There are millions of demon-possessed people in the United States—possessed by the unclean spirit of lust.

Satan, the prince of this world, fans the flames of lust in the hearts of men and women. Playing on one of the strongest urges of nature—one that, when controlled, is one of God’s great gifts to mankind—Satan has down through the ages perverted it, wherever he can, for the destruction of his victims.

Some may think it fantastic to say that lust is a demon, but let them not forget that there is perhaps no more vulnerable point in the human personality, and that sex obsession has been a prime reason for personal and national disintegration all through human history.

America seems to have gone nearly to the limit in worship at the shrine of sex. In every medium of communication today, authors, publishers, producers, and advertisers vie with one another in encouraging lust.

History is filled with records of religions that have fostered unbridled lust, some through phallic objects of worship, others by the use of cult prostitutes. But not until the last few years has the Christian Church been infiltrated by those who have regarded the Seventh Commandment as relative. Through the permissiveness and twisted philosophy of the “new morality” and “situation ethics,” these persons have attempted to break down the moral concepts and restraints of God’s holy laws. Our risen Lord’s denunciation of those in the church at Pergamum who “taught” men to “commit fornication” (Rev. 2:14) is going unheeded by these new apostles of “freedom,” with devastating results to themselves and to their victims—usually young people.

Perhaps only those from whom this demon has been exorcised can tell the sordid story of lives so possessed. Like David of old they can rejoice: “He brought me up out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings” (Ps. 40:2).

The points of entrance of this demon are legion. Usually he finds easy access through the thoughts. Like bottle flies swarming over a carcass, thoughts flit hither and yon and linger on forbidden areas and uncleanness until the soul is saturated with filth.

The lustful look—how easy to let the eye linger even as the mind gloats. Who can withstand such temptations? Who can say, I am not guilty? The Apostle James describes the process of this demon’s work: “Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (Jas. 1:14, 15).

The lustful thoughts, the lustful looks lead on to the lustful acts—and without the forgiving and cleansing power of the Saviour, these lead on to death.

Many of today’s novels, particularly paperbacks, are wholly unrestrained in describing any and every kind of lewdness and perversion. And for a play or movie to become a hit now, it seems almost essential (so the producers say) to portray some form of sexual activity—even perversion. Those who feed their minds on this garbage find themselves possessed by the demon of lust, with an insatiable desire for more and more filth.

Newspapers and magazines often warn of the dangers of mixing alcohol and driving, of the immediate and ultimate dangers of LSD and other hallucinatory drugs, and of other things that are a menace to health. But only the Church has the message about the things that harm the soul, and of late the Church has been woefully silent about those moral standards affirmed by Christ and his Word. The demon of lust is unrecognized. The Church seems more concerned with social problems—few of which have eternal implications.

Lust defiles the mind, body, and spirit; it consumes its victims with unholy desire. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks clearly: “God will judge the immoral and adulterous.” The risen and triumphant Son of God pronounces solemn judgment on the “polluted” and fornicators: they are among those whose “lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death” (Rev. 21:8). The Apostle Paul is equally explicit: “Be sure of this, that no immoral or impure man has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God” (Eph. 5:5).

Has God set for mankind standards that cannot be met? Humanly speaking, he has. The natural man finds himself bound in the chains of the flesh. But right at this point there lies the wonder of the Gospel: What we cannot do, Christ does for us. The temptations that constantly assail us are never greater than we can bear, by his grace and strength. The demon of lust can be exorcised. This Christ will do for all who turn to him for help.

Perhaps at no point is the compassion of our Lord more in evidence. He forgave the woman taken in adultery even as her accusers slunk away, convicted by their own consciences. Denouncing the Pharisees for their hypocrisy Jesus said, “The tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you …, [for] the tax collectors and harlots believed him—[John the Baptist]; and even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him” (Matt. 21:31b, 32b).

There is victory over the demon of lust, victory by the Cross. Christ died to condemn sin in the flesh and to give freedom and release to those who look to him.

These are days of unusual testing. The demons of lust lurk on every hand. Like David of old all of us can say, “As the Lord lives … there is but a step between me and death.” Satan controls so many areas of life that we are confronted by these temptations daily.

But God offers to give us clean hands and a pure heart, by an act of creation. After his double sin of adultery and murder, David prayed, “Create in me a clean heart” (Ps. 51:10).

Beware of self-reformation! The demon may depart only to return with others. This must be a work of God’s grace—a cleansing by the atoning blood of the Cross and an infilling with his Spirit.

L. NELSON BELL

Learning From The Teeming Ditch

Are the persuaders coming more and more out of hiding? I’d suspected this for some time before spotting a brazen advertisement while on my travels last week. “DON’T GO TO PIECES ON SUNDAY!” it pleaded, offering a well-known newspaper as a steadying influence. On that view Sunday is potentially a drag, a put-upon, a space to be filled.

The thought sent me back to something jotted down a while ago from Dennis Gabor’s Inventing the Future. He begins by suggesting three dangers that confront our civilization: “The first is destruction by nuclear war, the second is being crippled by over-population, and the third is the Age of Leisure.” If the first two happen, says Gabor, life will be very unpleasant, but people will know what to do. “Only the Age of Leisure will find man psychologically unprepared.” (Surely not to the extent that our resourceful Sunday newspaper couldn’t cope?)

Gabor’s statement seems to imply that man at the moment of going to press is putting up a creditable psychological front to the changes and chances of this mortal scene (at least for five or six days in the week). A further implication is a great dichotomy fixed between labor and leisure, a bittiness altogether alien to an epitaph once seen: “God give me work till my life shall end, and life till my work is done.”

Yet Gabor is right if he means that ennui is the enemy for those who, in Chesterton’s words, “because they are entirely unacquainted with life … know nothing but distractions from life.” It was Chesterton, the genial creator of Father Brown, who went to the root of the problem when two years before his death in 1936 he said: “Unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labor interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilization a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilizations do not recover. So died the great Pagan Civilization; of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods.”

Chesterton was, however, no pessimist: he liked to think of himself as “always perfectly happy,” with a real faith and a real zest for life, which two don’t always go together. “I have,” he said, “experienced the mere excitement of existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as ditchwater. And, by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.”

To believe that is not to go to pieces on Sunday, and is to freewheel unafraid even into a leisurely age.

A Manner Of Speaking

Thanks for inviting Howard M. Ervin (“As the Spirit Gives Utterance,” April 11) to say his piece, which was a pretty good one as I saw it.

Thanks also for a fairly succinct editorial (“The Gift of Tongues”) in the same issue. However, some of us are a bit weary of the “yes, but” approach, i.e., yes, speaking in tongues is bona fide but love is so much better. That is like saying, “A church is a fine place to meet God, but heaven is so much more conducive”—well, obviously!… But as we Pentecostals are prone to reply: certainly we ought to enjoy God’s “least gift,” at least.

Assoc. Editor

Campus Life Magazine

Wheaton, Ill.

Gobbledygook! Dr. Ervin’s interpretation of the Corinthian languages as “unintelligible” tongues, until God reveals the meaning, is the crux of his presentation.…

But … how can unintelligible sounds manifest anything? Furthermore, would not the gift of required interpretation ultimately render the gift of unintelligible languages quite unnecessary, if not meaningless? Is not God then put into the position of providing an intelligent gift to explain an unintelligent one?

Zion, Ill.

I am thoroughly grateful for Dr. Ervin’s complete, concise report on this sensitive issue, and for a treatment of the subject that is intellectually stimulating and theologically sound. He has done much to clear a lot of the smoke from the flame.

The Word Of Faith Broadcast

Orangeburg, S. C.

It would appear to me that a close look at the conditions existing in the church at Corinth when Paul wrote First Corinthians would cast some light on the source of the ecstatic utterances experienced by some in that church.

The church was in a state of carnality (3:3). It was divided into four factions (1:12). Fornication such as would cause even the heathen Gentiles to blush was permitted to go unrebuked (5:1, 2). Disagreements among various factions led to individual airing of their complaints before civil courts of the metropolis (6:1). The communion service was profaned by the conduct of some of the participants (11:21, 22). Against this backdrop, Paul asks a question: “How is it then, brethren? when ye come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation” (14:26).…

Paul, conscious of the genuine (Acts 2), was cautious—“Forbid not to speak with tongues”—but he understood what was needful—“Covet to prophesy.” The very absence of any comment dealing with tongues in Paul’s other epistles speaks strongly of the uniqueness of the problems at Corinth, a problem complicated by unrestrained sin in the church. Such a questionable situation is a poor basis for any major doctrine, much less a mandatory spiritual experience.

