No other pastoral poem is so well known and so highly prized as Psalm 23, the Shepherd Psalm. This poem has been on the lips and in the hearts of men for three thousand years. First heard on the hills of Judah, it spread with the advance of the Christian faith to the ends of the earth. Composition and style alone cannot account for its influence. Behind this imperishable record of a deep and unshakable faith lies the proven experience of divine providence.

The simplicity of the poem conceals the purity of its art. Hebrew poetry is not under the law of mechanical meter; its cadences and rhythm belong to the dimension of the free spirit, where movement is not in measured steps. To reduce Hebrew poetry to numbers is the idle fantasy of unpoetic minds.

The Shepherd is the focal point of the psalm. Although the psalmist himself is the subject of four verbs, he depicts himself as inactive (“I shall not want,” “I do not fear”), as engaged in unavoidable activity (“I walk”), or as appropriating a prepared benefit (“I shall return”—not to his own home but as a guest to the household of Jehovah).

The other eight verbs have for their subject either Jehovah or his benefits. They are all transitive, and in each case the object is beneficially affected. In the first, for example, the shepherd causes the sheep to rest: “he makes me to lie down.” In the divine order, rest precedes activity; receiving precedes giving. What tragedies have followed the neglect of this simple principle. The efficient servants of God are not the underfed, the over-wrought, the work-weary, or the stale. Rest and spiritual restoration are the prerequisites of fruitful service. The second verb (“he leads”) follows naturally on the first: the sheep that God leads abroad are well rested and refreshed.

The psalm has five parts, each affirming a major benefit of the psalmist’s relation to the Shepherd. Together they present a five-fold liberation from the states that threaten man’s well-being:

1. Freedom from want. In a land often subject to the ravages of famine and drought, it must surely have seemed a rash thing to say, “I shall not want.” But with God, even escape from want is possible. He provides both food and water, the two essentials for life: “He makes me to lie down and rest in fresh green grasslands” and “he leads me beside restful, tranquil waters.” This provision resounds to the end of Holy Writ: “He [the Lamb] shall feed them and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters” (Rev. 7:17). It is heard in the words of the Shepherd himself: “He who comes to me shall not hunger and he who believes on me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). And it is recalled in the bread and wine used to memorialize the sacrifice the Shepherd made to liberate us from eternal want.

2. Freedom from decline. “He restores my soul,” for he not only leads out but also brings back. He retrieves us from our straying and makes good our depletions. To do this, he both puts us on the right road and gives us the right to travel there: “He guides me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” The word for “paths” means the ways clearly marked by wheeled traffic. Because such a way could be used by the king’s war chariot, it would be part of the king’s highway. The necessary permission to travel this way is given on the highest authority: “for his name’s sake.” Both access and progress are assured.

3. Freedom from the fear of death. “Even when I go in the valley of the shadow of death, I shall not fear evil.” How can this be? The fear of death, present throughout life, can rob a man of sleep and of peace. It is not dying itself that is terrifying: it is the thought of what lies beyond death. How can the psalmist claim freedom from this fear? Because “thy staff and thy supporting rod they comfort me.” The Shepherd provides protection of two sorts: the staff, or club, to keep danger away from the sheep, and the rod, or crook, to keep the sheep away from danger.

The psalmist gives the ultimate answer, by making a significant and dramatic change in his use of pronouns at this point. Previously he has referred to God as “he”; now he switches to the intimate “thou,” in “Thou art with me.” When a man comes to know God personally, the death barrier is shattered. This most precious of all freedoms belongs only to those who through a personal experience with God have come to address him as “thou.”

4. Freedom from insecurity. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” Even the presence of foes cannot disrupt the lines of communication. The table may be only a simple mat spread on the ground, but it continues to be laid. And it is more than bare provision. An unmistakable mark of prosperity is there: “Thou anointest my head with oil.” The word “anoint” is not the verb used of ritual anointing but one that means “to make fat,” that is, prosperous. Something has gone seriously wrong if a Christian becomes spiritually bankrupt. The supply of spiritual resources, rightly used, can lead only to true prosperity. That the provision is not transient is confirmed by the next phrase: my cup is an “abundant overflow,” that is, my portion is a perennial fountain.

5. Freedom from separation. The association between the psalmist and the Shepherd is indissoluble. “Goodness and grace will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” “They will follow” means, literally, “they will pursue,” and the verb is elsewhere used in a predominantly hostile sense. This reversal of usage could hardly be more striking. It is not “I shall pursue good,” as ethical theory would have it, but “they [the goodness and the grace] will pursue me.” Goodness is benevolence in the fullest sense of the word. Grace is God’s attitude and action toward us arising from divine love. No completely satisfactory translation has yet been found for this Hebrew word. A possible but still inadequate rendering is “kinship love,” that which is based on a blood relationship. If we could recover some of the original meaning of “kindly,” that is, “kin-like,” then “kindly love” might provide a near equivalent. Since the basis of such love is not sentiment but relationship, it is unchangeable and constant. It operates on all days (“all the days of my life”)—not only on the light and the bright days but also on the dark and shadowed days, to the very end of the journey. We are not orphans; we have a Father who will never desert us. His home awaits us, and nothing can separate us from his love.

These five freedoms—from dearth, decline, death, deficiency, and desertion—will meet all man’s spiritual needs and provide peace and security for his soul.

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.”

Three well-known American religious spokesmen here discuss implications and overtones of current God-is-dead speculation. They are Dr. Gordon H. Clark, head of the philosophy department at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana; Dr. Russell V. DeLong, Nazarene educator and evangelist, who served as president of colleges in California and Idaho for nineteen years; and Dr. Bernard Ramm, professor of Christian theology at California Baptist Theological Seminary in Covina, California. Moderator of the discussion is Editor Carl F. H. Henry of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. The panel is one of thirteen produced by Educational Communication Association in the series “God and Man in the Twentieth Century,” offered for public-service television use.

Henry: Gentlemen, I think you will recall a statement by Dietrich Bonhoeffer written shortly after the Nazis had imprisoned him. In his Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer writes that man has now learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. Of course, Bonhoeffer is referring especially to science and to art and to ethics; but he adds that for the last one hundred years this has been increasingly true of religious questions also. It is becoming evident, he says, that everything gets along without God and just as well as before. Now, will anyone dispute this assertion, that much of modern life has experienced what some of the death-of-God theologians call “the eclipse of God”?

Clark: This phrase, “the death of God,” is a little silly if you think of the supreme God ceasing to exist. But it is to the credit of these men, and particularly Professor Gabriel Vahanian of Syracuse University, that they describe very accurately the secularism of our culture. Professor Vahanian unmasks the hypocrisy of modern religion and shows the essentially secular nature of what goes on in most of our churches. His criticism of American religion is devastating and salutary. I appreciate his writing.

DeLong: It seems to me, Dr. Clark, that there really are two kinds of atheists. First there is the theoretical, philosophical atheist, who says there is no God and acts like it, which is really the Communist approach. The second type I would label practical atheists. They would say, yes, there is a God, but they ignore his existence. If you asked the average professional man “Are you an atheist?” he would be insulted.

Henry: The Gallup polls indicate something of this, don’t they?

DeLong: Yes. Millions of people would be insulted if you labeled them atheists. And yet, practically, if God were dead it wouldn’t change their pattern of living. They never pray; they never go to church. Their God is sort of a dead concept buried in the intellectual cemeteries.

Ramm: Well, I think that there is something very critical in the God-is-dead emphasis, and that is, a program in theology. But this program only works if the validity of the New Testament—its theology, its interpretation of Jesus Christ, and its life of Christ—is destroyed. As long as there is any possibility that the New Testament is the authentic document of the life of Christ, that who he was and what he said and did comes through its pages—I say, as long as there is this possibility, then this movement can’t even get off the ground. So the prior question then is not “Is God dead?” but “Is the New Testament reliable?”

Henry: So that as a Christian theologian you are suggesting that this God-is-dead theory rests on the premise of the invalidity, the fallaciousness, of the Apostles’ Creed, the invalidity of the biblical revelation, the collapse of the whole Christian view of God and the world.

Ramm: Well, let’s say—you have to have quite a funeral procession! You have to have “the Old Testament is dead”; “the New Testament is dead”; “the Apostles’ Creed is dead”; “the great issues of the Reformation are dead.” And only as you have successfully taken this trip to the cemetery can you say “God is dead.”

Henry: Is an attack of that kind on the Christian view of God something essentially new and modern?

Clark: Oh, no, no, no! There is nothing new or earth-shaking in this. There have always been attacks not only on the Bible but on religion in general. The phrase “God is dead” was of course used by Nietzsche. Ludwig Feuerbach, about 1840 or so, provided some of the arguments and even some of the words that these people use. With some existentialist trappings, this God-is-dead movement can be viewed as a last gasp of reaction against the Hegelian absolutism of the early nineteenth century. There’s nothing new, nothing earth-shaking.

DeLong: Well, if it isn’t new, why is so much publicity given to it?

Clark: Yes, that’s a question, isn’t it? Why is it so popular? Well, I don’t know. Why is it?

Ramm: I think one difference between this movement and Nietzsche and other men of the nineteenth century is that these men of today are attempting to give a theological justification for it, a theological interpretation of it, so that “God is dead” is not just the raucous protest of an unbeliever but a methodological conclusion of people who are following a certain track in theology. And this, partially, is why it has received such a tremendous hearing—it’s a theological program, not a program of protest.

Henry: Do you mean that there is a development or a trend in modern theology which has made concessions farther back along the way, and that these, when consistently applied, lead to this more radical and extreme denial of religious propositions and beliefs?

Ramm: Yes. I think that in the time of the German enlightenment and French materialism and English deism there was a repudiation of the historic grounds of Christianity. Now sometimes it might take two hundred years for the real disease to develop. So I think the God-is-dead movement is the only kind of theology—if you can call it theology—that’s consistent with a denial that took place a couple hundred years ago whereby we are now neo-pagans; we are no longer Christians bound to the authority of Holy Scripture.

Henry: At least those who are caught up in this rebellion are in this predicament.

Ramm: Yes, that’s right.

Henry: What accounts, however, for the fact that the death-of-God theology has taken hold in our time in this way?

DeLong: It seems to me that this modern movement is being championed by so-called Christian theologians, whereas some of the God-is-dead movement in the past has come from men like Nietzsche, Spinoza, and some others who were not professedly Christians. This makes it more astonishing today, the fact that Christian theologians would come out and say God is dead.

Henry: And then, the press has helped to popularize the position, in a day of mass media. It seems also that the alumni of some Christian institutions have carried the revolt to the attention of their constituency by way of critique of what is going on in their institutions.

Clark: Dr. Ramm spoke about methodology in theology. I think this is one of their poorest points. They accept some modern scientific ideas, some existentialism, some remnants of the Judeo-Christian tradition, plus this or that or something else. They also reject some of these.

Henry: Perhaps you can spell this out just a bit.

Clark: The point is this. They accept some parts of existentialism, some parts of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but they reject other parts. Now the question I want to ask is, On what basis do they select some things and reject others? What criterion, Dr. Henry, do they use in putting together this amalgam of their positive program? What’s the basis of their choice—or in technical language, what is their fundamental epistemological principle? If you read their books you have great difficulty in discovering any answer at all to this question. They seem to accept and reject at random, and this to my mind is a serious philosophical defect.

Henry: There is a certain amount of intellectual irresponsibility here, you feel?

Clark: Well, you can put it that way.

Ramm: Dr. Clark, pressing just as hard from another direction are the great number of people who are deeply afflicted by physical disability, physical sickness, maybe even emotional disturbance. It would be catastrophic to come and tell these people that God is dead, because they have a tremendous spiritual vitality. It keeps them going day after day with these afflictions. So I think that anybody who buys a theology has to buy the practical consequences that go with it. And the consequences of this God-is-dead theology are very drastic when you talk to a cripple, a wheelchair case, a cancer patient.

Clark: You’re talking like a pastor. Of course I’m a professor and I don’t meet those cases.

Henry: I suppose you’re saying that, in contrast with the theology of the Bible, the God-is-dead philosophy is spiritually and morally powerless.

Ramm: Yes, you’ve got to live with the cases. I grant, Dr. Clark, that they’re not academic cases or instances; but I know of such people, and I know that they are kept alive by a very powerful faith in the living God. I for one would not have the moral courage to go and tell these people that this is all just a mistake, a dream, a soliloquy that they’re having among themselves.

Henry: Well, if you were convinced that God is dead, would you feel an obligation to tell them?

