Our readers are quick to catch changes that are sprung on them unannounced. During the summer months we normally skip one issue of the magazine. We will do so again this year, but instead of keeping readers uninformed for one month we will print two issues three weeks apart. Therefore the summer issue dates will be July 18, August 1, and August 22. We will go back to the normal two-week schedule with the September 12 issue. The summer change enables us to schedule vacations better and catch up on things we have missed during the winter season.

How to understand and interpret the current scene in the light of commitment to Christ is our perennial problem. This issue of the magazine goes to press against a backdrop of the Pope’s visit to Geneva, Nixon’s conference with Thieu and the promise to bring home 25,000 servicemen from Viet Nam, the occupation of the National Council of Churches’ offices by James Forman, the end of the Warren Court, and the singularly unproductive Communist summit meeting in Moscow with Red China and Czechoslovakia much in the limelight.

In all of this, humility dictates that we confess our own puzzlement about the turn of events, acknowledge that we don’t always make sense out of things as they are, and at the same time reaffirm our conviction that God is the Lord of history. He knows what’s happening, and he is bringing about the consummation.

One characteristic of our day is confusion—confusion between nations, within nations, and in individual lives. An affirmation of one day is refuted the next. A position taken by some is rejected by others. A philosophy dear to one group is held up to ridicule by another.

Behind this confusion lie diverse sources of reference. What is good to some is evil to others. What someone regards as vitally important is unimportant to someone else. That which one person considers relevant could hardly be more irrelevant to another.

There is but one way to abolish confusion and to substitute peace and unity, and it is offered by God. As the Apostle Paul affirms, “God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Cor. 14:33a).

The God of creation and redemption has a plan for every man, and confusion results when he goes any other way. The obvious cause of the world’s unrest is that so many are outside the will of God. Those who would cure the world’s ills by any means other than through the Gospel of Jesus Christ and all that it implies are therefore adding to the confusion, not lessening it.

I can hear someone saying that little good comes from oversimplifying a problem. True, but it is not an oversimplification to recognize that God has a solution for every problem of mankind. The Creator of the universe, the author of our redemption, the One who can take all the intricate aspects of the lives of every single person who loves him and so operate upon and control them that they work out for good—surely he has not only the answer to the confusion of men and nations but also the power to carry out his holy designs!

In that the world system is at variance with God’s most holy purposes it is like a dislocated joint. There is pain, distress, and loss of function. As a dislocation needs early reduction to relieve pain and restore function, so the world needs God’s cure in the person and work of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. To offer this cure is the Church’s calling.

A wise patient realizes his condition and quickly seeks relief. Surely the Gospel, God’s remedy for a confused world, requires haste by those to whom it has been committed!

In a social order torn by strife and seething with unrest, man needs to hear the voice of love: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28–30).

O that ministerial sociologists within the Church would change and become preachers of the unsearchable riches of God’s mercy and grace! O that those who yearn for social justice and righteousness would realize that this must be a matter of the heart, rather than of legal compulsion! O that those who, acutely aware of the evils of poverty and discrimination, try to remedy them by governmental edict and money would realize that there can be no lasting solution to these or any other problems aside from the transforming power of Jesus Christ in the lives of individuals!

And I might add: O that those who are so acutely sensitive to the composite sins of society might be equally sensitive to the personal sins that are a stench in the nostrils of a holy God. Corporate sins are real, but they are no more real than the individual sins of the flesh and the spirit.

Does not our Lord speak to us today, calling us to repentance for our personal sins and to faith in him before social reformation can have the seal of his blessing? We are taking entirely too much for granted, not only with the young people in our churches but also with adults, for within the churches there are many who have never entered into a personal relationship with God through faith in his Son.

For this reason we are, as the Chinese say, trying to “carve rotten wood,” and with disastrous results. There is confusion within the Church because the content of the Christian faith is not stressed. And there is confusion outside the Church as unbelievers see in Christians little to commend the faith they profess, while the person and work of Jesus Christ are pushed aside in the frantic attempt of some to become “relevant” through social activism.

Suppose a patient should come to a physician with symptoms that proved to be cancer. But the doctor also notices a disfiguring harelip and gives it top priority. For a time the patient might look better, but he would still be dying of cancer.

Many in the Church ignore or play down the fact of sin and its resulting separation of the sinner from God. There is much talk about Jesus as a “revolutionary” and his burning “social consciousness” with little or no mention of the fact that he came into this world to redeem sinners, and that until he is Saviour he cannot be Lord.

But, you say, what about poverty and hunger? Are Christians to ignore the plight of the poor and destitute? And further, how can one effectively preach the Gospel of God’s saving grace to the poverty-stricken? The answer is that this is not an either-or problem but rather one of priorities. When the Church concerns itself chiefly with secular and material needs, it neglects the one thing that can eventually lead to the amelioration of both. Unless the Church keeps its eyes fixed squarely on its God-given task, it will continue to add confusion to a confused world.

When the Church’s interest began to swing away from the central message of the Gospel, it swung toward civil rights. At the moment it is on poverty, and tomorrow it will probably be on peace. What the Church needs to recognize is that without Christ in the hearts of men, civil rights may be no more than a mirage, poverty a continuing blight, and peace an unattainable hope—all because, like a rabbit-chasing bird dog, the Church has left its primary mission and calling.

Furthermore, all the major denominations are now caught up in the movement toward ecclesiastical union, in which organization takes precedence over the content of the Christian faith. Lip service is given to doctrine—but only as a matter to be dealt with after organic union is achieved!

Little wonder that confusion continues. How can there be an effective witness of the Church without clear affirmations about the person and work of Jesus Christ as revealed in Scripture.

But see what happens if one insists on his virgin birth, his miracles, his vicarious atonement for our sins, his bodily resurrection, and his coming again!

If for the sake of unity these are ignored or played down, will such a union be blessed? Will it not add to the confusions of the world?

Helpless Before An Idea

A serendipitous experience came my way the other day. Hot on the scent of an elusive quotation in the library, I got diverted by an old book that was as relevant to my quest as the flowers that bloom in the spring (I have what some have called “a grasshopper mind”).

The tome in question dealt with the trial of John Macleod Campbell, the Scots divine condemned by the General Assembly in 1831 because of his teaching on the atonement. “Macleod Campbell’s teaching was unsettling,” said the writer, “and ecclesiastics, helpless as usual in the presence of an idea, were well content to be rid of him.” What caught my eye was his description of the proceedings, which included a verbal slip of Principal John Lee, clerk of the assembly. Transposing his nouns, Lee declared that “those doctrines of Mr. Campbell would remain and flourish after the Church of Scotland had perished and was forgotten.” Whereupon Erskine of Linlathen, saint, mystic, and lay theologian, said to those sitting beside him in the hall: “This spake he, not of himself, but being High Priest that year he prophesied.”

