The cup that Jesus agonized over in the Garden of Gethsemane holds the mystery of his suffering and death. He had left most of his disciples sitting in the garden and had taken his inner circle—Peter, James, and John—further into the garden with him. He began to be very troubled and said to these three: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here, and watch with me” (Matt. 26:38). Then he left them, and, going deeper into the garden, he fell on his face and prayed: “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

This cup that Jesus had to drink is an important symbol of his suffering and death in all four Gospels, in Matthew (26:39, 42), Mark (14:36); Luke (22:42), and John (18:11). What is the meaning of this cup? What was so terrible about it that even the thought of drinking it caused him to be in agony, his sweat falling on the ground like great drops of blood?

Of course, the cup symbolized the suffering he would be required to undergo in the horrible death that awaited him. Jesus foresaw not only the fact of his death but the very method of his execution—by crucifixion (Matt. 20:19). Indeed, he had used the cup as a symbol of suffering in a general sense when James and John came to him seeking the place of honor in his kingdom. “Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” he asked. “You will drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left is not mine to grant” (Matt. 20:22, 23; Mark 10:38, 39).

Since Jesus’ followers will have to drink the same cup, in one sense it must represent persecution and suffering, even to death. However, there is a profound difference between the cup of suffering his disciples must be prepared to drink and the cup over which he himself agonized in Gethsemane. The disciples could drink the cup of suffering and die as martyrs, but only Jesus himself could drink the cup that the Father gave him to drink (John 18:11b).

Following the rule of interpreting Scripture by Scripture, the first place to look for a clue to the significance of Jesus’ cup is in the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, the Bible that Jesus knew and loved and lived by.

There the references to “cup” fall into three categories. First, the word is used with only its literal meaning—a physical vessel from which liquids are drunk—and no symbolic meaning. Such for example are the references to Joseph’s silver cup, which he ordered to be hid in the mouth of Benjamin’s sack of grain (Gen. 44).

Second, three times in the Old Testament the word is used in a symbolic sense, meaning something good and beneficial that signifies a blessing of God. “My cup runneth over,” the psalmist sings (23:5). And in Psalm 16 he says, “The LORD is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup.” The prophet speaks of “the cup of consolation” (Jer. 16:7).

Obviously, neither of these two meanings—the literal or the cup as a symbol of goodness, salvation, and consolation—explains the cup that Jesus beseeched the Father to remove from him. It is in the third category that we find some light shed upon that mystery. Fifteen times the cup is used in the Old Testament as a symbol of the wrath of God, that is, of the condemnatory judgment of the holy and righteous God upon sin. In this category, the cup is one of cursing, not of blessing.

That this cup contains the wrath of God is shown in Psalm 11:6 (“on the wicked he will rain coals of fire and brimstone; a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup”) and is confirmed in Psalm 75: “It is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another. For in the hand of the LORD there is a cup, with foaming wine, well mixed; and he will pour a draught from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs” (vv. 7, 8).

In the prophetic writings, the meaning of the cup as a symbol of God’s wrath is made absolutely clear. Isaiah says: “Rouse yourself, rouse yourself, stand up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his wrath, who have drunk to the dregs the bowl of staggering” (51:17, RSV). Then after God’s judgment has been executed against his people, Isaiah says: “Thus says your Lord, the LORD, your God who pleads the cause of his people: ‘Behold, I have taken from your hand the cup of staggering; the bowl of my wrath you shall drink no more’ ” (51:22).

It is in the prophecy of Jeremiah against Judah (Jeremiah 25) that the cup becomes the most striking and terrifying symbol of God’s wrathful judgment upon sin and evil. Jeremiah preached this powerful sermon to the people of Judah and Jerusalem in the year 605 B.C., the first year of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, after Nebuchadrezzar had defeated the forces of Egypt under Pharoah Neco at the decisive battle of Charchemish. Jeremiah begins his sermon by reminding his people that they have persisted in rejecting the word of the Lord and have provoked him to anger because of their idolatry and unbelief. The prophet then transmits to his people the word of the Lord, that because of Judah’s disobedience, the Lord would send Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, as the Lord’s instrument (notice “my servant,” verse 9) to destroy Judah utterly, so that the land would lie a ruin and waste. Then after seventy years, the Lord’s punishment would fall upon Babylon for its iniquity.

At this point in his sermon, perhaps Jeremiah actually took a cup of wine and dramatized his sermon by insisting that members of his congregation representing various nations actually drink from it: “Thus the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. They shall drink and stagger and be crazed because of the sword which I am sending among them’ ” (25:15, 16).

So Jeremiah took the cup from the Lord’s hand and made all the nations to whom the Lord sent him drink it, beginning with Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, its kings and princes; then Egypt; then the Philistines on the west of Judah; then Edom, Moab, and Ammon on the east of Judah; then the kings to the southeast of Judah; then last of all, the king of Babylon himself. The Lord ordered Jeremiah: “Then you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Drink, be drunk and vomit, fall and rise no more, because of the sword which I am sending among you.’ And if they refuse to accept the cup from your hand to drink, then you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts: You must drink! For behold, I begin to work evil at the city which is called by my name, and shall you go unpunished? You shall not go unpunished, for I am summoning a sword against all the inhabitants of the earth, says the LORD of hosts’ ” (27–29).

Behind Jesus’ agony over the cup in Gethsemane lies this terrible scene from Jeremiah where the Lord God forces all the nations and inhabitants of the earth to drink the wine of his wrath upon their sin.

Not only in Isaiah and Jeremiah but also in the prophecy of Ezekiel, the cup is a symbol of God’s wrathful and righteous judgment upon sin. This is found in chapter 23, the allegory of the two harlot sisters Oholah (representing Samaria, the Northern Kingdom of Israel) and Oholibah (representing Jerusalem, the Southern Kingdom of Judah), who were warned they would drink “a cup of horror and desolation” (vv. 31–34).

Thus, to the three major prophets of the Exile, the cup of the Lord was a terrible and horrible symbol of God’s wrath and judgment upon sin. Other references to the cup with this meaning are Jeremiah 49:12; Jeremiah 51:7; Lamentations 4:21; Habakkuk 2:16, and Zechariah 12:2. And this interpretation of the cup from the Lord’s hand—that it represented God’s holy wrath upon sin—begins to open the depths of the dark mystery of Jesus’ cup in Gethsemane. No wonder Jesus, the sinless One, shrank from the cup and was “exceedingly sorrowful even unto death.”

It is significant that the New Testament records that Jesus actually did drink vinegar or sour wine while he hung on the cross. When he was offered wine mixed with the sedative gall or myrrh, he refused it (Matt. 27:34; Mark 15:23). But near the end of his agony, when he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34), one of the bystanders ran and filled a sponge with vinegar, and put it upon a reed or spear, and gave it to him to drink. The Greek word used, potizo, carries the meaning that he actually drank the vinegar, though the English translation does not make this clear. St. John makes a special point of recording that it was immediately after Jesus had received the vinegar that he said, “It is finished,” and bowed his head and gave up his spirit (John 19:28–30; see also Matt. 27:48–50; Mark 15:37). He had drunk the cup that the Father had given him, and he had accomplished what he had been sent to earth to do, and so he cried out, “It is finished.”

The Old Testament references to “cup” make it clear that the cup Jesus had to drink, the cup the Father gave to him, contained symbolically the wrath of God. This interpretation is further supported by the references to “cup” in the Book of Revelation (14:9, 10; 16:19).

Many American Christians are more imbued with a sentimental idea of “love” than with scriptural teaching and are offended by the suggestion that there is an element of wrath in God’s love. Yet we cannot be true to the Scriptures and neglect their clear teaching about the wrath of God. Although it is certainly true that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), Scripture makes it abundantly clear that God’s love is holy love that blazes out in wrath and anger at human sin. Even St. John, the theologian of God’s love, writes: “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him” (3:36).

In short, we cannot have a biblical doctrine of the atonement won by Jesus Christ on the cross without taking into account the wrath of God. Perhaps the reason we have difficulty with this idea is that we really do not take sin as seriously as Scripture shows us God does.

We can picture the metaphor of the cup in this way: Because each one of us is guilty of both original and actual sin, we deserve to be forced to drink the cup of God’s wrath; however, Jesus the sinless One, true man and true God, received the cup of wrath from the hand of God the Father himself and drank it all, even the bitter dregs, for us, on our behalf. Then, having emptied the cup of God’s wrath by taking it within himself, Jesus, the risen Lord, filled the cup with his own blood. He now holds out to us the cup, which is no longer a cup of cursing but by his sacrificial death has been transformed into a cup of blessing, a cup that contains his life. As St. Paul wrote: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16).

Thus the metaphor of the cup holds out to us the same atonement that we find elsewhere in the New Testament. It is in line with St. Paul’s teaching that God made him who knew no sin (that is, Jesus Christ) to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Cor. 5:21), and that “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13).

In the presence of the One who had such love toward us that he suffered once for all the bitter pains of hell for us, on our behalf, in our place, what can we do but say with the psalmist:

What shall I render unto the Lord

for all his benefits toward me?

I will take the cup of salvation,

and call upon the name of the Lord.

During the past five years, alert and sensitive observers of the theological scene have noted that Christian apologetics is undergoing a renascence. This discipline, possessed of such an honorable heritage, fell into decline during the ascendency of Barthianism, with its aversion to natural theology and evidential supports for faith. Today this is changed, however. Thus, Martin Marty writes:

The apologist is coming into his own again in the church. In the earlier Barthian period the apologist had to run for cover; now more are coming to agree with W. Norman Pittenger that it is hard enough to be a Christian; should thought forms be adopted which exaggerate the intellectual difficulties? John Baillie, for instance, chastened by Barthian mistrust of natural theology, consistently attempted to carry on an understanding of the secular world and bring a Christian witness to it [Varieties of Unbelief, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964, p. 208].

In a similar vein, William Hordern has written: “In recent years a number of books have appeared to argue that, despite changes in the world, the truth of Christian faith can be defended. A new form of apologetics is beginning to appear” (New Directions in Theology Today, Volume I: Introduction).

At least two factors have especially contributed to the renewal of apologetics in our day, it seems. One, already mentioned, is the decline of Barthianism. Daniel Day Williams says:

The dogmatic expositions of Christian doctrine (and when have there been three more powerful ones than those of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Paul Tillich?) have suddenly lost the center of attention, and are not the major subject of theological inquiry, nor are they invoked in that inquiry. It is as if this systematic language about God has suddenly been drained of its power to communicate the meaning of God. I am not referring primarily to the “death of God” thinkers. They are not unimportant indicators, but by themselves they do not give us the key to the theological situation. I point rather to the widespread concern of the new generation of theologians with questions about meaning, truth, and language which have been pressed by the philosophers. Barth and Brunner tried to bypass the philosophical analysis of meaning. Tillich accepted its necessity, but while, I think, he met the positivists’ questions at the right point, the discussion is far from over, and his own metaphysical language quite clearly does not carry conviction even to many disposed to accept some ontology [“The New Theological Situation,” Theology Today, Jan., 1968, p. 446].

An examination of the topics at the fore in theological discussion today is instructive: religious language, faith and history, Christian hope. All these are basically apologetic in character. It is not simply the resurgence of apologetics as a distinct discipline that is notable today but rather the whole apologetic tone of theology.

The other factor, also alluded to in William’s statement, is the reduction of skepticism in philosophical circles. From the zenith of logical positivism, with its rejection of theological discourse as literally “non-sense” and therefore meaningless, philosophy has become considerably more disposed to consider the questions of theology and religion as at least being proper questions. One indication of this is the large number of philosophy-of-religion texts that have recently appeared.

If apologetics is experiencing new life, the question of its role and task becomes even more important. (In this discussion we are using the term Christian apologetics to mean, simply, reasoned advocacy of the Christian faith, the alternatives being either an unreasoned advocacy or a reasoned nonadvocacy.) If, as the late Edward J. Carnell maintained, the apologist must adapt his approach and method to the mood of the day, then the question must be asked anew: What is the task of apologetics in this day?

The first task of apologetics will be to ask the question of the truth of Christianity. It has become fairly commonplace to say that the important issue is not the truth of Christianity but its relevance. Today, however, that thesis is being challenged. The so-called Pannenberg circle in particular is insisting that the geschichtliche significance of Christianity is logically dependent upon the Historie. In the long run, nothing can be relevant that is not true. Carl Braaten says: “The common retort that modern man, after all, is not concerned with the old question of the truth of the faith, rather with its meaning, is a dodge that is as apologetically impotent as it is theologically fatal” (New Directions in Theology Today, Volume II: History and Hermeneutics, Westminster, 1966, p. 48). He then goes on to quote Gerhard Ebeling:

“The criterion of the understandability of our preaching is not the believer but the nonbeliever. For the proclaimed word seeks to effect faith, but does not presuppose faith as a necessary preliminary. The actual situation with the church’s proclamation today is, however, that for the most part the believing congregation is made the criterion of whether the preaching is understandable, and thereby faith is made a prerequisite of the hearing of the Word.”