Ramm: There are some times when it is more humane to shut up than to try and tell somebody he is mistaken.

Henry: Well, do you think that God is dead?

Ramm: The question I have in my mind is: Whoever got the idea that God is alive? Go back to Exodus where the name of God is given as Yahweh, which comes from the verb “to be” or “to be alive.” And God said to Moses, “I am the living one.” So the whole motif of the Bible is that here out of nowhere comes the God who is the living God. The real question to me is not, “Is God dead?,” but, “How come we happen to have had the idea for centuries that God is alive?”

DeLong: Let me ask you this, Dr. Ramm. I’m not a theologian, but it seems to me that this God-is-dead declaration is the logical, maybe the next, step of those who during the past fifty years have denied the supernatural and those who have championed humanism; that divine revelation has been relegated to the theological dump heap, and now the Deity who makes this revelation possible is cast aside as an unnecessary and nonexistent being.

Ramm: Yes. Historically, Christian theology should be the critic of culture. In the God-is-dead movement we have a sudden reversal in which culture becomes the critic of Christianity. And if this is true, then God is dead and the Bible is dead and all of Christian theology is dead. So it’s back again to Dr. Clark’s question of methodology. If you’ve got your methodology backwards, you’re going to come out to some mighty sick conclusions.

Henry: Isn’t there a whole tidal wave of organized atheism in the world today?

DeLong: Yes, it seems to me that this movement makes a good atmosphere and a good soil for the spread of atheistic Communism. The God-is-dead movement is dangerous, very dangerous. If it becomes widespread it will cut the vital nerve of ethical living. If there is no God, there are no higher values. If there is no God, there is no Christ who is the Son of God. If there is no God, there is no Calvary, no salvation, no immortality. Human beings are merely hunks of protoplasm floating over the briny sea of life. We then live a life with no meaning. We’re sort of bodies without souls living in a universe without a God. It seems to me that it’s impossible to have a vital, dynamic ethics that isn’t rooted and grounded in a meaningful metaphysics.

Henry: Of course, some of these God-is-dead theolologians do postulate an ethics of sorts. But you’re saying that if they were really consistent with their major premise they would scuttle it.

DeLong: Yes. If God is dead, what is the purpose of living?

Ramm: If God is dead, the Great Commission is also dead. And if the Great Commission is dead the Church is dead, because the function of the Church is to execute the Great Commission. So once again I see a fascination with an idea without a real calculation of everything it pledges me to. When you start to articulate what you are forced to deny, in saying that God is dead, it becomes rather frightening. Yet this list ought to be made up.

Henry: These God-is-dead theorists retain a certain passion to leave a mark upon the world that is derived from Christian presuppositions. But the Great Commission, and the relation of a small body of men or believers to the world, really ought to be erased if you scuttle the presuppositions on which the whole rests.

Clark: Now it is obvious that when people today talk about God they have various concepts. For accurate thinking we ought to know just what we mean by God, the living God. Personally I like the definition of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, that “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being, wisdom, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” There you have something definite; you know what you’re talking about.

Henry: I have a feeling that these God-is-dead theorists, or philosophers in general, really obscure the living God whenever they say that one cannot have rational knowledge of God, or when they speak of an abstract God without any reference to his revelation, his self-revelation in Christ and the revelation of truths about himself and about his purposes for man and the world—in other words, whenever they cease to speak of the Bible as God’s revealed word. Do you see a connection between this tendency in modern theology and a loss of awareness of the revelation of the living God?

Ramm: Right at this point, you see, we have a certain treatment of the Bible. This theology is not based on looking at texts in the Scripture and saying, here is the meaning of these texts. Rather, it is, shall I say, philosophical theology in the sense that it’s dealing with ideas, not with the concrete materials of the biblical revelation. And I as a Christian standing in the tradition of nineteen centuries want to say that this is wrong, seriously wrong.

Henry: You know, last night I picked up my Bible—one that happens to be falling apart, actually—and I thought, Well, look at this, the way it’s been marked for devotional study, for preaching. I read the death-of-God theologians once, maybe twice, perhaps three times to get a nuance here and there. I don’t think anybody reads that literature with the sense of permanent possession and treasure that this Book holds for those who have searched it through the ages.

DeLong: The leaders of the God-is-dead movement, as I understand it, call themselves Christian atheists. To me that seems to be a misnomer, for I don’t see how a man can be a Christian atheist any more than he can be an honest thief or a truthful liar.

Clark: Or a Mohammedan Buddhist or a Jewish Hindu. The combination is untenable. The word “God” just doesn’t have any meaning in a sentence that says God is dead, and a Christian can’t possibly be an atheist. I don’t see how they get these combinations.

Henry: Dr. Ramm, let me ask you this question. Do you think that these men have made any contribution besides what Dr. Clark has said, that is, that insofar as they speak of the secularism of modern society, they do give an apt characterization of it? They are not the only ones who have made this characterization, and it doesn’t depend for its effectiveness or its accuracy on their thesis that God is dead. In denominational circles today so often we hear references to the “insights” of these God-is-dead theologians and the “great contribution” they are making to the religious dialogue of our time, how they have stirred up new interest in the Christian faith, and so on. What do you think of all this?

Ramm: I have a sort of glassy look at this because it just shows me one particular thing: If you do not accept the truth of God as embodied in Holy Scripture, then you can go anywhere. This shows one of the simply odd and crazy places where you can go, where you can put together, as Dr. Clark and Dr. DeLong have said, such contradictory notions as God and death. So it has deepened me in my own convictions about how I’m to think about Christian theology and about Christian truth.

Henry: There is one point where these two notions do come together dramatically in the Christian faith, and that is in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the great center of Christian faith. But these death-of-God theologians destroy that center.

Clark: Well, the crucifixion, the atonement, doesn’t mean of course that God ceased to exist. Jesus was crucified and died and was buried and rose again, but that doesn’t mean that God ceased to exist for three days.

Henry: You’re exactly right.

Ramm: There is another interesting angle to this. The earliest origin of this concept was to scare people into Christianity. A German philosopher, poet, littérateur, Johann Richter, used this notion that God is dead to show how terrible it is to be an atheist. Here we have the odd turn that something that started out to drive people to Christianity is now used for the annihilation of Christianity.

Henry: Which means that evangelists perhaps ought to be especially careful what theological devices they use to get their message across.

DeLong: I’d like to raise this practical question—we’ve been dealing with theory a great deal. Of course, we all deny this God-is-dead movement; we believe in the living God. But how are we going to put God back into the thinking of modern youth especially, and of nonchurch people? We can’t very well do it through divine revelation or through prayer. It seems to me we’ve got to begin at the foundation and through a dialectic process point out that intelligence is the most satisfactory and rational solution of all that exists, with our spaceshots, moonshots, and all the evidence of order and purpose and law. It seems to me that we’ve got to ask, Did this all come from nothing? Is it the result of blind, inner, chaotic matter or of Intelligence—the answer to intelligence that we find in the universe? And this Intelligence, then, we would label God. We would have to define God after that. But it seems to me that we are going to have to reason with our people that God or a Supreme Intelligence is the only rational option. The Bible says, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.” I think that any man who concludes that all that exists came out of nothing, that there is no Supreme Intelligence, is rationally foolish to reach such a conclusion.

Ramm: Dr. DeLong, if I may retranslate it into my language, what you are saying is that the Christian doctrine of creation is dead and the Christian doctrine of providence is dead. So as soon as you say God is dead you’ve got a funeral procession that is a rather lengthy one.

Henry: And if you start with the living God as the Bible does, as the presupposition without which everything makes nonsense and which alone makes sense of everything, then it’s the God-is-dead theology that is inverted. Now gentlemen, I think we’ve just about come to the end of our time. Perhaps we have just a moment for a concluding statement from each of you.

Clark: I would say that the inability of these men to show how they select what they like and how they reject what they don’t like—this philosophical defect spells the death of the death-of-God movement.

DeLong: I feel that our need today is not to kill the concept of God but rather to put God back into our homes and our schools and our churches and our businesses and more vitally in our minds and hearts. My conviction is summed up best in the words of that renowned British historian Arnold J. Toynbee: “The great need of the modern world is a rebirth of a supernatural belief; without it man, unregenerate man, is hardly to be trusted with the dangerous toys the laboratories have hatched.”

Ramm: If God is alive, which I believe he is, then we reverse the funeral procession and come from the cemetery back into the city of the living.

Clark: A resurrection.

Ramm: Yes.

Henry: It seems to me that the God-is-dead theory proves nothing so much as the depravity or corruption of man, and that the modern theologians are no more exempt than we are from corruption and the need of divine rescue and redemption. Gentlemen, thank you very much for sharing time out of your busy lives on this important subject of debate and controversy today.

We are sometimes told that the modern mind cannot accept the 2,000-year-old Gospel of Jesus Christ. I first heard the Gospel as a practicing physicist, and I find this opinion about the “modern mind” hard to understand. For when I first examined the gospel message I found that it appealed to me in the same way that physics had first appealed to me. In fact, I concluded that my training as a physicist had given me a viewpoint and a manner of thinking that made acceptance of the Gospel particularly easy.

The way I began to study the Bible was through a Bible class in a home. Here, for the first time in my experience, the Bible was examined seriously. I’d been brought up in a church where the Bible was up on the pulpit, but somehow the preacher and the congregation never really got into what it said. The people in the class took it seriously, and I found that they looked at the Bible in the same way that I looked at nature in a laboratory. It was considered to be reliable and important. If something didn’t seem quite right, they didn’t throw the whole thing away. They studied it carefully, compared different parts, crosschecked things, just as the scientist does in the laboratory. The difficulties were taken as a basis on which to learn more. Everyone seemed to believe that problems could lead to new understandings.

Now, this is a very scientific point of view. Professor P. A. M. Dirac, winner of a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics, makes this clear in commenting on the quantum theory:

I should now like to dwell a bit on the difficulties in physics in the present day. The reader who is not an expert in the subject might get the idea that because of all these difficulties physical theory is in pretty poor shape and that the quantum theory is not much good. I should like to correct this impression by saying that the quantum theory is an extremely good theory. It gives wonderful agreement with observation over a wide range of phenomena. There is no doubt that it is a good theory, and the only reason physicists talk so much about the difficulties is that it is precisely the difficulties that are interesting. The successes of the theory are all taken for granted. One does not get anywhere simply by going over the successes again and again, whereas, by talking over the difficulties people can hope to make some progress.

Scientists have learned to live with difficulties; we expect them. Thus the difficult things in Scripture were not the problem for me that they are for many people.

As a result of this inductive Bible study, I also saw the Bible message as a whole for the first time. Now it is hard for me to see how anybody can miss it, though I did for many years. The message is simply that back in the beginning (and we don’t know the details at all), man turned away from God. He was made to be in fellowship with God, but he rejected this fellowship. We have the story of the Garden of Eden. We see over the centuries how rejection of God got man into trouble over and over again. But God, who created man in his own image and loves him, determined to do something to restore this fellowship. He did this by coming himself. We say by “sending his Son,” but after all God and the Son are the same. He came himself, though in a sense that we don’t really understand. He didn’t pick somebody else to bear this burden but came himself and took on himself the punishment deserved by man. Because of this we can once more have good relations with God; we can have a new birth. We can be new people, no longer out of fellowship with God, no longer estranged from him.

Then we go on, and at the end of the Bible we have the Tree of Life again; we have God and Satan, the same cast we saw at the beginning, and the drama is completed. Those who are in fellowship with God are united with him forever. It’s a tremendous—let me use the word—“theory.” It encompasses history; it encompasses our own lives, our own thoughts. It explains the tragic history of man—terribly clever, yet somehow never able to prevent things from falling into ruin. Most convincing of all, we see a change in the lives of those who have become new creatures in Christ.

It was the attractiveness of this very comprehensive and beautiful theory, plus the fact that everywhere that I could test it in my own experience it rang true, that led me to become a Christian. There are difficulties. But this theory certainly explained a lot of things. A scientist doesn’t throw away a good theory because of a few difficulties.

I think that at this point it is perfectly understandable for people to demur. They can say, “well, you’re not very objective. You accepted this theory just because it seemed like a nice theory. Isn’t that wishful thinking? Are you going to believe in things simply because they are appealing?”

Let me appeal to scientific advances that are based on precisely this principle, that we want the world to be very nice and pleasant and that it’s right to construct theories that are this way. The first example is Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a theory of gravitation. Physics really began with Newton’s theory of gravitation, by which he could explain the orbits of the earth and planets. His theory was so good that we can use it to predict eclipses to a hundredth of a second. In fact, Newton’s theory was essentially perfect. As far as anybody knew, it explained everything.

