Satan turned his smoke-wreathed face toward his underling and sighed. “Christmas again!”

“People are rushing around like mad,” said Fireball. “Crushing each other in the stores. Kris Kringle is back in the windows. The trees are lighted. They’re singing carols, with now and again that song about a red-nosed reindeer. Kids are talking about toys. Business is booming. Any number of people are getting drunk.”

Satan shrugged. “The usual thing. Man has no imagination. His capability for duplication astounds me.”

“Millions are celebrating, Majesty. But most of them don’t know why, I’m happy to say.”

Satan nodded. “Things look well for us, I trust.”

“Rather, sir. I feel nothing is happening that threatens our cause.”

“Look. Ignore the gift-giving, the cork-popping, even the stable scenes in the yards, the lighted churches, and all that. Just make sure you keep them away from the real reason for celebration.”

“You mean,” said Spitfire, “don’t let them think about its being the Enemy’s birthday?”

The devil frowned. “Let them think about that, if they wish. Let them read Scripture and sing hymns. Even let them wax sentimental over the Lord’s visit to the earth. Just don’t let them dwell on why he did it!”

“You mean …”

“Allow them to talk about peace and joy and all that. Just get them away from that word ‘sin.’ They must feel that somehow there’s an incongruity between that word and the happy holidays. This shouldn’t be too hard. Men don’t like to think much about sin at any time, particularly not at Christmas.”

“Sin—that is why he came, isn’t it?” mused Fireball.

Satan nodded. “That’s why we’ve got to keep them away from that theme. Keep them singing, trimming trees, shopping, throwing parties, even having church services—but shoo them away from the real significance of the Incarnation. They mustn’t see that the cattle shed was a starting point for Calvary.”

“Come to think of it, Majesty, that’s what the Book says—the Enemy was to be called Jesus because he was to save the people from their sins.”

“ ‘The Word was made flesh,’ ” grumbled the devil. “And that wasn’t just so he could rub elbows with mankind, or tell them about how the higher world lives. He had a specific mission, remember? He came to die. And for one reason, ‘the sins of the world.’ ”

“True,” muttered Fireball.

Smoke curled about Satan’s face as he went on with his explanation. “There’s that other thing, too.”

“Other thing, Majesty?”

“The Enemy didn’t come only to die. He came to come—again. That first coming was a prelude to the second. Now, this we must never let enter their minds—even if they do remember he came to go to the cross the first time. Keep them away from those Scriptures that say he will appear again.”

Fireball nodded assent. “It won’t matter too much, then, if they preach eloquently about the birth in the cattle shed, or even on the great life he lived. Just so they don’t realize that nothing matters if he never comes again.”

“Precisely,” said Satan. “That’s the bastion we must hold at any cost, at any time—but it’s especially important that we hold it during the Yuletide. Little brother, I almost break out in a cold sweat every Christmas when I think how close the masses come to that big truth—he came once to die to save men so that he might come again and establish his Reign. But, thanks to me, they have usually been sidetracked. We must keep it that way.”

“It sure wouldn’t help our business if people got to thinking what that Incarnation really means,” agreed Fireball. “What I mean is, there’s so much involved. Not just his coming as a Baby to the earth but his resurrection, his coming again—even the Judgment!”

“Even the Judgment,” said Satan. “We musn’t let them think about that, either. But that won’t be too difficult. No one ever thinks of associating the Judgment with Christmas.”

“But they really belong together, don’t they?” said Fireball. “Those things all belong together—his birth, his death, his resurrection, his second coming …”

“Naturally,” growled the devil. “But that’s our business—to keep men from seeing the truth whole. We won’t be able to keep them from celebrating the Enemy’s birthday, or celebrating his resurrection, or quoting from his sermons, or talking about his good life. But if we can keep a curtain drawn over his coming again, we will have gotten ourselves a great victory.”

“Quite so, Majesty.” Fireball hesitated, then added, “There will always be some, though, who will see the whole picture.”

“I know,” said Satan, “but they are comparatively few. They have no loud voice and they aren’t very well organized. Their publicity is often atrocious. See that things stay that way.”

“Depend on me, sir!” Said Fireball stoutly. “I’ll try to see that Christmas remains meaningless!”

“Get going, then,” ordered Satan. “The shoving, jostling masses are out there, making ready for the big celebration. Invade them!”

Fireball chortled. “I’ll get right out and do my thing!”

Satan glowered darkly. “How often must I counsel you to forego that hippie talk? Off with you.”

Fireball started to scamper away, but paused. He grinned impishly. “Merry Christmas, Majesty!”

“Keep it merry, little brother,” growled the devil. “If they ever get serious about it we may be in trouble! Happy holiday!”—LON WOODRUM, Hastings, Michigan.

Reputable scholars as different in time and perspective as last century’s Edmund Gosse and our contemporary Roger Sharrock have thought that the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress was unconsciously a consummate artist. I should like to argue, however, that there is evidence aplenty that Bunyan was consciously concerned with the literary merits of his masterpiece. Undeniably, his primary purpose in writing was to teach and edify; but it is equally clear that both in theory and in practice he showed that art is no enemy of belief. In its fascinating story, its balanced structure, its living characters, and its generic features as an allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress shows the hand of a literary artist who knew what he was about.

Bunyan’s rhymed preface shows that he had done some thinking on the fictional and imaginative in relation to truth. (For all quotations from the work I shall use Roger Sharrock’s Oxford edition of Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress [London, 1966].) He tells of the personal satisfaction this realm affords, of the delightful experience of having his thoughts come intuitively, and of the legitimacy of writing in the style he had chosen. Summoning the authority of the Old Testament writers and the teachings of Christ and the apostles, Bunyan insists that truth can be released through fiction. In the final section of his preface, he shows his perception of imaginative literature—its illusory quality, its nexus of meaning, its tragi-comic essence, and its power to evoke response:

Would’st thou be in a Dream, and yet not sleep?

Or would’st thou in a moment Laugh and Weep?

Would’st thou loose thy self, and catch no harm?

And find thy self again without a charm?

Would’st read thy self, and read thou knowst not what

And yet know whether thou art blest or not,

By reading the same lines? O then come hither,

And lay my Book, thy Head and Heart together [p. 145].

In theory, then, Bunyan asserts his confidence in the value of imaginative literature. And in practice he shows similar confidence.

Bunyan tells the reader that he purposes to “chalk out” the journey of a man who seeks “the everlasting prize,” and one of the strengths of the work is, of course, the fascinating story of that journey—a story that, as Professor Livingstone Lowes has observed, puts Bunyan’s allegory “not far from the kingdom of great fiction.” Bunyan loses no time in getting his story moving: His main character, Christian, has fled from the place of destruction and started upon his adventuresome pilgrimage to the Celestial City. Along the way he encounters Pliable and Obstinate, “wallows” in the Slough of Despond, meets histrionic Worldly Wiseman, receives instructions in Interpreter’s House, unburdens at the cross, “clambers” up the Hill Difficulty, crosses the plain Ease, fights with Apollyon, trudges through the Valley of the Shadow, suffers persecution in Vanity Fair, sinks in despair in Doubting Castle, converses with faithful and unfaithful pilgrims, catches a glimpse of the ultimate goal from the Delectable Mountains, and crosses the river of Death. Finally he triumphantly enters the Celestial City. Bunyan does not neglect the landscape through which Christian’s pilgrimage takes him. Consider the view from the House Beautiful: “When the morning was up, they had him to the top of the House, and bid him look South; so he did: and behold at a great distance he saw a most pleasant mountainous Country, beautified with woods, Vineyards, Fruits of all sorts, Flowers also, with Springs and Fountains, very delectable to behold.”

The manner in which Bunyan controls his fascinating story shows the hand of a craftsman. As he moves his character across an indefinite terrain of roads, hills, and valleys, he skillfully balances action with contemplative interludes. After Christian’s experiences at the Slough of Despond, his confrontations with Worldly Wiseman and Legality, and his chastening interview with Evangelist, there follows an interlude of study and reflection at the Interpreter’s House. After the incident at the cross and the rigors of Hill Difficulty, the “retreat” of the House Beautiful awaits Christian. The renewed confidence gained in conversation with Evangelist comes after the trials of the Valleys of Humiliation and of the Shadow of Death. The persecutions in Vanity Fair and the sufferings in Doubting Castle are followed by the quietness and peace of the Delectable Mountains; the Land of Beulah succeeds the Enchanted Ground. And finally, after the ordeal of crossing the River of Death comes the victorious entrance into the Celestial City.

Perhaps the most notable of Bunyan’s artistic achievements is his character depiction. Often he shows the essence of a personality with only a few strokes. Obstinate begins almost every speech with a remark ringing with finality; his mind is made up, and he needs no help from either books or people. He makes intimating assertions about those who fail to share his viewpoint, thereby confirming his disregard for knowledge. When Pliable indicates his inclination to follow Christian, Obstinate’s intimidating reply is, “What! more Fools still? be ruled by me and go back.…” Earlier he says to Pliable, “Tush, … away with your Book; will you go back with us or no?” Among many other well-drawn characters is By-ends, one of the most subtly depicted. Eager to impress, By-ends proudly says he is a “Gentleman of good Quality” and arrogantly gives the names of his family connections, an impressive roll call including such men as Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Mr. Anything, and Mr. Two-tongues. In By-ends’ own words, “Mr. Two-tongues was my Mother’s own Brother by my Father’s side.” Not only must he define his social position; he must leave no one in doubt about his religious distinctiveness. In only “two small points” do the By-ends couple differ from those of “stricter sort”: they never “strive against Wind and Tide” and they are “most zealous when Religion goes in Silver Slippers.” By permitting By-ends to become his own satirist, Bunyan shows how thoroughly hypocrisy is worked into this little man’s being. Even Christian himself is no plaster saint; he has a man’s magnificence and a man’s stupidity. He is complex and has within him something of Sloth, Mistrust, and Timorous—to name only a few of his fellow agents present in his own character.

As a literary form for his story of Christian, Bunyan chose the genre of allegory. Dorothy Sayers, referring to Bunyan as the last of the English allegorists in the great tradition, suggests that even though the extent of his reading in allegories of literary repute is subject to question, their influence is evident in The Pilgrim’s Progress in that all the distinctive features of allegory are present: the pilgrimage, the dream framework, the personifications, and the “debates” or dialogue.

