Two other early rivals to Christianity should be considered, the first because of its attractiveness, the second because of its persecuting power. Both are equally operative in the Asian world of today. The first, more a movement and a climate of thought than a coherent religious system, is represented by Gnosticism and the mystery religions. It is also represented by the substratum of magic that underlay all first-century religions, as Taoism underlies modern Chinese popular religion or the bomah (witch doctor) underlies the popular Islam of Malaysia.

If we start at the lowest level of magic, the classical biblical example is at Ephesus, where the triumph of the Gospel meant the burning of many of the famous “Ephesian letters,” the magic spells for which the city was famous. Simon of Samaria and Elymas of Cyprus apparently used this sort of magic in connection with more developed religious systems. In one respect at least, magic corresponded very closely to science in modern times. It was an attempt by man to manipulate and control his natural environment for his own benefit. Of course, we know that it was a false and pseudo-science; but those who used it believed in it implicitly, and it did seem to produce some results, no doubt by demonic power. The fortune-teller of Philippi bore true witness to the mission of Paul and Silas, just as the demon-possessed man in the Gospels bore unwilling but true testimony to the nature of Christ. Christian workers today are sometimes puzzled by the heathen fortune-teller who can actually foretell the future; this problem too was known to the primitive Church.

The belief in magic led to that bondage of fear of the spirit-world that is still prevalent in many lands. To such people, the good news of the resurrection victory of Christ, with its triumph over all the powers of darkness, came as a liberating message. But it is important to understand that magic, as well as being terrifying, was as fascinating as science is today. It professed, at least, to give knowledge of the future, and even to be able to mold that future; it seemed practical, modern, this-worldly. Those of us who strive to present the Gospel to the scientifically minded youth of the great Asian cities today find ourselves faced by similar problems. Christianity does not seem as relevant to them as the atomic reactor. On the other hand, those who work in the villages still face magic, in the old sense, as a rival to Christianity.

The mystery religions as such are not mentioned in the New Testament. It is almost certain, however, that when Paul uses the term “mystery” in his epistles, he is deliberately using the language of one of Christianity’s rivals, and giving it a Christian meaning. Of course, “mystery” to Paul meant the revelation of a previously hidden secret of God, something very different from the meaning of the word in either the Eleusinian Mysteries or any other of the well-known examples. All these mystery religions alike catered to the religious cravings of the common man, unsatisfied by the formalism of state religion and the emptiness of the old mythologies. Indeed, the wilder and more orgiastic of the mystery religions catered to men’s emotional as well as his religious needs, giving worshipers the sort of emotional release that fans nowadays get from an exciting ball game or a Beatles concert. But as far as we know, the mystery religions were not as a rule immoral: instead, they gave men hope of rebirth and salvation, with noble aspirations and ideals. In later days the simple soldier-faith of Mithras, with its clear distinction between right and wrong, was a rival to Christianity in winning the loyalty of the Roman legionnaires. What then was the danger to Christian faith posed by the mystery religions? Perhaps it was similar to the danger in modern non-Christian psychotherapy. Such religions gave men release from tension and psychological relief without touching the deeper problems of salvation and peace with God.

Gnosticism, at the other end of this spectrum, was something very different and far more dangerous. It was many-armed, like the octopus, and like it engulfed its foes. Hinduism and pantheism and theosophy are all Gnosticism in its modern forms. True, today Hinduism has a militant movement in India; but this is as inconsistent with historic Hindu philosophy as the militant Buddhism of Viet Nam is inconsistent with traditional Buddhism. Gnosticism, too, was rarely a persecuting force and claimed few martyrs. Instead it was parasitic on the Christian Church, and continually sucked weak Christians into its maw.

Of all the rivals, Gnosticism was the most attractive; it flattered man’s intellect, and gave its followers the impression that they were superior insiders and that all the rest of mankind were outsiders. It was a philosophy, it was a church, it was mysticism; what more could men ask? It found a place for Zeus, Moses, and Christ, along with a thousand others, as different emanations of the divine. One Roman emperor had statues of all three in his private chapel. Broadmindedness and tolerance and enlightenment were its watchwords, and the proof of this claim was that it took two very different forms. The first was ascetic; this is still one great tradition of our Asian lands—the man who controls, despises, ignores, perhaps even burns, his body. This often kindles natural man’s admiration, or even his emulation; but to despise or ignore the body is not Christian doctrine, and led to the worst excesses of the monastic movement. This wing of Gnosticism was admired by many but followed by few; the other wing was the true danger. Gnosticism was fundamentally amoral; salvation was by intellect alone. Many Gnostics glorified sex in the name of religion, or at least allowed men to give free reign to all their passions, as Baal worship had done in the old days. Liberty became license. Among other sterner Gnostic groups, the body itself was considered an evil and a hindrance; that being so, it did not matter what man did to his body. This sometimes led to the condoning of immorality, as is done in certain theological and ethical circles today. No wonder, in view of the practices of some of these sects, that Christians were accused of every kind of vice, the more so since their doings had to remain secret because of persecution.

We who have seen the glorification of sex both in ancient Hinduism and in modern Hollywood can realize the magnetic power of such an approach to fallen man, especially to young people. True, unabashed sexual license had always been a part of the worship of Aphrodite at Corinth and other places; but normally, Graeco-Roman religion at its worst was only amoral, not immoral. Gnosticism on the other hand glorified and boasted of the very things of which paganism was ashamed. If the Jews saw the Christians as heretics, and the polytheists saw them as atheists (because of their rejection of images), then the Gnostics saw them as killjoys. Christianity was pictured as gloomy, frustrated, unnatural, evil—all the adjectives we hear applied to ourselves today by those who will not accept the biblical revelation of God’s will. How the Church met the Gnostic challenge, we have no time to see in detail; but principally the answer lay in clinging fast to God’s Word and refusing to lower the moral standards that God demands, no matter how attractive the alternatives seemed.

Of all the rivals, the one that claimed the lives of most martyrs was the state religion, and this still remains the greatest danger to many Christians in Asia today. The strange thing is that, while it least partook of the nature of a true religion, it was the most bitterly intolerant. Those who would not burn a pinch of incense to Rome and Caesar were led at once to death. Of course, the Roman emperor was not the first to institute this practice. The Hellenistic kings of the East had long used this method (for it was but a political ruse) to bind into one the heterogeneous peoples whom they ruled. It is doubtful whether, in later days, either ruler or ruled took emperor-worship seriously; the crowds in Acts were only flattering Herod (Luke makes clear the financial motivation again) when they said he was a god, though Herod was punished for accepting this title. Typical was the attitude of the dying Roman emperor who, when asked how he felt, said with dry humor, “I feel that I am becoming a god.” Yet from the time of the Maccabean martyrs to the early Christian Church, Jew and Christian alike steadfastly refused this token worship of the state, which to them was idolatry. This, to the imperial authority, was narrowmindedness, inexplicable stubbornness, lack of patriotism, and, worst of all, open defiance of government edict.

So men and women died for Christ’s sake, but, in the eyes of the government, they died because they were bad citizens; this was a stigma hard to bear. So today many suffer and die, not as Christians, but, in the eyes of their governments, for some other reason that actually stems directly from their Christian obedience. True, in quite early days a man could be put to death simply on the charge of being a Christian; but the acid test as to whether or not he was a Christian, in the eyes of the state, was whether he would sacrifice to Rome and Augustus. In the days of World War II, Japanese Christians faced similar problems in connection with emperor worship; and in other lands, bowing to pictures of rulers or founders of states has exercised the Christian conscience. In all totalitarian states, this clash is bound to occur in some form or another. It often crops up in far less extreme forms in our new states of Southeast Asia.

The tragedy is that the point of difference seemed so small; yet, to the Christian, everything was at stake. It would have been easier to bear if Christianity had been totally opposed to the state as an institution, as some peripheral groups have always held. But the Lord’s word was clear: Caesar’s things to Caesar, and God’s things to God. No man could have gone further than Paul or Peter in preaching civil obedience, and obedience to an autocratic government.

Yet the Book of Revelation shows the dilemma of a Christian, who is bound to cooperate with the state as far as he can in good conscience, but who knows that there will always be a limit to the cooperation when Caesar’s law and God’s law conflict. When does Caesar cease to be the one set in authority by God and become instead the Beast, drunk with the blood of the saints? There is no easy answer, and perhaps not all Christians will answer alike. This Christian intransigence puzzles any government still further: Why, having come so far, cannot Christians come all the way with them? Worse still, what of the Christians who give way under pressure and sacrifice to Caesar, and are then in an agony of remorse? This was a continual problem to the Church in the days of the persecutions that followed the New Testament (and, surprisingly enough, none dealt with it as wisely as Cyrian, a church father not usually found congenial by evangelicals). It is a problem we may have to face in parts of Asia in days to come.

In the West, the problem of the opposition of the state religion to Christianity was solved with the accession of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, who turned the tables by making Christianity the state religion. But the Western churches are still suffering from the ill effects of Constantine’s move; and we in the East have never had our Constantine. State religion is a rival to Christianity that we must be prepared to meet increasingly in days ahead, whether our countries are totalitarian states, or guided democracies, or full democracies. The Christian must love his country, true, but he must love God more.

Having seen something of the nature and extent of the rivals to Christianity in the first century, we may take heart when we see that they were not only just as serious as the rivals of our day but also very similar. We may also take heart from the knowledge that Christianity finally triumphed. The Roman Empire is no more, but the Christian Church remains, planted today in every continent. What was the secret of its triumph, the triumph of the Cross? Were there any great principles we may follow today?

The first letter of John was written at a time when the storm of persecution on the one hand and heresy on the other was already breaking on the Church. The aged John says very simply, “Whatever is born of God conquers the world. Our faith, that is the conquest that conquers the world. Who is the world’s conqueror but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” (1 John 5:4, 5, Moffatt Translation). The quality of Christian faith is the key, for it is a faith in the One who said, “In the world you have trouble, but courage!—I have conquered the world” (John 16:33, Moffatt). In this way, and this way alone, the Christian has “survival value.” This is no automatic process; it is Christians who are conscious of the nature of their faith who will overcome (1 John 2:14, Moffatt: “You are strong, and the word of God remains within you, and you have conquered …”). Faith in the Christ who has already conquered on the Cross, and a readiness to proclaim that faith—these are the two essentials for dark days.

In the Book of Revelation, the experience of the infant Church is summed up as, “They have conquered … by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony” (Rev. 12:11, Moffatt). But there is a second part to this verse, one that shows the price: “They had to die for it, but they did not cling to life.” Totality of commitment to Christ is as essential as faith and readiness to witness; a lukewarm church has less to offer than any of the ancient or modern rivals of Christianity, and will go with the winds of change. For many Christians in the first century, this meant martyrdom, as it had for their Lord—that final act of witness by death that seals and completes the witness by life. For some Christians in the twentieth century, especially in totalitarian countries, it may well mean this also. For all of us, it will mean that we hold life, and all that it offers, cheap as compared with the triumph of the Cross throughout the world.