Then why did Einstein produce another theory? Because he didn’t like the looks of Newton’s theory; it wasn’t quite symmetrical. One had to put in several assumptions, and these could be removed. Hence Einstein developed a new theory called “general relativity.” Of course, it had to predict everything Newton’s theory did, because Newton’s theory was right. But it also predicted three more things, things that were deviations from Newton’s theory. They were so small nobody had ever found them. But physicists scurried to their telescopes to see whether they could find them and apparently have found all three. Einstein was right; his theory was better. And the basis of the theory was just that it was a beautiful theory. It was what scientists call “elegant.”

My second example concerns the quantum theory. Professor Dirac wrote:

I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between one’s work and experiment one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account, and they will get cleared up with further developments of the theory.

Professor Dirac says that if you have to choose between exact agreement with experimental data and the beauty of a theory, you choose the beauty of the theory. This is the way a scientist looks at nature. And this is how I responded to the Gospel. Here is a theory that is really beautiful; it explains so many things.

Yet what about the evidence? I really believed for the first time when I sat down and read through the Gospel of John one night. I was compelled to believe that this man Jesus was what he said he was. But then I got very concerned about being objective and began to look into the evidence for the reliability of the Bible. I was very pleased, actually, just as Einstein was when they tested his theory, to find out that the Bible is indeed reliable. For example, there are literally hundreds of archaeological discoveries that make contact with Old Testament history, and we’re told that not one discovery has conclusively disagreed with the Bible. This is remarkable, almost unbelievable. A lot of things are still unexplained, of course; we don’t know, for example, just how the world was created by God. But a tremendous amount is verified.

We also find that the New Testament stories of Christ were written within the lifetime of the people who knew him, all within the first century. It would be like historians writing about the First World War between 1940 and 1980. Historically, then, the evidence is very good that what we have in the Bible now is accurate. It is as accurate as a historical record can be. In thinking back about my decision to believe, however, I realize that I really believed before I knew these things. And I think that Einstein also believed in his theory before the tests were made.

Another aspect of the Christian message that appeals to the scientist is that both the physical world and the Christian Gospel have certain peculiar characteristics. We find when we study the atom that we get down to a little particle called the “electron.” I said “little particle,” but it turns out that this “little particle” isn’t always a particle. Sometimes it is like a wave. A particle is something that is right here, exactly, and a wave is something that is everywhere. Two things could not be more different from each other; yet both these descriptions fit electrons. The electron is sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave. It depends on how one looks at it. When it zips through a geiger counter and the geiger counter goes blip, there goes a particle through the counter. But sometimes the electron diffracts around things and spreads all over, then it looks like a wave.

There is nothing mysterious about all this; it’s just part of nature. But it is very complicated, and when we try to speak of something as small as the electron in terms of particles and waves that we see all around us, we find out that these limited concepts of ours just aren’t adequate. Actually the electron is different from either a particle or a wave; but we must use human language and haven’t lived inside an atom, and so are limited in our description of what happens.

PREPARING THE CROSS

Long ago when the earth was bare

He fed the soil.

And with His breath

Blew Life into a tree.

Then He hid the crooked wood

Beneath a cloak of leaves

And the thorns

Beneath the rose.

And He made

The carpenter,

The soldier

and the priest.

And gave to them

A nail,

A spear

And a lamb.

And then He waited …

DANIEL J. CALLAGHAN

The physicist isn’t terribly surprised, then, when he runs into paradoxes in the Bible. For example, predestination and free will could not be more different from each other. In predestination everything is determined, while with free will man can choose to do what he wishes. What really brings the problem to a head is that Paul writes about both. In fact, he writes about predestination in the ninth chapter of Romans and free will in the tenth. There they are, and unless Paul is a fool we have to recognize the force of both positions. To me, this is one of the best signs that Scripture is a revelation. A man writing from his own knowledge just would not clearly contradict himself; Paul obviously was writing down things he didn’t completely understand. Certainly, no theologians since then have really understood these things.

This comparison between science and theology can be made even more precise. When we look at things from God’s point of view, we find the sovereignty of God and predestination. What he says is going to be done is done. When we get around on the other side and look from man’s point of view, we see that we have free will. It’s very much like the matter of the electron: what the object looks like depends on the experiment one does. Thus, there is something in the Christian Gospel that is very similar to what we find in nature, and as a scientist I find this reassuring. The Gospel may be very complicated and not readily understandable, but it shows signs of having the same Maker that nature has.

There is one point, however, at which I think the scientist is at a disadvantage in responding to the Christian message. One has to believe the Gospel. He can’t just say, “Yes, that looks very nice. I’ll write a book about it. I’ll discuss some reasons why a scientist is attracted to the Christian Gospel.” That is the natural response of a scientist: to set up his experiment on Christianity, get back, keep hands off, and see what happens. But he does not become a Christian by doing that. He has to take a step forward and say, “Yes, I believe it; I’m going to commit my life to it.”

The Gospel does promise that if we believe, then we will begin to accumulate evidence. Let me quote Peter here. When everybody was turning away from Jesus, he said to his disciples, “Are you all going to leave me now?” Peter answered, “We have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God.” The disciples believed first, and then they were convinced. It’s a bit like learning how to swim. One may be pretty sure he can do it, but in order to know he has to jump in. In responding to the Gospel one has to say, “All right, it’s very convincing; I’m going to commit my life to this.” Then, when he opens the Bible, he begins to understand things he didn’t understand before. He can begin to pray in a different way. Events fall into place, and his assurance grows.

It was about ten years ago that I made this decision for myself, and I have never had reason to regret it. Since then I’ve learned more and more about the Gospel and therefore about myself, other people, and the purpose of life. The promises of God have been kept in my own experience; I’ve seen prayers answered, have had warm fellowship with other Christians, have experienced “the peace that passeth understanding.” What more could a scientist want than to have the most beautiful theory he can imagine validated so completely in the laboratory of life?

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.”

For almost two hundred years historical criticism of the New Testament has been retreating before the advance of the historical Jesus. Great ramparts have been erected against him, yet each has been overpowered in turn. Liberalism sought to limit Jesus to non-supernaturalistic terrain and manned its defenses with the great names of nineteenth-century historicism—Baur, Harnack, Strauss, and others. Yet liberalism now lies as impotent as Shelley’s Ozymandias (“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”). After the fall of liberalism, New Testament scholarship in Germany erected an existential fortress that flew Bultmannian colors, but it too is being overthrown. In recent years Bultmann has been deserted by his followers, and a ‘ “new” quest for the historical Jesus is in progress. The new quest is promising. Whether it will eventually come to terms with Jesus is one of this century’s imponderables.

Critical study of Jesus’ life has reached a crucial juncture. Scholars can screen out the elements in Christ’s life that they find objectionable, with the result that the historical Jesus will either fade into the irrecoverable past or be recast as an unindividualized shadow of modern man. Or scholars can yield to the Jesus of Scripture, with all his disturbing elements. Only this will satisfy the deepest needs of men.

I

The old quest of the historical Jesus dates from the death in 1768 of Hermann Samuel Reimams, the historian with whom Albert Schweitzer begins his survey of nineteenth-century research. Reimarus was no New Testament scholar, but at his death he left behind a manuscript that was to have far-reaching implications. He argued that historians must distinguish between the “aim” of Jesus and the “aim” of his disciples, that is, between the Jesus of history and the Christ of early Christian preaching. Faced with the choice between what he believed to be mutually exclusive figures, Reimarus opted for the former and posited a non-supernatural Jesus: Jesus preached the coming of God’s kingdom, but he died forsaken by God and disillusioned. Christianity was consequently viewed as the product of early disciples who stole the corpse, proclaimed a bodily resurrection, and gathered followers.

Reimarus was certainly extreme and his work polemical. But his views of Christian origins set a pattern for a century of historical-Jesus research. Reacting against the supernatural element in the gospels and casting about for a Jesus made in their own image, idealists found Christ to be the ideal man, rationalists saw him as the great teacher of morality, and socialists viewed him as a friend of the poor and a revolutionary. The most popular lives of Jesus, those of David Friedrich Strauss, rejected most of the gospel material as mythology, and Bruno Bauer ended his quest by denying that there ever was a historical Jesus. Bauer explained all the stories about Jesus as the products of the imagination of the primitive Christian community.

One can hardly fail to be impressed even today at the immense energy and talent that German scholars poured into the old quest for the “original” Jesus, but the results were meager and the conclusions wrong. Scholarship attempted to modernize Jesus. But the Jesus they produced was neither the historical Jesus nor the Christ of Scripture. By the beginning of this century, when Schweitzer declared his moratorium on the liberal quest, scholars were beginning to realize that a new approach was needed.

II

If the liberal quest for the historical Jesus had faltered, as it seemed, through its pursuit of a non-supernaturalistic original Jesus, it was possible that a new approach might concentrate on the Jesus of Scripture, on the Christ of faith. Thus scholarship turned in this direction. Hugh Anderson writes:

The nineteenth-century liberal quest was intent on driving a wedge between the historical Jesus and the Christ of the kerygma. In making the cleavage, the liberal historians fastened onto the human Jesus, the portrayal of whose history was the abiding theme of their researches, as the great object of their faith. The impression we now get in retrospect is that, having differentiated between the man Jesus and the Christ, and having envisaged the need to choose between Jesus or the Christ, they voted wholeheartedly for Jesus. In our own century the vote has swung. There has been something of a landslide away from the historical Jesus to the Christ of the Church’s kerygma, the Christ of the Church’s faith … [Jesus and Christian Origins, p. 18].

The shift that Anderson mentions may be traced to a book by Martin Kähler, The So-Called Jesus of History and the Historical, Biblical Christ. Kähler rejected the attempt to get behind “Christ” to ‘ “Jesus,” arguing that the proper concern of Christians is with the Christ of the early Christian preaching. Only this Christ, he said, is of permanent significance for faith. At the same time, Kähler did not neglect the question of history, for he felt that the biblical descriptions of Christ give every indication of being the most complete reality.

Since the Second World War elements of Kähler’s thesis have been revived in an extreme form by Rudolf Bultmann. Much of Bultmann’s energy has been expended on stripping away what he feels to be the “mythology” of the New Testament writers—heaven, hell, miracles, and so on. But Bultmann’s views are misunderstood if one imagines that the historically real Jesus lies beneath the allegedly mythological layer. According to Bultmann, what lies beneath the mythology is the Church’s deepest understanding of life created by its experience with the risen Lord. Consequently, nothing may be known of Jesus in terms of pure history except the mere fact that he existed. In Bultmann’s words, “We can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus” (Jesus and the Word, p. 8)

Operating under the assumption that a period of oral transmission intervened between the years of Christ’s earthly ministry and the transcribing of the traditions about him in the Gospels, Bultmann envisions a creative church that devised the unique theology and sublime ethics of the New Testament. In Bultmann’s reconstruction there is no literal preexistence of Christ, no virgin birth, no sinlessness and deity, no literal atonement, no ascension, and no second coming. By these motifs, he says, the early Church was actually speaking of the possibility for all men of dying to the past and opening themselves to the future. Salvation consists in experiencing a profound inner release and freedom.

According to the Bultmannian school: (1) the earliest Christian sources exhibit no interest in the actual history or personality of Jesus, (2) the biblical documents are fragmentary and legendary, (3) there are no other sources against which to check the data provided by the biblical writers, and (4) preoccupation with the historical Jesus is actually destructive of Christianity, for it leads, not to a faith in Jesus as God, but to a Jesus-cult, the effects of which can be clearly seen in Pietism.

Fortunately, Bultmann’s system has not proved satisfying either intellectually or spiritually, and theological leadership has now passed into other hands. In the first place, even Bultmann’s disciples have expressed dissatisfaction with his statements on the historicity of Jesus. If, as Bultmann says, virtually all we need to know of the historicity of the Christian faith is the mere “thatness” of Jesus Christ, his existence, then why even that? Why was the incarnation necessary? And if it was not really necessary or if it is impossible to show why it was necessary, what is to keep the Christian faith from degenerating into the realm of abstract ideas? And what in that case is to distinguish its view of the incarnation from Docetism or from a Gnostic redeemer-myth? Käsemann raised these questions in his famous address to the reunion of old Marburg students in 1953, arguing that “we cannot do away with the identity between the exalted and the earthly Lord without falling into docetism and depriving ourselves of the possibility of drawing a line between the Easter faith of the community and myth” (Essays on New Testament Themes, p. 34). A few years later Joachim Jeremias voiced a similar warning:

We are in danger of surrendering the affirmation “the Word became flesh” and of abandoning the salvation-history, God’s activity in the Man Jesus of Nazareth and in His message; we are in danger of approaching Docetism, where Christ becomes an idea [The Expository Times, 69, p. 335].

