Clear Statement Of Priorities

Jesus and the Revolutionaries, by Oscar Cullmann (Harper and Row, 1970, 84 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Harold O. J. Brown, theological secretary, International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, Lausanne, Switzerland.

This short but timely work is an expansion of a lecture delivered in Paris on November 4, 1969. In it the author finds fault with those who rashly claim the authority of Jesus for their espousal of either revolution or the status quo. Both claims, he says, usually result from failure to place what Jesus actually did, said, and taught in its proper context, that is, in the social and political situation of his day. Professor Cullmann charges a host of modern interpreters with too little zeal for historical accuracy and too much eagerness to make Jesus speak for their own particular cause.

With his accustomed carefulness and sobriety, the author examines the relation between Jesus and the Zealot party on parties. While affirming the socially revolutionary implications of Jesus’ message, Professor Cullmann contends that Jesus promptly and vigorously rejected every attempt to make him into a this-worldly Messiah. The rebuke to Satan in Matthew 4 and to Peter in Matthew 16, as well as his statement to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), are all indicative of his persistent refusal to place political change in society ahead of personal change in individuals.

The various events in Jesus’ ministry which are used to support the currently fashionable contention that Jesus was a (political) revolutionary can be more adequately explained, Professor Cullmann believes, by placing them in their biblical and cultural context. Thus the triumphal entry into Jerusalem (to which the author ascribes a modest scale) saw the Lord seated upon a donkey, following Zechariah 9:9, and not upon a war-horse like a political Messiah. On the other hand, he was no yes-man for the political and social status quo: his critical attitude towards both the Romans and Herod earned him the enmity of the established authorities and paved the way for his condemnation. There was at least one former Zealot among his Twelve, but also one former tax-collector; in both cases, Cullmann emphasizes the former. Both the Zealots and those who collaborated with Rome had to accept a new set of loyalties, or at least of priorities, in order to follow him. Both uncritical approval of the status quo with its injustices and espousal of political and social revolution with its violence and false utopianism represent conformity to this world. The Christian is called to something different: to a transformation by the renewal of his mind (Rom. 12:2). In the author’s view, a personal change of heart and transformation of life must come first, but it must not come alone. Spiritual change has social, political, and economic consequences, but to reverse the priorities is to be false to the teaching and example of Jesus Christ.

Cullmann frequently rejects the temptation to dismiss certain Gospel narratives, such as the cleansing of the Temple, as Gemindebildungen, but he does not categorically reject the possibility that the Gospels contain such fictional elaborations. In a general way he accepts the contention that Jesus’ ethical teachings reflect a mistaken expectation of an imminent end to the present world order, and goes on to argue that we should take over his message without weakening its eschatological radicalism, that is, without losing its rejection both of complacent self-satisfaction and of revolutionary utopianism. This recommendation sounds illogical if one accepts Cullmann’s concession that Jesus held a view that the end of the world was imminent and was, therefore, mistaken, but it is not necessary to concede this. Although he is very cautious in his acceptance of certain critical methods and conclusions, Professor Cullmann does leave open the possibility that the Gospels have erred in their presentation of Jesus’ history and even that he himself was mistaken on an important matter.

Deserves A Patient Reading

Sacra Doctrina: Reason and Revelation in Aquinas, by Per Erik Persson (Fortress, 1970, 317 pp., $9.75), is reviewed by Gordon H. Clark, professor of philosophy, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana.

This careful work of fine scholarship, with the bottom third of nearly every page covered with finer footnotes, aims to explain the relation between reason and sacra doctrina in Thomas Aquinas. This includes an exposition of Thomas’s idea of revelatio and its relation to Scripture, the status of elements derived from Greek philosophy, and the systematic principle in the structural framework of Christianity.

One of the points Persson makes is that an event, a miracle or a war, is not as such a revelation; nor is its observation: there must be interpretation of the event, for the cognitive content is all decisive. Faith is “an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth at the command of the will moved by God through grace.” All doctrina or teaching consists in the communication of knowledge by the use of words; but what is thus communicated is not the object about which the teacher speaks [the truth??] but concepts that signify the objective. Nevertheless Thomas identifies the contents of faith with the written words of Scripture.

Most interestingly, the author notes several important points on which Thomas differs from modern Romanism; e.g., the papacy is founded not on Peter but on the content of Peter’s confession. “There is a clear distinction between Thomas and post-Tridentine Catholic theology.”

Since the concept of cause is one of the great confusions in the argument for God’s existence, one may be somewhat disappointed that Persson did not more fully explain Thomas’s substitution of Plato’s causa exemplaris for Aristotle’s formal cause. This omission may not be entirely his fault: he may have included everything Thomas says. At least he gives many delicate details; for example, is it true (footnote 199 on pp. 136, 137) that Thomas’s metaphysics provides a better foundation for the Trinity than Bonaventura’s neoplatonism? If pages 159 ff. are intended to give the remainder of the explanation, one can hardly fail to be impressed with the emptiness of the verbiage—Thomas’s, not the author’s—because to say that “God is in things as a cause is in its effect” explains neither God’s nor a cause’s inherence. See also Thomas’s amusing comment on Romans 8:1 in footnote 60 on page 241.

The work is a worthy contribution to Thomistic studies and deserves a patient reading.

Geology And Scripture

Rock Strata and the Bible Record, edited by Paul A. Zimmerman (Concordia, 1970, 209 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Donald C. Boardman, chairman, department of geology, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Evangelicals have been subjected to a number of books and papers putting forth the so-called “flood geology” approach to earth history. The thesis of flood geologists, usually, is that the earth is young, conditions were different at the time of creation than now, and that the greatest geological event was the Noahic flood which laid down many, if not all, of the rock strata in the earth’s crust. Flood geologists contend that accepting these viewpoints affirms belief in the literal interpretation of Scripture and disproves evolution.

Probably most scientists who are Christian and believe in the infallibility of the Bible also believe that the earth is very old. The latest conclusion, after study of the moon rocks, places the earth’s beginning about 4.6 billion years ago. These scientists also contend for a uniformity in natural laws, and many hold to some type of evolution to explain the life which has developed on the earth over the last billion or so years.

It is obvious that these two views are poles apart, and if a person holds to one, it is difficult for him to see any merit in the position of a person at the opposite end of the axis. The result has been much contention, dividing groups, and doing much to hinder the work of the Church. In the midst of this polarization, it is encouraging to have a book that does not try to put everyone into small boxes.

About ten years ago seven men in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod were appointed to a study committee which came to be known as the Rock Symposium. Funded by a grant from the church, these scholars—three biologists, two theologians, and two geologists—studied and discussed some aspects of science and theology, putting the results into eleven papers published under the title Rock Strata and the Bible Record.

According to the preface, the purpose of the book is to show the relationships of the truths of the Bible to the truths of science. In general, the papers take a more moderate position than has been held by many in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The book will probably not please anyone who holds extreme views regarding the origin and history of the earth and man. The authors oppose evolution, hold to a very literal interpretation of all Scripture, and believe the Noahic flood was universal. They believe that the earth is very old, that there is uniformity in nature, that the scientific methods of dating rocks are valid, and that there is little, if any, geological evidence for the Noahic flood.

Divided into five sections, the little volume begins by giving some theological and scientific guideposts. The chapter by Professor Robert Preus of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, gives a Lutheran confessional approach to the doctrine of creation. Although the many references to the Augsburg Confession, Formula of Concord, and the Smalcald Articles may be strange to non-Lutherans, they are valuable in showing the development of Lutheran doctrine.

The chapter on uniformitarianism by Dr. Kenneth L. Currie of the Geological Survey of Canada is a good statement of the subject. It points out some of the mistakes made by scientists in the past but shows that there is a uniformity in nature which makes possible an objective approach to scientific study. A section on time gives the layman a good resumé of why theologians do not consider Ussher’s chronology valid. Those who wonder how geologists determine the age of the earth and different rock layers will find Dr. Currie’s chapter on age dating a valuable reference.

The section on Noah’s Flood brings toegther the ideas of a number of people regarding this miracle. Dr. Paul Tychsen gives a very good short essay on the lack of geological evidence of a deluge such as Genesis describes.

Along with these assets, the book has weaknesses. Although this is a work that should be referred to many times, the lack of an index makes looking up what is said on a given subject difficult. More careful editing could have made the writing style of each chapter more consistent. More attention to equal presentation of the subjects would have been helpful; chapter lengths vary from eight to forty-six pages, and the chapter on human fossils is much too long in relationship to the others.

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is to be congratulated for undertaking this project. It shows a confidence that the Word of God can be examined and will always stand. Only when one is afraid his own ideas can be disproved is he unwilling to listen to another viewpoint. Let us hope more authors will follow the example set by this volume.

A Concise Commentary

Ezekiel, by John B. Taylor (Inter-Varsity, 1969, 285 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Lester J. Kuyper, professor of Old Testament, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.

This commentary is clear and concise; the author’s apparent purpose was to condense within a brief commentary his previous extensive studies and writings about the prophecy of Ezekiel. Long discussions on difficult Hebrew texts where variations and emendations seem the only way to arrive at meaning are not to be found here. However, Taylor is fully aware of difficulties and offers his solution(s) within a sentence or two. Thus the reader who has little interest in textual matters is nonetheless given a key to understanding difficult passages.

The introduction deals with the book, the prophet, the historical background, the message of the prophet, and the original text. Taylor ascribes the book to a single author, the prophet Ezekiel, and notes reasons advanced by other scholars to support this view. The prophet’s ministry took place in Babylon, where he delivered all his oracles, including the visionary visit to Jerusalem (8:3–11:24). The problem of this visionary visit is fully discussed, together with the manner of prophetic inspiraton.

In the RSV translaton of Ezekiel, one becomes aware of several appeals to the versions such as the LXX, Syriac, and Vulgate and of translators’ corrections. These departures from the Hebrew text were necessary, the translators felt, to bring meaning to the text. Professor Taylor at times approves the changes. He is always concerned to establish accurate and meaningful translations of Hebrew words as he contrasts the renderings of various modern translations.

To do justice to the prophet’s message, the interpreter must take into account the special historical context in which the prophet speaks. Further, the concepts of individual responsibility and communal solidarity must be held in proper balance. This Taylor does in his exposition of Ezekiel 18. The prophet takes the despondent captives in Babylon to task for using the proverb, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,” by which the people were accusing God of injustice. Out of this setting the prophet develops one of the best sermons in the Bible on individual responsibility.

