Street barricades. Alternate singing of the Internationale and the Marseillaise on the Champs-Élysees. Near-total paralysis of the economy. Near-anarchy everywhere. This was Paris during the already historic “days of May.”

For church history, a Paris Congress of Evangelical Theology attended by 140 theologically sophisticated persons from the French-speaking areas of Europe may be no less significant. The meeting, projected in February by a committee of stellar French theologians and pastors, was providentially scheduled for the days immediately following the end of the three-week general strike that reduced transportation and communication to zero.

Organizers made the aim clear: to affirm to Christians and the general public “the sovereign authority of the Bible as the Word of God. After the assaults of Modernism at the end of the last century and the early part of the present century, currents of still another New Theology are now disturbing the minds of many. The Congress will be a reminder that there is only one Gospel, and that to believe it and to preach it does not presuppose either ignorance or obscurantism.”

The three intensive days focused on the necessity of an unadulterated biblical theology and the relevance to the problems of our day that results only when such a message is proclaimed. The Paris congress came like a fresh breeze in a Europe where for a century theology has been characterized by rationalistic dogmatism and the changing fashions of the German professorial caste. It was as if the spirit of the Monods, d’Aubigné, and Gaussen—those firebrands of early nineteenth-century orthodoxy—was once again animating the life of the Church.

In the opening address, General Secretary Pierre Marcel of the French Bible Society argued that the post-Bultmann “new hermeneutic” is by no means new, since it rests squarely on rationalistic presuppositions expressed (more clearly) by Semler in the eighteenth century. For the critical interpreter past or present, “the Holy Spirit is dead,” since the Bible is a product of its human authors and not, as it claims for itself, the work of a single Divine Author. The result: a “pathological state of jesiology” where the interpreter, caught by his own debilitating humanistic presuppositions, speaks only of “Pauline thought,” “Petrine thought,” and, by extension, “Jesine thought”—never of the Word of God. Marcel said reports he receives from all parts of the world show beyond question that the Bible is “not merely the opinions of human writers, for whenever it is placed in men’s hands, regardless of their cultural diversities, it speaks to them, and it speaks the same unequivocal message.”

Henri Blocher, young, dynamic professor at the new government-approved Faculty of Evangelical Theology at Vaux, presented the concept of myth developed by Eliade, Ricour, and Gusdorf, then demonstrated that on no single count could the New Testament message, centering on the death and resurrection of Christ, be regarded as mythical. The Bible’s stress on historical localization (versus the timeless quality of myth), on removal of the sacred-profane distinction, on salvation once-for-all accomplished in Christ (versus the “eternal return”), and on the specific power of the Gospel to free men from ritualistic myth—all this demands that man’s fall and Christ’s redemptive work be faced as historically true, he said. “The natural man prefers myth to history because he can thereby avoid facing his own historical responsibility for sin.”

Rector Hans Rohrbach of the University of Mainz, a mathematician, said today’s biblical critics assume that science is still operating in closed nineteenth-century categories that exclude the miraculous, a view that fell by the wayside in the Einstein revolution. And they erroneously assume that the Bible presents a primitive three-story cosmology. Rohrbach told how he found the reality of the biblical world-view and personal salvation in Christ during the chaos of Germany as the war ended.

Professor Frank Michaëli of the Protestant Theological Faculty at Paris stressed the amazing relevance of the Old Testament in terms of re-establishment of the State of Israel, progress in biblical archaeology, and rediscovery of a unified Old Testament theology after years of efforts to fragment its message.

Marc Lods, dean of the Theological Faculty, and Editor René Lovy of Positions Luthériennes agreed that neither the Church Fathers nor the Reformers would allow any other authority than Holy Scripture as the ultimate norm in the Church. Lods asserted that in spite of the cultural diversity among patristic writers spanning seven centuries, “none of them allowed any other final authority than Scripture.”

Professor Jacques Ellul of the Law Faculty at Bordeaux posed again Jesus’ question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Ellul said we have no guarantee of any given amount of faith or church success, or of personal well-being. We are guaranteed only his Coming.

“We are tempted to be conformed to this world in our theology and in our lives,” he said. “It’s up to us to give the full evidence that God is alive before the bar of this world. We cannot live in the past, not even in our great confessional traditions. We must help society out of the secularistic prison it has made for itself, and this is only possible when the authenticity of Christianity is seen in the authenticity of our faith.”

This idea of relevance was reinforced by Walter Martin of the United States, who drew rapt attention as he presented Christian Research Institute’s ideas for dissemination of theological and apologetic insights through world-wide computer networks.

Underlying all such evidences of the supreme vitality of orthodox theology was the congress theme, repeated in magnificent French hymnody: “Thy Word, Lord, is our strength and our life; the torch that illumines the darkness of our path; the sun that enlightens our way.”

SEMINARIES FOR THE ’70s

Design for seminaries of the ’70’s: a small number of major ecumenical clusters of schools in big cities near universities, with a more diverse curriculum providing training in many types of ministries and making direct use of community institutions and social-action agencies.

The design came in a 35,000-word report to last month’s biennial meeting of the American Association of Theological Schools. The St. Louis delegates discussed the report for the better part of a day, then sent it without specific endorsement to the 156 member schools.

AATS Executive Director Jesse Ziegler, who initiated the “Resources Planning Commission” study more than two years ago, said his concern was to find ways in which seminaries could survive in the face of mushrooming costs, enabling the Church to keep control of religious education rather than losing it to secular universities.

The report says that “isolated seminaries can go it alone” and still make some contributions but that big cooperative efforts are the major need. The St. Louis discussions showed, however, that a significant number of seminaries will stay in the go-it-alone camp.

Such tokenism as putting one Protestant on a Catholic seminary faculty, or cross-registration between schools, is inadequate, says the report. It specifies that the new clusters should have a common campus, incorporating at least three Protestant and three Roman Catholic seminaries—and if possible Orthodox and Jewish schools as well.

As for courses, the eight-member commission thinks students must interact with emerging social issues rather than just learning “theological and doctrinal material formulated by others.”

The report says one major obstacle to radical change is lack of lay enthusiasm. So “building broadly based constituency support” is a major task for seminary administrators. The report characterizes “many” seminaries as “extremely stimulating and interesting places, alive with concern about a wide spectrum of issues ranging from the ‘secular city’ to ‘situation ethics,’ … in which almost any layman would be likely to find himself at home in terms of his own interests and concerns.”

In other business, the AATS elected as its new president the chairman of the study committee, Dr. Arthur R. McKay, head of Chicago’s McCormick Seminary (United Presbyterian).

The AATS granted full accreditation to: Concordia Seminary, Springfield, Illinois (Missouri Synod Lutheran); North American Baptist Seminary, Sioux Falls, South Dakota (North American Baptist General Conference); and Woodstock, Weston, and Maryknoll—the first three Catholic schools to gain full membership.

SQUABBLE WITH A LANDLORD

In facilities rented from the University of Chicago, the Winona Institute for Continuing Theological Education opens a summer graduate program this week. A contract cancellation had threatened to keep “America’s unique summer seminary” out of the plush quarters of the university’s Center for Continuing Education.

John A. Huffman, president of the Winona enterprise, has announced that eight top evangelical scholars will be on hand to teach courses said to be geared to the post-B.D. level. Among faculty members scheduled are Dr. Stuart Barton Babbage, president of Conwell School of Theology, and Dr. James G. S. S. Thomson, noted Old Testament scholar from Glasgow.

Huffman says he was informed on Good Friday that a contract for use of the University of Chicago center signed last December 2 would not be honored. He appealed to university President George W. Beadle who intervened and assured Huffman that the facilities would be made available as originally agreed.

Spokesmen for the center had cited misleading advertising that left the impression that the center facilities were actually those of the Winona Institute. A Winona brochure carries color photographs of the center with captions like: “This four million dollar air-conditioned neo-Gothic structure houses Winona Institute for Continuing Theological Education.” Copies were distributed that gave no hint that the pictured facilities were actually those of the University of Chicago. Huffman said the center had approved the brochure, but he agreed to add imprints stating that the institute was being held at the University of Chicago center and that the photographs were of the center.

In addition to the dispute over the brochure, pressure was reportedly brought to bear by Dr. Jerald C. Brauer, dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Brauer is a Lutheran described as a one-time theological conservative who now demeans evangelicals.

The Winona episode recalls a major academic dispute at the University of Chicago when Dr. Robert M. Hutchins was president during the thirties and forties. Hutchins fell into disfavor with his philosophy professors because he insisted that if a philosophy department is to be justified, it must be devoted to metaphysics. But the philosophy faculty was dominated by naturalists, so they moved to the divinity school and called Hutchins a fascist. Today the divinity school has moderated its antagonism toward metaphysics, but not toward evangelical Christianity.

Northern Baptist Theological Seminary was founded in 1912 as a protest against the University of Chicago Divinity School, which itself had been founded as an evangelical Baptist seminary but had subsequently became interdenominational and liberal in its theological orientation. The divinity school for a time tended to admit only those Ph.D. candidates who subscribed in advance to its naturalistic philosophy.

The Winona summer seminary also stages an annual series of courses at Winona Lake, Indiana, a place that became well known for Billy Sunday’s meetings many years ago.

It took only twenty minutes for the 108th General Assembly of the 960,000-member Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) to say yes to marriage proposals involving the smaller Reformed Church in America (see story following).

Commissioners (delegates), meeting last month at Montreat, North Carolina, voted 406–36 in favor of a plan to create the Reformed Presbyterian Church in America. Ratification by three-fourths of the seventy-nine PCUS presbyteries and by next year’s assembly, with similar acceptance on the RCA side, must precede the constituting session, set tentatively for Memphis in 1970.

Upon final agreement, a new confession of faith and liturgy will be drawn up and a twenty-four-member joint commission will be given four years to set up housekeeping structures. Meanwhile, a syncretistic “Plan of Union” will guide household government and liturgy.

Liberals and conservatives voted harmoniously, the liberals “for the ecumenism of it,” the conservatives in the hope of picking up strength “at top levels.”

Everyone agreed that the most crucial issue, from a PCUS viewpoint, had to do with a denomination on the sidelines: the 3.3-million-member United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. Deluged with pleas from PCUS “border” states, commissioners facilitated formation of “union” synods and presbyteries with UPUSA bodies. But many, though they favor such ecumenical moves, fear they will result in worse strain on PCUS support, described as “lagging badly” by outgoing Moderator Marshall C. Dendy.

Dendy’s cousin, conservative, congenial Patrick D. Miller, 68, who is guest professor at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, was elected moderator 240–207 over Dr. Warner L. Hall of Charlotte, North Carolina. Sporting a thirty-nine-cent corn-cob pipe, Miller told newsmen he was “just a country boy who has come to town.”

Dendy celebrated his relative’s arrival in town by dumping a sack of PCUS ills on the assembly floor. Among them: “tension” and “hurting witness” from strife between the liberal Fellowship of Concern and the conservative Concerned Presbyterians¹The FOC, numbering 500 members, says it formally disbanded in May but will continue to deal with issues on an ad hoc basis. Concerned Presbyterians, with “over 500” ruling elders, vows to continue to lobby for conservatism in the PCUS. It has five staffers, a $72,000 budget, and a monthly bulletin mailed to 50,000.; racial hang-ups in Mississippi churches; “unrest and dissatisfaction” over board policies.

Commissioners nevertheless upheld most of those prickly policies. They said no to numerous overtures demanding the end of contributions to non-PCUS causes, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ($750) and striking Memphis garbage-collectors ($5,000), but they specified that “ordinarily” such funds should come from non-budget sources. They dodged dealing with the much criticized liberal editorial stance of Presbyterian Survey, the official denominational journal, and asked only for “continued discretion” by staffers. In their closest vote—211–208—they gave the PCUS Council on Church and Society permission to make pronouncements between annual assemblies—a decision that may lead to deeper cleavages.

Amid battering emotional debate, commissioners backed abolition of clergy draft deferments, but they declined to recognize conscientious objection to “particular” wars. When they refused also to endorse the SCLC Solidarity Day March in Washington, 115 commissioners paraded to the clerk’s desk to register their minority vote.

Assembly page James Graves, student-body president at Richmond’s Union Theological Seminary, was allowed to read a statement he and other students had hastily drafted. It scorched commissioners for their frown on selective conscientious objection and for alleged “insincerity” on race issues. It questioned whether ministerial students’ “intellectual, leadership, and pastoral abilities could be used in the church in the next few years.” National Ministries board executive John F. Anderson, Jr., added his scathing rebuke. In a bid for funds for the nation’s crisis, he accused: “White racism is still in this assembly tonight!” But an irate delegate shot back: “We are as a church lacking in spiritual insight!”

A lengthy split-conclusion report on the new morality was referred to the churches for study. The commissioners strongly endorsed gun-control legislation and open-housing measures but took vaporous positions on civil disobedience and on exertion of church economic power.

They voted to maintain PCUS membership in the National Council of Churches (272–118) and in the Consultation on Church Union (278–83). COCU Plan of Union draft chairman William A. Benfield, Jr., a PCUS pastor, assured delegates that “we are not in the midst of de facto union,” and that only their action could authorize anything beyond the talking stage.

A $9.05 million budget was adopted along with a “challenge” goal of $900,000, “urgently needed” for World Missions board capital and operational expenses.

Some observers believe that the PCUS-RCA wedding is a must for PCUS vitality. They cite ominous reports showing a shortage of ministers (4,002 churches, 2,681 pastors) and a steady five-year decline in professions of faith, baptisms, Sunday-school enrollment, and number of churches. New geographical vistas, they say, may help enliven PCUS outreach efforts. The PCUS had its roots in Scotland but has operated exclusively in the U. S. South. The Dutch-background RCA is in the North and West.

The honeymoon may well start with a spat, however. The constituting assembly must determine “ecumenical relationships” of the new church while “taking into account those previously sustained by the two uniting churches.” The RCA has rejected COCU, and it may have second thoughts about PCUS groups in “union” with UPUSA counterparts. The RCA might just feel like a third party to its own marriage.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

GREAT DEBATE OF ’68?

Delegates to the Reformed Church in America General Synod took hours to do what commissioners to the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. Assembly did in minutes.

By finally approving the proposed plan of union for the two denominations, the RCA’s top judicatory only set the stage for what one delegate called “the great debate of ’68” in the lower courts. Forces on both sides of the question are organizing for the encounter. Approval of two-thirds of the judicatories (called classes) will be required for merger. The most optimistic predictions say the vote will be close.

Although the RCA’s top court and the Presbyterian assembly met simultaneously, they were separated by distance and by extent of debate over union, as well as by stands on some other issues. Site of the Reformed churchmen’s gathering was the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. It was the group’s first meeting on a secular campus.

Negotiating committees of the two churches kept in touch over a “hot line” telephone hookup. Agreement was reached on nine proposed amendments to the plan, but the RCA delegates took nearly four hours to approve the nine and to debate other suggested changes.

