It occurs to me with increasing frequency that I somehow have membership in a minority group that is far from popular in this land of the free and home of the brave. The trouble is that I am a WASP, a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It distresses me even more to discover that I and my kind are not only disliked but also disorganized. No one now can criticize a Black or a Jew or an Irishman, and Frank Sinatra is very protective of the Italians. Practically all the words that I learned to use on “foreigners” I have had to clean out of my vocabulary. Meanwhile, anyone who wants to can blame a WASP for anything, and do so with impunity. It is time to organize!

We are even told that we cannot organize because we are already organized; it seems that we all belong to the Establishment. The Establishment controls the government (except for the Irish in Boston) and all the money (except for the Jews in New York) and all the big businesses (except for those we don’t control, like the news media, for example). And I belong to this establishment? Just exactly where do I hook into all this power structure I hear so much about? And even if I should belong to the Establishment, I certainly didn’t join it; I have no membership card, and for the life of me I can’t figure out how to resign. Assuming I am in the Establishment and assuming I should like to get out of it, just where do I report in?

So how do we WASPs campaign for our own protection? Take the fact that I am white, for example. What am I supposed to do about that? Maybe we should start a “White is beautiful” campaign. I might have a go at that, but my last trip to the beach was too discouraging. There are some whites who are beautiful, but my general impression at the beach was that there is an awful lot of white skin around that is very discouraging to look at. Besides that, most of them weren’t white at all. Sometimes when I am not at my best I look a little green or a little gray; when I start to sunburn I get pink, and by the end of the summer I have freckles. If my “White is beautiful” campaign begins with me, I really don’t think it can get off the ground.

Then there is the little problem of being Anglo-Saxon. Maybe I can start a campaign about being proud of my ancestors. Well, I am. But I see no reason to try to dress the way they did, nor wear my hair the way they did. I never did like kilts in spite of the fact that my Scotch grandmother thought that I had very nice knees “for a boy.” A great-uncle of mine who made some money looked up the family tree and managed to get a tartan and a coat of arms. He also discovered two relatives who were hung for treason and a couple of others who stole cattle. Historians tell me that the Angles were the dumbest slaves on the Roman slave market and that some of my Anglo-Saxon relatives were painting their bodies blue and practicing canabalism while people were civilized all around the Mediterranean Sea. Gregory the Great sent missionaries to my folk in spite of those who argued that the Anglo-Saxons would be too stupid to understand the Gospel.

All in all I am proud of my ancestors—they have done some pretty grand things. Still, I see no reason to try to live the way they did or look the way they did. I have it on good authority that many of them were dirty; in those days a bath a week was considered a bit extreme.

Being a Protestant is a more serious matter. I like the way the Protestants got under way and I like the sorts of things they stand for, even though they do not stand for them very often and very well.

The word Protestant began with the second Diet of Spires in 1529. What had happened between the Romanists and the Lutherans had really reduced itself to a battle for religious freedom. Religious freedom was a new idea, and it took a long time for it to become popular in Europe.

The battles for religious freedom were the groundwork for all kinds of other freedoms, and still are. As Principal Rainey pointed out about fifty years ago, “freedom is one thing.” Men do not fight for freedoms but for freedom. The second Diet of Spires was of basic significance in this battle, which is far from over. It is no accident that in our day churches, in spite of their failures, have been well to the front in the battle for civil rights. And even those who disdain the Church and leave the Church nevertheless learned their lessons about freedom at their Mother’s knee.

At the Diet of Spires certain Protestant rights to spread the Gospel were cut off by state and church control. The Lutheran minority appealed, in what was called An Appellation and Protestation, against the findings of the Diet. These words abide: “Then they must protest and testify publicly before God that they could consent to nothing contrary to His Word.” Out of this came the honored title, which was really a nickname, “Protestant.”

So now we have it. A good Protestant will “protest” and “testify,” or if you like, “protestify.” He will do so under the Word. He will do so for freedom. And he will do so for everyman’s freedom. I don’t think the WASPs should be ashamed of being Protestant, but I do think WASPs should be ashamed in these days if they do not live up to their name.

Right now there are a lot of places where we might get going for Christ and freedom in the matter of testifying to the truth and protesting all injustice. Maybe other minorities are waiting for us to put our money where our mouth is.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

Never before in the twenty-year history of the National Council of Churches of Christ had there been a triennial assembly like the one in Detroit last month (see December 19 issue, page 30). The dust (or more precisely, paint) had hardly settled before the council’s general board faced another identity crisis.

Responding to a revolt of angry women, minority militants, and radical youths during the assembly the previous five days, the policy-making general board the following day rejected nominations for twenty-five key council posts because the slate did not offer enough blacks. And then the board turned out the fifteen-man nominating committee itself, including Episcopal lay chairman Peter Day, who pleaded that his committee had done the best it could.

Sensing the tide, Disciples of Christ executive George G. Beazley, Jr., who had been tabbed to head the new nominating committee, quickly withdrew.

The general board was suddenly faced with no approved nominations—and no nominating committee. A scant quorum was present and adjournment time was one hour away.

Newly elected president Mrs. Cynthia Wedel saved the day (but not Peter Day) by hastily asking an ad hoc committee to name a new nominating committee that would in turn revise the slate by this month’s general board meeting in Tulsa.

In what Washington Post religion writer William MacKaye called “a sweeping repudiation of the council’s older generation,” the committee retained only six members of the original Day nominating group and appointed a black Methodist woman, Miss Theressa Hoover, chairman of the new group. She is general secretary of the United Methodist women’s division. With her are three other women, six Negroes, three young persons, and one Spanish-American.

Her committee will nominate persons to NCC posts until the 1972 triennium. The bold move was seen as an indication that the younger, blacker, and more radical element of the council will take an increasingly stronger role in steering the interchurch agency.

On the heels of the assembly and general board meeting, rumors circulated that incumbent general secretary R. H. Edwin Espy would step down in favor of a younger man, possibly a black. (Both he and Mrs. Wedel are 61.) But Espy seems determined to remain, at least for the present, aided by vice-president Bishop Frederick D. Jordan of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and American Baptist Convention veteran layman Carl W. Tiller as treasurer (they were elected at the Detroit assembly by handy margins).

Buoyed by the boundless optimism of president Wedel and hopes that hitherto uninterested groups on the left and the right will scurry under his proposed “ecumenical umbrella” (see December 19 issue, page 30), Espy will soon discover just how many things thirty-three denominations want to do together these days.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Evangelical Reaction

The National Council of Churches authorized initial steps last month toward broadening its structure to include religious groups not now involved in the council, such as the Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics, and Pentecostals. CHRISTIANITY TODAY asked leaders of several key groups that would be affected to comment on the proposal.

Dr. Jacob A. O. Preus, president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, indicated that the “phase” arrangement of a new council has a potential appeal, because so far the Missouri Synod’s policy and posture toward the conciliar movement has been at the level of “purchase of service, or on an ad hoc basis.”

Planks In The Ncc Platform

In resolutions at its Detroit General Assembly, the National Council of Churches:

Supported the Washington peace marches in October and November as “legitimate, peaceful, and legal demonstrations of political dissent and moral protest against U. S. policy in Viet Nam.” A separate resolution on Viet Nam, which was debated only briefly and passed easily, asked President Nixon to act unilaterally “to seek a ceasefire with or without the consent” of the South Vietnamese government, and called on him to withdraw all U. S. troops by the end of 1970.

Urged churchmen to minister to U. S. draft-dodgers in Canada.

Called for an international investigation, by an agency such as the United Nations or the International Red Cross, of the alleged Song My massacre. The resolution on civilian massacres said a “belated full-scale investigation by the U. S. Army … is quite inadequate.”

Opposed production, maintenance, and use of all chemical and biological weapons, and encouraged President Nixon in his stated intention of disposing of stockpiles of such weapons.

Asked the government to reform the food-stamp program, extending it to all counties, and to declare an emergency so funds and foods “can be freed for quick distribution.” A related resolution noted the seriousness of the population expansion and called on the U. S. government to halt further population growth.

Created an Indian Board within the NCC to “broaden opportunities” for Indians and Eskimos, and in a separate resolution supported the “just settlement” of long-standing Indian and Eskimo land claims in Alaska.

Urged President Nixon to withhold $495,000 in federal funds allocated to a Mississippi state panel working on Hurricane Camille rehabilitation because of alleged racial discrimination in the agency’s activities.

Referred for action a resolution expressing concern “over injustice and resultant suffering experienced by great numbers of displaced Palestinians.”

Urged the elimination of war toys as Christmas presents and asked Christians to reduce commercialism in Christmas by reducing gift-buying and instead “giving money to religious and peace causes.”

Voted unanimously, in the final rush of business, to seek ways to supplant the NCC with a “general ecumenical council” plan of decentralized, smaller groups under one umbrella organization, including a “more inclusive Christian fellowship” and participation of member churches in a “national consultation” on the subject.

Asked planners of the 1972 General Assembly to provide more “forum” activities and fewer “working” sessions.

The following day, the policy-making General Board asked for the formation of an “entirely voluntary armed force” by the United States, and called for the abolition of Selective Service.

Dr. Paul Rees, editor of World Vision magazine: “Proposals for a restructuring of the NCC are not surprising. Bureaucratic tendencies plague all expanding organizations. Structure is not as important as ethos and commitment. If the new proposals can be helpful in achieving a sort of balance between the values of a membership bond on the one hand and those of a free association or open forum on the other hand, I could be thankful. It is a big order—perhaps too big to succeed. Something needs to be done to break the hammer-lock of ‘pro’ NCC and ‘anti’ NCC do-or-die attitudes. What is all important is truth, and the truth of the Gospel is confined neither to the NCC nor to those who are outside of it.”

The Rev. W. Amos Criswell, president of the Southern Baptist Convention: “Not in the foreseeable future will the SBC join any such council, however loosely it may be joined together. Each church can do as it pleases, but the convention will stay out.”

The Rev. Thomas F. Zimmerman, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God: “Frankly … it is very unlikely that the Assemblies of God would give serious consideration to any conciliar affiliation.”

The Rev. Clyde W. Taylor, general director of the National Association of Evangelicals: “The … council proposed by Dr. Espy is essentially a non-ecclesiological body including churches and other types of social organizations. This type of ‘united nations’ structure fails to meet the minimum biblical and theological bases for Christian fellowship, and certainly lacks the basic ingredient of oneness in Christ. I am confident that evangelicals inside and outside our fellowship will not be interested.”

The Battle For Missouri

Conservative and liberal forces in the three-million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod are outlining battle plans. Both are mapping strategies aimed at denominational “balance,” but there seems to be little agreement on whose scales should be used.

A group of Missouri Synod conservatives charge that official church publications “have a certain lack of balance which needs to be corrected.” The group says it plans to set up a nonprofit corporation to publish a magazine and occasional study papers to support charges against the more liberal wing of the church.

Missouri Synod liberals, on the other hand, complain that the new administration of President J. A. O. Preus has been upsetting the balance by giving key posts to conservatives. The liberals are headed by Dr. Alfred O. Fuerbringer, who retired last summer as president of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. They recently sent a letter stating their charges to a number of pastors and laymen. The letter, said to be the first of a series, was written by the Rev. Richard E. Koenig of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Preus charged that Koenig is acting in “an irresponsible manner.” and that the letter contained false information. “The only effect it can have is to polarize,” Preus observed.

Hollywood Boulevard: One Way

For a mile and half they stretched down Hollywood Boulevard, not to protest but to demonstrate peaceably that Christianity is alive and well. The Sunday-afternoon march (December 14) was sponsored by the youth department of Hollywood First Presbyterian Church. Some 15,000 invitations were sent; the turnout was somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000.

The marchers carried signs such as: “God is eternal,” “He died for you—live for Him,” and “One Way.” Organizer Bob Norton said the march was strictly to demonstrate that Christ is still effective in the affairs of men. An observer would at least have concluded that Christians are happy: the marchers smiled, chanted, and sang their way down “Tinsel Street.”

Afterwards, they gathered on an athletic field to hear black singers and speakers from Watts. This was designed to show that Christianity is unifying and total, Norton said. The youthful crowd was typical, with long hair on both sexes and many bare feet. But hundreds jumped up shouting approval when the Reverend Edward Hill of Watts said the answers black militants give are “a lot of junk” and concluded, “We’re here to tell them Christianity is the answer.”

The featured speaker was Hal Lindsay, a former Campus Crusade for Christ staffer who now heads “The Light and Power Company” of ULCA. His talk was apocalyptic, and the kids went wild when he thundered, “Christ is coming in this generation.”

Many Hollywood residents probably didn’t understand what the march was all about, but it was obvious that the young people who took part were turned on by shamelessly taking Christianity back into the streets, where it began.

BRIAN BASTIEN

Pcus Rally: Determination Without Compromise

“There will be a continuing Presbyterian Church in the Southland.” This promise, uttered by Dr. Robert Strong of Montgomery, Alabama, was greeted with enthusiastic applause by the 1,500 ministers and laymen attending the first rally of Presbyterian Churchmen United in Atlanta.

The mood was one not of divisiveness, rebellion, or reaction but of determination. All the speakers showed aversion to a division of the denomination, but they expressed firm refusal to compromise with theological liberalism.

Student Activists Go For $110,000

It could only be described as a student uprising. Coeds poised for invasion of the home-economics building. Male students grabbed axes, broom handles, and buckets of paint—then assaulted the college town of Harrisonburg, Virginia.

But there were no injuries, the campus of Eastern Mennonite College emerged unscathed, and the townsfolk had nothing but praise for the determined display of student power. The insurgency began one weekend last month when trustees of the 920-student college announced that $110,000 was needed by Monday night to meet $400,000 in matching funds for a federal grant that would enable the school to build a new $1.5 million library.

By early Saturday, the word was out, and students fanned into the community chopping wood, washing cars, and punching doorbells for donations. Coeds became housemaids, men hired out as butlers, yardsmen, and even singing messengers. Others hit up parents, relatives and churches. A bank kicked in $1,000, but most gifts were small.

Pies, cakes and other goodies baked by the coeds were sold at a campus auction Monday night, the deadline. By 2 A.M., when the last item went on the block, $112,000 had been raised—and money was still coming in the next week from as far away as California.

Harrisonburg’s mayor appeared at a college chapel service and handed a plaque honoring the school to Eastern Mennonite president Myron Augsburger. Student coordinator Everette Ressler summed it up: “Most of these kids are tired of hearing about college demonstrations, and they’re darn proud to be a part of one like this.”

Presbyterian Churchmen United is a fellowship of Presbyterian U. S. ministers who have signed a “declaration of commitment” first published in early October in four denominational periodicals and more than thirty metropolitan newspapers (see October 24, 1969 issue, page 45, for text of declaration). PCU is now a chartered organization that anticipates tax exemption by early 1970.

Former General Assembly moderator Dr. C. Darby Fulton, who served as executive secretary of the Board of World Missions for thirty years, told the group he signed the declaration because it “is consistent with, and derived directly from, the standards that have long been recognized as the canons of our church.”

The Rev. Frank Barker of Birmingham cautioned that “there may well be a fork in the road ahead. But if so, it will not be we who are departing. We will continue straight ahead, and we will invite men from all over the nation to join us, if and when that time comes.”

Asserting that the concern of conservatives is first and foremost theological, Dr. Strong pointed to those who would depart from the church’s historical doctrinal commitment as the disturbers of the peace. He spoke of the “radical ecumenists” committed to making the PCUS a part of the ecumenical mainstream at all costs. He noted five specific proposals to which PCU is opposed: the attempt to reduce from three-fourths to two-thirds the majority necessary to effect a constitutional or confessional change; restructuring the boundaries of lower courts (which some feel will decrease the effectiveness of certain conservative presbyteries and hinder lay participation in the courts); making a new confession of faith; participation in the Consultation on Church Union; and renewed effort to achieve union with the United Presbyterians.

Keynote speaker for the meeting was Dr. D. James Kennedy, pastor of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the denomination’s fastest-growing congregation. Kennedy declared: “I think the time has come that the people are ready to stand up and say ‘Halt! Thus far and no further will we go.’ ” He spoke of theological liberalism as unbelief that is killing the church: “It is emptying the churches, the seminaries, the mission fields and the benevolent causes of the churches.”

He also rebuked evangelicals’ failure in social action, pointing especially to racial prejudice, “which needs to be dealt with as sin.” And he warned of the danger of affirming belief in the priority of evangelism, while failing to be involved in the work of evangelism.

RICHARD L. LOVE

Canadian Church Council: Will Activism Pay?

The Canadian Council of Churches, long regarded as a dull-gray paper organization, struggled to shed its lackluster image at its December triennial conference. The decisions of that gathering indicate that the council, which represents eleven Canadian denominations with 2,270,000 adult members¹Anglican Church of Canada; Armenian Church of America (Diocese of Canada); Baptist Federation of Canada; Churches of Christ (Disciples) All-Canada Committee; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America—Ninth District, Canada and Alaska; Lutheran Church in America—Canada Section; Presbyterian Church in Canada; Reformed Church in America—Classis of Ontario; Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)—Canada Yearly Meeting; Salvation Army—Canada and Bermuda Territory; and the United Church of Canada., is trying to steer on an activist course.

The Montreal meeting heard a warning from general secretary T. E. Floyd Honey, a United Church minister, that a financial crisis threatens the organization. Member denominations, he stated, were pinched for funds, and they tend to regard their financial commitment to the CCC as optional.

