The Emperor And The Church

Augustus to Constantine, by Robert M. Grant (Harper & Row, 1970, 334 pp., $10), and Constantine, by Ramsey MacMullen (Dial, 1969, 263 pp., $7.95), are reviewed by Frederick A. Norwood, professor of the history of Christianity, Garrett Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois.

From both of these books the sculptured image of Emperor Constantine stares out awesomely at the mere reader. Stylized in the classic carving appropriately much larger than life, the head well depicts the powerful Roman emperor who promoted the fateful assimilation of Christianity into the structure of Roman civilization.

Grant’s survey covers the first three hundred years of Christianity. It is well organized for systematic study, and offers a well-rounded interpretation of the history of the early Church in the context of secular society. The author emphasizes religious developments in relation to Roman life and plays down correspondingly internal theological themes. One learns as much about Roman governmental structure and financial policy as about Alexandrian theology and homoousion. Grant’s up-to-date view of that early period offers important insights today without the slightest hint of propagandistic intent. Especially characteristic is his repeated insistence that early Christianity was not primarily a revolutionary movement. He is not arguing that the Gospel does not have revolutionary implications. He is saying that the actual course of the story shows very little revolutionary activity. Christians did not participate in the violent revolts of the Jews against Rome. They did not agitate against social norms unless a clear threat to Christian witness was present. They did not come from an oppressed and desperate lower class, though all classes were represented. Early Christianity emerges as in general a middle-class movement, illustrated by such diverse spokesmen as Tertullian, Minucius Felix, and Origen.

MacMullen’s book is a biography of the life-and-times variety, identified as the first in a series to be known as “Crosscurrents of World History,” at least four of which introduce issues of church history. The approach is that of the historian of Rome who observes the impact of the challenge of Christianity through the principal agent of its establishment as the official faith. It is written in a vivacious style with excellent use of thumbnail portraits and perceptive descriptive settings. One learns a great deal about the complicated process by which Constantine moved from a subordinate role on the western frontier to the apex of power in the throne whose occupants had for generations been deified. This tradition required modification to fit the startling new factor—the emperor’s conversion to Christian faith. One therefore also learns a great deal about the manner of his conversion and its significance for his own religious development and for the status of Christianity in the empire. He comes out looking very much like a typical layman, firm in his commitment but strangely lacking in understanding of the real meaning of the faith and its implications for the common life.

Both books bring us face to face with this crucial person who unintentionally determined what kind of church most Christians would have for the better part of the next two millennia. Both books have been written by eminent historians who have mastered their fields. But they exhibit several interesting differences, not so much in their conclusions as in their method and style. Grant, though he has done a survey, has provided useful and illuminating footnotes that lead directly to the sources and to recent scholarly research. He has paid the reader the compliment of assuming he can read not only English but also French, German, and Italian, to say nothing of Latin and Greek—although these languages are not necessary to understanding of the text. MacMullen, on the other hand, though well established as a scholar, has contented himself with no more than a brief bibliographical note at the end limited to a few English works. One is left completely dependent on his reputation as a scholar. Grant’s style is clear and organized; MacMullen’s is in addition scintillating. Grant introduces the reader to more controversial issues. MacMullen has added a sheaf of carefully chosen illustrations. Obviously the authors—or editors—had somewhat different audiences in mind. Both books make profitable reading for people interested in learning about Christian life as the early Church moved from apostolic obscurity toward imperial dominance.

Toward Arbitrary Exegesis

Biblical Theology in Crisis, by Brevard S. Childs (Westminster, 1970, 255 pp., $8), is reviewed by Robert G. Rayburn, president and professor of practical theology and homiletics, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

The biblical theology referred to here is not the biblical theology of Vos or of the conservative seminaries, in which the method of approach of biblical theology to the study of doctrine is contrasted with the approach of systematic theology. Rather, Childs is referring to an approach to the study of the Bible that developed almost exclusively in America after the Second World War and has been called the “Biblical Theology Movement.” This by no means included a return to an orthodox view of the inspiration of the Scriptures. It was rather a reaction among the neo-orthodox against what they considered a misuse of historical criticism by the older theological liberals. The scholars of this movement did not direct their attack against historical criticism; they accepted the validity of the critical approach to Scripture. They agreed, however, that the critical scholars had so fragmented the Bible that its message had been distorted and the Church had largely forgotten what the message of the Bible was.

The great problem of the “Biblical Theology Movement” was how to accept biblical criticism without any reservations as a perfectly valid tool of exegesis and still recover a strong, confessional theology. Childs’ book traces the history of the movement and shows clearly its failure to recover a theological dimension for the Bible. While its scholars sought “to experience a new urgency in the Biblical message,” and scorned the liberals for their lack of theological perspective, they blamed the conservatives (consistently called fundamentalists) for rejecting what they considered valid biblical criticism. Only rarely were any of the presuppositions underlying the historicocritical method even questioned.

This is a book for those well trained in theology. The layman would find it very hard to follow the intricate theological devices that these scholars used in seeing the Bible as revelation in history and as an essentially unified message and at the same time recognizing that much of its content was myth and that what purported to be history was far from accurate and was thus definitely nonrevelation.

After describing in detail the collapse of the Biblical Theology Movement, Professor Childs presents his own proposal for a new type of biblical theology worked out within what he calls “the canon of the Christian Church as the context.” By this he does not mean to reject the critical approach to the Scriptures any more than did those scholars whose failures he has so adequately described. Rather he proposes the “acknowledgment of the normative quality of the Biblical tradition.” He says:

The Bible does not function in its role as canon to provide a collection of eternal ideas, nor is it a handbook of right doctrine, nor a mirror of man’s religious aspirations. Rather the canon marks the area in which the modern issues of life and death are defined in terms of what God has done and is doing, and what He demands as a response from his people.

Thus the contemporary minister seeks in the context of a normative body of tradition to understand what the will of God is and to proclaim that to his people.

In the last section of the book, Professor Childs illustrates different elements in his proposed method with examples from the Bible. His own complete commitment to the presuppositions of the critical approach to Scripture is immediately evident. The evangelical student will find little that is satisfying or even stimulating, since the words of the Scriptures, despite the emphasis upon the importance of the canon as context, are continually treated as “the words of the tradition.” The author’s exegesis is often as arbitrary as that of any fundamentalist.

The Marijuana Epidemic

The New Social Drug, edited by David E. Smith (Prentice-Hall, 1970, 186 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by A. E. Wilder Smith, professor of pharmacology, University of Illinois, Chicago.

This symposium by fourteen contributors covers the medical, legal, and cultural aspects of the current marijuana epidemic. It is markedly, but informedly, slanted toward permissiveness in regard to cannabis and other “soft” drugs and is therefore likely to be frowned upon in religiously and culturally conservative circles.

The clinical and pharmacological investigations reported are a breath of fresh air to the pharmacologist normally subjected to official tendentious reporting intended to scare the younger generation off drugs, psychedelic and otherwise. One contributor, F. H. Meyers, classifies marijuana not as a psychedelic drug at all but rather as a mere hypno-sedative along with the barbiturates. The fact that alcohol consumption and marijuana use seem to be inversely related is taken to mean that marijuana is a substitute for alcohol.

That cannabis may cause psychotic episodes even when smoked as marijuana is freely admitted, particularly where smoking is taken up again after a period of abstention. Thus there seems to be evidence for a sort of sensitization to the drug. However, the small number of subjects investigated under controlled supervision reflects the serious lack of real knowledge we have to date on cannabis.

Legal and cultural aspects of cannabis control are adequately handled, and the similarities to the marijuana position now and that of alcohol legislation after the introduction of Prohibition are well drawn. Is it in the best interests of society to deprive the majority of the “benefits” (that is, allegedly, insight, relaxation, euphoria, hedonism, and so on of cannabis) in order to protect the small proportion of society that admittedly reacts badly to it? Is it fair to deprive society of its right to privacy (allowing such things as no-knock police searches) in the interest of protecting a few from themselves? Prohibition, so runs the argument, caused the building up of a vast system of organized crime and a huge counter system of police surveillance, both of which made society the poorer.

The entirely relative nature of marijuana (and LSD) toxicity is well brought out. It is admitted that cannabis will cause “amotivation,” sloth, lack of initiative, and lethargy. “If one hundred nineteenth century English bankers were to take LSD at least 95 per cent of them would have ‘bummers’ (bad trips).” Under the same conditions, it is suggested, one hundred of the present generation would probably react 95 per cent favorably. Toxicity is a very relative matter and depends on the drug, the “set,” and the “setting.”

Finally, the religious implications of the psychedelic era are noted by mention of the religious void in which the younger generation has often been reared. Allegedly, the “old protestant mythology” (including the value of hard work and achievement) is over. Machines are going to put half the labor force out of work in the near future. We shall soon no longer have to work hard and achieve in order to live. We shall all have time and opportunity to withdraw, which is what the drug-users are doing already. Today we are already living off machines. More of us will allegedly become parasites of machines—just as members of the psychedelic community are presently parasites of society! Allegedly, the drug users are just a little ahead of their time!

The whole symposium is highly factual but shows little patience with the absolute standards that are the life blood of the one who believes that God has revealed them.

The print of the book is small, the paper of moderate quality, and the price rather high.

Questions Biblical History

New Atlas of the Bible, by Jan H. Negenman (Doubleday, 1969, 208 pp., $19.95), is reviewed by Carl E. DeVries, research associate, The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Covering so long a span of history and so great an area of geography is a difficult task for one writer. Jan H. Negenman has accomplished it in an informative, interesting, and readable book that testifies to his erudition. It is inconceivable that such a work could escape criticism of details by specialists in various periods and geographical areas, but the scholarly level of the book is generally good.

On the credit side the book is beautifully produced. One distinctive feature is that it has a number of charts, plans, and drawings. For the theological student, another asset of the book may be its compact presentation of the standard “liberal” view of the composition of the Bible, which is the basis for much of the outline of this atlas.

It is this, however, that in my opinion gives rise to the most telling criticism of Negenman’s atlas. Ideally, an atlas should have numerous detailed maps and should be concerned essentially with geography and topography; this atlas leans heavily on literary criticism. The particular brand of literary criticism limits the usefulness of the book, for the author appears to have little confidence in the Bible as a book of history. He neglects the early sections of Genesis, doubts the historicity of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, and challenges the historical character of many incidents related in the Old Testament as actual events, though often he does this by qualified rather than by outright statement. He expresses relatively fewer objections to the historicity of New Testament happenings and voices no questions about the resurrection of Jesus.

Although it provides much interesting information about the background of the Bible, this atlas is not recommended for the use of the Bible-believing layman, who may find its liberal emphases a source of confusion.

Book Briefs

Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science and Religion, by James Luther Adams (Schocken, 1970, 310 pp., paperback, $2.95). Paperback edition of what has become a standard introduction to Tillich.

Christ’s Suburban Body, by Wilfred M. Bailey and William K. McElvaney (Abingdon, 1970, 208 pp., $4.95). Two suburban pastors are optimistic about the potential of the suburban church.

Heredity: A Study in Science and the Bible, by William J. Tinkle (Zondervan, 1970, 182 pp., paperback, $2.45). This reprinted study of the science of genetics rejects heredity as a process and vehicle for evolution.

Sacramentum Mundi, Volume 5, edited by Karl Rahner (Herder and Herder, 1970, 438 pp., $17.50). The most recent volume of a major Catholic theological work. Treats in alphabetical order subjects from philosophy to salvation.

Exposition of Psalms, by H. C. Leupold (Baker, 1970, 1010 pp, $8.95). Reprint of a commentary helpful for pastors and laymen alike.

Mark: The Gospel of Action, by Ralph Earle (Moody, 1970, 127 pp, paperback, $.95). A commentary that loses none of the freshness of the Gospel itself in its systematic discussion of it.

New Life for All, by Eileen Lageer (Moody, 1970, 144 pp., paperback, $1.25). An account of the indigenous in-depth evangelistic movement in West Africa that began in 1964.

Sinners Anonymous, by H. S. Vigeveno (Word, 1970, 170 pp., $4.95). The author contends that Christians must begin with confession of sins if they are to change the Church and the world.

Where Are You, God?, by David A. Ray (Revell, 1970, 160 pp., $3.95). Using specific illustrations, the author shows how to combat the feeling of separation from God that at times confronts every Christian.

