Alive And Well

Dr. William Barclay of Glasgow, Scotland, is alive and well and still writing the popular religious books and Bible commentaries for which he is well known.

The Dr. William Barclay, 86, who died in London, Ontario, last July (see August 22 issue, page 43), was also a native of Scotland. He served as a president of the Canadian Council of Churches, and for twenty-four years was pastor of Central Presbyterian Church, Hamilton, Ontario.

A Religious News Service release incorrectly ascribed to him the authorship of several books written by the living William Barclay, a professor in the University of Glasgow Department of Divinity and Biblical Criticism.

In a letter to an American pastor last month explaining the mix-up, the Glasgow Barclay noted wryly: “I am not dead but very much alive.… I hope in the future to produce still more books which I hope you will find useful.”

Biblical Scholarship: ‘30 Years Closer To Jesus’

The prevalent belief that Mark is the earliest of the Synoptic Gospels—and the most historically accurate—has been challenged by a Southern Baptist missionary in Jerusalem. Luke’s gospel is both older and more reliable than Mark’s, claims Robert L. Lindsey, 52, a Bible scholar from Oklahoma who has been translating the New Testament into Hebrew during the past ten years.

If true, the theory would upset much New Testament scholarship developed during the past century. Lindsey reported that he accidentally stumbled into his hypothesis while translating Mark into “good” Hebrew; he found he couldn’t do it without distortions. In contrast, he found Luke translated easily into Hebrew, leading him to believe that the Greek text had been based on a Hebrew source.

In Lindsey’s view, Mark contains numerous “non-Hebraic” words and phrases, as well as other problems of literary construction almost totally absent in Luke.

Instead of viewing Mark as the basis for the narratives of Luke and Matthew, Lindsey concludes that Mark used Luke (along with a protonarrative), and that Matthew drew heavily from both Luke and Mark but chiefly from Luke.

Lindsey characterizes Mark as a Midrashic rabbi type, interested in “words and word parallels following a more or less normal Jewish literary pattern,” in the style of a journalistic rewrite man. The scholar, who went with his family to live in Israel in 1954, finds that Mark’s editorial habits exhibit a “tendency to word redundancy … a willingness to play on words … and a penchant for dramatization or exaggeration.”

In the eighty-page introduction to his translation just publishedA Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark, Dugith Publishers, Baptist House, Box 154, Jerusalem, Israel., Lindsey notes that only in comparatively recent years has Mark been considered the earliest and most authentic gospel writer. He points out that “the earliest references to Mark’s gospel, a fragment of one of the writings of Papias (c. 135 A.D.), shows that Greek Christians of the second century were critical of the gospel. Its unpopularity is also seen in the order the gospels take in some very early unicals, Mark’s text appearing sometimes at the end of the four gospels. It was not until the sixth century that a Greek writer even bothered to compose a commentary on Mark.”

The theory of Mark’s primacy gained acceptance among New Testament scholars eighty years ago. According to H. J. Holtzmann, who was probably the father of the theory, before the writing of Mark there existed a protonarrative, very similar in content and language to the present Gospel of Mark. It may have been used by Matthew and Luke in addition—or possibly in preference—to Mark, according to Holtzmann.

Lindsey’s position squares more with that of the leaders of the first-and second-century Church who saw and understood Mark’s Gospel as an unoriginal rewrite, somewhat garbled, copied from better sources known and used in Christian circles of that day.

Some scholars have hailed Lindsey’s book as the most scientific work of New Testament translation into modern Hebrew in the past hundred years (the last translation was made by Franz Delitsch in 1870 before Hebrew was revived as a spoken language).

Dr. David Flusser, professor of comparative religion at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said that to accept Lindsey’s theory means a revolution in understanding and interpreting the New Testament. The hypothesis makes Luke more credible from the standpoint of history, he said. He noted that scholars can now work through the Greek with the sure knowledge that an earlier Hebrew source existed, probably written around A.D. 40–50.

“This,” commented Flusser, “brings us some thirty years closer to Jesus.”

DWIGHT BAKER

Ottawa Congress Hits Squall

The Canadian Congress on Evangelism has encountered squall conditions, and several evangelical leaders are running up storm warnings. The congress, patterned after the Berlin gathering, is slated for Ottawa next August (see November 7, 1969, issue, page 49). Now, eight months before its opening, two leading Toronto evangelicals have publicly expressed their misgivings; one reportedly has withdrawn from participation.

Dr. Paul B. Smith, pastor of The People’s Church, Canada’s largest Protestant congregation, has made his apprehension known in an open letter that received wide circulation. Said Smith: “At the time of its formation, the congress, in my opinion, had great potential. Unfortunately its high aims have been sidetracked due to the all inclusive attitude which is pushing to places of influence men, who by their own statements, do not adhere to the evangelical position.”

Smith referred to alleged undue influence that old-line denominations are exerting. He stressed that he did not object to the participation of committed evangelicals, whatever their denomination; his protest was aimed at the participation of non-evangelicals. It has been authoritatively learned that Dr. William Fitch of Knox Presbyterian Church, who had been secured as the morning Bible-study speaker, has resigned from the roster of speakers for similar reasons. Fitch was one of the sixty-four original sponsors of the Berlin Congress on Evangelism.

Another prominent Toronto evangelical firmly disagreed with Smith and Fitch. The Rev. Kenn Opperman, of the Avenue Road Church of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, is invitations chairman for the Ottawa congress. He declared that “the overwhelming majority of those invited are committed evangelicals.”

Congress organizers are hoping that the flurry is only the result of poor communications, and that the whole Canadian evangelical constituency will rally to support the gathering.

LESLIE K. TARR

God Goes To High School

A school campus cannot be declared off limits to God.

So ruled the Alameda (California) County Counsel last month in a case that attracted national interest. It involved Steve Minyen, a soft-spoken 18-year-old senior at Washington High School in Fremont.

During lunch hour one day, Minyen and some friends were chatting outside when the conversation turned to drugs and sex and the meaning of life. Minyen, who has attended Assembly of God churches all his life, related how Jesus Christ has helped him. A dozen youths gathered to listen. A school administrator, sensing trouble brewing, plunged into the group and spirited Minyen inside to principal Robert Callahan.

Callahan, an ex-Marine who runs a tight school, instructed the youth to refrain from talking about his faith while on school property or face suspension. He cited the state education code, which prohibits religious teaching “directly or indirectly” on a public-school campus.

Minyen replied that he could not obey the order because God was “the most important factor” in his life. The irritated principal sent the student home with a request that he return next day with his parents. Minyen’s mother and his father, a brick-layer, backed their son. Talk of drugs or Marxism, they accused, would not have incurred censure. They and Callahan agreed to a cease-fire and submitted the matter to the county attorney for an opinion.

In the ensuing week, the case crept onto front pages of San Francisco Bay area dailies. It also became a major topic of radio talk shows, and Minyen appeared as a guest on several.

County Counsel Richard Moore ruled that Minyen was within his rights of free speech so long as he did not interfere with the school’s operation. Other students, he said, were free to walk away if they did not wish to listen.

Most high schoolers are interested in spiritual things, observed Minyen, who is still talking about Christ on campus. They sometimes ask about church, he says, “but I don’t stress that too much. The main thing is to experience Christ, to accept him inside.”

RICHARD TAYLOR

Second Lunar Visit: An Ecumenical Memento

A white linen banner with crewel-embroidered Christian symbols in assorted colors accompanied the Apollo 12 astronauts during their November voyage to the moon.

The banner, measuring fourteen by eighteen inches, was the idea of Alan L. Bean, one of the three Navy commanders who conducted the second lunar landing manned mission. His plan was to bring it back and give it to the Clear Lake (Texas) United Methodist Church, which he helped to found several years ago. Another charter member, Mrs. S. Milo Keathley, made the banner.

The 37-year-old Bean is a life-long Methodist. The Apollo 12 commander, Charles (Pete) Conrad, is an Episcopalian. Command module pilot Richard Gordon is a Roman Catholic; his wife said she planned to attend mass each day of the mission. Interviews with the astronauts prior to the moon trip showed Bean to be the most outspoken about his religious convictions, an inclination for Playboy magazine notwithstanding. “Two things are major factors in a man’s life,” he was quoted as saying. “One is his technical knowledge and ability, the other is his ethics, which are mainly the result of religious convictions.”

The APL News Service, a branch of Aerospace Ministries, said he has taught Sunday-school classes and has served on several church commissions. A World Book Science Service report declared that “Bean balances his intensity with a good sense of humor. Asked who he would like to be if he could be in someone else’s skin, he replies: ‘Sophia Loren.’ (Playboy ranks fourth among his nontechnical reading.)”