The understandng of any book of the Bible is much enhanced by incidental comments about words or phrases. In this volume these comments often become a backdrop against which the message of the prophet becomes more meaningful. Examples are those about Sheol, about soul, nephesh, and about righteousness, sedeq. The author shows himself well grounded in the language and thought forms of biblical Hebrew.

An index, even though restricted in size, would be desirable.

Shaky Moral Foundations

Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality, by Daniel Callahan (Macmillan, 1970, 524 pp. $14.95), is reviewed by John Warwick Montgomery, chairman, Division of Church History and History of Christian Thought, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Of the present state of Roman Catholicism, crusty but perceptive Malcolm Muggeridge writes in Jesus Rediscovered: It “is now racing at breakneck speed to reproduce all the follies and fatuities of Protestantism, and will surely before long arrive at the same plight, with crazed clergy, empty churches, and total doctrinal confusion.… I used to suppose that the Roman Catholic Church, having so valiantly and obstinately defended its citadel against the assaults of a triumphant and vainglorious scientific materialism, would celebrate a well-deserved victory. Instead, to my amazement, just when the attacking forces were about to withdraw in disarray, the citadel’s defenders have opened their gates and emerged bearing white flags.” Callahan’s treatment of the abortion question stands in the front rank with those pushing the gates wide, and its white flag is held aloft for all to see.

Abortion is a massive volume—the result of a Ford Foundation travel-study grant that enabled the author, well known for his Mind of the Catholic Layman, Secular City Debate, and 1961–1968 executive editorship of Commonweal, to examine abortion practices throughout the globe. The work deals with three major aspects of the subject: the medical (with stress on the “indications” for abortion, particularly those in the psychiatric and psychosocial realm), the legal (a discussion of the sociological patterns where abortion laws are “restrictive,” as in the United States and Latin America, “moderate,” as in Scandinavian countries, and “permissive,” as in Russia and Eastern-bloc Communist lands), and the ethical (an effort to establish criteria for moral decisions and for their practical implementation). As a reference work, the book has considerable value, especially in its survey of current abortion practice; detailed bibliographical citations to published literature and a careful index of names and subjects give the user of the volume access to a wide range of sources that would otherwise be hard to come by.

One hopes, however, that readers will not commit the author’s fundamental error: the venerable “sociologist’s fallacy”—what E. G. Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy”—whereby moral judgments bubble automatically from a cauldron stuffed with descriptive data. Here is one example among legion: in “seeking a new moral methodology,” Callahan refers to Latin-America slum conditions and concludes: “The physical meaning of an abortion in that context is, of course, the destruction of a conceptus, which for the moment we can, for the sake of argument, assume to be a ‘human being.’ But in the case of a mother with too many children and too few material, familial, social or psychological resources to care for them, the full human meaning of the act of abortion is preservation of the existing children.” It is this kind of moral decision by environmental pressure that the author sets over against what he terms “deductive arguments from general principles” (which being translated is “revelational absolutes”).

In contrast with a wide range of sociological, medical, and legal citations, few references are made to serious recent analyses of the abortion issue from the standpoint of biblical revelation. The Christian Medical Society’s symposium, Birth Control and the Christian, is cited but once—in a footnote—and then only to give the author an opportunity to distinguish his “developmental” view of the origin of the human person (some degree of development after conception must take place before an “individual human being” can legitimately be spoken of) from M. O. Vincent’s “genetic” view (the human being commences at conception, and abortion thus always constitutes the termination of a human life). Callahan advocates “an ideal law—most closely approximated in some of the East European countries”—that would “permit abortion on request up to that point where the medical danger of abortion becomes a concern (normally about twelve weeks)” and would “provide for free abortions for all women who desire an abortion, as well as free assistance of the kind needed to bear and raise a child if that option is chosen.”

Abortion is dedicated to “Daniel Berrigan and Philip Berrigan, who know what it is to wrestle in the arena of law and conscience.” One wonders. Surely the Rome of the past was reactionary on many fronts, political (support of Latin-American dictatorships) and ethical (always save the unborn infant even at the cost of its mother’s life). But does one function better in the “arena of law and conscience”—to say nothing of the sphere of Christian belief—when one burns Selective Service files and no longer protects the pre-born child from the whims of its mother or from the social patterns of the day?

Modern World Vs. Ancient Ethics

Judaism and Ethics, edited by Daniel Jeremy Silver (Ktav, 1970, 338 pp., $10), is reviewed by Warren C. Young, professor of Christian philosophy, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Oak Brook, Illinois.

This volume contains twenty essays on various ethical themes as they relate primarily to Reformed Judaism. All the essays are from the quarterly journal of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which Silver edits.

The essays fall under four topics: “The Issues” (ethical issues today), “The Jewish Background,” “Social Action,” and “The Mission of Israel.” All but two are written by Jewish scholars. The Christian scholars who contribute are James Gustafson (“What Is the Contemporary Problematic of Ethics in Christianity?”) and Julian Hartt (“Modern Images of Man”), both professors at Yale Divinity School.

Some of the articles in this collection deal with the historical background of Jewish ethics, such as the meaning of “Torah” and “Death and Burial,” while others are as contemporary as Viet Nam or the Six Day War.

A basic problem stands out. How can the modern Reformed Jew relate to modern issues and still be somewhat faithful to the ancient Jewish commands and prohibitions? Often the ancient teaching seems as strange to the modern Jew as to the Gentile. How can one be a child of the modern scientific cultural outlook and still root his ethics in the teachings that applied to a world of several thousand years ago?

Professor Samuel Sandmel presents the theological problem bluntly: “I guess what characterizes the C.C.A.R. is that of its members 90 per cent are naturalistic and 10 per cent theistic, and it is searching for a mandatory theology which it desires should be 100 per cent theistic and no per cent naturalistic.” If this is the actual situation (and Sandmel should know), it is difficult to see how the Hebrew revelation can have any significance for the Reformed Jew at all. The ethical verities of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob can have little relevance if they have been relegated to the realm of pious human aspiration. Is this all that is left of the prophetic vision of Israel?

There are, though, two or three voices pleading still for a higher view of the ancient teaching. Rabbi Eugene Lipman stresses the need for a theistic foundation for ethics. Jewish ethics, he insists, must be founded on the Covenant of Sinai. It is the God of Sinai, not some process idea of God, that must be maintained, for “if God is process, He or It needs no partner, and Jewish civilization needs no theological purpose.” And in his penetrating essay “On the Theology of Jewish Survival,” Rabbi Steven S. Schwarzchild warns all of us, as well as his Jewish colleagues, by pleading, “I implore you and me and all of us not to prove Nietzsche to have been right—that morality is the rationalization of the weak.”

There is much of value for all of us in these essays, much that should make us pause and think. Is there to be any room for God in the modern world? Will there remain any foundation for ethics other than cultural determination or personal preference?

The translation is quite uneven and at times seems to follow the German original too closely, and the footnoting is rather inadequate. The book is small for the price, and this is not compensated by the inclusion of an appendix borrowed, with revisions, from the 1905 Jewish Encyclopedia. Nevertheless, this book remains a clear and enlightening contribution to the discussion of the social implications of the Gospel and is remarkable for the firmness and clarity with which it restates the New Testament order of priorities: transformation of human being first, change of social structures second.

Newly Published

Some of the following books will later be reviewed at greater length.

A Call to Christian Character: Toward a Recovery of Biblical Piety, edited by Bruce Shelley (Zondervan, 1970, 186 pp., $4.95). Eleven teachers at Conservative Baptist Seminary each contribute a chapter. Half study piety in different parts of the Bible; the rest relate piety to various aspects of contemporary practical theology.

The New English Bible: Companion to the New Testament, by A. E. Harvey (Oxford and Cambridge, 1970, 850 pp., $9.95). This book is designed primarily to help first-time readers of the New Testament understand what is being said. The commentary follows the New English Bible.

The B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Classics, edited by David Patterson and Lily Edelman (Norton, 1970). A series projected to include about fifty volumes. The first three: selections from the Mishnah, Jewish folklore, and Rashi.

North American Protestant Ministries Overseas (Missions Advanced Research and Communication Center, Monrovia, Calif., 1970, 316 pp., $7.50 hardback, $4.50 paperback). This ninth edition of the directory is by far the best. A “must” for those seriously interested in the Church’s evangelistic task.

Science and Secularity: The Ethics of Technology, by Ian G. Barbour (Harper and Row, 1970, 151 pp., $4.95). The technological age calls for a new theology—a combination of science and nature—to bring religion back into acceptance (according to this author, anyway).

I Talked with Spirits, by Victor H. Ernest (Tyndale, 1970, 89 pp., $2.95). An important exposé of spiritism told by one who was once deeply involved with this phenomenon.

Scientology: The Now Religion, by George Malko (Delacorte, 1970, 205 pp., $5.95). A carefully researched work sure to be denounced by Scientologists but invaluable for those trying to help persons entangled in this false religion.

The Responsible Suburban Church, by Gaylord B. Noyce (Westminster, 1970, 176 pp., paperback, $3.50). A professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School discusses the people and issues of suburbia, giving practical suggestions for those who ask, What shall we do?

Prayer and Modern Man, by Jacques Ellul (Seabury, 1970, 178 pp., $4.95). Sensitive approach to the anxieties and deterrents to prayer found in “our technical, technicalized society.”

Christian Apologetics, by J. K. S. Reid (Eerdmans, 1970, 224 pp., paperback, $2.45). A history of apologetic literature from New Testament times to the present, helpful as an introduction for those who have no background in this field.

Getting Along with Difficult People, by Friedrich Schmitt (Fortress, 1970, 113 pp., paperback, $2.50). A keenly perceptive book with such topics as “Know-It-Alls,” “Helpers Who Need Help,” and “Love Under Fire.”

The Unhurried Chase, by Betty Carlson (Tyndale, 1970, 158 pp., $3.95). A delightful and truly inspiring autobiography of a close associate of L’Abri in Switzerland.

Barricades in Belfast: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland, by Max Hastings (Taplinger, 1970, 211 pp., $5.95). A young newsman gives an eyewitness and basically objective report of the civil strife in Northern Ireland.