Bunyan places his story within the framework of a dream. And, moving his chief character toward his goal while at the same time keeping his finger on the contending forces within Christian, he makes abundant use of personification. This is perhaps the allegorical feature least palatable to contemporary readers. But readers of allegory might well heed the counsel of C. S. Lewis that they keep in mind both the literal and the allegorical sense and treat the one not as a mere means to the other but as its imaginative interpretation. This could mean that those capital-lettered words are far richer than they immediately appear. Consider Talkative. What the word means is clear. But what has Bunyan done to create his Talkative? How and why does he “imagine” him? Even the slightest observation of Talkative reveals that he is excessively loquacious. According to him, his capacity for discussion stretches over an astonishing expanse of subjects. And what a keen, inquiring mind this loquacious man thinks he has! To talk “of the History or the Mystery of things” and on any number of subjects “is most profitable,” for by so doing, says he, “a Man may get knowledge of many things.” On and on he talks until his empty words catch him in a web of contradictions from which he finally extricates himself by accusing Faithful of being “some peevish or melancholly man not fit to be discoursed.” Bunyan shows his Talkative to be a pretender who lacks the qualities needed for the pilgrimage. But Talkative is not merely a conceptual equivalent; he is an imaginative interpretation.

Characteristic, too, of Bunyan’s allegory is the “debate” or dialogue. That he had done some thinking about dialogue is evident from his rhymed preface: “I find that men (as high as Trees) will write/Dialogue-wise; yet no Man doth them slight/For writing so.” His fondness for it is obvious in his story. Though at times his dialogue is hardly more than stereotyped conversation, at other times he gives it a highly dramatic quality. Many episodes might be cited: the conversation of Christian with Talkative, with Mr. By-ends, with Ignorance. But the dialogue between Christian and Mr. Worldly Wiseman has a special excellence. In a few paragraphs Bunyan reveals the self-satisfaction of Worldly Wiseman, his contempt for Christian’s thinking, his bland censure of Evangelist’s counsel, and his complacent confidence that Christian’s earnestness arises from weakness of the intellect and from following faulty advice. At the same time Bunyan shows a great deal about Christian, too: he is not quite prepared for Wiseman’s insidious counsel; he is nervous and uncomfortable in the presence of this man of worldly reputation and lacks the discernment to cope with Wiseman’s quality of mind.

In the dialogues that fill the pages of his allegory, Bunyan usually has an artistic purpose. Acclaim for the quality of his dialogue has come from numerous critics, and no less a dramatic critic than George Bernard Shaw speaks of the terse manageableness of some of the speeches and of the manner in which the sentences go straight to their mark. Even the long, drawn-out conversations, admittedly weak as dialogue, are not meaningless digressions, for as the pilgrims march toward their goal the chief subject of conversation is naturally Hopeful’s experience as a pilgrim.

Through his fascinating story, his well-balanced structure, his keen depiction of living characters, and his skillful handling of allegorical features, Bunyan shows his awareness of the artistic demands of imaginative writing. The story of the pilgrimage of Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City is a masterpiece from the hand of a conscious artist.

Abraham Lincoln, I understand, once asked his debate opponent, “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs has he got?”

The opponent thought a bit and then said, “Well, if you count the tail as a leg, I guess you would say he had five legs.”

“That is precisely where you are wrong,” responded Lincoln. “Even if you call a dog’s tail a leg, it isn’t one. It’s still a tail.”

He was right, of course. Calling a tail a leg simply does not make it one. And that fact is worth remembering in a society where public opinion is so often equated with truth. There is no substitute for constant reference to the facts of the matter.

Even—or perhaps especially—in the Church of Jesus Christ this is so. We might be inclined to think that the spiritual nature of the Church somehow exempts it from the temptation to call a tail a leg. After all, isn’t Christianity “the word of truth”?

The Apostle Paul once prayed that discernment might be added to the love of the Philippian believers (Phil. 1:9). This suggests that Christians are not naturally endowed with wisdom. God must supply it. Discernment is precisely our great need today, because tails are too often taken for legs. Several ideas presently circulating about the Church and its ministry reveal this need.

Take, for example, that concern closest to evangelical hearts, the importance of spiritual conversion. The warm air of ecumenism and brotherhood in our time is tending to melt the firm conviction that men must repent and believe the Gospel.

In the midst of brotherhood weeks, union Thanksgiving services, and inter-faith seminars, an idea has taken root and is now bearing fruit. It is this: Since God loves all men and our baptism attests to our essential oneness in Christ, it is improper for one Christian to seek to convert another baptized Christian.

Consequently, evangelism, as most evangelicals know it, has come in for some scorching criticism in recent days. Some churchmen have compared counting decision cards with collecting brownie points for heaven. One Canadian minister wrote not long ago: “The desire to evangelize is unchristian.” Conversion-seeking, he said, is an application of Madison Avenue tactics to religion.

Since ecumenism is reaching out to embrace Jews as well as Christians, fundamentalist missionaries to the Jews may expect to be out of business shortly. Jewish evangelism is no longer in style. An associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches asked the Convention of Conservative Rabbis last year, “How can any Christian have the unutterable gall to invite a Jew to accept what had been the cruelest kind of hell to him and his forebears throughout all these years? When we add to this the fact that conversion itself has brought to the Jew far more misery than joy, how can we possibly be so callous and unthinking?”

This crusade against conversion knows no bounds. Even those outside the Judeo-Christian tradition can relax. They too are no longer targets of evangelism. Many sections of the Christian community now feel that the missionary’s primary task is not “the preaching of the Gospel to those in darkness.” It is the seeking of common ground with members of the other great religions of the world and the building of a better social order. Many now feel that he is most Christian who says the least about it.

How is an evangelical Christian supposed to respond to this rejection of traditional evangelism? Is it unchristian to seek converts?

It may help to resort to that old distinction between method and message. Evangelicals may unhesitatingly join those who object to the use of emotional gimmicks, personality cults, high-powered propaganda, and imbalanced criticisms of other religions, all in the name of “evangelism.” There is, however, good reason to suspect that current attacks on the winning of converts go deeper than the matter of evangelistic methods. At times, Jesus Christ’s claims to uniqueness—such as “I am the way, the truth, and the life”—are diluted to mean little more than “Let’s be friends.” But if what Jesus said about his mission in this world is true, then it is not the part of courtesy to withhold from men the only means to personal forgiveness from God. To offer kindness as a substitute for truth is to call a dog’s tail a leg.

Another current kick in religious circles is the appeal for church renewal. On every hand we hear of the need to update the Church. The Church, we are told, has failed. It must learn to speak meaningfully to modern man, and this necessitates new forms.

Seldom does a message catch on unless there is some truth in it. It is so here. If the Church is to minister to people, it is fairly well limited to people living today. That means, of course, that those who communicate the Gospel will have to get close enough to those who are without a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ to be heard. And “closeness,” we all know, is not a matter of mere physical position.

That truth, however, is hardly new. It was underscored by Jesus a long time ago when he talked about physicians’ going to the diseased (Matt. 9:11–13). Evangelicals have no reason to reject appeals for renewal on this account. The fact of the matter is, many churches do have vested interests in some segments of society. Many churches have turned their backs on the poor or the rich, on the youths or the aged. Money and buildings, organizations and status do have a way of making us defensive when someone begins to talk about change—even though we know that people and institutions begin to die when they no longer listen to critics. That is what is right about the current call for renewal.

On the other hand, many of the criticisms of the old ways are made under the apparent assumption that there is something sacred about the new per se. Avant-gardism can easily become a new creed. The newest becomes the truest and the latest becomes the best, in the minds of those devotees of change who have been “born again” by confessing the sins of the past and surrendering themselves to a wide-open future.

This a-historical mood that fires the evangelists of change is more American than Christian. Dreams of a new tomorrow and visions of a second Eden here in America are not new among descendants of the Puritans, who long ago insisted that the Kingdom of God must come to the United States—and now!

The dangers such a mood presents to a historic faith like Christianity are obvious. It is not enough to demand change and to insist on new forms. We must ask how are the changes going to be improvements. The new is not necessarily better.

And what about the once-for-allness of the faith? Are we to update the cross? Do we have a modern form of the resurrection? Has God somehow evolved into a more efficient manager of the universe? To pursue this sort of questioning reveals how much of our search for renewal is calling a dog’s tail a leg.

One instance of this practice shows how great the need really is for Christian discernment. Consider the almost universal fascination with social action today. The Rev. Robert Raines, a Methodist pastor who wrote The Secular Congregation, said not long ago that the controversy between “secularists and pietists” is splitting churches all across the country.

By a “pietist,” Raines referred to the church-centered believer. He looks for God primarily in the sanctuary and is more concerned that the true faith be preserved than that it be relevant. He thinks of sin as private immorality; stealing, lying, and adultery are examples. Consequently, salvation too is considered in individualistic terms.

A “secularist,” on the other hand, is world-centered. He looks for God in the party precincts and in the shopping centers. He is more concerned about the relevance of the Gospel to the world than about its preservation. He thinks of sin in terms of public immorality—injustice and inhumanity—and of salvation in corporate terms.

We may question Raines’s particular labels, but we cannot deny the problem he raises. How does the Church serve in the world without being fashioned by the world?

The current view of the Church as a serving community seeking to lay down its life in the world of poor and deprived men is a welcomed corrective to the recent preoccupation with the faith as an antidote to anxieties, fears, and neuroses. God is more than the Great Personal Problem-Solver. He is the Lord of History.

Evangelicals in America, under the pressure of an individualistic pietism, have often tended to ignore the wider dimensions of God’s work in the world. Revivalism, which evangelicalism employed so successfully in the nineteenth century, is inclined to turn a personal Gospel into an individualistic Christianity. They are not the same thing. The Bible makes it clear that God has purposes beyond the individual. Christ, Paul reminds us, is “the firstborn of every creature” and “the head of the body, the church” (Col. 1:15–18).

At the same time, however, far too many advocates of the secularization of the Gospel and the humanization of social structures fail to keep man’s fundamental need central. In the light of the biblical indictment of “this present evil age,” we dare not fall under the spell of illusory kingdoms. Sin in the individual and in society is still rebellion against God. And God has offered only one remedy for that.

This is not to suggest that Christians are in the least exempt from the quest for social justice. It is simply to recall how easy it is to drift from a biblical course for social progress, especially when a storm rages all about us. In fact, one could argue that our crises have reached such depths that only a Gospel as radical as that preached in the New Testament is sufficient for our times. Take, for example, the universality of sin. All, both black and white, both young and old, have sinned and come short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). One may not have sinned as often as the other, but admission of fault, it seems to me, is the starting point for the reconciliation of two estranged parties.

The proper balance between changing society and converting sinners is a delicate one, and there is little doubt that evangelicals in the twentieth century have leaned awkwardly toward an unbiblical individualism. But to confuse earthly service with eternal security is simply another instance of calling a dog’s tail a leg. As Harvey Cox, no less, one of the founding fathers of the Secular City, said recently, “Once you transform everything into a mission for social action and lose the intrinsic joy of the spirit of worship, you are in danger of losing both.” Like most exhortations, that one must be aimed in the right direction; but it ought not to be dismissed.

