Some California evangelicals are breaching barriers to hippies and other urban “unreachables.” Most of the dropouts have church backgrounds, many of them evangelical. An increasing number are ministers’ sons.

Curiously, opposition from the rear threatens to isolate the evangelical pioneers in an ecclesiastical no-man’s-land.

Ask Southern Baptist evangelist Arthur Blessit, 27, who runs “His Place,” a coffeehouse on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Or converted hippie Ted Wise, 30, who heads “The Living Room,” an evangelical beachhead in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.

Sunset Strip clubs and sidewalks are clogged nightly with thousands of teens, including each night some 500 who jam into “His Place” for free coffee and sandwiches, gospel “rock, folk, and soul” tunes, and midnight sermons. Result: “Five or six receive Christ every night,” reports Blessit.

Blessit, who believes in “taking the gospel where the action is,” has also scored conversions among the “booze, dope, and sex” clientele at the famed Hollywood-A-Go-Go club during by-popular-demand Tuesday-night shows. His program: “groovy music, testimonies of ‘name’ Christians and former drug-users, and my messages—with no pulled punches.” His associate, Leo Humphrey, 33, recently led club coowner Rose Gazzarri to Christ, but a few weeks ago her partner and brother banned Blessit except for a few “seasonal” appearances. It seems other club operators fear a bad-for-business gospel aftermath.

The same group tried unsuccessfully to ban Blessit from witnessing on their sidewalks by having him arrested for blocking pedestrian traffic. The judge threw out the case during a colorful jury trial April 30. Blessit was defended by the American Civil Liberties Union. The young Jewish defense lawyer portrayed Blessit as a doctor pausing to treat spiritually ill persons in the best tradition of the Great Physician.

Most Strip transients, Blessit says, are “plastics”—young counterfeit hippies—from well-to-do families. Many blame their disillusionment on the “hypocrisy” and “misery” of Christianity as practiced at home.

Although Blessit’s talks often spark eager responses on the Strip, his appeals for follow-up help back home don’t. He offers the converts literature, training classes, and directions to evangelical churches in their home neighborhoods. But his letters to pastors requesting that they contact the youths are, dishearteningly, “almost always” unheeded.

In a survey, some pastors bluntly told Blessit they didn’t want Negroes or anyone with a hippie background in their churches. Nearly fifty others said they were “willing” but begged off because they “lacked a church program that would interest those young people.”

Frequently caught in the middle on the issue is suburban San Francisco pastor John MacDonald, one of three American Baptist ministers who founded Ted Wise’s storefront coffeehouse, “The Living Room,” more than a year ago. MacDonald says hippie converts have native inclinations to reject the institutional, regimented aspects of the Church, while longtime parishioners scorn lingering hippie nonconformity. The clash leads to “isolation versus insulation” tendencies, causing some on both sides to worship elsewhere.

Most Living Roomers have found niches of service in evangelical churches, though in every case they are a source of irritation to some among the old guard. Another “Living Room” sponsor says wryly, “Most of our people want to share their Christ with the hippies, but not their pews—until the hippies conform to ‘straight’ appearances.”

Beards, beads, and sandals are a matter of retained culture for Wise and his volunteer aides. Wise, part of the original Haight-Ashbury scene, was saved from drugs and immorality two years ago. He immediately began winning others of the psychedelic set to Christ. He now makes sails part-time to help pay “Living Room” bills. Wise has “In” status, deep-rooted evangelistic fervor, and a surprisingly keen knowledge of Scripture. The result is scores of conversions. Some new converts return home, but others insist on maintaining transiency, which makes follow-up difficult.

Drugs, especially marijuana, present special problems for many hippie converts who “don’t see anything wrong” with them. Most eventually abstain, but for unorthodox reasons. (“Who needs drugs when you can have a permanent high with Jesus?” “Christians must obey the laws, even bad ones.”)

Wise is much in demand as a speaker to youth groups, who give him an enthusiastic hearing. Most adults are wary. After it featured a story on Wise, Christian Life magazine received a storm of protest from disgusted readers. Some churches returned bundle subscriptions with expressions of worry “lest our young people read about this.” A few readers, however, offered commendations, and some even asked for help in locating runaway children. (Wise was able to find three.)

On a recent visit to Haight-Ashbury, evangelist David Wilkerson, the author of The Cross and the Switchblade, was “shocked” by the language and drug use of some new converts. He promptly denounced them and Wise’s ministry over Bay Area radio and TV and in the newspapers. The manager at one Christian radio station was dismayed by the attack; he’s a “Living Room” board member.

A local official with Wilkerson’s antidrug Teen Challenge project privately voiced regret, adding, “Dave’s authoritarian methods work with hard dope addicts, but not hippies. We haven’t had much success in reaching them.”

“Living Room” spokesmen called the magazine story “premature” and Wilkerson’s charges “a threat to our successful, but still experimental, witness.” Despite the opposition and lagging financial support, they and Wise vow to continue.

DROPOUT DIALOGUE

Even the U.S. Army has its hippies—the 100,000 “marginal soldiers” who bring their character and behavior problems into the service each year. Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D. C., has run an experimental four-month rehabilitation program for two years now. Of forty-eight graduates, three-fourths are back on regular duty. In an untreated control group, 80 per cent went AWOL, landed in a stockade, or got an undesirable discharge.

The Army psychiatrists use the basic Pavlovian system: good behavior is rewarded with passes, playing cards, education, or TV. Bad performance is ignored; not punished. Nobody has to do anything.

Among thirteen staffers on the project is Methodist hospital chaplain David W. Polhemus, who holds a weekly class with the men, few of whom have had any contact with organized religion.

One major theme is that God accepts and loves the dropout. The chaplain also advises them that nobody will listen until “you are selective in your non-conformity.” “Anything beyond three slops and a flop [meals and a night’s sleep] must be paid for through participation in life.”

One discussion-starter was, “Does life actually have an ending?” One hippie replied that life ended when he entered the Army and would start up again upon discharge.

A BISHOP BOWS OUT

Colorado’s Episcopal Bishop Joseph S. Minnis, who faced an August 20 trial on unspecified charges, said last month he would resign. But apparently the trial will be held anyway, under church law.

The charges, involving personal conduct, were made by seventeen laymen, and an indictment was subsequently issued by the denomination’s Board of Inquiry.

In a speech to the diocesan convention, Minnis said the “sickness of heart” in the diocese over the past year has taken a toll on his family, including two sons who are priests in Colorado. He did not set any date for the resignation.

THE MODERATOR

A Canadian-born ecumenist known as a theological conservative was elected moderator of the 180th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. He is the Rev. John Coventry Smith, 64, general secretary of the United Presbyterian Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations since 1959.

Smith, who spent twelve years in Japan as a missionary and was interned there for six months during World War II, was chosen on the second ballot. He received 476 of the 818 votes cast. The Rev. Frederick E. Christian, a pastor in Westfield, New Jersey, got 188 votes. The Rev. David E. Dilworth, chaplain and teacher at Whitworth College, got 154.

Smith was in the old United Presbyterian Church of North America before it merged in 1958 with the larger Presbyterian denomination, both mainly in the northern United States. He is the first from the smaller church elected moderator since Dr. Theophilus M. Taylor, whose election in 1958 was widely interpreted as a conciliatory gesture.

As a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches and the General Board of the National Council of Churches, Smith has repeatedly espoused a wide assortment of social pronouncements. He also is a soft-spoken, gracious person who has the reputation of being a committed evangelical, and he has promoted contacts with evangelicals outside the conciliar movement.

A native of Ontario, Smith grew up in western Pennsylvania and northern Ohio. He was graduated from Muskingum College and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

‘WHY’ AND ‘WAY’ FOR E.P.A.

Evangelical Press Association editors were told off twice at last month’s meeting. First by alienated youth, in The Why Generation, a provocative drama produced for the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism. Second by black militants, during two hours at “The Way,” a community center in the Minneapolis Negro sector.

The Why Generation, produced by young people at a Presbyterian church, includes bitter denunciations of the Church by youths in the United States and overseas drawn from actual interviews (see November 25, 1966, issue, page 35).

At “The Way,” Milt Williams, bearded, bushy-haired teacher of Afro-American history, delivered a brilliant, earthy survey of material left out of “white nationalist” schoolbooks.

Negroes have been in America for fifteen generations, he said, longer than nine-tenths of the whites. “We paid a hell of a lot of dues to make this country rich.” As for the diligence of white immigrants, he said, “You didn’t work any harder than my grandfather. That’s a damn lie. If you were so swinging, why weren’t you rich in Wales?” “We built the country from the ground up,” he continued, hooking his thumb in a long string of beads around his neck.

Negro Baptist minister Stanley King, head of another community-action agency, said both blacks and whites want to duck blame for the murder of 156 people in city riots. Blacks need to accept responsibility, he said, but whites must provide economic resources. “Many say, ‘lift yourselves up by your bootstraps,’ but we don’t have any boots.”

King said urban unrest “is not my problem. It’s not your problem. It’s an American problem.” The only way to stop Communist aggression in poor nations, he said, is for America to prove it believes in justice.

As for the Church, he scored its racism and said it has “hurled an anathema at the inner city.” Suburban churches are “air-conditioned cubicles with three-manual organs to drown out the cries of the perishing!” he shouted.

A white suburban minister, Methodist Rolland Robinson, spoke as president of the board of “The Way.” He said that “the Church, predominantly influenced by liberalism, has totally misunderstood” the race situation. It thought education and evolution would erase the problems. But “racism is a demon. You must exorcise it.” He said evangelicals have failed to counter the dangerous “optimism on human nature” that “perpetuates racism in the Church and condones it in society.”

If two of the black speakers were nervous about the meeting, so were some of the white visitors. One middle-aged lady editor admitted, “I got out of there as fast as possible.”

The day before, at a panel on situation ethics, talented piano Professor C. Edward Thomas of Bethel College, St. Paul, said he saw value in Joseph Fletcher’s agape emphasis. As a Negro trying to find housing, he discovered “Christian people are more concerned with their property than with me as a person.”

Closing-night speaker Lester DeKoster of the Reformed Journal and of Calvin College expressed surprise at the panel’s “mild acquiescence to Fletcher. Never has love suffered such systematic destruction.”

“Liberal theology welcomes an honesty-to-God which questions his existence,” DeKoster said. But for fifty years the Soviet Union has provided a laboratory test of the idea, and “men have gone out with God.” With God “dead,” Stalin scientifically collectivized the farms in the interests of the whole and “12 to 15 million peasants disappeared in the process.”

He said Communism proves that “when politics is not invaded by religion, it becomes an agent of destruction.” DeKoster said the “unfilled promise of evangelical Christianity to this generation” is a passion for saving men’s institutions as well as souls. He then recounted some of John Calvin’s daring, institution-saving social action in Geneva.

On internal matters, EPA rejected a bid from the ecumenical Associated Church Press to hold a joint or concurrent convention. A statement noted “friendly ties” through the several mazazines that belong to both associations but said “differences exist.” The key difference is “doctrinal distinctiveness,” said EPA President Paul Fromer of His, an ACP member; leaders feared a joint meeting could split EPA.

Judged Periodical of the Year from among EPA’s 184 publications was Campus Crusade’s bright quarterly Collegiate Challenge. But the judge in the “Most Improved Periodical” contest, Wesley Hartzell of Chicago’s American, said Challenge “has reverted to a ‘house organ’ rather than a forum appealing to all collegians and challenging them for Christ.…”

After scanning the magazines, Joseph Bayly of David C. Cook Company said that “writing hasn’t improved as much as art and layout,” and EPA subsequently voted two $150 scholarships for student writers at evangelical colleges, one for a Negro “if possible.”

SCHISMS IN ASIA

The United Presbyterian Church of West Pakistan, inheritor of the legacy of Andrew Gordon and John “Praying” Hyde, lies in shambles following a violent April split. The rupture was brewing for years over the so-called dictatorship of veteran Moderator K. L. Nasir, accused of trying to control the synod and other Presbyterian institutions.

Opponents, who say Nasir’s influence has dwindled, accuse his supporters of starting violence at the April meeting to prevent his ouster. They reportedly threw chairs and flower pots and broke windows, and general disorder prevailed. Nasir supporters—about one-third of the synod members—walked out and held their own “synod” on the grass outside. Three weeks later the Nasir party formed what it called the true Presbyterian Church, paving the way for a bitter court struggle.

President Carl McIntire of the International Council of Christian Churches, long a foe of the Presbyterian establishment, predictably showed up at the Nasir synod to fish in the troubled waters. But it was a strange catch for anti-ecumenist McIntire. Nasir was a leading figure in Pakistan ecumenical circles until the split, when he renounced these ties. He was principal of the United Theological Seminary, president of the West Pakistan Christian Council, a member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, and a strong advocate of a proposed united church.

The new denomination joined McIntire and split with the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. Nasir based the action on the U. S. “Confession of 1967,” but the Pakistan synod had earlier discussed the new confession and rejected it in favor of the traditional Westminster Confession. A missionary said, “Liberal theology is no problem here because it just won’t stand up in a Muslim culture.”

The real issue appears to be money and control of institutions. One missionary said, “Unfortunately, none of the church leaders are clean in this fight. There could be no neutrals. Everybody had to pledge loyalty to one party or another. The only clean ones are the laymen.” No one is quite sure whether the laymen will support their pastors in secession.

The bitterness goes deep, and the majority Muslims are likely to see the Christian minority fighting and fragmented for a long time to come.

In neighboring India, meanwhile, McIntire’s ICCC claims to have won the allegiance of 471 Baptist congregations in the Telegu area. The American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, however, estimates the dissident group led by the Rev. J. Edward at between five and twenty congregations.

An ABFMS spokesman said that in 1957 the vast majority of South India’s Baptist churches voted to form Telegu “Samavesam” in order to circumvent a complicated legal battle with Edward. He said this group, which continues ABFMS affiliation, includes 553 churches with about 190,000 members. In the intervening decade Edward has lost three lawsuits, and in January of this year his churches voted to link up with the ICCC.

Edward claims his group is nationalist and lay-oriented—similar to the Burmese Baptist Convention, which he says brought about the expulsion of missionaries from that nation in 1966.

In a letter to McIntire, Edward said the missionaries employ “a gang of parasites, sycophants, mercenaries, satellites, seducers, and guerrillas,” attracted by “bags of foreign money.”

As to Edward’s charges of heresy, the ABFMS official said the South India affiliates are “as conservative as you’re likely to find.” Edward also opposes participation in the National Christian Council of India and use of the New English Bible.

HAITI INVASION ATTEMPT

Raymond Joseph, Wheaton College graduate who leads the Haitian Coalition, said that his group of exiles in the United States did not organize last month’s invasion of Haiti by anti-Duvalier forces in the Bahamas, but they agreed with the goals of the group. Lay preacher Arthur Bonhomme, Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, announced that the small invasion force had been crushed at Cap Haitien. Haiti then lodged in the United Nations an official complaint against the United States that referred to Joseph’s shortwave broadcasts critical of the Duvalier regime (see March 15 issue, page 43).

Portland: Melting The Resrve

By the time they near the half-century mark, most evangelists tend to slow down, to lose their luster, to establish institutions, and to reminisce. George Whitefield was an exception. So is Billy Graham.

In Portland, Oregon, last fortnight, the roses were still in bud, but the man Graham was in full bloom. Presidential candidates were whistle-stopping around the state, mostly with indifferent results; but the appeal of Graham’s message was undiminished. The new Memorial Coliseum on the banks of the Willamette plus two overflow rooms were filled each night as he proclaimed the same Gospel that had won such an astonishing hearing a month earlier in Sydney, Australia. (Three services of the Portland crusade will be telecast in color in hundreds of cities beginning June 17.)

The attraction for young people was again evident, and Graham reaped his advantage by scheduling three youth nights in nine days. He invited a dozen “rose princesses” to sit on his platform, and one of them gave her Christian testimony. He shared his pulpit with the popular U. S. Senator Mark O. Hatfield, whose Christian testimony is well known. Norma Zimmer of the Lawrence Welk TV show also gave a Christian testimony and sang.

As a result, things began to happen. The sight of hundreds of young people flocking forward nightly to give their lives to Christ melted the reserve of many a conservative Oregonian. Church leaders, excited to see their own people making spiritual commitments, began to speak of “revival” and “awakening.”

By the time the ten-day crusade was half over, 99,730 persons had passed through the coliseum turnstiles and 2,830 had passed through another kind of turnstile, the nature of which only the Spirit of God knew. Well over half of these were making first-time commitments to Jesus Christ.

A nurse at the first-aid station in the coliseum heard the invitation one night and responded in uniform. A minister and his wife and son came forward, the parents for rededication, and when the counselor filled out the wife’s card he referred her to her husband.

Many links with an earlier crusade in the Rose City were discovered. A man and his wife had found Christ in 1950 in the tabernacle on Glisan Street; this time their three children made commitments. The chairman of the counselors serving each night was himself a 1950 convert.

But this year Portland faced urban problems unknown in post-war days. A Negro member of the Graham team, associate evangelist Ralph Bell of Los Angeles, was one of the chief speakers at the School of Evangelism held during the crusade and attended by some 420 seminarians and young pastors from four Western states. Bell warned them that evangelical churches have been inexcusably slow to accord Christian treatment to their Negro brethren.

Editorialized the Oregon Journal, “A Graham campaign gives a moral and spiritual lift to a city or a region wherever it is conducted. Portland and its environs was no exception.” As the crusade moved to its climax, that opinion seemed well grounded.

SHERWOOD E. WIRT

In a time of troubles and change, what are the Church’s priorities?

That was the question that kept popping up for commissioners to the 180th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church during a cool week in May in Minneapolis. Whenever it seemed an answer was ready, the question was raised again.

Answers were slow in coming, and debate lasted long in the denomination’s first assembly since its 1967 adoption of a new doctrinal stance. The ambiguity of the church’s Book of Confessions was reflected in some of the governing body’s actions.

Commissioners got one of their cues from John Coventry Smith, the veteran executive of the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COE-MAR), elected as this year’s moderator (see page 42). “The Christian in a time of troubles” was the theme of his Sunday sermon in Westminster Presbyterian Church. A Christian’s faith and hope, he said, give him impetus to work for the establishment of the kingdom of God. Smith added the Christian knows that his work “must deal with more than the life of individual persons.” Suggesting political involvement, he added, “People are also participants in the structures of society, structures which can enhance their humanity or dehumanize them.”

From this departure point the assembly went into a variety of recommendations from agencies dealing with denominational programs. COEMAR won endorsement of its plans to spend some $100,000 in deploying seventy-five overseas missionaries and churchmen in American urban centers during the remainder of 1968. The national missions agency got endorsement of its emphasis on housing. In its action on an evangelism report, the body called for production and promotion of materials to aid in personal evangelism, but it also approved such current emphases of its evangelism division as “demonstration of love.”

Boards and agencies were directed to implement buying and contracting policies favoring businesses with equal-employment practices. They were directed to invest up to 30 per cent of their non-restricted funds in high-risk, low-interest ghetto investments.

Much attention was devoted by the assembly to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and its Poor Peoples’ Campaign and March on Washington. This month’s fund for freedom will be a special target, with a goal of $200,000. SCLC will get the first $100,000 for a Martin Luther King economic development fund, and SCLC was authorized to use up to $50,000 for the march, with the understanding that it would later restore the money to the development fund. The assembly also gave an offering of over $4,000 to the march and called for de-escalation of the Viet Nam war.

An early assembly speaker was SCLC President Ralph David Abernathy. On the theme of a time of troubles, he called on the Presbyterians to be “trouble-makers” of the sort that Martin Luther King was. The Baptist minister urged “massive public action … whatever it may cost,” including a guaranteed annual income as a right.

The assembly echoed this, calling it a pronouncement for “eventual elimination of the present welfare system and for the establishment of an adequate income for all … as a basic human right.” In the same document the assembly called on Negro members of the church to involve themselves in the “black power” movement. Service to this cause “is a service to the church of Jesus Christ and to the nation.”

The assembly was one of surprises for many participants and observers.

Among the unusual actions was election of New York community organizer Robert Lee Washington to the denomination’s General Council. He was nominated from the floor and won over National Council of Churches official Ellsworth Stanton III, who was described as not being a representative of the struggle for minority rights. Both candidates are Negro laymen.

Also unexpected was a ruling on glossolalia. In a judicial proceeding, the assembly upheld the right of an Arizona minister to refuse his presbytery’s insistence that he vow not to speak in tongues, exorcise spirits or otherwise engage in manifestations of the gifts of the Spirit. The case was decided on the technical point that a presbytery cannot require any vows other than those required of all ministers at ordination and installation. The assembly created a special committee to study the glossolalia issue.

In an unprecedented action, the assembly turned down the preliminary judgment of its permanent judicial commission in a judicial case. An Iowa couple, Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Baker, had been excommunicated by presbytery for disturbing the peace and the unity of their congregation in opposing destruction of an old church building. Two members of the assembly’s permanent judicial commission dissented from the judgment recommended by other members of the panel on the basis of irregularities in presbytery trial procedures. After hearing the reading of the long dissent the commissioners to the assembly, on a standing vote, rejected the preliminary judgment. The matter then went back to the permanent judicial commission for rehearing. Three dissents developed from the rehearing, but the assembly reversed itself and approved the preliminary judgment when the case came back to it.

The assembly decided to continue the operation of Johnson C. Smith Seminary at Charlotte, North Carolina. The parent institution, Johnson C. Smith University, and the denomination’s council on theological education had taken steps to close the Negro institution. After hearing protests from alumni, the assembly set up a blue-ribbon commission to keep the seminary in operation temporarily, possibly relocating it at the interdenominational theological center in Atlanta, Georgia. Provision was made for $150,000 to operate the commission, which will also be charged with recommending long-range policy for ministerial education in the Southeast at the next assembly.

The actions were taken by the court against a background of statistics to the church’s own trouble. Last year it lost over 25,000 members (not counting 4,000 removed when an autonomous church was created of the former Presbytery of Cuba.) It was the second annual net loss. Denominational income was up last year, but not enough to keep the agencies from dipping into their reserves to maintain programs at current levels.

EXPOSING A RIFT

A petition is being circulated among United Presbyterians to lay bare grassroots concern over liberal trends in the denomination. “When all the signatures have been tallied,” sponsors say, “our denominational leaders will know the magnitude of the rift which has been created by the passage of the Confession of 1967.”

The basis for the desired signatures is “An Affirmation” of 1,900 words emphasizing “acceptance of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.” The three-part document charges that the United Presbyterian Church has recently deviated from its constitution, from orthodox theology, and from earlier concepts of church-state relations. Pastors and laymen are asked to lend their signatures if they agree generally with the basic principles of the affirmation.

The appeal for signatures is being circulated by a group known as the Fellowship of Concerned Presbyterians—U. S. A. The document was adopted October 4, 1967, at a meeting of the fellowship at the Great Valley Presbyterian Church, Malvern, Pennsylvania. Those originally signing the affirmation were David W. Baker, James A. Clark, Ralph P. Coleman, Jr., Luther P. Fincke, Raymond N. Ohman, and Leon F. Wardell.

NOSTALGIA IN PHILADELPHIA

The city of Philadelphia looms large in the life of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The denomination began there 181 years ago when a group of Negroes, asked to move to a special section of St. George Methodist Episcopal Church, left in protest. In 1816 Philadelphia was the site of the denomination’s first convention. And last month the AME Church met there for its thirty-eighth Quadrennial Conference.

Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who spoke early in the fourteen-day convention, drew parallels between the 1816 conference and the Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia 130 years later. There, he said, “a group of us … demanded … that humanity be placed above politics.” And today, he added, “words spoken at that convention in 1946 are still true: ‘People—human beings—this is the issue of the twentieth century.’ ”

The Rev. F. C. James, social-action consultant for the denomination, said the AME Church “needs to identify anew with the pressing issues facing the underprivileged in the country. We had that identity in the beginning, but in recent years we have had so many internal problems and so much need for ecclesiastical reform that we have gotten away from pressing social issues.”

The denomination moved toward that identity by establishing its first Department of Social Action, which will study ways to implement concern for poverty, urban renewal, and the indiscriminate use of natural resources.

Most of the conference time was required for administrating the thirteen U. S. and six foreign districts with more than a million members, electing bishops, and revising the book of discipline. One bishop was reinstated after his eleven-year suspension for infraction of the rule that a bishop may not handle the fiscal affairs of his district.

Delegates received an invitation from the United Methodist Church—extended also to two other predominantly Negro churches—to join in merger dialogues. Although there was much discussion, no official reply was made. Delegates decided to continue the denomination’s representation in COCU, and they established liaison committees to discuss union with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Although the three denominations are similar in origin, doctrine, and organization, they grew independently in different parts of the country with no thought until recently of reuniting.

Meanwhile in Detroit the AME Zion Church, meeting for its quadrennial convention, also expressed ecumenical interest. Delegates talked about union with AME and CME churches as well as with the United Methodist Church and decided to maintain representation in COCU.

Social problems confronted the delegates, whose denomination began in 1796 because of racial discrimination at John Street Methodist Church in New York City. They heard both Roy Wilkins, NAACP executive, and Whitney Young, head of the Urban League, urge non-violence this summer; and they heard Vice-President Humphrey say that racial and economic problems should be approached as problems of America, not of a minority group.

Delegates passed a resolution to appoint a social-action committee to take over some of the areas formerly handled by the Christian-education committee.

The church’s Layman’s Council proposed some departures from traditional forms of church structure in order to save money and make the program more efficient. But some clergymen were hesitant about changes, and tension resulted. Proposed changes would affect church curriculum, ministerial training and support, overseas churches, public relations, and distribution of financial secretaries.

In other action, the AME Zion Church put an African, rather than an American, bishop in charge of its African work and voted to establish a study commission on divorce. Many in the church have opposed its conservative attitude toward divorce, feeling a need to face contemporary society more realistically, as many other Protestant groups do.

In the quaint old university town of Uppsala, Sweden, students have already cleared out for the summer holidays. Ordinarily, the townspeople would also be busying themselves with vacation plans by this time. Swedish law provides everyone with a guaranteed four-week vacation, so most industries shut down completely. But this will not be a normal summer in Uppsala. Beginning July 4, the town will play host to the biggest and most important ecumenical clambake yet, the seventeen-day Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches.

Uppsala residents may not be aware that the assembly could turn their town into an ecclesiastical storm center. Radical forces in the WCC, bent on making churches a major instrument of socio-economic change, will seek delegate approval of militant strategies. A draft of a document due to be adopted by the assembly calls for “revolutionary action” to correct social ills, acknowledging that such action “may, if not kept under control, lead to even greater suffering.”

As many as three thousand persons, including 800 official delegates, may pour into Uppsala to witness the assembly. The town, about forty miles north of Stockholm, has a population of about 80,000. Since the year 1164 it has served as the seat of the Swedish Lutheran archbishop. Parts of the Gothic cathedral in Uppsala date back to the thirteenth century.

But the assembly theme, appropriated from Revelation 21:5, is “All Things New,” and delegates will be expected to use twenty-hour days occasioned by the northern latitude (about the same as that of Juneau, Alaska) to help engineer the demise of old orders. The WCC Central Committee’s report to the assembly contends that “the Council has moved out of the stage of discussing social ethics in general and has stimulated the churches to take specific action to establish social justice.”

A big question is whether delegates will put more muscle in the draft on “revolutionary action” (see adjoining text) or will soften it. Militant churchmen can be expected to attempt to win endorsement for force and violence.

Pope Paul VI has been rumored to be a possible speaker at the assembly. The late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was to have given a major address. Evangelist Billy Graham has accepted an invitation to attend, but his role on the program has not yet been announced.

Some WCC leaders will be inclined to temper pronouncements, in the light of the World Council’s deteriorating public image and its financial standing. The WCC’s basic annual budget is now up to about $1,000,000, and the Uppsala meeting may cost nearly half that much. The council has not been able to put as much money aside for Uppsala as it desired. Official reports indicate that operations this year will create a sizable deficit for the first time in the WCC’s twenty-year history. “Inflationary tendencies and the rising costs throughout the Western World” are blamed.

Another problem facing the World Council is the growing theological confusion since its New Delhi assembly in 1961. The WCC Central Committee now openly admits that “the emerging ecumenical consensus on a number of important points of faith and order or of life and work is less stable than had been supposed.”

Toward A Sadder Tomorrow?

From a draft of a proposal to be presented to the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches:

In their faith in the coming Kingdom of God, Christians agree that no given state or society is sacrosanct, and that it is their duty to contribute actively to the continual renewal of social institutions and structures, where these have fallen short of allowing individuals, groups, or communities to develop and live in human dignity.

While we do not differ about the ultimate goal of these endeavours, we find it hard to agree on a common road to achieve them:

There are those who argue that the injustice done to certain people under the present state of affairs is such that the entire establishment order should be overthrown. To wait for an evolutionary change of conditions would be to cover up and condone corruption and violation of human rights.

On the other side, there are those who argue that there are certain problems of social reconstruction for which, by the nature of things, there is no quick solution. Bloodshed and other violence could not produce them, since the fabric of human society today is too complex and interdependent. No one would gain from its destruction.

Although we cannot reconcile these extreme positions, we recognize that there are situations in which development is prevented by the existing power structure, and in which revolutionary action to achieve a radical change of social structures or of the political regime seems the only way to arrive at a social order based on greater justice. Such revolutionary action should not be idealized, for it may be costly in terms of many human values and may, if not kept under control, lead to even greater suffering. But the possibility should not be excluded that, in this dilemma, it may be an expression of Christian responsibility to take revolutionary action rather than to acquiesce in the indefinite continuation of an oppressive status quo.

Still another persistent issue is the WCC’s problem of identity and nature. It is still trying to figure out what it is. The Central Committee notes that “it became clear” at a faith-and-order conference in Montreal in 1963 that “it was not yet possible to arrive as a common ecclesiological definition of the nature of the World Council.” The same year in Rochester, New York, the Central Committee discussed, “What can we say together about the meaning of membership in the WCC?” A paper on the subject by the WCC general secretary was sent to member churches for study and comment. “Unfortunately,” the Central Committee notes, “so few churches responded that it was not possible to prepare a further report.”

Undeterred by the muddle, WCC leaders seek to expand the influence of the ecumenical movement and to make it more inclusive of Christendom. Their priority target (aside from the world’s half billion Roman Catholics) is “the conservative evangelicals.” Organizationally, these prospects are manifest mainly in the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and the National Association of Evangelicals. The Central Committee report says about the NAE churches that “there are many in their leadership and membership who are well-disposed towards the World Council and who participate in its consultations and conferences, but others are ambivalent or take a more negative view.” Two consultations between the WCC and “the conservative evangelicals” have already been held (in 1961 and 1965), and another is to take place in Bossey, Switzerland, after the Uppsala assembly.

On the one hand, Chairman Franklin Clark Fry of the Central Committee argues that “nobody even faintly intends that the Council should ever get away from the churches, either to be above them or distant from them.” From another perspective, however, the World Council propels the concept of a more centrally authoritative, inclusive Christian ecumenism.

Among proposals to be offered at Uppsala is one expressing “hope for a Universal Council.” “How will the churches of the whole world speak and act together?” a draft asks. “Will it happen again as in the first centuries that they will occasionally come together in a Universal Council?” The ecumenical movement, it adds, “works towards the time when such a Council may become a reality.”

HOUSEKEEPING—IN PRIVATE

Observers from three East Europe satellite nations were among observers at last month’s General Council of the World Evangelical Fellowship in Lausanne, Switzerland. Most of the week was spent on housekeeping matters for the WEF, which stresses a minimum of central organization.

The Rev. I. Ben Wati, a Baptist from India, won a five-year term as council president, the first person from outside the United States and Britain to hold the post. In contrast to previous meetings, only three of the sixty-five persons attending the council were U. S. delegates: President Arnold T. Olson, General Director Clyde W. Taylor, and Dr. Hudson Armerding, all representing the National Association of Evangelicals.

Canadian Baptist Dennis E. Clark was re-elected international secretary, but WEF headquarters will be shifted from Canada to Lausanne.

The meetings were closed to the press. One delegate said little mention was made of the World Council of Churches. The sixteen-year-old WEF, a conservative counterpart of the WCC, has several affiliates that have ties with both groups, including alliances in Germany, France, Denmark, and Switzerland that were voted into the WEF at the recent meeting. The WEF constituency includes several million evangelicals in eighteen countries, and five new national associations are close to joining.

After much discussion of evangelism, the WEF decided to support the Rev. Samuel Kamalesan, a Methodist in Madras, India, in part-time evangelism. It also appointed part-time coordinators of youth work and theological study.

CLIMAX IN CONFUSION?

Student groups in Scandinavia urge churches that “wish to take biblical revelation seriously” to withdraw from the World Council of Churches. They cite a need for a viable alternative to the present ecumenical movement.

The call came out of a four-day meeting at Enebakk, Norway, this spring. On hand were representatives of Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish evangelical student organizations. They adopted a declaration saying, “The preparatory documents for the Uppsala assembly this summer clearly show that the criticisms of the World Council of Churches over a period of many years have not been unfounded, and that the ecumenism within the World Council of Churches now has been carried to a preliminary climax of confusing ideas and opinion about the faith of the church and its tasks.”

In contrast to most other evangelical student unions around the world that are members of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, such as Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in the United States, the Scandinavian movements have a strongly confessional Lutheran orientation. Since the four Scandinavian state churches belong to the World Council and have played an important role in WCC development, and since the Scandinavian student fellowships want to maintain loyalty to their national Lutheran heritage, the official relation of the state churches to the World Council is more of a problem in Scandinavia than elsewhere, with the possible exception of French-speaking Switzerland, where conformist pressure is also strong.

At the Enebakk meeting, attention was frequently drawn to the inhibiting effect that the WCC and the Lutheran World Federation have had upon the evangelizing and catechizing work of Norwegian Lutheran missionaries.

Participants unanimously concluded that biblical principles have virtually disappeared as a motivating force behind WCC actions. They felt that an alternative movement should be initiated, not with syncretistic, bureaucratic, super-church tendencies, but as an actively functioning theological forum in which evangelical believers could express and implement their unity in Christ and their fidelity to the whole of the biblical revelation without prejudicing the diversity of theological and confessional opinion that exists among them. It was agreed that organizations such as IFES and perhaps the World Evangelical Fellowship are a step in the right direction, but that they leave unmet the need for a real discussion of disputed doctrinal issues, such as those that divide the Lutheran churches from the Reformed.

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

Three Views Of Vatican Ii

Ad Limina Apostolorum, by Karl Barth (John Knox, 1967, 79 pp., $1.50), Vatican Council II: The New Direction, by Oscar Cullmann (Harper & Row, 1968, 116 pp., $6), Ecumenism or the New Reformation?, by Thomas Molnar (Funk and Wagnalls, 1968, 208 pp., $5.95), are reviewed by David H. Wallace, professor of biblical theology, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina.

Professors Karl Barth and Oscar Cullmann, who have brought such distinction to the theological faculty of Basel University, were invited to attend Vatican II as Protestant observers. Owing to illness Barth did not attend, but Cullmann was present at all sessions of the council. Barth journeyed to Rome after recovery to visit with several leading Roman Catholic figures and assess the council from a Protestant standpoint. Both theologians wrote down their evaluations of Vatican II, and both reports are characterized by sober theological discrimination, irenic criticism, caution about future prospects, and expressions of charity towards Roman Catholics in their renewal today.

Barth’s opening remarks are a salty, humane description of his encounter with Pope Paul. He confesses that he returned to Basel just as evangelical as he was upon leaving. “Any optimism about the future is excluded,” he says. “But calm, brotherly love is called for.…” Barth raises a number of probing questions about the declarations of Vatican II. Concerning the schema on freedom, Barth asks why no recourse to Scripture was sought on this issue, and then he reproaches Rome for its diplomatic concordats with civil governments that have suppressed Protestant freedoms. While Vatican II professed to stand in the tradition of Trent and Vatican I, it nevertheless assigned a higher priority to Scripture as a source of revelation than did the earlier councils. But a sharp contradiction appears in chapter 2 of this declaration; here Scripture and tradition are placed on a par, a decision Barth holds to be a “great fit of weakness.”

At the close of this brief report, Barth replies to an anonymous Roman Catholic theologian who had sent him a lecture on Mariology, asking for a critique. His peaceable disposition shines nowhere so brightly as here, and at the same time his firm Protestant refusal to acknowledge the cult of Mary is likewise evident. Knowing the restlessness of so many Catholics on this issue, Barth ventured to predict that “you will not deliver this lecture again, as interesting as it is.” Again, on the same page he writes, “The Catholic Church does not stand or fall on its Mariology.”

Cullmann’s opening chapter is a review of Heilsgeschichte (salvation history), which he urges as a foundation for a trans-confessional theology for Protestants and Catholics. Like Irenaeus, today’s theologian must resist all Gnostic substitutions of ideology for revelation-event. The schema De Divina Revelatione is criticized for its retention of Mariology, which Protestants must reject because it is not rooted in the canonical Scriptures.