Where Have All The Artists Gone?

Last year, artists at a New York exhibition displayed their “worst work,” in order to question the basis of taste in Western culture. One pornographic poem was covered with a paper curtain that said, “Look at your own risk.”

In Europe a fifty-five-minute documentary on the German Richard Strauss showed the composer’s wife being raped and murdered and a horde of sex-mad nuns attacking the hero. After protests had been rejected, the author said: “Thank God there is still such a thing as free expression.”

At this year’s Monte Carlo TV Festival, one entry was Funeral Games, a play in which a bogus priest seduces penitent ladies, steals from the offering box, and is accused of murder and adultery.

In California the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta!, featuring simulated love-making in the nude, was raided by police, and several actors were arrested. Undeterred, author Kenneth Tynan is said to have promised the show would be “more perverse and decadent” for the London opening this month.

Benjamin Spock, for long an avowed “uncompromising civil libertarian,” now condemns recent trends and the courts’ acceptance of “shock obscenity” and complains that some sophisticated judges are afraid of being considered illiberal. So too are certain churchmen.

I think that Frank Gaebelein is right in suggesting an aesthetic counterpart of Gresham’s Law, and that bad art does drive out good, but too often we get resigned and assume the situation is irreversible. Christian condemnation is something we are good at, but, like the former bishop of Woolwich, we are not so hot on constructive thinking. Condemnation, like patriotism, is not enough.

In a fascinating book called Dreams and Dream Life published eighty years ago, the South African Olive Schreiner has this moving passage. I quote it without comment: “I thought I stood in Heaven before God’s throne, and God asked me what I had come for. I said I had come to arraign my brother Man ‘because he is not worthy, and … my hands are pure.’ I showed them. God said, ‘How is this?’ I said, ‘Dear Lord, the streets on earth are full of mire. If I should walk straight on in them my outer robe might be besotted, you see how white it is! Therefore I pick my way.’ God said, ‘On what?’ I was silent, and I let my robe fall. I wrapped my mantle about my head. I went out softly. I was afraid that the angels would see me.”

EUTYCHUS IV

Money To Learn By

Just a word of deep personal appreciation for the wonderful lead article relative to tax dollars for Christian higher education (July 3). Mr. Cattell has certainly stated the issue as succinctly as possible. I particularly appreciate his clear-cut delineation between the secular and the truly Christian institution.

EDWARD G. COOKE, JR.

Christian Reformed Church

West Sayville, N. Y.

Here we go again, proposing that the government provide a solution! A tax credit would be nice, but I balk at student grants unless accompanied by an obligation upon the student to pay a small additional percentage of tax in the future to liquidate the grant.… It will enlarge the opportunity for the immature to continue their immaturity for four more years.

KEITH MISEGADES

Arlington, Va.

As an alternative I would like to propose a “pay before you go” tuition credit plan. The essence of the plan is that the parent … of the prospective Christian-college student would take the money which would otherwise be invested in a savings or other institution to be used eventually for payment of college tuition and send it directly to the Christian college of his choice instead. The college would credit a reasonable interest which would accumulate with the principal, and the total principal plus interest would be credited toward ultimate payment of tuition. Transfer of tuition credit between Christian colleges would be arranged to allow for a change in the selection of colleges. Also, an arrangement would be made to permit refunding in the unlikely event that the prospective student did not eventually attend any of the Christian colleges participating in the plan.…

The plan would provide the Christian college with instant cash … for building and otherwise strengthening the college. The parent would, while setting aside money for the education of the student, be making a real contribution to Christian education and therefore the work of Christ.

FRANK E. JONES

Bethesda, Md.

President Cattell, in my opinion, has not matured as far past the Maginot Line level of spiritual perception as he imagine-ohs! Underlying his argument is the desperate evangelical cliche that God has restricted the performance of his will in an individual’s life to correspond to the type of educational institution he attends.

After a quarter century of teaching in both Christian and secular institutions, I find my own impartial list of pros and cons weighs heavily in favor of the state—provided of course that the divine order of Christian witness through first the home and second the church is observed. A school is primarily neither an instrument of evangelization nor an intensive-care unit for weak believers, a sort of extended maternity ward. Nowhere are we instructed to teach students out of the world, but to assist them in discovering their appointed places in the world. Miracles still happen when Christian teachers take their places on the firing line with the Sword of the Lord instead of in the sick bay armed with a bedpan. Worldly students are infinitely more receptive to the Gospel than are sanctified saints of one another. It is only Christ-in-the-heart which attracts, and the greatest power of light is manifest in most absolute darkness.

J. FURMAN MILLER

Chairman, English Dept.

Athens College

Athens, Ala.

Of Bans And Brands

Thank you for your most excellent editorial on “The Responsibilities of Denominational Publishers” (July 3), which defended Southern Baptist Convention action in withdrawing the Broadman Commentary volume. I am a little tired of professors, pastors, and religious publishers who are always ready to brand Bible-believing people who have deep convictions about the teaching of God’s word as bigoted, illiterate witch-hunters. If the “liberals” are so broad-minded and so willing for all to express their convictions, why are they so anxious to censure us and call us names when we express our opinions and demand that teachers and writers who represent us follow some decent guidelines when writing or speaking for us?

BILL HARTLEY

First Baptist Church

Key West, Fla.

It must be a sad day for the dedicated professors in Southern Baptist colleges and seminaries as they ponder the action of the SBC in banning the Genesis-Exodus volume of the Broadman Bible Commentary. (“Southern Baptists on the Spot,” July 3). I purchased that book and found it quite conservative in light of the advances in biblical scholarship, but I was pleased with the effort to bring Southern Baptists closer to the realities of modern knowledge.

Unfortunately, the retreat of convention commissioners in withdrawing the volume indicates that these Baptist brethren have moved very little in their theological thinking since they banned the Elliott book (Message of Genesis) a few years ago.

Of course, time is on the side of the progressives since the contents of these volumes have been standard fare at SBC seminaries for at least a decade and will continue to be included in the training of the ministers who attend them.

JAMES A. ROHNE

Asst. Minister

First Presbyterian Church

Charlottesville, Va.

The Fall And All

I did enjoy Mr. Lockerbie’s commentary on “The Theater of Deceit” (July 3). But I have one small quarrel with his analysis of Easy Rider. What Mr. Lockerbie identifies as “Christian” in the film struck me as much vaguer and more typically modern than that. The riders are most delighted with the simple existence of the commune or the rancher because it is so close to nature. In a Rousseauesque series of scenes, the film glorifies the unsophisticated life as the sinless life …

It is a pattern of thought typical of many of my students. They want to believe in man as unfallen and innocent, and they want to equate all ideas of God in a vaguely benevolent and democratic theology. They long for a mystic experience, but will seek it in a pot party run by the local guru. They want wisdom, but shun Christian Scriptures while hanging on every word uttered by sham prophets of Zen. In short, they thirst for the living water, but reject it because it satisfied their parents—middle-class capitalists who pollute the atomsphere and accept the corrupt system.

NANCY M. TISCHLER

Professor of English and Humanities

Capitol Campus

Pennsylvania State University

Middletown, Pa.

I resented the article! I get enough of that junk in the magazines of today; in a Christian magazine, I see no need for that article and wonder how it got by your censor.… Imagine going to the slop trough to be further demoralized through an article read in your magazine!… By the way, where is your censor, and who is he?…

We have been in the Lord’s work for over thirty-eight years, so covet the very best for the printed page … to guide faltering footsteps heavenward!

POLLY BURRIS

Long Beach, Calif.

Couple Of The Century

The reference to the nude couple receiving communion beats all (Religion in Transit, July 3). For my part it is the “sacrilege of the century.” I am amazed that God did not strike dead on the spot both the couple and the officiating clergyman. Just one more proof of the “long-suffering” of God!

I. ROBERT WANNER

Church of the Nazarene

Bloomsburg, Pa.

Dead And Choking

In “Moment of Decision” (June 5) you speak of the danger of the United Presbyterian Church committing spiritual suicide by such actions as adopting the report on “Sexuality and the Human Community.” And you add, “Perhaps there will come a time when those faithful to Scripture will be disciplined for upholding the Bible against the unbiblical pronouncements of their church.”

Let me remind you that Dr. J. Oliver Buswell, Dr. J. Gresham Machen, and others were disciplined out of the church in 1936 for exactly this reason. They refused to obey the 1934 Mandate, which placed the duty of supporting the regular boards and agencies of that church on a level with participation at the Lord’s Table. That unbiblical pronouncement is still very enforceable. We argue that it was in 1936 that that church committed spiritual suicide. The new sex code (which was adopted, with a disclaimer added as a sop to the conservatives) simply illustrates how spiritually dead the church already is.

EDWARDS E. ELLIOTT

Garden Grove Orthodox Presbyterian Church

Garden Grove, Calif.

“Sexuality and the United Presbyterians” and “United Presbyterians: Dropping the Traditional” (June 19) are sufficient evidence that Dr. Carl McIntire is correct in his separationist movement.

IGNATIUS DI GUARDIA

Holbrook, N. Y.

As a visitor to the United Presbyterian General Assembly recently held in Chicago, I noted very severe tensions, almost irreconcilable polarization, as to the role of the Church in our contemporary society.

I feel that one of the most urgent responsibilities of the organized church—from the session to the General Assembly—is to see that all the proceedings and interpretations of the Chicago assembly are intelligently and coolly presented to the membership of the churches. And this presentation should be more than a commissioner’s report from the pulpit or a reminder to read the General Assembly report in one of the church papers.

If this is not done sanely and intelligently, I fear that the United Presbyterian Church will be strangled by its inability to bridge the gap between “front office” and the laity of the local congregation and could choke to death on hot-headed words by uninformed, partially informed, and misinformed people.

RUSSELL E. HALL

Western Springs, Ill.

Text of address by Billy Graham at the Honor America Day religious service held in Washington July 4, 1970

The Bible says in First Peter 2:17: “Honor all men. Fear God. Honor the king.” And the king referred to was the Roman emperor. Since our nation is a republic and not a monarchy, this Scripture could read, “Honor the nation.”

Today, in the capital of the United States, thousands of us have come together to honor America on her 194th birthday.

We stand here today within the shadow of three great monuments.

That great shaft over there honors George Washington, who led the revolution that obtained our freedom.

Not far away is the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, father of the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the rights of free men and began the greatest experiment in freedom the world has ever known.

Behind us is the memorial honoring Abraham Lincoln, who helped preserve the unity of this country by his courage, faith, and perseverance—and who gave black men hope that they, too, would become first-class citizens.

We can listen to no better voices than these men who gave us the dream that has become America. These men represent thousands who worked, prayed, suffered, and died to give us this nation.

We are not here today only to honor America; we are come as citizens to renew our dedication and allegiance to the principles and institutions that made her great. Lately our institutions have been under attack: the Supreme Court, the Congress, the presidency, the flag, the home, the educational system, and even the church—but we are here to say with loud voices that in spite of their faults and failures we believe in these institutions!

Let the world know today that the vast majority of us still proudly sing: “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.” America needs to sing again! American needs to celebrate again! America needs to wave the flag again! This flag belongs to all Americans—black and white, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat.

I think there is too much discouragement, despair, and negativism in the nation today. On every hand critics tell us what is wrong with America, where we have failed, and why we are hated. We have listened and watched while a relatively small extremist element, both to the left and to the right in our society, has knocked our courts, desecrated our flag, disrupted our educational system, laughed at our religious heritage, and threatened to burn down our cities—and is now threatening to assassinate our leaders.

The overwhelming majority of concerned Americans—white and black, hawks and doves, parents and students, Republicans and Democrats—who hate violence have stood by and viewed all of this with mounting alarm and concern. Today we call upon all Americans to stop this polarization before it is too late—and let’s proudly gather around the flag and all that it stands for.

Many people have asked me why I, as a citizen of heaven and a Christian minister, join in honoring any secular state. Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” The Apostle Paul proudly boasted of being a Roman citizen. The Bible says “Honor the nation.” As a Christian, or as a Jew, or as an atheist, each of us has a responsibility to an America that has always stood for liberty, protection, and opportunity.

There are many reasons why we honor America today.