I mention this because readers of this journal will have learned from its indefatigable British reporter that the latest Church of Scotland General Assembly was restless about continuing to view the Westminster Confession as a subordinate standard. That the mother church of Presbyterianism should take a softer line on heresy by criticism of what another prophetic (newspaper) slip not long ago called the Westminster Concession will raise some eyebrows. The inevitable question will be asked about orthodoxy, relevance, and the Church’s witness today. “Even an orthodox theologian can be spiritually dead,” Thielicke points out, “while perhaps a heretic crawls on forbidden bypaths to the sources of life.”

And yet, and yet.… those of us with no allegiance to comprehensive man-made bases of faith, rules of conduct (cf. Big Jim Taylor), and Articles of War (Salvation Army) are deprived of a discipline, and might just drift into what Paul Bull once called the “pleasant suburbs of pious opinions” that surround the central fortress of the Christian faith.

Another thing, now that heresy trials are no longer with us to keep us on our toes. I am convinced that many an evangelical’s reputation for orthodoxy depends on his not being asked certain questions, on his astuteness in keeping his mouth shut on thorny topics—and on the silence of his family. The possibilities for blackmail are unthinkable.

Silence On License?

I appreciated your remarks in “Communists Are Right About Some Things” (June 6) in which you cite the frightening rise of amorality in our society.

When one reads the statistics of production of literary pornography et al. and begins to grasp the dimensions of this problem it is even more a cause for anxiety. This coupled with the Church’s all but total silence is remarkable.…

The tragedy of our day is that, while censorship is not the answer to this problem, nor will it ever be, the only remaining restraint of evil left to a democratic society is moral suasion, and even this force has not been exerted by the Church in the face of this crisis. The misconceptions concerning the nature of freedom which so abound in society today arise basically from the rejection of the Bible as God’s revelation. Unless we as evangelicals who profess to believe that God has revealed his mind in Scripture declare that divine condemnation upon license and libertarianism, how will the world know good from evil? They await an answer; dare we meet it with preoccupied silence?

Eastern Regional Director

National Association of Evangelicals

Allentown, Pa.

Telling Actions

I regret that the article by Richard Jungkuntz, “The Lutheran Quest for a More Visible Unity” (June 6), does not tell all. The complete silence about the American Lutheran Church’s declaration of fellowship with the Lutheran Church in America amazes me. Thus far the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod has had only “unofficial” doctrinal discussions with the LCA. If the LCMS has fellowship with the ALC, and the ALC has fellowship with the LCA, it follows that the LCMS has followship with the LCA. If A = B and B = C, then A = C. ALC actions speak louder than words.

Thanks for the Current Religious Thought articles by John Warwick Montgomery (Jan. 17, March 28, June 6). [That] very many agree with him is shown by no less than 240 overtures in the Workbook for the July 11–19 LCMS convention in Denver. They oppose fellowship with the ALC at this time, request withdrawal from the Lutheran Council U.S.A., particularly in view of its Christ-denying publication entitled “Who can this be?,” reject the proposal to join the Lutheran World Federation, and call for affirmation of the sound doctrine and practice of our church. In contrast to this overwhelming number of overtures from all parts of our country, only about one-fifth as many overtures call for more latitude in doctrine and practice. The quest for unity must continue, but never at the expense of compromise or Christ-denying diplomacy.

Lutheran Center

Pittsburgh, Pa.

In connection with the Montgomery articles on the Missouri Synod I think one thing should be added.… The strong push of the leadership of our Synod to bring us into fellowship with the American Lutheran Church and into full membership in the Lutheran World Federation should not be construed to mean that the Missouri Synod will be drawn closer to evangelicals such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY represents. The very opposite will be the case! The Missouri Synod will gradually drift toward the WCC, the NCC, and the entire ecumenical movement, just as the ALC and the LWF are now completely involved in the modern unevangelical ecumenical movement. This is clearly the intent of the present leadership, which now is beginning to turn also toward these ecumenical affiliations. Former “Lutheran Hour” preacher Walter Maier and Dr. Eugene Bertermann, present executive-secretary of our Lutheran Laymen’s League, were and are friendly toward closer ties with evangelicals. But this will not be the case if Missouri joins in fellowship with the ALC and joins the LWF.

Prof. of Systematic Theology

Concordia Seminary, St. Louis

Strasbourg, France

Foremost Mission

I wish I had said that (“The Churches and James Forman,” June 6). Seldom have I read an article of which every word elicited from deep within my very being—mind, heart, soul, and body—a sincere “amen.”

Our greatest problem among so many of the clergy today is that in seeking a “quest for mission,” we have forgotten that our very vows of ordination and oath of commitment have already laid on us a prime mission, above all else, that is, to “Preach Christ and him crucified.”

Chaplain (Colonel), U.S. Army

Fort Monroe, Va.

Please let me say a few words in your column re James Forman.… Even black civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin calls this demand ridiculous and preposterous. Also many Negro ministers are against this approach.

Three hundred years ago African tribal chiefs sold their subjects into slavery. The U. S. Civil War ended slavery in the United States. Abraham Lincoln in his Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery. Since 1865 no U. S. citizen should feel any guilt for slavery, since every Negro had his or her chance to progress. Parishioners in all churches should say “No” to any minister who gives in to Forman!

Oakland, Calif.

I am appalled to see how naive I am about the injustices that occur among the poor in our country. And as I repeat the incidents I hear, I see that my white friends have been living with the same blind spot. Safe in a middle-class society, many of us grew up without ever really being confronted with America’s painful injustices. We must rearrange our thinking.… Times demand a “beyond the call of duty” kind of action by individuals as well as organizations.…

How poignant to observe a patriotic program where Christian children pledged allegiance to “one nation indivisible.” To watch happy, proud Negro youngsters sing their hearts out about America, land of the free, knowing that some day they will find out that it isn’t all that free. How sad to know that Negro friends must prepare their youngsters for the inevitable problems they will face from Christian and non-Christian white people alike.…

When we think or speak of other races, we must no longer think of them, but of us.… Still I must continue to hope, work, and pray that finally each citizen will wake up and do something. America isn’t the other fella. It is you and it is me. And we can change things if enough of us choose to let Christ’s love work through us.

Rochester, N.Y.

His And Hers

I believe the article by Andre S. Bustanoby, “Love, Honor, and Obey” (June 6), to be superb. How refreshing to know that there are a few people left who adhere to the biblical concept of the marriage relationship and not the 50/50 partnership idea.

Open Door Bible Church

Bethany, Mo.

On The Face Of It

In regard to your editorial “Union Seminary” (June 6), I had to double-check the cover of the magazine to be sure I wasn’t reading the Christian Beacon. Such strident, over-simplified strictures such as “socialist Bennett” do no credit to conservative Protestantism, ignoring a carefully reasoned argument in favor of McIntire-oriented bombast.

Also, I have read Martin Marty’s The Search for a Usable Future but was unable to detect any significant correlation between its contents and the review you gave it. I feel the reviewer has the obligation to give to the potential reader some indication of the content and not just his own highly personalized and drastically condensed reaction to it. By contrast, the review of Berger’s A Rumor of Angels was a near model of excellent reviewing.