Florence, Miss.

Or Not To Budge

In his appraisal of the Consultation on Church Union (April 11), Dr. Cary N. Weisiger III has neatly set forth the very reasons why evangelicals can have no share in this ecumenical effort.

With remarkable insight, Dr. Weisiger states, “It is manifestly impossible to have a union if two conflicting viewpoints will not budge.” He can be assured that evangelicals will not budge on their historic Protestant view of Scripture. They will not be dazzled by fancy verbal footwork into a union which is not catholic, not evangelical, and absolutely not reformed. Nor are evangelicals likely to welcome a presiding bishop or another kind of pope. But most repulsive to the evangelical is the weird notion that when men can agree even in unbelief, the Holy Spirit is working therein.

COCU asserts that “we will, in the course of time, become something other than the church that any of us now knows.” To that, anyway, evangelicals can agree. Without budging an inch!

Portland, Ore.

If others are using the term “evangelical” as does Dr. Weisiger, I will be forced to return to the term “fundamentalist” to describe my position. The modern press and the man in the street have an image of snake-handling and foot-stomping when their ears hear “fundamentalist,” but I am not sure that that image is worse than the one created by linking evangelicals with COCU.

First Conservative Baptist Church

Birmingham, Ala.

Animated Living

We agree! The manner of Christian life described in Diognetus (“The Manners of the Christians,” April 11) is an appropriate expression for our day. You might also have observed, however, that this apologetic makes no brief for the current sport of Christians to huddle in quasi-sanctified enclaves, e.g., resorts and suburbs et al. Diognetus argues that the second-century “manner of Christian living” animated the barbarian cities, “not their own.” I covet especially this author’s conclusion: “It is to no less a post than this that God has ordered them and they must not try to evade it.”

Innercity Athletic Mission.

Chicago, Ill.

Thanks for the stimulation which started me reading again in those resourceful and meaningful Christian classics!

Johnson City, Tenn.

Battle Of The Taxes

I enjoyed your “Tax Funds for Religious Education?” (March 28).… As a direct result of these two well-reasoned expressions of opinion, I am certain that your readers will be more tolerant of both sides in this complicated issue. Dialogue will become more calm, more reasoned, and more loving and prepare the way for a solution that will intensify love and understanding.

MORTON A. HILL, S.J.

New York, N. Y.

I have long been against state support for religious day schools and high schools, so I read the comments of C. Stanley Lowell with much approval. But I must confess that the arguments of Gordon Oosterman were very convincing. I still have reservations about the matter on one count, however, and I wonder about a reasonable answer to it. It has been my opinion, based on what I have observed over the years, that when the government gives financial aid to any segment of our society, they soon follow this by regulations and restrictions. This would lead, I feel, to a deplorable church-state situation, causing most participating schools to regret their haste in rushing to the feed trough.

Valinda, Calif.

The very title of the essays naïvely presupposes that the state schools are not religious schools. Here is the nub of the entire question. No education is religiously neutral, not even the humanistic secular one of public schools.…

One task of the government is to be religiously neutral between conflicting religious interests. Under our current system it opts for one kind of religion against theism. This is neither Christian nor just nor wise. Let the government give tax money for all education that meets the state’s compulsory educational laws regardless of race, color, and creed.

Wayne, N. J.

In the news article “Parochial School Crisis Fuels State Aid Debate,” the quotation from the 1965 resolution of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod should read: “that federal aid for children attending nonpublic schools, as authorized by Congress and defined [not “defended”] by the courts, be deemed acceptable so long as it does not interfere with the distinctive purposes for which such schools are established.”

Secretary of Schools

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod

St. Louis, Mo.

Authority Alarm

Just recently I read Dr. Carl F. H. Henry’s articles entitled “The Reality and Identity of God” (March 14 and 28).… In reflecting upon them I could not help but begin to see what he was driving at. “Process-theology” postulates that God is himself always becoming and changing.… Thus one finds himself in the peculiar predicament of worshiping a “God” who is perhaps “not yet,” but rather “a God of temporality and becoming.”

Now what alarms me in all this is that … then indeed God is not the absolute in the universe but rather subject of the “process” or change.… What is even more frightening is the fact that this is not revealed from any outside source, but is only a concept which has come from inside the thinking and reason of man.…

This brings us right back to the hideous and sinister evil in the very heart of man which began the entire sinful mess in the world, namely, the rebellion of man against the authority of God.…

As Dr. Martin Luther once said, “From this preserve us, Heavenly Father.”

St. John’s Lutheran Church

Brunswick, Mo.

Those ‘Slithering’ Students

My righteous indignation was greatly aroused by a comment in your magazine concerning Oral Roberts’s program “Contact” (“Oral Roberts: Rousing Return to TV,” March 28): “And in their choreography ORU students slithered across the stage at a pace somewhere between Lawrence Welk and the cavorting on the Smothers Brothers program.” … I saw no slithering, only movements related to the singing which to me edified the greatness of God.

I am not a hippie, dippie, or yippie. I am a thirty-year-old Christian, very conservative school teacher, and the only comment I can make about the program “Contact” is that I feel it is the greatest “happening” of the century.

Sparks, Okla.

Of Tape And Terror

Although aware of Rev. R. B. Thieme’s ministry for many years, it has been only recently that I have found the time to review and study his doctrinal studies by tape.

Therefore, I personally resent being lumped with terrorist activists (“Bible and Bombs,” News, March 28). Or, as is slyly implied: Thieme is spreading “racism in the 6,000 tapes a month he mails across the nation”.…

You do your readers a disservice without providing us with a bit more information about Rev. Thieme and his ministry, which God has blessed.

West Bend, Wis.

Dialogue With Gordon Clark

The Philosophy of Gordon H. Clark, by Ronald H. Nash (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1968, 516 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Alvin Plantinga, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California.

This Festschrift in honor of Professor Gordon H. Clark contains an expanded version of his 1965 Wheaton Lectures, some twelve essays in comment and criticism by “evangelical” philosophers and theologians, and Clark’s “Reply to Critics.” Although nearly all the contributors react with appreciation to Clark’s work, nearly all of them also find important areas of disagreement. Among the most interesting I found Merold Westphal’s “Theism and the Problem of Evil” (which defends Clark against the charge of committing the “naturalistic fallacy” and makes some enlightening distinctions along the way), Arthur Holmes’s “The Philosophical Methodology of Gordon Clark,” and George Mavrodes’ “Revelation and Epistemology.”

Clark’s lectures are written in a breezy, insouciant style, punctuated here and there with memorable wit. Archbishop Temple, says Clark, claims that “the possibility of misunderstanding the Scripture ‘destroys the whole value of this form of revelation’ Clark retorts that “apparently the possibility of misunderstanding the writings of Archbishop Temple did not in his opinion destroy the whole value of his writing his book.” He adds later that the archbishop “has no excuse for personally illustrating his theory that the Scriptures can be misunderstood.”

Clark’s first lecture is a rapid and necessarily cursory examination of “secular theories of epistemology, science, ethics, and religion”; he concludes that none are successful. Here he tries, I think, to cover far too much ground in far too brief compass; the result is probably too ambitious to be of much use.

The second lecture is noteworthy for a valuable polemic against those who unduly deprecate “mere human reason” and claim that all knowledge of God must be “analogical” or “negative” or “paradoxical” or all three. In this connection Clark quite properly defends logic and the use of logical techniques of argumentation in philosophy and theology; on the other hand, his paraphrase of the Prologue to the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was Logic, and Logic was with God and Logic was God”) might be considered a little strong even by the more enthusiastic friends of logic.

More important, however, is that he argues in this chapter that every philosophy must have presuppositions; apparently he thinks of a philosophy as a deductive system whose axioms are its presuppositions. And since all secular systems fail (as he thinks to have shown in chapter 1), Clark suggests that we try the Christian philosophy, whose sole axiom is:

A1The Bible is the Word of God. From A1 Clark apparently believes he can deduce “syllogistically” such truths, as, for example, that David was King of Israel.

What, exactly, is the role Clark means to assign to this axiomatic system? This question is not altogether easy to answer. But clearly he means to assert it; that is, he means to endorse every proposition that is a theorem of the system. Further, he claims, I think, to know the theorems of the system. But he also seems to suggest that neither he nor anyone else knows any proposition that is not a theorem of the system.