First, we honor America because she has opened her heart and her doors to the distressed and the persecuted of the world. Millions have crossed our threshold into the fresh air of freedom. I believe that the Bible teaches that God blesses a nation which carries out the words of Jesus, “For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in.”

Secondly, we honor America because she has been the most generous nation in history. We have shared our wealth and our faith with a world in need. When a disaster occurs any place in the world, America is there with help. In famine, in earthquakes, in floods, in distresses of every kind, we pour out billions of dollars every year, even if we have to borrow the money and go in debt.

Thirdly, we honor America because she has never hidden her problems and faults. With our freedom of the press and open communications system, we don’t sweep our sins under the rug. If poverty exists, if racial tension exists, if riots occur, the whole world knows about it. Instead of an Iron Curtain we have a picture window. “The whole world watches”—sometimes critically and sometimes with admiration, but nobody can accuse America of trying to hide her problems.

Fourthly, we honor America because she is honestly recognizing and is courageously trying to solve her social problems. In order to fulfill the ultimate dream, much remains to be done—but as even our critics abroad are saying, “America is trying.” The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were moved by a magnificent dream. This dream amazed the world 194 years ago. And this dream is rooted in a book we call the Bible. It proclaims freedoms that most people of the world thought were impossible. We are still striving to achieve for all men equally those freedoms bought at such a high price. From the beginning, the dream of freedom and equal opportunity has been a beacon to oppressed peoples all over the world.

Let those who claim they want to improve the nation by destroying it join all of us in a new unity and a new dedication by peaceful means to make these dreams come true.

Fifthly, we honor America because she defends the right of her citizens to dissent. Dissent is impossible in many countries of the world, whereas constructive dissent is the hallmark of our freedom in America. But when dissent takes violent forms and has no moral purpose, it is no longer dissent but anarchy. We will listen respectfully to those who dissent in accordance with constitutional principles, but we strongly reject violence and the erosion of any of our liberties under the guise of a dissent that promises everything but delivers only chaos. As General Eisenhower once wrote: “We must never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

Sixthly, we honor America because there is woven into the warp and woof of our nation faith in God. The ethical and moral principles of the Judeo-Christian faith and the God of that tradition are found throughout the Declaration of Independence. Most presidents of the United States have declared their faith in God and have encouraged us to read the Bible. I am encouraged to believe that Americans at this hour are striving to retain their spiritual identity despite the inroads of materialism and the rising tide of permissiveness.

On the front page of a Chicago newspaper some time ago there appeared a picture of Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag. Over the picture was the caption, “Time to check our stitches.” Let’s check the stitches of racism that still persist in our country. Let’s check the stitches of poverty that bind some of our countrymen. Let’s check the stitches of foreign policy to be sure that our objectives and goals are in keeping with the America dream. Let’s check the stitches of pollution brought on by technology. Let’s check the stitches of a moral permissiveness that could lead us to decadence. Let’s even check the stitches of freedom to see if our freedom in America has become license. A liberal British writer recently said. “You Americans have become too free until you are no longer free.”

What a wonderful thing it would be if we could check these stitches before we celebrate our 200th birthday only six years from now! It could be done.

As we look out on modern America today, we must admit there is a vast vacuum of the soul, a void into which millions of Americans are pouring alcohol, drugs, illicit sex, and religious occultism. Our youth are perishing in an orgy of quest. They want the older generation to tell it like it is. They have questions they are asking—the ultimate questions of life: Why am I here? Where did I come from? What is the meaning of my life? The Bible is the only book in the world that fully answers these ultimate questions.

I find that there is a certain sense of fear and expected cosmic judgment that hangs over our country at this hour as the divine timepiece ticks away. Thomas Jefferson felt this so deeply that he once wrote: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

The Bible teaches that God will judge any nation that turns its back on him—especially a nation like America, which has been given privileges and opportunities more than any other nation in history.

At President Eisenhower’s first inauguration he put his finger on a verse of Scripture, and here is what it says: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

If we don’t check those stitches and check them quickly, the American dream could turn into a nightmare. There are groups of university students throughout America that are beginning to use a sign, the clenched fist with the index finger pointed upward, and they cry, “One way!” They are saying to the world that there is only one way for America, one way for individuals—God’s way. That is the way. Jesus said: “I am the way.”

We have raised our hands and our voices in protest over many issues and many causes during the past few years. Why not raise them now to God?

During a recent crusade that I was holding at a university, a student came forward when I gave the invitation to receive Christ. As we stood there, he was holding both hands up—one had the two-finger sign and the other had the one-finger only-one-way sign. Within a few minutes his arms were tired and his hands began to wobble. A black clergyman sitting on the platform went down and stood behind him, and held his arms up. What a picture of brother helping brother find God and getting involved in the world’s suffering.

Today I call upon all Americans to raise your voices in prayer and dedication to God and to recommit yourselves to the ideals and dreams upon which our country was founded. Let’s dedicate ourselves today to a renewal of faith in God. Let’s dedicate ourselves to building rather than burning.

What our forefathers began, we must work to fulfill. Their goal must be our goal. Their vision must be our vision. It is the vision of one nation under God, where men can live together as brothers in freedom.

I’m asking all Americans today, especially our young people, to pursue this vision under God, to work for freedom and for peace. It will not be easy. The journey will be hard. The day will be long. And the obstacles will be many.

But I remember today a word spoken by Sir Winston Churchill, whose courage and faith and persistence carried his nation through the darkest days of World War II. The headmaster of Harrow, the famous prep school that Churchill had attended as a boy, asked Mr. Churchill to address the students. The headmaster told the young people to bring their pencils and their notebooks to record what Britain’s greatest man of the century would say. The moment they waited for came. The old man stood to his feet and spoke these words: “Never give in! Never give in! Never! Never!”

I say to you today, “Pursue the vision, reach the goal, fulfill the American dream—and as you move to do it, never give in! Never give in! Never! Never! Never! Never!”

There have always been false prophets who have gained their livelihood from the church while they have chiseled away at its cornerstones. Some have done so for profit and have not been above resorting to deception, falsehood, and other unethical practices. Others have had better motives and have tried to justify their actions on the basis of superior knowledge, changing times, or concern for improving the lot of mankind. Whatever the reasons, the results are the same: true religion suffers and apostasy comes, followed by God’s judgment on his unfaithful church.

The Bible paints this picture of unfaithfulness in two general ways: the Old Testament describes past patterns and their consequences, and the New Testament tells of God’s future dealings with his Church.

The darkest side of the Old Testament is the prophets’ description of priests who were called to preach God’s truth and live out God’s commandments but did neither. Speaking of Jerusalem, Zephaniah said: “Her priests profane what is sacred, they do violence to the law” (3:4). Micah condemned priests who “teach for hire” and prophets who “divine for money” (3:11). Hosea says: “As robbers lie in wait for a man so the priests are banded together; they murder on the way to Shechem, yea, they commit villainy” (6:9). These priestly false prophets had an effective ministry—they lulled their parishioners to sleep and led them as sheep to the slaughter. True religion declined, as priests and people together departed from the faith. In a recurring pattern, the judgment of God fell; his wrath overtook his people. When renewal came, the process was reversed: the people turned to God, and he blessed them. Time and again there was defection followed by renewal. But at last the apostasy of Israel was irreversible. The branches of the olive tree were cut off and the wild branches—the Gentiles—were grafted in.

The Old Testament is the story of God’s pattern of dealing with his people Israel in the past. The New Testament lays down the pattern of God’s dealing with his Church. The similarities between Old Testament Israel and the Church since the New Testament are marked. Like Israel, the Church has followed a cyclical pattern. There have been times of decay followed by eras of blessing, advance, and manifest spiritual power. Repentance has led to renewal.

The Church today is in a period of decay. It is spotted through with humanists who deify man, with liberals who repudiate the basic teachings of the apostles, with syncretists who claim that Christianity is not the only true religion, with universalists who say that all men will be saved at the last. Yet the particular tragedy of our day is not that there are false teachers in the Church; there have always been such. The tragedy is that the false teachers live off money that has been given to propagate what these teachers do not believe. They are twice deceivers, first because they remain in the churches even though they do not believe what these churches have historically taught, and second because they take salaries under false pretenses and undermine what they are paid to promote. The second aspect of the tragedy is that good men in the churches do little to rid their churches of the subverters. Because they are unconcerned or unwilling to act or fearful of the possible consequences, they silently endure what they should be challenging and opposing.

For orthodox believers, the situation is fraught with difficulty. Should they remain in denominations in which the presence of false teachers is evident? Are not the churches their churches, begun and nourished in orthodoxy? Should true believers abandon to unbelief churches that have long been orthodox? Should not the righteous wait on God for deliverance and look expectantly for renewal under the Holy Spirit?

However God’s people answer these questions, one crucial decision still faces them. Theological orthodoxy, important to effective witness as it is, is not enough. Orthodoxy that does nothing more than give assent to propositional truth is dead. Those who are theologically orthodox must go far beyond mere assent to doctrine. For them the crucial decision is whether they will add action to belief, and thus authenticate their convictions. They must enter the fray and uphold the faith—using every available spiritual means to check the forces of destructive unbelief. This action requires repentance for sin, renewal of their own faith, and ceaseless prayer for the Holy Spirit’s renewal of the churches. There must be reformation and revival: reformation that turns men to true doctrine, and revival that leads to purity of life and power in witness.

Congressional Reform

The U. S. Congress is considering changing its procedures to bring them more in line with democratic ideals. Such changes are long overdue and warrant bipartisan support.

This month the House of Representatives began the task of putting together a reform package, the first in twenty-four years. Some progress seems guaranteed. Unfortunately, however, one of the first votes by the House on the issue was to reject a move that would have made it harder for committees to meet in secret.

For Christians At Play

One of the less pressing tasks facing theologians today is the development of a theology of games. Too many people think games are only for the very young or very old.

Some blame their lack of interest in games on the lure of television. Others have corrupted the word game to mean unimportant activities that substitute for meaningful action.

The latter deserves special rebuttal. Games are not a substitute for meaningful activity but the symbolic enactment or reenactment of it. In a game we can defeat our opponent without doing actual permanent harm to him. Thus from games we learn something about winning and losing in life.

Playing games can also bring together people who may have little in common. And in our day, every little bit helps in the face of growing estrangement.

The Apostle Paul’s use of competitive sports as pictures of the Christian life bears witness to the fact that the game impulse is a gift of God. So during these more leisurely summer days, let’s break out the backgammon set, dust off the Monopoly board, retrieve the Scrabble game from the attic, and experience anew the therapy of good gaming.

The Fairness Doctrine

A court test now seems assured on the so-called Fairness Doctrine, the controversial set of principles that the Federal Communications Commission has sought to impose upon owners of radio and television stations. In essence, this concept sees broadcasting outlets as necessarily ideological cafeterias. The reasoning goes that the total number of frequencies is limited, so each station must offer a variety of viewpoints if it wants to keep its government license to stay on the air. There are “only” 6,000 radio stations currently licensed in the United States.

A judicial review of the Fairness Doctrine apparently will come as a result of the FCC’s refusal this month to renew the licenses of WXUR and WXUR-FM in Media, near Philadelphia. These stations are owned by Faith Theological Seminary, where Dr. Carl McIntire serves as chairman of the board. After testimony filling 8,000 pages, an FCC examiner recommended that the licenses be renewed; nevertheless, the commission itself unanimously voted to kill the licenses.

Whatever technical reasons the FCC may have had for its decision, the net effect is to restrict dissent from the right. Meanwhile, more sophisticated (and often more destructive) dissent from the left gets increasingly wider exposure, slowed only by an occasional barrage from Vice President Spiro Agnew.

The FCC’s action against McIntire, in ironic contrast to the stated intent of the Fairness Doctrine, narrows the diversity of views available to the American public. Unless it is upset by the U. S. Supreme Court, the obvious immediate implication is that station owners will be more wary of airing the views of the political and theological right. McIntire’s beliefs are indeed obnoxious to many. Anyone familiar with McIntire knows that CHRISTIANITY TODAY is frequently subjected to his attack. Nevertheless, we believe that silencing him by government edict is a clear violation of his constitutional freedoms.