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, by John M. Allegro (Doubleday, 1970, 349 pp., $7.95). Although a full scholarly apparatus is present, and readers whose knowledge of Sumerian is weak might be momentarily awed, the author’s anti-Jewish and anti-Christian bias is so pronounced that only those who share his passion could be duped. Allegro contends that almost everything in the Bible, such as the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Supper, is really a veiled reference to worshiping mushrooms. Informed scholars, regardless of their religious views, see the work as “an essay in fantasy rather than philology.” Doubleday has transmitted a literary hoax.

Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology, by Francis A. Schaeffer (Tyndale, 1970, 125 pp., paperback, $1.95). One cannot praise Dr. Schaeffer enough for his writings on twentieth-century thought. Here he turns to a problem facing us all—one that should be of the utmost concern for Christians—and gives clear biblical guidelines “which if followed would bring about substantial healing and restoration.”

Religion Without Wrappings, by David H. C. Read (Eerdmans, 1970, 216 pp., $4.95). This compilation of lively and thought-provoking sermons gets to the heart of the problems that confront the Christian in this “relevance-crazed” age.

A Survey of the New Testament, by Robert H. Gundry (Zondervan, 1970, 400 pp., $6.95). Average students will appreciate the format and writing style of this textbook. The information is accurate, but the impetus to think is lacking.

The Growing Church Lobby in Washington, by James L. Adams (Eerdmans, 1970, 294 pp., $6.95). A fascinating account of the rise and strength of church lobbyists (or “social action secretaries or public affairs officials,” as they like to be called), researched while the author was an intern with CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Habitation of Dragons, by Keith Miller (Word, 1970, 188 pp., $4.95). Designed to be used as a daily devotional book. The author includes in each chapter personal observations, quotations from various sources (such as Bonhoeffer and Gandhi), as well as Bible verses suitable for the subject under discussion.

HOLY TERROR?

During the WCC’s Uppsala meetings two years ago there was a remarkable exchange between a priest and a journalist, both from Catholic Ireland.

Journalist: “How are things going over in the assembly hall, Father?”

Priest: “Lousy, thanks be to God.”

Given that viewpoint, the same cleric doubtless hailed with gratitude the news that the WCC had spent $20,000 of non-Catholic Christian money on sponsoring last spring’s Beirut dialogue with Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists.

I wish he were available for comment on the council’s latest attempt to prove itself meaningful in a changing world. The executive committee has allocated ten times the Beirut sum to anti-apartheid groups, including guerrilla organizations in Africa. The grants, says a spokesman ingenuously, are intended to “strengthen the organizational capacity of racially oppressed people.” Whatever these woolly words mean, it seems clear that the council will have no control over the way its money is spent.

Apartheid is one of many evils that disfigure this fallen world, but such a method of countering white African oppression not only implies a tidy degree of allrightness in the major part of the continent where black rules black, but conveniently diverts attention from other areas of man’s inhumanity to man. When, for example, did the Geneva-based champions of human rights venture an outraged squeak against the inexorable persecution of Russia’s Protestants?

With such a capacity for selective indignation, it is not surprising that the WCC has been losing both momentum and credibility, and not surprising that it should wish to create a diversion. Its straits must nevertheless have been more desperate than we thought for it to identify with partisans whose political antecedents will be greeted with dismay by some member churches whose money the WCC is so liberally disbursing.

An unfortunate by-product of all this is that it helps to make defensible the indefensible policies of the Republic of South Africa. Already a Durban archbishop has suggested that the WCC’s action may be a throwback to the “cold steel and holy water” mentality of the Middle Ages. The WCC will dislike that utterance as much for its charge of naked militarism as for its imputation of an overtly religious motive. Perhaps neither allegation will sting so severely as the attempted defacement of the council’s painstakingly drawn image of itself as a swinging child of the seventies.

LETTER TO LINDA

Thank you so much for printing that open letter to Linda Kasabian (Sept. 11).…

I had thought so much about her when she was giving her testimony and wishing I could think of the right things to say to her to help rescue her from the morass in which she found herself entangled. But I know I never could have written just such a wonderful letter.

I pray that she receives it, thinks about it, and commits herself to the Living Lord.

El Monte, Calif.

It was nicely put, without overstating. It is pretty easy for us to decry the brutality of extremists of both the left and the right in this day without giving them the benefit of the doubt that our Lord would.

Director, Office of Communication

Christian Church (Disciples)

Indianapolis, Ind.

THE SPOTLIGHT’S GLARE

I want to express my appreciation for the quality and the care with which Russell Chandler prepared “The Mennonites: Pioneer Nonconformists” (Sept. 11). On the other hand, I do express my concern that this features the Augsburgers in a way which does not honor so many of my brethren who are most outstanding in their contribution.

President

Eastern Mennonite College

Harrisonburg, Va.

Your article reveals extensive and accurate research from responsible persons interviewed as well as other sources. It is gratifying to realize that a magazine of this stature has recognized the position and commitment of one of the smaller denominations.

Martinsburg Mennonite Church

Martinsburg, Pa.

POINTED WORDS

I was disconcerted with the editorial, “Evangelical Without Adjectives” (Aug. 21). It seems that you are being too “uptight” with words. The use of the adjective “conservative” is meant to clarify aspects of an individual’s evangelical belief. For example, Carl McIntire, Billy Graham, Carl Henry, C. S. Lewis, J. B. Phillips, and Karl Barth may all accurately be called “evangelicals” in every sense of Webster’s definition. But one would be blind not to perceive differences in their theologies.…

To many of my fellow ministers I am very “conservative.” But your magazine might regard me as “liberal.” Yet I am still an evangelical Christian.

So what is your point?

San Juan Larger Parish Intern Pastor

United Presbyterian Church U. S. A.

Bayfield, Colo.

FLAGS OVER IRELAND

While I respect the integrity of your thinking and writing, I must point out that your editorial “Ulster: Who’s a Christian?” (Aug. 21) is misinformed.

It is true that many Roman Catholics and Protestants are actively hostile to each other, and this has been so for generations in Ulster.… Fifty years ago the southern portion of Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom; this part of Ireland is 95 per cent Roman Catholic. Northern Ireland, which is two-thirds Protestant, and largely composed of Ulster-Scots, has strenuously retained the link with Britain. But Ulster’s Roman Catholic minority has always been Republican and anxious to sever the link with Britain. The basic cause of the present unrest is political, and if you were here you would see Protestant crowds waving Union Jacks and singing loyal songs, and you would see Roman Catholic crowds waving Eire tricolours and singing rebel songs.… It must also be stated that those involved in disturbances are not Christians; the “Protestants” are mostly non-church-goers and the “Catholics” are not devout Catholics. I was pastor of a church in Belfast for thirteen years and I am quite familiar with the situation there.

Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland

County Antrim, Northern Ireland

FINDING TIME

Thanks for the exposé of the latest episode in the story of the “lost day in history” (Editorials, Sept. 11).

This is not new … I have in my library a book by a Sidney Collett titled All About the Bible.… My copy is from the twentieth edition of the book and was printed in the 1930s. Collett stated that a Professor Totten, of America, wrote a book, Our Race (no publication information is given), which purports to prove this same thing. Thus we are probably talking of a book which goes back half a century.

Professor Totten, says Collett, figured back from the present to Joshua’s long day and found that it fell on a Wednesday. Then he figured forward from the prime date of creation (we aren’t told how he arrived at that) to Joshua’s long day, and this time it fell on a Tuesday. Thus a day is lost. Then he brought in the sundial episode of Hezekiah and by these two events accounted for the missing day.

I have heard this story repeated in some fundamentalistic circles before the recent revival with a NASA setting. It may well be that Mr. Hill got the information from Totten’s book and fed it into the computer and came up with Totten’s answer. But of course, a computer can only work on the material fed into it. It would be quite interesting to know just what the basic material of Hill or Totten was, especially when they dated the creation. Thanks for your sensible answer.

Livonia Baptist Church

Livonia, Mich.

FEAT OF CENTURIES

You imply that “heresy at Concordia” is a “matter of interpretation” (News, Aug. 21). In asserting that President Preus is to move against “liberal professors in the denomination’s seminaries,” you apparently have indicated which interpretation of the dispute you prefer. I’m at a loss to understand just how you are able to perform this feat and judge that the seminaries harbor “liberals,” but I do not dispute your right to make your judgments, however uninformed.

Missouri Synod Lutherans, however, have to be grateful to CHRISTIANITY TODAY for the statement it carried from President Preus on the controversy in our midst. While it can hardly be called a full treatment of the problem, the quotation was the fullest we have seen on what the president is about. I imagine that Christians of all persuasions will rejoice that we in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod are about to settle problems which have bothered all the rest of Christendom for centuries.

Immanuel Lutheran Church

Amherst, Mass.

PLUS AND MINUS

I am sorry that you found it necessary to give such a negative report (News and Editorials, Aug. 21) of the Fifth Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation held this summer. There were, of course, many problems at this world assembly.… However, there were also very good things.… Among these was the pronounced interest of the assembly to establish closer and more cordial relationships with evangelicals around the world.…

Contrary to your editorial, which disparaged the assembly for its lack of emphasis on the Scripture, the very theme of the assembly, “Sent Into the World,” is scriptural, is it not? Or did your reporter not know that!…

It is true that I removed some copies of the journal, Sola Scriptura, from the official Lutheran World Federation desk. The reporter involved had asked for permission to put this free literature on the table with the official Lutheran World Federation literature and had been denied that privilege. Anyone could distribute any literature he liked at the door, and we welcomed that opportunity for anyone at the assembly. But placing this magazine on the same table with official materials made it appear to many as though the Lutheran World Federation were sanctioning this publication. Knowing of this abuse by this guest, I put Sola Scriptura on the table behind the desk and went to inform the associate general secretary. When he learned of this infraction of the rules, he removed the magazine himself and then proceeded to give it back to those who wished to distribute it properly. I think your reporter owes an apology to Lutherans for his tasteless comments.

President

Wartburg Theological Seminary

Dubuque, Iowa

DOLLARS TO DEATH

“Changing Partnerships in Christian Higher Education” (Aug. 21) presents an accurate and cogent assessment of the dilemma facing the Christian liberal-arts college today. The tone of the writing, however, implies that this competent, concerned Christian administrator has viewed these changing partnerships … with mixed emotions.