Even Bultmann’s supporters must find it a bit incongruous that in his Theology of the New Testament the former Marburg professor can give only thirty pages to the teachings of Jesus while devoting more than one hundred pages to an imaginary account of the theology of the so-called hellenistic communities, of which we know absolutely nothing.

It is also clear to many New Testament scholars that Bultmann has minimized both the early Church’s concern for the facts of Jesus’ life and its dependence upon him as teacher. While it is true, as Bultmann argues, that the biblical documents are concerned primarily with Jesus’ identity as the Messiah and with the revelation he brings of the Father, it is no less significant that their understanding of him is embodied, not in theological tracts or cosmic mythologies (as in Gnosticism), but in Gospels. Their structure is historical. Moreover, every verse of the Gospels seems to cry out that the origin of the Christian faith lies, not in the sudden enlightenment of the early Christians or in an evolving religious experience, but in the facts concerning Jesus Christ—his life, death, and particularly his resurrection. Even the kerygma proclaims the historical event, for it was Jesus of Nazareth who died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again on the third day.

The nature of Christianity and its written sources constantly drive the student to the figure of the historical Christ. To settle for a kerygma divorced from history is to reject the Incarnation, and neither the Church’s documents nor the risen Lord of the Church will long permit it.

Throughout the modernist period, from Reimarus to Schweitzer, the major studies of Christ’s life combined a concern for historical fidelity with a commitment to liberal theology. In the Bultmannian period there has been acute historical skepticism coupled in many cases with doctrinal conservatism, or at least confessionalism. Both have proved inadequate. The old liberalism tried to find Jesus behind the New Testament while the Bultmannian school tries to find him above and beyond it in individual involvement and response. It is no wonder that the new school has tended to produce an existential Christ just as the earlier generation produced a purely human one.

III

Growing dissatisfaction with the need to choose between purely historical interests and the Christ of the early Christian preaching has inspired the so-called new quest for the historical Jesus, a quest that carries scholarship of the Gospels into a third and more promising phase.

Since 1954, when Käsemann’s address to the old Marburg students first appeared in print, many of the post-Bultmannians—Käsemann, Fuchs, Bornkamm, Conzelmann, Robinson—have reacted both to the extremely negative results of the old quest and to the historical defeatism that characterized the Bultmannian years. At the same time they have sought renewal of the search for the Jesus of history along new lines. These men reject the psychologizing about Jesus that was prominent in the liberal quest. But they also reject Bultmann’s premise that the facts about him cannot and need not be known. Instead of a historical Jesus stripped of all mystery and all doctrinal significance, the post-Bultmannians seek a Jesus whose words and deeds are to be understood only in theological and existential categories. Thus they are again opening the possibility that some aspects of the Christ of the kerygma and the Jesus of history may be one.

The work of these scholars involves more than a change of attitude and approach. It also involves a new appreciation of Jesus and his message. For instance, Käsemann argues that scholarship can be certain that Jesus possessed a unique sense of authority, an authority that rivaled that of Moses. According to Käsemann, Jesus believed himself divinely and uniquely inspired. He writes:

While Jesus may have made his appearance in the first place in the character of a rabbi or a prophet, nevertheless his claim far surpasses that of any rabbi or prophet.… Certainly he was a Jew and made the assumptions of Jewish piety, but at the same time he shatters this framework with his claim. The only category which does justice to his claim (quite independently of whether he used it himself and required it of others) is that in which his disciples themselves placed him—namely, that of the Messiah [Essays on New Testament Themes, p. 38].

Ernst Fuchs and Günther Bomkamm not only follow a similar line but also add assurances about what Jesus did. They stress his gracious attitude toward social outcasts and his self-consciousness of an ability to forgive sins. James M. Robinson notes “an unmistakable movement toward a consensus as to the basic direction of Jesus’ message” (“The Formal Structure of Jesus’ Message,” Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation, ed. by Klassen and Snyder, p. 97).

The prominence given such views today represents a promising reaction against the extreme skepticism of the Bultmannian era. But even this newer portrait of Jesus is not satisfying. One great discovery has emerged from the post-Bultmannian studies—namely, that we cannot have the historical Jesus without the risen Christ (the error of liberalism), nor the risen Christ without the historical Jesus (the error of the early Bultmannian school). But the new quest has still not come to terms with either prong.

Robinson argues that the selfhood of Jesus is “available to us … via historical research and via the kerygma” (A New Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 125). But the historiography of the post-Bultmannians still reveals a one-sided commitment to existentialism, which influences the selection of data. And reliance on the narrowest criteria for historical authenticity inevitably rules out valuable dimensions of Christ’s life and personality. Exegetes wish to admit only those aspects of Christ’s life that have no parallel in first-century documents. But Jesus was both the Son of God and a man of his times, a rabbi who spoke in terms his followers would understand. Hence, much of his teaching and many of his acts must have been very similar to the teaching and actions of many of his contemporaries.

There is no doubt, moreover, that most post-Bultmannians are still highly reluctant to admit the supernatural. Thus, Käsemann seems to follow in the footsteps of nineteenth-century liberalism when he contrasts the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John with that of Luke, arguing that Luke erred in attempting to contain Christ’s life within the category of historicity. He argues that Luke’s approach wrongly makes “Jesus into a miracle-worker and the bringer of a new morality, the Cross into a misunderstanding on the part of the Jews, and the Resurrection into the marvellous reanimation of a dead man” (Essays on New Testament Themes, p. 30).

IV

For over two hundred years the quest of the historical Jesus has had its ups and downs; for most of those years the Christ of scholarship has emerged in a fashionconscious mini-version, carefully tailored to the philosophy and interests of those who write his story. Scholarship has pursued its way with vigor. Yet it is a tribute to the inescapable historicity of Jesus and to the reliability of the Gospels as history, not to scholarship, that a truer picture of Jesus has emerged in recent studies.

The new historians of Christ’s life are on the way, but they have not gone far enough. It is true that the Gospels are theology as much as they are history. This is the one great contribution of the Bultmannian school. But the New Testament claims to present, not merely a spiritual appraisal of Jesus’ life and death, but the proper appraisal. “Jesus died for our sins.” “Jesus rose for our justification.” The Bible never presents these statements as optional interpretations to be measured against one another, weighed, and possibly rejected. They are true, and the events of Jesus’ life cannot be understood without them. Oscar Cullmann constantly calls attention to this, noting that the New Testament takes its place alongside the Old Testament in presenting both the divine acts in history and the divinely given interpretation of those acts.

It cannot be forgotten, moreover, even in the most critical appraisal of the New Testament, that the biblical writers lay claim to divine inspiration. And this is to say that they are conscious of being guided by Christ’s Spirit. In the farewell discourses in John, Jesus observes that “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). And he adds, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth … for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:13, 14). If this is true, then one cannot legitimately claim to recognize the voice of the risen Christ as he is present to us through the preaching and at the same time reject the testimony of the New Testament about him. According to Scripture, the definitive testimony of the risen Christ is precisely the material that we have transmitted through the historical memory of specially commissioned and divinely inspired apostles.

Ultimately scholarship must decide, not between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith (a stage already passed in the discussions), but between its own reconstruction of Christ’s history after a sifting of the biblical material and Jesus’ own interpretation of his history as it is transmitted to us by the Spirit in the New Testament documents.

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.”

Post Office authorities have approved CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S bid for second-class mailing privileges. Rapid growth of paid subscriptions (now over 90 per cent of total circulation) was the major qualifying factor. Readers will receive copies earlier through preferential handling of second-class mail, while the lower postage costs will appreciably reduce this magazine’s operational deficit.

Titled “Rebirth,” the next issue will be devoted to serious readers who have not made a life commitment to Jesus Christ. Extra copies are available in limited supply on advance order only. Single copies are 40¢ postpaid; ten or more copies to one address, 20ȼ each.

Since much modern religious writing has little more survival value than a box of Kleenex, it’s pleasantly surprising to learn that a recent “Editor’s Note” (offering traffic-jam observations on the stalemate in Viet Nam) has garnered a Freedoms Foundation honor medal. Another award winner was Executive Editor Dr. L. Nelson Bell for an essay on “Character” in “A Layman and His Faith.” And FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received $100 and a distinguished service award for his essay on “An Analysis of the New Left” (Aug. 18, 1967, issue).

The inner city and its ministries continue to be a prime conversation starter in today’s theological circles. It is still far from certain whether the megacity is to be a place of constructive “anonymity, freedom, and opportunity” in the future; perhaps it will prove to be the place “where the action is” in a radically demonic and negative manner. There is still some reasonable doubt whether Christianity must, if it is to survive, broadly affirm the emerging norms in our secular and urban world.

The recent trend toward world-acceptance clearly seems to be a reaction against the earlier (and gloomy) stress upon the “alienated man in the asphalt jungle.” It may also be a reaction against certain strains in dialectical theology, with its motif of the ultimate weakness of mere human endeavor and its distrust of any long-range solution to social problems through programs of Christian action. In any case, the newer emphasis is upon identification, participation, and acceptance.

Certain questions emerge from the newer discussions of the city in such works as Gibson Winter’s New Creation as Metropolis and Harvey Cox’s The Secular City. These writers, especially Cox, view the freedom, anonymity, and multiplied opportunities that urban life affords as high on the scale of tomorrow’s values. Now, it may be that the one who has the money, the background, and the sophistication to enjoy these will find them exhilarating; but to the one who is excluded from participating in them, they may prove terrifying. Anonymity, for example, may be of some value to a certain type of person, but if anonymity is imposed by poverty or loneliness, it may lead to the gravest sort of anxiety.

Underlying part of the current eulogizing of the megacity’s virtues is the assumption that there is a unified and identifiable urban community. But though certain characteristics may be common in urban living, the megacity is more accurately seen as a varied and complex collection of subcommunities linked together by a common water system. It is only those who are a part of a well-structured subcommunity who do not find the total city to be a threat. Those who lack a stable place in some subcommunity (and the number of these is increasing rapidly) seem to fall outside the pale of the urban blessed. To many of these, the city is a cage with invisible bars, a menacing and chaotic place.

The fragmentation of the urban community has deprived even the ghetto of its earlier meaning and role. To the immigrant of two generations ago, the ghetto was a defense against the confusions of the city as a whole, a retreat in which he could find a common set of symbols and a common mode of discourse. Today’s ghetto seems to possess most of the liabilities of the traditional ghetto but few or none of its assets, though these assets are still desperately needed. Those who are in a position to judge tell us that in many ghetto-situations the so-called storefront mission is the most effective agency for projecting the creative values of the ghetto, and especially for bridging the gulf between the environment its dwellers left behind and the mainstream of life in the culture they adopted.

In light of all this, one is inclined to ask: Are not many of the projections for the future of the city so problematical that one should view with reserve even the drawing of sociological inferences from urbanization? This does not mean that the Christian should not welcome any valid insights into urbanization that the social sciences may yield; he should prayerfully seek the implications of these for the projection of the Evangel into the emerging world of tomorrow. What seems open to legitimate question is the acceptance of the megacity as the interpretative norm for theology.

Submerged just below the surface of much of the discussion of the urban community as a controlling model for Christian thinking and action is the view that the new urban pattern confronts the Church with a cultural situation so radically different from that of the past that traditional patterns of ministry are now obsolete and historic understandings of the Christian Evangel in need of radical revision.

This is another way of saying that the urban man of today is a qualitatively different sort of being, that he faces social needs and conflicts radically different from those of his predecessors. Biblical faith is thus thought to need a profound reflective alteration, and biblical projection of the Good News is said to demand abandonment of older ministerial structures and techniques in favor of procedures dictated by the emerging situation, and especially by the “discoveries” of the social scientists. It may be that those who propose this radical reappraisal and restructuring of Christian theology and evangelical practice have performed an unwarranted extrapolation, in which there is a false appraisal of the parallelism involved.

In practical application, this assumption has led some to insist that the local church or “geographical parish” is an anachronism (resting, it is said, upon the dwindling prestige of bourgeois values) that will inevitably be supplanted by new structures. The parish ministry is alleged to be passé as a model for the propagation of Christianity. It will persist for a time as a phase of cultural lag, we are told, but is doomed to ultimate disappearance.

