When the National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC) looks at the power levels of the National Council of Churches, it sees white. Therefore, by “whatever means necessary,” militant blacks aim to take over general secretary R. H. Edwin Espy’s job and many other top NCC executive posts—now. If they are defeated at the NCC triennium at Detroit this month, they intend to preside at the NCC’s funeral.

That is the gist of an ominous eight-page “message to the churches” issued several weeks ago at Berkeley, California, by the NCBC at its third annual convocation. Of 350 registrants, fewer than fifty remained at the end to vote on the paper. The NCBC is an ecumenical coalition of militant black churchmen, mostly ministers.

Blacks must now “resort to unusual forms of pressure,” the document declared, because “months of fruitless negotiations” have failed to enlist church funding for the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC).

Most denominations to date have officially shunned the BEDC because too many church members see red at the mention of James Forman’s Black Manifesto, the BEDC’s program guide. It was at Detroit eight months ago that Forman seized control of the first BEDC meeting and read his manifesto, which outlines nine major black programs with a price tag of billions of dollars in demanded “reparations” from white churches.

The NCBC “message” condemned the NCC as “a sorry example of institutionalized white decision-making power.” It continued: “If … racism and white negativism are … so vital a part … of the NCC that it would choose to destroy itself before acceding to these just insistences, then … the NCC is incapable of becoming relevant to blacks, and, being thus irrelevant, would serve a more Christian purpose in its demise than it would in a continuation of its present disguise.”

But, say veteran observers, wholesale capitulation by the NCC to black demands would touch off a great grassroots backlash. Thus either way the NCC is in serious trouble.

Delegate Calvin B. Marshall, BEDC chairman, warned NCC enemies not to take comfort in the NCC’s plight. “We’ve got a lot of churches to spank. We’ll get around to the Southern Baptist Convention and to the Church of God; we’ll get them all.”

Newsmen were barred from most NCBC sessions. Participants described some meetings as factious, marked by loud arguments and parliamentary chaos. A few local ministers complained privately that the NCBC establishment had brought the paper from New York and had undemocratically rammed it through. Not so, said NCBC executive director J. Metz Rollins, Jr., who attributed the statement to “many hands.”

In another NCBC development, Marshall won agreement from the black caucuses of the major denominations to press for more no-strings-attached money and to channel these funds into the NCBC and BEDC. This will doubtless result in fresh strife and defections in churches that have sought to ignore the BEDC by funding their own minority programs. “No longer will we allow whites to separate us,” vowed Marshall.

The black churchmen also laid the groundwork for NCBC hopes to bring together the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), the NCBC, and the BEDC in joint strategy. Much of the membership is already interlocking. The plan calls for a coordinating committee to be chaired by NCC social-justice head Charles S. Spivey, Jr. Roles were assigned: IFCO, funding and training; BEDC, economic programming and implementation of the Black Manifesto; NCBC, mobilizing black churchmen for political pressure.

In a unity move the NCBC and several caucuses voted to join the twenty-three-member IFCO. Each will have voting influence over IFCO policies equivalent to that of every member denomination that shared in IFCO’s creation.

NCBC president H. B. Shaw, bishop of North Carolina African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches, reaffirmed NCBC endorsement of the Black Manifesto. He was joined by Gayraud S. Wilmore, director of the Committee on Church and Race of the United Presbyterian Church, who repudiated “Communist interpretation” of the manifesto by its opponents. Churches must not allow rhetoric to impede direct funding of the manifesto’s programs, he said.

At an afternoon NCBC “information” session in Berkeley, Shaw asked everyone to stand while a young woman sang the Black Panther party national anthem. Panther chief of staff David Hilliard drew enthusiastic applause when he advocated “extermination of all forces of reaction.” But delegates quieted when he warned that many “bootlickin’ black preachers” were high on his elimination list. Even Boston’s firebrand Virgil Wood questioned the sanity of “blacks killing blacks.” Hilliard’s reply: “The most atrocious enemies of black people are black people.”

Asked whether love might be a better way, he responded that the killing of a Panther enemy was an act of love for oppressed people. Three days later he was soundly booed by thousands for virtually the same speech at a Viet Nam Moratorium rally in San Francisco.

Later, Haziah Williams, head of Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union (GTU) urban/black studies department, offered one interpretation of the “whatever means necessary” section of the NCBC “message.” He related how he was named to his GTU post: After almost a day of “unproductive” negotiations last February, he and other clerics, under the influence of alcohol, threatened the GTU administrator with physical violence. He got the job.

Williams and the other NCBC delegates sported over-sized white buttons that probably summarized the mood of the convocation. The picture on the buttons: a large black fist clutching a small white cross.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

The story of Paul’s thorn in the flesh is given in the twelfth chapter of his second letter to the Corinthians. He begins his account of this experience with a statement of his great and abounding privileges in the Christian life. The visions and revelations of the Lord he has had, he says, have lifted him up to a third heaven of rapture and delight. But, he goes on at once, “lest I should be exalted above measure”—a phrase he repeats, no doubt in order to emphasize its importance—“there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me.” That is to say, Paul was given this thorn in the flesh in order to save him from that most ugly and devastating and deadly of sins, spiritual pride.

What was this thorn in the flesh? Paul does not identify it. Probably he left it vague quite deliberately. For one thing, Paul was never a man to chatter about his troubles; he had no desire to magnify his difficulties so as to make himself out to be a hero, and thus win sympathy; he did not have any martyr complex. For another thing, by leaving it indefinite, his experience could be of value and help to all who might have any sort of burden to endure.

The question of just what this thorn of Paul’s was, however, has continued to excite the curiosity and to call out the ingenuity of students of the Bible ever since the Apostle’s words became part of Holy Scripture. Three main types of interpretation have been suggested. First, some Roman Catholic expositors, especially those with monkish leanings, have thought Paul was referring to carnal desire, bodily temptation, the solicitations of the flesh. This explanation has perhaps been suggested by the Latin Vulgate translation, “stimulus carnis.” It is, however, rather unlikely. For one thing, there is nothing in Scripture to suggest that Paul was particularly subject to bodily temptation; and if he had been, he would have prayed about the matter, not three times—as he did about his thorn—but constantly.

Second, such commentators as Chrysostom, the great preacher of the Eastern Church, and Erasmus, the great Christian humanist of the sixteenth century, have suggested that Paul was here referring to a personal enemy who sought to slander and discredit him and thus undermine his Christian work and witness. In Second Timothy 4:14 Paul says that Alexander the coppersmith did him much evil, and in First Timothy 1:20 he speaks of the opposition of Hymenaeus. So, according to Chrysostom and Erasmus and other interpreters, Paul’s thorn in the flesh may have been someone like Alexander or Hymenaeus. This explanation, while possible, is not very likely, for Paul would probably not have referred to such a man as “the messenger of Satan.”