Discernment! That is our need—as well as our conclusion. Evangelism, renewal, and social justice are difficult assignments in themselves. We only add to our confusion if we fail to distinguish legs from tails.

It was very early Sunday morning, and Avery could not sleep. Thoughts about the Christmas cantata and the Sunday-school Christmas program made round after tedious round through his weary mind. Then he began to worry again about the gifts Janet was buying for the children. He knew they couldn’t afford them. But attempts to talk about the matter always seemed to end in irritated disagreement.

His sermon for that day was to be on hope for the hopeless, good news for the frustrated. Now he wondered whether he would be able to preach convincingly the new reign of peace in the lives of men through Jesus Christ, when he didn’t feel that peace.

Christmas had not been very enjoyable around the manse the past few years, he thought. It seemed to be a continual round of discussion, negotiation, ultimatum, and capitulation. As father and minister he felt that the spiritual values ought to outweigh the material aspects of celebration. But it was very hard to bring the season into focus this way, even in his own family.

The outdoor decorations should have been up by now. Lights along the roof line. A well-proportioned tree in the picture window. Just like last year—and how many years before that?

Where was the joy to the world—or the joy in his world anyway? What had happened to all the pleasant excitement of the Christmas pageant and the family tree and other familiar parts of the holiday season?

Avery got up, walked across the hall into his study, and stretched out in his lounge chair, as if to try to get a better perspective on God, the world, Christmas, the good news, money, God’s love, his family, and all the other things that were bothering him. Just what was the matter? Didn’t he like his people and his work? Didn’t he love Janet any more? Would leaving the ministry and starting a new life help them grow closer?

As pastor he had tried earnestly, he felt, to lead his people to a greater understanding of the meaning of Advent and Christmastide. He wanted them to look beneath the tinsel and bright paper and bright lights and find God’s answer for frustrated man. But he couldn’t see that his efforts had done much good.

Maybe the cause of his problem lay with him rather than with his wife, or his church, or the Christmas commercializers. Maybe what he really wanted to do was to come with the Magi and bring a gift to the baby-king and then leave for the kingdom in the East, never to return.

Maybe he was too involved in his daily schedule—visiting in the hospital, calling on members and potential members, writing sermons, working with the young people, taking part in PTA and other community activities, taking radio talks, meeting with the women’s council, sitting in on committee meetings. Maybe he couldn’t be both a good pastor and a good father and husband.

Critical members, family tensions, the sermon he didn’t really feel like preaching, unpaid bills, the gradual end of family devotions, jealousy—all these things seemed to settle into a thick fog of anxiety. Where was the creativity and inspiration, the firm trust in God and the accompanying self-confidence, that he used to think he had? If only his life were a story, he thought, he would walk out into the clear starry night and the heavens would speak to him, and guide him back to a stronger faith.

Avery reached over to pick up his Bible from the desk. It was open to Luke’s account of the Christmas story, which he had needed to refer to while finishing his sermon the evening before. “And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.” He remembered a time many years ago when he had memorized this passage to recite at a Sunday-school program. He had had to limp up to the platform, because earlier in the day he had stuck a knife in his foot while playing a knife-tossing game with a couple of his friends.

“And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were filled with fear.” He thought of the moon shining on the snow one evening shortly after Pearl Harbor, long before he had met Janet. He was driving out to Sue Anne’s, and the radio in his ’39 Ford was playing, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” Later they had walked hand in hand under the stars and felt that God was very close. Would it take a heavenly vision to stir his belief now?

He read on. “And the angel said to them, ‘Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.’ ” News of a great joy. During his last days in college everything had seemed right. He had a firm faith in God and enthusiasm to serve him. He had a college degree and a good job that promised a profitable future. And though he did not realize it then, the ground work was being laid for his decision to go into the ministry.

“And suddenly there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly host praising God.” A brief tour of duty in the business world was only a happy prelude to a decision to go to seminary. During this time he had met Janet. Their courtship had been rich and exciting, and they were married in a beautiful church wedding. Together they enjoyed the three years in seminary, good years of learning and personal growth, overflowing with service to God and man.

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!” Peace here and now was the problem. Years had passed since seminary, and disillusionment had set in. Avery felt a dissatisfaction that people didn’t respond, that ideas didn’t blossom. The renewal he planned time and again didn’t come about. People continually disappointed him. His financial problem was always lurking in a back corner of his mind, ready to bother him in the small hours of the night. He remembered many times of deeply satisfying closeness with Janet and his family, but now he felt distant from them, overwhelmed by the goals he had set for himself.

“When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another. ‘Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord made known to us.’ ” He thought of the stories he had written in the hope of recapturing the spirit of Christmas. Still Christmas seemed to stay on the tinsel and shiny-ball level. The Christmas Eve service never seemed to get through to many of the people.

“And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in the manger. And when they saw it they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child.” Was he holding back? Was he failing to go to the manger and lay his life at the feet of Jesus? Why couldn’t he and Janet seem to find time to pray together, or to read the Bible and pray with the children? Was it because he advocated things from the pulpit and didn’t do them that he felt depressed at Christmas?

“And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them.” How long had it been since he had told the Christmas story anywhere but in the pulpit for anyone to “wonder at”—even his own children? How could he say that this was such great news, if he didn’t feel it was vitally important to him?

“And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.” He put down the Bible. How was he glorifying and praising God? By being concerned about a Christmas bonus big enough to make ends meet? By becoming so involved with the theological implications—or lack of them—in the Christmas celebration that he missed the opportunities to show God in his best light?

Perhaps he had been trying to find his job at the crib, instead of going all the way through childhood and manhood with Christ—to the hillside where he fed the five thousand, to where he healed the lepers, to Jerusalem, scene of the triumphal entry, to the Upper Room, to the Garden, to Calvary, to the empty tomb, to the seashore. He began to realize that joy comes in sharing the suffering and the death and the resurrection, as well as the birth, which is only the beginning.

Avery knelt by his chair. “Dear God and Father, forgive me. Forgive my frustrations and anxieties. Take me, weak and miserable, and use me. Make me realistic when I am too confident. Lift me when I am depressed. But always keep me close to you.” He felt a little like the shepherds, who couldn’t stay long at the crib but had to get out and tell the story. He looked at the clock on the wall and saw it was a little after six. In a few hours he would be standing before his people. This time, he thought, maybe he could help them to see Christmas as the starting point of faith—to see Christmas anew.

Christmas is not the most pleasant time to go to church. Not only unbelievers suffering from the compulsions of a churchgoing childhood but even fervent believers often have to steel themselves when the pastor rises to deliver his Christmas sermon. There is always the grim possibility that the focus will be upon those wretched persons in the congregation who have not been seen since the previous Easter; such sermons agonize the unbeliever without helping him and fail to edify the faithful (since Law is confused with Gospel and good advice is substituted for the central Christian message of Good News). But even if the Christmas churchgoer is fortunate enough to miss a law preachment, he will seldom avoid the twin agonies of sermonic rationalism and homiletic iconoclasm.

At the liberal side of the ecclesiastical spectrum, the person who has the temerity to enter a Christmas service has every chance of hearing an urbane plea to make his religion “relevant to the twentieth century” by chucking the supernatural baggage of the Christmas story. Influenced both by the Bultmannian efforts at “demythologizing” the New Testament message (penetrating beneath the miraculous accretions to its “genuine” existential center—the quest for “self-authentication”) and by the current vogue of “secular Christianity” (redefining the faith in terms of modern humanistic values), the liberal clergyman derides or pities the childish parishioner who must still hitch his religious wagon to the burnt-out Christmas star. Such legends were meaningful to our pre-scientific forebears, one is told, but to hold on to them now is to remain hopelessly wedded to an irrecoverable past. Magi and shepherds, annunciations and virgin births—surely we must locate the kernel of truth that is imbedded in these mythological shucks.

So loudly do such sentiments resound on the clear, crisp air each December that Anglo-Catholic philosophical theologian E. L. Mascall has immortalized them in two poems entitled, “Christmas with the Demythologizers” (Pi in the High [1959], pp. 49–51). Here are sample stanzas:

Hark, the herald angels sing:

“Bultmann is the latest thing!”

(Or they would if he had not

Demythologized the lot.)

Joyful, all ye nations, rise,

Glad to existentialize!

Peace on earth and mercy mild,

God and Science reconciled.

Lo, the ancient myths disperse.

Hence, three-storied universe!

Let three-decker pulpits stay:

Bultmann has a lot to say,

Since Kerygma still survives

When the myths have lost their lives.

Hark, the herald angels sing:

“Bultmann shot us on the wing!”

But the agonies of the Christmas sermon are not entirely avoided even if our hapless seasonal churchgoer stumbles into an evangelical setting. There, though rationalistic shreddings of the New Testament account of the Incarnation are rigorously excluded, often an iconoclasm is promoted that leaves the congregation only slightly less unsettled. The preacher inveighs against all the unbiblical trappings that have accumulated around the Saviour’s cradle (better, swaddling clothes): the carols that do not express precise scriptural teaching; the emphasis on material gift-giving; the pagan Christmas tree; the gluttonous centrality of the Christmas dinner and the anthropocentric family reunions; the stress on our own children instead of on the Christ-child; and the evil genius of the whole occasion: Santa Claus. Depending upon the closeness of his confessional and temperamental alignment with Cromwellian times, the evangelical pastor may even give the impression that Christmas should be radically de-emphasized—or done away with altogether. After all, the holiday is nowhere commanded or even recommended in Scripture; and look at the appalling ways in which non-Christian Western society has secularized it since the eighteenth century!

Versus A Rationalistic Christmas

These two forms of sermonizing, the modernistic and the evangelical, though poles apart theologically, are bedfellows in their antipathy to “myth.” Where specifically has the follower of Bultmann gone off the track?

The Bultmannian demythologizer is convinced that the gospel accounts, particularly the infancy narratives at the beginning of Matthew and Luke, are the end products of an oral tradition that was shaped and freely altered by the early Church in light of its own needs and the mythological view of the world current at that time. By the techniques of “form criticism,” as practiced by the Dibelius-Bultmann school, one can reach behind the New Testament documents as they have come down to us and find the existential heart of the Christmas message.

But what assures the advocate of such “demythologizing” that he is arriving at bedrock reality when he reaches the level of existential experience? Is there any reason to assume that Heideggerian existential categories are less “mythical” than the simple New Testament accounts? As some nasty but profound critics of Bultmann such as Fritz Büri have pointed out, he may well be accomplishing nothing more than substitution of a modern philosophical myth for the original Christian conviction. The same could even be the case when the Bultmannian replaces the ancient “supernatural” conception of the universe by a modern cosmology. Contemporary cosmologies have not exactly excelled in durability; the twentieth century, with its high obselescence in cosmic explanations, has done no little myth-making on its own.