Religion In Transit

A District of Columbia judge ruled that Washington, D. C.’s anti-abortion law is partially unconstitutional, saying abortion is a matter between a woman and her physician. The ruling thus exempts licensed physicians from the law, and paves the way for a rash of court battles—predicted to reach the U. S. Supreme Court level.

A two-and-one-half-hour movie based on the life and work of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will be shown in more than 1,000 theaters in 300 cities next year.

Burglars absconded with three $1,000 bills hidden in the pages of a family Bible in the home of Thomas Williamson, Scarborough, Ontario. “I never thought anyone would look in the Bible,” mourned Williamson.

Someone spirited away the one-ton bell in the belfry of St. Jarlath Roman Catholic Church, Chicago, on Halloween night. An astounded wrecking company official commissioned earlier to remove the bell estimated that a crane with a 125-foot boom would have been needed to perform the feat and could offer no explanation of how thieves did it.

Deaths

FRANK GOAD CLEMENT, 49, three-term governor of Tennessee, lay preacher; in Dickson, Tennessee, in an auto accident.

WALTER CORLETT, 65, director of World Vision’s ministries in India and West Asia, a founder of Youth for Christ in India, pastor of Carey Memorial Baptist Church, Calcutta; in Calcutta.

JACK HUME, 52, religion editor for the Cleveland Press, president of the National Religious News Writers Association; in Cleveland, Ohio.

ERNESTO SCHLIEPER, 60, president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Brazil, Lutheran World Federation executive; in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Personalia

Assemblies of God general superintendent Thomas F. Zimmerman was reelected chairman of the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America at its twenty-second annual convention in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Presiding Bishop Hans Lilje of the Evangelical Church of Hannover, Germany, has asked the denomination’s synod to replace him as he plans to retire for health reasons.

Dr. John H. Tietjen was installed as sixth president of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, during the Missouri Synod Lutheran school’s 130th anniversary last month … Loyed R. Simmons resigned as president of California Baptist College at Riverside, California, after eleven years at the post … Dr. Harm A. Weber, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Detroit, was appointed president of American Baptist-related Judson College at Elgin, Illinois, this month.

“I kept the Lord in front of me,” was the way Mrs. Annie Mae Bankhead explained how she was able to “save the town” of 5,000-population College Station, Arkansas. She was cited by the National Council of Women of the United States for her efforts extending over forty years in bettering conditions there. The slender Negro woman, voted Woman of the Year and recipient of the Woman of Conscience Award, put her four children through college.

World Scene

The Reformed Churches (Gereformeerde Kerken) in the Netherlands voted by an overwhelming majority to apply for membership in the World Council of Churches. The Reformed bodies have a membership of 450,000.

After keen debate, the Board of Missions of the Australian Presbyterian Church decided to let each aboriginal mission and reserve determine for itself whether or not to allow the use of alcoholic beverages on the premises.

The Baptist Union of South Africa has withdrawn from the South African Council of Churches, citing long-standing “differences with the council’s liberal stance.”

The Rev. H. G. Goddard has purchased from the Methodist Church the Primitive Methodist Chapel in Colchester, England, where evangelist Charles H. Spurgeon was converted in 1850.

Four Protestant and three Roman Catholic seminaries in Toronto, Ontario, have pooled faculty resources to form the Toronto School of Theology, with an enrollment of 350 (200 Catholics).

A mosque in Peking—opened in 1966 and tolerated as “a gesture to African Muslim countries”—is the only religious building still believed open to worshipers on mainland China, according to the South China Morning Post.

The protesters have come to Washington and gone—250,000 of them, according to reports, who easily must have spent between five and ten million dollars to do their thing. Some were high schoolers, others—such as the perennial Dr. Spock and folk singer Pete Seeger—were on the oldish side. On Friday afternoon as the marchers filed by the White House, each bearing a placard with the name of someone who had died in Viet Nam, nature erupted in a fury of lightning, thunder, high winds, heavy rain, and hail. Was there any meaning?

It brought to mind an experience of Elijah recorded in First Kings 19. He had fled to Horeb after his great success against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. God met him at Horeb and passed by him. There was “a great and strong wind … [that] broke in pieces the rocks … but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.” This was the voice of God.

God is speaking today; of that there is no doubt. But how is he speaking, what is he saying, and through whom does he speak in this age of unrest? Most important of all: Who is listening for his voice? And who, like young Samuel, is ready to say, “Speak, for thy servant hears”—and will obey?

Does christian faith really make a difference in real life? Does it actually have the power to grab hold and set life on a new course? Or is the vocabulary of faith a mere set of pious phrases? Questions like this fill the air these days, and they need tending to. For they touch the vitals of sanctification; they call into question its possibility and its reality.

What sort of pretention does the Church make by calling itself the communion of the saints? Has it made good, at any time, on this title? Or has nothing really changed? Are we the same people we have always been, living our unchanged lives in an unchanged world? Was Martin Buber right when he said that the Messiah could not have come because human life has not yet been fundamentally changed?

The question of whether faith has really changed anything is also an important one within theology. The biblical picture of sanctification pointedly suggests a radical alteration of our real and concrete life. Sanctification entails a thorough-going rerouting of life, an about-face of human existence. There is talk about a new creature, remade after the pattern of God’s will (Eph. 4:24). Over against lies, bitterness, and hostility, the new light has come—and whoever resists the new light grieves the Holy Spirit (Eph. 4:30).

The reality of change, in fact, implies a crisis for the future: without being sanctified, no one shall see the Lord (Heb. 12:14). We are therefore obliged to strive toward holiness, toward peace and sanctification. The Old Testament, too, puts the question: Who shall ascend the mountain of the Lord and who shall stand in his holy city? It gives its own answer: Only he who has clean hands and a pure heart, who pays no heed to falsehood, nor swears falsely (Psalm 24). Israel was not allowed to substitute cultic piety for real piety—there was to be no flight into feasts, holy days, and sacrifices. Nor is the Christian Church permitted by the New Testament to avoid the mandate for personal change of life. If life is not altered, if we do not progress toward a new life style, we are wide open to the Apostle’s terribly serious indictment.

Nor can we take comfort in the idea that sanctification really happens after this life. The Christian walk has to be made on this earth (1 Pet. 1:15 f.), and it must here and now contradict the former way of life. Our new life must be public; Peter takes this so seriously that he talks of winning men “without words” (1 Pet. 3:1, 2). God intends a restoration and a renewal; for this Jesus died outside the gates of Jerusalem.

The Church’s teachers have sometimes been too quick in their judgment of perfectionism. In doing so, they usually point to the obvious weaknesses in Christian people, and they recall what James said about all of us stumbling, in many ways (Jas. 3:2). But we should not forget that James meant this as a confession of guilt; he would be amazed if his words were quoted as an excuse. In fact, he meant to urge his readers on toward obedience to the perfect law of liberty and so to the achievement of active and practical holiness (Jas. 1:25).

Perhaps our own day is seeing a new awareness that God wills us to be actually sanctified, actually to change, and actually to be new creatures. We are impressed with our Lord’s inescapable demands, and are less inclined to adjust them to our convenience. But along with this it is asked whether we must not be more serious about the human structures in which life is formed and shaped in our time. That is, we are told that obedience to the Lord cannot be a narrowly individualistic striving for inner piety. Helmut Thielicke wrote an article lately whose title asked: “Can structures be converted?” (Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 1969). Thielicke argues that our day is one in which life is shaped and directed by social structures, and that therefore our Christian duty can no longer be limited to the cultivation of individual piety. One may not hide behind John’s word about the whole world lying in evil (1 John 5:19). Surely, the Bible recognizes the evil desires of the heart and the lusts of the eye that are often stimulated by the world; but we should not suppose that therefore the only proper subject for sanctification is the inner heart of man. Out of the heart are the issues of life, says the writer of Proverbs. And this is the biblical opening for talk about service.

Sanctification and service are married, and may not be divorced. And service is directed man-ward as well as God-ward. He who would be great, let him first be a servant, be first, let him be willing to be last, be the leader, let him be a follower (Matt. 20; Mark 10; Luke 22). Competition between service to God and service to men is unthinkable. The just commandment entails the second commandment; the vertical dimension of life assumes the horizontal.

Sometimes one gets the impression that service to man tends to displace personal piety. That it could do so is not surprising. For we are experiencing a reaction against a passive piety, an actionless holiness. And this reaction had biblical support (1 John 3:18; Jas. 1:23). But the dilemma is grotesquely untrue to biblical reality. God, out of love for the whole world, summons men to be sanctified for concrete service to the world. He calls for cups of cold water—a symbol of man’s most survival-type needs. He calls for an abandonment of evil acts because the earth is going to be full of the knowledge of the Lord. In his environment, evil is out of place.