A third explanation is that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was some physical or nervous ailment. For example, G. Campbell Morgan thought that his thorn was weak eyesight; and in the Epistle to the Galatians there is evidence that Paul had eye trouble, at least occasionally. Sir William Ramsay, the great Scottish Pauline authority, suggested that Paul’s thorn was the burning malarial fevers so frequent in his day in Asia Minor, where so much of his missionary work was done. Lesley D. Weatherhead thinks that perhaps the affliction was nervous exhaustion, maybe superimposed on some physical ailment. This third explanation, that Paul was referring to some physical or nervous malady that caused him acute frustration and agony, seems most probable, but there is no certainty about it.

What is quite clear, however, is that this thorn, whatever it was, drained his strength and seemed to interfere with the progress of his missionary and evangelistic work, and he prayed God three times to remove it. No doubt the members of the churches that he had founded joined their prayers to his.

God answered this prayer—but not in the way Paul had expected and hoped for. He did not take the thorn away: to that aspect of Paul’s prayer God’s answer was simply “no.” But he did something far better. He answered it by saying: “My grace is sufficient for you; for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” In other words, God’s answer was: “No, Paul, I am not going to remove the thorn from your flesh. But I am going to do something far better for you—I am going to give you grace to overcome it.” And Paul, having learned his divinely taught lesson, said this: “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” Although he might never have thought this in advance, Paul gained some of his deepest and richest Christian experience right there, through the thorn in the flesh that afflicted him.

Paul’s handling of this problem has important lessons to teach Christ’s followers in at least three areas of their own experience. First of all, it offers guidance as to the Christian response to frustration. Frustration seems to be an inescapable part of human experience; everyone has some project to complete or some ambition to realize in which success is denied him. The most common reaction to such frustration is to try to escape from it. Some seek escape in cynicism and bitterness of spirit. About the year 1700 one of the most able clergymen in the Church of England was the Irishman Jonathan Swift. He hoped to be given some position of importance in the church, perhaps a bishopric, but received nothing higher than the deanery of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. As a result he became cynical and bitter about life. One evidence of this is his well-known book Gulliver’s Travels, which is a cynical exposure of the smallness, the meanness, the bitterness of human nature. The little money Swift managed to accumulate during his life he left in his will to establish a madhouse, and he wrote the following epitaph:

He left the little wealth he had,

To found a house for fools and mad;

And showed, by one satiric touch,

No nation needed it so much.

A second way of seeking to escape from frustration is through alcohol. Edgar Allan Poe was brought up by foster parents in Richmond, Virginia. When he entered the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, he was not given much spending money, and this put him at a disadvantage in relation to his many classmates who, as the sons of wealthy planters, had plenty to spend. Poe gambled to recoup his losses; but he lost again. In his frustration he took to drink and became an alcoholic.

In extreme cases people seek escape from frustration in suicide. In the mid-eighteenth century a young English poet named Thomas Chatterton went up to London, the literary Mecca of the England of that day, to seek fame and fortune as a literary man. But recognition was slow in coming, and Chatterton committed suicide. William Wordsworth, in one of his poems, speaks of “Chatterton the marvelous boy, that sleepless soul that perished in his pride”; but it was much more in frustration than in pride that Chatterton died.

The Christian response to frustration is not to run away from it, nor to seek to escape it. It is, rather, to accept it, and by the grace of God to make the most and the best of it. This is what Paul did with his thorn in the flesh; and this is how Christian men in every age have responded. As a young man, Robert Louis Stevenson had literary ambitions, but he was handicapped by tuberculosis (which was to bring him to a premature grave in Samoa at the age of forty-four). This physical weakness, however, did not prevent him from pursuing his literary ambitions. At first he wrote with his right hand. When this failed, he learned to write with his left. When he could no longer do this he dictated his literary works; and when speech failed him, he dictated a novel in the deaf and dumb alphabet. This was the man who wrote, “This world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

Paul’s experience of his thorn in the flesh gives guidance as to the Christian understanding of unanswered prayer. Of course, to the properly instructed Christian, prayer is much broader and fuller than mere petition; it should include adoration, thanksgiving, and confession of wrongdoing. But petition is a definite part. The Christian asks God not merely for spiritual blessings but for material things as well; for example, right in the middle of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples there is this petition: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Sometimes God does not answer such requests affirmatively. But the petitioner who asks in faith will always be answered; he will be rewarded with what Robert Louis Stevenson called a “gracious visitation.” Adoniram Judson, one of the pioneer missionaries from the United States a century and a half ago, once said that no prayer of his had gone unanswered. But he had prayed to be sent to India, and had to settle for Burma. When his wife took sick he prayed that her life might be spared, but she died. He was imprisoned by one of the Burmese rulers when war broke out between that king and the British, and although he prayed for release, it did not come for months. All the time, however, the great prayer of his life was being answered; for through his work and witness and sufferings the Christian Gospel was coming to Burma in a vital way.

Finally, the experience of Paul’s thorn in the flesh illustrates something of the Christian attitude toward suffering. The Christian faith does not deny the reality of suffering. It is a grim, stabbing reality. Nor does the Christian faith teach that suffering is necessarily the fruit and punishment of sin, though it may be that. After all, what did Paul do to deserve his thorn in the flesh, or Jesus to merit his death on Calvary’s cross? But Christianity asserts that suffering, if properly responded to, if taken in the right spirit, can carve and mold Christian character. Said Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick:

If our vocabulary did not have in it words like “trouble,” “adversity,” “calamity,” “grief,” our vocabulary by no possible means could have in it words like “bravery,” “fortitude,” “patience,” “sacrifice.” He who knows no hardship will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong admixture of trouble [The Secret of Victorious Living, p. 14].

If Paul’s thorn was given in order to save him from spiritual pride, it undoubtedly succeeded in doing so. When he started out on his Christian pilgrimage, he described himself as “an apostle”; when he had progressed somewhat, he called himself “less than the least of all saints”; and when he had progressed still further, he described himself as “the chief of sinners.” Paul learned humility through the thorn in the flesh that afflicted him. To the Christian who responds in faith, suffering can produce greater Christ-likeness of character and richer and fuller Christian usefulness and service.

Norman V. Hope is professor of church history at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a graduate of Edinburgh University with the M.A., B.,D., and Ph.D. degrees.

