnic with his family to discover that the demolishing of the hotel next door to us had come to the state of an earth-moving process that was rapidly making a canyon immediately next to us. However, the enormous jaws of steel, with their jagged teeth biting into the earth, bringing up huge boulders, ripping into walls, were not staying on their own side of the wall, but had already bitten through our wall, demolished our pear tree and some pines, destroyed our strawberry bed, and were moving with a menacing efficiency to bite away more, with a white painted line on our grass indicating how far they expected to go into our territory. There was no picnic for Franky that day as he called a halt to the work, went into action with the police and other authorities, and outlined something of our “rights” that had been invaded.

As I sit here on this foggy day, brightened only by leaves and trees, there is so much missing, so much that out of my right eye is a picture of destruction where a muddy ragged yawning hole, large enough to build two apartment houses, has taken the place so quickly of trees that took years to grow, and a hotel that gave warmth and comfort for so long a time. How rapid destruction is. How quickly the jaws of steel can root up, cast down, demolish, destroy things that took years to build, or to grow. What a very vivid and traumatic illustration it has been, and is now to me of the need to understand something of what the “two sides of the wall” can mean in our own lives, and the lives of others.

Satan is the destroyer who comes to our minds so immediately. He has in a certain sense, with yawning jaws, bitten down on people from the time of Adam and Eve through the centuries. He has made places that were warm and growing, beautiful and full of song, of candlelight and firelight, into nothing but mudholes, in the way this mudhole at my right side is a contrast to the hotel formerly prepared for Christmas skiers. We could go through the books of Chronicles and refresh our memories of how bad kings built up false places of worship and false altars and tore down and destroyed the altars of God, allowing them to be destroyed. We could think of the strong words concerning false pastors who were ministers of Satan in Jeremiah 23:1: “Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture; saith the LORD.” The tearing down of the hotel is a picture of the destruction of something that was in the territory of the owner to go ahead and destroy. Going just this far with the picture, Satan as the destroyer does destroy the lives of the people who are committed to him in a variety of ways, people that follow his “ways,” his “paths,” his “precepts,” his “goals,” his “false promises.” It is his own people Satan destroys thoroughly. “The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; the enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.” The devil has knowingly and purposely sowed tares to the destruction of the people who are following him: “wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction” (Matt. 7:13b).

But the devil has not stayed on his own side of the wall, in his destructive biting away with his diverse sets of steel-like jaws. He bites into our lives, our time, our energy, our thoughts, our money, our possessions, our emotions, our strength. He tries to destroy the possibility of our having courage to go on, by trying to make us into ragged holes with much of the beauty of the growth we had bedraggled and cast down. Satan tries to destroy the beauty and continuity of Christians’ lives and work by turning them into a variety of ugliness and spoiledness with his many kinds of “jaws.” “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world” (1 Peter 5:8, 9). Help is promised us in resisting his “jaws,” here likened to the jaws of a lion. We are told that “the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus,” will make us perfect and establish us and strengthen us. As we have access to him at any moment, we may call out—not to the communal police, “help, my land is being invaded”—but to the Creator of all the universe; “help, my land which is your land also, is being invaded; help me to resist.” We may turn to the Bible, the sword of the Spirit, and use the full Word of God as our weapon against the “jaws” approaching us, frighteningly close time after time.

There is coming a day however when the destruction and the devouring will be in the other direction, and final. In Joel 2:1–3 we have a picture of blowing trumpets and the heralding of darkness and gloom as a fire devours and leaves behind a desolate wilderness, although ahead there is the garden of Eden, that which is described in Isaiah as the beauty that will come from ashes. The time is ahead of us for which Jesus paid the price. Jesus came to allow his body to be destroyed by death, to be spoiled by nails and hanging that he might come forth resurrected and ready to promise the same to each who will believe. The destruction in the time ahead is the destruction of the evil one, and all his power. Come to Hebrews 2:9, and 14b: “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.… that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” This is the end of “jaws,” the end of the danger of these “jaws.” The destructive jaws will be destroyed forever.

Oh, god!,” a new Carl Reiner film, has received wide publicity and is creative enough to attract a wide audience. But its theological statements leave me uneasy. I sometimes ask myself what it was like to be a disciple of Jesus. I’m sure most Christians wonder that from time to time. It must have been difficult for the disciples to tell their spouses that God was hanging around the neighborhood and had spoken to them. If “Oh, God!” achieves anything, it shows some of the unusual problems people would have with the incarnation. George Burns plays God and John Denver is Jerry Landers, an atheist grocery store manager to whom God reveals himself (Denver gives a surprisingly good performance).

Jerry’s encounter with the Divine is considered foolish by his wife, the religion news editor of the Los Angeles Times, Dinah Shore, and the rest of the world. Perhaps this is reminiscent of Paul’s description of the kerygma as being foolish in the eyes of the world (1 Cor. 1:27). The world resists believing that God has spoken to people. Most of us want to keep God out of our lives. But Jerry Landers has to tell his wife that God spoke to him on his car radio, in the shower, and as a bell boy. It makes you wonder how Moses’ wife reacted to her husband’s account of the burning bush.

God does have personality. And, as Elton Trueblood in The Humor Of Christ tells us, he has a sense of humor. The film shows a God who can sit back and reflect that ostriches are silly, and that avocados have been created with too large a pit. But when God gives approval to Voltaire’s statement that “God is a comedian playing to an audience who is afraid to laugh” I wonder whether Reiner goes too far. Despite his creativity, there are several theological problems in the film.

Jerry Landers is supposed to be the new saviour of the world; he is commissioned to spread God’s message. Jesus’ words regarding himself as being the only way to the Father are contradicted. The film rightly criticizes denominationalism before personal belief—as characterized by the Pharisaical clergy of the local seminary. The criticism becomes excessive, however, in its scourging of profiteering evangelists. Although some hucksters should rightly be instructed to “sell shoes and shut up,” it seems unjust to exactly imitate the voice of a leading evangelist who is not a con artist.

No less than five times during the film is the message of God stated. Basically, God is upset about the way things are going on earth (the pollution, hate, and wars). God wants everyone to know that the people’s lives and the world’s events will work out all right if everyone gets together and does their share to help matters. Even though it is difficult for people to believe in God, God believes in us. Not only does this version of the Gospel place the entire burden of salvation on the shoulders of people, it completely ignores the need and purpose of Christ’s atoning work on the cross.

This idea is pressed further when God explains the reason for all the suffering on earth. The suffering, says God, is a result of people not cooperating with each other. This answer is not presented with an Augustinian or Pelagian view of original sin. Rather, it seems to be saying that if everyone pitched in and did their share now, suffering would end. This response seems tragically inadequate when you consider such problems as birth defects, cancer, heart disease, and the like.

The film presents a humanistic salvation and a humanistic God. It doesn’t bother me that God wears a captain’s hat and glasses in this film. After all, Jesus wore sandles and ordinary clothing, too. But I am disturbed that God is presented as a person who just doesn’t know what the future holds. When asked about what is to come, he replies: “I only know the future as it becomes the present.”

In “Oh, God!” God apparently is able to break into history, but he’s only done so in a few circumstances, such as the Red Sea, a New York Met’s game, a rainstorm in an A.M.C. Pacer, card tricks, and a disappearance act in a courtroom. George Burns plays a God who is “God only for the big picture and who doesn’t get involved with details. One who doesn’t guide our destiny … which is just a matter of luck. The only help we are to get is from each other.”

The resurrection or any other miraculous intervention such as the incarnation of Jesus Christ has no purpose in this film. Jesus is not considered to be God. What is most disappointing to Christian viewers is the Christological statement of the film. God is asked: “Is Jesus Christ the Son of God?” God responds: “Jesus was my son, Buddah was my son, Mohammed, Moses, You (Jerry Landers), the man who said ‘there is no room in the inn’ was my son.” In other words, this is a film of the Bahai faith, which tries to syncretistically blend all religions together.

Regarding the purpose of human existence, God replies in the film: “Men and women persons, their existence means exactly and precisely, not more, not one tiny bit less, just what they think it means, and what I think doesn’t count at all.” In short, the God of this film has not spoken about the solution to the human predicament.

When God is not omnipotent, omniscient, and holy, a portrayal of the Divine becomes a limited anthropomorphism with a touch of magic. You merely need to read early Gnostic apocryphal works to see the shortcomings of a Merlin-like Jesus who turned the stones of fighting boys into birds, and cloths of a poor merchant into purple linens. Jesus never yielded to requests to perform supernatural antics to impress people. He healed and restored people in order to help them physically and spiritually. “Oh, God!” is certainly a creative attempt at describing God’s dealings with people, but falls short of showing us who God really is.

Philip A. Siddons is pastor of Wright’s Corners United Presbyterian Church in Lockport, New York.

Cornelius Van Til wanted to be a farmer. He was born in Holland and grew up on a farm in Indiana. As a young man, he preached at street-corner evangelistic services in Hammond. At Calvin College and then at Princeton, his extraordinary insights into complex issues were readily recognized. Van Til could never go back to the farm. Instead he became one of the foremost Christian apologists of our time.