Marriage Covenant: Promises, Promises

One of the chief architects of the Lutheran Church in America’s new, definitive statement on sex, marriage, and the family (see News, page 32) admits, “We have a tiger by the tail.” Holding the tiger will get rough when pastors begin to answer questions about whether the church now officially says that sexual intercourse outside marriage may be permissible.

A sentence inserted in the final paper says the church neither “condones or approves premarital or extramarital sexual intercourse.” Yet drafters of the 2,200-word document say a “marital union” doesn’t necessarily require a legal contract to be valid.

A concept in the statement is helpful: “Christian faith affirms marriage as a covenant of fidelity—a dynamic, life-long commitment of one man and one woman in a personal and sexual union.” The paper goes on to say: “A marital union can be legally valid yet not be a covenant of fidelity, just as it can be a covenant of fidelity and not a legal contract.”

We agree with the first half of the sentence: too many “marriages” are paper husks; the legal document stands, but the dynamic, lifelong commitment atrophied long ago. But we would argue that a covenant of fidelity—defined by a drafter of the statement as a “personal promise of commitment”—must be accompanied by a legal contract for there to be a true marriage union that can be blessed by God and honored by men. For the Christian, the promise of marriage commitment should be publicly affirmed and contractually protected. In a marriage between Christians this happens simultaneously before the minister who marries them. He acts as a double agent: as a minister of Jesus Christ he joins together the man and the woman, and as a representative of the civil government he publicly sanctions the union.

Those who follow Christ will want to honor the laws of God and the land.

Giving The Devil A Hand

Fifty years ago traffic lights were born. Now they have multiplied and replenished the earth—at the apparent rate of five red for every green. What perversity is it, we ask, that makes a light turn red just as our car approaches and then stay red longer than it ever did before or will after. Perhaps a Washington columnist lit on the answer when he wrote, “I have a very bad feeling that the Devil himself has had a hand in all this.”

At times, though, we suspect that on the road “the Devil himself” has, not red, yellow, and green lights, but four wheels and a V-8 engine. Such creatures spew poisonous fumes into the air, barely outlive the payment book, and by some voodoo in the steering wheel transform the sweetest saint into a raving maniac. Like the one behind us, honking while we think deep thoughts about traffic signals and the frailty of man and the light turns green.

Inflation, The Sneak Thief

Inflation is still very much with us. One index after another tells us what we already know: prices continue to rise, then wages chase prices, and the spiral goes onward and upward just as it has been doing for more than a quarter of a century. Meanwhile retirees living on fixed incomes are increasingly worse off.

Labor-union leaders gleefully tell their members that they have just signed the best wage pacts in history. The employers tell their stockholders they have bought peace at a price, and the consumers—including the union workers and the stockholders—pay that price.

Months ago economist Kenneth Galbraith predicted that wage and price controls would be necessary. Not long ago David Rockefeller suggested that the administration use its influence to achieve restraints. Surely there are no easy solutions and no reason to believe that selfish, egotistic human nature will change. Everybody wants inflation to end—but at someone else’s expense. Nobody wants to pay the price himself. Thus it goes on and on.

Need we say that inflation is immoral? Need we say that it is a thief, however disguised its activities may be? Need we say that there is a pay day someday, even in economic matters, and that the laws of God cannot be flouted forever? Maybe someday is here.

Families: Love And Learn

Families lodge sibling skirmishes, accommodate penny-pinching parents, house scads of hand-me-downs, and garage the car everyone wants at once. And sometimes that’s about all there is to families. Divergent viewpoints generate estrangement; professions, school, and even church activities scatter family members before they find time to discover what they share and where they differ.

The “reuniting” of traditional family reunions—where great aunts and fifth cousins gather to gossip and scrutinize—is often slight. But, sensing potential there, the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge and Kiwanis International began sponsoring an annual Family Reunion Day in the United States and Canada. They suggest that family members spend a day together—August 9 this year—getting to know one another. A worthy goal, that. To know, as the song says, is to love. Christian families can build that knowledge on a solid foundation if they take time first to “think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God’s children.”

A Model Of Faith

Jesus’ customary way of defining such concepts as faith was to point to specific examples. Certainly anyone who has tried his hand at definition can recognize the merit of this approach. Luke’s account in chapter seven of his Gospel of an incident in our Lord’s life is instructive. The beloved servant of a centurion was gravely ill. The officer knew of Jesus and his power to heal, and so he requested that Jesus heal his servant. Our Lord did so with the comment that “not even in Israel have I found such faith.”

Apparently there were two aspects of the centurion’s faith that were particularly impressive. First, even though he was a relatively good man, he was impressed not with his virtue, as so many people of Jesus’ time were, but rather with his unworthiness. A prime requisite of Christian faith is acknowledgment of one’s inability to merit God’s favor. Second, the centurion, from the analogy of the authorities over him and those under his authority, firmly believed that Jesus was able to heal his servant with a word if he willed. Christian faith requires confidence that God is indeed able to do what he has promised. Too often we reason ourselves out of confidence in God rather than reasoning, as the centurion did, that if mere sinful human beings can get things done, how much more God himself can do his will.

Of course there are other aspects of faith, as Luke endeavors to show by reporting next the raising of a widow’s son from the dead. Nothing is said about the faith or morals of the mother or boy, nor did she request the miracle. This is a dramatic reminder that the initiative in God’s blessing of us ultimately rests with him alone. Christian faith is the positive response to what God has done.

An eighth assignment for apologetics is the development of empathy for differing viewpoints. The apologist begins, not by seeking to destroy all viewpoints other than his own, but by attempting to understand the other. He will aim at thinking from the perspective of the others, so that he can truly understand what the others are saying, and why. Only then can effective Christian witness be brought to bear. Dogmatism and opinionation are not attractive qualities in a Christian. Although the believer must be convinced of the truthfulness of what he holds, he must be capable of recognizing that there is a difference between having absolute truth and understanding it absolutely.

Apologetics will also have to give itself to the careful delineation of the objective and subjective elements in faith and in theology. The general movement of our age has been toward increasing subjectivity, in many fields: art, music, philosophy, theology. In taking this route, some have continued beyond subjectivity into subjectivism, with consequent skepticism and even despair. In theology, Bultmann took the neo-orthodox emphasis upon subjectivity a step further, making the biblical message primarily a message about existence and man’s self-understanding, rather than relating to truths about the objective God. Some of Bultmann’s followers carried the principle to its logical extreme, virtually maintaining that the objective referent is superfluous, and that the subjective experience is the message of Christian theology. In the work of Wolfhart Pannenberg, there is a reaction against this trend. Here, a strongly objective position on faith is advocated. Theology may be leading the way back to a more objective form of thought.

Christianity is not to be a purely objective, coldly impersonal matter. It cannot be assimilated to the methodology of natural science, nor should it. As usually understood, it has required involvement, commitment, passion. Yet it also is something more than belief in “the great whatever.” Jesus seemed to teach that belief was good not in itself but only as it rested upon the true object (Matt. 16:13–20; John 14:5–7). One can err in the direction either of excessive subjectivity or of excessive objectivity. It seems to me that at present excessive subjectivity is a greater potential danger. Christian apologetics will be concerned to locate, define, and describe accurately the objective basis of Christian faith and the believer’s subjective involvement with it.

One particular area illustrates this issue: the problem of ethical norms. Christian apologetics must work hard at the problem of how ethical judgments are made and justified. In so doing, it must take account of the complexity of the situations in which ethical decisions are made and to which they are applied. Yet, it must not take lightly the question of the identity, nature, and status of ethical norms, if ethics is to be more than mere expression of one’s own preferential tastes. This problem is graphically seen in the case of Joseph Fletcher, who places his situational method midway between antinomianism and legalism. Yet, as Paul Ramsey has shown, Fletcher has difficulty keeping his method from sliding into one or the other of these extremes, largely because of a lack of specification of the meaning of “love,” as well as any really clearly defined conceptual framework, such as the understanding of man’s nature and destiny. Apologetics should deal with the status of ethical judgments.

Finally, apologetics accepts the task of helping to place theology in the context of other, non-theological disciplines. If it is to speak relevantly to the world in which it finds itself, Christian theology must interact with the so-called secular world. Thus, for example, in developing and expounding a doctrine of man, the theologian will draw its content from the biblical revelation, and will seek for insight in what the best theological minds are saying on the subject. But he will not disregard the questions the behavioral sciences are asking about man; he will address himself to them. It may well be that the most significant questions that the theologian must answer today are not those being asked by the exegete. Most of these have already been quite adequately answered. Further, the non-Christian is often quite indifferent to them. But the behavioral scientist is posing questions to which he does not necessarily have the answers himself. Apologetics attempts to relate theology to general culture.

This means that there will be a concerted effort to determine just what the biblical view on a given matter is, and similarly, what non-theological disciplines are saying. At times there will be insight into the biblical doctrines from these other areas. If the Bible teaches that God created man in his own image, psychology, sociology, and anthropology may help us to understand just what it was that God created. This is a procedure not unlike the use of archaeology and secular history to shed light upon a given event reported in the Bible. Sometimes an antithesis may be found, which should not be surprising in view of First Corinthians 1, and the apologist should call attention to this. Neither uncritical acceptance nor blind rejection of culture should be the pattern for the Christian.

We seem to have moved beyond the idea that the Christian life is to be lived in a monastery. We are quite generally agreed that the Christian is to be in the world, actively relating his faith to it. Yet we may perpetuate a monastic tendency in our theology. The result is usually a theological jargon that is little comprehended by the secular thinker.

What I am speaking for is a dialogue that is broader than theologian with theologian and extends to conversations with secular disciplines as well. There are a number of practical means by which those could be promoted. One could be a use of the sabbatical leave program, for study not simply in the scholar’s own theological field in a seminary or university divinity school but rather in a cognate discipline in a secular university. This would be particularly desirable in the case of a scholar who has taken none of his previous education in a truly secular environment. For example, a systematic theologian might spend his time studying philosophy; a New Testament scholar, classics; an Old Testament man, ancient history; a homiletics teacher, communications; a pastoral-counseling professor, clinical psychology; a church-administration teacher, business administration. Another valuable tactic would be for a theological scholar to join a professional society in a “secular” field for which he might be qualified.

It is not simply the intellectual who is exposed to the influence of secular thought. Through literature, music, the various art forms, even the modestly educated layman is encountering modern forms of thought. It is no secret that the most effective teacher in a Sunday school is not always the theologically trained minister. Often the doctor, the engineer, or the public schoolteacher does a more effective job of communicating Christian truth, because he lives in the same world as fellow laymen and speaks their language. The apologist will attempt to do away with “ghetto theology” and relate his work to the world of today.

But if these are the tasks that apologetics is to fulfill, what of the general nature of the apologetic that will attempt this? We will concern ourselves with the “shape” of apologetics, a general contour or outline rather than a detailed depiction.

There is a rather broad consensus that the traditional proofs for the existence of God are not effective today. Whether one considers them valid or not, they do not seem to make much impact upon modern man. These proofs rest upon certain assumptions that were once very widely held and thus considered to be “first truths,” innate truths, or indubitable facts. An example of this is Thomas’s premise that there cannot be an infinite regress, which is widely disputed today. Attempts to begin with certain features of the space-time universe and conclude to God seem to be falling into disuse.

The new apologetics in general does not attempt to prove demonstratively the truth of Christianity, as did classical natural theology. It recognizes that all proof is a function of two factors: evidence offered, and someone who accepts the validity of that evidence. Rather than claiming to start with something accepted by all men, it acknowledges that it begins with faith. It rests upon presuppositions not antecedently proven. In this, it takes its stand within classical Augustinianism. Yet it hastens to observe that the issue between Christian and non-Christian is not between faith and proof. Every position ultimately rests upon unproven assumptions. Although these cannot be antecedently proven, there will be basis for choosing one standpoint over another, and apologetics will concern itself with showing this.

This new apologetic will not claim to derive a theism from the data of natural theology. Rather, it rests its content upon the special revelation claimed by Christianity. The contention is that once the hypothesis has been derived from the revelation, its tangency to the whole of man’s experience can be seen. Natural theology is like a person trying to discover the solution to a mathematical problem from the problem itself. The new apologetic is more like a man who has been given a claimed solution to the problem and whose task then is to determine whether it is the correct solution. The Christian message is the key to understanding the puzzle of life. The case is not for theism in general; it is more effective when it seeks to assay the adequacy of the distinctive Christian biblical theism.

