A charter bus rumbled through the outskirts of Atlanta last March taking participants in the eighth annual plenary session of the Consultation on Church Union to visit the grave of Martin Luther King, Jr. En route an official observer from the African Methodist Episcopal Church shared his views about the giant merger proposal with a reporter. “There has been just a rearrangement, not anything fresh or new,” he said.

“This year we simply have the timbers and material,” continued Dr. Andrew White, executive secretary of his denomination’s Division of Christian Education in Nashville. “Next year we’ll ask, ‘Is this the house in which I can live?’ ”

Delegates to the ninth session, held in St. Louis this month, began looking at the first draft of a plan of union for nine denominations that would put one-third of America’s Protestants under one roof: the Church of Christ Uniting. And they began deciding whether the house could be home for 25 million—with an open door for other Christian bodies to join later. The “unity of the whole church” is the ultimate goal of the plan of union, according to the 147-page draft released last month from COCU’s Princeton, New Jersey, office.

If delegates in St. Louis give the plan a green light, it will go to the nine denominations for further study and refinement. Revised details may then be approved by subsequent COCU plenary sessions, perhaps by 1972 or 1973. Finally, each denomination must vote acceptance or rejection. No timetable for such action has been set, but COCU spokesmen say they hope union can take place by 1980.

After all denominations have voted, merger can begin if at least two favor it. Presumably a constitution would then be drafted. The document to be voted upon in St. Louis contains services for ordaining presbyters and deacons and for consecrating bishops, as well as a service of inauguration.

At any time within a year after the national service of inauguration, any local congregation of a uniting denomination could withdraw from the united church by a majority vote of its communicant members. The departing congregation would retain local church property, according to the plan.

The new church, as proposed, would have an episcopal form of government, with bishops the chief executive officials (a black bishop must be the first presiding officer), and other ministerial offices of presbyters and deacons. But laymen would be able to outvote clergy delegates in decision-making units; the plan provides a two-to-one ratio favoring laymen.

The plan permits women bishops—something none of the present COCU partners has—and stresses that “all minority races, various age groups, and men and women shall participate fully.”

The basic unit would be the parish, not the congregation. A member would belong to a parish unit, consisting normally of at least several congregations—not necessarily geographically contiguous—and a number of task groups. These task forces would be made up of loose, ad hoc associations of persons committed to particular social and religious projects.

Nationally, some 75,000 congregations will be affected if the COCU plan is adopted by all nine churches. Each cluster of about seventy-five parishes and task groups would be lumped into “districts,” and six or eight districts into “regions.” There would be about 200 regions throughout the country.

The plan was prepared by a fifteen-member drafting commission headed by Dr. William A. Benfield, Jr., a Charleston, West Virginia, Southern Presbyterian pastor. The commission began its work in the summer of 1968.

“We have met with liberals, conservatives, black-power people, radical renewalists, organizational-theory people, youth, and a wide range of others,” said Benfield in describing the commission’s work. “We have tried to devise a structure which will enable the Church to spring loose from antique practices and fulfill the mission given it by the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Doctrinally, the draft plan calls for the united church to confess the Trinity and “Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior,” acknowledge “the unique authority of the Holy Scripture,” and accept the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds “as witnessing to the mighty acts of God recorded in Scripture.”

Both infant and believers’ baptism would be practiced, and persons eligible to receive Communion in other churches could take that sacrament in the united church.

A key test for evangelicals is an examination question to be asked at the ordination of presbyters (now known as priests, pastors, and elders in COCU member churches): “Are you persuaded that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments convey the Word of God needed for teaching our faith and nurturing the life in Christ?”

The Service of Inauguration of the Church of Christ Uniting will signal actual union and will be based on one central service. The part that would unite the ordained ministries “is not to be described as a service of reordination, or of conditional ordination,” the plan of union points out.

This has been touchy among high churchmen who are sensitive about the apostolic succession. The inauguration service goes to great lengths to avoid any inequality: “The setting for the central and regional services will be spaces large enough and properly shaped so as to accommodate the assembling of the people all the way around a circular table. Acts of unification within this service are planned in such a way so as to affirm the equality of the participating churches by arranging representatives of them in a complete circle.”

Noted ecumenist Bishop Lesslie New bigin of South India, a Presbyterian who is bishop of the Madras diocese, was scheduled to conduct study sessions and preach at a Communion service during the St. Louis sessions. But a man whose name is a COCU household word was not expected to appear this year. The press of his job as general secretary of the World Council of Churches probably would keep Dr. Eugene Carson Blake from attending, COCU communications officer Robert Lear told CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

In December of 1960, Blake kicked off the COCU movement, then as stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church, with a famous sermon in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. He has appeared at most of COCU’s annual meetings, started in 1962.

Blake reportedly indicated during a press conference in San Francisco this January that he had “about lost all interest” in COCU, saying that organizational concerns had overrun the original intent of “spiritual renewal and fervor.” Blake later denied any disaffection with the Consultation.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

All Souls

In one week last month. All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D. C., was the rallying point for the National Council of Negro Women, the Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus (BUUC), and leaders of the Conspiracy, a group supporting the “Chicago Seven” in their much publicized trial.

The women’s group (not church-affiliated) plugged unity among black women, and the black caucus—representing 90 per cent of the 1,000 Negroes in the 283,000-member Unitarian Universalist Association—voted to withdraw from its parent organization. The move was seen as a plan for black Unitarians to retain control and autonomy of the caucus while still keeping ties with local congregations of the church.

At its 1968 conference, the General Assembly of the UUA took what many called a most progressive step: it allocated $1 million to the caucus without strings, to be paid in $250,000 allotments over four years. The 1968–69 total UUA budget was only $2.7 million. Among other grievances cited by BUUC leaders for the disaffiliation—which may set a trend that black caucuses in major Protestant denominations will follow—was the allegation that UUA directors cut off $50,000 of the $1 million allocation.

Church officials said that the full $1 million would be paid but that budgetary problems made it necessary to spread the allotment over five years instead of four. The $50,000 would be made up the final year, they said.

The Chicago Seven rally was attended by about 200 persons, and plans were laid for two demonstrations in the capital that followed over the Washington’s Birthday weekend. Some 230 persons were arrested then during skirmishes with police, more than at any other post-trial demonstration for the Chicago Seven defendants by that date. An assistant minister at All Souls Church said “groups of all persuasions” are allowed to use the church facilities, but “that doesn’t imply [church] endorsement.”

Fasting And Picketing

“This kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.” According to many ancient biblical texts, this was Jesus’ reply when the disciples asked why they could not cast an unclean spirit out of an epileptic boy.

Anti-war protesters who are stationing themselves in front of the White House daily are convinced that there are demons about, and that a Lenten-Passover fast of seventy-five days may help to drive them out. They began the fast on Ash Wednesday to protest the Viet Nam war, and spokesmen say they hope for “a positive response for peace” from President Nixon.

Most of the approximately one hundred demonstrators fast only about eight hours a day, but a few—including the Reverend Richard R. Fernandez of Philadelphia—plan to consume only water until April 28. Fernandez, nominal leader of the group, heads the sponsoring Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Viet Nam. The Fellowship of Reconciliation is co-sponsor.

Before marching to the White House on Ash Wednesday, participants held a service at a nearby church. There they daubed their foreheads with ashes from the charred remains of tax forms, armed forces recruiting posters and identification tags, and other “symbols of repression.” About fifty persons, mostly young and mostly white, then walked from the church to the executive mansion. Among those who manned the picket line there on subsequent days (the average size of the line between nine and five o’clock was ten persons) was the treasurer of the United Church of Christ, James Davis, and the newly elected Episcopal bishop coadjutor of New York, Paul Moore, Jr.

Leaders of the fast and picket promise the pace will pick up as Easter approaches: vigils and fasts in front of federal buildings in various cities every Wednesday noon; a “religious procession” on Good Friday to places that are “signs of death”; pulpit readings on Easter of a pastoral letter signed by some fifty national religious leaders; and a “freedom seder” near the end of Passover in which Jews and Christians will participate.

Meanwhile, the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam mounted a “winter-spring” offensive for peace this month. The coalition of about 100 civil, religious, and youth groups that engineered the October and November demonstrations in Washington planned teach-ins, withholding of income tax, turn-in of draft cards, and poster campaigns.

Most unusual, however, is a design to clog draft-board files with Bibles mailed in by Selective Service registrants. United States law requires that all correspondence with registrants be kept. Draft-resisters may be boosting Bible sales, but how many copies of the Good Book will be read is anyone’s guess.

Mcintire-O’Hair Debate: Bruised But Unbowed

Excited conversations rippled through the packed television studio as the portly middle-aged woman, her fading blond hair tied into a pony tail, stepped into the room and flashed a smile at the two men she was about to debate.

Mrs. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a World War II WAC and former social worker who is now America’s most prominent atheist, placed her worn leather case beside her chair, faced Dr. Carl McIntire (fundamentalist minister and head of the International Council of Christian Churches), and launched the first of two debates that would be televised locally in late February and early March.

Perhaps because of a light touch of flu or a facial bruise that earlier in the day had prompted her to file aggravated-assault charges against her husband, Mrs. O’Hair was caught off balance by Dr. McIntire’s humor and by the debating skill of her second opponent, Dr. Edward Bauman, progressive theologian and host of a nationwide television series on the Bible.

“Atheism is the religion of the future,” she argued. “simply because it is relevant. It is the religion of life. It gives them a new kind of freedom, an independence of spirit.”

Before loosing his attack, Dr. McIntire drew laughter and applause when he quipped: “The way is open to go to the Supreme Court and have atheism ruled out of public schools as a religion.” It was the first of many jabs at the Poor Richard Universal Life Church, a non-profit organization that Mrs. O’Hair and her husband recently organized in an effort to have the tax-free status of churches abolished. She named herself bishop and her husband—who was arrested minutes after the taping session for assaulting her—the prophet.

Drawing out his black King James Bible, Dr. McIntire quoted Scripture to “prove” the existence of God and explain the “first principles” of Christianity. Taking the offensive, a tack that disarmed Mrs. O’Hair, the grey-haired, barrel-chested, Bible Presbyterian minister lectured her on sin and told her she needed to be born again. “Atheism has no messiah, no savior.… What hope do you have for eternity? You’re wasting your life now.… Lady, you need to be born again,” he declared.

“What I’m doing,” she replied, “is gambling that there won’t be any eternal life. I don’t want it. What I want is life now … and let the devil take the rest.” The audience roared.

She “applauded” Dr. McIntire, host of the “Twentieth Century Reformation Hour” radio program, for “at least having the intellectual honesty and courage to stand by those absurd ideas … without exception fallacious, erroneous, and a little bit ludicrous.”

Old women in the studio shook their heads as Mrs. O’Hair dismissed Jesus as “horrendous, intolerant, hate-filled and anti-sex. I would have appreciated Jesus Christ if he had found a woman, married, and had a beautiful love af-fair.” When Dr. McIntire began equating Christianity with patriotism and atheism with Communism, Mrs. O’Hair retorted: “Communism cannot equal the horrendous atrocities of Christianity.”

Mrs. O’Hair’s exaggerations and generalizations—about Jesus’ brutality, for example—kept atheism from “winning” the debate. And Dr. McIntire’s soft voice, willingness to smile at himself, and occasional jests prevented fundamentalism from “losing.”

Mrs. O’Hair launched the second debate by calling Dr. Bauman, pastor of Foundry Methodist Church in Washington, D. C., a liberal who “draws the circle of religion so large that you include even people who don’t want to be entrapped. Progressives and liberals just coat the pill differently.”

MARQUITA MOSS

Ethel Waters: Study In Inspiration

In a beautiful little theater in Chicago last month, an aging and ailing Ethel Waters came back. Young America knows her best from Billy Graham’s television crusades. But show business acclaims her most as the stage and screen star in The Member of the Wedding. It is in that role that she returned for a six-week stint at Chicago’s new Ivanhoe Theater.

“I’m prayin’ that I’ll be able to hold out,” said Miss Waters. It was a remark typical of her lifelong determination and dedication. She was born under the worst of conditions at the turn of the century and has been flying in the face of adversity ever since. But few in the entertainment world have soared higher longer.¹The New Yorker has said that “there is every reason (voice, technique, originality) to believe” that Ethel Waters “is the one truly great, compleat popular singer this country has produced.”

Miss Waters is associated most widely with the gospel song “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” She learned it as a girl while her grandmother pumped out a one-finger version on the organ. It is the song she sings in The Member of the Wedding, the play in which she made a big hit on Broadway. The title is also that of her autobiography, a 1951 Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

“Wedding” won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award twenty years ago. Reviving it was a risk, however, for today’s theater audience seems to favor moral perversion over sentiment. Miss Waters plays a Negro housekeeper and substitute mother to a girl who finds the transition from 12 to 13 a traumatic experience. The drama is an adaptation of a novel by the late Carson McCullers.