Van Til has nonetheless kept very much down-to-earth. Like most great thinkers he is not easy to understand, but unlike them he goes the extra mile to reach a broad audience. At eighty-two, he still preaches occasionally. And a distinctive of his scholarly writings is his homespun exposition. For example, he compares the reliability of Scripture to a concrete bridge. The flaws in Bible translations he likens to water on a bridge—the water presenting no great problem unless it gets deep enough to kill the car’s engine.

In one major work Van Til structures his argument around the plight of a young pastor with a congregation challenged by modern skepticism. How will he guide his flock, Van Til asks. “He has no time to read many books. He lives too far from the centers of Christian learning to profit from personal conversation with others of like mind who have studied these matters in depth. He needs, therefore, a criterion by which he himself may be able to distinguish truth from error.” Van Til launches into an involved philosophical discussion, but repeatedly comes back to the young pastor and what it all means to him.

Outline Of The Van Til Apologetic

A. My problems with the “traditional method.”

1. This method compromises God himself by maintaining that his existence is only “possible” albeit “highly probable,” rather than ontologically and “rationally” necessary.

2. It compromises the counsel of God by not understanding it as the only all-inclusive, ultimate “cause” of whatsoever comes to pass.

3. It compromises the revelation of God by:

a. Compromising its necessity. It does so by not recognizing that even in Paradise man had to interpret the general (natural) revelation of God in terms of the covenantal obligations placed upon him by God through special revelation. Natural revelation, on the traditional view, can be understood “on its own.”

b. Compromising its clarity. Both the general and special revelation of God are said to be unclear to the point that man may say only that God’s existence is “probable.”

c. Compromising its sufficiency. It does this by allowing for an ultimate realm of “chance” out of which might come “facts” such as are wholly new for God and for man. Such “facts” would be uninterpreted and unexplainable in terms of the general or special revelation of God.

d. Compromising its authority. On the traditional position the Word of God’s self-attesting characteristic, and therewith its authority, is secondary to the authority of reason and experience. The Scriptures do not identify themselves, man identifies them and recognizes their “authority” only in terms of his own authority.

4. It compromises man’s creation as the image of God by thinking of man’s creation and knowledge as independent of the Being and knowledge of God. On the traditional approach man need not “think God’s thoughts after him.”

5. It compromises man’s covenantal relationship with God by not understanding Adam’s representative action as absolutely determinative of the future.

6. It compromises the sinfulness of mankind resulting from the sin of Adam by not understanding man’s ethical depravity as extending to the whole of his life, even to his thoughts and attitudes.

7. It compromises the grace of God by not understanding it as the necessary prerequisite for “renewal unto knowledge.” On the traditional view man can and must renew himself unto knowledge by the “right use of reason.”

B. My understanding of the relationship between Christian and non-Christian, philosophically speaking.

1. Both have presuppositions about the nature of reality:

a. The Christian presupposes the triune God and his redemptive plan for the universe as set forth once for all in Scripture.

b. The non-Christian presupposes a dialectic between “chance” and “regularity,” the former accounting for the origin of matter and life, the latter accounting for the current success of the scientific enterprise.

2. Neither can, as finite beings, by means of logic as such, say what reality must be or cannot be.

a. The Christian, therefore, attempts to understand his world through the observation and logical ordering of facts in self-conscious subjection to the plan of the self-attesting Christ of Scripture.

b. The non-Christian, while attempting an enterprise similar to the Christian’s, attempts nevertheless to use “logic” to destroy the Christian position. On the one hand, appealing to the non-rationality of “matter,” he says that the chance-character of “facts” is conclusive evidence against the Christian position. Then, on the other hand, he maintains like Parmenides that the Christian story cannot possibly be true. Man must be autonomous, “logic” must be legislative as to the field of “possibility” and possibility must be above God.

3. Both claim that their position is “in accordance with the facts.”

a. The Christian claims this because he interprets the facts and his experience in the light of the revelation of the self-attesting Christ in Scripture. Both the uniformity and the diversity of facts have at their foundation the all-embracing plan of God.

b. The non-Christian claims this because he interprets the facts and his experience in the light of the autonomy of human personality, the ultimate “givenness” of the world and the amenability of matter to mind. There can be no fact that denies man’s autonomy or attests to the world’s and man’s divine origin.

4. Both claim that their position is “rational.”

a. The Christian does so by claiming not only that his position is self-consistent but that he can explain both the seemingly “inexplicable” amenability of fact to logic and the necessity and usefulness of rationality itself in terms of Scripture.

b. The non-Christian may or may not make this same claim. If he does, the Christian maintains that he cannot make it good. If the non-Christian attempts to account for the amenability of fact to logic in terms of the ultimate rationality of the cosmos, then he will be crippled when it comes to explaining the “evolution” of men and things. If he attempts to do so in terms of pure “chance” and ultimate “irrationality” as being the well out of which both rational man and a rationally amenable world sprang, then we shall point out that such an explanation is in fact no explanation at all and that it destroys predication.

C. My proposal, therefore, for a consistently Christian methodology of apologetics is this:

1. That we use the same principle in apologetics that we use in theology: the self-attesting, self-explanatory Christ of Scripture.

2. That we no longer make an appeal to “common notions” which Christian and non-Christian agree on, but to the “common ground” which they actually have because man and his world are what Scripture says they are.

3. That we appeal to man as man, God’s image. We do so only if we set the non-Christian principle of the rational autonomy of man against the Christian principle of the dependence of man’s knowledge on God’s knowledge as revealed in the person and by the Spirit of Christ.

4. That we claim, therefore, that Christianity alone is reasonable for men to hold. It is wholly irrational to hold any other position than that of Christianity. Christianity alone does not slay reason on the altar of “chance.”

5. That we argue, therefore, by “presupposition.” The Christian, as did Tertullian, must contest the very principles of his opponent’s position. The only “proof” of the Christian position is that unless its truth is presupposed there is no possibility of “proving” anything at all. The actual state of affairs as preached by Christianity is the necessary foundation of “proof’ itself.

6. That we preach with the understanding that the acceptance of the Christ of Scripture by sinners who, being alienated from God, seek to flee his face, comes about when the Holy Spirit, in the presence of inescapably clear evidence, opens their eyes so that they see things as they truly are.

7. That we present the message and evidence for the Christian position as clearly as possible, knowing that because man is what the Christian says he is, the non-Christian will be able to understand in an intellectual sense the issues involved. In so doing, we shall, to a large extent, be telling him what he “already knows” but seeks to suppress. This “reminding” process provides a fertile ground for the Holy Spirit, who in sovereign grace may grant the non-Christian repentance so that he may know him who is life eternal (The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity & My Credo, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Box 185, Nutley, New Jersey. 07110).

People who know Van Til admire not only his mind but also his heart. As a clergyman he has conducted many funerals before a crowd of unbelievers. Even if given only five or ten minutes to speak he invariably presents the Gospel and urges his audience to believe in Christ. Van Til and his wife of fifty-two years have also had an extensive ministry in comforting the bereaved and visiting sick people.

Van Til has been perhaps the most controversial of the really great evangelical thinkers of the twentieth century. Person to person he is gracious, gentlemanly, humble, and considerate. On paper, too, he is respectful of others’ views and highly charitable toward those with whom he disagrees. But in Christian academic circles Van Til has a host of critics—people who vigorously challenge his system while recognizing and respecting his profundity. One such opponent is Gordon H. Clark, who like Van Til ranks at the top of the list of influential evangelical apologists and yet who with Van Til is sometimes labeled an ultra-Calvinist, an appellation rejected by both men.

Van Til taught at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia, for more than forty years. He has written numerous books on philosophy, theology, and ethics. He lives in the historic Pennsylvania community of Chestnut Hill on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He was interviewed in his home there on three occasions, and the following questions and answers represent an edited version of the conversations with him.

Question: Dr. Van Til, how do you know that what you believe is true?

Answer: I am sure of my faith because its source is the Bible, the revealed Word of God.

Q: But doesn’t it then become necessary to establish that the Scriptures are true, and that they are as we know them indeed the Word of God?

A: The problem with that question is that it shifts the starting point. I concede that the truth of the Bible is a presupposition. My argument is simply that this presupposition is the only one from which a Christian can begin without surrendering the sovereignty of God.

Q: Are you saying that any kind of human test applied to God and his Word violates the concept of God?

A: That is my basic position.

Q: I might note here that your supporters see you as a great defender of the faith, and even in a recent major critique of your thought it was pointed out that your apologetic represents a position that is now encountered with increasing frequency. On the other hand, isn’t it true that you have been accused by your opponents of substituting proclamation for argument, of championing the idea that the Christian faith is its own best defense?

A: I believe in proclamation. I also believe in the need of defending the faith; Scripture enjoins me to be always ready to give an account of my faith. But there are two ways of defending the faith. One of these begins from man as self-sufficient and works up to God, while the other begins from the triune God of the Scriptures and relates all things to him.