Moreover, if the purportedly historical accounts of gospel events such as the Virgin Birth are not to be taken as factually true—if they require “demythologization”—why is the “core” message to be accepted at all? “History” and “theology” are painfully intertwined in the infancy accounts: “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (and this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) … And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.” If the early Church could not get its historical facts straight, why do we think it succeeded so well when making high theological judgments? Here again Professor Mascall has the poetical word for the occasion (this time to the tune of “Good King Wenceslas”):

Sir, my thoughts begin to stray

And my faith grows bleaker.

Since I threw my myths away

My kerygma’s weaker.

What is retained in the demythologizing process is, of course, a naïve faith in the methodology of the demythologizer. One is reminded of the encounter between Alice and (William Ellery) Channing-mouse in R. C. Evarts’s clever parody, Alice’s Adventures in Cambridge, published by the Harvard Lampoon in 1913; after the mouse has demythologized General Washington, the American revolutionary army, Paul Revere, and the Queen, he is forced to say to those who appeal to historical facts, “Your memory is simply a legend”—and when Alice finally asks the Black Knight, “Doesn’t he believe in anything?,” the inevitable reply comes: “Nothing but himself.”

The form-critical method of the demythologizer, however, is anything but believable, as its loss of ground in non-theological areas well exemplifies. In Greco-Roman and comparative Near Eastern studies, less and less reliance is being placed on such techniques as every year passes (cf. Composition and Corroboration in Classical and Biblical Studies [1966] by Edwin Yamauchi of Rutgers), for these methods are intensely subjectivistic. In the case of the New Testament material, the unscholarly character of this methodology appears especially in its gratuitous use of rationalistic presuppositions against the miraculous (how do the Bultmannians know that “the nexus of natural causes is never broken”?), and in its failure to recognize that the interval of time between the recording of the events of Jesus’ life and the events themselves was too brief to allow for communal redaction by the Church—especially in a hostile environment in which so many competing faiths were interested in destroying Christianity’s particularistic claims. In the study of English ballads, John Drinkwater (English Poetry) has rejected redaction-theory because of inadequate time for extensive alteration of the original ballads; yet the infancy narratives of our Lord never passed through such a long period of oral tradition as did the ballads, and the gospel narratives were in circulation when Mary and the other principals were still alive and when the opponents of the faith would have blasted accounts of Jesus’ divine origin had they not been factual.

This Christmas, should one have the misfortune to wander into a demythologization service, the recommended Rx is serious contemplation of a typical assertion by one who knew both Mary and Jesus intimately: “We have not followed cunningly devised fables [Greek, mythoi], when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Pet. 1:16).

Versus An Iconoclastic Christmas

“Quite right! Well done!” declares our evangelical iconoclast from his Christmas pulpit: “The very factuality of the Christmas story requires us to strip away from this season all that is mythical—all the extra-biblical accretions, both ancient and modern, that have become associated with the birth of the Christ.” Certainly the iconoclast is right to demand that we maintain a clear distinction between the truly historical facts of the Incarnation and the non-historical, traditionalistic additions (for example, the impossible view evidently held by all crèche-makers that the wise men arrived at the same time as the shepherds). The iconoclasts perform a valuable service by emphasizing the distinction between retaining the old oaken bucket of solidly factual theology and scraping off the traditional moss that clings to it.

Yet the iconoclast misses a profound point as to the nature of the Christmas story—a point that applies with equal force to the entire Christian story. The genuine historicity of the Gospel does not prevent it from being at the same time genuinely mythical—in the special sense of a story that cuts to the heart of man’s subjective need. The greatest contemporary creator of literary myth, J. R. R. Tolkien, author of the three-volume masterpiece The Lord of the Rings, has argued this case in a manner that bears repeating (“On Fairy-Stories,” The Tolkien Reader [Ballantine Books, 1966], pp. 71–73):

The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world.… The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe [decisive event of maximum value] of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.… To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed.… The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is pre-eminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of Angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.

But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.”

What Tolkien says here is most assuredly true: the myths and legends and tales of the world that give symbolic expression to man’s fundamental needs (Carl Gustav Jung called them “the archetypes of the collective unconscious”) serve as pointers to the reality of the Christian message in which they are historically fulfilled. A tale as common as Sleeping Beauty is fully comprehended only in this light: the princess, subjected to a deathlike trance by evil power that cannot be thwarted despite all the good intentions and concerted efforts of her family, represents the plight of the human race; the prince, who comes by prophecy, enters the castle of death from the outside, and conquers the evil spell by the kiss of love, is the Redeemer of mankind; and the marriage and happy ending express the eschatological future of the redeemed and the marriage supper of the Lamb. God becomes the Lord of angels, and of men—and of elves.

Seen in this light, as the fulfillment of the deepest longings men have brought to expression in their myths, the Christmas story is not to be set over against the traditional lore of the Christmas season. Indeed, that lore, when properly understood, will reinforce and heighten the truth of the Incarnation itself. The traditional carols will be listened to more closely, and even the most “secular” will yield the eternal message:

God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,

For Jesus Christ our Saviour was born upon this day,

To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray,

O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy.

The Christmas tree will inevitably and properly suggest the One who grew to manhood to “bear our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” Family reunions will point to the truth that where two or three are gathered together, there Christ is in the midst, as well as to the family of the Redeemed, the clouds of witnesses, and the Church Triumphant that we shall ourselves join by God’s grace before many more Christmases have passed. The dinners and the parties will speak of the Christ who hallowed feasts when he walked this earth and who constitutes “living Bread come down from heaven.” The centrality of children at this blessed season should remind us that childlike faith before the mysteries of the Incarnation is a requisite for participation in his kingdom. And even (or especially?) the archetypal and ubiquitous Santa Claus, who comes from a numinous land of snow-white purity to give gifts to those who have nothing of their own, proclaims to all who have ears to hear the message of the entrance of God into our sinful world to “give gifts to men.”

The Way Of Affirmation

Christmas thus calls for total appropriation and re-consecration. It calls not for demythologizing but for remythologizing. It calls for what Christian litterateur Charles Williams termed “the Affirmative Way”:

The Negative Way of the mystics is fulfilled and corrected by the Affirmative Way.… To its adherents, the heavens indeed disclose the glory of God, and the firmament shows clearly that it is his handiwork. They witness that he discloses himself in all things. Human love manifests divine love; particular beauties exhibit ultimate beauty [Shideler, The Theology of Romantic Love (1962), p. 25].

All the glories of the Holy Season, and all its tales—from Van Dyke’s The Other Wise Man to Seabury Quinn’s retelling of the Christ-oriented legend of Santa Claus—can in this way be reaffirmed. The Christian, solidly grounded in the eucatastrophe of man’s history, the birth of Christ, finds that the Evangelium has indeed hallowed every genuine manifestation of Christmas joy. Tire believer can affirm them all; to each he can say with thanksgiving: “This also is Thou.”

And as he remythologizes the season, another transformation occurs: in contact with the Christ who hallows all things, he is himself hallowed and becomes a living symbol by which others are pointed to the Incarnate Saviour. Like the Santa Claus of the legend (Quinn, Roads [1948], p. 110, he receives the wondrous commission:

His is the work his Master chose for him that night two thousand years ago; his the long, long road that has no turning so long as men keep festival upon the anniversary of the Saviour’s birth.

Current thought on evangelism is clustering around two poles: “presence” and “proclamation.” “Christian presence” is a current ecumenical “in” term, minted, apparently, in French Roman Catholicism. Charles de Foucauld, founder of the Little Brothers of Jesus order, who was murdered in the Sahara in 1916, described his vocation as “being present amongst people, with a presence willed and intended as a witness of the love of Christ.”

The term has been popularized since World War II, particularly, perhaps, through the mission of the “worker priests” in France. For French Catholics, “presence in the world” has meant a kind of evangelistic reentry to sectors such as the laboring world from which the church has been absent. In Western intellectual circles, the term has been expanded to include involvement in the political and cultural structures of society. Major WCC evangelism and missions studies have concentrated on “structures of missionary presence.”

Eszard Roland candidly says that the slogan “Christian presence” is “so abstract, so vague, that each of us can take it to mean something different.” The World Student Christian Federation statement entitled “The Christian Community in the Academic World” uses “presence” “to express both the center of Christian faith and our response to it.” “ ‘Presence’ for us means ‘engagement,’ involvement in the concrete structures of our society.” Colin Williams suggests that “presence” replaces the common view of mission, seen primarily in verbal terms, with a recognition that “mission is first a ‘being-there’—a servant presence in love on behalf of Christ—and that the opportunity to name the Name is one for which we must long, but which must know the right time.” Max Warren interprets “presence” as “the attempt to be identified with the other person by being in the profoundest sense of the word available.…”

The WSCF document ties presence closely to incarnational theology: “As an expression of our faith, it points to the incarnation: God became man like us and lived among us.… His presence has shown God to us. No reference is made to the death of Christ as opening to man the presence of God. His resurrection is overlooked, and the work of the Holy Spirit is ignored.

Philip Potter grounds the “presence” idea in such biblical material as God’s revelation of himself to Moses as “I am”; the God whom man cannot escape, Psalm 139; the Shekinah dwelling among men in John’s Gospel as Jesus, the supreme “I am”; and the Emmanuel presence and promise of Matthew’s opening and closing chapters.

Gilbert Rist has interpreted “presence” in a “theology of silence”—the “incognito” in which Jesus lived, and the “silence of Golgotha.”

“Presence” theology dwells on the omnipresence of God or, in current terms, on God’s secularity. Revelation tends to be seen in terms either of the “hiddenness” of God or of the universal light of the Logos. In this theology, Christology emphasizes the incarnation, has little definite to say of Christ’s atoning death and resurrection. The dominant note is that of a world already reconciled and redeemed, which needs only to learn that this is so and that Jesus is already its Lord.

Something more is involved in the “presence” approach than simple reaction to a “word-centered” evangelism, or the seeking of a proper balance of word and deed. The WSCF paper says that older terms—“evangelization,” “witness,” “mission”—suggest a posture of confrontation or aggressiveness that is no longer acceptable. These words “suggest a certainty of faith and purpose”; they express faith in terms that create difficulty. “Presence” without “proclamation” seemingly may be witness enough.

Colin Williams and Max Warren seem to be saying instead that it is a question of priority. The witness of word is important. What matters most, however, is not what is said but the “being present” of the one who says it.

Those concerned for “Christian presence” are by no means unanimous in their theology or practice. For some, “presence” is the outgrowth of a radical secular theology that doubts the efficacy of the evangelical Gospel. For others, “presence” means taking seriously the Incarnation pattern so that we may win the right to be heard. We must not judge too hastily or generally or harshly.