I cannot agree with the conclusion that “the Christian college will have to accept a balance of partnerships in order to survive.” Not when these so-called partnerships have been imposed by secular accreditation agencies, the business community, and the federal government. Once these influences make their presence felt, it is no longer a matter of survival but of how long it will be before the evangelical imperative is completely strangled—if it is not already dead.…

I am convinced that Christian higher education can be financed through God’s leading in the Church, concerned alumni, further painful tuition increases, and a dynamic public-relations campaign spanning the broader evangelical community.

Director, Psychological Services

Office of Special Education

Adair, Cass, Montgomery, Shelby Counties

Atlantic, Iowa

Christian attitudes toward schoolteachers are strangely diverse. On the one hand, the warning of James 3:1—“Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness”—supports a rather general feeling that teachers have a role of exceptional significance and grave responsibility. Thus education is often ranked by evangelicals alongside medicine and only just below the ministry. Alternatively, however, Christians may assess the teacher by the “realistic” standards of society as badly paid, often indifferently qualified, and of rather humble status. In the United Kingdom a third view is sometimes taken—that the teacher is divinely commissioned to “preach the Gospel” throughout, or even outside of, the statutory lessons devoted to religious education. Certainly an impressive number of Christians feel called to teach. How can they assess their work in Christian terms, especially since most of them will not be concerned with teaching the Scriptures?

First of all, there can be no doubt of the cultural significance of Education. Man’s impressive cultural development has been possible only because each human generation can stand on the shoulders of its predecessor. The teacher’s indispensable part in this process gives him social significance that cannot be denied. This is very important to the Christian teacher, for it means that his work is not peripheral but of central importance; he is making a direct contribution to the community and even to the human race.

In the second place, the Christian will set this contribution in an even wider context. The command to “exercise dominion” has been called man’s cultural mandate. The Bible teaches that man’s terrestrial supremacy is no accident. In making it possible for successive generations to extend their dominion, the Christian teacher is working with the Creator.

Of course the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28 and 2:20 extends further than technological and biological expertise. Man is graciously commanded to act thus as the Creator’s viceroy because he is made—as is no other animal—in the divine image. Every area of the school curriculum witnesses to this truth, as does the whole process of education.

Professor Paul Hirst, of King’s College, London, has pointed out that within the traditional curriculum we may distinguish several different modes of knowledge. These are not in most cases identical with “subjects” but constitute distinct disciplines, and each demands its own particular approach. He suggests that they include the following: mathematical (concerned with abstractions and logic), scientific (concerned with what can be sensually experienced and experimentally checked), human (including such fields as history and certain aspects of literature), moral, aesthetic, religious and philosophical. Hirst’s distinctions will be relevant to the Christian teacher. He will regard them as a witness, singly and together, to the uniqueness of man, the divine image that sin may deface but can never utterly destroy. It was the Spirit of the Lord in Bezalel and Oholiab (Exod. 31:1–11) that qualified them aesthetically and technically, and the same holds for all forms of expertise. With these considerations in mind, the Christian teacher will see the importance of education in making apparent to every pupil how complex and diverse is a reality that demands so many different approaches for gaining understanding. It will also strike him as important that each approach makes on the student demands that are by no means divorced from moral imperatives. Each of them requires a full response of mind, will, and feeling. To whatever extent such a response occurs, so God is glorified as men in Kepler’s phrase “think God’s thoughts after him,” or in creative activity faintly reflect the activity of their divine Maker.

The Christian teacher will inevitably be conscious of the problem posed by the apparent self-sufficiency of curriculum subjects. How can he mention God in a science lesson? To say that God sends the rain is a theological and not a scientific statement. Nor is it historically sound to explain the survival of the early Church or the success of the War of American Independence by reference to the will of God. Surely then it must be intolerably limiting for the convinced Christian to teach “secular subjects.” It may appear that he is encouraging children to pursue limited aims in a manner that may be socially valuable but that by definition excludes the relevance of religious faith. Such a view is unduly pessimistic. In the first place, it ignores the factors mentioned above, the demands made by each discipline and the sense of wonder and purpose in all learning and discovery.

However, it also overlooks something even more basic that indicates a fourth Christian viewpoint on the teacher’s role. For every human activity, including science and history, ultimately poses moral and even religious questions. Scientific studies, for example, not only throw up moral problems that are presently causing widespread concern though often they are ignored in the classroom; they also raise issues about the nature of reality. What (if anything) exists objectively? What grounds have we for accepting scientific method as a valid way of acquiring knowledge? Is it possible to give an adequate account of science itself except in a context that is ultimately metaphysical or religious? Of course the Christian teacher is not alone in being aware of these problems, and differing viewpoints about them must exist in the nation’s schools. But the Christian may nevertheless be more aware of their importance and better able to offer a coherent viewpoint for evaluation by students. As Thurber’s farm dog taught the Scottie: It’s better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers. Christian teachers should be peculiarly well placed for raising questions that they know can be satisfactorily answered only by Jesus Christ.

A fifth way in which the Christian teacher’s approach should be affected by his faith is his attitude toward students. For him they are not complex animals demanding careful conditioning, nor empty vessels capable both of noise and of being filled to the brim with information. He knows that their uniqueness is not a mere biological phenomenon. Created by God in his own image, capable of hearing his voice and responding to it, objects of the love revealed at Bethlehem and Calvary, able to be made like Jesus Christ—such a view of man should powerfully modify the teacher-student relationship. It means that the Christian teacher will be especially careful to treat his students as people. Modern studies in child development have reminded us of what the Bible implies, that children are not just miniature adults but display their own developmental characteristics (First Corinthians 13:11). Yet they are none the less individuals. Each child is to be brought up in “the way that he [and not some other child] should go.” The Christian knows what it means to draw strength and acceptance from a personal relationship with his Maker. So although he may reject many of the assumptions underlying “progressive” education, he will approach each student as a person, an individual of infinite value, created for love and community, and with the God-given right to be treated as a person, not a school register number.

All that has been said so far relates to the sphere of common grace. It is in this area that the teacher principally operates. But although preaching the Gospel constitutes no part of his formal role, yet he may nevertheless communicate Christ and even do so in a way that could lead sooner or later to a student’s conversion. In the classroom as well as the common room, he will witness to Christ. His duty not to indoctrinate students in no way hinders him from offering what they may not encounter elsewhere: acquaintance with a committed Christian relating his faith to the world of thought and action. On countless occasions it is wholly appropriate for a Christian teacher to say, “Of course, as a Christian I approach this question with the following factors in mind.…” We cannot underestimate the importance of this witness in building up a total picture of what biblical Christianity entails.

Yet over and above this application of biblical principles to human affairs or to a subject discipline, the Christian teacher is like any other in that what he teaches most lastingly is himself. Whatever revolutions in education may have been witnessed by the twentieth century, in this there has been no change. It is the teacher’s personality and life style that stay longest with his students.

Some would plausibly deny that the Christian teacher should be expected to behave in any other way than quite simply as a good teacher. The work of the Holy Spirit would on this view appear in the believer’s greater competence in a recognized and definable role.

But there are certainly two characteristics of great educational significance that one may expect a Christian teacher to manifest. The first has already been mentioned: a concern for his students as individuals. Jesus showed this concern, and Paul spotlighted a distinctive New Testament emphasis when he personalized the atonement—“he loved me and gave himself for me.” Classrooms can be cold, impersonal places. The Christian teacher must display God’s concern for the individual and thus reveal the family likeness (Matt. 5:45a).

Second, the Christian teacher will be no less concerned to witness to the existence of standards in every area of school life. He knows that these are ultimately grounded in God’s character and in the objective existence of the created order. In an age of rootless relativism and subjectivity, this Christian witness was never more relevant. Today men need both the security and the threat of knowing that their failures and achievements are judged by criteria that go beyond individual preference and transcend even a hypothetical human consensus. Until they perceive this rock of security and destruction (Luke 20:17 f.), they will scarcely see the need or possibility of salvation.

This concern does not give the Christian teacher any right to reject those who fall short of such standards. He witnesses to the truth that they apply to him and condemn him no less than his students. In this respect he stands alongside and not above them. In penitence and faith he has learned that his sins and shortcomings may be condemned while he himself is accepted. Failure to accept others is the mark of the Pharisee in the twentieth as in the first century. Teachers are especially liable to reject. Unbelieving teachers will tend to accept only at the cost of jettisoning standards. Believers, on the other hand, may so assert trans-subjective standards that they reject students whose achievement (academic or moral) falls below an arbitrary level. Charles Simeon, nineteenth-century leader of the evangelical revival in the Church of England, said of the Arminian controversy that the truth lay at neither extreme nor in the middle but at both extremes. Similarly the Christian teacher is committed to an uncompromising assertion of objective standards and an equally unconditional acceptance of students. In so doing he is teaching the most important lesson of all. He learned it at Calvary.

Peter Cousins teaches theology at Gipsy Hill College of Education near London and is the editor of “Spectrum,” a magazine for Christian teachers. He holds the M.A. from Cambridge University and the B.D. from London.

The roots of racism are imbedded deep within the life history of the individual as well as the history of mankind. The term psychodynamics refers to the systematized knowledge and theory of human behavior and its motivations. Psychodynamics contends that a person’s total makeup and probable reaction at any given moment are the product of past interaction between his specific genetic endowment and the environment, both animate and inanimate, in which he has been living from the time of his conception.

A child is born as free of racial prejudice as of political preference. The significant activities and needs of a human being are not determined by the amount of melanin in his skin. While the black man’s and white man’s experience in this society differs, the principle of physiological and psychological functions is the same. As William H. Grier and Price M. Cobb write,

There is nothing reported in the literature or in the experience of any clinician known to the authors that suggests that black people function differently psychologically from anyone else. Black man’s mental functioning is governed by the same rules as that of any other group of men. Psychological principles understood first in the study of white men are true no matter what the man’s color [Black Rage, 1968, p. 129].

To understand the behavior pattern of racism we must dig below the surface. The influence of early thought patterns of the child stains his life-long perspective of his fellow human being in ways of which he may not be conscious. Many white Bible-believing, evangelical Christians find it impossible to accept a black man into fellowship with them. Why?

We shall first examine how the emotional effects, attitudes, and concepts of color lead to racial prejudice.