After the beginning, man began. And man said, Let there be a wheel, and there was a wheel. And man saw that it was good and invented all sorts of vehicles, from wagons pulled by oxen to trains driven by the power of the piston; from carts pulled by ponies to planes pushed by jet engines. And the evening and the morning were the first era.

And man said, Let the laboratories bring forth the cleansers, the labor-saving devices, the maintenance-free equipment; let them multiply in infinite variety; and it was so. And man made self-cleaning ovens, frost-free refrigerators, remote-control lawn mowers, automatic washers and dryers, electronic, transistorized trouble-free equipment of every conceivable type. And man saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the second era.

And man said, Let there be a new dimension to our vision so that we can see what takes place on the other side of the earth as well as in every corner of our countryside and cities. Let this television divide the night from the day for its viewers so that the night people may rule. Let it be for a sign of the seasons and give information to all the earth. And it was so. And man made great towers to send the vision on waves of light and sound, and he made a lesser sound called radio to rule the day. And he set them in the pattern of life to divide the day into segments, the years into series, and the summers into reruns. And man saw that it was good, and the evening and the morning were the third era.

And man said, Let there be power from the building blocks of the universe. And man made the power by dividing the atom, and called that power an atomic bomb. And man said, Let the power of the atom be channeled into one purpose. And man called that one purpose the guarantee of Peace upon the earth, and the working together of all peoples for the benefit of all. And man saw that it was good. And man said, Let the power bring forth new ways of manufacturing goods for all men; and the atom yielded its power to produce submarines, aircraft carriers, missiles, each yielding after its own kind. And men thought it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth era.

And man said, Let the men of science bring forth a craft that will break the power of gravity and fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And man created great space capsules, orbiting platforms, communications satellites, flying spy machines in order to explore the universe and to keep track of his earth neighbors. Every invention brought forth abundantly after its kind and inspired new creations. And man saw that it was good and blessed it with huge budgets, saying, Be fruitful and multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth era.

And man said, Let us make a machine in our image, after our likeness, and let it do all our calculating for us, keep accurate record of our fiscal affairs, make out the payroll, keep up to date the data on all scientific progress, store in memory all the facts of all the earth and every moving thing in heaven and on earth.

So man created the computer in his own image, computer and collater created he them. And man blessed them and said, Do all the work required of man, multiply formulas and equations to the end of the universe, take charge of the power of the atom, and compute the path of the orbiting spacecraft. And man saw everything that he had made, and behold, he thought it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth era.

Thus was all the modern world completed with its host of ingenious devices created by man. In the seventh era man said, Now I will rest and enjoy the fruits of all my labors. But the screaming jets would not let him sleep; the gadgets and expanded vision gave him stomach ulcers; his unlimited power kept him nervously suspicious of his neighbors; and the creation in his own image gave him answers to his questions he did not like.

Having made all things for his comfort and enjoyment, man found himself still in trouble. Great and marvelous were his achievements; but they brought no peace to him or to the world. For in the beginning was God, who made man, and made his heart to be restless until it finds its rest, not in man’s inventions, but in the Creator and Ruler who created peace and bestows it upon those who believe in the One he sent. May 1969 have this kind of Genesis.

Ministers often lead frantic, frenzied lives, and like physicians are faced with intense stresses. They are called to enter into the tragedies, heartaches, and tears of many lives—the very gut-level of existence. These involvements can extract a high price, especially if there has also been neglect of body.

It is neither selfish nor neurotic to be maturely thoughtful about one’s bodily health. In one of his essays Montaigne wrote, “It is not a soul, it is not a body that we are training up; it is a man, and we ought not to divide him into two parts.” Ministers, and all of us, would do well to re-evaluate our physical condition in this light. My recommendations for good health stem from long years of professional surveillance of the human scene, and from professional reading, teaching, and research in the leading cause of death, cardiovascular diseases.

In one of his books Paul Tournier quotes another physician: “Man doesn’t die, he kills himself.” I state further: He kills himself with his stresses and excesses. How many of our American businessmen are on that diabolical status treadmill of security and material success, at great cost to their spiritual, mental, and physical health? Executives tell me that much of today’s business is transacted over the banquet table, often after several drinks. When I find their blood pressure elevated and prescribe a simmered-down way of life, they protest, “But it will hurt business!” Was man made for business or was business made for man? Similarly, many ministers mistakenly think they give their best to their work only by pushing themselves to the limits of their endurance.

My very first prescription for better health is: Exercise. Ponce de León traveled the world in his fruitless search for the key to long life. Now, cardiologists are bombarding their patients and the public with a new conception of “The Fountain of Youth.” To push back the walls of death, exercise in boyhood, in youth, in young manhood, in middle age, and beyond.

Jesus exercised vigorously as he walked the Palestinian highways. Those who have actually walked in his steps have said that only one in full strength of manhood could cover the territory he covered within the indicated time. I picture Jesus, not as a pale-faced ascetic clothed in a skirt, but as a vigorous man bronzed by the Syrian sun, glowing with the radiant health of a well-exercised, well-disciplined body.

The Prophet Amos proclaimed “Woe to them that are in Zion.” Today, woe to them that are in automobiles, in escalators and elevators, in chairs in front of a TV set—to those equipped with a host of labor-saving devices that rob them of their strength and stamina—and perhaps even their very life.

Neither yard work nor golf provides adequate physical activity for a man. Most golfers have a caddy carry their bag, roll it on wheels, or ride an electric cart between shots. Thus they minimize the very beneficial effect of physical activity. Ride a bike, swim, join the Y, use your hiking boots—get up! Many thousands have taken up jogging to good advantage. It’s an excellent way to exercise if your doctor says you are up to it. To be active is to live; to be sedentary is to die.

A second important prescription for good health is: Abstain from nicotine. The clergy should stand firmly with the doctors in this matter. Floods of research have pointed an accusing finger at smoking. This damaging habit invites early coronary disease, emphysema, lung cancer, bladder cancer, and chronic cough from chemical bronchitis. Great numbers of physicians have stopped smoking, and the American Medical Association will no longer accept tobacco advertising in any of its journals.

Prescription number three is: Abstain from alcohol. The medical profession is deeply concerned over the rising incidence of alcoholism in this country. Alcohol is guilty of killing tens of thousands on our highways and of inciting many other deaths through murder, suicide, and health destruction. It places many behind bars as raving maniacs. Others drink their way to cirrhosis of the liver and perhaps death. Recent cardiac publications have discussed a new entity called “alcoholic cardiomyopathy,” or “beer drinker’s heart,” a condition that can occur in persons who drink heavily and consistently for many years. We have learned that alcohol is a cardio-toxin that poisons the mitochondria of the heart muscle cell, blocking the transfer of chemical energy into physical energy. The clergy should stand firmly with the medical profession in denouncing the increasing alcohol consumption.

The fourth mandate for good health and longevity is: Do not become overweight. One of the curses of this affluent nation is its widespread obesity. We who have the finest economy in the world, the finest supermarkets, look it. I constantly urge people to lose weight in order to reduce heart work, lessen frequency of anginal pain, lower blood pressure, and slow down degeneration of the artery walls.

Pastors, shape up, skinny down, and don’t hesitate to bid parishioners to do likewise. I believe it is a form of discipleship and consecration to keep thin and healthy. Paul spoke bluntly in Philippians 3:19 about those “whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly.”

Another edict is: Limit animal fats in the diet. In recent years medical science has come to realize that generous eating of animal fats is one of about ten factors leading to arteriosclerosis. It is interesting that in Leviticus 7, written 3,500 years ago, we are told: “And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, Ye shall eat no manner of fat, of ox, or of sheep, or of goat.”

When people want to debate with me the relation of fats to arteriosclerosis, I simply point out that this is only one of a number of known factors. The limitation of fat is logical, for fats contribute nine calories per gram of food, and limitation of fats aids in weight control. Greasy blood is clotty blood, and since we know red cells stick together more easily when the blood is fatty, it’s hardly worth an argument. Far better to be safe than sorry.

Still another decree for the preservation of good health is: Reduce salt intake. Dr. Richard C. R. Connor reported that the salt consumption in Glasgow, Scotland, was about 10.3 pounds per year per patient while in Monmouthshire, England, it was 6.7 pounds per patient. The incidence of coronary heart disease is much higher in Glasgow than in Monmouthshire; this suggests that we would do well to cut down on salt consumption. Most of us crowd too much salt into our diets, and it tends to make us waterlogged. Experiments in which rats and guinea pigs consumed a lot of salt have produced a surprisingly high number of animals with high blood pressure. Heavy salt intake is one of five factors implicated in hypertension, taking its place alongside heredity, obesity, nicotine, and stress.

In this attempt to present a formula for preserving health, a final edict is necessary: Avoid fatigue and stress. Just what is stress? How can we set limits on such a thing? Were our ancestors more afraid of being scalped by the Indians than we are of being scalped by the Internal Revenue Service? What may disturb one person may not so affect another. Almost all of us are sometimes guilty of “generating ten dollars’ worth of adrenalin over some ten-cent incident.”

We all must deal with daily tensions, anxieties, and stresses. Here I believe that the Christian faith has much to offer. Our Lord wants us to lead balanced, rested, orderly lives. Too often Christians represent not the Company of the Committed but the Company of the Overcommitted. We become tired and anxious and stressful, and this is reflected in our spiritual lives. We need to avoid the wheel-spinning of an excessive Christian activism.

I remember Norman Vincent Peale best not for his book, The Power of Positive Thinking, but for his short article, “The Power of the Positive NO.” How often Christians equate consecration with activism, with doing everything they are asked to do within the Christian structure. It is far better to do a moderate number of things well than to do many poorly.

Many men and women pay a high price in body and mind for their excessive application to work without proper periods of respite. Jesus gave this directive: “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for their were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat” (Mark 6:31). How often as professional men we rush about, miss meals, and live in a frenzy. Yet not one of us is indispensable.

Walking relaxes tension. So does prayer. Quoting verses of calm assurance in prayer is often helpful. “I sought the LORD, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears” (Ps. 34:4).

Ministers and physicians are often honored as representatives of the fine and noble. They owe it not only to themselves but also to others to lead exemplary physical lives, and protect their health. A man may be a committed evangelical, firm and correct in his doctrinal beliefs, but if he is an overweight trencherman his testimony may be sorely impeded. A doctor who advises a patient to stop smoking undermines his counsel if his own consultation room is permeated with smoke. The same can be said for a doctor who tells a patient to lose weight while his own fat bulges over his beltline.

Pastors, to improve your ministry, to avoid chronic illness, to extend your lifespan, it is very important to attain and maintain normal weight, to exercise until the angel of death appears, to avoid nicotine and alcohol and excesses of caffeine, fats, and salt. Finally, try to live balanced, integrated, fulfilled lives, avoiding fatigue and controlling reactions to stresses to the best of your ability. You are urged to use the power of prayer, the power of the positive no, the power of a nap, and the tension-reducing power of exercise to temper stress, worry, and anxiety. Remember the desire the Apostle John expressed in his third epistle: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.”