Integrating literature and the Christian faith is a task that has concerned Christian readers through the centuries. The arts have always insisted that God’s reality is not limited to the practical, philosophical, and scientific spheres but includes the artistic world also. Just what is the relation between this artistic world and the believer’s faith in God? What does the enjoyment of beauty have to do with the central doctrines of the Christian revelation?

Many have questioned whether literature can be related to a Christian commitment. The significant thing about the Western tradition that has declared an antithesis between literature and faith is that it is either pre-Christian (Platonic) or post-biblical (the patristic era and following). The Bible itself is emphatically not a part of the tradition. There is no trace in the Bible of a negative attitude toward literature. In fact, Scripture itself is for the most part a work of literature. That is, the Bible is not primarily an expository treatise on systematic theology (though it contains this too) but rather a concrete, experiential presentation of the Christian view of reality in an artistic form.

The concept of artistic form is worth emphasizing, because Christians with a high regard for God’s infallible Word are usually so absorbed in content that they are scarcely aware of the formal characteristics of the Bible. Yet the concern with literary form is so pervasive that one cannot ignore it without drastically distorting the Bible as a written document. In a book entitled The Literary Study of the Bible, Richard G. Moulton discusses the variety of literary forms found in the Bible—epics of various types, oration, drama, lyric, ode, acrostic, hymn, elegy, encomium, epigram, epithalamion, prophecy, parable, vision, and so forth. Now this concern in the Bible with the literary aspect of discourse raises a number of questions, such as whether God inspired the form as well as the content and whether the formal excellence of the Bible deserves our attention and appreciation on its own merits. What is indisputable is that biblical example supports the integration of literature and the Christian faith, for Scripture is literature.

Biblical doctrine also leads to the conclusion that there is an inescapable connection between man’s ability to enjoy beauty and the truth of God’s revelation. Scripture teaches that beauty is an attribute of God and that he is the source of beauty, just as he is the source of truth. We must conclude this, it seems to me, even though the word translated “beauty” in English versions of the Bible encompasses a variety of Hebrew terms and includes the idea of spiritual as well as physical beauty.

David “desired from the LORD … to behold the beauty of the LORD” (Ps. 27:4); this suggests not only that beauty is an attribute of God but that beholding it is the desire of the believer. Similarly, Moses prayed, “Let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us” (Ps. 90:17). Zechariah exclaimed regarding God, “How great is His goodness, and how great is His beauty” (Zech. 9:17).

In the prophet Ezekiel we read that God gave to his people the gift of his beauty, which was perfect until men in their sinfulness desecrated it: “And your fame went forth among the heathen, because of your beauty; for it was perfect in My beauty, which I had put upon you, says the Lord GOD. But you trusted in your own beauty.… You have also taken your beautiful jewels of My gold and of My silver, which I had given you, and made images of men to yourself” (Ezek. 16:14–15, 17). From such a passage it would seem clear that beauty is a quality of God, that he bestows it as a gift to men, and that, as with all of God’s gifts, men can either use beauty to God’s glory or defile it by making it the object of religious devotion.

We know, too, that God created a beautiful universe and that the creation reflects his own nature. The creation account in Genesis tells us that “the earth was without form”; the divine act of creation consisted of filling the earth with a host of beautiful forms—trees and mountains and stars and flowers and animals and man. The beauty of God’s created universe, even in its fallen condition, affords us a glimpse of God’s beauty and craftsmanship, so that we cannot help saying with the psalmist, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork” (Ps. 19:1). That God, in his role as creator, is a craftsman with a great regard for beauty is equally evident in the descriptions of the new heaven and the new earth (Rev. 21). All descriptions of heaven indicate that it is a place of transcending beauty.

Various accounts of the Old Testament places of worship also tell us that God is the source of beauty and greatly concerned with it. We must conclude that God has a regard for more than functional practicality when we read that he “put this in the king’s heart, to beautify the house of the LORD” (Ezra 7:27). The Hebrew worshiper could declare about his God that “strength and beauty are in His sanctuary” (Ps. 96:6); if we could ask him whether the beauty he sensed at the temple was a quality of the God whom he worshiped there or of the temple surroundings, he would undoubtedly reply that both were a part of his total experience. In prophesying the restoration of Israel, God said, “The glory of Lebanon shall come to you, the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box tree together, to beautify the place of My sanctuary; and I will make the place of My feet glorious” (Is. 60:13).

The account of the building of the tabernacle reinforces the idea of God as the source of beauty and the dispenser of artistic talent to men. Commenting on the tabernacle, Moses stressed that it was God who had called Bezaleel and “filled him with the spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all kinds of work, and to work out skillful works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in the cutting of stones to set, and in carving wood, to make any kind of skillful work” (Ex. 35:31–33). And he said the same thing about other artisans who beautified the tabernacle (Ex. 35:35). After pages describing the artistic beauty of the tabernacle, the thought is reiterated that the making of this beautiful structure was nothing less than the outworking of God’s creative imagination (Ex. 39:42, 43).

Beauty, we conclude, is divine in its origin, as these Old Testament passages suggest specifically and as we can infer from the broader principle that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). Indeed, if God is perfect in all his being, could we suppose for a moment that he would be ugly rather than beautiful, or that he would be the source of the unbeautiful rather than the beautiful?

A further aspect of God’s relation to beauty is simply that he enjoys the contemplation of his beautiful creation. We read that after each of the days of creation “God saw that it was good.” And after the act of creation was completed, “God saw everything that He had made, and behold! it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). God felt delight and satisfaction in contemplating the perfection and beauty of what he had created.

Now what does this biblical view of beauty have to do with reading literature? Primarily, it validates enjoyment of the imaginative beauty of literary form as a Christian activity. Scripture tells us that man was created in the image of God. This means, among other things, that man has the ability to make something beautiful and to delight in it. When we enjoy the beauty of a sonnet or the magnificent artistry of an epic or the fictional inventiveness of a novel, we are not only contemplating a quality of which God is the ultimate source but also performing an act analogous to God’s enjoyment of the beauty of created things. To the question, How do we read literature to the glory of God?, the answer would seem to be, By enthusiastically enjoying its beauty and recognizing God as the ultimate source of that beauty. If beauty is a gift of God, we can best demonstrate our gratitude for the gift by using and enjoying it.