As the child’s external sensory apparatus of sight and hearing develops, he is developing also the internal psychic mechanism. He does this through reflex behavior, associations, assimulations, and various psychic defense mechanisms—processes that enable him to interpret the various images and concepts that are to be a part of his life. The significant adults in the child’s life convey not only thought patterns but their own anxieties. There is an intermingling of concrete and abtsract stimuli, and emotional and intellectual responses are formed.

At approximately the age of three or four, the child is becoming familiar with the color spectrum. While his eyes are interpreting and distinguishing colors, his ears are picking up various phrases. “Pure and white,” “black as sin,” “yellow coward,” “savage redskins”—these are emotionally flavored word concepts that portray color as abstract qualities. Such phrases in the primitive thought patterns of the child’s mind become emotionally charged by the various methods of reinforcing present in the child’s environment.

One of those methods of reinforcement is fear, which may be used to control the child’s behavior. The child may be told that “if you’re bad the big black boogieman will get you.” In this way the color black can become “phobogenic.” Phobia is the term used to describe the process in which a fear becomes attached to objects or situations that objectively are not a source of danger. The object or circumstance selected to be feared is something that can be avoided. The child may fear his parents but is unable to avoid them. If he is told about the “big black boogieman,” he is given an object of fear that he can avoid and repulse. This “black object” can later become the first black boy he meets in kindergarten.

I vividly recall one of the first poems I heard recited to me during my kindergarten days:

God made the nigger;

He made him in the night,

He made him in a hurry,

He forgot to paint him white.

The five-year-old white boy who recited this to me had already been programmed to have a racist view of a fellow human being. To this child, at the age of five, color had become a measure of a person’s worth, and in his deception he attempted to make me an inferior creature of God.

The fantasy of white-good, black-bad, white-superior, black-inferior, has been maintained and preserved by our society with all the resources at its command. In the past, both Christians and non-Christians used pseudo-scientific articles to perpetuate the fantasy. This method of brain-washing is seen in the following quotation:

Before the abolition of slavery persons of mixed Negro and White were produced in very large quantities in the southern states. The best blood of the south flowed in the veins of Virginians and South Carolina slaves, and there is said to have been not a plantation in Louisiana on whose cotton fields there were not to be found the half-brothers, and half-sisters, the children or the grandchildren of the owners kept at work by the overseer’s whip [Baur, Fisher, and Lenz, Human Heredity, third edition, 1931, p. 628].

What conclusion would you draw from this information? By a process of mental distortions, the author draws this one: “Naturally this extensive admixture of white blood has contributed to raise the intellectual level of the colored population.” And so amoral slave-owners who exploited the minds, bodies, and souls of fellow human beings, disobeying the laws of God and man, are portrayed as if their sins were a blessing.

How can a white Christian who knows and believes the Bible refuse to have fellowship with his black brother? This is accomplished through a mechanism called logic-tight compartments. Arthur P. Noyes gives the following example:

The psychotic patient may live simultaneously in two related worlds—one of fantasy, and one of reality. One patient in his fantasy would own the United States Treasury and its contents; he built and controlled the hospital in which he lived, but had just lost the key to it. Almost daily he would hand his physician an order for a billion dollars, at the same time begging for some tobacco and that he be given parole of the grounds.… This coexistence of the consciousness of fantasy and the consciousness of reality is made possible by the mechanism of rationalization and its production of what is known as logic tight compartments. Related ideas exist in each compartment undisturbed by those in the others, each group pursuing its course segregated from those which are incompatible by a barrier through which no reassuring or argument can force a passage [Modern Clinical Psychology, fourth edition, p. 62].

Logic-tight compartments produced by the defense mechanisms of rationalization and denial are not only found in the psychotic patient; they are also found in persons who are considered to be of sound mental health. By such a mechanism, a white Bible-believing Christian can read a verse such as First John 4:20—“If anyone says ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar …”—and refuse to have fellowship with his black brother. Our society has been instrumental in planting the seeds of racism in other concepts besides color. Dr. Charles A. Pinderhughes tells how words such as high and low are used to assign roles to people:

High-type people are associated in the mind with the high part of the body, with the head, with thinking, with leadership, with what is taken in and believed and with food. Low-type people are associated with the lower body, with the bottom, with the perineum, with what is excluded and expelled. Lower parties are often trained or molded by upper parties and sent out on missions often as expendable, as reflected in military and other hierarchial organizations [Journal of the American Psychiatric Association, May, 1969, p. 1552].

A person’s behavior is likely to be influenced by whether he is perceived, and in turn perceives himself, as “high type” or “low type.” This also determines whether he sees himself as one who should control or should be controlled. The systematic manner in which the black man has been held in the “low” position perpetuated the fantasy that the black man was less human and less worthy than the white man, who made laws to enforce this fantasy. This sense of paternalism of the white man to the black man is reflected not only in political areas, but also in the missionary efforts of the Church.

Because our society is programmed to reproduce white power and not black power, the concept of black people being in positions of control has been difficult to accept. Forming a positive self-image is extremely difficult in the black community. The white child, on the other hand, through word concepts of color and of “high type” and “low type,” is engendered with a sense of self-aggrandizement and control. Any challenge to his authority, whether violent or non-violent, must be suppressed.

Perhaps the most important dynamic factor determining personality is a person’s choice of a device to handle his fears and anxieties. From his earliest existence, man has used the defense mechanism of projection—finding a scapegoat. Adam said to God, “The woman whom thou gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” Like individuals, a society can project repressed impulses onto an outside source when its members learn to project the same impulses to a given object or an idea. By this process, group members identify with people who are perceived as similar (“our kind”) and trustworthy; they are associated with the “higher things of life,” and thought of as right. Those who are different are perceived as objects not to be trusted but to be regarded with suspicion. Their culture may be strange; their appearance is unlike that of group members. They are considered either wrong or inadequate and must be rejected. They must be kept out of the “In” group. Some of the ideas and thoughts of members of the “In” group are delusions and fantasies, though they are not recognized as such because all the members believe them and use their reason and their other facilities to support them.

To act out impulses of anger or hostility on other members of the group would interfere with society’s sense of unity, so the “In” group finds an outside object on which to project those impulses. For more than 300 years, the black man has provided that scapegoat for white “In” American society. He was, as could plainly be seen, different, and it was a difference he could not hide. To the black man could be conveniently imputed all those repressed, forbidden impulses our human nature harbors. The forbidden sexual impulses, for example, were placed upon him, and that projection gave rise to further myths and fantasies.

A weak society, like a weak individual, is threatened because of immature thinking processes; it neglects to build up an inner strength and instead builds outer defenses that delude it into thinking it is strong. The process of segregation is such an outer defense, and it has been harmful to our country. Now the black man is saying to the white man, “I am no longer going to be your scapegoat.” The young black child is not swallowing the poison that has tended to make him hate himself but is spitting it back into the faces of those whose forefathers fed it to his forefathers. Now that the psychological projections of the white man are not being accepted by the black man, white society is frantically searching for another scapegoat. Perhaps the hippies are fulfilling this role.

The Christian Church has tended to maintain society’s fantasies by presenting a false picture of the Christ of the Bible. It has tended to portray Jesus as an Anglo-Saxon, blue-eyed, blond, Protestant (and, some add, Republican) Saviour. As William E. Pannell writes in My Friend the Enemy, “this conservative brand of Christianity perpetuates the myth of white supremacy.”

Underlying all injustices and the desire to dominate is the self-serving inner force that Freud called the id. The basic nature of man, which in theology we know as our sinful nature, cuts across all racial lines, and the black man as well as the white man is subject to this disease that perhaps more than any other cause leads one human being to dehumanize another. The Black Panthers—who refer to white policemen as pigs—have learned this lesson in dehumanization well. So have white men who refer to blacks as monkeys or apes. When we deprive human beings of their humanity and soul, we can justify and rationalize anything we do to them. We can murder them, lynch them, or shoot them as easily as we shoot a squirrel or rabbit.

Perhaps the black man’s use of the word soul is a reminder to himself and his white brother that he is human, that he is a “living soul.”

Joseph Daniels is director of the Mental Health and Counseling Center of the Christian Sanatorium in Wyckoff, New Jersey. He is a psychiatrist with an M.D. degree from Howard University Medical School, Washington, D.C.

During this year of 1970, while the Western world gropes about in a quagmire of racism, both black and white, it would seem appropriate for the historic revolutionaries, the Christians, to make a public declaration on race. This paper is an attempt at a Christian manifesto on the races of man, declaring to the world our high view of race and culture, and pointing hopefully to that super-kingdom in which “we are no longer strangers and foreigners but fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God” (Eph. 2:19).

The Bible contains at least three positions about the races of man:

1. All men are made in the image and likeness of God.

2. All men are descendants of one pair, Adam and Eve.

3. All men are sinful and in need of redemption. These positions are probably distinctive to the Hebrew-Christian tradition.

1. All men are made in the image of God. The lofty view of man expressed in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” is so indelibly stamped on Western culture that the “imagehood” has survived the obsoleteness of the Creator. This biblical pronouncement cannot be dismissed as mere anthropomorphism or a mirror-image of Xenophon’s theory that men create their gods in their own image. As Cuthbert Simpson remarks,

[To the Hebrew mind] the representation that man was made in the image of God meant much more than that man looked like God or like the divine beings which formed his retinue. The image included likeness to them in spiritual powers … the power of thought, the power of communication, the powers of self-transcendence [The Interpreter’s Bible (Gen. 1:27), 1952].

The powerful effect of this image idea upon our society has probably been grossly underestimated. This Hebrew concept has invested man with an odor of sanctity that is a delight even to the pagan. The extent to which our civilization is indebted to this theory of God-likeness has been well explored by Elton Trueblood in The Predicament of Modern Man and also in an article in Christian Life:

The historical truth is that the chief sources of the concepts of the dignity of the individual and equality before the law are found in the Biblical heritage. Apart from the fundamental convictions of that heritage, symbolized by the idea that every man is made in the image of God, there is no adequate reason for accepting the concepts mentioned [Christian Life, March, 1969, p. 23].