Q: Evangelicals, then, who from your way of thinking should know better, are inadvertently diluting their view of God. Is this it? Don’t you assign such exclusive epistemological authority to Scripture that you part company even with fellow Calvinists?

A: Yes, my good friend Gordon Clark believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, but he builds his philosophical outlook not simply on the Scriptures as such but on the law of contradiction, which has its classic statement in Aristotle and which to my way of thinking has turned out to be an eternally static turnpike in the sky.

Q: What has been your goal in life?

A: When I got my Th.M. from Princeton Seminary and the master’s and doctorate from Princeton University I was questioned by my ecclesiastical superiors as to why I had spent so much time on education. My reply was that the time being what it is we faced the necessity of meeting unbelief on its own ground and meeting not only the man on the street but also the philosophical person. Study was not easy for me. Having grown up on the farm I was used to weeding onions and carrots and cabbages. It was hard to adjust to classroom work; I had labored physically and my body was aching for that.

Van Til served briefly as pastor of a Christian Reformed church at Spring Lake, Michigan, before being summoned back to Princeton to teach. He was told that he would be getting a full professorship. It was a time of great doctrinal turmoil. He taught a year at Princeton and then joined a group of conservatives who left the school to form Westminster Theological Seminary.

Q: Do you have any regrets about the move from Princeton? Wasn’t it a pivotal event that turned over ecclesiological momentum to liberalism for a half-century and left evangelicals struggling for a new start as “independents”?

A: In the spring of 1929 the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church U.S.A. reorganized Princeton Seminary by electing a new board containing in it two signers of the Auburn Affirmation. According to this document “a minister of the gospel may or may not believe such facts and doctrines as the inerrancy of the Scriptures, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, and the continuing life and supernatural power of our Lord Jesus Christ.” If two communists were elected to membership in the Supreme Court of my country I would think of it as a collapse not of verbal but of actual democracy. I felt this way when the assembly took my seminary away from me. The fall of Princeton was a tragedy not only for all who lived the Reformed faith but also for all who love the Lord Jesus Christ. In short, when Princeton fell, evangelical Christianity received a body blow.

A Tribute To Cornelius Van Til

Over the span of a career approaching fifty years Cornelius Van Til has attracted many students to Philadelphia. They have come, responsive to the radically faithful note struck by his reformed presup-positionalism. They wanted a defense of the faith that is methodologically consistent with the faith. His apologetic stands in stark contrast to the classic deductive and inductive rationalism that they had found religiously and scientifically dissatisfying.

Van Til, the pedagogical performer, proved as vigorous in lecture and discussion as the polemics of his writing would suggest. Every student of Van Til can instantly recall the characteristic Van Tillian blackboard graffiti: the foremost symbol being two circles, a big one for the creator, the other for creation with no ontological bridge between. The entire history of philosophy or Christian thought, including most heresy, would be strewn in names and phrases across the board. He scrawled Latin, Greek, German, and Dutch wherever there was room. By the time he finished lecturing his hands, his clothes, and even his face would be chalk-smudged.

Van Til composed complete syllabi for his courses that were virtual textbooks, in many cases en route to publication. His students treasured those syllabi and quoted from them as if they had already been published. Few of his students could easily digest his running critique of the different historical forms of apostate thought, the unfortunate wedding of Christian theology to the apostate system, and his own constructive “theontology” based on the ontological trinity, the creator, and the creator’s analogue, man.

The consumption of chalk and the whir of ideas were symptomatic of an excitement generated not from brilliant eruditions, though some of his skyrocketing digressions could be called that, but from the strong and systematic emphasis on the antithesis between a biblical world and life view and the several intellectual and scientific versions of the carnal mind. Students began to see how far-reaching were the differences between believer and non-believer. For example, the problem of finding a common ground for discussion with non-Christians became a matter of making clear what God has freely given to all of us. Students felt that their minds were freed from a twentieth-century way of thinking. Van Til’s task was to make both despisers and defenders of the faith “epistemologically self-conscious.” For him the journey from philosophical apologetics to evangelism was a mere adjustment in style, not in basic content.

To a man of Van Til’s radical vision, there is much to deplore in the world and in the Church. Yet Van Til is magnanimous, hopeful, and ecumenical; sometimes these qualities come through when he is most polemic. I recall his debating liberal and neo-orthodox champions at Boston University. He graciously, respectfully, but incisively told them that they were going to hell. Van Til lives what he believes.—T. GRADY SPIRES, former student of Van Til and associate professor of philosophy, Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.

Q: Your radical reliance on the Bible makes you have more at stake in the current debate over inerrancy. How crucial is the issue? Granted that doctrines are interdependent, wouldn’t you still agree that there are times in history requiring a focus on certain ones?

A: The biblical teaching about the inerrancy of Scripture is a good deal more important than the present discussion indicates. In the final analysis, I cannot discuss what I believe about Scripture unless at the same time I discuss the content of Scripture. No doctrine of Scripture can stand by itself. I wish that my evangelical brethren would face up to this fact more than they appear to do. To be sure, there have been individual teachings of Scripture that stood in need of special defense. Remember, for example, the old question of whether Christ is a man like God or whether he is God.

Q: As I understand it, you reject all the traditional attempts to prove the existence of God because from the first chapter of Romans we learn that every human being has the idea of God already planted in him.

A: Yes. The traditional ideas of trying to find some neutral, common ground on which the believer and unbeliever can stand are based on the notion that man is autonomous. The ancient Greeks began from man as self-sufficient; they took for granted that all being is one. There was for them no distinction between the creator and his creatures. Holding this view, Plato said that man participated in the being of God as absolutely good; but he found it impossible to say anything by way of conceptual reasoning about the good. It was Diotema the inspired who pointed him to it. This rationalization based on the assumption that man is ultimate found itself absorbed into irrationalism. Aristotle sought to improve on this position by saying that potential being develops into fully actualized being, that is, into thought thinking itself. The god of Aristotle, any more than the god of Plato, does not have a personality, does not know itself, and does not create. No one can prove anything when there is nothing from which to begin. To have faith in faith is blind faith. It is meaningless. It is wicked because, as Paul says, all men, knowing God, hold down this knowledge in unrighteousness. Again, in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul says, “And you he made alive, when you were dead through your trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). Jesus tells Nicodemus, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be bom again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Shall I join blind men to see whether Jesus is right when he says, “I am the light of the world”? Shall the surgeon rely exclusively on the diagnosis the dying patient gives of himself? Did Jesus say to Lazarus that if he did his best he would give him a lift so that together they would get him out of his grave? To be sure, I must be all things to all men, but I establish men in their way unto death if I do not say to them, on the authority of Christ, that only if they repent of their sin will they have eternal life in him. Is this blind faith? On the contrary, it is the only basis man has on which he can stand, to know himself, to find the facts of his world and learn how to relate them to one another. Without the Creator-God-Redeemer of Scripture the universe would resemble an infinite number of beads with no holes in any of them, yet which must all be strung by an infinitely long string. Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not by its wisdom know God through wisdom.

Q: But are you really satisfied that Calvinism has an adequate philosophical base, one which commends itself to the human mind in understandable fashion?

A: Calvin says that men take away from God “the chief thing: that he directs everything by his incomprehensible wisdom and disposes it to his own end” (Institutes I 16:4). On election he says: “And as He alone was predestined, as MAN, to be our HEAD, so many of us are also predestined to be His members” (Calvin’s Calvinism, p. 40). If I do not finally attribute my salvation to God’s electing grace, I detract from his glory.

Van Til has a much lighter side. In the classroom he has been enough of a wit to arouse gales of laughter among his students. He admits to throwing chalk at anyone who dared to doze. “One of these bullets drew blood,” he says. “The next class the victim of my violence wore a steel helmet.” Among his students have been such people as the late Edward John Carnell and Francis A. Schaeffer, who went on to important achievements of their own. His refusal to concede any common ground between Christians and non-Christians except that given in Romans 1:19 puts him at odds with most of his peers. He transcends those differences with a warm, kind spirit.

Q: How does conscience fit into your system?

A: I would not think of conscience as some definite entity within my personality. I would think of it as the indestructible consciousness within me that I am a creature of God and will die from my sins unless I repent.

Q: Dispensationalism seems to be the most popular theology today among rank-and-file evangelicals. How do you account for it?

A: I know too little about dispensationalism to make a fair judgment of it.

Q: You have been a little hard on Bill Bright and Campus Crusade. Why?

A: My problem is with the so-called four spiritual laws that are supposed to be the distilled essence of the Gospel. For Paul, the distilled essence of the Gospel is Christ and him crucified, Christ and his resurrection, and these are conspicuous by their absence in the four spiritual laws. I have a similar problem with Schaeffer.

Q: What do you mean?

A: I have not read Francis Schaeffer as warning his fellow evangelical pastors—as he quotes Ezekiel doing—to declare the wrath to come for those who reject God. And, again, with the best of will I cannot find in Schaeffer’s writings what Paul says is the heart of his preaching: Christ and him crucified, and Christ and the resurrection. When I read Matthew 25:46 I shudder at what Jesus says. I know Francis believes that as well as I do. Should he not express himself on these his own convictions?