The conservative’s presentation of the message generally rests upon a tacit syllogism:

Whatever the Bible teaches is true.

This is something that the Bible teaches.

Therefore: This is true.

Exegesis deals with the second premise, seeking to determine just what the Bible’s teaching is. Exegesis is indispensable, and as long as our audience is restricted to those who accept the major premise, exegesis may be sufficient. There are, however, large segments of the world population that simply do not accept the major premise and consequently are very little interested in the results of our exegesis. If Braaten and Ebeling are correct, we must direct our attention to the question of the truth of Christianity. This does not presuppose that the case for Christianity can be or ought to be attempted on the unbeliever’s own terms. It may well be that, as Hordern says, the Christian apologist will have to point out to the unbeliever that his position rests upon certain faith elements, and to challenge that faith. Nonetheless, he will seek to ask and to answer the question of truth.

The second task of apologetics will be to show the signification of the Christian faith. If large numbers of contemporary persons are not convinced of the truthfulness of Christianity, it is similarly true that many modern men find it meaningless. When we speak of the tenets of our belief, they simply do not understand what we are talking about, and perhaps cannot even imagine what we could possibly be talking about. To be sure, it appears unlikely, from Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus (John 3:1–15) and his experiences with the disciples (cf. John 10:1–6), as well as from Paul’s statement in First Corinthians 2, that we will ever completely overcome this problem. Nonetheless, the communication gap between the Church and the secular world seems sharper than it has usually been in the past. Consequently, it is essential that we try to avoid making the message unnecessarily hard to understand.

To be biblical in communication is not necessarily to repeat the exact words of Scripture. I have never met a minister whose sermon consisted solely of direct biblical quotations, nor have I met a minister who gave verbatim to a group of kindergarten children the message he gave to a group of college students, or who quoted the Bible only in Greek and Hebrew to an audience of persons who did not know the biblical languages. The task is to take the essential meaning of those words and express it in language and concepts that the hearer can comprehend. If we require our missionaries to spend months in language study so they can communicate with the Japanese or the Filipino, ought we not similarly to spend time learning to speak the language of the doctor, philosopher, businessman, or truck driver? This will not be easy work, but it is important work.

A third task relates to the significance of the Christian message. Often the non-Christian does not ask questions of what Christianity is and whether it is true, because he fails to see what difference the answer to these questions would make to him. Apologetics will concern itself with this problem. It will seek to state the message in a way that relates it to the kinds of questions contemporary man is asking. Man may not always be asking the right questions, but the conversation must begin where the person is, or it will not really begin at all. The message must be related to existing persons and to their questions, not to those of a generation ago, or even five years ago. It will begin at the point of contact in the man’s consciousness, and move from there. The apologist is to present the full message of Christianity, but there are several possible beginning points. Apologetics will initially emphasize themes that relate naturally to the interests and felt needs of the hearer.

An excellent case in point is Jurgen Moltmann and The Theology of Hope (Harper & Row, 1967), in which he stresses one of the primary Christian themes: the doctrine of hope. His book is in large part a reply to the Marxist Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. One of the questions that Marxists seem particularly concerned with is man’s hope and his future. Moltmann is therefore able to engage them at this point, whereas they would probably turn a deaf ear to attempts to begin with Christianity’s other salient features.

Yet another item on the apologist’s agenda will be the need of defining the essence of Christianity. As overlooked as that title was in the nineteenth century, the question definitely needs an airing. Is Christianity essentially an experience? A way of living? A set of doctrines to be believed? A series of historical events? Or is it several or even all of these, and if so, in what proportions? Much of the debate now going on in Christian circles appears to stem from confusion and ambiguity about what is Christianity. We need to do some hard and clear thinking on this question.

A fifth task of apologetics is posing pre-theological questions. Karl Barth attempted to construct a theology in which philosophy would make no constitutive contribution. So strong was this determination that when, after the first volume of his projected Christliche Dogmatik appeared, scholars pointed out that it contained Kierkegaardian existentialism, he abandoned the project and began anew with his massive Kirchliche Dogmatik. In this he believed he had attained the cherished ideal of a philosophically sterile theology. The verdict of history, however, appears to be that Barth’s attempt failed, and that this is perhaps an indication that the attempt is a futile one.

It is my contention that theology, as a formal discipline, cannot function without adopting or assuming some philosophical basis. Theology is to the immediate affirmations of the faith (e.g., “I believe God is one and God is three”) somewhat what scientific theory and explication is to protocol sensory statements (e.g., “The book is blue”). Theology and science are attempts to ask the deeper meaning of the relatively simple statements made above. It may be that the faith statement about the Trinity (“God is one and God is three”) can be made without much philosophical involvement (though this is debatable). I challenge any theologian, however, to explain the Trinity without employing philosophical concepts. But what philosophical categories shall we use in formulating our understanding of the Trinity? Substance, process, existential, personalistic, or what? Apologetics must concern itself with this issue.

This means that some of the slogans that have become commonplace in recent years will bear intense examination. One of these is the idea that the New Testament reflects Greek ontological concepts, while the Hebrew mind of the Old Testament was more non-postulational. The implication is often left that we ought to try to get back to the pure Hebraic. Reinhold Niebuhr has said:

Christianity is commonly believed to be a joint product of Hebraic and Hellenic cultures. This is true only in the sense that, beginning with the Johannine literature in the Bible, it sought to come to terms with the Greek concept of the permanent structure in things, and has embodied in its own life the permanent tension between the Greek and the Hebraic ways of apprehending reality. But this does not change the fact that when it is true to itself, it is Hebraic rather than Hellenic [The Self and the Dramas of History, Faber and Faber, 1956, p. 89].

Yet when Niebuhr describes the Hebraic conception, it comes out sounding strangely like twentieth-century existentialism. May it be that something is happening here similar to the charge brought by George Tyrrell against the nineteenth-century liberal searcher for the historical Jesus, that he looked down through nineteen centuries of time and saw simply the reflection of a liberal Protestant face? Perhaps the contribution of Rudolf Bultmann has been in making explicit what he has been doing in giving the New Testament message an existentialist interpretation, whereas some other theologians may have been practicing this covertly.

A whole host of questions here arise. Does the Christian revelation carry a philosophy of its own? If so, how does one come to apprehend it? On what criteria does one judge which “pre-understanding” he ought to adopt? How can he become objective enough to make such an evaluation and choice? These again are hard questions, but they must be asked if we are to avoid undue distortion of the Christian message.

Yet another function of apologetics will be in sharpening our thinking and thus focusing more clearly the issues being considered. In theological discussion, as in so many other realms, progress is sometimes impeded because there is no real agreement about what the issue is. I have sat in more than one classroom discussion in which the real point of difference was not over what the answer to the question was but over how we go about finding the answer, or how we recognize that it is the correct answer when we obtain it. Apologetics concerns itself with defining the terms and isolating the issues under discussion.

William James gives a now classic example of this in an essay entitled “What Pragmatism Means.” Two men, says James, were engaged in a heated argument over whether a man “goes around” a squirrel on the side of a tree. The dispute, however, is not really what it appears to be, according to James. The real question is what it means to “go around.” If by “go around” one means to be first to the north of the squirrel, then to the west, then to the south, and then to the east, the man does indeed go around the squirrel. If, however, one means by that expression to be first on the squirrel’s right side, then behind him, then on his left side, and finally in front of him, the man does not, as anyone familiar with squirrels knows, go around the squirrel. The squirrel will always keep the tree between himself and the man. The argument is really not about a difference of fact, but rather over a definition of terms.

Real progress in the resolution of differences of opinion can come only when the issue is correctly and clearly identified. It appears to me that in our dialogue with other theologians, as well as with those outside the Christian faith, there is need for this work of clarification. The issue will not necessarily be resolved for having been clarified, but at least progress is more probable.

Apologetics also has a vital role to play in the spiritual well-being of Christians. If, as we so regularly say, man is a unified being, then his spiritual relationship to God will be affected by the intellectual problems with which he grapples. The parents whose child is dying of leukemia will find that their faith and devotion to God is disturbed by it. To be sure, the problem of evil is not always or entirely encountered on an intellectual level, but it will frequently call for some type of intellectual alleviation. I have cited the problem of evil because it is a problem for a rather large number of Christians. Others may have different problems. Some of these cannot be adequately solved within this life, but alleviation will often be helpful.

Growing disenchantment with the ecumenical movement

Despite the continued progress of the ecumenical movement, all is not well. Both the radical militants and the traditionalists have voiced uneasiness about ecumenical trends.

Recent pronouncements of world and national church councils suggest that the concern for doctrinal purity and integrity has been supplanted by a preoccupation with solving the pressing problems in society. The Church must not hesitate to speak to the moral issues of our time, but its judgments should be primarily theological, not sociological or ideological.

It also appears that the earlier missionary orientation of ecumenism is being overshadowed by a search for organizational unity. The well-known ecumenist John Mackay, in this book Christian Reality and Appearance, deplores this latest style of ecumenism and urges that there be a renewed emphasis on mission. Ian Henderson sees the call for oneness as a demand for power and maintains that ecclesiastical imperialism rather than the Gospel is the motivating force in many ecumencial conversations (see his Power Without Glory).

The distinguished Roman Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown notes that in Catholic ecumenism a biblical theological basis is no longer as evident as it was during the second Vatican Council. The new tendency is “to make much less use of Scripture”; he also opposes the “widespread ethical relativism which questions the Bible’s relevance to moral standards today” and “the evolutionary approach in theology, whose optimism about human history strongly contrasts with … biblical pessimism” (The Christian Century, June 11, 1969, p. 816).

Although evangelicals are becoming more ecumenically minded, they continue to have deep reservations about ecumenism. In The Protest of a Troubled Protestant Harold Brown points to syncretism as the greatest current danger in the ecumenical movement. He does not mention that Dr. Visser’t Hooft, former general secretary of the World Council of Churches, in a very relevant and significant book entitled No Other Name, also expressed concern that the faith not be diluted by the synthesis of Christian and pagan outlooks. Brown recognizes the difference between ecumenical conversations within Christianity and interfaith contacts; yet “to the extent that ecumenism minimizes the importance of doctrine and the content of religious ceremonies, as is currently being done in ecumenical worship, it is laying the necessary groundwork for inter-faith worship, which is religion without doctrine, without meaning, and ultimately without God” (The Protest of a Troubled Protestant, p. 36).

The Eastern Orthodox churches are also becoming increasingly disturbed about recent developments in the ecumenical movement. In a thirteen-page memo distributed by faculty members of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox seminary, the National Council of Churches was said to encourage “hasty mergers and the dilution of Christianity in secularism” (Newsweek, Feb. 9, 1970, p. 78). The memo also deplored the fact that the conciliar movement does not concern itself with the moral degradation in our society.

There is every reason to believe that ideological considerations have intruded into the faith-perspective of many ecumenical leaders. How else, for example, can one explain why James Baldwin, a hero of the New Left, was invited to address a plenary session at the Uppsala conference, but Richard Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor who spent fourteen years in a Communist prison in Romania, though present at Uppsala, was not permitted to tell the delegates about the underground church behind the iron curtain? Instead of giving an unequivocal witness to the Gospel of Christ, some of the new ecumenical liturgies accentuate themes that are marked by liberal-radical commitments.

There is indeed a pressing need to rethink the goals and purposes of ecumenism. If the ecumenical movement is not to flounder in the morass of syncretism and institutionalism, it is imperative that biblically concerned Christians within the ecumenical movement make their voice heard.

Questionable Kinds Of Ecumenism

Among the questionable kinds of ecumenical activity today is secular ecumenism. If this term meant simply a united witness in the social area, we would have no objection, but for many people it appears to signify that the very basis of unity lies in common tasks in the world. Concerted effort in the social dimension should be regarded not as a ground but as a manifestation of Christian unity. Fruitful ecumenical relations must issue in action, but such action cannot long maintain itself unless it is motivated by mission and rooted in a living faith in Jesus Christ.

Ecclesiastical ecumenism also falls short of the mark. Here the emphasis is upon organic mergers and institutional consolidation. In Roman Catholicism this is reflected in a concern for hierarchy and sacraments. Some conservative Protestants seek a return to the creeds of the Reformation or of the early Church. A prescribed liturgy and a uniform polity are among the goals of the ecclesiastical ecumenists. The truth they are trying to preserve is that real unity does entail visible embodiment as well as spiritual kinship.