If we fail to be earnest with the reality of sanctification (the new life), we betray our own refusal to understand the basic meaning of faith. We shall be accepting a dead faith in place of the reality—and in this we are on a par only with the demons.

Quite possibly, the structures of society could be changed so that people are benefited materially while we live without love in our hearts (cf. 1 Cor. 13:1–3). But it need not be so. And it can also be possible for Christians to understand their call to service in the light of the Gospel, and recognize the origin of their duty: “For the Son of Man is come, not to be served, but to serve …” (Mark 10:45).

G. C. BERKOUWER

As we all know, the dialectical-existential revolt against reason overtook the American religious scene with astonishing ease, although few evangelical centers capitulated.

Noteworthy indications are appearing, however, of a renewed interest in the scientific legitimacy of theology in view of the cognitive significance of its knowledge claims. There are signs of a new wrestling with the rational importance of Christianity. At long last the modern age of religious anti-intellectualism may be burning itself out.

A year ago Charles Scribner’s Sons published the Harvard scholar Gordon D. Kaufman’s Systematic Theology. Issuance of this title by a major publishing house, not on its general list of religious books but rather among volumes intended specifically for university use, is noteworthy. Although Kaufman’s work too much reflects H. Richard Niebuhr’s contrast of faith and reason to sustain a satisfactory evangelical theology, its shortcomings should not hide the importance of the appearance of a work of this nature at a time when theologians either have been running away from any vestige of a system or are still on the prowl for one.

Now Oxford University Press has published Thomas F. Torrance’s Theological Science, in which the Edinburgh theologian boldly champions what, as those of us recall who heard him lecture under the early fascination of Barthian theology, was surely at that time held to be in league with the world, the flesh, and the Devil rather than with God and faith. Professor Torrance had, in those years, shocked his evangelical friends by the reckless abandon with which he insisted that faith is self-vindicating, and by his disdain for all external evidences as a betrayal of justification by epistemological trust. His theology soon became a target of philosophers who rightly saw that such detouring of reason leads also to the end of the road for Christian faith.

Across recent years there have been indications that Dr. Torrance was pursuing a more cautious line, and the shift of emphasis is nowhere more evident than in his present insistance that faith is “the orientation of the reason towards God’s self-revelation, the rational response of man to the Word of God” (Theological Science, p. 33). We are told that knowledge of God is “essentially a rational event” (p. 11); that it is knowledge “in the proper sense of that word” just as every branch of science intends true knowledge of its special object (p. 12); and that knowledge of God is “conceptual both in its acts of cognition and in its acts of expression” (p. 13). It has been a long time since this commentator has been tempted to shout an “amen” loud enough to be heard in Auld Reekie. For its intention to vindicate theology as a rational science with its own thought-forms and language in view of its own proper object, and to relate its knowledge content to that of the other sciences, Torrance’s work is to be wholly commended.

It is not, however, for all his high-sounding intentions, to an evangelical and biblical view of revelation that Torrance returns. Whoever stays through his exposition will discover that evangelical rational theism is left floating in epistemic mid-air. Torrance perpetrates Barth’s unjustifiable emphasis that revelation is salvific, and his corollary repudiation of general divine revelation. In flat contradiction of Romans 1, we are told that men “cannot truly know God without being reconciled and renewed in Jesus Christ” (p. 41).

While Torrance wants conceptual revelation and knowledge of God, he proposes a distinction between closed concepts and open concepts. Closed concepts are reducible to “clipped propositional ideas”; open concepts cannot fully conceive their object and are elastic. Our cognitive relation to God is “essentially and unceasingly dialogical” (p. 38), so that the “extent” to which theology can systematize knowledge of God in a conceptual framework is limited (p. 18).

The implication would seem to be that no assertions about God can claim to be finally true. Theology is a matter, not of knowing certain truths about God to be absolutely the case, but of holding beliefs open to revision. Curiously, Torrance seems to have stage-door access to the God who transcends revelational knowledge, for our provisional statements of ultimate Truth are said to be true “so far as” their reference is appropriate.

Torrance affirms the crucial centrality of the Logos in Judeo-Christian revelation, audition of the Divine Word as the medium of revelation, and the person Jesus Christ as the supreme and final revelation of God. But he insists on a distinction between the “inner” Word of God and the outer “words”—between the Word heard and the words used to communicate revelation—in disregard of the prophetic “Thus saith the Lord” in terms of specific verbal content, and of Jesus’ words identified with the content of revelation. Jesus Christ is God personally present in the identity of Word and Person (p. 147), but the Message is not received apart from personal relation to him (p. 148). Scripture is a pointer to rather than a carrier of revelation; truth is communicated in a mystery-form that cannot be reduced to clear-cut conceptions or systematized (pp. 150 f.).

Man’s predicament, Torrance contends, is not simply that in sin his thoughts are “twisted into untruth and are resistant to the Truth,” but that man’s ideas and conceptions and words are inherently “too limited and narrow and poor for the knowledge of God” (p. 49). To know the Truth requires personal decision, and “knowledge of Jesus Christ as Eternal Truth in the form of historical being involves … a change in the logical structure of our consciousness” by “an action of Divine Grace” (pp. 153–55). Here Torrance surely shifts the meaning of the rationality of faith, for he exempts the Truth of revelation from universal validity, logical consistency, and the relevance of coherence as a test. If the validity of revelation depends on internal decision and requires a miraculous change in the logical structures of the mind, Torrance defeats the possibility of establishing theology as knowledge in the sense that other sciences claim to offer knowledge. Apparently God uses a different logic than that which serves man in all other knowledge relations.

We are told, moreover, that God’s revelation must not be turned into “propositions that have their truth timelessly” (p. 40). Apparently God is incapable of uttering what is permanently and universally true. Then are we not left with merely a situational theology? Would not even Torrance want to preserve the First Commandment as a timelessly true revelational imperative? Or is “no other God” also at the mercy of supposedly open concepts—perhaps sometimes open even to the Devil?

CARL F. H. HENRY

The background of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the basis on which it must be preached, and the realities that must be faced are: the sinfulness and hardness of men’s hearts, the infinite love, patience, fairness, and mercy of God; and the certainty and severity of his judgment.

This is not a harsh analysis; it is a true one. There is nothing harsh in God’s offer of cleansing and salvation to “whosoever will.” There is nothing harsh about his plea, “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other” (Isa. 45:22). There is no harshness in our Lord’s loving appeal, “Come to me … and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). There is nothing but patient, loving yearning in Jesus’ words, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Rev. 3:20).

No, the problem is not that we are dealing with a harsh and unloving God, but that men have hard hearts, hardened by sin.

What I write applies to all of mankind, but it applies with added force to America because of our historical background, with the spiritual light shed abroad in our land from the very first, as well as the material blessings with which God has so richly endowed us, and the unprecedented privileges and opportunities that surround us on every hand.

Our hearts are hardened by unbelief, by disobedience, by willful sinning against the light, by hypocrisy, and, within the Church, by the substitution of man-made religions for the Christian faith.

In a very real sense we have become hardened against the one and only thing that can deliver us from the wrath to come. We have hardened our hearts against the truth “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4). We have substituted for the righteousness of God in Christ a righteousness of our own that is like filthy rags.

But in spite of these attitudes of heart, we find ourselves confronted with God’s infinite patience, love, fairness, and mercy. He is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Ps. 103:8). He is patiently waiting, “forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

God has revealed his holy standards, and he patiently waits for men to accept them rather than the sin-tarnished standards of the world. He took the ultimate step to save us from our folly by sending his only Son to bear the guilt and penalty. He sent his Spirit to woo us and to live in our hearts, and he has given us his written Word for our instruction. All around us we have the evidences of his creative and sustaining wisdom and power. He has never left himself without a witness, and, as no other people on earth, we can hear the gospel message through multiplied means. We have, too, the witness of the Church universal, the company of believers.

God’s love and patience are seen in his repeated warnings of the disaster that is inevitable without him. By experience we know that we have only ourselves to blame if we disregard the signs along our highways and find ourselves involved in tragedy. How much more should we listen to God’s warnings!

This theme of warning is found all through the Bible. A warning shows fairness in telling what lies ahead. Implicit in every warning is an alternative and in the multiplied warnings God has given us lie the alternatives of spiritual life or death.

God has exercised great patience in the face of man’s hardness of heart and continues to do so. We still live in that day when we can either reject him or receive Christ and what he has done for us. Today he warns, and warns, and warns, but he will not always warn.

Looming on the horizon is the certainty of God’s judgment on sin and on unrepentant sinners. If America continues to follow its present course, the nation is sure to find itself under the inexorable judgment of a holy God whom it has ignored, rejected, and defied. “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption; but he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life” (Gal. 6:7, 8). Surely this admonition applies both to individuals and to nations.