Much has been made in recent years of Wisdom’s famous parable. It goes like this:

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.” The other disagrees. “There is no gardener.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well’s The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Sceptic despairs. “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?” [quoted by Anthony Flew in “Theology and Falsification,” New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. by Anthony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, Macmillan, 1964, p. 96].

Note, however, that the evidences that support the hypothesis of a gardener are derived from a scrutiny of the problem itself. If a claimed communication from the gardener were found, indicating certain specific features of his nature and describing certain features detailed of the garden-tending, not ordinarily observed but accessible under a certain type of study, then the parallel to Christianity would be more appropriate. Apologetics today finds the most effective evidences for Christianity to be those specifically pertaining to the distinctive nature of Christianity.

This means that the new apologetic will focus upon Jesus Christ, and what his life and teaching mean to the person who puts his trust in him. Christianity is not so much a philosophy of reality and of life as it is a person. To be sure, the person who becomes related by faith to Christ in taking him as personal Saviour has thereby committed himself to much else as well. Nonetheless, this is secondary and derived. In our age, which is apparently so starved for reality in personal relationships and is more person-oriented than idea-oriented, an emphasis on Jesus as a real person, a person with whom one can interact, is probably the most germane to the felt needs of men, and is, of course, biblical.

Further, then, the apologetic will attempt to focus upon man’s existential predicament. Rather than starting with an abstract principle and deducing from it certain conclusions, the strategy today will involve beginning with the problems of anxiety, confusion, and impersonality that modern man feels. It will try to show how the Christian message relates to these concerns. The present age is at least suspicious of, and perhaps even hostile to, authority. It will be necessary to make man aware first that his situation necessitates acceptance of some authority and then that he achieves this best by turning his life over to Jesus Christ as Lord and teacher.

One of the areas where apologetics will make its primary thrust is ethics. The old arguments that seek to move from observable characteristics of the physical universe to God are not very effective today. In part this ineffectiveness is due to logical difficulties that have often attached to many forms of the argument. Beyond that, however, is the fact that a large number of persons today are relatively uninterested in the physical universe; they are more interested in ethical issues and activity.

In particular, this is seen on college campuses, where there is strong interest in politics, in issues of war and peace, civil rights, materialism, and related concerns. It is instructive to note that on many rather relativistic campuses, quite absolute pronouncements are being made, such as: The Viet Nam war is immoral! Racial discrimination is wrong! This opens to the apologist what appears to me to be a potentially very fruitful opportunity for dialogue, not necessarily about the conclusions or positions taken but rather about the very basis of ethical judgments. There should be an opportunity for demonstrating the significance of the Christian revelation, both in the ethic it presents and in the support and justification it gives to ethics.

The new apologetic will ask about the basis or rationale for man’s estimation of himself. In what context does modern man’s self-concept make sense? Christian apologetics has often argued that a humanism that does not go beyond itself is incomplete and inconsistent, that man has real significance only if there is something beyond him from which he derives value. Today, this seems to be an even more strategic type of approach, as man concentrates increasingly upon the problem of man.

Finally, apologetics will want to stress the dimension of history. If it is true, as I contended earlier, that Christian apologetics will be most effective when it concerns itself with what is unique in Christianity, then history will occupy a prominent place. Christianity is a historical religion, in a sense in which most other world religions are not. It depends upon certain events claimed to have occurred. The renewed concern with history, exemplified by the “Pannenburg circle,” should prove an effective vehicle for Christian apologetics.

Christian apologetics has in all ages a task to do, and some of the most highly regarded theological critics of our day recognize the particular urgency of apologetics today. Theology, however, can be likened to a long train. When the cars at the front have already rounded a curve and are headed in a different direction, later cars will still for a time be traveling the old course. Thus, despite the facing of Barthianism and its emphasis upon a purely kerygmatic type of biblical theology, there will be theologians who continue to regard this as exclusively sufficient. Yet others are proclaiming the need to supplement this with apologetic. As the train of theology moves onward, from yesterday, through today, into tomorrow, I want to be in that front car.

To reach threescore and ten is something like arriving on top of a mountain. Attaining even a modest summit—the highest point in a range doesn’t always give the best view—reveals to the discerning eye features of the landscape hidden from those who see it only from level ground. Likewise, looking back from a sunset height in life helps sort out relationships and meanings in the landscape of experience. It is with such feelings that, at the request of the Editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, I venture upon these reflections.

“My life,” said Sir Thomas Browne, the author of Religio Medici, “has been a miracle of thirty years; which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.” There is a sense in which every mature Christian can echo this thought. For he knows, as G. K. Chesterton put it, that “the incredible thing about miracles is that they happen,” and that for him the miracle of the new birth has happened. He knows too that the same Lord who led the Israelites by a pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night has in the providences of everyday life been directing his pilgrimage.

The first thing the perspective of the years shows me is an overwhelming sense of the goodness and grace of God. If, unlike Francis Thompson’s “hound of heaven,” the Lord did not pursue me for a long time but found me early, it was because I had parents whose faith in Christ was so real that there was no hindrance to trusting the Saviour in young boyhood.

It was through my mother that I did this. The date is uncertain, but etched in memory is the picture of the evening when with boyish concern I asked my mother how to be born again and she explained lovingly the way of life from John 3. The next morning I walked to school with the thought singing in my heart, “I’m saved.” The sky was bluer, the leaves greener, the sun brighter that day. To be sure, through the years this initial experience has been immeasurably deepened. Yet I look back on it as the beginning of sixty years of Christian life. When our Lord told Nicodemus about regeneration, he likened the Spirit’s action to “the wind [that] bloweth where it listeth.” In some conversions, the wind of the Spirit blows with stormy power; for me, his touch, though like a gentle breeze, was no less irresistible than if it had struck with gale force later on.

The home in Mount Vernon, New York, in which I grew up, was Christian, not because our parents were constantly talking to my two brothers and me about religion, but because of the good sense with which they lived their faith. My father was born in Germany; both my mother’s parents were also born there. Doubtless this European background had much to do with the cultural depth of our home.

Some early recollections come to mind. In one, I am sitting on the front step of our house looking at an open book, not yet able to read it but wanting with all my heart to do so; in another, I am picking out on the piano a little German song and am then cutting a notch in the wood above the keys to show where the tune started! Music lessons began soon after that. Music was part of our life—not, to be sure, through radio and records, but “live” as my father and oldest brother played four-hand arrangements of Haydn and Beethoven symphonies and my brother played Chopin and other masters. Books also were part of our life. My father was a scholar and writer, and in our house books were not just displayed but read. Thus two of my lifelong pursuits—reading and writing books, and playing the piano—go back to these early days.

In another way our home was formative. By my father, whose knowledge of nature was exceptional, I was introduced to the beauties of the countryside as he took me on walks; later, I came to know something of the fascination of the mountains, as we tramped together in the Catskills. Out of these experiences grew the avocation of mountaineering, which has led me to the Far West and to Canada, Switzerland, France, Mexico, and Iceland.

One more thing, and that of prime importance, I owe my home. My parents lived in and by the Bible. To its teaching my father devoted himself until his death in his eighty-fifth year. It was my mother’s constant companion during her long life. Memory holds no recollection of their ever telling me to read the Bible. Yet I began its daily use very early. And now, after living with it since boyhood, I know that the Bible has done more to form my life and thought than the whole of my schooling. In every way—doctrinally, intellectually, devotionally, ethically, aesthetically—this incomparable book has molded me. It has kept me near to Christ. It has given me a perspective for seeing in the light of God’s truth the different currents in life and thought flowing through our times.

Crucial though my heritage was, it was neither intellectually nor spiritually parochial. Some have recently written of their emergence (through a kind of “up-from-evangelicalism” experience) from the cocoon of a pietistic, biblicistic upbringing; my experience was different. Our home, with all its genuine devotion, was not defensively pietistic. True, I do not dot every i or cross each t just as my father, giant in the faith that he was, did. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” In the spacious liberty of Christ and of the Scriptures, which, contrary to the opinion of some, lead not to provincialism but to responsible freedom (“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”)—in this liberty my thought and life have developed.

In my formal education, the same pattern of providential direction is discernible. First-rate preparation for college at Mount Vernon High School; a major in English under scholarly teachers at the University College of New York University; an A.M. in English and comparative literature at Harvard with work under such scholars as John Livingston Lowes and Irving Babbitt and with membership in Dean L. B. R. Brigg’s unique course in creative writing—this training helped make me a generalist rather than a specialist. It led to the habit of wide reading. By imbuing me with the determination to write plainly and well, he helped me learn how to think. For one must think clearly to write clearly.

A good liberal-arts education is always relevant. The recovery of a Christian humanism (using the term in its Renaissance rather than current religious sense) seems to me essential in this day of the ascendancy of the specialist, for the specialist tends to lose sight of the wood for the trees and needs to be corrected by the generalist. The principle applies, by the way, to some specialists in biblical criticism, who, as C. S. Lewis has said, though they insist that certain New Testament documents are myth or romance, wouldn’t recognize myth and romance if they saw them.

Toward the close of my graduate study an invitation came to organize a new school for boys on the conference grounds of the Stony Brook Assembly on Long Island. The invitation was unusual in that it was given to a young man who did not have a day of teaching experience. It was also very specific. The new school was to be wholly committed to Christian education. On this basis, there was developed the Christian educational philosophy that has been expressed for forty-eight years at the Stony Brook School. Beginning in 1922 with about thirty boys, the school now has 240 students, a faculty and staff of 40, and buildings and grounds valued at $4 million. Today it stands even more firmly for Christian education than when it began—all this in God’s providence through the work of many devoted teachers, understanding trustees, and generous friends.

For forty-one years this school was my life. Next to my conversion and my marriage, the decision to serve at Stony Brook was most determinative. There my intellectual and spiritual interests matured. Out of teaching Bible to generations of schoolboys came knowledge of the Word. Talks in chapel and also off campus provided practical training in public speaking. Because demands of a growing school continued during summers, there was no time for further graduate work. Although I looked with a certain wistful respect at friends with earned doctorates, I recognized that for me my scholarly work could only come through independent study. So amidst the busy life of a boys’ school nine books were written, seven on Bible study and two on the philosophy of Christian education. So also preparation for ordination was made through private study just as some years before I had taught myself the elements of New Testament Greek.

A constant and essential support and help during the Stony Brook years was my wife, Dorothy Medd Gaebelein. She merged herself unselfishly with the school to which I was committed and made its ideals and purposes her own. We have served together in unity of faith and life, and my work would have been impossible without her.

One of my interests was in religious journalism—writing articles, and serving as associate editor and later publisher of Our Hope (the Bible-study monthly founded by my father in 1894). There were other connections too—as an associate editor of Revelation, a consulting editor of Eternity, and a contributing editor to CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Again retrospect shows a providential pattern. For with this background it was logical on retirement from Stony Brook in 1963 to accept an invitation to become co-editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, where I served for three years.

What are some of the more important things I have learned? In what ways has my outlook changed, my convictions matured? Anyone who attempts even a modest retrospective essay faces questions like these. On looking back there come to mind several directions in which my thought has changed.

I am an evangelical whose convictions are rooted and grounded in Christ, the incarnate Word, and in the Bible, the infallible written Word of God. To speak of being “rooted and grounded” in Christ and the Bible is a metaphor of growth. Just as a tree, nourished by moisture-laden soil, grows and puts forth foliage and fruit, so a person whose theological and spiritual residence is rooted in Christ and the Bible lives in a context of growth—and that of the most expansive kind.

Intellectually, growth comes through learning. It has been my practice to be open to other points of view. I have long read theologically liberal as well as conservative writers and have faced radical positions regarding the Bible. Today my position is that of a moderate Calvinism based on a high view of Scripture. For the historic creeds and confessions, such as the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds and the Westminster Confession, I have deep respect, although even the greatest of these, being on another level from the inspired Word of God, lack the ultimate authority it alone has.