Yet it is possible to have altar and pulpit fellowship as a sign of visible unity without structural unification. A world church may be in the providential plan of God, but this would be more a fruit than a goal of ecumenical endeavor. John Mackay has given this warning: “When Christian unity is equated with institutional oneness and episcopal control, and when both these are regarded as indispensable for real unity, let this not be forgotten: the most unified ecclesiastical structure in Christian history was the Hispanic Catholic Church, which was also the most spiritually sterile and the most disastrously fanatical” (Christian Reality and Appearance, p. 88).

Then there is the spiritualistic kind of ecumenism. In this case the basis for unity is seen to be a common religious experience or the inner light. Those who are inclined to spiritualism almost invariably have a docetic view of the Church. The real or “essential” church is equated with the invisible fellowship of believers, and the institutional church is a mask or cloak that hides more than it reveals the spiritual fellowship. Bonhoeffer in his Sanctorum Communio argues effectively against this position, for he shows that the Church can exist only in visible form. The charismatic revival that has penetrated Catholic as well as Protestant churches exemplifies a spiritualistic ecumenism: the ground of unity is seen as a renewal of the experience of Pentecost. To dispute this is not to deny the very solid contributions of the neo-Pentecostals to the missionary thrust of the Church in our time, but to insist that every movement and theology must be subjected to the critical scrutiny of the biblical Word.

Too often the spiritualists within the Church are inclined to doctrinal indifference and even syncretism, since what is sought is not a unity in truth but an experiential unity. To be sure, our unity is centered in a common faith in a single Lord, and this faith entails experience as well as trust. But the ground of our unity is in the object of faith, the Word of God—the person of Jesus Christ and the biblical witness to him.

Evangelical Ecumenism

True ecumenism will be both evangelical and catholic. It will try to maintain continuity with the tradition but at the same time seek the purification of this tradition in the light of the Word of God in the Bible. It will also be outreaching: its aim will be to include the whole world under the banner of Christ. Indeed, this aspect of ecumenism is closely related to the original meaning of ecumenical (oikumene)—worldwide.

An evangelical and truly catholic ecumenism will seek not the unity of various religious traditions but instead their conversion to the Gospel of Christ. It will be the opposite of eclectic, for it acknowledges a definitive revelation of the truth in history. At the same time it will endeavor to bring the message of this revelation to all peoples. It will seek a common witness to Jesus Christ in word and deed, and this may entail organic union. But it will involve a visible unity under the cross of Christ, a unity that finds its embodiment in mission.

Evangelical ecumenism will be confessional, but not in the sense of calling for an uncritical submission to confessions of the past. On the contrary, those who are open to the Word of God today will boldly venture to forge new confessions that preserve the integrity of the faith in our age. A true confession, as Arthur Cochrane has aptly pointed out in The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, will negate and exclude as well as affirm. A confession of faith must embody a specific word of God that is directed against particular threats to the faith either within or outside the Church. Among these threats in our time are evolutionary naturalism, relativism, universalism, neo-mysticism, and racism.

One reason why Christians of an evangelical, biblical persuasion are wary of the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) is that it proposes organic merger without a prior agreement on doctrinal matters. A true church will seek to live on the basis of a confession of faith that gives it direction and purpose. To unite in the hope that some agreement will result at a future time is to put the cart before the horse.

Evangelical ecumenism also insists that there cannot be reunion in the true sense apart from inward spiritual renewal. The Vatican Council document “Decree on Ecumenism” reflects this truth: “There can be no ecumenism worthy of the name without a change of heart. For it is from newness of attitudes, from self-denial and unstinted love, that yearnings for unity take their rise and grow toward maturity” (II, 7).

The spirit of evangelical ecumenism is present as much within Roman Catholicism as within mainline denominational Protestantism, and perhaps more so. No one has sounded the call to unity more forcefully than Hans Küng, but he constantly reminds us that unity does not necessarily mean union with centralized control. Küng opposes the vision of a monarchial, absolutist, centralized church that seems so often to preoccupy the conciliar movement. Those who stand in the tradition of evangelical and Reformed Protestantism could surely affirm with Küng: “The road to unity is not the return of one Church to another, or the exodus of one Church to join another, but a common crossroads, the conversion of all Churches to Christ and thus to one another” (The Church, p. 290).

At the same time other voices within Roman Catholicism appear to locate unity in the spirit of good will or in a common pursuit of truth. Many Catholic scholars seek as their ecumenical partners Protestant liberals who practically abandon the heritage of the Reformation. An evangelical ecumenist will insist that we cannot attain true unity without taking into account the achievements of the Reformation. A Catholic theologian as astute as Louis Bouyer has acknowledged that the Reformation preserved essential Catholic truths: the primal authority of Scripture, justification by grace, and faith alone (sola fide). Evangelical ecumenists will recognize the Protestant Reformation as a tragic necessity in the history of the Church, for although it sundered church unity, it also recovered for a time the biblical evangel, apart from which Christian unity is merely a façade.

Bonhoeffer’s Legacy

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is the spiritual mentor of many secular theologians, nevertheless contended that serious theology must be anchored in a concern for biblical and doctrinal truth. Though active in the ecumenical movement, he was at the same time sharply critical of trends that are very much apparent now. He observed in 1932: “The really disquieting problem of ecumenical work is not the relationship between organism and organization but that between truth and untruth in the preaching of the different churches” (No Rusty Swords, p. 157). He warned: “The Churches in the World Alliance have no common recognition of the truth. … We may not play with the truth, or else it will destroy us” (p. 172). A Roman Catholic scholar has observed: “To Bonhoeffer the ecumenical struggle was not a matter of ‘dialogue’ in the talkative, compliant sense, nor of an easy concession of doctrinal conflicts for a cheap unity; it was the search for integral Christian truth” (W. Kuhns, In Pursuit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 69).

Bonhoeffer understood the essential task of the Church as the proclamation of the Gospel and the restoration of sinners. “The word of the Church is the call to conversion, the call to belief in the love of God in Christ” (Ethics, p. 357). He emphatically stated that the mission of the Church is not to solve the problems of the world, but at the same time he declared that the Church should relate to these problems and challenge them. He believed that fruitful ecumenical relations must issue in action, but that they must begin on the basis of the biblical proclamation. The word of truth must be applied to the world in which we live, but it must always remain the word of truth. Though he sought a concrete and compelling witness to the truth, his overriding concern was with the truth itself, the crucified and risen Christ.

Bonhoeffer was an authentic evangelical ecumenist, and this is why his writings have a catholic relevance. He avoided both a narrow evangelical sectarianism, which opposes dialogue with fellow Christians of other doctrinal persuasions, and a sub-Christian eclecticism that substitutes the universal quest for truth for the biblical imperative to witness to the truth. This is not to suggest, however, that we concur with all his conclusions, for sometimes he diverged from the scriptural norm, particularly in the belief expressed in his Ethics that all men are included in the kingdom of Christ.

A Prognosis

I hesitate to predict the future course of the ecumenical movement, but I can suggest one possibility on the basis of present trends. Instead of one church, there might very well be two churches emerging in the not too distant future. One of these will be hierarchical, monolithic, and syncretic, concerned with worldly power more than biblical truth. The other will be evangelical, spiritual, charismatic, and authentically catholic. The spiritual church will be a church under the Bible intent on bringing the world under the dominion of Christ; the worldly church will be a church that practically deifies its own tradition and external forms. The spiritual church will be missionary-minded: it will see its mission as going into the world and upholding Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the lost. The worldly church will seek to promote dialogues with the world religions as well as with Marxism and other forms of secular humanism, in order to discover a common unity. The spiritual church will be intolerant and exclusive in matters of faith, but its intolerance will be based upon the love of Jesus Christ that goes out to all men. The worldly church will seek to advance itself and therefore will be preoccupied with correct forms of ministry and polity. The spiritual or charismatic church will gladly die for the advancement of the Kingdom of God and the conversion of the lost. There will be a noticeable tension between the spiritual church and the secular culture, whereas the worldly church will tend to reflect and embody the values and goals of the culture.

True ecumenism does not deny structural unity, but it does seek to bring all things in subjection to Jesus Christ and his Gospel. It does not even rule out the papacy, but, as Bonhoeffer has affirmed, “only a Pope who submitted unreservedly to the word of the Bible could be the shepherd of a united Christendom” (Ethics, p. 94). May error within the ecumenical movement be exposed, and may the truth of the Gospel be triumphant!

God’s law that all men shall reap as they sow operates inexorably, and America seems to be reaping a bumper crop of dissension, disaffection, and hatred. Some of the causes are easy to see. One is the dialectic that undergirds Communism, historic materialism. This philosophy is purely humanistic and is viciously anti-God, not simply agnostic or neutral. Humanism has dug deep into the churches, and their present troubles are in large measure due to the humanistic, secularistic stance of some who still profess to be Christians. Until humanism has been met and overcome, the churches will continue to decline.

In this issue college president Everett Cattell suggests that students be given tuition grants that they could use in the colleges of their choice. He sees this as a way out of the pressing financial predicament of privately supported religious and secular schools. His remarks are distinctly controversial, and I’m sure not all our readers will agree with him all the way. But the problem must be aired. Bruce Lockerbie analyzes the contemporary theater and asserts that Christians don’t have to immerse themselves in filth to be relevant.

July 4 will bring a great assemblage of people to the nation’s capital for an Honor America Day that includes among its sponsors Billy Graham and Bob Hope. Patriotism is no sin, and love of country is essential for a strong and progressive society. I still love America and hope it will ever be the land of the brave and the free.

For months the British secular and religious press had hummed with controversy because a South African cricket team chosen on apartheid lines was due to play in England this summer. Bishops who had no known views on the new morality and who had maintained stoical reticence at rumors of God’s death showed that after all some things are too sacred for silence: there followed the wondrous spectacle of bishop pitted against bishop, expressing themselves on this issue with that deadly English courtesy which can be more terrible than any medieval malediction.

Last year the white South African rugby football team was here. Match after match was marked by uproar. Thousands of police were deployed, hundreds of anti-apartheid demonstrators were arrested. As in recent American and present Ulster and South African occasions, the left wing came under suspicion (what would we do without “subversive elements”?). Then it was noticed that some leading churchmen and a fair proportion of the respectable middle-aged were marching, too. Perhaps the full implications of the Rhodesian tragedy (it is no less) were making themselves felt. The argument that relations with South Africa, never cordial since that country’s withdrawal from the British Commonwealth in 1961, could be improved through sporting links became less convincing in the context of two white teams in competition.

Demands came from many quarters, including the British Council of Churches, that the 1970 cricket tour be canceled. Young hotheads defaced cricket grounds and promised physical disruption of the matches. Freelance entomologists claimed to be breeding locusts, half a million of which would devour the grassy surface so necessary for the game. Kidnap threats were made to cricketing families. The cricket council stood firm, saying cancellation would have to be a government decision—a neat bit of hot-potato-passing to a prime minister who had himself encouraged peaceful demonstrations, but whose party’s bid for reelection for a further term of office was ironically due to be decided on June 18—the very day of the first England-South Africa game.

It should be understood that peaceful demonstration was the object of the majority of protesters, one of whose leaders is David Sheppard, old England cricket captain and new bishop of Woolwich (distinguished from the old by one sports writer who speaks of “the good cricketer, not the bad theologian”). The Wilson government operated brinkmanship to the utmost but finally was driven to “request” that the cricket council cancel the tour. Heady with success, the young non-peaceable protesters plan further action, such as renewed boycott of South African goods. This led to a cartoon in which a father is saying to his hippie offspring. “You’re quite right, son. It’s immoral to live on the earnings of trade with South Africa, and I expect you’ll insist on handing back part of your student grant.”

Disingenuous, yes, but it shows how singlemindedness and myopia sometimes go together. While appreciating the fallacy inherent in diverting attention from one evil by pointing to another, I have grave misgivings about our violent young. Do they show as much compassion for those victimized in Prague as in Pretoria? Do they work less spectacularly and more constructively to improve relations in their own communities? When next the Australian cricket team comes to these islands, will there be demonstrations against that country’s treatment of its aboriginals (one of whom claimed last year that his race’s exclusion from the armed forces was apartheid in reverse)? Indeed, looking round our far-flung British commonwealth of nations, one could find evidence that every color, including white, is somewhere the victim of discrimination.

One does not need to range the world for examples, for they are close at hand; no one comes to this subject with clean hands. Even for many Christians it involves selective indignation, and the temptation to isolate one single evil from its background of a whole fallen world. For years Britain boasted that it had no race problem. Now we are obliged to think differently. The Race Relations Act came into force in 1965, and its provisions were extended in 1968. Honest attempts to observe it and deliberate attempts to evade it have shown how difficult things are.