Read today’s newspapers and magazines; note what people are reading and watching; look at our colleges and universities and on our streets: you will find a nation obsessed with sex, money, possessions, and knowledge, without the wisdom which comes from God. And out of this “culture” that no longer gives God his rightful place come mobs, demonstrations, violence, destruction of property. The words of Scripture, “You shall not follow a multitude to do evil” (Exod. 23:2), are unknown. Because of the willful ignorance or open rebellion of a godless majority, America teeters on the brink of a devastating revolution—God’s judgment on a people who have “In God we trust” on their currency but not in their hearts!

Confronted with the hardness of men’s hearts, the loving patience of God, and the certainty of coming judgment, what shall the Christian do?

The Christian must be prepared to take ridicule and persecution. He must recognize that, by God’s grace, he is different from the world, and he must stay that way.

The Christian must, as the Apostle Paul said to Timothy, “never lose [his] sense of urgency, in season or out of season” (2 Tim. 4:2, Phillips), and he must face the fact that, for many, the time has already come when they will no longer “endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (2 Tim. 4:3, 4).

Above all, the Christian must live very close to his Lord by making full use of the means of grace God has provided—prayer, the study of God’s Word, and daily application of what he has learned from him.

A Christian must endure; he must learn to “take his share of suffering as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Tim. 2:3). He must learn the difference between “involvement” in the world for Christ’s sake and entanglement in the ways of the world by Satan’s power. He must take to heart the Apostle Paul’s admonition,” … be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:15, 16).

L. NELSON BELL

But Answer Came There None

It has been said that neuroses might be graded according to the inability to tolerate ambiguous situations. Another revealing factor surely is the way in which a man copes when confronted by the unexpected. Look how some opportunist on the New York Times went all madly partisan on the front page (no less) when the Mets did the miraculous this fall—as ambiguous and unexpected a circumstance as you will find.

Another press report last week offered a touching little cameo in telling how something literally out of the blue caught up with a holidaying couple. I quote: “Mr. Joe Clarkson and his wife Mona were strolling along the beach when a voice from the skies politely asked them to move out of the way.” The speaker was a pilot whose engine had failed and who was silently sweeping toward them for an emergency landing. Though the incident itself was not without interest, I liked best of all the sequel as solemnly given by the reporter: “Later the pilot apologized to the couple on the beach.” He acted like a gentleman throughout. In a tight ambiguous corner I could trust myself to a boy like that; he evidently has not a neurotic bone in his body.

Billy Graham tells that on the very day he arrived in England to conduct a crusade some years ago, a balloon enthusiast complained in a national newspaper that “the British regard balloons with utter indifference.” When floating over the country, he declared, he would call down to people, but they completely ignored him. Above his lament was the poignant headline: “If you hear a voice coming from the sky, please talk back.”

While I have always admired English aplomb I doubt if there is a more depressing sight than a man always superbly in control of himself. Even the very English John Ruskin agreed with this view in “Of the Pathetic Fallacy”: “However great a man may be, there are always some subjects which ought to throw him off his balance.”

But to come back to that frustrated balloonist. He reminded me of something relevant but elusive. I found it after two hours’ dogged searching (editor, please note) and some serendipitous literary encounters, in Dante’s Purgatorio:

Heaven calls,

And round about you wheeling, courts your gaze

With everlasting beauties. Yet your eye

Turns with fond doting still upon the earth.

I’m sure I could have pressed the analogy to better advantage, but those two hours took it out of me, and I merely proffer the whole idea as containing the germ of Something Profound.

EUTYCHUS IV

To Market The Message

In your November 7 issue I read of an opening in sales for which I would like to apply (“Salesmen Wanted”). The product, I understand, is “Christ and His Good News.”

Dr. Halverson states that there is a market for this product and everybody needs it. No competition. How nice, if true.

In marketing we distinguish between unknown needs, known needs, and apparent needs. Very sophisticated—but true. Either his market has unknown needs or he assumes the need—but I have not had many come clamoring to me for the product as packaged. Nor have I found competition absent. Mephistopheles, Inc., has done an excellent job in selling Materialism. His sales are zooming.

Islamis, Inc. and The Buddha Co. are making much faster progress than we are. The younger generation are buying Nihilism, Inc. What they are rebelling against is pat phrases and generalities such as Dr. Halverson’s article.

I agree with Dr. Halverson in principle, or I could not long remain a Christian, but when, in God’s name, are we going to get off the dime and get up to date?

Marblehead, Mass.

WENDELL E. LAKE

Challenging ‘Challenge’

You’ve got to be pulling our leg, or else the editorial department needs flashy attention-getting headlines. I’ll grant that “Christianity’s Greatest Challenge” (Nov. 7) is a fine article, well written and researched, but it has to come to the inevitable “how to do it” in four or five simple steps. It reminds me of the instructions I receive with the toys I have to assemble for my children at Christmas time.

Do you honestly believe that Christianity’s greatest challenge comes from outside of Christianity?… Unbelief is still unbelief, whether in or out of the Church.…

The article might still stand, but please forget the title.

Good Shepherd

ROGER PH. DREWS

Evangelical Lutheran Church

Burnsville, Minn.

Spiro The Splendid

There are many admirable features in the November 7 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY … All were blunted for me by the slighting remarks about Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew (“M-Day in Retrospect”). Sad, sad, very sad.… Is Mr. Agnew to “applaud” such Communist-instigated demonstrations?… I weep for those who read and are influenced by the impudent snobs at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Time magazine. Your editorial has prompted me to write a note of encouragement to our splendid, splendid Vice-President.

RICHARD H. MACKAY

Watertown, Mass.

Lutheran Tears

The question on the front cover of your November 7 issue, “When Should a Christian Weep?” has a proper and adequate answer in your editorial columns. But there is another answer.

A Christian should (in fact, is driven to) weep when he reads such unfair, biased, uninformed, judgmental and sweeping tirades against Christians as you published on the back cover of the same issue under the title “Current Religious Thought”.…

As one who has some responsibility for preserving the good reputation of a major Christian denomination, I protest the inference in the article by John Warwick Montgomery that the American Lutheran Church, among others, is something less than “a Bible-believing Church” which holds with Luther and the Scriptures that “there is none other name under heaven, given among men [than Christ], whereby we must be saved.”

LESTER F. HEINS

Public Relations Director

The American Lutheran Church

Minneapolis, Minn.

I have deep respect for the scholarship of Dr. John Warwick Montgomery but none for his judgment. Your readers suffered a series of dire predictions and warnings concerning the “evil” of pulpit-and-altar fellowship, if the brethren of the Missouri Synod decided to practice it with their fellow Lutherans in the ALC, last spring.

Now that the Missouri Synod did go along with the proposal we have an article entitled “Missouri Turns a Corner,” which is as slanted and biased a report as I have ever read! In which corner of the desert does the learned professor bury his head?…

Dr. Montgomery wants the Missouri Synod to keep its skirts clean by nonassociation with the ALC. How puerile. Thank God that the Lord of the Church has brought the Missouri Synod into the mainstream of American church life, and that fellow Lutherans can “drink wine together on our knees.” Will the learned doctor be among us?

The American Lutheran Church is basically a conservative church. We love our Lord and believe in our church. So do our friends in the Missouri Synod. And we want to get together. Why is Dr. Montgomery so sore about that?

HARRY FULLILOVE

Church of the Abiding Presence

Bronx, N.Y.

Near Catastrophe

I congratulate you on publishing Harold Brown’s “Rome and Reformation Today” (Oct. 24). It’s articles like these that save CHRISTIANITY TODAY from utter catastrophe. For example, equating the Marine Corps with Red China (via Eutychus) is for the sick Left. And in Current Religious Thought one reads about Miss Bernadette Devlin’s “Catholicism” and “Christianity.” I thought everyone—literally everyone—knew that Miss Devlin is a Marxist. What’s with you people?

Murrysville, Pa.

ROY STRICKLAND

That’s Not Funny

To say the least, I had to do a little eyebrow-lifting when I read in “TV or Not TV” (Oct. 24) that “Laugh-in” in your opinion “is one of the funniest and most absorbing on television,” “demands full attention,” etc. On the same day I read in my newspaper that the producer and head writer of this show, Paul W. Keyes, has resigned and in parting called the show “slanted, vulgar, and dirty.”

Frankly, I have never been able to watch “Laugh-In” through an entire program. If this is humor, it must be sick humor.

Could Isaiah 5:20 apply to a Christian magazine who fosters such a program as “Laugh-In”?

Beaumont, Calif.