One might honestly ask, though, if this dignity and sanctity were intended for all men, or if the Hebrews, like almost all other peoples of the earth, conceived of themselves as the only “people,” and thus the only heirs of the promise. It is the glory of Israel, and later of the Church, that the oracles of God are for all men. Isaiah could see the mountain of the house of the Lord established as the highest of mountains with all the nations flowing into it, “and many peoples shall come, and say: ‘Come let us go up to the mountain of the LORD … that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths” (Isa. 2:2, 3). We as Christians believe ourselves to be the spiritual Israel, and we bear a powerful message for this age: All men are endowed with a special distinction; they are made in the image of their Creator.

2. All men are descendants of one pair, Adam and Eve. An interesting and recurring conversation I have had in Haiti is on the question whether we all actually had the same ancestor. The suggestion that a white man and a black man should have the same common grandfather is usually greeted with a great deal of mirth. More seriously, the Haitian takes his estrangement so deeply that he may be unable to conceive that we are indeed brothers under the skin. Yet the story of man’s creation in the Bible implies this very conclusion. I doubt that it is dispensable.

I wonder if this “one-family” concept wasn’t the charisma that permitted an ancient Near East tribe to accept emotionally its mission to be a “light unto the Gentiles.” Later, during those dark and doubtful hours when the primitive Church was discovering that the Gospel was for all men, there must have been considerable reassurance in the scriptural traditions about the first man, Adam. Paul, the arch-exclusive ex-Pharisee, was enabled to stand in the Areopagus and proclaim that God had made “from one [blood] every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).

The drama and power of this one-race unity was not lost on subsequent generations of Christians, either: witness Milton’s moving scene in the closing pages of Paradise Lost where Michael permits the fallen Adam to see his progeny from a high mountain, ranging from “Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can and Samarkand by Oxus, Temir’s throne,” to “the realm of Congo, and Angola farthest south; or thence from Niger flood to Atlas mount” (XI, 370 ff.).

Or listen to the impassioned words of the Reverend Robert Hall delivering an address in the city of Leicester in 1823 as part of the British Anti-Slavery Society’s last assault on slavery in the British colonies: He reminds his audience that they cannot remain silent on the subject of human slavery unless they forget that the British nation had already abolished the slave trade, unless they forget that they are the countrymen of Grenville Sharp, Wilberforce, and Clarkson. Indeed, to remain silent “we must lose sight of a still more awful consideration, and forget our great Original, who made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth” (quoted by C. S. Lewis in Christian Reflections, 1967, p. 82).

Standing over against this “one blood” idea of Christians is a vast body of scientific and pseudo-scientific projections regarding the history and evolution of man, indeed the evolution of the entire universe, including the atoms and molecules of which it is made; a broadly painted picture, apparently without meaning, which depicts man as an accidental inhabitant of this globe, existing between the eons of primordial emergence and the eons of slow cooling and death—a dramatic tragedy on the grandest scale of all, one which C. S. Lewis was pleased to call the Great Myth of Western Civilization. Needless to say, the great “myth” does not afford us a clear view of human unity. The different races may (or may not) have branched off some human “stock” at different stages of development. Man is assigned his place as part of the stuff of the universe, taking part in random reactions that are carrying out their capricious destiny. Family, brotherhood, and love may be only adaptive phenomena in the inexorable evolution of events. Racism and brotherhood may both be nonsense. To this somber picture we as Christians have a message of relief: All the races of men are created in the image of God and are part of one family, destined for some glorious purpose that has only partially been revealed.

3. All men are sinful and in need of redemption. In the third chapter of Romans, Paul discusses the spiritual state of the Jews as compared with the Gentiles and reaches that dramatic and well-known verdict: “There is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom. 3:22–25).

The Christian view has been that all men share the common disease of Adam’s race, which is sin, and that all may be redeemed and transformed by the mysterious working of that second Adam, Jesus Christ. Christians have long asserted that all of man’s relationships are tinged and stained with sin, causing even the best of endeavors to be sullied with hatred, jealousy, greed, lust, violence, and disorder. To the Christian it is lamentable, but not surprising, that some Christian groups were involved in the destruction of Indian societies in the New World, in the capture and exploitation of black slaves, in the degradation and dehumanization of plantation life, in the racism still present in some Christian churches. What is astonishing, however, is that these so-called Christian societies used the ideologies of their own religion to judge themselves, finding the instruments of cleansing and redemption in the same Book that spoke of their sin. This self-judgment and cleansing I believe to be a unique phenomenon of the Christian society, one which, when seriously considered in the light of man’s history, should give even the atheist cause for reflection. Even the non-Christian social activist of 1970 must acknowledge his debt to the “theory” of Christianity, which, buried in the subsconcious mind of Western society, permits an emotional appeal to the dignity and rights of all human beings.

But the Christian influence on the race question was not limited to self-judgment and restraint of behavior. There was always a dream, as it were, a vision of a redemption of all tribes and nations into a spiritual kingdom in which the races of men would be reconciled to their Creator and to one another. Even the Columbus voyages, motivated though they were by a hope for instant wealth for the coffers of an ailing Spain, often gave evidence of the Christian dream:

So, since our Redeemer has given this triumph to our most illustrious King and Queen, and to their renowned realms, in so great a matter, for this all Christendom ought to feel joyful and make great celebrations and give solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity with many solemn prayers for the great exaltation it will have in the turning of so many peoples to our holy faith, and afterwards for material benefits—Done on board the caravel off the Canary Islands, on the fifteenth of February, year 1493. THE ADMIRAL [Samuel Eliot Morison, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1963].

The European invaders of the New World found they were little prepared to meet and understand the cultural conflicts posed by the complex pagan Indian societies such as they encountered in Mexico, with their weird customs and gruesome practices, including cannibalism and mass human sacrifice. Yet the men of faith held to a higher view of the cultural confrontation. Father Antonio Vasquez de Espinosa, a Carmelite missionary who traveled throughout the New World before 1620, wrote the following estimate of the Indian’s condition:

The Father of Lies, who kept them deceived and blinded, himself taught them this abundance of ceremonies, superstitions, idolatries, and revolting human sacrifices with which he made them worship him, holding these blind heathen tribes under his tyranny until God our Savior with his divine providence and mercy sent them the light of his blessed gospel, to bring them out of that blind darkness in which these poor heathen were cowed by the tyranny of the Devil” [Antonio Vasquez de Espinosa, Description of the Indies, Smithsonian, 1968, p. 24].

The great moral drama of the New World remained to be acted out, and we are convulsed by its contradictions until this day: the black man’s position in Western society, and the accompanying contradiction between Christian racial theory and the greed, arrogance, and racism of society, the Church, and individuals. The battle has shifted many times in the past two hundred years, but the whole of Western society has used Christian tools to judge itself and thus far has stopped the slave trade, abolished slavery, and proclaimed the Negro to be a man, and is currently struggling to see him as a brother.

The Christian ideology depicts a grand spectacle of the fallen tribes of men being united at the foot of the Cross, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. The only other going option sees the tribes of men arising, as it were, from the primitive ooze and recognizing their common humanity as they strive for the stars, but it offers neither an explanation nor a cure for human brokenness and discord. From a “natural” viewpoint, one could find no more reason for a rapprochement of the races than for a biological equilibrium of trees and bushes in which they could no longer strive for a “place in the sun” but instead seek a mutual pact of brotherhood and well-being. The leaves for the healing of the nations lie in the Christian manifesto.

The three points of the Christian racial thesis are a matter of faith. There will never be any way to “prove” them, though one might postulate that these same aspirations lie deep in the hearts of all men, an almost instinctive clue to their true nature and destiny. If we as Christians are willing to accept these declarations as truth, then I believe that we shall have to push on to some pertinent reflections and conclusions:

1. If we are all of the same family, then we all have essentially the same genetic makeup, and are human in the fullest sense of the word.

2. The differences between the races can be explained by isolation and cultural history.

3. Christians of all races, with their great insight into man’s true nature and their greater motivation to heal mankind’s wounds, are the only hope for racial peace.

1. If we are of the same family, then we have the same genetic makeup and are human in the fullest sense of the word.

The Winter 1968–69 issue of the Harvard Educational Review contained a controversial article by Dr. Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California that asserted among other things that well-controlled testing of Negro I.Q.’s showed that they were consistently below their white peers, and that this should be seriously considered as evidence of genetic differences in learning capacities. He further showed that the testing revealed differences in conceptual and categorical thinking. There was some allusion to the Negro’s early display of motor skills and non-cognitive abilities. There will probably be more of this type of reasoning in the future, though many wise men have already made their dissent in print and in public.

Recent black nationalism and racism in the United States seeks to establish a similar thesis, though this time the genetic inferior is a “beast” or “devil.” The mythology of the Black Muslim movement, dating from Master W. D. Fard, expounded by Elijah Muhammed, and popularized by Malcolm X, shows the white man as an inferior and vengeful degenerate of the original black race. The white race was developed genetically by a Mr. Yacub who hated Allah and “decided as revenge to create upon the earth a devil race … a bleached out white race of people” (Malcolm X: Autobiography, paperback, 1966, p. 165).

To one who has lived for the past twelve years in the world’s first black republic, trying in some way to grasp the nature of the barriers that divide the two races, both these points of view are hopelessly inadequate. The one, using European-based statistical testing, finds the black man “genetically” different, but is apparently oblivious of the fact that the methods used are part of the very culture that the black man only partially embraces. On the other hand, the Negro only senses his alienation from the culture of the white man, and recoils as from something inhuman. Misunderstanding between the two races in this year of 1970 remains critically high. It is doubtful that the strong emotional reactions will be overcome by anything less than a much higher and supernatural grace that gives each race the ability to recognize members of the other, for all their differences, as long-lost kin, men and women who were created for the glory of God and who may yet become part of that great fellowship of redemption. As Christians, therefore, we shall have to reject any theories of genetic differences, and conclude with Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, bishop of Chiapas, that:

All the peoples of the world are men.… All have understanding and volition, all have the five exterior senses and the four interior senses, and are moved by the objects of these, all take satisfaction in goodness and feel pleasure with happy and delicious things, all regret and abhor evil [Eric Williams, Documents of West Indian History (quotation from Historia de las Indias, 1559), p. 110].

2. The differences between the races can be explained by isolation and cultural history.

Granting, then, our genetic oneness and common ancestry, we must try to understand our racial antipathies, no less for the black than for the white.