This claim has a certain initial implausibility. I know my name and address, and I think that the same could be said for Professor Clark. Yet clearly enough the Bible does not furnish us with these bits of information; and according to Clark it follows that no one knows them. Furthermore, according to Clark, none of us knows who his wife is (or, for that matter, whether he’s married), a situation that could conceivably lead to trouble. To this kind of objection, Clark retorts that no one has given a really convincing solution of such traditional epistemological problems as Descartes’s “evil demon” query: Is it not possible, for all Descartes knows, that some malignant demon is constantly and consistently deceiving him (and us) about his name? (He always thought it was “Descartes”; but all along it was “Schultz.”) And so long as we have no answer to Descartes we cannot, Clark holds, properly claim to know these things.

Even more interesting, I think, is the fact that from A1 alone we can deduce very little. We cannot, for example, deduce that David was King of Israel; to do that we should need the additional premise P1:

P1The assertion “David was King of Israel” is contained in the Bible.

But P1 does not follow from A1; how, then, does Clark know it is true? You and I think we know P1 is true; we simply turn to Second Samuel Chapter 5 and there it is: David was anointed King of Israel. But this won’t do for Clark; he may be, for all he knows, the victim of some evil demon’s deceit; he may have been led to suppose that Second Samuel contains this assertion (and also led to suppose that everyone else thinks so too) when in fact it says nothing of the kind.

This problem is carefully explored in Mavrodes’ excellent essay; so far as I can see, Clark’s only recourse is to take as axiom, not the assertion that the Bible is the word of God, but each of the propositions asserted in Scripture. Clark expresses a certain distaste for this procedure (a deductive system with 16,000 axioms could perhaps be scored as uneconomical and inelegent), but it is not easy to see an alternative for him.

Although the essays in this volume are of uneven quality, it contains much that is stimulating and much that is worth reading. I recommend it.

Refreshing Study Of John

The Gospel According to St. John, by J. N. Sanders, edited and completed by E. A. Mastin (Harper & Row, 1968, 480 pp., $10), is reviewed by Bruce M. Metzger, professor of New Testament language and literature, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.

Of the writing of many books on the Fourth Gospel there is no end; according to Edward Malatesta’s recently compiled bibliography entitled St. John’s Gospel, 1920–1965 (Rome, 1967), more than thirty-one hundred books and articles on John were published within that forty-five-year period. Yet there is always room for one more good book, and this commentary qualifies as a scholarly and sensitive piece of exegesis.

J. N. Sanders, a former student of Sir Edwyn Hoskins of Cambridge, was fellow and dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and university lecturer in divinity. At the time of his death in 1961 he had completed the introduction and the commentary on chapters 1 through 14. One of his students, B. A. Mastin, who now teaches at University College of North Wales, completed the commentary and added a few notes to Sanders’s material at points where recent discussion seemed to demand notice.

Sanders takes a refreshingly balanced and realistic approach to the Fourth Gospel. Again and again he insists that the theological symbolism that pervades John does not preclude the historicity of the events that are recounted. “The sceptical attitude to the historicity of the Gospels which is characteristic of Form Criticism (though by no means confined to it) is only justifiable if it can be shown to be impossible for the evangelists’ aims to be at once historical and theological.” Furthermore, “only those who can share the evangelists’ presuppositions are capable of admitting that their Gospels are historically reliable.” At the same time Sanders acknowledges that the expositor must still “ask himself whether the evidence which the evangelists adduce will bear the significance which they find in it, and whether they have committed mistakes of fact or interpretation. In particular, the Gospel which presents Christ as the truth ought to be able to stand up to the most rigorous investigation, and the critic would be failing in his duty, not only as a critic, but also as a Christian, if he hesitated to apply it.”

In view of such forthright statements, one is not surprised that Sanders accepts the literal historicity of Jesus’ miracles reported in John’s Gospel, including the resurrection of Lazarus.

Concerning the knotty question of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, Sanders argues that it was the work of John, known in the New Testament as John Mark, the son of Mary, whose house in Jerusalem was probably the scene of the Last Supper. After traveling with his uncle Barnabas and Paul to Cyprus, he later was with Paul at Rome, where, after Paul’s death (A.D. 62?), he met Peter. John returned to Jerusalem and was banished to Patmos, where he received the visions that are included in the Revelation. Released at last from exile in A.D. 96, he went to Ephesus, and there, on the basis of a copy of what he believed to be the memoirs of Lazarus (who was the “beloved disciple” mentioned in the Fourth Gospel), he dictated the Fourth Gospel to an amanuensis named Papias. The First Epistle is an introduction to the Gospel, and Second and Third John are letters he wrote from Ephesus. It was only at a later date, perhaps subsequent to Irenaeus (c. A.D. 180), that patristic tradition identified the author of the Fourth Gospel as John the son of Zebedee.

Whatever one may think of Sanders’s ingenious theory (and the reviewer has certain reservations), it is at least a worthy alternative to other hypotheses, many of which make little or no attempt to correlate internal evidence with the external evidence preserved in the Muratorian Canon, the Anti-Marcionite Prologue, and other early patristic sources.

Sanders’s death at the age of forty-eight cut short the fulfillment of a productive and scholarly career. It is a matter for satisfaction that his work on the Fourth Gospel has now been made available in the series known in America as “Harper’s New Testament Commentaries” and in Great Britain as “Black’s New Testament Commentaries.”

Israel And The Canaanites

Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, by William F. Albright (Doubleday, 1968, 294 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by R. Laird Harris, professor of Old Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

The remarkable literary output of Dr. Albright continues with this and other significant volumes on biblical history. Basically, this book is a study of the literary and cultural interrelations of Israel and her Canaanite-Phoenician neighbors. It contains the Jordan Lectures given at the University of London in 1965. Albright’s thesis is that the Canaanite’s influences were much more important than those from elsewhere.

The first chapter presents Albright’s analysis of the poetic style of Ugaritic literature in comparison to the biblical. He claims that truly archaic poetry has a higher ratio of repetitive parallelism than that of the monarchy. His study is of value, though one may wonder whether our scanty evidence justifies such sweeping generalizations. No Hebrew poetry has been discovered in excavations of the monarchical period.

In his discussion of the patriarchal backgrounds, Albright restates his views on Abraham as a caravaneer, on the relation of Hebrews and the ‘Apiru, and on the background of biblical law. His view, though far from that of Warfield, is a distinct relief from that of Well-hausen et al. He says he has changed his earlier opinion and now believes that the “religious traditions of Genesis” and the “specifically Israelite religious institutions” go back to pre-Mosaic times.

The analysis of the religion of Canaan as evidenced by the Ugaritic literature is broad and useful. It is no wonder that the Canaanite deities here described were the horror of Israel’s prophets. Albright gives some interesting conclusions: a pre-exilic data for Genesis 1 (supposedly in the P document), the reliability of Chronicles and its authorship by Ezra (in the “first edition at least”). He puts Job in the seventh century and Ecclesiastes in the fifth, which is at least in the right direction. He presents here his theory that the divine name YHWH is derived from the causative form of the verb “to be” and cannot come from the simple stem. His negative conclusion is based on evidence and is convincing. The reviewer feels, however, that the word may not be a verb form at all and that Exodus 3:14 is a play on words rather than an etymology.

He remarks that parallels fail in the area of cult: “We have almost no description of ritual in the entire Ugaritic literature.” He claims also that there are few material remains of the cult and that all possible parallels to the tabernacle have perished. Here he overlooks a very good parallel to the construction of the tabernacle, on display in the Cairo museum. It is a demountable chapel from the tomb of King Tutankhamun made with panels of framework construction held together by sliding bolts and covered with linen curtains. The linen cloth still is decorated with gold ornaments.

In dealing with the prophets and their conflict with Canaanite religion, Albright rightly points out that Canaanite contacts are shown in the use of words, names, and so on; but about this influence he says, “Israelite authors were able to utilize it without permitting it seriously to distort their monotheistic approach.”

This somewhat technical book will repay careful study. Its many references are particularly valuable.

Suggested For Mission Study

Sent by the Sovereign, by Walter D. Shepard (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1968, 109 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by C. Darby Fulton, retired executive secretary, Board of World Missions, Presbyterian Church in the United States.