If the act of enjoying something beautiful seems either blameworthy or trivial, it is because we have fallen prey to an unbiblical attitude, whether it be derived from Christian asceticism or the Puritan ethic or scientific pragmatism. It is a fallacy to suppose either that pleasure itself is wrong or that an activity must be directly useful in order to be considered worthwhile. God has created us with the ability to enjoy, in a purely contemplative act, that which is beautiful, even as he himself does. Paul wrote to Timothy, “Charge those who are rich in this world that they be not high-minded nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6:17), establishing the principles that God is the giver of all good things, that he gives us these things to enjoy, and that the real misuse of them consists of going beyond the enjoyment of them to trusting in them.

The principle that God has given us all things to enjoy has seldom been sufficiently heeded by Christians. They are not the only culprits in this regard: in the whole body of literary theory, ancient and modern, I have seen few writers who do not speak slightingly of the specifically entertaining function of literature. But this view, based on the unwarranted assumption that the act of enjoyment is somehow ignoble, is surely wrong. C. S. Lewis has argued cogently that the ability simply to enjoy literature is precisely what separates the Christian from the unbeliever:

The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan.… The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experiences.… But the Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.… He has no objection to comedies that merely amuse and tales that merely refresh.… We can play, as we can eat, to the glory of God [Christian Reflections, p. 10].

The belief that pleasure itself is bad is not a biblical notion, though the Bible does emphasize that fallen man tends to pursue false or depraved pleasures. The biblical doctrine of heaven and hell, and the suffering of Jesus as bearer of our sin and pain, and the glorious fact that in the next life there will not “be any more pain” (Rev. 21:4) are intelligible only if pleasure is good and pain bad. In the same way, God’s natural revelation should have taught us long ago that enjoyment is not trivial simply because it does not produce practical results. Many of the most worthwhile things in life are matters of contemplation and enjoyment—sunsets and morning mists and mountain peaks and ocean waves and starlit skies and the play of children. The worship of practicality, so prevalent in our scientific culture, is something the Christian ought to be combating for the simple reason that it is not a Christian view of the world. We ought also to be in the forefront in the task of teaching people to enjoy the beautiful, whether in God’s natural creation or in culture. In an age when multitudes of people are using their leisure time in ridiculous and depraved ways, and when many do not know how to escape boredom in their leisure, the task of a truly liberal education—an education in literature and the arts as well as the sciences—becomes nothing less than a work of compassion.

Only the Christian has a genuine vision of the terrible effects of the fall and of the glory of restoration. He knows that he has been “bought with a price,” that God’s redeeming grace is not cheap but costly. I believe that the reality of Christian redemption is related to the Christian’s concern for the importance of beauty in the world and in culture. Having a high view of all that restoration of the fallen condition means, the Christian of all people should be protesting the ugliness of a fallen society. Restoration of that which is ugly to a state of beauty is a high and noble imperative, like restoring error-ridden fallen man to truth, depraved man to spiritual life. The Christian cannot be indifferent to the cultivation of beauty at a time when God’s creation, once perfect, is steadily being desecrated and stripped of its beauty. This explains, too, why the Christian can never rest content in an aesthetic theory that the artist has done his task if he has simply depicted ugliness and depravity, because these are the conditions of life. The whole point of Christian redemption is that it is not sufficient to leave fallen experience where it is. Restoration is the Christian’s calling—restoration from ugliness as well as from error and sin.

Literature is a powerful agent for arousing and energizing our awareness of beauty in all things. Our practical modern world is disposed to regard beauty as an extraneous luxury. But if one looks honestly and deeply within the human spirit as created by God, he will find a hunger for beauty as well as for truth and righteousness. And if one looks beyond the human spirit to the God of all glory—the God of creation and the God who reveals himself in a Book that is beautiful as well as truthful—he will conclude that God does not regard beauty as the unnecessary pursuit of an idle moment.

Matthew Arnold said the task of literature was to teach men “how to live.” What he had in mind was that literature, as the vehicle of classical, humanistic values, would become a substitute for the Christian religion and assume the role of a moral and spiritual guide in modern culture. Literature has not fulfilled—and for the Christian can never fulfill—what Arnold envisioned. But in a sense far richer than what Arnold intended, literature does address itself to the question of how to live. Seen from a Christian perspective, literature and the arts show us that life can be lived in a joyful awareness of the beauty God has poured forth on his creation and in culture. It is a great calling. The abundant life begins now and permeates the whole man, including his artistic impulses.

Leland Ryken is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College, Illinois. He holds teh B.A. from Central College, Illinois and teh Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. His book “The Apocalyptic Vision of Paradise Lost” is to be published by Cornell University Press next year.

THE BIRTH OF CHRIST

From the German of Rainer Maria Rilke¹Marienleben: Geburt Christi

Had you not your simplicity this Birth

Could not have happened thus to light our night.

God whose voice thunders over nations from His height

Makes Himself mild and comes through you to earth.

Had you imagined Him as greater might?

What then is greatness? By all ways of measure

His path is straight that leads Him to the Cross …

But here the kings come proffering their treasure—

Things they hold greatest gain against time’s loss.

Before your lap what gifts are these they toss?

All that has value in the world to them:

Are you surprised perhaps that they should fall

Before Him in the cave of Bethlehem?

Yet look within the soft folds of your shawl

Behold even now He has outdone them all!

The rarest amber ever shipped afar

Or goldsmith’s pride or spice on southwinds blowing—

Such as the Magi bear lured by His star—

Pass swiftly and pain marks them in their going;

But He (you’ll see) brings joy past all men’s knowing.

Translated by

M. WHITCOMB HESS

The year is 1979. A first-year theological student, on holiday in Switzerland, is walking through one of the cemeteries of Basel. Perhaps you find this a rather strange pastime for a student. Well, we all occasionally do strange things during our holidays—as well as at other times. As the young fellow looks at the tombstones, suddenly he sees a name that seems to ring a bell. “Karl Barth, 1886–1968.” Isn’t that a rather familiar name? Who in the world is he?

I projected this imaginary case into the future, ten years hence. But something similar might happen even today. It is remarkable but undeniable that Karl Barth, one of the giants of our century, is unknown to many people today. Although thirty years ago his name was almost a household word, not only in but also outside the Church, many of our daily newspapers did not even record the fact of his death on December 9, 1968.

Who was this great man, and why was he pushed into the background in recent years?

Before World War I

For the greater part of his life Barth was professor of theology, first in Germany and, after his dismissal from the University of Bonn by Adolf Hitler in 1935, in his native Switzerland. He was no dry-as-dust professor but one of the most creative thinkers of the century, a man who single-handed changed the whole theological climate of his day.