“One of the reasons why the churches are short of money,” Honey suggested, “is that people are losing confidence in the denominational structure and programs. The more they seek to bolster the denominational image, the more self-defeating the operation becomes. What the CCC stands for represents a very important part of their salvation. It seeks to bring them out of isolation into common action.”

Despite last year’s financial reverses, the council adopted measures that will call for a threefold increase in giving, including a direct appeal for donations.

This year’s gathering witnessed an immediate demand for hard cash from the newly established social-action fund, and Canada’s first taste of the “reparations” technique, although that term wasn’t used. Joseph Drummond, a vice-president of the National Black Coalition of Canada, threatened to leave the meeting if the council didn’t grant his group $10,000 annually for three years—with no strings attached. The council quickly and unanimously agreed, and before the conference had concluded, the Anglican Church of Canada had forwarded $5,000 to the black coalition.

Miss Ruth Tillman, Honey’s associate, contends the council’s new activist image will commend its work to Canadian churchmen, who will triple their giving to the budget.

At its closing session, the council—meeting in the major city of French Canada—called on all clergymen working in Quebec to speak French. A committee, working with the Canadian Catholic Conference, was asked to probe the French-English problem.

An eighty-four-page report on sex and family life, financed by a contraceptive manufacturer and the outgrowth of study groups across the country, was received. No uniform viewpoint emerged on the report, but the prevailing note seemed to be a call to the churches to “play it cool” regarding specific standards.

If the CCC succeeds in its crucial fund drive, Canada can expect a more aggressively activist ecumenical push. If not, some observers feel the council will fade away.

LESLIE K. TARR

Charismatics Gain Bishops’ Blessing

The numerous Roman Catholic priests in their traditional black garb seemed out of place at the Pentecostal breakfast meeting sponsored by the Toronto, Canada, branch of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International. But they were there to hear fellow Catholic Kevin Ranaghan, a theology professor at Indiana’s Notre Dame.

Ranaghan, an apologist for the so-called charismatic movement, told the gathering that in the last two years 30,000 Roman Catholics in the United States had embraced the Holy Spirit movement. The upsurge of tongues-speaking in Catholic circles began with a small group at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and now “is spreading like wildfire,” Ranaghan said.

Significantly, the Pentecostal movement among Catholics captured the attention of the 250 prelates who rule the U. S. Catholic hierarchy at their semi-annual meeting in Washington, D. C., last November. The bishops accepted a report from the committee on doctrine that said the movement “should at this point not be inhibited but allowed to develop.” This rather startling statement on glossolalia is much more liberal in tone that the official positions of a number of mainline Protestant denominations, which have looked askance at the movement, if they have not opposed it outright.

Catholic reaction to the charismatic renewal has been “one of caution and somewhat unhappy,” said the committee report. “Judgments are often based on superficial knowledge. It seems to be too soon to draw definitive conclusions regarding the phenomenon and more scholarly research is needed.”

After being careful to distinguish the charismatic renewal from “classic Pentecostalism,” the bishops’ statement concluded that the movement has legitimate theological underpinning: “It has a strong biblical basis. It would be difficult to inhibit the working of the Spirit which manifested itself so abundantly in the early Church. The participants in the Catholic Pentecosal Movement claim that they receive certain charismatic gifts. Admittedly there have been abuses, but the cure is not a denial of their existence, but their proper use.”

‘Stork Passed The Plow’

The black horse of famine is riding down upon us and by the year 2000 the world population is expected to more than double its present three billion. The stork passed the plow, perhaps in 1963, said World Vision magazine in its December issue, and the world population is now outracing food production at the rate of two to one each year.

In the twenty-two years since independence, India has doubled agricultural production, but her population has shot up to 537 million, a rise of 170 million. Even in America, one in every five persons suffers from a lack of food, shelter, or medicine.

Alarmed by the galloping black horse of hunger, the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health issued a call to President Nixon to declare immediately a national hunger emergency. A “priority” statement adopted by the 2,700 delegates at the Washington, D. C., meeting urged the President to take steps to feed all hungry Americans—estimated to be 25 million this winter.

Nixon responded by announcing he has asked the Department of Agriculture to put food-stamp programs in the 307 counties without the federal project within the next six months, and said he would hasten implementation of a new rule granting $106 a month in food stamps to any needy family of four.

Although the White House in the past has limited its designation of disasters to such things as floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, delegates wanted Nixon to break new ground by expanding the disaster definition to include hunger, a commitment the President deferred pending further study.

The Religious Action Task Force, one of eight units taking part in the conference, came up with a host of recommendations for church groups. Included were urging religious institutions to make staff persons available for work on hunger problems, even to the extent of participating in government-sponsored efforts, and pressing the federal government to fulfill its responsibilities toward the poor.

The Big Bequest

For two Southern, church-related colleges, 1969 was the year of the big bequest. Generous donations from E. Clairborne Robbins to the University of Richmond are not unusual. What was unusual about the Baptist layman’s gift to his Virginia alma mater last June was its amount—$50 million.

The donation to the Southern Baptist-supported university will be used, said President George M. Modlin, to “make this the most outstanding church-related school in the country.” It consists of $40 million in A. H. Robbins Pharmaceutical Company stock that will yield about $400,000 per year plus the promise of $10 million to match that amount raised by the university before 1979.

The university plans to improve its 350-acre suburban campus and to upgrade its faculty, curriculum, and scholarship program for the 4,500 students in its day and evening programs.

Robbins has a reputation in Richmond for being generous; people wait in line for jobs at his pharmaceutical firm. Before Castro, Robbins gave his employees a Cuban holiday. More recently, he’s taken them to New York.

Though smaller than the gift to the Richmond school, the $2.5 million gift to Texas Lutheran College is the largest ever to an American Lutheran Church school. More than thirty years before he died last year, O. G. Beck of San Antonio named the liberal-arts college as principal beneficiary in his will. Most of the money, officials say, will go into an endowment fund.

Religion In Transit

Tiny Tim and Vicki Budinger, exchanging marriage vows on the Johnny Carson TV show, promised to obey each other and serve Christ. As the cast toasted them with champagne, Tiny and Vicki drank milk and honey. “The Lord’s food,” Tiny said.

Indignant over a $40,000 training grant from the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council to the controversial Alianza of New Mexico, Episcopal Bishop C. J. Kinsolving III cut off financial support for the fund-troubled national church. The New Mexico bishop said the Alianza, which was founded by Reies Lopez Tijerina and demands, among other things, thirty-five million acres of land it claims under old Spanish crown land grants, promotes violence and is contrary to the Christian position.

The first Episcopal money piped to the Black Economic Development Conference (part of a $200,000 Episcopal allocation made in South Bend last September) will launch a development called for in the Black Manifesto. BEDC chairman Calvin Marshall said a black publishing firm, Black Star Press, would open in Detroit this month to promote further money for manifesto-prescribed projects.

Four of the nine faculty members of a Christian Reformed grade school in Cicero, Illinois, have resigned because the school won’t admit the children of Negro church members.

Early projections for Southern Baptist church memberships in 1969 show 11.4 million persons, up 132,500 from 1968.

The first integrated fellowship of black and white Southern Baptist pastors was formed in Houston last fall, according to Texas SBC information director Billy Keith.

The Pittsburgh Council of Churches has been replaced by the Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania, which includes Roman Catholic and Orthodox dioceses and involves 2,200 congregations. Baptist minister Lee Hicks heads the new ecumenical venture, touted as “a notable national first.”

Another first—Rockefeller-endowed Riverside Church in New York City revealed its assets: $23,994,000 in endowment funds, $86,105,000 in property.

The Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania slashed its 1970 budget 23 per cent, citing a deficit of perhaps $300,000 last year.

Hmm!, a new “magazine” consisting of four-by-six-inch file cards, is produced by the American Baptist Home Missions Societies to “get essential facts to key audiences.” “It allows us a great flexibility,” a spokesman said … A new evangelical periodical in French, edited in Paris, is called Ichthus … While only a slight majority of U. S. Catholic bishops are satisfied with the nation’s diocesan papers, 70 per cent are satisfied with their own weeklies. Hmm!

A growth of 10 per cent in the combined investment income of its twenty-five participating church pension boards was reported at the fifty-fifth annual Church Pensions Conference in New York last month.

Forty-five Lutheran seminarians from thirteen schools have formed the American Union of Lutheran Seminaries to discuss “common issues.”

Mail-order-minister king Kirby J. Hensley (see March 14, 1969, issue, page 34), head of the Universal Life Church, filed an $8 million libel suit against Life magazine last month for its November 14, 1969, article, “The Instant Minister Racket.” Hensley says his Modesto, California, religious organization is bona fide.

Personalia

The Right Rev. Paul Moore, Jr., suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D. C., was elected coadjutor bishop of the prestigious Diocese of New York last month; this places him in line to succeed Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan, who will retire not later than 1972. Moore, 50, a liberal, gained a reputation in the Jersey City area for championing civil rights causes in the early 1960s.

The Right Rev. Stephen F. Bayne, Jr., first vice-president of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council, has resigned, effective July 1, to become a professor at General Theological Seminary, his alma mater.

Prominent Canadian evangelical Dr. Frank C. Peters, a past president of the General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, has been named to another term as president of Waterloo (Ontario) Lutheran University.

Theologian-scholar Bernard J. Cooke, a Jesuit, has resigned as chairman of Marquette University’s theology department and has asked to be released from the priesthood.

The Southern Baptist Home Mission Board confirmed that evangelism professor Kenneth Chafin of Louisville will lead the agency’s division of evangelism.

Student Walter E. Brandon, 33, of McCormick Theological Seminary (United Presbyterian) was arrested last month in Chicago on charges of attempting to rob a downtown bank of $10,000 with a toy pistol. Brandon, who was filmed on the bank’s closed-circuit TV, was a B.D. candidate specializing in social work.

A piano teacher who still lives in the house in which she was born has taught Sunday school for eighty-one years. Miss Elizabeth Aageson, feted by Immanuel Baptist Church in Portland, Maine, last month on her 100th birthday, is believed to be the oldest Sunday-school teacher in the nation.

Dr. Alan Buchanan was enthroned as Archbishop of Dublin in Christ Church Cathedral last month. President Eamon de Valera and Premier Jack Lynch attended, the first appearance of heads of the Roman Catholic Irish Republic at a Church of Ireland ceremony.

Paul Neumann, onetime San Francisco Warriors’ pro and former assistant basketball coach at Stanford University, is preparing to be a missionary at Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon.

World Scene

A Vatican document of far-reaching import in Jewish-Christian relations calls upon Christians “to respect the religious significance of the state of Israel.” The statement, made public by Baltimore’s Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, notes that the trial and death of Jesus “cannot be attributed to all Jews then alive, nor … to the Jews of today.” Hence, “the Jews are not to be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from Holy Scripture.”

A division of the World Council of Churches last month protested the continuance of food flights to Biafra, saying that the aid only prolongs the Nigerian civil war … Meanwhile, Church World Service, an arm of the National Council of Churches, warned that a minimum of 500 tons of relief supplies is needed daily to stave off starvation, more than twice the present cargo from Joint Church Aid airlifts. JCA plans to continue flights.

In a sweeping decision, Italy’s highest court removed all criminal penalties for marital infidelity, leaving it a purely civil offense.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the First Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI lauded the century-old dogmas of papal supremacy and infallibility, saying they had stood the test of time and served as an example to non-Catholics of the “truth and unity” of the Roman church.

Delegates from eighteen nations and areas formed the World Christian Anti-Communist Association in Taipei, Taiwan, after five years of planning.

A fifteen-minute weekly short-wave radio broadcast, recorded entirely in Poland by Polish Baptists, went on the air last month over Trans World Radio from Monaco.

Gideons of Canada presented its seven-millionth Bible to Governor-General Roland Michener, the Queen’s representative, at a dinner in Toronto.

Eighty-four students from two Sudan Interior Mission Bible schools in southern Ethiopia spearheaded a three-month evangelistic tour that resulted in 9,037 professions of faith in Christ. Forty-five witchdoctors destroyed their amulets and idols.

Four series of commemorative stamps will be issued by the Vatican post office this year.

On The Solid Rock

Indian squatters on rockbound Alcatraz island are a somewhat captive audience for Southern Baptist preacher Wayne Bailey, 26, a Creek-Seminole who is pastor of nearby San Francisco’s seventy-five-member American Indian Baptist Church.

Hostile Indian leaders have protested informal open-air services he holds at the abandoned federal prison, scene of a takeover by hundreds to publicize nationwide Indian grievances. They charge him with importing a “white man’s religion.” But Bailey replies they haven’t got a case “because Christianity is the dominant faith among American Indians.”

Although Bailey, a Bacone College alumnus with pastoral experience in Shawnee, Oklahoma, fully agrees with the movement’s goals, his own priority is to reach those on The Rock “who need Jesus, our blood brother.” For him Alcatraz is more than a symbol; it is a happy hunting ground—for souls.

WENDI LEWIS

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”—From “A Tale of Two Cities,” by Charles Dickens.

The present is the aperture through which the future rushes into the past. The present also is the aperture through which the past is focused into the future.

With these thoughts in mind, CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S news department takes an over-the-shoulder glance at the receding nineteen sixties and a telescopic squint into the nineteen seventies.

Admittedly, the topics for review both fore and aft of 1970 are somewhat arbitrary. Our review-preview isn’t exhaustive; it doesn’t attempt to be. But at least the summary covers some of the key issues that Christians and the churches wrestled with in the decade past—and doubtless will confront again in the seventies.

As for the risky business of prognosticating, we think there is reason to be optimistic, despite the pollsters’ grim finding that 70 per cent of adult Americans of this era believe religion is losing its influence on society. After all, California survived the predictions of mystics that last April the state would be split from the nation and slip into the sea.

Ten years ago, who could have dreamed that by decade’s end, man would walk on the moon, and live, at least temporarily, with a transplanted heart?

If we live another ten years—and the Lord tarries—we may look back and laugh at our imperfect wisdom and poor predicting power. But whether we’re right or wrong, the seventies are sure to be a challenge.

Theology

The year 1960 found Protestant theology in the form of Karl Barth’s neo-orthodoxy going to seed. Unfortunately, the seed fell on largely unproductive ground, and the dearth of a virile, perennial stock persisted as 1970 began.

Church historian Martin B. Marty noted last month: “Theologians are entering the 1970s in a state of combat fatigue. They look back on the debris of the 1960s—it was theologians and not atheists who experimented for a moment with the death of God movement—and feel exhausted. During that decade their mentors died. Albert Schweitzer (reverence for life) and Martin Buber (I and Thou) were gone. Pope John had sought unity; Paul Tillich, profundity; Karl Barth, awe. They too were gone.”

In their place, the radicals thrust their secular theology and “religionless Christianity.” The death of God was in vogue in the time between Selma and Watts, and Harvey Cox soon abandoned the secular city to others while he glided on to liturgy, celebration, and, with Jürgen Moltmann, eschatology. Next, we augur, he will concentrate on the new monasticism.

The “in today, out tomorrow” tag dance of theology is likely to continue into the seventies, as will liberal-conservative dialectic. Theology may be enriched by a more sophisticated use of the behavioral sciences; death and resurrection will be key themes.

We agree with Catholic lay theologian Michael Novak when he says: “One of the most important developments of the seventies will be an exploration of the spirit, a quiet rebirth of the practice of long, silent, meditative peace.…”

And who knows, there may be a theological giant waiting in the wings for such a decade as this.

Ecumenism

The Second Vatican Council, summoned in 1959 and convened in 1962, was widely romanticized as opening the window of the church to let in some fresh air. Whether what followed was a welcome breeze or a chilly draft depended on one’s point of view.

But, by common consent, probably nothing so fostered and enlivened inter-confessional relations as Vatican II. Formal and mutual condemnations between the Roman church and the Eastern Orthodox were removed, and by 1969 a giant leap of ecumenicity saw the appointment of a Southern Baptist theologian by Roman Catholics to teach in Rome.

Within the Protestant matrix, the decade saw Eugene Carson Blake’s modest proposal for unity blossom into the Consultation on Church Union. Then enthrallment with institutional unity faded somewhat under the wilting effect of shrinking budgets and the swinging exuberance of the so-called free church. The bitterest disappointment in Britain came with the defeat of the anticipated Anglican-Methodist merger. Evangelicals got together, but for the most part, rapprochements were temporary trysts; there were few marriages.

Christian-Jewish understanding seemed to take an upturn in the waning days of the decade when a Vatican document asked Catholic respect for the modern Jewish state and recognition of Judaism as more than a stepping stone to Christianity.

In 1962 the Vatican Council was more shadow than promise; in the seventies many of the long shadows will become realities. We predict that the doomsayers who bemoan the end of the organized structures of the churches by the end of the century will revise their jeremiads before 1980: given the complexity of the society in which religious denominations must operate, the bureaucracies will increase while, paradoxically, local congregations will become more autonomous.

The National Council of Churches will continue, but will be greatly altered in form by 1980,

We agree with sociologist Andrew M. Greely: “American ecumenism will continue to be a denominational ecumenism, with progress, such as it is, occurring within a complex of continuance of the various traditions.”

Authority

The authority crisis in Roman Catholicism was one of the continuing anguishes of the sixties, accelerated to break-neck speed by Vatican II momentum. “Pope Paul VI is trapped between Pope John XXIII, Vatican II and the Roman Curia,” comments Dr. Al Stauderman, associate editor of the Lutheran magazine.