The authorities have done their best but have at times forsaken imagination for scrupulosity, and a farcical situation has emerged. The Race Relations Act is laudably color blind and cares not whether a man’s origins are Tongan or tartan. An exiled Scottish physician advertised in an English newspaper for a “Scottish daily [domestic] for Scottish family; able to do some plain cooking”—in other words, someone who could prepare porridge properly. The doctor was warned by the race-relations board that an offense had been committed, as the wording displayed racial discrimination. Little wonder that advertisers for French polishers and Siamese cats became neurotic about rushing into print. The board censured a Pakistani who advertised in the window of his own home for an English lodger who could help teach his five children the English language. A well-known columnist complained in his newspaper that after the taxi he had ordered had been appropriated by a Negro, he could not call the latter a thieving scoundrel, though he manifestly was.

A country town not far from London found that 95 per cent of its citizens did not want colored neighbors. Ghettos have sprung up; London has some schools in which children from immigrant families form more than 80 per cent of the enrollment. In East London, “Paki(stani)-bashing” has become a regular sport of youthful thugs known as “skinheads.” Second-generation immigrants are now old and able enough to apply for employment with higher qualification than the white English. The reasons given for rejection by employers will have a familiar ring to Americans: existing staff wouldn’t like it; customers would object; immigrants are reputedly indolent and footloose. The ambivalence of trade-union attitudes in some cases has prompted satirical challenge on the vaunted brotherhood of man.

Needless to say, I’ve done no more than give a few illustrations of something that will trouble Britain deeply and increasingly in years to come. The sting came when an Indian Christian said in a symposium on race: “It is impossible to distinguish in Britain between a Christian and a non-Christian by his behavior. Where the colored immigrant is concerned they all behave alike.” Said one immigrant woman with magnificent charity: “I studied the people. It’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the weather makes them like that.” Take that in conjunction with the Anglican bishop who planned to foil the South African cricketers by having his people pray for rain, and you can see just how muddled the whole thing is.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Reports of torture of political prisoners prompted the Lutheran World Federation to move the site of its Fifth Assembly. The meeting will take place July 14–24, not in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it was originally scheduled, but in the small French town of Evian-les-Bains, near Geneva, Switzerland.

LWF officials said they “regretfully concluded that conditions for a strictly working assembly no longer exist in Porto Alegre where the meeting was planned.… The declarations made by several delegations that they would refuse to participate in an assembly in Porto Alegre and the reaction in Brazil to the LWF’s decision that it would refrain from extending an invitation to the federal government representatives is indicative of the tensions which would impair the intended working character of the assembly.”

The statement was issued just four days after the Geneva-based LWF had reaffirmed a decision to meet in Brazil but said that no representatives from the Brazilian government would be invited to attend. The Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil, host to the Porto Alegre conference, wanted to have President Emilio Medici on hand.

The shift represents a major victory for religious liberals who have been in the forefront of a campaign that seeks to establish that the military government of Brazil is conducting a “reign of terror” against leftists.

The LWF has no legislative power over its member churches, which together make up the largest Protestant communion in the world. Its recommendations and study documents, however, have considerable weight, and its relief and rehabilitation programs are among the most extensive conducted by religious agencies. The LWF meets only once every six years.

The controversy seems to have begun with stories in secular newspapers in Europe. Reports indicate that documentary evidence was in hand showing that political prisoners were being mercilessly tortured in Brazil. Early reports also spoke of massacres of Brazilian Indians. Official Brazilian response has been to minimize the extent of atrocities and to deny government complicity.

During May and June, a number of liberal religious periodicals in the United States began carrying the torture reports. These reports cited the murder a year ago of a priest working in the poverty-laden northeast section of Brazil, Fr. Antonio Henrique Pereira Neto. They say that clergymen, mostly Roman Catholics, have been the second largest target of oppression and torture. The chief victims are said to be students. The death last November of a 23-year-old Jewish medical student was attributed to beatings suffered at the hands of Rio de Janeiro police.

One celebrated friend of the victims has been Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Recife and Olinda. He brought the matter to the attention of Pope Paul last January. The Pope’s public response was that “the church will tolerate no longer the commission of atrocities and tortures in a country that calls itself Christian.” Thus far secular media have not carried substantial confirmation of the torture reports.

Attention has been focused on Brazil not only because the LWF was to have met there but because the country is the largest Roman Catholic nation in the world and has the largest number of Protestants in Latin America.

LWF officials said bravely that “changing the site of the assembly does not exempt the LWF from obligations presented by the theme ‘Sent into the world.’ It will be the task of the assembly to analyze and learn from the present difficulties and to define its witness as a fellowship of churches. It will be the task of the assembly to analyze and learn from the present difficulties and to define its witness as a fellowship of churches. The present discussion demonstrates that in effect the assembly has already started.”

The New Congo Superchurch

The Congo Protestant Council (CPC), an association of forty-seven missionary societies and forty-one Congolese churches, had never been known for harboring any ecumenical passions. In 1962, a telephone call from CPC headquarters in Kinshasa forced the editor of Envol to replace the word ecumenical in an article by the word worldwide. Two years later, at the CPC’s forty-third General Assembly in Lubumbashi, a proposal by an American missionary that the CPC should develop into a more “concrete form of Christian unity” was overwhelmingly defeated.

But things were surprisingly different last year, when the council held its forty-eighth General Assembly at the Catholic Center in Nganda. Christian unity became the major topic of discussion, and was identified by assembly officials as “part of the political scheme for re-unifying the nation.”

A resolution requested the National Executive Committee to draw up a draft constitution for a superchurch structure, as a means of “ensuring the organic unity of the Church of Christ in the Congo, consistent with the spiritual unity which already exists.” Another resolution deplored “the shameful conflicts and divisions” between church and mission and urged missions to proceed with all deliberate speed to merge themselves into the churches. Wherever a church had no legal status, the mission was asked to bequeath its own to the church.

The meeting left many persons worried and unhappy. An evangelical prayer bulletin later commented that “democratic procedures left much to be desired” at that meeting, and that following the meeting, “any Congolese Evangelical standing up for his faith and for his right of free religious expression faces the accusation of being unpatriotic.”

The general meeting in Kinshasa this year left even more people more perplexed and displeased. After a brief, tense opening session, attended by the Congo’s minister of justice, Bruno Ndala, the delegates lost little time in getting down to the question of church unity.

Dr. Pierre Shiumba, honorary general secretary of the CPC, made a spirited plea in favor of the proposed superchurch, which he said was what the African Christians of the Congo wanted. “We just want to be free to determine our own future, to form our own church,” he declared. “The mission era is finished.”

Jean Massamba, assistant director of the Kinshasa Theological School, presided over the sessions and developed the conference theme, “Christ Makes All Things New,” in his morning devotional messages. He asked missionaries to “recognize that the Spirit is doing a new thing in Africa. He is revealing to Africa in a greater way the scriptural truth of Christian unity, something which the European (and American) churches have failed to demonstrate.”

Sensing the rather anti-missionary tone of some of the official speeches, Noah Kabeya, a professional diplomat and an active Presbyterian layman, advised that serious attention be given to the decisions in progress lest difficulties arise later. He reminded his fellow Congolese of a situation of which they are only too sadly aware: “The problem in some government offices is a lack of cooperation between officials who have authority but lack ability, and technicians who have ability but not authority.” “Missionaries must continue to work and cooperate with the church,” he concluded, “because the church has need of help just as a grown daughter needs help and advice from her father.”

The Reverend Benedict Assani, president of the Association of Evangelicals in the Congo, said that while the evangelicals fully supported the CPC on the mission-church merger issue, they felt it was too soon to talk about organic union.

A number of delegates, including the Reverend Jean Ruhigita, second vice-president of the assembly, stated that their churches were not interested, and would never be interested, in organic union, as this appeared to them to be a step backward toward Catholics.

The debate was stormy; though about unity, it sadly lacked the spirit of unity. The Reverend Jean Bokeleale, CPC secretary general, was forced by the circumstances to call two special sessions behind closed doors, one for only the Congolese participants and the other for only the missionaries.

At these sessions, the necessity for immediate organic union was carefully explained. Attention was called to an observation by Senegalese president Leopold Senghor that “he who has the Congo has Africa.” The Congo, it was explained, is large and strategic, and holds the hopes of black Africa for leadership in all fields. Christians in the Congo must therefore unite, not only to strengthen national unity but also to exert effective and united influence on the government.

Again, it was explained, the Congolese church needed a new identity, and needed to shake off missionary domination, symbolized by the existence of missions as separate institutions and the denominational distinctions. Some missionaries were said to have exploited “the naïveté and ignorance of Congolese to encourage and provoke conflicts.”

After eight days of heated debating, the Church of Christ in the Congo was voted into official existence at 2:30 A.M. on Sunday, March 8, 1970. Of the voting members, thirty-two voted in favor of the new superchurch, fourteen voted against, and two abstained.

The CCC is the largest nationwide organic union of churches in Africa. There is probably no national church as inclusive anywhere in the world. Individual churches are free to retain their denominational labels and organizational structures, their distinctive doctrinal beliefs, and even their own legal status with the government. But they will be referred to as “communities” rather than “churches.” A “community” retains its membership in the superchurch so long as it continues to “accept Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, and the Bible as the basis of faith.”

The new superchurch has also adopted “a policy of neutrality with relation to all foreign religious movements, notably the World Evangelical Fellowship and the World Council of Churches.”

“All things new” in the Congo; but, as the editor of Congo Mission News, Robert Niklaus, points out, “the mandate of extending Christ’s kingdom on earth remains unchanged. The only variation will be the size and variety of ministry by a growing Church in a growing Congo.”

ODHIAMBO W. OKITE

The Americas’ Greatest Natural Disaster?

Church relief agencies are appealing for special help to alleviate suffering caused by the Peruvian earthquake, which one observer termed “the greatest natural disaster in the Western Hemisphere.”

There are said to be at least 35,000 known dead. Some think the toll may rise to 60,000.

Among the first church agencies reporting that they were sending help were Church World Service (the relief arm of the National Council of Churches), the Salvation Army, and the United Methodist Committee for Overseas Relief.

Wilson O. Radway, CWS operations director, said: “I went to Peru to see the damage for myself and to see how best the churches might respond beyond emergency shipments. I have seen the aftermath of many disasters; I have never seen anything to match this one.”

Radway said there have been worse earthquakes (some 180,000 were killed in China in 1920 and some 143,000 died in Tokyo in 1923). But he declared that the two earthquakes in Peru on May 31 and June 1 “represent the greatest natural disaster in the Western Hemisphere.”

Local congregations everywhere were urged to plan special appeals for funds to aid the survivors.

Irish Turmoil Scrutinized

A joint statement issued by four church leaders in Northern Ireland contends that religious differences are not the primary cause of the continuing violence there.

The statement from the Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Methodist churches asserts that the “serious and deep divisions … arise from deep and complex causes—historical, political, and social.”

New light was shed on the problem in May when Prime Minister Jack Lynch of the predominantly Catholic Irish Republic fired two of his cabinet members and then had them arrested for gun-running. Charles Haughey, former finance minister, and Neil Blaney, former agriculture minister, were taken into custody along with two other men. Lynch alleged that they were mixed up in a plot to smuggle in guns and ship them to the Protestant-ruled British territory of Northern Ireland, where Catholic elements have been battling discrimination. Right-wing elements in the fray are worried that Catholics want to cut Northern Ireland’s ties with Britain so that the Emerald Isle can be “re-united” and the Protestants be subjected to Catholic domination.

Lodge At The Vatican: An Ironic Envoy

In 1960, John F. Kennedy, in his campaign for the U.S. presidency, questioned the value of an American government representative at the Vatican and vowed he would not appoint any. He didn’t. Nobody bothered to raise the question with the other contender, Richard M. Nixon, or his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge. Ten years later it appears that maybe they should have been asked that question.

Nixon, upon assuming the presidency in 1969, said he was considering appointment of a Vatican ambassador. He later said he would not. Last month, the White House announced that the President would dispatch an emissary to the Pope after all. The choice: Henry Cabot Lodge.

Lodge, it was explained, is representing the U. S. government at the Vatican. Senate confirmation of his selection is unneeded, however, because he does not have ambassadorial rank. All his expenses are being paid by the government but he is not to receive a salary as such. Whether the “expenses” include payment of a generous consultant-type remuneration was not immediately clear. Lodge, 68, is to visit the Vatican two or three times a year and stay from two to four weeks at a time. He is an Episcopalian.

Personalia

Dr. Richard Jungkuntz, 51, was appointed provost at Pacific Lutheran University, which is affiliated with the American Lutheran Church. Jungkuntz was until recently the executive director of the Commission on Theology and Church Relations for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. He failed to win reappointment to that post.