As evangelicals we have much to learn about “Christian presence.” Too often we have evangelized in a mechanical, impersonal way. We have hoisted many “gospel blimps.” “Identification” is a word that speaks to our condition. Our Lord did not broadcast the word from the sky, but he spoke as one found in fashion as a man, in the form of a servant. We are called to identification not only by the example of Christ but by a deep sense of humility that we who bear his Gospel have often brought so much discredit upon it. We are indeed not supersaints but “beggars telling others where to find bread.”

But our “yes” to the truth of witness by presence stands alongside a “no.” We cannot be party to any downgrading of the Word. For our Lord has called us to be heralds of his grace. The Word we preach is not a mere human word. It is the message of God himself, in which he is present revealing himself to man, a powerful Word by which God creates faith and life in those who hear (Rom. 10:8, 14, 15; 1 Pet. 1:23–25). Nor can we accept the notion that “presence” is merely a saved man who knows he is a saved being with a saved man who doesn’t yet know of his salvation. The light that comes into the world brings both response and rejection, salvation and condemnation (John 3:17, 18). Evangelism does imply a separation of the believer from the world as well as an identification with the world.

So we say yes to presence but no to presence without proclamation. We say yes to dialogue but no to dialogue without decision.

The “presence-proclamation” tension still forces many questions before the Church. Is “presence” a more valid and necessary approach in some cultures that in others? Can “Christian presence” be continued as a valid witness permanently in situations where open proclamation is not possible? Must all Christians engage in verbal witness? How much does a lack of “structures of Christian presence” hinder the effectiveness of proclamation?

We must face all such questions as obedient witnesses to our Lord and Saviour, who has said to us, both, “You are the salt of the earth,” and, “Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man shall also be ashamed of him.”

LEIGHTON FORD

I write this immediately after my return from Singapore, where I attended the Asia-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. It was a moving experience to watch the eleven hundred delegates sing together, worship together, and discuss the mission of the Church together.

While passing through some of Asia’s great cities I was struck by the stark contrast between the affluent and the underprivileged. Some live in tin-walled shacks and others in splendid modern homes; some wear fine clothes and ride in chauffeur-driven cars while others perform the hardest menial labor without the help of Western mechanical gadgetry; some eat well and enjoy excellent health while many others live marginally and have a high incidence of tuberculosis; some children are neat and cleanly dressed while others are dirty, scabby, and shabbily garbed. This is Asia.

The white man’s future in the missionary dimension is bleak. The day may not be far away when few of them will be left in Asia. Asian Christians are optimistic, however, and feel that their day has come. Indeed, the decline of the West and its decaying faith may mean that Asians will be bringing the Gospel to Europe and America in reversal of the traditional missionary pattern.

The word has come that Billy Graham will spend Christmas with our servicemen in Viet Nam. He deserves our prayers.

Eleven hundred Asians from twenty-four countries gathered in steamy Singapore November 5–13 under the banner “Christ Seeks Asia.” Their congress, sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, was an outgrowth of the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin.

The Asian Congress met to implement Berlin proposals, define biblical evangelism, stress the urgency of proclamation to Asia’s two billion people, assess the obstacles to evangelism in Asia, develop effective techniques, evaluate evangelism programs in the light of changing conditions, and challenge churches and Christian organizations to a bold and cooperative program.

Unlike the World Council of Churches conclave at Uppsala last August, which devoted itself mainly to social, political, and economic issues, the Asia-South Pacific Congress concentrated on winning men to personal faith in Christ. While some attention was paid to the theology of evangelism, the delegates spent most of their time devising strategy.

From the outset, the Asians said plainly that they wanted to stand on their own feet and be independent of the West. While grateful to Graham for making the congress possible, they wanted it known that it was an Asian congress run by Asians. Some delegates said there was too much western involvement. But the Asians had problems of their own: Chinese from Singapore complained they had inadequate representation.

Asians have grave doubts about the theological stability of the West. Dr. Jong Sung Rhee of Korea charged that. Western Christianity has been infiltrated by humanism, liberalism, syncretism, and universalism. Spontaneous and prolonged applause greeted his statement:

“If our guilt-conscious western friends cannot stand firm against the danger of religious syncretism which is infiltrating Christian minds so rapidly in recent years, we Christians from non-Christian countries, that is, non-white Christians, should take over the battle.”

The congress did not break new ground theologically, perhaps because Asia has not yet developed a scholarship comparable to that of the West, which has had centuries of opportunity. The theology that did emerge, however, was evangelical, for delegates whose churches are both in and out of the WCC.

Most position papers stressed the need for good works by Christians as a witness to the Gospel and as an expression of human concern. There were differences in the congress papers on the role of the institutional church in sociopolitical matters. Donald Hoke of the Japan Christian College, Tokyo, said that “it is the individual, and not the Church corporately, who is to go out into society and work to achieve [social reform].” Benjamin Fernando, a Ceylon layman, called for the Church to speak out corporately and said, “Even democracy … must be constantly under the judgment of the Church.”

Professor Alan Cole of Singapore told the delegates that opposition to the Gospel in Asia is little different from that faced by the early Church. M. A. Qayyam Daskawie from Pakistan, in a paper on witnessing in a resistant culture, boldly declared that one “big hindrance is the constant demythologizing that some Western scholars practice with reference to the Christian faith. This has been accompanied by the decay in morals that has come in the wake of a permissive, affluent society. To the people of our part of the world, western nudity and drinking are far worse than what goes on nearer home. The freedom of action, thought and speech which are the hallmark of western culture are completely misunderstood and misrepresented.”

Chua Wee Hian of Hong Kong and David Claydon of Australia told of the need for reaching Asia’s youth, who increasingly make up the bulk of the population. The youth, they said, are confused by the adult world. Better educated and more affluent than their fathers, youth are lonely and isolated in high-density living areas. What they want most is to be delivered from the feudalism of their fathers and to secure a voice in molding their future.

Again and again the idea surfaced that God has given the West its opportunity; now he is giving Asia its chance. And Asians do not want the new wine in old wineskins.

Some of the congress highlights came, not from papers, but from testimonies of participants. Datin Aw Kow, a Chinese housewife whose husband started the Singapore newspaper Evening Sun, told how she was made chairman of the paper with complete charge over its operations. God supplied newsprint for her in an almost miraculous manner and provided personnel in answer to her believing prayers. Daniel Liu, Honolulu police chief since 1948, testified to the grace and goodness of God. Even more thrilling were stories of what God has done in New Guinea among headhunters in primitive cultures.

Dr. Helen Kim, formerly South Korean delegate to the United Nations and now a roving ambassador, urged Asian churches to bring Christ to all men. She pointedly said that “some scholars in theology and some church leaders in Asia say that the Holy Spirit is already working in these non-Christians through their faiths so they need not be considered as people to whom we need to preach. I cannot follow that way of thinking.” Having frankly rejected the viewpoint espoused by some in the conciliar movement, she went on to speak of the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ, whom men must receive personally.

At the conclusion of the congress, delegates read in unison a declaration in which they acknowledged past failures to evangelize as they should and affirmed their intention of fulfilling their mandate in the days ahead.

The congress seemed to mark the beginning of a new era in Asia as delegates talked together, prayed together, and set up a continuing body to carry on when the congress adjourned. Area groups will hold theological consultations, and evangelistic teams will be exchanged among nations.

Two significant events followed the closing session. In one, the Japanese delegation went to the Singapore war memorial and publicly asked forgiveness for what their nation had done in World War II. The same evening more than four thousand people attended a meeting at the national theater. Akira Hatori, Japan’s foremost radio evangelist, related his conversion experience and called for the commitment of Christians to the task of evangelism. A great hush fell over the audience as he concluded his message.

It was hard to avoid noting differences between Uppsala and Singapore. In Singapore there were no policemen guarding the assembly; no acrid, tobacco-charged atmosphere; no protest marches and student revolts; no anti-U.S. resolutions on Viet Nam. There was a keen awareness of the Communist threat in Asia and an appreciation of what the United States had done to contain that threat.

The announcement of Richard Nixon’s election to the presidency brought a round of applause. The absent Billy Graham would have enjoyed listening to the Asians sing “Happy birthday, dear Billy,” on the occasion of his fiftieth, which came during the congress.

The congress was saddened by the news that Congress Coordinator W. Stanley Mooneyham, a BGEA staff member, suffered a recurrence of a heart condition and was hospitalized before the congress ended. Cliff Barrows led the singing for the congress. Graham’s associate evangelist Grady Wilson will return to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur for mass evangelistic campaigns early next year.

Miscellany

Starvation this month in Biafra will be “the greatest catastrophe of the century,” predicted Father Dermot Doran, Irish missionary who has helped lead relief airlifts. United Church of Christ staffer B. Kenneth Anthony estimates December daily deaths at 20,000. Meanwhile, church spokesmen denied a rift with the separate Red Cross operation over its previous statements that Biafran needs are being met.

In the first six months under a liberalized law, more than 14,000 women in Britain were given legal abortions. Canadian Catholic Bishop Alexander Carter said members of Parliament who ask their bishops how to vote on relaxation of abortion laws are told to vote their conscience.

Marking its fiftieth anniversary last month, the Belgian Gospel Mission is dropping church administration functions and acting as evangelistic arm of the Association of Free Churches, organized in Belgium in 1962.

A group of anti-missionary Jewish students quietly demonstrated against a meeting of Pentecostalists in Jerusalem.

LOGOI Inc. and the David C. Cook Foundation teamed up to distribute 500,000 religious booklets in Spanish during the Mexico City Olympics. Some 300 volunteers aided in distribution.

The District of Columbia is considering raising $18 million in needed revenue by taxing church and other tax-exempt property. Congress killed a similar plan two decades ago.

The Gallup Poll reports that in the United States 72 per cent of those surveyed oppose inter-racial marriage, but only about one-fifth are against marriages between Catholics and Protestants, or between Jews and non-Jews.

Religious Instruction Association found only twenty-six communities where public high schools offer objective courses on the Bible, despite U. S. Supreme Court approval of such instruction.

Some forty students at Wheaton (Illinois) College are spending two hours a week in a volunteer course on Afro-American history. Text is Lerone Bennett’s Before the Mayflower.

Church Panorama

Membership of the newly merged United Methodist Church is 10,990,720. The former Methodist membership decreased 36,256 in the last year; the Evangelical United Brethren lost 8,337.

The Judicial Council, highest court in the United Methodist Church, refused to take jurisdiction in a petition claiming that endorsement of civil disobedience “in extreme cases” is against the church articles. In another issue from this year’s national meeting, the Methodist Publishing House balked at having itself investigated and is not participating in Project Equality despite denominational endorsement of the fair-employment pact.

After a three-hour discussion of church unrest, the Southern Presbyterian home-mission board passed a vote of confidence in its staff. Winston-Salem (North Carolina) Presbytery gave a congregation a “certificate of dismissal” so it could join the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod.