Miss Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, an industrial town on the Delaware River just south of Philadelphia. She was conceived out of wedlock and grew up in an area where poverty and crime flourished. She knew all about life in the raw and “just ran wild as a little girl,” she says. “My mixed blood explains this, partly, I think.” Her maternal great-grandfather was a native of India. Her grandmother on her father’s side was Dutch.

Through it all, Miss Waters retained her principles. She never drank, smoked, or took dope. At the age of 6, while lying seriously ill, she was baptized by a Roman Catholic priest. When she was 12 she was converted at a revival meeting. She now says:

“I don’t say I’m a religious person. I say I’m a born-again Christian. And that is the most important thing in my life because I’ve found my living Saviour.”

Miss Waters launched her career as an entertainer when she was 17. It was in the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore, and the song that got her started was W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” She obtained special permission to sing it, and was the first woman and the second person to do so professionally. Other songs that helped to make her famous were “Dinah” and “Stormy Weather.”

Miss Waters did not become interested in evangelistic work until 1957, the year Graham held his first big meetings in New York. Then she sang in the choir and did solo work. “I felt a rekindlin’ I hadn’t felt since I was 12,” she recalls. Since then she has appeared at numerous crusades, despite diabetes, heart trouble, and high blood pressure.

It is through crusade television, interestingly, that Miss Waters has performed for her biggest audiences. And there are some ironies in that fact. Her autobiography records that she was mistreated by white people many times during her life. For some years she was understandably indignant. Thus it is a gratifyingly Christian reflection that what she considers the most significant work of her life should come in partnership with a Southern white evangelist. Movie producers who want to depict her life should take note.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Celibacy Vows: Mandate Or Mistake?

As Maundy Thursday (March 26) nears, Roman Catholic priests around the world are debating whether they will accept an invitation to renew their vows of celibacy and priestly obedience. The strong suggestion that every priest should do this on Holy Thursday morning was made in a circular letter to the heads of the national episcopacies by John Cardinal Wright, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy. Public announcement of the policy last month marked a hardening of papal defense of the Latin Rite celibate priesthood (see February 27 issue, page 39).

By month-end national hierarchies were lining up in a way that boded ill for Pope Paul’s authority and the seamless church he heads.

Among those who backed priestly celibacy were the U. S., German, and French bishops; Paul Cardinal Zoungrana of Upper Volta, West Africa: and Julius Cardinal Döpfner of Munich.

But eighty-four professors of theology in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria appealed to their bishops for a dialogue on celibacy—a request previously voiced by the Dutch hierarchy (who issued the initial challenge to the rule). A group of French priests—despite their bishops’ stand—thanked the Dutch bishops for “taking a realistic position.” And 140 priests in Switzerland supported optional celibacy; so did 155 in Münster, West Germany.

While Spain’s ninety-five bishops affirmed celibacy, a poll showed that 61 per cent of seminarians there did not want it compulsory. In the Archdiocese of Toronto there won’t be an obligatory oath of celibacy for priests this year.

In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the whole subject seemed largely academic. A classified ad in the progressive Dutch weekly De nieuwe linie recently asked: “WHAT PRIEST of approximately 50–55 years wishes further contact with high-school teacher of 49 years in order to be a help to each other and to grow toward a happy marriage. Letters under No. L. 996 at address of thit paper.”

Pranksters are turning Philadelphia street-signs to misdirect the traffic; not even one-way arrows can any longer be trusted to tell the truth.

These misdirectional signs may also reflect the shifting vogue ideas of modern society. One by one the reigning notions of liberal learning and action seem to be coming under fire. Detached from any truth of revelation, the high dogmas of scientists, moralists, and even theologians soon become unwelcome detours.

Current revision of evolutionary theory emphasizes the highly tentative character of scientific assumptions. Biochemists and anthropologists at the University of California (Berkeley) now contend that differences in the genetic structure of hemoglobin (blood proteins) of man and the apes are so small that their presumed evolutionary line divided merely five to ten million years ago, not twenty to thirty million as previously held. Dr. Sherwood Washburn told the Philadelphia Inquirer (Dec. 13, 1969) that paleontologists, long dependent on fossil evidence in guessing at relationships, should now look to biochemistry and the protein clock. “This changes the rules of the science,” he said. Surely not, we may add, for the last time.

In another field, comparative religions, many evolutionary scholars have held that a common core of religious ideas can be detected and developmentally arranged to exhibit ethical monotheism (particularly if one earns his bread and butter in the West) as the latest and highest emergent. The price of this compliment to Judeo-Christian religion was, of course, the surrender of its claims to revelational uniqueness; the religion of the Bible was held to differ from other religions not in kind but in degree. More recently, however, this assumption of a shared common core has been widely disputed. More and more scholars insist that the specific religious claims can be properly understood only within the divergent outlooks to which they belong, and that the notion of a universal essence to which all world religions are to be related on a sliding scale is a speculative imposition in the interest of evolutionary theory.

In Old Testament studies the incomparability of Yahweh is now stoutly affirmed by a number of scholars, despite every effort of radical critics to derive the God of the Old Testament simply from the Semitic religious milieu. The differences between Yahweh and the ancient polytheistic gods are held by these specialists engaged in comparative studies to be irreducible.

In New Testament studies also there are rumblings to indicate that a major earthquake may not be far off. If any single assumption has been basic to liberal studies through the twentieth century, it is the priority of Mark’s Gospel, premised on the evolutionary assumption that its brevity argues for priority. But impressive scholarly opinion against this theory continues to accumulate, and the issue may soon emerge into front-line dispute.

For two generations neo-Protestant theology, in its dialectical and existential preoccupation, has emphasized the reality of God by deliberately rejecting God’s objectivity and existence in the interest of divine subjectivity. This emphasis on God’s non-objectivity and non-existence has gradually emptied itself into sheer subjectivism. Doubt about the transcendent reality of God has given way to prattle about the silence, eclipse, and death of God. But now this whole approach of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann and their satellites is under weighty assault by scholars who insist once again that the Living God is an object of objective knowledge.

Neo-Protestant assumptions about the Church seem likewise to be collapsing right and left (mostly left). The National Council of Churches, the great liberal Protestant experiment in church unity, is breathing so heavily that some interpreters see its demise not far off. So long has the NCC trumpeted the prophecy that merger of smaller denominations into one huge church would impress upon the world the importance of Jesus Christ, and so long has it pressured for a leveling of material resources as the heart of authentic Christian social ethics, that conciliar ecumenism is now hard pressed on both counts. The enthusiasm for revolutionary radicalism has led on unexpectedly to such bold black-power demands that neither Roman Catholics nor unaffiliated evangelical Protestants would currently welcome the NCC if it were offered as a gift. Even a professor at Union Theological Seminary recently reminded his students of the false prophecy emanating from nearby 475 Riverside Drive: “They told us that the world would become Christian if we got the denominations together.” The fact is that fewer and fewer Christians are attending the ecumenized churches.

The absolutized relativisms are giving way to relativized absolutes, and nowhere are the indications of an erosion of conscience more evident than in the realm of morals. In recent months the United States has been especially stunned by two reports of atrocities. Although the My Lai massacres—if actually committed—run counter to official U. S. policy, they raise once again the issue of the complete suspension of personal conscience upon a higher human authority, military or political. But the cold-blooded California murder of Sharon Tate and three friends raises the wider problem of an existential view of life that frees neighbor relations and sexual love from universally valid criteria and connects them only with one’s inner preferences.

For the modern generation the comments attributed by the Los Angeles Times to one of the suspects, Susan Atkins, ought to be required reading:

When we got back … he just acted as though it never happened. Charles is the type that lives for each second, and pays no mind to what may happen two seconds later. That’s how much he is with it.… I went in and slept for a while, but first I think I made love with Clem.… I’m not sure who I made love with—or if I even made love that night.… There was a comment made by one of us that what had happened had served its purpose. That was to instill fear in Man himself. Man the establishment. That’s what it was done for. To instill fear—to cause paranoia. To also show the black man how to go about taking over white man. Then I just put what had happened out of my mind, the best I could. But I couldn’t.… I’d look at Charlie, and he’d wink at me and give me reassurance that everything was O.K., was going to be all right. Not that he said it aloud. He didn’t have to say it—I just felt it. That’s the way Charlie was.

It isn’t so much that modern vogue ideas proclaim out loud that God is myth and man but a clever animal. They just wink the message, and a warped conscience sportively turns life’s directional signals whichever way it wabbles.

CARL F. H. HENRY

In its current effort to be “relevant” to the world, the Church seems bent on playing down, if not completely disregarding, the very reason for its existence. And in the cry of a bitterly needy world, one can hear again those words of the weeping Mary, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:13b).

There are those in the Church who, while they wring their hands and bemoan the effect of their irrelevance to the world’s need, are unwilling to face the reasons for their predicament.

Are we willing to admit that many of us have never had a personal, converting experience with Jesus Christ? We talk a lot about him as the “Lord of life” (and he is), but before he can be that he must become Saviour from sin, and there are “Christians” who reject the concept of Christ as the atoning Redeemer.

Furthermore, through the influence of some theological seminaries, as well as the Bible departments of many church-related colleges and the official literature of certain denominations, the Bible is now regarded, not as the sword of the Spirit, but as a bent and rusty instrument that has lost its convicting and converting power.

Our Lord said of the Pharisees of his day. “They are blind leaders of the blind” (Matt. 15:14). Are we any better? The first thing the risen Lord stated as Paul’s mission to the world was “to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18a); but there is little evidence that the organized church believes men to be spiritually blind and lost. No wonder it has lost its relevance to the world! The Church has misinterpreted its Saviour and his message. And its attention is focused on the effect of its rejection of the Gospel rather than the cause of it.

But let us who claim to be “evangelical” beware lest we become complacent and critical in our orthodoxy. It is not orthodoxy that saves. The Pharisees were the most orthodox of people in our Lords’ time, but his most bitter denunciations were leveled at them: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:20). The lovelessness and bitterness exhibited by some Christians causes us to shudder. They are like “noisy gongs” and “clanging cymbals,” apparently having never learned the basic truths of Christian love so graphically described by the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians 13. All of us have something of the Pharisee and the Sadducee in us, and when these attitudes dominate our thinking and behavior, our effective witness vanishes.

Our source of reference as Christians is the Bible. Our message is the Christ revealed therein. Our personal attitudes must be dominated by him.

One reason for the Church’s present ineffectiveness is that it often depends on administrators rather than preachers, on programs rather than the gospel message, on organization rather than the Holy Spirit, and on personalities rather than on Christ. Administrators, programs, and the rest all have their place, but in accomplishing the Lord’s work they are nothing if not directed by the Holy Spirit.

Church leaders spend much time in running hither and yon to attend meetings, councils, and consultations, asking innumerable questions about the purpose and aim of the Church. Yet they ignore the all-important questions about the person and work of Christ. In fact, one of the reasons why the Church is proving ineffective in a time of world crisis is that it is trying to usurp the place of its Lord and Saviour—demanding allegiance to itself while leaving allegiance to him, in degree and in fact, to the decision of the individual.

The Church is proving ineffective and irrelevant because so many of its leaders show an appalling ignorance of the Word of God. There are those who use a small w in referring to the Word. They regard it more as the work of fallible men than as a divine revelation of God’s truth, given to men under the inspiration of his Spirit.

Again, the Church is proving ineffective and irrelevant to the needs of a world steeped in sin because many of its leaders believe in and speak of a Christ stripped of his diety, virgin birth, miracle-working power, atoning death, bodily resurrection, and sure return. If anyone doubts this statement, let him attend the church courts of many major denominations and listen to those who come to the defense of ministers who are applying for admission despite their “reservations” about these things.

Many religious groups are as sheep without a shepherd because of a church leadership that has been diverted from its calling, of church programs that neglect the centrality of Christ, first as Saviour from sin and then as Lord of life. No matter how efficiently we may work, or how well organized various church departments may be, nothing can take the place of the preaching of the Word in the power of the Holy Spirit.

To shift the Church’s emphasis from the spiritual needs of the individual sinner to world poverty, population explosion, race relations, urban renewal, and war and peace is to build on the sand. To change the figure, it is the “quack’s” approach—treating symptoms while ignoring the underlying disease. This many church leaders are doing, and as a result they are making the Church irrelevant at the point where it is most urgently needed.

To hold that the Church is called to solve the social, political, and economic problems of society while neglecting the basic need of changing men through the redeeming, transforming, and keeping work of Jesus Christ is to deny Christ and his Gospel.