Up to the First World War, the dominating theology in Europe as well as in the United States was the older liberal theology. It was characterized by a strong optimism about the abilities of man and an extremely shallow conception of God. Over against the claims of nineteenth-century science, by whose progress it was deeply impressed, this liberal theology maintained that religion was necessary for man and that Christianity, the highest form of religion, was as valid in the modern age as it ever was.

But at the same time it admitted that the Christian faith had to be modernized. Much in the Bible, it was felt, was unacceptable to modern man, such as the miracles, the absoluteness and finality of Christ, and the idea that he is the ontological Son of God and that by his death he brought about the atonement for sin. All these elements have to be removed. But this does not really matter, for despite this “demythologizing” (the term may be modern but the matter is not!), we still can retain the real core of the Christian message. Adolf Harnack, the leader of German liberalism, summarized this core in three propositions: (1) the fatherhood of God; (2) the inestimable value of the human soul; (3) the ethical teaching of Jesus. In other words, the liberal teaching of that period was nothing else than a Christian form of natural religion, with its customary emphasis on the immanence of God and man’s inherent goodness.

During the First World War, while millions of men were dying on the battlefields of Europe, this theology broke down completely. Paul Tillich described his own experience as a chaplain in the German army in a graphic way. During the battle of Champagne in 1915 there was a night attack in which many of his personal friends were wounded or killed. “All that horrible long night I walked along the rows of dying men, and much of my German classical philosophy broke down that night—the belief that man could master cognitively the essence of his being, the belief in the identity of essence and existence.… The traditional concept of God was dead.”

Barth’s Discovery

Barth, who was a native of Switzerland, never was actively engaged in the war, but in those same years he entered the ministry in one of the small mountain villages of Switzerland. Soon he discovered that the liberal theology simply did not work. He had no message for his parishioners. He then began to study Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and saw that the message of Paul was quite different from that of his liberal teachers. Instead of the immanent God of liberalism he found a God who is holy and transcendent. Instead of the liberal conception of revelation as man’s discovery of God—who can be found everywhere—he discovered that according to the Bible God can be found only in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. Instead of the optimistic humanism of the older liberal school, he read about man as a sinner, who is lost in himself and can be saved only by divine grace.

These discoveries he published in his first major work, his Commentary on Romans. This book was a bombshell. It was completely different from the usual commentaries of that time. In the liberal commentaries, exegesis was a purely historical-grammatical exercise. One analyzed the text, put it into its historical and religious context, and then extracted the elements of truth. Naturally, this “truth” always coincided with the author’s own conception of truth. Barth, however, went far beyond the merely critical approach. He was looking for the theological message. What does Paul say to us people of the twentieth century? What does his message mean when we apply it to our personal, ecclesiastical, and religious situation? The exhilarating and liberating answer was: God, the holy and transcendent God, in whose sight all our own righteousness (whether personal, ecclesiastical, or religious) is sin and unbelief, speaks to us redemptively in his Son Jesus Christ, who became sin for us and in our stead. Throughout all his writings Barth has emphasized this same message. Indeed, his entire Church Dogmatics, a monumental work of thirteen big volumes, is one long commentary on this one theme: the revelation of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

Why So Much Influence?

But had not conservative theologians said the same all through the period of liberal hegemony? Why did Barth become so influential? There are several reasons.

1. Here was a man who himself came out of the liberal school. Although he came from a conservative background (his father’s Introduction to the New Testament was for many years used as a textbook in my own former university, the Free University of Amsterdam), Barth had studied under the great leaders of the older liberal school, such as Adolf Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann, and he had absorbed their teaching. When, after his rediscovery of Paul’s message he started to attack the liberal theology, the attack came from an insider who knew exactly what the weak points were. The presuppositions of liberalism had been his own, and he knew why they had failed him and would fail everyone else.

2. Barth spoke the language of his time. He was deeply influenced by such writers as the Danish theologian-philosopher Sören Kierkegaard and the Russian novelist Feodor Dostoevski. Their books were devoured by the post-war generation, and Barth, who spoke their language, thus spoke to the mood of this generation. Theology was no longer a speculative affair; it had become an existential matter touching the deepest layers of man’s existence.

3. Most important, Barth struck some of the deepest and most central chords of the biblical message. Over against the immanent “god” of the liberals, he spoke of the holy and transcendent God of the biblical revelation. Over against the shallow humanism of liberalism, he spoke of the grace of God. Over against the liberal idea of revelation as man’s discovery of God, he spoke of revelation as God’s act in Jesus Christ, condescending to man in his blindness and unbelief. Salvation was no longer a matter of man’s improving himself by following the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount; it was again recognized as fully and wholly God’s initiative in Jesus Christ. Admittedly, some of young Barth’s emphases were rather one-sided. Barth himself admitted this in some of his later writings, especially in his small book The Humanity of God. But it cannot be denied that his theology meant an entirely new approach. Barth repeated it again and again: There is only one truly Christian theology, namely, a theology based on God’s revelation in Christ. And this was his conviction throughout his life. In his Dogmatics in Outline, a series of lectures on the Apostles’ Creed given to German students immediately after the last war, Barth said that the second article on Jesus Christ is the heart of the Christian confession:

The second article does not just follow the first, nor does it just precede the third; but it is the fountain of light on which the other two are lit.… Article II, Christology, is the touchstone of all knowledge of God in the Christian sense, the touchstone of all theology. “Tell me how it stands with your Christology, and I shall tell you who you are.”

4. In all this Barth returned to the insights of the Reformation. The Heidelberg Catechism, for instance, explains the first article of the Apostles’ Creed as follows: “I believe that the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who of nothing made heaven and earth with all that is in them, who likewise upholds and governs the same by his eternal counsel and providence, is for the sake of Christ his Son my God and my Father, in whom I so trust …” (Lord’s Day IX). Indeed, Barth was in the tradition of the Reformers, and it was he who sparked the renewed study of the theology of the Reformers, which was, and still is, so characteristic of the post-liberal period. Yet his own theology was not just a mere repetition of the answers given by orthodoxy; again and again the old answers were set within a new and modern framework, resulting in new depths and new perspectives, and at times also in marked deviations from the traditional Reformation theology.

All these factors caused Barth’s voice to be heard everywhere, and it continued to be heard throughout the whole period between the two world wars. It became particularly loud in the thirties, when Barth strongly opposed the so-called German Christians, who regarded Hitler as a special instrument in the hand of Providence and urged the Christian Church in Germany to recognize him as such. Barth recognize this as a pseudo-Christian version of “natural theology,” which thinks it can hear God’s voice in the ordinary facts of history and read God’s message directly from these facts. Over against this Barth maintained that God’s voice can be heard only in Jesus Christ. In the famous Barmen Declaration of 1934, in which the Confessing Church expressed its Christian opposition to the false religion of the “German Christians,” Barth and his friends confessed that their sole trust was in Jesus Christ. The first article begins with the quoting of John 14:6 and John 10:1 and 9, and then continues with these words:

Jesus Christ, as He is testified to us in Holy Scripture, is the One Word of God, which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine that the Church can and must acknowledge as sources of its proclamation, except and beside this one Word of God, other events and powers, forms and truths, as God’s revelation [cf. W. Niesel, Reformed Symbolics, 1962, 358].