MRS. LEE SCHEHRER

From Science To God

After some deliberation, I feel that I must object to at least one sentence in the review of my book, Come Let Us Play God (Oct. 24).… We have had this nonsense for far too long, that scientists are amoral and that there must be this wide gap between science and religion. My whole book is designed to try to bridge whatever gap exists and in fact to point out that while we must play God, we had better do it pretty humbly and prayerfully so we do avoid the pride that goes before the fall.… I would like to know where I “admit that scientists proceed successfully without introducing God into their hypotheses.”

LEROY G. AUGENSTEIN

Chairman, Biophysics Dept.

Michigan State University

East Lansing, Mich.

Of course Professor Augenstein is aware of the danger of pride. I merely suggested that the record does not support his view that human beings, perennially the victims of pride even when they cowered in fear of nature, may suddenly become humble exactly when they have begun to control nature. I applaud the aspiration.

Second, on God and scientific activities: my reference is to page 136, where Professor Augenstein remarks that “the only question really is, was the order [of Nature] created or did it arise by itself? I happen to believe very strongly that it was created by God. As an experimental scientist I really don’t need to worry about this question as I go about my day-to-day business.”

The commendable crusade he is now embarked upon—in which I wish to join him—is a spin-off from his scientific activities.

I gave this book a careful, honest, and quite favorable appraisal. I am now engaged in a small campaign to persuade the (all too few!) alert pastors of my acquaintance to use it in their church education programs.

RALPH L. LYNN

Dept. of History

Baylor University

Waco, Tex.

The Truth About CBA

In the news story about the Graham crusade in Anaheim (Oct. 24), there is a statement that is not supported by the facts. It is said that Conservative Baptists did not support Billy Graham in 1963 but did so this time. I do not know where your news reporter got his story, unless he copied it from the Los Angeles Times that made the same mistake.

The truth is that in 1962 we took a stronger stand as a CBA than we did in 1969! Please do not confuse us with the “hard core” that has opposed Billy Graham through the years. Actually, our CBA men have been among the most active workers, and the churches have been most loyal in participation and attendance.

WILLIAM C. THOMAS

President

Conservative Baptist Association

West Covina, Calif.

Faith In Space

In your news story on “Project Astronaut” (Oct. 24) you stated that more than 300,000 letters had been received and were presented to NASA.

At the time of the presentation to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, over 2½ million letters and petitions had been received by the Family Radio Network. The mail continues to come in, and we expect that eventually over four million persons will have spoken out in favor of allowing our astronauts to express their faith while in space or on the Good Earth.

TOM SOMMERVILLE

Communications Coordinator

Family Radio Network

San Francisco, Calif.

‘Minimal State’ The Ideal

Theological Ethics, Volume II: Politics, by Helmut Thielicke (Fortress, 1969, 696 pp., $12.50), is reviewed, by Ellis Hollon, associate professor of philosophy of religion, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, North Carolina.

In this second of his Theological Ethics, Helmut Thielicke applies his “contextual hermeneutic” to the ethical problems posed by two unique facts of our time—the “nuclearization” of the world and the “secularization” of the Western so-called Christian states. Thielicke’s approach to these two essentially political problems depends primarily on his crucial presupposition that institutions are “objectifications” of individual fallen men. The centrality of this presupposition for Thielicke’s argument can be shown by the following syllogism (constructed, I admit, by me: Premise One: The individual is a fallen, post-Noahic man whom power corrupts and whom absolute power corrupts absolutely. Premise Two: The modern democratic state and its institutions are objectifications of the individual fallen man. Therefore: (To quote Thielicke at this point) “A provisional emergency order does not apply to spheres which can be handled by other means on a non-emergency basis.”

To say the same thing another way: Thielicke, striving to employ his famous methodology of judging and deciding only “within a situation,” infers that an awareness of the “eschatological relativization” of the state brought about by man’s sin necessarily leads the Christian moralist to postulate the “minimal state” as the ideal. This means, concretely, that social responsibilities that can be handled apart from the state (by families, neighbors, business enterprises, and especially by the sacrificial efforts of individual Christians) should not be “sloughed off” on the state. Thielicke finds little hope in the secularized “welfare” state, and less hope in such a state’s ability to handle “legally instituted power (potestas)” properly. Too often, he observes, the power of order (potestas ordinans) committed to kings, states, and rulers by God as an emergency, post-Noahic necessity becomes disorderly power (potentia inordinata), “a tool of the lust for power, of rebellion, and of pride.”

This ambiguity of the secularized, post-Noahic state manifests itself especially in the modern state’s grappling with the “nuclearization” of the world. Even when we realize that a “revolt of means” has occurred with the advent of the nuclear bomb, and even when we further realize the contemporary irrelevance of Luther’s judgment that war can be “not the least part of the divine mercy” when used to ward off an external threat to peace, we yet find it necessary to manufacture nuclear arms for self-defense. The necessity of a “psychological deterrence” arises because the state is itself a potential element of chaos in that “its sovereign authority to bind citizens within implies its own freedom from bondage without.” To Thielicke, the political and ethical problems raised by the “nuclearization” of the world strongly suggest that “every decision we make in this aeon has the character of a compromise.” If Von Clausewitz was accurate in his observation that war is “only the continuation of state policy by other means,” then it must be said in our time nuclear war might well be the termination of all states by the final mean!

What is the Church’s task in this highly explosive but ambiguous situation? Thielicke views it as primarily prophetic:

If the origins of war both cold and hot are to be sought in the most inward areas of fallen man, the church … must warn against all false hopes, e.g., the hope that war can be overcome by institutional and organizational measures such as treaty systems, disarmament conferences, the achievement of an atomic peace, unilateral renunciation of defense, etc. For as man cannot justify or change himself by good works, so he cannot alter the world—which is the objectification of man—by organizational and institutional works [pp. 492, 493].

Thus Thielicke holds up the “minimal” state as the exact opposite to the “maximal” state, and he definitely sees the “eschatological relativization” of the state “as an essential antidote to all totalitarian tendencies.” But he insists that even when it is prophetically criticizing the state, the Christian Church must not make the mistake of “mythologizing” the state or its power. Only because man posits himself absolutely does he posit absolutely the objectification of himself and of his favorite values in the state. So Christian preaching in any kind of state—totalitarian or democratic—must be to the individual man who alone is responsible and who alone can repent and be converted. “It is only the men who establish and operate the institutions—not the institutions themselves—that can be summoned to repent and be converted.” As Thielicke says, all this means “we should commit to the state, not everything we can, but only what we must.”

Here, then, is Thielicke’s Politics. What does one say to all this? To be quite frank, the thesis of the “fallen man” and the “post-Noahic world” cuts both ways. If from it one can infer that the state will use an expansion of its efforts in education and welfare to nourish the tree of totalitarianism, one can just as correctly infer that the “fallen man” is in the Church too, and that if education and welfare, housing and discrimination, and all other social ills are left to be healed as best they may be by the Church alone, then either one of two things will very probably happen: (1) either the Church will use its social service as an avenue through which to nourish the tree of churchly totalitarianism (as happened in the days of the late Roman Empire when much of the charity was dispensed by the Church), or (2) the Church will let the illnesses go unchecked (as it has done for the most part in the twentieth century) because it is wallowing contentedly in its material success and is unwilling to make the enormous sacrifices required to meet the social and physical needs of those discriminated against because of poverty or race.

Thus, it is the conclusion in our syllogistic construction of Thielicke’s argument for the “minimal” state that is false, containing as it does an inference not supported by, and, indeed, actually contradictory to, either the first or the second premise—or perhaps to both! There are no nonemergency orders; the Kingdom of God is coming but not yet come; the “fallen man” lives in the Lord’s house (the kingdom on the right hand) as well as in the Devil’s house (the kingdom on the left hand). After all, there can very well arise a “totalitarianization” of minimalism, and this may be what has actually happened to the twentieth-century Church in its tragic and disastrous failure to respond compassionately and dramatically to the social ills so radically manifested in our time. If it is true, as Thielicke holds it to be, that “the state stands in the halflight between what it ought to be in virtue of its origin, namely, a divinely willed institution to guard against chaos and to help bring the world through to the last day, and what it actually is, namely, an objectification of man himself, and consequently a reflection of the cleavage in man between creation and sin, blessing and judgment, destiny and present condition,” then how much more can the same thing be said of the Church!

First Of A New Series

The Broadman Bible Commentary, Volume 1: Genesis and Exodus, and Volume 8: Matthew and Mark, general editor Clifton J. Allen (Broadman, 1969, 407 and 402 pp., $7.50 each), is reviewed by Clark Pinnock, professor of systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Bannockburn, Illinois.

