George Orwell’s book, 1984, may have new significance to Toronto United Church leaders. Consultants have predicted that Canada’s largest denomination could be nearly extinct by that year in the non-suburban areas of the city.

Metropolitan Toronto population has increased by 50,000 annually, but United Church membership (206, 379 persons are under pastoral care) is declining by 3,000 a year. The report from Project Planning Associates cost $83,000 and was commissioned eighteen months ago.

Some observers suggest that the United Church predicament is only a part of a larger Protestant urban problem. They point out that between 1961 and 1969, combined United, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Baptist membership in Toronto fell by 30,000. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic population, swelled by immigrants, jumped 200,000.LESLIE K. TARR

Josef Lukl Hromadka, 80-year-old president of the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference, has turned his back upon the movement he himself started. Hromadka, a long-time member of the World Council of Churches’ Central Committee, announced his resignation from the CPC when his co-worker, General Secretary Jaroslav N. Ondra, was ousted last month.

In the beginning of November, “member churches and regional organizations of socialistic countries” (the official wording, but read: Bishop Nikodim of the Russian Orthodox Church, who usually pays the bills) asked Ondra to resign. The official reason given at the executive board meeting in Buckow, East Germany, was that Ondra has given priority to the Czechoslovakian problems instead of the aims of the CPC.

That was near the truth. Ondra had officially protested against the Russian invasion of his country last year. The decision of the two Prague church leaders to quit the movement they founded climaxed a split that has hampered the CPC for the last year (see December 20, 1968, issue, page 34).

And there are signs many more will turn their backs on the CPC. The regional committee for West Germany already has hotly protested the forced resignation of Ondra. Committee members who kept quiet at the Buckow meeting were sharply criticized. This caused a West German split, and only three of the regional committee members stayed with the CPC.JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

A British high court ruled last month that Scientology is not a religion. The decision was handed down on a case in which Scientologists had protested refusal of the register-general to register a chapel as a “house of worship” under the 1855 Places of Worship Registration Act.

Scientologists again hit the headlines in Britain when eight of them obtained a high court order that effectively adjourned the annual meeting of the government-subsidized National Association for Mental Health.

Earlier an audacious takeover bid by the cult had nearly caught the 2,000-strong NAMH on the hop. An unprecedented flurry of new members (about 250 during the previous month alone) marked the Scientological strategy, and clearly had implications for the annual NAMH meeting, where attendance did not normally exceed 500. When ofiicials tumbled to what was going on, the association froze membership until after the meeting. (For a two-part report on Scientology, see the November 7 and 21 issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.)

The ground had obviously been carefully laid by the devotees of Scientology, unabashed by the British Minister of Health’s description last year of their philosophy as “socially harmful,” and alert to the possibilities of slapping a writ on critics before you can say “L. R. Hubbard.” His followers complain that for years they had been snubbed in their attempts to “meet NAMH representatives to cajole or jolt the association into some sort of action to get a Bill of Rights for mental health patients.” They decided to put the pressure on after government inquiries had disclosed staff misbehavior at some of the country’s mental health institutions.

J. D. DOUGLAS

No Stickups Allowed

An Arizona state prison inmate who once pulled armed stickups was told to “get in there with your hands down” when he was baptized in a two-by-six-foot stock tank two feet deep.

James Carpenter, six foot six, was too tall to be immersed in a prison bathtub, and officials nixed the idea of taking him outside the facility to a nearby pond. Carpenter, 31, dubbed a “five-time loser,” is serving twenty to thirty years for armed robbery and car theft.

Reached through “Herald of Truth” radio programs, the convict sought baptism from Church of Christ minister Tommy J. Hicks of Northside Church in Coolidge.

Protestant prison chaplain Charles Surber actually performed the rite, but he “could only get one foot in the tank,” according to Hicks’s report in the Christian Chronicle, Church of Christ newspaper. A Seventh-day Adventist was immersed first, “and his hands were sticking out,” Hicks related. “We told Carpenter … the Scriptures said total immersion, and his hands couldn’t stick out.”