To hear some people talk you would think that the Bible was basically a book about reconciliation. They will say that Christ’s atonement was essentially a work of reconciliation. Or they will say that the task of the Church in the world is first and foremost a task of reconciliation, of reducing tensions so that men learn to live at peace with one another. In view of the frequent use of the term these days, a little work on the concordance comes as quite a shock. The reconciliation words are used comparately little in the New Testament. Reconciliation is not so central to the New Testament understanding of atonement as is, for example, justification. And it is not so central to Christian duty as is love.

This does not mean that reconciliation is not important. Though the passages in which it is mentioned are few, they are highly significant. We should not overestimate them, but neither should we minimize them. They certainly repay close study.

The basic idea in reconciliation is that of making up after a quarrel. If people get on well at a first meeting, we do not say they have been reconciled. It is when they have been at enmity and have come to be of one mind again that we speak of reconciliation. The word means a process of making peace between those who have been in a state of strife.

Man The Enemy Of God

In the biblical view there is a fundamental hostility between God and sinful man. This is the great problem to be faced by all religions: How can a good God be at peace with sinful man?

The Bible does not pull its punches when it speaks of the hostility between unregenerate men and God. “Do you not know,” asks James, “that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” (Jas. 4:4). Paul speaks of unregenerate men as “estranged and hostile in mind” (Col. 1:21), and simply as “enemies” (Rom. 5:10). But we scarcely need to quote specific texts. The whole thrust of the Bible is toward the fact that sin creates a barrier between man and God. It also creates barriers between man and man, but in the Bible the primary thing is the enmity it arouses between God and his creatures.

Sometimes today this is taken to mean that man, because he is a sinner, has taken up a stance in opposition to God. He is hostile to God. God, on the other hand, is seen looking on man with unwavering love. The state of enmity is thus considered to be on one side only. This makes reconciliation simple. It requires only that man realize how far he has strayed from the right path, and return. Peace will follow immediately.

There is some truth in this, of course. It is true that man is far from God. It is true that if he realizes this and repents, reconciliation will take place. But it is not true that this is the whole story. It leaves out the Cross.

The Place Of The Cross

And the Cross is central. We cannot understand the New Testament unless we see the centrality of the cross. For it was through the Cross that God worked out man’s salvation. Specifically, it was through the Cross that man’s reconciliation was effected. Christ died that he might “reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end” (Eph. 2:16).

The point we must grasp if we are to understand the biblical teaching is that it is God’s attitude to the sin of man, not man’s, that is decisive. Man is usually not particularly worried by the fact that he has done wrong. If it can be brought to his attention that he is a sinner, he is usually content to let bygones be bygones, and he cannot see why God should not do the same.

But the Bible makes it clear that God will not do the same. The reason for the enmity between God and man is not that sinful man is actively and consciously hostile to God. He is not. It is rather that a holy God will not tolerate sin in those he loves. God’s demand on man and man’s failure to meet it constitute the problem. If God regarded sin as of no account, there would be no enmity and no problem. But God never condones evil. He never countenances wrong.

The Method Of Reconciliation

Now we are quite familiar with the process of reconciliation in human affairs. We know that when two people are at loggerheads, the way to bring about reconciliation is to take the cause of the quarrel out of the way. If harsh words have been spoken, they are withdrawn with an apology. If money has not been paid, it is paid. If a letter has not been written, it is written. Whatever is the root cause of the trouble must be identified and dealt with. If this is not done we will have at best an uneasy truce; we will not have a genuine reconciliation.

So also in relations between God and man. Sin is the cause of the trouble, and if there is to be reconciliation, the sin must be dealt with and taken out of the way. It is important to be clear on this, for man cannot remove his sin. He was able to erect a barrier that separated him from God, but he was not able to pull it down. When he repents and turns over a new leaf, that is fine for the future. But what of the past? “God seeks what has been driven away,” or as the King James Version puts it, “God requireth that which is past” (Eccles. 3:15).

In our own affairs we never doubt that the past is important. When a student fails his exams, he cannot laugh it off and proceed to the next unit of his course as though nothing had happened. When the businessman finds his debts pressing, he cannot write them off and start afresh as though nothing had happened. In every area of life we recognize that our actions have consequences and that we are responsible. We cannot cut ourselves adrift from the past.

C. S. Lewis has some wise words here:

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ [The Problem of Pain, London, 1943, p. 49].

It is the place of “the blood of Christ” that is critically important. We may or may not be able to say how this puts away sin. The important thing is that it does. “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received our reconciliation” (Rom. 5:10, 11). Notice that Paul speaks of the reconciliation as something that can be “received”; i.e., it in some sense exists before we receive it. In other words, reconciliation is not something in which we have the decisive part. It is worked out by Christ, and we enter into it by our repentance and our faith. But it is his work first and foremost. This is the main thrust of New Testament teaching on reconciliation.

But the Bible does have something to say as well about the reconciliation of man with his neighbor. The most important passage is the one in Ephesians that deals with the bitterest enmity in the ancient world, that between Jew and Gentile. There we read that Christ “is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2:14). Reconciliation is effected not by man’s effort but by Christ’s. He is our peace.

Nor should we think that this is a vague general result of his setting us a good example so that we try to live in peace with others. If we are his, we do so try. But the effective making of peace is due not to these efforts of ours, but to the work of God in Christ. Paul goes on to explain that the breaking down of the wall of hostility was done “by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end” (Eph. 2:15, 16).

Part Of Man’S Salvation

This is not a more or less accidental by-product of man’s salvation. It is an integral part of it. If we are truly reconciled with God, we will certainly seek to be at peace with our fellows. It is part of the living out of the implications of our reconciliation. But we should be sure that we get our priorities right. In the New Testament it is our relation to God that is of primary importance. Once that is put right, our relation to man must follow. Without a right relation to God it is difficult to see how there can be a right relation to man.

All this means that for the biblically instructed Christian there will always be an emphasis on reconciliation with God. He will not sit loose to the obligation of doing all he can to reconcile men with men. But he will see this as effectively done only when they are first reconciled to God. In short, he will see his task as essentially one of persuading men to be reconciled to God. As Paul put it (2 Cor. 5:20, 21): “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

It was the Year of the Pill. Rarely has a single event so predominated the year’s religious news as Pope Paul’s birth-control encyclical, and subsequent ferment in the Catholic Church.

It was the good old days of Vatican II turned bad, with front-page stories on Catholicism abounding. First, the reaffirmation of church teaching against any “artificial” contraception. Then the waffling reactions by several national hierarchies, culminating in the (apparently) conservative support’ from the most powerful group of bishops, the Americans.

Internally, this issue was the occasion, if not the cause, for dissent on a wide range of Catholic concerns: papal authority, church authority in general, the role of individual conscience in disagreement with that authority, discipline and “due process” for accused priests, and—in general—the limits of free speech and thought in Catholicism.

Externally, the Catholic stand had stunning consequences for the population curves of the next generation. For whatever the extent of disobedience among sophisticated Catholics in educated and affluent nations, the church teaching has great force in nations where population is potentially more dangerous. But even in the United States the conservative weekly newspaper Twin Circle was able to lead a December edition with an article arguing not only that there is no population explosion but that a growth in world population will aid world prosperity.

The murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the Memphis garbagemen’s strike was a second major event. And unlike many deaths it both symbolized and set off a complex series of social forces. Weeks before the murder the Kerner Commission had indicted U. S. society for white racism. Weeks after, King’s proposed mass protest occurred in Washington, D. C., but “Resurrection City” did little more than highlight the agony within the civil-rights movement, and the difficulty of applying old protest strategies to new, complex problems of employment and economics. By year’s end, the long alliance of Negroes and Jews seemed crumbling in New York City over the school strike.

Within the Church, black power took a bold new form, as formerly quiescent black blocs lobbied for ecclesiastical power, formed new organizations, and talked of black theology, and even of separation.

Many denominations pledged special efforts toward racial justice and aid to the poor, led (on paper) by the United Methodists’ $20 million “Reconciliation” fund.

Despite the deaths of King and of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, violence continued not only as a motif of American life but as a growing theme in liberal theology and as a “justifiable” means of domestic social revolution. That it could be met in kind was easily seen in police conduct at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and in the 13.5 per cent national vote for George C. Wallace as president.

In international affairs, the Soviet Union did strange things to some ecumenical presuppositions. The onus of evil had been hung for years on the United States over the Viet Nam war.

Churchmen’s protests both inside and outside the United States continued even after the partial bombing halt of the spring, and the volume of the past era was replaced by a mere whisper of praise when all bombing ceased. Then the Soviets sent as many soldiers into liberalizing Czechoslovakia overnight as the United States had sent to Viet Nam in years. And the suffering church of East Europe stared into the darkness ahead.

Otherwise, world ecumenism featured increasing friendship between Rome and the World Council of Churches and Protestant and Orthodox groups around the world. And a point of increasing contact was social action, a theme that captured much attention at the WCC’s Uppsala assembly and in U. S. National Council affairs.

In American ecumenism, the Consultation on Church Union voted to write a union plan for 25 million Protestants by 1970. The United Methodist Church was formed from the Methodists and Evangelical United Brethren, and there were significant developments toward unity among more conservative Wesleyan groups. The Southern Presbyterian and Reformed Church conventions voted for merger, subject to regional approval. More Baptists than usual found a point of unity in plans for next year’s evangelistic Crusade of the Americas. And The American Lutheran Church voted intercommunion and a merger hint for both the Lutheran Church in America and the Missouri Synod.

But the ecumenical and social-action developments produced a growing counter-reaction, as protest organizations surfaced in several denominations. The Christian Churches quietly lost 2,113 congregations over the “restructure” that passed this year. Other denominations watched anxiously as the U. S. Supreme Court decided to rule on two Georgia Presbyterian churches that quit the denomination and sought to keep their property.

Within evangelicalism, there were also some signs of growing inter-group cooperation, and of grappling with pressing social issues (see page 31). The Southern Baptist Convention issued a crisis-in-the-nation statement, the Reformed Ecumenical Synod passed a fairly strong statement on race, and most of the churches of South Africa joined in a statement against apartheid that could be an overture to one of the twentieh century’s great church-state confrontations. Black and white U. S. evangelicals broke barriers with a bid at relevant revival in Newark, New Jersey.

The biggest new ethical issue of 1968 was transplantation of human hearts, a procedure that proved to have 99-to-1 odds of failure in about that many actual operations. And the Nigerian civil war and the agony of breakaway Biafra raised anew the human peril of starvation and its cynical use as a weapon of war.

In theology, Germany’s young Jürgen Moltmann came into prominence in 1968 with his Theology of Hope, which did not neglect Christian origins in its effort to recapture the vision of the future world. In denominational life, orthodoxy retrenched again as the United Church of Canada paraded a proposed doctrine-less modern creed, and the Lambeth Conference cast a skeptical eye at Anglicanism’s Thirty-Nine Articles.

And personalities made news this year. Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy married divorcé Aristotle Onassis and became the world’s most famous fallaway Catholic. Pop artist Sister Corita became America’s most famous fallaway nun. Pentecostal healing evangelist Oral Roberts became a Methodist. Carl McIntire charged that new leaders of the fundamentalist American Council of Christian Churches which he founded are trying to force him to the sidelines. Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., was among those convicted of conspiring to circumvent military draft laws.