This is a book about theology and missions, delightfully simple and direct, written by a layman. It is refreshingly free from the pedantry of many theological discussions today which tend to compound the confusion of thought by confusion of language. Walter D. Shepard is an architect who spent twenty-one years in missionary service: thirteen in Africa and eight on the staff of the Presbyterian U. S. Board of World Missions.

Each chapter of the book has two parts: first, a brief statement and explanation of a specific doctrine; second, a demonstration of the power inherent in this doctrine for the Church’s task of missions. There are chapters on the sovereignty of God, human depravity, predestination, salvation by grace, perseverance, and the Bible. In all these doctrines the author finds “those principles which underlie, energize, indeed produce as a natural and necessary effect” the Church’s efforts to spread its message throughout the world. He concludes: “We rest our case for missions in the Holy Scriptures, a missionary book, which from start to finish is inspired with a world vision, energized with a world purpose, and marches to a world goal.”

There is an autobiographical quality about this book. The author makes use of plain logic and his own experience as he presents Bible teaching, and he enlivens his discussion with illustrations and humor. Sent by the Sovereign offers a lift to spiritual morale in an age when both theology and missions have suffered from the erosion of faith within the churches.

Basic Text In Introduction

A General Introduction to the Bible, by Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix (Moody, 1968, 480 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Merrill C. Tenney, dean, The Graduate School, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

New scholarly writers in the biblical field are always welcome, especially when they make a positive contribution to the store of knowledge. Geisler and Nix have produced a compact and thoroughly systematized work dealing with the inspiration, canon, and textual transmission of the Bible that is exact enough to be reliable and plain enough to be understood by neophytes. Its organization is particularly impressive; it is a model of lucidity and orderly progression. The content is stated clearly and outlined well, and each chapter concludes with a summary for review. The work is designed for textbook use and should become a standard one in its field.

The apologetic aspect is firm but not obtrusive. Although the writers’ evangelical position is unmistakable, the reader feels they have dealt fairly and objectively with the facts. Their claims are not extravagant, and their sources are generally well documented.

One or two points might be debatable: whether Jesus knew and quoted apocryphal works, and whether Codex C was actually “erased by Ephraem” or by some copyist of his sermons. A definition of Urim and Thummim would clarify the rather obscure statement of the paragraph in which these terms are abruptly introduced. For the more advanced student, a bibliography of the main editions of the more important manuscripts of the Greek New Testament might be useful, and a diagram of the ages, provenance, and possible relationships of these MSS would clarify an area of the discussion. These criticisms, however, are eclipsed by the general excellence of the book, which deserves acceptance as a basic text in general introduction.

Book Briefs

Rediscovering the Book of Revelation, by Barclay M. Newman, Jr. (Judson, 1968, 127 pp., $3.95). Suggests that Revelation was written as a refutation of gnosticism.

Farewell to the Lonely Crowd, by John W. Drakeford (Word, 1969, 144 pp., $3.95). Analyzes some small-group attempts to deal with contemporary social problems.

Tradition for Crisis by Walter Brueggemann (John Knox, 1969, 164 pp., $4.95). Sees Hosea and the other prophets as interpreters of the Mosaic covenant tradition rather than as innovators, and on the basis of this thesis suggests principles for a prophetic ministry in our own situation.

The Fantasy World of Peter Stone by Malcolm Boyd (Harper & Row, 1969, 119 pp., $3.95). A slightly different approach, but the same old Boydism.

The Czeh Black Book, edited by Robert Littell (Praeger, 1969, 298 pp., $6.95). An eyewitness, documented account of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The Jesuits: A History, by Christopher Hollis (Macmillan, 1969, 284 pp., $6.95). A concise history of the Society of Jesus from its foundation in 1539 to the present.

The Christian and the Nations, by André Donner (Eerdmans, 1969, 71 pp., $3.95). Emphasizes the necessity that the Christian consider world affairs from a biblical rather than a purely “nationalistic” perspective.

Prayers to Pray Wherever You Are, by Jeanette Struchen (Lippincott, 1969, 64 pp., $2.50). Short, straightforward, plain-talk prayers about a variety of subjects.

For Laymen and Other Martyrs, by Gerald Kennedy (Harper & Row, 1969, 122 pp., $3.95). Written for and about laymen, these witty, tongue-in-cheek observations about church life offer helpful insights toward a more effective Christian witness.

The Gospel According to St. John, by Rudolf Schnackenburg (Herder & Herder, 1968, 638 pp., $16). This first installment of a multi-volumed coverage of John’s Gospel offers a long introduction and detailed exegesis of chapters 1–4. An extremely thorough and scholarly work that opposes Bultmann’s at many points and affirms the Old Testament-Jewish background of John rather than a Hellenistic-Jewish one.

God, Christ and the World, by Arthur Michael Ramsey (Morehouse-Barlow, 1969, 125 pp., $2.95). The Archbishop of Canterbury affirms the continuing validity of the historic Christian faith and concludes that its supernatural character can be asserted most effectively as we are willing to learn from contemporary conflicts.

Evolutionary Philosophies and Contemporary Theology, by Eric C. Rust (Westminster, 1969, 256 pp., $6.50). Surveys the various process and evolutionary philosophies of the past century and suggests they may work as analogies in contemporary theological thought.

Paperbacks

The Now Generation, by Dennis C. Benson (John Knox, 1969, 143 pp., $2.45). Seeks to relate the needs and contributions of contemporary youth culture to the Christian faith.

Earth with Heaven, by Richard R. Caemmerer. Sr. (Concordia, 1969, 124 pp., $2.75). Examines the problems that confront the Church in communicating the message of Jesus to our skeptical scientific age and emphasizes that Jesus Christ is the connecting link for man between earth and heaven.

Include Me Out, by Colin Morris (Abingdon, 1968, 99 pp., $1.25). Vividly demonstrates that in its preoccupation with some of the trivial details of union the Church has overlooked matters of eternal significance.

A Man Just Like Us, by Harold W. Fife (Christian Literature Crusade, 1969, 117 pp., $1.25). Sermons on Elijah relating the experience of the prophet to the present day.

Ethics and Social Responsibilities in Business, by Harold A. Gram (Concordia, 1969, 108 pp., $1.25). A realistic approach to Christian ethics for the businessman who deals with the complex problems of business today.

Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, by Thomas Brooks (Puritan, 1968, 253 pp., 7s. 6d.). Reprint of a Puritan classic discussing the ways in which Satan will seek to lead men into sin and suggesting ways to defeat temptation.

The Best Books—A Guide to Christian Literature, by W. J. Grier (Banner of Truth Trust, 1968, 175 pp., 4s. 6d.). Although most publishers listed are English and prices are in English currency, this is a most useful list of evangelical books currently in print (in October, 1968), arranged according to subject matter.

The Bible and Tomorrow’s News, by Charles C. Ryrie (Scripture Press, 1969, 190 pp., $1.25). A sober consideration of prophecy from a pre-millennial, pretribulation-rapture, dispensational position.

The Bible Tells Us So, by R. B. Kuiper (Banner of Truth Trust, 1968, 132 pp., 5s.). A clear, readable statement of some of the major doctrines of the Christian faith from the pen of an outstanding Reformed theologian.

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah 1–39, by Arthur E. Cundall Eerdmans, 1968, 96 pp., $1.25). A helpful addition to the “Scripture Union Bible Study Books” series.

Knowing the Living God, by Harold L. Phillips (Warner, 1968, 128 pp., $1.75). Assumes the reality of God and proceeds to consider the ways in which God makes himself known to man.

A broad understanding of academic freedom includes recognition not only of the rights of teachers but also of the rights of students. First and foremost among these is the right of access to a representative segment of the available field of knowledge, including specifically the right to hear more than one side of controversial issues. This right concerns primarily the structured and classroom aspects of the learning process, and calls for encouragement of the widest possible range of inquiry.

Involved also is the right of access to the widest possible range of available subject matter in documentary and other forms. This objective can scarcely be served by reserve shelves or reading lists that ignore significant segments of the pertinent literature.

Again, the student has a right to find, particularly in verbal instruction, coherent patterns of class work. He deserves protection against unreasonable exposure to the favorite dislikes of his professors, and against the systematic erection and destruction of straw men.