Living Biblically

“Learning to live biblically in a secular world means learning to give full and active support to Christian education, Christian political action, Christian labor activity, Christian anything.” These are the words of Dr. Hendrik Hart, assistant professor of philosophy at Toronto’s fledgling Institute for Christian Studies, which aims to “pull together the scattered elements of the Reformed-Evangelical community.” The ultimate goal is establishment in North America of a major new university with authentically Christian dimensions.

The institute was opened in 1967 and has this year an enrollment of ten full-time students and 98 part-timers. There are three full-time professors (with doctorates in ethics, philosophy, and political economy). The 1969 budget is $105,000. Forty per cent of the income is derived from membership fees of the more than 2,000 members of the Association for the Advancement of Christian Scholarship. The remaining funds come from individual donations, student fees, and church designations.

The institute has no official church sponsorship, but the movement behind it is part of a tradition that has its primary manifestation in the United States in the 280,000-member Christian Reformed Church. Among its heroes are two Dutch neo-Calvinists, the late Abraham Kuyper, who served at one time as prime minister of the Netherlands, and philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd of the Free University of Amsterdam.

The present program of studies is carried on without benefit of accreditation from the Ontario Department of University Affairs, but the leaders look to possible incorporation into one of the existing universities in Toronto—perhaps in the manner of the well-known Pontifical Institute (Roman Catholic) or Victoria University (United Church of Canada), both of which are related to the University of Toronto.

In the meantime, the institute frankly informs incoming students of the facts of non-accredited life: “It should be emphasized that the Institute is geared to those students who are committed to developing a Christian frame of reference without concern for accreditation and to those who have already attained degrees.”

Dow Now: No Napalm

Dow Chemical Company quit manufacturing napalm for United States armed forces last May—but the protests linger on.

In the past two months: (1) The women’s division of the United Methodist Board of Missions voted to sell more than $400,000 worth of Dow stock because of the firm’s “moral irresponsibility” in its manufacture of napalm and munitions; (2) militants calling themselves “Beavers 55” raided Dow’s Midland, Michigan, headquarters, damaging computer equipment to the tune of several thousand dollars (ten days later, eight of the group, sitting cross-legged in the pulpit of St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D. C., “confessed” their part in the act and said they were disclosing their names to encourage similar actions); and (3) five Notre Dame University students were expelled and five others suspended after about 150 persons, led by a mini-skirted nun, blocked campus interviews by a Dow representative and routed him from the premises.

The ex post facto protests took place before Dow chairman Carl Gerstacker rather casually let it drop in a Los Angeles speech that the napalm contract had expired six months earlier. Why had the company been mum? “We win and lose contracts all the time,” shrugged President Herbert Doan, denying that Dow had purposely overbid on the controversial $9.2 million contract. (The manufacture of napalm amounted to only about one-quarter of 1 per cent of Dow’s gross sales.)

Now, American Electric of La Mirada, California, has the contract, but antiwar groups still are harrassing Dow, saying: “Your basic position hasn’t changed.”

“We make a good target, with our nice short name,” said one badgered Dow official. “If we just made paper towels, they’d get us for knocking down the tree.”

Religion In Transit

St. Peter didn’t sit there after all, a commission of engineers, scientists, and scholars concluded last month about a revered chair resposing in St. Peter’s Church of Rome. The widely venerated “chair of Peter” dates to 875 and was probably a gift to Pope John VIII by the Roman emperor Charles the Bald, according to the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences.

The 1,000th broadcast of the Hour of Decision will be aired December 28. The program is heard by 20 million people each Sunday over 713 stations in the United States and 216 elsewhere.… NBC will carry an hour-long program from Washington (Episcopal) Cathedral on Christmas featuring the first major use of the Consultation on Church Union liturgy.

All thirteen Negro students at Presbyterian-affiliated Lees Junior College in Jackson, Kentucky, dropped out of school because of a shooting incident that followed a basketball game; Lees canceled its remaining games after the team was left with only two players.