Northfield, Minn.

Capping Short

Hats off to J. D. Douglas for saying (in his review of Robert Short’s latest Peanuts opus, May 23) what has long needed to be said publicly: that Mr. Short’s interpretations of Peanuts are nonsense—frequently delightful and enjoyable nonsense, to be sure, but still nonsense. That such books could become best-sellers is a kind of indictment of our time. Let us earnestly hope that we will not soon be subjected to a third book of Short-on-Schulz!

Prof. of Religion and Philosophy

Whitworth College

Spokane, Wash.

J. D. Douglas’s review of Short’s book is the best example I’ve seen of a reviewer who strains at a gnat and swallows a camel. I’ve read Mr. Short’s book, and it seemed to me to be a completely consistent exposition of at least one man’s understanding of the Christian faith. But where in Mr. Douglas’s review arc we given any idea of what this understanding is? It is almost as though Mr. Douglas is so afraid of the ideas expressed in the book that he spends all the review picking at how these ideas were expressed, rather than telling us what was said. Surely Mr. Douglas is not so insecure in his faith that he doesn’t really want us to know what the book is about?

I enjoy CHRISTIANITY TODAY … especially the book reviews—usually!

St. Petersburg, Fla.

Socking It To Us

Joshua Tree, Calif.

Christ’S Challenge To History

Ideas of History, edited by Ronald H. Nash (Dutton, 1969, Volumes 1 and II, 291 and 369 pp., $8.95 each), is reviewed by C. George Fry, assistant professor of history, Capital University, Columbus, Ohio.

“From its beginning,” writes Ronald H. Nash, “Christianity has had a special interest in history.” Across twenty centuries—from St. Luke to Kenneth Scott Latourette—Christian historians have confessed with their fellow believers that Jesus Christ is the center of world history. This conviction has not gone unchallenged. Rival philosophies of history have arisen. In the resulting struggle for men’s minds, it has become essential that Christian intellectuals be familiar with the competing and complementary interpretations of the past.

This is no small task. But help has arrived. Ronald H. Nash, head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Western Kentucky University, has provided what is indeed “the finest survey of the subject to be published in recent years.” In Ideas of History Dr. Nash has furnished an anthology of significant selections from the major philosophers of history from Augustine to Toynbee, prefacing each excerpt with a fair and penetrating analysis, and following it with excellent suggestions for further reading. The beginner in the field can find no finer introduction and the professional historian, theologian, and philosopher can secure no better summary than this work.

The philosophy of history, Nash explains, has two major divisions: speculative and critical. The speculative dimension is concerned with meaning in history and asks three questions: What is the pattern of history? What is the mechanism of history? and What is the purpose or value of history? Intellectual giants have wrestled with these issues and Volume I, Speculative Approaches to History, introduces the reader to the historical thought of St. Augustine. Giambattista Vico, Immanuel Kant. Johann Gottfried Herder, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels. Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee. Kenneth Scott Latourette, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Is history repeating itself? Is there progress? Does the past make sense? Can the historian predict the future? These are some of the exciting avenues of thought that are explored.

The philosophy of history involves more than speculation, however. There are critical questions concerning method, such as, “How does the historian come to understand the past? Is the historian’s method of inquiry significantly different from the kind of inquiry found in the natural sciences? What is the nature of historical explanation and does it differ from explanation in the natural sciences? Can the historian be objective?” In Volume II, The Critical Philosophy of History, divergent views are offered by Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Dilthey, R. G. Collingwood, W. H. Walsh, Carl G. Hempel, William Dray, Maurice Mandelbaum, R. H. Weingartner, Charles A. Beard, Carl L. Becker, A. I. Melden, Ernest Nagel, Raymond Aron, Raphael Demos, Sidney Hook, Isaiah Berlin, and Georges Florovsky. Decisions on these “how to do it questions” must be made by every historian. By examining his assumptions on a conscious level, the historian can improve his comprehension of the past.

There is, however, an even more basic question. Nash has done well to conclude his anthology with these words from Georges Florovsky concerning the question of Christ, “Who do men say that I am?” (Mark 8:28): “An attempt to write history, evading the challenge of Christ, is in no sense a ‘neutral’ endeavor. Not only in writing a ‘Universal History’ … but also in interpreting any particular sections or ‘slices’ of this history … the historian [is] confronted with this ultimate challenge—because the whole of human existence is confronted with this challenge and claim.” Called to commitment, the Christian historian has no alternative but to take his stand and “to vindicate his claim in the practice of his craft and vocation.…” Nash’s book will help him fulfill this mission.

A Poor Defense Of Religion

Sense and Nonsense in Religion, by Sten H. Stenson (Abingdon, 1969, 255 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Gordon H. Clark, professor of philosophy, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Professor Stenson at first intended to write a devastating criticism of all forms of religion. Then he decided to write a defense—against the four charges that religion is sick, silly, meaningless, and self-contradictory.

The last is the basic accusation and depends on the assertion that “of the proposed solutions of the problem of evil … none has stood up to criticism.” Job’s solution is particularly bad: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty.” Job’s solution, however, and Calvin’s, and even my own development of the theme in Religion, Reason, and Revelation, is not open to the charge of self-contradiction. The usual charge is that Calvinism is too logical.

Professor Stenson does not like logic. That is why religion, though self-contradictory, is acceptable. “Religious testimony is a mythopoeic … expression of … momentous insights.” “The Bible is a myth … a collection of … shaggy dog stories, witticisms, puns, and so on.” The author openly accepts the allegorical method of interpretation and says. “This is not reprehensible.”

But this, I submit, is reprehensible. It enables a man to impose all sorts of contradictory interpretations on a text. “There is no one … true theological interpretation of religious testimony.” The proposition, David was King of Israel, can mean, LSD gives an experience of God. This is no scholarly method. Careful study gives place to hunch and impulse.

As an illustration of religious doctrine the author draws a physically impossible three-tined tuning fork. An elementary lesson in drawing would point out the mistake. In religion the stupid mistake is to remain. The author deprecates reducing ambiguous language to logical form. “This common hope of the thirties and forties is no longer a deliberate or popular program”—as if it were not the hope and deliberate program of the eighteen thirties, the twelve thirties, the three thirties B.C., and of all rational mankind.

Anti-intellectualism, stubborn irrationalism, and existential freedom in exegesis make a poor defense of religion against the charge of being sick, silly, and meaningless. It would have been more scholarly for the author to remain true to his original intention “to write a devastating criticism of all forms of religion … the ultimate irrefutable philosophical destruction of all forms of Western theistic belief.” That would have been at least intelligible.

Historicist Theology

Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective, by Gordon D. Kaufman (Scribner, 1968, 543 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Donald B. Bloesch, professor of theology, Dubuque Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.