The Church Dogmatics

Barth’s leadership in the Confessing Church led to his expulsion from the University of Bonn. He returned to Switzerland, where he was appointed professor of systematic theology in the University of Basel. Here he began the great work of his life, the writing of his Church Dogmatics. In the course of the years this work grew into a monumental dogmatic cathedral. First of all, it contains his own understanding and interpretation of the message of Scripture. Scripture itself plays an essential part in it. Although it contains speculative elements, it is undeniably a serious attempt to base theology on Scripture. No recent theologian has put so much pure exegesis into his dogmatics. I know ministers who will not prepare a sermon before they check to see what, if anything, Barth has written on the text or passage. In the second place, Barth in the Church Dogmatics enters into a penetrating discussion with the church fathers of all ages: the fathers of the early Church; the great church father of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas; the Reformers; the fathers of the Post-Reformation period, both Lutheran and Reformed; the great leaders of Liberalism, notably Schleiermacher, founding father of the liberal school of thought. The Church Dogmatics contains some of the finest analyses of the history of theology that have ever been written. Yet in all the volumes the central theme is always that God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ as a God of grace and mercy.

This was the main reason why Barth’s theology appealed to a generation that had come out of the ruins of the older liberalism. It was as if a new world opened itself to them. Many ministers learned anew what real preaching is. A new interest in systematic theology manifested itself, resulting in the course of the years in a flood of dogmatic handbooks. Exegesis too profited from the new theological climate, and many new sets of commentaries and many volumes of biblical theology appeared. One may even say that such great works as the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament edited by Kittel are the indirect fruit of Barth’s theology.

For many belonging to the generation between the two world wars, Karl Barth was the theological leader and spiritual father. Even during the last world war Barth played a leading role, by encouraging his brethren in all countries, irrespective of which side of the conflict they were on, by the letters he sent from Basel.

After World War Ii

After the Second World War, however, a change took place. A new liberal theology arose. Actually it started during World War II, in 1941, when Rudolf Bultmann, professor of New Testament theology in Marburg, addressed a meeting of German ministers on the topic “New Testament and Mythology.” In this lecture Bultmann proposed an entirely different approach. He did not want a simple return to the older liberal theology of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, but at the same time he rejected Barth’s “solution.” In his opinion Barth dealt with revelation as if it were a stone falling straight from heaven into a strange world. Bultmann wanted to take his starting point in modern man with his existential needs and problems. Before we can hear the answer of the Bible, he said, we must know what the problems are for which we desire an answer. At this point Bultmann turned for help to the contemporary existentialist philosophy, especially that of Heidegger, his former colleague at Marburg. In its analysis of human existence, existentialism gives us the true picture of man, Bultmann felt, and with this picture in mind we should turn to the Bible. He believed that the Bible does give us an answer to our human, existential problems but that this answer can be found only after we have demythologized the Bible and translated its message into existential categories.

After 1945 this new approach caught on everywhere, to such an extent that both on the Continent of Europe and in the English-speaking world the theological discussion was dominated by the new theology. In Germany the chairs of theology in the main universities were occupied by former students or followers of Bultmann. In the United States Reinhold Niebuhr’s leadership was replaced by that of Paul Tillich, and later came such extreme movements as the God-is-dead theology. In Britain the new theology found eloquent defenders in such men as Bishop J. A. T. Robinson and R. Gregor Smith. One of the results was that Barth and his theology receded into the background. Some soon spoke of the “eclipse” of Barthianism and of the post-Barthian era.

But why this change? The first and general answer is that it was in conformity with the mood of the times. Everywhere after World War II one could hear the cry for change and renewal. But this is not the only answer. I believe the eclipse of Barth’s theology was due also to some weaknesses in it.

Barth’s Weaknesses

In the first place, there was a lack of emphasis on man’s personal existence and responsibility. In the first years Barth so strongly emphasized the divine, transcendent aspect that the human aspect was almost neglected. Not only was faith seen as God’s gift, but God himself was seen as the real subject of faith. There was continuity neither in the divine revelation nor in the responding faith of man. Later on, Barth admitted that this approach was one-sided and tried to correct it, but the damage had been done. In addition, in the second half of his career there was an increasing tendency toward what I would call an “objectivism of grace.” For instance, Barth taught that in Christ’s death all men are “objectively” reconciled with God. Some—namely, the believers—know it; others, the unbelievers, do not; yet it is objectively true of them all. But does this not mean that man in his unbelief, in the existential need and pride of his unbelief, is no longer taken seriously? This was the charge the new liberal theology leveled—and still levels—against Barth. In strong reaction it asks: How can one approach modern man with such an objectivizing message, which does not take his existential situation into account? Must we not start from the other end, from man himself and his existential situation?

A second weakness of Barth’s theology was that he never satisfactorily solved the problem of the authority of God’s Word. Undoubtedly, the Bible had the central place in his theology. His one desire was to derive his theology from the Bible, and he did not hesitate to call the Bible the Word of God. But at the same time this expression was bracketed by far-reaching qualifications. The Bible is not the Word of God, in the sense of a direct identification, but it has again and again to become the Word of God (i.e., the actual conception of revelation). In itself it is only the human, fallible witness to revelation, and as a human, fallible witness it may freely be subjected to historical criticism. Barth has always defended the good right of such criticism (though, unlike Brunner, he hardly ever practiced it). But of course, once one accepts the critical approach as legitimate, it becomes theologically very difficult, if not impossible, to oppose radical criticism. If the Bible in itself is nothing more than a human witness to revelation, why should we accept everything that is in it? Must we not strip it of the mythological framework in which the authors expressed themselves as children of their time, a framework that is completely out of tune with our modern scientific outlook? In addition, there was Barth’s concentration of all revelation in Jesus Christ, to the exclusion of all general revelation. This one-sidedness was bound to lead to a reaction in which the significance of the general revelation would easily be overrated.