The United Presbyterians’ church-and-society council wired President Johnson and President-elect Nixon urging immediate Senate ratification of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

The board of Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York, voted to dissolve its 170-year ties with the Lutheran Church in America. And the Texas Baptist convention voted to end control over Baylor University’s medical school so it can get federal and state aid.

The Vatican City weekly told Italian Catholic citizens and legislators it is their duty to fight divorce laws.

Some forty Basque priests occupied Derio seminary near Bilbao, Spain, to protest against Bishop Pablo Beope, charged with favoring Franco over the Basques. The protest continued despite Beope’s death.

In Portugal—where Baptists reported a record 265 baptisms last year—Catholic Father Jose Alves was dismissed from his suburban Lisbon parish for criticizing the nation’s church and government.

A Baptist evangelistic crusade in a northern Denmark town of 2,000 drew 1,300 persons on closing night. Significantly, two Lutheran organizations cooperated in the five-day effort.

Rumania’s Pentecostalists now number 80,000 in 900 congregations.

The Greek government set new terms of tenure that will force retirement of three Orthodox metropolitans and twenty bishops.

After a petition from 6,000 laymen upset over dismissal of heresy charges against Principal Lloyd Geering, the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand affirmed the Apostles’ Creed and recent assembly statements on other doctrines.

South Africa’s Baptists issued their own statement on apartheid, criticizing an anti-apartheid decree from the national council of churches for confusing “national survival with personal salvation.” On apartheid itself, the Baptists admitted divided opinion but condemned imposing of personal hardships on the basis of skin color.

The American Bible Society proposed a budget of $8,340,000 for 1969 and discussed plans to get a Bible into every U. S. home to mark the nation’s 200th anniversary in 1976. A recent poll showed that 10 per cent of American homes have no Bible and that the book is used regularly in only 22 per cent.

The Vermont Council of Churches rejected an inter-religious preamble to its constitution and passed 105–50 a statement that member groups must accept Jesus Christ as “divine Lord and savior.” The action, which expels Unitarians, was backed by Lutherans and Baptists. But Episcopal Bishop Harvey Butterfield said he was “ashamed” of the action and would find it hard to justify further council support.

DEATHS

JOSEPH HAROUTUNIAN, 64, Presbyterian and native of Turkey who taught systematic theology at the University of Chicago; in Chicago, of a heart attack.

DERWARD W. DEERE, 54, Old Testament professor at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary; in San Rafael, California, of a coronary attack.

ALVA J. MCCLAIN, 80, president emeritus of Indiana’s Grace Theological Seminary; in Waterloo, Iowa.

Personalia

President-elect Richard Nixon’s victory speech said a placard he saw during the campaign would be the theme of his administration: “Bring Us Together.” The sign was carried by Vicki Lynne, 13. daughter of United Methodist minister David Cole of Deshler, Ohio, but it wasn’t her own message. She found the sign on the ground and held it aloft without reading it.

J. Robert Nelson of Boston University will be the first Protestant visiting professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, founded to combat the Reformation.

McCormick Seminary student Roy Ries, Jr., is suing the city of Chicago for $1,250,000 for being clubbed by police during the Democratic Convention. He was hospitalized twelve days.

Presbyterian pastor Ben Haden of Chattanooga, Tennessee, has quit NBC-radio’s “Bible Study Hour” and started his own program, which he hopes will go nation-wide. NBC has been running replays of his old tapes since October.

California Governor Reagan refused to extradite Edgar Eugene Bradley for the New Orleans probe of an alleged conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. Bradley is West Coast representative for fundamentalist broadcaster Carl McIntire.

A federal jury convicted Vincent McGee, Jr., sophomore president at Union Seminary in New York, who refused induction into the armed forces after being reclassified. The prosecution argued that McGee, a Roman Catholic, was not a legitimate candidate for the priesthood because his church did not sponsor his studies.

The “Catonsville Nine,” Roman Catholic pacifists who destroyed draft records, were sentenced to prison terms varying from two to three and one-half years.

Metropolitan Meliton, dean of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox patriarchate, predicted the marriage of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy to divorce Aristotle Onassis “will be respected on the Roman Catholic side.” Meliton, a key ecumenical negotiator with Rome, said the Orthodox validity of the marriage must be considered.

The Vatican removed excommunication and celibacy vows from John Leahy, former superintendent of Atlanta Catholic schools, who married a widow.

Philippine faith-healer Antonio Agpaoa, 29, has been charged by the U. S. marshal in Detroit of $72,000 fraud for promising cures that did not work in a mass airlift to Asia last year (see December 8, 1967, issue, page 51).

The U. S. Supreme Court refused to review the littering conviction of Baptist pastor Vernon Lyons for passing out Scripture portions in a Chicago park. Justice William O. Douglas favored a review but gave no reasons for his position.

Presbyterian clergyman Donald Kauffman, managing editor of Fleming Revell publishers, will take the same job at Christian Herald.

The U. S. Catholic hierarchy, an exclusive, mostly-Irish club of 271 members, met last month in a most un-club-like atmosphere. There were unprecedented clergy and laity sit-ins out in the lobby, pickets, 100 hungry reporters, and fringe meetings of liberal, traditionalist, and black lobbies.

Much of this democratic ferment was over birth control, and when the bishops released their long-awaited response to Pope Paul’s July encyclical against artificial methods, both sides claimed victory. It was an odd tribute to the stylish ambiguity of the drafting committee headed by Pittsburgh’s John Wright, leading hierarchy theologian.

The probable results: dissatisfaction on the left, frustration on the right, and confusion among the average laymen in the middle who are accustomed to getting moral instruction without having to look through a glass darkly. Rather than closing the case, the U. S. and foreign developments seemed merely a prelude to a crisis in Vatican authority.

The bishops’ 17,000-word pastoral letter, in the mode of Pope Paul, combined conservatism in birth control with liberalism on peace and international affairs. The U. S. bishops, cautious to a fault on internal church controversies, appear ready to escalate their advice to secular society.

Since the bishops’ statement on birth control followed so closely the substance of Paul’s encyclical, the liberal victory claims may seem far-fetched.

All twenty-one national hierarchies that have issued statements generally endorse the Pope’s decree. What matters is where they go from there. On the eve of the American bishops’ meeting, the French hierarchy professed ritual loyalty to the Vatican, then winked and said:

“Contraception can never be a good. It is always a disorder, but this disorder is not always guilty. It occurs in fact that spouses consider themselves to be confronted by a true conflict of duty.”

In varying degrees, the possibility of letting private conscience overrule the Pope on birth control enters into the statements from Canada, Britain, Austria, Belgium, Holland, West Germany, and Scandinavia.

In contrast with that lineup, the Americans said decisions must be governed by a conscience “dutifully conformed” to divine law and “submissive” toward church teaching. But this is balanced by a quotation of Cardinal Newman’s teaching that conscience can drown out the Pope’s voice—after serious thought and prayer—if a man believes “as in the presence of God, that he must not, and dare not, act upon the Papal injunction.…

The U. S. bishops conclude that all artificial contraception is an “objective evil,” though “circumstances may reduce moral guilt.” The same paragraph urges birth-control users to “take full advantage of’ penance and the Eucharist, but does not state that use of contraception must be confessed before communion. At a press conference, Wright’s opinion was that confession is necessary.

The pastoral offers a “tribute” to “parents of large families” and advocates income based on number of children rather than on actual work done. It suggests a family allowance system such as is used by underpopulated Canada and Australia.

The four pages on “Negative Reactions to the Encyclical” leave room for doubt by theological experts so long as they are discreet and do not question the church’s teaching authority.

And—in a section clearly aimed at the dissident priests who later claimed victory—the document says those performing a pastoral ministry in the church’s name must faithfully present her “authentic doctrine.”

Whatever comfort the forty-one suspended priests of Washington, D. C., found in this statement issued in their home city, they got little cheer from the rest of the meeting. The forty-one claim they are not against the Pope’s teaching as such but want to respect the consciences of those laymen who disagree. Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle, their bishop, holds laymen who “have made up their minds to go on practicing contraception” should be denied the sacraments.

Some 4,000 persons turned out for a rally to support the dissidents the day before the bishops’ meeting opened. There headliner Senator Eugene McCarthy drily announced, “I am not here to announce the formation of a third party nor of a second church,” then read one of his poems that praised priests “daring as much for man as for God.”

On opening day 300 priests from sixty-one dioceses met to demand “due process” in the O’Boyle suspension cases, and in the drive of sixty-eight San Antonio priests to oust 77-year-old Archbishop Robert Lucey. It sometimes had the flavor of a civil-rights or early CIO rally, as when Boston Father John White said, “When the bishops return to their offices next Monday, I’ll lay 100 to 1 another priest will be brutalized.”

Though some bishops sympathized, the meeting put the immediate demands into the context of the glacial canon-law reform process, and issued a tepid request for suggested improvements.

Spokesmen explained that the national bishops’ conference had no authority to force its way into a local dispute. And embryonic mediation procedures depend on agreement of both parties—a concession O’Boyle is unwilling to make. He named U. S. Catholic Conference General Secretary Joseph Bernardin to iron out the dispute, but when dissidents realized he was not a mediator they asked him to withdraw.

The bishops also discussed ways to speed action on mounting cases of priests seeking lay status or marriage, and a seminary report showed enrollment of 39,500—a drop of nearly 10,000 in nine years.

Official minutes brought out of the secret meetings showed an annual budget of $10.9 million for the U. S. Catholic Conference, the hierarchy’s national administrative office. One morning the bishops refused to reveal anything about their discussions. National Catholic Reporter reports that the touchy topic was a paper from New York’s Archbishop Terence Cooke recommending that dioceses release limited financial statements, on the argument that church members have a “right” to know how their money is used.

The bishops favored organization of farm labor but refused to echo the National Council of Churches’ endorsement of the grape boycott, and ordered a study of the growing “pentecostal movement” within their church.

Nearly overshadowed by the birth-control dispute is the pastoral’s remarkable chapter “The Family of Nations.” It urges outlawing of all wars; condemns unlimited war and wars of aggression; and says peace is development, not a mere balance of power between enemies. The bishops favored Senate ratification of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty as a first step in arms reduction; opposed even the “thin” anti-ballistic missile system planned by the United States; questioned the security value in maintenance of U. S. “nuclear superiority”; favored a U. S. volunteer Army to replace the draft; hoped for the United Nations as a “universal public authority” to keep the peace; called growing nationalism and isolationism a “peril”; urged increased U. S. foreign aid; raised grave doubts about the Viet Nam involvement, which the bishops had previously justified; and favored conscientious objection to particular wars.

AUGUSTIN CARDINAL BEA

At age 79, when most men are ready to rest, Augustin Bea began a remarkable and vigorous new eight-year career that ended at his death last month.