Gordon Kaufman, professor of theology at the divinity school of Harvard University, here seeks to reinterpret the Christian faith from a historicist perspective. By historicism he means the attempt to understand man and his world in radically historical terms. His criterion is neither the Bible nor the Church “but the movement of history itself.” Kaufman constantly tries to show that his historical-personal theology stands in continuity with the faith of the Church through the ages. His contention is that because biblical religion is both personal and historical, it therefore lends itself to a historicist interpretation.

Although he often refers to God as “the Beyond,” one wonders whether he is not positing a transcendence within immanence. He affirms the aseity of God but not his immutability. In his view God is caught up in the striving of his creation for fulfillment. Although insistent that God transcends the world, he seems to equivocate on whether God transcends history itself, since it seems that his God is essentially both historical and temporal. He proposes an ontology of history and interprets God within this framework. Against this view I suggest an ontology of the Personal Spirit who creates history.

His Christology is more Nestorian than orthodox, for while he affirms both the humanity and divinity of Christ, he fails to see the unity of the two natures in one person. He questions both the sinlessness of Jesus and his virgin birth and locates his uniqueness in the fact that he fully revealed divine love. Kaufman understands the cross of Christ not as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin but as the victory of suffering love that initiated the kingdom of God on earth. He rejects the bodily resurrection of Jesus, maintaining that the resurrection appearances can be better understood as “visions” or “hallucinations”; at the same time he affirms the resurrection as “an event in the history of meaning.” What broke through the barrier of death was not the personality of Jesus but “the continuing presence of God’s redemptive act.”

We can appreciate Kaufman’s attempt to take seriously the historical and personal dimensions of the Christian faith. But he does not sufficiently perceive that revelation is more than the act of God; it is also the speech of God. It is a disclosure not only of the presence of God but also of his will and purpose for mankind. The Christian faith is both historical and supernatural; it concerns both this world and the world to come. By envisioning the goal of the Christian faith as the historical realization of the kingdom of God, he fails to do justice to the biblical vision that this kindgom is basically beyond history, even though manifested within history.

Kaufman writes in a lucid style, and his many original insights, while not always biblically sound, make this book worth reading.

Easing Ecclesiastical Tension

Lutherans and Roman Catholicism, by Myron Marty (University of Notre Dame, 1968, 244 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by David P. Scaer, assistant professor of systematic theology, Concordia Theological Seminary, Springfield, Illinois.

The age of intense antagonism between the church of Rome and Luther’s descendants has so quietly sneaked out of theological prominence that it takes all the powers of memory to conjure up the annual Reformation Day sermon with its traditional and expected barbs against popery. Lutherans and Roman Catholicism is a refresher course for those who can’t remember or don’t want to remember the time when journals of both groups threw brickbats back and forth for what often seemed to be just more ecclesiastical exercise. The author, a Missouri Synod parochial-school teacher, traces the attitude toward Roman Catholicism in his church body from around the beginning of its English-speaking period in 1917 through 1963.

In this rapprochement between Protestant and Catholic most of the attention has been on the Catholics, because this church has submitted to public self-analysis. Its linen, soiled or not, is hung up for all to see. Everything from the non-traditionally centered Dutch Catechism to the marriage of the pope’s liturgical assistant to the refusal of the Austrian hierarchy to carry out the papal prohibitions against birth control is placed before the bar of opinion for the public verdict. But what are the Protestants doing?

Myron Marty, who holds his doctor’s degree from a Catholic university, digs around in the hoary past of the Missouri Synod looking for every printed remark on Roman Catholicism by any official or spokesman of the denomination. The results of his research are not unexpected. Sometime around 1960, there was a definite change in the public image of the Missouri Synod in its dealings with Roman Catholicism, the former belligerent attitude giving way to a more conciliatory one. Although this account is limited to one Protestant denomination, it has a much broader appeal. Whatever bothered the Missouri Synod about the Roman church also bothered other Protestants. All bases are touched: Catholic involvement in politics, aid to parochial schools, the election of a Catholic president, an ambassador to the Vatican, and the theological claims of the Catholic Church. Undoubtedly most Protestants will see their own changed attitudes to Roman Catholicism mirrored in this case study. Such studies are no guarantee of future church unity. But honest denominational evaluations like this help clear the air so that theological discussions can proceed without the need to deal with some of the previous unnecessary theological insults spoken more out of parochial devotion than informed conviction.

Marty’s study is largely historical and does not give a satisfactory explanation for the change in attitude in the Missouri Synod. What internal forces caused this church body with conservative learnings to do an about-face?

The big changes are still coming from the Roman church, in the opinion of this reviewer, and it is these changes that are the cause of the favorable reactions among Protestants. With only a few exceptions, the posture of the Missouri Synod toward Catholicism was largely determined by the stance of the pope toward Protestantism and not the reverse. Even if the pope is not the acknowledged head of the church, he is certainly functioning as the helmsman. Let the reader, unconverted to this opinion, please note that this book was published not by a Protestant publishing house but by the University of Notre Dame Press. Can Protestants still claim the position of theological prominance, even in self-evaluation?

Rendering Unto Caesar

Should Churches Be Taxed?, By D. B. Robertson (Westminster, 1968, 288 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by Earl M. Baker, staff associate, American Political Science Association, Washington, D. C.

It is disconcerting to think of American religion as an industry comparable to textiles or mining. Yet as D. B. Robertson points out, church giving, approximately $6.5 billion annually, equals income for these industries—impressive testimony to the extent, if not the depth, of American religious involvement. This income, plus the estimated $80 billion in real property, plus securities, owned by churches, makes it obvious why church tax exemption raises the question of “rendering unto Caesar.”

Robertson first discards two misconceptions about tax exemption of churches: that it is only recently controversial and that only secularists would question it. The church discussed here is the institutional, not the spiritual. The issue is particularly sensitive now, with taxpayers and elected officials alike concerned about inequities in the tax structure.

Much is unknown about church income, and especially participation in business. For example, the author states that “no one person or agency, including the government,” has a “exact knowledge of the value of church property in the United States.” But we can appreciate his outlining of what he cannot tell us as much as we appreciate all that he does tell. The book is generally well organized, but its sequence might have been improved, by, for instance, having the valuable chapter with pro and con arguments at the beginning instead of near the end.

Briefly, major arguments for exemption are that churches simply receive fair return from society by not being taxed, hardship, the challenge to “freedom of religion,” and tradition. Opposing arguments question churches’ unique benefits to society and the reality of a constitutional danger, and emphasize the positive obligations of churches.

Robertson’s position is that churches deserve exemption for the sanctuary or place of worship and its maintenance; but he makes clear distinctions between types of church income, and questions the necessity of gray-area exemptions such as parking lots, parsonages, and cemeteries. He definitely opposes exempting income from commercial enterprises. In this contribution to historical and policy research, Robertson sees the church in a pluralist perspective and notes its responsibility to the whole polity. Earthly wealth should not place the church apart from the social context of its ministry.

Book Briefs

Philosophy and the Christian Faith, by Colin Brown (Inter-Varsity, 1969, 319 pp., paperback, $2.50). This bird’s-eye view of the history of philosophy down to the present day and of its relations to Christianity will prove very helpful to the layman.