Where my thought has changed most definitely has been in the social implications of biblical truth. Until middle age, I reflected uncritically the social attitudes of the evangelicalism in which I grew up. In zeal for the Gospel, opposition to anti-supernaturalist theology, recovery of vital prophetic truth (especially that of Christ’s return), and concern for foreign missions, the evangelical leaders of the earlier decades of the century stood for historic Christianity. Their stalwart witness made it impossible for the Church to forget the true, supernatural evangelicalism of the Bible. I am lastingly indebted to such leaders and their influence. Yet in reacting against the modernism of many advocates of the social gospel and in complying with the mores, particularly in racial matters, prevalent in North as well as South, they missed much of the biblical emphasis on compassionate responsibility for victims of injustice and exploitation. To be sure, they belonged to a generation that, except for concern about such things as alcohol and ministering to down-and-outers in rescue missions, had not awakened to the social implications of biblical ethics here at home—a lack of awareness that was shared by most Americans of the time. In retrospect I am distressed that it took me so long to realize that social concern is a vital biblical imperative.

Several things led to a changed outlook. In the 1940s I began an intensive study of some of the minor prophets, and this confronted me with the burning ethical message of these men of God. After that, I read and was moved by two books: Carl F. H. Henry’s, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism and, later on, Kyle Haselden’s The Racial Problem in Christian Perspective. Moreover, a personal project to memorize the Sermon on the Mount brought new understanding of our Lord’s ethical teaching.

In 1955 I realized that Stony Brook, though open to Oriental, Latin American, and American Indian students, could not maintain integrity as a Christian school without any black students in its enrollment. That year, tardily indeed, we admitted our first Negro. In 1969–70 the school had 23 black students in its student body of 240. Here let me say that we still need to be greatly concerned about the paucity of black students in evangelical schools and colleges.

To equate uncritically, as many evangelicals continue to do, a conservative theology with political and social conservatism, is for me not possible. I know only one Gospel—that of the atoning death, the burial, and the justifying resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:1–4). But I also know that our Lord’s Great Commission (Matt. 28:19, 20) is twofold: evangelistic (“Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”) and ethical (“teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you”). The Lord, who had compassion on the poor and oppressed, who condemned injustice as well as other sins, who loves all men with a holy impartiality, said: “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you” (John 20:21). Therefore, while fully committed to the priority of the Gospel, I cannot accept the oversimplification that says, “Just preach the Gospel and everything will be all right.”

Another revision in my thinking relates to the doctrine of the Church. My upbringing stressed the great truth that all the redeemed constitute the body and bride of Christ and thus are the true Church, whose actual membership is known only to God. It placed much less emphasis on the visible manifestation of the Church here and now. Along with this, there was a tendency toward independency and separatism. Today, while holding fast the precious New Testament doctrine that all the redeemed are indeed Christ’s true Church, I value the Church visible much more highly than I did several decades ago. Experience has shown me the dangers of independency and separatism.

My views respecting Christian fellowship have mellowed. I am not an ecumenist. To me there are critical dangers in organic union of ecclesiastical bodies that hold fundamentally divergent theologies. But I am deeply committed to fellowship on a practical working basis with all who know and love our Lord Jesus Christ. God has richly blessed me with friends. With some of them I am in full doctrinal agreement. Their fellowship has been and is a benediction. Other friends, including some who are much involved in ecumenical activities and with whom I have certain doctrinal differences, are also a benediction to me. They know and love our Lord Jesus Christ and manifest his Spirit.

The New Testament makes the peril of apostasy very clear. Undoubtedly departure from the faith marks our times. Yet the Lord knows all who are his, and their number is very far from small. So it seems to me essential for Christians of all nations, races, and churches who acknowledge Christ as God and Saviour and who accept the Bible as God’s inspired Word, to recognize one another and to work together whenever possible for the salvation of men and for the alleviation of suffering and meeting of human needs. Our Lord’s high-priestly prayer for the unity of believers compels us to take seriously the outward expression of that unity so that the world may believe that the Father sent him (John 17:21).

Still another development of my thought concerns Christian education. Although from its beginning the Stony Brook School had placed the Bible and the Christian faith at the center of its program, it was not until the late 1940s that I began to work out the far-reaching implications of this position. Study of the Harvard Report, General Education in a Free Society, awakened me to the need for an evangelical and biblical articulation of the Christian philosophy of education. The result was Christian Education in a Democracy (1951), written under the auspices of the National Association of Evangelicals and with the help of a committee of Christian scholars and teachers. Also, in the early years of my association with the Council for Religion in Independent Schools, I was influenced by the clarity with which some in the Episcopal schools stated the necessity of a Christian world-view. Another influence was that of leaders in the Christian day-school movement with their insistence upon a comprehensive Christian philosophy of education. So I came to the exciting recognition that all truth, whether we call it sacred or secular, is God’s truth. The result was discussion of the Christian philosophy of education in The Pattern of God’s Truth (1954).

Work on this book led me to apply the principle of the unity of truth in God to the field of aesthetics, a line of thought especially congenial because of my activity in music and writing and my more recent interest in the appreciation of painting. My thought about the relation of the arts to Christianity has been enriched by seeing the relevance of the theological doctrine of common grace to aesthetics. The Christian life is truly a full one, and I am convinced that evangelicals should, to the glory of the God who gives artistic as well as other talents to men, move out of the cultural provincialism that has characterized so many of us.

Sooner or later, every educator of long experience is asked how young people have changed since his earlier years of teaching. To this question, I have a twofold reply: in fundamental human qualities young people have changed not at all; in certain ways in which they act many of them have changed markedly.

At bottom, the young are still impatient; they still seek reality; they still want a cause that will challenge them; they still respond to integrity and honest conviction; they still see through pretense. As always, they abhor being different from their peers and submit rather uncritically to the prevailing attitudes and customs of their group. Like their predecessors, they combine impatience at restraint with an inner (and frequently unrecognized) need for authority they can respect. Without someone who cares enough for them to take time to listen to them and then, acting according to his integrity, to make decisions they may or may not like, children and adolescents are deprived of something essential for their emotional stability. These are some constants that apply to them in the seventies just as they applied to youth in the twenties, thirties, and middle decades of our century.

The outward characteristics of youth today are another matter. Some future historian of our society will, I think, identify as a watershed in twentieth-century life the rise of the mass media—notably films, radio, television, and the multi-million-circulation periodicals. These have tended to proliferate attitudes and practices with a rapidity formerly unimagined. In an increasingly hedonistic and depersonalized society that puts profits above human welfare, the young are among the chief casualties. They are being brought up on more hours of television than of books and are habituated to quick answers and superficial gratifications. They see the emptiness of materialistic affluent living. They lack in many instances a structure of authority (at home or in school) based on love and respect. No wonder many of them express themselves so overtly.

To understand the roots of youthful rebellion, adults need to look at themselves. The present moral slippage began with the decline of faith and with the lack of self-restraint among many adults too preoccupied with their own pursuits to keep open their relationship with God and their communication with their children. An age shadowed by the twin threats of nuclear catastrophe and ecological ruin, along with the insistent problems of race and war, is not a happy one—a fact reflected in the highly judgmental attitude of so many young people. Irrationalism, nihilism, drug addiction are ugly symptoms. And not the least of the causes of these symptoms is spiritual emptiness. For like all other human beings, young people need new life in Christ.

Young people have a wonderful resiliency that must not be underestimated. In a time of troubles when civilization is making an even more radical turn than in the industrial revolution, they have not lost the capacity to respond and grow. By no means are all, or anything like a majority of them, doing so in destructive ways. This is a day, I believe, when Christian educators have one of their finest opportunities. To meet it effectively requires not only a genuine openness to necessary changes in schools and colleges—it requires above all a self-giving concern for youth that reflects authentically the love of Christ.

Prophets of doom are saying that the small private college will die out. It is faced with skyrocketing costs, with the competition of large universities for research funds, foundation grants, and qualified faculty, with the public institutions’ subsidy of a student’s education. The doomsayers can point out that of 594 American colleges founded before the Civil War, only 182 still survived in 1927. Perhaps it is good that some did not last and that others yet may not, for a college does not deserve to survive unless it embodies a worthwhile idea of what a college should be. Yet prophets of hope declare that the small college’s day is yet to come—provided it can define its distinctives and carry them out with excellence. The Christian liberal-arts college is in just this situation. Whether it survives or even deserves to depends on the identity it defines for itself.

The idea of a Christian liberal-arts college has no fixed form, eternal in some Platonic heaven. It varies from place to place and changes from time to time. It has found different forms in the face of different needs. In colonial days, the idea was of a classical education to discipline the mind and provide the tools of scholarship deemed essential for the clergy and other leaders of society. During the westward movement, the classical ideal stood in contrast to the more vocational and pragmatic goals of the Land Grant colleges.

Adolescence is the age of independence, and in time the idea of a Christian college found a life for itself that seems independent of classical education. It evolved amid theological controversy into what has been called a “defender of the faith” institution. But though defending the faith was certainly an apostolic responsibility, it is hard to extend this conception to the educational task. Yet this defensive mentality is still common among pastors and parents; many suppose that the Christian college exists to protect young people against sin and heresy in other institutions. The idea therefore is not so much to educate as to indoctrinate, to provide a safe environment plus all the answers to all the problems posed by all the critics of orthodoxy and virtue.

This is an idea, I say—more a caricature than a reality. The trouble with it is that there often are no ready-made answers, new problems arise constantly, and the critics are perplexingly creative. The student who is simply conditioned to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli is at a loss when he confronts novel situations—as he will in a changing society undergoing a knowledge explosion. He needs a disciplined understanding of his heritage plus creativity, logical rigor, and self-critical honesty, far more than he needs prepackaged sets of questions and answers. The trouble with cloistering young people to keep them from sin and heresy, as evangelicals—of all people—should realize, is that these things come not from the environment but out of the heart. And while every parent feels protective towards his youngsters, over-protectiveness can stifle faith and hope and love, and trigger opposite excesses of thought and conduct.

Is the idea of a Christian college, then, simply to offer a good education plus biblical studies, in an atmosphere of piety? These are desirable ingredients, but are they the essence of the idea? After all, through religious adjuncts near a secular campus, students could be offered opportunities for biblical studies and support of personal piety while they were getting a good education, without all the money and manpower and facilities and work involved in maintaining a Christian college. Nor is the idea of a Christian college to prepare people for church-related vocations, desirable as this may be as a byproduct and central as it may be elsewhere in the educational work of the Church. The Christian college, like any other small institution, must decide whether its primary calling lies in the liberal arts or in vocational training.

Then why a Christian college? I suggest that its purpose, its idea, is the creative and active integration of faith and learning, and of faith and culture. This is its unique potential in higher education today and in American life. I say “integration,” for this precludes disjunctions between piety and scholarship, faith and reason, religion and science, Christianity and the arts, theology and philosophy, or whatever the differing points of reference may be. The Christian college will not settle for a militant polemic against secular learning and culture, as if there were a great gulf fixed between the secular and the sacred. All truth is God’s truth, no matter where it is found, and we can thank him for it all.

Integration also transcends awkward conjunctions of faith and learning in some unholy alliance rather than a fruitful union. It will not settle for taking critical pot shots at variant interpretations of material without working out a more satisfactory explanation. Nor will it settle for tacked-on moralizing and applications, for stale, superficial approaches that fail to penetrate the real intellectual issues. It will require a thorough analysis of methods and materials and concepts and theoretical structures, a lively and rigorous interpenetration of liberal learning with the content and the commitment of Christian faith. The Christian college has a constructive task, far more than a defensive one.

The Creation Mandate

A positive mandate of this sort hardly needs justification if we confess that God the Father Almighty is Maker of heaven and earth. To confess God as Creator is to affirm that he is Lord over all life and thought. It is to admit that every part of the created order is sacred, and that the Creator calls us to exhibit his wisdom and power both by exploring the creation and developing its resources and by bringing our own created abilities to fulfillment. For while all nature declares the glory of God, we men uniquely image the Creator in our created creativity. Implicit in the doctrine of creation, then, is its cultural mandate and the call to a creative integration of faith with learning and culture. It is a call, not just to couple piety with intellect, nor just to preserve biblical studies in our schools, but more basically to explore the wisdom of God in every area of thought and life, and to replenish the earth with the creativity of human art and science.