Q: Your criticism of Clark is of a different character.

A: Yes. With Descartes man declares as clearly as did Adam his independence from God. It is his Fourth of July. One would think that as a believer in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, Clark would have called the attention of his philosophical colleages to the exclusiveness of the god of the Cartesian self and the God, world, self, and Satan of the Genesis account.

Q: This is an urgent question. Clark believes, doesn’t he, that the law of contradiction is implicit in Scripture? That is, he holds Christianity to be true because it is the most consistent system. He believes in logic and reason as an ally, and he contends that universally and necessarily we cannot affirm and deny the same thing at the same time and in the same way. What is wrong with that? Doesn’t it supply him with a common ground and a neutral access to the unbeliever? Doesn’t this aid evangelism?

A: My concern is that the demand for non-contradiction when carried to its logical conclusion reduces God’s truth to man’s truth. It is unscriptural to think of man as autonomous. The common ground we have with the unbeliever is our knowledge of God, and I refer repeatedly to Romans 1:19. All people unavoidably know God by hating God. After that they need to have true knowledge and righteousness restored to them in the second Adam. I deny common ground with the natural man, dead in trespasses and sins, who follows the god of this world. When these people, for whom my wife and I pray constantly, are born anew as Jesus tells Nicodemus they must to be able to see or enter the kingdom of heaven, then we have common ground and will together call other spiritually dead people to repentance and life. The primary task is always to win people to the triune God of the Scriptures. It is in this interest that it is every Christian’s duty to witness. The Christian ought to do this, “speaking the truth in love.”

Q: What did you mean earlier when you called the law of contradiction “an eternally static turnpike in the sky”?

A: I meant that there is no way to get on it.

Q: What would you like to be most remembered for?

A: I should like to be remembered as one who was faithful to him, “from whom, through whom, and unto whom are all things.”

David E. Kucharsky, former senior editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, is editor-designate of “Christian Herald” magazine. He has the M. A. from American.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

The teaching of morals was considered to be an important part of the educational process prior to the First World War. Teachers as well as parents took the common-sense approach that training in such virtues as cleanliness, obedience, care of property, truthfulness, and dependability is important to a child’s development. And so they instructed children in these virtues and gave rewards for compliance and punishment for infractions.

But after the war, the mood of America began to change. Opposition developed to the teaching of morality. Part of this was a healthful criticism of some of the methods used, such as frightening the child into being good or administering harsh physical discipline. Part came as a result of studies showing that children who were enrolled in character-education classes, Boy Scouts, or Sunday school were no more likely to be honest in the classroom than those without these advantages (H. Hartshorne and M. May, Studies in the Nature of Character, three volumes, Macmillan, 1928–1930). Also, the thirties, forties, and early fifties were a time of optimism based on a philosophy of social evolution that said that people are getting better and better. It seemed, therefore, that they did not need specific training to improve. During this period the main thrust in education, other than teaching the necessary skills of reading, writing, and ciphering, was to promote social adjustment. If the child could get along with his peers, his teachers, and his family, he would develop into the kind of adult who was a good neighbor and respected citizen and would be a credit to himself and to his country. A preponderance of such well-adjusted adults would assure the kind of democratic living so highly prized.

But since World War II and the conflicts in Korea and Viet Nam, the Western world has undergone another change of thought. The optimism has faded; for some it has been replaced by apprehension and uncertainty. A look at the socially conforming members of the Nazi and Stalinist systems, at our own soldiers obeying orders at My Lai, at young people adhering to the expectations of subcultures that are in conflict with the larger society, makes us painfully aware that social conformity is not a substitute for adequate personal morality. And, as one observes the hollow lives of many people in our affluent society who are well respected by their friends and neighbors, it is evident that something other than social adjustment is badly needed. Add to this the rise in delinquency and crime, the breakdown of marriage and the home, Watergate, and other distressing signs of the times and apprehension may turn to alarm.

Now, once again, there is a demand for moral education in the classroom. More and more educators, philosophers, and psychologists are viewing it not as a panacea, but as a necessary part of the public-school curriculum. Within the past few years, numerous books and hundreds of articles have been written on the topic of moral education. The new college textbooks in education and psychology deal with it. A recent Gallup Poll showed that 79 per cent of those interviewed thought the schools should give instruction in morals and moral behavior. Among parents with children in public schools, the figure rose to 84 per cent.

Programs are rapidly being developed and adopted. The New York State Department of Education estimates that four-fifths of the state’s elementary and secondary schools offer some kind of program to help students clarify their values and measure their conduct. The Georgia State Board of Education has decreed that all public-school children be taught a respect for God and authority and an appreciation of concepts of right and wrong. The Tacoma, Washington, school district received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a pilot program, one that could become a model for schools all over the country. A number of elementary schools are using the Intergroup Relations Curriculum, developed by the Lincoln Filene Center for Citizenship and Public Affairs and supported by an HEW grant. At the high school level, there is the Carnegie-Mellon Social Studies Curriculum, which includes moral dilemmas as a basis for a discussion. Workshops and conferences on moral education are springing up throughout the nation.

The program instituted at any particular school depends on the age level of the students and on the preferences of the school board, principal, or classroom teacher. Let us look at the three types now in use.

First there is character education, a direct method that is similar to the approach taken in previous generations. The teacher tells the child what is right and what is wrong, and the child is to behave accordingly. There are rules to be learned, and obedience is important. The child is not to run in the halls, hit another child, or play in the restroom. He is to do the assigned work, tell the truth, and be moderately quiet. This monitoring of the child’s actions as a way of teaching morality has a number of advantages. It is the most natural way of directing his behavior and is used daily by both parents and teachers. It is based on the universally accepted premise that adults know better than children what is right and what is wrong. Directions and guidelines are essential for the proper development of the young person and for the smooth functioning of the home or the school. Also, the child’s behavior more directly affects others than do other aspects of the moral process, such as his feelings or thoughts.

Among the curricula materials available are those produced by the American Institute for Character Education, a non-profit educational foundation based in San Antonio, Texas. The group has been holding seminars and workshops since 1969. It emphasizes such standards as honesty, generosity, justice, honor, kindness, courage, tolerance, and good citizenship.

The “bag of virtues” approach, as character education is called by psychologists in the field, has its deficiencies as well as its virtues. We know that children do not learn morality in the way they learn the ABC’s. Only a minor portion of moral development could be said to be at the “facts” level. Those who do not act morally may know as well as anyone else what the standards of behavior are, but they simply choose not to abide by them or do not see why they are obligated to please others. True morality must be within the person, not imposed upon him by an outside source. In order to “internalize” the norms that parents and teachers present to him and thus develop a conscience, the child must identify with an adequate model of morality, not merely hear the precepts. The reason why the character-education approach appears to work as well as it does is that most children do identify with their parents and teachers. But the method alone has serious limitations.

A second approach to moral education is values clarification. This approach was developed by Sidney B. Simon of the University of Massachusetts and Louis E. Raths of the State University of New York, College of Fredonia. It offers a way of making classrooms more relevant to a world of change.

Seven criteria must be met for a child to choose a value. He must: (1) be able to choose freely, without the restriction of authoritarian rules; (2) consider alternatives; (3) choose only after thoughtfully considering the consequences of each alternative; (4) be happy with his choice; (5) affirm the choice publicly; (6) act upon it; and (7) incorporate the behavior into his life pattern. Areas such as money, friendship, love, leisure, politics, maturity, religion, and morals are fertile ground for values clarification. The teacher needs to provide the opportunity for a child to express his ideas, must accept these expressions non-judgmentally, and should encourage the student to consider the ideas of others.

Suppose, for example, that during a science class the subject of pollution arises. The teacher will discuss with the students the facts about pollution. What kinds of pollution are there? How do they come about? What are the consequences? Will decreasing one kind of pollution increase another kind? The facts are then integrated into concepts. What is the reasoning behind the concerns of the environmentalists? Of industry? Of the factory worker? What are your concerns? Before values can be chosen, there must be a firm basis of both facts and relevant concepts. The children can then talk about whether they would like to reduce the amount of pollution. If so, one child may decide she could wear a sweater instead of turning up the thermostat. Another may say he will ride his bicycle to school instead of being driven in the family car. A third child may say he will buy soft drinks only in returnable bottles. The children are reminded that their choices will count only as they repeatedly act upon them.

An example of a large public school system using this approach is Akron, Ohio. In 1969, the Akron schools and the local council of churches sent eight people to a workshop in values clarification. These eight then conducted a workshop in Akron attended by some sixty teachers, one from each school in the district. From this came a teacher’s guidebook, developed by a school committee and a council of churches committee. Then in several evening meetings, two hundred and fifty teachers were trained in values clarification, and they in turn conducted training sessions in surrounding areas.