A further right of the student is that of unimpeded access to the buildings and other resources of the college or university. This raises the important question of the right of a minority of students to “liberate” a building, imprison visitors to the campus, or confine its administrative officials. And it raises also the larger question of where the ownership of a university rests. There is a growing opinion among students of the Left that when an enrollee joins an academic community and pays his tuition (which probably covers at most one-fourth to one-third of the costs involved in his education), he thereby becomes a part-owner of the institution. In this view, the student body, by pooling the part-interests of all the students, becomes virtually the proprietor. This is a question yet to be adjudicated; but its implementation seems to violate the clear right of the student to pursue his work under conditions of relative relaxation.

The question of student rights sometimes focuses upon the right to determine what persons shall be invited to speak on campus, and incidentally, what speakers shall be denied a hearing. The reservation of this decision to the student rests upon deeper premises, as James R. Kreuzer points out in “A Student ‘Right’ Examined,” an article that appeared in the Summer, 1967, Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors. He describes how students view adults:

First, adults—parents, politicians, professors, presidents have as proof of their utter incompetence an impossible world situation; it is in the nature of things that one generation is the enemy of the next, that hence adults are not to be trusted. Second, administrators—college presidents and deans and their minions—are not only adults, hence incompetent, but evil as well. They are dedicated not to the furthering of the mission of the institution but to placating the natural enemies of the institution at whatever cost and at whatever sacrifice of principle. They are the enemies of change and the upholders of the status quo [p. 197].

Clearly, the question of the cause and content of the alienation students feel is an important ingredient in the determining of student rights. The same writer criticizes the view of historian Henry Steele Commager (see part one of this essay) that students have an unqualified right to decide on campus speakers and allied matters, even if they fulfill their duties badly.

Students see in Commager’s position their most cherished self-image. They are adults, responsible for their actions, free from faculty interference, free to stand on their own feet or fall on their faces [p. 199].

Dean Kreuzer believes that there may yet be a place for professional guidance in such matters as the invitation of campus speakers, and that administrators and faculty also have a stake in these questions.

The rights of students are involved deeply in situations in which the restraint or control of the operation of an institution rests with a minority that acts patently contrary to the wishes and interests of the institution itself and of the majority of students. It has proved tragically true in our time that a small but disciplined minority can succeed in trampling underfoot the evident and expressed wishes and the seemingly clear rights of the large majority of students. True, the elite will vehemently proclaim that they are in a better position to determine what the majority needs and therefore “wants” because of their superior abilities and their larger perspectives.

It will be of little avail to call the attention of these activists (and militants) to the position stated by Daniel Lerner and others in the chapter “The Nazi Elite” in World Revolutionary Elites. The view expressed and defended here is that the engineers of Nazism came from the privileged classes, that they represented an alienated aspect of these classes, that they relied upon violent and one-sided coercion as basic to social control, and that they built their power base upon disaffected and alienated elements in society.

The danger of the degeneration of student freedom into license finds an especially crucial expression when an activist minority deprives the majority of hearing speakers of proved distinction. Members of the militant minority do not hesitate to shout down invited speakers, seize microphones from their hands, tear up their manuscripts, and even block their exit from lecture halls. Here freedom has quite evidently been interpreted as license.

Again, students who wish to study have a right to protection against elites among their number who engage in “confrontation” without the slightest desire to seek solutions, and as a pretext for eliciting violence. These persons systematically set their demands at a level that rules out compromise, since compromise would deprive them of an excuse for bringing out their dupes in mob force to occupy buildings, challenge law-enforcement authorities, and destroy property. In other words, the sincere and earnest students who make up the vast majority have a right to protection against a disciplined and regimentarian minority that is determined to use the campus as a power base in its attempt to destroy the social and political order.

Seen in this light, the question of the “ownership” of the educational institution is largely an academic matter. The simplistic assumption that it “belongs to the students” is absurd (even when seen apart from the normal legal canons of property tenure and the usual procedures for the use of stipulated funds and the pursuit of stated objectives), for it supposes that “the students” constitute some sort of philosophical entity. The activists’ attempt to make the campus a preliminary target in the struggle for revolution in our land has nothing to do with the stated objective of “liberating the institution for the students.”

It seems clear, then, that the serious student (and to his category belong the vast majority) has a right to be protected at two points. First, he can reasonably expect protection against arbitrary treatment in academic matters. If the professor has freedom to seek for truth from all directions, so also the student can ask for both opportunity and overt encouragement in the same task. He deserves also freedom from arbitrary grading, and free access to effective channels in case of clear and flagrant violation of the canons of fairness.

Second, he has a right to be free from exploitation by disciplined and regimentarian minorities who arrogate to themselves the responsibility of being architects of a “new order” that at the moment has no visible blueprint, and whose base would certainly not be the free expression of the popular will. No student who spends his time and money for an education should have to tolerate having the resources of his chosen institution taken over by dissidents whose “confrontation” offers no ground for negotiation, and whose very continuance in disruptive business depends upon “no negotiation.”

Thus the student finds himself, not so much tempted to let his own freedom degenerate into license, as faced with the possibility of being exploited by an elite that will settle only for license leading to anarchy. There remains much work to be done in the area of academic freedom for the sincere and diligent student.

A third, and in some respects exceedingly complex, aspect of the problem of academic freedom concerns institutions with unusual and special commitments. An example is the confessional institution, whether church-related or interconfessional, that is committed to a specific doctrinal stance. The governing standards of such institutions are often embedded in their charters, and often reflect the doctrinal and procedural expectations of sponsoring constituencies.

The American Association of Theological Schools, which assents in general to the 1940 AAUP Statement (see part one of this essay), includes in its Bulletin for February, 1960, a discussion of the special situations that arise in this connection:

Christian freedom exists within the confession of Christian faith. Theological schools may acknowledge specific confessional adherence as laid down in the charters and constitutions of the schools. A concept of freedom appropriate to theological schools will respect this confessional loyalty as well as the general standards of Christian community. At the same time, no confessional standard obviates the requirement for liberty of conscience in the Christian community and the practice of the highest ideals of academic freedom [pp. 2 f.].

It may be assumed that the norms laid down here are appropriate also for colleges maintaining a confessional position. Their relevance to a university conducted under parallel conditions of doctrinal adherence raises some further problems. The Catholic Church is at present wrestling with some of these.

It remains to be seen whether, for example, the position set forth by the Rev. Robert E. Hunt of the Catholic University of America will be approved by the hierarchy. There is, he says, “no cogent reason in the theory why the Catholic theologian and the student of Catholic theology cannot live by the canons of academic freedom as developed, operative and normative in the United States today” (Christian Heritage, October, 1968, p. 16). In saying this he seems willing to waive any special provisions for confessional institutions. The problems such institutions face in carrying out their special stipulations may account in part for the reluctance of some to seek accreditation in regional or national agencies. Certainly no administrator responsible for a confessional institution can remain unaware of some problem areas here.

It seems obvious that the special limitations and stipulations should be put before a prospective faculty member in writing, and that they should be clearly and mutually understood by both the employing institution and the prospective teacher. Interpretation should probably be the responsibility of both administration and tenure faculty, whose understanding of the specific points of doctrinal adherence should be shared by trustees and other governing officials.

These mutually agreed-upon principles should be respected in both letter and spirit by every teacher. The AATS Bulletin stipulates, under the conditions of freedom of teaching and learning, that:

An institution which has a confessional or doctrinal standard may expect that its faculty and students subscribe to that standard. The question of a faculty member’s adherence to the standard may be opened according to specified procedures [February, 1960, p. 3].

The college or university that is bound by specific doctrinal commitments is subject to special problems that often focalize in persons and may be expected to embody the ambiguities present in the complex human personality.

For instance, it is often difficult to distinguish between the precise words used in teaching and the effect of these words on the students. A teacher can state alternative views in such a way that he either commends or else subtly discredits certain points. Again, the ambiguities involved in classroom note-taking are such that a decision in such a situation is difficult if not impossible to render. Pauses, gestures, and intonations, which cannot be recorded in writing, may be crucial in either underscoring or undermining a position.

Another problem is that tentativity and suspension of judgment may easily be misinterpreted as either skepticism or negation of belief. The young professor who has recently come from a university atmosphere often needs some time to discover those adjustments and adaptations of method demanded of him by service in a committed institution. These adjustments may be either affirmative or negative. On the affirmative side, he must adapt the mood of tentativity that is typical of the university scene to the academic task into which he has now come. On the negative side, he must seek to discover in what respects his commitment to the confessional position may or must modify his accepted mode of thinking, and lead him to the careful and scholarly indication of which view among possible alternatives is most compatible with the Christian way of seeing things.