Of the proposals failing to win approval, the one discussed the longest called for including the office of deacon in the new church. Both denominations now have deacons, but the plan provides only the offices of minister and elder. By a vote of 103 to 124 the General Synod declined to alter the plan by adding deacons.

After the discussion of amendments, another three hours were spent on the main motion to submit the plan to the classes for their vote. With only a simple majority necessary for approval, it passed 183 to 103.

Drawing some fire during the debate was the plan’s provision for women officers. During the past year an amendment to allow women to be ordained deacons and elders had failed to receive the necessary approval of two-thirds of the classes. (It got twenty-six pro votes and nineteen con.) An attempt to send the issue down for another constitutional vote, independent of the plan of union, lost 129 to 138.

The court also refused to send down to the lower judicatories a proposal for union classes (presbyteries) and union synods with the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. and the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. It did send down for a vote a proposal to allow union congregations with the other two denominations.

Still another issue on which the General Synod stand differed from that of the Southern Presbyterians was participation in the Consultation on Church Union. In an overwhelming voice vote, the court again declined to join COCU. One of the principal speeches against COCU was made by New York pastor Norman Vincent Peale, who had spoken earlier for union with Southern Presbyterians (“our own family”). Calling himself a conservative and noting that he had chosen to come into the Reformed Church from a Methodist background, he declared, “If we flirt with COCU, we flirt with the episcopacy.” He also took issue with COCU’s doctrinal stance.

Peale, widely known pastor of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church, was named vice-president of the General Synod early in the session. If precedent is followed, he will become president next year. Taking over this year as president, after a term as vice-president, was Raymond Van Heukelom, a pastor in Orange City, Iowa, who has served on the committee negotiating union with the Presbyterians.

Money matters also came in for a share of the court’s attention. Peale, who has served as chairman of a capital-funds drive seeking $6 million, reported that pledges total just over $5 million. Although this amount set a national record for campaigns of this sort and although the RCA continues to lead members of the National Council of Churches in per-capita giving, the percentage of contributions flowing into denominational headquarters fell off last year. Agencies said they had to curtail programs and dip into reserves.

The Board of North American Missions requested and, after extended debate, received permission to establish priorities for the use of its limited resources. They are: (1) mission to the city; (2) renewal of the church in town and country; and (3) development of new churches. The same recommendation, as passed by the court, also asks all RCA groups to reconsider current building plans in favor of “projects of highest priority.”

In another action related to the urban situation, the General Synod asked its investment agents to consider putting as much as 15 per cent of unrestricted investment funds into low-cost housing. The recommendation finally adopted was a substitute for one directing that 15 per cent of all agency investments be assigned to “investments of social significance.”

Plans of all the agencies were contingent not only on future receipts but also on the reorganization now in process. All the boards are being combined, and the General Synod took steps to elect one program council to govern them all. The single agency will formally begin operations next January 1, with the church’s stated clerk, Marion de Velder, as its general secretary.

Also reinforced at this meeting of the court was last year’s decision to put both denominational seminaries (New Brunswick in New Jersey and Western in Michigan) under one board.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

NEW RULES FOR PRESBYTERIANS

“I still really can’t believe it happened,” the Rev. Stuart Coles of Toronto told reporters after the Presbyterian Church in Canada voted overwhelmingly to modernize the 300-year-old rules of the denomination.

Coles is a member of the Congress of Concern, a group within the church that recently called for freedom to change traditional forms of worship. He will now head a panel of three to recommend revisions.

The Presbyterian assembly asked that the Canadian government try to stop Britain’s shipment of arms to Nigeria in its civil war with rebel Biafra.

The government also was asked to set up suicide-prevention centers.

NAZARENES NAME OVERSEERS

For the first time in its sixty-year history, the 383,000-member Church of the Nazarene on June 18 replaced three of its six policy-setting general superintendents. Vacancies were created by action of the 1964 quadrennial assembly that set 68 as the retirement age.

As about 10,000 Nazarenes looked on in Kansas City, the 676 delegates chose evangelism Secretary Edward Lawlor, 61, Nazarene Theological Seminary President Eugene Stowe, 46, and home-missions Secretary Orville Jenkins, 55. All three men are former district superintendents who were raised in other denominations. Lawlor, a convert from Roman Catholicism who was something of a dark horse, was the first elected. Eliminated in the fifth and final ballot was foreign-missions Secretary E. S. Phillips, despite his prominence in the missions-minded church.

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS TAKE SIDES

Will the Southern Baptist Convention survive without schism its deepening evangelism-versus-social-involvement rift?

Yes, according to random polling of “messengers” (delegates) among the 15,000 attending annual SBC meetings in Houston last month.

Social-action advocates went home boasting a newly struck “progressive” stance on race, violence, and Viet Nam. Convention resolutions acknowledged a “climate of racism” in the nation, backed gun-control legislation, and called for “immediate” ceasefire by “all sides” in Viet Nam.

Evangelism enthusiasts were happy, meanwhile, over virtually unanimous commitment to ambitious new goals. “Their” man—president-elect W. A. Criswell of the 15,000-member Dallas First Baptist Church—vowed to immerse the SBC more deeply in evangelistic endeavors during the next two years. His pledge was praised by evangelist Billy Graham, who also said he was “proud” of the SBC’s “historic actions” socially.

Things began cooking less than one month before the convention when North Carolina collegian Terry Nichols formed “Baptist Students Concerned” to “wake up” the SBC to “the vital issues.” Next, seventy top-rank SBC staff leaders released a controversial 1,000-word “Crisis in Our Nation” statement²Architects were: SBC Executive Secretary Porter Routh; Foy Valentine, Christian Life Commission head; Clifton J. Allen of the Sunday School Board; Baker James Cauthen, Foreign Missions Board secretary; and C. Emanuel Carlson, of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. they asked the SBC to adopt and implement. Confessing, “As Southern Baptists … we have come far short of our privilege in Christian brotherhood,” it went on to affirm, in part, “We will personally … welcome to the fellowship of faith and worship every person irrespective of race or class.” It recognized the SBC’s “obligation to work” for social betterment, and it bade Southern Baptists “engage in Christian ventures in human relationships, and to take courageous actions for justice and peace.” Convention agencies were asked to “take the leadership” in devising remedial action. All things considered, it was the SBC’s strongest social-conscience stand ever.

While Nichols’s students staged a “silent vigil” outside, the fifty-eight-member SBC Executive Committee during pre-convention deliberations toned down the document’s “confession” section and added a favorable “review” of past SBC efforts to make it more palatable to critics, among them Texas Executive Secretary T. A. Patterson, who objected that the SBC was being “put on the spot.” Quizzed about the paper’s origin, Clifton J. Allen, one of the framers, declared: “We did not create the situation; it exists. The ends of the ages have come down on us. We would have spoken by our silence.”

Debut Of A Denomination

When Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren churches merged to become the United Methodist Church in April, some Pacific Northwest EUB members were distressed. They considered the old Methodist Church too liberal. It “just isn’t compatible with my conservative theological position,” said one former EUB district superintendent. So last month another denomination was born: the Evangelical Church of North America.

Fifty-one of the fifty-four Washington and Oregon EUB churches that withdrew from the United Methodist Church sent representatives to Portland to organize the new denomination. They paid $75 rent to meet for three days in the Lents EUB Church, which under church law belongs to the parent denomination.

Meanwhile, the twenty area EUB churches that are going along with the union met in Portland’s Milwaukie EUB Church to carry out merger actions. The Milwaukie congregation was among those seceding.

The new church, said its organizational statement, “is orthodox in its beliefs, evangelical in its emphasis, and Wesleyan-Arminian in its interpretation of the scriptural meaning of salvation. Thus its mission is to proclaim the glad tidings of a free and full salvation to all men in this present life.”

The property problem loomed large over the new denomination, especially when the UMC claimed the property of three of the seceding congregations. (The following Sunday fewer than a dozen people appeared at the three churches, designated as UMC mission works.) The withdrawing congregations offered to settle the question with a lump sum based on property value, home-mission help, pension obligations, and other factors.

Despite unanswered questions, observers saw little evidence of bitterness at the June 3 meeting in which the withdrawal became official. And the committee sent by the parent denomination to each of the withdrawing churches commended “the generally good attitude of the respective congregations.”

During the meetings, representatives of the new, 6,500-member denomination elected a secretary, the Rev. R. L. Morris; two superintendents, the Rev. V. A. Ballantyne and the Rev. George K. Millen; a board of trustees; and directors of evangelism, stewardship, and Christian social action. They also established several boards, among them missions, Christian education, and evangelism. And they resolved to maintain the old EUB Discipline until a committee can draft a new one.

WATFORD REED

Former SBC President Herschel Hobbs and other respected luminaries voiced support, and 197 SBC foreign missionaries meeting nearby unanimously urged its passage. The committee, with only three dissenting votes, approved it and sent it to the messengers, who fought off crippling amendments and delay tactics, finally passing it 5,687 to 2,119. Passage led one flustered ministerial opponent to move—unsuccessfully—that “all in sympathy with this statement be given a one-way ticket to Resurrection City.”

The Sunday School Board and Christian Life Commission introduced new study materials on race and the nation’s crisis, and SBC religious educators formally requested even more in their call for “educational experiences … designed to help our church members overcome their [prejudices and closed minds] so that they can truly be a part of the answers … and not a part of the problem.”

While most convention speakers stressed a “both-and” approach to evangelism and social action, the former got precedence. Criswell, a backer of the crisis paper, nevertheless warned of the “dangers” of preoccupation with social affairs. To repeated applause, New Orleans Seminary Professor Clark H. Pinnock charged that “an early-stage drifting away” by the SBC from “biblical, Christ-centered” theology “is apparent” and that “millions” of Christians are “forsaking the biblical Christ for a false Christ of process philosophy and revolutionary social action.” And Graham warned: “We’ve made the mistake of going too far in the other direction.… We need to get back to preaching the Gospel, to evangelism.”

Some SBC leaders privately express uneasiness. Seminaries reported a decline in the number of ministerial students; this is due, say some liberal academicians, to the SBC’s “unattractive” conservatism. Others put the blame across the hall. Also, a goal of 1.6 million baptisms for the next four years is only slightly more than the expected junior-department enrollment of SBC Sunday schools in that time.

On other fronts, SBC messengers:

• looked unfavorably on proposed congressional legislation to fix certain national holidays on Monday, fearing more weekend exoduses;

• urged “stronger” highway-safety legislation.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Beware Of Soviet Ecumenism

Nikolai—Portrait of a Dilemma, by William C. Fletcher (Macmillan, 1968, 230 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Blahoslav Hruby, managing editor, “Religion in Communist Dominated Areas,” National Council of Churches, New York.

The world situation into which this new book comes makes it even more timely than it was at its conception. For one thing, there is the growing spiritual ferment among intellectuals and churches in the Soviet Union and the persecution of those who struggle for greater freedom. Even more striking is the present non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia, which with an unheard-of openness has demythologized twenty years of brutal and immoral rule and in so doing has brought to light the manipulation and infiltration of churches by the Communist party. This revolution is probably the best illustration of the problems raised in William Fletcher’s excellent study of Nikolai. Thus this book about the violent conflict between the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church, personified by the tragic and enigmatic Metropolitan Nikolai of Krutitsy and Kolomna, transcends the Soviet scene. The questions Fletcher raises about church life in a totalitarian Soviet state apply to other Communist countries as well.

Fletcher does not attempt to write a biography of this controversial figure. To do so would be extremely difficult, for free research is impossible in this nation that, despite de-Stalinization, still remains a close society. What he offers is a scholarly, fascinating portrait. Nikolai was able to preach sermons arising from a deep Christian faith, nurtured by centuries of Russian Orthodox tradition and history, without paying any attention to the Communist state. Yet this same man indulged in the most lavish praise of Stalin and in the service of Soviet propaganda uttered violent attacks against the United States and the Vatican. He also served the Soviet interests in occupied territories. His accommodation to the regime brought many temporary advantages to the Orthodox Church, but at the same time, many clergymen suffered in prisons and concentration camps. And whatever Nikolai gained for the church from the Soviet state in return for his services “vanished almost overnight,” says Fletcher. “By the criterion of lasting results achieved, Nikolai’s career was an almost total failure.”

Fletcher is not trying to defend his subject, but neither is he passing judgment on him. Nikolai was considered by many as one of the leading Russian agents and by many others as a Christian martyr murdered by the Soviet secret police. Fletcher’s last sentence is the last sentence of Patriarch Alexei’s eulogy of Nikolai, echoing a phrase in the Russian Orthodox litany for the dead: “Though he sinned, yet he did not depart from Thee.”

At a time of confusion and division in our churches, when clichés and fads often seem to be more welcome than cold facts (some people do not want to hear “horror stories” and seem insensitive to the suffering of fellow Christians), we are deeply grateful to the author and publisher for this study. Nothing is more dangerous for our understanding of religion under Communism than the ignorance, superficiality, and arrogance of instant experts. Nothing is more misleading than their statements that churches are now safe and that we can stop worrying about Christian churches in Communist countries because Communism is no longer monolithic. Nor should we take comfort in the dialogue now going on between Christians and Marxists.

Reading For Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

• What’s New in Religion?, by Kenneth Hamilton (Eerdmans, $3.95). An incisive explication and critique of the new theology that reveals its antisupernaturalism, humanism, and immature concern with newness for its own sake.

• Jesus—God and Man, by Wolfhart Pannenberg (Westminster, $10). The English translation of a scholarly work in Christology that contends for the historical resurrection of Christ and sheds light on Jesus’ deity and humanity.

• Dying We Live, edited by Helmut Gollwitzer, Kathe Kuhn, and Reinhold Schneider (Seabury, $2.75). Touching and inspiring letters and other writings of faith and courage by Germans who valiantly resisted Hitler and suffered triumphant martyrdom during World War II.

Seen in the context of the growing dissent in the churches and among the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, and in the context of revelations about the ordeal of church life during the past twenty years of Stalinist rule in Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and elsewhere, Fletcher’s study leads to a suggestion that the time has come to reappraise ecumenical relations with the churches in Communist countries. The problem of living in a meaningful fellowship with churches that in many cases are manipulated and infiltrated by the Communist party must not be ignored. Nor can it be swept under the rug of “ecumenical accommodation.” Our Christian brothers who struggle for the freedom of the Church of Jesus Christ, for “democratization,” “liberalization,” “humanization,” or whatever words they use, must not be forgotten by Christians in the free world.

A Chunk Of Life

Journey Inward, Journey Outward, by Elizabeth O’Conner (Harper & Row, 1968, 175 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Keith Miller, author and Christian layman, Austin, Texas.