The values-clarification approach does not suffer from the same problems as character education. It recognizes that if morals and values are to be meaningful and lasting, they must be affirmed by the person himself rather than being imposed upon him by someone in authority. However, for those who do not accept a relativity of truth and ethics, and most evangelical Christians do not, values clarification presents another sort of problem. The materials available for using this technique with such subjects as literature, mathematics, foreign languages, and physical education would meet with little objection. But in matters of morality and religion, the assumption that values are not absolute but are relative to individual preferences and feelings, which is a basic presupposition of values clarification, makes many of us uncomfortable.

Suppose that a child says cheating on a test was the right thing for him to do. He needs a passing grade and does not think he can get it any other way. After considering the alternatives and the consequences of each alternative, he still says he will cheat and plans to act upon this value repeatedly, if necessary. The adult, who has communicated to the child that he has a right to choose his own values and that his choice will be respected, finds himself in an untenable position. Parents and teachers hope that in the process of values clarification the child will choose the same values that they themselves hold, but this does not always happen.

A third approach to moral education in the schools is that of moral judgment. Curricular programs based on moral judgment are increasing in popularity. In developing the underlying theory, Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychology professor at Harvard who is considered by many to be the leading authority on the subject of morality, has drawn heavily from the keen observations of Jean Piaget. Piaget is a Swiss biologist and philosopher whose writings have contributed greatly to both psychology and education (especially notable is his The Moral Judgement of the Child, published in 1932). One of his points is that there are many ways in which older children differ from younger children in their responses to moral dilemmas.

The method used in the classroom is to present a story with a moral dilemma. Each child is then asked to state a position on the dilemma and to tell why he has taken that position. The story may be one used by Piaget a half century ago, one developed by Kohlberg, or one taken from a local newspaper. There are also booklets and filmstrips that present a variety of moral dilemmas.

One such story is of a man named Heinz who stole a lifesaving drug so that his wife would not die. The children are asked if he did right or wrong. It is the reasoning behind their answers rather than the answers themselves that is important. Teachers may also respond to the dilemma, but they are not to suggest that one response is right and another is wrong.

The teacher can fit each child’s response into one of six stages, later stages reflecting more mature reasoning than earlier ones. It is desired that a child move up from one stage to the next, and this may take place when he hears the reasoning of someone at the next higher stage. Since a typical classroom will have children giving statements at several stages of moral development, there is a “+1 model” for almost everyone. For those who are more mature in moral judgment, the teacher may act as the “+1 model.” Although indoctrination is not used, the teacher is aware that the fact that people do have different moral values does not mean that they ought to have different moral values. Ethical relativity and value neutrality, so prominent in the values-clarification approach, is not accepted in Kohlberg’s scheme.

At the first stage of moral judgment, the child interprets an action as good or bad according to its physical consequences. Avoidance of punishment and unquestioning deference to power are valued in their own right. When asked about Heinz, he may say, “he shouldn’t have done that because now he’s a thief and they might catch him and put him in jail.” The stage two child believes that right action consists of that which instrumentally satisfies one’s own needs. He may say that Heinz did right to save his wife’s life because “if she dies there will be no one to cook his dinner.” Kohlberg has done considerable cross-cultural research and finds that a typical stage two response in some countries is that Heinz did right because “if she dies it will cost him too much for the funeral.” At stage three a child is good in order to win approval. There is a conformity to expected behavior. He may say Heinz did wrong because a person should not steal or that Heinz did right because he should take care of his wife. In either case the judgment is made on the basis of an image of what society expects of its members. The stage-four child is oriented to law and order. Right behavior consists of doing one’s duty, showing respect for authority, and maintaining the given social order for its own sake. He will probably say that it was wrong for Heinz to steal. As one stage-four child put it, “It was wrong because he was breaking the law no matter how you look at it, and although I can see why he would have done it, I don’t think he was justified in doing it.” Those who progress to stage five believe that the purpose of the law is to preserve human rights; they may say that even though it was wrong for Heinz to steal, it would be more wrong to let his wife die. In the opinion of those who reach stage six, morality is grounded not in legality or specific rules but in abstract principles of justice and respect for the individual. In this light, Heinz was legally wrong but morally right.

Although the United States Constitution is based on stage five, most adult Americans are at stages three and four. The emphasis of our society is on being a good neighbor and obeying the laws of the land. Those who operate either lower or higher than convention dictates may pay the penalty. But unlike the stage-two person, who dislikes the law because it interferes with his personal freedom and selfish demands, the stage-five or stage-six person, having progressed through stages three and four, understands the reason for the law and respects it. If he cannot in all good conscience obey it, he is willing to suffer the consequences. As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in his “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail” (1963), “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.… A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”

The moral-judgment approach recognizes that true morality comes from within the individual rather than being imposed upon him. Also, it is based on the premise that some values are to be preferred to others. It is in keeping with both developmental and philosophical principles and does not conflict with the teachings of major religions. The Scriptures show a similar hierarchy; for example, stage two, “them that walk after the flesh … and despise government” (2 Pet. 2:10); stage four, Pharisees who teach for doctrines “the commandments of men” (Mark 7; 7); and stage six, the teaching of Jesus that “whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matt. 7:12).

Some will say that the place to teach the child right from wrong is in the home, not in the school, and one would be hard pressed to disagree. But what about the many children who do not receive moral instruction in the home? The parents may not be adequate models of moral maturity and may even encourage delinquency by showing little interest in the child or by being unwilling to monitor the child’s behavior. Far too few children are getting what they need in moral instruction in the home.

To what extent moral-education programs in the public schools will help to stem the tide of delinquency and to teach our young people to care for the rights and privileges of others as well as their own remains to be seen. But in these troubled times we need to try every avenue open to us. Some schools have reported fewer discipline problems and a more pleasant atmosphere after they set up a program in moral education. Teachers, as well as children, become aware that kindness and respect for one another (stage six) do more to bring about harmony and a favorable learning environment than either a situation in which everyone does “his own thing” (stage two) or the enforcement of a myriad of rules (stage four).

Whether or not one agrees with the particular methods being used, it is encouraging that many educators now recognize the need for moral education and are trying to do something to meet it.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

A name that often crops up in Christian education these days is that of Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg is with the School of Education at Harvard, and he has done some important research into moral education. Christian educators who hear of this research have varying reactions, ranging from “Now we know how to teach morals” to “We can’t follow Kohlberg; we must follow the Bible.” Clearly, here is a theory to be reckoned with in the field of Christian education.

The theory of moral development proposed by Kohlberg uses Jean Piaget’s concept of developmental stages. In the area of moral development, Kohlberg has worked out the stages more thoroughly than Piaget did. These stages, grouped into four levels, may be described as follows:

Premoral Level

Stage O: Does not understand or reason about moral issues. Has no conception of obligation to others or to authority. Good is what is pleasant, and bad is what is painful. Does what he can do or wants to do.

Preconventional Level

Responds to the way society labels good and bad or right and wrong, but only because of consequences to himself.

Stage 1: Guided by consequences—punishment or reward. Defers to authority or power not out of respect but because avoiding punishment is a “good” in itself.

Stage 2: Guided by personal satisfaction and occasionally the satisfaction of others. Actions are an instrument for achieving satisfaction. “You be good to me, and I’ll be good to you.”

Conventional Level

Responds to society’s expectations for reasons beyond himself—for loyalty.

Stage 3: Guided by the expectations of others. Acts for the approval of others. The “good boy” stage.

Stage 4: Understands something of the need for authority, rules, and social order. Respect for these is a “good.” Duty is a “good.”

Principled Level

Tries to find values that have justification in their own right, apart from any supporting person or group.

Stage 5: Somewhat legalistic view of the social-contract idea. Standards tend to be those that have been evaluated and agreed upon by the whole society. But open to changing law when this seems best.

Stage 6: Standards are in the individual conscience rather than in laws or social agreements. Principles are self-chosen on the basis of universality and logical consistency. These principles are abstractions, such as justice, and are not concrete rules found in religions or philosophies or elsewhere.

Teachers who want to make use of these must understand that they are cognitive levels—that is, levels of moral reasoning not of moral behavior. The very young child at the premoral level may not take a piece of candy because he cannot reach it. He is not able to reason at all about whether or not he should take it; he is guided merely by whether or not he wants it and is able to take it. The child at the preconventional level may refrain from taking the candy because previously he was punished for that behavior. An older child at the conventional level may refrain from taking the candy because that is the “rule,” or because he wants to be a “good boy.” On the other hand, he just may take it if circumstances are such that no one will know he was not a good boy. The man at the principled level will not pick up the private letter that is none of his business, because he respects the privacy of the other person. If this truly is a principle with him, it does not matter whether or not his action will ever be known; he acts on his principle and not on the possibility of getting caught.

In all the above illustrations the action was the same: not touching the object. However, it is not the action that determines a person’s moral level but the reasoning involved, according to the Kolhberg theory. Knowing what is right does not insure doing right. But according to Kohlberg, those who reach a principled level are more likely to act on what they believe is right than are those at lower levels.

In the United States many people reach the conventional level by about age thirteen. The principled level is reached, if at all, by late adolescence or the early twenties. Kohlberg has some evidence that those who do not reach these levels by more or less “normal” ages are likely to be thwarted in development and never attain higher levels.