I am writing out of the deep conviction that unless the major denominations change their present stance we shall find “Ichabod” written across our portals while our Lord turns to “lesser” denominations to fulfill his commands.

We must return to simple faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and his death and resurrection as the one hope of lost sinners. Worldly sophistication and conformity hangs like a death-dealing smog across much that is found in the institutional church. With eyes closed to the reality of sin in the human heart, the Church goes blithely on its way, trying to reform the world without the work of personal redemption by the Saviour. By soft-pedaling the supernatural of Christianity, it is promoting a naturalistic religion that neither saves souls nor brings peace and satisfaction to the human heart.

Do I mean that we should not be concerned about the tragic plight of humanity? Just the opposite! The greatest concern anyone can show to his fellow man is concern over his relationship to Jesus Christ. Once that concern is uppermost, we can and should prove our love by acting in compassion wherever sorrow, need, and suffering are found.

The spiritually starved multitudes are crying, “Sirs, we would see Jesus.” Unless the Church preaches the gospel of redemption from sin, it is irrelevant to the world’s supreme need and fails in its calling and mission.

L. NELSON BELL

For some time Jews and Christians have been arguing about proselytism. From the Christian perspective, the question is whether Christian efforts to convert the Jews to Christianity are in accord with scriptural ethics. Are the Jews rightly related to God in Judaism apart from Christianity? Are they really in need of Jesus Christ?

In the former centuries the Roman Catholic Church persecuted the Jews, accused them of deicide, and otherwise maligned them. Since Vatican II the situation has changed dramatically. The Roman Catholic Church has acknowledged that the Jews are not God-killers and has taken a strong stand against anti-Semitism. Now a working document in which the relations between Jews and Catholics are described in detail has been sent to Rome for consideration. The document may be changed before it is approved, but in the preliminary form it calls for true dialogue with the Jew and excludes all intent to proselyte or convert. It is hard to believe that the Roman Catholic Church is prepared to say that Jews, like “separated brethren,” are in the Kingdom.

In the past Protestants have not outshone Roman Catholics in their attitude toward Judaism. They too have persecuted the Jews and have said many unkind things about them. Indeed, the roots of anti-Semitism lie deeply buried in Christianity in many of its forms. Currently Protestantism, like Roman Catholicism, has more and more condemned anti-Semitism, though still there are evidences of anti-Semitic attitudes among some of its adherents.

Several things are clear to all who take biblical revelation seriously. First, in the matter of guilt for the death of Christ, the Jews are neither better nor worse off than the Gentiles. Since all men are sinners, all men are in some sense responsible for the death of Christ. The sins of all men sent Jesus to Calvary. Moreover, a Gentile could have prevented it-but then where would sinners be? Gentiles who point an accusing finger at the Jews should point first at themselves; all of us are guilty.

Second, the whole ethic of the New Testament is unalterably opposed to anti-Semitism. Only an uninstructed or disobedient Christian can be anti-Semitic; one who is has breached the law of love. But this is not to say that the Christian should scrap his conviction about the uniqueness of Christianity or his belief that the Jew needs to come to God through Jesus Christ. It is this last point that is the enduring source of friction between Jew and Christian.

Recently, in a dialogue between Jews and Southern Baptists, the Baptists were told plainly by one rabbi: “Quit trying to convert us.” The prominent Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, among others, wholeheartedly agrees. This raises the difficult question whether Judaism is an authentic bearer of God’s truth.

There is no doubt that evangelicals acknowledge the authority of the Old Testament Scriptures and accord them a position as high as that given them by any Jew. God chose to reveal his truth through the Jews, who were the bearers of God’s Old Testament revelation and the custodian of that revelation. In a peculiar sense Israel is called the people of God in a covenant relationship.

Evangelicals assert, however, that the Old Testament does not contain all of God’s revelation to man. They believe in progressive revelation and insist that the New Testament completes God’s full revelation. Most of the books of the New Testament were written by men who sprang from Judaism, so that we are deeply indebted to Jews for the New Testament as well as for the Old.

No New Testament writer explains the relation of the Jew to God more carefully than the Apostle Paul. In the Epistle of the Romans, chapters nine through eleven are devoted to this. Earlier in the epistle he concludes that Jew and Gentile alike are under condemnation: the Gentile who has sinned against the light of conscience and the Jew who has sinned against the light of conscience and the light of the law. His conclusion is that no man shall be justified in the sight of God by the deeds of the law. Paul declared he was willing to be accursed himself for the sake of his Jewish brethren. His heart’s desire was for all Israel to be saved. But their only hope of salvation, he says, is through Jesus Christ, who was a Jew and is the only one in whom the Old Testament prophecies of Messiah find their fulfillment.

If we take Paul seriously, then we must conclude that apart from Jesus Christ even the Jew, who has the light of the law and was the bearer and custodian of the Old Testament revelation, is under divine condemnation, and this for two reasons: He does not keep the law, nor does he turn to Jesus Christ in faith. Left to himself, spurning the New Testament and refusing to accept Christ as his Saviour, the Jew is lost. His condition is neither better nor worse than that of the Buddhist, the Muslim, or the Shintoist, except that he has the benefit of immeasurably greater light.

The evangelical believer cannot assent to the proposition that he should quit trying to convert the Jew. He must agree that the Jew is free to believe as he chooses. He must accept the right of the Jew to worship in his own way and to propagate his faith in competition with Christianity. He must accord him the treatment to which all human beings are entitled. But when it comes to the Gospel, the evangelical must choose either to obey God and try to evangelize the Jew or to disobey God and not try to evangelize him. If he evangelizes the Jew he will anger some, but if he disobeys the divine mandate he dishonors God. He must choose whether to obey God or men. If the Jew insists that he yield the evangelistic principle, this in effect robs him of a measure of the very essence of his faith.

The evangelical should affirm clearly that he is not asking any Jew to become a Protestant or a Roman Catholic or an Orthodox adherent. He is asking him to do precisely what the Apostle Paul did: to accept his own prophet and messiah, Jesus Christ, and find in him the final fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures. The man who does so can continue to call himself a Jew, and he may try to stay in the synagogue as Paul did when he visited from city to city. But like Paul he must witness to his fellow Jews, arguing from their Scriptures that Jesus Christ is the hope of Israel.

Of all non-Jews, the evangelical should have the deepest affection and the greatest heart concern for God’s chosen people. Paul says that God has not cast them off forever. And the day is coming when multiplied numbers of them will see that Jesus is the true Messiah for whom many of them still long. The evangelical, too, has the deepest interest in the return of the Jews to Palestine. He shares the burdens they shoulder as they endeavor to develop as a nation surrounded by hostile Arab neighbors. But above all he remains convinced that the Gospel is “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”

Helen Kim

Asia lost one of its most respected Christians with the death last month of Helen Kim.

As an educator, national leader, and spokesman for the Christian faith, Dr. Kim set an admirable example. She was the first Korean woman to earn a doctorate, and went on to become president of Ewha Women’s University. Under her guidance it became one of the largest women’s schools in the world.

Dr. Kim represented her country at the United Nations and once served as publisher of the influential Korean Times. In 1966 she was a speaker at the first World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. She was truly one of the great ladies of the Orient.

Keeping Heroes Clean

The suspension of pitcher Denny McLain dims the pennant hopes of the Detroit Tigers, but it serves the best interests of organized baseball. In a day when so much unscrupulous activity is winked at in so many aspects of everyday life, it is refreshing to see professional sports officials continue to take strong measures against even the appearance of wrong. Other social institutions might well follow this example of making heroes worthy of their recognition.

Taming The Tongue

Much energy has been expended on debating whether the best expression of Christianity is found in evangelism or in social action. There are those on both sides of this issue who seem to have overlooked James’s standard for measuring the effectiveness of a man’s religion. He says: “If anyone appears to be ‘religious’ but cannot control his tongue, he deceives himself and we may be sure that his religion is useless” (Jas. 1:26, Phillips). Certainly James would not minimize the importance of evangelism, social action, doctrine, personal holiness, fellowship, or worship. But all these important aspects of the Christian life have a hollow ring about them if a man cannot control his tongue.

James uses three vivid illustrations to alert his readers to the importance of the tongue (3:2 ff.). A large and powerful animal like the horse can be controlled by so small a thing as a bit in its mouth. So the tongue is a small member of the body, but control of it reflects the ability to control all the passions of our nature. The movements of a large ship are controlled by a small rudder. So the tongue, despite its smallness, can achieve great things. A small spark can set a whole forest ablaze. So the tongue that is out of control can bring about tremendous destruction.

The tongue can be used for good or for evil. It praises God or blasphemes his name. It can build up and encourage our fellow man, or it can tear him down and even destroy him. It can lead men to deeds of love and kindness, or it can incite them to hatred and violence. But, says James, it is as ridiculous for good and evil to come from the same mouth as for fresh and salt water to come out of the same spring. When evil gushes forth from a man’s mouth, he reveals an inward corruption that belies his religious profession.

Too often the cause of Christ has been substantially hindered by the sharp tongue of those who profess to be Christians. Their vicious words have broken homes. ruined friendships, split churches, and caused unbelievers to turn away in disgust.

When James wanted to identify the true Christian, he did not ask: Does he smoke? Does he gamble? Does he drink? Does he play cards? Does he demonstrate against war? Neither did he feel it necessary to examine a man about his doctrine. He simply looked for a man who could control his tongue. How many “Christians” would pass this test?

When an angry crowd tried to take Jesus away after Judas had betrayed him, Peter drew his sword and was apparently ready to take on the whole mob. He began by slashing off the ear of Malchus, the high priest’s servant, and seemed to be set for further action when Jesus intervened. He instructed Peter to put away his sword, and then he healed Malchus’s ear. (One cannot help wondering what thoughts must have crowded into Malchus’s mind as he led away captive the one who had performed this miracle of healing upon his own body.)

Then Jesus uttered these remarkable words: “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” (Matt. 26:53, 54). Thus Jesus made it clear that he was not at the mercy of the mob. They had tried before to capture him and could not because his “hour had not yet come.” If God had not willed it, no mob, regardless of its size, could have taken Jesus captive. He submitted to his enemies and eventually to death because in the plan and purpose of God it was absolutely necessary. It had to be.

If God was to carry out his purpose of calling out a people for himself, if the barrier of sin that separated man and God was to be broken down, it was imperative that Jesus Christ die on the cross. As once again we approach the season of the year when we remember the death and resurrection of Christ, it is tragic that some theologians attempt to devise a Christian theology that bypasses what took place on the cross. They speak of “relevance” and “renewal” and “reconciliation” but remain strangely silent about the cross, apart from which these terms become meaningless. Without the cross there is no renewal, there can be no real reconciliation Godward or manward, and Christianity therefore has no relevance to the needs of modern man.

Why was the cross necessary? Why must it be at the very heart of any statement of Christian theology? Why did the first messengers of the Gospel characterize their ministry as preaching Christ crucified? As Jesus indicated at the time of his arrest, the cross was necessary as a fulfillment of prophecy. The cross was the reality of which the Old Testament sacrifices were only a shadow. It was the once-for-all shedding of blood without which there could be no remission of sins. It was the offering of the sacrificial lamb par excellence—the Lamb of God—as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. Jesus knew that his chief role as Messiah was to be the Suffering Servant who would be “brought as a lamb to the slaughter.” In the Garden he had prayed that if at all possible he might be spared the bitter cup he was about to drink. But there was no way to avoid it. And he was prepared to be obedient “even to the death of the cross.”

The cross was necessary as a fulfillment of the Scriptures; but there was an even deeper reason why it was necessary. Paul states that reason clearly in writing to the Galatians: “Now Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law’s condemnation, by himself becoming a curse for us when he was crucified” (Gal. 3:13, Phillips). Apart from what happened on the cross, sinful man finds himself estranged from a holy God. He has been pronounced guilty in God’s sight, and the sentence is the wrath of God, alienation from God, hell. Man is totally incapable of doing away with the barrier that separates him from God. God alone could do something to solve the problem. This is what the cross is all about.

On the cross God himself in the person of Christ became a substitute for man. He took man’s sin upon himself and suffered all the horror that hell has to offer. If Christ had not done this, there would be no possibility of forgiveness, no reconciliation between God and man, no such thing as “eternal life.” To preach a “gospel” without a cross is to propagate a delusion that can lead only to despair and death.

In emphasizing the imperative of the cross, we cannot, of course, overlook the importance of the resurrection. The two must be always seen as one event. Had not Christ risen from the dead, his death would have been no more than the passing of another famous (though eccentric and even grossly deluded) man. And to speak of his life—past or present—apart from his death leaves man still an enemy of God sentenced to death.