After a decade of planning and preparation, the first two volumes of a projected twelve-volume series is offered to the public by a press of the Southern Baptist Convention. These volumes manifest a comprehensive, serious, and highly competent interpretation of holy Scripture. The first sentence reads: “We begin with the affirmation—the Bible is the Word of God.” The New Testament volume especially maintains a consistently high regard for the veracity of the text and repudiates radical critical conclusions.

The commentary on Matthew (by Frank Stagg) and Mark (by Henry Turlington) is prefaced by superb articles on New Testament theology (by William L. Hendricks), on text and canon (by James A. Brooks), and more. The commentary on Genesis (by British Baptist G. Henton Davies) and Exodus (by Roy L. Honeycutt) is introduced by an article on biblical authority (by the general editor), on hermeneutics (by John P. Newport), on Old Testament theology (by E. C. Rust) and on the history of Israel (by Clyde T. Francisco). Each writer is expert in the field assigned, and the result is a commentary of first rank.

Unfortunately, from the viewpoint of the evangelical reader, the Old Testament volume reflects the negative critical theories of the current Old Testament scholarly consensus, and lacks the moderate conservatism of the New Testament volume. The commentary on Genesis and Exodus, while it acknowledges that more traditional views have their defenders, consistently works from “the orthodox critical view of the J, E, D, P, documentary theory.” The commentary is punctuated with speculations as to how the several documents have become interwoven in the present text. In accord with this critical stance, creation is set in the realm of faith rather than history, Adam is mythic, representative man, and the flood account is an Israelite transformation of a Canaanite story, dubious both historically and morally.

Professor Davies holds that God has given us two sources of revelation, the Bible and nature, and that we should assess the truthfulness of Genesis in matters of fact in accordance with the findings of science. While this dodge from all possible criticism into the circle of unverifiable faith is familiar to anyone acquainted with neo-orthodox dialectic, it robs the plain assertions of Scripture of normative significance and makes faith meaningless. To allow that the Bible is mistaken in the testable (scientific) parts is to make the claim wholly unconvincing that it is truthful in the untestable (theological) parts.

This compromise of the absolute truthworthiness of Scripture is all the more tragic because it is based upon a critical approach that is unproven. Kenneth A. Kitchen has shown that the lexical and stylistic criteria on which this superficially imposing hypothesis rests were applied to the Old Testament in a vacuum, and produce absurdities when they are imposed upon comparative Near Eastern compositions (see his Ancient Orient and Old Testament, Inter-Varsity, 1966, pp. 17–20, 112–38). Evangelical biblical criticism begins with a decision about the nature of Scripture that determines our approach to the phenomena. This decision providing our hermeneutical Gestalt, when taken in accord with Christ’s teaching about scriptural infallibility, excludes the kind of negative theories this volume proposes.

The introductory article to the entire series elaborates the low view of biblical inspiration that accounts for the disappointing nature of the Old Testament volume. Editor Allen rejects verbal and plenary inspiration in favor of an imprecise “dynamic” theory. Christ is lord of Scripture, and that which is the result of human misunderstanding is to be interpreted in the light of what we know of him. The real authority of Scripture is seen to reside, not in the given text of normative, binding significance, but in the Christ of self-authenticating experience. In this way the objective, unerring standard of the written Word is replaced by the old familiar egoistic principle of authority. Legions of Southern Baptists who only last June (in their national convention) reiterated their commitment to an infallible Bible will surely demand something better than this.

An Answer To The Hippies

Zen-Existentialism, by Lit-sen Chang (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1969, 254 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Walter R. Martin, director, Christian Research Institute, Wayne, New Jersey.

At long last we have a thorough analysis of Zen existentialism and its relation to Western culture and philosophy. Lit-sen Chang is an authority on world religions and a special lecturer in missions at Gordon-Conwell Divinity School. He has grasped the significant truth that modern hippie philosophy is directly related to the influence of Zen existentialism upon certain schools of American philosophy, and he reviews the background that made this possible.

Professor Chang, a first-rate intellectual who became a Christian convert after fifty years in Buddhism, offers this basis thesis:

Non-Christian philosophy is immanent and anthropocentric by its nature: it begins by absolutizing and deifying a created aspect. So, it is akin to the spirit of Zen. It is implicitly blasphemous since it seeks to honor and deify the sovereign man.… It was also the root from which liberal Christian theology as well as the Western humanist culture have grown.

Non-Christian philosophers erect, in place of the God of revelation, a temple founded upon human wisdom in which they bow before the idol of “sovereign reason.”

Chang does not stop with a general survey of the history and teachings of Zen. He deals with such subjects as “the crisis in Western philosophy,” which he believes paved the way for modern atheistic existentialism to penetrate the minds of Western students, and the semantic maze that has made it possible for people to use identical terms to describe antithetical concepts. Particularly impressive is his ability to relate Zen existentialism to such diverse schools of thought as pantheism, “God is dead” theory, Schleiermacher’s theology of immanence, and so-called Christian atheism, as well as to today’s hippie movement.

Chang is a gifted, if not always lucid, writer with a penchant for definition of terms, a vast grasp of Eastern mysticism and philosophy, and an evangelical zeal for those enmeshed in the syncretism of Zen existentialism. This book is an outright apologetic written from the inside, an exposé of that twilight world of agnostic and skeptical philosophy where, as Tertullian once put it, “Athens and Jerusalem can never agree.” Professor Chang has moved from Athens (the love of human wisdom) to Jerusalem (the love of Divine Wisdom). His analysis and conclusions cannot be dismissed lightly by any person who wishes to come to grips with revolt against reason and logic so evident in our day.

Emphasis On Eschatology

Well-Founded Hope, by Hendrikus Berkhof (John Knox, 1969, 107 pp., $3.25), is reviewed by Ralph Earle, professor of New Testament, Nazarene Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri.

Hendrikus Berkhof is professor of dogmatics and biblical theology at the University of Leiden. This book contains twelve lectures he gave at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 1967, plus a final chapter of more technical theological background.

The word that most aptly characterizes the twentieth century is “change,” and theologians have been far from immune to this spirit. They have swung from Barth to Brunner to Bultmann, and now to Moltmann, whose Theology of Hope is the latest fad. Berkhof’s volume is a popular definition and critique of this view.

He begins by pointing out the obvious fact that the early Church was much more interested in eschatology than is most of Christendom today. But the existentialist domination of the 1950s is now being challenged by a futurist theology.

Berkhof stresses that the future is always related to the past. He writes: “The future is the continuation, confirmation, extension, and fulfillment of what God has accomplished in the past and present.… We may say that the eschatology of Israel is the confession of God’s faithfulness projected on the screen of the future.” But what of the new covenant? “… In the New Testament the future is seen as an unfolding of what is given in the resurrection of Christ”—this, together with “the work of renewal which the Spirit has begun.”

In another lecture the author declares that “the future will show—on a larger, and eventually worldwide scale—a repetition of what has happened in the crucifixion and resurrection.” In this chapter he gives a very helpful treatment of the poetic nature of apocalyptic language.

“Time and Eternity” furnishes an excellent corrective to the somewhat one-sided view of Oscar Cullman in his Christ and Time. Berkhof does an unusually fine job, it seems to me, of “holding a straight course in the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15) in the area of biblical eschatology. On the much debated question of what Paul means by a “spiritual body” in First Corinthians 15:44, he makes this excellent comment: “A spiritual body is not an unbodily body or a refined body but an existence which also in its bodily aspect has been transformed by the Spirit to be fit for the glorified existence awaiting us beyond the borders of the resurrection.”

In his lecture on “The Double Image of the Future,” Berkhof seems to approve the idea of a final universal salvation. He writes: “Does this therefore mean that we may hope that the rejection has a limit and that hell means a purification? Yes, we might say that.”

But this is a small blemish in a book that on the whole is faith-building and inspiring. Unlike most Continental theologians, Berkhof writes with a clear, readable style.

Book Briefs

I, Too, Am Man, by James R. Dolby (Word, 1969, 143 pp., $3.95). Studies the relation between biblical Christianity and insights of the social sciences.

A Layman’s Introduction to Christian Thought, by James Kallas (Westminster, 1969, 140 pp., paperback, $2.45). Offers helpful insight into the origin of different views within the framework of Christian theology.

Power Structures and the Church, by Davis S. Schuller (Concordia, 1969, 175 pp., paperback, $1.75). Seeks to present a biblical understanding of the Church’s use of power in confronting contemporary social problems.

Revelation Theology, by Avery Dulles (Herder and Herder, 1969, 192 pp., $5.95). Though one may question some of the analyses presented, this volume offers a helpful survey of the concept of revelation as it has found expression in the thought of various theologians throughout church history.