What shall Christian educators do with this theory? Some, pointing to the late ages that Kohlberg gives, have accused him of saying there is no advantage in moral education at early ages. But Kohlberg says no such thing and his theory implies no such thing. This is a false criticism.

Kohlberg has done some research into the problems of helping children move up to a higher level of moral reasoning. He has found, for instance, that children often prefer the reasoning one or two stages above their own but do not even understand the reasoning beyond that. For example, in studying a historical or social problem and being presented with several alternative courses of action, children see the higher course as being better, provided it is not more than two stages above the stage of reasoning they have reached.

Teachers who understand this can do much to help their students develop higher levels. Discussion is perhaps the best technique to use; also effective is roleplaying followed by discussion. History teachers can lead discussions of moral dilemmas such as those the Germans had in Hitler’s time. What about disobeying the law and helping the Jews to escape? Or what about the underground railroad in our own pre-Civil War days? Bible teachers have many situations to use, also. What about Lot’s “rights” in the matter of the wells? Or Abraham’s going to war to rescue Lot? Through much experience with moral decisions students can grow in their level of moral reasoning, but only if guided by teachers who themselves are on a high, principled level and who understand that the route there is long and difficult. They must help pupils see from a perspective just one, sometimes two, stages above their present stages. Teachers who deal with the behavior of stage-three children by appealing to a stage-one punishment orientation will do nothing to advance the moral reasoning of those children.

Christian educators can certainly make use of what Kohlberg has told us. We might also do research of our own, in a Christian context, to find better ways of helping children develop their moral reasoning. Research has shown, for instance, that in parochial schools children’s levels tend to be higher. If we could, find out why, perhaps we would do an even better job. Kohlberg’s findings can be useful tools for us, and there need be no controversy about the stages and the ages he has identified.

But even those who accept Kohlberg’s stages and ages may have questions about his approach. Some of his critics among the psychologists ask, “Is reasoning enough?” They point to some of our knowledge about affective learning, about parent identification and internalization of parental values. Such psychologists are not ready to operate only with the cognitive model Kohlberg presents, and Christian educators should not be, either. We have our own particular beliefs that must be taken into account in our approach to moral teaching—beliefs such as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes we forget this. Sometimes Christian educators jump into new educational propositions that are not necessarily compatible with their own beliefs. The widespread interest in “values clarification” is an example of this. Values clarification is a cognitive approach in which people learn to understand their own values and those of others. It stops at that. This is not enough. We must go beyond helping a person know his values; we must help him learn and accept ever higher values.

A more substantial problem with Kohlberg’s theory lies in the philosophical realm. In identifying the kind of moral reasoning people do, Kohlberg has found that at his highest level people make judgments based on internalized principles. And the highest of these principles is justice and the welfare of others. Then he goes beyond the science of identifying what is; he turns philosopher by claiming that what “is” is what “ought” to be. Philosophers have criticized him in this area. And Christians also will object to this humanistic approach to identifying the highest values.

Kohlberg does argue, along with Christians, that values cannot be relative. That is, he sees problems in the system of “You do what you think is right and I’ll do what I think is right.” He sees that there must be a standard, that there must be positivism in ethics. But he would derive this standard by scientific means: what science finds is true in people becomes the thing that ought to be true. Science thereby takes the place of religion. Or for Christians, it takes the place of God and his Word.

Christians will find their highest values in God and his revelation. They will not expect to find them in the study of man. And so Christians who want to make use of Kohlberg’s theory will have to use the Bible first and the theory second.

At Kohlberg’s “premoral” and “preconventional” levels, a Christian parent will already be teaching what he believes to be right, even while realizing that his child has no such high principles but is only responding according to his punishment-obedience orientation. At the “conventional” level, which includes the “good boy” and “law and order” stages, Christian parents and teachers will want to make certain that children are well taught in the “laws” of the Bible. The Bible teaches us things we are supposed to do and not do—we are to love our neighbor, we are not to steal, and so on.

A good grounding at the “law” level is a prerequisite for living later at the principled level. In order to learn to live by his own internalized principles, a person must first have learned to live under the authority of good rules and law.

Kohlberg’s theory requires that each stage be learned and lived before the next is reached; there is no skipping. So it might be said that Kohlberg has found in the psychological realm a counterpart to what Paul stated long ago in the spiritual realm, that the law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, who is our righteousness.

Kohlberg is trying to separate moral teaching from religion. He thinks that if he can show scientifically what moral development is, apart from religion, he will have an acceptable base for bringing moral teaching into the schools. No one could then argue that it is the same thing as bringing religion into the schools.

So if we want to use Kohlberg’s theory in Christian education, we must see clearly what he is doing. We must understand that he is trying to separate moral development from any religious base. And then we must put his psychological knowledge together with biblical principles to develop our own theory of Christian moral education.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Bible-believing Christians are convinced that morality and values are rooted in religion. A society may enjoy the fruit of civilized mores for a while after the root of religious commitment is cut, but in time the fruit will wither away.

The enemy that insidiously gnaws at the religious root is secularization. To gain objectivity in defining this problem, let me go outside the realm of evangelical faith to consult Bernard Eugene Meland, distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. In The Realities of Faith: The Revolution in Cultural Forms (Oxford, 1962), Meland observes:

“A full account of the evolving cultural experience of the west would reveal the Bible to be the primary document of western culture … The Bible, and its tradition, has a priority in our cultural experience which no other document shares; it cannot be dissolved or denied without serious loss and possible radical dissolution of the controlling sensibilities of our common life” (p. 45).

Later in the book he says this about secularization:

“In defining secularization as a pathology in the social process affecting taste and judgment, following from a truncation of human experience in which ideal and spiritual values are disregarded or denied to man, one is not so apt to interpret its meaning within a single point of view or philosophy. Instead one will see that it is a condition and response within human existence which disregards all intrinsic meaning as this applies to man, and thus deprives him of dignity and of a personal destiny. So defined, the term secularization can have meaning to Christian and non-Christian alike as a threat to man’s spiritual life” (p. 63).

Has this pathology taken control of the public school? Michael B. McMahon, writing in Intellect, says: “So great has been the reliance on objectivity and scientism in modern education that not only learning experiences, but the whole enterprise of schooling have been cast in a positivistic mold” (“Religion, Scientific Naturalism, and the Myth of Neutrality,” Intellect, April, 1974, p. 431). “Questions of a spiritual or religious nature are a vital part of every student’s experience,” McMahon says, but modern education has ignored this dimension by “uncritical and slavish allegiance … to the canons of scientific analysis.” It is dedicated, he says, “to the postulates that man is self-sufficient, that human society is the arbiter of its own morality, and that knowledge is exclusively the product of scientific inquiry.”

Up to this point in our discussion of religion, morality, and the public schools, most evangelicals would be in agreement: moral values are enduring only when rooted in religious commitment, and the secularization of the public schools is a basic problem. But when we move into the area of solutions, the consensus dissolves.

True, all evangelicals would agree that basic responsibility lies with the home and church. The home and church should be able to produce children who are resistant, if not immune, to viral secularism. Some evangelicals believe that these institutions are all that is necessary for the moral and religious training of children and that banning religion from the public schools is a good thing.

Many others, however, cannot acquiesce in the secularization of education. Education that leaves God out is not true education, they feel, for it deals with only part of reality. And worse, to deal with the material dimension alone is to distort even the truth about that. These evangelicals are responsible for the phenomenal growth of private Christian schools in the last decade. Schools associated with various national Christian-school organizations increased from 652 in 1971 to 2,428 in 1975; they are estimated to number 4,000 today. And many more are unaffiliated and are identified only with local churches. The National Observer (January 15, 1977) reported that this movement is considered by some “the most significant trend in American education.” The Observer estimated that two new private Christian schools open in the nation every day.

These educators do not feel they are doing an un-American thing. They point out that education in America began with evangelicals. They have watched the historical process by which evangelical faith has been replaced by secular humanist faith and reluctantly concluded that John Stuart Mills’s judgment expressed more than a century ago is true: state-sponsored education “is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarchy, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind.”

Other evangelical Christians are unwilling to give up so easily on the public schools. A more moderate approach was reflected in an editorial in the National Courier:

“The high courts did not ban prayers in the schools; it only put a ban on those prayers dictated, written or prescribed by State authorities. And contrary to the general notion, the court did not prohibit the study of religion and the Bible in the public schools; it simply ruled against using these studies in publicly financed schools to propagate the doctrinal ideas of any single religious faith.… Prayer in the schools is acceptable by the Supreme Court, as long as the prayers are voluntary.… What this country needs at this point then is a loud and persistent public demand that the Bible be brought back into the schools and that religion be taught within the guidelines set by the court” (February 4, 1977, p. 5).