The melting-pot doctrine has been so much a part of the American scene that it is hard for most Americans to observe the persistence of cultural and national values even among those peoples whose presence in the United States stretches back three or four generations. Yet, recent studies tend to confirm that certain characteristics that might distinguish southern Europeans from northern ones are detectable in the descendants of said immigrants even after several generations. How much more would such differences be noticeable if the original cultures were widely divergent!

Some of the pioneer work on cultural persistence in the New World was done by the great African ethnologist Melville Herskovits, working in the valley of Mirebalais in Haiti in 1934. Herskovits was particularly interested in learning the extent to which African culture and values had persisted in the New World after three centuries of slavery and a century and a half of isolation. He found a certain amount of European intrusion and survivals in Haiti: the furniture of houses is Western, as is clothing, agricultural tools, and certain trades. However, food tastes and methods of preparing food, methods of planting, systems of marketing, the position of women in trading, plural marriage and matriarchy, love of music, rhythm, dance, voodoo, folklore and folk games, patterns of talk and speech, and conversation were so obviously African that Herskovits is forced to concede that the “Haitian Negro has by no means been overwhelmed by European tradition, just as he has not retained his aboriginal African heritage without any change (Life in a Haitian Valley, second edition, p. 297). He further states that “Haiti has experienced as long and perhaps as intensive a degree of exposure to European influence as any area where non-Europeans have lived in contact with European patterns of life.” In a chapter entitled “Some Wider Implications” Herskovits asks the following extremely pertinent question, written in 1936 but devastatingly important in 1970:

But may it not be true that the Negro in the United States has preserved some vestiges of his aboriginal heritage even in outward institutionalized forms; that in his attitudes, points of view, and characteristic responses to social situations, the factors of his dual heritage have not been entirely lost; and as would follow elsewhere as it has followed in Haiti, that this may be reflected in his resulting personality types? Even the possibility of affirmative answers strongly suggests that further investigation of these matters may point the surest road toward racial understanding and toward eventually alleviating the strains which exist between Negro and white groups in the population [p. 302].

When it is remembered that cultural carry-overs apply not only to food habits, tastes for music and dance, or patterns of speech, but also to value judgments, moral views, rules of personal conduct—in general one’s whole outlook on the world—then one should not be surprised to find that the two major races in the United States find it hard to tolerate each other.

An illustration from Haitian life may help to clarify these ideas. The Westerner who comes to Haiti sooner or later learns that the Haitians don’t “see” things in the same manner as he does. He is used to naming objects specifically, such as daisies, lilies, crickets, beetles, and the like; whereas his Haitian neighbor will more often than not call such objects “white flowers” or “yellow flowers” and sometimes not even be too careful to distinguish the colors! The creeping things are merely ti-bêtes—little animals. The foreigner is further upset to find that prominent landmarks seem to be of no particular interest and may not even have a well-known name. Even words for caves and waterfalls have rather uncertain use among the peasant population. Yet the Haitian’s interest in people is overwhelming; the various situations that may occur between persons are blown up into all their theoretical possibilities, giving rise to an immense body of folklore and proverbs that intricately and artfully describe the human scene. One is led to the conclusion that the European is a “thing-people” (fascinated and obsessed by objects and their categorization) while the Haitian is a “people-people” (obsessed by people and their manipulation). If these two cultural predispositions have any carry-over into North America, then it is no wonder that black children do poorly on categorization tests, nor can we be too surprised to hear the black man refer to the white as “beast.”

In 1939 a black Martiniquan named Aimé Césaire explored the black-white frontier in a famous poem entitled Un Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal. The author attempts to discover the black distinctive, or “negritude” as it is called in French:

Hurrah for those who never invented anything

For those who never explored anything

For those who never mastered anything

But who, possessed, abandon themselves to the essence of each thing

Ignorant of the coverings but possessed by the movement of everything

Indifferent to mastering but playing the game of the world [Presence Africaine, 1956, p. 71].

For many this will be a very tiny window through which to glimpse the cultural gulf that probably separates the white and black races, but the wall of separation may be equally opaque to white and black, giving rise to “soul” and a search for identity in the one and fear and mistrust in the other. What then is the hope for racial fellowship and peace?

3. Christians of all races, with their greater insight into man’s true nature and their greater motivation to heal humanity’s wounds, are the only hope for racial peace.

The modern humanist will smile at this assertion and declare that of all agencies promoting racial understanding in the modern world, the Church shows least promise of success. He would remind us of the sanctified genocide that opened the New World to colonization, the destruction of the Indian societies, the traffic in African flesh, the brutality of plantation life, the dehumanization of the ghetto, often with ecclesiastical blessings. He would reproach us with the apartheid-like policies of Christian churches all over the world, where racial and cultural separation is practiced as a twentieth-century blind spot.

Yet we might well reply: Granted. But this only confirms our conviction that the races of men are afflicted alike with the sickness of sin and alienation. We are prepared to find the worst in the best of us, and therefore must stand amazed at the apparent healing power of the Christian message:

Who, indeed, proclaimed a universal God for all nations, a justice for all generations? The Hebrews, a people where we might least expect it.

Who, indeed, wrote the words: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made us both one, and has broken down the wall of hostility?” Paul the Apostle, writing to the despised Gentiles!

Who, indeed, proclaimed the abolition of class and position and died together by the thousands in the arena for Christ?

Who, indeed, defended the races of the New World against their exploitative “Christian” brethren? Was it not the Christians themselves, appealing to a higher god than greed and gain, men and women of the stripe of Bartolomé de las Casas, Roger Williams, William Penn, William Wilberforce, and even Harriet Beecher Stowe?

Who, indeed, has provided the “theory” that underlies humanism, philanthropy, integration, civil rights, and even certain parts of communist doctrine, to the extent that modern Western man has now come to believe that equality, love, justice, human dignity, and human rights are merely man’s natural heritage? Is it not the Christians who in fact have impressed these ideas on Western society to the extent to which they are now proclaimed as “self-evident”?

Where, indeed, in history do we find a society that has judged itself in regard to slavery, exploitation, greed, intolerance, and racism? Is it not significant that the only society to have made even faltering steps in the direction of human dignity happens to be that society which historically has been associated with the Christian religion?

The pagan world can hardly make any claims about racial understanding and peace, but there are non-Christians in the Western world who are striving for understanding and peace among the various races of men. As I have said, it is my conviction that they are using principles that are Christian survivals in Western society, and that they may well repudiate these should the going get rough, for to the non-Christian the ideas of human god-likeness and one-family-ness will never hold the awe of hallowed ground.

One is reminded of the great debate that shook the National Assembly in Paris in 1791 when the question of rights for the colored man in the French colonies arose. The convulsions of the French Revolution were striking at the roots of the nation, and in the discussion the establishment warned that if the “Rights of Man” were applied to the colonies, there would be war, great financial loss, and untold suffering, both abroad and in the maritime provinces of France. In his most famous speech the great Jacobin Robespierre rose and outlined the options—principle or property:

The supreme interest of the nation and the colonies is that you remain free, and that you do not overturn the foundations of liberty with your own hands. Perish the colonies if the price is to be your happiness, your glory, your liberty [C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, paperback, 1963, p. 76].

But the moral thrust of those early days of inspiration was soon to be lost in the confusion of the Terror and the guillotine. The “borrowed” principles of Christianity lacked that motivation which alone could make love and justice survive the wreckage of greed, bloodlust, and madness. The Christian enters the contest with better weapons than the humanist, for not only does he possess the principles but he comes with the emotional harmony of knowing that these ideas are God-given, part of the great history of redemption.

If this paper has any claim to truth, the stakes are high. The human family is alienated by long isolation and the corruption of sin. Increased contact and familiarity between long-separated cultures and races carries great danger of hatred, polarization, nationalism, and war. In this maelstrom the Christian is proclaiming the super-culture of faith in Christ. He is declaring, after all, that racism is only another word for sin, and that the formidable problems of culture-welding will indeed be accomplished when the estranged tribes of men meet at the foot of the Cross. In that shadow the races of men will share the triumphs of their whiteness, blackness, and yellowness, and each will become more like the other, but the victory will be Christ’s.

There will be danger. One should not forget that Paul’s final arrest and subsequent trials began when he mingled with the hated Gentiles in Jerusalem. The passions aroused in his fellow Jews caused them to throw dust into the air and shout that “he ought not to live” (Acts 21:22). Christians of the twentieth century, in proclaiming the glorious unity of the human races, will necessarily be faced with the enormous problems of intercultural mixing, from the mingling of the races in the schools to the more delicate issues of intermarriage. As in all social revolution, Christ would have us be the saltness of the earth, the lights that cannot be hidden under a bushel; for we bring the light of the Creator to focus on the human problem, and by his grace we shall not shrink from the consequences.

We may well find ourselves in the dilemma posed more than a century ago in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book contains one of the most moving condemnations of slavery ever conceived, and builds up the horror of Simon Legree’s plantation to the pitch where the reader could accept any fate that might befall that inhuman. The climax is reached as Cassy, Legree’s mulatto mistress, creeps into Tom’s cabin and proposes to murder Legree with an axe. Half crazed with the suffering and death all around her, benumbed by the degradation of her life with Legree, she gasps: “His time’s come, and I’ll have his heart’s blood!” Tom replies:

“No, ye poor, lost soul, that ye mustn’t do. The dear blessed Lord never shed no blood but his own, and that he poured out for us when we was enemies. Lord, help us to follow his steps and love our enemies.”

“Love!” said Cassy, with a fierce glare; “love such enemies! It isn’t in flesh and blood.”

“No, Miss, it isn’t,” said Tom, looking up, “but He gives it to us, and that’s the victory.”

Tom paid for his Christian view with his life. In these days the bonds between the races of men are stretched to the breaking point. We shall have to match the courage of a Paul or an Uncle Tom to assert the unity of the human family and the forgiveness of God. The consequences may be awesome, as they usually are in the big issues, and some of us may leave the field of battle strewn with our bodies. Our institutions, our property, our reputations, our families, or our health may be the price, but we will show that it is not by (white) might, nor by (black) power, but by his Spirit that the races will find peace.

William H. Hodges is a medical missionary serving at Hopital le Bon Samaritain in Umbf, Haiti, under the American Baptist Home Mission Society. He holds the MJ. degree from the University of Southern California.

THE PLANTS IN THE BATHTUB

Sir, as I prayed for the dog

(dead) and do for the cat

(with friends), I ask Your care

now for the plants that stand

in an inch of water in the bathtub:

one gangling avocado,

two coleuses, marigolds

(four, I think), waiting

for me to come home.

An indifferent master who took

their company for granted,

watering them, yes,

but stinting on plant food,

granting them only

a few words on weekends,

I miss them a little: the reds,

the pinheads, the beanpole thatched

like a palm. We lived together.

Will You see that they get enough

porcelain light? And, Sir,

please, don’t let them drown.

FRANCIS MAGUIRE

Ten years ago Eugene Carson Blake, then stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church, delivered an address in the cathedral church of Bishop James Pike in San Francisco. Out of that speech has developed COCU, the Consultation on Church Union. It has for its immediate goal the formation of the Church of Christ Uniting, which will include the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church in the U. S., the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.

At the ninth plenary session of COCU in St. Louis last March, a Plan of Union was presented to the delegates. This document constitutes the substructure on which the new church will be built, and in it the provisions of the union are spelled out with precision. It is an impressive product into which much labor and care have been poured; indeed, numerous changes in the text have improved it. It is worthy of the most careful analysis, not only by the denominations currently participating in the merger but by all denominations and all Christians, because it is the announced purpose of the champions of COCU to try to bring into this union, sooner or later, all the churches of Christendom. They envision at last the one holy catholic visible church on earth.

We could profitably examine many of the secondary facets of the Plan of Union. But for most people, the two matters of overriding importance are: (1) What will the theological basis of the union consist in? (2) What will the polity, the church government, be? Answers to these two questions will determine the acceptability of the Plan of Union for many clerical and lay people, whether their denominations are now part of COCU or are among those that COCU would like to add in the future.

The denominations participating in COCU either are presently committed to a confession (or confessions) of faith or have grown up out of church groups that were controlled by creeds or confessions. The Episcopal Church has its Thirty-nine Articles. The Presbyterian Church in the U. S. and the United Presbyterian Church have the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the United Presbyterians have also the Confession of 1967. The United Church of Christ, a result of the 1957 merger of the General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church, has the statement of faith adopted at Oberlin in 1959. The various Methodist bodies are tied in one way or another to the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglicanism, the root from which they have sprung.

Chapter V of the Plan of Union contains The Confession for the new church. Here lies the theological basis to which the churches will commit themselves when the merger takes place. The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed are specifically cited. But they will have no binding force in the new church. These creeds “the united church accepts … as witnesses of Tradition to the mighty acts of God recorded in Scripture.” They are “classic expressions of the Christian faith” and “have a wider acceptance than the more recent formulations or confessions by separated parts of the church” (pp. 26, 27).

In addition to the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the new church will accept the “corporate covenant and confessions” of the uniting denominations and “agrees to the continued use of these as enrichments of its own understanding of the Gospel” (p. 27; italics added). But none of these statements, separately or corporately, will in any true sense be binding on anyone in the united church, for the church “will not use any of these confessions as the exclusive requirement for all, nor permit them to become a basis for divisions in the new community” (p. 27). It follows, then, that any who for conscience’ sake raise issues that divide will have to be dealt with, though how this will be done is not explained in the document. Indeed, this sort of statement precludes significant discussions about deep-seated differences that everyone knows exist and cannot be swept under the rug. It also means that the new church will have what is essentially an inclusive, eclectic theology, a collection of what are certain to be conflicting and irreconcilable viewpoints.

It is true that in each of the denominations involved in the union, widely divergent theologies already prevail. There are humanists, liberals, neo-orthodox, evangelicals, and fundamentalists in all of them. In this sense the new church will simply be an enlargement of an already existing pattern. The Plan of Union is so constructed, however, that those who might desire to challenge what they feel are unbiblical opinions will find their hands tied. Those who enter the merger bind themselves to the Plan of Union, “which guarantees to respect the conscientious convictions of individual members and to enhance the deeply personal character of Christian faith” (p. 27) but will not permit confessions to become a basis for division. Thus those who do not believe the confessions will be protected, it seems, while those who might wish to protest unbelief will have forfeited the right to act, since they will have agreed that confessions should not become a basis for divisions.

This introduces into the situation an element not present in most, if not all, of the uniting churches as presently constituted. The right of individual conscience is a precious one; every man has the right to believe as he chooses. But nearly every association of men has its ground rules, designed to open the door to those who are in agreement with the basic beliefs of the association and to close the door against those who are not. This provision will be virtually non-existent in the new church.

Even the power of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as witnesses to truth is so diluted in the Plan of Union as to make these creeds inconsequential. “They are for the guidance of the members of the church and are to be used persuasively and not coercively” (p. 27). Various surveys taken in recent years indicate that substantial numbers of the clergy of the uniting denominations now disbelieve many of the particulars of these creeds, and it is ludicrous to expect that such men will use “persuasively” among their people what they themselves deny. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion, then, that the new church, without binding confessions and with no real barriers to exclude unbelief, will be syncretistic.

The projected confession does include some familiar concepts and phrases: Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour; the one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; saved by grace; justified by faith; the authority of Scripture; the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. But these are not defined, and the church is to be informed by the confessions of the uniting churches but not bound by them.

What is meant, for example, by the phrase “authority of Scripture”? Is Scripture inspired by God? If so, all of it or parts of it? Is it to be trusted? Does it present propositional truth? Nor is the confession specifically trinitarian. The statement about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is so worded that any Unitarian could agree to it without crossed fingers or mental reservations (“In glad celebration we worship the one God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit [p. 27]). That the one God subsists eternally in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, is not made clear. Nothing is said about the eternity of the Son and the Spirit. Nothing is said of the Virgin Birth. The death of Christ is mentioned (“Jesus Christ crucified and risen” [p. 26]; “in his life, death, and resurrection” [p. 18]), but nothing is said of its theological meaning. Whereas the Westminster Confession of Faith (accepted by Presbyterians and, in modified form, by Congregationalists and Baptists) speaks of a vicarious and substitutionary atonement in which the wrath of God was satisfied, the new formulation says nothing like this. Similarly, the resurrection of Christ from the dead is mentioned, but its historic content is left unstated. The phrase “raised from the dead” means different things to different people; since nothing is said of the biblical teaching that Christ rose from the tomb in the same body and that the tomb was empty, members are free to let their “conscientious convictions” determine the meaning of the phrase.

Scripture is said to be “included in the Tradition” and is to be “interpreted in the light of the Tradition” (p. 26). The new church is to be “under the authority of Scripture,” but it is impossible to determine what “being under” means. One thing is clear: the new church will not be committed to an infallible Scripture. There is little reason to hope that churches now seemingly unconcerned about an infallible Word and willing to permit within them all shades of opinion under existing and supposedly binding confessions will in the united church be more strict or more concerned. Indeed, everything points in the opposite direction—to an inclusive church, marked by theological vagary, entertaining opposing viewpoints, having a compass that points in all directions at the same time.

That the formulators of the Plan of Union expected opposition and are prepared to offset it may be seen from a number of illuminating statements: “Our efforts to unite in a common obedience no doubt will release divisive forces” (p. 10), and such divisive forces, even though based on biblical grounds and standing for truth, are not to be tolerated; “we envisage a united church, embodying all that is indispensable to each of us”—even though this may violate logical consistency and the biblical witness itself; “oneness in the church is required for the credibility and effectiveness of Christ’s mission”—a statement that has never been true and one that fails to acknowledge that the greatest missionary advance since the days of the apostles came in the nineteenth century, when the Church was more divided denominationally than at any other period in its history.

Various statements in the Plan of Union can only yield the conclusion that the new church will be committed to the supposition that all men will be saved. Belief in universal salvation is characteristic of segments of the ecumenical movement and seems to be growing in strength. The plan foresees “the oneness of all men as reconciled in Christ’s new creation” (p. 11); “the church invites the world to see foreshadowed the final destiny God has prepared for all mankind and to participate in it” (p. 17); “through this act [the identification of the risen and ascended Christ with mankind] God draws all men into fellowship with his Son” (p. 18). In a church that intends to regard as divisive those who raise questions that could become a basis for division, one can expect short shrift for people who believe in hell and are willing to make an issue of it.

The theology of the new church, as it now stands, hardly constitutes an endorsement of that to which the uniting churches have traditionally been committed since their earliest days. The union will mark the end of adherence to creeds and confessions as we have known them (or their use to determine orthodoxy) and will decisively depreciate the value of great documents like the Westminster Confession of Faith. Rather than hastening the reunion of churches based on biblical truth, the Church of Christ Uniting is likely to be an affront to bodies like the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Southern Baptists, and the smaller denominations in the National Association of Evangelicals.

As it now reads, the COCU confession will not satisfy those who stand in the evangelical tradition. If the united church becomes a reality without considerable improvement of the present doctrinal platform, evangelicals will be faced with difficult decisions. They can go into the union but will have to compromise conscience. They can withdraw by exercising an option that is part of the Plan of Union. If many churches opt out and establish continuing denominations, then the total number of denominations is likely to increase, even though the uniting church will undoubtedly become the largest single Protestant body in the United States.

Evangelicals who are not pleased with the present confession of the new church are likely to be equally unhappy with its ecclesiology. This aspect of COCU we will discuss in the second part of our critique in an examination of the Parish Plan and the historic episcopate, which are integral to the COCU Plan of Union.

With this issue CHRISTIANITY TODAY begins its fifteenth year of publication. Our readers should note the restatement of our purposes in the editorial pages. We are grateful to God for his mercies and for his continuing provision for our financial needs. Religious magazines generally do not pay their own way by subscription and advertising income, and subsidies must make up the difference. We depend on the gifts of God’s people to balance our budget. We ask our friends to read the explanation on page 49 of deferred giving as a means of forwarding our work.

The essay on COCU is the first of two in which we examine the basic issues in this projected merger of key denominations. In the second part, which will appear next issue, we will explore the parish plan and the question of the historic episcopate. Two essays in this issue deal with racism, a problem that has wracked churches as well as governments and nations. Dr. Daniels, a black psychiatrist, speaks compellingly about the psychodynamics of racism, while Dr. Hodges explores the biblical principles that relate to racism and their application to current situations.

Donald Tinder, a Yale Ph.D. who joined us as assistant editor fifteen months ago, is now our book editor. All communications regarding books should be addressed to him.