Theology without the cross ignores the Scriptures that demand the cross as their fulfillment. Theology without the cross fails to come to grips with the fundamental problem of human existence—the sin that separates man from God and alienates man from man. Theology without the cross is left with another gospel, which, as Paul says, is “no gospel at all” (and he says of him who preaches “another gospel,” “let him be damned”).

Would God have allowed his beloved Son to endure the brutal death of the cross if there had been any way to avoid it? There was no other way—it had to be. And man ignores it to his own destruction.

Cocu’S Plan Of Union

The Consultation on Church Union holds its annual meeting this week, and the outcome may determine the face of American Protestantism for years to come. Representatives of the nine COCU denominations have before them a long-awaited plan of union. They must decide whether it is acceptable and whether it will work.

The initial reaction to the plan is predictably varied. More than a few are wont to take their cue from the Soviet cosmonaut who on first seeing the Washington Monument said, “It will never get off the pad.”

Sheer size seems to be a major liability of the new Church of Christ Uniting. Bulk already inhibits many of the larger denominations from moving expeditiously (the COCU proposal itself has been nearly a decade in the making, and formal merger is still at least five years away). What will the new church be like with 25 million members and the vast machinery that is bound to result? Programmers will need to be prophets.

We doubt whether COCU plan of union is adequate for the coming great church. Religion Editor William R. MacKaye of the Washington Post, a liberal Episcopalian, wrote of his “suspicion that the drafters have managed to prescribe for the government of their united church a careful melange of most of the worst features of the governmental methods of the denominations they presently serve.”

Evangelicals should not reject the plan out of hand. Those who have drawn up this blueprint have worked long and conscientiously. They have sought a framework for renewal, which the churches desperately need. They should be heard and their plan appraised fairly. There is merit in at least asking ourselves, “Are there things that the churches can do better as one church than separately?” The Los Angeles Times calls the COCU plan “a flexible design, with many positive features. Among them are the new life it would breathe into today’s often struggling parishes and the new order it would bring to a somewhat confused church picture.”

Perhaps the most distressing facet of the plan is its equivocation on Scripture. The united church, according to the plan, “acknowledges the unique authority of the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments. It witnesses to God’s revelation.…” A distinction is thus made between Scripture and revelation. We are given no clue of the extent to which the Bible is revelation; we are not even told what revelation is. Therefore, it does little good to describe Scripture, as the plan does, in terms like “inspired writing” or “the supreme norm” or “the fundamental guardian.”

Tradition, interestingly, gets pretty firm support, including explicit insistence that it be given a capital T (the drafters apparently were uncertain, however, whether Tradition should be prefaced by the article the). The discussion of Tradition seems to leave the reader to choose between such statements as “Scripture is interpreted in the light of the Tradition” and “Scripture is the supreme guardian, expression, and correction of Tradition.”

Adherence to the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds likewise is surrounded by ambiguity. They are accepted as “witnessing to the mighty acts of God recorded in Scripture,” “conditioned … by the patterns of language and thought of their time”; they are symbols that the united church will use as “acts of praise and allegiance,” and they are to “be used persuasively and not coercively.”

It seems clear that what the churches have not been able to do in eliminating humanists, syncretists, and universalists will not be done in the united church either. The present weakness caused by the inroads of unbelief will be a continuing weakness in the larger framework.

The key question is not whether COCU will get off the pad but where it will go once it is launched. There is good reason to be concerned about its direction unless further and substantial changes are made to bring it in line with the tradition (small t) of the apostles and thus with the Word of God.

A Case For Sexual Restraint

Homosexuals have increasingly come to public attention and have had some success in gaining reluctant toleration from a predominantly heterosexual society. The Jewish and Christian traditions have historically condemned the practice of sexual relations between members of the same sex. Whatever unbelievers may think of the origins of this prohibition, Christians are firmly convinced that it is based on divine command (see also “Homosexuality in the Bible and the Law,” July 18, 1969, issue). Paul was speaking for God, not simply venting his own prejudices, when he deplored men who “gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men” (Rom. 1:27).

But homosexuality is not unpardonable. Those who have practiced it have as much opportunity to receive the forgiveness of God and participate in the fellowship of the church as any other sinners. Paul told the Corinthian congregation not to be deceived, that “neither the immoral, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:9–11). The company that homosexuality keeps in this list is noteworthy. There is no scriptural indication that this sin is in a separate category from adultery. Congregations should welcome repentant homosexuals just as much as repentant adulterers.

The corollary is that homosexuals, whatever the cause of their problem, are no more free to engage in sexual relations than are the many heterosexuals who are not married, or whose work requires them to be separated from their spouses for a time, or whose spouses are ill—physically or mentally—and unable to engage in sexual relations. Do those who say that homosexuals who claim to be Christians should be free to practice their sexual inclinations also advocate that Christian heterosexuals be free to violate God’s commandments against adultery and fornication?

It may be that some homosexuality is the result of glandular malfunction, and that most homosexuality is deeply established from one’s earliest years. But God is able to give to those homosexuals who trust him the ability to control their passion just as he can give it to heterosexuals.

All of us need to remember that Christ died for the “gay” as well as the “straight,” and to recognize that we do not have scriptural warrant for deploring homosexuality more vehemently than illicit heterosexuality. Both are sins and deserve denunciation. Yet at the same time, compassion for the sinner, and patience with him when he slips, is just as clearly our responsibility and privilege. The practice of homosexuality is a sin, but so is the attitude that looks upon others’ sins as worse than one’s own.

The Middle East: A Stern Test

“Barring divine intervention, another Middle Eastern war is as certain as day and night. The only question is when, and there may be less time than we think.” So says George W. Ball, former undersecretary of state and American ambassador to the United Nations, now a New York banker.

To Arab guerrillas, the war is already on: they have warned foreigners to stay out of Arab territories administered by Israelis and have advised Christians not to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The admonition followed an Arab terrorist attack on a busload of American tourists near Hebron. Barbara Ertle, 31, wife of Baptist minister Theodore W. Ertle of Grandville, Michigan, died after a hail of bullets struck the bus.

The ambush, together with recent sabotage of airliners bound for Israel, darkly underlined a comment made by President Nixon in his foreign-affairs message to Congress last month. He said the Middle East is “one of the sternest tests of our quest for peace through partnership and accommodation of interests.” The French, eager to curry favor in the Arab world, recently sold 110 jets to Libya. And the Israelis asked Nixon for twenty-five more supersonic Phantoms and eighty more Skyhawks, a request likely to be granted.

Is there a way to head off the fourth Middle Eastern war in twenty-two years? The United States, first of all, can make it unmistakably plain to Moscow once again that Soviet intervention on behalf of the Arabs can only result in American intervention on behalf of Israel. Second, we can press as hard as possible for all warring parties in the Middle East to observe an immediate ceasefire according to United Nations resolutions. Third, we can urge negotiation, improbable as it appears to be.

Christians could emphatically wish that the transforming power of the Gospel could be brought to bear in the lives of those making the decisions, for New Testament Christianity can break down even these barriers and allow the Holy Spirit to overrule. But while we wait and work, we’d better take a cue from George Ball and pray for divine intervention.

Heroin In The Schools

“Within a couple of years every high school in the country will be inundated by heroin.” Dr. Donald H. Louria, president of the New York State Council on Drug Addiction, made this alarming prediction at a recent seminar on student drug abuse in New York. Other experts in the field note the speed with which not only marijuana, but harder, addictive drugs are moving through elementary and junior high schools. One expert says 40 to 60 per cent of these students may be on drugs in a year or two.

Statistics confirm this frightening outlook. According to Dr. Michael Baden, associate medical examiner for New York City, the average age of that city’s heroin addicts who have died from overdoses has decreased from thirty-four in 1950 to twenty-four at the present time. Of the more than 800 heroin deaths from all parts of New York in 1969, more than 210 of the victims were twelve to nineteen years old. And many of the youngsters are being hooked inside the schools.

The use of marijuana is a serious problem, but with the appalling increase in heroin addiction among the young, many parents will feel fortunate if their youngsters restrict themselves to smoking pot. We do not advocate the legalizing of marijuana. But neither do we feel that there should be a disproportionately heavy penalty upon some young people who are caught with that drug.

As long as marijuana is available, young people will use it, laws or no laws. And many are now turning to the far more dangerous heroin. The time has come to declare all-out war, not upon the victims but upon the victimizers—those who profit from making drugs readily available to even our elementary-school children.

The drug problem is here to stay. It will not go away of its own accord, and we cannot afford to ignore it. Christians must inform themselves about drugs—not so they can criticize the young but so they can understand and help them. And perhaps the most effective way to help our young people is to demonstrate that the release they seek to find through drugs can be found in submitting to and serving Jesus Christ.

Rare Reflective Wisdom

Christian Reality and Appearance, by John A. Mackay (John Knox, 1969, 108 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Stuart Barton Babbage, executive vice-president, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Wenham, Massachusetts.

John Mackay relates that, as a philosophy student at Aberdeen, he became fascinated by the title and substance of F. H. Bradley’s important study, Appearance and Reality. In this book the Hegelian philosopher affirms that “metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what one believes upon instinct.”

Mackay, in opposition to Bradley, insists with Pascal that “the heart has its reasons which reason does not know,” and that human thought and action are influenced in a decisive manner by what happens to the heart and in the heart. For the Christian, he points out, life is a movement from one reality to another, not from one appearance to another.

Mackay believes there has been a fateful tendency within the Church to move from the real to the unreal, from Christian reality to Christian appearance, from what is authentically Christian to what appears to be but is not. Today, Mackay accuses, a large proportion of those who bear the name Christian are marked by religious nominalism and theological illiteracy.

Christian reality, he continues, stresses the fact of God’s self-disclosure, the transforming encounter, the community of Christ, and Christian obedience. But each of these four facets of Christian reality is liable to distortion and perversion. “It is a tragic fact,” he notes, “that the emotional thrill derived from sights and sounds that are the aesthetic accompaniments of the public worship of God can become, and in a multitude of instances do become, substitutes for a genuine encounter with God.”

In his younger days Mackay played a formative role in the development of the ecumenical movement, but he is highly critical of present developments. He writes:

In view of the religious nominalism that marks the lives of the majority of the men and women who have been baptized and confirmed in churches of the Protestant tradition, should not priority be given to a united movement toward spiritual awakening in these churches rather than to a top level ecclesiastical effort to merge church denominations and conventions in a single organizational structure?

Mackay suggests that the future of Christendom may well lie between a reformed Catholicism on the one hand and a matured Pentecostalism on the other. He regrets that the churches of historical Protestantism are becoming increasingly bureaucraticized at a time when more and more church members are meeting in cells in an un-ecclesiastical underworld, when the Roman Catholic Church is developing evangelical concern and a deepening sense of what it means to be Christian, and when the charismatic movement is growing across all church boundaries.

This is a book of rare reflective wisdom. From the perspective of a long life as missionary educator, seminary president, and Christian statesman, John Mackay reflects on trends and tendencies in the life of the Church today. He is deeply disturbed and troubled by what he sees. We would do well to listen to him.

Christ In The Old Testament

Luther and the Old Testament, by Heinrich Bornkamm (Fortress, 1969, 307 pp., $9.75), is reviewed by Carl S. Meyer, graduate professor of historical theology, Concordia Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

Martin Luther, professor of Old Testament at the University of Wittenberg, found Christ in the Old Testament. Not allegory or typology but reality, the reality of Christ, is what Luther sought there. The factual occurrences in Jewish history, in which the salvific acts of God are evident in saving his people although they in no wise merited it, are in themselves Christ events to Luther. This means that there are Christians in the Old Testament, for those who believed in the promised Christ, said Luther, are Christians. Adam and Eve believed in the Protevangelium (Gen. 3:15); they were Christians; they constituted the church. Bornkamm says, “His [Luther’s] interest in the Old Testament is not historical [historisch], in the sense of a modern science of history, but rather historical [geschichtlich] in the sense of the true history of God” (italics in the original).

Bornkamm, renowned Luther scholar of the University of Heidelberg, in this manner emphasized Luther’s unique view of the Old Testament. It is in contrast to the allegorical method of the Middle Ages, Origen, and Erasmus. Bornkamm also has a long chapter on “The Old Testament as Word of God.” Luther recognized two testaments or covenants, but the new was the fulfillment of the old. For Luther the unity of the Scriptures meant that the written record of the Old Testament is the proclamation of the New. Luther wrote: “… The Gospels and Epistles of the apostles have been written to direct us to the writings of the prophets and of Moses in the Old Testament so that we might read and see for ourselves how Christ was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger—that is, how he is contained in the writings of the prophets.”