More significant still, the avant-garde urban religious planners say that preaching is a relic of a bygone age, partly at least because of its appeal to reason, which, like Piggy’s spectacles in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, is assumed to be badly fractured, and at best a pseudo-Promethean crutch to man. Perhaps the Apostle Paul foresaw some such development when he spoke of “the foolishness of preaching” and said that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.”

All shades of the theological spectrum are represented in the inner-city ministries. But much of the theoretical work, as well as too much of the planning, is being done by those deflecting the tendencies just described. The evangelical may well be perplexed, perhaps frustrated, by what seems to him a sort of tyranny of the inner-city ministries.

The problem demands some sort of reasoned answer. May we propose the following: Let us as evangelicals welcome varied forms of urban ministries as pilot projects, with the distinct understanding that they are just that, and that their pronouncements are tentative. Let them teach whatever may be of value in the matter of approach, and whatever may be found to cast light upon the realities of man’s predicament. But let us make it plain that we do not take kindly to premature assertions of the obsolescence of the preaching and witnessing Church, or of the ministry by which lost and alienated persons are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.

The Archbishop of Canterbury last month dropped his first hint that this summer’s meeting of the world’s 500 bishops will be a major turning point for the Anglican Communion. Some have suggested that the 1968 Lambeth Conference will be the last, and Archbishop A. Michael Ramsey said, “It is impossible now to prejudge what decisions may be made about the future role of Lambeth Conferences,” which have been held every ten years for the past century.

Ramsey also said the 1968 meeting will make decisions about the future organization of the Anglican Communion and “its relation to the wider ecumenical movement.” In many nations, Anglican bodies are involved in merger talks, though suspicions lurk that when the moment of decision comes, some of them may get cold feet. The parent Church of England is supposedly nearing merger with the Methodists. The Anglican Church of Canada is talking officially about 1974 merger with the United Church and gets a report this June on possibilities for intercommunion before that. But some pro-union Anglicans fear the whole thing is bogging down. In the United States, the Episcopal Church is a pivotal factor in the nine-way Consultation on Church Union, which meets again the last week of this month.

A delegate to closed-door talks between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion revealed last month that a report not yet released by Pope Paul and Archbishop Ramsey will recommend practical measures for the growing together of the two communions. This plotting of a course in the direction of unity, said Professor Eugene Fairweather of Toronto, was settled at the third joint meeting, which closed January 3.

Along with discussions of unity, signs of Anglican slackness abound. The U. S. church is relatively healthy, but some alarms went up at last fall’s convention. In the Church of England, ordinations last year dropped to a ten-year low of 496, with even lower figures forecast for the next two years.

Enrollment in Canadian Anglican seminaries this year dipped to 174—less than the figure for 1956.

All this is the background for a report issued last month by the Church of England Missionary and Ecumenical Council, which sets the stage for Lambeth. Religious News Service calls it “one of the bluntest reports” published in London in years.

It says the English church faces a real danger of “using its wealth and influence in a paternalistic or dominating way” toward other Anglican denominations. “Outside England, Anglicans wonder whether the Church of England cares any longer about the Anglican Communion now that it can no longer control it.” The document says the “provinces” are ahead of the mother church in their thought and flexibility on church union, government, liturgy, and supplemental ministries.

The report says that “newly united churches” should not be cut off from fellowship or otherwise penalized but that the “time is not ripe” for the Anglican Communion and other world confessional bodies to die out. The report ruled out—for now—church merger talks among the confessional groups, such as the Lutheran World Federation, or with the Roman Catholic Church.

The Lambeth Conference convenes July 25, five days after the World Council of Churches assembly closes in Sweden. Its theme is “renewal” in faith, ministry, and unity. Of the world’s 47 million baptized Anglicans, 27.6 million belong to the Church of England, which also predominates in overall wealth, manpower, and missionaries. However, the U. S. Episcopal Church is the main financial contributor.

PROTESTANT PANORAMA

Methodist Publishing House workers in Nashville voted a second time against joining the bookbinders’ union, but the union is contesting the second election, as it did the first, thrown out by the NLRB. In New York, the Methodist missions board withdrew its $10 million investment portfolio from First National City Bank to protest a credit pact with South Africa.

The three major U. S. Lutheran bodies are discussing cooperative “planning and development” of church curriculums; and a meeting of their theological education staffs proposed shared plans on “the number, location, and task of Lutheran seminaries.”

St. Olaf College (American Lutheran) says it urges “equal opportunity” employment but refuses to join the Minnesota Project Equality because it does not agree with “economic pressure” on businesses.

The Free Will Baptists cut ties with the American Bible Society because of growing Roman Catholic involvement and questions on the bibliology of translators.

The Baptist community in Rwanda, Africa, has grown from 500 to 4,200 since 1962. To supply badly needed pastors, a new school with eight teachers has opened, aided by books from the World Council of Churches.

PERSONALIA

The Iowa Presbyterian Synod set March 15 for an appeal by University of Iowa English Professor Joseph Baker, tried and suspended for “disrupting the peace and unity” of his Iowa City church in opposing its decision to raze its 112-year-old building. Next step for Baker would be the denomination’s national assembly.

Canadian Catholic theologian Gregory Baum, writing in an English Jesuit journal, says that “the Church’s mission among Jews is not to proselytise, to persuade Jews to leave their religion and join another.” Baum, born of agnostic German Jewish parents, converted in 1947.

Professor Norman Lamm of Yeshiva University criticized efforts by Christians “to legitimize homosexuality as ‘morally neutral’ ” and asserted Judaism can never agree with this view.

Former Congressman Brooks Hays will head an institute for study of the ecumenical movement at Wake Forest University (Southern Baptist Convention), starting this month. New Orleans pastor J. D. Grey, like Hays a former SBC president, was named president of the city crime commission.

Robert Garcia, a Roman Catholic priest who used to head New Mexico’s antipoverty office, was fired from the agency, then said he would marry a divorcee. The rector of Maryknoll Seminary in New York, Father George Weber, has resigned and asked for lay status and freedom from the celibacy vow.

A county judge sentenced activist priest James Groppi to a $500 fine and two years’ probation for resisting arrest during a civil-rights march in Milwaukee.

Ottawa’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Aurele Plourde revealed his own salary—$300 a month—and promised to open diocesan books to the laity.

Episcopal Bishop Coadjutor Robert Appleyard of Pittsburgh was consecrated in a service in the Roman Catholic cathedral.

German Catholic Bishop Joseph Hoffner gave “conditional” ordination to former U. S. Episcopal priest John Jay Hughes in a private ceremony, apparently recognizing validity of Anglican orders.

Burmese Baptist layman U Kyaw Than was named general secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference, replacing Dr. D. T. Niles. The EACC approved four new denominations, bringing its membership to ninety-one groups in sixteen countries.

J. Robertson McQuilkin, 40, son of the founder, was named president of Columbia (South Carolina) Bible College. He is a missionary in Japan.

MISCELLANY

The U. S. welfare department will make offers of birth-control information mandatory for health and welfare recipients, instead of waiting for them to ask.

The Churches of God in North America want Maryland’s Court of Appeals to overthrow a county-court ruling permitting two congregations to leave the denomination and keep their church buildings. The denomination says the ruling violates church-state separation.

Catholic University law teacher John J. McGrath contends in a new book that church charities and schools “are now owned by the sponsoring body.… If anyone owns the assets, … it is the general public.”

The war on poverty gave $810,748 to maintain fifty-six schools for migrant workers run by the New Mexico Council of Churches.

Pope Paul enthusiastically praised the 1929 Lateran Pact for bringing “religious peace in the life of the Italian people.”

Wycliffe Bible Translators has published the New Testament for Mexico’s Huichol Indians. Wycliffe started work with the tribe in 1941 and now counts at least 400 believers among the group.

Fifty-four Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose troubles have been described recently in the cult’s publications, were refused admittance to Zambia and ordered back to Malawi, where several have reportedly been slain.

Orissa State in India passed a law with penalties of $1,000 fine or a year in prison for missionaries who convert minors, women, or untouchables. Penalties will be doubled if evangelism entails “force, fraud, or exploitation of property.” The Church of South India Synod protested that the bill “ignores the right of every citizen freely to hold any views and convictions.” In Bombay, Salvation Army General Frederick Coutts asked India to continue to allow foreign workers to minister there.

Deaths

EDWARD J. YOUNG, 60, Old Testament teacher for thirty-one years at Westminster Theological Seminary; of a heart attack.

ELIEZER SILVER, 86, leading Orthodox rabbi who helped rescue 500,000 Jews from the Nazis; in Cincinnati.

STEWART DOSS, 52, religion writer for the Dallas Times-Herald; of a heart attack.

A national conference of Negro Methodists, meeting in a militant mood last month and embracing “black power” as the answer to racism, decided the church’s segregated Central Jurisdiction should be replaced with an all-Negro organization called “Black Methodists for Church Renewal.”

Looking ahead to the April merger meeting of the Methodists and the Evangelical United Brethren, the 250 delegates demanded that Negroes get proportional representation on all boards and agencies of the new United Methodist Church (they make up about 4 per cent of 11 million members).

There were ironical overtones to the group’s establishing the “Renewal” organization to replace the Central Jurisdiction—which it had successfully pushed into oblivion. But the Negroes saw a difference between a power base they themselves set up and a structure ordained by whites to serve as a kind of jurisdictional catch-all for Methodists with black skin. The new agency plans to hire an executive at $15,000 a year, with an operating budget of $38,000.

The delegates let it be known that the Negro voice will be heard loud and strong in the United Methodist Church. With this assertion went a not-very-veiled threat that the Church had better shape up or the Negro may ship out.

The conference concluded with lively floor fights on six papers of “findings” from committees. The one on black power asserted: “We confess our failures to be reconciled with ourselves as black men. We have too often denied our blackness rather than embrace it in all its black beauty. We are becoming new men—the old man (the nigger) is dead. The ‘boy’ is now a man. How then do we respond forcefully and responsibly to racism in America and racism in the Methodist Church? We unashamedly reply—Black Power!”

Black power was said to provide “the means by which black people do for themselves that which no other group may do for it.”

The man who coined the phrase, Methodist layman Stokely Carmichael, tiptoed down the aisle to the front pew to hear a church address by former CORE Director James Farmer. Farmer said black power is good for the nation and essential to the Negro if he is to be accepted as an equal. He said all minority groups, such as Irish and Jewish immigrants, had to form economic and political power blocs to succeed in America.

Carmichael was not introduced at the meeting and refused to talk to newsmen. He did return to the headquarters hotel to address a workshop on “Black Churchmen and the Black Revolution.” After spending the night in the hotel’s presidential suite, he slipped out of town.

The hottest floor fight at the conference was triggered by the phrase in one paper, “whether it be within or without the institution and whether it be pleasing or painful to white Methodists.”

The Rev. Merrill Nelson of Columbus, Ohio, rushed to a floor microphone and proclaimed, “I will not walk out of the Methodist Church. I will not vote for something I personally will not do.”

Then Cincinnati pastor Samuel Wright reminded delegates that the Methodist Church came out of the Church of England. “I have no hesitancy at all in walking out of an institution,” he said. “We can leave it, and if we ought to, we should. It’s a choice of radical transformation of the church or creative disaffiliation.”

When unflappable conference Chairman James Lawson of Memphis, a skilled parliamentarian, brought the issue to a vote, the explosive language was killed 51–47.

Caught up in the vortex of violence, the Negroes left open-ended the role of congregations caught in the midst of conflicts. One paper made the innocuous recommendation that the Church should “educate people relative to the role of the church in the midst of violence.” Delegates agreed that no one knew what the role was but that it should get top priority. They defeated the suggested addition of “… and, if possible, prevent violence” as part of the Church’s role.

BLOODSHED IN SOUTH CAROLINA

Negro Methodists’ concern about violence (story above) was dramatized with the news during last month’s conference that three Negro collegians had been shot and killed and fifty others wounded in the wake of demonstrations against a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina. The Cincinnati conference stood for a moment of silence, then sent telegrams backing the students and deploring the killings.

The violence closed South Carolina State College, with 1,600 students, and Claflin College, nearby Methodist school with 600 students. Carolina State’s President M. Macco Nance, Jr., defended the protests but indicated that a small group of activists had taken over and that this had led to the violence and deaths.

The Rev. W. McLeod Frampton, a white Presbyterian, was named to lead the city’s new biracial Human Relations Commission. The pastor said, “Unrest and violence, hatred, prejudice, and even revolution will engulf us unless somehow we are willing to establish effective and effectual lines of communication.… No individual, no home, no community will be safe until every home and every individual is safe.…”

BAPTIST MARCH MALADY

Baptist leaders from the ten denominations joining for an unprecedented Continental Congress on Evangelism this October are running into some resistance from pastors in the host city, Washington, D. C.