“The crisis … grows as hundreds of priests defect, even bishops leave the church and polls show that the majority of Catholics disobey the Pope’s teachings on birth control.”

Upon the pivot of authority turns the concept of church mission: the relevance of Protestant denominational and interdenominational structures came under increasing attack during the sixties, particularly from minority groups and youths.

More subtle, perhaps, but nonetheless pervasive, was the continuing assault on biblical authority. Although the authority crisis will continue in the new decade, we affirm the prediction of Billy Graham: “The real evangelical will not abdicate biblical and divine authority.… The hopeful evangelical Christian … would not throw away the lessons and traditions of the past, but neither is he blind to new methods, new approaches, and new, effective implementation of the Gospel.”

Home And Family

In the sixties, medicine produced the Pill, and the Pill produced freedom from reproduction, bringing women, as they say, a long way. Finding identity and fulfillment in something besides nest-building and child-rearing, the New Woman mounted her soapbox to declare her independence—symbolized by bra-burnings.

The Pill also produced moral codes that some called “new.” While parents, preachers, and physicians asked of single girls, Should they or shouldn’t they take it?, the girls were asking, Should we or shouldn’t we bother with a wedding now that parenthood can be safely planned? Youthful disillusionment with the Establishment extended to the institution of marriage—with some justification: out of every four marriages in the sixties, one ended in divorce, another in legal separation.

Catholic priests and nuns risked excommunication for marital bliss while the Now Generation complained of cumbersome lifetime commitments. In the seventies, both may get their wish. Commonweal expects priests to have the option to marry. Sweden already claims group marriages; California promotes wife-swapping.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead predicts the end of the “nuclear” family—one set of parents and their young children. Instead, she claims, “clusters” of people, including “closed units,” single adults, and elderly people, will share home and family responsibilities, providing more security for children and more freedom for their parents.

Race

Rosa Parks refused to stand, and her soul brothers and sisters (of all races) stood behind her all the way through the sixties. They also sat at lunch counters, faced fire hoses and chains at school doors, marched to Washington, D. C., to declare their dream of equality, and buried their peaceful dreamer who was felled by a white assassin’s bullet.

If talking and walking failed to compel action, burning cities succeeded, and the Kerner Commission pointed to white racism. But eleven o’clock Sunday morning often remained segregated despite denominational and conciliar pronouncements of equality. Demanding, as it were, works with faith, James Forman invaded a number of influential pulpits with his Black Manifesto asking “reparations” for past injustices to Negroes. Though most churches refused to pay, many at least agreed that talk alone would not right centuries of wrongs.

By the end of the sixties, “discrimination” was the battle cry of other minorities as well—notably American Indians—and at least one majority—women. By 1980, the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority may be demanding university departments of Celtic studies.

War And Peace

What began with John F. Kennedy’s offer of advice to a tiny southeast Asian country flamed into a war that by decade-end claimed more than 40,000 American lives. Disenchanted with unkept promises to end it and disgusted with the inhumanity of man, clergymen and young people began protesting the undeclared war. Some burned draft cards and attacked Selective Service recruiters visiting college campuses. Others poured blood on draft records and wrecked offices of companies like Dow Chemical that manufactured napalm.

Elsewhere, the Middle East smoldered and periodically erupted; Biafra and Nigeria lunged at each other’s throats; Protestants and Roman Catholics battled in Northern Ireland; Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and sparred with China.

None of the conflicts ended with the decade. The seventies will discover the truth about My Lai, claim the promise (again) that the war will end, watch the beginning of another one (in Laos?), and rehabilitate Vietnamese, Arab, and Biafran refugees. And maybe the seventies will also see the end of violence on television and in the streets.

Evangelism

Evangelical editors voted as the top 1969 news story the September U. S. Congress on Evangelism at Minneapolis—a gathering that infused new freedom and apparent unity into the evangelical movement. The congress was the outgrowth of the first worldwide evangelism congress in Berlin during 1966.

As a result, in the late sixties congresses also were held in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. The long-planned Crusade of the Americas involving 24 million Baptists in thirty-two countries was staged, and the Key Bridge meetings, launched in 1967 by CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S founding editor Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, promised a yield of coordinated evangelistic emphases in 1973.

A second world congress on evangelism may be convened in a year or two in Europe, and the Baptist World Alliance has set plans for global evangelism by its churches in 1974.

During the past decade Billy Graham crusades continued to swell stadiums and halls, and they show no signs of withering away during the seventies.

The stage seems set for Leighton Ford, Billy Graham’s brother-in-law, to take Graham’s place someday.

Liturgy

“Jesus isn’t dead, but alive and well, stirring things up on the streets and in the church aisles,” notes the Rev. Robert Raines of the Germantown, Pennsylvania, First Methodist Church, in an article on “The New-Time Religion.”

Nowhere has there been a greater stir in the sixties than in the church aisles, where the new-time religion focuses on a liturgy that is essentially experimental and experiential. Spontaneity, improvisation, and total participation characterize it.

Nuns and priests lock arms and swing to rock masses and Corita Kent pop posters and balloons float gaily, gaily, in not a few Protestant sanctuaries. During the sixties, the Latin mass was translated into an English service, and the Consultation on Church Union liturgy was pressed as a possible standard for ecumenical worship. Occasionally, hamburgers and Cokes were substituted for the traditional Communion elements—in the name of authentic meaning and community, of course.

The outworkings of the liturgical revolution are not yet clearly defined for the seventies. A hint: the world of psychedelia, where much of the bizarre innovation is taking place.

Perhaps by the 1980s the rational, the orderly, the sedate, and the “respectable” will reassert themselves in religious ritual (indeed, these will not rusticate, meantime), but we believe that the guitars and stomping feet will have their day in church first.

Ecology

By the end of the sixties, ecology had become a household word; a decade earlier, environmental nomenclature was the property of the ecologically elite.

But as the smarting smog spread, America’s rivers ran murky with pollutants, and the offal stench of the slums incensed the nostrils of city-dwellers, pollution control and conservation became an inescapable problem for all.

As the realization dawned that not even immense oceans can gobble up mankind’s filth, the public became more alarmed, and youth added a cry for clean air to their cudgels of war, race, and poverty. Well they might, for President Nixon’s science adviser, Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, warned that man must curb deteriorating environmental trends or leave this planet “quite uninhabitable” for the next generation.

In 1972—assuming the Viet Nam war no longer is dominating all other questions—cleaning up the environment will be the big issue in the presidential election.

Already, Wisconsin U. S. Senator Gaylord Nelson has planned a nationwide moratorium day protesting pollution next spring, and an action team has been organized within the National Council of Churches to help churchmen assume responsibility on moral and ethical aspects of environmental care. The group plans a major environmental stewardship conference next fall.

Watch this one in the seventies: it will be very big, and the churches will be in the forefront of the action.

Space

Once it was a dream of science fiction and cartoons, but man walked on the moon in the sixties—twice—and shared his experience via television with the world. Cheers for the technical triumph that planted America’s flag in the moon’s ancient glassy surface ahead of the Russian’s were mingled with boos: urban crises, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation deface the earth while millions of dollars’ worth of equipment litter the moon. Militant atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair took astronauts’ religious expressions to court—but lost.

As 1970 begins, Apollo 13 is on its launch pad in preparation for the third lunar voyage. Space scientists look forward to sending man to Mars, speculating on the presence of life there and on the possibility of finding wide-open space for some of earth’s excess population. Meanwhile, theologians plot an astrotheology that proclaims man’s “significant puniness” and unity that transcends political, racial, and religious barriers. As United Press International religion writer Louis Cassels says, “The view from the moon makes clear that this is the most realistic of facts.”

Life And Death

Splashiest medical headline of the sixties was the transplantation of a woman’s heart to Louis Washkansky by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, and the nearly two hundred subsequent heart transplants. Ethical questions sent physicians and theologians to redefine death in terms of brain activity rather than as a final heartbeat.

Transplant surgeons were called ghouls, and worse, for taking organs from not-yet-dead bodies for other nearly dead patients. Yet Philip Blaiberg, with the second transplant, lived more than eighteen months with his new heart, and nearly all recipients rejoiced in the improved quality of their lives, however brief the quantity.

If replacing worn-out organs with new or used ones fails to eliminate death by 1980, improved cryonics techniques will freeze decaying bodies till means to cure them are discovered. By then, ways to defrost them should also be available. If not, beautiful or valuable people might be cloned now that geneticists know that every body cell, not just the joined male and female sex cells, contains all the characteristics of an individual. By giving up a few of his cells, an evangelist or a criminal could reproduce hundreds of carbon copies of himself.

Motherhood will not be out in the seventies, but it may be different. Parents will be able to choose at least the sex of their offspring. They may also be able to choose from frozen embryos the one they like best. No couple need be childless with perfected artificial insemination (10,000 babies a year are already born by that means) and artificial inovulation (begun in human beings only in the late sixties). Women with handicaps or careers that discourage childbearing will be able to have their children by proxy mothers in whom the fertilized egg will be planted.

Isolation of the gene late in the sixties gives credence to promises of eugenic manipulation, beginning, probably, in the seventies. Hereditary diseases like hemophilia could be eliminated by such manipulation, but so could certain types of personalities at some tyrant’s whim. Ethics, if such a discipline lasts through the seventies, will have some grappling to do.

Key Bridge: Still Holding Up

Participants in the Key Bridge Consultation come from such widely divergent ecclesiastical backgrounds that observers often wonder how long the group can stay together. The consultation now includes representatives of forty denominations, however, and the structure seems to be holding up reasonably well under the strain.

Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, who initiated the talks in 1967 when he was editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, was the featured speaker at the consultation’s seventh session, held in St. Louis, December 8 and 9. Henry declared that hundreds of thousands of evangelical Christians “are waiting for some courageous voice to rally them to a new and bolder course of action.”

“They are distressed by the stance of ecumenical Christianity, disturbed over denominational trends, dismayed at the impotence of evangelicals in their present divisions,” he added. “They sense that if things drift along as they are, with our consent, they will quickly worsen to the place where our dissent will mean nothing; it is now or never for an evangelical thrust that can still make a difference.”

Updating Archaeology

New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield (Doubleday, 1969, 191 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Elmer B. Smick, professor of Old Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

This book is the product of a symposium on biblical archaeology sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages of the University of California at Berkeley and the biblical-studies faculties of the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley and San Francisco Theological Seminary. Editors Freedman and Greenfield claim for these articles the substance of the 1966 symposium with overtones of 1969. For those who want to keep abreast of recent developments, viewpoints, excavations and discoveries in Palestinian archaeology relating to the biblical period this small book is worth its price.

The American contributors and the Israeli archaeologists (Yohanan Aharoni, Yigael Yadin, and Moshe Dothan) are outstanding scholars, and most are field archaeologists. Professor Albright heads the list and wrote the first article, “The Impact of Biblical Archaeology in Biblical Research—1966.” Here Albright appears quite defensive as he attempts to answer some of his critics, who in recent years have become very vocal. He deserves the credit for having shaped the direction of Palestinian archaeology in the last generation, for his definitive research in comparative Semitic philology (especially as it relates to the Old Testament text and history), and for his interest in epigraphic dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is now largely the province of his distinguished disciple F. M. Cross.

Albright gives a needed warning of the dangers of reasoning from analogy in the reconstruction of biblical history. Although he himself has used this method for years, he warns that it is valid only if a series of independent analogies all lead to a consistent model. He gives as a good example of proper analogical method G. E. Mendenhall’s discovery of the likeness between the structure of the Israelite covenant with God and the Hittite suzerainty treaties of the second millennium B.C. As a bad example he points to Wellhausen’s refusal to accept the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Babylonian cuneiform while trying to reconstruct early Israelite life on the basis of pre-Islamic Arabic life of the fifth to seventh centuries A.D.

Dothan reports on Ashdod of the Philistines, telling of a pottery find that may come from the first wave of Sea Peoples in that city. Aharoni gives a very interesting account of the Israelite sanctuary of the Negev fortress called Arad that among other things appears to clarify an obscure feature of Solomon’s temple. This is the first Israelite temple ever discovered. It was built in the tenth century and destroyed in Josiah’s revival. Aharoni believes it was a sanctuary of Yahweh on the order of those in Samaria, Bethel, and Dan. Some two hundred ostraca, half of them in Aramaic from the Persian period and half in Hebrew from before the exile, double the amount of inscriptional material from the pre-exilic period in Palestine.

F. M. Cross’s article on the Samaria Papyri is most significant, for this discovery (1962) provides absolute dating for the fourth-century B.C. Aramaic cursive writing in Palestine and by doing so proves the third-century B.C. dating for certain Qumran manuscripts. The papyri mentions a Sanballat of the early fourth century that tends to vindicate Josephus against opinions of modern scholars who rejected the Jewish historian’s Sanballat of the time of Alexander the Great. Another important result, according to Cross, is proof that the Samaritan Pentateuch was not as early as the fifth century B.C. but branched off in the first century B.C. from an old Palestinian tradition that used the Paleo-Hebrew script. Professor B. K. Waltke of Dallas Theological Seminary deserves credit for his research in this area under the guidance of Professor Cross.

F. V. Filson writes on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament and D. N. Freedman on the Old Testament at Qumran. R. G. Boling surveys all Dead Sea discoveries, and in a chapter on “The Scrolls and the Old Testament” P. W. Shehan suggests there was a period before the first century A.D. when scribes of the Old Testament freely harmonized and expanded texts on the basis of other parts of Scripture. This practice is evident in the Samaritan Pentateuch and certain parts of the Septuagint and some Qumran material. It raises a large question for the textual critic. The Scrolls have far-reaching effects for understanding of history and evaluation of the Septuagint. The complicated question relating to the New Testament use of second-century A.D. “Theodotian” is solved by clear proof from a Greek scroll of Minor Prophets that this version dates to the first half of the first century.

Articles also appear on the Psalms Scroll and the Temple Scroll. G. E. Wright in the final paper gives an apologetic for biblical archaeology, apparently as an answer to critics like Morton Smith, who attacks the “pseudo-orthodoxy” he detects among those who are at once biblical scholars and archaeologists (Journal of Biblical Literature, March, 1969). Wright almost turns biblical archaeology into biblical theology. “It is natural and proper that biblical scholars who in order to comprehend and to exegete the Bible must take responsibility for the history of Palestine, should also be concerned with the archaeology of Palestine and of the ancient world generally.”

For Wright, who objects to the anti-historical quality of much of modern theology, biblical theology cannot evade history. The work of the historian and the theologian overlap. Wright believes history is the only realm of knowledge by which God can be known. This aversion to the totally subjective nature of religious truth is welcome, but knowledge of God, while rooted in history, should not be limited to an interpretation of history, it must include also spiritual enlightenment derived from a personal encounter with God as One who entered history to deliver man from the consequences of history.

In Search Of Life

The Drug Users, by A. E. Wilder Smith (Shaw, 1969, 294 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Ivan J. Fahs, medical sociologist, College of Medical Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Like the modern drugstore, this book dispenses a lot more than drugs. The variety of subjects reflects the author’s belief that man is a many-faceted hybrid of matter and spirit. He takes the reader on a trip through many of these facets, giving attention to the microscopic level of drug biochemistry as well as the macroscopic level of dreams, ESP, necromancy, and Mind-at-Large.

A recurring theme is: “Where there is no vision in real life, we find the younger generation generating artificial vision with all the infective abandon of youth—and the modern know how of psychopharmacology.” Dr. Wilder Smith, a pharmacologist, is at his best when describing the various drugs in use today—LSD, marijuana and hashish, tranquilizers, amphetamines, and the morphine drugs. The heavily documented early chapters (Part One: The Drug Factor) merit careful reading by those who wish to understand today’s culture. His less microscopic considerations of Mind-at-Large, mediumistic séances, and the theoretical significance of death (Part Two: The Environment Factor) are heavily documented also, but tend to be exhortative in tone. Sweeping statements are made in an analysis of Red China, Soviet Russia, Sweden, affluence in the United States, the bureaucracy of higher education, and depersonalization. The author is much more convincing, if less emphatic, in Part One.

But Wilder Smith has attempted a basically serious task of seeing man as a whole. If the book occasionally appears to be a string of unconnected miscellany, the fault may be due to the broad scope of the drug problem.

There are some very bright passages and some very dull ones; there are the carefully phrased comments of a college professor and the broad generalizations of a right-wing politician. But there is no ambiguity when the author perceptively asks: “Is it to be wondered that stolid Evangelicals and denominationalists stand helplessly by and watch the stampede to the new psychedelic fountains of joy? A primary cause of the stampede lies in the choking thirst produced by generations of religion devoid of true joy.”

Exploring Ezekiel

The Prophecy of Ezekiel, by Charles Lee Feinberg (Moody, 1969, 286 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Samuel J. Schultz, professor of Old Testament, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

The prophecy of Ezekiel, often regarded as very difficult to explain, is here discussed in a commentary that offers interesting reading for both the pastor and the layman. History, geography, and the cultural elements of Ezekiel’s time are repeatedly brought into focus as Feinberg discusses the behavior of the prophet as well as his message. Much emphasis is given to the literal rather than the figurative or symbolical interpretation. The author often appeals to common sense to find a simple and reasonable interpretation of a passage.

Caution and reserve are evident as Feinberg discusses the predictive and eschatological passages. The prince of Tyre in 28:1–10 is identified as the actual ruler of Tyre, but proper recognition is given to the motivating power that incited him to set himself up in opposition to God. Concerning the five nations in chapters 38 and 39, the author observes that “it is not worthy of the prophecy to make identifications merely on the basis of similarity of sounds.”