The King and the Kingdom, by William Barclay (Westminster, 1968, 211 pp., paperback, $2.45). In his usual clear and readable style, Barclay traces the idea of the kingdom in Jewish thought beginning with the theocracy, when Israel’s king was God, and concluding with a study of Christ as the King of the Kingdom.

In Quest of a Ministry, by Julian Price Love (Knox, 1969, 136 pp., paperback, $2.45). After spending nearly half a century in the classrooms of two theological seminaries, Dr. Love offers sixty vignettes revealing what students for the ministry are like and what seminary does or does not do for them.

Tourist’s Handbook of Bible Lands, by Guy P. Duffield (Regal, 1969, 186 pp., paperback, $1.65). A handy guide linking various sites with the appropriate Scripture passages.

So Who’s Afraid of Birthdays, by Anna B. Mow (Lippincott, 1969, 128 pp., $3.95). A seventy-six-year-old gives sensitive counsel to those who are confronting the problems and anxieties of growing old. Her secret for a rich and radiant life: “Christ is alive and is in us now.…”

Bench Marks, by József Farkas (Knox, 1969, 112 pp., $3.50). Contends that the purpose of the Ten Commandments is to help man become fully human. Though the reader may question this view, he will find that Farkas offers many fresh applications of the commandments to modern life.

Disturbed About Man, by Benjamin E. Mays (Knox, 1969, 143 pp., $3.95), The former president of Morehouse College, who was a close friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., contends that Christianity in action is the effective answer to the prejudice and poverty of our day.

The First Christian Century in Judaism and Christianity, by Samuel Sandmel (Oxford, 1969, 241 pp., $6). A Jewish New Testament scholar investigates the historical context in which Christianity arose. Arrives at some questionable conclusions, but useful for research.

A Church Without Priests?, by Jacques Duquesne (Macmillan, 1969, 192 pp., $4.95). Investigates the problems confronting priests and calls for a declericalization of the priesthood. Priests should not be different from other people, the author says; they should marry and exercise normal professions in which they can still perform their priestly functions.

Our Guilty Silence, by John R. W. Stott (Eerdmans, 1969, 119 pp., paperback, $1.45). First American edition of this vigorous challenge to the Church to rededicate itself wholeheartedly to its evangelistic mission. Excellent for group study on the very vital subject of the mission of the Church.

Black Theology and Black Power, by James H. Cone (Seabury, 1969, 165 pp., paperback, $2.95). An angry black theology professor investigates black power and its relation to Christianity, the Church, and contemporary American theology. Sees black power as Christ’s central message to twentieth-century America, calling the Church to total identification with the suffering poor.

Man at the Top, by Richard Wolff (Tyndale, 1969, 131 pp., $3.95). A practical discussion of the Christian understanding of leadership in the light of biblical teaching and secular history.

Groups Alive—Church Alive, by Clyde Reid (Harper & Row, 1969, 126 pp., $3.95). This helpful handbook of small-group dynamics treats such topics as purpose, leadership, discipline, size, and problems of this increasingly significant phenomenon in church life.

Handbook to the New Testament, by Claus Westermann (Augsburg, 1969, 180 pp., $4.95). This companion to Westermann’s Handbook to the Old Testament offers the general reader a cursory survey of the New Testament books. Virtually avoids controversial issues and sees the person of Jesus Christ at the heart of the New Testament.

For nineteen years, between 1927 and 1946, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick conducted a nationwide program entitled “National Vespers.” Each year he received 100,000 letters from members of his vast audience, many of them telling about their religious difficulties. On the basis of that experience he had this to say: “No verse in the Bible puzzles more people than the petition in the Lord’s Prayer ‘Lead us not into temptation.’ ‘Is it not a shocking idea,’ many say, ‘that God leads men into temptation and that we must beg him to stop doing it?’ ” (On Being Fit to Live With, p. 151).

There are three problems with this petition:

1. There is the difficulty of supposing that it is God who leads us—in the sense of inviting and tricking and even seducing us—to quote George Buttrick’s expression—into temptation.

2. There is the difficulty involved in asking God to help us avoid temptation, since it is as clear as crystal that temptation is an inescapable part of human experience.

3. And there is the difficulty of knowing what good purpose would be served by our completely escaping temptation, even if that were possible or conceivable, since Christian character is hammered out only on the anvil of conquered temptation.

The first difficulty may be disposed of quite readily. Although the King James Version gives the rendering “Lead us not into temptation,” the Greek text does not mean to suggest that God actively and deliberately pushes men into situations of temptation. A more accurate translation is this, “Let us not be led into temptation,” or perhaps, “Let us not enter into trial.”

What about the second and third difficulties? Clearly they are bound up together. Two explanations have been offered to resolve them. First, the petition may mean that while of course no one can hope or expect wholly to avoid temptation, and while character is formed not by avoiding temptation but by actively meeting and defeating it, still we are entitled to ask God to spare us from testing as much as possible. The pattern for this interpretation is found in Jesus Christ’s experience in Gethsemane, when he prayed to his Father God, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me”—that is, having to undergo death at the hands of his enemies. This was not possible, and Jesus Christ had to drink the cup of the dregs; but nonetheless he was justified in offering this prayer. Another case for this interpretation is found in Paul’s handling of his thorn in the flesh, as described in Second Corinthians 12:8. “I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart from me” the Apostle says. The thorn was not removed, but Paul was quite justified in praying this prayer.

Or again, this petition may mean, “Let us not be led into temptation” in the sense of yielding to its demands. This point is insisted upon by Canon Anthony C. Deane in his book Our Father. He contends that there is a mighty difference between being led “into” temptation and being led “unto” temptation. A different word is used for these two expressions in the Greek, and there is clearly a difference in meaning between them. Obviously, it would be foolish and futile for anyone to pray not to be led unto temptation, since temptations abound on every hand. One cannot escape them, any more than he can escape breathing or dying. Jesus never suggested praying against that. What he commanded was that his followers should pray, “Let us not be led into temptation.” By this he meant “into the power of” or “under the sway of.” In bidding his disciples to offer this prayer, Jesus meant: Pray to God that, though you will undoubtedly be led into the presence of temptation, you shall not be overcome by it, you shall not fall victim to its power. Canon Dean illustrates his point thus:

Take the case of a man to whom alcoholic drink is a temptation. Such a man may find that on his way back from work on the day on which he receives his weekly paycheck he will have to pass a tavern. There is no other way in which he can get back to his home, so he has to take this particular route. Obviously, it would be foolish and futile for him to pray “Lead me not unto temptation”; for if he wants to get back home he will have to come into the vicinity of that tavern. But it is very much in order for him to pray “May I not be led into temptation,” which would mean “Though I must need come into the vicinity of this tavern, may I not succumb to its lure and temptation, i.e., may I be given strength to pass it without going inside.”