Luther found the Trinity in the Old Testament, not by using allegorical interpretations, but in passages such as Genesis 1:26 and 3:22; Genesis 11:7, in the plural Elohim, and in the functions he perceived ascribed to the Godhead.

Law and Gospel were to Luther the two most important teachings of the Bible. He found Gospel in the Old Testament, of course. The Decalogue “rhymes with natural law,” he said. For him, the First Commandment gave goal and meaning to the other nine. That Christ is the end of the Law (Rom. 10:4) means that the Law is annulled insofar as it concerns justification. Since sin remains, the Law is valid until the end of the world. The proclamation of Moses is transformed by the promise of the Christ and his salvation. From it the Law receives its deeper meaning. Those passages of the Old Testament Law that are in a prophetic context can be interpreted, Luther said, in terms of the new Law, the Gospel; and the iustitia Dei could be interpreted as the righteousness of God in the grace of remission of sins. The Old Testament, therefore, also provided living examples of faith.

Bornkamm is not concerned primarily about the problems that Luther’s use of the Old Testament presents in the light of the historical-critical findings. He does refer to these problems and concludes: “Recent Old Testament study has set us a world apart from Luther’s point of view. We are unable to bridge this gap. Yet it should disturb us.” However, the task of interpreting the Old Testament with a Christocentric interpretation (not a Christological prophetic one) in the light of modern findings remains.

It is good to have an English version of this classic published in 1948, and this translation by Eric and Ruth Gritsch, edited by Victor Gruhn, is an excellent one. The references and bibliography are updated. It is a boon to have the references not only to the Weimar Ausgabe but also to the American edition of Luther’s Works. The appendix is valuable.

Evangelicals And Science

The Scientific Enterprise and Christian Faith, by Malcomb A. Jeeves (Inter-Varsity, 1969, 168 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Howard A. Redmond, professor of religion and philosophy, Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington.

To most Americans the name Jeeves brings to mind the English butler on the late late show. What we are served by this Jeeves—Malcomb A., of the University of New Zeland—is intellectual and spiritual fare that is both stimulating and nourishing. In this age of heart transplants and moon landings, it is essential that well-informed people try to understand “the scientific enterprise” and its relation to Christian faith. This book, based on a week of discussions among scientists, philosophers, and theologians at Oxford, can do much to help one achieve this goal.

Eschewing many of the popular clichés and superstitions about science, Jeeves succinctly states some of the major emphases in contemporary philosophy of science. Natural law is seen as descriptive, not prescriptive; in good Humean fashion he says it has no implications for the future but only states what we have observed (this is related to the concept of miracle, which would be difficult to accept if natural law were prescriptive or binding). The scientific method, so much revered by non-scientists, is shown to be neither mystical nor magical but simply the way the scientist goes about his work. Time is seen as a created reality, freeing us from the naïve view that space and its contents are created but that time is eternal. The function of models is discussed in some depth, with the warning—useful in theology as well as in science—that we take care lest we confuse the model with the reality is seeks to express.

In exploring the relation of science to Christian faith, Jeeves notes that it is probably no accident that modern science developed in a Christian civilization, a point also made by such writers as A. N. Whitehead and Alan Richardson. Certain forms of determinism are not incompatible with Christian faith. The “God of the gaps” concept, a modern deus ex machina philosophy in which God is used to explain what science does not, is rightly deprecated. The importance of the religio-scientific theories of Teilhard de Chardin is recognized, but so is the speculative and fanciful character of some of his conclusions. The evolution issue is discussed rationally, unemotionally and—this reviewer thinks—fairly. The author concludes by endorsing C. S. Lewis’ method of “transposition,” that is, the recognition that science and religion can describe the same events differently but without contradiction; each can say what is valid from its own point of view.

The book is not without flaws, which are mainly in form and style. Some parts are almost a collage of quotations, and some participants in the discussions seem to be given undue prominence. Such flaws are probably inevitable in a book that endeavors to summarize a week of varied interchange among scholars of different disciplines. But on balance the book is a noteworthy contribution to evangelical scholarship, a kind of evangelical philosophy of science for the seventies. It is one of those books that Bacon would tell us to taste, chew, and digest.

Ancient Jerusalem Revisited

Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, by Joachim Jeremias (Fortress, 1969, 405 pp., $9), is reviewed by Bruce M. Metzger, professor of New Testament language and literature, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.

Where does one look for information on the population of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus? What were the status and condition of slaves, both Jewish and Gentile, in the first century of the Christian era? Exactly who were the “chief priests,” referred to so often in the Gospels and Acts?

Answers to these and to hundreds of similar questions related to social and economic conditions during the New Testament period are provided in this encyclopedic volume by Joachim Jeremias, who recently retired from his chair of New Testament in the University of Göttingen.

Jeremias was born and reared in Palestine. For this volume he draws on all available sources of contemporary and rabbinic documents and canvasses every aspect of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day. He deals with the industries and guilds of Palestine, and with commerce involving both local and foreign trade. The industries connected with the building of the Temple and with its cultus are described in full detail, and there are vivid accounts of the great feasts that filled Jerusalem to overflowing with visitors. In brief vignettes the author portrays the living conditions of the rich and the poor, and of most of the levels between. There was a weekly dole to the poor of the city, consisting of food and clothing. The Temple cultus provided one of the main sources of income for the city. It maintained the priestly aristocracy, the priesthood, and the Temple employees. The latter included not only sweepers and other menial laborers but the bakers of shew-bread and the makers of incense, the weavers and knitters who produced annually two of the Temple curtains, the goldsmiths, and even a Temple doctor.

In discussing social status, Jeremias gives attention to the scribes, Pharisees, noblemen, traders, peasant workers, tax-collectors, and Samaritans. Within the context of Jewish concern for pure ancestry he examines the historical value of lay genealogies, including those which are recorded in Matthew and Luke.

Full indexes enable the reader to find information on a great number of New Testament passages and personages. This volume, designed for scholar and lay reader alike, will surely remain for many years the authoritative treatment of economic and social conditions of Jerusalem in the time of Jesus.

Valuable Aid For Pastors

Pastoral Counseling with People in Distress, by Harold H. Haas (Concordia, 1969, 193 pp., $4.95), is received by Leslie R. Beach, professor of psychology, Hope College, Holland, Michigan.

Perhaps the real strength of this book is that its author is fully trained and experienced both as a pastor and as a clinical psychologist. Dr. Haas knows both fields, where their boundaries are, where and how the roles of pastor and psychologist mesh, and what each can and cannot do for people in distress. It is good to distinguish as he does between emotional distress and mental disorder, and to leave the disorder to the mental-health professionals. It is good too to draw his distinction between pastoral counseling and pastoral care. Haas must be lauded also for pointing out, in his thorough treatment of distress and its causes, that even religion has a place among the causes of distress.

A fine thing I have not seen in similar volumes is the assumption that the pastor who reads the book is going to know his own field and professional role. Haas spends his time and words showing him how he can fit his training and his skills to the professional mental-health orientation. His cautions to the pastor against assuming an authoritarian role, offering instant diagnosis, and playing therapist are excellent.

Yet with all this Haas still carves out an important counseling role for the pastor—one characterized by limitations, yet offering a unique contribution commanding the respect of any professional. He says the pastor’s basic goal is “to put the right relationship between man and God by conveying the Word of God concerning Jesus Christ to man.” This includes goals of the helping professions—alleviating distress and helping the individual achieve his full potential.

Haas provides excellent examples of counselor responses that impede counseling and those that facilitate counseling. A chapter on practical issues and counseling ethics is also commendable. His “bill of rights” for those being counseled furnishes the pastoral counselor with much food for thought. And a real boon for the serious pastor who knows the limits of his own competence and wants to get the best professional help for his counselees is the chapter dealing with signs of severe disorder and describing referral resources and how they can be located in any community.

The pastor himself is not neglected. The final chapter on the pastor as a person punctuates the need for him to be an effective person himself if he is to be an effective counselor. An appendix of suggested readings gives the reader more sources on selected topics.

This is clearly one of the best small volumes on pastoral counseling I have seen. It is rich and thorough, yet readable even for the person without training in psychology. And when the author deals with theology, he does not feel compelled to prove to his readers that he knows its labels and its jargon; he speaks theologically without moralism and “preachiness.” This book should not be on every pastor’s shelf—it should be close at hand on every pastor’s desk.

Book Briefs

The Cutting Edge, Volume II, compiled by H. C. Brown Jr. (Word, 1969, 130 pp., $4.95). Several contributors wrestle with some of the critical issues facing the contemporary Christian (such as the sex revolution, divorce, and the new morality), emphasizing the necessity for the Church to move out into the world to confront today’s problems.

Lectures on Preaching, by Phillips Brooks (Baker, 1969, 281 pp., paperback, $2.95). Reprint of a valuable series of lectures by one of America’s greatest preachers.

The Dynamics of Confession, by George William Bowman III (John Knox, 1969, 119 pp., $3.50). A former pastor, now serving as a counselor and hospital chaplain, affirms the need for confession of sins and offers his suggestions for the practice of confession in Protestantism.

Bible and Gospel, by Archibald M. Hunter (Westminster, 1969, 146 pp., paperback, $2.25). A widely known New Testament scholar discusses, in an understandable way, questions about the Bible as a whole, the Gospels, and the current quest for the historical Jesus.

Pocket of Pebbles, by Charles R. Hembree (Baker, 1969, 128 pp., $2.95). Devotional and practical study of “the fruits of the Spirit.”

Church Politics, by Keith R. Bridston (Word, 1970, 173 pp., $4.95). Contends that the Church is a political as well as a sacred institution and sees politics as neither good nor bad in itself but as a method of achieving goals Calls for a more representative organization of the Church.

The Contemporary Preacher and His Task, by David Waite Yohn (Eerdmans, 1969, 159 pp., paperback, $2.95). Affirms that expository preaching, based on biblical authority, can be an exciting and meaningful adventure for both preacher and congregation.

Along Life’s Highway, by Clarence E Macartney (Baker, 1969, 103 pp., $2.95). Eleven sermons selected from the Macartney Collection at Geneva College.

The Many Faces of Friendship, by Eileen Guder (Word, 1969, 139 pp., $3.95). On the basis of her own experience, the author discusses the values and challenges of friendship.

Dissent In and For the Church: Theologians and Humanae Vitae, by Charles E. Curran and Robert E. Hunt (Sheed and Ward, 1969, 237 pp., paperback, $3.95). This document, based on the dispute over Humanae Vitae at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C., considers the role of theological dissent in today’s Roman Catholic Church.

Are These the Last Days?, by Robert Glenn Gromacki (Revell, 1970, 190 pp., $4.50). An examination of some of the most common questions regarding prophecy.

Is Life Really Worth Living?, by David Hubbard (Regal, 1969, 103 pp., paperback, $.95). The president of Fuller Seminary points the way to answering ten of life’s toughest questions (e.g., How do I handle my guilt? How do I overcome my past?).

Commenting and Commentaries, by C. H. Spurgeon (Banner of Truth Trust, 1969, 224 pp., $3.50). This reprint of Spurgeon’s valuable catalogue of biblical commentaries includes two lectures about commentaries and commentating. As an added feature the volume includes a complete textual index of Spurgeon’s sermons.

James—A Study Guide, by Curtis Vaughan (Zondervan, 1969, 128 pp., paperback, $1). A brief devotional exposition of James written with the layman in mind.

Paul and His Epistles, by D. A. Hayes (Baker, 1969, 508 pp., $6.95). Reprint of a classic in Pauline studies.

Is The Press Then Perditionable?

For Kierkegaard I used to have that wary esteem normally directed toward those I imperfectly understand. Then he dropped several points when I encountered something of his that I understood too well. “The lowest depth to which people can sink before God,” he declared, “is defined by the word ‘journalist.’ ” If his daughter were brought to dishonor he would not despair, but hope for her salvation. “But,” went on the redoubtable Dane, “if I had a son who became a journalist, and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up.”

As one on the scribal periphery I took this pretty hard, but I perked up on the discovery today that, courtesy of the ecumenical movement, we pen-pushers may well have a saint rooting for us. It happened thus. As I sat down to write this column about something totally different, a page in my heterodox diary informed me that it was the feast day of St. Francis of Sales—a circumstance that any robust Protestant would have pointedly ignored. Disloyally I looked him up. My grasp of his vital statistics was shaky, and I am always on the lookout for some ammunition against my local priest, who is suspiciously friendly.