The literal interpretation is applied with as much reasonable care to the exposition of chapters 40–48 as to the preceding chapters. With an awareness of numerous interpretations—figurative, spiritual, allegorical, and literal—Feinberg offers an exposition he feels is “consonant with the prophecies of the Old and New Testament” and “permits the historico-grammatical method of Bible interpretation to have its rightful exercise, allowing the context in each passage to be the determining factor.”

Each chapter concludes with a devotional lesson and a practical application to current times. Feinberg believes that the basic principles of God’s relationship with men in prophetic times are significant for the twentieth century.

For the student who wishes to study the Book of Ezekiel in depth, this commentary would be much more valuable if footnotes and references had been included. Although the bibliography might well have been more complete, it is annotated and provides guidance for further reading.

Rare Spiritual Stimulus

The Hope of Glory, by Marcus Loane (Word, 1969, 160 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Harold Fife, minister-at-large, Far Eastern Gospel Crusade, Detroit, Michigan.

The eighth chapter of Romans magnetizes Bible expositors in the same way Everest attracts mountaineers, and for similar reasons: the peaks are as challenging as they are rewarding to the climber.

Archbishop Loane’s book is a precise exposition of the text couched in unusually felicitous English (his wide vocabulary is delightfully refreshing). He sees the chapter “as the crowning passage in the Pauline thesis on the guilt of man and the grace of God.” As such it demonstrates the completeness of life in Christ. Living this life is not an experience governed by mysticism or enthusiasm. It is as down to earth as the ideas of being led by the hand or walking in the way suggest: it means obedience to the rule of God’s will in mind, mouth, and manhood. There need never be an hour in which this is not true in the life of one who has been made free from the law of sin and death.

The all-embracing sweep of this chapter is expounded with scholarship, clarity, and balance. Loane’s sixty-three references to H. C. G. Moule’s writings on Romans reveal the deep devotional spring at which he has drunk, which brings spiritual warmth and freshness to the book. Christ’s saving work is seen in its entirety: “Salvation is a term which may have references to the past, the present, or the future. We have been saved from the guilt which sin entails; we are being saved from the power which sin exerts; we shall be saved from the taint which sin involves.” Here is the scriptural ground for what has come to be known as the Keswick message but is simply New Testament Christianity.

The rare spiritual stimulus of this book made me wish I still had a pastorate and could preach this chapter through, for it has a thrilling message particularly suited to a jaded age and bewildered church. Pastors who buy this stimulating book and proclaim its truths to their people will doubtless find these truths a wonderful antidote to the shallow uncertainties of today. In fact, the result might well be the groundswell of the long-looked-for revival.

Book Briefs

The Religious Situation 1969, edited by Donald R. Cutler (Beacon, 1969, 1,091 pp., $15). This second in a projected series of annual volumes examines the state of religion in its confrontation with changes and problems in cultures throughout the world.

Church Growth in Sierra Leone, by Gilbert W. Olson (Eerdmans, 1969, 222 pp., paperback, $3.95). An evaluation of mission methods and goals based on a study of the Church in Protestantism’s first mission field in Africa.

Jesus Christ Our Lord, by John F. Walvoord (Moody, 1969, 318 pp., $4.95). The president of Dallas Theological Seminary offers a popular study in Christology.

The Wesleyan Bible Commentary, Volume III: Isaiah Through Malachi, Charles W. Carter, general editor (Eerdmans, 1969, 807 pp., $9.95). Those familiar with the earlier volumes of this commentary by distinguished | Wesleyan scholars will welcome this new addition.

The Development of Christianity in the Latin Caribbean, by Justo L. González (Eerdmans, 1969, 136 pp., paperback, $2.65). Surveys the development of Latin Caribbean Christianity from its earliest beginnings to the present.

1970 Biblical Sunday School Commentary, H. C. Brown, Jr., general editor (Word, 1969, 404 pp., $3.95). An evangelical commentary on the International Lesson Series.

The Ten Largest Sunday Schools, and What Makes Them Grow, by Elmer Towns (Baker, 1969, 163 pp., paperback, $1.95). And they said it couldn’t be done!

A Life, A Cross, An Empty Tomb, by H. S. Vigeveno (Regal, 1969, 166 pp., paperback, $.95). A brief survey of the life and teaching of Christ suitable for devotional use or study groups.

Names and Titles of Christ, by Francis H. Derk (Bethany Fellowship, 1969, 164 pp., $3.95). This useful reference work locates the various biblical titles of Christ and gives a brief explanation of each.

My Daily Quiet Time, by Harold Lindsell (Zondervan, 1969, 255 pp., paperback, $.95). This reprint of an earlier work by the editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY includes stimulating devotional readings for every day of the year.

Negative Capability, by Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (Yale, 1969, 173 pp., $6). Examines the expanding relation between literature and religion on the contemporary scene.

It’s a Playboy World, by William S. Banowsky (Revell, 1969, 126 pp., $3.50). This analysis of the playboy philosophy and its powerful influence on today’s society seeks to expose the fallacies and inconsistencies of playboyism.

Justinian Welz: Essays by an Early Prophet of Mission, by James A. Scherer (Eerdmans, 1969, 111 pp., paperback, $2.45). Essays by a little-known pioneer missionary to South America who was martyred in 1668.

Which Way to Nineveh?, by Ethel Barrett (Regal, 1969, 135 pp., paperback, $.69). In a style particularly appealing to young people, Ethel Barrett portrays the reaction of several Old Testament characters who were confronted with something God wanted them to do.

Here’s Your Answer, by Robert J. Little (Moody, 1969, 220 pp., $3.95). Seeks to give a biblical answer to many of the problems and questions that plague modern man.

Minister’s Federal Income Tax Guide, by Conrad Teitell, (Meredith, 1969, $2.95). New edition; will be extremely helpful to ministers in the preparation of income-tax returns.

1844: Religious Movements, Volumes I, II, and III, by Jerome L. Clark (Southern, 1969, 1,022 pp., $7.95 ea.). This three-volume set surveys the religious, social, cultural, and political reforms and movements that either had their beginning or were coming to their climax around 1844.

Translating for King James, by Ward Allen (Vanderbilt, 1969, 157 pp., $10). One of the translators of the King James Bible kept notes on the proceedings, and this volume offers the translation of some of those notes.

The Relevance of the Prophets, by R. B. Y. Scott (Macmillan, 1969, 248 pp., $6.95). Revision of a well-known introduction to the Old Testament prophets.

One Moment With God, by Edward L. R. Elson (Eerdmans, 1969, 192 pp., paperback, $1.95). Reprint of an earlier work in which the present chaplain of the United States Senate offers devotional readings for each day.

The Jewish Sources of the Sermon on the Mount, by Gerald Friedlander, (KTAV, 1969, 301 pp., $8.95). The editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review looks at the Sermon on the Mount in the light of Rabbinic literature.

New Joy for Daily Living, by Eric C. Malte (Concordia, 1969, 86 pp., paperback, $1.95). Thirty-six devotions on themes from Philippians.

I’m a Good Man, But …, edited by Fritz Ridenour (Regal, 1969, 164 pp., paperback, $.95). Talks about how God can help us to become the good men that he wants us to be. Appealing to young people.

God’s Turf, by Bob Combs (Revell, 1969, 129 pp., paperback, $1.95). This story in photography portrays vividly the ministry of David Wilkerson and Teen Challenge.

Retire to Action, by Julietta K. Arthur (Abingdon, 1969, 254 pp., $5.95). This very practical work shows those who are retired or are planning retirement how they can remain active and useful.

In this initial issue of a new decade, CHRISTIANITY TODAY presents thoughts of fourteen young evangelicals. They speak—sometimes in strident tones—to the great issues that face the Church in the seventies. Their views are important for younger as well as older readers who are concerned that Christian options gain greater visibility in the cultural crisis.

Mass Evangelism

Tom Skinner, 27, is an evangelist with an international reputation. He attended Manhattan Bible Institute and Wagner College and is an ordained Baptist clergyman. He has conducted evangelistic crusades in a number of large American cities and is heard throughout the country on a weekly radio broadcast. He was one of the major speakers at the U. S. Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis last September. He is the author of “Black and Free.”

An article in the Wall Street Journal last November stated that we can expect more changes in business, politics, and economics in the next five years than took place in all of the last twenty. If this is true, and I believe it is, then the Christian Church is faced with an immense challenge as it prepares to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the seventies.

1. Education. Education will change its emphasis from the study of history to creative preparation for the future. The message of Jesus Christ then must be preached in that vein.

2. Population. A majority of the population will be under twenty-five years of age. This means the Gospel of Christ must be preached in the language of that age group and in a way relevant to its life-style.

3. Black power. Black power will be a reality; many of the large cities will be controlled by a very highly trained, articulate, aggressive black constituency. If the message of Jesus Christ does not penetrate the black communities of America now, our cities will be lost then. The average age of black people in the 1970s will be twenty-one.

4. The Church. The Church will have to be less organization-oriented and more people-oriented if it is going to fulfill its task of reaching people in the 1970s.

I believe that we have the resources to do the job; but we need to change some basic attitudes and pattern our approach more after the New Testament.

The Preached Word

The Rev. Peter J. Marshall, 29, is pastor of East Dennis (Massachusetts) Community Church. He holds the B.A. from Yale University and the B.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the son of the late chaplain of the U. S. Senate.

Some people doubt seriously whether the sermon is still a legitimate method of communication in our fastchanging world. There are those who feel that the sermon belongs to the bygone days of leisurely Sunday dinners, afternoon snoozes, and long strolls in the countryside—the halcyon days when a particularly stirring offering from the pulpit might bring a basket of eggs to the back door of the parsonage. For many of these ecclesiastical “moderns,” the sermon has been relegated to the attic of life, along with grandfather’s old Bible commentaries.

I would like to gently remind these people that the sermon has never been more popular—nor, I might add, more effective as a means of communication—than it is today. The orators for the new left can certainly draw good crowds and get definite responses from their preaching, too!

Let us not excuse our own failure with the lament that this age cares nothing for biblical preaching—that claim is given the lie in hundreds of churches throughout America every Sunday. Let us rather look to ourselves to see if perhaps the failure is in our preaching, and ultimately within our own hearts. I do not think the answer lies in better seminary courses on preaching. The trouble often is due to a lack of personal enthusiasm about the Lord Jesus Christ and his Gospel. Even an inarticulate man can be an exciting preacher, if his own heart is on fire with the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Sermons are always going to be of importance to those experiencing (or wishing to experience) life in the true Body of Christ. First of all, the Lord Jesus Christ himself “came preaching the Gospel.” He chose preaching as an effective means of communicating his Gospel, and we cannot beg the issue by contending that preaching was the cultural norm of his day for itinerant rabbis. Maybe it was, but the son of God was not culturally bound to preaching as a method any more than he was bound to healing by the use of the medicinal herbs of his days. Yet he preached.

Secondly, Jesus Christ chose men to go out and preach sermons to the whole world. This was, and still is, one of the main ways in which the Gospel is to be spread—the apostolic preaching of the early Church was instigated and carried out by rather obvious divine guidance. Our Lord has said: “As the Father sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” That “as” applies to methods also, and Jesus “came into the world preaching.”

But why should Christ use men to preach? Because the truth must come through human personality if it is to interest humans. God’s truth is always communicated best through the warmth and vitality of the human voice coming from a person who is present to be seen face to face. Long ago, the Word became flesh. He still seeks to do so, again and again. Preaching will not die.

Foreign Missions

Howard L. Biddulph, 26, is under appointment for missionary service to Colombia under the Oriental (Inter-american) Missionary Society. He was reared as a missionary child in Medellin, Colombia, and holds the A.B. from Asbury College and the M.Div. from Asbury Theological Seminary. He is currently associate pastor of the Central Alliance Church, Dearborn, Michigan.

The dawn of the new decade is exciting for missionary enterprise. Missionary strategy has felt the impact of the studies on church growth. Seminary extension education has discovered ways to train large segments of church leadership that until recently had been neglected. Saturation evangelism has demonstrated the potential of a church mobilized for witness.

In the midst of optimism, however, some serious questions must be posed. Will missions of the seventies establish a healthy relationship with the national church? Or will historical paternalistic patterns prevail? The watchword of evangelical efforts overseas has been the “indigenous” church. But even a self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating national church can remain stalemated under the heavy-handed, insensitive influence of the founding missionary organization.

The new decade calls for church-mission integration: national representation at every level of decision—whether involving policies, funds, or personnel assignment. For the most effective performance of his task, the missionary must shift to the “partner-servant” role. In the first century, the Holy Spirit operated through persecution in radically changing the pattern of missionary outreach. Rising nationalism may prove to be his tool in forcing a change in the paternalism of modern evangelical missions.

Will missions of the seventies place a high enough priority on spiritual qualifications of the missionary? In recent years, more and more emphasis has been placed on the techniques and methods of mission. But beware of losing sight of the truth: God’s method is men. The best educated and fully dedicated, he fills with His Spirit as the enduement for service. Without this spiritual enduement, all the human qualifications do not and cannot make a missionary.

Missions of the seventies will prosper as their programs are subject to the guidance of the national church. Missionaries will prosper as their methods are subservient to the Spirit of God.

Theology

The Rev. John M. Frame, 30, was Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton University and has completed doctoral work at Yale. He is an instructor in systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary.

I do not see a new Barth on the theological horizon; the seventies will not be dominated by any single figure. But neither will they witness another bewildering array of theological fads (“new hermeneutics,” “radical theologies,” “process theologies,” “history-theologies,” “hope-theologies”) like that which we desperately tried (or pretended) to keep abreast of in the sixties. Theologians are just plain tired of all this, and they are not at all sanguine about discovering “the key to Christianity” in some new scheme. To be sure, they will still talk about “language-events,” “existential self-understanding,” “Heilsgeschichte,” “dialectical self-negation,” “universal history,” “hope,”—even “encounter” and “crisis.” But they will discuss such concepts with less of a party spirit and more careful analysis. There will be more “metaquestions” asked: questions about questions; questions about theological language, argument, structure; questions about the meaning, function, and value of such conceptual schemes as those noted above. For such questions the techniques of analytic philosophy will be indispensable, and the theologians will have to quit talking so much about “analysis” and learn how to do it. As they thus move from a frenzied activism to a quieter self-examination, I suspect they will discover that Christianity is richer—more multi-centered—than most recent theologies of this and that have even hinted. They may even find that there are “keys” to Christianity other than those obtainable through conceptual sophistication.

This development will significantly advance the decay of that synthesis of Kantian philosophy and Christianity that has supplied the presuppositions of all the fashionable theologies of the last century and a half. Theologians of the seventies will be more prepared than ever before to challenge this synthesis at a basic level. But what will replace it? A new synthesis of the Gospel and a secular philosophy? Or (as in similar periods of ideological decay in the fourth and sixteenth centuries) might the orthodox perhaps seize the theological initiative?

Indeed we could, by God’s grace. But to do so, we must, like Athanasius and Luther, (1) recognize keenly the sharpness of the distinction between the Word of God and human theological traditions, (2) resist adamantly any temptation to compromise the former in the interest of the latter—even if such compromise appears to make the Gospel more “relevant” to our age, (3) develop gifts of knowledge and love so that we can speak to nonevangelical theologians, especially those who are themselves asking basic questions, and yet (4) be willing to endure the scorn of the theological mainstream if we must, determined to obey God’s Word even when it separates us from the sphere of the respectable—especially then, for this is always the direction of genuine advance. For these reasons and for many others, the courageousness of our commitment will determine the impact of our theology.

Physical Science

Carl Reidel, 32, holds a master’s degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is assistant director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams College. He is a member of the First Baptist Church in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

God commanded man in Eden to “be fruitful and fill the earth and subdue it.” In seeking the good life east of Eden we have subdued the earth in selfishness and ignorance, endangering the quality of life for all mankind. Our excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides and the careless discharge of home and industrial wastes have polluted land and air, fresh waters and oceans. In the name of progress we have ravaged the land with erosion, urban sprawl, and highways. Unchecked world population has reached the point of sure starvation for millions in this decade. We have subdued the earth east of Eden and stand on the brink of a global environmental crisis in 1970. The Christian, as steward of God’s creation, cannot escape responsibility.

Ecology—the study of the interrelationships of living organisms and their environments—tells us that Nature is a community to which man belongs, linked to all of creation by the complex web of life in our natural environment. Man, however, is capable of altering his relationship in that community, and with his scientific technology is threatening the balance and function of fundamental natural systems. In so doing, ecology clearly indicates, he affects the lives of men everywhere. As God’s stewards we are our brother’s keeper. With this understanding we do well as Christians to heed our Lord’s warning that “as you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

A Christian environmental ethic must, however, be more than a humanitarian response. Neither ecologist nor poet can interpret all of nature in terms of man’s physical or aesthetic benefit. We are stewards of all God’s creation, not just that portion from which we can benefit. In response to the depth of God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ, our love of his creation should have no bounds. An environmental ethic based on Christian stewardship requires an extension of love to all of nature.

Church And Society

Howard M. Moffett, 26, is currently an aide to U. S. Congressman John B. Anderson. Moffett holds the B.A. from Yale and the M.A. from Cambridge University, and served as a Newsweek correspondent in Viet Nam. He is the son of Dr. Howard F. Moffett, superintendent of Presbyterian Hospital, Taegu, Korea.