This creation mandate has not been rescinded by either sin or grace. On the contrary, it is reaffirmed. God’s grace comes to men in creation to help us fulfill the creation responsibilities in which we have failed (Heb. 2:6–10). The incarnation of Jesus Christ reaffirms the potential value of what we see and hear and handle in this world, for he came in the flesh, into a family and a community and a nation and a culture, into history. Christianity is not an otherworldly religion on the periphery of life—the doctrine of creation and the incarnation of Jesus Christ see to that.

Education With A Perspective

The idea of a Christian college that creatively integrates faith and learning, then, is an extension of the doctrine of creation. But we need to examine the idea more closely. Christian scholarship is not primarily distinguished by its techniques, nor by some privileged access to esoteric facts hidden from the uninitiated. At the levels of technique and fact, Christian and non-Christian scholars work together in fruitful and irenic cooperation. Rather, Christian scholarship is distinguished by its interpretation of material and by the value-judgments it makes. There is no distinctively Christian history of modern times—but a Christian view of God and man is likely, as Butterfield and others have pointed out, to affect our interpretation of the past and even, in measure, our selection and use of historical materials. There is no Christian physics—but belief in divine creation is likely, as Whitehead and others have said of early modern science, to shape our attitude toward scientific inquiry, and especially toward the kind of interpretation that goes into making a supposedly scientific world-view.

In other words, Christian scholarship is perspectival. The Christian revelation provides a vantage point—not just a set of presuppositions stated in propositional form from which to deduce a closed system, but a whole outlook on life replete with values and attitudes as well as beliefs. And it is from this perspective that we proceed. It motivates us, gives sanctity to our work, and provides an interpretative framework. We confess our faith in our work. This means repudiating the idea of ideological neutrality and detached objectivity; the teacher and scholar and student are whole persons, and their faith and their values inevitably influence their work.

The perspectival nature of thought is by no means unique to the Christian. All human thought and life is perspectival: consciously or unconsciously, what we are speaks loudly in what we say; what we believe and value shows itself in how we think. The more closely our thinking touches on matters of world-viewish concern, the more overtly our guiding perspective shows through.

The Christian college, then, should clarify its guiding image, so that the Christian perspective its students encounter is one that they understand, one also that they can make their very own. For while neutrality is impossible, the alternative is not blind prejudice—it is a self-conscious and self-critical commitment, an honesty that need not be ashamed. Christian thought is legitimately perspectival when the scholar is authentically Christian.

Second, it is pluralistic. A variety of perspectival traditions is at work in Western thought, and each of these is itself diversified. Naturalism, for instance, is a tradition that has taken many different forms, each one true to a common basic perspective. So too with theism, and within theism with Christian thought. To many things there is no one Christian approach, and Christian thinkers differ among themselves while affirming the truth of their common perspective. Some of our differences arise from our theological diversity, but not all. For Christian theology, effective as it is in providing an overall direction for our thinking, does not of itself resolve every theoretical and practical question that may arise. Our differences are due as well to differences in training and experience, in personal emphasis and interest, in the breadth and depth of our scientific and humanistic knowledge. In these matters, Christian learning, like Christian living, requires Christian liberty—hence the importance of academic freedom. There is no all-embracing “party line” dictated by biblical revelation. Ours is not a closed, complete “system to end all systems” but a richly variegated heritage of thought from the perspective of a biblical faith. It requires an honesty that is irenic, not contentious, an honesty that humbly admits our humanity. We see through a glass darkly. We know in part. The finiteness, the fallibility, the fragmentariness of human understanding require that we grant others the liberty we desire for ourselves; that we be willing to learn from others and remain open to correction, to new angles, to invigorating insights. The pluralistic character of Christian thought is a blessing, for it safeguards us against premature dogmatism and monolithic structures. It will keep us humble and keep us human; it will keep us working creatively and self-critically in all our endeavors.

This leads to a third characteristic; if Christian education is both perspectival and pluralistic, it must also be exploratory, an open-ended adventure in learning and living. As long as we fall short of omniscience it will be this way, as it is for those in non-Christian traditions. They have to explore the implications of the viewpoints they take, and so do we. We have barely begun to chart the worlds of science and of ideas, to relate faith and learning and life, and so to explore the insight afforded by the meaning-giving Logos of God. This is an exciting prospect for the believer, whether student or professional scholar, and it demands of us both creativity and discipline. After all, education should be exacting and exciting.

We have spoken of Christian scholarship in ethical terms, like faith and love and honesty and liberty. Some writers have suggested that it involves hope, and I think they are right: the virtue of hope should mark the Christian in this world. We believe that life is not absurd but that it makes sense, that the world of nature and history are intelligible from the perspective of faith. We may therefore add a fourth characteristic of Christian thought—it is redemptive. The Christian perspective enables us to see things whole, to recapture the meaning and worth of human existence, to reinvest secular life with its God-given sanctity. We bring this hope to our work in a secular world, to the interpretation of our learning, and to the application of learning to life. We live and think with a redeeming hope. The truth is not yet complete; it is not yet all in. To use Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, truth-for-man is an “eschatological ideal” toward which we strive, an ideal we glimpse in broad outline and in part but have not yet fully attained. Yet we work at it in the confident hope of truth’s full disclosure and of the ultimate redemption of human thought. This hope begets imaginative endeavor and hard work. We confess our hope in our work, and thereby bear witness in a secularized world that is fast losing hope as it already lost faith.

A Mandate For Today

This idea of a Christian college is strategic at the present juncture in history. We hear a great deal about the secularization of society, the compartmentalization and seeming irrelevance of religion, the loss of ultimate concerns in the routines of daily life, the fact that the Hebrew-Christian world-view, which once gave meaning and value to Western life and thought, has disintegrated. God is said to be dead, the Church is caught in a suburban captivity, and modern man, eviscerated in this way, is left groping for meaning and grasping at whatever straw blows by.

Involved in this crisis is the secularization of learning. The medieval university was governed by a unifying religious world-view—theology was at the center of the curriculum, just as the church spire was at the center of the city. But all this has changed. Education today is largely rootless, or at best governed by a heterogeneity of goals. The university has become a multiversity, and its orderly operation is threatened, in part, because it lacks a unifying world-view that can unite the heritage of the past with the realities of the present, and that can infuse meaning into learning and hope into life in a bent world.

Hence the idea of a Christian college where learning is honest about its perspective, dialogical in its pluralism, exciting and exploratory, yet still able to see things whole. It is the idea of a faith that inspires learning, gives sanctity and value to culture and scholarship, and casts light on the perennial concerns of men and society. The truth still has its meaning-giving power, and knowing the truth will still make men free.

Stock phrases in the current ecclesiastical jargon make it clear that the institution thinks pragmatically of its task for the seventies. “Ministry is people.” “Church is where the action is.” “Live love!” “To be Christian is to be human.” The directives coming to the minister, now conceived as an “enabler,” seem to imply that his primary function is to build up a head of steam powerful enough to drive the people forward in good works. The area of good works is determined by the pressing need of the moment. A few months ago it was the desperate situation in Biafra. During Lent it was overseas development and relief. Right now it is drug addiction. On the horizon is environmental pollution.

The reasoning behind this frenzied activism seems logical enough. When Jesus was living in this world, he went about doing good—healing the sick, feeding the hungry, giving sight to the blind. The Christian Church is supposed to be his body and to continue his saving work in the world. If Jesus were living in the world today, surely his concern would still be with people in need of human deliverance—the victims of such hardships as war, poverty, and racial injustice. Therefore, if the Church is to be true to its function as the body of Christ, must it not be the Church that “serves a hurting world”? Hence the contempt today for stained glass and broadloom. Anything that shuts the worshiper out from the clear vision of a torn and bleeding world, or deadens the noise of human strife, has no place in Christian work and witness. Worship itself—the action by which God is praised—must forsake the passivity of inward renewal to identify with Christ in constructive (or destructive!) social action.

The reasoning is logical. Yet a question remains: Are the underlying assumptions concerning the “saving work” of Jesus perhaps an oversimplification—one great enough to be considered a tragic distortion? The Church is indeed supposed to be the body of Christ in which he continues his saving work in the world, and responsibility, both individual and corporate, indisputably attaches to Christian discipleship. But where is the real action of Christ in the world to be found? And what, precisely, is his saving work? The question that the disciples asked Jesus “on the other side of the sea” must repeatedly be put: “What must we be doing to be doing the work of God?” (John 6:28).

The answer to this question is not, I believe, to be found in the feverish social action now being forced on the body of Christ. It is found, rather, in the thrust of the Gospel as expressed in Jesus’ reply to the disciples’ question: “This is the work that God requires: believe in the one whom he has sent.”

Before looking more closely at this answer, let us glance at the distressing world situation that confronts the Church in the seventies. Over-population, ecological imbalance, racial tension, armaments buildup, the widening gulf between affluence and poverty, pollution, drug addiction—these problems are so great that any one of them appears capable of destroying society. If they are not solved speedily, no world will be left to which the body of Christ can witness. Hence the urgency of social action.

And yet, the very magnitude of these problems is forcing solutions that can be found only beyond the periphery of Christian concern. As the complexities of a technological society and the interrelatedness of its concerns become more evident, the catalytic effectiveness of programs of Christian social action becomes less evident. The greater the social problem, the less likely it is that the church will have anything very helpful to say or to do about it. Consider three examples:

1. Concern for the economic distress of “underdeveloped” peoples has now moved beyond the sphere of overseas mission boards of churches to take top priority on the agenda of secular international bodies as UNESCO and the World Bank. Involvement by the churches in areas where the experts have taken over is proving to be something of an irritant. (Witness the about-face that the World Council of Churches had to make on the Biafra situation: after urging the Christian constituency to do the “right” thing and feed Nigeria’s “enemy,” it was forced at the eleventh hour to withhold aid from Biafra so that “realistic” political action might be taken!)

2. A short generation ago the problems of addiction—drug, tobacco, and alcohol—were felt to be trivial enough to be relegated to the passion of the WCTU or the denomination’s board of evangelism and social service; now they are found on the front doorstep of health departments at every governmental level. It is somewhat amusing to discover that though university students a dozen years ago were contemptuous of the Church for worrying about liquor and tobacco, today’s students are snide for another reason: the problem of addiction is so serious that only society’s superior scientific wisdom can solve it.

3. Then there is pollution. The annual conference of the United Church of Canada here in Saskatchewan has decided to make itself relevant in the year 1970 by studying pollution. But it will hardly achieve relevance by doing this. It will merely tag behind a host of other interest groups that have latched on to the latest “in” thing in order to be heard. Its findings on this subject may be profound, but the world is not going to look to the churchmen for help. Both for analysis and for solution of the problem of environmental pollution, the world will look to its technical specialists—as it should.

Even the motivation for good works is unlikely to require Christian support in a world that is increasingly maturing in its sense of responsibility for its secular well-being. Bonhoeffer’s insight here is certainly valid. The Christian has no monopoly on good works. Caesar’s realm takes in a lot of territory—most of the territory, indeed, that bestirs Christian activists today. The Christian should not feel resentful if his moral judgment is no longer needed to press good works that secular man, motivated by self-preservation and a “live-and-let-live” philosophy, can successfully undertake himself. Indeed, secular man can plausibly argue that he has more right to clean up the world than the Christian. This is all the world he has.

Does all this imply that the message of the Christian Church no longer has social significance? Does this mean that the Christian Gospel confronts modern man with indifference and his tragic plight with resignation? Far from it! In a world “come of age,” the Church has to define more carefully than ever the nature of Jesus’ saving work for the world. It has to differentiate more clearly than ever what man can do and be without Jesus Christ and what he can do and be only in and through Jesus Christ. As Joseph Sittler has said:

[The Church] only serves that which is not itself by being most absolutely itself. Otherwise it has no reason for being. When, therefore, we ask for a permeating presence of the Church in the world, this is absolutely right, but that presence will only be a presence effective in order to its calling when the particularity of that presence, which is nothing less than God in his world, remains that which permeates, and constitutes the substance of, that presence [“Revolution, Place and Symbol,” Journal of the First International Congress on Religion, Architecture and the Visual Arts, New York, 1967, p. 65].