Not only, I found, was Francis a leader of the Counter Reformation: he was audacious enough to engage Calvinists on their own home field. Thereafter this irrepressible bishop had everything going for him: beatified, canonized, and doctored in less than two and a half centuries—a record that will stretch even Hans Küng to emulate. Some will consider, however, that Francis’s Big Moment arrived in 1923, when he was patronized by the Catholic press.

It may be that he owed his adoption by writers, and his inevitable popularity with editors, to five deathless words: “Never drag out your sentences.” In the manner of true Roman tolerance in the face of human weakness, those five words might be considered modified by seven more spoken on a different occasion, and here shamelessly wrested out of context: “Always plan more than you can undertake” (I wondered where Browning had got that line of thought).

But what really endeared the said Francis to me was a piece of profundity uttered after he had begun his risky and unenviable campaign to win the erring Swiss back to the old religion. “Love alone,” he stated, “will shake the walls of Geneva.” Without dragging out my sentences, I pass this on without comment as something not devoid of wider implications for the Church Militant.

EUTYCHUS IV

Waking Up Sane

I would like to put in my word of appreciation for “Law and Order” (Jan. 30). Truly that is the most sane and scriptural article on the subject I have read for many a day.… Maybe some Christian people will wake up to the true Bible teaching on such a subject.

(The Rev.) LEONARD D. BELL

Pawhuska, Okla.

I regret that you saw fit to change the title of my article. I believe my original title, “The Kingdoms of This World and the Kingdom of God,” sounds better and more accurately describes the content and purpose of the article. I particularly regret that you chose a title which, by its connotation to some of our citizens, turns many people off. They are just the ones I would like to speak to.

WILLIAM SANFORD LASOR

Professor of Old Testament

Fuller Theological Seminary

Pasadena, Calif.

Did Professor LaSor title his article? I note the expression “law and order” does not appear in his text, but he does speak of “law and justice.” It is a classic example of the lack of communication where the establishment is supporting “law and order,” while the poor ask first for “justice”.…

The question is not as to the rightness of the law, but rather, “To whom is it applied?” The Bible teaches that mercy dictates the law be applied less stringently to the poor, the weak, the ignorant.…

As a white Protestant minister I know the law handles me with preference. And I don’t feel good about it. A close friend in law practice has told me, “The only way you can get justice today is to buy it.”

ROBERT DISCHINGER

Executive Secretary

Mid-Atlantic Baptist Conference

Meridan, Conn.

If the duty a Christian owes to God and the state was so neatly differentiated as William Sanford LaSor suggests, Christians would indeed have an easy moral life.…

Unfortunately, the Christian is an anarchist, at least in terms of the state. He owes his first allegiance to God, and that duty does not end just because it is in conflict with the civil rulers.

The Old Testament prophets would have enjoyed a peaceful life had they followed Dr. LaSor’s course. So would Jesus—who was, after all, executed—and so would the German Christians who opposed Hitler and suffered the consequences.

Apparently, Dr. LaSor feels that the Christian duty to uphold God rather than man ended with the reign of Nero.

(The Rev.) WILLIAM R. WINEKE

Madison, Wis.

When Sex Goes To School

How thankful I am for “Sex, SIECUS, and the Schools” (Jan. 30). As a first-grade teacher who teaches family life in the course of the year, I realize how controversial this topic is. I have long been aware of the facts you brought out concerning the organizers and promoters of SIECUS. It is clear that they are anti-Christian. True, they don’t represent all the sex-education backers, but too often they’re contacted when a school district is planning their program. Our only hope is that Christian parents and educators see to it that material presented is not contrary to Christian teaching.

JUDY HARVEY

Bloomington, Minn.

One fact usually overlooked is that SIECUS was not formed with the schools in mind at all; the schools came to SIECUS. Over and over again we have stated the truth, that we have absolutely no curriculum guide, nor have we ever produced materials for use in schools, only background materials for professionals.…

I heartily agree with your sentence, “If SIECUS were to disband tomorrow, sex-education programs would continue.” They would indeed; the evidence is clear in our files that the great majority of clergymen, physicians, and educators, as well as parents of this country, want them to continue and will see that they do so. Our only goal is to help them achieve what they—not what we—want, because we have never been presumptuous enough to claim to know what is best for other people. I believe that this is the reason for the acceptance of SIECUS by the highest professional groups in the country, which have recognized the truth about SIECUS and have not been impressed by the untruths which many innocent people, including, I believe, yourself, have been led to believe.

MARY S. CALDERONE, M.D.

Executive Director

SIECUS

New York, N.Y.

Isadore Rubin and Sexology have been made much of because of the pictures on the magazine, which, like large numbers of displays in theatre foyers, were designed to attract people who have over the years been trained to respond to sex by sensational pictures. But in terms of educational enlightenment Sexology has at least equalled the theatre. Recently Dr. Rubin and I developed a book, Sex Education of the Adolescents, published by Association Press, with all articles taken from Sexology. This has been a widely and favorably reviewed book.…

Sexology has been trying to work directly with low educational level people who have been assiduously miseducated by our mass media, and so have actually to be approached this way.

LESTER A. KIRKENDALL

Portland, Ore.

The major fault found with Rubin’s magazine Sexology is that it is factual, professional, and “amoral.” To condemn any periodical, person, or action because it does not expound one’s own particular biblical views is the height of provincial narrowmindedness [and] an approach alien to Christianity.…

When dealing specifically (finally!) with actual material used in sex education programs (which are almost universally not solely sex education, but rather are family-life-in-society studies, contrary to the implications in the article) misrepresentations and myths again predominate. The graphic presentation of the sex act in man and animals is correlated with the higher moral aspects of the act and does not suggest solely animal appetites. This material has been presented on educational television (late at night), and careful listeners could find very little objectionable material present. In addition, to argue that some facts of sex education should be reserved until after high school ignores the fact that unfortunately this information is often received in back alleys and dark corners.…

In conclusion, there are legitimate reservations that the Christian may have about sex education. It is certainly a difficult task that the schools face in attempting to present this material while maintaining the separation of specific religious morality from the facts of sex. However, the schools are not forbidden from presenting a basic moral approach to sex. This is justified since our schools are the legitimate avenues of passing on our cultural heritage and traditional values to the youth of the nation. The heritage of our nation is certainly based on acceptable moral values for most Americans and most Christians.

MAHLON W. WAGNER

Psychology Dept.

State University College

Oswego, N.Y.

This Christian Country

I enjoyed Dr. J. W. Montgomery’s article, “God’s Country?” (Current Religious Thought, Jan. 30). May I suggest you put this out in a tract or pamphlet form, perchance, with a “patriotic” type of title page (red, white, and blue colors or an American flag or eagle) to catch the eye. I would enjoy handing out such a tract to well-meaning but mistaken ultra-conservatives who identify patriotism with biblical Christianity. As a result, when one does not support some of their extreme plans or accept their sweeping statements as gospel truth, they at times are rather quick in questioning the orthodoxy of your Christianity. In fact, one or two have even wondered whether I was a “pinko” underneath my cloak of religious conservatism.

WALTER A. SYLVESTER

Grace Lutheran Church

South Everett, Wash.

As a student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I wish to voice my disgust at the article, “God’s Country?” At the outset, without derogatory comment, Montgomery cites “Laugh-In” as a source of information. Docs he not know that this show—to which he lends legitimacy by his citation—is a veritable cesspool of the television screen?

He then proceeds to state that he can stand invitations to the Playboy Club more than so-called “right-wing” literature which claims that America is Christian. I reply to this by asking: How can a Christian theologian stoop so low as to tolerate an invitation to cavort with harlots, while simultaneously renouncing Christian literature which idealistically—and admittedly naïvely—sets forth a picture of America which is totally in harmony with the Word of God? Now, nobody is claiming that the America of today is in any real sense Christian. Furthermore, Christian patriots such as Dr. McIntire and Dr. Hargis are certainly aware that the Founding Fathers were not all Christians. What they do assert is that Christian principles were inherent in the governmental structures formulated by our forefathers. And Montgomery admits that this is true!

Let it also be said that great churchmen like Dr. McIntire are doing more to oppose those anti-Christian elements (e.g., Communists, anarchists, and civil-rightists) which are eroding our moral fiber than Montgomery has ever done!

RONALD INNES

Deerfield, Ill.

Renewal And Revelation

I had about decided to send in my check for continuing my subscription.… I have decided against this, and am asking that you remove my name from your list for the following reason.

I did not at all care for the final paragraph in “Mormons and Blacks” (Jan. 30). The business about blacks will be taken care of according to revelation. When our Heavenly Father leads us to give the priesthood to blacks we shall do so. Otherwise we hold no superior attitudes about blacks and, indeed, they are most welcome in the church as members or visitors, and are regarded as his children even as we are.

L. POWELL EVERHART

Atlanta, Ga.

Since I’ve lived among the Mormons for more than thirty years, I read your comments carefully.… I have found the Mormons more liberal minded, more tolerant to all others, including blacks, more helpful, more honest to deal with, and much more Christlike than all those who in their hypocritical ways find fault with them.…

Tell me, sir, was your God discriminating when he gave his priesthood to Aaron of the tribe of Levi and refused to let other nations or even the other tribes of Israel have it?… Perhaps you would be kind enough to point out to me where Jesus Christ chose one colored apostle.…

The more I read hate-creating articles of so-called Christians, the more I feel like saying “almost thou persuadest me” to be a Mormon.

A. J. SCHETSELAAR

Salt Lake City, Utah

Tipping The Top

I was amused by your tongue-in-cheek (certainly it must have been that) inclusion (“Deans List Top Ten,” News, Jan. 30) of the results of a “survey” of the “top ten Christian liberal-arts colleges” in America. Not having at my disposal the vast quantity of statistical evidence doubtlessly employed in the survey by Biola College’s Dean Craig E. Seaton, I was overwhelmed to note that such academic strongholds as those listed left no room for the likes of St. Olaf College, Pacific Lutheran University, and Calvin College.

Could it be that we at Calvin College are not regarded as a college with a “long established reputation for all-around excellence”? In this regard, it may interest your readers to know that we have more Ph.D.’s (or the equivalent thereof) on our faculty as well as more books in our library than the combined totals of those of the two colleges topping the list. While other evidence would reveal similar comparisons, such “ratings” would do little more than divide us as Christians more than we already are.

RONALD A. WELLS

Assistant Professor of History

Calvin College

Grand Rapids, Mich.

If anyone really wants to know which are the top ten Christian liberal-arts colleges, perhaps he should first essay some definition of which colleges are to be so labeled. “Christian”? Who says so?

And for some objective selections, rather than eighteen very personal opinions, one might turn to some factual evidence.… Doctorate Production in United States Universities, 1920–1962, with Baccalaureate Origins of Doctorates in Science, Arts, and Professions gives some fascinating information.…

Precisely one Biola alumnus had received an earned doctorate during the years studied. Precisely one.

(Yes, of course, I had looked first at the Greenville College record. Ninety-nine doctorates. I repeat, ninety-nine.)

The scoreboard for the other colleges:

Of course there are many aspects of excellence other than a record of doctorates among alumni. Of course the colleges listed are not all of the same size and are not coequal in seniority. But if CHRISTIANITY TODAY is to cite comparisons, shouldn’t it find comparisons based on a more scholarly (or more journalistically sound) foundation?

Probably by now the alumni and friends of dozens of colleges across the nation have joined in a chorus of pain and wrath and perplexity. If so CHRISTIANITY TODAY has served a worthy purpose, anyway, in stimulating loyalties and in causing some valuable questions to be asked about the nature of excellence, after all, in a Christian liberal-arts collgee. For which, we must all thank you—even through our wryly pursed lips.

ELVA MCALLASTER

Greenville College

Greenville, Ill.

Applying Caution

“College Consumers: Rocking the Boat” (Jan. 30) did an unintentional disservice to Bethel College and Seminary in St. Paul, stating that “Bethel, on the other hand, allows both movies and dancing.” This is not the actual situation at Bethel.…

The policy statement in the admissions material sent to all incoming students calls for a distinctiveness in social practice. The section on life style emphasizes eight basic principles for guiding student conduct. It then concludes: “Hopefully, legalism and negativism is avoided as much as possible in order to place primary stress upon personal, vital relationship to Jesus Christ as Lord. At the same time, certain cautions have been highlighted in … universal Biblical principles.… The application of these principles has led to the identification of certain social practices which are detrimental to the common good at Bethel.… Students are expected to exercise discretion in all of their entertainment and recreation. Social dancing, indiscriminate attendance at the theatre, and the use of euchre card games is discouraged. It is expected that students will order their behavior both on and off campus in the light of these guidelines.”

CARL H. LUNDQUIST

President

Bethel College and Seminary

Saint Paul, Minn.