Billy Graham proclaimed anew the old-time religion with crusades in Australia; Portland, Oregon; and Pittsburgh; and turned out to be an important influence in Richard Nixon’s decision to run for president and—perhaps—an influence in garnering votes for Nixon.

New faces: President Robert J. Marshall of the Lutheran Church in America, and Editors Alan Geyer and Harold Lindsell of rivals Christian Century and CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Significant figures who died during 1968 included Karl Barth, the century’s pre-eminent theologian; Augustin Cardinal Bea, founding leader of the Vatican’s Christian-unity secretariat; President Franklin Clark Fry of the Lutheran Church in America; J. Ray Hord, the controversial social-action director of the United Church of Canada; journalists Daniel Poling (Christian Herald) and Kyle Haselden (Christian Century); and six American missionaries, killed by Viet Cong terrorists in January in Viet Nam.

And, as always in religion, the really important developments of 1968 may not have been chronicled at all. What new idea, its hour come at last, might have been born? Or what now obscure personality might one day change history? Perhaps one of those 375 college students who attended Inter-Varsity’s Missionary Convention and, during 1968, sent in a card indicating a decision for foreign missionary service. Or one of the 652 others who signed willingness to consider missionary work.

FOOTNOTES TO 1968

In a year of ins and outs, the Evangelical Candor Award for 1968 goes to the Ohio school that issued a press release stating:

“A recent evaluation of the Presidency has been made by the Salem Bible College Board of Trustees, and it has been their unanimous decision to have the Rev. George E. Bowen terminate his connections with the College effective January 31, 1968. Rev. George E. Bowen has tendered his resignation accordingly.”

Sign of Progress: On December 16, 1968, Spain officially revoked the government order expelling all Jews from the nation. It was put on the books by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

Personalia

A second look at the national executive committee for next September’s U. S. Congress on Evangelism showed all Republicans (Senator Mark Hatfield, former Congressman Walter Judd, Congressman Albert Quie, Judge Luther Youngdahl). The remedy: Add presidential candidate and Senator George McGovern, a Democrat and Methodist who was a delegate to the World Council of Churches assembly.

New Congressman Earl Landgrebe (R-Ind.) is on the Executive Committee of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod, Lutheran Church in America.

R. Burnett Thompson, Houghton College graduate and former Methodist minister, will be the administrative assistant to new Congressman G. William Whitehurst (R-Va.).

FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson praised a fellow member of Kenwood Country Club, Episcopal Bishop William Creighton of Washington, D. C., for working from within to end club racial bias. Episcopal activists had demanded the bishop quit Kenwood.

Leighton Ford passed up a bid to take over the “Old-Fashioned Revival Hour” to speak alternate weeks on colleague and brother-in-law Billy Graham’s “Hour of Decision.” The move cast Canadian Ford in an heir-apparent role.

Louisville’s Duke McCall was flying National to Miami to confer with other Southern Baptist seminary presidents—he thought. Turned out he was on the latest plane hijacked to Cuba, but he got back in twenty-four hours.

Baptist pastor Thedford Johnson is the first Negro to head the Miami area church council, and the U. S. Catholic Conference named black priest Charles Burns as field director of its race-and-poverty agency.

Veteran Church of the Brethren service director W. Harold Row is moving to Washington, D. C. to head both government liaison and interchurch relations.

Scottish Episcopal Bishop John Howe, a 48-year-old bachelor, is new executive of the Anglican Communion.

Retired Anglican Archbishop Edwin Morris of Wales defended Enoch Powell’s controversial proposal to repatriate non-whites from England, noting the plan was voluntary.

The Rev. J. Ketelaar, 40, was fired as head of the Dutch Baptists’ evangelism committee because he spends too much time on his new “Radical People’s Movement” for social justice.

Father Charles Coughlin, right-wing radio priest of the thirties, put out a pamphlet charging Catholic bishops are “social engineers” who play ball with dissidents.

Latest Catholic clergy dropouts: Jesuit Paul Harbrecht, 45, dean of the University of Detroit law school and until August board chairman at Georgetown University—to marry. And Alkuin Heising, 41, abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Michaelsberg, West Germany—to protest “authoritarian” church policies.

DEATHS

KARL BARTH, 82, the twentieth century’s foremost Christian theologian (see pages 22, 34).

THOMAS MERTON, 53, French-born intellectual who, despite vows of silence as a Trappist monk in Kentucky, had great impact through the written word, as in his best-selling 1948 autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain; champion of racial justice; in Bangkok, Thailand, of accidental electrocution.

HOWARD HAMILTON, 65, layman who headed United Presbyterian ministerial relations; in Worthington, Ohio.

HANS C. JERSILD, 72, president of the Danish Lutheran body who sparked talks toward The American Lutheran Church merger; in Rock Island, Illinois.

ILSLEY BOONE, 89, nudist leader who quit the Reformed Church and became a Baptist clergyman; in Oakland, New Jersey.

HOMER A. TOMLINSON, 76, head bishop of the Church of God (Queens Village, New York), which split off the Pentecostalist group his father founded; jolly Presidential candidate and self-proclaimed “King of the World” who circled the globe to be crowned in his portable aluminum “throne”; in New York City.

Church Panorama

The Southern Presbyterian Church joined the long-range church-education planning project previously formed by the United Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and United Church of Christ.

Episcopal Church executive council members discussed a “theological” cleavage found in the Episcopal Church after visits to eighty-two dioceses. The Virginia diocese held an emergency meeting last month because pledges are running $85,000 behind, partly in reaction to national social-action programs.

After a closed meeting in Atlanta, a Consultation on Church Union committee said its merger plan for 25 million Protestants won’t be ready this year but is expected in 1970.

Dallas pastor Neil Jones thinks the Southern Baptist Convention should put out a national newsmagazine.

Moody Memorial Church closed its doors to a Crusade of the Americans rally when it learned American Baptist President Culbert Rutenber would be on hand. But 2,000 Baptists from six denominations turned out at another church to hear Rutenber, National Baptist President Joseph Jackson, and former Southern Baptist President Herschel Hobbs.

Top Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic executives issued an implied rebuke against National Guard troops that have been patrolling black sections of Wilmington, Delaware, nightly since April.

Regional accreditation has been won by The King’s College, New York; Southern Baptist Seminary, Kentucky; Crozer Seminary (American Baptist), Pennsylvania; and Houston and Mobile Baptist Colleges.

Nine evangelical missions and national groups have formed the first permanent body for united action in Paraguay.

Nearly half the summer-school students at Union Theological Seminary, New York, were Roman Catholics, as are 15 per cent during the current term.

Dubuque Theological Seminary (United Presbyterian) and Aquinas Institute (Roman Catholic) in Iowa plan complete sharing of campus buildings.

Two dozen hooded students held a street march to protest a ban on dancing at Eastern Baptist College (American Baptist), Pennsylvania.

Miscellany

Berkeley medical researcher Joel Fort studied 9,000 teens in northern California high schools, and found more than a third of twelfth graders are on marijuana and nearly half had experimented with it; 11 per cent had tried LSD; 15 per cent had used amphetamines.

The Gallup Poll estimates that 49 per cent of Protestants voted for Nixon, 35 per cent for Humphrey, and 16 per cent for Wallace. The Catholic vote went 33 per cent for Nixon, 59 per cent for Humphrey, 8 per cent for Wallace. Nixon did not run as well among Protestants as he did in 1960, but did better than Barry Goldwater.

Northern Ireland’s regime gave virtual amnesty to Roman Catholic “civil rights” demonstrators and appealed for calm and an end to street protests.

The Malaysia Evangelistic Fellowship and the Asia Evangelism Fellowship planned to seek to reach the poor of Laos, Viet Nam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore with the gospel message and needed food and clothing during the Christmas season.

Ontario’s government decided against taxing church property, despite recommendations from two committees.

The Anglican cathedral in Ottawa invited thirty-eight convicts to join a choir for a special service, similar to others arranged by law officers across Canada. At the close of the service there were only thirty-seven.

Contention has bedeviled English evangelical scene these last two or three years, and we have lurched from one crisis to another. First, the Anglican/Methodist merger plan is still throwing up a lot of dust, leading to acrid exchanges and serious divisions in both churches.

Then the separatists wished a plague on all denominational houses and their guilty associations, and thereby flung many godly men into agony of heart and soul. On this, General Sir Arthur Smith had a pertinent word to last year’s National Assembly of Evangelicals at Westminster. “Whereas,” he said “those who favor separation and the principle of separation believe there is biblical authority for being guilty by association, there are others of equal sincerity who are convinced that Christians who refuse to mix with others … are guilty of non-association.” Checkmate.

Now the English evangelical body has been further torn apart by the publication of an explosive report compiled under the auspices of the Evangelical Alliance (On the Other Side, Scripture Union, 7s. 6d.). This is the outcome of a resolution passed at the 1966 National Assembly of Evangelicals sponsored by the London-based E.A. It called for a Commission on Evangelism that would “prayerfully consider and recommend the best means of reaching the unchurched masses at national, local and personal levels, bearing in mind the need to co-ordinate existing endeavours where possible and specifically to promote a new emphasis on personal evangelism.”

According to the chairman of the working group, Baptist pastor David Pawson, the report sets out to be “neither deliberately controversial, nor designed to please”; it is intended to say what is true, and to be realistic. It is not, added E. A. general secretary Morgan Derham, “a party-line document.” At the press conference called on publication of the report, the impression was reiterated of something daringly unconcerned with being all things to all men. An official remark dropped on the same occasion underlined this: “Every member of the working group was prepared to commit ecclesiastical suicide over this report.” A delicious touch, that; but theatrical effects apart, there is something odd about such a self-consciously valorous declaration about a report that attacks no denomination. Ecclesiastical suicide, or a tendency thereto, far from being an offense on the statute book, is virtually an impossibility these days, and can even be positively rewarding. Look at the Bishop of Woolwich, with us to this day and prospering as the green bay tree.

Readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY ought to read this 190-page paperback for themselves (sorry, the publisher tells me there are no plans yet for an American edition). Its basic assumption is that “effective evangelism depends on the number of Christians who really care for others, who are prepared to enter into their world, who are willing to alter traditional methods, and who believe that people will be interested in the Lord in spite of their attitude to the Church.” Yes, we know what they mean.

The first chapter, called a little unfortunately “Through the Looking Glass” (admirers of Lewis Carroll will understand), offers a comprehensive survey of the social revolution in its various aspects, and outlines the challenge presented to the Church. This is a disturbing chapter. Typical point: “Whereas nothing can alter the essential nature of Christian truth and the facts of the Gospel which we are to ‘press home on all occasions’ … it is still quite possible to present the truth in a way that is insensitive to people’s personalities or completely lacks an understanding of present-day thinking and culture.” Nothing that I say is intended to detract from the value of such splendid observations found in this document, which must have involved a great deal of work for those principally involved.