Political pundits are fond of saying that President Nixon’s two greatest problems are the Viet Nam war and inflation. Conventional wisdom has it that if he can settle these, he will be re-elected in 1972 and the nation can settle down to another four years of relatively peaceful Republican rule. I believe that our political problems are deeper and vaguer than this, and that Mr. Nixon may end up presiding over the disintegration of our society if he does not address himself to two other serious problems.

The first is that individuals are finding less and less meaning in our corporate life. The central institutions of our society, the organizations that dominate our waking hours—the corporations, the universities, the government, the news and entertainment media, the armed services—are now so big and impersonal that individuals feel less and less able to have any impact on them or within them. No matter what we do, they seem to carry us mindlessly in a direction that is rapidly becoming impossible to identify, much less control. For personal meaning and satisfaction we are forced to look outside these central institutions—to leisure, family, and spiritual pursuits, which as we ask more of them are less able to bear the whole burden. At the core of our life together, apathy threatens to bring on a winter of the soul.

Our second great problem is the sense of impotence we are coming to feel in the face of mounting social and environmental threats to this most affluent, most effluent of nations. The Viet Nam war and inflation are long-standing and serious, but even they seem more tractable to us now than the pollution, violence, urban disintegration, moral decay, and racial hatreds that inflame our middle-class fears as they tax our middle-class consciences. We are poisoning our streams with filth and our hearts with hate, all with the oblivious ease of children who do not understand that poison kills. To the apathy brought on by the impersonalization of our institutions, we add malaise over a shrinking ability to cope with our deteriorating social and physical environment.

I see no panaceas for these problems—Christian or otherwise. I believe that one of the most serious sins of the Church has been to suggest that to convert our society would be to save it. The evidence is to the contrary in many cases, most notably that of race relations, where the monumental indifference and hypocrisy of many churches has added to the problem rather than helping to solve it. I can offer no easy answers, only the thought that these problems will be with us a long time, and that it is worth putting some of our most committed and enlightened thought into dealing with them.

Philosophy

Merold Westphal, 29, is assistant professor of philosophy at Yale, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. He is a member of the Community Baptist Church of New Haven.

During the seventies Christian philosophers will continue to employ theologically neutral methods in the exploration of technical issues whose relation to faith is at best remote. But they will also continue, as always, to address those philosophical issues that open themselves to distinctively Christian development.

What is new is the explosive situation which defines the philosophical present, and which philosophy can ignore only by being untrue to itself. The new challenge is for philosophy that can serve as prolegomena to living in a rapidly changing national and international society. In short, the task is the development within evangelical perspectives of a contemporary Christian humanism. For example, the problem of appearance and reality needs to be explored in relation to the drug scene and the rising attraction of Eastern thought. And the debate over universals needs to be reopened in light of the inhuman distortions that collectivism and individualism impose on so much contemporary experience.

There also needs to be a continuing concern with the traditionally primary task of Christian philosophy, prolegomena to theological systems. But these prolegomena dare not be merely apologetics for old and familiar styles and systems of theology. They need rather to be the stimulus to genuinely new evangelical theologies, as new as Luther’s was in his day. As handmaiden-gadfly to these new theologies, Christian philosophy needs to develop a biblical ontology, an eschatological ontology of reality as history. Such an ontology would seek to develop the categorial scheme that gives form to theology from the biblical content it seeks to articulate.

Finally, and above all, evangelicals in philosophy need to break free of the Cabot-Lodge syndrome, of speaking only to themselves and to God.

Medicine

William C. Wood, M.D., 29, is a clinical associate at the National Institutes of Health. He is a graduate of Wheaton College and Harvard Medical School. He is a member of Wallace Memorial United Presbyterian Church in Hyattsville, Maryland.

The cornucopia of medical science faces a worsening bottleneck, and delivering the fruits of research from the laboratory to the sickbed has become of prime concern. The next decade will see a doubled volume of all the medical information previously amassed in man’s history. Attempts to utilize this information in treatment will require increasing sub-specialization, a greatly expanded role for para-medical personnel, and the use of data-processing methods for mass screening and diagnostic procedures. This will demand increasing organization and institutionalization of health-care delivery with attendant depersonalization of this care.

Although our society has come to consider medical care a right of all men, many barriers inhibit the fulfillment of this concept. Costs will continue to rise geometrically as nurses, hospital aides, resident physicians, and laboratory workers are allowed to approach the pay scales and work hours in industry and government for equivalent positions. The consumer (government, insurance companies, corporations, unions, and individual patients) will demand a greater voice in regulating costs and determining what quality of medical care society can afford to provide.

Financial considerations will be overshadowed by matters of supply and demand. Medicine is decreasingly productive, as illustrated by the dozen or more physicians and surgeons, equal numbers of nurses, and innumerable laboratory tests required for an organ transplant or open-heart surgery. Minimal increases in training of personnel contrast sharply with the mushrooming demand for health care swelled by increasing medical sophistication of the lay public and overpopulation. The consequences of overpopulation on the provision of health care are beyond comprehension. The geographical barrier of maldistribution of health resources results in an excess of health care in certain areas balanced by a lack of care among great masses of the world’s population. And even in our own society educational and psycho-sociological hindrances to adequate care are manifold.

As research turns increasingly from mechanisms and treatment to causes of disease, we must focus on preventive medicine. It seems hypocritical to suggest to “underdeveloped” nations that they improve sanitation by moving their privies farther from their wells, when in America our industrial and urban offal is piped directly into our water and air. On the personal level, cigarette smoking, overeating, underexercise, alcoholic consumption, and driving habits are factors having a major bearing on our health.

Many moral problems will arise from the role of medical science in the generation, termination, and modification of life. This last involves the increasing use of psychotropic (mind-changing) drugs, which in ten years will probably be almost universal in our society, at least on an intermittent basis. These are largely tranquilizers or mood-elevating drugs. How much to be preferred is Christ’s offer of “peace, such as the world cannot give.”

Christian Education

Vicky Smith Hess, 27, received the B.A. and M.A. from Wheaton College. She has served as director of Christian education at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C., has taught at Washington Bible College, and served as dean of women there.

Education in the seventies will be an issue more of practice than of theory. Educators have long cried for individualized learning that starts where a pupil is and not where he should be. The challenge comes to understand people as well as subject matter and to equip these people for full and productive lives in a modern world. However, as this world becomes more complex, the achievement of a relevant education becomes more difficult.

The granting of a degree even now signifies obsolescence because of rapid mushrooming of knowledge. Education must become a continuing, lifelong process. College enrollments and adult-education programs will see astounding growth in the seventies. The further application of technology to learning promises increased efficiency.

Struggles are inevitable. Creative teachers attempting to meet needs in a non-traditional setting face the harsh reality of pupils whose homes have offered little training in discipline or structured learning. They see children receiving more and more freedom, not all of which they are able to handle responsibly. As protest spreads, schools will be pressed to offer constructive reform and to avoid convenient concessions. For example, the crisis in inner-city education demands answers in the next decade. The largest problems will be lack of money and of courageous, trained leaders to administer changes and to use funds wisely.

While public education faces a theory-practice gap, the Church finds itself in a similar predicament. Can it relate the vitality of the Gospel to an Apollo 12 world? The Church is pressed for viable answers. These answers won’t come from a new audio-visual method. They won’t come from those who are satisfied to perpetuate tradition or from those who are bound by stunned reaction to current trends. The Church in the seventies must agree to move in new and varied ways and to trust the veracity of the Gospel to win and change men.

Social Ethics

Paul B. Henry, 27, is completing doctoral work in political science at Duke University. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia and Ethiopia and is a member of Watts Street Baptist Church, Durham, North Carolina. He is the son of Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor-at-large ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

To say that there is a generation gap between the post-thirty establishment evangelicals and their pre-thirty offspring is not only to state the obvious but to border on understatement. The entire apologetic mentality of establishment evangelicalism is out of tune with the problems being faced by the under-thirty generation. While the establishment debates concepts of organic evolution with scholastic precision, we face the challenges of social revolution. While the establishment continues to split hairs as to how we are to be separate from the world, we wonder how we can become meaningfully involved. These current issues are as apologetically meaningful to the contemporary mind as were the older issues in generations past.

Twentieth-century evangelicalism has failed in the task of giving social and political expression to its commitment to Ghrist. Its own mentors have attested to “the uneasy conscience of modern fundamentalism.” Evangelicalism needs an awakened conscience that will no longer take lightly its de facto alliance with privileged interests and conservative socio-political forces. It must repent from its tendencies toward cold-blooded rationalism in the face of human need, and remember the compassion of Christ, who literally wept for the city of Jerusalem.

The under-thirty generation rejects the sectarian tendencies and the overly personalistic ethics of establishment evangelicalism. This highly individualistic temper within the evangelical community has made it functionally incapable of relating to the broadly based and interdependent social structures of contemporary society.

At the same time, the under-thirty generation does not totally repudiate all it has learned from its tradition. It realizes that the ultimate questions are not political, but spiritual. It realizes that man’s utopian quests are always frustrated by his nature as sinner. It realizes that it, too, shall be judged by its children, just as we are now casting judgment on our elders. Above all, it realizes that all mankind shall someday be judged by God himself, and that only then will the questions of history and the social order be resolved.

Military Life

Peter M. Smith, 22, is a 1969 graduate of the United States Naval Academy now on active duty with the Navy as an ensign. He is the product of a Presbyterian manse, the son ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY’SDirector of Development.

Traditionally the armed forces has not been an organization known for its religious leadership. Much of this can be attributed to the frequent lack of family life experienced by the career personnel. The family is the seat of religious conviction and practice, but the career serviceman can expect to spend nearly half his adult life away from this stronghold of Christianity. This forces the Christian to have a much more personal relationship with Christ in the midst of many who seem content without Him.

There is great pressure on the officers and enlisted men who live their job twenty-four hours daily. One wrong decision or even a slight hesitation may cost many lives and millions of dollars in equipment. To many, adding Christ to a myriad of minute details of which one must be readily knowledgeable is almost unthinkable.

The “squareness” of Christianity also seems to be magnified in the armed forces. The byword is conformity, and many find it difficult to decline to patronize local nightclubs, which offer such a change of pace from the rigorous daily routine.

There are no simple solutions to these problems, but credit must be given to the chaplains, who are daily showered with problems that seem unresolvable. It is mainly through these pillars of strength that the message of Christianity is initiated and nurtured. With the opportunity, many men renew their dedication and lead a changed life after this exposure to Christian leadership. This is shown by the tremendous impact made on the troops in Viet Nam by Dr. Billy Graham.

It seems to me the best vehicle for spreading the Gospel of Christianity is on the personal level where others learn through observation of, and discussion with, an active disciple.

The Arts

Kathleen Norell, 25, is an instructor of English at Prince George’s Community College, Largo, Maryland. She holds an M.A. from Loyola University and is a member of the Evangelical Free Church.

The arts, always a year or ten ahead of Madison Avenue and the institutions of our society, are already voicing the themes and concerns of the seventies.

The “Age of Aquarius,” that epoch of peace and community heralded by pop culture, is struggling to be actualized in the poetry, music, painting and life-style of artists who seek to transcend the conflicts and anxieties of the sixties through drugs.

The forces of a dehumanized, technological environment are being confronted and often reshaped in the experiences of “total” theater, junk sculpture, and “habitat” architecture.

The individual artist of the early sixties, speaking of his personal alienation through a private symbolism, now begins to search for the common voice. Racial and ethnic backgrounds form the basis of a shared vision for many; common social class or geographic region provide the same for many others. In the visual arts and literature, especially, the quest for identity begins to give way to assertion.

Sex-and-violence, almost a cliché in our culture, has moved far beyond mere tawdry exploitation, pervading the arts with an obsessive quest into the nature of man. Although movies and best-seller lists draw public attention, the walls of little galleries and the offerings of contemporary theaters reveal more profoundly a serious and intense search for freedom from guilt.

The arts in the seventies will present problems as old as man himself—but in the language and media of a space age that touches no finite boundaries and of a nuclear age whose boundaries are too well defined. The contradictions of man’s seemingly unlimited ability to conquer his environment through technology and research and his apparent inability to cope with uncontrolled population, poverty, war, and pollution will find vivid expression in the arts.

And these are the problems which the Christian artist and layman must confront. Will the Church, faced with the art of Afro-American solidarity or hippie commune, recognize the inherent value of all human attempts at community—and yet bear witness to the truth that wholeness centers in Christ? Will Christians take seriously the sometimes creative, sometimes destructive response of the junk sculptor to a mechanized environment, realizing that man needs to find God’s presence in this world? Will we condemn the serious explorations of human sexuality, even in its perversions, as malicious exploitation? Or will we, out of our own deep understanding of guilt and shame, respond with an art and interpretation that points to release?

The arts burn into our consciousness the realities of these changing times. The coming decade provides us another opportunity to express through them the Reality that does not change.

The Urban Problem

Ozzie L. Edwards, 33, is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. He holds the Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin.

Apart from some very radical change in the nature of man and in the nature of his modes of social and political organization, we can expect that the decade which has just begun will be marked by a persistence of patterns of urbanization and polarization of social groups, both of which have significant implications for the Christian Church. While urbanization is not a new trend, its rate has been greatly accelerated in recent years. In the half century between 1850 and 1900, the world population increased from 1,171,000,000 to 1,608,000,000. During this period the proportion of a population in cities of 100,000 or more increased from 2.3 per cent to 5.5 per cent. In the first half of the twentieth century, world population increased to 2,400,000,000 and the proportion in large cities increased to 13.1 per cent.

Social psychologists have observed that these large dense settlements produce persons possessed with a sense of isolation and powerlessness, persons whose life-style is marked by a rational, reserved, sophisticated approach. They are not readily converted to new positions. Lest a positive value be placed on this psychological predisposition, we hasten to note that the rates of suicide and mental illness are considerably higher in urban places. Moreover, a greater incidence of various forms of social deviance is found in the urban setting. Murder is one and one half times greater, burglary three times greater, and robbery twelve times greater in urban places. With an increase in urbanization of the population, we can expect an intensification of these problems.

While urbanization has involved a decrease in physical distance, it has been correlated with an increase in social distance. As we enter the seventies we find ourselves in a society characterized by cleavages of social groups. We find intense conflict between rich and poor, old and young, non-white and white. The urban setting proved to be the primary site for the joining of battles. Although some would classify these as “social issues,” more careful and honest evaluation reveals the basic underlying moral issues involved. Morality, right, and truth are the stuff of Christianity. We must not abdicate our responsibility to meet these challenges in the decade of the seventies.

Mass Media

Richard N. Ostling, 29, is religion reporter for “Time” magazine. He holds bachelor and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He is former news editor ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

As an American Indian demonstrator was reading a statement of protest at the U.S. Congress on Evangelism, a key official put his hand in front of a TV man’s camera. A few months earlier a lay leader in a big Northeast evangelical church argued with me that Time and most major media are infiltrated by the Communist party. So I suppose many evangelical “Amens” were muttered at Spiro Agnew’s attacks on TV news and the press.

Like Agnew, evangelicals often blend ignorance and distrust with the idea that comments shouldn’t oppose their own interests. This approach stifles the spirit of the Reformation, and now that evangelicals are a minority group they have a vital stake in free discussion. How many have read the great Puritan Milton in Areopagitica: “If it comes to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.” Those are words for the seventies.

While he was putting some important problems (well discussed by journalists) into a partisan context, Agnew was ignoring the greater problem. Our minds and culture have been trivialized by the TV cult of the sixties. Christianity and many other matters of weight have not been profitable enough to get into the limited prime time. If the 1970s bring cable TV, religion suddenly will have a crack at eighty-two channels in each home. Quantity of outlets is no cure-all, however. Evangelicals already have quantity in radio, but much of it is aimed at fellow evangelicals. Relatively few non-Christians listen in except in drunken derision. The print media in religion are also over-extended. Why not pool 300 Protestant publications into a dozen or so of real quality and variety? Maybe even those non-Christians will take interest.

Evangelicals, often trapped in the culture of Middle America, have special communications problems. They must strive for content first. They must learn to listen to outsiders so they can respond to them. Some favor puffery to candor. Others don’t care about public opinion at all. These foibles are getting dangerous, because communication of Christianity as a live option in the seventies depends greatly on evangelicals. The spiritual sap of tradition is not running in ecumenical Protestantism. Catholicism is preoccupied with inner turmoil. Eastern Orthodoxy is parochial.

One more facet of the seventies: Christianity has always depended on rational, verbal forms to communicate the Logos; now all the non-print media are becoming machine guns of image and emotion. In such an atmosphere, Christians will be in danger of divorcing heart from mind—always a strong temptation for evangelicals.

Until recently I thought that only in England could one find a plumber whose response to an emergency call took so long that a leaky sink repaired itself. But since returning to the United States, after a year abroad, I have sensed a remarkable deterioration taking place in the world of work right here at home.

The gas company promptly turned on our kitchen burners. But after Saturday supper supposedly had been roasting for several hours, my fair and furious lady discovered that the oven hadn’t been connected.

The telephone crew installed our phones on schedule. But it took seventy-eight hours before the units worked well enough to get through even to the operator. No phones in the world have ever buzzed a busy signal for a longer period of inaction.

Carpenters showed up on time to install additional bookshelves in my seminary office. But it never occurred to the workmen—while buzz saws showered sawdust with gay abandon—to cover valuable research papers and several thousand books.

Fading from the workaday world, it would seem, are the factors of competence and service. Many workers are more concerned with higher wages and hurried completion of a job than with thoroughness and guaranteed performance.

I often remember a quite different experience in Sorrento, Italy, a city famous the world over for wood inlay craftsmanship. I ordered a small picture made of various woods, and the artisan promised its completion at a certain hour on a certain day. When I arrived as scheduled, he begged profuse forgiveness: he was finished with the job, yes, but was not completely satisfied with the results. Could he not take more time? So I watched as, by turns, he and his son gave themselves to polishing and repolishing, polishing and repolishing. The process continued for several hours until at last, delighted that “the moment” of artistic fulfillment had come, father and son beamed with satisfaction and with proud joy entrusted their handicraft to my keeping. The memento had cost about fifteen dollars; in value it has always represented far more.

I recall another experience, more recently, in Yugoslavia. Among the visitors to the Novi Sad evangelism conference was a Christian tailor with a wide reputation for fine custom work. My ten-day visit seemed a good opportunity to augment my wardrobe. The tailor was delighted to be of help—that is, until he learned the time limits. Of course, he said, he could finish a suit in ten days, and in all probability I would be wholly satisfied with the product. He refused to take the job, however; on so hurried a schedule, he said, he could not hope to maintain his own pride in his work. Would I forgive him, then, if he declined the present request in the hope that at some future time he might serve me better because less hurriedly?

Such experiences give me an uneasy feeling about what is now happening around us in America. I hesitate to escalate particulars into generalities, for there surely remain in America many workers who take pride in their work and many businessmen who know that service is not only the best salesman but the best policy. It is my happy privilege to know some of them. But if one were to multiply my recent frustrations by many parallels, one must surely be alarmed at the growing vocational shoddiness.

Just to nail down the point, let me add that on the first day after we moved into our Philadelphia apartment I bought a hammer. Hardly had I begun that vexing ordeal of picture-hanging when the hammer head parted company with its handle. Now I could have forgiven a Japanese hammer that had developed jitters during trans-Pacific shipment. But it was considerably harder to forgive a hammer “made in America.”

We ought to remember that Eastern European Christians live constantly with the Marxist assault on the capitalistic view of work. Exploiting the vacuum in the heart of the secular Western worker, Communism long ago promised to orbit a halo around the laborer’s life by enlisting him in the struggle for a new world order. It is increasingly clear, of course, that Communism glorifies not the worker but rather his work in the service of the state; the worker himself is but an instrument of the totalitarian powers. Neither the secular capitalist nor the materialistic Communist grasps the unique meaning and value of work.

Christianity brought to the world of work a new sense of significance and worth. Work was not, as the Greeks thought, at best an evil that ought to be avoided in the interest of philosophical contemplation as a higher way of life, nor was it to be pushed on a slave class of so-called half-men. The Bible has never been embarrassed that David was a shepherd, the early disciples were fishermen, and the Great Apostle to the Gentiles was a tentmaker. With patient industry, devout men so practiced their special tasks that they became qualified also to shepherd souls and to fish for men. Historic Christianity has much to say to contemporary man about glorifying God and serving one’s fellow man in the world of work and these things need today to be said with equal force in West and East. For the Christian, the daily job is not simply a means of economic survival—indispensable as that surely is; most of all it is an investment of one’s vocational gifts as a divine stewardship.

Communist leaders, as is well known, disparage Christian pastors as non-productive workers—a verdict grounded not in vocational realities but in atheistic propaganda. In Bulgaria, for example, and in some of the other Eastern European lands, authorities divert young men from the ministry by insisting that their country needs them in other types of work. When these Christians comply and in due course some of them rank head and shoulders above their colleagues in work performance, they are not advanced to managerial positions, simply because they are Christians and refuse to renounce the Church.

Such circumstances give Christian workers a prime opportunity to show what difference a sense of Christian responsibility brings to the world of work. By faithfully performing their work as a calling, and to the limit of ability, workers who suffer discrimination can clearly demonstrate, even without a word, what sort of “equality” Communism promotes, when it penalizes a better worker simply because of his belief in God.

While the worker in capitalistic lands is not penalized for his religious beliefs, he is nonetheless paying a penality for his lack of them. Every shoddy job for which people in the free world now pay (and pay more and more because of the inflationary spiral) is a peg in the coffin of free enterprise. The philosophy that puts a fast buck above a good job is an extension of the illusion that we can get something for nothing. Given enough of that sort of thing, we will end up with nothing, and with social chaos as well.

CARL F. H. HENRY

Writing from china to a friend in America on February 22, 1929, I said: “One other cause of pessimism is the character of the average student in the schools, the class from which naturally the national leaders will come in time. Communistic teaching and propaganda has been going on among these boys and girls for three or four years and is still rampant. The result is a group of young people who fear neither God nor man and whose minds are filled with an insane desire to tear down the existing social order, even if their own parents go in the fall. I have personally come in contact with the results of the new freedom which, as in Russia, has declared freedom between the sexes, with all restraints removed.”

Today, thirty years later, the Washington Post quotes Bruce Schwartz on the recent upheaval at MIT: “This was not a week of antiwar protests.… They are indeed revolutionaries, Socialist-Communist revolutionaries dedicated to the overthrow of the government and the political-social system of the United States.”

Within the week I have seen quoted two churchmen who concede that the answer to the present social revolution in America is “violence.” Both of these men are strategically placed and highly regarded. And just yesterday I heard a first-hand report of a conversation with another clergyman who, when asked about incidents of violence and destruction in a local school, had said, “The kids were exactly right. They should have done it.”

The point I am trying to make with all the earnestness I can is that a determined and regimented minority can overthrow the existing order, even here in America, and that the tactics with which I was familiar in China are exactly those being used here today. Remember, it was not a majority movement that swept Hitler into power. It was a small group of fanatic and dedicated activists who accomplished this task.

I am not writing as an alarmist, but the fact remains that, if America is to be spared the horrors of growing anarchy with an eventual dictatorship of either the right or the left, there are things that must be done.

First of all, we must recognize the forces with which we have to deal. We are not confronted merely by a group of idealists who wish to effect change by an over-activistic approach. True, many young enthusiasts have been captivated by the professed idealism of some leaders. But the fact is that we are faced with a hard core of student activists and others who are determined to tear down the present structures of society at any cost, and within their number are those whose basic philosophy is closely allied with that of either Moscow or Peking.

What should be the attitude of the Christian toward this menace? The support given by some churchmen to radical activists who in some cases are found at the forefront of the movement cannot possibly be used as an excuse for failure to take positive action. The fact that some ministers are advocating or condoning violence and destruction only intensifies the necessity that Christians look behind what is going on and evaluate the evidence. We are confronted by people who are determined to destroy America!

First of all, “law and order” must be restored to its rightful place as the basis of that stabilizing force by which a constructive society can operate. That some have succeeded in making this phrase a “dirty word” shows the gullibility of some otherwise good and discerning people.

When people threaten to “burn your town down,” or boast, “I will kill you,” or, “We will take over your institution until you accede to our demands,” the time for temporizing has ended. We have been entirely too easy on those who have defied the law or threaten to do so, and we are now paying the price for our foolish permissiveness. Surely the words of the Scriptures are being fulfilled before our eyes, “Because sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the sons of men is fully set to do evil” (Eccles. 8:11).

So one duty of the Christian is to back those who would maintain law and order in the midst of chaos. Those within our midst who condone violence and destruction will be wise to take to heart the words, “He who says to the wicked, ‘You are innocent,’ will be cursed by peoples, abhorred by nations; but those who rebuke the wicked will have delight, and a good blessing will be upon them” (Prov. 24:24, 25).

But the Christian is not a negativist. He has something wonderfully positive—the Lord Jesus Christ and his redemptive Gospel—and he needs to distinguish between the spirit of Barabbas that has infected so many (even within the Church) and the Spirit of Jesus Christ, which was its antithesis.

Jesus was not a “political revolutionary,” even though there are those who so malign him today. He was a spiritual revolutionary, devoted to changing men from the inside, rather than seeking to alter the social order by means of unredeemed men. When he drove the money-changers out of the temple, this was not social activism but a burning indignation against what was taking place within the church. He made a clear distinction between the secular and the spiritual when confronted by those who wished to impale him on the horns of a political dilemma: “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Luke 20:25).

The spirit of Barabbas was that of insurrection and violence, the Spirit of Christ that of gentleness and love. His plea, then and now, is, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:29).

Is it not that for which countless millions are longing? And who but Christ can give that rest? It will be found not in the spirit of Barabbas but in the Spirit of the One who speaks to and changes men at the heart level.

For this reason the Christian and the Church have an unprecedented opportunity and responsibility today. Our nation needs men of character and conviction, men able to distinguish between the unbridled spirit of rebellion and that Spirit by which alone peace, hope, and joy come into human hearts and through those hearts to the nation.

That tiny and rebellious minority of today can become an ominous movement of power tomorrow. It took twenty years for the seeds of Communism in China to grow into a tree that bore the bitter fruit of totalitarian repression, during which God and his Church were banished and man’s most precious possession, personal freedom, was lost.

It can happen in America!

L. NELSON BELL

1969 And Welcome To It

Any day now my mailman will deliver the monthly magazine of a small regional denomination. Its leading article, the usual review of the year gone by, never varies in January. I could write it in advance: crime has increased; you can’t walk the streets at night in safety; the Man of Sin’s local lackey (“that so-called bishop”) continues his baneful influence in state government; insidious humanism is being purveyed from television and radio stations; the long-haired hordes have taken over the country’s education system; and people generally are harkening unto the voice of the charmer. Like its predecessors, 1969 was a dismal failure, best forgotten, twelve disastrous months in which sin was rampant, virtue unrewarded, and the warnings of a faithful remnant unheeded. A gloomy, rigid, legalistic commentary on that-was-the-year-that-was and good riddance to it. Forecast for tomorrow: rain all the way. Its treatment of the year makes me want to paraphrase Mark Twain: “There’s a lot to be said in its favor, but the other is more interesting.”

Yet the editor is a kindly man who has greeted me warmly on the two occasions we have met, despite my incriminating links. I’m sorry for him (he is probably sorry for me), and for all who are obliged to write to order. I have a delightful memory of one of that editor’s colleagues, far from home and watchdogs, telling seminarians to guard against inordinate preoccupation with bibliolatry. His illustration: “If the Bible says the bush burned, then the bush burned whether the bush burned or not.”

But to return to that magazine. I wondered what it needed to balance its not wholly unjustified Weltanschauung, and decided that a capacity for saying thank you would not be out of place. 1 wish, for example, they could have printed a letter from one of my oldest friends, both of whose parents died in quick succession. With an obscure form of cerebral palsy that denies him control over shaking limbs, makes speech indistinct, and confines him to a wheelchair for life, he has an alert mind that devised an instrument (made to his instructions) to attach to his slightly less affected foot, allowing him to type. Speed: one line in twenty-five breathless jerking minutes.

Enclosing a poem he wrote for “The Day of Grace” (Christmas), he says: “God has been kind to me, and I know He will always be with me. I offer thanks for those blessings He gives to each one of us.”

Well, 1969 maybe wasn’t so black after all. I don’t know how long he took to compose the poem, but just typing it and the letter meant eight hours of his life. I wish my day’s work produced such a powerful sermon.

EUTYCHUS IV

Fast Relief

I agree with the philosophy in “ ’Tis the Season to Be Gluttonous” (Nov. 21). If every Christian American would start a “fasting fund” by putting aside the money he would have spent on some unnecessary snack, relief agencies like ours would not have to work so hard to raise funds so we can put a little meat on the bones of some of the “tiny skeletons.”

If this idea caught on, particularly among idealistic youth, they would do something about it, I’m sure. We recently received a $200 check from Montana Evangelical Youth, the proceeds from a “sacrifice banquet” which they initiated at the annual convention of The Evangelical Church of North America, held recently in Billings, Montana. Bread sticks and thin rice soup took the place of the annual roast beef banquet, and the young people sent their “fasting fund” to us to help feed starving children.

EVERETT S. GRAFFAM

Executive Vice-President

World Relief Commission

King of Prussia, Pa.

Conking Out On Death

Thomas Howard certainly has a nice writing style, impressive educational credentials, a certain amount of fame. But methinks he conks out when it comes to the theological implications of Christ’s death (“The Human Experience of Death,” Nov. 21). While it is true that physical death was an enemy met and overcome by our Lord, it is not true that physical death was the basis for the great anguish evidenced by his scream of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” His cry of anguish came as God the Father laid on him the sins and iniquities of us all. Thus to build so much of his article around the death of Christ brings only confusion. We, as believers, will never have that experience to go through. Ours will be purely the participation in the battle with death, not the bearing the weight of sin.…

I did appreciate Mr. Howard’s line of thought that death is one of the common experiences of life, held by all. And yes it is a part of being transformed into the image of Christ. And yes it is a real enemy. But the battle is also fought by our Lord.

Cloverdale, Ore.

LEON WALLACE

A Withering Policy

After reading your editorial, “The President’s Viet Nam Policy” (Nov. 21), I am convinced that political observation is not your specialty. You begin by saying, “President Nixon’s long awaited speech on November 3 broke no new ground, offered no new substantive changes of policy, and probably did little if anything to alter public opinion.”

Until President Nixon put forth the policy of gradual withdrawal of forces from Viet Nam and the Vietnamization of the war, there were only two alternatives prominently discussed, either to stay in or get out, either of which would encourage the enemy to continue the war. The first would be used to divide us at home, the second would give them a military objective. No wonder we could see no end in sight of the war.

The Nixon genius not only denies the enemy both of these advantages, but it would uniquely and wisely deny the Communists the opportunity to work the negotiations racket on us in a Viet Nam settlement. This, we contend, is a substantive change of policy and will probably see this war wither on the vine within a year. No wonder the new left came wailing out in “moratorium” anguish.

The fact that public opinion was altered dramatically, probably more than by any other single speech in history, is demonstrated by an unprecedented jump in opinion backing the President in his Viet Nam policy from a reported 65 per cent to 78.2 per cent within the space of a two weeks’ sampling.

It should be mentioned, too, that President Nixon’s challenge, bringing out the “silent majority” in such amazing force, probably altered some Communist opinion too about a seriously divided America. JAMES E. HANSON Evangelical Presbyterian Church Bellingham, Wash.

Nobody knows if his plan is right or not, but we must go along, and if he is wrong, he will be responsible and we can register our dissatisfaction at the polls. Yes, but it is the young American boy who must take all the risk when the political statesman is right or wrong; for the politician it is only the office he may lose, while the youth may lose his life. The young man under twenty-one has no other place to protest than in the street; he cannot vote for three years after he has been eligible for the draft. While we wait for the next election three years from now, another 90,000 American boys may be killed—plus all the other humans, no matter what name they bear. I don’t think we can wait that long to end an immoral war where we are twisting even the morals of the youth who are fighting it, when even the American soldiers are alleged to kill a whole village of people—women and children who plead for their lives. Instead of making men out of the boys in the military, we are making murderers out of them.

WALTER A. STEEN

Covenant Church

Floral Park, N. Y.

Twinkle, Twinkle

Janet Rohler’s “What’s the Mutter with Astrology?” (Nov. 21) prompts me to point out a fact the astrologers never emphasize to their clients and admirers.

Astrology is inextricably interwoven with reincarnation, both deriving from that fount of Eastern occultism that extends back to prehistoric civilizations. A basic tenet of reincarnation is that souls, through thousands of successive lives, struggle to shed their egocentricity and worldly concerns.

The outstanding mark of the perfected Eastern mystic is his freedom from all influences of the stars, freedom from this “wheel of life.” For the stars are said to affect only the worldly, egocentric nature of man. His spiritual nature is God-centered and therefore free from astrological influences.

This astrological reincarnation process of “salvation” is said to take eons to accomplish. But faith in Jesus Christ, we know, brings the same salvation in a matter of seconds, the same freedom from the “wheel of life”! Therefore the question of the validity of astrology is purely academic—who needs it?

WILLIAM R. PALMER

Monmouth Junction, N. J.

Stirring Body

“John Brown’s Student Body” (News, Nov. 21) has filled me with dismay, for it appears that it can only be described as unfriendly. This news item is substantially in error in matters of readily verifiable fact, and I must face the question: How many of your other articles and news items are similarly inadequately researched and are perhaps in error? Surely you must be concerned that such an apprehension may hang like a cloud whenever your magazine is read!

ROGER F. COX

Dean of Academic Affairs

John Brown University

Siloam Springs, Ark.

To think any college which calls itself Christian would, by “a faculty-dominated committee,” not allow “neatly clipped” mustaches and beards to be worn by its students! Is it possible to find anywhere a more vicious example of un-Christian legalism?

But, almost infinitely more important, the school is in a town where local law dictates that “Negroes must leave town by 5 P.M.”! Has any member of the faculty or student body any Christian commitment at all? How much longer (“The Arkansas school is marking its fiftieth anniversary this year”) will it be until the “Christian” students and faculty members rise up in holy wrath and make a really gut protest at the local level until such an un-Christian and vicious law be removed from the community?

DONALD K. BLACKIE

The Collegiate Church

Des Moines, Iowa

Please be advised that Siloam Springs, Arkansas, does not now, nor has it ever had an ordinance to the effect that Negroes must leave town by 5:00 P.M., nor is there any ordinance pertaining to this subject.

NEAL LANCASTER

City Clerk-Treasurer

Siloam Springs, Ark.

I am a student at John Brown University.… It has been discovered that a JBU student wrote the article even though he was not identified in the article. This student made a mistake, I feel, in analyzing student reaction to a speech made by Senator Mark Hatfield who spoke here on October 25. Senator Hatfield received a standing ovation after his speech not necessarily because the majority of the student body agreed with his views or because he gave a great speech. He received a standing ovation out of courtesy to Dr. John Brown, president of JBU, who stood up first. The standing ovation was definitely not spontaneous.

BRUCE W. CLARK

Siloam Springs, Ark.

I hardly think that the student body of JBU can be considered a “prototype of Southern religious-political conservatism” … because the student body is a cosmopolitan one coming from almost all of the fifty states and a few foreign countries. As a matter of fact, for the past decade, at least, the majority of the students have come from California, the Midwest, and the North Atlantic states.…

That Hatfield received a standing ovation means comparatively nothing any more at JBU. This is not to downgrade the Senator; the JBU student body has handed out “standing ovations” like silverware at the dining hall. And I might add they were quite frequently led by Mr. John Terry—who in my opinion can hardly be accepted as a spokesman for the student body or the faculty.…

I say these comments as a person who loves his alma mater and deeply appreciated the training I received there.… I do feel that JBU and campuses like it need our prayers in the face of the neo-evangelical trend facing America as well as, it appears, does Mr. Hatfield need our prayers.

Warsaw, Ind.

KEITH MEGILLIGAN

Of all the New Testament doctrines mythologized by neo-Protestant theologians, none has fared worse than justification by faith.

One ploy of recent modern theology has been a constant appeal to the majestic Reformation principle of sole fidei in an attempt to divorce Christian belief both from the certainty of objectively revealed truths (in the inspired prophetic-apostolic Scriptures) and from any firm grounding in external historical events (particularly the substitutionary atonement and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ).

To be sure, the Bible’s rejection of salvation by human effort rules out man’s ability to relate himself acceptably to the Living God by the genius of the human mind no less than by the energies of the will and emotions. God’s thoughts and God’s ways are higher than man’s—higher still than sinful man’s, who cannot achieve divine acceptance whether by intellectual ingenuity or by moral striving.

But the lifeline of the Protestant Reformation was its rediscovery of the Scripture truth that God offers to penitent believers, hopelessly guilty in their strivings to achieve salvation by works, the benefits of Jesus Christ’s mediation on the Cross. God acquits sinners, solely on the ground of a righteousness that he himself provides, a righteousness made known by intelligible divine revelation and embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a righteousness available to sinful men by faith alone.

But modern theologians have extended the Protestant principle of soteriological justification into a perverse speculative theory of epistemological justification by skepticism. Many neo-Protestant writers contend that the religious-ethical principle of justification solely by faith must be expanded to include a religious-intellectual corollary. In deference to divine revelation, man not only must renounce speculative rationalism, but supposedly must also repudiate all cognitive knowledge about God in order to give faith the right of way. Some recent statements consequently expound justification by faith in a manner that would destroy both the indispensable historical content and the indispensable knowledge content of revealed religion. “Justification by faith” becomes an abstract speculative principle through which its neo-Protestant advocates undermine much, if not all, that the New Testament and the Protestant Reformers considered essential to their exposition of the doctrine.

According to the contemporary view, intellectual faith-justification requires the rejection of any claim to divinely revealed truths, to the historical factuality of saving events, and to the scientific credibility of biblical miracles. Faith that justifies, it is said, has nothing to do with revealed information and external events: it is essentially trust in God devoid of cognitive knowledge.

That faith should liberate man’s conscience, rather than burden it, was indeed one of Luther’s emphases. But to turn this freedom into a theological necessity for emptying Christian belief of revelational truths and of the historical actuality of redemptive events is to misappropriate and pervert a Reformation principle.

Yet almost every influential neo-Protestant theologian in the recent past—including Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, F. Gogarten, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and the Niebuhrs—has wrongly used “justification by faith alone” to discount or dismiss the cognitive content and historical foundations of Christian faith. Some have done worse than others: they have turned justification by faith into an apology for non-Christian theology while at the same time evaporating the great distinctives of biblical religion. Some statements virtually reduce faith to courageous ignorance.

The early Barth contended that God confronts man and precipitates spiritual crisis by exposing the ambiguity of man’s religious life. Barth insisted, however, that divine revelation does not convey truths and that faith is a “not-knowing” (The Epistle to the Romans, London: Oxford University, 1933, p. 88). His later attempts to rescue an intellectual or cognitive significance for faith came too late and were, in any case, too halting. Barth’s early emphasis on a cognitively contentless revelation was nonetheless coordinated with God’s exclusive revelation in Jesus Christ; later theologians, traveling the same route of “not-knowing” faith, freed divine disclosure from a necessary connection with Jesus Christ.

Every one of the dialectical and/or existential theologians insists that any and all religious truth-claims are ambiguous; existentialism’s repudiation of every attempt to speak objectively of God was, therefore, destined for special welcome. Revelation is regarded, not as an objective divine communication of truths about God and his purposes, but rather as internal and paradoxical spiritual encounter. Revelation, in this view, has for its correlate not knowledge but trust; justification by faith, in consequence, is correlated with intellectual doubt.

Bultmann considers his whole demythological projection of faith and understanding wholly “parallel to St. Paul’s and Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone.… Or rather, it carries this doctrine to its logical conclusion in the field of epistemology” (in Kerygma and Myth, ed. by Hans Werner Bartsch, Harper, 1961, pp. 210 f.). Insists Bultmann: “Indeed, de-mythologizing is the radical application of the doctrine of justification by faith to the sphere of knowledge and thought.… There is no difference between security based on good works and security built on objectifying knowledge” (Jesus Christ and Mythology, Scribner, 1958, p. 84). Faith is correlated with the word alone, but this word of proclamation has no basis in revealed truths or historical saving events, inasmuch as the modern world-view is assumed to have ruled out the supernatural. The act of God in the Christ-event, however, that meets man in the preached word, enables man in faith to experience authentic life.

After first whittling down Paul’s entire Christology to justification by faith, Bultmann then reinterprets the latter to mean that man can experience “new life” by forgoing all self-justifying effort—a category in which Bultmann includes any confidence in divinely disclosed truths. The authority and evidential value of the prophetic-apostolic writings is excluded as a support for faith, since to buttress belief objectively would contribute to self-justification by obscuring the possibility of a new mode of existence in terms of radical faith. If authentic existence is defined as existential self-understanding, then assurance that rests on externally valid beliefs and objective factors must belong to inauthentic existence. Bultmann welcomes negative historical criticism for the support it gives to his theological slant. The assaults of a naturalistic philosophy of science and of historical positivism upon external miracles in nature and history enjoy free course. Reformation theology cannot base faith upon any “work,” and in this category Bultmann includes any fruit of historical and scientific inquiry. Faith must rest, instead, solely upon the preached word (though it is unclear why this, too, cannot be critically viewed as in some sense also a “work”). Bultmann concentrates the entire reality of revelation upon the event of preaching. Theological propositions are true only as existential statements, and only through faith is God knowable (which is Bultmannian shorthand for authentic self-understanding).

“Faith alone” here means existential decision without dependence on supernatural supports, historical happenings, cognitive content, or external evidence. Unlike Barth, who maintained the necessity of Jesus Christ’s substitutionary death and external resurrection, Bultmann retains the supernatural and miraculous only as myth and not as objective reality. For Bultmann, the essence of justification by faith is trust in God’s act experienced in existential response to the preached word in the absence of objective knowledge and external considerations.

But if Bultmann insists nonetheless on the reality of God apart from our faith, while denying God’s knowability outside faith, H. Braun radicalizes Bultmann’s existentialism to the point where the existence of God is wholly identical with the self-understanding of man in faith. Braun reduces the New Testament doctrine of justification by faith to the ethical tension of “I ought” and “I may.” The apostles sound forth Jesus’ call to moral transformation in terms of the paradoxical unity of God’s radical demand and radical grace. By first understanding and proclaiming the faith that unites God’s demand with his grace and hence justifies, Jesus provided historical impetus for justification. But Braun holds that justification can be verified elsewhere in human experience. Anthropology, according to Braun, is the New Testament constant, and Christology the variable. Despite his dismissal of the independent reality of God, and despite the dispensability in principle of Jesus of Nazareth (the moral paradox at the heart of the doctrine of justification might, in theory, have been uncovered by another person remarkably dissimilar to the Man of Galilee), Braun nonetheless espouses justification by faith, however deviantly.

Since faith is presumably independent of conceptual knowledge and of historical events, F. Gogarten ventures a restatement of justification that makes possible both the complete and radical autonomy of the physical and historical sciences and man’s total reliance upon them in shaping the future (see The Reality of Faith, Westminster, 1959, chap. 10). Justification by faith is, therefore, not related to man’s individual moral and spiritual predicament before God; instead, it sanctions man’s shaping of the world and of history by reason and science alone, rather than their forfeiture to religious incredulity. Gogarten misappropriates Luther’s great doctrine to advance his own connection of faith with secularization as a Christian phenomenon; for him, the revelation of Jesus Christ is the direct and original basis of secularization. Jesus’ unreserved trust in the Father fully exposes the fact that the cosmos and history, contrary to the prevalent pagan beliefs, are not controlled by divinatory powers. As son of the Father, and in view of his confidence in the Creator, man is now wholly free to become lord of the world—so Gogarten contends—through unlimited use of reason and science.

In other words, the secularization of society assertedly has a divine mandate; man can fulfill his responsibility in the world only by aggressive reliance on reason alone rather than on faith; the limitless use of reason and science are the means by which man must advance the order, unity, coherence, and future of the world. But, says Gogarten, only faith in God as Creator frees man for this total reliance on reason. Man’s understanding of the world as God’s creation is, therefore, the equivalent of man’s justification in God’s sight. In this way the doctrine of justification, forcibly detached from the whole framework of supernatural revelation and miraculous redemption, gains speculative exposition in terms of man’s freedom to enlist science to fulfill his culture-mandate in the world and history.

In America it was Tillich who carried the modern distortion of justification by faith to its extreme. Repeatedly Tillich claimed the Pauline and Lutheran doctrine of justification as the foundation of his entire theological outlook. The essence of that doctrine, he insisted, is as indispensable today as in the first and sixteenth centuries. But, as he went on to say, a reinterpretation and wholly new understanding of it are necessary: “This idea is strange to the man of today and even to Protestant people in the churches” and is now “scarcely understandable even to our most intelligent scholars.… And we should not imagine that it will be possible in some simple fashion to leap over this gulf and resume our connection with the Reformation again” (The Protestant Era, University of Chicago, 1948, p. 196).

Tillich proposes to revive and reinterpret justification by faith not merely as an article of the creed but also, by relating man to God as the Ground of all being, as the comprehensive frame through which ultimate reality is to gain new power in universal human life. Tillich’s radically conceived view detaches justification by faith from its historical understanding—namely, from the doctrinal biblical view of God, of Christ, of redemption—and boldly turns it into a formula for repudiating supernatural theism.

In view of man’s inability to protect himself, by human striving, against devastating threats to survival and existence, Tillich expounds the implications of justification by faith for cultural autonomy. Neither right beliefs nor spiritual activity nor any other achievement on man’s part, he says, can stave off the ultimate condemnation of man’s efforts to failure. But justification means that man is accepted as he is, without even striving for acceptance; it declares that grace is available, and that man’s estrangement from God is overcome in reconciliation and new being.

To see in such a presentation the New Testament content of justification by faith is to misunderstand Tillich. He calls man to no particular beliefs, to no intellectual presuppositions whatever, to no specific spiritual affirmations—not even to the definition of acknowledgement of divine grace, nor to the naming of God’s Name. According to Tillich, the Protestant principle assertedly implies that “there cannot be a truth in human minds which is divine truth itself. Consequently, the prophetic spirit must always criticize, attack, and condemn sacred authorities, doctrines and morals” (The Protestant Era, p. 226). Protestantism must proclaim the judgment that brings assurance by depriving us of all security and must proclaim our having truth in the very absence of truth (even of religious truth). “You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.… Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” (The Shaking of the Foundations, Scribner, 1948, p. 162). Hence, in his application of justification by faith to the religious aspect of man’s ethical life, Tillich divorces divine acceptance of man from specific doctrinal beliefs.

He goes still futher by applying the justification theory to the whole intellectual side of religion in such a way that the skeptic is no less divinely justifiable than the striver who merely believes himself to be accepted. Doubt is said to unfold within itself an infinite passion for the truth, a faith is assertedly hidden inside skepticism. If justifying faith involves no specific content, the skeptic who has hidden faith must also be regarded as somehow in the truth and in unity with Being itself. “The paradox got hold of me,” said Tillich, “that he who seriously denies God, affirms him” (The Protestant Era, p. xv). So then justification by faith is universally assured, even to those who find belief in God an impossibility. On Tillich’s premises “there is no possible atheism”: God is present in every act of faith, even if this faith expressly denies the very existence of God. If correct ideas are a dispensable “work” in relation to justification by faith, then neither incorrect ideas nor ideas in suspense or doubt can disqualify one from justification by faith—just so long as one is earnestly involved. “Go with Pilate, if you cannot go with Jesus; but go in seriousness with him!” writes Tillich of Pilate’s doubts concerning the truth (The New Being, p. 68).

This is not all. Tillich gives an even more radical, more universal, more abstract statement of justification by faith. Not only for the skeptic, in whose doubt faith is said to be nonetheless present as a presupposition, but even for one committed to a-meaning, justification is possible without intellectual reversal. Heinz Zahrnt summarizes Tillich’s position as follows: “The courage which looks despair in the face already is faith, and the act of taking meaninglessness on oneself is a meaningful act” (The Question of God, London: Collins, 1969, p. 344).

In his closing chapter of The Courage to Be, written in 1952, Tillich suggests that the very term faith desperately needs modern reinterpretation, then proceeds to analyze the experience of courage, connecting, in the face of meaninglessness, the courage to be with the power of being, or the Ground of all being.

By affirming our being, we participate in the self-affirmation of being-itself. There are no valid arguments for the ‘existence’ of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not.… Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to meaning itself [The Courage to Be, Yale University, 1952, p. 181].

Tillich’s closing words are, “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” (p. 190). The experience, undirected, without specific content, that appeals to no special divine revelation but takes into itself doubt and meaninglessness in the bald confidence that one is accepted—this Tillich calls “absolute faith.” Its sole presupposition is the Ultimate, the God above God,” beyond describable identity. Absolute faith is faith without a theology, without words and concepts, yet is faith in the trans-personal presence of the Divine, the depth of things, the ultimate Ground.

For Tillich, in other words, there is no unconditional truth of faith except one, and that is, it would appear, that no one possesses any such truth. Despite this disclaimer, however, Tillich was somehow misled into believing justification in the Tillichian reinterpretation to be an indispensable truth, and this at the high cost of scuttling the biblical truth of the self-revealing God and the truth of justification by faith in the understanding of the Book of Romans and in the experience of the Reformers. In his exposition, justification gains a universal significance that goes beyond Protestantism, beyond Catholicism, beyond Christianity itself. Tillich’s concept loses both the God of the Bible and the supernatural redemption and rescue of sinful man. In short, by elaborating justification as a speculative principle the way he does, Tillich forfeits justification as a supernatural provision of divine grace.

Quite clearly, then, with Gogarten and Tillich, the justification principle takes on essentially post-Protestant and non-Christian features. Not only is its content emptied of New Testament essentials, but its form is shaped by theosophy rather than by theology. A justification that requires even Christians to give up all their revealed knowledge of God, to surrender supernatural realities, to forgo the metaphysical significance of Jesus Christ, is a justification totally foreign to the first Christians. As Zahrnt observes, if the people who longed at the waning of the Middle Ages for a more authentic way of speaking about God had thought that Luther’s Reformation must necessarily end this way, they would “have put their hands over their ears in horror and cried: ‘Anything but that!’ ” (The Question of God, p. 359).

Nowhere did neo-Protestant theology seriously question its speculative extensions and reformulations of justification in terms of radical faith. Rather, justification was made to imply the epistemological theory that all knowledge is historically conditioned, that faith requires the rejection of objective truths, that faith is uninterested in the historical actuality of saving events, that even the severest criticism of the natural and historical sciences could in no way jeopardize the vitality and propriety of faith: moreover, Protestantism, it was held, historically sponsored and licensed these views.

In his early writings, Barth had insisted that the revelation of the Living God is confined to Jesus Christ. He later acknowledged that this view could not rest simply on the contention that divine revelation enlists only nonintellectual trust in its exposure of the ambiguity of man’s righteousness. In his earlier view, faith was considered to be implicit in the question “Who am I?,” and accessible to man as man; its connection with God’s unique act in Christ, therefore, seemed hardly necessary. He came to see, however, that a flat rejection of objective knowledge of God and historical revelation threatened to dissolve divine disclosure into theological subjectivism. Under counter-pressure by Bultmann and existentialists, Barth, therefore, increasingly sought to inform faith with cognitive significance, and stressed the external objectivity of Christ’s resurrection, though he continued to place the event beyond the reach of historical inquiry.