Both these interpretations have been held by respected New Testament scholars and eminent preachers. They can be combined in some such fashion as this: “O Lord, whatever temptations we have to face, be thou with us and suffer us not to be overcome by evil.”

How can we help God answer this prayer? To begin with, it must be emphasized that though temptation is not sin, there is great wisdom in avoiding it as much as possible. It is wise for Christians not to run deliberately into situations of temptation as if to prove that they can overcome them. In the early days of persecution in the Christian Church there came a kind of frenzy among some of the Christians. They would go and deliver themselves up to the authorities of the Roman Empire and insist upon the honor of martyrdom, as if to say, “Put me to the test and see how boldly I shall pass through the fiery ordeal.” But wiser leaders of the Church were compelled to check this recklessness by threatening heavy spiritual penalties for all who practiced it. Real martyrdom was indeed the highest Christian blessedness, but to seek it in this way, to court it deliberately, made a man not a martyr but a suicide. Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Northern Cobbler” tells of a man who was a victim of strong drink and who successfully fought down his temptation with a bottle of gin standing day by day before him in the window where he worked. But such a course of action is never wise for Christians. To court temptation is foolish. As far as is honorably possible, it should be avoided. To do this is not cowardice or timidity; it is simply sanctified common sense.

The next point to be made about overcoming temptation is this: It must be carefully watched where it always begins, namely, in the mind, in the realm of thought. Saint Augustine, with his keen insight into human nature, describes the progress of temptation as “a thought, a picture, a fascination, a fall.” All temptation begins in the human mind; only if and when it has been allowed to take root there does it bear fruit in wrong action.

One big help in the struggle against temptation is to fill mind and heart and life with things that are pure, true, lovely, and of good report. Let a man’s life be systematically filled with such earthly interests and he will be able to overcome many temptations to which he might otherwise yield. Dr. Frank W. Boreham tells of a certain small town whose governing body decided to have a canal running down its central street. The bed was dug and the water allowed to flow, and the city fathers thought that they now had their canal. But soon a fungoid weed began to grow profusely in the canal bed, preventing the passage of boats. All sorts of remedies were suggested. Acid was poured in; but the weed, after disappearing for a time, began to grow again more thickly than ever. The attempt was made to hack at the weed and uproot it; but soon it grew back as strong as ever. Then some bright person suggested that willow trees be planted on the banks of the canal, and soon the weed disappeared for good. The reason simply was this, that the nourishment that otherwise would have fed the weed now went to sustain the willow trees.

This incident has its parallel in real life. The story goes that some of the companions of the venerable Bede, at his monastery at Monkwearmouth in northeastern England, came to him one day and said: “Father, we are harassed by many temptations, which appeal to us so often and so strongly that they give us no rest. You seem to live untroubled by these things and we want to know your secret. Don’t those temptations which harass our souls ever appeal to you? Do they never come knocking at the door of your heart?” The old saint listened, smiled, and said: “I do know something of the things of which you speak. The temptations that trouble you do come making their appeal to me. But when those temptations knock at the door of my heart, I always answer, ‘This place is occupied’ and that is the end of it.” John Newton, the well-known hymn-writer of the eighteenth century, used to say that two things kept him out of hell in his early days: his early and lifelong love of Mary Catlett (the woman he subsequently married) and his early and lifelong love of good books.

In the attempt to overcome temptation, any healthful and worthy interest will help—gardening or golfing or some other sport or hobby, or anything else that helps to fill up honorably and usefully the blank spaces of life.

But the strongest help in this fight to overcome temptation is undoubtedly to be found in devotion to God through Jesus Christ. Charles F. Andrews, the English missionary who was so great a Christian worker and servant of humanity in India that it was said his initials stood for Christ’s Faithful Apostle, once told how his conscious, active life as a Christian began when he was eighteen. Though he had been brought up in a godly home, he was becoming indifferent to all religion and falling into sins that would ultimately have wrecked his character. One night, as he knelt to pray, there came upon him an overwhelming realization of the holy presence of Jesus Christ. He struggled with a sense of his own evil life, and at last the voice of Christ seemed to bring forgiveness and love in place of darkness and despair. Andrews wrote later:

Since that time, during more than forty-three years of incessant struggle, journeying to and fro throughout the world, I have never lost the assurance of Christ’s living Presence with me. He is not a mere vision, he is no imaginative dream, but a living Presence who daily inspires me and gives me grace. In Him, quite consciously, I find strength in time of need [quoted by Jack Finegan in Like the Great Mountains, p. 54].

The grace of Jesus Christ that strengthened and empowered C. F. Andrews is equally available to all others who seek him in the struggle with temptation. In him they can be more than conquerors.

If the Church is to be adequate for today and tomorrow, she must, in St. Paul’s words, “declare the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27, RSV). She must proclaim to the world a balanced, full-orbed gospel.

We are caught just now in a tug-of-war between two groups of churchmen—those who champion individual salvation from the guilt and penalty of sin, and those who champion Christian social action. As a consequence, the “body of Christ” is afflicted with the disease of “either/or,” whereas what is needed is a fresh baptism of “both/and.”

A serious weakness of the Christian enterprise in our day is the way followers of Christ are breaking up into factions for the propagation of one feature of Christianity to the practical exclusion of all others. We hear a good deal from competing groups about “the personal gospel” and “the social gospel,” as if there were two gospels and one must choose between them. Well, I for one refuse to choose between doctrine and ethics, between Christianity as a creed and Christianity as a life, between the inner life of the soul and the outer life of conduct, between personal salvation and social crusading. Why not have both? Are not both in the New Testament? Why choose between them?

There must be no feud between private religion and public morals. Walter Rauschenbusch, the great champion of ethical Christianity, believed in and championed both. “Go at both simultaneously,” he pleaded. “Neither is possible without the other.”

Let the partisans of personal Christianity remember that a faith which does not issue in Christlike attitudes and acts—which does not work unceasingly for social righteousness and justice—is a counterfeit faith. A faith which does not make people care about “man’s inhumanity to man” is not a religion worth having. Every Christian is duty bound to apply Christ’s spirit and principles in all areas of man’s existence, and if he is making no serious attempt in this direction we may well question the maturity or validity of his faith.

It is probably not the business of the Church as an institution to prepare technical blueprints for political change or social betterment, but certainly the Church should clearly enunciate Christian concern and principles and produce the kind of people who have a passion for the kingdom of God on earth and who make militant conquest of anything that wars against human personality.

A true Christian Church will develop in its adherents a sensitized conscience so that they will take a courageous Christian stand on any social, moral, or political issue of the day. It is a major tragedy when a church becomes genteel, giving herself exclusively to pious exercises and lullabying her people into ethical and social complacency. It is the function of the Christian Church, not only to provide the objective means of salvation, but to concern herself with the renewal of the entire life of the community, and, through her redeemed members, to seek to bring the whole range of life under the sway of the Christian spirit and ethic.