Pope Paul VI will go to Australia and the Philippines in November. It will be the 72-year-old pontiff’s ninth trip outside Italy.

Dr. Dillwyn T. Evans was elected moderator of the ninety-sixth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. The 52-year-old Evans, born in Wales, is a pastor in Thornhill, Ontario.

Edward B. Fiske of the New York Times was given this year’s William B. Leidt award by the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church for the “best religious writing in the secular press.”

Dr. Leslie Parrott was elected president of Eastern Nazarene College. He has been pastor of the First Church of the Nazarene in Portland, Oregon.

Dr. James Hastings Nichols was appointed academic dean of Princeton Theological Seminary. He has taught church history at Princeton since 1962.

The Rev. Olan Hendrix was appointed general director of the 153-year-old American Sunday School Union, with headquarters in Philadelphia. He is a former home secretary for the Far Eastern Gospel Crusade.

Religion In Transit

A federal court in Providence handed down a unanimous ruling declaring unconstitutional a 1969 Rhode Island law that authorized the state to pay part of the salaries of parochial school teachers.

The Federal Communications Commission granted a construction permit to the Radio Prayer League to install a new transmitter and increase the power of its station KJNP, North Pole, Alaska, to 50,000 watts, with unlimited hours of operation day and night.

A nude couple received communion in Minneapolis during an American Lutheran Church district convention. The only reported “hostility” to the young pair came from a white-haired man who was headed in the opposite direction to partake of the elements. He turned and slapped the girl’s buttocks.

The Baptist Standard reported a record weekly circulation of 376,535. The figure represents the biggest circulation among all periodicals, secular or religious, in Texas. The Standard serves the state’s 1,800,000 Baptists through more than 100 regional editions.

A new hymnal for Spanish-speaking United Methodists is expected to be published by 1973.

A grant of $100,700 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will help the county of Maui, Hawaii, restore Hale Aloha Congregational Church, one of the island’s most historic landmarks.

A new journal will be published by the Northern and Southern Provinces of the Moravian Church in America starting this September. It will take the place of the Moravian and the Wachovia Moravia, the two monthly publications of the provinces.… The quarterly theological journal published by the American Church Union,American Church Quarterly, has changed its name to the Church Theological Review.

The World Fellowship of Buddhists, an ecumenical body probably representing the world’s largest religious grouping, will hold a twentieth-anniversary meeting in Ceylon in May, 1971. At least four issues of stamps made by Asia’s Buddhist nations and 200,000 commemorative coins will mark the event.

The influential Southern Baptist press lined up behind a denominational decision to revise a controversial new book, but questioned the spirit in which the move was made. A survey of seventeen state papers showed wide support of the action taken by messengers to the 1970 sessions of the Southern Baptist Convention in Denver. There seemed to be more concern, however, about the way the messengers went about it.

One editor denounced the “vitriolic, hostile, accusative, unforgiving, prideful, arrogant and often downright abusive attitudes and words of many of the preachers who spoke [at Denver] in defense of the Bible.” Another lamented the fact that “unknown men who have never proven themselves grab the microphone and sway the messengers while proven leadership is ignored.” But most seemed to agree the messengers were right in ordering the Baptist Sunday School Board to recall and rewrite the first volume of the Broadman Bible Commentary. The most outspoken dissent was expressed by the Capital Baptist of Washington, D. C., which called the convention action a “big mistake.”

Other reaction came from New York, where officers of the Religious Publishers Group of the American Book Publishers Council issued a protest against withdrawal of the volume. They said that “to suppress or bowdlerize a book on the ground that it questions traditional thought is to deny the value of thought itself.” (See the editorial on page 21.)

The 472-page book in question is the initial volume in a set of twelve scheduled to be released by 1972. It contains several introductory articles on the whole Bible as well as a commentary on Genesis and Exodus. Dr. Clifton J. Allen, former editorial secretary of the Sunday School Board, is general editor. He asserts at the outset his preference for the “dynamic view” of the inspiration of Scripture (as over against verbal and plenary inspiration). “To the writer of this article,” he says, “the problems of the dynamic view of inspiration, though real, do not invalidate this view of the Scriptures. The problems are resolved by reverent faith in the Lord of the Scriptures and in the Scriptures themselves as the Word of God, in wholeness and unity in Christ.”

In another introductory article, Dr. John I. Durham of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, commenting on source analysis, declares that the approach of contemporary Old Testament study to Pentateuchal criticism recognizes within the Pentateuch “anachronisms, repetition, conflicting accounts, a variety of large and small discrepancies, differing conceptions of God, and several markedly different writing styles.” He adds that this approach “has led most contemporary scholars to the view that the Pentateuch known to us is neither a unity nor, when considered as a whole, a composition of Moses.”

About 20,000 copies of the book reportedly have been printed and about 10,000 of these have already been sold. The convention’s action to withdraw the volume was adopted by a vote of 5,394 to 2,170. James Sullivan, executive secretary of the Sunday School Board, said the board would meet August 12 and 13 and that its members “will give general guidelines concerning the procedure for complying with the convention’s requests.” The motion asked the board to see that the commentary was rewritten “with due consideration of the conservative viewpoint.”

What does the new president of the convention think of the commentary? “Personally, I’ve never found any single set of commentaries that satisfy me,” said Dr. Carl E. Bates, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charlotte, North Carolina. He added that he had “every confidence in the people who have committed themselves to this task.”

Bates, 56, holds a high view of Scripture itself. He was converted to Christ as a young man in New Orleans. Broke and out of work during the depression, he was roaming the streets when someone gave him a job in a hotel, then a room, and there he read a Gideon Bible. That led to his conversion.

Reformed Church In America: Weighing A Wedge

After hearing a committee that worked for a year to seek reconciliation in the Reformed Church in America, the denomination’s top governing body struggled five days without deciding how to keep the nation’s oldest communion together.

Delegates to the annual General Synod meeting at Hope College, Holland, Michigan, went home wondering whether they had helped solve the church’s problems or had added to the fragmentation. In trying to ease pressures, they took tentative steps toward giving more decison-making power to the denomination’s lower judicatories.

“Regionalism” was proposed by a special committee of eighteen named in 1969 to resolve differences. The General Synod decided, however, that “regionalism” was too strong a word, and asked its own executive committee (a continuing body) to study “regionalization” and submit plans for implementing this concept next year.

By a thirteen-vote margin, the delegates refused to accept a judicial business committee’s attempt to recognize a form of regional self-determination. In doing so, they took a position opposite to that taken in May by the United Presbyterian General Assembly. At issue was a “united (joint) synod” formed by New Jersey judicatories of the two denominations.

The judicial business panel recommended that a complaint against the constitutionality of the New Jersey action be dismissed. The court defeated the recommendation on a 124–137 vote and then directed its New Jersey particular synod to submit another plan in 1971 for General Synod consideration. (The United Presbyterian assembly at Chicago upheld the joint body’s constitutionality on a split vote, but the margin of difference was greater.)

The national body also defeated, on a voice vote, a motion from a framer of the joint synod plan that the General Synod form two provinces to handle certain controversial issues. An “escape clause” in the proposal would have allowed conservative congregations to transfer from a liberal-dominated province and vice versa.

One unprecedented step was taken toward regional decision-making on a thorny issue. A constitutional amendment to give congregations the right to ordain women got over the first hurdle at Holland, but it must be approved by two-thirds of the classes (presbyteries) and the next General Synod before it becomes effective. The amendment gives classes the option of allowing their congregations to name women officers.

While this freedom would be welcomed in the eastern wing of the denomination, it may not get the approval of classes in the western sector. Proposed amendments that would have allowed distaff officers throughout the church have repeatedly failed to get the approval of two-thirds of the classes.

One action was designed to meet an objection from the western wing, traditionally opposed to the World and National Councils of Churches. Undesignated contributions for the central administration of the councils (amounting to about 5.5 cents per member annually) were removed from the General Synod per capita assessment budget. The RCA gifts to the general funds of the councils will hereafter come from voluntary sources.

One traditional recognition of the two regions was repeated in the election of General Synod officers. Retiring president Norman Vincent Peale of New York was succeeded by Professor Lester Kuyper of Western Seminary in Holland. The new vice-president is Christian H. Walvoord, former education executive in the denomination and now a pastor at New Paltz, New York.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Southern Presbyterians: Clashing In Memphis

For nearly three days the 110th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church U. S. (Southern) had ascended a growing mountain of reports and recommendations with near unanimity—on the surface, at least.

There was no serious threat to approval “for study and response” of the Consultation on Church Union plan for joining Southern Presbyterians and eight other Protestant denominations in a proposed Church of Christ Uniting.

Dr. Robert Strong of Montgomery, Alabama, pointed out, however, that lack of opposition to study of the COCU plan in no way implied support by commissioners (voting delegates) for that plan or for proposals being framed for union with the United Presbyterian Church.

And so it went in Second Presbyterian Church, Memphis, Tennessee, until the 1970 assembly came within eleven emotion-packed votes of labeling a church publication “profane, blasphemous and immoral.”

The vote not to do so was 189 to 179. It came after a vigorous debate on Colloquy, a monthly magazine published “especially for youth” by the United Church of Christ, but with the cooperation of United and Southern Presbyterians. By its negative vote, the General Assembly rejected the request of twenty-five commissioners “to order” the church’s Board of Christian Education to sever its ties with the magazine. The defeated resolution criticized language and photographs used in the publication, which recently received an award from the Associated Church Press for “outstanding performance” in religious journalism.

Until the Colloquy matter was introduced, the only closely contested order of assembly business had been the election of a moderator. Dr. William A. Benfield, Jr., Charleston, West Virginia, pastor who is chairman of the COCU Plan of Union Commission, squeaked to victory by a vote of 217 to 212. His opponent was an Atlanta minister, Dr. Harry A. Fifield.

JOHN F. NELSON

Adventist Urgency: Race And Missions

Urgency, said Kenneth H. Wood, editor of the Seventh-day Adventist magazine Review and Herald, is a good one-word description of the movement formally organized 105 years ago at Battle Creek, Michigan, with 3,500 members. Last month the Adventists plainly showed they have lost none of the zeal or urgency that characterized the young church. Now, with world membership hovering at the two-million mark, Seventh-day Adventists still boldly assert that Christ’s return is imminent, and that the advent message of their “remnant church” has been uniquely tailored by God for these times.

The strategy, declared outgoing general secretary W. R. Beach at the quadrennial Adventist General Conference in Atlantic City’s monstrous Convention Hall, is a self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending church in every land. He added that it was a church advancing in racial integration, for anything less would “eat the heart out of a world church.”

The race question was much on the mind of the 1,710 official delegates and some 35,000 observers and guests who swelled attendance to near-capacity on weekends. “We cannot love people on the Sabbath with our speech and dehumanize them the other six days by our actions,” said SDA world president Robert H. Pierson in his Sabbath sermon. He appealed for an end to misunderstanding.

A few, however, charged the Seventh-day church with a “callous and racist attitude.” And before the ten-day conference was over, there had been several minor confrontations, long talks between officials and spokesmen for activist Adventists (mostly black), and the passage of a strong resolution by the world body recognizing “that prejudices and discrimination are sins.”

Immediately after the resolution passed (it appeared to be unanimous, but dissenters weren’t given an opportunity to vote against it), the North American Division received for study a statement from a group calling itself Black United Constituents. That document had a familiar sound; it contained some of the same recommendations that black groups within the mainline denominations have been making to their officials for the past several years. Among them: more black leadership at top administrative levels, black-controlled unions (jurisdictional units of the church similar to synods), and more denominational money channeled to inner-city and black causes. (About 15 per cent of the church’s North American membership of 426,000 is said to be black.)

Despite the seeming preoccupation with race, the dominant theme of the convention stressed missions and holding fast to the Seventh-day doctrines of biblical literalism and the pure gospel message untainted by social activism. Some 800 missionaries, representing 193 countries, marched into the hall in a mammoth mission pageant. Many, garbed in colorful native dress, then filed out to mingle with startled participants in an Elks’ parade tooting down Atlantic City’s famous boardwalk. The church has sent out 18,000 missionaries since 1900.

Mission-mindedness is largely responsible for the denomination’s rapid growth—which persists despite the decline facing most major Christian bodies. World SDA membership grew 23.7 per cent between 1966 and 1969, with a gain of 5.8 per cent last year (North American membership climbed 3 per cent in 1969). Giving rose 8.2 per cent last year.

Theological liberalism seems to have made nary a dent in the SDA armor. A reporter could find no one at the convention willing to question either the SDA’s millennialist views or the prophetic utterances of its revered Ellen G. White.