The Tennessee Board of Equalization ruled that Nashville property owned by the Methodist Publishing Company, the National Baptist Convention, the Southern Baptist Convention, and Seventh-day Adventists and used for printing operations is subject to taxation.

Police raided a Garden Grove, California, Catholic church and found a crowd of 400 playing blackjack, chuck-a-luck, and shooting craps. A bar was in operation. Gambling equipment and $2,000 in cash were confiscated at the church fund-raising party.

The United Presbyterian Board of Christian Education has slashed its 1970 budget $1 million because of declining giving and will operate on $6 million next year.

Sixty-two Louisville, Kentucky, retail firms lost a bid to remove a circuit court order limiting their Sunday operations in time to take advantage of the Christmas-shopping rush.

The sex education controversy continues to spread across the nation: By the end of last month twenty-seven state legislatures had either taken up the issue or had agreed to do so in their next session.

Brigham Young University’s rigid Mormon doctrine caused picketing and off-field strife at most of the school’s football games this fall. The entire nine-school Western Athletic Conference was thrown into turmoil over the alleged racism (Mormonism forbids blacks to hold the priesthood), and Stanford University said it won’t compete with BYU teams.

Missionary Baptist Pastor James H. Bishop said he was “willing to lay down my life for the cause” last month, referring to a fight he is spearheading to invalidate the property transfer of 900 acres (Bishop’s church is surrounded by one of the tracts in question) to the Black Muslims. The twenty-two thousand-resident St. Clair County in rural Alabama is up in arms over the controversy.

A $1 million budget cut and an overhaul in operations was voted by the directors of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Denominational vice-president Raymond Hopkins said the 200,000-member church still will be about $500,000 in the red at the end of the fiscal year.

The Vatican threatened last month to withdraw press accreditation from any correspondent thought to have “an incorrect attitude” toward the Pope, the Holy See, or the Roman Catholic Church.

Twenty-one suicide and other crisis intervention telephone counseling centers are in operation in seven countries, and twenty-five more are scheduled to open next year.

Personalia

“Lutheran Hour” radio preacher Oswald Hoffmann and New York Archbishop Terence Cardinal Cooke will participate in Christmas Eve celebrations for U. S. troops at Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon.

Dr. Arnold T. Olson, president of the Evangelical Free Church of America and the National Association of Evangelicals, has been named one of seven vice-presidents of the United Bible Societies.

Former American Baptist Convention president Carl W. Tiller, a layman who is a U. S. Budget Bureau special adviser, was named president of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention last month.

Tiny Tim, alias Herbert Kauhry, the long-haired and high-voiced singer, testified in an interview by This Week that Christ had guided him to fame. He said Christ told him not to cut his hair and “that’s why I believe my success was … the biggest miracle that ever happened in show business.”

Dr. William Larson of Minneapolis has been named head of the United States National Committee of the Lutheran World Federation.

Jesuit priest Richard A. McCormick, 47, professor of moral theology at Bellarmine School of Theology in North Aurora, Illinois, was named the outstanding Catholic theologian of the year by the Catholic Theological Society of America.

The Vatican investigation of the orthodoxy of prominent Catholic philosopher and writer Dr. Leslie Dewart was closed with a “no condemnation” verdict, but he was asked to withhold further editions of his controversial book The Future of Belief.

A U. S. attorney and lawyers for NASA tried to button down Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s space suit last month, claiming that the self-proclaimed atheist was hair-splitting and lacked the necessary standing to sue the government. Mrs. O’Hair, whose request for a a ban on the broadcast of prayers by American astronauts was refused by a federal court, contended that the oaths required of the three judges made it impossible for her to get a fair trial.

Evangelist Billy Graham (a Southern Baptist) received the Anti Defamation League’s B’nai B’rith Award for outstanding citizenship last month in Temple Beth-El, Charlotte, North Carolina. A Roman Catholic priest, Father Cuthbert Allen, past president of Belmont Abbey College and a personal friend of Graham’s, presented the award.