Elizabeth O’Conner has done a great job of writing. As I finished her book I felt I had seen beyond its pages into the world about which she has written. A thousand miles from a depressed area in the nation’s capital, I heard the horns in the five o’clock traffic she describes, smelled the rotting back steps of a tenement, saw a little black princess with a rag for a cape as she paraded down a trash-littered alley. I could see small groups of Christians sitting around a table at night in a coffeehouse church, trying to love one another in spite of the bitterness that had arisen as they argued about the right way to love other people for Christ’s sake.

This is a real book about the real world. Its subject is life—life within each one of us as it gropes for meaning and love and creative expression, life that often hides beneath the surface of our religious habits. And yet this is also a book about life out in the street, beyond the tight, brittle boundaries of many of our church meetings and programs. Miss O’Conner vividly describes the problems and meanings people found as they tried to restore run-down tenements, help culturally crippled Negro children in a ghetto, and bring group therapy into their own congregational life.

Of all the books I have read on church renewal, I think this one best presents the built-in paradoxes confronting those who honestly try to be God’s persons. There is no question here that a Christian must be involved in the world. And yet the author feels that the outward relating needs to have its roots in a deeper inner relatedness with God and one’s self.

I like this book very much and recommend it strongly to anyone who seriously wants to become involved in the world … because of Christ.

Jesus As A Secular Contemporary

Secular Christ, by John J. Vincent (Abingdon, 1968, 240 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Robert L. Reymond, visiting lecturer and administrative assistant, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

Here is a contemporary interpretation of Jesus that contends for his “essential secularity.” Joining those who are convinced that a meaningful Christology is yet to come, Vincent, who holds a Basel Th.D. in New Testament studies, rejects the traditional assessment of Jesus.

He divides his book into three main sections. In Part I, he confronts the Cambridge “radicals” and the secular theologians with the question, What is Christ for man today? Agreeing in many respects with both in what they make of Jesus, he nevertheless argues that they “do not take seriously the Gospel picture of Jesus” nor do they “depend explicitly on the ‘one word’ of God to man in Jesus Christ.” He concludes this part by setting his own effort within the context of recent gospel studies. He is not uncritical of scholars who separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith, believe that the “Gospel” dates only from the resurrection, and fear that the words of Jesus have little historical reliability.

In Part II, he re-examines (mainly) Mark’s picture of Jesus and concludes that his is a “secular gospel” about a secular event within this world. Vincent projects Christ in activist terms and hangs Christology upon the actions of Jesus and the ability of the seeker to see in them “the actual living presence of that which is messianic.” Jesus’ healing and teaching ministries are seen as supporting this secular messianism, and human response to Jesus is seen always and only in deeds, in involvement in God’s actions, and as the continuation of Jesus’ work.

Vincent does not think that the story of Jesus’ resurrection adds “anything new” to this picture; it merely points to the contemporaneity of Jesus’ secularity. The task of New Testament theology today is to show how Jesus, our contemporary, now conducts his secular ministries in our midst. And by participating in these ministries, today’s man finds guidance for living and true significance (salvation).

In Part III, Vincent seeks to develop a new “dynamic” theology in which concern for Jesus’ actions has priority. By interpreting Christian discipleship within this theology as “ethical existentialism,” he can regard all men as “secular Christians” participating in Christ’s “hidden lordship” in the world.

Vincent shows a very thorough acquaintance with all the recent existentialist and secularist sources. His criticisms of Bishop Robinson and the Bultmannians are indeed cogent. But the orthodox Christian must conclude that, operating with a view of Scripture that permits him to pick and choose among the Evangelists’ descriptive statements about Jesus, Vincent fails to do justice to the biblical Christ. The Synoptics alone, not to mention John’s Gospel, yield a far different picture of him. Need we say he is depicted precisely as Chalcedon describes him?

Finally, existential involvement in the political, ethical, and personal decisions of the secular realm utterly fails as a description of biblical soteriology, which portrays man as fallen, lost, deserving of hell, and desperately in need of the redemptive merits of Christ’s atoning work applied to him through faith.

Preachers At Their Best

Best Sermons, Volume X, edited by G. Paul Butler (Trident, 1968, 409 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Evelyn K. de Voros, professor of speech and English, California State Polytechnic College, San Luis Obispo, California.

Best Sermons contains fifty-two addresses by leading American religious spokesmen delivered during 1966–68. Although we cannot here mention all the speakers who have selected topics suitable to the times, presented dynamic ideas that inspire and persuade, and used satisfactory rhetorical methods to reach their listeners, the few singled out in this review will show the merit of the collection.

Perhaps the most significant sermon is Joseph R. Sizoo’s “How to Handle Doubt,” in which he takes doubt, man’s deep fear in his most alone hours, and leads his listener toward assurance in seeking a “satisfying God.” Sizoo counsels:

Do not be afraid of doubt … Doubt implies the presence of faith.…

Religion is not a formal garden with carefully arranged beds of petunias, lilies, violets, and roses and well-manicured lawns, but a wild, windblown field with pools so deep they cannot be fathomed, with fruit so unusual it has never been classified, and with flowers so rare they have never been catalogued.

This timeless sermon, with its rhythmic sentences, simplicity of style, and abundance of biblical references, is indeed a memorial to the greatness of the man who until his recent death was director of university chapel at George Washington University.

Also outstanding are two sermons based on extended analogies. Carl F. H. Henry’s “Mars Hill and Modern Myths” shows how Paul’s address to the Athenians, with little change in terminology, is in every respect most timely today. John McClanahan’s “The Ecstasy and the Agony” (the title comes from Irving Stone’s book on Michelangelo) presents discipleship as a combination of vision (derived from vital worship) and work. With beauty of expression he summarizes:

God doesn’t want men on the mountain who are not willing to go to the valley.

God doesn’t need men in the valley who have not been on the mountain.

God wants men to live in the valley with the mountain in their hearts.

This is the ecstasy and the agony of Christian discipleship.

Pointing a finger directly at a special ill of the times, Robert James McCracken, in “The Human Touch,” reiterates: “We have achieved propinquity, not community.” The use of a slogan method also helps make impressive Lynn Harold Hough’s “The Glory of the Christian Church”; a line from Ezekiel about healing “waters” issuing “out of the sanctuary” is repeated for transition from one main idea to another and is effective until the final point, which centers on the Church in the modern world.

A number of the speakers who have worthwhile messages do not completely fulfill their purposes. The reasons vary. They place too much emphasis on negative ideas, make unproved controversial statements, violate the tone by intermingling commonplace material with elevated expression, lose unity and clarity by shifting from the message seemingly intended to one perhaps more readily acceptable, or allow method to dominate rather than idea. Among those using poetry as a medium, for example, only one successfully subordinates the form to the message: Thomas W. Kirkman, Jr., in “Twelve Inches from God.”

Much variety of method and material is contained in this volume. And, more important, the speakers whose sermons Dr. Butler has selected for his 1968 collection show such a fine appreciation of language and unusual depth of thought in advancing the Christian message that few readers will remain unmoved.

Rumblings In Dutch Catholicism

A New Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults, by the Higher Catechetical Institute, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, translated by Kevin Smyth (Herder and Herder, 1967, 510 pp., $6), and Those Dutch Catholics, edited by Michel Van Der Plas and Henk Suer, translated by Theo We stow (Macmillan, 1967, 164 pp., $4.95), are reviewed by M. Eugene Osterhaven, professor of systematic theology, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.

In all the change going on within Roman Catholic theology these past years, Dutch Roman Catholicism has been second to none, as these two books clearly show.

During the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands was reduced to a minority with an inferiority complex. Not until 1853, when the hierarchy was reconstituted in the country, did Catholicism begin to play a part in Dutch social and political life commensurate with its size. Today it includes over 40 per cent of the population and shows remarkable vigor.

The Dutch church, strongly influenced by Calvinism, was an irritation to conservative circles in Rome even before Vatican II. It had a strong sense of independence from Roman control, insisted on going pretty much its own way in many matters, and was characterized by progressive theological thinking, often strongly biblical. Evidences of the Dutch spirit are its challenge to remove the celibacy requirement for priests, its questioning of traditional hierarchical structure, its attitude toward birth control, its numerous experiments in liturgy, ecumenics, catechetics, training for the priesthood, and religious life, and its inclination to consider the code of canon law a “moldering monument.” Although Rome has warned of impending schism, Dutch Catholics deny the probability (though in the next breath they affirm their determination to go their own way).

A New Catechism is the only published translation of a Dutch work that has sold half a million copies in the Netherlands in the two years since it appeared. The Vatican has held up its publication in other languages until the controversy in the Netherlands has subsided, misunderstandings have been cleared up, and, according to reports, certain passages have been rewritten. It is no ordinary book of questions and answers but rather a down-to-earth discussion written for the thinking adult. Its purpose is to further the renewal now going on within Roman Catholicism.

The text has five parts: the mystery of existence; the way to Christ; the son of man; the way of Christ; the way to the end. The writing is a skillful blending of apologetics, history, and biblical exposition, with a good deal of theological acumen and psychological insight thrown in. The authors try to meet man where he is, show him who he is and what his existence means, and lead him to Christ.

The reader who has not kept abreast of developments in Roman Catholic theology will find many surprises. For example, he will note that:

1. Evolution—superintended by God, of course—is accepted without question.

2. A considerable amount of higher criticism of Scripture is adopted.

3. The Reformation is seen as partly the fault of Rome, which was corrupt at the time. “It is impossible to estimate the immense amount of goodness and holiness which the Reformation, even in what is most peculiarly its own, has to offer all Christianity. The Catholic Church cannot do without the Reformation.”

4. Transubstantiation is not mentioned in the discussion of the Mass. Although the bread “becomes something quite different,” the mystery is left unexplained; the only sacrifice is the one which “has already been offered” at Calvary. The one element in the Eucharist that should never be lost from sight is “the memory of what our Lord did.”

5. Teachings on indulgences and the treasury of merits of the saints are called “antiquated customs,” and the authors consider them an embarrassment. The limbus patrum, moreover, is relegated to limbo.

6. Persons are advised to consult a doctor about birth control.

One of the finest things in the book is the support it gives to family and private devotions. At a time when many Protestants regard the family altar as something that died with Grandma, it is both frightening and heartening to learn of the surge of interest in the devotional life among lay Roman Catholics. The Bible must be read in the home, the authors say. Moreover, Christians should kneel in prayer before retiring at night; and they should have daily periods of prayer and meditation, especially before and after meals.

The book by Van Der Plas and Suer is a symposium describing in some detail the background and spirit of the renewal going on. The authors, all avant-garde Roman Catholics, know their church well and speak honestly. May their tribe increase!

Involvement In ‘Worship Drama’

Words, Music, and the Church, by Erik Routley (Abingdon, 1968, $4.95), is reviewed by Donald P. Hustad, professor of church music, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.

Since 1950, we have come to expect that about once every two years Erik Routley will publish a book on church music or hymnology. Most of his books have been worthy contributions to long-neglected fields. In this latest one there are, as usual, good ideas, often expressed brilliantly. But the total result does not come up to Routley’s usual standard of lucidity.

The volume’s subtitle, “The Drama of Worship in a Changing Society,” should be printed in large letters at the top of each page; for it is a sign the reader needs to keep constantly in view as he is led through a maze of musicological discussion, some of which seems to head down the garden path of irrelevancy. Church music is indeed Routley’s basic concern, but only as it is an integral part of the “worship drama.” As he says in the foreword, this is a theological approach to the analysis of contemporary church music he outlined in Twentieth Century Church Music (Oxford. 1964).

Worship is drama, says Routley, designed not for the amusement but for the involvement of the audience, as demonstrated in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town and Benjamin Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera. This kind of worship involves dialogue (between minister and worshiper as well as between man and God) in statements of faith and in prayer. Its central act is the reading of Scripture “as poetry, history, legend and gospel”—not the exposition of Scripture. In another day, a Jonathan Edwards or a Joseph Parker was able to provide most of the action through eloquent preaching. But today, even if a minister in the non-liturgical church had that degree of talent, his culture would not receive it with grace and understanding.

Basic to the concept of worship drama is the drama of the liturgical year. The entire “drama of redemption” must be evident in the inclusion of both Old and New Testament truth in Scripture readings and hymnody. Worship symbolism and verbiage should also be clearly related to the drama of contemporary life. We must not eschew physical action—processions, genuflection, perhaps even ballet. Finally, the use of modern “miracle and mystery” plays may be one of the best ways to preach the Gospel today.

The music for Routley’s “worship drama” must be chosen to fit the context. To perform an anthem because it is “good music” is not enough. It must be judged principally by its text and carefully integrated into the worship script. Its musical setting should be the expression of the total “congregation of artists,” and in our day this may mean that the folk-song style is the best new medium.

Routley seems unaware that the liturgical revival of the 1950s has already brought these ideas into the worship life of many American congregations. He does give polemical and musicological support (I found little that was truly theological) for this new trend, and for this many readers will be enthusiastically grateful. Others will agree that new forms of communication are desirable but may still wonder whether the divine office of the “prophet” is really so outmoded.

This reviewer must express his approval of Routley’s attack on the myth that “art lovers” should be entrusted with the choosing of music for the worship of God. Church music must not be “romantic”—an evoker of emotion alone. It must not be “pedagogic”—a slave to correctness and tradition. As the author says, a true work of art will “involve a listener or a beholder in response to things which he and the artist agree to be fundamental data of life.” “Good church music” is truly existential; it speaks directly to the worshiper where he is, culturally and spiritually.

The Church’S Effect On Environment

The Impact of the Church upon its Culture, edited by Jerald C. Brauer (University of Chicago, 1968, 396 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, professor of church history and historical theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

This book of essays is not, as its title might suggest, an examination of the general interaction of church and culture. Rather, it is devoted to a series of specific themes, men, and movements, ranging from the use of the prefix auto-in the early Church, by way of Grossetete and the Anabaptists, to Hurban and Hamack in the modern period. The general aim is to show that the Church has affected its environment; in this respect the book is complementary to an earlier one, Environmental Factors in Church History (1939), in which a previous generation of Chicago scholars stressed the influence of environment upon the Church.

In general one may say that despite its multiplicity of theme and authorship, this is a useful and stimulating work. Although some of the topics are perhaps too esoteric for the ordinary reader, they are on the whole aptly chosen. The writers maintain good standards of scholarship, insight, and composition, and, though some of their judgments are debatable, they avoid overemphasis and rash generalization. If there are criticisms, the first is the one common to works of this type: unevenness in the merit of the various essays. More serious is the fact that some of the articles hardly indicate what was the specific cultural contribution of the man or movement presented. The title and introduction promise more than the performance warrants.