That part of the report which hit the headlines, however, concerned its discussion of mass evangelism. What the compilers had intended to say, it emerged later, was that the Graham crusades had served well in the fifties and sixties but that a different pattern might be called for in the future. Alas, it was so clumsily put that even Dr. Cecil Northcott, anything but an irresponsible and uninformed journalist, began his account in a national daily: “Mass evangelism of the Billy Graham type is not the way to evangelise modern Britain, says a report by the Evangelical Alliance.…” Other newspapers hit the same chord more loudly.

Some apparently loose writing helped to create such an impression—for example, this from the foot of page 92: “The Billy Graham Crusades initially attracted, but there are signs of increasing disillusionment.” Fair enough, but note what follows as the only illustration given here of the alleged disillusionment: “One church had 100 enquirers in 1961; in 1966 they ran trains to the Crusade, but in 1967 they ran ‘one train only.’ ” That sentence is anything but a clincher! It first gives inadequate data for a logical comparison, contains a whopping non sequitur, and is generally misleading. Moreover, the information that only one train ran, compared with an unspecified number the year before, omits the vital fact that the 1966 crusade lasted one month, but the 1967 one was a nine-day effort and was relayed to twenty-five TV centers throughout the country, making trains all but unnecessary. Other vague criticisms of mass evangelism would somehow have been more convincing if the impression were not occasionally given that supporters of mass evangelism never did anything but mass evangelize (i.e., were not active in other forms of Christian work and witness).

Not the least significant reaction was the report’s delirious welcome by a novelist (“I am a passionate Christian”) who says he has dedicated his life to destroying everything that Billy Graham stands for. It may have been coincidence that at the same time the E.A.’s general secretary warmly commended one of the passionate brother’s Christian novels to an assembly of evangelicals.

If he can do that, I can cite Oliver Wendell Holmes next time one of the authors of this report gives me that our-report-was-misunderstood line. “It’s no matter what you say when you talk to yourself,” said O.W., “but when you talk to other people, your business is to use words with reference to the way in which those other people are like to understand them.” There’s a word worth pondering!

J. D. DOUGLAS

The Editor and the staff of the magazine send New Year’s greetings to our readers. Along with the greetings goes an explanation of a change. Dr. Robert Cleath revealed his identity as Eutychus III in the previous issue, and we express our appreciation for his labors as the anonymous scribe for these many months. At the same time we greet Eutychus IV, whose first contribution appears on page 11. His identity will remain undisclosed until his retirement. Meanwhile sleuthlike readers can try to guess.

My desk has been flooded with mail in response to an essay in the December 6 issue, “Confusion About Tongues.” The reactions were quite pronounced, as the letters we publish will show. We have be gun to work out arrangements for another essay on the same subject but from the other perspective, which we hope to publish in two or three months. Reader response shows that interest in this subject is great.

Looking out from our office windows, we can see workmen constructing the review stands for the inauguration of our new president. The sight serves as a reminder that Mr. Nixon needs and deserves the prayers of us all, for all of us are Americans first and Republicans or Democrats second.

The morning of December 14 the blanket of clouds that had covered Switzerland for several weeks lifted at the nation’s northwest corner, and a clear winter sun shone down on Basel. And there the memorial service for Switzerland’s grand old theologian, Karl Barth, was held in Basel Minster, in the presence of Swiss and German professors, church and civic officials, and a large throng of former students, friends, and admirers.

Barth had died quietly at home during the night of Monday the ninth, of heart failure. He had been near death several years ago, but had recovered to continue work on the five unfinished volumes of Church Dogmatics. He underwent surgery in September but had been expected to recover.

The public memorial service—following a small private burial—was simple and solemn, with a note of majesty. Despite words of sorrow and the sense of loss expressed by several speakers, the atmosphere in the great church was one of homage rather than mourning. It was in keeping with the character of a man who—as Berlin’s Professor Helmut Gollwitzer said—had spent his life witnessing to Emmanuel, God with us, and is now with him.

Tributes from members of the Basel theological faculty and the city administration emphasized his geniality as a teacher, his simplicity in dealing with the common people, his loyalty to Switzerland and Basel, his humor, and his humility.

A younger Zurich professor claimed that Barth’s greatness lay in his theological industry and sachlichkeit (matter-of-fact-ness), and appealed to theologians to honor his memory by working harder and being ever more sachlich.

This well-meant tribute sounded flat by comparison with personal homage paid by former World Council General Secretary Visser’t Hooft, and by Czech Professor Joseph Hromádka, who, in an unexpected visit from Prague, honored Barth for his deep understanding and brotherly love for Christians in East Europe.

Gollwitzer was the first to sound a spiritual note, which was reinforced by Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng.

Küng praised Barth for protesting against a sickly, anthropocentric Roman Catholic and Protestant theology that tried to incorporate God into a man-centered framework, in order to protest for God, for Christ, and for the communion of believers.

Küng struck a deeply personal note in recalling a conversation in which Barth rejected a compliment Küng had paid to his good faith. Barth told Küng that when he stood before God he would bring neither his theological books nor his good faith but only the plea, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.” For Küng there was no doubt that Barth has found that mercy.

Despite all the praise of Barth’s scholarship, the strongest impression was made by Küng and Gollwitzer as they recalled how, early in 1945, Barth turned to a Germany smothered in blood and ashes with Christ’s message of repentance, forgiveness, and hope, showing for the Germans a love that came from his knowledge of God’s love for him.

In the magnitude of his theological productivity, Karl Barth was without parallel in our century. As a scholar he had few peers. As a scholar ready to acknowledge his debt to God’s mercy, fewer still.

The Barth Era

A lover of Mozart, American Civil War buff, and the man history will probably adjudge the twentieth century’s most important theologian, died last month.

The eighty-two years of Karl Barth’s life spanned an era of great turbulence both in world affairs and in theology. In the midst of it all, this one intellect shifted the theological spectrum away from the subjective Left and revived a biblical skepticism toward the structures of men.

Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, in a family that had produced several generations of Swiss Reformed pastors. When Karl was 3, his father left his parish to take a New Testament and church history professorship at Bern. His father was his first theological teacher, and he went on to study in Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg. In 1908 he was ordained in the Reformed cathedral at Bern. He worked a year on a liberal theological journal, and held pastorates in Geneva and Safenwil. In the latter town he became immersed in the cause of the factory workers, and sparked controversy by espousing socialism.

But Barth saw the weakness in such liberal mentors as Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann when the German theological leadership endorsed the militarism of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914. This was the logical outcome of stress on an immanent God working through temporal movements (see editorial, page 22).

Barth’s response was the 1919 commentary on the Book of Romans, a twentieth-century equivalent of the Ninety-five Theses, nailed on the cathedral door of cultural Christianity. His concept was that of a transcendent, “Wholly Other” God.

By the time Barth’s influence had seeped to America, he was beginning to apply the same critique to a later regime in Germany. Appointed to a chair in Bonn in 1930, Barth was thus a state employee, but he refused to take the obligatory oath to Hitler or to open classes with a salute to the chancellor.

By 1934, with Nazi pressures for a docile church and a “German Christianity,” Barth became the chief author of the “Barmen Confession,” signed by 200 leading Protestants. Its biblical invective against political encroachments in the Church steeled the opposition of the “confessing Church” through the persecution ahead, and set a new style for faith-affirmation in crisis. By 1935, Barth had been expelled from Germany and had resumed his teaching in Basel.

Much has been made of the fact that when a third totalitarianism—Communism—came along, the post-war Barth was quite conciliatory. He was much more interested in pastoral admonitions on how Christians should deal with the new regimes of East Europe than in political polemics. One reason: Barth saw the Reds’ mailed-fist atheism as an obvious enemy, of little threat within the Church, whereas Nazism had remade the faith in its own image. And Barth’s disdain for the man-made applied to what he saw as a paranoid West.

During these dramatic years in politics, Barth was carefully churning out volumes of his massive Church Dogmatics. This unsystematic systematic theology followed some of the convolutions of Barth’s own thought. Though little-read, it seemed destined at his death to have as much long-range effect as any other theological work of the century. And it was increasingly apparent that the work would be mined as much by future Catholic thinkers as by Protestants. Although he wrote 200 books in all, it was Dogmatics that led to the assessment that Barth was probably the most important Protestant theologian since Calvin.

Barth shuddered at the thought of producing “Bartbians” and was uncomfortable with the labels men put on his work: “neo-orthodoxy,” “crisis theology,” “dialectical theology.” It had to be admitted that his tremendous impact in the forties and fifties was giving way in the sixties to a theological force remarkably similar to that which he had originally protested. He scorned such radical “paperback theology.”

Many evangelical scholars, who found riches in the bulk of his work, saw this decline inevitable because of internal weaknesses in Barth’s view of revelation. Fundamentalist Carl McIntire’s curious, erroneous epitaph was that Barth “did as much as any one man in this century to destroy the historic Christian faith built upon the literal bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead and Christ’s visible ascension into Heaven.… What indeed did he find when he entered the gates of death?”

Whatever complaints were aired about his theology, there was near-universal appreciation of Barth the man. It was typical of his personal style that about ten years ago the news leaked out that for years Barth had quietly spent his Sundays preaching to inmates at the Basel jail. In his only trip to the United States (1962), Barth expressed shock at the condition of a Chicago jail.

Despite his great influence on ecumenical theology, Barth was less than enthusiastic about formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948. At his death WCC General Secretary Eugene Carson Blake said, “His influence on the ecumenical movement has been much greater than his occasional appearances at ecumenical meetings, of which he was not very fond, would indicate.” Barth urged caution about Vatican II reforms in the Catholic Church, but took great interest in developments and visited Rome to talk with scholars and Pope Paul in 1966.

Barth brought puckish humor to his work, but rarely without mixing in a serious thought. When a sophisticated American student in his Basel seminars would ask him what was the most important concept of Christian thought to him, Barth would reply, “Jesus loves me; this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

Barth is survived by his wife, the former Nelly Hoffman; two sons, Professor Markus Barth of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Professor Christoph Barth of Djakarta, Indonesia; and one daughter, Franziska, wife of a Basel businessman. His son Matthias died two decades ago.

Bishop Pike’S Third Marriage

It proved impossible to eliminate James A. Pike from the Episcopal hierarchy because of his theology, but it appears he will become an excommunicated church member, on other grounds.

Pike, 55, revealed plans to marry Diane Kennedy, 30, head of his lecture and literary agency, the Friday before Christmas at Willow Glen United Methodist Church, San Jose, California. Pike said he passed up the Book of Common Prayer and its Methodist rewrite to style his own service text, to be accompanied by guitar music. Four clergymen from three denominations were to join in the rite.

Pike’s first marriage was dissolved by a church annulment. His second wife divorced him last year on grounds of mental cruelty. Although the required year has passed since that divorce, Pike—like any other Episcopalian—must have an annulment from his bishop to remarry. And his successor as head of the Diocese of California, Bishop C. Kilmer Myers, apparently has not given it. This would mean excommunication for Pike. San Francisco papers claim Pike originally asked Myers to perform the marriage in Grace Cathedral and he refused.

The bride has been a Methodist teacher in Uruguay and a church youth director in Palo Alto. More recently, she turned literary collaborator in Pike’s latest book, The Other Side, the bishop’s account of seance contacts with a son who killed himself in 1966.