World Scene

The College Singers, a gospel group from Cameroon—the first cultural-exchange group from that West African nation ever to tour the United States—sang in seventy U. S. and Canadian cities this fall, including a Capitol rotunda performance in Washington, D. C., and an appearance at the United Nations’ General Assembly. Sponsored by the North American Baptist General Conference, the nineteen students from NAB mission schools in Cameroon are mission converts.

Culminating forty years of merger talks, the 600,000-member Methodist Church in Southern Asia (largest overseas unit of the United Methodist Church) has voted to join the proposed Church of North India, already approved by six of seven participating denominations.

Only 475 candidates for the priesthood entered Roman Catholic French seminaries this year, down from 810 in 1968 … According to Vatican radio, India is “the only country in the world” that shows a net increase in Catholic priestly vocations.

American-born Episcopal Bishop Dillard H. Brown, Jr., of Monrovia, Liberia, was shot to death by a pistol-wielding intruder in the Episcopal Church center there. Diocesan business manager Claude Nadar, a Lebanese, was killed by the gunman, also, and the bishop’s secretary was critically wounded. Investigation suggested the motive was revenge.

Some 500 French young people heard the gospel message during a riverboat excursion on the Seine sponsored by The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) last month.

Laymen from churches of the West too often become “agents of stability and the hindrance of change” by retreating into the Christian ghetto of foreign-language congregations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Instead, they should cross cultural and language barriers to help to fulfill the church’s mission in countries of the Third World.

This was the firm view of a consultation on the task of laity abroad, meeting last month in the castle Oud-Poelgeest, near Leyden, Holland. Churchmen from thirteen Western European nations and Czechoslovakia, plus North American observers, discussed the “responsibility of the European churches in the service of their laymen in the Third World.”

While asking overseas churches to name staff members to assist laymen in this ministry, the consultation decided that the home churches themselves had a responsibility to their expatriate members to equip them “for witness in the world wherever they are.”A recent survey on the American laymen overseas, made by the National Council of Churches’ Department of Research, showed that only one of twenty-one denominations had a person or office expressly responsible for programs for laymen overseas, and that no substantial efforts were made to reach or involve laymen going overseas in training or orientation beforehand. These laymen must become “agents of a just and equitable change,” the consultation said.

When they fail to do this, one report noted, then the churches should not depend solely on their members sent by secular firms but should send their own personnel to support movements of just change.

A Dutch businessman who lived for years in Indonesia warned, however, against being overly optimistic. “The aims of my firm and the aims of the Gospel were quite diverse,” he said. “I have never been able to solve that problem.” Neither did the consultation.

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

Lutherans in Norway don’t want to break the old, established ties between their church and the state. But there seems to be rising doubt about the wisdom of a cozy relationship between religion and politics in the country.

Last month, the non-official but representative assembly of the Lutheran State Church voted 145 to 25 against a church-state separation. Approximately 96 per cent of the 3.8 million Viking descendants are members of the Church of Norway, and the connection between church and state goes far back in history. In line with the tradition of other predominantly Lutheran countries in Europe, the king has functioned as a kind of “emergency bishop” since the Reformation, and is regarded as “the first member of the church.”

When Norway got her independence from Denmark in 1814, the constitution (still in force) stated that “the evangelical Lutheran religion remains the official religion of the state.” The Norwegian Storting (parliament) passes church laws.

But more than a hundred years ago, a commission declared that the church was in danger of being “swallowed by the state.” “Our church is dependent on the state in a problematic way,” it said. “There are no guarantees its affairs will be taken care of in its own spirit and according to its own interests.”

Some reforms have since been made: parish councils are elected by the church members, and ten diocesan councils elect members to the Church Assembly, which meets every four years.

In 1965, a commission was appointed by the assembly “to rethink the position of the church in the society of today and discuss the need and possibility of reforms.” The commission report was the central concern of last month’s assembly, which called for a new commission to discuss the church-state issue.