Sticking Up For Truth

I recently saw the cartoon and article about myself (“No Stickups Allowed,” News, Dec. 19), and I must say it made me physically sick to think that you would make fun of a man getting baptized, be he in prison or wherever the solemn occasion might occur.

I’d also like to point out a glaring error on your part.… There is no such thing as a Church of Christ newspaper. The Christian Chronicle is a periodical for the Churches of Christ but not an official church newspaper.…

I dare you to print this letter. I’m sure you won’t as it tells it like it is and that’s something your organization can’t stand, the truth.

JAMES CARPENTER

Arizona State Prison

Florence, Ariz.

Hebrew In The Gospels

An unfortunate mistake was made in “Biblical Scholarship: ‘30 Years Closer to Jesus’ ” (News, Dec. 5).…

While it is true that my observations have led me to conclude that Mark used Luke and a proto-narrative and that Matthew has used Mark, I do not hold that Matthew has used Luke.…

The new element in my analysis is only what I view as a correction of one of the longstanding defects of the Markan hypothesis, namely the failure of Markan Priorists to treat seriously the evidence that Matthew and Luke know another document than Mark in their Markan contexts.

This does not mean that it is not of the greatest importance that Luke can be shown to be our first Gospel. Not only are the strange repetitious stereotypes and redundancies of Mark (one need only recall the frequent “and immediately” as an example) shown by this kind of observation to be due to the fascinating targumist method of our Aramaic-minded Mark, but the remarkably Hebraic materials of Luke can no longer be explained as the result of Luke’s “improvement” on Mark. They appear to be excellent and early literary sources which give every sign of having descended from a written Hebrew document or documents.

The same methods indicate that Matthew’s Gospel, where not dependent on Mark, shows dependence on the same kind of remarkable Hebraic-Greek materials we see in Luke.

R. L. LINDSEY

Jerusalem. Israel

Ann Landers, who is Mrs. Jules Lederer of Chicago, writes one of the most widely read syndicated newspaper columns in the world. She is Jewish, and her principal appeal to the Decalogue in offering advice has won her the respect of many church and lay people. She attended Morningside College and holds an honorary doctorate from that school.

Question. Why do you think people come to you for advice rather than seek the counsel of a clergyman?

Answer. My readers actually answer this question in the opening sentence of their letters. For example: “Please don’t tell me to see my clergyman about this problem. I’m ashamed to let anyone know we are having this kind of trouble in our family.” “It is easier for me to write to you because you do not know us.”

Q. What are the most frequent spiritual problems that people bring to you?

A. Often I am asked, “If there is a God in heaven, why does he allow such terrible things to happen? Where was God when a five-year-old child was raped by a mentally deficient gardener? Where was God when all the horrible things we read about in the newspaper occurred?” Recently, I dealt with this question in the column. One of the readers provided me with a superb answer. Here it is: God was there. He warned people before it happened, but they paid no attention. They failed to see themselves as God’s instruments. They didn’t realize the power they had. God can work his miracles only through you and me. Countless tragedies have been prevented because somebody listened with his heart. These are the incidents we never hear or read about. How many accident victims would be alive today if someone had shut off the liquor at the party or driven the drunk home instead of allowing him to drive his own car? Those who say, “It’s none of my business,” are no better than the heartless breed who turn their backs on people in trouble and ignore the helpless victim’s cry for help. Commitment, compassion, and involvement are virtues that can’t be overdone. God doesn’t let things happen. It’s you and you and you.

Q. What kind of problem gives you the most difficulty?

A. Letters from homosexuals are the most disturbing to me, because I can give them so little hope for a cure. I always suggest therapy, although I am well aware that therapy fails to produce the desired results in the majority of cases.

Another type of problem that gives me a great deal of trouble is the one involving Catholics who have very poor marriages and stay together because of the church. “The priest told me that I must keep the family together at all costs.” In many instances, there is alcoholism, brutality, and non-support. Some of these letters are heart-breaking. I always recommend counseling, although in my heart I feel that the woman would be better off if she took the children and left-or kicked the bum out!

Q. What factor more than any other seems to cause young people to go morally astray?

A. Young people go astray morally because their parents failed to discipline them properly. And they failed, also, to give their child a feeling of self-responsibility and personal worth.

Q. How much mail do you receive? Is it all answered?

A. I receive approximately 1,000 letters a day. Every letter that has a name and address receives a personal reply in the mail. I have eleven well-trained secretaries who assist me with this enormous work load.

Q. Do many of the people who write you about their problems complain about their own clergymen? Or about their particular churches?

A. I’m sorry to say I do get some letters of complaint against clergymen. I am well aware, however, that not all these complaints are justified. The most frequent criticism is, “He didn’t give me enough time. I got a quick brushoff.”

Q. Do many clergymen write in to dispute your advice?

A. I receive a great many letters from clergymen, and I am pleased to say that most of them are complimentary.

Q. Your replies to questions are often sprightly little sermons. How do you account for their popularity in view of the unpopularity of so much preaching today?

A. I believe the humor in my column makes some of my stern counsel acceptable.

Q. Do clergymen or psychiatrists ever write to you for help?

A. Both clergymen and psychiatrists have written to me for help. Far more numerous are letters from wives of psychiatrists and clergymen. The wives of clergymen resent the criticism of women from the congregation. If they dress in style the word is, “She has no right to look like a fashion model.” If the clergyman’s wife underdresses, she is harpooned for “looking dowdy.”

Q. Since you began your column in 1955, has there been any appreciable change in moral attitudes? Has the new morality had an effect toward more permissiveness?

A. In the fifteen years I have been writing this column, I have noticed definite trends in permissiveness on the part of parents. They seem to have given up somehow. Perhaps a better word is abdicated. I do not feel there is a “new morality.” In my opinion, this is a fancy phrase for an old weakness. It must be understood, however, that there is some sexual precociousness among teen-agers. My medical consultants tell me that children today mature between two and a half and three years earlier because of better nutrition and super drugs. Today the thirteen-year-old is as physically mature as the fifteen and-a-half-year-old in the 1940s. In other words, boys and girls thirteen years of age are behaving in the same way that sixteen-year-olds behaved thirty years ago.

Q. What effect has the pill had on moral standards?

A. I believe the pill has provided a shade more promiscuity but not to the degree that one might think. Actually, the girls who are on the pill would be using another type of contraceptive. The one problem the pill has created, however, is an increase in venereal disease. For your information, VD has reached epidemic proportions in this country over the last six years.

Q. What prompted you to begin the column?

A. I started to write the column because it occurred to me that this type of counsel in a large number of newspapers could be immensely helpful to a great number of people. My hunch was right. My daily column, it is estimated, is read by 54 million people every day.

Q. Have you ever seriously regretted some advice you have given?

A. Yes. I seriously regret that I admitted in print that I was unable to make a successful gelatin mold! The following weeks brought me approximately 14,000 “sure-fire, failure-proof” gelatin recipes. This column appeared two years ago and I am still receiving helpful hints. I also regret having told a young bride that she should be gracious and allow her in-laws to join her in Honolulu for her Viet Nam husband’s R and R. I received thousands of letters from angry women who reminded me that when a man marries, his wife should come first. I finally reversed my advice and told the folks to unpack and stay home.

Q. What word do you have for the clergy of North America?

A. My advice to the clergy is: Try to understand how desperately people need love, compassion, understanding, and, most of all, someone to talk to. Try to understand, too, that the clergyman occupies a very special place in the lives of a great many people. He is looked up to, admired, thought of as enlightened, gifted, and a messenger of God’s word. When a clergyman disappoints his parishioners, he tarnishes the image for all clergymen.

Q. You are in effect a substitute pastor. Do you ever feel you would actually like to be one?

A. Thank you for the compliment, but “no.” Because of my religious affiliation, I would have to be a rabbi. I do not believe there are any female rabbis in existence, and I have no desire to be the first!

This home is ideal: father and mother faithfully together after twenty years of marriage; white frame house in upstate New York; children making good grades in the local school; warm fellowship at a sound evangelical church. And then Anne, the eighteen-year-old, who has just graduated from high school, announces that she is pregnant. Whatever is to be done? This is chaos. It doesn’t happen in families like ours. It can’t happen to us. I mean, we’re Christians. How shall we hold our heads up? How shall we respond? Shall we be furious? Grief-stricken? Mortified? Shall we hide her? Should we move?

This home, on the other hand, is not ideal: there has never been a father about—only a succession of men; roaches scuttle among the drainpipes under the sink in one corner of the fourth-floor walk-up in Manhattan; the children are pushed from one grade to the next in the local school without ever learning to read; church is a word that doesn’t mean much of anything. When Lucille finds that she is pregnant, it isn’t even worth an announcement; one more baby in the house is nothing new, and half the girls she knows get pregnant by the time they are eighteen.

Two situations, very similar, very different. In both of them, some pressing questions are raised. The questions appear on at least three levels: the practical (where shall the girl go to have her baby? how will it be financed? what ought to be done with the baby?); the psychological (who will be a friend and confidante to the expectant mother? who will advise her? who will listen to her side of things—her feelings and hopes and fears?); and the moral (what about all this business of random sexuality? what about pre-marital sex? is there a question of good and evil involved here?). What sort of answers would Christians give to these questions?

This is an era when it is popular to say that there are no “easy answers.” That can mean two things: either that the answer is clear enough but very difficult to attain, or that we don’t know what the answer is to begin with. It is common enough to hear the Church protesting that it is not offering easy answers to the world; the vehemence of the protest arises partly, it would seem, from a certain embarrassment over having gotten ourselves a bad reputation in the world by standing apart from the agony of men and shouting “Ye must be born again!” at them. The fear that this reputation may be all too accurate has led some Christians to forswear all “God talk” and to address themselves entirely to the immediate material, psychological, and social needs of men. The evangelical section of the Church, however, cannot do this, convinced as it is that when the chips are down, no amount of sunshine and soap and security and money will quite do the trick, since we are creatures that really are made for God.

The jostling claims of time and eternity never seem to be wholly settled, and perhaps this is good. Perhaps it keeps us awake and alive and pressing ourselves with hard questions as to our priorities. And perhaps it forces us to learn and keep on learning what a great mystery the Incarnation is—that great event in which time and eternity, flesh and spirit, earth and heaven, met and were caught into each other. But it keeps coming down to questions like whether we shall use social work and medicine, say, as lures to get men where we can “give them the Gospel,” or whether we should put our efforts first of all into preaching and witnessing, with the idea that, once a man knows God, other problems appear in their proper perspective.

Any Christian who has spent much time in actual engagement with social problems (alcoholism, drug addiction, disease, poverty, broken homes, unwed mothers), will tell you that you can’t cook up a theory and beckon to people to come fit in. You’ve got to get in there and live with things and try to help, all the while learning a little, perhaps, about what is at stake in being a “witness” to the Gospel.

The last few years have seen an enormous awakening in the Church to the problems of society, and the appearance of many efforts to minister to men in the name of Christ. Many of these efforts, because they are directed to social problems that attract widespread attention, are familiar to us—various youth and ghetto and drug programs. The “sexual revolution” is a phenomenon that is leading society a merry chase at the moment, but whatever popular sexual mythology is abroad, there is nothing new or exciting about one matter: childbearing outside of marriage.

This is not an article on the Christian idea of marriage. There is such an idea, but it is not the subject here. The subject here is the Church’s response to the situation that arises when people don’t bother to marry. For in our society, whether a girl is Christian or non-religious, rich or poor, if she finds herself pregnant outside of marriage, she has problems. And they are not the sort of problems that disappear under the sound of preaching. Gestation pursues its implacable way.

Here is one instance of Christian response to this problem, although it is not a solitary instance. (The Swanscott Home in Utica, New York, the Florence Christian Home in New Jersey, the Salvation Army homes across the country—there are any number of efforts being made by Christians in this field.) On a lovely, tree-lined street in Manhattan’s East Seventies, there is a “brownstone” (New Yorkers’ term for buildings that were built as private houses), like thousands of other brownstones on the cross streets of the island. There is no sign on the front, but if you ring the bell and go in, you will very likely meet before long a cheerful, energetic, grey-haired woman who will make you feel as though she had been expecting you.

She is Josephine Schenkweiler, and she and her husband Lou are “Mom” and “Dad” to fifteen or so girls, all of them pregnant, and none of them married. The atmosphere in the house (it is called Heartsease Home) is very convivial and family-like. If you are lucky enough to join the family for a meal, you will find yourself at a long table with Dad at one end and Mom at the other, and a great deal of laughing and joshing going on over the steaming dishes. After the meal the girls fall to their various tasks of clearing up and putting away. Much of the work of the house is done this way.