But there are brilliant exceptions. While it is perhaps invidious to single out one essay for special attention, that by B. A. Gerrish on “The Reformation and the Rise of Modern Science” might serve at least as an example. Here is a theme of indisputable importance, both intrinsically and because of the confusion and misinformation relating to it. The author takes the opportunity to bring some order into the material. He also engages in an enjoyable and effective refutation of myths based on Luther’s isolated judgment on Copernicus and the persistent Calvin “quotation” that no one has yet been able to find in his works. More positively, he argues cogently that Luther’s idea of “multiple discourse” and Calvin’s doctrine of accommodation both allow for scientific research and discovery, though one should take with a grain of salt the suggestion that Calvin is perhaps a father of demythologization.

In view of the general excellence of the book, one notes with some regret that its own contribution to culture includes in places some very peculiar English; there are even one or two dangling participles!

Scripture Is The Foundation!

Revelation and Theology, Volume I, by Edward Schillebeeckx, translated by N. D. Smith (Sheed and Ward, 1967, 266 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Lynn Boliek, assistant minister, First Presbyterian Church, Burlingame, California.

This collection of articles comes from the hand of an influential representative of the new Rheological viewpoint within the Roman Catholic Church. The man whose name even Karl Barth found “difficult,” E. Schillebeeckx, is professor of dogmatic theology at the Netherlands University of Nijmegen. The articles date from 1945 to 1962 and have the definitive character of contributions to theological dictionaries, which a number of them are.

Schillebeeckx is deeply concerned to avoid any shrouding or obscuring of the revelation of God in the history of Israel and in Jesus Christ as made explicit in the word of Scripture. It is this desire to hear God’s word that ties these essays together. Behind the theological discipline we see a man in search of the living God and responding to him in faith.

The reader will see clearly that Schillebeeckx represents the new theology in rejecting any resting of dogma, including Mariology, upon some unwritten tradition. All dogma must grow out of Scripture itself—not as logical conclusions but, at the minimum, as the implicit sense of the Scripture. The church in its living tradition is only reflecting upon the biblical authority, sometimes in its fuller meaning (sensus plenior) for its Mariology and Christology. This kind of explicit submission to scriptural authority has opened up new possibilities of discussion between Catholics and Protestants.

The Protestant will do well to understand the deep evangelical motive in the new Catholic theology. With theologians such as Berkouwer, he should see that the objection to Mariology in the Reformation derived not from docetism but rather from the fact that the biblical presentation of the work of Christ was obscured by a non-biblical intrusion of a work of Mary. Also, the Reformation was not rejecting the offices within the church when it rejected the tension between faithful biblical exegesis and the “infallible teaching authority of the church,” says Schillebeeckx. But he does not make it clear how he feels he can avoid a tension here. Out of evangelical motivation, the Reformation insists that no static or abstract concept of an infallible teaching office should be permitted to interfere with the dynamic quality of the church’s submission to the God of Scripture.

Beyond the questions of inter-church discussion, this book opens up rich insights into problems to us all. To me, Schillebeeckx is refreshing in his candid statement that theology results in an overview or system of biblical truth. There is not just one possible system, and all systems have some contributions to make, though not all systems are equally good. No system is final; all reflect the social and intellectual climate of their times, as they should. Nevertheless, they are systematic structures of understanding. Protestants who have always had systems but are sometimes reluctant to say so might be helped by this section. Schillebeeckx shows that it is not necessary to play systematic (speculative) theology against exegetical (positive) theology. Both are grounded in biblical authority.

Another fascinating area of remarks has to do with the way philosophy and theology converge. Schillebeeckx rightly sees the parallel between Bultmann’s doctrine of Vorverständnis and the Catholic concept of the praeambula fidei. He is aware that philosophy is not neutral on the question of God and man. His brief remarks leave us with the hope that his evangelical motivation might lead to a critique more profound than Bultmann’s of the religious influence upon philosophy. He realizes that philosophy untransformed by the Gospel will obscure it.

This book is an appeal to us all for theological responsibility. It brings to us careful reflections within the broad area of theological method and authority. It particularly challenges us to work along with Schillebeeckx’s deepest motivation: to let theology become in our time a servant to the church as it seeks full obedience to the God of Scripture.

Book Briefs

Kierkegaard on Christ and Christian Coherence, by Paul Sponheim (Harper & Row, 1968, 332 pp., $9.50). A systematic treatment of the fragmentary writings of the Dane who criticized theological system-building.

The Broadman Minister’s Manual, by Franklin M. Segler (Broadman, 1968, 154 pp., $3.50). A guide for ministers: orders of worship, special services, church organizational principles, visitation, other helpful materials.

The Lord’s Supper, by William Barclay (Abingdon, 1968, 128 pp., $2.75). The history, liturgy, and meaning of the Lord’s Supper are discussed by a scholar who views it as a sacrament.

Atheism Is Dead, by Arthur J. Lelyveld (World, 1968, 209 pp., $5.95). A Jewish scholar contends not only that atheism’s day is past but also that the secularizing of theology is moving the Church toward the basic position of Judaism.

Paperbacks

Man in God’s Milieu, by Bastian Kruithof (Baker, 1968, 144 pp., $1.95). Brief but incisive considerations of the relation of the Christian faith to such theological and cultural questions as revelation, science, history, secularism, evil, beauty, and morality.

The Sermon: Its Homiletical Construction, by R. C. H. Lenski (Baker, 314 pp., $2.95). If your pastor’s sermons lack analysis and organization, give him this paperback reprint of a classic in homiletics. From the “Notable Books on Preaching” series.

Evangelical: What Does It Really Mean?, by Ernst Kinder (Concordia, 1968, 105 pp., $2.75). A German systematic theologian stresses that true evangelical Christianity is based on the New Testament Gospel as reclaimed by the Reformers.

America is confronted with a new philosophy—a guaranteed annual income for every person. If this were solely in the realm of political stargazing or economic sophistry, one could keep silent. But church leaders and organizations such as the National Council of Churches are beginning to take up the chorus of approval, and serious discussion of the subject is sorely needed.

With the coming of the industrial age, there were dire forebodings that men would be replaced by the machine and that starvation would be an inevitable result. But this pessimism proved unwarranted. Although many have lost their jobs to machines, new and varied jobs have been opened up, and those countries that have shared in industrialization have become the most prosperous in the world.

There are those who prophesy widespread unemployment as we progress further into an era of cybernetics, automation, and population explosion, and they are making plans based not on fact but on fear. The fact is that even now new conditions are creating new jobs and will certainly produce more. To say the least, it is fallacious to insist that our nation will be confronted with enforced joblessness and poverty and that some sort of governmental provision must be made for all citizens.

Does the government owe everyone a living? Do citizens really have the right to expect a guaranteed wage, salary, or “negative income tax”? That the government should do all within its power to encourage opportunities for employment for individuals is inherent in our concept of democracy. Furthermore, that no one should be permitted to starve is also recognized as a responsibility that local governments and charitable institutions must assume.

But the proposed guaranteed annual income is something else, for it ignores, not only sound ethical concepts, but also numerous human weaknesses to be found in the individual and in the political machinery of the nation.

Employment is now at an all-time high in our country; with few exceptions, all who are employable or willing to become employable have a reasonable hope of securing jobs—and at the highest average wage ever paid in any part of the world.

I am not an economist, and I make no pretense of understanding the intricacies of an industrialized society. But there are some truths that ordinary common sense seems to dictate.

It is my deep conviction that a guaranteed annual income would be a mistake from which our nation might never recover. In the first place, the innate weakness and perversity of human nature must be taken into account. There are people in every society who are only too glad to be supported by others. Once the need to earn a living were taken away, there would inevitably be some who would view public support as a permanently desirable way of life. Already this demeaning philosophy has become one of the greatest problems in the welfare programs of our nation.

While the idea of a guaranteed annual income contravenes the biblical injunction, “If anyone will not work, let him not eat” (2 Thess. 3:10b), there are those who will ask, “Is it not inhuman to let people starve?” Of course it is, when there is no work available for those who are willing to work.

There must always be provision in a society for those in want. Welfare work is a necessity, for there are always some who are pitiable victims of disaster, illness, physical handicaps, and discrimination that denies them jobs. For these there must be immediate help as well as a long-range effort to eliminate their problems.

Christians should be found at the forefront of those who seek to provide aid for the genuinely needy. The letters of the Apostle Paul make repeated reference to raising funds for needy Christians, and this continues to be the duty and the privilege of Christians today.

But nowhere in Scripture do we find it even intimated that the Church, or individual Christians, should become involved in a program to guarantee an income to all people. This, while seemingly a humanitarian concept, is basically a political one with great potential for being detrimental to our society. It would almost inevitably become a political football. We would find one party vying with another to offer more and more to an ever-growing dependent segment of our society.

In other words, instead of being viewed as a fluid situation—one to be met by shifting methods as conditions varied—poverty would eventually be seen as a permanent political problem, and an evergrowing number of people would view state support as an approved way of life.

No one questions the existence of poverty in our land of affluence. Nor does anyone question the need for some plan of relief. But any such program should be in the nature of an emergency measure, not a permanent grant regarded as the natural “right” of the recipient. It is the aspect of permanence involved in the demand for a guaranteed annual income that makes it particularly dangerous, while the certainty of escalation because of political pressures would cause it to become an intolerable fiscal burden on those who work and pay taxes. The Church and individual Christians should face up to the inherent dangers in this proposal. The meeting of human need should not be left to the politician; relief should come through Christian and social-service efforts. Relief of the poverty-stricken should never become a professional matter, divorced from realistic administration and Christian compassion.

As we read about the early Church, we find that Christians were deeply concerned about the plight of needy brethren. Today, even within the Church, the trend is to urge the government to provide for all the poor, while the Church apparently makes no distinction, so far as its own responsibility is concerned, between needy people inside and outside the Church. Perhaps this naturally is a part of the thinking of those for whom the distinction between believers and unbelievers no longer exists.

It has been advocated that ministers take up the question whether all should be paid the same salaries. Establishment of an organization devoted exclusively to the care of needy Christians might also receive consideration. At the moment, both possibilities might have more claim on the Church’s attention than her present concern to lobby the government into providing a guaranteed annual income for all citizens.

Going into this could prove to be the most foolish move our government has ever been pressured into making.

Dear Connoisseurs of Linguistic Jive:

National Council of Churches social activists have, as part of their crash program on the “Crisis in the Nation,” erected a shanty in Resurrection City. It stands on Martin Luther King Plaza right off Abernathy Boulevard. New Breed churchmen have earnestly tried to establish “meaningful relationships” with the soul-brother—yippie—type demonstrators. I’m not sure how their “relevant dialogue” has gone, but I imagine their language adaptation may have been something like this:

“Hey, man, those long beads over the Nehru jacket and denims are wild. Like they’re the most! In this uptight world what a gas it is to be here in Resurrection City doin’ our own thing. Black and white together—sockin’ it to those Machiavellian racists on Capitol Hill—man, it’s positively groovy. Before we’re through, the Establishment’s really gonna know where it’s at. It’s high time the plastic man laid some bread on us poor cats. Till we get what’s ours nobody’s gonna turn us ’round.

“But you know, man, we gotta split from our own hang-ups, too. Like we gotta overcome our angst. You don’t dig? Sorry about that, Clyde. I mean we gotta get outa drag and get ultimately concerned. Ultimately concerned about what? Ultimately concerned about ultimate concern. I’m not talkin’ about Big Daddy in Skysville. I’m talkin’ about bein’ a man for others. I’m tellin’ it like it is. We also gotta accept the fact that we’re accepted, know what I mean? Man, that’s greater than droppin’ acid or flyin’ with a joint of grass. It’s really somethin’ else! It’s like an everlastin’ love-in!

“Of course, the straights don’t dig this. It’s not their bag. They’re too hooked on pie in the sky. And they’re always tryin’ to scare people with that jazz about the end of the world—Heah come de judge! Heah come de judge! They don’t realize that the existential moment is the thing. It’s now that’s important. We can’t wait. We gotta play our game now—and the name of the game is power—now! We gotta stick together and keep shakin’ up the honkies till we get some of that power. In the process of doin’ our own thing, we soul brothers will really tune in to each other. We’ll experience life force. And that’ll really blow our minds. As I said, Baby Cakes, I’m tellin’ it like it is. But we better get in that chow line now. It’s free, y’know.”

EUTYCHUS III

With heart and soul,

FACING THE CHANGE

Thank you for the excellent article by Harold Fife, “The Changing Face of Missions” (June 7). The observations, especially that of the existence of the Church in most of the areas of the world, are accurate and desperately in need of emphasis in our churches today. In fact, I consider it my greatest obligation as a returned missionary to try to educate people at home to missions today.

RICHARD B. STEWART, M.D.

Augusta, Ga.

Harold W. Fife presents some very sound suggestions which are worthy of consideration by any mission board.

RALPH HOBSON

United Baptist Church

Presque Isle, Me.

“The Missionary and Cultural Shock” (June 7) was very revealing.…

There seems to exist a syndrome among missionaries on furlough to present a glorious picture of the work, no doubt in hopes of acquiring support. Because of this, conclusion number two—“Homeland supporters should be sympathetic about the new missionary’s problems in cultural adjustment and should pray specifically about this area”—is in many cases asking for prayer on a subject of which very few people are aware. The dynamic presentation of the work on the field causes many Christians to assume that the missionaries are stronger and more spiritual than everyone else.

GEORGE WAKEFIELD

Hazelwood, Mo.

HELPFUL SCOOP

An undesigned scoop! How fitting, the articles on the Israeli-Arab conflict (June 7) in the light of that week’s tragedy, and the hatred expressed.

Beside, they were helpful articles and interesting.

KEITH MARTIN

Central Baptist Church

Wallaceburg, Ont.

“Perspective on Arab-Israeli Tensions” gave the following two viewpoints:

Dr. Culbertson … was favorable to the overall Israeli position. His analysis contained at least forty-two separate Scripture references.

Dr. Kelso … in his vehement defense of the Arab position did not use a single verse from the Bible.

HARRY JACOBSON

Director

AEDUS Community Center

Chicago, Ill.

James L. Kelso’s article … failed to give the main reason for American support of Israel since 1948: the Jewish vote.…

If the Christian Church is guilty for the present Arab hostility toward the United States, it is because of the Church’s failure to counter the Zionists’ nationalistic arguments. The Zionists were able to convince the United States that they represented the Jewish vote and that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine was in America’s best interest. Without sufficient opposition from either the Christian Church or the Arab block, the Zionist cause in Palestine carried the day, and Palestine became a Jewish state.

ROBERT G. PAUL

Pasadena, Calif.

COMBATTING ANTI-SEMITISM

The editorial, “The New Testament and the Jew” (June 7), is excellent. Actually, to say that the New Testament is anti-Semitic is itself as anti-Semitic a statement as anyone can make.… For by such viciously false utterances, men, both Jewish and Gentile, are blinded to the glorious saving light of the most wonderful book in the universe, the New Testament. And thus they are kept estranged from God; for in it only does he reveal the way of reconciliation between man and himself.

I only wish those Jews and professing Christians who so perversely call the New Testament anti-Semitic could hear, as I have, what happens to an anti-Semite when he comes to know the New Testament as it really is. Here is what I, a Hebrew-Christian, have heard such men say: “I used to hate the Jews; but now I love them.” Quite a remarkable effect to come from an “anti-Semitic” book, What?

MEYER MARCUS

Scarborough, Ont.

Lately, a new attitude has appeared among liberal or non-religious Jews, an attitude supported, unfortunately, by some liberal Protestant theologians and ministers. Seeking to find natural causes for the Jews’ suffering, they have begun to point to the New Testament as the basis for anti-Semitism.…

These liberals propose that we evangelicals confess our guilt … [and] openly confess that the New Testament is a legacy of myths, written by bigots, filled with lies against a people who would not believe in Christ.

Would this really help combat anti-Semitism? I say that it would not! In fact, it would only increase the world’s persecution of the Jewish people!…

Sober thinking reveals that it is the Christian nations that have opened their hearts and doors to the Jews.… (I say “Christian” in opposition to Islamic or any other religious faith not founded on the New Testament revelation of Christ.) Do these liberals who attack us know that it was the good will and interest of Christian governments that gave Israel her land? It certainly was not the Arabs who did it! No, it is not by destroying the New Testament and the evangelical faith that we are going to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, because the Gospel alone breaks down the middle wall of partition (Eph. 2:12–18) and makes Jews and Gentile one in Christ Jesus.

JACOB GARTENHAUS

Founder and President

International Board of Jewish Missions

Atlanta, Ga.

Anti-Semitism is an acquired reaction just like racism—it is a manifestation of racism. Some thirty years ago, when I was a missionary in China, I read several statements by theologians (?) asserting that anti-Semitism was due largely to the anti-Jewish implications of the Gospel of John. I determined to try to substantiate this hypothesis. I spoke to a good friend of mine, a very devout Chinese Christian and a serious student of the Bible, and asked him, “Have you read the Gospel of John?” “Of course,” he answered. “Many, many times. Why do you ask?” I replied by asking, “Do you hate the Jews?” To which he responded with evident astonishment: “Why, of course not. I don’t know anything about the Jews.” I am led to the conclusion that anti-Semitism has its root in two factors—cultural inoculation, and Jewish intransigence. Perhaps Christians would do well to emulate at least a modicum of their intransigence (Rom. 12:2).

H. M. VEENSCHOTEN

Byron Center, Mich.

TOUR TO NIRVANA?

I do enjoy Eutychus III. Do you suppose he would be interested in leading a summer tour to Nirvana (“Dear Probers of Inner Space,” June 7)? I’ve heard so much about it, I’d at least appreciate directions as to where (or how) it is to be found. I am most interested in meditation—however, not in the company of gurus.… Seriously, I do enjoy your articles.… Thank you for challenging, informing, and amusing.

BETTY HANGARTNER

Lakeside, Calif.

PRAISE AND DEFENSE

“Portland: Melting the Reserve” (News, June 7) presented two compliments: one to Billy Graham, who is still in “full bloom,” … [and] most important of all, praise to the Lord Jesus Christ, who is continually working within the heart of man.

JERRY D. WRIGHT

Portland, Ore.

It is true that the preaching of the free offer of salvation has sometimes been accompanied by an unscriptural denial of fallen man’s natural inability.… But to accuse a scriptural evangelist of denying man’s natural inability to initiate his own salvation, simply on the ground of the giving of a general invitation, is a gross distortion of the truth, a violation of the ninth commandment.

In a libelous pamphlet entitled Billy Graham, the Pastor’s Dilemma, by Erroll Hulse, one reads, “The repetitive manner in which every meeting must conclude with a call for immediate response, is itself an eloquent confession of credence in the natural ability of man.…”

Let us imagine Mr. Hulse seated in a certain religious assembly in the time of Christ. “There was there a man having an atrophied hand.” Enter Jesus Christ. “And he says to the man with the atrophied hand, Stand forth in the midst.” At this Mr. Hulse grows anxious, and he tries to hold the patient down in his seat. All the time Hulse explains to Jesus, “This man really cannot move his hand. The high priest has certified that his hand is completely atrophied. The circulation in the hand has stopped. The nerves do not function. It is a case of total inability.”

But Jesus does not heed Hr. Hulse’s warning. He demands an immediate response: “Stretch forth thy hand.”

At this Mr. Hulse expostulates, “But he can’t. Total inability is the first doctrine in the System. If you, Jesus, insist on an immediate response, then later on one of your disciples, under stress of an earthquake and threatened suicide, is going to tell a distressed army officer, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved,’ in the expectation of immediate results, and the custom of asking for immediate decisions will grow.”

Fortunately, Mr. Hulse’s interruption did not discourage the patient, for the record says, “He stretched it out, and his hand was restored whole.”

The seriousness of the argument against what he calls “Decisionist Evangelism” is grave. Whereas Christ commanded his Church to preach the Gospel to every creature, yet John Owen (The Death of Death, Eerdmans reprint of 1963, p. 202) says, “The proffer [of grace] itself neither is nor ever was absolutely universal to all …”; and so good a man as J. I. Packer, in his introductory essay to the John Owen work, says, “It is not likely, therefore, that a preacher of the old Gospel will be happy to express the application of it in the form of a demand to ‘decide for Christ’ …”

In opposition to the denial of the universality of the offer of salvation, we are fortunate to have an excellent brochure by Professors John Murray and Ned B. Stonehouse (The Free Offer of the Gospel, published by Louis J. Grotenhuis, Belvidere Road, Phillipsburg, N. J.) … that answers the attack on universal “decisionist evangelism,” by thorough scholarly examination of Scripture.

J. OLIVER BUSWELL, JR.

Dean Emeritus

Covenant Theological Seminary

St. Louis, Mo.

PROCLAIMING OR PRETENDING

“The Church’s Defection from a Divine Mission” (May 24) illustrates the difference in the Church proclaiming salvation and a religious group pretending “Christianity.” …

If more preaching of the Gospel were done from the pulpits and lived in the lives of the hearers, then no room would be sought for “socio-politics” sermons (?). For a country which stands on the separation of church and state; it seems that more “state” is proclaimed from the churches and more “church-ianity” is proclaimed from our politicians than any nation on earth.

JERE VIA

Church of Christ

Bradenton, Fla.

Could it not be that Ilion T. Jones has misread the intentions of many who advocate church participation in social change?…

To me the Church has two responsibilities: (1) to be a gathering of those who want to hear the good news proclaimed and (2) to be a gathering of those who together seek to implement such change as will bear the fruit of redemption in terms of a healthy society. And perhaps the point of contention between staunch conservative and ardent liberal arises over the fact that each insists upon one without the other when, in fact, both are required.

THOMAS BLOWERS

Associate Minister

First Methodist Church

Saratoga Springs, N. Y.

That article “really preaches”! I used the Scripture, Galatians 1:6–9, as a text and most of Mr. Jones’s facts, and the people were really interested. It is true that the Church, or any part of it, cannot change the one Gospel already given to us just to fit our particular desires for our time.

NED H. BROWN

Gardena-Torrance Southern Baptist Church

Gardena, Calif.

Many of us share Professor Jones’s concern for the maintenance of a clear evangelical witness and agree with many of his views. However, at least some of us are deeply disturbed by certain aspects of his brief essay.… With sweeping generalizations he rejects churchmen who “are openly using money as an external force to achieve what they consider to be the Church’s goal,” who “lobby for the passage of particular bills,” who “maintain lobbyists,” and so on. Quite apart from the democratic propriety and necessity of group activity and group expression, it is, of course, an undeniable fact that all significant Christian groups (see Miscellany, same issue), including the National Association of Evangelicals, use money to inform government leaders of their views, lobby for bills, and generally maintain lobbyists; I speak from experience, for I at one time participated in an NAE lobby! What Professor Jones seems to be denouncing is not economic and political church activity in general but rather activities which he disapproves of because of their goals. If that is what he means, then that is what he should say, and he should probably not present his personal views as being theologically orthodox or necessarily correct.

As far as I can ascertain, the closing quotation attributed to Lord Percy is taken out of context and was not meant to imply that the only way to change the world is to make people Christian. But Professor Jones implies precisely that and infers that all who think otherwise are lunatics. Presumably, then, all fair historians are lunatics, for it is abundantly clear that in many places and many times the world has been changed and greatly improved quite apart from Christianization.… The fact is, of course, as any informed observer knows, that in the United States and scores of other countries, both minor and major changes for the better, as well as many obviously regressive moves, have been instigated and achieved by non-Christian people.…

To be sure, personal conversion must remain central in our Christian witness; but that fact in no way justifies a naïve or erroneous interpretation of past or present.

JOHN H. REDEKOP

Associate Professor

Pacific College

Fresno, Calif.

A PRIZE WINNER

The editorial “Dissent in the Churches” (May 24) ought to win some sort of prize. Your statement: “The big gripe … is that church leaders are issuing pronouncements and underwriting enterprises with no mandate to do so from those who supply funds,” just about tops the list for the materialistic basis for making theological decisions. Did you really mean to be so crass, or have we come openly, at last, to this in the Church?…

Where are all of these Bible-believing Christian laymen you speak about? Surely such a conviction on your part does not imply literacy or even close acquaintance with the Bible on the part of such believers. The existence of such, apparently, mythological persons has yet to come to my attention in my pastoral or otherwise daily experience. You should be awarded if only for verifying the existence of such folk.

BOB KASH

Faith Presbyterian Church

El Paso, Tex.

OF MOB AND ROD

I especially want to express my approval of the editorial, “The Ugly Spirit of Mobbism” (May 24). It appears to me that most of the “student rebels” are emotionally immature.… Those who act like naughty children deserve to be disciplined accordingly. Too many thousands of parents have “spared the rod,” and today’s headlines are the natural result.

FRANK M. MARSH, JR.

Wakefield, N. H.

VIEW ON REVIEW

I really wonder if your reviewer of Bitter Harvest (“An Arab Strikes Back,” May 24) even read the book in its entirety.… Obviously no one likes what the Nazis did to the Jews, and therefore if you can imply that the Arabs or an Arab writer wants to do what the Nazis did, then you can write him off as not someone to whom we should give serious consideration. Dr. Young has tried to use just such a device. However the whole of the book indicates that Mr. Hadawi is not opposed to Jews but to Zionism and the concept of a “Jewish state.” His own proposed solution is to “return both Arabs and Jews to their own homeland,” and the Jews “who remain in Palestine would be only those who are willing to live and share with the Palestine Arabs the responsibility and privileges of citizenship.” This may not be a solution that is compatible with the views of your pro-Israeli reviewer, but this is not the suggestion of genocide nor Nazism! Undoubtedy, as in most books, there may be some mistakes and some overstatements to make a point, but I can assure you that this is a sober, well-documented presentation of the Palestinian question from an Arab point of view.… The United States must know that there are others, Christians and Muslims, who think Palestine is their land because it was their fathers’ land for generations. They will not so quickly be quiet just because we tell them, “Now we’re going to give this land to the Zionists from Europe.”

RAYMOND E. WEISS

Manama, Bahrain

MAY DAY: TOO SHORT

It was most disappointing to discover that you had devoted a mere twenty-five lines to the Christian Labour Association of Canada and its recent Supreme Court of Ontario victory (“May Day Victory,” News, May 24). Both Dr. William Fitch and I had fully expected that you would give our evangelical activity more space.… Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, devoted 123 lines to this court case alone.… Surely we may count on at least that much attention from an evangelical journal that is expected to favor a scripturally directed approach to social and economic problems.

You leave us and your readers with the distinct impression that you are not really vitally interested in independent, Christian movements that seek to be busy with issues of public concern in a Christian way.

GERALD VANDEZANDE

Executive Secretary

Christian Labour Association of Canada

Rexdale, Ont.

The main problem with the contemporary church is not that some are saying God is dead, nor that the redemptive thrust of the Gospel has been dulled by the over-emphasis on social action, nor even that theologians, ministers, and ecumenical organizers are hanging crepe. The problem is that the man in the pew has lost interest in doing anything about the main challenges confronting the Church today.

And if the man in the pew is uninterested, the parish church will die, if it has not already done so. If the man in the pew does not exercise his individual Christian responsibility toward others who are not Christians, if he does not give tangible meaning to his asserted belief that he should love his brother as himself, then God will, for all modern intents and purposes have been killed by the very ones who call themselves his children.

Here is the Church’s weakest link: those who confess Christ and then do nothing for him. If the clergy share the guilt, it is because they have made it easy for church members to shirk their Christian responsibility. Many have, intentionally or not, promulgated the immoral theory that church members can give their way into heaven without ever moving from the pew; that they can feed Christ’s sheep with dollars and cents alone; that they can love their neighbors by putting crisp, green bills in clean, white envelopes, without troubling themselves over the continuing problems. Christians share their money fairly readily. But the most important thing they have to share, belief in a redeeming Lord, is hidden away somewhere, to be uncovered only when piety demands it.

Today the Church is at a tragic impasse. It has more buildings, more money, more members than ever; but it is less involved than ever, less concerned that individual reach individual. It is less an example of the redemptive work of Christ.

A major concern of Martin Luther’s Reformation was to recapture the spirit and form of the New Testament Church. There was the immediate vitality of the Holy

Spirit in action—redeeming men, caring for their physical needs, helping them to become full men. Although Luther did not get back to the form of the primitive Church, he managed to recapture enough of its spirit to revitalize Christianity in an age of material corruption.

The corruption today is even more gross and material. The Church, in a collective and an individual sense, must reach back beyond the Reformation to the excitement and enthusiasm of Paul and the apostles if it is once again to generate the electric energy needed to illuminate the world for Christ.

This kind of reformation cannot take place until the man in the pew discovers that renewal depends upon individual reaction, commitment, and action, and not upon some collective effort staffed by a few who maneuver blocs of people around on charts and predict that enough money spent in a certain area will bring about the desired transformation of buildings and men.

The hunger of minority groups is a spiritual hunger expressed in a material way—the most meaningful articulation possible in a society that has erected its standards upon the shifting foundations of materialism. It is a hunger for the spiritual concepts of dignity and full human recognition. Dignity is articulated by God in Christ through the Holy Spirit and is claimed by men who believe. Full human recognition stems from a religious belief that men are worthwhile beings who ought to be loved.

Dignity and recognition, however, cannot be expressed by some great, intangible force known as society. They are conferred upon individuals by individuals. They come when people love their neighbors as they love themselves, when they help their neighbors as they would help themselves.

It is among individuals that the possibilities of social action, as a means to increase the pace and quality of individual Christian participation in the work of the Gospel, become exciting. Social action is really the Christian outworking of Christ’s commission. One of the apostles’ first concerns in the early Church was to administer the desire to meet social needs already evident as an obligatory function of the Christian in society. The Gospel takes on deeper meaning when it is seen as the sole motivating force behind Christian social action, something missionaries have seen for years. When a Christian loves because his commitment to Christ demands it and because through Christ he loses prejudice, he reaches the heart and begins to clear the passage through which the Holy Spirit must move to reach the core of a man and transform him.

When a man becomes a Christian, he accepts a gift he cannot buy. Being a Christian, he gives that gift away time and time again as part of the redemptive effort Christ demands of the Church. But too many church members think giving that gift away means worrying about the mortgage on the sanctuary, replacing hymn-books, reorganizing circles, planning all-church picnics, and going to choir rehearsal.

If its administration deters the Church from fulfilling its role in the parish, the community, the state, the nation, and the world, then it would do better to dismantle its institutional fixtures and return to the tents and mud houses of New Testament days. Then it was passionate and alive. Filled with the holy fire of God, it turned over an empire and rejuvenated nations because individuals, caught up in the excitement of a faith filled with Christ, told others and demonstrated the transformation they had experienced.

The usual approach to missions, evangelism, and other areas of spiritual concern has reinforced among church members the feeling that personal involvement is not necessary. In the national climate of a government moving toward socialism, the Church too seems to be moving away from individual action. The tendency is reinforced by newspaper editorials, television documentaries, and social-science classes. It is also reinforced by literate social critics who say, “Society is the cause of all our ills.” “Society must find the answers.” “Society must produce the ways and means to help man lift himself up by his bootstraps.”

But social vices will never be corrected by mass social attack. Individuals must focus on specific problems and reach other individuals. Prejudice will vanish, not when more jobs are created for people stigmatized by race, but when individuals learn that Christ meant what he said about loving our neighbors as ourselves, and that if we do not love our neighbors we do not really love God.

The question is, then, how to wake up the man in the pew, charge his interest with direct current, open his eyes, make him get up and start walking toward responsibility. One way is for the Church itself to stop walking away from its social obligation. Once the Church was the axis on which all charitable activities turned. The sick, the destitute, the poor in spirit and in pocket, the ravaged of mind and body, could find spiritual solace and physical relief flowing from the Church. The help was as sweet as fresh spring water. It had no restrictions, no political motivations. The Church could again be this new Samaritan, binding up old, festering wounds. Too often, however, it appears to be getting out of the business of helping people while at the same time it preaches involvement in racial and economic problems. Some denominations are saying that their institutions for care of the aged, the orphaned, and the physically and mentally downtrodden should be self-sustaining, should not come to the Church for support but should look to the government. Meanwhile laymen nap in their pews and dream about burning the mortgage.

Every single challenge the Church faces today is a challenge it has faced before. If the intensity has increased, it is only because the Church has backed away from today’s spiritual and material realities and hidden itself in the paperwork of ecumenism and in dreams of ponderous theologies. In direct proportion to the Church’s withdrawal from the exciting reality of its redemptive mission in the world, the man in the pew has sunk more deeply into spiritual lethargy. That lethargy will continue to deepen unless the energy of the Gospel is transfused with a force of action able to shake men out of their sleep and into a redemptive confrontation with other men. As Christ used parables, so the Church must offer its message in appropriate language for those who carry it to a society ingrown with materialism. As Christ concerned himself with every interest of the human mind and every condition of the human soul, so the Church today must become immersed in the total needs and aspirations of people in all their diversity. With this must be coupled the transferral, by church members, of secular interests and abilities into spiritual areas of concern and action.

Unless church members begin to act like Christians and respond individually to individuals, the atrophy will continue. And if this happens, it seems certain that the parish church will die, and that God will be hidden in the vestments of a collective giant weighted down by the staggering problems of administrating a church for people who attend by rote and who have forgotten that at the bottom of the sanctuary, held down by mass inertia, there is a Christ who would make men whole and transform a world into his image.

There are countless possibilities for confrontation. There are countless channels through which God’s people can take God’s Word to others and at the same time help solve the crying social needs of this and every age. But God’s people must take the initiative to do it.

Stephen, the first Christian martyr, defended himself before the Sanhedrin by indicting Israel. He said:

How stubborn you are! How heathen your hearts, how deaf you are to God’s message! You are just like your ancestors: you, too, have always resisted the Holy Spirit! Was there a single prophet that your ancestors did not persecute? They killed God’s messengers, who long ago announced the coming of his righteous Servant. And now you have betrayed and murdered him. You are the ones who received God’s law, that was handed down by angels—yet you have not obeyed it! [Acts 7:51–53, Good News for Modern Man, The American Bible Society].

The indictment of Stephen rests as heavily on the heads of Christians now as it did upon the heads of the Sanhedrin then.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

Professional churchmen who labor to devise denominational superstructures begin to seem like children building sand castles on the shore. Incoming waves may soon sweep away their elaborate creations. The tide of ecumenical good will is pounding on our accustomed patterns with a power of more than human devising. It is prompting Christians in communities all across the country to exchange visits and work together on local projects without waiting for draftsmen to shape some gigantic merger. As one executive lamented, “COCU [the Consultation on Church Union] has come ten years too late.”

The dream of Christian unity was spontaneous, reflecting the God-centeredness of religious experience and the claims of our one Lord. The more than thirty-year span of my own ministry goes back to the Oxford Conference of 1937. I recall the thrill that came to me as a young pastor preaching on the testimony of the delegates: “Our unity in Christ is not a theme for aspiration; it is an experienced fact.” Being claimed by the oneness of God’s people in Christ gave power to my ministry. We sought to build bridges, and to work with our brothers regardless of labels.

When in the late forties we constructed a chapel window series on the seasons of the Christian year, we even selected Worldwide Communion Sunday for the chancel. The reconciliation of races, nations, and creeds in Christ is the supreme evidence of the victory of the Cross over the world. Because God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, Christians can hold the world together.

But in this same period I saw the vision of unity give way to schemes for greater ecclesiastical kingdoms. The executives of official Protestantism liked to look inward at their structures. I am tempted to say that they preferred to look inward rather than outward at the world, but this would be too harsh a judgment. It is probably more accurate to suppose that they thought the Church could minister to the world only to the extent that it was a highly efficient and centrally controlled organization. Hence we had two decades of merger negotiations among some of the major denominations—Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Evangelical and Reformed, Evangelical United Brethren.

More than that, we witnessed the reshaping of the whole conciliar movement in Protestantism to meet the structural demands of bureaucrats and theologians. From the National Council of Churches down through state and local councils, the grass-roots desire of Christians to reach over barriers and engage in common community services was redirected. Councils were persuaded to rewrite constitutions so as to have members of boards selected by communions rather than by congregations or by the councils themselves. No longer is a layman chosen for his faith and works in interdenominational affairs; he is chosen because of certification by his denomination. What we now have in so called councils of churches is councils of communions, with control firmly established in the executives of the various denominations.

Then came the Blake-Pike proposal, with the resultant Consultation on Church Union designed to create a church that is “truly catholic, truly reformed, and truly evangelical.” This is the super-colossal. It envisages ever more elaborate machinery to regulate the powers and administer the authority. Within the consultation there is an inevitable jockeying for position and a balancing of interests to assure that the prerogatives of all groups are properly maintained. The individual Christian in his home church scarcely knows what is taking place at these annual spring convocations, where the fate of American Christendom is supposedly being determined by the sharp minds of our Protestant leaders.

The past twenty years of mechanical approaches to unity were suddenly altered by Vatican II. Through the centuries the Roman Catholic Church has maintained the tightest form of organizational structure. But the winds of the Spirit moved the heart of Pope John XXIII and began to blow through the ancient forms. The very magisterium of Rome has been challenged, not by outside critics but by reform movements within the church itself. The Declaration on Religious Freedom declares that men are to be immune from coercion; no one is to be forced to act contrary to his own beliefs. The emphasis shifts from authority, power, and orthodoxy to responsiveness to the Spirit of God moving in Christ. Most of us know Roman Catholics who are rejoicing in their new-found freedom and joining with their Protestant neighbors in acts of religious and social concern.

This new openness on the part of the Roman church has done as much as anything to outdate COCU, and to break down the sea walls that were hindering the tide of God’s Spirit from moving freely for good will among his people. In community after community, men and women are discovering that Christ calls in our time, even as he did in Galilee. They need not wait within their churches for officials in New York, Philadelphia, or Nashville to permit them to meet with other Christians. Christ is calling beyond all barriers. The response is the committed heart and the willing hand.

The good will that is manifest is an expression of the deep hunger of souls to find unity in Christ, a hunger that has been present ever since the gospel writers first told the story of our Lord. One can make a fascinating study of the ways in which professional churchmen through the ages have thwarted the satisfaction of this hunger, often with the best of intentions. No doubt the ecumenical leaders of our day think they are laboring truly for Christian unity; but their emphasis is on structures about which Jesus was silent. He said, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.” Open love and mutual recognition of ministry and sacraments are qualities that denominational purists are reluctant to give.

Ours is indeed a secular culture. The times are ominous, and we dare not be superficial in our analysis. White racism, black hatred, callous indifference, scientific pride, greedy affluence, and selfish lusts are diseases from which we suffer. These we must overcome. The point is, however, that the power grip of the ecclesiastical hierarchy has been broken. After decades of meeting the problems on the level of churchly lobbying, synodical resolutions, and executive pronouncements, the Christian community is today in a better position to face these problems where ultimately they must be overcome: within local congregations and through the voluntary association of Christ-motivated persons from several congregations. We are not waiting on COCU. We are waiting on the Holy Spirit.

Last winter one of the young ministers on our staff led our Neighborhood Board (one of six boards with special responsibilities in our congregation) to arrange what we called a Training Course for Volunteers in Urban Needs. The course ran for two-and-a-half-hour sessions on ten Monday nights. Speakers from the university, minority groups, and special agencies came to acquaint the participants with the attitudes of people in problem areas. Each enrollee had to promise to give three months of service. As we planned the training course, we thought that if twenty-five persons responded, the project would be worthwhile. To our surprise, 165 came for the entire time. Because the course was announced at worship services broadcast over the radio, about half the enrollees were from outside our congregation. Eight were Catholic nuns, and many Protestant denominations were represented. This is an example of the grass-roots movement that is bringing people together in Christian concern. The old ecclesiastical structures are increasingly meaningless.

The congregation I serve has been one of the leading challengers of the activities and publications of our denomination’s council for social action. We have questioned the council’s propriety in speaking from the top in behalf of church members. Yet we have always been active in the affairs of our city. Again, we were among the strongest opponents of the merger that carried most Congregational churches into the United Church of Christ. We remained independent, and we give substantial financial support to the National Association of Continuing Congregationalists. Yet aside from a handful of older persons, the members of our congregation have scarcely more interest in this group than in the United Church.

Through the decades we have attracted to our staff younger ministers from the popular seminaries whose faculties are involved in perfecting the ecumenical machinery. The younger men are much more interested in Christian commitment than in denominational allegiance. Their theological viewpoints vary, but all of them take seriously Jesus Christ and their discipleship. I think we shall see a withering away of denominationalism and even of councils of churches, at least in the role of the centers of influence we know them as today. These structures have become institutions that are very concerned with their own power and prestige. Although COCU makes a great fuss about obedience to Christ’s commands, it is bogged down in ecclesiastical details that alienate rather than impress laymen and laywomen today. It is jealously safeguarding the validity of ministry and sacraments in historic forms rather than responding to the tide of the Spirit that prompts laymen to ask only, “What is God in Christ asking me to do with my neighbor, where we are, for His glory and the coming of His kingdom?”

The ecclesiastical system has one undeniable asset: money. The vast denominational endowments, the denominational presses, and the seminaries are in the control of leaders who wield great influence for the established order. One of my younger colleagues went to a new church to which a denomination contributes heavily for program and building. Not surprisingly, he is a booster for the program of that denomination.

Dr. Arthur A. Rouner, Jr., has just written a book that puts the challenge squarely where Christ put it. The Free Church Today calls ecumenical leaders to see what they all have in common, namely, congregations. The gathered church is what we find in the Book of Acts—a gathering together of sincere and committed believers who have been led by the Spirit to become part of a particular congregation by their own choice. Jesus’ promise to be in their midst was given to the Church in this original form, and it is here that hope rests today. Our faith is in the presence of the Risen Lord, his invitation to discipleship, and the hunger of the human heart to respond.

In this direction lie openness, good will, commitment, and service.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

First of Three Parts

In studying the views of the Bible advocated by modern critical theology, one immediatedly faces the difficulty that there are many different kinds of critics. They range from almost conservative to ultra-radical. As an example of a conservative critic we can take Karl Barth. Barth accepts criticism of the Bible as a legitimate aspect of theology: “There cannot be any question of sealing off or abandoning so-called ‘criticism’.… All relevant historical questions must be put to the biblical texts” (Church Dogmatics, I, 2, 294). He can say this because he believes that the Bible is not only a human but also a fallible book:

The men whom we hear as witnesses speak as fallible, erring men like ourselves. What they say, and what we read as their word, can of itself lay claim to be the Word of God, but never sustain that claim. We can read and try to assess their word as a purely human word. It can be subjected to all kinds of immanent criticism, not only of its philosophical, historical and ethical content, but even of its religious and theological content. We can establish lacunae, inconsistencies and overemphases [ibid., 507].

A little later he says clearly:

The prophets and apostles as such, even in their office, even in their function as witnesses, even in the act of writing down their witness, were real, historical men as we are, and therefore sinful in their action, and capable and actually guilty of error in their spoken and written word [ibid., 520].

Yet we must point out that Barth hardly ever says of a particular passage: I cannot accept this or that statement as true. In all the eleven volumes of his Church Dogmatics, covering thousands of pages, one can find only a few isolated instances of such a direct criticism.

At the other end of the critical line we find the extreme position of Rudolf Bultmann and his school. They go very far indeed. Bultmann himself leaves hardly anything untouched in the Bible. According to him, the Gospels, for example, are so overgrown with legends and myths that we know hardly anything about the real history behind them. In 1926 he published his book Jesus and the Word, in which he declared:

To be sure, I am of the opinion that we can know next to nothing of the life and personality of Jesus, since the Christian sources were not interested in that, and are moreover very fragmentary and overgrown by legend, and since other sources do not exist … I am personally of the opinion that Jesus did not consider himself to be the Messiah.… The sources give us the proclamation of the Church.… Critical study shows that the whole tradition of Jesus … breaks up into a series of layers.… That the Fourth Gospel is a source … is out of the question altogether.… Within what remains … secondary material must again be rejected.… By means of critical analysis we can reach an oldest layer, even though we can define it only with relative certainty. Naturally there is even less certainty that the words in this oldest layer were really spoken by Jesus … for this oldest layer is also the result of a complicated historical process.… To be sure, there is no ground for doubting whether Jesus really existed.… Anyone who wishes to set this “Jesus” in quotation marks … and regard it as a valid designation of the historic phenomenon … is welcome to do so [p. 8].

Bultmann wrote this in 1926. Since then forty years have passed, but his views have not essentially changed. He does admit now that we can know a little about the real Jesus through critical inquiry. But it is really not more than a little.

With some degree of caution this much might be said about Jesus’ activity: characteristic for him are exorcisms, the breach of the sabbath commandment, the infringement of the purity regulations, polemic against Jewish legalism, association with the declasse such as tax collectors and prostitutes, his friendliness towards women and children. We can also see that Jesus was not an ascetic like John the Baptist; he enjoyed food and drank a glass of wine. Perhaps too we may add that he called men to discipleship and gathered around him a band of adherents, both men and women [quoted in R. H. Fuller, The New Testament in Current Study, 1962, p. 48].

But this is really all we know, says Bultmann. We do not know, for example, how Jesus interpreted his own death. “All we know is that Jesus was executed by the Romans as a political criminal.”

It is evident that Barth and Bultmann occupy extreme, almost opposite positions on the one critical line. Between them there is an almost endless variety of shades of criticism. And yet all these critics have one thing in common: they all are convinced that the Bible is a human book.

Barth says that “in the Bible we are concerned with human attempts to repeat and reproduce, in human thoughts and expressions, the Word of God (in Jesus Christ) in definite human situations” (op. cit., I, 1, 127). The Bible is through and through a human book, written by sinful men who are not only limited by their humanity but also capable and actually guilty of error by their sinfulness. But how then can we hear God’s voice in this human and fallible book? The answer is that when God’s Spirit uses these human and fallible witnesses, they become the Word of God for us. Behind all this, of course, lies Barth’s conception of revelation. According to him, revelation is always an event. It never means revealedness, so that we can say that we have God’s Word in the Bible; it always is revel-ation, that is, God’s act of revealing himself to us. God’s Word comes to us only when and where it pleases him to speak to us through the human and fallible witness.

To a large extent Bultmann shares this view. Of course, he goes much further than Barth in criticizing the biblical texts. But he fully agrees that the Bible is a thoroughly human book. He further says that it is not only fallible but also actually full of errors. And yet God can use it as a means of revelation. “The fact that the word of the Scriptures is God’s Word cannot be demonstrated objectively; it is an event which happens here and now. God’s Word is hidden in the Scriptures as each action of God is hidden everywhere” (Jesus Christ and Mythology, 1960, p. 71, cf. pp. 79 f.).

Demythologizing the Bible

For many years Barth was the leading theologian. The whole period between the two world wars was dominated by his theology. After the Second World War, however, the situation changed. In 1952 Paul Tillich, summed up his impression of the theological scene in these words: “When you come to Europe of this day, it is not as it was before, with Karl Barth in the center of discussion; it is now Rudolf Bultmann who is in the center.”

Actually the change had started during the Second World War. In 1941 Bultmann delivered a lecture on “New Testament and Mythology,” in which he outlined his so-called demythologizing program. According to him, the Bible, both the Old and the New Testament, is full of mythical conceptions and representations that are unacceptable for modern man. We must therefore demythologize the Bible, i.e., strip the essential message, the kerygma, from its mythical framework.

Bultmann’s program has had a tremendous influence upon post-war theology. Nearly all leading theologians in Germany today are former students of his or at least have been strongly influenced by his way of thinking. In the United States, similar but even much more radical ideas have been advocated by Paul Tillich, and again we must say that many of the leading theologians belong to this school. Some go even so far as to say that the traditional idea of God, based on the Bible, is dead.

What does this new approach mean for our understanding of the Bible? In brief, it means that what is supernatural in the Bible can no longer be accepted. There is, for instance, no place for miracles. All the miracles recorded in the Old and the New Testament (with the possible exception of those that can be “explained” psychologically—which means, of course, that they are no real miracles either!) must be rejected as myths. This holds true of the miracles that are attributed to Jesus. And, we must go a step further and say that the miracle that, according to the New Testament, Jesus himself is in his own person, is also a mythological representation. There never was a real incarnation: God becoming man. Jesus was nothing else than a man in whom God was present in a special way, or perhaps better, who stood in a special relationship to God. The virgin birth is legend that in pictorial language points to this relationship. We cannot speak, either, of a real atonement, in the sense of an offering by Jesus of his life as a sacrifice to God. Bultmann describes the New Testament view of the cross in this way: “The Jesus who was crucified was the preexistent, incarnate Son of God, and as such he was without sin. He is the victim whose blood atones for our sins. He bears vicariously the sin of the world, and by enduring the punishment for sin on our behalf he delivers us from death” (“New Testament and Mythology,” in H. W. Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, 1960, I, 35). His comment is: “This mythological interpretation is a hotchpotch of sacrificial and juridical analogies, which have ceased to be tenable for us today.” As to the resurrection, we cannot possibly take this literally and say that Jesus arose in the body in which he was crucified. Furthermore, there never was a real ascension, nor will there be a real second coming. All these matters are pure myths.

But why? Does not the Bible describe them as facts? Modern theologians do not deny this. But they say that the Bible writers could tell stories about such “facts” because they shared the primitive world picture of those days. To put it again in Bultmann’s words:

The cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings—the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events.… It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other. These supernatural forces intervene in the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do [ibid., p. 1].

For people who hold such a world picture, it is not difficult to believe in miracles. In fact, it is the most “natural” thing to do so. But for modern man it is impossible to accept this. In a much quoted sentence Bultmann said: “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of daemons and spirits” (ibid., p. 5).

But what then? Must we cut all these “myths” out of our Bible and simply throw them away? No, Bultmann says. As a matter of fact, this was the great mistake of the older liberals. They eliminated all the myths, with the consequence that all that was left of the Bible was a small booklet with a few basic principles of religion and ethics. Bultmann wants to go a different way. He believes that we should not eliminate the myths but rather reinterpret them. We should try to find out what kind of human self-understanding lies behind them and what kind of personal experience is expressed by them. In this way these myths will furnish us with an important message for our self-understanding and our experience today.

The World View of Modern Science

We cannot here go into the details of the theology of Bultmann and his followers. But we must note that these scholars approach the Bible with certain presuppositions that come, not from the Bible itself, but from somewhere else. And it is obvious that they measure the Bible by these presuppositions and force it to conform to them.

The first presupposition is the world view of modern science. According to many modern theologians of the Bultmann school, this world is a closed entity in which everything is determined by the laws of nature, in particular by the law of cause and effect, so that there is no place for divine “intervention.” Bultmann himself seems to accept this view as absolute truth. Admittedly, he has also said that “the science of today is no longer the same as it was in the nineteenth century, and to be sure, all the results of science are relative, and no world view of yesterday or today or tomorrow is definitive” (Jesus Christ and Mythology, p. 37). But from all his books it is quite clear that he believes that the laws of nature give us the final word about this universe. On the same page from which the above quoted words were taken we read:

Modern man acknowledges as reality only such phenomena or events as are comprehensible within the framework of the rational order of the universe. He does not acknowledge miracles because they do not fit into this lawful order. When a strange or marvelous accident occurs, he does not rest until he has found a rational cause.

The question must be asked: Is Bultmann’s world view really scientific? I am not so sure that it is. For one thing, it seems to be the world view of nineteenth-rather than twentieth-century science. Since the formulation of the quantum theory based on Planck’s radiation law and the subsequent work in the same field by Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, and others, many modern scientists no longer believe that this world is such a “closed” one, regulated by the unbreakable, deterministic laws of nature. But even apart from the present trends in physics, we should never forget that the theory of a “closed” world is not of a scientific but rather of a philosophical nature. In simple words, it is not a matter of science but of belief. It may be helpful to go somewhat deeper into this, because there is so much confusion on this point, both inside and outside the Church.

First of all, we want to state that no one, of course, wishes to deny the relative value of the modern scientific world view. Both the non-Christian and the Christian accept the law of cause and effect as the indispensable starting point for all scientific work. But at the same time we must emphasize the adjective “relative.” The scientific world view deals with only one aspect of reality. It looks at this world from one limited angle and thus sees it as a mechanism ruled by the laws of nature. Or to put it in another way, it studies the “natural” connections between the various parts of this cosmos. But science as science can never go beyond this mechanistic aspect. It cannot make any statement about the relation of this very same cosmos to God, for this relation cannot be observed or measured. This is the realm of faith.

Faith looks at the same reality that is the object of study for science, but it looks at it from God’s viewpoint and says: God is at work here. When science says, “This is a matter of the laws of nature,” faith says, “It is a matter of God’s power upholding everything.” These two statements are not contradictory but rather complementary. Together they form a twofold approach to the same reality. For faith this whole world is the “workshop of God.” It is he who maintains it. It is his power that keeps the various constituent elements of the cosmos in their right relationship and that upholds the forces science describes as “laws of nature.” The cosmos is never, not even for a single moment, without God’s presence. If it were, it would immediately cease to be a cosmos and would become a chaos. Even worse, it would fall back into nothingness, from which it was called forth by God in his act of creation.

This world is always God’s world. It is always filled with his presence. And there is no reason why he should not do special works, that is, miracles—in his own world. Nor is there any reason why he should not be able to come into this world in a special way, namely, in the incarnation of his Son, Jesus Christ. In this miracle, God, the same God, is at work in his own “workshop” in a unique way. When therefore Bultmann and many others with him say that miracles are impossible, they simply rule God out of his own world. And we should realize that this is a matter, not of the scientific versus the primitive world view, but of the unbelief versus faith. On this point Bultmann believes in the philosophy of science rather than in the revelation of the Bible.

Modern Existentialism

There is still another major presupposition in Bultmann’s view of the Bible: his acceptance of modern philosophy in the form of existentialism. Again we cannot go into details. It must suffice to say that modern existentialism looks upon man in the same way as many modern scientists look upon the world as a whole. Man too is “a self-subsistent unity immune from interference of supernatural powers.” There is virtually no place for such a thing as the penetration of the Holy Spirit into the close texture of man’s own natural powers. In other words, there is no place for such a thing as regeneration.

Philip E. Hughes trenchantly expresses his criticism of the new theology in these words: “The Holy Spirit has been ushered off the stage, and the human spirit dominates the scene” (Creative Minds in Contemporary Theology, ed. P. E. Hughes, 1966, p. 22).

The Form-critical Method

All this also applies to the so-called form-critical method used by Bultmann and other modern theologians in their study of the Bible. There are several critical methods of studying the Bible, used by conservative theologians as well as others. First is textual criticism. It is a well-known fact that none of the original manuscripts of our Bible books has been preserved. All we have are a great number of copies, dating from various periods and greatly differing in purity of text. No single copy is altogether pure. In the course of transmission, all manuscripts have been corrupted to some degree. It is the task of textual criticism to establish, as accurately as possible, the original text, and conservative Bible scholars engage in this task just as much as their liberal colleagues.

Secondly, there is the method of literary criticism. The books of the Bible, though from one point of view unique because they are inspired and therefore the Word of God, are at the same time ordinary books like all other books, and they share the characteristics of all books written by human authors. This means, among other things, that in them we find different kinds of literature, and these various kinds must be studied carefully if we are to understand them. The ecclesiastical tradition about the authors and the addressees, if not revealed in the book itself, must be submitted to thorough examination. In the case of the New Testament Gospels, there is obviously some kind of relationship among the first three Gospels, the so-called Synoptic Gospels (“synoptic” means giving an account of the same events from a common point of view). It is the task of literary criticism to study this relationship and, if possible, to discover which Gospel was written first and then used by the others. It is also clear to the attentive student of the Bible that several of the books have undergone editing. Because of this, we find so-called interpolations here and there (e.g., in Deut. 2:10–12, 20–23; 3:9, 11, 14). All these matters are studied by conservative scholars as well as non-conservative ones, and rightly so. There is, however, an important difference in approach. The conservatives accept the Bible as the Word of God and therefore refrain from criticizing matters that are clearly mentioned in the books themselves, but the critics include everything in their research and, at least in principle, are prepared to put every statement under the microscope of their criticism.

Finally, there is the third method of criticism, form criticism. By this is meant the critical research that wants to go behind the present form of the Bible books to discover what was the “pre-history” of the present records. For example, form criticism asks: What was the situation in the period before our present Gospels were written? Which were the sources used by the Evangelists? What was the typical form of the oral tradition that preceded the fixation of the kerygma in the Gospels?

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

Do we have the right to generalize about “modern theology” or to speak of the “modern theologian” as though he belonged to a well-defined class? Can we say that the various competing contemporary schools of theology and all their different advocates have anything in common beyond similar titles and the fact that they exist today? “Classical” or orthodox Protestantism and its modern adherents are easy to identify by their fidelity to the great Reformation confessions of faith. “Liberal” Protestanism, which has supposedly been theologically obsolete since World War I at the latest, is still with us today, more deeply entrenched than is often recognized. Neither of these two schools is what is meant by the expression “modern theology.”

The Unity of Modern Theology

There are at least two other major trends in recent theology: the “theology of the Word of God” and the theology of “existentialist interpretation.” Each has some legitimate claim to the label “modern,” but the two combat each other vigorously. With the “theology of the Word of God” we associate certain parallel or similar trends: dialectical theology, neo-orthodoxy, crisis-theology, and more recently “heilsgeschichtliche Theologie,” and such names as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Heim, Oscar Cullmann, and most recently Wolfhart Pannenberg. The term “existentialist interpretation” covers the school—now in its third generation—that was molded by its encounter with Martin Heidegger’s existentialist analysis of human self-understanding. It includes the famous name of Rudolf Bultmann as well as those of such disciples and friends of his as Ernst Fuchs, Ernst Käsemann, and Gerhard Ebeling; in a slightly different sense we could also mention Albert Schweitzer, Martin Werner, and Fritz Buri, who so thoroughly tied the historical figure of Jesus to an unfulfilled promise of an immediate, apocalyptic end of history that Bultmann’s kerygmatic Jesus, speaking to us in the eschatological now, seemed to many to be the only way out of the supposed failure of the historical Jesus.

Undoubtedly there is much that divides these schools. Nevertheless, they are united by a common motive: a desire to abstract the meaning of Jesus from the particularities of his historical setting. This desire, which Georges Florovsky has called a perpetual companion and peril of Christian theology since the days of Justin Martyr (c. 110–c. 165), was stigmatized again in 1959 by Pannenberg as common to both major “modern” schools:

Their common starting-point can be seen in the feeling that historical-critical research no longer left any room in its scientific determination of what had actually happened for any redemptive event. For this reason, Heilsgeschichte theology fled into the haven of supra-history or—with Barth—pre-history (Urgeschichte), supposedly safe from the flood of historical criticism. For the same reason, existentialist theology retreated from the objective course of events, which it saw as lacking in meaning and in saving force, back to the experience of the meaningfulness of history in the “historicality” of the individual [in Grundfragen systematischer Theologie, Göttingen, 1967; translation mine].