National planners have scheduled a Sunday march up the Mall to proclaim Christ as “the only hope.” But one of the congress committee chairmen, Editor James Duncan of Capital Baptist, says local Baptists “are not interested” because “the psychology of this city won’t accept another parade.”

Parade equals protest in many local minds, it seems, and the shadow of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., falls over much of the discussion. King—whose Negro denomination supports the congress and the huge evangelistic drive that is to follow—plans a major “camp-in” in the capital this spring to last until Congress accedes to demands for poverty legislation.

Another potential irritant—not yet surfaced—is that D. C. churches are dually aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention, which is behind the congress, and the American Baptist Convention, which has voted against any official role.

The four-day Continental Congress will be limited to 2,500 delegates from the denominations, but the hope is to swell the ranks with thousands from the D. C. area for a final Sunday march. Despite appeals from Duncan and other local leaders, parade plans were pushed forward at last month’s steering-committee meeting. North American Coordinator W. Wayne Dehoney, past president of the SBC, gave an emotional appeal for the parade at a rally for about 200 D. C. area pastors.

Dehoney reported that the 1969 Crusade of the Americas campaign now has the support of 18 million Baptists and 100,000 congregations in twenty-seven nations of the Western Hemisphere.

A.B.C. INDECISION

The General Council of the American Baptist Convention proved indecisive on crucial issues before the denomination at the meeting that closed February 1. Ecumenicity was strongly urged, but when it became evident that Cardinal Cushing was to be among the welcoming speakers at the Boston convention in May (he seemed to have partially invited himself) the council appeared alarmed at this development.

On evangelism, President L. Doward McBain reported extensive sessions with the Home Mission Society and its evangelism department, but it was clear that no meeting of the minds had been reached. On war and peace, no significant discussion was scheduled, though at the end of the meeting Iowa pastor Heinz Grabia reluctantly offered brief personal observations from a recent Viet Nam visit. In the statement—given with strong urging from McBain and enthusiastic council reception—Grabia confessed that he had gone as something of a “hawk,” but had returned less than satisfied with that position.

The council spent major time visiting Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, where the Rev. Leon Sullivan has led development of an extensive job-training and employment service center. After three years, more than 3,000 persons are working as a result of the effort, with 1,400 currently in training. Sullivan will get the denomination’s peace award for 1968, along with ailing Christian Century Editor Kyle Haselden.

The council also surveyed the less concrete program of the denomination’s evangelism secretary, the Rev. Dr. Jitsuo Morikawa, which seeks to enlist Philadelphia laymen to express their faith in and through vocations.

LAWRENCE T. SLAGHT

EPISCOPAL UNDERCURRENT

Liberals in the Episcopal Church get the headlines, but a revived undercurrent of traditional theology may be developing. One indication is a small, low-key group that drew 200 persons to its third annual meeting last month, held at St. James’ Church in Leesburg, Virginia.

The group is the U. S. beachhead for the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion, the conservative group within the Church of England that includes some of the world’s best-honed evangelicals. Two of them were there: London clergyman John R. W. Stott and the Rev. Dr. Philip E. Hughes, currently teaching at Columbia Seminary in Georgia. Hughes is president of the U. S. group, but most organizational chores fall to the Rev. Peter Moore of New York, young, urbane head of the Council for Religion in Independent Schools.

The fireworks at Leesburg came from the Rev. Dr. John Rodgers, theology teacher at Virginia Theological Seminary. The heavy-set, 37-year-old theologian said, “The Good News of God’s self-disclosure in Christ is not only badly obscured but even attacked in institutions which bear his name.… The Word of God is considered to be archaic and hindering the Church.… The institutional churches to a large extent have lost the ‘pearl of great price’ in this country. Things are every bit as bad as in the sixteenth century. It is a time for reformation through the Word of God.”

Rodgers used a piece by the Rev. Dr. Daniel Day Williams in Theology Today as an example, saying that it is “wild speculation offered as Christian theology” and gives “joyous approval” to most major heresies of church history. God is described in passive terms, he said, as the mere matrix for man’s possibilities. “This is where our parishes are headed.”

In another address, his seminary colleague, the Rev. Dr. FitzSimmons Allison, discussed Freudian attacks on the fatherhood of God and asserted that the Judeo-Christian teaching is not an adolescent reversion, since the biblical God requires adventuresome service.

Suffragan Bishop Samuel Chilton of Virginia spoke on “Personal Commitment to Christ.” The meetings were also attended by a dozen Virginia seminary students, plus three from General Seminary, New York, and the Rev. Dr. Stuart Barton Babbage, president of Conwell School of Theology in Philadelphia and the former dean of the cathedrals in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia.

VOICE FOR CONSERVATIVE ORTHODOXY

A crack in the Eastern Orthodox cocoon has appeared with the slim, interesting new monthly, The Logos. Orthodoxy, the first issue complains, has disobeyed Christ by remaining silent “while Protestantism and Roman Catholicism stir restlessly in a renewed quest for what has been lost.”

Editor Eusebius Stephanou, 43, priest of Holy Trinity Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is no novice. He got an A.B. in history at Michigan and a divinity degree from Holy Cross Theological School in Massachusetts, and became the first Greek Orthodox to get an earned doctorate at General Theological Seminary, the Episcopal school in New York. Other ecumenical credentials: he was the first Orthodox to teach theology at Notre Dame, and represented Orthodoxy at such meetings as the Montreal Faith and Order session of the World Council of Chinches.

The result of all this is conservative theology, conservative politics, and disquiet about the ecumenical movement born of Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic doctrinal confusion.

Answering Archbishop Iakovos’s comments to the New York Times last fall, the first issue of the journal says, “Roman Catholics and Liberal Protestants leave the preaching of the total Christ to the Fundamentalists and Southern Baptist Evangelists. They are too busy either building up the defences of the crumbling institutional Church or advocating programs of social and political reform. Whatever the case may be, they are striving for a Christianity without Christ.”

Though Logos strives to be a pan-Orthodox organ, the tone is distinctly Greek. On affairs of that troubled nation, the paper says last year’s military takeover was “a blessing.… Who ever said that freedom was an end in itself? Once it is abused, it is forfeited.… Discipline and restriction of political freedom is Greece’s salvation.”

And an Athens Orthodox paper is quoted to the effect that cooperation with Western Christians in social activity is all right “so long as all proselytism on their part is put to a stop. We shall offer prayers to God for their return to the Church … to which they belonged until the ninth century.”

STORM OVER ASBURY

The Rev. Karl K. Wilson, fired after sixteen months as president of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, refused to vacate the president’s house January 31 as ordered, and is hoping for a change at the April board meeting.

After firing Wilson December 28, the board named as Interim President Cornelius R. Hager, graduate of the college and neighboring Asbury Seminary. Hager went on leave as an assistant extension dean of the University of Kentucky.

A board member said a list of twenty-nine specific instances of Wilson’s incompetence has been withheld for Wilson’s sake, but Wilson contends that he was never presented with the charges, and that the special board meeting was illegal.

Summing up the weeks of turmoil, campus editor Paul Delaney wrote: “Ill will, detectives, lawyers, falsehoods, and differing interpretations of ‘God’s Will’ have been used by both sides. And poor Asbury has been left so reeling that ‘holiness unto the Lord’ seems to be fighting against itself.”

Before the Christmas holiday, fifteen threatened faculty resignations were bolstered by a petition in which 200 of the 1,050 students at the conservative Methodist school threatened to protest in an “overt and forceful manner” if the board didn’t act. Now that the change has been made, several teachers are likely to leave anyway.

Wilson, who was a Methodist pastor in Canton, Ohio, followed the thirty-year reign of President Zachary T. Johnson. He was the dark-horse candidate who won when the board split between Johnson’s choice and a second man.

PRESBYTERIAN PLIGHT

With Presbyterian Professor Lloyd George Geering of New Zealand cleared of heresy charges (see December 8, 1967, issue, p. 40), conservative reactions are beginning. An independent Presbyterian fellowship has arisen in Auckland, New Zealand. A pastor in suburban Sydney, Australia (whose church includes five seminarians), has led his church into separation despite sacrifice of the property. The pastor, a hyper-Calvinist, spent ten days in New Zealand speaking at protest meetings called by the International Council of Christian Churches and the Presbyterian Laymen’s Association.

But the major evangelical Presbyterian voice, the New Zealand Westminster Fellowship, repudiated the campaign. Leading Australian evangelicals like Graham Hardy and Gordon Powell, who have the major Presbyterian churches in Sydney and Melbourne, criticized the Geering decision but as yet plan no separatist moves.

Moderates are chagrined that New Zealand Presbyterians have not rallied evangelical forces and have thus left the door open for the ICCC and others to capitalize upon the evident bewilderment. Some separatists look to the Australian Reformed Church, a Dutch-background body with twenty-five congregations.

Most evangelicals across the South Pacific are deeply concerned. Many hope to form a continuing Presbyterian body true to historical standards but without the extremist label, and view the first separation moves as immature.

On top of this, the New Zealand Assembly added fuel to the fire by distributing a pastoral letter with pleas for “liberality” and expressions of confidence in Geering’s stand.

CRAIG SKINNER

Six American missionaries—three men and three women—died at the hands of Viet Cong terrorists during the Tet lunar New Year offensive in Viet Nam. The slayings occurred at Ban Me Thuot, some 150 miles northeast of Saigon. They are thought to have been carried out January 30 and 31 (see account on page 16).

The Viet Cong also took at least two American missionaries captive.

The dead were:

• Miss Ruth Wilting, 42, of Cleveland, Ohio.

• The Rev. Robert Ziemer, 49, of Toledo, Ohio.

• The Rev. C. Edward Thompson, 43, and his wife, Ruth, 44, of New Kensington, Pennsylvania.

• Leon Griswold, 66, and his daughter, Carolyn, 41, of White Plains, New York.

All served under the Christian and Missionary Alliance, an 81-year-old evangelical denomination that gives top priority to foreign missionary work.

Several buildings on the CMA compound at Ban Me Thuot were destroyed during the Viet Cong attacks.

The two Americans seized by the Viet Cong were Henry Blood, of Portland, Oregon, and Miss Betty Olsen, of Nyack, New York. Miss Olsen is a nurse whose services presumably were deemed valuable to the Viet Cong.

Freed by the Viet Cong was Mrs. Marie Ziemer, whose husband was killed. Mrs. Ziemer was wounded but not seriously.

Only about three days before the attack, the three Ziemer children and the five Thompson children had left Ban Me Thuot for a boarding school in Malaysia.

Dr. Nathan Bailey, CMA president, said that although the Viet Cong marauders had invaded a number of South Vietnamese cities, only the missionaries in Ban Me Thuot were victimized. “Word from the State Department indicates that all of our other missionaries are considered safe,” Bailey said. CMA missionaries have been serving in a number of areas of South Viet Nam.

Missionaries in Dalat had a close call. Some thirty-four men, women, and children were evacuated by the American military only minutes before the Viet Cong attacked in force.

Dr. Louis L. King, CMA foreign secretary, was on a tour of Europe and Africa when the slayings occurred. He went immediately to Saigon after learning the news.

Ironically, while the news broke of the Viet Nam martyrdoms, a group of prominent clergymen were releasing in New York a 421-page, soft-cover “war crimes study.” The preface states that in Viet Nam the United States “must be judged guilty of having broken almost every established agreement for standards of human decency in times of war.”

The book was published by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam, a two-year-old organization that claims a membership of 16,000. The group sponsored a two-day Washington protest demonstration against U. S. involvement in Viet Nam after the release of the volume.

The study, entitled In the Name of America, is signed by twenty-nine Christian and Jewish leaders, most of whom are familiar faces among the activists who have been protesting American policies in Viet Nam. They include Martin Luther King, Union Seminary President John Bennett, and Robert McAfee Brown.

A State Department official told Religious News Service the allegations against the United States “are not at all true legally and they are morally debatable.” He suggested that this war appears more awesome and gruesome than others because “for the first time in history people have been able to watch a war over a bowl of potato chips.”

Highlight of the Washington event was a silent vigil at Arlington National Cemetery by about 2,000 persons. Despite a series of legal appeals, the “Clergy Concerned” group was unable to get permission to hold a service at which King had been asked to speak. The Pentagon issued a statement saying that only a silent march would be allowed, and the courts upheld it.

ILLEGAL VOYAGES TO END?

The “Phoenix,” a fifty-foot ketch, has completed what its sponsors say will be the crew’s last effort “personally to deliver medical aid to suffering Vietnamese, no matter what the politics of the government under which they live.”

According to its Quaker sponsors in Philadelphia, the craft sailed into Haiphong, North Viet Nam, January 29 and unloaded $5,000 in surgical instruments and $2,000 worth of medicine. It was the third trip to Viet Nam for the “Phoenix” within a year. A load for South Viet Nam was never delivered because of a dispute over who should distribute it.

Quakers have acknowledged that the trips were illegal, but according to a spokesman they feel “conscience bound to do so … and … obligated to protest the brutal United States policy of terror.…”

SELECTIVE SOCIAL ACTION

Prominent churchmen joined in the condemnation of legal proceedings in South Africa under which thirty tribesmen were given prison sentences for terrorist activity. Some $37,500 in American church money had been given to aid the defendants, some of whom were accused of receiving guerrilla training in Communist China and the Soviet Union.

Dr. Arthur Larson, who flew to Pretoria to appear as an “observer” on behalf of the major ecumenical groups, called the sentencing a “monstrous travesty of law.” Larson, a Lutheran layman, teaches in a law research center at Duke University.

Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, called the sentencing a “tragedy.” The NCC, along with the Lutheran World Federation and the World Council of Churches, had tried to win leniency for the tribesmen, many of whom were members of the militant South-West Africa People’s Organization. Nineteen of them were sentenced to life imprisonment on charges that they returned to South-West Africa from abroad with weapons, that they took part in raids and skirmishes with police, and that they organized a plot to kill tribal leaders.

Ecumenical spokesmen agreed with a group of 200 American lawyers who condemned the trial of the tribesmen as a “flagrant violation of international law.” The lawyers said in a statement that the prosecution was illegal because the defendants were arrested in South-West Africa. The U. N. General Assembly ended South Africa’s jurisdiction over South-West Africa in 1966, but South Africa does not recognize the action.

South Africa prosecutors also were condemned because the tribesmen were convicted under an act passed in 1967 but made retroactive to 1962. The defendants could have received the death sentence.

The American denominations that contributed to the defense of the accused terrorists were the United Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ. The U. S. committee for the Lutheran World Federation also donated money, all of which was channeled through the NCC Africa Department.

That the case was a travesty of justice seemed quite clear. Similar travesties occur with discouraging regularity in Communist and other totalitarian countries. But the ecumenists ignore most of these—including those involving religious persecution—and chose instead to support apparently pro-Communist guerrillas.

DETROIT: MORE VIOLENCE?

Recent bomb threats to two moderate Negro ministers in Detroit raise fears of new racial violence in the riot-scarred city, National Catholic Reporter says.

An unexploded gasoline bomb was found at the home of the Rev. Roy Allen, head of the Detroit Council of Organizations, twenty-eight Negro groups opposing the militant-action committee headed by the Rev. Albert Cleage. The day after that bomb was found, a bomb exploded in the offices of the Baptist Pastors Council, headed by the Rev. Charles Williams, who takes a moderate civil-rights stance.

When Milwaukee activist Father James Groppi came to town recently, the meeting was disrupted by “Breakthrough,” a group that is urging whites to arm themselves.

Such activity comes in the wake of the worst city riot in American history, and a matter of weeks after participants in a social-ethics conference called by the National Council of Churches said violence may be a morally justifiable means to eradicate “systemic” violence in U. S. society.

DIGESTING THE NEW RELIGION

In honor of one of its February articles, “Are You Disturbed by the ‘New Religion’?,” Reader’s Digest sponsored a New York seminar to give the “new religionists an opportunity to speak for themselves” (which ones don’t?). The moderator was article-writer David Edman, an Episcopalian, ecumenical chaplain at Rochester Institute of Technology, and son of the late chancellor of Wheaton College, V. Raymond Edman.

First there was “new religion” jazz worship. Then a luncheon well attended by Digest brass and secretaries and by Union Seminary students who were not averse to gleaning a free lunch from a magazine few would admit ever reading.

Over lunch, the soft-spoken Edman said he left the evangelical camp after Wheaton because of its “man-centered” thrust. Now his contact with evangelicals “is rather slim—governed by their exclusiveness rather than mine.” “Biblical literalism is just uncongenial,” he added, but he refused classification as a thoroughgoing “new religionist.” His “first responsibility is Christ, out of which grow certain imperatives that deal with sins private and public.”

At the panel, Malcolm Boyd said explosively that the total death of the institutional church was needed. William Hamilton prophesied a “post-Christian, post-political mysticism” with people “who want to build a community without sin.” Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, immortalized in Time last month, said Judaism and Protestantism are in trouble because they are “religions of the Book,” whereas Catholicism is a “turned-on sensualism.”

Besides downgrading the man-God confrontation, speakers scornfully dismissed the printed word as inadequate for the new age. Yet in this McLuhan age more printed material is disseminated, and presumably read, than ever. We can wait to read the new religionists’ next books (or magazine articles).

JOHN EVENSON

The Diverse Dr. Poling

Few clergymen have involved themselves in a wider range of causes than Daniel A. Poling. The 83-year-old Poling died last month in Philadelphia, four days after attending the silver anniversary of one of these causes, the city’s Chapel of the Four Chaplains. It honors the World War II death at sea of his son Clark and three other clergymen who gave their lifebelts to others.

When Poling was a young Baptist pastor in Ohio, he ran for governor on the Prohibition ticket and got 47,000 votes, even though he was too young to serve. In his youth he also earned two college degrees, worked as a lumberjack, farmer, railroad man, and reporter, and suffered a severe gassing while doing YMCA relief work in Europe during World War I.

In the 1920s Poling entered the Reformed Church in America and became pastor of the venerable Marble Collegiate Church, New York City. He was once president of the RCA General Synod but switched again in 1936 to become pastor of Philadelphia’s Baptist Temple.

During the twenties Poling began a pioneer radio talk show on the NBC network and became editor of the sagging Christian Herald, which he turned into the biggest independent Protestant journal in the country. The journal also undertook such charitable works as the Bowery Mission, and Poling helped set up philanthropies for retailer J. C. Penney. In 1925 Poling was elected president of the International Society of Christian Endeavor, where he served for twenty-two years.

Poling’s most controversial activities were political. He lobbied long and hard for the successful Prohibition amendment. A lifelong Republican, he backed Roosevelt for president in 1944; but he believed enough in church-state separation to hire the Academy of Music in Philadelphia to announce it.

In 1951, the faltering Philadelphia Republican machine nominated Poling as its candidate for mayor, but he lost by 122,000 votes to the reform Democratic candidate Joseph Clark, now a U. S. Senator.

Poling was theologically conservative, anti-Communist, and anti-pacifist, and was one of the few big-name church leaders to oppose the Supreme Court prayer decision.

Poling received fourteen honorary degrees and all sorts of other honors. He was the author of more than two dozen books. Twice widowed, he is survived by one son, Daniel K., minister of an RCA church in New York City.

A VESSEL FOR EVANGELISM?

After plying the seas for three decades, the luxury liner “Queen Elizabeth” soon may enter her final berth. The world’s biggest passenger ship is up for sale, and chances are the buyer will put her at permanent anchor. Her sister ship the “Queen Mary” seems to have set a precedent in her new role at the dock in Long Beach, California.

One possibility for the “Queen Elizabeth” was raised by evangelist Billy Graham, who thought that use of the vessel as a floating school and/or Bible-conference facility might be worth exploring. Graham asked George Wilson, treasurer of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to look into it. Wilson was in London in February attending a meeting.

The 83,000-ton vessel is more than 1,000 feet long and carries 2,288 passengers. The city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reportedly offered its harbor to the ship if it is purchased by Graham’s organization.

Graham says he has suspended consideration—at least for the time being—of starting a university. He feels his role in such a school would be a “great diversion” from evangelism and speaking to secular audiences. He said world conditions give these priority status.

For a number of years there has been discussion of the feasibility of establishing a new Christian university, and Graham has at times expressed an interest in spearheading the project. He estimates it might cost $50,000,000 or more just to build the plant. “Twenty-two cities over the nation have offered property and finances for the school,” Graham said.

The prime site seemed recently to be along Florida’s eastern Gold Coast, where millionaire developer John D. MacArthur is said to have offered the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association a 1,000-acre plot for a campus in Palm Beach Gardens. The Florida Baptist Convention has been holding up its own plans for a new college pending Graham’s decision on whether he would start a school there.

NOT FOR TV-WATCHERS?

“I’m trying to reach some kid who is hung up on LSD and probably hates TV,” declared adman-satirist Stan Freberg, discussing the new color TV spot he produced for the United Presbyterian Church.

The spot features a well-groomed hippie, on camera, whose “bag” is reading psychedelic posters, talking with Freberg, who is off camera.

“It’s not so much that I want people to believe in God as opposed to not believing in God,” Freberg says. “I would just like to remind them of his existence.… I believe God is present in this world and that Christ died for us and was killed and rose again and I think if you believe this you will try to stop war and nonsense and bigotry.”

Freberg is also preparing a new series of radio spots based on the “God-Is-Dead” theme. “… While it has been pretty well covered from the pulpit,” he said, “I felt that somebody should say something out here in the so-called mass media for the benefit of those people who might have been tied up the last couple of Easter Sundays.”

The spots will be distributed as public-service announcements in cooperation with the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council of Churches.

CHURCH-STATE MONOLOGUE

“I gather from looking at your program you are going to be carrying on a dialogue among yourselves,” chided a Roman Catholic lawyer as the national conference of Americans United for Separation of Church and State opened last month. “You have nothing to lose by creating a little more dialogue with those with whom you differ.” Whatever the merits of the suggestion, it was ignored as the Cincinnati convention raised its traditional warning flag over blurring lines between church and state.

The opening debate on “Should Churches Pay Taxes?” proved the most provocative session. Dr. Paul A. Reynolds, philosophy professor at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, took thirty-two pages to say “yes.” Dr. Roy Nichols, Negro minister of Salem Methodist in New York City, needed only six to say “no.”

Three reactors—a Jewish rabbi, a fundamentalist Bible-college president, and the Catholic layman—agreed with Nichols. William R. Schumacher, the Catholic layman, who is active in ecumenical circles in Cincinnati, also suggested that men of reason will have to settle the thorny problem of federal assistance to parochial schools. He said he doubted whether the courts could ever settle the issue.

Dr. C. Stanley Lowell, associate director, said many mainline Protestant denominational leaders who once were friendly to the organization have now turned against it. “We haven’t changed, they have,” he explained. “We still stand at the same place we did twenty-one years ago. The reason for their change is that they now seek … public funds for the support of their programs and institutions.”

He said activist clergymen now leave the pulpit for bureaucratic positions without missing a step or even bothering to change their collars. He estimates that 1,000 Protestant clergymen have left their parishes to work for the Office of Economic Opportunity.

Dr. Glenn L. Archer, executive director, told the 150 delegates that history shows that when church and government meet at the public treasury, the church is put in jeopardy.

“More recently, a few politicians and churchmen, tipsy with the new wine of brotherhood, have involved the church and state in social-welfare programs at public expense until the American public is beginning to wonder which is church and which is state,” he said.

During the conference Archer received a bomb threat, the fourth in his career. Someone called the hotel to say he had planted a bomb in Archer’s room. Hotel and city police combed the room carefully but found nothing.

The longest applause during the conference came at the request of the camera crew that was filming part of the program for the upcoming CBS documentary on church wealth. They asked the delegates to applaud three times for the camera.

In a 7 A. M. board meeting on the last day, an enlarged program for 1968 was adopted, calling for:

• Expanded educational program with chapters and committees in many new communities and special appearances on at least 100 college campuses.

• Broadening of already extensive legal assistance in the church-state field. Much of this is predicated on the hope the organization can win standing in courts.

• A goal of 60,000 new members, a figure well beyond that achieved in any previous year. (The group now claims 200,000 members.)

• A direct appeal to churches to refuse all tax funds for support and to exercise their ministries in the deepening of spiritual concerns.

JAMES L. ADAMS

Reactions To Radicalism

The Future of Belief Debate, edited by Gregory Baum (Herder and Herder, 1967, 229 pp., $2.45), is reviewed by Milton D. Hunnex, professor of philosophy, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.

Radical theory reaches into Catholic as well as Protestant thought. Leslie Dewart’s The Future of Belief is a “theological bombshell” designed to catapult Catholic theology into the twentieth century.