The Douglass Sunday School Lessons 1970, edited by Earl L. Douglass (Word, 1969, 394 pp., $3.50). This familiar lesson guide follows essentially the same pattern as in previous years. Offers a very helpful guide to audio-visual aids.

A New Look at the Apostles’ Creed, edited by Gerhard Rein (Augsburg, 1969, 87 pp., paperback, $1.50). This look by such scholars as Von Loewenich, Bornkamm, Conzelmann, and Ebeling is so “new” that one can hardly recognize the Apostles’ Creed.

Sören Kierkegaard, by Robert L. Perkins (John Knox, 1969, 46 pp., paperback, $1.25). An introduction to Kierkegaard’s thought, written for the layman. In the same series: Alfred North Whitehead, by Norman Pittenger.

The Exploration of Faith, by R. E. O. White (Moody, 1969, 125 pp., $3.50). A helpful devotional study of Hebrews 11.

If God Is God, by Richard Edwin Koenig (Concordia, 1969, 100 pp., paperback, $1.50). Brings the truth of historic Christianity to bear on some of the questions of today’s youth.

An Introduction to Religious Counseling, by Richard P. Vaughan (Prentice-Hall, 1969, 164 p., $5.95). Written from the standpoint of the Christian counselor, this volume offers many helpful insights for those charged with the responsibility of dealing with problem-laden people.

That Amazing Galilean!, by Jesse Hays Baird (Lantern Press, 1969, 123 pp., paperback, $1.75). A former moderator of the UPUSA Church in a warm personal way shares truths that have undergirded him during his years of ministry.

“Only bishops can take part in the deliberations,” Bishop Joseph L. Bernardin, general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, reminded newsmen at the first press briefing. But he noted that NCCB president John Cardinal Dearden had just told the 221 prelates attending their semi-annual meeting in Washington, D.C., that priests and lay people had been brought in at various levels. “The levels of collaboration will expand,” Bernardin predicted.

Taking his cue from the Holy Father, Dearden had urged his colleagues to plunge into new arenas of shared authority, just as Pope Paul at the Rome synod a month earlier (see November 21 issue, page 36) had emphasized “the moral and spiritual value which collegiality must take on in each of us.…”

There were evidences during the five-day conference that many in the U. S. hierarchy intended to take their president’s plea seriously. But there also was a swelling counterpoint of dissent, sometimes rising to a shrill pitch, as an unprecedented number of unofficial Catholic (and some non-Catholic) groups clamoring for a medley of special interests tried to get the bishops’ ear.

Before adjournment, six persons had been arrested, a black Methodist minister and his Black United Front cohorts were turned back (in the nick of time) at the huge door guarding the bishops’ secret meeting, a lone priest successfully held a six-hour sit-in for peace while the bishops talked about celibacy and holy days, and the vice-president of the National Association of Laymen screamed an obscenity at two bishops who were attempting to hear out demands of his group.

The Rev. Patrick J. O’Malley, president of the National Federation of Priests Councils (representing about 35,000 of the nation’s 58,000 Catholic priests), became the first priest ever to address the U. S. hierarchy on priestly problems. At a closed session on opening day, the curly-haired Chicagoan warned of “disaster” to the church if priests were not granted “a share not only in the implementing of programs for the good of the church, but in the planning and decision-making for that church.”

O’Malley proposed a national policy-making board of priests, bishops, and laymen, and asked that at the April NCCB meeting, each bishop bring a priest representing his diocese as a voting member. The latter request was denied, but bishops at a press panel following O’Malley’s unprecedented address spoke of a national pastoral council, intimated by Vatican II, as the eventual solution to the problem.

Presently, only the Netherlands has such a national council, and American bishops previously have shown an interest only in councils at the parish and diocese level. But Dearden indicated the NCCB is now definitely steering toward a national council.

The far-off promise of such collaboration failed to excite members of a radical congress of priests’ associations, which held a separate one-day meeting at an adjoining hotel.

Monsignor Thomas Reese, spokesman for the groups, noted that many were faced with falling membership, and criticized O’Malley’s federation as too establishment-oriented.

“The liberal, activist priests are going, going.… The brothers will be gone,” mourned the Rev. Joseph O’Donoghue, the first priest to be disciplined by Washington D. C.’s Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle last year over the birth-control controversy.

Another “first” for the bishops that will have direct bearing on such priestbishop disputes was a set of due-process guidelines prepared by the Canon Law Society. The document adopted by the bishops was hailed by Dearden as “a uniform way to deal with some of the tensions … eliminate suspicions, and the fear of the unknown.” The procedures—which are not mandatory in any diocese without consent of its bishop—cover conciliation, arbitration, and administrative (judicial) cases.

The preamble to the due-process statement states that all persons in the church should have, among other rights, “freedom to speak and be heard and to receive objective information regarding the pastoral needs and affairs of the Church.”

One young priest, eager to assert his “rights,” pushed his way through a service entrance and crashed the bishops’ meeting. The Rev. Charles Sullivan, 28, a leader of the unofficial Society of Priests for a Free Ministry, was allowed to remain after a lay companion was ejected for starting to read a statement attacking the bishops for “your seven-year silence on Viet Nam and your military mass.”¹Part of the blast prepared for the bishops read: “You are the last of the absolute monarchs as you gather in your palaces. Your credibility is so shaky that one would wonder how many people would buy a used car from a bishop.”

Sullivan, the first uninvited visitor to attend a closed NCCB session, sat crosslegged in meditation while the bishops continued business, recessed for lunch, and returned for another three hours of business. Emerging after hotel security forces threatened to arrest him, Sullivan described the gathering as a “boring Holy Name meeting with four cardinals [McIntyre of Los Angeles, O’Boyle, Krol of Philadelphia, and Wright, the new head of the Vatican Congregation on the Clergy] as spiritual directors.”

The most ornate event of the conference (although not officially a part of it) was the mass for peace at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The program, on the eve of Veterans Day, included a spit-and-polish procession of servicemen, plumed Knights of Columbus, a military color guard with rifles, and the massed choirs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force academies in their first performance together.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, recently retired bishop of Rochester, New York, deplored the permissive society and the breakdown of Christian discipline in his sermon. More than 100 bishops attended.

The so-called military mass irked dissident groups all week, and the arrest of six persons outside the Shrine for “unlawful entry on private property” (they were distributing anti-war leaflets on the steps) added fuel to the fire.

Malcontent factions pointedly noted that the bishops issued no statement whatever on Viet Nam, except one urging humane treatment for prisoners of war.

The NCCB reaffirmed—for the third time in two years—the values and necessity of priestly celibacy. But the vote (145 to 68, only three more than the necessary two-thirds) indicated that the bishops are carefully weighing the matter. A minority wished an even stronger statement, it was reported, but many opposing it felt it would be heavyhanded to issue another one now. Archbishop Philip M. Hannan of New Orleans was among those who believe the U.S. church should one day consider ordaining to the priesthood men who are already married.

Meanwhile, a married priest and his wife spoke at a special forum on celibacy. The audience, including at least one bishop, applauded Catholic pastor, historian, and ecumenist Henry Beck when he declared: “Compulsory celibacy is infidelity to the Gospel,” and, citing ecumenism, “This obstacle makes no sense in a reunited Christian ministry.”

The NCCB formally approved the creation of a National Central Office for Black Catholics, and empowered a black caucus to appoint a steering committee. The new office will develop black leadership, work with black university students, and adapt liturgy to needs and experiences of Negroes.

Midway in the conference, about fifteen members of the Black United Front, which has been hitting up Washington churches for a total of more than $20 million to “rebuild the burned out places of the city,” paid an expected visit.

Brushing past security guards, the Rev. Douglas Moore cornered Archbishop Hannan (his auxiliary, Harold R. Perry, is the only Negro bishop in the American church) and demanded to speak at the meeting. Hannan refused, and Moore settled for reading a series of “righteous requests” to the archbishop and a gaggle of newsmen (after allowing time for cameramen to plug in lights).

Among progressive measures taken by the NCCB this fall was the adoption of a new committee for the nomination of bishops. One bishop from each of seven regions of the country will screen nominations for bishop candidates before names are sent to the Vatican. This was seen as “a tremendous advance” that will give the U. S. bishops greater influence, while diminishing the intermediary role of the Apostolic Delegate.

The bishops also moved toward opening the financial records of the church’s 156 dioceses by authorizing preparation of a uniform system of bookkeeping, and approved a new, $50 million national crusade against poverty.

A statement on “the right to life” protested U. S. government population control programs limiting births.

Most of a long list of suggested changes in the mass and services of baptism and marriage were approved, making them more compatible with Consultation on Church Union and inter-Lutheran usage. All of the International Committee on English and Liturgy text was adopted, except for part of the new English translation of the Lord’s Prayer, and a new version of the Apostles’ Creed. All holy days of obligation were retained, but the changed rites may go into effect as early as next Palm Sunday.