Central to the book is concern for a decent balance in viewing Vatican II. Pessimists feel that nothing of any significance was achieved, and optimists see more accomplishment than the facts justify. In Cullmann’s view, one of the striking advances lay in the restoration of the Bible to a critical place in Roman Catholic theology, a development that means the diminution of scholasticism. Like Barth, Cullmann shows that the gains of Vatican II were made only within the limitations imposed by Rome’s tradition. Both warn against glib, facile evaluations that imply that rapprochement is just around the corner, for such notions are doomed by the hard realities of the dogmatic differences separating the two wings of Christendom. The task of the entire Church is not finally reunion but sincere penitence and true renewal.

Molnar’s book, published by a non-Catholic press and bearing no episcopal imprimatur, is one of the most flagitious, disgusting, testy, and vulgar books I have read in many years. Superficially a review of Vatican II by a Roman Catholic, it is a prolonged shriek of rage, resentment, frustration, hostility, derision, and studied vituperation bordering on the pathological against all modernizing, “Protestantizing,” Marxist, atheistic contaminations of the medieval purity of the Catholic faith as represented by the Council of Trent. Scholars are wont to rebuke themselves for not writing books. This volume is eloquent testimony that a worse fate is possible: to write a book like this.

The solitary virtue of the book is Molnar’s passionate commitment to the absolute centrality and finality of God’s redemptive act in Jesus Christ. However, even his “orthodoxy” is rendered grotesque by its sole appeal to the tradition, not Scripture, of the Roman church and is compounded with unbridled bitterness toward Protestantism. The Bible plays no role in his discourse.

At the outset it is clear that the Roman Catholic Church has nothing to recant, retract, review, or repent of; in its pure form it springs directly from the divine intention of Christ, nothing more or less. Therefore any criticism, from within or without the Roman communion, of its confession, theology, structure, practice, or tradition is animated by the devils of worldliness, power lust, publicity, socialism, Communism, and Protestantism. Inquiry, whether by Catholics or by anyone else, is absolutely unallowable; it can stem only from the pernicious will to disbelieve. Heresy, one of Molnar’s chief preoccupations, is a Hydra-headed monster; it begins or ends with sex; it traces to a special claim for gnosis; it rises from inattention to (Roman Catholic) history; it begins with false accusations. Molnar grasps the nettle repeatedly. Galileo was rightly excommunicated for his failure to understand Einsteinian physics, which Cardinal Barberini tried to help him perceive. “The Church authorities never asked more of the great astronomer than just this recognition.”

Three groups can be discerned as objects of his invective. His contempt for “Church-intellectuals” like Teilhard de Chardin, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and Hans Küng knows no limits. Lured into abandoning their “Mediterranean” and “Greco-Latin heritage,” slavishly following the “metaphysical underpinnings of Nordic-Protestant societies,” these false prophets are seduced by the scientific-technolosical-capitalist Protestant ethos. In addition, they are addicted to the Hegelian-Heideggerian-Marxist philosophy and are really Communists at heart. “It is noteworthy that all these Church-intellectuals are so completely sterile and unoriginal that their position is indistinguishable from that of secular sloganeers.” He is not reluctant to call them Christ-haters.

The second group is Protestant Christianity, which owes its existence to Gnosticism. After a garbled discussion of Barth, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, and Tillich, Molnar assures us that “the central Protestant thesis is that for one reason or another man cannot count upon God.” His logic is astounding. Bultmann is a Protestant; Bultmann demythologizes the New Testament; therefore all Protestants demythologize the New Testament. He is persuaded that the sole responsibility of Catholics in dialogue with Protestants is to offer them “the light by which to leave their darkness.” The Greeks had a word for this: hubris. His undiscussed assumption is that to be in the camp of Luther or Calvin is prima facie evidence of demonic apostasy. Protestantism, the “poison in the body” of the church, is the subject of the book’s finale, where he equates it with the gates of hell that shall not prevail against the (true) church.

Last, the Jews also feel his scorn. Their atheism is ineluctably implied in this sentence: “Hence the Church-intellectual’s real aim is dialogue with atheism for which the one with the Jews represents a convenient passageway.” Doubtless the most outrageous and slanderous material in the book appears in a passage in which he states that the church’s only sentiment towards the Jews has been a charitable desire to help them to the truth. He then observes that although Jews in the past may have died for their faith, the six million Jews who perished in Hitler’s holocaust were “devoid of any religion; desacralized and disintegrated, they died for nothing.”

But enough now of this vile book. It remains only to be said that the Roman Catholic Church today deserves a far better spokesman than this son of Torquemada.

New Studies In Matthew

The Use of the Old Testament in St. Matthew’s Gospel by Robert Horton Gundry (Brill, 1967, 252 pp.), and The Theme of Jewish Persecution of Christians in the Gospel According to St. Matthew by Douglas R. A. Hare (Cambridge Press, 1967, 204 pp.), are reviewed by William W. Buehler, associate professor of biblical studies, Barrington College, Barrington, Rhode Island.

Doctoral theses do not enjoy the reputation of exciting reading. Nor do they usually deal with problems of concern to a wide audience. Fortunately, these generalizations do not entirely apply to the dissertations at hand.

In an attempt to bring some order out of the plethora of theories about the source of Matthew’s quotations, Gundry calls for a re-examination of the material and in so doing opens up a fresh and provocative path in gospel studies. He holds that allusive quotation of the Old Testament was a conscious literary device and that these citations must be included in any study of Matthew’s sources. Earlier studies are faulted for their treatment of the formula-quotations in Matthew as a textually distinctive group. In a careful 176-page examination of the text-form of Matthew’s quotations, Professor Gundry comes up with some instructive results: “First, the formal quotations in the Marcan tradition are almost purely Septuagintal. Second, a mixed textual tradition is displayed elsewhere—in all strata of the synoptic material and in all forms (narrative, didactic, apocalyptic, etc.).”

From these two conclusions flow implications. The Septuagintal form of Mark’s formal quotes suggests a Hellenistic background and conforms with the tradition of a Roman origin. Matthew appropriates these quotations and thus gives evidence of his dependence upon Mark, but the mixed textual tradition apparent in the other Synoptic quotations points to a common tradition behind all three Gospels, a phenomenon that cannot be explained by any of the previous theories.

For Gundry, the only hypothesis adequate to account for the data is that of a body of loose notes standing behind the Gospels. Here he aligns himself with Goodspeed’s theory that Matthew took notes during the earthly ministry of Jesus upon which the bulk of the apostolic tradition was built.

This book makes a positive contribution to gospel studies. It serves as a needed corrective to the pessimism of the radical form critics, for it leaves one with a greater appreciation for the historicity of the Synoptic tradition.

Professor Hare approaches the theme of Jewish persecution of Christians in Matthew’s Gospel intent on determining whether Matthew exaggerated the severity of the persecutions and to what degree his theology was affected. The treatment is thorough and stimulating, and a sixty-page survey of the data of Jewish persecution of Christians found in sources other than Matthew is especially valuable.

Hare concludes that the persecution occurred primarily within the Jewish community and was directed against Christian missionaries rather than against the Christian church as a whole. Matthew (an unknown writer—not the tax collector) is seen to exaggerate at one point only: “His charge that the Pharisees are primarily responsible for the death of Christian missionaries must be regarded as without foundation in view of the available evidence.”

As to the influence upon Matthew’s theology, the persecution is primarily responsible for his pessimism concerning Israel’s place in the divine plan and for the redirecting of the Church’s energy toward the Gentiles (Matt. 28:18–20).

The least satisfying feature of the book is the author’s confidence in Redaktions-geschichte as a tool for solving problems of historicity. The result is more skepticism than this reviewer shares over what we can know about the words and actions of Jesus in the First Gospel.

Reading For Perspective

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

• The Biblical Doctrine of Heaven, by Wilbur M. Smith (Moody, $4.95). This significant work draws together scriptural teaching and scholarly judgments on many facets of a glorious but often neglected doctrine. Recommended.

• Who Was Who in Church History, by Elgin S. Moyer (Moody, $6.95). A new revision of a helpful volume of thumbnail sketches of seventeen hundred people whose vital lives influenced the course of the Christian Church.

• God in Man’s Experience, by Leonard Griffith (Word, $3.95). A Toronto minister offers perceptive expositions of twenty-one selected Psalms “written in the ink of personal experience” that will stimulate readers to study these profound hymns of faith in greater depth.

A Gold Mine Of Information

Patterns of Religious Commitment, Volume I, American Piety: The Nature of Religious Commitment, by Rodney Stark and Charles Glock (University of California, 1968, 230 pp., $6.75), is reviewed by Harry Yeide, Jr., associate professor of religion and assistant dean, Columbian College, George Washington University, Washington, D. C.

This first part of a trilogy will be followed by volumes on the sources and consequences of religious commitment. What we have here and the previews of what is to come lead me to hope that the trilogy will soon be completed. For while many will challenge the authors’ analyses, the lack of empirical data on American piety make unarguable their claim that “in terms of sheer description and empirical generalization we can hardly fail to make some important contributions.”

Using mainly data from a survey of 3,000 church members in northern California, supplemented by more broadly based information, the authors extend two points they have urged in other works. The first is that people are religious in different ways; they present widely varied mixtures of beliefs, methods of communal and private worship, religious experience, knowledge about religion, and involvement in church groups and friendship patterns. The authors attempt to express these differing modes of religious commitment in mathematical terms. Second, they also try to measure what everyone knows but sociologists often forget: that there are vast differences among Protestant groups not only in average social status but also in the kind and degree of religious commitment. Thus while 99 per cent of the Southern Baptists agreed that “Jesus is the Divine Son of God and I have no doubts about it,” only 40 per cent of the Congregationalists gave that answer. Other Protestant groups and Roman Catholics range between the two in an often repeated pattern on a large number of questions.

Readers of this journal will be interested in the assertion that conservative church bodies are suffering a net loss of members to liberal bodies. One must examine both the ability to hold members and the ability to recruit switchers. Although conservative groups do well on holding members in comparison to the liberal groups, they do very poorly in recruitment from liberals: “people who change their church tend to move from more conservative bodies to theologically more liberal ones.” The authors, aware that they contradict membership figures published by the National Council of Churches, offer reasons for believing that the NCC statistics are incorrect and/or misleading.

Glock and Stark link their findings to the larger thesis that the shift in membership in the liberal direction is but a step on the way out of the Church as we enter the post-Christian era. They are tentative in turning from description to prophecy but feel the Church must liberalize to survive. This they regard as unlikely. But they ask: Even if the Church could liberalize, would the final product be identifiably Christian?

This prognosis depends upon certain premises that flaw much of the diagnosis as well. Their idea of “orthodox” Christianity is constructed upon their perception of nineteenth-century rural American piety. Is it really surprising, then, that the Southern Baptists and certain sects consistently score highest? Does it not seem more strange, at least to Presbyterians and Lutherans, that orthodox beliefs are measured with no reference to justification by faith?

Similar questions are in order about their notion of “liberalism,” which seems at times to include any departure from their model of “orthodoxy.” Thus points of view understood by some Christian groups for centuries as orthodox can appear as signs of liberalism. On the basis of two questions on the necessity to salvation of “doing good for others” and “loving the neighbor,” the authors, noting the lower scores for some of the groups they judge as conservative, conclude that higher scores are more liberal and that liberal groups are more ethical than orthodox groups; they fail to perceive that some denominations, while encouraging “good works,” have insisted that they do not contribute to salvation. Other groups have, of course, regarded as orthodox the contribution of good works to salvation. Differences between Christian groups on such questions may have no relation to liberalization.

I suspect that the authors had difficulty perceiving such issues because of their natural sympathy for liberalization, a suspicion nourished by such an extravagant statement as: “It is not philosophers or scientists, but the greatest theologians of our time who are saying ‘God is dead,’ or that notions of a ‘God out there’ are antiquated.”

Whatever its flaws, however, the book merits widespread study as a gold mine of information and a challenge to the churches.

Elihu’S Lesson In Counseling

Dialogue in Despair, by William E. Hulme (Abingdon, 1968, 157 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Richard Allen Bodey, Sr., professor of practical theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi.

“The man who shook his fists at God and got away with it!” Slip that one into your next Bible quiz. Chances are nobody will come up with Job for an answer. But then, what pastor ever recognized himself in Eliphaz, or Bildad, or Zophar, Job’s uncomforting comforters and unfriendly friends?

Exegetes and theologians traditionally prize the Book of Job for its theological value: it wrestles with the problem of why the righteous suffer. William Hulme, professor of pastoral care at Luther Theological Seminary, takes a different but complementary approach. He finds in this ancient drama a biblical resource for pastoral care. “It presents the dynamics of suffering and healing within the framework of the pastoral relationship.” Indeed, it attacks the enigma of human existence with “the reckless abandon of the modern existentialist.”

Confident of his self-righteousness, Job the counselee clings tenaciously to his integrity above the security of his relationships: human and divine alike. Bold, reckless, defiant, he dares to call God to account. His angry outbursts and stubborn self-acquittals threaten his friends’ philosophy of life. Insensitive to his personal need, and under pretense of defending God against Job’s assaults, they vainly try to bludgeon him into confessing that his plight is just punishment for his guilt. They typify the defensive counselor who substitutes reaction for response.

Happily for Job, a fourth and wiser counselor, Elihu, enters the conversation. Although he repeats much that the trio before him said, his attitude and timing are different. Meeting Job with empathy, he leads him to a deeper level of insight and action. Elihu’s counseling method is as up-to-date as Hulme’s book: identification, acceptance, restatement, confrontation. By challenging Job to develop a wider vision and see God’s redemptive purpose in his trial, Elihu paves the way for Job’s direct encounter with God. He then quietly exits.

Elihu’s role as mediator and his counseling techniques set the pattern for every pastor who wants to lead people out of the darkness of despair into living contact with the God who kindles faith and justifies hope. In his presence—which always has an element of mystery—they, like Job, may not learn the why of their trial. But they discover the who, and so are able to accept the how.

Pastoral commentaries threaten to become a fad in this day of the pastor-counselor. This one pushes to the frontiers of incisive, relevant biblical interpretation. It even furnishes suggestions, drawn from its pastoral perspective, that can be used to counsel Job’s literary critics on their inadequate understanding.

Atonement: Limited Or Unlimited?

The Death Christ Died: A Case for Unlimited Atonement, by Robert P. Lightner (Regular Baptist Press, 1967, 151 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Norman Shepherd, associate professor of systematic theology, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In deliberately putting a book by a four-point Calvinist into the hands of a five-point Calvinist, CHRISTIANITY TODAY doubtless expected something other than hearty endorsement. Any five-pointer would need at least 150 pages to unravel the fallacies he finds woven into its fabric. Lacking that, this one will just outline briefly why he remains unrepentant.

It is not, of course, simply a question of one point more or less. Lightner finds that “strict Calvinism,” with its particular atonement that secures all the benefits of Christ for the elect, makes faith unnecessary. In effect, he is saying that Calvinism is deterministic and determinism makes history meaningless. The remedy proposed is a large dose of indeterminism in a form oscillating between myraldianism (Lightner uses only the expression “moderate Calvinism”) and Arminianism. But then the problem is to show how one can have any faith or history at all. Having charged Calvinism with the one extreme, he is saved from the other only because, as a sincere believer, he subjects himself to the infallible authority of Scripture. In point of fact, the Orthodox Calvinist is not deterministic because he shares that same commitment. The question is, Where does Scripture lead?

The crux of the matter is that the substitutionary atonement in which Lightner believes is efficacious. He virtually admits this when he approvingly cites Walvoord to the effect that “Christ’s death constituted an act of purchase in which the sinner is removed from his former bondage in sin by payment of the ransom price.” Here, quite properly, cross and consummation are seen in the light of each other. But all this is denied when Lightner contends that the same sinner may well enter into eternal condemnation. J. Miley and H. O. Wiley are much more consistent when they adopt the governmental theory of the atonement in order to universalize it.

Lightner is worried lest the Calvinists deprive us of the universal offer of the Gospel. He does not see that a redemption that does not redeem and a propitiation that does not propitiate leave us with no Gospel to offer anyone.

The author has gone into print without allowing himself to feel the full impact of what he opposes. As a result, his analysis lacks depth of penetration and his exegesis tends to be cavalier. Spurgeon’s argument has not been answered: “God will not punish twice for one thing.”

Calling A Dog’S Tail A Leg

The Secular Saint, by Allan R. Brockway (Doubleday, 1968, 238 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Robert L. Reymond, visiting lecturer and administrative assistant, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

This book is aimed at those “who have the suspicion that God is not dead, but can see no logical alternative,” according to its author, a Methodist clergyman and editor of Concern magazine. Its hero, the Secular Saint, is a “religionless Christian” interacting with both individual and corporate lifestyles.

The world is in transition. In our century we have already moved from the automobile and atomic-power ages into the age of space exploration. Change can produce various anxieties, but because transitions are now occurring so quickly, man has built up a resistance to the social shock produced by change. In this sense, the world of transition is also a steady-state world. This strange, new world, furthermore, is urban and leisurely, external (looking outside rather than inside man’s mind for the meaning of life and of the universe itself), and religionless. This is, for Brockway, the world of the Secular Saint.

Ancient Christian symbols must be reinterpreted for this new world. Orthodoxy’s stop-gap and escape-hatch God will suffice no longer. God, for Brockway, now becomes the absolute limits and impossible demands that confront a man; Christ is the possibility of receiving these limits and demands as good and for one’s good; and the Holy Spirit is the decision to receive the Christ possibility as the operating mode (Lord) of one’s life, the promise always to receive life as good, and the active reduplication of this decision and this promise in historical existence. Sin is rebellion against God so understood; it is the refusal to admit an absolute limit to one’s desires, power, and will. The Secular Saint is the man who in the “Christ response” refuses to receive the events of his life as threats to his significance and decides to entrust his own significance to the very limits and demands that threaten his sinful self.

Any man who so acts is a Secular Saint, whether he is aware of it or not. His individual life-style is one of freedom (from all allegiances and “causes” and toward death, even his own) and responsibility. He “joys in every little bit of life, worships and studies whenever he encounters another Secular Saint.” But there is another life-style: knowing that alone he cannot make the Christ possibility known to all parts of the world in relationship to himself, he supports the Corporate Saint, the organizational life-style whose purpose among other organizations is to make the Christ possibility available to society as a whole.

Brockway has, of course, committed the one basic error of all those who repudiate orthodoxy. He believes, autonomously, on the basis of his research and his experience, that his calling a dog’s tail a leg makes it so! Actually, his Secular Saint and Corporate Saint are not saints at all. They are simply reflections of Brockway’s humanism cast in traditional religious language.

Frankly, the orthodox Christian grows a little weary of the secularist’s use of Christian language that has become freighted with power by biblical usage and tradition to make the case for his non-Christian thought. Brockway’s God is of his own construction, and his Christ, as the possibility of choosing freedom and responsibility, speaks of two human categories incapable of definition and proper balance apart from the biblical revelation of Christian theism. The world, as Brockway says, is in transition; it has been since the creation. But man’s basic spiritual needs—redemption and restoration—have never changed, not since Adam’s fall.

The Kernel And The Shell

Jesus and the Christian, by William Manson (Eerdmans, 1967, 236 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Stanley A. Ellisen, professor of biblical literature, Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, Portland, Oregon.

This book by William Manson, Edinburgh giant of New Testament studies of the past generation, is a posthumous compilation of his lectures and articles published in various journals between 1925 and 1957, arranged by T. F. Torrance. Here we see Manson’s concept of “depth exegesis” in relation to Christian living and the world mission of the Church. This exegesis moves from a clarification of Jesus’ ministry to the significance of that life and ministry for the Christian and then to its significance for world evangelism.

True to his concern for exegetical foundation, Manson first establishes the reliance of the New Testament sources and the solidarity of its witnesses, especially Jesus and Paul. Although he accepts many of the higher-critical findings on both Testaments, he renounces the methods and conclusions of form criticism as superficial and conjectural. And, assuming the priority of Mark, he pursues the essence of Jesus’ ministry through precept and event.

Jesus’ first coming was the eschatological event foretold by the prophets. The time of the eschaton had come. But, although Jesus came to fulfill the Messianic prophecies, he did not come to fulfill Old Testament expectations in their “external garb.” He came to clarify the true nature of the Kingdom, to strip off the “shell” and reveal the spiritual “kernel.” Manson says the parables demonstrate this; in them Jesus demythologized the reign of God for the faithful and spiritual. The passing of the Law involved also the passing of any claims to an Israel-centered eschaton. The spiritual enclave of the Church constitutes the “Israel of God” in the fullest sense. This interpretation is the product of Manson’s “depth exegesis.”

His greatest contribution doubtless lies in his treatises on the Christian life. His wholesome mysticism in regard to the believer’s life “in Christ” is fresh and challenging. He stresses the verticality of the Christian experience and implies that much Christian experience is of the “shell” rather than the “kernel.”

All these concepts of eschatological Christian living are brought to focus on the program of world missions. While there is a “realized eschatology” in Christ’s ministry, says Manson, there is yet an unrealized eschatology that motivates the Church in its gospel witness. The prophecy that world blessing would come through Israel is fulfilled in the Church’s world mission, he says, and indeed is the Old Testament impetus for this task.

Many points in this “depth exegesis” call for evaluation. While Manson offers some profound insights, a host of his assumptions lack verification. While there is a coherency in his theological structure, the “ex” is not always prominent in his exegesis. While he pleads for the Church’s proper expectation of the parousia and of Christ’s reign within the historical plane, he vaporizes the millennial content of that reign. While he seeks to demythologize the Old Testament prophecies, he mythologizes both the patriarchal covenants and the eschatological promises. In this, one suspects an “overplussage” of consistency. Having been deprived of the “shell” of biblical eschatology, which God vouchsafed by his solemn oath, one is hard put to find satisfaction in the uncertain meat of the existential kernel.

This outstanding book is a scholar’s manual and is certainly a work to be reckoned with, as was Manson’s Jesus the Messiah.

Protestantism Through A Prism

Spectrum of Protestant Beliefs, edited and compiled by Robert Campbell, O. P. (Bruce, 1968, 106 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by E. S. James, editor emeritus, “Baptist Standard,” Dallas, Texas.

This unusual book seeks to present five distinct Protestant viewpoints—fundamentalist, new evangelical, confessional, liberal, and radical—on twenty-one significant topics. These topics include the Trinity, the Bible, the Virgin Birth, original sin, heaven and hell, premarital sex, racial integration, anti-Semitism, the ecumenical movement, Communism, and the Viet Nam war. Many readers will find it hard to classify themselves in any of the categories on the basis of the thought advanced by some of the spokesmen. The compiler-editor selected well-known persons to represent the varieties of Protestants as he sees them: Carl F. H. Henry (new evangelical), John Warwick Montgomery (confessional), James A. Pike (liberal), William Hamilton (radical), and Bob Jones, Jr. (fundamentalist). But, in my opinion, the division of thought on doctrine and social issues is much too narrow.

Although Carl F. H. Henry has voiced well the views of the millions of Bible-believing evangelicals, I see no reason to call his viewpoint new evangelical. There is nothing new about it, since from their beginnings nearly all Protestants who have thought of themselves as evangelical Christians have believed essentially what he expresses concerning the Scriptures, and today millions of them agree with him on social issues. One could wish that John Warwick Montgomery’s position were representative of all confessional groups, but it clearly is not. James A. Pike is too radical for many liberals to claim him. And William Hamilton’s “God is dead” theory is too far-fetched and removed from scriptural teachings, its followers too few, to be considered a basic category in this survey. Bob Jones voices what seems to be the general opinion of a group that designate themselves fundamentalists; yet he is not representative of the millions who believe every fundamental truth of the Bible but refuse to speculate on prophecy and abhor the idea that God is responsible for the spirit of racism.

The book is well arranged, readable, concise enough to be read at one sitting, and enlightening. But it does not, in my opinion, live up to its title. A spectrum shows all the colors. The viewpoints covered in this book are too limited to be called the “Spectrum of Protestant Beliefs.”

Book Briefs

The Righteousness of the Kingdom, by Walter Rauschenbusch, edited by Max L. Stackhouse (Abingdon, 1968, 320 pp., $5.95). Today’s theological crusaders for social change will find much to agree with in this newly discovered, previously unpublished book written seventy-five years ago by “the father of the social gospel.”

Speaking in Tongues, by Laurence Christenson (Bethany Fellowship, 1968, 141 pp., $2.95). A charismatic Lutheran pastor appeals for renewal of the Church through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Modern Theologians, Christians and Jews, edited by Thomas E. Bird (University of Notre Dame, 1967, 224 pp., $5.95). Short essays that introduce such contemporary theologians as Buber, Murray, Hromádka, Schillebeeckx, Robinson, Hick, and Heschel.

God’s Answer, by W. Herbert Brown (Scripture Truth, 1967, 256 pp., $3.95). Brief but perceptive analysis of the verses throughout the Bible that refer to the Holy Spirit.

Christianity & Humanism, by Quirinus Breen, edited by Nelson Peter Ross (Eerdmans, 1968, 283 pp., $6.95). Students of a retired University of Oregon professor have collected and published some of his significant writings relating to Greek and Renaissance philosophy and Christian theology.

The GodB Within, by W. Farnsworth Loomis (October House, 1967, 117 pp., $5.95). A Brandeis University professor of biochemistry sets forth a naturalistic view of “God” and man. “God A” made a world ready for the evolution of man; “God B” was born in man circa 15,000 B.C. when Cro-Magnon man demonstrated his creative ability (as seen in the Lascaux cave paintings). In the foreword, Bishop James Pike lauds the thoughts of Loomis. The book is a glaring example of a scientist’s forsaking science for scientism.

And the Greatest of These, by George Sweeting (Revell, 1968, 128 pp., $3.50). The pastor of Chicago’s Moody Church writes about the power of Christian love. Well worth reading.

My Flickering Torch, by E. Jane Mall (Concordia, 1968, 176 pp., $3.50). A Christian woman’s victorious story of her experience after her chaplain husband died and she was left with five adopted children.

PAPERBACKS

Learning to Love God, Learning to Love Ourselves, and Learning to Love People, by Richard Peace (Inter-Varsity, 1968, 63 pp., 61 pp., and 73 pp., $1 each). Booklets to help new Christians become established in their faith through simple, inductive Bible studies.

Science and Religion, edited by Ian G. Barbour (Harper & Row, 1968, 323 pp., $3.95). An interesting collection of current essays with varying perspectives on religion and evolution, scientific method, and technology.

Between Christ and Satan, and Day X, by Kurt Koch (Evangelization, Berghausen/Bd., West Germany, 192 pp. and 128 pp., 1967). A German evangelical discusses (1) fortune-telling, magic spiritism, occult literature, and miraculous healings, and (2) the return of Christ.

The Seven Great “I Am’s”, by Archibald Campbell (Christian Literature Crusade, 1968, 133 pp., $1.50). Instructive and inspiring studies of the seven “I am’s” and seven miracles in the Gospel of John.

A Time to Embrace, edited by Oliver R. Barclay (Inter-Varsity, 1967, 61 pp„ $.60). A practical, biblically sound booklet on courtship and sex for today’s Christian young people.

From Call to Service, by Glenn E. Whitlock (Westminster, 1968, 122 pp., $1.85). An experienced counselor of ministerial candidates offers a sensible discussion of the ministerial call, candidates’ backgrounds and motivations, and the Church’s means for helping men fulfill their ministries.

Protestant Agreement on the Lord’s Supper, by Eugene M. Skibbe (Augsburg, 1968, 143 pp., $2.50). Shows how Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed Christians are coming closer together in their understandings of the Eucharistic doctrine.

Understanding the Book of Hebrews, by Robert L. Cargill (Broadman, 1967, 133 pp., $1.95). Readable, devotional, inspirational.

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hos. 4:6a). “Fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Prov. 1:7b). These words from the Bible apply both to individuals and to nations; they explain the cause of personal misery and national disorder. It is still true that by sowing the wind of folly we reap the whirlwind of chaos.

There must be an explanation for the phenomenon of a world gone mad—and there is; there must be a cure—and there is. Men have rejected God’s way and gone their own. They have rejected God’s wisdom in favor of man’s. “Claiming to be wise, they became fools,” because they “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator …” (Rom. 1:22, 25).

Basic to true wisdom is the recognition of God as Creator, the Source of all things. Rule him out of his universe and one has taken the road to folly. God has placed before every man irrefutable evidence of his wisdom and power. David speaks of this in Psalm 19. And the Apostle Paul neatly wraps up the truth in these words: “What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:19, 20).

What then has happened? Is it not that men have accepted the wisdom of this world rather than the wisdom that proceeds from a reverential faith and trust in God?

True wisdom, for man, is adjustment to and acceptance of God’s revealed truth. It lies in seeing himself, the creature, in right perspective to God, the Creator, and in acting accordingly. The wisdom of the world denies or ignores God, but true wisdom gives him top priority in every area of life.

The words “wisdom,” “knowledge,” and “understanding” are often confused and used synonymously. Wisdom has to do with a right apprehension of God; knowledge, with the multiplicity of facts about the universe and the process of discovering them. Understanding may be said to be the proper evaluation of wisdom and the correct use of knowledge.

Without true wisdom, one may go far afield in any one of a thousand directions. God-given wisdom is the anchor of both knowledge and understanding.

It is clear from the biblical definition of wisdom that one may have great knowledge of facts about nature, history, all branches of science, art, sociology, economics—the entire gamut of knowledge—and yet be a fool in God’s sight. For many, this idea is hard to take. We all admire intellectual ability. It is a compliment to be called a “brain.” And we are all indebted to the accumulated knowledge of those who have excelled in learning. But knowledge without God-given wisdom can lead men and nations into chaos. Like an engine without a governor, a car without brakes, a ship without a rudder, knowledge that is not controlled by wisdom leads to folly.

We like to think we are smart and sophisticated. True, we live in a time of staggering discoveries in every area of learning. But we also live in a time of uncertainty, frustration, and despair. Apparently knowledge is not the answer to our problems.

Many people—the young in particular—look on the Bible as outdated. They think it speaks only to a time and culture far different from our own. But I believe that if anyone will take the Book of Proverbs and read it consistently—a chapter a day for a month, then repeat—he will be amazed to find in that ancient book the answer to every moral and ethical problem confronting men today. It is particularly relevant for young people living in the second half of the twentieth century.

In the first chapter of Proverbs, after a series of reasons for taking this compilation of wise sayings and riddles at face value, the basic message of the book begins. Two courses are open to man: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Prov. 1:7).

Why is the proper attitude toward God the beginning of wisdom? First, because he is the Creator of all things and is therefore sovereign. In this he has demonstrated his wisdom—so deep and wide and high that man can only wonder and worship in his presence.

Because he is also the Sustainer of all things. Speaking of Christ, the one to whom creation power was delegated, the Apostle Paul says, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). He created not only the universe but also the laws that govern it, and his control is so complete that he can cause all things to work out for the ultimate good of his own.

Because he is our Redeemer. He comes first because he saves from the guilt of past sins, gives power to overcome sin now, and promises a future free from even the presence of sin.

He has first priority because he is the ultimate Judge, and his judgment is based solely on the righteousness of his Son.

We put God first because he is King of kings and Lord of lords, the one who will rule for ever and ever. It is to him that man must ascribe all honor, power, and glory.

The second question is, How? How can man come into this relationship with God?

The first four verses of the second chapter of Proverbs tell us that top priority must be given to the search for God. Isaiah tells us to “seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near” (Isa. 55:6). And this portion of Proverbs speaks of the urgency of the quest. We are told to “receive,” “treasure up,” be “attentive,” “incline” our hearts, “cry out for insight, “raise [our] voices” for understanding, “seek” it “like silver,” “search for it as hidden treasures”; all these express the idea of seeing in God and his wisdom the most precious thing to be had.

But we live in a world of things, people, and problems. How can we practice the way of wisdom? How can we bring all this down to the level of everyday living?

The third chapter of Proverbs provides the answer, and with it gives a promise. On the one hand we are warned against a do-it-yourself approach to life: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight” (Prov. 3:5). How many decisions have you made today based solely on your own understanding of the situation? How many have been dictated by ignorance or prejudice?

Then the promise: “In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Prov. 3:6).

God has told us what the source of wisdom is, why we should put him first, how this may be done, and what blessings will follow. So that we will not miss the point it is repeated in Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.”

Dear Probers of Inner Space:

His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru of Beatles, Beach Boys, and Mia Farrow Sinatra, had arrived in the New World. The Light of Asia had come to bear the message of transcendental meditation to the youth of America. Embarking on a nationwide tour with the Beach Boys of twenty appearances in nineteen days, the soft-spoken little Hindu from India assumed a lotus position on an early-American couch at Washington’s Roman Catholic Georgetown University and prepared to meet the press.

Attired in a silken robe, his gray-streaked shoulder-length hair flowing over a lei of twenty dozen white carnations presented by the Society of American Florists, the Maharishi easily stood out from the double-breasted, slash-pocketed, turtlenecked New York advance men who surrounded him. His nut-brown face, aglow with twinkling dark eyes and a smile that refused to be hidden by a wirey white beard and black mustache, projected his message of joy and tranquility. Plucking the petals of a yellow chrysanthemum, he spoke of “an underlying unity present in the different parts of life as sap is present in a plant here and here and here and here.” Meditation, he claimed, is the way to this unity that enables one to “live 200 per cent of life—100 per cent outer, material life, and 100 per cent inner, spiritual life.” Furthermore, if people would meditate, not only would wars end but also natural disasters, which are caused by “eruptions of hostile influences in the atmosphere.”

I asked him if his meditative plan was strictly humanistic or involved a relationship with a personal God. He said, “It is purely humanistic to start with,” but after a time “one easily finds his god.” His tactful reply to my question, “How do you view Jesus Christ, his death and his resurrection?,” drew a hearty laugh from the audience. “With all admiration,” he said, and joined in the laughter. When I called his attention to Malcolm Muggeridge’s reference to him as “a conman,” he said, “I sympathize with him.” But he disputed Malcolm’s ideas of self-renunciation. Said the yogi: “Renunciation does not belong to life.”

One can easily see that the Maharishi’s meditative mystique is transcendental hooey. But I haven’t quite decided if he is a faker or a fakir. Is the Maharishi an intentional victimizer of young minds? Or is he himself a sincere victim of clever publicists and promoters? That’s one I’m going to meditate on.

On the way to Nirvana,

EUTYCHUS III

CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

Dr. W. Stanford Reid’s article, “Jesus Christ: Focal Point of Knowledge” (May 10), has presented in few words an excellent guideline for the Christians on our college campuses.

SOLON G. PEREIRA

Los Angeles, Calif.

In your editorial, “Is Education Losing Lasting Values?” (May 10), you allude to that amazingly ironic assertion of the McCall’s survey: “A [college student] is most likely to lose his religious faith at … any church-supported school.” Having studied, taught, and counseled at such schools, I submit that that statement is disturbingly tenable.

However, in the face of such an indictment, we who care about Christian higher education cannot afford the casual, one-sentence explanation, “… presumably because … courses in Bible … are taught from a liberal point of view.”

WAYNE JOOSSE

Huntington, Ind.

I teach in a Bible college (Vennard, University Park, Iowa) and am constantly with young men and women of A-1 character and talents, and motivation and goals. It is hard for me to visualize a generation of youth so lost, without God and without hope in the world, to use St. Paul’s expression.… It is surely a pitiful thing, and desolating, to think that our country is facing a future in which so many of its young adults will be “godless.” I have known for some time of the baleful effects of liberal—ultra-liberal—teaching of Bible in church-related colleges. I would like to say that Vennard College—and schools like it—must be a sort of an oasis in the educational desert.

CASSIUS G. MCKNIGHT

Oskaloosa, Iowa

There is a knowledge that cannot be had from any book or institution of man.… It is not gained by the most severe intellectual discipline. No teacher, unmoved by the Holy Spirit, however brilliant or sincere, can impart it.…

Confusion in the religious world is the result of great minds, unmoved by the Holy Spirit, trying to think their way to God. It can’t be done. It takes more than a diploma, or a special kind of garb or denominational sanction, to authorize anyone to speak for God, or to lead anyone to God.…

While mental ignorance is far from commendable, an illiterate person who knows by personal experience the work of the Holy Spirit is a far safer guide concerning spiritual things than the most brilliant bishop who knows nothing of the Spirit.…

If our youth could understand this, they would not be bowled over so easily by the first college professor who poses as an authority on matters of which he is totally ignorant.

J. J. STEELE

Grove, Okla.

ABOUT THE NEWBORN CHURCH

As one who attended most of the sessions of the Uniting Conference of The United Methodist Church, I would correct a couple of misstatements in “Racial Birth Pangs for United Methodists” (May 10). “Dedicated to the work in the Negro ghettos, the young churchman [Woodie White] is one of the founders of the Black Methodists group, which published a race-conscious daily paper, Behold, at the conference.” Instead it was a publication of the “more numerous white group,” Methodists for Church Renewal, as each copy plainly indicated.… Its chief emphasis was on church renewal, and it felt that racial attitudes needed radical changing, if there was to be true renewal. It comes from whites, appealing to the whites … to make those changes.

As to the $20 million sum asked for helping meet the urban crisis, … the vote for approval of it was strong, and nearly a half-million dollars was pledged by the members of the Uniting Conference and others.… The vote was not just to ask other people to give sacrificially.…

I talked with several Negro delegates and observers, and they were by no means all dissatisfied with the progress and pace of United Methodist efforts to deal with matters of racial discrimination both within its own structure and in American society. Some did fear that there would be a tendency to slow down too soon, feeling that the problems were all solved; it was toward overcoming this inertia that many of the efforts were directed. Even those who opposed some of the stands taken kept saying that they were not opposed to the general idea and the need for action in this area—but they objected to its being forced, or to having the leadership in the hands of a body in which representation from minority groups would be equal to, or even larger than, representation from the white majority. The fact that they had to keep denying that they wanted to return to the old ways, or to prevent true equality of treatment, said much.

MARCIUS E. TABER

Delton, Mich.

FIRST TO LAST

When my May 10 issue arrived I almost read it from cover to cover before laying it down. Truly, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”.… The nation could use an old-fashioned revival from shore to shore.

MIMA HOOK

Baton Rouge, La.

May I express my gratitude for the April 26 issue. This was the first issue I have ever read from the first to the last page. Let me thank you for the finest magazine that comes to my desk.

MAX O’NEAL

First Baptist Church

Eastman, Ga.

GO AND STOP

I was not going to renew my subscription.… Then came the April 26 issue with all the fine articles on preaching and the realistic articles on Martin Luther King. I had been disappointed on what I had to listen to during Holy Week services. I decided I must have CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

MRS. R. W. RITCHIE

Indianapolis, Ind.

It is regrettable a good magazine has to propagate outrageous lies concerning Martin Luther King. This man has done more to disrupt our country, cause people to be killed, interfere with the law and lay it aside, and yet [he is] called a “non-violent leader.” I am not saying please stop my subscription; I’m demanding it.

ROYCE POWELL

Mount Olive Baptist Church

Rossville, Ga.

BRINGING SOCIAL REFORM

Dr. Bell’s column, “Civil Disobedience” (April 26), is overdue. It says very well what should have been said long ago.…

Don’t these wild-eyed preachers advocating revolution and shedding of blood to bring social reform realize the blood has already been shed on Calvary to accomplish this end? And we have been lax in our preaching these many years? Or haven’t they read that part of their Bibles?

GEORGE L. WILLIAMS

Richland Community Church

Johnstown, Pa.

This article seemed to say everything my husband and I have been trying to teach our children about law and order.

DOROTHY J. FINSON

Northfield, Ill.

It surely hits the nail on the head, and I wish the various denominations who fell for the idea would realize what it has led to.

CARL A. STEVENSON

Peoria, Ill.

Just a word of appreciation for Dr. Bell’s sober appraisal of the cause and results of the civil-disobedience movements, which threaten the destruction of our society. Many are afraid to speak out courageously and sensibly as he has done. The riots, the campus disturbances, the alarming increase of crimes of frightful violence, are frightening for those of us old enough to remember the days of comparative peace and tranquility.

VARNER J. JOHNS

Loma Linda, Calif.

LET HIM BE BRIEF

“What Shall the Preacher Preach?” (April 26) is a mighty big question. But I fervently urge that whatever he preaches, he be brief.…

If, as most of the respondents suggest, the preacher preaches variations on the theme of the (literal) acceptance and authority of the Bible and “proclaiming Christ and him crucified” Sunday after Sunday, how will the congregation be able to stand the boredom of such repetition? Most Christians committed themselves to following Jesus long years ago. Now they want to go on from there. They want to study into what that commitment means, how they should live, what they should do in the world of today.…

The preacher is faced with the fact that whatever he preaches, whether fundamentalism, conservatism, or liberalism, there are going to be those … who disagree with him.… The charitable, honest, and considerate thing for him to do is to present what he sees as the truth, acknowledging that he, like every other person is a fallible human being.… Let him be humble enough to admit his limitations of knowledge.

But above all, let him be brief!

MRS. A. J. TERHUNE

Plantation Key, Fla.

HARDLY NEEDED ‘PAINS’

It was most unfortunate that you gave such poor publicity to the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (“Canadian Growing Pains,” News, April 26).… The secular press could not have done any worse.…

The MacRury issue did not need any more airing! We members regretted that it happened but forgot about it overnight. The statement about the United and Anglican Churches “who are sensitive about domination by smaller groups” was hardly needed, either. The whole picture given was that the various churches were constantly pulling against each other. This was hardly the case.

We who attended received many blessings as we met fellow Christians who came from widely separated parts of Canada.… There is much need for this organization in a country where the evangelical churches ought to present a united front and a good witness in our secularized society.

PETER DEKKER

First Christian Reformed Church

Regina, Saskatchewan

A DEAD MULE WON’T WORK

I don’t know just what “older image of the Pentecostal” (unless it be “holy roller”) you consider that Oral Roberts does not now fit—and the rest of us apparently still do—now that he has changed his ecclesiastical address (News, April 12 and 26); nor in what “cultural backwater” Pentecostalism is floundering and from which Roberts is doing a lot to save us; but I don’t think the suggestion you hinted, that we all flock back into the old-line denominations, would promise to be much of a step forward. As men such as Luther and Knox and Wesley have shown us by example, and as any hillbilly knows well, you don’t try to hitch a wagon to a dead mule.

Further, concerning Dr. Corvin’s fears about the theological trend at Oral Roberts University, the inroads are probably not so much existential as they are antinomian. The heavy emphasis on faith coupled with a liberal attitude toward theological codes has produced such a climate.

Such an attitude is pervading the entire neo-pentecostal movement—of which “charismatic renewal” has become the banner cry—until it is attempting to embrace men of even doubtful evangelical persuasion.

The curious result of this is that … men [are] being urged to tarry in the Upper Room who have never knelt at Calvary.

JOHN O. ANDERSON

Assembly of God Wilder, Idaho

WORD FROM CAMPUS CRUSADE

Your April 12 issue carried an excellent news article regarding the new emphasis upon grace and freedom in Campus Crusade for Christ.

PETE GILLQUIST

Big Ten Regional Director

Campus Crusade for Christ

Evanston, Ill.

OPTING FOR QUAINTNESS

I’m opting for another year of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, not because I’m in agreement with your viewpoint, but rather that it’s a quaint and faithful reminder of what I once regarded as an adequate position.…

It seems to me that most of your articles raise questions that have already been answered or deal with matters that are of minor importance. However, you do a fine job in your wide coverage of news that is essentially church related, although in this you tend to be clearly editorial.

HOWARD J. HANSEN

Community Non-Denominational Church

Bradford Woods, Pa.

You might be interested in knowing that we use the brief news notes from CHRISTIANITY TODAY on our weekly … “Tomorrow Show” on Guantanamo Bay’s Armed Forces television station.

Isolated and cut off here in the remote corner of Cuba, people are happ̀y to receive a gleaning of all the religious news of the outside world. Your publication does a fine job.

LEX L. DAVIS

Chaplain

U. S. Naval Air Station

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Your editorials are timely, to the point, and fearless.

LESLIE WOOTEN

Oak Grove Church of the Nazarene

Decatur, Ill.

“He used to be a missionary!” the woman whispered, pointing to the new pastor. The implication was evident. He was obviously a failure because he had not stayed and died on the foreign field.

The three-year military man comes home a hero; the two-year Peace Corps volunteer, a traveled practical idealist; the businessman returning from an overseas stint, an adventurer; the Foreign Service officer, a credit to his country. But the returning missionary is looked upon as a failure, though he may have given a dozen of his best years overseas in the cause of Christ.

As some of my young missionary friends prepared to leave the field for good, my heart went out to them. I knew what they would have to face at home. They could not say simply that “our health broke down,” or that “missionaries were expelled from the country.” Their reasons for leaving were much more complicated; they themselves could hardly express them.

While on furlough I tried to find out why many missionaries did not return to the field after their first term of service, or did not even finish the first term. Many of the former missionaries whom I questioned seemed to be attempting to cover up what others had conveyed to them: they were spiritual failures. Because of their defensiveness, I felt my study would have to be made indirectly.

One of the few sources of psychological studies of overseas personnel I found was a recent unpublished report of Peace Corps psychologists. I studied this material, on the assumption that the problems of missionaries were in many ways similar to those of Peace Corps volunteers. The Peace Corps findings underlie the analysis that follows.

Missionaries who give up and go home do so for a variety of reasons. I want to deal here with only one, a condition we might call “cultural shock,” or “cultural fatigue.”

The missionary seems to pass through three main crisis periods: the crisis of selection, the crisis of engagement, and the crisis of acceptance. In the crisis of selection, the prospective candidate faces the realities of his emotional make-up, his personality strengths and weaknesses. If he feels capable of becoming a missionary, he makes a commitment to God and also to his friends and his church. Although mission boards may see serious personality weaknesses in a candidate, rarely do they turn anyone down for this reason. They tend to assume that if the candidate is “called of God,” he will be able to adjust. But this is not always so. Many missionary volunteers are traveling to the field on youthful dreams or parental pressures, rather than on a firm and realistic commitment. A young person from a Christian home who has attended Christian schools, perhaps even graduated from seminary, may still not have a tried and proven faith.

After the candidate has passed through the crisis of being selected as a missionary, raising funds, doing deputation work, and going through orientation school, he may feel ready to face anything. After all, wasn’t he called by God to serve? If one tries to talk to him about the emotional and cultural problems he is almost certain to face on the field, he may reply indignantly, “I won’t have those problems—they warned us about those in orientation school.” But many who have this confidence later experience “cultural shock” on the field, to their own surprise and frustration.

After a missionary arrives on the field, two crisis periods may occur. First is the crisis of engagement. During his first weeks, the new missionary has great enthusiasm and wants to accomplish all kinds of things; but he may be met by apathy and distrust. This causes him a great deal of anxiety, and after several months he may enter a period of depression.

During this time he is struggling with the language, and he may feel that as soon as he can speak well, his problems will pass. One candidate explained it by saying, “I wanted to set this country on fire for the Lord but found that I couldn’t even ask for a match.” But by blaming the problem on language, the new missionary has only postponed making the real adjustment in personality needed on the field.

The third period of adjustment for the new missionary is the crisis of acceptance, which comes after he has been on the field for about a year. By then the romance and adventure have almost vanished, and the full impact of living in a totally different society hits the newcomer. The till now latent conflict of cultural shock now expresses itself forcefully. It is a period of psychological let-down. He had expected his hard work to be greatly appreciated, but now he realizes that the host country places a different value on work than he does. This may cause him to feel foreign, unaccepted, not understood, alienated from the people with whom he is working. Successful relationships with these members of a culture very different from his own require new attitudes, new patterns of response, new techniques—and these he has not developed.

The missionary easily sees all this stress and turmoil as spiritual failure, rather than as a conflict between his personality and the alien culture. He may write home to his Christian friends for solace. But instead of comforting him they may express their disappointment, and chide him for not being victorious over his problems. In time his relations with the nationals and with fellow missionaries become greatly strained, and his sense of isolation deepens. Things that once seemed romantic and exciting—the different language, different sounds and smells, different ways of responding and thinking—now seem only strange and threatening. Yet he dare not be frank in expressing any of this; missionaries aren’t supposed to have such feelings, he thinks. He feels he is failing as a Christian example, and guilt compounds the problem.

If the missionary returns home at this stage, without adjusting to the cultural shock, without coming to terms with the changes in attitudes and behavior that life in this new culture demands, he will probably never come back to the field.

Yet it is possible for him to work through these crisis periods—by adjusting and accommodating bit by bit until he accepts new ways of interacting with others. Gradually he can come to feel at ease in a strange culture, and then to go on to the point of being able to praise it. It has been said that no one really knows a culture until he can praise it.

What conclusions can we draw about this matter of cultural shock? (1) Although orientation before leaving the homeland is helpful, counsel is needed most during the crisis periods on the field. Missionary leaders should be more sensitive to this, more ready to help. (2) Homeland supporters should be sympathetic about the new missionary’s problems in cultural adjustment and should pray specifically about this area. (3) A missionary who leaves the field should not be assumed to be lacking spiritual fervor. It may well be that in his psychological makeup he cannot make the necessary accommodation to the culture. Like Mark, he may return to Jerusalem without completing his term. But he should not be considered a failure. God always has other areas of service for his children when one area closes. (4) A missionary should not be considered stronger and more spiritual than everyone else. He needs to be accepted as a weak human being, just as we all do. This acceptance makes him better able to make the adjustment necessary on the field. For him to feel he must live up to an ideal image in the minds of his supporters only increases his problems as he tries to accept his new role in an alien culture as a man among men.

In Singapore this year, November 5 to 13, the Asian-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism will emerge as the first regional follow-up to the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism, held in Berlin.

Why did Billy Graham and other initiators select Asia for this first regional evangelism congress? A number of reasons are apparent:

1. Asian delegates to the World Congress on Evangelism expressed their desire to have a regional congress. Since then the desire has grown among church leaders throughout Asia.

2. Three-fourths of the world’s population is in Asia. To the concerned Christian, this means above all that the Christian community in Asia is faced with the greatest missionary challenge of today. “Christ Seeks Asia”—this is the theme of the November congress. The Rt. Rev. Dr. Chandu Ray of Pakistan, one of the congress planners, has said: “In Berlin the dominant feeling was unity in the task of evangelism.… We cannot postpone the translation of the Berlin aims.”

Of special note is the rapidly burgeoning youth population. Recent statistics show that nearly 80 per cent of the people from as far west as Pakistan to Japan in the east are under forty. This region of very old cultures has become phenomenally young. In 1980, according to current projections, Asian countries, excluding mainland China and Japan, will have 513 million young people between the ages of six and twenty-one. Many will not be in school and will not have jobs.

Behind these statistics is the reality of a troubled generation, ill equipped for the exceedingly competitive world it faces. Talks by politicians, parents, educators, and the young on the prospects of Asia’s youth throb with exasperation. There is the vision, apocalyptic almost, of anguished youth rising in protest, feeling bitterly that they have been let down.

Indonesian students who helped dethrone Sukarno were not merely making a political gesture. They were reacting to a leadership that had failed to lay the foundations for a good society. Calcutta students on the rampage were likewise rebelling against an unpromising future. The Red Guard type of movement has meaning for the restive, deprived young.

The fears of these young people are justified. Despite impressive gains, Asia’s struggle for survival is still acute. Development programs appear to be acts of desperation by nations hopelessly in hock and facing mounting pressures from populations that are increasing at an alarming 2.5 to 3 per cent annually.

In a revealing analysis the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East notes:

The rates of growth of gross national product do not compare unfavorably with those of Australia, New Zealand, France, the United States. Rates of population growth are, however, very much higher in the developing countries. As a result, rates of growth of per-capita gross national product in the developing countries are low, being less than 2 per cent in many countries. The 1960 per-capita income in the Far East was only 3 per cent of that in North America and 6 per cent of that in all developed market economies.

United Nations Secretary-General U Thant has expressed the challenge of what he calls “tomorrow’s generation” in Asia. “We used to talk of planning ‘for the coming generation,’ ” he said. “Now we have to realize that this generation is here already, all around us, only waiting to realize its potential—millions upon millions of young people who can be the hope of Asia, if we plan and work together intensively to make that hope a reality.”

3. The countries in the South Pacific and those “down under” are essentially a part of Asia. Although geographically the islands of the South Pacific may be separated from mainland Asia by miles of seas, yet their present life and future and that of Asia are unavoidably linked.

Take Guam, for instance, an island that stands at the crossroads of the Pacific. Historians claim that its original inhabitants came from Southeast Asia a good 3,000 years ago, and many observers still see a resemblance in features and language between Guam’s Chamorros and the Malays. These close racial ties have led to various areas of partnership. Many of Guam’s workers come from various countries in mainland Asia; in fact, Guam has done much to remedy the problem of unemployment among some of her Malay and Polynesian neighbors.

This linking between Asia and her Pacific neighbors is seen also in Australia and the islands “down under.” Despite its strong Western tradition, Australia is geographically linked to the Asian mainland, and economic forces are making this relationship increasingly more significant. Developments in the European Economic Community and Britain’s bid to join it, make it likely that much of Australia’s future business expansion will have to be in Asia. Australians realize that the continuing growth of their national economy is tied to the economic health and stability of their neighbors.

And, on the other hand, Asian leaders realize that much of their future will be linked with that of their relatively young but highly successful neighbor. In a region of faltering economies, of scarce capital, skills, and raw materials, both Australia and Japan will be challenged to help Asia become economically viable and politically stable. For Asia, almost aggressive in its opposition to Western domination, Australia offers a possibility of friendship and support that will not offend most sensitive nationalist-oriented regimes.

It is against this background, then, in a region once said to have “unlimited impossibilities,” that some 800 church leaders and laymen from about twenty-five nations will converge at the Singapore Conference Hall in November.

Why the Asian-South Pacific Congress? Its planners have answered the question. The congress is to:

Discover ways of implementing the proposals of the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in our area challenged by an exploding population and social upheaval;

Define biblical evangelism with emphasis on personal conversion that leads to membership and participation in the life and mission of the Church;

Expound the relevance of the Christian evangel and stress the urgency of its proclamation to the two billion people living in this region;

Study the obstacles to evangelism inherent in the diverse cultures of Asia, and to find specialized methods which will effectively overcome them;

Share in discussion the tools and techniques of evangelism which we may successfully employ to cope with our unique problems and opportunities in Asia today, i.e., the growing influence of youth, rapid urbanization, poverty and economic needs, the primary role of the family, etc.;

Evaluate existing evangelistic programs and policies in the light of contemporary conditions, and explore ways of vitalizing the programs and updating the policies;

Summon the Church corporately and its members individually to recognize and accept the priority of evangelism;

Challenge the churches and Christian organizations to a bold cooperative program of evangelism and missionary outreach.

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.”

Christian workers in Africa are participating in the third attempt to take the message of Christ to that great continent. The first attempt began in the days of the apostles. Christianity spread from Egypt down the Nile into Ethiopia and flourished for hundreds of years along the North African coast in the territory now occupied by Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. It reached its height between 180 and 430, with hundreds of bishops and three popes, and produced such men as Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine.

In the eighth and ninth centuries, however, the African church was almost completely inundated by the wave of Islamic conquest. Why did it not stand up to Islam? The answer is threefold: It had not become a missionary church; it had wasted its strength on internal controversies; and it had not identified itself with the common people but had been satisfied with reaching only the upper Roman classes. A remnant proved faithful in Egypt and is seen in the Coptic churches today, but in North Africa Christianity practically vanished. Had the Church been faithful to its God-given task, Africa would doubtless have been as enlightened and advanced today as any other part of the world.

The second attempt to take the Gospel to Africa was made in the fifteenth century by priests who were chaplains to the Portuguese navigator-explorers. Their work was at first down the west coast, mainly in what is now Ghana and the Congo, and later up the east coast to Mozambique and inland as far as the borders of Rhodesia. Unfortunately, this work did not survive the slave trade; when the Portuguese moved their interests to the Far East, the work they had established withered. This church had not been firmly established among the native people, and the second attempt failed for the same reasons.

The third attempt came as a result of the spiritual awakening in England and on the continent at the turn of the nineteenth century and was centered in such pioneers as Robert Moffat, David Livingstone, C.T. Studd. Today we seem to be living near the end of this attempt. Will the Church in Africa survive the earthquake changes now taking place? The answer depends on how far the Gospel is made relevant to the people of Africa. Only as the Church is made part of the life of the people, and only as a strong indigenous leadership develops, can it survive. Regrettably, there are signs that we may once again fail our brothers in Africa.

A Beleaguered Fortress

Christianity has met its greatest test in the field of race relations, and here it has suffered some humiliating defeats. Islam is winning anywhere from seven to ten times as many converts as all Christian forces put together, according to some authorities. It has been presented to Africans by Africans and is considered an African religion, while Christianity is still identified with the West and considered “foreign.” “Africa is black, Islam is black.” Furthermore, it is a religion that can be assimilated gradually, without a great disruption in everyday life.

The fortress of African Christianity is also threatened by a revival of traditional religions. Having become disappointed with Christianity, or politically disillusioned, many Africans are reverting to the religions of their fathers. The heathenism of the early centuries dealt a strong blow to Christianity; it could do so again.

Christianity in Africa is threatened by internal forces as well. When churches compromise the positions of their founding fathers, as many African churches today, they open the gates to liberalism. In Africa this is a liberalism that seeks to find common ground with heathenism. A speaker at a recent African theological conference maintained that pagan concepts and Christian concepts on subjects like God, man, the world, morality, and evil are not so very different and that the missionary should try to work more closely with the leaders of pagan worship. He deplored the view of the non-Christian as one who has no light at all, and felt the missionary should take the pagan where he finds him and lead him from what he has to fuller knowledge of God as revealed in the Bible. There is some truth in this approach, but there are also dangers. It has led to the phenomenal rise of syncretistic “African” churches. In South Africa alone the government has registered more than 2,000 of these deviationist sects. If this approach should spread throughout the Church, the result might be a repetition of what happened in the early centuries, when Christianity nearly lost its identity under the trappings and concepts of heathenism.

The Great Priorities

If Christianity is to survive in Africa, several needs must be considered basic:

1. Africa must develop a truly indigenous church. Christianity cannot grow and deepen its roots there until African Christians carry their full share of responsibility for leadership. The Church must speak to the soul of Africa and must genuinely “belong.” The slowness with which this is taking place is most unfortunate; heaven alone knows the great loss the Church has sustained through the unwillingness of some to give way to progress in this matter.

Does this mean that the missionary will no longer be needed? No! But it does mean that he must be willing to work alongside the African as an equal. Persons not ready to accept this role ought not to try to work there.

Lessons may be learned from the Roman Catholics and the Muslims. The secret of the Muslims’ success has been their complete identity with the African way of life. And the phenomenal gain the Roman Catholic Church has made in recent years—from 18 million members in 1957 to 29 million in 1962—is due almost entirely to its successful Africanization policy. Like the Muslims, the Roman Catholics are not only developing a highly educated ministry but also trying to make their religious system thoroughly African in its theology and philosophical outlook.

2. The African church must be provided with a better-trained ministry, a ministry capable of showing the meaning of the Christian message for the Africa of today and of taking its rightful place in the new society. With the rapid growth of education, resulting in an emerging intelligentsia, there is an urgent demand for such a ministry. If the minister lacks a college education, with the accompanying cultural overtones, he will be handicapped in capturing the interest of the younger generation. And he will also find it hard to win the older educated class (court interpreters, police officers, teachers, businessmen); they may respect him for his position, but they will lose interest in his sermons and eventually stop attending his church.

There is indeed a bright future for the Christian message in Africa—but only if the Gospel is fully identified with an indigenous church served by a well-trained, indigenous ministry. Better training for the ministry on all levels must be a part of the planning of all church administrators, regardless of their particular field or institution.

3. Theological training must become a matter of top priority. This would seem to go without saying, but unfortunately the need for ministerial training has not always been kept prominent. With the demand for secular education high and tempting grants-in-aid from the governments available, missions have undertaken an educational program that leaves little or no time for the training of ministers. Consequently theological education has not had the emphasis that secular education has had, and the whole church program is suffering. In Seminary Survey Yorke Allen says:

Up to now the mission boards have often tended to be more interested in bandages rather than books, in hospitals rather than libraries, and in secular education as compared to the training of men for the ministry.… With the level of education rising in most countries, it seems reasonable to believe that the growth of faith, as well as the development of reason, will in the future be accomplished less through simple evangelism, however zealous, and more through the theological training of the most capable youth in each country [p. 568].

Several years ago a survey showed that American mission boards were devoting less than 6 percent of their annual foreign-missions expenditures to overseas theological training, and that the British societies were giving an even smaller proportion.

4. Recruitment of young men for the ministry needs to be greatly improved. It has largely been left to chance, with the result that the few who have entered the ministry have done so entirely on their own initiative. In no other important enterprise is recruitment so neglected.

The Church must continue to depend, as it has always done, upon the work of the Spirit in calling men to offer themselves as candidates. But it must also meet its own responsibility in pressing the claims of God and his work upon the young people in its congregations and schools.

Obviously, if the need for a better-trained ministry is to be met, then the colleges and seminaries must be improved. This does not necessarily mean that costly buildings must be erected, though in some places building may be necessary; it does mean that staffs must be strengthened, libraries expanded, and many courses realigned to meet the needs of present-day Africa. This, incidentally, is one of the best ways of solving the recruiting problem. Throughout the world the poorer-quality seminaries report difficulty in obtaining recruits; the strongest seminaries do not. Entrance requirements must be kept high, to attract good students.

The greatest days of the Church in Africa are before us, if, in the words of playwright James Barrie, “we choose to make them so.”

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.”