Commitment to confessional directives is basically not so much a matter of the signing of statements as of the spirit and commitments of dedicated men and women. This does not rule out the need for academic protection through established standards of institutional practice. It does mean that the ultimate task of fusing a genuinely Christian commitment with a genuinely liberal education-style, difficult as it is, rests with the committed teacher. Only through a ceaseless quest by Christian scholars for meaning and for interconnections in knowledge can the whole of the educational endeavor be related to the principles of the Christian faith. The effectiveness of a confessional stance essentially rests upon the informed and sincere dedication of those who find a genuine spiritual home in it.

There are no absolute guarantees that a teacher will exercise academic freedom responsibly, or that the convictions that initially led him to work in a given institution will remain harmonious to its stated purposes and objectives over a long period of time. There are built-in risks in the educational endeavor as a whole. The institution committed to confessional directives shares them, and also is involved in some peculiar to itself.

And yet, we are persuaded that education within the framework of doctrinal directives is a highly significant and necessary task. It is to be hoped that there will be a continuing recognition that determining the specific content of such directives lies outside the competence of accrediting agencies. Thus, the concern of these agencies will be primarily that specific and well-understood stipulations are established and honored.

Like our other freedoms, academic freedom is under sharp attack in our generation. In general, the mechanisms for protecting and preserving free inquiry in the mental sense are more fully developed than those for its safeguarding in a physical sense. That is, there are documentary norms that safeguard the freedom to conduct research and to present its results in lecture and printed forms, and associations that serve to enforce acceptance of these norms; but as yet there seem to be no parallel means by which freedom of access to the facilities and resources for free inquiry can be secured and guaranteed.

Involved here is the contemporary and forced “evolution” of the conception of the university. Max Lerner, in a recently syndicated column entitled “The Changing University,” suggests that:

The idea of a university as a place where learning happens and the life of the mind is explored is now considered square. Instead, the university is now seen as an arena where the conflicts of society are fought out, and as an engine for social action and social transformation.

If this latter “ideal” should prevail, what has traditionally been known as academic freedom will probably be due for eclipse, at least in many of our larger institutions.

Those who seek to retain the historic role of the university as a place where ideas can compete freely and openly for the allegiance of the mind seem to be fighting a rear-guard action, and at times a losing battle. The outcome depends in large part upon the wisdom of administrators and upon the responses of the courts.

The issue may be long fought and acrimonious. One fervently hopes that calmer counsel will prevail, and that those who would enslave the halls of academe or chain them to the chariot of revolutionary action will either perceive the illogic of their position or find themselves restrained by forces for public order. These forces will need to be restrained and courageous enough to act out the meaning of freedom for the mind both in the streets and in the courts.

Today the Western world is experiencing attacks on two of the main bastions of its cultural citadel. On the one hand, Christianity, which has underlain the whole development of Western civilization for the past fifteen hundred to two thousand years, is now under heavy fire from within the Western world itself. This attack has developed gradually for over a century, and it now seems to have reached a climax with the God-is-dead movement and the “God-might-just-as-well-be-dead” attitude of many others within the professing Christian Church. Likewise, the second typical Western phenomenon, democracy, increasingly suffers denigration and even positive assault, often by those who claim to be its staunchest supporters. Recent events in Czechoslovakia, a good many of the happenings during the American presidential elections, the activities of the New Left on campus and on main street, all indicate that democracy, like Christianity, is facing agencies that want to destroy it.

A question that forces itself upon us is this: Is there any relation between these two crises? Are Christianity and democracy so intimately linked that they rise and fall together? The Marxist replies with the stock answer that since Christianity and Western democracy are both the products of a bourgeois capitalistic society, they are certainly part of the same movement. Therefore if one goes down the other must soon follow. Some Christians, however, deny this interpretation. Numerous statements made in various Christian writings recently seem to reject democracy as non-if not anti-Christian, almost classifying it with Communism. They seem to place Christianity and democracy in antithetical positions.

In attempting to determine the truth of the matter, one might begin by examining how the Christian faith and democracy have been related in the past. The two appear linked together at various points, particularly at times of the Church’s revival and reformation.

Although the whole pattern of society at the time of the early Church was authoritarian and dictatorial, Christian believers adopted a democratic approach to ecclesiastical government. The Book of Acts, particularly chapters one and fifteen, shows that the early Church believed that Christ governed his Church through the Holy Spirit’s working in the entire Church as his body. The people as a whole, or their representatives, expressed their views by casting their votes.

After apostolic times this procedure was followed in the election of bishops and choice of pastors. But once the Church had become linked to the empire, things began to change. The emperor, and later in the West the Bishop of Rome, began to appoint bishops on their own authority. At the same time, the doctrine of apostolic succession became generally accepted; this placed in the hands of either the Eastern emperor in Constantinople or the pope in Rome ultimate and absolute ecclesiastical power.

With the fall of the Empire in the west and the ensuing barbarian invasions, a sort of primitive tribal democracy existed for a time, but this largely disappeared in the chaos of the “Dark Ages” (500–750). At the same time, the last vestiges of democracy within the Church vanished with the acceptance of the doctrine of papal sovereignty over all society, supported from the thirteenth century onward by the Aristotelian hierarchical view of all reality. Although at times popular democratic movements arose in both church and state, they had little or no lasting effect and only served to underline the fact that democracy in almost every sphere had all but disappeared.

Renaissance humanism, with its implicit anti-Christian and anti-democratic bias carried on the medieval ideas. Although accepting in general the idea that the individual was unique and therefore capable of great things, the humanists believed this possible for only a few, the elite. As Pico della Mirandolla put it, by the use of his reason the true virtuoso could lift himself to a position that would make him almost divine. Castiglione in The Courtier sought to show how this might be accomplished by a noble, and Machiavelli in The Prince advised rulers how they could attain this goal by becoming absolute in their domains. By 1520 the rule, rather than the exception, was despotism.

With the coming of the Reformation the situation changed. The return to the Bible, and the resulting rejection of Aristotle’s influence and the Renaissance humanists’ irresponsible individualism, brought into vogue in Protestant circles a different concept of man and his position in the world. Luther, Calvin, and the other Protestant leaders laid great stress upon the individual, but the individual as responsible for the whole of his life to God. This meant that the prince was not autonomous; he was liable to the judgment of God for abuse of his position. Likewise, the individual had a duty to the “commonwealth,” of which he was to be, as Knox put it, “a profitable member.”

This meant that no human power was absolute, and that both sovereign and subject were under the rule of Jesus Christ, who is Lord over all. Similarly, since Christ governs his Church through his Word and Spirit, working within the body of believers as a whole, the Church is neither an autocracy nor a despotism but fundamentally a kingdom of which Christ is the ruler. Calvin, who worked this concept out most fully in the organization of the Genevan church, also laid it down as the basic principle for all civil government.

One cannot fail to notice that in the seventeenth century democracy developed only where Protestantism, and especially Calvinism, held sway. England, Scotland, Holland, and the New England colonies all established what were, for those days, radically democratic governments. The English Puritans and the Scottish Covenanters put up a long fight to achieve their concept of parliamentary government, and eventually they won. The French Huguenots tried the same thing but by 1685 had suffered total defeat. The ground-motive of these struggles to establish democracy was fundamentally Christian, based upon the idea of Christ ruling over the state by his Word and Spirit through the people.

Yet, though the early democratic ideals were inspired by the teaching of the Protestant Reformers, with the rise of rationalism and deism in the latter part of the seventeenth century democracy soon came to be regarded as a purely human concoction. The idea of Christ’s kingship over the state disappeared. According to the American revolutionaries, democracy was one of the inalienable rights of all Englishmen, and according to the French revolutionaries, it was one of the undisputed prerogatives of all men. Democracy, now regarded as purely human in origin, was not considered to have any relation to religion, except that religion, since it was all basically the same, demonstrated that all men are equal. But the rejection of the Christian ground-motive led to democracy’s domination by a mob as in the French Revolution and then by a dictator such as Napoleon. This has been the constantly repeated story of humanistic democratic movements.

While rationalistic humanism spread and gained adherents, such movements as the Great Awakening in New England, the Evangelical Revival in Britain, and the Afscheiding in Holland were taking place. With the revival of the doctrines of the priesthood of believers and the Lordship of Christ over state and society, Christian thinking began to reassert itself. For a time during the nineteenth century there was a growth of Christian influence in politics and in society as a whole. The names of men such as Shaftesbury, Gladstone, Kuiper, and others point directly to the Christian influence that went along with a revival of democracy in that century. At the same time, however, anti-democratic and anti-Christian forces were gathering strength: Hegel, Marx and Engels, and Nietszche were declaring democracy to be weak and evil. Christian views of democracy faced the threat and opposition of materialistic unbelief, which favored the dictatorship of the elite, whether proletarian or intellectual.

The first two-thirds of the twentieth century have seen the growing success of anti-Christian, anti-democratic forces. As men have increasingly turned away from the Christian Gospel, they have more and more come to accept the universe as an accidental thing in an irrational world. In such a situation democracy has little to offer. Elitism and despotism seem to provide the only solution to the problem of how men can live upon this earth. The result has been Communism, Nazism, or the New Left, with a constant threat of mob violence. Only a dictator or an oligarchy, we are often told, can really control things in the face of absolute, ultimate chance.

With the rejection of Christianity by so many, even the old Christian “virtues” have now been cast overboard. To many people, moral principles no longer have any validity. The result is demonstrations for or against anything and everything, increasing difficulty and weakness of law enforcement, and threats of turmoil on every hand. In such situations the cry then goes out to hand over the country to someone who will restore “law and order.” This was the ground of Hitler’s election, and has increasingly become the electoral basis in other Western lands. The result could be dictatorship, the police state, while democracy disappears and Christianity also suffers persecution and retreats underground.

The world today does not need more dictatorship—ask any Czech or Slovak refugee! Nor does it need amoral, humanistic democracy. It needs to have the Church once again call men back to repentance for their sins. Men must recognize that they are under God’s judgment for their rebellion in thinking they can run their own lives without reference to him who is the Lord of Life. At the same time, they must hear the call to reconciliation through faith in Jesus Christ. When they take this to heart and recognize that he is Lord even over political government, the truly democratic way of thinking will be restored. If this does not happen, democracy will disappear, and with it the freedoms that down through the ages have meant so much to Christians.

Conflict between Christianity and aesthetics is no new thing. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091–1153) asserted that “works of art are idols which turn men away from God”; and long before Bernard, Tertullian (1607–230?) argued that the arts are ministrations of sin and rejected Christian participation in every aspect of contemporary culture. The great nineteenth-century novelist Tolstoy in his mystical years rejected the entire culture that had nourished him, including the sciences and the arts (except for art that was explicitly harmonious with Christian morality, which because of its explicitness often turns out to be homily or tract rather than art). And in 1960 Professor Charles I. Glicksburg of Brooklyn College wrote: “all orthodoxy spells the death of the creative imagination” (Literature and Religion: A Study in Conflict).

But I wish to dissent. I believe that there is no conflict between Christianity and aesthetic pursuits—and in fact, that there is a strong correlation between Christian values and the values inherent in an aesthetic object and in aesthetic contemplation.

In an essay “On Style” (in Against Interpretation, Dell, 1961), Susan Sontag says that ethical attitudes are fostered or nourished by aesthetic experience. Morality she defines as a form of consciousness that is aimed at decisive action, whereas aesthetic experience is the nourishment of consciousness, the enlivening of human sensibility. Only rarely can a man make a moral choice that rises higher than his vision of reality, his sensibility; and it is partly through aesthetic experience that he sharpens and deepens that sensibility. Therefore aesthetic experience is actually the nourishment of the human capacity for moral choice.

Let me illustrate. On Thanksgiving, 1968, Truman Capote presented a TV play about Thanksgiving during his childhood. The major conflict was between Buddy, a boy cherished by his elderly aunt, and a poor neighborhood boy whom the aunt insisted should be invited to share Thanksgiving dinner. When Buddy sees his archenemy steal his aunt’s prized brooch, he waits until everyone is seated at dinner to announce the fact of the theft. Both Buddy and the audience are shocked when the aunt refuses to support him; she checks her jewelry box and insists that the brooch is still there, even though both Buddy and his rival know the truth. Naturally, Buddy feels betrayed by the adult world, and the sympathetic viewer feels outraged and baffled. But later the aunt lovingly explains the reason for her lie: Buddy had deliberately and maliciously planned to humiliate his enemy, whereas his enemy had simply been too weak to resist the sudden temptation of the brooch. Lovelessly triumphant retaliation is worse than moral weakness: this was what the aunt wanted Buddy to learn.

And it was also what Truman Capote wanted his TV audience to learn, no doubt in conjunction with his well-known campaign against capital punishment. My point is this: through that play Mr. Capote made his audience more aware of the moral ramifications of certain choices. Whether or not the viewer agreed with the playwright’s conclusions, the experience made him more sensitive in the major areas of self-righteousness, vengeance, love, and human relationships. So vivid was the drama that it remains embedded in the viewer’s consciousness, causing certain attitudes to change or to become stronger, so that his reactions in related situations in the future will be slightly different than what they would have been had he never seen the play. I must emphasize that I am talking, not of accepting an author’s personal solutions, but of being stimulated to greater awareness of the issues involved in a specific type of choice. Quite properly, art is not so concerned with supplying answers as with posing a broad spectrum of questions.

An authentic appreciation of beauty (that is, an aesthetic experience) has certain characteristics. Sontag’s list includes disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, and the awakening of the feelings. Moreover, to have an aesthetic experience, I must be in contact with an aesthetic object—which could be a building, a novel, a string quartet, a painting, a beautifully set dinner table, a champion athlete in motion, the actions of someone whose skill and dedication have turned his work into an art. This aesthetic object will possess the following qualities: grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, and sensuousness. All these qualities, both those inherent in the object and those inherent in the appreciative beholder, Sontag calls “fundamental constituents of a moral response to life.”

And any one who knows the Bible can see that these same qualities are praised there, though in different terminology. Disinterestedness, the first requirement for aesthetic experience, means unbiased freedom from unselfish motive; and it was precisely this quality that St. Paul praised in the attitude of Timothy, because he found it so rare: “For all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ’s” (Phil. 2:21). Similarly, in First Corinthians 13 Paul cited disinterestedness as a characteristic of love: love “seeketh not her own.” And the many passages concerned with conquering the flesh refer to the conquering of the inveterate human tendency toward self-interest, self-centeredness. To receive the full impact of an aesthetic object, I must be disinterested, directing my attention to the object rather than to myself; thus aesthetic experience will nourish my capacity to rise above self-interest and to become absorbed in that which is not me.

Nowhere is the disinterested reaction more fully evoked than in response to the aesthetic objects of God: mountains, sunsets, waterfalls, forests filled with snow. (Who can forget the shock of worship when, concentrating on a scientific achievement, we heard from the moon the divine poetry, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”?) But disinterestedness is a necessary component of every aesthetic experience, whether of human achievements or of the handiwork of God.

The second quality Sontag finds in aesthetic experience is contemplativeness. Christianity recognizes this as the quality that raises man above animality and that therefore must be developed in healthful balance with active living. There is an overt blending of aesthetics with morality in the terminology of a leading New Testament passage on contemplation: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” (Phil. 4:8).

A third quality of aesthetic experience is attentiveness, or heedful observation through the selective narrowing or focusing of consciousness and receptivity. One cannot really experience a symphony if he uses it as background for a game of checkers; he must discipline his mind, focus his consciousness. Love of one’s neighbor calls for a similar ability to listen, to observe, to react to what is out there in the other person, as opposed to defensive or preoccupied uninvolvement. And this too requires discipline. On first hearing Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, the non-musician may hear nothing but noise, and may suspect that the instruments are wandering aimlessly, with no overall pattern; but if through repeated exposure he learns to listen, to focus his mind on the music instead of wool-gathering, he will begin to perceive and enjoy beauty. It is a discipline, but everything worthwhile requires discipline. (There is, for instance, no mental discipline more arduous than meaningful prayer, which is a form of creative thinking about reality.) And this ability to be attentive has been offered to those who want to live abundantly: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound [disciplined] mind” (2 Tim. 1:7).

The final quality Sontag lists as intrinsic to aesthetic experience is the awakening of the feelings. Perhaps it was exactly this that Bernard and Tertullian feared in the arts. Certainly it was what Plato feared. “We shall be right in refusing to admit [the poet] into a well-ordered State,” he says in The Republic, “because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings [inferior faculties of the soul] and impairs the reason [the soul’s highest faculty].” But despite much confused thinking through the years, the New Testament is not essentially Platonic and denies the validity neither of the emotions nor of the body.

When the King James translators chose the word heart, they were using it in its Old English sense as “the center of vital functions, the seat of affections, desires, thoughts” (Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology). Therefore statements such as “Keep thy heart with all diligence: for out of it are the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23) constitute a recognition of the importance of affections and desires as well as of reason. A man is redeemed by believing in his heart—that is, in an organic fusion of mind and will and emotions, in the center not of some single faculty but of his whole being. Thus the Bible recognizes the importance of emotion and gives it equal status with reason by recognizing in man’s sensibility an organic union called the heart.

In his essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), T. S. Eliot complained that in the later seventeenth century “a dissociation of sensibility set in from which we have never recovered,” a split between feeling and thinking, so that later poets tended to think and feel “by fits, unbalanced.” This is not the occasion to argue all the literary ins and outs of Eliot’s theory; but on a practical level the dissociation of sensibility is still all too obvious. Some liberal preachers speak as if reason were everything and shudder at emotion, while certain fundamentalist pastors speak as if conversion were purely an emotional matter and lose no opportunity to denigrate reason. In contemporary society, the cult of D. H. Lawrence and LSD and the quest for sheer sensation (all in revolt against mechanization and ultra-rationality) are yet other manifestations. All this extremism could have been avoided had mankind heeded the emphasis of the Bible that out of the heart are the issues of life.

Perhaps someone may object that the emotions have never gone to sleep and therefore do not need to be reawakened. But the fact is that most of life is made up of routine, and routine deadens emotional reactions. The aesthetic object dislocates us, shocks us with its unique reordering of familiar reality, and thus brings us alive. It may also acquaint us with areas where we were so ignorant that we could not possibly have made an appropriate emotional response; for that reason I consider it important for every white Christian to read black authors such as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.

Then there are the qualities inherent in the aesthetic object itself: grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, and sensuousness. All these, properly understood, are Christian virtues as well as aesthetic ones. For most evangelicals, the most troublesome to understand as a Christian virtue might be sensuousness, which in its emphasis on the physical senses might seem to be the enemy of spirituality. But there is nothing antispiritual about a sensitive appreciation of the surface of things, as is demonstrated by God’s concern for the minute aesthetic details of the tabernacle, even down to the precise formula for the incense (Exod. 30:34–38). I agree heartily with Irwin Edman when he says:

To be sensuously dead is to be on the way to death in toto. A subtilization of sensuous response is a subtilization of the whole temper and fibre of being. Flights of the spirit are perhaps better to be looked for in persons whose senses are stinging and alive than in those who go about dead to the colors of that world in which their spirit lives and has its being [Arts and the Man, Norton, 1939, p. 47].

I hope that by now it is clear why I believe that Christian virtues are reinforced rather than weakened by aesthetic experience. But I am not claiming that any person of extensive aesthetic awareness will necessarily be a Christian, for being a Christian is a matter of heart-belief as well as of perception. As Robert Browning shows in “My Last Duchess,” it is possible to be at once an art connoisseur and a moral monster; and as he shows in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed,” maniacal selfishness and astute sensitivity to beauty can indeed co-exist. But in cases like this, art is viewed as an opportunity for ego-extension and acquisition rather than a liberating experience of reality (inevitably, God’s reality: there is no other reality).

Even so, the demonic influence in art cannot be denied; there have been morally depraved artists and morally depraved lovers of art. But even the work of Richard Wagner, who has been called “the most self-absorbed egotist of all times,” can be experienced as a revealing of the grandeur and glory of God. For regardless of Wagner’s self-seeking motives, when he composed well he discovered and submitted to the musical principles of God inherent in the universe; and in that submission (that is, in the creative act) he was forced to manifest biblical virtues in order to produce music characterized by grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, and sensuousness. Beauty is God’s, regardless of the artist’s conscious motivation.

It is simply not true, of course, that being a Christian will make a technically good artist out of a technically bad one. If two artists were technically equal, it is possible that the genuine conversion of one might provide the impetus and inspiration that would give him an edge over his fellow artist. But if he were converted to a fearful and anti-cultural type of Christianity, the experience might well be the death of his art. Here the blame would not fall on the Word of God but on human warping of it.

Nor is it true that a genuinely aesthetic approach to life would necessitate Christianity, though such an approach would, by my definitions, cultivate certain biblical virtues. This much, I think, can safely be said: because of the mutually reinforcing qualities of Christianity and aesthetics, a Christian who is aesthetically aware will be a richer human being, and therefore a better Christian, than a Christian who is uninterested in beauty and insensitive to it. And conversely, an art-lover who is a Christian will be a richer human being, and therefore a better human being, than the lover of beauty who ignores Christ’s claims upon his life and thus shuts himself off from the power of the Holy Spirit.

According to St. Paul, the marks of the Holy Spirit in a man’s life are these: “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Gal. 5:22–23)—in short, the kind of orderliness and beauty that we expect in the form of a good work of art. However tempestuous or ugly the content of an art work may be, as in a war poem by Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, the form brings the content under ordered control and thus into meaningful beauty through the fusing power of the imagination. And the power of the Holy Spirit in a complex human life can similarly bring order out of chaos, beauty out of ashes.

A Christian who has not developed his sense of beauty by appreciative contact with the arts is an incomplete man. He is missing many opportunities to explore some of the deepest dimensions of humanity—and, after all, it was humanity that Christ died to redeem. Furthermore, both the incarnation and the resurrection, with their union of spirit and flesh, authenticate and validate human experience. A Christian who has not heightened his consciousness of humanity through the arts has cut himself off from one avenue to awareness of what redemption is all about; for the deeper the awareness of the human predicament, the deeper the gratitude for its solution in Christ. And a lover of beauty who has not tasted of redemption is also an incomplete man, unaware as he is of man’s ultimate need.

But the Christian lover of beauty is in a position to make his own life a work of art. “Do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31)—here is rich motivation, here is a worthwhile theme, here is an integrating, synthesizing motif for the hurly-burly of human experience. Must the dishes be washed? Then let them be washed with a constant eye for improved technique, as an act of worship with a loving heart toward God and man: thus drudgery becomes touched with the divine, and to the beholder mere work becomes aesthetically satisfying. Must studies be mastered? Then let them be mastered with an eye for excellent form, making enormous private effort so that in public the learning will sit lightly and gracefully (for all true art is apparently effortless). Is there injustice within one’s sphere of influence? Then let it be viewed aesthetically, perceived as ugly, and corrected—for justice is a form of harmony. As D. W. Prall writes, “It is aesthetic discernment that is required both to see the evils of the world and to picture a better one” (Aesthetic Judgment).

There is nothing that may not be done aesthetically—that is, beautifully in its own way or kind. For a Christian, doing all things aesthetically amounts to doing all things for the glory of God. And artists like Bach and Rembrandt and Milton and T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis (as well as hundreds of non-artists who lived beautifully but never achieved fame) have left to us their testimony that it can be done.

As I see it, then, there is no conflict between Christianity and aesthetic pursuits. There is, rather, a strong correlation between the values of Christ and the values inherent in the aesthetic object and in aesthetic contemplation.

GOD OF QUASARS

God of the quasars and the miniscule,

God of all origins and all futureness,

God of the holy ones, and God of all,

And—most of all—of One who chose to bless

Me

(An enemy):

You came too lowly for my perch of pride,

Yet seemed too far aloft for me to reach you;

You gave, but made your own selection, God,

Not thinglings longed for by the creature

Me

(An enemy).…

You “reconcile” by tossing forth a rope

And not the handsome ribbon I would dangle

Round my honor-worthy throat.… That Hope

And Grace and Peace! They cannot wangle

Me

(Your enemy).

New terms, perhaps—more mine? A truce?

Oh, surely, God of quasars, you can save on

Suaver terms, some laxer kind of peace;

But I won’t call you “bully”—I’m too craven,

Me

(An enemy).

I’m bogged in this, this no-man’s middleness,

And going down is bad, and climbing’s harder.

But I’ll consent (as prince to prince) to this

Or that deed or renouncing.… What? No barter

With me

(As enemy).

Mark the foregoing, God, “to be continued.”

I think I shall, I think I’ll do a sequel.…

But tug, tug, tug.… O God the mighty-sinewed,

YOU know this situation is unequal,

For me,

Your.…

God of the quasars and the miniscule,

God of all origins and all futureness,

God of the holy ones, and God of all,

And—most of all—of One who chose to bless

Me

(An enemy).

HENRY HUTTO