Our Lord was certainly a teacher and preacher of social righteousness. When he returned to Nazareth he seized the opportunity to issue what amounts to a proclamation of social action. In the synagogue one Sabbath he read this from the Hebrew Scriptures: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” And then he added: “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:18, 21).

The Christian religion has to do with life, the whole of life, mightily and all the time. There is no “secular” or “sacred” in the absolute sense. It is our duty as Christians therefore, to make the influence of Christ effective in all human relations, however difficult or complicated this may be.

But having said this, let me go on to say that the partisans of social action should remember that apart from transformed men and women the victories we yearn for in society are impossible, for there will be lacking the mind that knows the right, the heart that loves the right, and the will that works for the right. As Mrs. Browning reminds us in her finest poem, Aurora Leigh:

It takes a soul to move a body;

It takes a high-souled man

To move the masses, even to a cleaner sty.

Until something happens between God and man along some Damascus road, nothing much will happen to the world.

While we ministers are speaking as helpfully as we can from our pulpits on social responsibility, we had better not forget “God’s mighty acts” in Jesus Christ, without which we are only “beating the air.” I wouldn’t give much for a preacher who is not a humanitarian, and neither would I give much for a preacher who is nothing but a humanitarian. We have a “gospel” to proclaim, and it is the gospel of personal regeneration, conversion and the “new birth.” Let us welcome, encourage and support every social and political scheme which looks as if it might help in putting the world right, but let us keep reminding ourselves that no measure, however nobly conceived, can succeed unless men and women are being changed into “new creatures.” You cannot fashion a Christian society out of an aggregation of pagans. Social change must be rooted in personal regeneration.—THE REV. WILLIAM M. ELLIOTT, JR., pastor, Highland Park Presbyterian Church, Dallas, Texas.

The Gospel ascribes a very great importance to the termination of Christ’s earthly life; it is his death on the cross that is preeminently the saving event. Why is this death so important and how does it save?

In the current situation there are undoubtedly those who see in Christ’s death the grand archetype of the non-violent protest demonstration. To speak of Christ’s behavior in his passion as non-violent is the understatement of the ages. For he was completely non-violent while subjected to what was, in view of his nature and person, the starkest violence and outrage of all time. As for protest, Christ’s death is the sharpest possible protest against all accommodation of sin, all cheapening of grace, all humanisticizing of salvation. But in the peculiarly contemporary sense of “protest,” it was actually the ultimate in non-protest. He articulated no grievances and he was inflamed with no indignation. The best of the judges into whose courts he was hustled in the farcical processes of that doleful night and ensuing day was struck by his silence and regally supramundane aloofness. (“Answeredst thou nothing?” “My kingdom is not of this world.”) Manifestly the real happening was on a level far above Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate, and the primary address of the cross was to the Father, not to the world.

Others make of the cross primarily a pedagogic posture or a hortatory stance. The great need of the world, in this view, is that men should be taught effectively to love God and one another. All other methods having failed, God, as a last resort, admonishes men through his crucified Son. Now assuredly no teaching stance could be more impressive. But if there was no objective need for the cross (by “objective” I here mean external to the teaching situation), if the impressive posture was assumed just to be impressive while all the time the Teacher claimed that his death was propitiatory and redemptive, then the whole thing backfires—the more so because it is thus reduced to an exercise in, of all things, moralism.

Another view of Christ’s cross refers it to a universal principle, that life comes only by death. This principle has the appeal of the paradoxical, and such a reference seems to have support in Christ’s words, “Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”—an illustration he in fact urged upon his disciples that they might accept the necessity of his death. But is “life through death” a universal principle? Our first parents were created wholly alive. Did God die to accomplish this? Or is revivification different from creating alive, involving the removal of an obstacle not present from the first? We shall come back to this.

Let us examine this saying about the grain of wheat to see whether there is even such application of it to Christ as there is to all other human beings. All of us must die radically to self in order to bear any fruit unto God. But this necessity derives from the corruption of our nature. Christ was fully on God’s side without any prior death. It is true that in Gethsemane he experienced a terrible tension between the desire to live and the desire to accomplish the Father’s will specific to the situation: death. The very degree of this tension issued from the perfection of his holiness. No man “sold under sin” could find “the wages of sin”—in this case the sins, and wages, of others—repulsive to a degree even comparable to what the Prince of Life found them. But though this struggle of a truly holy love of life and an obviously holy love of the Father’s particular will was so great that it caused the effusion of blood in the manner of sweat, at no point was Christ even in the least degree unsubmissive to the Father. This is a profound mystery, but nothing short of it is biblical, or for that matter rational, considering what Christ’s death accomplished. Now, any Epistle to Adam and Eve antedating the fall and urging on them the mortification of their members would have been an imposition; a fortiore no demand like this could justly be made of the God-Man. If Christ’s death had been an instance of the “mortification” we now mention, it would have been disqualified as the basis of life for others. Thus even in the less obvious sense, Christ’s death was not a case of “being crucified with Christ.” Since he could not in the usual sense die unto self but only unto God, his death is sui generis. Only thus springs there from it, for any believer, life from the dead.

Still another view of Christ’s cross makes it primarily a mighty application of God’s muscle to the trouncing of Satan, sin, and death; that is, this view apprehends the cross as directly an action of power. (For the legitimacy of “muscle” as a metaphor of God’s power, consider the biblical “arm of the Lord.”)

The appeal of this view is very great. It recognizes an objectiveness in Christ’s accomplishment on the cross; something was done to more than the minds of men. It is the view of high action: thrashing man’s most tyrannical foes. Again there is the fascination of the paradoxical—a paradox, moreover, that the Scriptures themselves assert: “That through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” Furthermore, it is a commonplace that by giving a thing an overdose of itself one tends to kill it. Finally, it is true that Christ by his death has destroyed sin, death, and the devil. This the Scriptures clearly teach. The objection is not to tracing these colossal effects to the cross but to referring them directly and immediately to the cross.

Consider the logical difficulties of understanding Christ’s death on the cross as directly an action of power. Take first the general notion of overcoming anything by death as a power. By definition death is the surrender of life itself. It is the ultimate in capitulation. How then can it ever wage a war? When two combatants, say a hunter and a buffalo, slay each other, the man spearing the beast and the beast goring the man, neither death can possibly contribute anything to the death of the other. Each is killed only by what the other does before he dies. In fact, rather than the death of one causing the death of the other, the prior death of either is the formal cause of the survival of the other. And if either, having exerted enough power to slay the other, had still had a reserve of power, he would have survived. (Incidentally, I cannot think that there were any limits to the endurance of the God-Man except as they were self-imposed; he himself said that no one took his life from him.) Again, the death of anyone cannot be the cause of the death of his antagonist where mere power is the consideration.

Take now the three tyrants one by one.

Sin (except for its guilt) is taken away by the rectification of love. The Man Jesus always loved the Father supremely; we have not. We are made to love God as supreme by the regenerating and sanctifying grace of the Holy Ghost working through the word and the sacraments. How can the death of Christ be directly a power to conquer sin?