A less prominent but nonetheless significant equation between the two schools was made in a popular pamphlet by Martin Voigt published in Germany in 1966, What Does Modern Theology Want? Voigt speaks of “three discoveries of recent theology”:

1. the humanity of the Bible;

2. the literary forms of the Bible (form criticism);

3. the central content of the Bible as dialectical theology.

(The evangelical will quickly recognize that the human role in the origin of the Bible is not a discovery of modern theology but is itself a biblical teaching [2 Pet. 1:21, for example]. The scholarly method known as form criticism has brought considerable advances in some areas of our understanding of the biblical documents, but its uncontrolled proliferation has also spread much confusion and misinformation. As to the idea of dialectical theology as the central content of the Bible, this is not merely not a “discovery”; it is positively false. But at the moment it is not our task to challenge the accuracy of Voigt’s analysis; we need only recognize that he reflects what modern theology thinks of itself.)

After having “recognized” these things, theology then turned its attention to the hermeneutical problem, i.e., to the characteristic concern of Bultmann and his successors. Voigt speaks (1) of separating the kerygma from supposedly historical but factually false accounts; (2) of separating it from “mythological” conceptions; (3) of rejecting all interest in the historical reality of a New Testament event such as the Resurrection, because we are concerned only with faith in the Risen One today; (4) finally, of deliberately abandoning every kind of assurance or security in faith, so that existentialist interpretation achieves a new, liberating, “authentic” self-understanding.

Even though dialectical or neo-orthodox theology would not be very happy with Voigt’s second and third steps, it too achieves step 4, and makes it a principle to do away with every trace of assurance or confident possession in our relationship to the Christ whom we approach by faith. Despite dialectical theology’s frequent affirmations of the reality of God’s redemptive action in Christ, Voigt is correct in seeing (a) a lack of interest in history and (b) a programmatic rejection of assurance or security in faith, as common factors uniting the divergent strains of modern theology and giving us the right to speak of it as a unity in some significant respects. An examination of modern theology’s distaste for real history will cast some light on its rejection of security, traditionally one of the great benefits of the Reformation, and enable us to sense something of the fateful nobility—and destined futility—of the courage of the modern theologian.

The Withdrawal from Real History

Professor Willi Marxen, born in 1919, is not only one of Germany’s more prominent figures in New Testament scholarship but also a very precise and clear writer—a particularly praiseworthy quality in a theologian in any age. He has devoted a considerable amount of attention to what seems to be a radically skeptical historical analysis of the New Testament teaching on the Resurrection, well illustrated by his pamphlet The Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical and Theological Problem, (Die Auferstehung Jesu als historisches und als theologisches Problem, Gütersloh, 1964). In the second paragraph of this essay, originally a guest lecture in Heidelberg, Professor Marxen warns his readers of the “Babylonian confusion” that often arises in formulating the problem of the Resurrection and says this can be avoided by “a more precise formulation and argumentation.” No fellow scholar will begrudge Professor Marxen his desire for more precision, especially upon noting that in his first paragraph he himself brings a little “Babylonian confusion.” First he quotes St. Paul: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14); then he attempts to explain what the sentence means by putting it slightly differently: “If Christ has not been raised, then our kerygma is without foundation, then your faith is also without foundation.” This means, he says, that “without the resurrection of Jesus, there would be no church.”

The rendering “in vain” in the King James and Revised Standard versions, like the usual German translation leer, seems a better rendering of the Greek kenòn than Marxen’s “without foundation” (ohne Grundlage); Hans Lietzmann in Handbuch zum Neuen Testament renders it “without content” (ohne Inhalt). Marxen’s substitution of “foundation” for “content” is immediately followed by the paraphrase of Paul’s argument, which in Marxen’s view means “there would be no church.” The hasty reader can easily overlook the serious implications of this false equation. Recognizing (a) the reality of Jesus’ resurrection and (b) its importance for the life of the Church, he may well fail to note that what St. Paul says is significantly different from Marxen’s interpretation. To say, “Your faith has no content,” is different from saying, “Your faith has no foundation”; and in this context, the difference is very important.

Paul was speaking to a group of people in Corinth who actually constituted a congregation, a part of the young Church, though some of them denied the resurrection of the body. Since they did exist while critical of the Resurrection, Paul could hardly have argued with them, as Marxen postulates. Instead, while tacitly admitting that the Church could exist without a foundation, Paul calls the preaching and faith of such a church empty and futile.

The tragedy of the Church is that it can exist without a foundation; it often does. The tragedy of the theologian is that he can proclaim a message without content, and hold a faith without content. For him to do so is a difficult and dangerous undertaking: it requires the courage of the modern theologian. The courage of the modern theologian lies in this: where the Apostle—and historic Christian theology—saw a logical relation, a meaningful sequence of facts and their consequences, the modern theologian has destroyed the connection, broken the sequences, and—unwilling to lose Jesus entirely—cast himself into the gap.

Perhaps Professor Marxen is not even clearly aware of what he is doing. Where Paul has a logical sequence, Marxen substitutes a functional relation of cause and effect. Paul has the sequence Resurrection (as a historical fact)—proclamation of the Resurrection—faith in the Risen Lord—life of the Church. Marxen does not deny that the life of the Church is contingent upon the Resurrection; but for him it is contingent in quite a different way than it was for St. Paul. As his writings show, Professor Marxen feels that the historical evidence prevents him from believing that the Resurrection actually took place, or even that the apostles reported it as a fact (he contends that they only reasoned, on the basis of their visionary experiences, that it must have been a fact). So the argument of Paul, from the fact of Christ’s resurrection to the content of his own preaching and then to the faith of the Church, is impossible for him to follow. Nevertheless, he is unwilling to abandon what he calls “the cause of Jesus” (die Sache Jesu). Since he cannot deny that the Easter message caused the Church to come into being but finds it impossible to accept the logical, rationally comprehensible content of the Easter message as the real history of the death and resurrection of the divine-human Saviour, Marxen—like many others—is forced to connect the Easter story with his own faith today in a different way: in a contentless, non-rational way. Therefore, where Paul says “without content,” Professor Marxen says “without foundation.” The Resurrection is no longer for him the rational content of Christian proclamation and faith, as it was for St. Paul; it is the mysterious, misunderstood incident that triggered the faith of the church—and also, almost accidentally, the imaginative, interpretative reports of the evangelists. He wants, somehow, to hold onto the response of faith to the Easter visions, even though he cannot accept the Easter message—and that requires a special kind of courage.

The Need for Courage

Professor Gerhard Ebeling has written these words in The Nature of Christian Faith:

It takes courage to jump off the ten-meter board into the water. It takes courage to entrust oneself to the parachute which only opens once one has started to fall, and to throw oneself into the yawning deep. It takes … incomparably more courage in the last analysis not to rely upon anything at all in the world, but to fall, so to speak, through everything into God. (Das Wesen des christlichen Glaubens, Tübingen, 1959, p. 119).

Naturally a practical man is not readily convinced that the life of the modern theologian is more daring than that of the paratrooper; yet there is something in Professor Ebeling’s statement. There is something incomparably difficult about having no one and nothing to trust, and proclaiming precisely that as “good news.” Thomas J. J. Altizer, a more radical “modern” than either Bultmann, Marxen, or Ebeling, a man who can hardly claim that his theological opinions are scientific, says that his kind of “radical Christian” must accept being banished from every hope in a transcendent life or power, and that “he has chosen a darkness issuing from the death of every image and symbol of transcendence …” (The Gospel of Christian Atheism, Philadelphia, 1966, p. 139). Altizer’s strange idea that a real resurrection would destroy the meaning of Christ comes, not from the New Testament, but from Hegel, Blake, and Nietzsche, and neither Marxen nor any other reputable New Testament scholar would follow him to those sources. But is Marxen’s view so different? He says: “We must ask precisely this: What right do we have to speak Christianly of the resurrection of Jesus?” (op. cit., p. 34). Then he tells us that we can speak of the Resurrection only if we are willing to use “older terminology” and “know the absolute limitations of this terminology.” In other words, we can talk about the Resurrection only if we know enough about the terminology to know that it can’t possibly mean that Jesus rose from the dead.

What does it mean, then, when, in the light of such an analysis, Marxen concludes his inquiry with the affirmation: “Therefore I can confess today: He lives; He did not remain in death. He has risen”? Perhaps less as a critical historian than as a spiritual heir of the Enlightenment, Marxen feels that a “horrid trench,” to use Lessing’s expression (ein garstiger Graben), separates the real events of the life of Jesus from modern man in his need to find a meaning for his life. Unable to bridge the trench with his scholarship, having in fact contributed to breaking down the bridges that exist in the minds of others, and yet unwilling to lose contact with the mysterious and inspiring figure of Jesus, he throws himself into the trench and exclaims, after thirty pages of qualifications, “He has risen.”

The Icy Slopes of Modern Theology

Many modern theologians, then, manifest a remarkable desire to hold fast to Jesus together with a zeal to break down what we have called the logical, rationally meaningful connections between the events of his time and ours. This attitude requires a kind of courage, just as Ebeling claims. It also requires a powerful and energetic mind. Therein lies part of its attraction for theological students, as well as its Achilles heel for theologians and others alike.

Understanding traditional theology requires no specially powerful imagination. Of course, the redemptive events described in the Apostles’ Creed ultimately remain mysteries; but in their literal meaning they can be stated and grasped, and their relevance to the individual man today clearly seen. If Jesus really rose from the grave on the third day, and if he offers me a like resurrection if I believe in him, that is easy enough to grasp. But if he did not rise, if instead the apostles interpreted their own enthusiastic experiences by talking of a resurrection, then considerable imaginative power is needed to make it clear just why and how that should be significant for me today. The young theologian is naturally tempted to follow a system that makes the contemporary relevance of the Resurrection dependent on his own powers of comprehension and persuasion. (Thus Marxen says, “If I know the absolute limitations of this terminology.…”)

Quite apart from the historical or factual difficulty involved (the very strong case in history and faith for the literal, historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead), this position has a practical difficulty for the theologian: holding onto it is difficult. Marxen throws himself into the historical-critical gap, trying with a bizarre courage to hold to the Jesus who is vanishing in his historical inquiry. But others, many others, let go. Altizer is an extreme case. But—to name some other Americans—Schubert Ogden reduces Christian faith to nothing more than man’s possibility of authentic existence; for Paul van Buren, Jesus only happens to be our liberator rather than Socrates. Examples of theologians who have lost their footing on Marxen’s icy ground could be multiplied.

The ordinary man, less inclined to attempt feats of intellectual concentration, to hold together a paradox by his own mental force, seldom even begins to follow the modern theologians into these speculative fields. It is seldom remarked but very significant that despite the evangelistic intention of Bultmann, Robinson, Marxen, et al.—that is, despite their desire to make it easier for modern, twentieth-century man in some sense to accept the Gospel—modern man does not run to them for religious help. Those who think that Christianity may have the answer usually turn to Billy Graham or to another preacher with a clear, comprehensible message. Or some searchers wander into the perfumed gardens of real or ersatz Oriental mysticism. Very few indeed turn to modern theologians in the quest for real answers to ultimate questions. In the non-intellectual man, this may be laid to intellectual sloth—but can we fairly say that Jesus came to bring his message only to those of Kierkegaardian mental powers? And the intellectual who is not a theologian—the attorney, doctor, scientist—seldom has either the leisure or the inclination to tax his mind by attempting to make it alone bridge the gap between Jesus and modern man.

The courage of the modern theologian must be recognized. It is a strange and fatal kind of courage, admittedly. Ultimately it is rather like the courage of Dr. Faust in the earliest versions of the Faust story, who realized that God could forgive him even his pact with the devil if he would repent and claim the finished work of Christ but who resolved, for the sake of his honor, to keep his word to the devil. There is something manly about Dr. Faust; we all are attracted to rebellious courage. But to rebel against the truth of the universe is not only courageous—it is fatal. To step out onto modern theology’s icy slopes takes courage, perhaps not quite the same courage as that of Professor Ebeling’s parachutist or of the martyrs who witnessed with their blood, but still real courage. It is a foolhardy courage, however, because it flies in the face of truth. The “honor” of Dr. Faust is not something for us to emulate. And very few modern men do in fact follow the modern theologian in his mentally anguishing, self-sacrificial leap into the gap.

The Historicity of the Resurrection

Perhaps the strangest thing about all this courage is that, in the name of history, it also flies into the face of history. As the recent discussion of the Resurrection in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (April 12 issue) shows, theologians’ doubts about the resurrection of Christ spring far more from philosophical presuppositions than from historical evidence. Henri-Irénée Marrou tells us that it is the philosopher in the historian who causes the past to lose its concrete reality and become nothing but a depot of philosophical truths, and he rightly observes that this is a source of perpetual irritation to the pure historian, (De la connaissance historique, Paris, 1954, p. 256). As Pierre Barthel observes about Bultmann, he has set for the historian the three-fold task of doing, at one and the same time, historical-critical research, existential analysis, and theology on the basis of salvation by grace alone—an extremely complex task (Interpretation du langage mythique et théologie biblique, Leiden, 1963, p. 80). It seems fair to observe that such a philosophical, existential, theological task can only obscure the historian’s ability to see what really happened and its overwhelming importance for the history of the individual and of the world.

Perhaps Pannenberg is not quite right when he suggests that the Resurrection should be accessible, through ordinary history, to any investigator of good will. There is a role for faith, for only by faith and through the Holy Spirit can we really grasp the truths of the Gospel. And this is not a weakness of our position, something to which to turn when knowledge fails us; it is a strength, a legitimate means of access to true knowledge about what really happened in our space and our time. As Auguste Lecerf says, “What must be understood is the epistemological legitimacy of the method of dogmatics which has as its internal principle the faith (fides qua creditur) which the Spirit of God attests as being His work (testimonium Spiritus Sancti)” (Du fondement et de la spécification de la connaissance réligeuse, Paris, 1938, p. 10). By epistemological legitimacy he means, for example, that faith in the Resurrection is not a substitute for a knowledge of what actually happened, but it is precisely the real grasping and understanding of what happened.

The modern theologian, then, is a lonely man, and in a sense a courageous man. He has taken it upon himself to stand in the gap between the eternal truth of God and the meaningfulness of an individual man. But the task is too big for him. Perhaps there is a kind of Faustian nobility about attempting it, but it is a fatal nobility, for it leads, in Altizer’s expression, to banishment from every hope—in fact, to taking the total absence of tangible hope, i.e., despair, and renaming it hope. And it is unnecessary as well as futile, for there is One who was sent by God to fill the gap, to give us time-bound creatures a meaningful, living relationship to the Eternal God. This One came into our history, into our space and time. His footprints can still be found there, visible to the eyes of the historian as well as to the eyes of faith. What happened with Jesus of Nazareth has meaning not because of our courage and ability to interpret and revalue the kerygma but because of who he was—and is.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”