The girls come from every possible background situation—from respectable homes, Christian homes, black homes, white homes, suburban homes, ghetto homes, the lot. They are referred to the home by parents, pastors, adoption agencies, the Bureau of Children’s Welfare, the Children’s Aid Society, and the courts. Some of the girls, when they arrive, consider themselves “above” the other girls by reason of some social or religious credentials, but they soon learn that, on the one hand, everyone is in exactly the same boat here, but on the other, no one is held in contempt, or even pity. There is a realistic acceptance of each girl and her situation, a welcome to whatever help Heartsease can offer, and an unsentimental facing of the problems arising from the pregnancy.

A social worker on the staff talks with the girls, and their families if possible, before they come to stay, and counsels them during their time at the home. The merely “routine” issues common to every case present a tangle of problems: whether the girl ought to keep her child, whether she is psychologically and financially able to do so, and if not, whether short-term or long-term foster care is advisable until the mother can provide a home for the child, or whether the child should be legally surrendered for adoption through an agency.

Besides having to face and decide upon these practical matters, a girl often finds enormous emotional difficulties when she takes up life with a dozen or more girls from backgrounds vastly different from her own, and it is often in the informal, impromptu conversations on these personal matters that staff members are able to speak to the point which is, Christians believe, at the center of whatever perplexity, fear, shame, or joy may be occupying a person at a given time. For it is the conviction of the staff at Heartsease that for a girl to know Christ is for her to begin to know real life. It will not solve a single one of the practical problems raised by her pregnancy: that is why the daily routine of the staff is overwhelmingly taken up with very pedestrian, not very “religious” matters. The consequences of one’s choices and acts do not dissolve upon one’s submitting to the lordship of Christ. To be Christian is not to be exempted from the plodding business of being human: indeed, it is to begin to understand that very business as the serious business of moving toward the perfection and glory for which we were made. It is to know the God who is Redeemer as well as Creator—that is, the one who takes the havoc we make of our lives, and retrieves and remakes it all, and turns it, beyond our imagination, to modes of glory.

Some of the girls find this out, and bear witness to their new faith. Others can’t see it. But all of them find something at Heartsease that they may or may not ever have known, and that is love. St. John insists that this is something that has its springs in God. To that extent, then, they have all seen God, whether or not they recognize his name.

This is one example of Christian response to one of society’s problems. There are, as I say, many other examples that could be cited, and, heaven knows, many other problems. Perhaps in some sense similar to the way in which God aroused the Church in other centuries to address itself to particular issues (doctrinal definition in the great councils, periodic reform, world evangelism), he may now be asking us to enter more fully than we have ever done into participation in his Incarnation—that manifestation of the Word in flesh. Our wing of the Church has been very active indeed in disseminating the Word by the word: perhaps we have a great deal to learn about the ways in which the Word becomes flesh.

“I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and, though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming.”

This is a part of the thirteen principles of the Jewish creed recited at the end of the daily morning service. “Messiah” is the Hebrew Mashiach, meaning “the anointed one” (in Greek, “Christos”), a title of honor given to the kings of Israel to signify that they were consecrated by God by anointing and, therefore, holy. However, the designation the Messiah refers only to the long awaited Redeemer of the Jewish people.

Except for the belief in God, nothing has occupied the Jewish mind more during the last 2,000 years than the coming of the Messiah. The daily prayers in the synagogue and at home revolve around this hope. While it has not yet been fulfilled, the very hope has been a temporary substitute for the Messiah, a binding conviction that saved the Jews from extinction. All through their exile, the Messiah has been the remedy for all their troubles and ills.

This hope has found its noblest expression in their prayerbook—in the daily prayers, the prayers of the Sabbath and festivals, and others. All bear witness to the intensity of this longing. Some of these prayers do not expressly mention the Messiah; they speak only of “redemption.” But all Jews traditionally have known that the “redemption” will be accomplished by the Messiah.

The constant yearning for the Messiah is expressed not only in the liturgy of the daily services of Orthodox Jews but also on various other occasions. For example, at the after-meal benediction that follows the service of a circumcision there is a remarkable passage, suggestive of the mystery of the Messiah:

May the All-merciful, regardful of the merit of them that are akin by the blood of circumcision, send us His Mashiach, walking in His integrity, to give good tidings and consolation to the people that is scattered and dispersed among the peoples. May the All-merciful send us the righteous priest who remains withdrawn in concealment, until a throne bright as the sun and radiant as the diamond shall be prepared for him, the prophet who covered his face with his mantle, and wrapped himself therein, with whom is God’s covenant of life and of peace.

At the time of Christ, the Jews awaited the Messiah as the one who would deliver them from Roman oppression. The Temple, with its sacrificial service, was intact. The Romans did not interfere in the Jews’ religious affairs, and the messianic hope was basically for a national liberation. But even then, to many Jews, the Messiah was also to be a Redeemer of the souls of men, both Jew and Gentile.

Thus, when John the Baptist proclaimed that Jesus was the Lamb of God who bears the sins of the world (John 1:29, 36), he evidently expressed the hope and expectation of those around him. Great numbers of them came to be baptized.

After the destruction of the Temple and the cessation of the priestly rites, the messianic hope in general was for one who would bring the Jews back to the land of their fathers—the “Holy Land,” the “Promised Land”—and there restore the Davidic kingdom. But, as expressed in the liturgy, the hope was mainly to rebuild the Temple and restore the sacrifices and subsequently establish the Kingdom of “Shadai,” the Almighty. The need for reconciliation with God by full obedience (including restoration of the sacrifices) is evident in the liturgy more than the yearning for national physical redemption.

While all Orthodox Jews believe “with perfect faith” in the ultimate coming of the Messiah, few have a clear conception of the Messiah’s identity and task. Is he of divine nature, or mortal, or both? Is he to redeem the Jewish people only, or all “the families of the earth”? Is the purpose of his mission to bring the Jews back to their ancestral home, and that only in order to let them live in freedom and peace? Or is his purpose mainly to reconcile them with God through their keeping of the Law, based largely on prescribed sacrifices? When will he come? And where is he now?

According to some traditional authorities, the Messiah is similar in both identity and mission to the Christian Messiah: he is supernatural, and the purpose of his coming is the salvation of all mankind.

Some rabbis, among them the great Maimonides, thought that the Messiah would be a person of flesh and blood, but very wise and mighty, who would free the Jewish people from foreign yoke and provide them with a comfortable life. Thus they would be able to devote their time to the study of the Torah and the observance of its laws.

The Jewish people as a whole believe in the supernatural personality of the Messiah, a demigod who by some miracles will inaugurate a state of peace and happiness for the Jews, when God will provide them with all necessities and luxuries of life. This comfortable life in the “Age of the Messiah” is pictured in the Talmud as a wonder world of ease. For example, Rabban Gamaliel says that the soil in Israel will produce cakes and silk garments, the trees will bear fruit continuously, and the Jewish women would give birth to children every day (Talmud, Shabbath 30b).

Some see this era of the Messiah as paradise. Although the Jewish paradise is not as carnal as the Muslim paradise, which provides believers with beautiful maidens, it too offers an abundance of pleasures, such as sumptuous banquets where the meat of the wild ox and of the Leviathan will be served, accompanied by the marvelous, delicious wine preserved for the Jews since the six days of creation. All this bliss they consider will be only a just recompense for the suffering and martyrdom they had to endure during their long exile among their cruel enemies.

Pious and learned Jews have not shared this materialistic view of paradise. They have believed that the reward of righteous Jews will consist of sitting in company with all the righteous men, all crowned and feasting their eyes on the radiant glory of the Shekinah, the presence of God.

There is no consensus about the paradise. It is generally understood that it has been in existence since the creation of the world. It was Adam’s original home, from which he was expelled after his fall from grace. Every Jew is believed to have a share in this place of bliss after death and after some expiation in Gehenna, according to the number and gravity of sins committed in this life.

It is also generally understood that after the coming of the Messiah, the dead will be brought back to life and there will come the “Day of Judgment.” This doctrine is shrouded in vagueness. The rabbis have given no clear idea of this judgment day.

Vague also is the idea of a suffering Messiah. While Christianity has a clear idea of a Christ who had first to suffer and die for the atonement of the world and then return to earth as a triumphant King over all mankind, the Jewish sages who rejected the Messiahship of Jesus could not explain the apparent discrepancy between the Bible passages describing the Messiah as suffering (as in Isaiah 53) and those describing him as a victorious king, as was expected by the Jews. So they devised two different Messiahs: the Messiah, son of David, and the Messiah, son of Joseph. The son of Joseph would suffer, be defeated, and die, while the son of David would be the real Messiah as expected.

In the liturgy, the suffering Messiah is mentioned in a special Yom Kippur prayer. However, this idea of two Messiahs is now generally unknown.

In answer to the question of when the Messiah would come, a matter that has greatly occupied the Jews, the rabbis devised theories, various speculations, and calculations based on some passages of the Bible (such as Daniel 11). In time, some of the rabbis, fearing the despair likely when such calculations proved false, pronounced a curse upon those who speculated upon the date of the Messiah’s arrival (see Sanhedrin 97b). It says in Kethuboth 111a that two of the conditions that God made with Israel were that they should not be importunate about the end of time and should not reveal it.

It has been generally believed that God has set a date for the Messiah’s coming, and that this may even be today. But he may arrive before the appointed date, it is thought, if all the people repent of their sins, or if they are in utter despair, or when they keep two sabbaths. That he may come “today” they infer from Psalm 95:7, which is quoted also by Paul in Hebrews 3:7. And so he is expected every day, as they repeat daily at the end of the morning service.

The Jews generally deny that Jesus is the Messiah. But one may ask them, If he is not, who is?

Since the Roman conquest of the land of Israel various persons have claimed to be the Messiah and have been proved false, often after their disastrous effects. How will any new Messiah establish his identity? How will he be able to prove he is of the House of David and of the Tribe of Judah? No Jew today can trace his ancestry back beyond two or three hundred years.

The great Maimonides tells how to identify the Messiah, but what he says has inherent problems. According to him, the claimant to Messiahship will be able to prove the validity of his claim by bringing the Jewish people back to their ancestral home. He will rebuild the Temple, restore the sacrifices, force the Jews to keep all the laws of the Torah, fight God’s wars, subdue all enemies of the Jewish people, and so on. After he has achieved all that, he will be the true Messiah.

Now, all these achievements could be performed only during a period of many years. How will the Jews, with their various sects and parties, accept this person upon “credit” (that he will in due course perform these deeds), and how will he be able to persuade the various conflicting groups to go to Israel and keep the Torah, including its teachings on sacrifices and on full submission to rabbinic authority? One may doubt whether many Jews living comfortably in free countries will leave home and business, go to Israel, and wait till a certain person (who has suddenly appeared and claimed he is the Messiah) proves that his claim is legitimate.

If Jesus is not the Messiah, there is not and cannot be one, and the messianic hopes held through thousands of years have been founded on legend, superstition, and idolatry. However, those Jews who believe in their Torah may be comforted in the belief that their Redeemer liveth and that he is Jesus, the true Messiah of Israel.

SUNWARDS

Drift, wheel, then swim

hard against that torrent,

your river of air, and climb

cascades of wind, my salmon,

my creaky bird, and know

I ache, I creak with you.

I fly too—higher,

farther, faster than you.

But how? Like a louse on a sparrow,

a carried thing. So now

here by this tidal river

I stretch these twigs of arms

and reach for the muscled wings

that carry your white glint

sunwards. To soar on my own,

straining, wind-whipped, aching

toward … Not that sun.

Another.

FRANCIS MAGUIRE

The Essence Of Christian Action

This faith that we discuss is all action. Never make the mistake, however, of letting it take on the form of mere activism, that is, action simply for the purpose of promoting the name of Christianity. When I speak of the Gospel of Action, I mean redemptive action aimed at bringing the good news of salvation to all people everywhere. All activity in personal life and in church life must be judged by the relevance to the Gospel. It is not enough for the rummage sale, the bazaar, and the church suppers to be held in the name of a good cause. The fact that the end product of a church activity will bring more money to the treasury does not exempt it from the importance of being in itself an agency of love, joy, peace, and mutual helpfulness. In many churches such activities have come into disfavor because they have often been used as vehicles through which, in the name of a good cause, people could push each other around. This, then, is an even worse kind of activism—more dishonest than when the same thing happens for the sake of some worldly goal.

The Gospel of Action is the kind of activity that brings the good news of Christ to people right here and now. The real work of the Christian is to know Christ and to make Him known by those practical, constructive actions that show forth His love and His assurance of the abundant life He has promised. “Church work” activism is one thing and the real work of the church is something else.—C. W. FRANKE in Defrost Your Frozen Assets (copyright 1969 by Word, Inc.; used by permission).