In the third place, Barth’s theology completely neglected the problems involved in the relation between natural science, with its empirical approach, and faith. There is a strange silence on this point in the thirteen volumes of the Church Dogmatics. In the volume that deals with the doctrine of creation, for example, there is no discussion of evolutionism and its implications for the Christian faith. In his strong dislike of all “eristic” (apologetic) theology (Brunner), Barth virtually neglected the apologetic conversation with the scientist. Again I believe that the new theology is a reaction against this omission, with all the sad results of a reaction theology, that is, of going to the other extreme.

The result of the new developments is that many in the younger generation are saying: Karl Barth? Ah yes, he was the chap who dominated the discussions before 1945; now we are living in another time with different problems.

Final Appraisal

My own opinion is that we should not dismiss Barth easily. Despite the limitations of his theological system, he undoubtedly is one of the giants in the history of theology. One must put him on a level with such men as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Schleiermacher, men who molded the thinking of their own time and of subsequent centuries. I am deeply convinced that in the long run the theologies of men such as Bultmann and Tillich will lose their significance and be regarded as abortive attempts to translate the Christian message into the thought categories of the twentieth century. I do not deny that they make a contribution, and that we can learn from them. But I also believe that when the period of existentialist theology is past, Barth will still be with us, just as Augustine and Thomas and Luther and Calvin are still with us.

Klaas Runia is vice-principal and professor of systematic theology at the Reformed Theological College, Geelong, Victoria, Australia. He holds the degrees of B.D., M.Th., and Th.D. from the Free University, Amsterdam. Among his books is “Karl Barth’s Doctrin of Holy Scripture.”

Are Christmas carols coming to the end of their run? “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” has done rather well since Charles Wesley wrote it in 1739, but that was long before the “Age of Aquarius.”

When the moon is in the seventh house,

And Jupiter aligns with Mars;

Then peace will guide the planets

And love will steer the stars.

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius …

This “rock hymn” from the Broadway show Hair is more than a hit. It is sacred music, “magic crystal revelation” for those who seek “the mind’s true liberation”—in the Age of Aquarius. No doubt this astrological doggerel needs all the help it can get from both drugs and the beat; but then, rock, dope, and sex are all part of Aquarian liberation. Like the Christmas carols, “Aquarius” is a hymn of salvation; it proclaims an everlasting kingdom of harmony and peace. The salvation of the new star-fated age is the ancient hope of Eastern mysticism: the transformation of human consciousness.

Just how ecstasy will bring in the political kingdom is not too clear. Will the management have to stop the world because so many young people are getting off? Dropping out and “turning on” might conceivably produce an age of anarchy rather than of peace. One observer of last summer’s Woodstock festival was disturbed by the “bovine passivity” of the drugged masses. Watching those groovy pastures, he feared other shows to come when the controllers might cut the groove, package the visions, and preserve for the devout only the freedom to stay stoned.

The New Left has worked up a formula for using mind-altering trips to serve society-altering revolution. The new mix adds Freud to Marx in a Molotov cocktail that is aimed at all repression, psychological and social. Revolutionary action will smash personality structure and social structure together.

The Age of Aquarius begins to look like a bad trip. Yet it has a desperate fascination for one who sees no way out, and hopes against hope. Long ago the star of Bethlehem led astrologers from the bondage of the zodiac to the worship of the infant Saviour. Those who now turn to the East seeking the harmony of the cosmic spheres have missed the sign of Bethlehem.

“And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12).

Yes, we have all heard of the angel’s word to the shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem. Carols are the sound of the season, amplified to fill our shopping centers. “While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground.…” We all have heard, but who has listened?

“Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.…” The Lord—in a manger! Feel the shock of the shepherds. Chilling darkness in the open field, then lightning, blazing lightning that did not strike in one flash but engulfed them in blinding glory. Exposed against the stones of the pasture, they heard the announcement of the Messenger from another world.

The constriction of their fear opened to a sense of unbearable joy. “Good tidings of great joy … to all the people … a Saviour, Christ the Lord.” They had watched for sheep but they witnessed what the prophets and sages had awaited through the centuries. The Messiah was born!

From darkness to light, from shock to bliss, from fear to joy. The armies of the Lord of hosts shout, “Glory to God in the highest!” Surely their praise must crumble every wall of oppression, every dark tower of pride and violence. The new age of God’s deliverance has broken in at last.

But a greater shock is planted in the words of the angel. The sign of heaven is most unheavenly. The sign of the angels, the sign of the Lord’s birth is this: “Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”

The Lord of the angels—in a manger, the feedbin for cattle? The sign is a scandal. If this is the message, why should angels bring it? Ought not the legions of angels to march on Jerusalem or Rome? What heavenly deliverance is this?

Luke is at pains to tell us how the Christ came to be born in Bethlehem. Caesar has decreed a tax registration. At Caesar’s command the royal line of David must be enrolled and taxed.

What of God’s promise that he would establish David’s throne forever? Shall the birth of the Lion of the tribe of Judah be determined by the decree of Caesar? David himself was severely judged for daring to number God’s holy people (2 Sam. 24). Shall Caesar enroll the Lord’s anointed? There, on the emperor’s list, a name must be written down: “Jesus … Son of David … Son of God!”

The hallelujahs of the angels reflect the perspective of heaven on the strange exercise of God’s rule. Long ago Elijah had been taught that lesson. Standing alone in his contest with the pagan priests of an apostate nation, he had been vindicated by fire from heaven. But after his triumph came despair. The pagan Jezebel was still queen, Baal was still worshiped. Elijah fled to the wilderness but was brought to the mount of God. There he found that God appeared not in the great signs of the divine presence, fire, wind, earthquake—but in the whispered voice that declared his will. Not by fire from heaven but by his ordering of history God would destroy the worship of Baal. Elisha would be made prophet; Jehu, king; and Hazael, a Syrian king, would be raised up to be the sword of God’s judgment and the instrument of his plan.

Yes, Caesar decrees an enrollment, but Caesar’s decree serves God’s purpose. By means of Caesar God’s providence brings Mary and Joseph to David’s royal city so that the word of the Lord might be fulfilled: “But thou, Bethlehem … out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old” (Mic. 5:2, ASV).

In the scandal of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, under Caesar’s dominion, is hidden the purpose that the angels praise. God can withhold his judgment and still carry forward his work of salvation. His avenging angels can carry the mystery of the Gospel.

For there is more to the scandal of the Lord’s birth. He is laid in a manger. There is no room for him in the inn of the city of David. Incredible! Of all places—a birth in Bethlehem of one in the royal line! Of all times—when those who could trace their lineage were gathered there by Caesar’s edict!