The ecumenical movement is anathema to Seventh-day Adventists: the end result, according to one official will be the lowest common denominator in beliefs and coercion stemming from an unholy alliance between the state and the “fallen Babylon” of denominationalism. (Putting it more tactfully, if less graphically, President Pierson said in an interview: “To join the National or World Councils of Churches more closely than we are at present would not help us in maintaining the Word of God.”)

Pierson, 59, was elected to a second term; he has served since 1966. Also returned to office was Kenneth H. Emmerson, 52, treasurer, and Neal C. Wilson, 49, who heads the church’s work in North America. Replacing Beach, 68, who has been general secretary of the world church for sixteen years, is Clyde O. Franz, 57, a native of Cuba and an associate general secretary of the General Conference since 1966.

Honored at the conference were H. M. S. Richards, for forty years of broadcasting on the “Voice of Prophecy” program (now heard on 700 stations); veteran author and editor Arthur S. Maxwell of Signs of the Times, retiring; medical missionary Harry W. Miller, 91, for sixty-seven years of service in China; and Eduardo Castro, a Bolivian Indian who preaches to the same tribe that murdered his father.

Adventists hope they won’t have to hold another General Conference. But if Christ tarries, they will meet again in five years instead of the usual four. They really didn’t want to meet this year. Elder Pierson opened his address by noting, “With heavy hearts now in 1970 when the work should have been finished and God’s people in the kingdom we are yet here in Atlantic City for another General Conference.…”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Legs For Religious TV

To see religious television programs, laments a United Presbyterian leader, “you’d think religion was on its last legs.” The Reverend Richard Gilbert was quoted last month in a TV Guide survey that predicts religious TV will become more heavenly minded.

“We’ve gone too far in embracing the secular world,” a National Council of Churches executive admitted. The result, says TV Guide, is a financial revolt of the “religious silent majority”—nearly 95 per cent of church members “who hunger for spiritual nurture but are being fed a crazy concoction of Marx and mush and mod,” according to an Episcopal clergyman.

“What we need now,” Gilbert suggests, “is a two-legged Gospel—the left leg being social concern, and the right being salvation.”

The United States Supreme Court ruled on June 15 that conscientious objectors do not have to be religious in the traditional sense of that term. The court also said that draft boards must reconsider a man’s status if he decides to be a conscientious objector after being classified. Later in the month the court was expected to decide whether men opposed to particular wars, but not to war in general, are entitled to draft exemption.

Originally, the federal law under which Americans are inducted into the armed forces stated:

“Nothing contained in this title shall be construed to require any person to be subject to combatant training and service in the armed forces of the United States, who, by reason of religious training and belief, is conscientiously opposed to participating in war in any form. Religious training and belief in this connection means an individual’s belief in a relation to a Supreme Being involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation, but does not include essentially political, sociological, or philosophic views or a merely personal moral code.”

The court ruled in 1965 in the so-called Seeger case that non-religious men could qualify as conscientious objectors if their beliefs were as important in their lives as a religious person’s belief in God. Congress amended the draft law in 1967, deleting the reference to a “Supreme Being” but continuing to provide that “religious training and belief” does not include “essentially political, sociological, or philosophical views, or a merely personal code.”

The principal in the 1965 case signed the Selective Service form after striking the words training and and putting quotation marks around the word religious. One of the appellants in the cases decided last month, Elliott A. Welsh II, signed after striking the words religious training and. The court said in the Welsh case it did not think that exclusion of those persons with “essentially political, sociological, or philosophical views or a merely personal moral code” should be read to exclude those who hold strong beliefs about our domestic and foreign affairs or even those whose conscientious objection to participation in all wars is founded to a substantial extent upon considerations of public policy. The court decision read: “The two groups of registrants which obviously do fall within these exclusions from the exemption are those whose beliefs are not deeply held and those whose objection to war does not rest at all upon moral, ethical, or religious principle but instead rests solely upon considerations of policy, pragmatism, or expediency.”

The court decision for Welsh was five to three.

The dissenting justices wrote that “even if Welsh is quite right in asserting that exempting religious believers is an establishment of religion forbidden by the First Amendment, he nevertheless remains one of those persons whom Congress took pains not to relieve from military duty.” The opinion stated that the court’s “obligation in statutory construction cases is to enforce the will of Congress, not our own” and added that whether or not the religious exemption from the draft is constitutional, “Welsh had no First Amendment excuse for refusing to report for induction. If it is contrary to the express will of Congress to exempt Welsh, as I [Justice Byron White] think it is, then there is no warrant for saving the religious exemption and the statute by redrafting it in this Court to include Welsh and all others like him.”

Defending The Unborn

In the past six weeks, debate over whether to relax abortion laws had its ups and downs. Shortly after Maryland’s governor Marvin Mandel vetoed a liberal abortion repeal bill, militant Catholics stormed a hospital in Washington, D. C., to protest the current spate of such proposals. Less than a month later, the nation’s most liberal abortion law went into effect in New York.

Opponents (mostly Roman Catholics) and proponents (a statewide poll showed them to be a five-to-four majority) of Maryland’s proposed law (see April 24 issue, page 35) had mustered a variety of medical and moral reasons for their views. But Mandel vetoed the proposal because of “legal uncertainties,” notably the lack of a time-in-pregnancy restriction, of a residency requirement, and of necessity for parental consent for minors.

Despite that victory, a group of abortion opponents gathered in the capital for a “rally in defense of the unborn.” After a Mass that drew about 100 Catholics, including some militant young people called the “Sons of Thunder,” L. Brent Bozell, conservative editor of Triumph magazine, spoke against the “murder” of unborn children in Washington hospitals.

A scuffle broke out with police when some of the group used their wooden crosses as clubs to break into a clinic near the George Washington University Hospital. Several were arrested, including Bozell, who is William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law. Bozell said the group was attempting to deliver a letter to hospital administrator Victor F. Dudewig, demanding that abortions be discontinued.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers were speculating about their state’s becoming “the abortion capital of the nation” when the bill passed last April went into effect on July 1. The law’s only restriction prohibits abortions after the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy.

Last year fewer than 1,000 abortions were performed in New York City hospitals; some doctors predict as many as 100,000 in the year following July l—creating the potential for “total chaos” in busy hospitals, according to one obstetrician. The city has ordered that abortions be performed only in licensed hospitals.

A “conscience clause” in state regulations allows physicians, other medical personnel, and perhaps even hospitals to refuse to participate in abortion procedures. New York medical personnel will be faced with other “startling contradictions,” the state Catholic Committee warned when the state health department said that birth, death, and “fetal death” certificates may be required in some cases. If the termination of a pregnancy results in a live birth, a birth certificate is necessary; “the subsequent death of the infant necessitates the filing of the usual death certificate.”

JANET ROHLER GREISCH

Fairness Doctrine: A Stricter Proposal

In a move that will affect religious broadcasters and their critics, the Federal Communications Commission is proposing a new requirement in behalf of its so-called fairness doctrine.

The FCC proposes that a broadcast licensee, in addition to notifying an individual or a group that an attack has been made that they have the privilege of answering, must show that he sought such a response by contacting a number of persons, if need be.

“The licensee may not rely solely on general broadcast announcements that offer an opportunity to present contrasting views,” the FCC said in announcing its proposed rule. “If no appropriate spokesman comes forward as a result of any general announcements, the commission would require the licensee to contact specific persons to present the contrasting viewpoint; informing them, at the least, of the essence of what has been broadcast; and offer them a clear and unambiguous opportunity to respond.”

The licensee will not be restricted to just his area in selecting spokesmen, the FCC emphasized, but would be allowed wide discretion.

The FCC pointed out that it does not propose to require that the licensee himself present the contrasting viewpoint, if no one responds to his offer. “If several spokesmen decline to present the contrasting viewpoint and no one responds to general over-the-air invitations, the licensee has conscientiously and in good faith sought to afford the opportunity for discussion of conflicting viewpoints,” said the FCC.

The FCC said that its view of the 1969 Supreme Court decision upholding the “fairness doctrine” in the case of the Red Lion Broadcasting Company is that a “licensee who can be and should be as outspoken and hard-hitting as he wishes in presenting his view of an issue should be equally vigorous in getting the other side before the public.”

The Red Lion, Pennsylvania, station, owned by the Reverend John G. Norris, had been charged by the FCC with violating the doctrine by carrying the broadcasts of the Reverend Carl McIntire, the Reverend Billy James Hargis, and other politically conservative clergymen without presenting other views.

The FCC has asked for comments on its new rule. They must be filed in writing by July 6, 1970, and a public hearing may follow. The FCC, headed by its new chairman, Dean Burch, voted 6 to 1 to propose the new rule, with newly appointed commissioner Robert Wells casting the only negative vote.

GLENN EVERETT

Rendering Unto Cesar

Grape-strike crusader Cesar Chavez challenged two hundred churchmen last month to intensify their support of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee’s five-year-old strike and table-grape boycott.

His confidence buoyed by recent contracts signed with six grape-growers in the San Joaquin and Coachella valleys, (the following day Chavez also signed a contract with a melon-grower in the Imperial Valley), Chavez said that his prime objective now was to establish a strong farm workers’ union rather than to concentrate on wage increases. He met the group in a Delano, California, union hall where a statue of the Virgin Mary enshrined by plastic flowers was flanked by the thunderbird La Huelga (“the strike”) emblem, an artistic wooden crucifix, colorful banners (“Poor Men, They Do Penance … for Rich Men’s Sins”) and trademarks of union-approved grapes.

Chavez expressed gratitude for church support: “Without the help of the church and students we would not have been able to build the union.” He combined appeals to humanitarian and religious motives to further his quest for union power, stating that “the real saints today” are his union-organizers, who work for five dollars a week and provisions: “They are doing what Christ said—caring for their brothers.”

Moved by the charismatic humility of the Saul Alinsky-trained Mexican-American leader, the audience of Franciscan and Dominican priests, Catholic sisters, Migrant Ministry workers, and representatives from Episcopal, Congregational, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and other Christian groups expressed desire to render unto Cesar the support he requested.

UFWOC assistant director Larry Itliong called upon churchmen to help recruit and support a thousand volunteers to police the grape boycott in 250 secondary-sized American cities this summer. Fifty major cities already have UFWOC workers seeking to prevent the sale of “scab” grapes, he said. He spoke highly of Los Angeles archbishop Timothy Manning’s support of the strike and claimed that if grape-growers continue to refuse to negotiate, he had been assured that America’s Roman Catholic bishops would soon back the boycott as a body.

A spokesman for the California Council of Churches Migrant Ministry, the Reverend Wayne C. Hartmire, asked church leaders to pressure store-owners to sell only union grapes and to instruct their followers not to buy grapes unless there is a union label on the box. He charged that stores have frequently lied and cheated by misrepresenting “scab” grapes as union grapes. He further asked church leaders to assign religious workers to work for the strike and to influence all unions to honor the boycott.

The Catholic Bishops Ad Hoc Committee on Farm Labor and a Palm Springs Methodist minister, the Reverend Lloyd Saatjian, have served as informal negotiators in recent uniongrower contracts. The agreement signed last month with the Bianco Fruit Corporation provided for $1.75 per hour, ten cents a box bonus, ten cents an hour for the Robert F. Kennedy Fund, and two cents a box for a union welfare program. Growers are obligated to hire only UFWOC members unless the union has failed to provide requested help for a seven-day period.

Many clergymen in the Delano area do not support the Chavez crusade for union power. They point out that the grape-pickers in their area are not poverty-stricken people being exploited by growers, and they cite statistics that show that Delano grape-pickers earned an average of $2.40 an hour including the piece rate. Ninety per cent of the Delano farm workers are not migrant but live in homes in the $15,000–$20,000 range and commute to vineyards and other harvest fields on a year-round basis.

The Reverend Robert Moore, Delano Negro Baptist minister, states that Chavez has used “the badge of poverty to unionize; instead of working for the poor people he has been working on the poor people.” He claims that the strike failed so the boycott was begun. “If the folks here had been in poverty, I would have been the first to lead out. But strikers were not those who lived here.” He recognizes the necessity for a clause in any union agreement to prohibit a strike during harvest that could result in destruction of perishables. Chavez’s contracts do not have such a clause. As a result of Moore’s vocal opposition to the UFWOC, his home has been picketed by members of the Student National (formerly Nonviolent) Coordinating Committee.

The Reverend C. Edgar Manherz, pastor of the First Methodist Church and past president of the Delano ministerial association, considers UFWOC practices for farm workers “undemocratic, un-American, and unchristian.” He voices strong objections to instances where strikers have vilified and thrown dirt at non-union workers who chose to remain in the fields.