Pope John XXIII made Bea the first Jesuit cardinal since 1946, then named him to set up the unprecedented Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. In the Vatican II years, Bea was credited with a key role not only in the ecumenism decree but on also in the statements on religious liberty and on attitudes toward the Jews.

More than any other personality, Bea symbolized and stimulated the Vatican’s increasingly friendly attitude toward Protestant and Orthodox Christians. He did this not through compromise of Roman doctrine but through a practical search for appropriate points of contact.

And one of the best was the Bible. Last year he told United Bible Societies leaders that “the Holy Spirit is surely at work drawing us together through the Bible; through the effort to translate the sacred Scriptures together and through the work of distributing the Sacred Scriptures together.” He also set up a social-action agency to work with Protestants and Orthodox.

Bea had a scholar’s devotion to the Bible. After lengthy academic study, he taught in Holland and Germany, then moved to the Biblical Institute in Rome, where he was rector from 1920 to 1949. In those years he also acted as personal confessor to Popes Pius XI and XII, and had a key role in the 1943 decree liberalizing Bible study.

Bea, the only child of a German carpenter, had frail health as a boy. Yet late in life, the slight-statured cardinal undertook an ambitious travel schedule in the cause of ecumenism. He visited the United States three times. He met the World Council of Churches staff in Geneva and the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth. He went to Greece to return relics of St. Andrew to the Orthodox, and to Turkey to meet the Ecumenical Patriarch.

Bea caught a cold in August and appeared to recover, but fell ill again in October with influenza complications. His death November 16 was attributed to strain on his heart from respiratory ills.

Along with eulogies from his own and other churches came this assessment from Religious News Service: “The cardinal may come to be regarded as one of the most important churchmen of this century by future historians.” Noting Bea’s opposition to intercommunion and other premature moves, RNS said “he gathered around him a smooth-working, knowledgeable team able to cut through red tape and established routine. Its success was the result of careful timing and a keen sense of what was possible and what was not. It carried off with finesse some extremely delicate programs that could have set back the ecumenical movement for years, for both Catholics and Protestants, had they gone sour.”

What The Bishops Said

Salient excerpts on contraception from the U. S. Catholic bishops’ November 15 pastoral letter, “Human Life in Our Day”:

“[Quoting Vatican II’s Church in the Modern World] ‘Sons of the Church may not undertake methods of regulating procreation which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority.…’

“[Paul’s Humanae Vitae] is an obligatory statement consistent with moral convictions rooted in the traditions of Eastern and Western Christian faith; it is an authoritative statement solemnly interpreting imperatives which are divine rather than ecclesiastical in origin. It presents without ambiguity, doubt, or hesitation the authentic teaching of the Church concerning the objective evil of that contraception which closes the marital act to the transmission of life, deliberately making it unfruitful. United in collegial solidarity with the Successor of Peter, we proclaim this doctrine.…

“We feel bound to remind Catholic married couples, when they are subjected to the pressures which prompt the Holy Father’s concern, that however circumstances may reduce moral guilt, no one following the teaching of the Church can deny the objective evil of artificial contraception itself. With pastoral solicitude we urge those who have resorted to artificial contraception never to lose heart, but to continue to take full advantage of the strength which comes from the Sacrament of Penance and the grace, healing, and peace in the Eucharist.…

“There exist in the Church a lawful freedom of inquiry and of thought and also general norms of licit dissent. This is particularly true in the area of legitimate theological speculation and research. When conclusions reached by such professional theological work prompt a scholar to dissent from non-infallible received teaching the norms of licit dissent come into play. They require of him careful respect for the consciences of those who lack his special competence or opportunity for judicious investigation.… The expression of theological dissent from the magisterium is in order only if the reasons are serious and well-founded, if the manner of dissent does not question or impugn the teaching authority of the Church and is such as not to give scandal.…

“Even responsible dissent does not excuse one from faithful presentation of the authentic doctrine of the Church when one is performing a pastoral ministry in Her name. We count on priests, the counsellors of persons and families, to heed the appeal of Pope Paul that they ‘expound the Church’s teaching on marriage without ambiguity’ …”

Strategy At The Front Of The Bus

“Marsh Chapel never rocked like this before” was the consensus regarding a rollicking gospel song fest in the Boston University chapel from ten to midnight November 8. The occasion represented a pause to celebrate a new stage in the mobilization of black churchmen through a consultation organized by black students in Boston and held at the university’s School of Theology.

The consultation attracted over two-thirds of the approximately 300 blacks in accredited seminaries across the country, and welded them into what will prove to be a strong pressure group for seminary reform.

The consultation originated in January with a group of black seminarians at Andover Newton, who, according to steering-committee chairman McKinley Young, “were concerned over the plight of black students enrolled in predominantly white seminaries. The feeling was (and is) that in terms of curriculum studies there has been no significant consideration given to black institutions and practices—historically, theologically, and sociologically. Furthermore, it was noted that in terms of the overall seminary experience, black students find themselves alienated as well as excluded from the mainstream, and white institutions do not provide adequate training for an effective ministry within the black community.”

Speakers spanned the spectrum of black leadership from moderate to militant. Included were Philadelphia pastor Leon Sullivan, founder of Opportunities Industrialization Centers; the Rev. Wyatt Walker, Harlem pastor and former associate of Dr. Martin Luther King; the Rev. Albert Cleage, pastor of Detroit’s Church of the Black Madonna; Muslim minister Louis (X) Farrakhan; Episcopal urban-worker Nathan Wright; and Director Charles S. Rooks of the Fund for Theological Education.

Key results of the conference were:

Realization of an “operational unity” with focus altered from the former concern for equality, which characterized King’s era, to working toward equity and enabling of black communities to secure for themselves their share of the economic and political pie; as Boston pastor Vergil Wood put it: “when we moved from the back of the bus to the front of the bus, we didn’t move very far, because Whitey still owns the bus.”

Beginning of a National Association of Black Students that will organize in Pittsburgh in January.

Acceptance of an invitation for a pilgrimage to Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammed, indicating a strong step toward Muslim-Christian dialogue.

More confrontations with seminary administrators for changes in style and curriculum.

The attitude seemed to be that the students could be true to their black heritage and Christian at the same time, in that the Christian ministry still provides the best channel for ministering to the needs of people today. However, this ministry would be characterized by “dehonkified” theology that emphasizes some black distinctives present in the early centuries of the Christian Church.

The white church was regarded as sick and sterile, laden with the guilt of having long perpetrated a gospel of oppression. The word for the white church was that it should “do its own thing,” that is, leave the ghetto to the black leadership and work within the white community to remove racism and find paths to repentance and wholeness.

On the last day of the conference, Rooks, while confessing skepticism about the willingness and ability of white seminaries to respond, nevertheless urged black students to keep trying.

“But,” he warned, “we should not keep waiting forever for response.… Either these white situations are reformed or we make the hard decision to go our own way.” “Keep the pressure on,” he added, “Don’t let anyone tell you that your ideas are impossible.”

KENNETH CURTIS

Record Seminary Enrollment

Enrollment in accredited seminaries in the United States and Canada reached a record 28,033 this fall, an increase of 946 students over last year. It is a significant upturn from the doldrums of 1964, when enrollment was 21,025.

The American Association of Theological Schools—stressing its figures do not include fourteen Roman Catholic and two other seminaries that joined in the past year—said this represents an increase of 3.75 per cent over 1967. AATS did not speculate on whether the shift to drafting of non-seminary graduate students is aiding enrollments.

The AATS analysis showed little change from last year in the type of curriculum. In both years, 62 per cent of the students were in the standard professional B.D. program or its equivalent. Other student categories were: Christian education, 5.7 per cent; interns, 5.9; and graduate, 17.7.

In line with the upswing, most of the major denominations showed increases at their affiliated seminaries. Among them were the biggest, the Southern Baptist Convention (up 338 students): United Presbyterian (172); Lutheran Church in America (150); United Church of Christ (129); American Baptist Convention (100); Southern Presbyterian (63); and United Methodist (39).

Seminaries of the smaller evangelical denominations also posted gains, including Bethel, Calvin, Conservative Baptist, Nazarene, North Park, Trinity Evangelical, and Western.

Among denominations with shrinking enrollments were the Christian Church—Disciples (down 80); Missouri Synod Lutherans (45); Canadian Anglicans (23); U. S. Episcopalians (22); and American Lutheran Church (2).

The category of twenty interdenominational schools—which includes some of the most conservative and most liberal seminaries—also showed the usual increase. Exceptions to this trend were declines at Harvard and Vanderbilt.

Dissecting ‘Courage’

Surprisingly, no one quoted Pericles’ “the secret of freedom is courage.” But there was no lack of other citations and approaches from wildly conflicting speakers at a symposium on “An Anatomy of Courage” last month at Roman Catholic Barat College in suburban Chicago.

In an electrically charged atmosphere of fundamental disagreement, conservative Russell Kirk asserted that courage was impossible apart from commitment to the transcendent. Staughton Lynd, radical pacifist and spearhead of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, ignored the transcendent and spoke of courage as an “elemental” phenomenon to be realized in social action, not in “academic discourse” or in the kind of “afternoon symposia” Barat organized.

Michael Novak of the State University of New York, Roman Catholic existential death-of-God theologian who is a vocal opponent of American involvement in Viet Nam, denied the existence of the transcendent realm entirely, claimed that all value-systems are competing myths, and set his own version of Tillich’s “courage to be” (“in creative existential despair we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps”) over against the “basic American myth of happiness.”

Chicago assemblage artist Harry Bouras assembled a concept of “initiative” courage (derived from dynamic action, vs. the common artistic variety of passive, “responsive” courage). And Bruno Bettelheim, University of Chicago psychiatrist who survived German concentration camps, castigated the liberals on the program for their naive conviction that they were “on the side of the angels” (“ ‘We shall overcome’ gives me the creeps,” he said). He argued that courage is seldom more than the projection of the hero’s inadequacy-feelings, and called for a “moving ahead of human evolution by the intellectual activity of the mind.”

The fundamental cleavage was in methodology: conservatives relied on intellectual argumentation, while liberals endeavored to win the audience through existential-emotional appeal. Thus Kirk employed Burke, Joad, Carlyle, Stevenson, Graves, Newman, Waugh, Bernard of Chartres, Shaw, and C. S. Lewis in a high-flying defense of transcendent, communal values. And Bettelheim performed a veritable biopsy on northern civil-rights workers in the South and the demonstrators at the Chicago Democratic Convention:

“They have not been able to put themselves in the place of the poor Southern white or the Chicago policeman. Instead of seeing their opponents as basically like themselves, they compensate for their own shaky identity by a posture of superior righteousness. Therefore they compound the social problem instead of solving it.”