Gordon-Conwell Merger

One of the nation’s biggest breakthroughs in evangelical education may well have taken place last month, when the board at Conwell School of Theology in Philadelphia voted to negotiate toward merger with Gordon Divinity School in Wenham, Massachusetts. The merger idea was first proposed by Gordon a month before.

The Rev. Dr. Harold John Ockenga, minister of Boston’s Park Street Church, who assumes the joint presidency of Gordon College and Divinity School in April, said other plans include a school of graduate theological studies on a separate campus in the rich-blooded intellectual environs of Cambridge, and an inner-city training center, possibly in Philadelphia.

The two evangelical seminaries could unite on Gordon’s 800-acre campus by next fall, with Conwell’s second-year President Stuart Barton Babbage as top administrator of the seminary itself. Conwell, heir to Temple University’s sagging seminary, has forty-seven students; five professors and fourteen other teachers, some part-time; and impressive financial aid from the Sun Oil family trust. Gordon has 250 students and sixteen professors. Evangelist Billy Graham has joined the boards of both seminaries.

Blueprint For A Bridge

A new bridge to bring together North American churchgoers for evangelism took shape at a meeting in December of fifty specialists from thirty denominations.

The group agreed in principle to cooperate in an emphasis on spiritual renewal in 1973, with special attention to ethnic and youth interests. Churches and denominations are urged to implement the drive in their own way.

The 1973 plans have grown out of the evangelically oriented Key Bridge meetings. At the fifth and latest of these, the two-day December meeting held in St. Louis, participants reaffirmed a definition of evangelism drawn up at the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin and authorized creation of a seven-member committee to carry plans forward.

The Rev. Victor Nelson, a Presbyterian from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis, chaired the meeting. The meeting was called by three denominational officials and conducted on the basis of materials they formulated: Dr. Theodore A. Raedeke, secretary for evangelism of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod Board for Missions, St. Louis; Dr. Harold Lindsey, associate director of the division of evangelism for the Southern Baptist Home Missions Board in Atlanta; and Dr. J. Sherrard Rice, secretary for Christian witness of the Board of National Ministries in the Presbyterian Church in the U. S., Atlanta. Their counterparts in other denominations made up the bulk of the meeting participants. These three were named to serve on the continuing committee and to choose four other members. The meeting approved in principle an initial seventeen-page prospectus for the 1973 effort.

Evangelical eyes are opening toward America’s inner cities.

Stirred by the 1966 Berlin and Wheaton congresses, struck in the solar plexus by galling ghetto cries of physical and spiritual want, some Christians are seeing human needs in America in a startling new light.

As the blinders fall off, like the veil that drops from the spiritual eyes of the new believer, these Christians are asking themselves and others painful questions about their racial attitudes, and looking for new ways to evangelize and minister to inner-city residents in the face of the churches’ flight to the suburbs.

A good indicator of the new concern is Eternity magazine’s naming of Dr. Sherwood E. Wirt’s The Social Conscience of the Evangelical as most significant book of the year for laymen. The choice was based on a poll of writers and reviewers. Last year not one book on social concern made the top twenty-five.

Last month the National Association of Evangelicals held a seminar on problems and programs in the inner city—its first ever. NAE recognition of the need for such a meeting was more significant than what was said during the three days of speeches and workshops in a Chicago suburb. NAE social-concerns chairman Peter Pascoe expressed “utter amazement that in NAE we’ve reached this place of dialogue,” though some representatives of inner-city ministries said the sessions were on a “third-grade Sunday-school level.” Chicago religion-and-race director Monroe E. Sullivan said participants represented a group fifty years late in relating to inner-city needs.

But Professor Glen Barker of Gordon Divinity School said “the majority of delegates wanted to think in new ways. They will not be as indifferent to the inner city as previously. And if we are able to follow through as we hope, the black Christian will be able to recognize that the evangelical really does care for more than his soul.”

Most of the 140 delegates from sixty-three denominations and organizations recommended meetings between the NAE and the National Negro Evangelical Association to discuss cooperation in inner-city ministries. The NNEA has already discussed strategy for its Operation Outreach—an evangelism/social concern thrust in ten major cities this year—with Campus Crusade for Christ.

Cooperation in evangelism will be the meeting ground for concerned conservatives in the immediate future, city Southern Baptist pastor John Stuckey told the Washington Post in a recent article, “Evangelicals Studying Shifts to Social Action.” Other leaders saw a new search to relate evangelical faith to human need, while holding that individual conversions underlie social reform.

And at a December executive meeting planning next September’s U. S. Congress on Evangelism, several of the nation’s leading evangelicals urged that the social concern expressed in the “Statement of Purpose” for the congress be implemented in its program.

But others are directly challenging evangelicals to scrutinize their own racial attitudes as an imperative prelude to both evangelism and social action. One topic discussed in the NNEA-Campus Crusade meetings was “pervasive racism,” not only in American society but also “in evangelism.”

Young Life devoted the entire July issue of its magazine Focus on Youth to a no-holds-barred discussion of race prejudice and the Christian. With such articles as “The Nature of Prejudice,” “Bitter About the System,” “Guilt Is Not Enough,” and “Racism and the Renewed Life,” the magazine starts on a rough, angry note, moves to more thoughtful discussions of black power and black beauty, then ends with a Scripture-woven call to Christians to overcome racism in their own lives through faith and the cleansing power of the Holy Spirit.

Another evangelical magazine, the independent, bimonthly Freedom Now, has in recent issues hit hard at white racism, “hypocritical” use of “law and order,” the charge that Communists are behind racial disorders, and police behavior.

During the barrage of words, however, a number of church groups have quietly inaugurated new approaches to the problem. Most striking, the United Presbyterians in June brought sixty-seven missionaries back from the foreign field for six months to help relieve racial tensions here. Church officials felt the missionaries could better “endure the isolation facing persons who work in the no-man’s-land of interracial relationships” because they’ve been away from current tensions but have often experienced racial rejection on the mission field.

Presbyterian officials feared American churchmen would reject aid from the missionaries they paid to save persons overseas. But little adverse reaction developed, though the missionaries worked in ghettos and suburbs interpreting racism, establishing community projects, and helping in police-community relations. Some missionaries said they’d felt guilty about being away from the United States in time of crisis and appreciated the chance to use their experience at home.

The American Sunday School Union, which pioneered in setting up Sunday schools throughout the American frontier, is now blazing trails in the inner city.

Philadelphia black pastor Ben Johnson joined ASSU in May to start its work in major U. S. cities. ASSU has already established a multi-racial board of suburbanites and city-dwellers and an afternoon Sunday-school program in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Johnson is developing the program now in Washington, D. C., where the response of suburbanites has been “overwhelming.”

“We don’t make a big thing of race,” says Johnson, “but we encourage integration of teaching staffs.”

On the old frontier Sunday schools often grew into churches. ASSU Sunday schools begun in frequently declining ghetto churches often regenerate them, Johnson says.

Efforts by other groups here and there reflect the new mood that is seeping slowly through evangelicalism. A Southern Baptist vacation Bible school this summer in the Watts section of Los Angeles drew more than 7,000 children. Baptist students from area universities taught them in garages, livingrooms, parks and churches, resulting in 564 professions of faith and improved relations between black and white Baptists.

Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and College, Philadelphia, have set up a commission to look for ways to help more black youths and pastors obtain higher education.

Even the American Tract Society is holding a “Black Christians Literature Conference” April 28–30 to discuss the most effective means of communicating to black people through the written word.

OLD TESTAMENT EVIDENCE

Findings by the British School of Archeology, reported in the journal Iraq last month, include the earliest references to the capital city of Samaria and to King Jehoash outside of the Old Testament. The inscription on a stone slab (stela) found at a late Assyrian temple site near Mosul, Iraq, also corroborate other scriptural names and events. In fact, this happens so frequently that such finds now tend to go unnoticed.

The stela, about four feet high, is engraved with the figure of Assyrian King Adad-nirari III (810–782 B.C.), with twenty lines of text across the royal skirt.

It is hoped that the discovery of more than 200 letters from the Old Babylonian level at the same site will yield useful information on the patriarchal period.

D. J. WISEMAN

New Idea In Overseas Witness

Evangelicals’ new heart for human need is taking innovative forms abroad as well as at home.

Newest is “Help for a Hungry World,” a Washington, D. C.-based organization launched this fall by the Rev. Paris Reidhead, NAE’s Clyde W. Taylor, and Dr. Horace Fenton of the Latin America Mission.

It seeks to interest and assist Christian businessmen in starting profit-making enterprises near foreign missions, which would (1) provide jobs for national believers now economically dependent on missionaries, (2) free missionaries for more evangelistic work, (3) boost economic development in the host country, (4) witness to business and government people in the host country, and (5) provide technically trained young American Christians with a chance to combine work and witness overseas.

The fledgling project is seeking church support for the first three years, then hopes to live off fees from businessmen it assists. Reidhead says government and other investment capital is plentiful.

One interested businessman-turned-pastor in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Clifford Chew, says he believes Christian businesses will open alien doors for Christ as medical missionaries did fifty years ago. “This may avalanche in the next ten years.”

RELIGION AND THE CABINET

Religious affiliations of the new Cabinet members announced by President-elect Richard M. Nixon are as follows:

Presbyterian: Secretary of State William P. Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, Attorney General John N. Mitchell, Postmaster General Winton M. Blount. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Robert H. Finch.

Roman Catholic: Secretary of Commerce Maurice H. Stans, Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel, Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe.

Latter-day Saints: Secretary of the Treasury David M. Kennedy, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George W. Romney.

Episcopal: Secretary of Labor George P. Shultz.

United Church of Christ: Secretary of Agriculture Clifford M. Hardin.

Draft Precedents

The U. S. Supreme Court ruled last month that draft director Lewis Hershey’s work to reclassify seminary students who protest the Viet Nam war was “blatantly lawless.” The court said clergy and seminarians have a draft exemption beyond the reach of the draft system. The case involved James Oestereich, 24, a student at Andover Newton Theological School (American Baptist-United Church of Christ). The court upheld the 1967 draft law and the draft system’s power to reclassify most registrants without review until the draftee is inducted or refuses induction.

And a federal district judge in Baltimore ruled Michael Shacter, 21, eligible for reclassification as a conscientious objector—the first avowed atheist known to be granted such exemption because of moral objections to war. A 1965 Supreme Court ruling said a person need not belong to a pacifist denomination to qualify as a CO, but it did not determine whether an irreligious person can be a CO. In 1967, Congress eliminated the rule that CO’s must believe in a “Supreme Being.”

New Wrinkle On Property

Forty-six former Evangelical United Brethren churches in Oregon and Washington, now the heart of the new Evangelical Church of North America, have reached a property settlement with the United Methodist Church. They will pay $690,266 to keep their property—$25,000 of it last month, and the rest within ninety days. The property is worth nearly $4 million, but some congregations owe money on their buildings and must pay this off as well. This amounts to about $85 per member to keep the property. To raise the money, some are mortgaging the property, borrowing from members, or putting on special fund campaigns. It is believed to be the first time such an arrangement has been made under the connectional Methodist polity.