This brings us back to Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ question: This is the work that God requires: believe in the one whom he has sent. The context in John 6 of this surprising reply is a discussion of food, the contrast being pointedly drawn between the kind of food men need to keep body and mind together and the kind of food that nourishes a believer “unto eternal life.” In John’s Gospel, the “work” of God, which Jesus’ earthly works attest—bread for the hungry, sight to the blind, life to the dead—is represented as the gift of a new humanity that is realized in and through Jesus. Jesus in his living perfectly fulfilled the will of God and in his dying triumphed over sin and death. As a result of this achievement—an achievement unique and unrepeatable on the human scale—a new order of righteousness has been established to which the natural man is called to relate himself. The paradox is that what man cannot do and be on his own, he is called to do and be in Christ. “If any man be in Christ Jesus he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things have become new.” Christian faith is the acceptance of this achievement of Jesus.

Obviously, implications for man and the world follow fast and sure from this act of faith. The Christian community has the responsibility of actualizing here on earth the union with God that Jesus has achieved. But it will do this, not by identification with “one-dimensional man” in his need, but by union with Christ in his risen power. The current obsession that the Church has first to “identify with men in their needs” before it can help them finds no support in the New Testament. Man by his sinful nature is already fully identified with his fellows and shares his fellows’ plight. What sinful man needs is not closer identification with sinners but identification with the One who has overcome sin and death—that is, identification with the risen living Christ in a faith union made possible by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Traditionally the Holy Spirit has achieved this when men have been open to God’s Word and have given themselves to prayer and sacramental renewal. From this work of faith, as the Epistle of James makes clear, practical works follow—“by these actions the integrity of his [Abraham’s] faith was fully proved” (Jas. 2:23). But the order is clear: faith in Christ, and then the works that prove it. The one thing that the Church dare not do is to reverse this order. It dare not move from man’s own works to faith. It dare not take a sweeping look over the human scene, assess what is wrong with man, and then turn to the Christian faith in the hope of redeeming the situation. Since Jesus Christ has already redeemed the human situation, all that the Church can do is point to him in whose name and power men are bidden to rise up and walk.

The very last thing that the Church needs to fear is that a faithful and simple proclamation of the mighty acts of God in Christ will be irrelevant to a hurting world. It was to meet the human need that God acted in Jesus Christ. The real questions, the ultimate questions confronting men and women in the seventies, are the very questions on which the drama of the Incarnation focuses. These ultimate questions go far beyond the social concern of our time to confront man at the basic level of his being. Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? These night questions will remain after urgent and remedial first aid has been given to social problems. Night questions confront all men everywhere and under all circumstances of life—whether they live in the black ghetto or in the white suburbs, in polluted air or clean. The pragmatic problems can be solved by sensible men everywhere, but the night questions find their answer only in the Christian Gospel. There is nothing outside the Christian Gospel to witness to the fact that man came from God and must return to the Father, and, while here, do the Father’s will.

It is both tragic and ironic that at the very time a vocal and influential segment of church leadership is trying to make the Christian Gospel relevant by secularizing it, the generation to which the appeal ostensibly is made is crying out, not so much for the solution of life’s social problems, as for an understanding of life itself. Lady Susan Glynn has remarked that “the quality of human nature is leading, as always, to two movements in opposite directions. Religious leaders are tending to speak more about corporate action and less about personal faith, but at the same time many individuals, particularly young people, feel starved of the things of the spirit.” Whether this generation’s spiritual hunger can be satisfied by the announcement of the Christian Gospel remains to be seen. There is a stage at which starved people spurn food, and it may be that the spiritual need of this day and age is not going to be met. It may be that even the most inspired “updating” of the Gospel will fail to win a response from those for whom Christ died. But this is beside the point, and it is not the real concern of the Church. The only real concern of the Church is that it be faithful to the Gospel it has been given, which is not its own but its Lord’s.

The Value Imperative

Colleges are not all as bad as the one glimpsed in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Yet there is certainly a great need for educational reforms. Although education has made great promises in methods, it is confused about goals and ends. Knowledge is like a sharp knife. It can be used to save a life in a delicate operation or to stab a man in the heart. It is just a means. At this critical moment in the world’s history, education has practically gone dead in regard to goals.

We have a disintegrating educational system in a disintegrating cultural order. A young person can graduate from even our finest universities with honors and still be broken down in health, vocationally a misfit, personally disagreeable, unfitted for home life, morally a menace to society, politically a grafter, and emotionally so unhappy as to be on the verge of suicide. There is something drastically wrong with such a system.

The great underlying issue of our time is whether we believe in a God-centered or a man-centered universe. All truth is God’s truth and should lead to God. Most education is fitted into a framework of naturalism and fails to discriminate between the facts and a naturalistic interpretation of facts. The same facts need to be fitted into a framework of theism. Instead of narrowing the fields of knowledge, religion should add immeasurable depth and height and significance. The heavens declare the glory of God. When the glory of God departs, the glory of man made in his image departs also.

The United Church of Christ gave $600,000 to a college that chose one of the main exponents of the “God is dead” theory as its only professor of religion. Some denominational leaders have advocated the separation of colleges from the Church. It is not surprising that many church-related colleges produce a lot of pagans.

The National Education Association has stated that more people have spent more hours in more schools since 1900 than in all human history before. To this we should add that more people have been killed since 1900 than in all previous human history.

Knowledge is a means. We greatly need Christian goals. What is the value of knowing physics if we use it to destroy mankind in a nuclear war? What is the value of knowing biology if we use it for biological warfare, or chemistry if we use it to produce poison gas? What is the value of knowing mathematics if we use it to cheat our fellow men, of knowing three, five, or twenty languages if we lie in every one of them? The more nuclear science we have in our heads, the more imperative it is that we have the love of God in our hearts.

The Book of Joel says, “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” Youth should accept the wisdom of age, and age should accept the vision of youth. “Without vision, the people perish.” Instead of the spectacle of youth and age scolding each other, we need to see the ripe experience and wise judgment of age clasp hands with the vision and idealism and adventurous spirit of youth.

We should help our young people to develop the love of truth and the love of man. We desperately need Christian higher education. The prayer of a student should be: “Unite my mind, O God, to know you and your universe and my purpose in it.”—Dr. WILLIAM R. BARNHART, minister emeritus, Circular Congregational Church, Charleston, South Carolina.

As we prepare this issue, the news reports tell us that near revolution has come to northern Ireland; the Arab-Israeli undeclared war is getting hotter; the stock market is in the doldrums; peace seems no nearer anywhere; and the hot season has once again brought rumblings of unrest in the cities during sultry summer nights. In the midst of all this God is still at work. Men are being converted as the Gospel goes forth in power, and Christian compassion is working to relieve the miseries of men everywhere.

A few days ago I heard Billy Graham preach at Shea Stadium in New York City (see News, page 30). His message was simple: as Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego had to choose between the worship of Nebuchadnezzar’s image and the worship of the true God, so men today must choose between false gods and the true God. When Graham asked his hearers to choose Jesus Christ, a large number—black and white, young and old—came forward to make that commitment. It was thrilling to observe the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the hearts of men.

Strangely enough, we often get discouraged even when we see God at work. Elijah got the blues after his great victory over the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel. What we need to remember always is that reassuring promise, “Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed for I am thy God.”

Several weeks ago the publisher of my latest book informed me that a well-known fundamentalist periodical had refused to advertise the volume. The reason? I quote directly from the letter my publisher received: “We do not feel we can carry this particular ad, since Dr. Montgomery openly opposes any talk against the movies and dance.”

The charge was not strictly accurate (in point of fact, I oppose immoral and inartistic movies, as well as lewd and cloddish dancing; what disturbed the periodical was simply that I refuse to throw all secular theatrical activities into outer darkness). But the anti-theatrical philosophy of American fundamentalism is sufficiently at odds with my own viewpoint that the letter in question motivated a long-standing intention to survey the current French stage and screen for readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. For years I have had a secret desire to imitate Janet (“Genêt”) Flanner’s “Letter from Paris” in the New Yorker; who would have thought that a certain Tennessee periodical would have turned potentiality into actuality?

First, some words about the cinema. (In my next “Current Religious Thought” column, the stage will be the focus of attention.) For those unacquainted with French cinematography, it is perhaps well to stress at the very outset the radical difference between French films and Anglo-American products. The difference is not (despite opinions in Murfreesboro) sex. Actually, film-makers in Hollywood—and even more so in London—are today producing erotica that cultured Frenchmen regard as trash; interestingly, the French answer to Playboy magazine (Lui) is much milder than Hefner’s product, and the dives in London’s Soho and Charing Cross districts would make an inhabitant of Montmartre blush for shame.

French movies differ from Anglo-American films as the modern French novel differs from its English counterpart: the Frenchman is concerned to plumb the depths of individual personality and to record the development of character that occurs in the crucible of human relationships; the Englishman and American love external action (“play the game”), clean-cut distinctions between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” and the positive resolution of the plot (everything should “come out all right”).

A comparison of the greatest of English-language fictional detectives with his twentienth-century French counterpart makes this point with telling effect. Conan Doyle’s Holmes is cold, almost machine-like, and ruthlessly effective in bringing his cases to a logical and successful conclusion; Simenon’s Maigret, in contrast, never has a “plan,” often does not “catch” the criminal in the traditional sense, but discovers the truth through intimate observation and involvement in the lives of all concerned.

I shall not spend time on French films available in the States with English dubbing or subtitles (e.g., Z—a superlative critique of present Greek political abominations); my comments are restricted to films not yet exported. L’Aveu can be considered to be a sequel to Z; the success of Z in castigating the Greek generals led naturally to a condemnation of Marxist imperialism in Eastern Europe—especially as concerns the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. The hero, again portrayed by Yves Montand, is subjected to a Kafka-like trial leading to an “admission of guilt.” This utterly unjust purge of an honest, patriotic statesman (Dubcek, to be sure) reminds one of the concluding chapters of Orwell’s 1984.

Current history is the point of departure for a number of excellent French film productions. Les Choses de la vie, for example, is perhaps the most telling blow ever struck on the screen against the demonic loss of life through traffic fatalities. Sensitive actor Michel Piccoli portrays the victim of a meaningless auto accident that in a split second destroys human relations and values built up over a lifetime.

France is still haunted by Indochina and North Africa, as the United States will inevitably be haunted by Viet Nam. Le Boucher, set in a harmless, sleepy French provincial village, shows how the past can devour the present: a butcher and a school mistress fall in love, but the taste of blood the butcher acquired years before in Indochina has made him incapable of experiencing the ordinary joys of life, and ultimately his pathological past destroys him.

Le Pistonné, the second unit of Claude Berri’s film autobiography, narrates the experiences of the hero during his draftee service in Morocco in 1955. Pistonné is slang for a person who “knows the right people” and can “pull strings” with the higher-ups. Actually, the young hero’s attempts to do this are farcical failures owing to the incredible stupidity and naïveté both of French civil servants (the buffoon-like fonctionnaires) and of military officialdom. The “pacification” program in Morocco accomplishes little more than the terrorization and uprooting of the native populace and the demoralizing of the soldiery. The final scene in the film shows our hero at his discharge, being met by his brother whom he has longed to see—and whom he finds grotesquely hopping on one leg, having been permanently maimed in similar military operations.

The question to which French film-makers return again and again is: Who is man? Like novelist Camus and playright Sartre, they are obsessed with the need to probe man’s nature. François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage follows the (actual) scientific diary of Professor Itar, who at the time of the French Revolution attempted to civilize a boy who had lived for years in the forest without human contact. The professor concludes that the boy has a “native moral sense”; but does he? Is it the very tenderness of the relation between the professor and his charge that elicits moral response in the boy? Are the professor’s interpretations the result of factual observation, or are they but “necessary conclusions” from his deistic presuppositions? The viewer is forced to confront these questions for himself.

My favorite among the recent films devoted to analyzing the human animal is Borsalino, with the inimitable acting combination of Belmondo and Delon. A “borsalino” is that peculiarly shaped fedora that was the mark of Chicago and Marseilles gangsters during the 1920s and early 1930s. The film tells the story of the friendship between two Marseilles underworld characters who combine operations and go to the top. Finally, one chooses to leave. Why? Because, he shrewdly observes, now that the opposition has been laid low, the two will go after each other, and he wants rather to preserve their friendship. On leaving, he is gunned down by an unknown third party—while reiterating his philosophy: “Nothing happens by chance.” Exactly. Power corrupts. He who lives by the sword dies by it. Selfishness extends to all unredeemed human relationships.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY