What effective sermons have in common

Sensationalism has a new home. Formerly it was associated only with the fundamentalist; now it has come to nest in the liberal pulpit. Jazz, dramatic readings, interpretative dancing, and discussions are replacing the the sermon in some churches. The idea is not that the sermon is completely out of date but rather that preaching must take forms the modern mind can accept.

Traditional preaching is now considered ineffective, and a look at the lives of many church members might lend weight to this stand. But a longer look and a second thought would take the viewer beyond preaching itself to the heart of the problem: the preacher and his message.

If today’s sermon is irrelevant, insipid, and outmoded, is that the fault of the method? Is it not rather the fault of the maker? An ineffective message will be ineffective no matter what form it is presented in. It matters little whether spiritual shallowness is doled out as a discourse or as a dance; it is still shallowness. I heard one of the popular disc jockeys in our area say one day on his program, “I have heard very few good sermons since coming to St. Louis. Why don’t they challenge us more?” He was complaining, not about the method of preaching, but about the message of the preacher.

My own experience confirms this. In my youth I attended Protestant churches of at least four different denominations. I can remember filling in the o’s on dozens of bulletins in an attempt to escape from boredom. Not until I was twenty and went to a Billy Graham meeting did I hear, for the first time in my life, that I needed to be saved.

What had I heard before? Ethics. Ethics garnished with Christian words, but still ethics without redemption. The problem with preaching today is that too many preachers are trying to teach unregenerate men how to live as Christians. This is dangerous. As Gerard Groote wrote, “Nothing is so dangerous as to preach about God and perfection, and not to point out the way which leads to perfection.”

The world has never lacked for ethical systems. High ideals are not confined to the Christian tradition. What the world has lacked is a way to find the salvation that is the necessary foundation for righteousness. The problem with preaching is that too often it has skipped the laying of a foundation and plunged blindly into constructing a building.

An old Anabaptist confession of faith says: “To command virtue in reliance upon human strength, is nothing else than to command one to fly without wings.” Little wonder that many sermons leave hearers frustrated.

P. T. Forsyth has described what he considers to be the chief temptation of the Church:

The reformation of society by every beneficent means except the evangelical; by amelioration, by reorganization, by programmes, and policies, instead of by the soul’s new creation … the temptation to save men by rallying their goodness without routing their evil, by reorganizing virtue instead of redeeming guilt [The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, London, 1955, p. 303].

As long as preaching falls before this temptation, it will remain ineffective.

But the power of biblical preaching is unabated. It remains God’s chosen method to reach the world (1 Cor. 1:18–21). And the power of Billy Graham, Sam Shoemaker, Oswald Smith, and many others bears ample witness to the continuing effectiveness of the sermon. What do the sermons of these effective preachers of today have in common?

At least three elements:

1. Simplicity. The sermon that is laden with philosophical or psychological terms and concepts is likely to miss its mark. The largest individual vocabulary ever measured, reports Terry C. Smith in How to Write Better and Faster, included only 10 per cent of the approximately 600,000 words in the dictionary. The man on the street is said to know fewer than 2 per cent of these words, while an educated man may know a little more than 3 per cent.

Today much emphasis is placed on communicating effectively through simple, concrete words. The preacher must learn to do this. Read a sermon by Billy Graham, or one of Dr. Shoemaker’s books. You will not need a dictionary of words or of philosophical concepts to understand what these men are saying.

2. Authority. When “Thus saith the Lord” is replaced by “some theologians think” and “most psychologists agree,” the power of the sermon rapidly drains away. Mark Twain vividly illustrated the uselessness of being equivocal when he was sent to cover an important social event for a newspaper. His editor had warned him to state only facts he could verify from his own knowledge, and so he turned in this story: “A woman giving the name of Mrs. James Jones who is reported to be one of the society leaders in the city gave what is reported to be a party yesterday to a number of alleged ladies. The hostess claims to be the wife of a reputed attorney.”

Effective preaching is rooted in the authority of the Bible. A skeptical physician who was converted under the preaching of D. L. Moody said, “I tell you, Moody’s power is in the way he has his Bible at the tip of his tongue.” When the preacher uses the Bible only as a springboard for a social treatise, or when he tears it to shreds in an effort to decide what parts he can consider reliable, his message will have no force. But when the Bible is proclaimed in its fullness, the power of God will be at work.

3. Focus on Christ. Preaching must center on God’s estimate of man, not on man’s estimate of God. Its heart must be the redemption of man by the power of God, not the redemption of society by the efforts of man. It should reflect the great central emphasis of Paul, who declared to the Corinthians, “I determined to know nothing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

When George Fox was seeking spiritual guidance, he walked seven miles to talk to a clergyman who had a reputation for being helpful, “but I found him but like an empty hollow cask.” The problem with preaching is that so often people come seeking the water of life, only to find an empty cask. But sometimes they find water—when the preacher with simplicity and authority proclaims Jesus Christ.

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.”

The main challenge to the Church in this changing world is the same one it faced at the dawn of the Christian centuries: to be the custodian of the changeless. Its first mission in Metropolis, its supreme task in the Secular City, is to execute Christ’s command: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Discussing the execution of this command, Gene Bartlett, in his Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale Divinity School, made a significant statement: “Essentially, the search for meaning in preaching centers in a few basic questions.… What shall we preach? Or again, How shall we preach it? Equally, in our time we have asked, To whom do we preach?” John A. Phillips, surveying the range of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology, expressed the same idea: “The problem for theology is speech: what we shall say and how we shall say it; what has been said and how it may again be said.”

To achieve excellence in preaching, the Christian herald should contemplate the ministry of the Lord. The Gospels abound with portraits of Christ as preacher; to study them is to gain an authentic concept of preaching.

For one thing, the Gospels reveal that preaching was the activity to which Christ gave priority. It was his first love, his main business and most consuming concern. This is not to say that preaching excluded all other functions. Christ was indeed a man of action, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, making the blind to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, the dead to live again. But most of all he was a man of words. He himself underscored his role as communicator: “Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also: for therefore came I forth.” He began the announcement of his mission to his hometown audience with a reading from Isaiah, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.” In answering John’s question, “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?,” he concluded by saying, “The poor have the gospel preached to them.” His first command to the twelve as he sent them on the first missionary journey was, “As ye go, preach.” And his last testament to the eleven began with, “Go preach.”

George A. Buttrick explores the idea that Jesus’ preaching was of supreme importance in his book, Jesus Came Preaching. “Jesus,” he writes, “could have written books. Instead, ‘Jesus came preaching.’ He trusted His most precious sayings to the blemished reputation and precarious memory of his friends.”

The Master knew that words are weighty in determining the affairs of the world. He did not assume that any deed could substitute for the spoken word. He was aware that words are the wings on which beliefs travel from one to another; that words are vehicles on which truth or error rides; that words are motivators, arousing interest and provoking actions.

D. Elton Trueblood in The Company of the Committed, comments on the power of words:

There has to be a verbal witness because there cannot be communications of important convictions without language. “I cannot by being good,” says Samuel M. Shoemaker, “tell of Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection, nor of my faith in his divinity. The emphasis is too much on me, and too little on Him.” We must use words because our faith must be in something vastly greater than ourselves. We make a witness by telling not who we are, but whose we are.

Implicit in Christ’s preaching is the key notion that Christian theology and human destiny are inextricably bound up with words. “Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” “By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” He concluded his Sermon on the Mount by saying, “Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock.”

In the second place, the Lord’s preaching was Christocentric, sprinkled with references to himself. The great “I am” passages that shine like jewels in the Gospel of John are vibrant with his self-consciousness and self-esteem. “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” “I am the good shepherd.” “I am the light of the world.” “I am the door.” “I am the bread of life.” “I am from above.” “Before Abraham was, I am.” This same self-esteem appears in his formal institution of the Lord’s Supper: he stipulated that the sacrament would be a memorial to his person in appreciation for the accomplishments of his blood. “This do in remembrance of me.” A thoughtless listener might accuse him of outrageous arrogance, callous conceit, strutting self-applause. But the discerning hearer knows that Christ’s seeming self-absorption is a trustworthy testimony to his true essence and identity.

In The Word God Sent, Paul Scherer charges that many people in the pew have never heard the Gospel. Far too many messages that pass for gospel sermons, he says, have little or nothing to say about Christ. He points out that the sermon voted best of the year by a certain polling agency was conspicuously barren in references to Christ. A minister who is trained in public speaking, gifted in social graces, and adept in business matters can gain a measure of success with these Christless communications. He may even count his church’s membership in the thousands, draw a better-than-good salary, win frequent compliments from his congregation, and achieve prestige and authority in the community. But if Christ is not the pith and marrow of his proclamation, his people hear less than the message of God.

A tragic trend in modern religion’s quest for spiritual reality, for a “new theology,” for an up-to-date Christology, is the tendency to discount the significance of divine personality. Any faith that conceptualizes God in impersonal terms and thinks of Christ as only historical, not contemporary, is unsound and unprofitable. Many American pulpits of today are manned by men who speak courageously about the Christian way of life, Christian morality, Christian conscience, and Christian concern but are cowardly about proclaiming the Christ who is the source and authority for all these. We desperately need more Christian heralds who are bold to say with the Apostle Paul, “We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord”; and, “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

Finally, the Lord’s preaching was portable. A television commercial says of Hill Brothers Coffee, “It’s reheatable.” About Jesus’ preaching we can say: It was repreachable. He structured his sermons so they could travel. He told so that hearers could retell. As far as we know, he never wrote a book, prepared a paper, or spoke from a script; like Elijah and Elisha and his forerunner, “the Baptist,” he was a non-writing “preacher-prophet.” Some in his audience grasped his message so thoroughly that they were able to furnish material that has won canonical credibility and now constitutes the major portion of the four Gospels.

Knowing that what he said would be remembered and repeated, he studded it with one-syllable words and simple sentences; he drew from material that was familiar to his hearers and made use of the sights and sounds around him; he honored the logician’s method of deductive and inductive reasoning; he depended little, if at all, on audible responses; and he had as a background for his preaching a life so unspotted that it was difficult for even his enemies to accuse him of sin.

He intended his hearers to become transmitters as well as receivers. He was aware that a Gospel that had the world for its field, all nations as its range of operation, and every creature as the object of its concern needed the voices as well as the ears of its non-professional adherents. Preaching ought to leave the listener with the challenge given to a man whom the Lord healed: “Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord has done for thee.”

Jesus’ preaching had top priority in his schedule, was Christocentric, and was reproducible. Those who speak for him today would do well to develop the same distinctiveness.

Of Marred Creation

Done on tired days, as all work now is done

(Eve could converse and act without fatigue

That dulls perceptiveness; now no one can),

This work is flawed as all work now is flawed.

Yet it is done. In spite of weariness

The clouded eye sees forms of leaf and wing

The slow hand celebrates in steel and stone.

The frayed mind seeks the fresh, creating word.

Clay cleaves to roots of trees whose tops aspire

To unconditional sky. The cursed ground bears

Sustaining blessings. Laboring, we catch

Glimpses of Eden glimmering through dawn mists.

JANE MERCHANT

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.”

A message to the World Congress on Evangelism by a chaplain to the Queen of England

First in a Series

The Church is under orders. The risen Lord has commanded it to “go,” to “preach,” to “make disciples”; and that is enough. The Church engages in evangelism today, not because it wants to or because it chooses to or because it likes to, but because it has been told to. Evangelistic inactivity is disobedience.

It is right, therefore, to go back to the very beginning and re-examine the Church’s marching orders.

The so-called Great Commission or Universal Commission occurs five times in Scripture, at the end of each of the four Gospels and once at the beginning of the Acts. There is no need to suppose that these are five versions of a single occasion; during the forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension, the risen Lord probably repeated the same commission many times, in differing words and with differing emphases.

John records what Jesus said on the day of the Resurrection itself (20:19–23).

Matthew records what he said later to a group of disciples on a mountain in Galilee (28:16–20).

Luke in his Gospel seems to be giving his own summary of what the Lord said on the subject during the whole forty-day period (24:44–49), for immediately before the discourse it is still Easter Day (v. 43) and immediately afterward it is already Ascension Day (v. 50).

In Acts 1:6–8 Luke gives another version of the commission, the final one, uttered just before the Ascension.

The fifth version is in Mark 16:15–18. From the plain evidence of the manuscripts it is generally acknowledged that Mark’s original conclusion has been lost and that this so-called Longer Ending is a later addition by another hand. We must therefore treat the passage with great caution; in this discussion I will omit it.

Let us begin with John’s account (20:19–23). It is the evening of the first Easter Day. For fear of the Jews, the disciples had met secretly, behind closed doors. Through these closed doors comes the risen Jesus. He has already appeared privately to Mary Magdalene and Peter, to the other women, and to the two disciples traveling to Emmaus. This, however, is the first official appearance to the Twelve. What he says to them is in striking contrast to their actual situation. They are terrified, but he tells them to have no fear and rather to be of good courage. They are in hiding, but he bids them throw open the closed doors and, risking persecution and death, march out to the spiritual conquest of the world.

He spoke four short sentences—of greeting, of command, and of promise:

1 First, “Peace be unto you!” He said this twice (vv. 19, 21), and again the next week, when Thomas was present (v. 26). Although superficially it was only the familiar Jewish greeting, there was more here, much more. As Bishop J. C. Ryle has said, “the first words that our Lord spoke to the disciples afford a beautiful proof of his loving, merciful, tender, thoughtful, pitiful, and compassionate spirit.” When Christ says, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,” he neither speaks nor gives as the world does (John 14:27). He was actually giving the Twelve the peace they needed, and he went on to confirm his word with a sign. “He showed unto them his hands and his side” (v. 20)—visible, tangible evidence that it was he who had died for them, and that he who had died had risen again. What sort of peace was this, then?

a. It was peace of conscience through his death. Those disciples had met as fellow sinners, for they had denied and deserted their Lord. Their greatest need was forgiveness and the assurance of forgiveness. How could they proclaim forgiveness to others until they had been forgiven themselves, and knew it? So he spoke his word of peace to them, and the scars in his hands and side were evidence (however dimly they understood it) that he who promised them peace had actually “made peace through the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). His death had an abiding significance; he still carried its marks in his body.

Our first need, too, before we can begin to evangelize, is the forgiveness of our sins and the assurance of forgiveness. And the risen Christ still speaks peace to the conscience of his people, still confirms his word with a sign. Are not the bread and wine of Communion today what the hands and sides of Jesus were on that day? They are visible, tangible tokens that he loved us and gave himself for us.

b. The peace Christ gave was also peace of mind through his resurrection. The disciples who gathered in that room on the first Easter Day were one in doubt as well as in sin. Even though the Lord had repeatedly predicted his death, it took them by surprise. They had not expected it. How could Jesus be the Messiah if he had ended his days on a cross, on an accursed tree? Their faith lay in dishevelment; their minds were in turmoil.

So the “peace” Jesus spoke and the sign he gave were for the mind as well as for the conscience. His wounded hands and side were evidence not only that he had died but that he had risen, and that the One who had risen was the same One who had died. “Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord” (v. 20). It was the same for Thomas a week later. Great is our joy when the bright light of the Resurrection shines into the dark corners of our doubt.

The Church’s very first need, then, before it can begin to engage in evangelism, is an experience and an assurance of Christ’s peace—peace of conscience through his death that banishes sin, peace of mind through his resurrection that banishes doubt. Jesus repeated his greeting for emphasis: “Peace be unto you.” We cannot preach the Gospel of peace to others unless we ourselves have peace. Indeed, the greatest single reason for the Church’s evangelistic disobedience centers in its doubts. We are not sure that our own sins are forgiven. We are not sure that the Gospel is true. And so, because we doubt, we are dumb. We need to hear again Christ’s word of peace, to see again his hands and his side. Once we are glad that we have seen the Lord, and once we have clearly recognized him as our crucified and risen Saviour, then nothing and no one will be able to silence us.

2“As my Father hath sent me, even so send 1 you” (v. 21). Although this is the simplest form of the Great Commission, it is at the same time the most profound form, the most challenging, and therefore the most neglected.

In these words Jesus gave not only a command to evangelize (“the Father sent; I send you”) but also a pattern (“As the Father sent me, so send I you”). The Church’s mission in the world is like Christ’s. He was the first missionary, and all our mission is derived from his.

How did the Father send the Son? Here are three answers:

a. The sending involved birth into the world. The Son did not stay in heaven; he was sent into the world. Nor did he come into the world in the full regalia of his divinity. He laid aside his glory. He became poor. He did not come in human disguise; he actually took our nature and was born into the world.

b. The sending involved life in the world. Having assumed man’s nature, the Son shared man’s experience. Once “the Word was made flesh,” he “dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He exposed himself to temptation, sorrow, loneliness, opposition, scorn. He mixed freely with men, even in sinful, secular society. He was criticized for fraternizing with publicans and sinners. “This man receives sinners and eats with them!” men sneered. Indeed he did. It is our boast: one of his most honorable titles is “friend of publicans and sinners” (e.g., Matt. 11:19).

c. The sending involved death for the world. God’s Son did more than just take upon himself man’s nature and life; he assumed man’s sin as well. If he was “made flesh,” he was also “made sin” and “made a curse” (John 1:14; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13). Of course, the sin-bearing death of Jesus in its atoning significance and power was absolutely unique. Yet in a secondary sense we too are called to die, to die for the very people we seek to serve. Not until the seed dies is the fruit borne. “The disciple is not above his master.… If any man serve me, let him follow me.… If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (see John 12:24–26; Luke 9:23). We must be ready to lay down our lives for others, not only in martyrdom but also in self-denying service—to be despised and rejected sometimes in the living death of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, ridicule, and obscurity.

By his birth, by his life, and by his death, then, God’s Son identified himself with man. He did not stay aloof; he made himself one with us. All this was involved in his being sent by the Father into the world.

Now he says to us, “As the Father sent me into the world, so send I you.” Failure to obey the implications of this seems to me to be our greatest weakness in evangelism today. We do not identify. We shout advice to drowning men from the safety of the shore; we do not dive in to rescue them. But Jesus Christ did not broadcast salvation from the sky. He visited us in great humility.

Our hesitancy is somewhat understandable. It derives partly from our sharp reaction against those who lay such stress on identification that they have renounced the duty to proclaim the Gospel. “We must sit down beside these unbelievers,” they say, and they are quite right. But they wrongly continue: “We have nothing to say to them. We must listen to them. We must let them teach us.”

By all means we must be ready to listen and learn; and we must also be ready to speak. Evangelism modeled on the ministry of Jesus is neither proclamation without identification nor identification without proclamation. It is both together. Jesus Christ is the Word of God, the proclamation of God; in order to be proclaimed, however, the Word was made flesh.

Frankly, this is my own greatest problem as a parish minister. I love to preach the Gospel—to those who will listen to it. No ministerial activity brings me greater joy than the exposition of God’s Word to those believers and unbelievers who come to church to hear it. But how am I to identify with the people of the parish who will not hear? How can I become one with secular men and women, as Christ became one with us, so that I can express and demonstrate my love for them and win a right to share with them the good news of Christ? I cannot be content to shout the Gospel at them from a remote and sheltered vantage point; I want to become their friend and argue it out with them side by side. I want to witness to Christ in their very midst. Just how to do this is an urgent question for those who want to follow in the footsteps of the Master.

3“Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (v. 22). These verses have a trinitarian framework: the Church’s mission is modeled on the Father’s sending of the Son and empowered by the Son’s sending of the Spirit.

I do not think that Jesus gave these disciples a special gift of the Spirit at that moment. His teaching about the Spirit, both in the upper room and during the forty days, suggests rather that here we have a dramatic anticipation of Pentecost, when he would pour out the Spirit upon them and endue them with power for their evangelistic task. He repeatedly promised this to them during the forty days, and here he breathed on them to confirm his promise with a sign. Just as before his death, in anticipation of it, he gave them broken bread, saying, “Take, eat, this is my body,” so before his outpouring of the Spirit he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Just as he enforced his word of peace by showing them his hands and his side, so he enforced his promise of the Spirit by breathing on them. After this experience they could never separate the Spirit from the Son. He had actually breathed on them. They knew the Spirit was his gift, the Holy Breath of Jesus Christ himself.

4 But the Church needs more than power; it needs a message. To this the Lord says: “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained” (v. 23). Upon these controversial words (with the words in Matthew 16:19 and 18:18 about binding and loosing) the Roman Catholic Church has built its rigid structure of sacramental confession and priestly absolution. But we deny this interpretation by applying to Christ’s words the two most basic principles of biblical interpretation. A text can never be interpreted in isolation; it must be viewed in its double context, that is, in both its historical and its biblical setting.

a. The historical context. In trying to understand a text we must ask what the speaker meant by it and what his hearers understood by it. We must be careful not to read into it alien ideas of a later age. What, then, did the apostles understand by this statement about the remission and the retention of sins?

That they did not imagine they were being given priestly or judicial authority to forgive sins is abundantly plain from the fact that later they neither claimed nor exercised such powers. Never in the Acts or the epistles did an apostle (or anybody else) require the private confession of sins or grant absolution to sinners.

What the apostles did, and did constantly, was preach the Gospel, declaring with authority the terms on which God forgives sins. Throughout the Acts and the epistles they do this, promising pardon to penitent believers and warning of judgment to impenitent unbelievers. The apostles understood that the authority the risen Lord had given them was the authority of a preacher, not that of a priest.

b. The biblical context is as important as the historical. We must allow Scripture to interpret Scripture, particularly when there are parallel passages. So here we ask: What else does Scripture report about the risen Lord’s teaching on forgiveness of sins?

The answer is not far away. Luke records Christ’s commission: to preach repentance and remission of sins to all nations on the basis of his name. Christ’s charge to them was not to give remission but to preach it, on condition of repentance.

This, then, is how we must interpret the Lord’s vivid statement: “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.” He was not giving men authority to remit or retain sins, for, as Christ’s contemporaries rightly asked when he forgave sinners, “who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7). He was simply telling them in a dramatic way to proclaim with authority the circumstances in which God remits sins and retains them. But the historical and the biblical context require us to interpret the verse in this way, just as the Reformers did.

Our commission, then, is to identify ourselves with the world, as Christ did, and to proclaim to the world the Gospel of divine forgiveness. In this striking paragraph in John’s account, identification and proclamation are brought together.

The whole world is burdened with a bad conscience; mental institutions are full of guilt-laden souls. But the Church has a message that can set men free, and it must proclaim that message with authority and without compromise! It is a message of blessing and of judgment: of the remission of sins to those who repent and believe, and of the retention of sins to those who will not.

In summary: In this first form of the Great Commission, given on Easter Day and recorded by the Apostle John, Christ emphasizes four marks of Christian evangelism:

1. an assured personal experience of peace in both mind and conscience;

2. a humble, sacrificial identification with those to whom we are sent;

3. the power of the Holy Spirit in our ministry;

4. an authoritative proclamation of the divine terms of peace.

This was the risen Lord’s word to the infant Church when it was still in hiding; it may yet bring the Church out of hiding today.

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.”

Time and again in our century the frontier demands for a relevant theology have been met by nonevangelical religious theories whose paralysis soon betrays their subtheological irrelevance. A theology so up to date that it boggles like the Boogaloo won’t survive as long as the Black Bottom.

Among the more recent victims has been Bultmannian existentialism. A theory that sought modern acceptance for Christianity by demythologizing the Bible, existentializing God’s revelation, and dehistoricizing the Gospel deserved an early death. Such gnosis can be kept afloat only by a steady stream of doctoral candidates in theology, and these religious lifeguards soon become so infatuated with their own mirages that they neglect the rescue of other men’s fantasies.

Our generation has been deprived of the truth of the Bible so long that a new opportunity now exists to present the fresh accents of the New Testament message as something novel and unique. Perhaps man is so much a stranger to the Gospel that in the twentieth century it can once again confront him with first-century newness.

God doesn’t need to talk like Woody Woodbury or wear a miniskirt to get mass exposure in 1968. All he has to do is to be himself; sooner or later twentieth-century man will either come to terms or run for cover.

Designating this as International Year for Human Rights was a splendid idea. Freedom of religion and civil liberty, it is said, are like Hippocrates’ twins: they weep or laugh, live or die together. Since effective influence is usually exerted through collective action, it was fitting that the World Council of Churches a few months ago issued a statement on the subject. This said in part: “Disturbances in many countries and regions arise when human dignity is not recognized and human rights are not observed. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights warns that, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse as a last resort to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, human rights should be protected by the rule of law.” The statement called for prompt and concerted action at the national and international level.

This is altogether laudable. So too is a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Mrs. Helen Joseph, whom the South African government recently placed under a second five-year confinement to her home every evening, weekend, and public holiday. Dr. Ramsey was “distressed beyond words at the injustice with which you have been treated and at the hardship and frustration which you are facing.”

These are the sort of words one expects from the WCC and from one of its presidents. Some evangelicals whose concern for human rights is no less keen than that found in Geneva or Lambeth would heartily concur with these expressions. There are others, however, whose sweeping condemnation of the WCC and its works extends to compassionate projects where doctrinal orthodoxy is utterly irrelevant.

Yet though we regret this shortsightedness in evangelical circles, some of us who cover major ecumenical occasions do become vexed at times by the selectiveness of the WCC’s public indignation. The big stick is brought out (often rightly) for South Africa and Viet Nam, while the big silence is maintained over, say, Cuba, Greece, and Cyprus. Outspoken critics over the former become embarrassed diplomats over the latter.

But why? The question of human rights knows no racial or national frontiers, a fact implicit in the proceedings of the WCC’s Hague Consultation last April. The consultation urged that in speaking out on international affairs the Church should be prepared to say a “costly word,” declaring the truth even when “men will not dare to utter it.”

Four days after that Hague meeting ended, there was a coup in Greece. Whatever the merits of the case, it has resulted in the violation of human rights. Men and women are detained on remote islands, under wretched conditions, untried and even uncharged. A recent report on Greece by Amnesty International, with its appalling account of the use of torture techniques, should elicit as much compassion and indignation as a comparable report on South Africa would. The junta, moreover, slapped a ruthless censorship on all expression of opinion; many reporters were arrested.

Those of us who belong to WCC member churches might here ask certain questions. Have the WCC’s pronouncements on human rights been directed toward Athens? There was no sign that this had been done until the executive committee met in February; then a press release suggested that the council was at last taking a stand on Greece. Three points were made. (1) “Dr. O. Frederick Nolde, director of the CCIA, reported that a letter had been sent on November 17 to the Prime Minister of Greece, Mr. Constantine Kollias, protesting the mistreatment of political prisoners.” No details of the letter were given. Kollias is no longer premier. (2) “On the basis of recently published reports by Amnesty International citing specific cases of torture, Dr. Nolde said a second protest would be forthcoming.” No details were given. (3) “The Executive Committee … agreed that it would be desirable for its General Secretary … to take advantage of an early opportunity to visit Greece in order to confer with ecclesiastical and government authorities.” No terms of reference were given, no great urgency suggested.

These formal—if imprecise—gestures were enough to trigger reaction in Athens. Archbishop Ieronymos and the Holy Synod espied “flagrant intervention” in Greece’s internal affairs, and promptly announced the Greek church would boycott the upcoming Uppsala assembly of the WCC.

The technique was familiar. Even before the 1967 Central Committee meeting in Crete, Ieronymos muzzled potential protest by threatening to take the Church of Greece out of the WCC if adverse comment were made on the Greek situation.

Archbishop Iakovos, primate of America’s Greek Orthodox and a WCC president, hoped “constructive steps” would be taken to win back the favor of Athens, since the purposes of Uppsala “should transcend all other considerations.” WCC General Secretary Blake said the WCC was working for a change in attitude. Then Ieronymos released correspondence with Blake welcoming him to visit—so long as he did not try to interfere in Greek affairs.

In some cases the WCC policy seems to involve the buying of silence by hints of delicate negotiations behind the scenes that must not be jeopardized. This seems totally reasonable unless one is tiresome enough to follow up some of the issues—as I did in visiting Cyprus, Cuba, and Greece. In Cyprus, both church and state are led by a man whose murderous anti-British (EOKA) campaign was financed by his church’s money, and who speaks of a task uncompleted until the last Turk has been driven off the island. After visiting a refugee camp outside Nicosia in which 3,000 Turkish Cypriot victims of the troubles existed in miserable conditions, I asked at the WCC’s Geneva headquarters if any official protest or statement had been made about Christian atrocities against the Muslim. Dr. W. A. Visser’t Hooft courteously produced a reply he had made to a similar query from a group of Swiss pastors. The gist of it was contained in one sentence: “It is not the task of the World Council of Churches to judge the acts of the member churches.”

I find that most revealing, for neither South Africa nor Viet Nam has a national church in WCC membership likely to be offended by any pronouncement on its affairs. Where Greece and Cyprus are concerned, here surely is a challenge for the WCC to speak that “costly word” during this International Year for Human Rights. Let it prove loyal to its own more thoughtful and less diplomatic self, remembering a section of its own report from the Hague last spring: “This costly word may create a tension not only between the Church and the society of which it forms a part, but also between those who speak and some of their fellow Christians.… They may at times have a duty to speak in warning or counsel to one or more member churches.” Until this is truly implemented without fear or favor, many can still complain that it is the WCC’s silences that are the most eloquent today.

The Consultation on Church Union voted without a ripple March 27 to write a plan of union for 25 million Protestants. A drafting group will propose the text to representatives of the nine denominations next March in Atlanta, or by 1970 at the latest.

The work group that made the proposal called it “reckless obedience” to God. Speed is sought both by those who want COCU to settle touchy issues and by zealots who want to get a merger through (with as few advance commitments as possible) while the ecumenical tide is still running high. This year’s sessions in Dayton, Ohio, gave plan-writers little guidance as to which controversies the merger document should face head-on.

Last year COCU had stated an open-ended commitment to work on a plan, and four commissions spent the intervening months in spotty spadework on structure, unification of ministers and members, and reaction to the basic Principles of Church Union approved in 1966.

The cap has been off the bottle for seven years now, and COCU is losing its fizz. The talks have a do-or-die atmosphere. “We do not have the time to be leisurely,” said outgoing Chairman David Colwell, who thinks COCU isn’t keeping pace with “the world’s agenda, which in theological terms is God’s agenda.”

If COCU doesn’t act, some fear, scattershot mergers will occur locally, denominational boards will go ahead and create a de facto union, and youth will declare the Church irrelevant. In a bid to that youthful grandstand, COCU told denominations to add a tenth delegate under twenty-eight years of age, but the action also will add negotiators from outside the Protestant establishment.

The second key Dayton decision was to set up COCU’s first full-time secretariat later this year. A big-name executive and a public-relations aide will get a combined salary of $32,000 a year. An annual $50,000 would go for travel and for an office in the New York City area, where most union planners are centered.¹COCU spent only $14,000 between April 1, 1967, and March 1, 1968.

The COCU Executive Committee met eight times since last May and stepped up the pace by ordering studies of current cooperation among denominations, guidelines for local ecumenical action, and legal obstacles to merger. (The lawyers’ advice: Go ahead, since the law is changing rapidly, and most major issues “end up” in court anyway.) This fall COCU will summon denominational executives to discuss their joint ventures. Christian-education staffs are making “definite progress in cooperative publishing.” The worship commission is urging wide use of its trial Eucharist and is working on a joint hymnal, and—with Roman Catholics and Lutherans—a common text of the Lord’s Prayer and Apostles’ Creed.

With all this harmony, can COCU go wrong?

COCU’s first significant open debate on structure gave a taste of things to come. A work group proposed a 300-member “Provisional Assembly” to assume authority over the national agencies and 25 million constituents in the first stage of union. In a compromise between COCU’s present equal vote for each denomination and the “one man one vote” ideal, each denomination would have had twenty-five votes, plus extras based on membership over one million. This would have given the United Methodist Church sixty-five and the Episcopal and United Presbyterian churches thirty-five each.

Truman Douglass of the United Church of Christ, seeing a “great danger” of domination by larger churches, pleaded for an equal twenty-five votes per denomination. After an edgy one-hour debate, Douglass got a razor-thin 38–37 victory, with help from Presbyterians and the three Negro Methodist churches.

The present strategy is to leave intact the denominations’ present regional organizations, as well as their national agencies, when the united church begins. Thus, for some years the church will really be a church federation, with a unified legislative and judicial body at the top. Proponents think this will improve continuity, make it easier to get approval from the various denominations, and head off obstruction by people who wouldn’t like their new jobs in a completely reorganized union church.

But, as the work group pointed out, no church will be anxious to go under the Provisional Assembly until “vastly more important concerns” are clarified. Dayton reached an apparent consensus on maintaining the Episcopal Church’s claim to the “historic episcopate,” while allowing varying interpretations of its meaning, under an act of unification with laying on of hands by bishops, clergy, and laity. Non-episcopal groups would “set apart” bishops at that time.

But the more troublesome issue is how powerful the bishops will be. As in the U. S. Constitution, checks and balances will play a major role. COCU founder Eugene Carson Blake said on the eve of the meeting that in such a large church congregational calls of ministers would have to give way to appointment by bishops, but Dayton dodged that one.

Unifying members should prove easier than unifying ministers, but one thorny area remains: discipline. Many delegates think union would be a good time to set up more rigorous membership demands, since, as Disciples pastor William J. Jarman put it, “the Church probably has the lowest standards of any social institution.”

A background paper on discipline by Southern Presbyterian educator Rachel Henderlite said scriptural standards of behavior are drawn from an individualistic agrarian society, while today’s “man sciences” require the Church to be less certain that “one standard is to be required of all.”

COCU may yet be pressed from the left to reopen the delicate theological accord reached in the 1966 Principles. Even though COCU requires no assent to the creeds, Dayton passed a resolution to assuage those who don’t believe certain articles by pointing out the creeds’ historical and corporate nature and stressing that their use will be persuasive, not coercive.

Princeton Seminary President James McCord said early COCU consolidated the consensus of thirty years of ecumenical effort. Now it faces a “radically different theological climate” and must mesh with radicals who are less interested in keeping “the fullness of tradition” than in confronting concrete problems of mankind.

New COCU Chairman James Mathews, Methodist Bishop of Boston, said once the formal union plan is written, the “quiescent constituency” will come alive and “the sparks will fly.” The Methodists’ first action on the plan would normally come at the 1972 quadrennial, with final approval possible in 1976. But Colwell and others would like to speed this up through special conventions. An Australian Methodist observer said he is waiting to see “how serious the American Methodists are about union.”

Dayton is headquarters city of the Evangelical United Brethren, who will dissolve into The Methodist Church later this month. And, for whatever it’s worth, a local TV station ran a poll on whether people favored merger into a few Protestant groups. Eighty per cent of the several thousand who phoned in said “No.”

MANNA FROM VIRGINIA

Atheist Garry DeYoung, one of the plaintiffs in the landmark 1964 Delaware ruling against school Bible reading, has moved to Minnesota. Last Christmas he got religious songs removed from a Duluth elementary school concert. Apparently in reprisal, somebody smashed two plate-glass windows at DeYoung’s bookstore. DeYoung, in his usual mood, said he wished “washed in the blood” Christians would pay for his broken windows instead of praying for him.

Thus challenged, the Charlottesville, Virginia, Seventh-day Adventist Church took up a special collection for DeYoung’s windows. Along with the $25, Pastor Trevor Delafield sent a letter explaining that although his members disagreed with DeYoung’s atheism, they upheld his right to his own beliefs. “Christ hates the sin but loves the sinner,” Delafield reasoned. “We try to do the same thing.”

PERSONALIA

America’s ten most powerful Protestants are ranked by United Press International religion writer Louis Cassels, in the April Christian Herald, in this order: Eugene Carson Blake, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Jr., John E. Hines, Franklin Clark Fry, J. Irwin Miller, J. Howard Pew, Arthur S. Flemming, Clyde W. Taylor, Robert McAfee Brown.

R. O. Corvin is being replaced as dean of the Graduate School of Theology at Oral Roberts University by Howard Erwin. Corvin may stay to teach.

America’s number one black-power churchman, the Rev. Albert Cleage, Jr., unveiled a new inter-religious effort to mobilize white affluence in behalf of the American poor. The project, a joint effort of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders, seeks to raise $10 million for pilot programs in five target cities. Cleage is co-chairman along with Presiding Episcopal Bishop John E. Hines.

Ben Hartley, editor of Presbyterian Survey, withdrew a letter of resignation after talks with a special negotiating committee named by the magazine’s board of directors. Survey is the official monthly periodical of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

Deaths

The Rev. Samuel H. Miller, dean of Harvard Divinity School, died in his sleep last month at the age of 68. He had planned to retire this year; Dr. Krister Stendahl, Swedish theologian at Harvard, had been named to succeed him.

Ecumenical involvement and the relevance of Christianity to modern life often occupied the former pastor’s thought. He considered the Church a boat that needed rocking before it could show twentieth-century man the way of God.

The Rev. Charles E. Fuller, radio preacher and a founder of Fuller Theological Seminary, died March 19 at the age of 80 (see editorial, p. 26).

Dr. Gilbert Bilezikian, 40, Bible teacher at Wheaton College in Illinois, will become president of Haigazian College, an evangelical school in Beirut, Lebanon, affiliated with the Armenian Evangelical Church.

Dr. Gordon Elliot Michalson was named president of the School of Theology at Claremont, California, a Methodist institution that has a cooperative relationship with the Christian Churches and the United Church of Christ. Michalson came from MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illinois, where he has been president since 1960.

MISCELLANY

A leading rabbi proposes that chaplains in the armed forces be removed from military control. In a report to the Rabbinical Assembly, an international association of Conservative rabbis of which he is president, Rabbi Eli Bohnen said dissociation from the military establishment seems necessary so that chaplains can counsel servicemen according to conscience.

A joint degree program is planned by Kansas State University and Manhattan Bible College. Meanwhile, Messiah College, a small Christian school near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, plans to set up a “living-learning” center on the campus of state-related Temple University at Philadelphia; a group of students and faculty from Messiah will study and teach at Temple with financial help from the federal government.

Two Christian colleges in the Los Angeles area, Arlington and Azusa Pacific, will be merged this fall. Arlington operates under the Church of God of Anderson, Indiana. Azusa is an independent evangelical school.

Martin Luther King’s “Poor People’s Campaign,” set to open April 22 in Washington, D. C. has won the support of the local United Presbyterian presbytery, officials of the council of churches, and two inter-Lutheran councils. A National Council of Churches agency plans to help, too, though the NCC has taken no official stand.

L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City newspaper, starts publication this month of a weekly English-language edition. It will be edited by Father Lambert Greenan, an Irish Dominican.

A merger of the Texas Council of Churches and the Texas Catholic Conference has been approved by both groups and now needs a two-thirds positive vote from the communions in the council to go into effect. The council counts 1.3 million members and embraces most of the big denominations in Texas. Leading outsiders are the 1.8 million Southern Baptists in Texas.

Campus Crusade for Christ is mushrooming. It was at work on 155 campuses last May; now it’s on 303. Participating students have more than doubled in the current academic year.

Staff numbers are up 67 per cent this year also, but the press of the crowd is making the effervescent, evangelistic movement increasingly student-run. Founder-President William R. Bright denies any shift in strategy or philosophy, preferring to speak of “evolution.” He insists that basically Crusade is “not a student-led program.” On many local campuses, however, the change is dramatic. Bright sees greater student involvement as a result of Crusade’s growth. Many on campus believe a greater student role is sparking that growth.

Crusade staff members often used to direct the entire program, conduct most of the meetings, do most of the evangelism. As University of Wisconsin student mobilizer Duane Dobschuetz puts it: “Staff ran things. Students tended to sit there and watch. It was just another organization. It killed our creativity.”

The movement is growing so fast now that staffers just can’t do everything. So last summer Crusade gave the equivalent of staff training to 8,000 students at its handsome hotel-headquarters near San Bernadino, California. “We gave the students the authority to start their own ministries on their campuses if they stayed in touch with the district staff team. The team is there to advise and support,” said national field worker Stephen Meyer.

Now many staffers are not resident at a single campus but travel in teams within a geographical area, going where the Spirit and need lead. And students increasingly plan local strategy and speak in fraternity and sorority houses.

Students are also “more on their own now,” Bright said, in leading the basic Crusade units on campus, the “action groups” of about a dozen students. Midwest staffer Robert Andrews says action groups are formed by students who desire them and are run the way they choose. The purpose of the groups, he adds, is not witness but fellowship.

Indigenous student leadership. Small fellowship groups. Sounds as if Crusade is getting more and more like the older, lower-key evangelical campus movement, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Bright denies the two movements are similar or competing. He emphasizes staff control and says action groups are not IVCF-type Bible studies but “revolutionary cells” to map evangelistic strategy and share victories and defeats.

Late in January, Bright met in Denver with the IVCF directors for the United States and Canada and the president of the Navigators—the first time the leaders of the four campus movements had ever gotten together. A terse news release said the quartet explored ways in which the organizations “could complement one another.” A second meeting reportedly will be held before summer to discuss the overlap issue more directly.

Another recent Crusade change is elimination of such requirements as the one that each staff member make at least fifteen appointments a week to talk with non-Christians. To some, this made a law out of witnessing.

At a November conference where the new emphasis was discussed, Andrews told 300 Midwest collegians that without compulsion, new Christians eventually develop a natural hunger to study the Bible, and that evangelistic witnessing comes as a “natural overflow” of the Holy Spirit.

“You can’t earn God’s love. You must be willing to be a glove for God’s hand. The catch is that you don’t have to be a star to be a glove.… You just have to be available.”

Students from Northwestern University, where the new approach began last fall, said the movement had taken on a freedom and spontaneity that formerly were lacking, and was drawing more students than ever.

Andrews told the conference that in a critical self-evaluation, Crusade had concluded that staff control on campus and emphasis on crusade methods may have put a damper on things. He hammered home two points: (1) Direction of the ministry was being put squarely in the hands of students. (2) Students are totally free to live, grow, and share their faith in the manner they desire. His comments seemed aimed at freeing students from any sense of pressure or obligation regarding their Christian lives or participation in Crusade activities.

“We are experimenting,” said Dob-schuetz, a senior from Milwaukee. “We don’t talk about Crusade with students. We are not hung up on pushing Crusade. We are talking about the person of Jesus Christ.”

The student-run ministry is raising the “quality of student discipleship” as well as the numbers, says Richard Edic, one of the southern California directors. Last fall he turned the Long Beach State College work over to students whom he had trained intensively the past year. Several months later Edic returned and found that “our student leaders had grown from boys to men. They are conditioned, trained Green Berets. They aren’t soft. They have a spiritual hardness in the good sense. They have shaped up. And they are having a campus-wide impact.” He said decisions for Christ have risen “a great deal” but offered no figures.

Edic now covers forty campuses, after having spent two years “running around Long Beach State with a clipboard trying to evangelize the campus and holding Christian students’ hands.”

At the University of Texas, active Crusade membership has grown from sixty to 200 since action groups began last fall, says central Texas director Jon Buell. Growth there and on nearby campuses is “staggering,” he said. “We have never had so much to handle before.” “Student mobilization is the key in our day to a widespread evangelistic impact,” Buell believes. “It will not lower the standards or dull the edge of the ministry. Students are capable not only of reaching others for Christ but also of running a ministry.”

Wisconsin director James Green sees in Crusade a deeper emphasis on the building up of Christians. “God has been impressing the meaning of grace in a new way on the hearts of staff all over the country,” he said. “It has been talked about all down through the organization.

“A lot of students have been set free. Witness is still important, but some students used to feel they weren’t accepted if they didn’t witness. Now many of them want to witness.”

Student mobilization at the University of Wisconsin began to increase late last semester as students gained leadership roles and demanded more training from staff members, Green said.

But staff is still crucial and—despite the end of the fifteen-a-week rule—still disciplined. Workers must raise their own support, and everyone gets the same salary: $250 a month for a single person, increased $10 annually to top pay of $300 a month. Couples get from $350 to $450 monthly, with allowances for up to four children. (Couples with more than four children, in Crusade slang, have “cracked the faith barrier.”) No conscientious objectors are hired.

Even with such rigors, Bright has built a staff of nearly 1,200, including burgeoning national work in thirty-seven foreign countries. From the basic campus effort have come a series of new ministries (see story below).

“We believe the Great Commission,” Bright says. By 1976 he envisions a staff of 10,000 at work in every nation on the globe—including Communist China.

NEW FOLK

From its campus base (story above), William Bright’s Campus Crusade has developed a ministry with thirteen major divisions, using everything from sex lectures to folk songs as evangelistic wedges.

Last year 75,000 pastors and laymen attended Crusade week-long “institutes for evangelism” all over the country. In recent weeks, Bright has led institutes in Florida, Michigan, Arizona, and Illinois, while holding conferences with Crusade college staff along the way.

In the 1966–67 school year, Crusade’s biggest crowd was 2,500 for a lecture series on “Sex and the Single Collegian” by national field chief Jon Braun. This year the same series drew 6,000 students at Western Kentucky University.

Then there are two troupes of the “New Folk,” five men and four women who tour campuses with a glossily packaged folk show that ends with personal testimonies by the performers, a ten-minute gospel appeal, and a prayer of commitment.

The idea began last year, and the original troupe played to 100,000 during the first season. The group charges $160 per day for appearances, booked through Campus Crusade districts. Some concerts are free and some charge admission. Audiences are 80 per cent college students.

The entertainment part includes folk material, pop songs, spirituals, original gospel songs with lively arrangements, and some humorous sketches. The lighting, attire, staging, and pace produce an up-tempo evening. The professional quality, judging from last month’s show at the University of Maryland, makes for an unusual, appealing Christian witness.

AUSTRALIA CRUSADE BEGINS

In Sydney, Australia, sometimes called “the most evangelical city in the world,” evangelist Billy Graham opens a major nine-day crusade next week.

Perhaps the claim could be disputed, but the wholehearted sponsorship of the meetings by the Sydney Diocese of the Church of England could not. This support wholly alters the usual supporting framework of Graham crusades.

The Church of England, both in its native established form and in its far-flung “colonial” imitations, is sometimes indifferent toward—even violently against—Graham’s theology. But in Sydney the Anglican Archbishop, Marcus Loane, is president of the forthcoming crusade. Bishop Clive Kerle of the country Diocese of Armidale, 400 miles from Sydney, is chairman of the executive committee, and A. Jack Dain. bishop coadjutor of Sydney, is vice-chairman. All are staunch evangelicals.

Other colors in the theological spectrum are not absent in Sydney. But evangelicals are clearly in the ascendancy in public and church life. They do not have to fight to survive. They are not a despised minority. Rather, they are people who proudly trace their heritage back to the convict days 180 years ago when evangelical chaplains came with the ships to “convert the natives and plant the Gospel firmly in Botany Bay.”

Graham’s 1959 crusades in Australia drew the largest percentage response of any he has seen anywhere. The spirit of unity and cooperation that characterized the effort could almost be felt in the Sydney finale, when a crowd of 150,000 turned out. In four weeks, more than a million people attended, and more than 56,000 recorded decisions for Christ. In contrast, Graham’s 1966 meetings in Earls Court, London, drew 900,000 with 36,000 decisions.

But, as in every part of the world, the mood in Australia has changed since 1959 almost as drastically as the length of women’s skirts, and Graham faces a new challenge.

Australians are remarkably casual, leisure-minded, home-loving people. Many do not believe in Jesus Christ, but few list themselves as “atheist” or “non-believer” on the census form. Census statistics show 34 per cent of the population belong to the Church of England and 25 per cent are Roman Catholic. These figures bear little relation to church attendance, where the Anglicans do badly and Baptists do well.

National catastrophes like the recent drowning of Prime Minister Harold Holt cause scarcely a ripple in the nation’s comfortable affluence. The nation’s policies are tied to the United States, though a minority clamor for independence. The death of young Australians in Viet Nam seems not to have caused much of a change in attitude.

Australians are somewhat more international than they were in 1959 (more than 1,000,000 immigrants have arrived since the end of World War II). They have more cars per family, earn more money, even when inflation is considered, and work fewer hours.

The week of the 1968 crusade, April 20 to 28, is an in-between season in Sydney. It gets a bit chilly, but there are still thousands on the beaches on a fine day. Pre-season Rugby League football matches play to tens of thousands of fans.

When Billy Graham comes this time, there will be little suspicion. Last time he was accused of emotionalism, of making money and seeking publicity, and of making the Gospel too simple. All these charges proved to be false, and by the end of his stay, press and public were on his side. In 1968 the communications media have already been generous.

If theological liberalism is now much more marked in several denominations than it was in 1959, it did not seem to affect the Sydney preparations. Even when some preachers denounced Billy Graham as “unnecessary” and “fundamentalist,” many of their members supported him. Liberalism has emptied some of the theological colleges in Australia, whereas Graham filled them in 1960 and 1961, and so it is hard for liberal antagonism to get going.

Among the highlights of crusade preparations:

• A study booklet for young people, “Arresting the Mod Generation,” based on the Acts of the Apostles, was produced.

• Three series of rallies attracted more than 12,000 young people to discipleship and evangelistic meetings. Six “Flying Squads” visited more than 150 church youth groups in Sydney and forty in Newcastle, an industrial city 100 miles north. They have spoken to more than 10,000 people with a special audio-visual presentation, professionally prepared, on the theme of Andrew, who found his brother and told him of Christ. The setting is in King’s Cross (a center of night life), the Opera House, and the famous Harbour Bridge, during the 1959 crusade.

• More than 12,000 persons have attended counselor training classes. An additional 2,100 were “tuned in” via live landline relays.

• Loane wrote a booklet telling of the impact of the 1959 crusade and concluding, “May it please God to renew that faith and vision throughout the churches in Sydney and to use the crusade in April, 1968, to bring a fresh and mighty spiritual awakening into the life of our churches and our city.”

• Twelve weeks before the crusade, women began to meet for the neighborhood prayer meetings that are a regular part of Graham crusade buildups around the world. More than 4,000 homes were open.

Graham’s recent illness had a great effect on crusade preparations in Australia. It eliminated his previously scheduled meetings in Melbourne and New Zealand. After some hesitation, a crusade committee in Brisbane, capital of the northern sunshine state of Queensland, changed its dates, and Graham promised to preach there in a Palm Sunday weekend series. Associate evangelist John Wesley White preceded Graham in Brisbane.

ALAN NICHOLS

In the ecclesiastical surprise of the year, evangelist Oral Roberts became a Methodist last month and said he planned also to transfer his ordination vows.

The 50-year-old Roberts, known around the world for his healing ministry, explained the change as “an enlarged opportunity to minister.” He emphasized that it meant no shift at all in his theology. “I will minister as I have always ministered,” he said.

Methodist Bishop W. Angie Smith said Roberts would be received into the Methodist ministry during the annual session of the Oklahoma Conference, May 27. The ceremony will take place in St. Luke’s Church, Oklahoma City.

A spokesman said Roberts would be recognized as a “local elder” with permission to administer sacraments. He is currently taking special studies required of all ministers who come from other denominations.

Actually, the move marks a return for Roberts, who as a boy belonged to a Methodist church in Stratford, Oklahoma. He joined the Pentecostal Holiness Church after his healing from tuberculosis when he was a teen-ager. He was ordained in that denomination, which now has about 65,000 members, and has been worshiping in one of its churches in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

On March 17, Roberts and his wife became members of Tulsa’s prestigious Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa, whose building was designed by the late Frank Lloyd Wright. Their three older children have for some time been members of the First Presbyterian Church of Tulsa. A younger daughter plans to remain a member of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, with which Roberts will maintain a fraternal relationship.

Dr. Finis Crutchfield, pastor of the 6,000-member Boston Avenue Church, made it clear that Roberts “has not changed his faith in any way.” He welcomed him as “a brother in Christ and a sincere Christian” with “wide attainments in the field of education, civic work, and evangelism.” Roberts’s work, Crutchfield said, is “ecumenical in orientation and broad in its influence, and he enjoys the confidence of people of all faiths.”

Smith, who is completing twenty-four years as resident bishop of the Oklahoma Conference and will be retiring from the episcopacy in August, said: “The Church has men of various talents and interpretations, and the strength of the ministry is in this fact.… I extend the right hand of fellowship to Dr. Roberts, believing The Methodist Church has a contribution to make to his ministry, and certain he has a contribution to make to us.”

Methodist discipline provides for reception of “ministers coming from other evangelical churches” if they “give evidence of their agreement with us in doctrine and discipline.” After Roberts comes under the jurisdiction of The Methodist Church, he will be assigned to continue his work as president of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. The school, with an ultra-modern $21,000,000 campus, is now in its third year and has 800 students.

Roberts is one of five children born to Mr. and Mrs. Ellis M. Roberts, both of whom are one-eighth Cherokee Indian. The elder Roberts, a native of Arkansas, used to hold revival meetings when Oral was a boy. That Oral would follow in his father’s footsteps seemed unlikely, because he stuttered badly. Then he came down with tuberculosis. The healing of both disorders came during an evangelistic tent meeting conducted by an evangelist named George Moncey in Ada, Oklahoma.

Oral vowed to go into the ministry, attended Oklahoma Baptist University,¹Dr. Ralph Scales, a former teacher of Roberts at Oklahoma Baptist and now president of Wake Forest University (Southern Baptist), is this year’s commencement speaker at Oral Roberts University. and accepted a pastorate in Enid, Oklahoma. He took further study at Phillips University and in 1947 undertook the itinerant evangelistic ministry that was to make him famous.

Roberts now holds about one crusade a month in the United States and two a year overseas. His non-profit evangelistic association employs some 270 persons and has been housed in a striking new building in downtown Tulsa. (The staff is moving to smaller quarters near the campus this month; proceeds from the sale of the downtown building will be put in a university endowment.) He has published forty-four books, which have sold six million copies. His tracts have been printed in 179 languages, and a slick monthly house organ now has a circulation of about 450,000. Roberts also sponsors regular radio programs on nearly 300 stations and has had extensive television ministries.

News of Roberts’s change of denomination jarred many of his fellow Pentecostalists, and a spokesman expressed anxiety that “some misunderstanding and some loss of participation” could be expected. But he added that Roberts felt “he has to take this step” because it is the will of God. The evangelist himself said publicly:

“Through the charismatic move of the Holy Spirit there is an openness in the church world today that permits different beliefs and practices within the context of sincere commitment to Christ and to the needs of people.”

Participants in the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin will recall that Roberts at that time expressed a desire for closer identification with “mainstream Christianity.” He said that the meeting had helped to “open his eyes” to this possibility, but that he still held just as strongly to Pentecostal beliefs and practices, such as speaking in tongues, which he does daily.

Roberts, genial and soft-spoken in private, is tall and robust and retains his Oklahoma twang. He has often had rough treatment from news media, and this has left him overcautious in what he says to reporters. But he is a churchman of great integrity who hardly fits the older image of the Pentecostalist.

Roberts is probably doing a lot to change that image and to bring Pentecostalism further out of the cultural backwater. His move to Methodism may bring more Pentecostals and other evangelicals back into the old-line denominations, thus strengthening the conservative power base in those groups.

CLEARING THE AIR AT GORDON

The quest for a new president begins this month at Gordon College and Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts. Dr. James Forrester, who has been president since 1960, is resigning as of August 31. It is no secret that tensions on the suburban Boston campus have run high in recent months.

Forrester, 58, has been on sabbatical leave since January 1. Local papers have quoted Robert C. Hagopian, whom Forrester brought to Gordon as director of development, as saying Forrester was “being pushed out of office.” George M. Rideout, chairman of Gordon’s board of trustees and acting president, said, “That is untrue. His resignation was submitted voluntarily.”

Forrester is moving to Puerto Rico to become vice-president for university relations of the Inter-American University. He will have special responsibility for development and public information, alumni affairs, and relations with government agencies. The university was founded in 1912 as a Presbyterian missionary effort and in its development has maintained a broad Christian context. In 1944 it became the first college outside the continental United States to win accreditation. It now has some 8,600 students.

Gordon has made remarkable strides under Forrester: Both the college and the divinity school have been accredited, the budget has grown from $450,000 to $2,500,000, student enrollment has tripled, and financial support has been cultivated within the conservative wings of the United Presbyterian Church and the American Baptist Convention.

Forrester, a native of Scotland, has seen pressures build with each innovation. Also, his resignation statement noted that “there is a changing concept of administration under which, with my training and background, the effective future advance of Gordon would be more difficult than necessary.” The resignation was disclosed two weeks earlier than planned in order to “clear the air” of the charges voiced by Hagopian.

‘LSD’ IN FREE METHODIST EDUCATION

When David L. McKenna assumes leadership of Seattle Pacific College next fall, he will be Washington state’s youngest senior college or university president. The 38-year-old educator was elected last month by the Board of Trustees to succeed retiring President C. Dorr Demaray.

McKenna leaves Spring Arbor (Michigan) College after seven years as president. He consistently aimed the Free Methodist college toward LSD—Leadership, Scholarship, Development.

During his administration the student body more than doubled. Originally a two-year junior college, Spring Arbor became a fully accredited four-year liberal-arts college. When McKenna first approached the Michigan Commission on College Accreditation, officials said the college had little if any chance of accreditation. But Spring Arbor met the requirements—and its president became chairman of the commission.

Seattle Pacific College will offer the community-conscious administrator ample opportunity to continue the pattern established at Spring Arbor. Nearly half of the more than 2,000 students commute to the city campus, largest of the Free Methodist colleges. McKenna foresees no “ivory tower” existence.

The Free Methodist minister is well acquainted with academic life. He earned the B.D. degree from Asbury Theological Seminary and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Before going to Spring Arbor, he was coordinator and assistant professor of higher education at Ohio State University.

KUNG’S PLANS FOR THE PAPACY

When Swiss-born Catholic theologian Hans Küng was last in America for any length of time, in 1963, his study of justification had just appeared, and his addresses centered on that theme. To many they sounded almost Protestant. This year the 40-year-old, wavy-haired professor from the University of Tübingen, Germany, has published a new book, The Church, and is in the United States again, this time raising questions about the doctrine of the church and its structure.

Above all, Küng feels, the church must retreat from the “domination” theory of the papacy and church doctrine—not only because the church’s magisterium “has erred” but because the twentieth century is marked by a “new passion” for sincerity and truthfulness. He defines infallibility as “the basic persistence of the church in truth which is not destroyed by errors in detail.”

Hawks In The Pews

A rough, unscientific poll of 34,000 Protestants shows a large majority are dissatisfied with President Johnson’s handling of the Viet Nam war. More than half believe the “United States should use all military strength necessary (short of nuclear weapons) to achieve victory in the war.”

Readers clipped the questionnaires from nine Protestant denominational magazines and mailed them in. The 63 per cent dissatisfaction with the President was registered before the damaging “Tet” offensive. Most of the replies came from laymen, who proved more hawkish than the 2,000 clergymen who responded. For instance, 57 per cent of the clergy wanted a halt of bombing of North Viet Nam, while 60 per cent of the laymen were against a halt. And two-thirds of the clergy opposed the statement about using “all military strength necessary.”

The survey indicated that readers of journals in the United Church of Christ and United Church of Canada were the most dovish, while hawks were strongest in the Southern Presbyterian Church. Other denominations involved were The Methodist Church, United Presbyterian Church²The United Presbyterian Church recently reported that fifty-five of its 3.3 million members are registered officially as conscientious objectors., Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church in America, Christian Churches (Disciples), and Evangelical United Brethren. The nine journals, with combined circulation of 3.6 million, did the poll as part of their cooperative venture called Interchurch Features (see September 16, 1966, issue, page 48).

Other results:

• Should the United States “immediately and unconditionally” stop bombing of the North? Yes, 35 per cent; No, 59 per cent.

• If a situation like Viet Nam develops elsewhere, should America send troops? Yes, 30 per cent; No, 58 per cent.

• Should “conscientious protest” against the war be defended by the Church, “whatever the consequences”? Yes, 40 per cent; No, 55 per cent.

• Should alternative forms of active service be provided for youths who are conscientious objectors to this particular war? Yes, 75 per cent; No, 21 per cent.

The latter sentiment won support last month from sixteen teachers at Fuller Theological Seminary, who sent President Johnson a letter appealing for the right for a person to conscientiously object to any war he believes is immoral, and asking Congress to amend the Selective Service Act accordingly.

An even dovier evangelical protest came from forty-seven teachers at Calvin College and Seminary (Christian Reformed) in Grand Rapids. They supported recent appeals from four generals and an admiral for a bombing halt, and from South Viet Nam’s Catholic bishops for peace.

After scanning the poll statistics and comparing them with pronouncements from the World and National Councils of Churches, the Lutheran commented, “Officially the churches may coo like a dove but the majority of their members are flying with the hawks.”

What changes would Küng recommend? As a start, greater lay participation in church affairs. He looks for many spontaneous developments but would like to see a general shifting of church structures: a synod of laymen (and women) to balance clerical synods, a greater voice for laymen in selecting priests and bishops, election to all church offices, and procedures for deposing ecclesiastics who become or prove incompetent. He traces the present confusion in the Roman church to the rapid changes made necessary by centuries of dogmatism and immobility.

The sweep of Küng’s remarks also touches the papacy, where he sees a pressing need for change. Instead of the totalitarian role that the popes have enjoyed in the past, the Tübingen theologian looks for a “pastoral” primacy. In Küng’s thought this is far more desirable than either an honorary primacy or one that merely involves jurisdiction. There must be spiritual leadership. Küng drew applause from seminarians at Washington, D.C.’s Catholic University by observing that this sort of primacy would also mean a restriction of papal pronouncements to things about which the pontiff is adequately informed.

A non-totalitarian papacy, coupled with guarantees of certain areas of autonomy for Protestant denominations, could be the basis for a united Christendom, Küng feels. In such a situation, the pope could really be a servant of the servants of God and not, as is often the case, a dominator dominatorum.

In answer to charges that his views are unrealistically visionary, Küng points with approval to John XXIII. “The mere fact that Pope John convened the Second Vatican Council was a tacit admission that the pope needs the help of a wide spectrum of Catholics to govern church affairs.” A resolution of the problems of the papacy will come about only when the popes themselves renounce some “rights” they have acquired—often by rather “curious means”—over the centuries.

In such an environment the church can continue to rid itself of useless clerical pomp, especially in the liturgy. Küng finds it encouraging that so much “painted plaster and trash has been cleaned out of the churches and the convents.”

This month Küng ends his stay in America, finishing up his spring lectures at Union Seminary in New York, and returns to Germany, where he will continue to call for spiritual leadership in all branches of Christendom. “The Roman Catholic Church needs charismatic leaders backed by competent and informed personnel—Kennedys with Eisenhower cabinets.”

“We have very few spiritual leaders,” he tells both Catholics and Protestants. “This is the most significant lack in the churches today.”

JAMES M. BOICE

SEQUEL IN ECUADOR

The latest sequel to the missionary saga of Ecuador’s Auca Indians was written in February when a second, downriver band of the Aucas was contacted.

Kimo, one of the killers of five missionaries in the jungles in 1956, had led an overland advance party some months ago that got lost and nearly ran afoul of a spearing party from the savage downriver group.

As an alternative, Wycliffe Bible Translator pilot Don Smith and Marion Krekler of station HCJB perfected an airborne public-address system mounted on the wings of a plane. Messages spoken by Oncaye, an Auca runaway, plus drops of gifts, overcame the primitives’ fear of airplanes. They finally realized one of their relatives was on the plane, and a rendezvous was arranged.

Then Kimo and other Auca Christians set out for the contact point, with the help of Auca smoke signals and radioed directions from a plane. The first downriver person to respond to Kimo’s call into the forest was Oncaye’s mother, who had thought her daughter was dead. At that site, Kimo led the downriver Aucas in their first Sunday service.

AN ARCHBISHOP ABDUCTED

A politically motivated band of Gautemalans kidnapped Archbishop Mario Casariego in broad daylight last month and held him in a country home for four days. The 59-year-old Roman Catholic prelate was rescued unharmed after police tracked down three men who were guarding him.

Police in Guatemala City identified the Mano right-wing terrorist organization as the group responsible for the abduction. What it hoped to accomplish by the move was not immediately clear.

Archbishop Casariego, a native of Spain, was named to the Guatemala See four years ago. He is regarded as socially and politically progressive and was once accused by right-wing extremists of being a “guerrilla archbishop.” Some sources indicated that one of his own priests may have been an accomplice in the kidnapping. Police say people involved in the incident were part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government.

The kidnapping put the Roman Catholic Church very much on the spot in Guatemala. Tensions had previously been focused on several American Roman Catholic missionaries who have vowed to help bring social reform even if it means taking up arms and losing their lives. The Rev. Thomas R. Melville, 37-year-old priest who in January married the nun with whom he had been working, says it is futile to try to bring about progress in Guatemala by peaceful means. Melville and his wife, 38, are now under excommunication.

WATCHMAN NEE: ALIVE AND UNHARMED?

Watchman Nee, best known and most widely quoted Chinese Protestant, is said to be living in a Shanghai prison, “bodily weak” but “spiritually strong.”

Asia News Report sources in Hong Kong contradict earlier stories that the 65-year-old preacher and writer had been beaten and mutilated. The later account says he has translated English chemistry books into Chinese and been visited regularly by a close relative during his sixteen-year incarceration.

Jerusalem At Easter: 1968

Easter, 1968, will be historically memorable in Jerusalem. Never before has Holy Week been celebrated with Jews in full possession of the ancient Holy City.

Most of the sites traditionally associated with the death and resurrection of Christ are located in the old walled section of Jerusalem, which until the Arab-Jewish war of last June was part of Jordan. Tourists and “pilgrims” are expected to descend upon the area by the thousands, as they do each year, unless there are new outbreaks of hostilities.

Focus of the interest will be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, long regarded by many as Christendom’s most sacred shrine. This is supposed to be the place where Christ was crucified and buried, but there is no direct evidence to support the tradition. The church erected on the site is encrusted with sacerdotal trappings and leaves many evangelicals cold.

Protestants tend to prefer to associate history’s most crucial event with what is called Gordon’s Calvary and the garden tomb. This place, north of the old walled city near the Damascus gate, is named after a nineteenth-century British general who saw the rock formations as the biblical “place of the skull.” Its tranquility has been compromised in recent years by noise from a nearby bus terminal. An Arab Christian who had tended Gordon’s Calvary since 1953 was killed in last year’s war; his wife now lives in Pasadena, California.

The big influx of tourists is expected between Palm Sunday, April 7, and Easter Sunday, April 14. Jews celebrate the Passover this year April 12–19. Jewish interest is heightened by the fact that 1968 marks the twentieth anniversary of the independent state of Israel.

Christians lacking the motivation or the means to travel to Palestine can get a good idea of what it is like through a new, lavishly illustrated, 448-page book produced by the National Geographical Society. In its text, Everyday Life in Bible Times makes regrettable concessions to higher-critical presuppositions. But the maps, diagrams, and pictures make it unexcelled as a graphic presentation of Palestine.

In 1952 the former industrial chemist was imprisoned on charges of counterrevolutionary activities and multiple adultery. But the Chinese church he had helped found did not die with the arrests of Watchman Nee and 2,000 elders and lay workers. Congregations divided into cell groups and continued with an emphasis on personal evangelism.

Although Watchman Nee completed his fifteen-year sentence a year ago, he has not been released. A former colleague in his church-planting efforts explained, “With the Communists a thousand years are as a day, and a day as a thousand years.”

Watchman Nee’s spiritual leadership is attested by the popularity of his devotional books. The Normal Christian Life, now in its sixth English edition, has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Some of his other books are Song of Songs and What Shall This Man Do?; both discuss his concepts of Christian service.

NEWS ON THE CAPTIVES

Two American missionaries taken captive by the Viet Cong February 2 were reported alive and well last month. Spokesmen for the Christian and Missionary Alliance said the information came from a prisoner released by the Viet Cong. The two captives are Miss Betty Olsen, an Alliance nurse, and Henry Blood, of Wycliffe Bible Translators.

The Alliance suffered the loss of six missionaries in Tet attacks at Ban Me Thuot. The two captives were taken at that time. Three other American missionaries have been held by the Viet Cong since May, 1962. They also were seized in the Ban Me Thuot area.

Maritain Speaks His Mind

The Peasant of the Garonne, by Jacques Maritain, translated by Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, 227 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Clifford L. Stanley, professor of systematic theology, Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria.

In Europe “The Peasant of the Danube” is a proverbial figure who blurts out disconcerting truth that no one else will speak publicly, because of squeamishness, cowardice, or some other bad reason. The author, the famous Thomist philosopher, lives in retirement on the Garonne and takes the liberty of adapting the tag to suit this situation. His intention is obvious. Plain speaking is long overdue; and he proposes to speak now with a forthrightness that will offend and embarrass many.

He has two main reasons for writing, one negative and one positive. Let us speak of them in order.

First, Maritain castigates what he calls Catholic neo-modernism. He finds this to be of like principle with and as offensive as, the first modernism, associated with Loisy and Tyrrell. He is thinking not so much of a rank-and-file movement as of untrustworthy leadership—intellectuals, professors, clergy. Four mis-developments scandalize him: secular utopianism, which would set up heaven on earth; existentialism, which removes the deeds of men from any context of fixed law; phenomenology, which cuts off the reason of man from the order of Being; and immanentist evolutionism (Teilhard), which substitutes the growing universe from transcend ant God. While all of these are general cultural trends, it is their influence upon the intellectual and practical life of the Roman Catholic Church that especially concerns him.

Reading For Perspective

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

• After You’ve Said I Do, by Dwight Hervey Small (Revell, $4.95). An experienced pastor-lecturer-counselor offers enlightening insights from the Bible, scholarship, and life on the complex problems of communication in marriage.

• Nine Roads to Renewal, by Walden Howard (Word, $3.50). The story of how nine Christian groups entered into deeper personal relationships with Christ and thereby recovered the experience of genuine Christian fellowship.

• Adamant & Stone Chips, by Virginia Mollenkott (Word, $3.50). A state-college professor of English makes a passionate appeal for a genuine Christian humanism that will relate the Lordship of Christ and the message of the Bible to the full range of human knowledge and activity.

The positive motivation is the Providential work of the second Vatican Council, opportunely developed “for such a time as this.” First, Maritain wants to ward off misinterpretations that see the council as neo-modernist. The “updating” (aggiornamento) is easily misunderstood by the heedless. The council offers true leadership and inspiration for the times, since it has in mind the problems and understands the mind of our contemporaries. The voice of the Church offers guidance in three great areas: “the general welfare,” the possibilities of human history; true philosophy, which takes us out of the subjectivist pit of phenomenology; man’s life with God both public and private, in liturgy and in contemplation.

Response to this book in Europe was sensational; this accounts for its appearance in translation here so soon after its writing (1966). Many people thought the writer (in his middle eighties) had all but taken leave of his senses; that he had betrayed many of the positions of his life’s work and had certainly altered its spirit; that he who had ever been in the vanguard was now commanding, “Backward, march!” To others the book was the still, small voice of sobriety and wisdom—“probably the most reasonable defense yet written of a moderate viable traditionalism” (Leslie Dewart, quoted on the jacket).

Since Protestants and Catholics live in the same world, they are subject to similar influences and should be expected to have many of the same problems. Maritain’s high-level work shows that these problems are even more widespread and disquieting than we had supposed. We have a great deal of fellow-feeling for him in his trials and share his grief. Yet often we can read his sturdy, blunt rejoinders with cheers. This is a heartening book. God reigns.

Often a sadness overshadows human affairs. Sometimes it seems that we are in dialogue with the wrong people. Frequently the people who talk with us seem to stand for less and less of their own tradition and to grasp the “idols of the tribe” to the degree that they have positions and make affirmations. The people we want to talk with will not talk with us, certainly not about the tradition itself. The Roman Question remains. It is—the Reformation. Put otherwise, it is the truth of justification by faith, the First Article, “by which the Church stands or falls.

The Road To Irrelevance

Crisis in Lutheran Theology, Volume II, edited by John Warwick Montgomery (Baker, 1967, 194 pp., $3), is reviewed by Herman Otten, pastor, Trinity Lutheran Church, New Haven, Missouri.

These essays, along with those in Volume I, show clearly that Lutheranism is indeed facing a theological crisis. The editor observes that the last decade has made it painfully clear to all but the very naïve that the Lutheran churches in America—those in the Missouri Synod included—are experiencing a “theological erosion” that, unchecked, will lead to deadness and irrelevance.

The contributors to this second volume include some of today’s most competent and loyal Lutheran scholars. Several chapters previously appeared in CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Herman Sasse of Australia writes, “Because it is no longer understood, the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture has been abandoned by the theologians in the majority of the Protestant churches.” Robert Preus of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, notes in an essay on “The Doctrine of Revelation in Contemporary Theology” that for such theologians as Karl Barth, Martin Heinecken, Anders Nygren, G. Ernest Wright, Reginald Fuller, and Rudolf Bultmann, Holy Scripture is not revelation. He says:

In replying to Neo-orthodoxy we must go back to the basic conviction of the Lutheran Church and of historic Christianity that the Sacred Scriptures are not merely metonymically or metaphorically or hyperbolically, but, as our old theologians have said, vere et proprie God’s word, the product of God’s breath (theopnestos), the utterances of very God (ta logia tou theou) [p. 29],

He stresses: “Scripture IS revelation. How naïve for theologians to speak of Scripture as God’s Word and then to deny that it is a revelation!”

This Missouri Synod professor claims that “the basis of inerrancy rests on the nature of Scripture as God’s Word.” He supports the official position of his church as it is confessed in the Brief Statement: “Since the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, it goes without saying that they contain no errors or contradictions, but that they are in all their parts and words the infallible truth, also in those parts which treat of historical, geographical, and other secular matters (John 10:35).”

H. Daniel Friberg of Tanganyika, Africa, asks, “If God caused men to utter certain words as his own—which they could utter as easily as they could hear his words—why should that utterance be called a witness to God’s Word rather than the very Word of God?” Raymond Surburg of Concordia Seminary, Springfield, Illinois, in discussing “Implications of the Historico-Critical Method in Interpreting the Old Testament,” rejects the JEPD source hypothesis and says that “the views of the historico-critical method cannot be harmonized with the traditional view on the inspiration of the Bible as held by conservative Christians in the past nor by The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.” Surburg’s well-documented chapter is an excellent summary, showing how the critical views of some modern Old Testament scholars are irreconcilable with historic Christianity. He rightly insists that what Jesus said about the Old Testament is entirely factual.

Lewis W. Spitz, Sr„ of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, concludes that Martin Luther affirmed the verbal and plenary inspiration of Holy Scripture. Ralph Bohlmann, also of that seminary, ably shows that today’s theologians can learn much from the principles of biblical interpretation found in the Lutheran confessions. However, he correctly emphasizes that “the exegesis of the fathers—whether they be fathers of the ancient church, the Reformation church, or The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod—cannot determine our doctrine; only Holy Scripture can do that.”

Both these volumes edited by John Warwick Montgomery deserve wide circulation, and not only among Lutherans. All major denominations are facing basically the same theological crisis. These volumes offer a clear testimony to Christ and his inerrant Word. May they arouse sleeping churches.

Unorthodox Literary Greats

Belief and Disbelief in American Literature, by Howard Mumford Jones (University of Chicago, 1967, 153 pp., $5), is reviewed by Paul M. Bechtel, chairman, Department of English, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Here are six essays on the religious beliefs or rejection of belief of major American writers: Tom Paine, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Robert Frost. Paine was a deist, Bryant and Emerson Unitarians, Whitman an unclassifiable universalist, Twain a foe of all organized religion, and Frost, at the core, a skeptic. Only Cooper could be considered Christian in an orthodox sense.

Howard Mumford Jones, who long graced the Harvard faculty and now is in retirement, chose these authors because they semed to him “to represent important phases of the relation of belief and literature” through major eras of American history. He wanted to see what their writings revealed about what he regards as major theological concerns: man’s place in the world, his relation to God, and the structure of moral values drawn from that relationship. Jones’s analysis leads him to this conclusion: “I do not see that the direct presentation of any system of religious orthodoxy has at any time been a matter of major concern to most major American writers.”

In its broad generality that statement is difficult to challenge. It is essentially right. No major American writer ever set out, as Milton did in Paradise Lost, “to justify the ways of God to men.” But had Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and T. S. Eliot been included in this study instead of Paine, Twain, and Frost, an alliance between belief and literary art might have come through somewhat more favorably.

Jones notes somewhat incidentally that our literary classics have been “overwhelmingly Protestant in tone,” or have been written by authors “reared in some branch of the Protestant faith and later departing from it, as in the case of Whitman.” We have had, of course, many books, articles, and novels on religious themes, “but most of them are negligible as literature.” America has produced no religious classics like Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy, though it has achieved successes of the second rank like the Journal of John Woolman.

This little volume reveals the organizing skill, freshness of insight, and grace of style that often characterize the mature scholar. Such assets make the author a valuable guide in extracting and organizing the core of religious responses in these writers, for no one of them was a systematic thinker about theological problems. Jones does not test his writers on some of the central Christian doctrines as Randall Stewart did several years ago in his fine book American Literature and Christian Doctrine, in which he makes the acceptance or rejection of original sin a clue to orthodoxy.

Jones acknowledges that great American writers have come powerfully to grips with the intense moral issues that forever engage men’s minds and that they have not failed to grapple with theological issues. But he concludes that there is “an almost continuous failure of religious orthodoxy to appeal to the serious literary imagination.” Perhaps there is a challenge in his words. Piety and high artistic creativity are not really alien. It happens only that each has such intense demands that the two are rarely found in fusion.

Courage Confused With Grace

Tillich: A Theological Portrait, by David Hopper (Lippincott, 1968, 189 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Ralph A. Bohlmann, assistant professor of systematic theology, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

Theological portraiture, the author tells us, is designed to illumine the bond of life and thought and thus to capture the inner spirit of the subject in a way that a photograph generally fails to do. In a series of five carefully and clearly written chapters, the Macalester College professor of religion draws a portrait of Tillich by illustrating how certain key situations in his life helped to shape important and persisting aspects of his thought.

Early formative influence in Tillich’s career shaped the revolutionary-romantic motif that he himself considered distinctive of his life and work. This motif is embodied in his doctrine of the kairos: the belief that significant moments in the ambiguous process of history witness the emergence of new forms of meaning and life amidst the death of the old. This doctrine was significantly involved in Tillich’s religious socialism. It also figured in two subsequent theological encounters, the first of which was his conflict with Barth in the post-World War I years. Professor Hopper illustrates how Tillich sought to universalize the Christian faith by romantic identification with the movement of history and culture, while Barth endeavored to carry out the theological task within the more traditional Christian categories of God, Canon, and Church.

Through his conflict with Emmanuel Hirsch and the views of national socialism in the thirties, Tillich-was led to differentiate more sharply between revelation and kairos. According to Hopper, Tillich’s encounter with Hirsch also led to the one major shift in his thought: from an early preoccupation with the broad social and political dimensions of history to a formulation of the New Being more open to individualistic application.

This was not a shift from history to ontology, however. Hopper shows that Tillich’s ontological frame of reference underlies and inspires not only his later work but his earlier kairos doctrine as well. On the basis of Tillich’s 1912 treatise on mysticism and guilt-consciousness in Schelling, Hopper sketches the main lines of Tillich’s ontological framework, then applies them to an explanation of the Systematic Theology, Tillich’s major work of the years 1951–63.

The author concludes his portrait with a penetrating assessment of Tillich’s theological contribution. While applauding certain Tillichian accents, he criticizes the romantic-mystical basis of his program for reconciling religion and culture. He finds fault not only with Tillich’s moral-exemplar theory of atonement but also with the generally subordinate role of Christology in his system. But the great weakness of Tillich’s theology, Hopper contends, is that it confuses courage with grace, thereby universalizing the particular message of the Christian faith, diluting the Gospel, and failing to structure adequately the Christian life.

Hopper’s portrait of Tillich deserves attention not only for its contribution to Tillich studies but also for the background it provides for understanding the efforts of some current theologians to recast and radically reformulate Christian doctrine on the basis of an intuitive reading of the times.

Gallery Of Great Reformers

Reformers in Profile, edited by B. A. Gerrish (Fortress, 1967, 264 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by C. George Fry, assistant professor of history, Capital University, Columbus, Ohio.

“For many years the history of the Protestant Reformation has been presented largely as a single movement and from the standpoint of a chosen hero … According to B. A. Gerrish, professor of church history at the University of Chicago, it is time to replace this “textbook orthodoxy” with an understanding of the sixteenth century as an “Age of Reformations.” To prove his thesis, he has assembled ten biographical essays by noted historians illustrating five distinct types of reform—later medieval, humanistic, Protestant, radical, and Roman Catholic.

S. Harrison Thomson begins the volume with a portrayal of “the whole Wyclyf,” a man simultaneously “a philosopher, a theologian, a reformer, and a political thinker.” Wyclyf stands in marked contrast to his near contemporary, Pierre d’Ailly, “a staunch advocate of the establishment theology of his day.” Lewis Spitz, in a readable and reliable chapter, paints a picture of Erasmus as a reformer in his own right. The prince of humanists was more than a man of weak will and character, or a premature philosophe, or “the John the Baptist of the evangelical revival.” He had his own program emphasizing a recovery of the Scriptures and a reappropriation of the “philosophy of Christ.” The sketch of Luther by F. Edward Cranz, though poorly written, conveys the Saxon professor’s quest for “a gracious God and a sound theology.” The Swiss reformers, Zwingli and Calvin, receive excellent treatment. Calvin has been variously interpreted by historians as a “narrow dogmatist” and “an ecumenical churchman,” as a “ruthless inquisitor” and a “solicitous pastor,” as an ‘inhuman authoritarian” and a “humanistic social thinker.” Gerrish reveals him as a theologian whose intention was to proclaim “the pre-eminence of Jesus Christ, not a gloomy pre-destinarianism nor a new legalism.” Geoffrey W. Bromiley of Fuller Theological Seminary offers an enlightening study of the enigmatic Thomas Cranmer. Primarily a scholar, Cranmer had administrative responsibilities thrust upon him. Paradoxically, it was not the “robust Luther” or the “dedicated Calvin” but the “cautious and timid” Cranmer who was to win the martyr’s crown. Believing that “Reformation theology is essentially that of the early church, as well as that of Scripture,” Cranmer made a unique contribution in establishing the relation between the Protestant and the patristic churches. Chapters on Menno Simons, the gentle and saintly evangelical, and Thomas Müntzer, the revolutionary social reformer, depict two facets of the Anabaptist movement. Finally, Ignatious Loyola is described as “the very epitome of Tridentine papalism.”

This book’s appearance is marred by printer’s errors, and its usefulness is limited by several errors of fact. Father McNally, for example, reports that prior to the arrival of the Jesuits “no one had ever before preached the good news of salvation” in China. What then of the Nestorian church in China before 700 and of the Franciscan mission in the thirteenth century? Indeed, a Chinese monk was even to visit Europe and administer Holy Communion to King Edward I of England in 1287!

One can also disagree with the editor’s thesis. The Reformation of the sixteenth century differed in quality and quantity from what preceded it. As historian Denys Hay has observed, there simply was no spiritual leader who “fired the imagination of all men in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,” and because prophetic power was lacking, “spiritual revival and reform was … confined.” The period from 1300 to 1500 was a pre-reformation era, and its significance derives from what followed it. Despite the editor’s contention to the contrary, I remain convinced that the work of the dissenters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was “adjectival to some other more substantive vision.” Frankly, would churchmen in 1968 read about Wyclif and d’Ailly had there been no Protestant Reformation in 1517? To equalize the two groups of reformers is to confuse anticipation with fulfillment and distort one’s understanding of the dynamic process of historical development. Try as one may, the trilogy of “forerunners, Reformers, Counter-Reformation” remains. Finally, while it is helpful to have the reformers’ differences carefully distinguished, it would have been ecumenically meaningful if their inter-relatedness and similarities had been stressed.

Probing Church Trouble Spots

Growth and Life in the Local Church, by H. Boone Porter, Jr. (Seabury, 1968, $2.50), is reviewed by Donald McGavran, dean of the School of Missions and Institute of Church Growth, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Growth and Life in the Local Church is a deeply Christian book that speaks effectively to today’s churches. Dr. Porter knows the American church thoroughly. He speaks about life and growth among congregations that generally are not growing, and what he says is reasonable and encouraging. He values the Church and does not strive for effect by belaboring it. He is for it—yet with a sure touch he probes the trouble spots and describes convincingly what should be done.

Porter’s realism and simplicity are welcome. Listen to him describe a common cause of stagnation:

Ask a faithful member of any parish … and he will … assure you that it is extremely friendly … almost like a family. And indeed it is to him.… He has known many members of the congregation for years. Several are neighbors, professional associates, or golf friends. Some may be relatives.… Naturally the church is like a family to them—it is their family.… Precisely this friendliness and family feeling of those inside … appear as aloofness and exclusiveness to those outside.

Or take his description of public worship:

The first half of the basic pattern of worship is the Ministry of the Word … an evangelistic rite, in which the Good News is joyfully proclaimed, summoning unbelievers to the faith and … the faithful to fuller belief.… The second half is also a basically simple action centering round the Holy Table … where bread and wine are taken, … and distributed to the worshippers. Over the centuries these simple actions have become embellished with stately words and music and ornaments.… A mission-minded church will not allow the embellishments to become so elaborate that the simple basic structure is obscured.

Porter, an evangelical Episcopalian, tackles some of the main problems of the American church—mission, extending the ordained ministry, lay leaders, baptism, worship, the Lord’s Supper, growth and renewal—with gusto and with a fresh approach ministers and laymen of all churches will find stimulating. Baptists and Mennonites will read what he has to say with as much profit as Presbyterians and Episcopalians. All will find their reading of this book an event, not because it is particularly new, radical, or startling, but because it compels us to reassess old assumptions and take more Christian views of familiar church and community scenes.

Book Briefs

The Christian Stake in Science, by Robert E. D. Clark (Moody, 1967, 160 pp., $3.50). A plea for Christians to realize that theology cannot be divorced from scientific discoveries but goes beyond them.

Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, edited by Kurt Aland (Concordia, 1967, 116 pp., $3.50). The theses, their relation to the Reformation, and sermons and comments upon them by Luther.

The New Oxford History of Music, Volume 4, The Age of Humanism, edited by Gerald Abraham (Oxford, 1968, 979 pp., $22.50). An imposing volume on music from 1540 to 1630. Church directors of music will appreciate its sections on Latin and Protestant church music on the Continent and in England.

The Gospel of Luke, by Ralph Earle (Baker Books, 1968, 110 pp., $2.95). Helpful homiletical units from each chapter of Luke; a good entry in the “Proclaiming the New Testament” series.

Luther for an Ecumenical Age, edited by Carl S. Meyer (Concordia, 1967, 312 pp., $9). High-quality essays by eleven top scholars on Luther, his period, and his theology.

Preparing for Platform and Pulpit, by John E. Baird (Abingdon, 1968, 222 pp., $4.50). A sound and methodical, though unimaginative, public-speaking text designed for seminaries and Bible colleges.

Angola Beloved, by T. Ernest Wilson (Loizeaux, 1967, 254 pp., $3.95). Wilson’s love for this land on Africa’s west coast is vividly communicated as he describes his forty years of missionary service there.

As a Roaring Lion, by Martha Wall (Moody, 1967, 254 pp., $3.95). On the missionary trail in Colombia with Don Vicente Gomez. A gripping story of Christian witness in remote areas.