WATFORD REED

Landmark Property Hearing

Two ex-Presbyterian churches in Savannah worth $170,000 may seem like a picayune matter to stir the hearts of U. S. denominational leaders, but it could be that millions of dollars in property hangs on their legal fate.

If the local churches win their case, heard by the U. S. Supreme Court December 9 and 10, untold other congregations may begin lining up to withdraw from connectional denominations. Things would come to a head when the vast Consultation on Church Union merger is voted on several years from now. Thus the Savannah case is easily the twentieth century’s most important church lawsuit.

The Southern Presbyterian Church seeks to overrule the Georgia Supreme Court and hold onto the breakaway congregations’ property, and more than one denomination is interested. Friend-of-court briefs were filed by the chief executives of the Episcopal Church, the United Presbyterian Church, the Reformed Church in America (en route to merger with the Southern Presbyterians), and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

But then, the opposition also has an interdenominational flavor. A Seattle congregation that is trying to disengage itself from the post-’67 Confession United Presbyterian Church filed a brief, and the Savannah attorney was sent forty pages of legal background by the American Church Union, the high-church group in the Episcopal Church that is already keeping a close watch on what will happen after COCU.

The Savannah churches argue that their denomination broke the terms of original affiliation by “intermeddling” in the secular issue of Viet Nam, and backing some types of civil disobedience, against the dictates of the Westminster Confession. They also oppose ordination of women, and the end to the requirement that Presbyterians believe certain persons are predestined to hell before birth.

At the U. S. Supreme Court hearing, Savannah attorney Owen Page’s skillful case sidestepped another of the congregations’ complaints: that the denomination hadn’t worked against the Supreme Court school prayer and Bible rulings.

The denomination’s lawyer, Charles Gowen of Atlanta, argued that the court would violate church-state separation by judging such a matter as whether the denomination is straying from its original beliefs. Several questions, particularly from Justice Hugo Black (a Baptist from Alabama), probed whether the case is simply one of deciding church law on who owns the property.

On that score, Gowen had to admit that “nothing in church law deals directly with the disposition of property.”¹The church constitution does give property to the presbytery in case a church disbands, and in denominational eyes that’s what happened in Savannah. But Page rebuts by saying that the congregations are alive and well. While the local churches hold title, the denomination argues that an “implied trust” exists and that the congregations joined it voluntarily. Gowen’s case draws heavily on the high court’s ruling in favor of the Presbyterian denomination in the 1871 property suit Watson v. Jones.

His brief says the Georgia ruling is a “threat to the continued existence of hierarchical or connectional churches,” since any dissatisfied congregation could withdraw. Also, he argues, “churches are not dead or stagnant bodies but are continually growing and changing.” Without a reversal, “churches will be effectively prevented from speaking out or taking a stand on pressing issues.…”

Episcopal Presiding Bishop John Hines’s brief says support of the Georgia ruling “would vest in contumacious congregations the right of secession from the national church.…”

Page argues that a denomination may be “representational” in its spiritual life but “congregational” on property ownership.

Page’s own congregation, St. John’s Church of Savannah, withdrew from the Episcopal Church in 1965. Bishop Albert Stuart explained last month that no legal action has been taken because the diocese hopes to get the church back eventually without such rancor. He also noted that St. John’s has an 1830 charter granted by the state legislature, giving it more legal independence than most Episcopal parishes.

Fordham: Eyeing Aid

Fordham University, faced with a growing financial crisis and its first full-scale student protest, is taking tentative steps in a secularization program that could lead to a challenge of the school’s 127-year history of Jesuit control.

First the university, in response to a study aimed at making the school eligible for New York State aid, announced it would expand its all-Jesuit board from nine to thirty-one to make room for a lay majority. To qualify for assistance that could reach $1 million annually, the study said, the university would have to assure the state it was “free of denominational control.”

Then early in December students formed a broad-based coalition of campus groups (which included none of the Jesuit faculty and only five lay instructors) and presented to the administration a list of demands calling for increased participation of students and faculty in policy-making, including board seats. The petition was signed by about 20 per cent of the 6,000 students on the coed campus.

Students backed up demands with a sleep-in protest and leaflets. Father Leo McLaughlin responded with a faculty-student advisory group; days later he was replaced as president by fellow Jesuit Michael P. Walsh, former head of Boston College.

Meanwhile, however, the trustees have reaffirmed that whatever happens, the university will remain “Catholic and Jesuit.” In addition, to cut back university expenditures, which now reach $17 million annually, the board also announced a freeze on faculty hiring plus a tuition increase. Christmas may be merry, but almost nobody at Fordham is saying anything about the new year.

WILLIAM D. FREELAND

Breakthrough For Evangelicals

The God Who Is There, by Francis A. Schaeffer (Inter-Varsity Press, 1968, 191 pp., $4.50; paper, $2.50), is reviewed by Clark H. Pinnock, associate professor of theology, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, Louisiana.

A cultural event of deep significance for the task of twentieth-century Christian apologetics has taken place in the publication of this startling book. For over a decade now the evangelical world has been dimly aware of the creative ministry of Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer in reaching intellectual unbelievers, but has until this year been compelled to learn of his fresh insights into evangelism and theology at second or third hand. This book, along with a smaller one that preceded it by a month or so, Escape From Reason (also Inter-Varsity Press), presents truly revolutionary and original insights into the understanding, communicating, and practicing of the truth of the Gospel. At last an orthodox Protestant has directed the biblical answers toward the contemporary questions without compromising the former or muffling the latter! So often a writer knows either the questions or the answers, but seldom both. The evangelical world at large is culturally barren and needs Dr. Schaeffer to be its teacher. For as John Killinger has written, “When the Church fails to listen to contemporary art, it usually misses the temper and mood of humanity and loses its opportunity to deal with the needs of man at the point where it might most readily have entered into them.”

In The God Who Is There Schaeffer explores the soulscape of modern culture. He discovers a monolithic ethos that despairs of ever finding answers to the human predicament. The dignity of man is related intrinsically to the existence of God. The whole culture now speaks of the loss of the human and the death of hope. Schaeffer is able to document his thesis with a knowledge of philosophy, art, music, and literature that few living Christians can match. In order to evade the demon of despair, modern man seeks to transcend nihilism by a mystical leap of faith rooted in nothing. Faith becomes a magic wand that chases away the gloom. The author detects this empty fideism in art, theology, philosophy, and music. The drug scene is the most eloquent proof that modern man has given up hope of finding rational answers to his existence.

This is a book of theology and apologetics. Every aspect of the Christian system of truth bears rich apologetic significance. Schaeffer, in a decade of dealing with avant-garde people in the remote Swiss village of Huemoz, has learned to couch historic Christian teaching in a new set of terms so that the Gospel glows again in that iridescent splendor it once had for Christians of an earlier day. This book will liberate the biblical truths for thousands to whom they seemed static and fossilized. For those who will read it, the Christian faith can become again a truly exciting prospect. Christian and non-Christian alike cannot help being challenged by it.

Weaknesses there inevitably are. It is so easy in an overview of intellectual history to oversimplify cultural evolution and force particulars into a general scheme. Schaeffer’s prophetic insights call for detailed studies in which his program is carried out with scholarly thoroughness. Furthermore, the absence of theistic argument and historical evidences might suggest that the Christian faith is a grand assumption based indeed upon a favorable correlation with other world views but ungrounded in objective considerations. However, with its weaknesses taken into account, Schaeffer’s book still stands head and shoulders above its closest competitor. At last an evangelical scholar has dared to rethink the historic faith, to present it in a fresh, new mode, and to propose a vigorous and exciting apologetic program fitted to our situation. The task is before us. The way has been shown. A renaissance of Christian culture is a possibility. If only evangelicalism will heed Schaeffer’s words and make it a reality.

Religion In Public Schools

Religion Goes to School: A Practical Handbook for Teachers, by James V. Panoch and David L. Barr (Harper & Row, 1968, 183 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Lee M. Nash, associate professor of history, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff.

This important book should be brought to the attention of every evangelical involved in the public schools, be he teacher, administrator, board member, or concerned parent. The authors, who direct the non-sectarian Religious Instruction Association fn Fort Wayne, Indiana, declare that our schools have become more secular because of Christian apathy and ignorance, not because of hostile courts. They offer practical helps to the teacher who wishes to include religion in the curriculum within both legal limits and sound educational principles.

Although Supreme Court decisions have barred the schoolroom practice of religion, as in prescribed prayers or worship services, those decisions do not hinder the objective study of comparative religions, religious history, and the Bible as history and literature. The school that neglects such studies implies that religion is unimportant. And the same constitutional principles that deny teachers the right to promote religion also restrain them from disparaging religion.

Panoch and Barr are not discouraged at the defeat of the Dirksen and Becker prayer amendments, for they are convinced that in guaranteeing the “free exercise” of religion the First Amendment already protects the right of students to private prayer and Bible reading. They favor the “moment of meditation,” officially adopted by Massachusetts in 1966, as an opportunity for voluntary prayer.

After fifty lucid, though sometimes repetitious, pages on legal and educational issues, the remaining two-thirds of the book consists of annotated lists of specific teacher aids. Curricular units now in use, rich audio-visual materials available, books on every phase of religion (with evangelical views well represented), a summer course at Wheaton for teachers—all are here in full detail.

Now what remains is for someone to do an article on the implications of these principles for public colleges and universities. Some militant anti-religion professors shatter the constitutional rights of Christian students daily, while some Christian teachers are so cautious that they fail even to give fair place to religion in their own courses. To be sure, open anti-Christian bias in the universities is probably less prevalent today than in the more liberal 1950s and before, and Christian professors are more numerous. But we need to be reminded of our special opportunities in the intellectual community.

Developing Responsible Christians

On Being Responsible: Issues in Personal Ethics, edited by James M. Gustafson and James T. Laney (Harper & Row, 1968, 310 pp., $3.50), and Power Where the Action Is, by Harvey Seifert (Westminster, 1968, 157 pp., $2.25), are reviewed by John C. Howell, professor of Christian ethics, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri.

Developing a creative sense of Christian responsibility in those who have allowed dullness to smother much of the inherent vitality of Christian faith is a central theme of these two paperbacks dealing with personal and social ethics. The volume by Gustafson and Laney, one of the “Harper Forum Series,” is designed for use by discussion groups, while Seifert’s is a manual for the involvement of local churchmen in community ministries.

Gustafson and Laney rightly interpret the concept of responsibility as fundamental to Christian morality. They have assembled readings from influential theologians, sociologists, and ethicists to stimulate thought on Christian responsibility in the particular areas of love, honesty, and citizenship.

As qualities that compose responsibility the editors cite responsiveness, the awareness of the importance of the other person in interpersonal relations; actions, as a person uses his freedom to determine how he will respond in moral choice situations; fidelity or trustworthiness; and awareness of accountability to God for one’s actions in society.

In contrast both to rigid legalism and to absolute situationalism, they hold that the idea of responsibility “charts a course between an ethics, on the one hand, of conformity to a law or an order that is given a priori, and an ethics that merely reacts in utter open-endedness to whatever is happening.” Their selection of readings as well as their excellent introductions places strong emphasis on an ethic of principle in responsible morality.