Despite Barth’s maneuverings toward revelational quasi-objectivity in history and in cognition, not only Bultmann but also many post-Bultmannian theologians continue to combine their insistence on God’s once-for-all disclosure in Jesus Christ with the costly thesis that faith is consistent with radical doubt. For all the assertion of the “new quest” of the historical Jesus, Gerhard Ebeling, for instance, contends that the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith is mirrored in the unqualified abandonment of historical considerations to critical methodology: “Protestantism of the nineteenth century, by deciding in principle for the critical historical method, maintained and confirmed … the decision of the Reformers in the sixteenth century” (Word and Faith, Fortress, 1963, p. 55). Ebeling’s interest is not the vindication of authentic as against spurious historical claims. In his essay on “The Significance of the Critical Historical Method for Church and Theology in Protestantism,” he postulates an inner connection between justification by faith, which assertedly requires us to live without any kind of security, and critical-historical methodology which undercuts any assurance that faith might find in external historical facts.

The announced effort of some post-Bultmannians to maintain some measure of historical rootage for Christian faith would in principle sacrifice, as Van Austin Harvey rightly comments, “the meaning of justification by faith which the ‘new questers’ also want to preserve” (The Historian and the Believer, London: SCM Press, 1967, p. 196). Most post-Bultmannians in fact really have no desire to reassert a historical or rational justification of faith. Ernst Fuchs, for example, still insists no less strenuously than Bultmann that to ground faith in objective demonstration would involve the human intellect in a form of illusory self-justification. A free faith would be precluded, he contends, if belief in the Gospel of the risen Christ were established by eyewitnesses: “The witnesses of a particular, repeated happening are in competition with faith, and what they have seen is in competition with the gospel which is to be believed” (Gessamelte Aufsätze, Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965, III, 276). So, too, Hans Conzelmann combines historical skepticism and cognitive uncertainty with existential justification in a manner that detaches faith from objective truth about God and the factuality of Christ’s resurrection (An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament, Harper & Row, 1969).

It becomes increasingly apparent that the dialectical-existential severance of divine revelation from rational cognizability and from external historical events leads inevitably to the loss both of special and of general revelation, since it hopelessly weakens the meaning of the term revelation. (Whatever else may be said about Wolfhart Pannenberg’s theology—and it is not beyond serious evangelical criticism—he sees clearly that the right aim of historical method is not, as recent modern theology would have it, to plunge the believer into such uncertainty about history that he can live only by a leap of faith, but rather to ascertain knowledge about the past). To be sure, the rejection of intelligible divine disclosure and of external divine revelation in nature and history was correlated in dialectical-existential theology, in its alternative emphasis solely on personal non-propositional confrontation, with an insistance that God confronts man only in and through his Word, Jesus Christ. Yet Bultmann’s view of faith as authentic human existence, or self-surrender inspired by the symbol of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, not only leaves in doubt the indispensability of a past unique act of God in Jesus of Nazareth, but also accommodates the logical possibility of another symbol of faith serviceable to those to whom Christ is unknown. If the faith that justifies is a matter of existential self-understanding, divorced from dependence on objectively revealed divine truths and external historical saving events, cannot man realize his own true nature independently of Jesus of Nazareth?

Bultmann concedes this possibility only in theory; he insists that God’s prior initiative in Christ must in actuality be assumed because only in the proclamation (kerygma) about Christ has authentic existence been realized.

But so-called left wing post-Bultmannians take the other option. Fritz Buri and Schubert M. Ogden contend that the neo-Protestant understanding of “justification” has as its logical consequence the radical universal character of divine grace; to identify it solely with a divine act in Jesus Christ they consider to be an arrogant theological presumption (Schubert M. Ogden, Christ Without Myth, Harper, 1961, pp. 145 f.). If Christian faith rests on no objective truth and no historical actualities, but depends rather upon a personal act of God in an event about which very little can be known, then radical faith becomes a universal possibility. Pointing to Bultmann’s deliberate distinguishing of self-understanding from belief in the cross and resurrection of Christ as objective events, the left-wing post-Bultmannians ask: If faith is a passage from inauthentic to authentic existence, without necessary dependence on an objective historical event in the past, is such faith not a possibility for man as man? Ogden takes the coordination of justification with doctrinal disengagement seriously: the teaching that salvation is by Christ alone is labeled—not “absurdly,” as Carl Braaten thinks (New Directions in Theology Today, Volume II: History and Hermeneutics, London: Lutterworth, 1968, p. 85), but in a way quite consistent with the existentialist premise—as “the final and most dangerous triumph” of “the heretical doctrine of works-righteousness.” This heresy, he says, we can now avoid only by stressing “that God saves man by grace alone in complete freedom from any saving ‘work’ of any kind traditionally portrayed in the doctrines of the person and work of Jesus Christ” (p. 145).

With an eye on the unstable Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian defense of once-for-all disclosure in Jesus Christ the Word, Van Austin Harvey takes the final step. Since neo-Protestant theology equates faith with trust or decision and detaches revelation from both cognitive truth and specific historical beliefs, Harvey contends that the content of faith may be as readily mediated by historically false myths as by actual historical events (The Historian and the Believer, pp. 280 f.). This view, he argues, “tries to take with utmost seriousness both the Protestant principle of justification by faith and the historical character of human existence, of which the morality of human knowledge is but a formalized constitutive part” (p. 288).

Thus, the neo-Protestant restatement of justification by faith as an epistemological principle attaching faith to cognitive doubt finally succeeds in destroying justification by faith as a soteriological principle that attaches faith to God’s saving revelation and redemption in Jesus Christ. A formless and contentless belief—rendered so by the loss of universally valid truth and of external historical grounding—must cut itself off from necessary connections with Jesus of Nazareth, from justification by faith in an authentically biblical understanding, and must attach itself instead to radical faith as a possibility available to every man as man. It is then free to draw its life-giving spirit from pseudo-scientific dogmas about the impossibility of miracle or the irrelevance of the supernatural, or from historicist dogmas that dismiss Judeo-Christian revelation as myth by hardening modern doubt into anti-Christian finality. When justification by faith is thus perverted into the speculative theory that revelational truths and revelational history are efforts at self-justification, the essential connection of Christian faith with intelligible and historical revelation is sacrificed on the altar of scientific-historical positivism.

The recent epistemological perversion of this soteriological principle must be seen as a massive delusion of self-justification. In their self-disengagement from the cognitive content of divine revelation, neo-Protestant theologians pleaded their personal humility and protested presumptive pride in the evangelicals’ attachment to the truth of Scripture. But it should be crystal clear that their modern justification of doubt is a pridefully presumptive repudiation of the rational content of the Living God’s intelligible disclosure and of his redemptive acts in external history. The neo-Protestant reconstruction of justification by faith is, in fact, a massive self-delusion, a subtle self-justification of the contemporary revolt against reason and against revelation in its Judeo-Christian understanding.

A theology of this kind needs more than renewal; it needs God’s forgiveness. All our theology, of course, stands always in need of purification by the inspired Scriptures; some of it needs to be purged. But can a speculative theology that guarantees its own justification in advance by correlating divine acceptance with man’s courageous ignorance, hope for a pardon of which it feels no need?

Ironically enough, evangelical theology must acknowledge that Roman Catholicism, whose misinterpretation of justification the Reformation protested, today has more understanding than does the influential vanguard of neo-Protestant theologians who have miscarried the doctrine to the point of mischief and misbelief. Were it not for the emerging radicals in the Church of Rome today, not a few evangelicals would seek liaison for examining biblical justification by faith, particularly with devout Catholics who show a new respect for the Bible. The neo-Protestant perversion of justification is so much worse than the medieval misconstruction that ecumenical Christianity can now profit by hearing of what the Scholastics had to say, although it is only through what the Scriptures have to say, of course, that we, like Luther, can find the way again.

Karl Barth could speak of the revelation of God as a clap of thunder in the Swiss Alps. For Paul Tillich, faith was like a flash of lightning that in a stormy night throws everything into a blinding clarity for just a moment. Barth’s thunder has worn itself silent, and Tillich’s momentary light has waned. The mind of modern man, whose doubt and sense of meaninglessness even theologians venture to justify, stumbles in blindness and night. May God who justifies authentically, on his own terms, and in his own way, cause the Light to shine and the Word to be heard again. And may theology experience forgiveness of sins in a gracious rediscovery and proclamation of authentic justification by faith alone.

Seminarians of the current and coming generations may well become the most “ignorant” generation of preachers in the later history of the Church. Now that they have succeeded in having the study of Greek and Hebrew made optional, seminarians must decide about exegesis and semasiology (semantics) before they understand the words, much less the ramifications of their decision.

Writing to his friends at Corinth, Paul expressed a concern about their being “uninformed” about the gifts of the Spirit and their use in the life and worship of the church (1 Cor. 12:1, RSV). The Greek word is agnoein. It has the sense of being unknowing, uninformed, unenlightened. The King James Version here translates agnoein as “ignorant,” and it is in this sense I use the word.

The Revised Standard Version is not a new translation but a revision of earlier English versions. The preface states that the preparation involved studying the biblical text in its original languages as well as in earlier translations, in order to make the Word of God clear so that God might speak “to men in these momentous times, and … help them understand and believe and obey His Word.”

Much current sentiment about the study of Greek and Hebrew does not lie in this direction. The 1969 General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church gave preliminary approval to a proposal to omit study of the original languages of Scripture from required seminary courses. Other denominations have already approved similar actions.

Making this language study optional implies, of course, that it is of only secondary importance in the training of the minister. Given that implication, the seminarian is understandably reluctant to subject himself to such rigorous courses.

One line of reasoning given for making language study optional begins with the complexities of modern civilization and begrudges time devoted to study of Greek and Hebrew; this time might better be spent, it is said, in the study of sociological disciplines. Another line of reasoning is based on the ready availability of many translations and exegetical studies. Both these arguments rest, in my opinion, upon fallacies. The first fallacy is that extensive knowledge of man in his world is adequate for effective ministry. The second is that translations and exegetical studies are adequate for “rightly dividing the word of truth.”

The first fallacy is readily derived from today’s theological climate. Daniel Day Williams, in his presidential address before the American Theological Society on March 31, 1967, described that climate as one in which the locus of theology (and thus, by extension, of preaching and of the total work of the ministry) can no longer be considered to be study about God. For our modern world it must be the theo-sociological study of man. If we grant this premise, the meaning of man’s life is to be sought through examination of what Williams called “the justice which orders his social existence,” rather than man’s relationship to God in Jesus Christ.

Making man the locus of theology greatly diminishes the need for study of the Scriptures, which are above all a recital of God’s redemptive acts in history and are not primarily concerned with man, except in his relation to God. The Bible, then, is no longer “the only rule for faith and practice,” as the Westminster Divines described it, but simply another sourcebook for man’s quest of knowledge about himself. As a consequence, knowledge of the original languages, sufficient to enable one to interpret “lexically, syntactically, contextually, historically, and according to the analogy of Scripture” (as it is put in a hoary formula beloved of professors of exegesis and ingrained in the thinking of many generations of preachers), is no longer important.

When preaching is no longer required to be biblical—that is, based upon exposition of the authoritative Word of God—it soon degenerates into a potpourri of discourses on current events, the arts, new books, and countless other matters. Anything can then become a basis for preaching. The late Halford Luccock, as professor of preaching at Yale Divinity School and through his numerous writings, has probably influenced more preachers than any other man in recent history. A number of times he commented pungently on this addiction to preaching on extra-biblical themes. Once he remarked that he and his generation had the same qualifications for speaking a word of warning about this addiction as did the prodigal for speaking of pig pens—they had been there, had suffered that addiction, and found it wanting. His conclusion was that extra-biblical preaching led only to homiletical poverty.

A seminary student who makes man the center of his study is in the same position as a law student who neglects courses in law so he can study man in society. There must be a foundation upon which ministry is based, a plumb-line by which it is judged. This cannot be man, transient, changeable, and varying in his capacities for good, for then knowledge and understanding would be equally impermanent, disappearing with the dust of history.

It is interesting to note that much of what is now called “prophetic” preaching becomes passé as quickly as today’s newspaper, while preaching that is biblical is timeless. The expository sermons of Luther, Calvin, Augustine, and Spurgeon still glow with life and vitality, despite their age. The reason is that they are rooted in the imperishable. Those who desire to be “prophetic” in our time often forget that the basis of the prophetic message was a relationship to God. The beginning of any truly prophetic ministry, whether of Amos, Micah, or the preacher to Metropolis, is a knowledge of what God has said. This knowledge and experience must be first-hand, gained through prayer, study, and preparation, for us no less than for the prophets and apostles of old. We must first receive the Word into our own life before we can share it with others.

Is not the primary concern of congregations today the same as that of Zedekiah, “Is there any word from the LORD?” (Jer. 37:17). The need for our time is nothing less than Jeremiah’s answer, “There is!” But how can preachers give that assurance if they themselves are “ignorant” of the Word of God?

The assumption that the multiplicity of available translations gives one all the tools he needs for “rightly dividing the word of truth” is fallacious also. Translators suffer from the same vagaries of thought, the same occasional spiritual sloth, the same variations of belief and conviction that are the lot of us all. They take the Word, subject it to their own abilities and belief, and translate it into words and phrases adequate for them—but perhaps woefully insufficient for others. The long debates and discussions among translators involved in preparing new versions is proof enough.

Dr. William Barclay, in the preface to his New Testament Wordbook, says:

Translation from one language into another is in one sense impossible. It is always possible to translate words with accuracy when they refer to things. A chair is a chair in any language. But it is a different matter when it is a question of ideas. In that case some words need, not another to translate them, but a phrase, or a sentence, or even a paragraph. Further, words have associations. They have associations with people, with history, with ideas, with other words, and these associations give words a certain flavor which cannot be rendered in translation, but which affects their meaning and significance in the most important way [SCM Press, 1955].

How can a preacher really know what the Scriptures say to the world today if he must always depend upon a translator? For example, how can he be sure what Paul meant by “reconciliation” in that classic passage, Second Corinthians 5:18–20 (classic, at least, for Presbyterians who have struggled through debates over the “Confession of 1967”!), unless he can study the Greek New Testament and lexical aids, seeing for himself the rich tapestry woven by the use of katalassein in the New Testament and in classical literature? I believe that much of the misunderstanding over this word would have been avoided had those responsible been honest students of the Greek.

So also the study of Hebrew. Is the English language capable of paralleling the richness of the Hebrew concept of justice contained in mishpat and tsedeq? Recent additions to Old Testament studies by archaeological findings require that one be competent in Hebrew to judge their worth.

A classic text for preaching upon which the intellectually honest student soon founders is Job 13:15: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.” This beloved King James translation is majestic in its portrayal of Job’s selfless devotion to God. The Revised Standard Version offers a very different translation: “Behold, he will slay me; I have no hope; yet I will defend my ways to his face.” Comparison with other translations only increases the variety of choices. The final decision must be the individual reader’s. With no knowledge of the Massoretic text and marginal notes, he cannot understand the possibilities for mistranslation inherent in the Hebrew text itself, so his choice is already crippled. Implicitly trusting the King James over the Revised Standard translators may be satisfying, but it is a subjective choice based upon a personal bias rather than upon biblical evidence, and is intellectually dishonest.

If we believe that God, who inspired the writing of his Word, will also illumine it to our hearts and souls and life, then obviously the first requirement for rightly dividing the word of truth is simply to know that Word, in all its original glory. If our knowledge of that Word is always a second-hand experience, through another’s translation, interpretation is much more difficult.

Of course, there have been many pulpit giants unlearned in Greek and Hebrew. But is it unfair to suggest that their Bible exposition might have been much more effective if they had mastered the original languages? The Church, the world, and the Kingdom will always be poorer for lack of able exegetes. Intellectual integrity should not allow men to preach, daring to be spokesmen for God, while willingly lacking first-hand knowledge of his Word.

A judgment made by two scholars about the problems of interpreting the New Testament is equally applicable to the Old:

All the New Testament books were written … in Greek, for Greek-speaking readers, by men who for the most part themselves lived in a Greek-speaking society. There can, then, be no accurate reconstruction of primitive Christian thought which does not rest upon an accurate knowledge of the meaning which the Greek words used by the Christian writers had for their readers. Philology and lexicography form the essential groundwork of the interpretation of the New Testament [Sir Edward Hoskyns and Noel Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament, Faber and Faber, 1931].

Rereading the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching that are still in print is always rewarding, particularly when one looks for a specific concept common to the lecturers. Almost without exception they were strongly convinced that real preaching is always biblical. This note, sounded constantly during the almost one hundred years of the lectureship, is usually accompanied by the caution that biblical preaching demands competence in studying the Word.

J. B. Phillips’s experience during translation is shared by all who have ever sat down with the Greek or Hebrew Testament to work out a translation and exposition. His “Translator’s Testimony” given in Ring of Truth speaks movingly of the greater effect his work had upon himself than upon those who might read his work. Most evangelical Christians come to the seminary with a love of the Word, nurtured by years of reading, meditation, and prayer. But what joy is theirs when they work with the actual language of Paul, John, David, or Jeremiah, and the Word begins to glow with vitality and truth unchanged through thousands of years! How shallow and superficial their previous understanding and knowledge then appears!

Coming face to face with eternal truth, in such first-hand experience, changes us. And when it has changed us and spoken to our hearts, we are ready to say, “Thus saith the Lord!” We can then lead a congregation to feed on his Word. Then the immense value of those long hours of agonizing work with conjugations, declensions, and vocabulary drills becomes clear.

A potential preacher will not deliberately choose ignorance if he wants to become, as the Today’s English Version of Second Timothy 2:15 has it, a “worker who is not ashamed of his work, one who correctly teaches the message of God’s truth.”