A law for an official, central church council is already in the works. The reform commission proposed that the Church Assembly be given official status and that it take responsibility for passing most church laws. This would make the church more independent from the political and non-confessional Storting and bring it more in line with those in other Scandinavian countries.

Defenders of the present church-state relationship (evangelicals generally think along this line) say that the broad contact with the Norwegian people is a tremendous opportunity for spreading the Gospel, and keeps the church from becoming “ghettoized.” They also reason that a free church doesn’t assure a more sound theological position, and they fear that if the church is separated from the state, it will probably splinter into many independent groups.

At present, tax money pays pastors’ salaries, allowing the committed to concentrate their giving on evangelistic and missionary activities. There are several large, independent organizations for mission at home and abroad. The laymen’s movement in Norway has built hundreds of prayer-houses, private schools, and weekend cabins for youth; members are conscious of their place within and for the state church, but not under it.

Nevertheless, some have doubts about a church with twin focuses: a state church and a layman prayer-house. The official church is constantly in danger of losing its spiritual integrity, and though the prayer-house can nourish koinonia, it lacks some functions of the New Testament ecclesia.

The time has come for a separation of church and state, says Per Lonning, Norway’s youngest bishop in the last two centuries. He calls the present arrangement a “narcotic” and a means of escape from reality. Not so, cry other churchmen, who say it is rather a springboard for preaching and service.

Who is right? The answer isn’t easy. It may come by a new spiritual awakening—or by a great tribulation.

ASBJORN KVALBEIN

Take a hundred artists in films, television, radio, music, writing, and painting. Mix them with a handful of psychiatrists, public-relations people, a swinging Catholic priest, and a long-haired rock singer. Place them together for three days in a plush desert spa. The result? A tempestuous explosion of ego and revelry? Not when the group is the Fellowship of Christians in the Arts, Media, and Entertainment.

Holding its third national conference in Palm Springs, California, last month, the fellowship took a hard look at today’s communications revolution and sanely considered how Christian artists can better penetrate the secular mass media with the Christian message.

Melvin Lorentzen, Wheaton College writing specialist and executive director of the Bedford Center for Creative Study, urged conferees to invade the mass media, buoyed by the realization that the artist provides insights into reality spurred by the Word of God. “The Christian philosophy of art,” he said, “must be rooted in the Word of God, which abides when all else withers and falls.”

Kenneth Talbott, information coordinator for Armed Forces Radio Service, stressed the need to understand the youth communications revolution. He presented a new film by John C. Broger, who heads the Pentagon’s overseas broadcasting system for 1.5 million GI’s. The film analyzed how rock music and lyrics, psychedelic-style posters, complex symbolic art forms, and a growing underground newspaper network are successfully communicating anti-government, antiracism, anti-draft, pro-drugs, pro-Oriental philosophy, and pro-sexual promiscuity messages.

To open the channels between generations, Broger recommended that communicators find out how to plug into youth communications methods, utilize modern technology effectively—and patiently speak truth.

A variety of new works were presented to the fellowship. “Opus for Contemporary Decision,” a blending of soft rock and traditional choral structures by Ted Nichols, music director for Hanna-Barbera films and California State College at Los Angeles, was enthusiastically received. A milder response greeted “Tell It Like It Is,” a Christian musical package by Ralph Carmichael and Kurt Kaiser soon to be aired on NBC television. (Conferees questioned whether it really “told it like it is” in the rock idiom.)

The musical high point of the conference was the performance of guitar-strumming Larry Norman, who sang original numbers from his soon-to-be released Capitol album, “Upon This Rock.” With long blonde hair almost reaching a sweat shirt imprinted with the words “Dearly Beloved,” Norman captured hearts by his exciting talent and simplicity of spirit.

Conference chairman Irvin Yeaworth, Jr., of Valley Forge Films, showed his latest motion picture, Way Out, a moving portrayal of the effects of heroin addiction, featuring as actors eight former addicts whose lives were transformed by faith in Christ. To those who despair of the low artistic quality of Christian films, Yeaworth’s excellent production gave great hope of future things. Conferees gained further inspiration for cinematic creativity from Saul Bass’s innovative film, Why Man Creates.