Death is directly overcome not by death—another death just adds to the domain and prevalence of death—but by “the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7:16). In the impotence of mortality all about us, what a power that is! This extraordinary power God possesses by virtue of being God, and by the same virtue he bestows it on whom he wills. He bestowed it, as suggested above, on our first parents without the requirement of any death.

Satan is a tremendously powerful foe, but to bring about his immediate and total extinction, God, the “stronger one,” needs only to snip the communication of his being-sustaining providence. Any teaching short of this is a perversion of the doctrine of creation. Where is the place of death directly as a power in the mastery of Satan?

And yet Christ’s death does gloriously save from sin, death, and the devil, and it does so specifically as death, i.e., the expiration and termination of his earthly life. This is the point of the whole system of foreshadowing Old Testament sacrificial ordinances. While the sacrificial animals qualified to die by being fit to live, the redemptive act was precisely the termination of their life. The emphasis upon the expiration of the life of the proper and fulfilling Sacrifice, though frequent in the Scriptures, is perhaps nowhere else made as succinctly as in Hebrews 9:15, where the availability of the promised inheritance is made to turn on just two words, thanatou genomenou, “a death having occurred.” And certainly the point of the soldier’s spear and its penetration of our Lord’s body—as well as the point of the narration—is precisely verification of thanatou genomenou.

If, then, power cannot be the category under which we directly subsume Christ’s action on the cross—since “he was crucified through weakness” and died through an absolute takeover by weakness—to what sphere shall we refer the mighty significance of that action in order to have a true understanding of it? Where do death certificates play a role in ordinary life? Only in the consideration and judgment of rights and liabilities, I submit.

And that’s just where the Scriptures place the primary significance of Christ’s death. The sacrificial ordinances of the Old Testament already alluded to; Isaiah’s relating of these ordinances (“an offering for sin,” v. 10) to the Messiah in his fifty-third chapter with its unequivocal words about atonement by substitution, and that by God’s own working (“Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole.… The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”); the New Testament’s authentication of the identification of Isaiah’s Sufferer with Jesus Christ through Philip’s conversation with the Ethiopian eunuch; Paul’s clear teaching about justification by faith through the blood of Another (“justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith”); the declaration in Hebrews that Jesus is the substantive Sacrifice; and finally the attitude, behavior, and words of Jesus himself before and on the cross—all these and other Scripture components compel us to understand the dying Christ as a substitutionary sin-bearer on whose account God forgives the believing penitent. We have only to try to reconcile two of the words from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” to realize how utterly requisite is the dual character of our Lord—one as he really was, one as he was representatively—to make any consistency of his utterances. On any other basis these cries are but that alternation of faith and unbelief so characteristic of us—and utterly disqualifying to a saviour of the world.

This biblical understanding of the significance of the cross, which, I submit, is the only rational one, has in fact been criticized as being just too patly rational. At the same time it has been faulted as the child of a regional (Latin, Western) turn of mind. Of course, these charges knock each other out. For to suggest (as opposed to noting its predominantly Western development) that one has to have a special kind of mind to take in the cogency of the doctrine of atonement is to impugn its rationality. Actually the Hebrews had received and grasped the rationale of substitutionary sacrifices more than a millennium before they knew any Romans, or indeed before there were any Romans to know. And why should we disparage the rational? Next to a knowledge of God’s word and faith, reason is the best aid in theology. The only time to disparage reason is when it rises up against revelation. Were our minds released from the limitations of creatureliness and healed of the perversions of sin, we should think exactly as God thinks and acclaim his revelation without recourse to faith.

Now, once the primarily and properly judicial character of Christ’s action on the cross has been understood and accepted, we rightly indulge in enthusiastic and hilarious celebration of Christ’s cross as power. All the power of an ordered government is available for enforcing the judgments of the judiciary. So long as a man is under the judgment of God, there is a kind of legitimacy of sin’s and Satan’s harassment of him, and death’s title to him is absolutely indisputable by God’s own ruling. Remove the judgment and all these evils become fair game; in principle they have already been crushed. Pointing to his letter of pardon the former death-cell occupant may well exult: “By this I have handcuffed the hangman and uprooted the gallows.”

But if we end up either way celebrating the same power results—the vanquishing of sin, death, and the devil and the glorious opening of the gates of life—then is not the distinction between a primarily power conception and an expiation-atonement understanding of the cross academic and barren? Not at all. To short-circuit the primarily judicial significance of the cross is not only a violation of scriptural teaching and of reason; it is also antagonistic to a saving faith. The theology of a man—if what he has is a theology—is all of a piece; and such is the integration of doctrine, as well as of doctrine and life, that what a man thinks of the cross of Christ, particularly in view of the centrality of the cross, is bound to affect deeply what he thinks of himself and the kind of salvation he needs. And the reverse is true also. In fact, a man’s view of the cross is the best clue to his whole system. Misconception of the cross entails misconception all down the line and must tend toward malformation of faith.

Consider the attitude to sin and salvation natural to one who short-circuits the judicial significance of the cross and looks upon Christ’s death as directly a power deliverance from the three tyrants. There is nothing necessarily reprehensible and shameful in being a captive. Thousands of lovely and noble-minded princesses have been captured by ugly bandits and robber barons and remained as honorable as ever even though they never got away. Nor does calling one of the bandits Sin really change the picture. It may just be a case of touching one’s hat to an ancient theological term with no real sense of its meaning. Sin conceived of merely as an arm-twister is not the foe whom Christ died to vanquish. The thing about sin is that it never twists merely an arm but also the will and the desires; indeed, it is itself a fearful twisting of the whole man and therefore a corruption and depravity, uniquely in the whole world, reprehensible, culpable, and condemned. The captive princess is not our story. Not only is the figure flagrantly inaccurate—we have indeed been taken captive by the forces of evil, but we love our captors; it is also flattering and titillating to the pride of man. Nothing so radically tickles a man’s pride as a denial or at least some de-peccatation of his sin.

A deep repentance cannot go with shallow notions of sin, nor a deep faith with a shallow repentance. Here our model, since it cannot be Christ, must be David, whose fifty-first psalm is a divinely inspired formulary of penitence. In it he evinces the incredible grace of joining with God in desiring for himself (David) “truth in the inward parts.” Surely a repudiation of all complimentary self-deceptions and a facing up to the sinfulness of sin and the radicalness of one’s corruption is the truth in the inward parts here indicated, as well as a condition of attaining a saving faith.

We then come upon the massive and confirmatory fact that conscience thus awakened and rectified finds no peace except in the Gospel of a Saviour crucified to take away guilt and condemnation. If faith cannot lay hold on him, it is condemned as a fearful exercise in futility and self-deception.

It is exceedingly instructive that the thief on the cross—who undeniably had a saving view of Christ’s cross—described his own condition and Christ’s with exactly the same term, condemnation, the sole distinction being that it was justly incurred in his own case and unjustly in Christ’s; and that having done so he turned to Christ with a prayer for a place in his kingdom—and got it!