In nearby Bakersfield, Dr. Glenn D. Puder of the First Presbyterian Church considers the secondary boycott “out of order.” He expresses concern that the small grower is the forgotten man in the grape controversy. In the case of a long strike or inability to sell his grapes at a profit, “the big grower can stick it out, but there’s no road back for the small grower.”

Churchmen supporting Chavez contend that a moral issue is at stake: the Church must stand with the poor. Opponents believe the controversy is a struggle for power by militant unionists and that poverty is not the real issue. Others, such as the Reverend George Woodgates, an Episcopal minister in Bakersfield, resist taking sides in an attempt to help reconcile the opposing factions. In the meantime grapes of wrath continue to ripen in the vineyards of California. ROBERT L. CLEATH

Putting One Over On The Laity

A noted newspaper columnist jolted the ecclesiastical establishment last month by showing how leading churchmen are promoting sexual permissiveness in the guise of “study reports.”

Louis Cassels, senior editor of United Press International, in a column released June 12, said the device has been employed in recent weeks by three of America’s largest Protestant bodies: the United Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Lutheran Church in America.

All three, Cassels wrote, have come out with statements asserting that extramarital sexual relations are not always wrong. The documents are printed, distributed, and publicized by the denominations. They are paid for out of denominational funds. “But there always is some fine print,” he notes, that says the statements were issued “to stimulate thought and discussion” and are not to be construed as an official statement of the teaching of the denomination.

Cassels, a devout Episcopalian, is one of the most respected reporters in Washington. In addition to covering politics, education, and special events, he has for the past 15 years written a weekly religion column that is now distributed to some 2,000 newspapers. He also has written several books and is recognized as an expert on organized religion.

Cassels’ candid appraisal of the churches’ new declarations on sex notes that Christians may sincerely differ on whether the views are consistent with biblical teaching. But he adds that “there seems little room for debate about the essential hypocrisy of the device by which they are put forward with a great fanfare of publicity by denominational officials who deny any responsibility for the stands taken.”

Jane Fonda In Church

Movie star Jane Fonda was the featured speaker at the Sunday-morning “Celebration of Liberation” in San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Methodist Church on June 7. “I never thought I’d ever be back in church,” said Miss Fonda, “but then I didn’t know they had churches like this!”

Glide Memorial in the downtown Tenderloin district is packed each Sunday with wall-to-wall hair as a thousand hippie radicals meet to share humanistic concern, vent revolutionary rhetoric, and spread joy. The spirited hippies welcomed Miss Fonda’s description of American society as a monster with lusty cries of “Right on!” Quoting abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips and Chief Sitting Bull, she pleaded for support of the Black Panther party and the freeing of “political prisoner” Bobby Seale.

A ball-of-fire black minister, the Reverend A. Cecil Williams, ignites his congregation of white, black, and yellow youths with hip-jargon-loaded revolutionary messages, “Quotations from Chairman Jesus,” and cool, swinging music. Cabaret singer Jean Hoffman and the Meridian West folk-jazz group provide an innovative backdrop for sing-a-long and gyrating dancers as a phantasmagorical light show is projected overhead during services.

“Sometimes I’m asked about bein’ saved,” said Williams in his message entitled, “Yeh, I’ve Connected.” “Well, I don’t believe in bein’ saved. I was saved once and nothin’ happened to me.” Now he claims he is “connected with people” and is a liberated man.

The happenings in Glide Methodist these days would set John Wesley aghast, but they apparently cause few ripples in the upper echelons of United Methodism. As for Wesley and his doctrine, the hippies couldn’t care less. Swaying to the benediction of “We Shall Overcome,” hands held high in a two-fingered peace sign or black-power fist, they are having a ball.

Honor America Day

Between ringing bells and sky-rocketing fireworks in the nation’s capital this Fourth of July will be Honor America Day, a red-white-and-blue celebration headed by Billy Graham and Bob Hope.

After the 11 A.M. bell-ringing, which sponsors hope will reverberate across the nation¹Last month telegrams went to U. S. mayors and governors asking them to set up local and state observances to “honor the flag, encourage unity, and express appreciation for blessings this nation has received.”, evangelist Graham will conduct a service at the Lincoln Memorial. In Denver last month, he told the Southern Baptist Convention that he would use the opportunity to “preach Christ as the way to heal America.”

Later in the day, Walt Disney Productions will stage a gala studded with stars like Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell. At the nearby Smithsonian Institution, the annual Festival of American Folklife will offer glimpses of rural and mountain life. Hope estimated that as many as 500,000 might gather at the Washington Monument grounds for the occasion.

Both Graham and Hope stressed that the event will not be a pro-war demonstration: “We’re not trying to answer a demonstration with a demonstration.” Although they expressed hope that President Nixon would make a “guest star” appearance, the day was not planned, they said, to rally support for his administration. “We want the world to see that Americans can put aside their honest differences and rally around the flag to show national unity,” Hope said.

Honorary chairmen for the day include Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower and former Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. Support was also promised from a bipartisan group of congressmen and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington.

I am not much given to commenting on Roman Catholic affairs. Few, if any, religious bodies are so unaware of internal problems that they welcome sidewalk superintendents. It is increasingly clear, however, that the Roman church is convulsed with revolt against authority and faces a tumultuous future in the rest of the twentieth century.

The Pope commands well over a million ecclesiastics—more than 430,000 priests and 600,000 members of religious orders. The controversy now raging over priestly celibacy has left few of these world-flung legions untouched. Half the lay Christians in the world are Roman Catholic. For a vast multitude of these, the controversy over birth control has nurtured unabashed disagreement with the Pope; whatever their theoretical convictions about papal authority may be, their private practice in this area of living implies a forthright rejection of papal directives.

If Protestants, as someone has said, do not know what to do with an infallible pope, Roman Catholics do not know what to do with a fallible one. In the matter of birth control the Pope in no sense presumes to speak infallibly; he gives counsel, rather, as the shepherd of his flock, counsel that the Vatican contends must be obeyed by those desiring a good conscience. But identifying good conscience with papal conformity in an area where the Pope does not speak infallibly, and where many Catholics think he has not spoken wisely, is the point at issue.

Neo-Protestant ecumenism has long dreamed of one World Church to erase the division of the Protestant Reformation and annul the divorce between Eastern and Latin churches. Pursuing Rome much more energetically than evangelical Protestants, the ecumenists included Orthodox churches in the framework of the World Council of Churches with more than a hope that Rome, too, might in time be enlisted. Conciliar ecumenism faced several logistic problems, however. Non-Catholic ecumenical strategists were ready to welcome the pope as “first among equals” in a collectivity of leadership that included Orthodox ecclesiastics. But historically the pope has always claimed to be Peter’s successor and viceregent of the church, and recent claimants have not seemed eager to demur. Moreover, if Rome came into the WCC, its vast world constituency would technically dominate the organization by proportionate representation, a fact that would virtually destroy the movement’s presumptively pan-Christian identity.

These problems were more theoretical than practical, however. Emergence of Vatican Councils I and II left no doubt that the WCC was no more the only authentic expression of Christian ecumenism for Rome than it was for vast multitudes of unaffiliated evangelical Protestants. In the United States, interestingly enough, one plan for revitalizing the ailing National Council of Churches provides for an enlarging role for Roman Catholic leadership. Concerning the NCC, however, one observer has noted that Protestant evangelicals would not now take the NCC as a gift, and Rome is too astute to inherit it. In this ecumenical game of musical chairs, moreover, the Orthodox seem to want out as the Catholics are urged in.

While conflict over authority was a basic issue in the Protestant Reformation also, the central concern at that time was remarkably different. For Luther, the crux was how a sinner can find peace in the presence of a righteous God; for modern Catholics, the controversy centers, rather, around sexual concerns. The Reformers found their alternative to papal authority in the authority of Scripture; just where the contemporary Roman Catholic finds his locus of authority is more difficult to determine. Yet the current turning away from papal authority can have ecclesiastical consequences no less staggering than those of Reformation times.

For good or ill the papacy has had enormous influence upon the Catholic world. If, on the one hand, one thinks of dogma like the perpetual virginity and assumption of Mary and the espousal of Thomism as the official Roman Catholic philosophy, one must also note, on the other hand, the initiative for reform taken by Vatican II. The official commitment to Thomism is now a source of growing academic uneasiness.

In time past there was loose talk of an American-based Vatican, but in view of present pressures the Pope can be thankful that the hierarchy’s $5.5 billion portfolio of stocks is beyond the reach of Forman-type reparation demands.

This discussion must not overlook a refreshing development that in its quiet course may at present seem as minor as some of the antecedents of the Protestant Reformation must have appeared before the fire fell. A growing company of Roman Catholic priests and laymen have come, largely through association with Protestant evangelicals, into a genuine experience of the new birth and have found a fresh power in Scripture that shames not a few routine Protestants. More church-conscious than many evangelicals, they are not attracted to the idea of leaving Rome either for neo-Protestant ecumenism or for evangelical independence; moreover, they have a greater feeling for tradition than for pietism. Some of them are disconcerted over effusive ecumenical statements made by certain prominent Catholics—Cardinal Cushing for one—to general or to Protestant audiences, but not to Roman Catholic congregations. Fellowship with evangelical Protestants, especially by the converted laity, has become a mutually rewarding aspect of this Christian development.

If evangelical Protestants are to move creatively and boldly into the future, they will not ignore the possibilities of this wider perspective and enlistment. The problem of reaching the Roman Catholic for an evangelical commitment is not essentially different from that of reaching non-Catholics. As the son of a Roman Catholic mother to whom I was privileged to witness of a personal faith, I know how receptive a Catholic soul can be, and how genuine its welcome for the evangel.

The present Roman Catholic revolt against authority can lead to the loss of all objective authority, and hence in the direction of neo-Protestant subjectivism. But it can also lead to acceptance of the reliable authority of Scripture, to a rediscovery of justification by faith, and to all the vitalities from which could emerge a new Reformation.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Product Of British Scholarship

A New Testament Commentary, edited by G. C. D. Howley, F. F. Bruce, and H. L. Ellison (Zondervan, 1969, 666 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Everett F. Harrison, senior professor of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Two distinctives of this volume stand out: all twenty-five of the contributors are affiliated with churches of the Christian Brethren (formerly known as Plymouth Brethren), and they present considerable diversity in their occupations. Some are professional educators with special competence in such areas as theology, language, geography, and archaeology, while others are Bible teachers, editors, and missionaries. All are evangelical. Two are from this side of the Atlantic, but in the main this work is a product of British scholarship.

In line with current practice in the commentary field, preliminary consideration is given in a series of general articles to matters pertaining to the New Testament—authority, text and canon, language, archaeology, historical, political and religious background, as well as to the development of doctrine, the apostolic Church, the Gospels, Paul’s letters, the general letters, and the New Testament use of the Old Testament. These are ably handled, with evidence of up-to-date research.

Part II is devoted to commentary, for which the RSV is the chosen translation, although the NEB is often referred to. The introductions are brief (Hebrews is somewhat longer), no doubt to conserve space for the commentary proper. In view of this brevity it would have been helpful to have more bibliographical information on crucial items of introduction, especially with reference to positions other than those taken in this book.

The commentary on each book is prefaced by a fairly detailed outline, and the treatment of the text often involves a brief paragraph setting forth the nature and importance of the section about to be treated. It is impossible in a single-volume work to treat each verse, but those that are selected for comment are the most strategic for the understanding of the passage as a whole. The deficiency of this selective process is in large measure compensated for by summaries of the thought in the various sections.

In at least two instances, writers line up on opposite sides, which gives the reader opportunity to weigh the presentations and possibly come to his own conclusion. One of these is the question of the identification of Galatians 2:1–10 with Paul’s visits to Jerusalem as reported in Acts. The other is the interpretation of the eschatological discourse of our Lord.

F. F. Bruce contributes the general articles on the Gospels and the general letters, also the commentary on the Revelation, maintaining that excellence which distinguishes all that comes from his pen. His colleagues make frequent references to his previous works, especially in the areas of Acts and the letters of Paul. Ellison’s workmanship in Matthew is impressive also, setting a high standard for the commentary as a whole.

It may surprise American readers that there is almost nothing that could be classed as dispensational in this volume. The Brethren outlook comes to the fore mainly in the area of ecclesiology.

This double-columned work is moderately priced, almost completely free of typographical errors, and packed with solid information. In all probability it will take its place alongside the New Bible Commentary as a friendly rival that can claim equal usefulness.

Affirmation Of Human Depravity

Gleanings from the Scriptures, by Arthur Pink (Moody, 1969, 347 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by M. Eugene Osterhaven, Albertus C. Van Realte Professor of Systematic Theology, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.