The principal speaker from the television field was Bob Tamplin, executive producer of the Leslie Uggams, Jonathan Winters, and Carol Burnett shows. He encouraged Christian organizations to increase their budgets for prime-time television programming capable of meeting competition from secular shows.

Accomplished British actor Nigel Goodwin enthralled the fellowship with readings from Albert Camus and Dylan Thomas.

The Palm Springs conference marked another step forward for Christian witness via the arts. With the Metropolitan Opera’s Jerome Hines, film producer Yeaworth, Wheaton’s Lorentzen, and Westminster Choir College president Ray Robinson leading the way, the Fellowship of Christians in the Arts, Media, and Entertainment hopes to attract more professionals to its ranks, and to make Christ known in our day.

ROBERT L. CLEATH

This issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY has in it three essays of significant import to our readers. J. Edgar Hoover, America’s best-known law-enforcement agent, takes a hard look at America then and now and warns of the pitfalls ahead. We would do well to heed what he says.

Billy Graham addressed the members of the Washington Press Club recently and we happily print his address. The illusions he discusses are deeply imbedded in the minds of many Christians and should be eradicated as quickly as possible. The Church cannot minister to the needs of men effectively until it embraces and propagates the world-view of the Bible, which conflicts sharply with that of secular man.

Lois Ottaway approaches the racial conflict of our day through the medium of black literature. Some of the books she mentions convey viewpoints unacceptable to us and to our readers. Others will be read with pleasure and appreciation. But we need to read all of these to grasp what men with black skins are thinking and to understand how they look at the white world and its power structures. Even when we do not agree with what is said, it will help us in our task of reconciling race to race and bringing the saving Gospel of Christ to black as well as white communities.

The future life, a salient aspect of theology, is often disregarded by religious spokesmen today—those who settle for a one-world faith that unquestionably heightens the irreligious mentality of our time.

Authentic existence, we are told, must be discovered in the here and now, not in some sweet by and by. But in a few clock-ticks the present will be the past, and the past is closed to us; so that always all we have open to us is the future. “The future,” said C. S. Lewis, “is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

At a dramatic moment in the New Testament report, Jesus, en route to agonizing death, faced the high priest at Jerusalem and said, “Hereafter you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power” (Matt. 26:64). However one interprets that utterance, he cannot deny that “hereafter” was a large subject with Jesus, as it was with all the New Testament writers.

To be sure, the New Testament does not suggest flight from the here and now. Yet while great stress is laid on the ethics of the believer in the human situation, this good earthly life is never dissociated from the life that shall be in the higher sphere. The most electrifying element of the faith lies in the challenge of the beyond.

The New Testament emphasizes that those who become completely engrossed in life in “this present world” may face eternal ruin. The Apostle Paul, speaking about “the enemies of the cross,” warned that “they are going to end up in hell, for their god is their bodily desires.… They think only of things that belong to this world.” He adds quickly: “We, however, are citizens of heaven, and we eagerly wait for our Savior to come from heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil. 3:19, Good News for Modern Man). Thus the New Testament always brings into relationship “the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter” (Rev. 1:19).

Scripture marks how “things yet to be” motivates men toward goodness. “Think what sort of people you ought to be,” says one writer, “what devout and dedicated lives you should live” (2 Pet. 3:11, NEB). What is the incentive for this deportment? The structuring of a finer human social order? No. (Not that we should think Peter unfavorable toward working for a better world.) The call to great ethical living is to be motivated by an event in the future. A big happening lies ahead. Worlds will burn, but a new day is coming, a new earth, “where righteousness will be at home” (vs. 13, Good News for Modern Man). “With this to look forward to,” says Peter, “do your utmost to be found at peace with him, unblemished and above reproach in his sight” (vs. 14, NEB).