Others in this camp are not so irenic. They would like to take the initiative and capture public schools for Christ. “Impeach Warren”—the chief justice of the Supreme Court at the time of the school prayer ruling—used to be their rallying cry. Today they provide muscle behind the promotion of the so-called prayer amendment to the Constitution. In a Christian society, the schools ought to be Christian, they hold. The separation of church and state was never meant to mean total banishment of God from government or governmental functions.

These are the three main evangelical views of what should be done about religion and morality in the public schools. Now we are hearing an increasingly strong fourth voice that unifies those from all three camps: the religion of secularism must be disestablished. Judeo-Christian religion and, along with it, religious values and Christian morality have been barred from many public schools, while at the same time the frankly secularistic position has been established. And yet secularism is religious in nature. Man-centered and limited to the realm of the material, it has all the basic elements of religion: absolutes based on faith, values based on these absolutes, ultimate allegiance, evangelistic fervor, and an emerging “priesthood.”

There is growing sentiment and activity among evangelicals to disestablish humanistic secularism in the public schools. This goal is being pursued by congressmen at the legislative level and by parents’ action groups at the local level, as well as in the evangelical press and pulpit. For example, in May, 1976, an anti-secular-humanism amendment was passed by the United States House of Representatives by a vote of 222 to 174. No similar amendment was offered in the Senate, and so the proposal died. But the action, initiated by an evangelical congressman, shows the strength of the opposition to secular humanism. The establishment of humanistic secularism as the only legitimate faith is being identified by increasing numbers of Christian and non-Christian thinkers as the great hypocrisy of the twentieth century.

Evangelicals think the Constitution is on their side. And some are convinced that the Supreme Court decisions on the issue are on their side, too. Gerald J. Stiles made this point to the Virginia board of education:

“Legally, the situation is in conflict with the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 and 1963. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954) the court stated that free public school education can no longer be considered a ‘privilege’; that it is a basic ‘right’ and must be made available without discrimination due to (among others) ‘creed’ (religious belief). In Abington–Schempp (1963), Justice Clark giving the majority opinion stated that the ‘state may not establish a “religion of secularism” or prefer those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.’ Justice Goldberg, in a concurring opinion, went further and said that the government cannot work ‘deterrence to any religious belief.’ He further warned: ‘Untutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to invocation or approval of results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it’ ” (“Presentation to the State Board of Education of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” January 24, 1975, pp. 3, 4).

Just as the more universal and enduring faiths have been disestablished, so should secular faith. Discrimination should not be tolerated. I suggest that we seek for a true pluralism in our educational system, at least commensurate with the pluralism of our society, using two simultaneous approaches:

1. If the public-school system cannot be truly pluralistic, public-school educators should join with legislators to ensure a continuing private-school alternative for the citizens. I think that the Christian school movement should not be harassed, denigrated, or oppressed in any way, directly or indirectly. For the true liberal, the private school and particularly the Christian school may emerge as the only hope that a free pluralistic society will remain free and pluralistic. Without the Christian alternative in education, our society may well become a secular monolith in which the person of religious faith is not considered a first-class citizen.

The Supreme Court, in a landmark decision in 1925 (Pierce v. the Society of Sisters), declared it was beyond the power of the state to compel all children to attend public schools. According to that decision, “the child is not the mere creature of the state.” The court held that a 1922 Oregon statute requiring that each child of school age attend a public school “unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”

In a thorough analysis of the history and implications of the Pierce decision, Stephen Arons seeks to establish not only the right of private schools to exist but also the responsibility of the government to provide this alternative, lest the poor be discriminated against. I will quote at some length from this important study, published in the Harvard Educational Review (Vol. 46, No. 1 [February, 1976], p. 76 ff.):

“Individual parents have rarely been able to feel that their particular values have prevailed in the schooling of their children. In almost all the struggles over the content, structure, and methods of public schools, the under lying agreement among the combatants has been that majoritarian political control of the school system is appropriate.… This commitment to majoritarian control over what basic values are institutionalized by public schools is made tolerable to some parents because Pierce guarantees their right to choose a non-public school that better reflects their values.… The First Amendment encompasses a right of individual consciousness to be free of government coercion. The specific application to schooling of this right would describe a right of educational choice by parents wherever values or beliefs were at stake in schooling.

“Reading Pierce as a First Amendment case and taking account of the nature of schooling suggests that Pierce principles reached the basic value choices on which school policy and practice are based. The result of such a reading is that it is the family and not the political majority which the constitution empowers to make such schooling decisions. A First Amendment reading of Pierce suggests, therefore, that the present state system of compulsory attendance and financing of public schools does not adequately satisfy the principle of government neutrality toward family choice in education.…

“Because value inculcation cannot be eliminated from schooling, the notion of value-neutral education implicit in the legal distinction between religion and secular education is untenable.

“Up to this point, the effect of the court schooling cases has been to uphold and entrench the legal fiction that schooling can be value neutral.…

“Parents, social commentators, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others who have done research on schooling have all understood its value-laden nature. Seemingly, only the law continues to avoid incorporating this understanding into its deliberations. When the court’s well-developed doctrine of government neutrality in First Amendment issues concerning manipulation of beliefs is combined with the social scientists’ and parents’ understanding of schooling as a value-inculcating process, some extensive restructuring of compulsory education may be constitutionally required and publicly acceptable” (pp.97, 100).

Evangelical schools are not pressing for the government funding Professor Arons feels is constitutionally demanded. But they do ask for freedom in the fullest sense.

2. Because of the double cost to parents who send children to a private school—they must continue to pay taxes to support the public school—and because the issues are not clearly perceived, most children of evangelicals will continue to attend public schools. So I offer an additional proposal for this major segment of our society, people of Christian faith whose children are educated in a system that officially treats God as irrelevant to life. I suggest that the public school system itself be thoroughly pluralized. There are two ways of doing it.

a. Recognizing that every teacher has a value system and is communicating it, we should reopen the doors psychologically (if legal doors are in truth open) for the Christian teacher to share his or her Christian values freely. Someone objects: what if children are indoctrinated in religious convictions and morality with which the parents do not agree? That is my point; this is precisely what is happening.

Recently I was told by a parent of an experience his eleven-year-old son had at a school in Florida. A small group of students was to devise solutions to real-life problems, such as, “What if you were eighteen years old and found yourself pregnant?” The eleven-year-olds who were to solve these problems were given no guidance except one rule: “You may not say that any problem or solution is right or wrong.” This is moral and religious teaching of the most profound sort, and the approach is typical of what is taking place in classrooms throughout the United States. Such “values clarification” courses typically establish moral relativism as an absolute norm; the Christian alternative is simply not allowed.

Several years ago my daughter, Jan, was studying sociology in a high school in Columbia, South Carolina. The teacher often spoke against marriage and said that his most valued possession was his divorce certificate. Once when Jan tried to defend marriage, a discussion of human nature ensued in which she said, “I am a product of my heredity, my environment, and the choices I have made.” The teacher responded, “Heredity, yes. Environment, yes. But no choices.” This is very potent moral education. It is not only anti-Christian but also desperately anti-human, in that it locks a person into a deterministic box.

Moral neutrality is impossible. Moral values are being taught in the public schools. I am simply appealing for equal time. Free the Christian teacher to teach his religious and moral convictions as the secular humanist is free to teach his. This freedom must be established by law. If, as many authorities claim, the Supreme Court has already affirmed this freedom, means must be devised to restrain the omnipresent and omnipotent Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Bureaucrats, from Washington to local school boards, must learn law or be controlled in their application of it.

b. Another alternative would be to renew the old released-time concept but with a crucial change: it would be under the auspices of the school itself. Any group of parents would be authorized to provide a teacher for an elective course in religion and morals. This approach recognizes that value-neutral instruction is a fiction and that true freedom in the area of religion and morals exists only if parents and students have a choice of instructor.

The current discrimination against traditional values and morals is a trend that threatens the fabric of our society. It establishes the faith of secularism, which can offer no sure word about morals or values. I am urging, not the Christianization of all education, but rather concerted effort to provide true freedom. Legislators, the courts, and government agencies must work to provide freedom for private Christian schools by refraining from regulatory or economic harassment. Educators must give administrative encouragement rather than subtle opposition or mere tolerance to the private-school alternative to cultic secularization.

But more important to the future of our republic, I urge that we work toward providing true freedom for alternatives within the public-education system through the pursuit of true pluralism. There are two ways to do this: make Christian teachers as free legally and psychologically as atheists are to teach their faith and morality, and offer elective courses in religion and morality taught by adherents of the faith who are chosen by parents.

Western society—and American society in particular—is reaping the first fruits of materialistic thinking. The full harvest may be the dissolution of civilization as we know it. People of integrity and courage must unite to unmask the hypocrisy of so-called moral neutrality and to disestablish secularism as the religion of the state.