Generally, the NCCB moved cautiously toward collaboration between the bishops and those priests and laymen who want—or at least are willing—to work within the sluggish, evolving system of the Church of Rome. Even impatient, suspended Father O’Donoghue conceded there was “a crack in the door.”

But for some revolutionized and radicalized Catholics, it already is too late.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

“You can accomplish more with a kid in one week of camp than in a whole year of Sunday school.”

This statement, made by one of the more than 600 directors and leaders of Christian camps assembled recently at the fourth Christian Camping International Convention in Ridgecrest, North Carolina, reflects the mood of optimism and challenge that characterized the gathering. During the four days of workshops, demonstrations, and platform addresses, the delegates were confronted with the problems and opportunities that will face Christian camps in the seventies.

Throughout the convention, speakers and leaders emphasized that the basic and unchanging purpose of Christian camps is to lead campers into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and help them grow in it. This emphasis was balanced by a challenge to be alert to the radical changes in contemporary society, and to discover unique ways camps can respond to them.

More than 127 workshops dealt with subjects ranging from the very practical—and seemingly mundane—matters of administration and development to the unusual and stimulating areas of sensitivity training, stress camping, sex education, drama, and specialized ministries to retarded children, physically handicapped, minority groups, delinquent youth, the inner city, single adults, and families.

The Rev. L. Ted Johnson, director of children’s work and camping for the Baptist General Conference, and the convention’s opening speaker, called attention to some of the dramatic changes expected in the seventies and called on camp leaders to plan for them. He noted that in an age of increasing depersonalization, Christ-centered camping has a special opportunity to maintain a personal touch. Man’s search for “someone who cares,” he said, combined with increased leisure time and interest in recreation, calls for camp leaders to provide the “creative, imaginative, resourceful leadership the times demand.”

Another platform speaker, Dr. H. Wilbert Norton, professor of missions and evangelism at Wheaton College, called attention to the ministry of camping in world missions. He noted the necessity of adapting camping to the life-style of those in other cultures if it is to be effective. He also affirmed the need to sell mission executives on the potentially significant role of camping in world evangelism.

Other speakers included Dr. Torrey Johnson, director of Bibletown in Boca Raton, Florida; Dr. Grant Whipple, director of The Firs in Bellingham, Washington; and Vincent Craven of Canada’s Inter-Varsity camps. What was probably the most challenging address of the convention was delivered by William Gwinn of California’s Mt. Hermon Conference on the closing day, when, unfortunately, a number of the delegates had gone home.

Gwinn noted six probable characteristics of the seventies that will affect camping: (1) increased leisure; (2) twelve-month school years; (3) affluence, ease, and comfort; (4) “easy solutionism”; (5) revival of the family; and (6) revolution.

He then cited demands these characteristics will place upon camping: a return to biblical authority (away from non-biblical traditionalism); a biblical understanding of the Church; extension of camp ministry beyond the Church to take advantage of camping’s unique opportunity for evangelism; involvement of youth at all levels of camping; use of relevant language as opposed to an Elizabethan-style presentation of Christianity; quality in administration and facilities; and movement away from meeting-centered and speaker-centered camps to a more personal interaction between counselor and camper (“too many camps are doing what can be done in the basement of a church”).

Gwinn said camping must be plugged into the social revolution of our day and send people out into the world “or we’ll never make a dent” in the needs of our society. But he made it clear this ministry will be effective only if camp leaders are totally convinced that change must come from the inside out. We bring about change by calling men to Christ and by demonstrating the change he accomplishes, Gwinn added.

Several notes were sounded repeatedly throughout the convention: the importance of a strong relation between camping and the ministry of the local church; the particular opportunity for dialogue in the camping situation; the importance of ministry to families (“the most important camping there is, bar none, is camping for the family”); the vital role of “stress”¹The use of “stress” in education has been advanced by the world-wide Outward Bound movement, which has five schools in the United States. Outward Bound seeks to help young people discover their physical, intellectual, and spiritual potential by leading them through a variety of “impossible” situations and experiences. Working closely with other young people and a leader in a small group situation, participants learn the meaning of physical stress, self-discipline, problemsolving, teamwork, competition, dialogue, cooperation, and solitude. Christian camp leaders have seen in this program an effective means of reaching young people for Christ. in the future of camping; and a concern to expand the camping ministry around the world.

Christian Camping International, a fellowship association of Christian camp directors and leaders, was founded in 1959 as the Christian Camp and Conference Association and received its present name in 1968. Mr. Edward Ouland, CCI executive secretary, stated that the association includes approximately 1,700 members from thirty-two countries representing more than 900 camps.

Recently CCI has begun to serve the camping ministry through the publication of the Journal of Christian Camping, a magazine designed to explore in depth the principles and philosophy of Christian camping as well as to offer practical suggestions for camp programming and administration.

Although the primary function of CCI is to provide opportunity for sharing ideas and programs, the convention business meeting at Ridgecrest reflected a forward-looking program. CCI plans to develop special funds for publication, leadership training, consultation, and research and development in order to provide better service to member camps.

The newly elected president, the Rev. Lee Kingsley, outlined some goals for the future: increased development on a sectional level; improved communication, especially through the CCI Journal; and an upgrading of Christian camping.

In a day when many are accusing the Church of being irrelevant, leaders of Christian camping have shown an awareness of the real needs of people. They are endeavoring to meet those needs through a unique ministry that can be used to greater advantage by the Church.

RICHARD L. LOVE

A woman is tabbed to take over the presidency of the National Council of Churches this week as it faces the most crucial hour in its nineteen-year history.

Many months ago, planners of the NCC’s eighth triennial assembly selected as a theme “Therefore Choose Life,” from Deuteronomy 30:19, 20. They may or may not have realized that the organization might actually face a life-or-death situation. As the five-day meeting drew near, council leaders announced they would seek to redefine the organization’s role on the American ecclesiastical scene. Meanwhile militant groups who see the NCC as a big power base laid plans for a takeover. The results will determine the nature and outcome of ecumenism in the United States for years to come.

This year’s assembly may debate personalities more than issues. The leading candidate to succeed Dr. Arthur S. Flemming as NCC president is Dr. Cynthia Wedel, an Episcopal laywoman. Religion editor Hiley Ward of the Detroit Free Press reported that “unless there is a black revolt” she will be elected.

An authoritative NCC source said that NCC leaders had previously sought to nominate Mrs. Martin Luther King but that she had refused to allow it. There also were reports that a leading black churchman might be chosen.

Ward indicated that Dr. Wedel’s name would be presented to the NCC’s two hundred and forty-five-member General Board at its pre-assembly meeting on Saturday, November 29. Dr. Wedel is the wife of Dr. Theodore Wedel, retired canon at Washington Cathedral. She has long been active in ecumenical affairs in the NCC, the World Council of Churches, and her own denomination. Earlier this year she resigned her salaried position as associate general secretary in charge of the NCC’s Division of Christian Unity. There is reason to speculate that this was related to a presidential nomination, since the NCC General Assembly wouldn’t normally pick someone directly from its paid staff.

Dr. Wedel is best described as a diplomatically outspoken or graciously insistent person. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology from George Washington University, If elected, she will become the first woman and the first Episcopalian to lead the NCC.

The militant blacks who have promised a showdown in Detroit (see story on opposite page) seem not so much interested in seeing who is elected president as in ousting the NCC’s top administrator, the Rev. R. H. Edwin Espy. As general secretary, Espy heads the day-to-day operations and obviously exerts more influence on the council than the president, who is more of a figurehead.

It is questionable whether the black militant coalition will have official representation in Detroit. More likely, they will come on as outsiders. They speak for only some of the blacks who are members of the NCC board or assembly.

Also planning “confrontations” is a young Presbyterian, the Rev. Stephen Rose, who formerly edited an avantgarde religious periodical. He has labeled his movement Jonathan’s Wake (after colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards) and wants a redirection of the council also, including the replacement of Espy by a black. So far he’s had trouble coordinating his campaign with blacks.

NCC spokesmen say a special effort is being made to involve young people in the assembly. Every indication is, however, that despite the council’s consistent leftist stand on race, war, and poverty—issues that are presumably uppermost in the minds of today’s young—the ecumenical movement has lost virtually all formal touch with youth movements. The last straw was seemingly the demise of the University Christian Movement earlier this year.

The Viet Nam war will again be a key issue, but it appears doubtful that any new approaches will come forth.

Some 3,000 persons are expected to be on hand in Detroit’s Cobo Hall for the assembly. Of these, 794 will be official representatives of the NCC’s thirty-three member communions.

DAVID KUCHARSKY