No doubt the Christian doctrine that most irritates some people is the doctrine of human depravity. Yet this is one that is fundamental to an understanding of the biblical view of man’s plight and the great salvation God provided for him through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. As the doctrine of human depravity was the real issue in Augustine’s struggles against Pelagianism in the fifth century and at the Synod of Dordt in the seventeenth, so it is the touchstone by which one may judge many a system of theology today. For while the query, “What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?” may be the central question, another, “What think ye of man? In what shape is he?” is more fundamental. The reason is that those who feel they are well do not think they need a physician, but those who know they are sick want one. Jesus Christ came to call, not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

A quarter of a century and more ago, Reinhold Niebuhr backed out of a very liberal theological position into something better by way of anthropology. Today self-styled humanists in Marxist countries are having difficulty reconciling evidences of human depravity in their lands with Marxist teaching. “How can these things happen in a socialist society?” they ask. The answer is that man is a sinner and no mere change in the political-economic system can alter that fact. More radical change is needed, a change in man’s heart.

Pink’s book has to do with this fundamental condition of the natural man, and it is not pleasant reading. It wasn’t meant to be. What matters is not whether it is pleasant but whether it is true. I myself agree completely with the author about depravity and the fact of the Fall. Man is a sinner, hopeless and helpless apart from God’s grace. The natural man is wholly unable to reach God or to initiate the change needed.

Part I of the book examines man’s depraved state, and Part II deals with the area of his impotence. The wisdom of that separation can be questioned, for there is repetition in several chapters. More serious is some of the exegesis, the “endeavor to explain how it was possible for a holy person, devoid of any corruption, to sin,” the attempt to show how in the Fall Adam broke each of the ten commandments, and the attempt to argue from philosophical first principles, rather than from Scripture, in setting forth the need for Christ as the remedy for sin. Authors cited are usually Puritan worthies—Charnock, Owen, Goodwin, and others—but no footnotes or references, or even book titles, are given.

The style of this work is old and at times ponderous, so that it makes for wearisome reading. Why can’t an orthodox treatment of this subject be as fresh and scintillating as, say, Brunner’s Man in Revolt? Solid works on major biblical themes are needed, but they must be written in a way that helps them strike fire. The author, who died in 1952 and is said to have been “uninfluenced by prevailing opinions and accepted customs,” knew man and his true condition; but that does not necessarily mean he could communicate his correct position to others—and this we desperately need.

‘Novel’ Approach To Paul

Great Lion of God, by Taylor Caldwell (Doubleday, 1970, 630 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Paul L. Maier, professor of history, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.

This major novel about St. Paul is the prolific Miss Caldwell’s twenty-seventh book, and it is written with the same questing approach used in her popular novel about St. Luke, Dear and Glorious Physician: maximum attention to the silent years in the lives of the saints, less where we already know their story. In that sense, this is not just “another novel about St. Paul,” for Stephen is not stoned until page 417 of this book, the event in which Paul first appears in the New Testament as garment-checker for the lynch mob. And Miss Caldwell does not carry the apostle’s story to its exciting culmination in Rome. One almost suspects she intended to, but, books can get only so big. The story rather ends with Paul leaving the harbor of Caesarea on his voyage to Rome, and this does indeed make for a very effective conclusion.

Credits in this novel are many. The author has used all her well-honed skills of description and character portrayal. Nature comes through brilliant, colorful, and alive, and each spring with its “pink almond blossoms” is a fresh picture. Action and pace, however, are often sacrificed for the minute brush strokes of this word-painter’s detail, which may disappoint some readers while delighting others. But Miss Caldwell has successfully jumped two millenia in history to unfold a vivid panorama for us in these pages.

Conservative readers may be aghast at several surprises in the full story of their favorite apostle. Young Saul of Tarsus making love to a slave-girl in a meadow near a Cilician pond? Fathering an illegitimate child? Sipping good Syrian whiskey with St. Luke on the creaking decks of a “galleon” (that should be galley!) sailing for Tarsus? Let the orthodox rage, but I will not fault Miss Caldwell here, for this sort of thing could have happened to Paul in his youth (even if it probably did not), and we must not forget about other lusty saints like David and Augustine. In fact, the author rather convincingly has this adolescent fornication standing in the background of the well-known Pauline attitude toward women. This, then, is a flesh-and-blood story of the man behind the famous apostle. This is the difference of the book, and its chief credit.

But in this journal, we must necessarily ask: Is this story of the man second only to Jesus in the founding of Christianity true and authentic where it impinges on history? Alas, not in many of its details. Indulge a brief listing: Someone is described as being “mad as Caligula” at a time when Caligula was not mad, not emperor, and only four years old. Pontius Pilate appears as governor of Judea about ten years before he actually arrived there, and his is the traditional portrait of a man who was sent to Palestine as a punitive measure and who crucified 2,000 Galileans near the close of his term, all of which is unhistorical, as is his supposed commissioning of Saul to arrest the Damascus Christians. The father of Judas Iscariot was not Annas the high priest (!) but Simon Iscariot (John 6:71). The author has Christ appearing at night on the road to Damascus, but in fact it was at noon (Acts 22:6). Paul visits Corinth before Athens in this book, when it was vice versa, and the disagreement with Barnabas over Mark takes place in Corinth rather than Antioch. The Roman governor Felix tells Paul about the great conspiracy against Nero six or seven years before it actually took place. And the economics of the Roman Empire of the time, including the rate of provincial taxation, is grossly exaggerated.

Finally, some of the early Christian militants of the time are represented as smashing idols in pagan temples and attacking religious processions in Rome, and Miss Caldwell repeats this for a fact in her introduction. But she does not supply her source on this, and such specific acts of violence by Roman Christians in the first century A.D. have not been documented.

Perhaps this is all unfair. Can’t a novelist use “literary license” in unfolding her story? Of course she can, particularly where history is silent. But where the facts are plainly known, why need they be distorted? If they must be altered to dramatize or advance the story, all right, I suppose. (This as a reader, not a historian!) But the above chronological misplacements and distortions of fact were not necessary to the success of the story. In most cases, the truth was even stranger, more fascinating, than the fictional alteration. In an age that wants to know “how it really was,” perhaps it is time to consider new ground rules for literary license.

Conservative Christians will be pleased that Miss Caldwell has shunned the mealy-mouthed route of explaining away the miracles in this story. She portrays them openly, frankly, splendidly, leaving the mystery a mystery. In fact, she has added several: the assumption of Mary will please Roman Catholic readers, though St. Paul’s raising Drusilla, wife of Felix, from the dead is in questionable taste, for if the apostle had done so, the Roman governor would surely have released him from his Caesarean imprisonment rather than waiting for a bribe.

Otherwise, Miss Caldwell’s greatest success in Great Lion of God is in burrowing into the Jewish and Greek minds of that day and laying them rewardingly bare for us. And her copious use of prime biblical citations keeps this story relevant for Christian lay readers, who will doubtless be far less sensitive to the historical problems than ministers, theologians, and historians.

A Catholic Theologian Speaks

Theological Investigations, Volume VI, by Karl Rahner (Helicon, 1969, 417 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by Donald G. Bloesch, professor of theology, Dubuque Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.

This volume of Rahner’s Theological Investigations deals with themes related either directly or indirectly to Vatican Council II. The noted German Catholic theologian again displays his theological acumen and depth of insight.

On the question of biblical authority, Rahner contends for one source of revelation, the Holy Scriptures. Tradition for him is an amplification and clarification of the truth in Scripture, though he makes little room for the idea that tradition must be corrected by Scripture. He maintains that every dogma in the church has in some way a scriptural ground. While holding to a historically conditioned element in Scripture, he subscribes to the traditional view that the Bible is inerrant in what it affirms.

Rahner sees philosophy as an introduction to theology. Philosophy prepares the way for the theological task just as reason prepares the way for revelation. While advocating a philosophical basis or groundwork for faith, he acknowledges that the language of revelation gives the concepts already known in the ordinary sphere “a more profound, changed or new meaning by the fact that they are put in a new context.” Although he posits an integral connection between theology and philosophy, he insists that the Christian faith stands in opposition to all ideology, an interpretation of reality that legitimates one’s social position.

In his understanding, justification includes “divinizing” as well as the remission of sins. Man is still a sinner but only in the sense of committing venial sins. For Rahner, the justified man is in himself righteous. For Reformation theology, our righteousness is only in Christ, even though we can and must reflect this righteousness in our lives.

This book has much to say about human freedom. Freedom is not destroyed by original sin but “profoundly wounded” by it. God does not bring man a new freedom but instead assists an “injured freedom.” Rahner seems to have little perception of the Reformation and biblical conception of the bondage of the will. For the Reformers the bane of man’s existence is not simply the abuse of freedom but the loss of freedom. We are referring here not to natural freedom but to the freedom to believe and to will the good.

Rahner stands essentially in the Thomistic tradition. Grace fulfills and completes nature but does not bring to man a radically new nature. The old nature is not crucified but elevated. Salvation is understood more in terms of self-realization than of total conversion.

Rahner’s conception of the “anonymous Christian” has aroused much interest and also some controversy, and in this volume he expands on the meaning of this concept. Anonymous Christians are all men of good will who do not explicitly call themseves Christian. To accept oneself is to have implicit faith in Christ. To fulfill the duty of conscience is to follow the hidden Christ. He contends that “anonymous Christianity can … be called Christianity in a meaningful sense.” He does not include in this category those who defy and rebel against the grace of God, but anyone who is open to the needs of his fellow man can be regarded as an anonymous Christian and therefore as being in the kingdom of God.

I can appreciate Rahner’s defense of supernaturalism over pantheism, his keen insights on the temptation to ideology, and his wholehearted acceptance of biblical authority. I have serious reservation, however, about his optimism concerning the capabilities of man and his monism of grace. He is constantly emphasizing that the Christian should be both in the world and above the world. But does not the Bible also speak of the need to be against the world as well?

Sampling Of Ethical Problems

Three Issues in Ethics, by John Macquarrie (Harper & Row, 1970, 157 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Harold B. Kuhn, professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

When the Christian theologian undertakes to “do ethics,” he is confronted by a wide spectrum of problems from which he must select at least a few if he is to relate his quest to the live issues of today. Professor Macquarrie has chosen three major themes as a backdrop for his survey of the contemporary ethical scene. The first is the relation of specifically Christian ethics to the general moral striving of the race. The second is the shape of a theological ethic that is meaningful in our day. The third is the relation of Christian faith to the ethical life.

It is always tempting to conclude that since humanistic systems have their ways of viewing the moral life, any specifically Christian ethic is superfluous, since many assert that all ethical considerations spring from the common nature of humanity. Macquarrie’s position is that the relation between religion and ethics is not superficial but basic and positive. If the areas of common concern are sometimes ambiguous, yet he is persuaded that they are vital. Both secular moral relativism and the more flamboyant forms of “situation ethics” seem to him to fail to do justice to the complexities of man’s moral predicament.

With respect to the kind of ethic today’s man needs—and will accept—our author works dialectically toward a definition of modern man’s image of himself. He rejects any such abstraction as “human nature” in any classical or essential sense and proposes a definition of man as “a Being-on-the-way” or a creature moving toward self-transcendence. Here, he notes, Marxists tend either to bog down or else to move beyond their “orthodox” economic interpretation of man. It is at the point of man’s self-transcendence that Macquarrie sees ethics as compelled to move beyond the advocacy of “personal integrity and the domestic virtues” into the areas of the social problems that overwhelm the world.

The volume seeks to relate the historic categories of sin, grace, faith, love, and especially hope to the moral life. The latter seems to Macquarrie to be most pregnant with possibility for the relating of religious (and more especially Christian) faith to the ethical life. His conviction is that “the hopeful attitude” and the theological underpinnings of it “do generate moral energy and encourage us in the pursuit of moral ends.”

The volume abounds in insights that tantalize and challenge the reader. The Christian-Marxist dialogue is never far from the author’s thinking, being second only to his concern for the way in which modern life styles place increasing demands upon the moral decision.

Two points do raise questions in the mind of this reviewer. First, is human nature as devoid of structure as Macquarrie seems to suggest? And second, does he do justice to the degree to which man has been wounded in his inner being by the Fall? Alienation is certainly a part of the pattern that estranges man from himself, from his fellows, and from God. Can, therefore, any specifically Christian ethic be elaborated apart from some serious consideration of God’s decisive reconciling deed at Golgotha?

Book Briefs

Witness and Revelation in the Gospel of John, by James M. Boice (Zondervan, 1970, 192 pp., paperback, $2.95). This study of the witness terminology in John’s Gospel is a valuable contribution to the current debate on the nature and content of divine revelation.

Conflict and Understanding in Marriage, by Paul Plattner (John Knox, 1970, 95 pp., $2.95). Sees conflict as an unavoidable part of marriage and points the way to a constructive use of this conflict in the development of personality.