Expedition

and this is how it was:

we were climbing along a

high sheltered ledge

when we heard his

thin and distant screams

from below pinioning rifts of debris

deserves it, said some of us;

he caused the avalanche himself

didn’t he? a stupid novice, surely

no rescue equipment, said some of us

come on, come on; no time to fritter

if we’re going to reach the Peaks

but you and you could not go on (nor I)

I reached; you took ahold of my two hands

and spoke invoking words

that turned my bones and muscles

into long and looping ladders

of nylon ropes

you flung me down

the shattered granite cliff

and he climbed up, climbed up

the ropes made for those moments

out of mortal me; now, now

he climbs beside us toward the upper Peaks

and

this is how

it was

ELYA MCALLASTER

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

The Ten Biggest Church Stories of ’77

This is the time when pundits put together articles on the biggest stories of the previous year. Here are my choices.

The senior pastor of a San Jose church met with the four members of his staff for breakfast each Tuesday morning last year. He was supportive toward their ministries and personal growth. He also insisted on their taking one day off each week, and set the example.

A teacher of adults in a Philadelphia church responded to a question by saying, “I don’t know.”

The woman who teaches nursery class in a Columbia church loves the children, and they love her. “When can we go back to Sunday school?” is their question on Sunday afternoon.

A Tulsa pastor’s twelve-year-old son misbehaved at the Sunday school picnic, and everybody said, “Boys will be boys.”

Three laymen in an Ann Arbor church contributed fifty dollars each to their minister for book purchases and periodical subscriptions. And they didn’t want to know his selections.

The pastor of a large Midwest church gave up his special parking space so that an elderly woman who was crippled could use it.

“They still talk about George, a year after his funeral,” said a woman in St. Paul.

Single young adults in a Rochester church got together several Saturdays last fall to take down screens and put up storm windows for old and handicapped people.

A black church and a white church in Chicago exchanged pastors and choirs several times during the year.

The daughter of an elder in a Phoenix church became pregnant out of wedlock, and other parents said, “That could have been our girl,” prayed for her, and collected money for the unexpected expenses.

EUTYCHUS VIII

Money Well Spent

M. N. Beck’s article, “The Myth of the Self-sufficient Man” (Sept. 23) has certainly made the rounds in our family. Today I received this letter: “Mom, I’m so glad you gave me a subscription to CHRISTIANITY TODAY. This week I read an article in my Psychology magazine which really disturbed me. According to the article, I was once again a victim, and the only hope for me or anyone was years of psychoanalysis, etc. The past was irreversible. Today, CT came in the mail and when I read the article entitled “The Myth of the Self-sufficient Man” my confusion resolved and I felt really great. It is so important to have a Christian viewpoint available in the secular world. Many times I know I don’t ‘buy’ an idea but I’m not sure of my intellectual reasons, only my emotional ones. I subscribe to three professional journals, the Psychology magazine and CT. I depend upon CHRISTIANITY TODAY to help me sort out and define the Christian view.” Now, wouldn’t any parent feel that their fifteen dollars was well spent?

VIOLA J. KLAFFKE

Sacramento, Calif.

Of Things To Come

Allow me to express my considerable pleasure upon reading “The Price of Praise” and “Christmas Is Coming” (Nov. 18). I was also impressed with “Of Heroes and Devils: The Supernatural on Film” (Refiner’s Fire). If these articles are harbingers of things to come under CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s new editor, count me as a continuing subscriber.

ARNE K. MARKLAND

Lutheran Campus Ministry

Salt Lake City, Utah

I am very grateful to Virginia Stem Owens for the delicate insights she offered in the article, “The Price of Praise,” in which she gave voice to the silent call which God, through the created universe, makes upon us all. In our increasingly man-made and man-centered world, it is a message of truly great importance which urges men to observe, explore, and ponder the world of nature—this: the Lord’s handiwork. The created world, in its forms, patterns, light, and purposes, never ceases to be that point of contact through which God is known, in a very real and present way.

JOHN F. WHALLEY

Bridgewater, Mass.

Paul Leggett’s article “Of Heroes and Devils: The Supernatural on Film” emphasized that films with supernatural themes contain within themselves an essential Christian view of good and evil. That may indeed be true. However, I must argue that such films also portray a brand of Christianity contrary to that set forth by the Word of God. Leggett suggests that the current Gothic films would serve as a warning for Christians to heed their messages. I find that difficult to relate to Scripture. If we believe the Bible to be our only rule of faith and practice, we must therefore turn to its pages rather than secular substitutes.… As I write this letter, I can think how appropriately the Dracula saga illustrates the fall of Satan and the ultimate sovereignty of God. Perhaps I can support Leggett to that point. Yet I must remind advocates of this view that Dracula and its sequels fall short in portraying a complete picture of the Cross … The Gothic films are exciting as mere entertainment, fulfilling the intents of the writers. Yet I fail to see why evangelicals should find interest in exploring the Christian concepts of such films when the intentions of the writers are purely secular. Perhaps we can find an evangelical answer to the Gothic film. Why can’t Christian producers make film out of the writings of C. S. Lewis or John Bunyan?

DENNIS K. CHAN

Portland, Oreg.

Rarely Seen Root

I wish to thank R. C. Sproul for his excellent article (“You Can’t Tell a School By Its Name,” Nov. 4) on the demise of Christian Colleges, especially his rare but significant insight that the demise of natural theology is a root cause. It is rare these days for an evangelical to see this historic position of the church in a post-Kantian world.

NORMAN L. GEISLER

Professor of Philosophy of Religion

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Deerfield, Ill.

Defining Evil

In the article “ ‘Star Wars’—Space Gondoliers” (Sept. 23) Harold O. J. Brown states that “There is evil in Star Wars. Yet curiously, as in Tolkien’s Ring series, it is undefined and unclarified.” This statement is, however, in error. Evil, except in a theology book of which Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings are neither, can only be defined as the opposite of good and by its actions. In the Bible evil often refers to evil men, evil thoughts, evil desires. One of the basic things behind evil is that it is in opposition to God and his nature which are good. Darth Vader, the leader of evil in Star Wars, Sauron, the evil ruler in The Lord of the Rings, and Lucifer, the devil, are very much alike. All were at one time good but were corrupted. Their main characteristic is greed for power and dominion. Lucifer wanted to be like God, Sauron wanted complete mastery over Middle-earth, and Darth Vader wanted control over the galaxy. All of them work in much the same way through deceit, fear, and brutality. So due to the fact that Sauron and Vader are very much like Satan, which is recognized by many people, they are thought of in much the same way. Therefore, the evil in Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings is defined because it is opposing the characters we know to be good, because of its actions, and because of the likeness to other things that are evil that we are already familiar with.

ERIC POTTER

Vienna, Va.

Unjustly Accused

I write to you as a brother in Christ, who has been unjustly accused, to ask for justice. It strikes me as almost irresponsible that an editorial in a Christian magazine would repeat a theological quotation taken from a secular newspaper and draw far-reaching conclusions from it without checking as to its accuracy with the primary source—the custom in professional journalism. I refer to the quotation attributed to me by John Dart of The Los Angeles Times in his extensive article on “Did Jesus Rise Bodily? Most Biblical Scholars say ‘No’,” (Editorials, “What Seminaries Don’t Believe,” Nov. 4).

In his article, Dart treats two subjects: (1) the divinity of Christ, and (2) his resurrection from the dead. From the context of the quotation attributed to me, it might seem that I was questioning both the divinity of Christ and the reality of his resurrection. I am writing to you to proclaim that I believe Jesus is God and Man and that he was truly raised from the dead by the Father’s glory.

In the hour-long interview with Mr. Dart by telephone, I was never asked about the divinity of Christ; hence, I was given no opportunity to affirm my faith in it. During the interview, I simply tried to explain the difference between the resurrection of Lazarus back to mortal life and Jesus’ resurrection into eternal life. In so doing, I stressed repeatedly the reality of Jesus’ resurrection, even though it was not the same as Lazarus’s. Unfortunately, the distinction was lost in Mr. Dart’s article, and as a result my remarks lost their meaning.

I assure you and your readers that as a Christian and as a Roman Catholic priest I do believe wholeheartedly and unreservedly in both the divinity of Christ and his glorious resurrection from the dead.

JOHN BURKE, O.P.

Executive Director

National Congress on Evangelization

Word of God Institute

Washington, D. C.

Revealing Interview

Thank you for the remarkable interview with Ruth Carter Stapleton (Nov. 4). Despite the ineptitude of the interviewers, Stapleton’s susceptibility to humanistic psychology and its accompanying narcissism is starkly revealed. The imaginary “christ” of her “theology” may “heal” us of a “poor self-image” by fanning into flame the “dormant spiritual part” of man. Certainly he is not the Christ of biblical, historical, and evangelical witness: the strong Son of God who gave himself for us and who by his life and work on the cross—and not by our life and works—saves us from all the penalties and guilt of our sin.

JOHN W. BETZOLD

Riggins, Idaho

I certainly agree with Ruth Carter Stapleton that it is “best to concentrate on love, on good, and on Scripture,” and yet, at the same time, to recognize the presence of evil as a force in the world, a force which can be cancelled out by … love.

This extremely talented, gifted woman who radiates the spirit does … much to enhance the message of Jesus for humankind through her ministry of inner, emotional healing. One can only wish there were more like her.

J. J. KAUFMANN

Honolulu, Hawaii