The Scriptures associate the central sacrament with futurity. Undoubtedly Jesus looked forward through ages when he said at the Last Supper, “I will never again drink this wine until the day I drink it new with you in my Father’s Kingdom” (Matt. 26:29, Good News for Modern Man); for Paul saw in these words the prophecy of a great and far-off happening—“Every time you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord, until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26, NEB).

To go through the Scriptures and eliminate all references to “the things that shall be hereafter” would be to strip them not only of content but of meaning, and to arrive at the gate of the existential nihilism that is found in so much of today’s one world theology.

Henrik Ibsen once wrote in a letter to George Brandes: “I hold that a man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.” From a scriptural viewpoint, men are nearest right who are in league with that future arranged by God. And they are the happiest! “Console one another,” Paul told the Thessalonians, “with these words” (1 Thess. 4:18, NEB). With what words? Such words as these: “The Lord himself will descend from heaven” (vs. 16).

Our vision of the future may affect our present lives more deeply than our experiences in the past. Who foresees himself as God’s friend tomorrow will not wish to be his enemy today. Who plans to live in heaven hereafter will scarcely be content to live in hell here.

The Gospel keeps setting men’s faces toward the future. Caught as we are in our troubled world, hopelessness nags the man who jettisons his dream of better things to come. The Bible has an expression like a repeated bugle cry: “That day—the day of the Lord.” In the word, all life marches, all ages bend, toward that day. If that day never comes, human existence will have been a nightmarish mystery, history a series of meaningless events.

Jesus faced deadly foes before the council at Jerusalem. His time for this world was brief. Ahead loomed his deathbeam in a human junkyard called Calvary. A violent world was closing in on him. But his vision swept swift-winged through down-coming darkness into the beyond. “Hereafter,” he said, “you shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of Power.”

And so they shall! In the hope of that hereafter lies the hope for mankind’s here and now. Paul understood this. “If our hope in Christ is good for this life only, and no more,” he said, “then we deserve more pity than anyone else in all the world” (1 Cor. 15:19, Good News for Modern Man). If this present world is all a Christian has, he has been outrageously swindled! But Paul’s affirmation bridges time: “The truth is that Christ has been raised from the dead, as the guarantee that those who sleep in death will also be raised” (vs. 20). Men live best to whom life is a forever thing!

—LON WOODRUM, evangelist and author, Hastings, Michigan.

THE ASSASSIN OF GOD

The assassin of god

was a heart sewn

on an empty sleeve,

a foot marching double

file on a one-way street.

The assassin of god

was a man-shaped

blankness, sucking

at the world’s edges,

decaying sunsets.

The assassin of god

went to church, rang

clapperless bells,

remembered his mind

in time to leave it.

The assassin of god

was a pillar of fire

in steel days, made

his life a movie,

and smasht the projector.

The assassin of god

cut his wooden tongue,

nailed himself with ice,

walkt into the harbor

of eternal absence.

The assassin of god

ambusht a metaphor,

drew a target of pale blood,

took a torrent of data

and ate darkness raw.

The assassin of god

murdered a shadow

and called it natural,

ran to the window

and leaped into himself.

F. EUGENE WARREN

It has become standard practice at this time of the year for dissatisfied Christians to announce that it is time we “put Christ back into Christmas.” This has provoked an even more dissatisfied pagan to retort that it would suit him fine if we just put Christ back into Christianity.

He thus shares in the widespread tendency to criticize all forms of institutional Christianity. Most of this is not as new as the critics think. Institutional Christianity has never been wildly popular. It has sometimes been respected, sometimes feared. But I do not know of any time when it was lacking in critics.

Perhaps what stamps the present mood as distinctive is the nature and volume of criticism from within the Church. It is only to be expected that there will be people outside who do not like what the Church is doing or not doing, and who will say so, loud and clear. But now more and more church people are doing much the same. Again, it is not a new thing for church members to criticize the Church. They have done so from time immemorial. But they have probably not done it as much, or in the same way.