In contrast, Lynd affirmed the non-articulate, personal dimension of liberal social action. His presentation consisted of examples of people “from whom he had received courage”—such as Bob Moses, who “hated to go up on a platform, and when he did, he would ask the audience questions,” and Father Berrigan, just sentenced for destroying draft files.

In the same vein, Novak set forth a remarkable series of Delphic-oracle-like emotive judgments: “It is more important to be a decent human being than a Catholic believer.” “American industrial and militaristic society crushes our emotions (contrast European reactions in a traffic jam) and is preparing now for new Viet Nams.” “Military spending is not even debated in Congress.” “Our give-away programs are geared to help the upper classes, not the underprivileged.” “By using black to symbolize sin in parochial schools, we condition our children to racism.” “We are incurably optimistic: the word ‘up’ occurs more in American than in British English.” “The whole purpose of suburbs is to avoid confrontation with misery.”

Novak and Lynd shrewdly criticized Bettelheim for “intellectual utopianism” and “psychological reductionism,” but their own retreat into the emotional, existential realm hardly satisfied the desire of the audience to discover the meaning of true courage.

Bettelheim penetratingly analyzed the problem as getting the lion and the lamb in human nature to lie down together, since “courage”—not just etymologically—centers on the heart (Latin, cor).

But how? In a reference to Luther at Worms, Bettelheim argued that courage does not depend on anything but the necessity of our own inner being: “I can do no other.” But Luther himself engaged in an even deeper analysis when he said on that occasion: “My conscience has been captured by the word of God.”

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

Small numerical gains by religious groups least represented in politics, at the expense of the big denominations, highlight findings of CHRISTIANITY TODAY’s religious census of the new Congress.

Changes in religious complexion of the membership from the Ninetieth to the Ninety-First Congress were slight, since 1968 was a good year for incumbents. Totals of only two groups changed by more than one member.

The Roman Catholics gained two, increasing their plurality to 111. The Methodists, largest Protestant grouping in Congress took the greatest loss (down three to ninety). The third-, fourth-, and fifth-ranking groups on Capitol Hill each lost one: Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Baptists.

Gains of one went to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Jews, Society of Friends (Quakers), Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), Lutherans, and Greek Orthodox. The latter three groups are among the most under-represented in the Congress, compared to the size of their church membership. In fact, the Greek Orthodox were not represented in Congress until two years ago. By contrast, the affluent, largely white, British-background denominations are well represented. Comparing church size with the congressional figures, leaders are the Unitarian-Universalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and United Church of Christ. The Congress statistics indicate something of the prestige and social involvement of America’s religious groups, on a personal basis.

The U. S. Senate has its first member from the Schwenkfelder Church, and the House, its first member from the Christian and Missionary Alliance (see story on facing page).

The most controversial religious figure in the new Congress is Baptist preacher Adam Clayton Powell, re-elected from Harlem even though the last House expelled him for misconduct. The Supreme Court last month agreed to review that House action. In Alabama, two black Baptist ministers, Richard Boone and William Branch, failed in National Democratic Party races for Congress, but Boone outpolled the George Wallace party candidate in the Montgomery area.

‘Firsts’ For Two Denominations

Many U. S. senators will get their first introduction to the Schwenkfelder Church when Richard S. Schweiker of Pennsylvania, first Schwenkfelder to serve in the House, takes his new Senate seat. And on the House side, many members will learn about the Christian and Missionary Alliance from its first congressman, North Carolina’s Wilmer (Vinegar Bend) Mizell.

The Schwenkfelders are a pietist sect with only 2,400 members in five congregations—four in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and one in Philadelphia. Though related to the Plain sects, members use conventional customs and dress. The group, begun in the United States the year the Revolutionary War ended, is named for the Silesian nobleman Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig (1489–1561).

Before Schweiker moved to Washington he served as a Sunday-school teacher, usher, and vice-chairman of his church’s ministerial committee. The Schweiker family attends a Lutheran church in Washington.

In the House, Republican Schweiker worked on behalf of religious minorities. He was a leader in the fight to exempt the Amish from Social Security payments, which ended in a 1965 compromise law. He worked successfully to take the sting out of harsh provisions for conscientious objectors in the 1967 draft law. Schweiker is not a conscientious objector and doesn’t oppose Social Security, his administrative assistant David Newhall says, “but he felt in these instances the government was impinging on long-held religious beliefs and therefore its actions were repugnant.”

Mizell, also a Republican, was a pitcher for nine years with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates. He is now “much in demand as a lay preacher—one of the finest there is,” says his minister, the Rev. Don Lyerly of Faith Missionary Alliance Church, Winston-Salem. Mizell is also assistant superintendent of the Sunday school and a deacon.

“This man is not a nominal Sunday-morning Christian,” Lyerly continued. “He is a man of convictions, as wholesome and personable as he can be. This, I am convinced, is what won his election for him—his humility, sincerity—he is real.” The Alliance is an evangelical denomination with 70,000 members.

‘I Was Supposed To Die’

“The gun went off. I was supposed to fall over and die—but nothing happened.” As two youths were arrested for the murder attempt, Ross Owens of Compton, California, said he found the spent bullet in his torn chest pocket, stopped by a sheaf of Bible crusade materials. They saved his life.

The murder attempt was “in the providence of God,” he says. News reports of his brush with death served to publicize efforts he has helped lead to get a much-needed YMCA program in Compton, which is more than half black.

Owens, an American Baptist, is president of the California Laymen’s Crusade, Inc., which has distributed 30,000 Bibles and 60,000 tracts in house-to-house campaigns since 1963.

More On Nixon

Evangelist Billy Graham had more praise for his friend President-elect Richard M. Nixon. Speaking on CBS radio’s “World of Religion,” he said Nixon, a Quaker, has a typically Quaker reticence about religion. Graham praised him for his care in avoiding religion “to gain political strength. Nixon’s “great sense of moral integrity” will make him a “respected president,” Graham said.

Evolution In Arkansas

For the record, the opinion of the U. S. Supreme Court in knocking down Arkansas’s 1928 anti-evolution law was unanimous, but some of the concurring justices let it be known that they thought there might be monkeys in the woodpile the way Justice Abe Fortas handled it.

But for soft-spoken, easy-going Mrs. Jon Epperson, 27-year-old former tenth-grade biology teacher at Little Rock’s Central High, the court’s action removed “an outdated source of embarrassment to the state and to the teaching profession.” However, she will not benefit directly from her feat. In February, she and her Air Force captain husband moved to Oxon Hill, Maryland, a Washington suburb, when he was assigned to the Air Staff at the Pentagon. Her only pupil now is her six-month-old son Mark. She recently joined Washington’s historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.

Mrs. Epperson, a winsome, urbane young woman who holds a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Illinois, said she had no overpowering desire to teach Darwinian theory (which for her presents “no strong conflict of understanding of what Genesis is trying to say”). What prompted her to be the stand-in for the Arkansas Education Association in the case was her feeling that “a very important responsibility a teacher has is to set an example for students. It can’t be done if a teacher is going to break the laws. To teach a theory of evolution about the origin of man was breaking the law in Arkansas.”

Before the Supreme Court, the state’s advocate, in presenting an argument described by Justice Hugo Black as a “pallid, unenthusiastic, even apologetic defense” of the Arkansas law, admitted that no one had even been arrested in the forty years of its existence. In compliance with the law, Mrs. Epperson never taught the theory, though many of her colleagues joined state education officials in disregarding the statute.

Mrs. Epperson holds evolutionary theory to be “quite valid” and not in essential conflict with her understanding of the Christian faith. She feels that with the clearing of the air, eventually more high-school students in Arkansas and Mississippi will get to study biology. “In some areas it is not taught at all, and I feel this law, in part at least, is responsible.” Mississippi is the only other state to have an enforceable “monkey law.” Tennessee invalidated the original of the fundamentalist-inspired laws last year.

Justice Black was highly critical of the main opinion written by Fortas for the court, contending, as did others, that in his search for missing links that would justify the court’s even rendering a decision, Fortas might have put some of the wrong bones together. Federal intervention was proper, Fortas held, because religious freedom was being impeded. Fundamentalists had no right to hold back learning merely because it might undermine one of their tenets, he said.

Black could see only one justification for intervening—the law’s vagueness. In deciding the case on the basis of the establishment-of-religion clause, he said, the court may have stretched the “long-arm” of the government farther than it should.

“Unless this court is prepared simply to write off as pure nonsense the views of those who consider evolution an anti-religious doctrine, then this issue presents problems under the establishment clause far more troublesome than are discussed in the court’s opinion,” he wrote.

Possibly so. But in the meantime, Mrs. Epperson has gotten a kink out of Arkansas’s educational conscience. And in Arkansas, that is evolution.

WILLIAM WILLOUGHBY

Kansas City Happening

Twelfth Street and Vine is where it’s happening; at least that’s how the song “Kansas City Here I Come” has it. Two blocks away, however, something else is happening. There the nation’s first ecumenical, Catholic Protestant church opened its doors for services this month.

Costing $400,000, St. Mark’s Church is an imposing concrete structure reached by climbing two dozen steps, and is topped by a lofty spire. Its practically windowless sanctuary will hide 275 worshipers from the sights outside: a high-rise project housing 8,000 of the city’s poor Negroes, an assortment of bars, street missions, and made-over offices of the Methodist Inner-City Parish.

In the fashion of a “happening,” St. Mark’s is decorated with multi-colored hardboard panels suspended from the ceiling and pop-art banners bearing religious themes. And for the sake of ecumenism, it is furnished with both a crucifix and a baptistry for immersions.

Two services are held each Sunday morning: an early Catholic mass celebrated by Benedictine priest Robert Ready, and a later service with United Presbyterian minister David O. Shipley officiating. Director of the building—which houses a sanctuary, pre-school, offices for United Inner City Services, and activity rooms—is the Rev. William A. Hayes, a United Church of Christ clergyman.

Hayes said that although there will be separate worship services, programs and activities will be unified, and members will function as one united congregation. “We know that we must earn the right to the real estate we occupy by the service we render to the community,” he added.

In addition to the present staff, an Episcopal priest and several social workers will soon join the venture. Support and staff appointments for St. Mark’s are the responsibility of local jurisdictions of the participating church bodies: Episcopal, United Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, and Roman Catholic.

JAMES S. TINNE

In the last two years the Post Office sold four billion Christmas stamps with a Memling Madonna and Child. This year’s design (above) is changed to a Van Eyck Annunciation depicting the angel Gabriel. But Americans United, still upset about Memling, claims the stamp was sectarian because Mary was shown as Queen of Heaven. The church-state separationists’ relentless stamp war got a lease on life last month. The U. S. Court of Appeals ordered a new district court hearing because a June Supreme Court ruling established AU’s standing to sue.