No, to Joseph’s desperate efforts and Mary’s silent need Bethlehem offers only the corner of a stable and a manger. With vivid irony the words of Isaiah find unimagined fulfillment: “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib; but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider” (Isa. 1:3). His master’s crib! In the ancient Greek translation of Isaiah Luke’s word for “manger” occurs in this passage, and “master’s” is literally “lord’s” (kuriou). “The manger of the Lord”: the ass knows it, but not “my people”! “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11).

The sign of the manger is given to shepherds. This too is scandal to the proud. Only on Christmas cards have shepherds and angels come to belong together. The wealthy rulers sleeping in Jerusalem—or perhaps in Bethlehem’s inn—would hold shepherds in contempt. God chooses the nobodies over the somebodies; the mighty angels pass every earthly aristocracy to bring the blessing of heaven to rough men of the fields. The manger sign is no more amazing than the “stablemen” who are summoned by heaven to the manger of the Lord.

Yet they are summoned, and, half-blinded still, they go running and stumbling to Bethlehem. The scandal of the manger is no stone of stumbling to their faith. They will find the child there, shut out, but not abandoned; in the manger, but wrapped in swaddling clothes. No other woman attends his mother, but she lovingly cleanses and swaddles her infant son. Her devotion makes the swaddling clothes a sign, too. The shepherds find the Lord both given and received—in the manger.

There in the dark stable they see the glory of the Lord in the manger. No heavenly light glows from the stone feedbin; only a guttering oil lamp shows them the smile on the drawn face of Mary.

But they have the sign, and they see the Christ. From the fields where David harped his young praise to God they have come to bow before that Son whom David called his Lord.

“The Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end” (Luke 1:32, 33). How these words of Gabriel must have illumined Mary’s memory as the shepherds told of fresh angelic tidings. She had not been forgotten or forsaken. The Messiah—born of God’s promise, the Messiah! The manger straw cannot hide his glory, for he has come to the poor and lowly. Again Mary may rejoice in God her Saviour, who scatters the proud, puts down princes from their thrones, and exalts them of low degree (Luke 1:46–55). He is born in this stable because he is the Prince of Salvation, come to shine upon those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.

Yes, there in the manger is revealed the glory of the Lord. The manger is a sign of greater wonder than the birth of the Davidic King. He is the Lord’s Christ (Luke 2:26), but he is more. The angel calls him “Christ, the Lord (Luke 2:11). When the virgin conceives and bears a Son, “he shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32, ASV). God’s ancient sign, greater than any that man might ask from the heights to the depths (Isa. 7:11, 14), has been given at last. Every sign of God’s covenant promise, from the arching bow in the clouds to the sign of Jonah in the depths of death—every sign must wait for the sign of the manger. The salvation that God promises is so great that he must come himself to bring it in. David could repel the Philistines to deliver the people of God, but David’s greater Son must overcome all the powers of darkness, for he must save his people from their sins. When God “lifts up his head” in victory, it is to his own throne, where he must sit until every enemy, even death, is put under his feet (Ps. 110; 1 Cor. 15:25, 26; Eph. 1:19–23).

The Lord of the angels is exalted far above them, for “he hath inherited a more excellent name than they” (Heb. 1:4, ASV). “Of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever …” (Heb. 1:8, ASV).

When the infant of the manger was taken to the temple a week after his birth, devout old Simeon blessed God with the child in his arms, saying, “for mine eyes have seen thy salvation … a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel” (Luke 2:30, 32, ASV).

Only the Lord, dwelling between the cherubim in his holy place, is the glory of his people Israel. When the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, “we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14, ASV). Simeon knew that at last the glory that had appeared of old in the tabernacle had again entered the temple. The glory had come, for the Lord of glory had come. John went before him to proclaim his glory; yet he was not the Light but came to bear witness to the true Light, who was coming into the world.

In the darkness of the manger the true Light shines. Where the cattle are let loose and where sheep tread (Isa. 7:25), there is the sign of the Lord of glory. This sign is his sign because he is Lord. No angel could take his place in the manger, for his work is beyond the power of the heavenly host. Those pure spirits, created but not born, could visit the wrath of heaven upon this rebellious planet, but they could not bring salvation to the darkness of Bethlehem.

Only glory from above all angels could make a manger the sign of salvation. The sign of the manger is God’s sign of love. “Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world that he might live through him” (1 John 4:9. ASV).

The glory of the manger is the glory of God’s love: blinding, burning grace. The Lord himself came, the Son and Sun of love, the Giver and the Gift. Had he come in the midst of the angels to the fields of Bethlehem, then no man—shepherd, scribe, or emperor—could have stood before the glory of his face. His coming with the holy angels will yet summon the living and the dead to judgment. But had he so come to Bethlehem, to judge in righteousness, no guilty sinner could have stood before him. The angelic joy would be only the solemn triumph of heaven over a world of rebels, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Bitter men, blind to their own sins, mocked him because he did not come with angels. “Show us a sign from heaven,” they said. “Come down from the cross, and we will believe!” Such men are still mocking; they boast about their own future when they will establish a justice that God cannot deliver.

But the sign of the angels points us to the glory of the manger and the cross. Heaven’s high glory descends upon the hillside with the angelic host—but the word of the angel directs the shepherds away to a glory that is greater still: the Lord of the angels comes to give himself in the place of sinners. At the manger the Mighty God glorified his name; at the cross he glorified it again. When God himself, when the Son of the Highest, hallows his name in blood, then the glory of grace is lifted above the heavens.

Our generation watches rockets burn into the empty sky; man ascends into the heavens, but he meets no one. He turns from the void without to the void within and seeks communion with the cosmos in the alchemy of the mind.

The search is vain. Suppose a man were to gain not the hallucinations of drugs or yet more dangerous delusions, but entrance into the circle of the angels of light. That happened to the shepherds; yet they tasted joy not from a mind-blowing experience with cosmic Powers on the hillside but from the dark manger where they found the Lord.

The One who has ascended above all the angels is the One who first descended to the depths. “Joy to the world, the Lord has come!” All our own seeking has been fleeing. We have not scaled the heights to find him, but he has pierced the depths to find us. The real and living God has come; the angel’s gospel calls you to the manger to meet him. It is dark now, but a Light shines, the Light of the new age, the living personal Light, Jesus Christ. Don’t “turn on” the weird lights of your own illusions. Turn from rebellion and illusion to love, “for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

Edmund P. Clowney is president of Westminister Theological Seminary. He is a graduate of Wheaton College, Westminister, and Yale Divinity School. He has written several books, including “Preaching and Biblical Theology,” and was Christianity Today’s first “Eutychus.”