Some of the criticism stems from a frank recognition that the Church is not doing as well as it should be. A group of young people in Holland this year even called in question the existence of the synod of their church, doubting whether it can possibly deal with the questions of conscience the church faces.

Some of it proceeds from a theology so vague that it is difficult to tell it from non-Christian humanism. But some is highly theological. It seeks to replace the traditional theology of the Church with what it thinks is more adequate for the needs of the twentieth century. But this radicalism finds itself subject to criticism, too. Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God was greeted by one skeptic with the verdict: “I don’t think the Church needs a new theology. I would just like to see it practice the one it has!”

In this spirit many of those inside the Church are looking again at the doctrine of sanctification. Among evangelicals there has always been a strong emphasis on the importance of individual repentance and faith. The Gospel has been preached, and results have been looked for in conversions.

This is all to the good, and no evangelical worth his salt would want it to be otherwise. The direction of the life is important. Through the centuries there have been many examples of people who, like Saul of Tarsus, have had a dramatic confrontation with Christ with far-reaching effects.

But preoccupation with the exciting business of obtaining “decisions” has led some to neglect the less spectacular growth in grace that is required of the Christian. But a significant part of recent evangelical thought has been directed toward this matter of Christian growth. There is no desire to downgrade the importance of calling men to put their trust in Christ; there is, however, an increasing realization that the consequences of believing in Christ cannot be played down. Being a Christian is serious business that involves the whole of one’s life. To live uprightly is not an option, not a game to be played by those Christians who like that sort of thing. It is a demand made on all.

There has been some new thinking on the evangelical’s social responsibility. The subject is not really new, of course. In earlier days evangelicals took it very much as a matter of course that acceptance of the Gospel meant acceptance of a social task. The work of such evangelicals as Shaftesbury and Wilberforce is well known.

It was probably the “social gospel” movement that side-tracked many evangelicals. There were some whose advocacy of social reforms was motivated by a theology so tenuous the those who took faith in Jesus Christ seriously could not but be repelled by it. It was not that they objected to meeting social needs; they objected to regarding such humanitarian action as identical with the Gospel. And in reaction they tended to play down the social implications of the Gospel and put all their emphasis on the faithful preaching of the Word.

We are seeing a widespread evangelical revolt against limiting the Gospel too closely to the sanctuary. It is symbolic that the Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis earlier this year was marked by an emphasis on social attitudes, an emphasis that drew comment in newspapers like the New York Times and magazines like Time.

This does not mean that the old evangelical values are being sold down the river. What is new is that these social concerns are being pressed by men whose commitment to the Gospel is unwavering. The result is not a betrayal of the faith but a recapture of tried values that evangelicals were in danger of losing.

Sanctification is never taken lightly in the New Testament. Christians are often called “saints,” a name that stresses that the Church as a whole is committed to God. We often use the term “saint” in the singular, as when we refer to “Saint Paul” or “Saint Peter.” Or we speak of someone as “a real saint.” This is not a New Testament usage. There the word is never applied to an individual believer. It is always in the plural and it is applied to the Church, the holy community. To see the Church as “the saints” is to see it as a body whose characteristic is holiness, a group of persons wholly given over to the service of their God.

As the New Testament teaches it, the love of God is to be discerned in the way we love our fellow man. If anyone says he loves God, yet hates his brother, then, John tells us, he is a liar, “for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).

The movement to emphasize this is far from being confined to evangelicals. There is a widespread interest in the way the Christian life is to be lived. But it should be stressed that this is a movement of Christian thought. It has been easy at times to take the best contemporary thinking, dress it up in religious language, and label the result “Christian.” What we are now seeing, however, is an attempt to strike the authentically Christian note. What is it that distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian?

Sometimes young men with a great deal more hair than their fathers have (or even had) take up their guitars and sing:

They will know that we are Christians

by our love, by our love.

They will know that we are Christians

by our love.

Perhaps we can sum up the new mood among Christian thinkers by saying that there is no better way of letting them know.

LEON MORRIS