In his book, Seifert too stresses man’s need for ethical guidelines as he involves himself in the daily routine of work, marriage, politics, and play. He sees three elements in decision-making: (1) Christian theological perspectives that are grounded upon competent study of the Bible, since “thin theology makes fragile ethics,” (2) ethical principles that grow out of religious insight or personal experiences, and (3) social data from the behavioral sciences, which can help the Christian separate fact from fancy, truth from propaganda.

Seifert rightly urges greater use of socio-psychological studies in the development of community ministry. One must realize of course, that these studies often have to be reinterpreted from the Christian view of man’s wholeness in Christ, the behavioral scientist is not usually concerned with this aspect of social responsibility but this does not invalidate the usefulness of this information.

Church leaders will find excellent guidelines to community action in this manual.

A Fresh Look At John Knox

John Knox, by Jasper Ridley (Oxford, 1968, 596 pp., $9.50), is reviewed by Paul Woolley, professor of church history, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Most Christian people consider John Knox the acme of sourness, bitterness, and angularity. In his later years he gave them plenty of reason for such a judgment. But if that had been all there was to John Knox, no one would remember him today.

This is the first biography of Knox in our century based directly on the original sources and supported by references. Jasper Ridley is a London attorney who has written lesser biographies previously. He attempts to hew to the requirements of objectivity; praise and blame for Knox alternate.

Best of all is the thrilling story of how Scotland’s Church became one of the great members of the Calvinistic family. Anyone who is under the delusion that at the time of the Reformation every one on the Protestant side acted like an angelic being will be sharply surprised. One can only wonder how God brought so much light and virtue as he did out of a course of events so widely characterized by deception, cruelty, malevolence, jealousy, and self-seeking. But Knox was different.

Knox’s greatest talent was his political sense. With hardly a slip, he knew what could and could not be done in a given situation. He seemed to be able to sense the exact quality of a situation, and whether or not a certain action was right and appropriate in it.

His contribution to the discussion about the Christian right of revolution is one of his most fruitful. On a number of matters Knox differed from the man whom he highly honored, John Calvin. This was one. Knox came to the conclusion that the ordinary Christian holding no particular office could actively participate in a revolution attempting to overthrow an established government, if that government was disobeying the law of God. With Knox and Buchanan behind it, that policy maintained the Reformation in Scotland.

The Lord’S Day

Sunday: The History of the Day of Rest and Worship in the Earliest Centuries of the Christian Church, by Willy Rordorf (Westminster, 1968, 336 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by William C. Robinson, emeritus professor of ecclesiastical history, church history, and apologetics, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.

This comprehensive treatment begins with the Sabbath law in the Old Testament, considering the relation of Jesus and his apostles to this law, and moves on to a full discussion of the Christian “day of the Lord” in the early centuries. In a thoroughly scholarly way, Rordorf explains the various positions. A biblical index makes the work useful for reference.

Rordorf writes out of a high Christology as he presents Jesus’ own messianic consciousness and finds in the Old Testament the roots of the ascription to him of the title Lord. It is a pleasure to read his well-considered testimony to the historicity of Christ’s resurrection. On the other hand, he holds a critical position and arrives at some conclusions with which the reviewer does not agree. For example, he says that the Sabbath began in a sociological concern for slaves and was later taken up by the Lord as one of the Ten Words. Why not the other way around? God showed his “sociological” compassion for those who needed rest by giving them this day for that end, as well as a prophecy of the sabbath rest to come.

Rordorf holds that our Sunday comes not directly from the Jewish Sabbath but from the early Christian worship on the first day. As the Old Testament Sabbath spoke of the original creation, so worship on “the eighth day” told of the new creation in Christ. Our observance of the Lord’s day comes from the regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper that grew out of Jesus’ table fellowship with his disciples on the first Easter evening, when presumably he again celebrated with them the Lord’s Supper. Thus the Lord’s Supper is the risen Christ in his Holy Spirit having communal fellowship with the disciples at their weekly worship. Christian worship centered around the evening Supper until the beginning of the second century, when an imperial edict, enforced by Governor Pliny in Bithynia, forbade the evening meetings of unlicensed clubs and thus forced the Supper to the morning hour. As the evening worship at first centered in the Eucharist, so the early-morning worship gathered about baptism.

The author insists that the importance of Sunday as the day of worship is not given sufficient recognition today, for “the individual Christian can be a complete Christian only as a member of an actual community which carries him along.”

Discover God For Yourself

Learning to Live from the Gospels, by Eugenia Price (J. B. Lippincott, 1968, 222 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Opal Lincoln Gee, Springfield, Missouri.

In this easily read commentary on several of the more understandable passages in the four Gospels, Miss Price bypasses what she considers obscure passages. Her purpose for writing the book comes through when she discusses Jesus’ invitation to his disciples to take his yoke upon them and learn of him:

Discover for yourselves, he told us, something of the true nature of this God who longs over you. Find out what he is really like in his heart, his plans, his dreams for the people he loves. Don’t settle for a secondhand notion of God. Learn of him firsthand by learning of Jesus Christ, his one complete, uncluttered, clear revelation of himself. Rest comes no other way. Through Christ, it can come to everyone. With him, no one is left out.

In at least two passages she seems to view God as a permissive, indulgent father. Commenting on Matthew 27:3–5, she writes that since Judas repented, he would be forgiven even after what he did (she does not deal with Matthew 26:24 or John 17:12). She does not believe, she says in her comments on Luke 1:19, 20, that God would punish Zacharias with speechlessness for his doubt; his nine-month silence was probably caused from shock.

Christians who believe God is a loving father who requires discipline and obedience from his children for their sake as well as his own will find this book considerably weak in passages dealing with submission and self-denial. And those who believe that Jesus commissioned them to go into all the world and make disciples will vehemently disagree with her comments on John 15:8, 9:

Jesus said God, his Father, was glorified if his disciples bear much fruit. How have we so distorted this as to mean that the Father is only glorified according to how many “souls we win”? I have never won a soul to Christ. None of us has. God does his own winning and the sooner we learn this the more rested and relaxed and natural we are going to be as children in the Kingdom.

But despite its limitations, this book can stimulate one’s thinking and deepen one’s appreciation of the patience, tenderness, and approachability of Christ.

Book Briefs

The Hebrew Kingdoms, by E. W. Heaton (Oxford, 1968, 437 pp., $5.75). A part of the revision of Clarendon Bible that offers commentary on the history, worship, wisdom, law, and prophecy of the Hebrew kingdoms, 922–587 B.C.

Liberal Protestantism, by Bernard M. G. Reardon (Stanford, 1968, 244 pp., $6.75). A “Modern Religious Thought” volume containing a comprehensive background study of theological liberalism and a collection of writings in which influential liberal Protestant theologians, such as Ritschl, Sabatier, and Reville, discuss their concepts of Christianity.

The Ministers Manual (Doran’s), edited by Charles L. Wallis (Harper & Row, 1968, 345 pp., $4.95). The 1969 edition of a standard work.

The Religion Business, by Alfred Balk (John Knox, 1968, 96 pp., $3). A penetrating study of the nature and extent of American religious wealth. Scrutinizes the exemption of religious organizations from federal income tax on “unrelated business income” and offers suggestions for reform.

Devotions for the Children’s Hour, by Kenneth N. Taylor (Moody, 1968, 175 pp., $3.95). A newly revised edition of a most helpful volume presenting Bible doctrines in language readily understood by pre-school children. The translator of Living Letters (and father of ten children) answers in a clear and simple way many of the questions often asked by children. Highly recommended for use as a part of the daily family altar. Other newly revised children’s devotional books by the same author: A Living Letter for the Children’s Hour and Stories for the Children’s Hour (Moody, 1968, 175 and 189 pp., $3.95 each).

The Double Yoke, by Lillian E. Hansen (Citadel, 1968, 268 pp. $5.95). The story of Salvation Army officer Dr. William Alexander Noble, who served as a medical missionary to India for forty-five years.

Jesus and the Historian, edited by F. Thomas Trotter (Westminster, 1968, 176 pp., $5.95). Collection of essays in honor of Ernest Cadman Colwell dealing with historical problems concerning the life of Jesus.

The Vatican Council and the Jews, by Arthur Gilbert (World, 1968, 335 pp., $6.95). An enlightening study unfolding the story behind Vatican II’s “Statement on the Jews.”

God Reigns, by James Leo Green (Broadman, 1968, 178 pp., $4.50). A non-technical study of selected portions of Isaiah pointing out its application for today’s world and emphasizing the sovereignty of God.

Who Are the Criminals?, by William S. Garmon (Broadman, 1968, 127 pp., $1.50). A poignant appeal to Christians to become active in rehabilitating criminals to healthy involvement in community life.

Czechoslovakia’s Blueprint for Freedom, compiled by Paul Ello (Acropolis, 1968, 304 pp., $2.95). Photographically reproduced copies of Alexander Dubcek’s statements leading to the conflict of August, 1968, with an introduction and analysis by a Georgetown University School of Foreign Service professor.

Search the Scriptures, by Robert B. Greenblatt (Lippincott, 1968, 168 pp., $4.50). Enlarged revision of an earlier work. A medical doctor studies personalities and incidents in the Bible from the perspective of modern medical science.

From the Beginning, by Karl Katz and others (Reynal, 1968, 287 pp., $12.95). A comprehensive record of Jewish history and tradition that concentrates on the great national collection of art in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Beautifully illustrated by 64 color plates and 150 black-and-white photos.

Is Christ for John Smith?, edited by John A. Ishee (Broadman, 1968, 127 pp., $1.50). Clear guidelines for leading persons to Christ.

Paperbacks

From Left to Right, by Herbert E. Robb and Raymond Sobel (Benziger Brothers, 1968, 265 pp., $2.50). An informative compilation of writings representing a wide variety of opinions (from far left to far right) on a number of current socio-political issues.

The Christian Encounters the World of Painting, by Wendell Mathews (Concordia, 1968, 112 pp., $1.25). An art professor presents a guide to judging art for the non-expert, with special emphasis on viewing art from a Christian perspective.

Religious Identity, by Gibson Winter (Macmillan, 1968, 143 pp., $1.45). A sobering study of present-day religious organization that uncovers the increasing separation between the organizational structures of the Church and the faith and life of the average minister and church-goer.

In the Holy Land, by Godfrey C. Robinson and Stephen F. Winward (Eerdmans, 1968, 128 pp., $1.95). Text, pictures, maps and biblical references take the reader on an armchair tour of areas of the Holy Land that relate to the biblical narratives.

Bible Study Books: St. John, by Robin E. Nixon (Eerdmans, 1968, 85 pp., $1.25). A Scripture Union book designed for use in personal Bible study.

Israel and the Bible, by William Hendriksen (Baker, 1968, 63 pp., $1.50). A cursory treatment of several contemporary questions dealing with the Jew in the light of biblical teaching.

On Becoming the Truth, by Walter W. Sikes (Bethany Press, 1968, 190 pp., $2.95). A helpful addition to the wealth of literature on the life and thought of Soren Kierkegaard.