One is reminded of Anglican Bishop Robinson’s earlier bombshell, which was followed up with The Honest to God Debate. But one is also impressed by the greater philosophical strength of the Toronto professor’s book, since he works out the foundations of his existential Christianity with much greater technical adequacy. Also, his radicalism is much more far reaching. Whereas Robinson tried to recast the content of the Gospel in more intelligible form, Dewart holds that the content itself must go. What was proclaimed in the first century in Hellenic terms, he argues, can no longer be true or relevant today. Hence the contemporary Christian should not even try to say what Paul said—however differently. He should articulate the Gospel in contemporary concepts only.

Dewart’s Catholic reviewers freely acknowledge that his program reaches beyond demythologization or even dehellenization. It is revolutionary in political direction as well as theological content, since it paves the way not only for the reconciliation of all Christians but also for a rapprochement of Christianity and Marxism.

According to Dewart, “Christianity has a mission, not a message.” Its mission is to bring about the progressive intensification of man’s awareness of himself as a creature who is responsible for his own creative development. God is not the Lord of history. He does not even exist in the orthodox sense of the term. He is the ubiquitous historical presence men experience as the ground of all that happens or could happen in their lives.

According to Dewart, what makes Christianity irrelevant today is that it is promulgated as a message that must be understood in Greek metaphysical terms. The Greek approach makes Christian revelation and truth into a set of propositions that Christians are supposed to believe. But truth is existential rather than propositional, Dewart argues. We know God only as a historical and existential presence, not as something we can talk about.

Men’s concepts are not true because they accurately represent something beyond themselves. They are true only because they enlarge self-understanding. In man’s experience of himself and his world, God is experienced only as a presence, and since all men are immersed in a cultural and historical situation, truth must be taken as those concepts that illuminate this situation for them. Hence while the form and content of the New Testament were appropriate for the situation in which it was written, they are not appropriate today.

The trouble with Dewart is that, though he is radical, he is radical in the wrong way and not radical enough. If being radical means getting at the root of something, then being radical as the evangelical Christian sees it would mean getting beyond the philosophical quarrels of Catholic theology to the origin and root of Christian faith. Scholasticism must go, Dewart says. The evangelical certainly agrees, but he wonders why it should have ever been allowed to envelop the faith as it did.

Evangelical radicalism calls for a Christianity unsupported by philosophical speculation and therefore not subject to the vicissitudes of philosophical style. Dewart’s call for an existential theory of truth that is hardly congenial to the modern scientific mind simply repeats all over again the mistake of trying to articulate a philosophical Christianity. The difference now is that the new philosophy that is to replace scholasticism not only will not buttress the faith as scholasticism tried to do; it will eliminate it on the curious grounds that this is the only way to save it. What is becoming clear today is that the only Christianity that can or, for that matter, should survive is evangelical Christianity.

Actually Dewart’s program for dehellenizing Christianity is itself another form of hellenistic philosophical distortion. The difference is that he prefers Heraclitus and Protagoras to Parmenides and Plato. Also, his appeal to “contemporary experience” is unconvincing, since there is no such thing as a homogeneous “contemporary experience” to which one can appeal. Moreover, many people still find that what the New Testament says in the way it is said is more radically relevant to their lives than the radical but secular reformulations of the faith.

The Inner Life Of A Missionary

Who Shall Ascend: The Life of R. Kenneth Strachan of Costa Rica, by Elisabeth Elliot (Harper & Row, 1968, 171 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Frank E. Gaebelein, headmaster emeritus of the Stony Brook School and former coeditor ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The reader of this book should not neglect Elisabeth Elliot’s introduction, in which she states her attitude toward the responsibility entrusted to her by the Latin America Mission, of which Kenneth Strachan was the distinguished head. That she has endeavored honestly to see him in the light revealed by the material so unreservedly made available to her is plain. Apparently very much of this material is in the form of letters; this is understandable, for Strachan was separated from his parents in his youth and later traveled much of the time during his missionary service.

Mrs. Elliot uses her sources with integrity and sensitivity. Out of them she gives us a portrayal of Kenneth Strachan reminiscent of the biographical genre of psychography (soul-portraiture) that made Gamaliel Bradford famous. For Who Shall Ascend is much more concerned with Strachan’s inner pilgrimage than with the outward details of his career as a missionary administrator and statesman.

Some aspects of the book will disturb those who think that Christian leaders are somehow exempt from personal tensions and uncertainties. To such readers, as well as to the Christian community as a whole, Mrs. Elliot has rendered a service in this discerning study of a man who, despite inward problems, to say nothing of outward trials, pressed unremittingly on and, through the idea of evangelism-in-depth, made one of the greatest missionary contributions of this century. Surely the evangelical missionary enterprise must be mature enough to look below the surface of its success and realize more fully the ways of God with his servants.

The title with its allusion to Psalm 24 is apt. But these absorbing pages also bring to mind the first beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” No one could accuse Kenneth Strachan of thinking of himself more highly than he ought to think. Yet what great things God did through this gifted, humble, and sorely tried man!

A question remains to be asked. To what extent do letters, even private family letters, really reflect the full truth about a person? Or, to put it another way, are not what a person does and his influence upon others as revealed by what they say of him also important means for understanding who he was? Nevertheless, it must be granted that, working within her established framework, Elisabeth Elliot has helped us know the kind of man Kenneth Strachan was. And we are indeed the better for this knowledge. Incidentally, a side of missionary life too little known—its human cost in separation of children from parents—comes through the lines of Who Shall Ascend.

The Latin America Mission has set a worthy example in giving this talented writer access to confidential materials and in not interfering with her conscientious use of them.

Views From The Quad

Never Trust a God Over Thirty, edited by Albert H. Friedlander (McGraw-Hill, 1967, 209 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Paul E. Little, director of evangelism, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, Chicago, Illinois.

“Do you believe all that?” This was the pointed question a student put to his campus pastor after a conversation about the historic Christian faith. The six religious counselors at Columbia University whose essays appear in this book would answer that question in varying ways.

The rabbi feels that though his function is varied in the complex Columbia context, he must be more concerned for the student than for the institution. He acts with the knowledge that the sacred realm of institutional religion has been rejected by the mainstream of Jewish tradition—that from the time of the Pharisees, the task of the rabbi has been the sanctification of the secular, a daily existence.

A Protestant counselor to Episcopal students feels that the new theology rules our present-day styles of campus ministry by offering new understandings about God, his Church, and “Jesus who is called the Christ.” He seems to feel that we should give greater emphasis to listening to the world than to declaring any message from God—a message about which he, in accordance with the mood of the new theology, is clearly uncertain.

The associate counselor to Protestant students and Presbyterian university pastor describes the student radicals and the campus ministry in relation to them. He feels that those campus pastors who have become involved in activist enterprises have established rapport with this group, but he observes that student radicals in their response to “marching” clergy have not been drawn into a formal religious stance. However, he does not consider this necessary. He says: “There is no place in the world for the old proselytizing spirit of the past, especially when the issues which confront us all demand understanding and acceptance of one another rather than attempts at converting one another.”

Only in the writing of the counselor to Catholic students and the Lutheran university pastor does one sense any feeling of a mission to communicate a God-given message. In contrast to some of his colleagues, the counselor to Catholic students feels that to abandon any rational element in religion is to commit intellectual as well as spiritual suicide. The church belongs on the campus primarily in an educative and intellectual capacity. I do not think that theology is to be forever in exile from the university anymore than I believe that revelation is now in exile from the world of man. For the Catholic, God’s revelation is now an objective fact—the fact of God’s action is history. From that divine action have emerged certain truths, which, as indicated, can be formulated, even if inadequately, in intellectual propositions.

He is concerned for real assent, which is reached only when what is apprehended becomes the motivation of one’s life and actions. This is in sharp contrast to mere conformity to rituals.

The Lutheran pastor sees the problem for the student as a combination of tradition, the intellectual content of tradition, and ethical considerations. To separate science, which is in the realm of reason, from a personal realm of values where preference is largely emotional, private, and distinct from the objective and rational, is disastrous. It leads to a relativism that says, “I don’t object to your faith, but I do object to any suggestion that it might be good for anyone else.” This relativism, he points out, evaporates when an appeal is made to “the moral issue” either for or against the Viet Nam war in campus discussions. Here the subjectivity of values disappears, and the “right” conclusion is supposed to be immediate and obvious.

Relativism and positivism create a mood pressuring students to discount religious assertions, and in effect narrow experience to its internal dimensions. He points out:”One does not have to work at attaining this point of view on the campus—it is in the very air we breathe. It is a mood. It is not the clear conviction of all concerned but a steady pressure in common contacts which surrounds the discussion of almost any subject imaginable.”

He urges that in the campus ministry it is essential to tackle once again the problem of faith and reason.

As an illuminator of campus attitudes in some quarters and of churchmen’s attempts—or lack of attempts—to shed light on the hard questions of existence, this book is helpful. I agree with the acerbic critic-at-large Paul Goodman, who writes in the introduction, “In my observation it is an error to say, like some of the writers in this book, that the present-day young are not interested in religion in a metaphysical sense.” It is only when those involved in campus ministry know clearly what they believe and why they believe it and are committed to it with “real assent,” so that this commitment is apparent in their lives, that they will make an impact on this student generation.

Reading For Perspective

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

• Christ in the Communist Prisons, by Richard Wurmbrand (Coward-McCann, $5). A heroic Rumanian minister, fourteen years a prisoner of the Communists, vividly describes the opposition to Christianity behind the Iron Curtain.

• Religion Across Cultures, by Eugene A. Nida (Harper & Row, $4.95). The American Bible Society’s noted linguist takes a fresh look at the psychological and dynamic factors related to effective communication in diverse cultures.

• Who Shall Ascend, by Elisabeth Elliot (Harper & Row, $5.95). At the request of the Latin America Mission, a gifted missionary-novelist has written an intimate, probing biography of R. Kenneth Strachan, Costa Rica mission leader who developed “Evangelism-in-Depth.”

Preaching To Prisoners

Call for God, by Karl Barth (Harper & Row, 1967, 125 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Andre Bustanoby, pastor, Temple Baptist Church, Fullerton, California.

Suppose a pastor were to pull out of his files his last twelve Christmas and Easter sermons and, instead of tearing them up, bundled them up and submitted them to a publisher. What would happen? He would probably receive a rejection slip promptly. But not if his name were Karl Barth.

That is more or less the story of Call for God, a collection of twelve sermons for Christmas, New Year, Easter, and other special occasions preached by Karl Barth to prisoners in Basel, Switzerland. Weighed in the homiletical balances, Call for God is found wanting in several respects.

Barth is often obscure. For example, he says in his sermon “You May” (Jer. 31:31) that the law of God is not an oppressive thing when it is written on the heart of man. It is no longer “you must obey” but “you may obey.” Unfortunately, the preacher does not tell us how the law of God comes to be written on a man’s heart so that obedience becomes a normal outworking of the life of faith.

Historical background must be taken into account in preaching from the prophets. But Barth preaches four sermons from Isaiah with little or no attention to historical background. The only connection between Isaiah 54:7, 8 and his Easter sermon “Brief Moment” is the phrase “the LORD, your Redeemer.”

Application is skimpy. Barth talks about “we,” “people,” and “the community” but does not address himself specifically to his audience—men in prison uniforms doing time for armed robbery and murder, suffering the frustrations of prison discipline and regimentation.

His Christmas sermon on Luke 1:53, “He has filled the hungry with good things,” offers an excellent opportunity to show how Christ can fill the void in the prisoners’ lives, and Barth makes a stab at it. But he speaks only in generalities, about such things as receiving a good conscience from Christ. He fails to tell how that prisoner who has murdered his wife in a fit of rage can receive the gift of a clear conscience and a cool head. He does not say what one should do about his uncontrollable temper. Barth never gets down to the nitty gritty.

Despite these liabilities, the book will probably sell. There is magic in the name Barth.

The Thesis Of Dodd Is Dead!

Preaching and Teaching in the Earliest Church, by Robert C. Worley (Westminster, 1967, 199 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Benjamin L. Rose, professor of pastoral leadership and homiletics, Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia.

A neat distinction between preaching and teaching did not exist in the earliest Church (despite what C. H. Dodd said), and the effort today to differentiate the two creates confusion about the purpose and direction of church education. That is the thesis of this book. In five chapters that are well documented but at times very tiresome reading, the author, associate professor of theology at McCormick Seminary, challenges Dodd’s thesis that there was in the New Testament a clear distinction between kerygma and didache.

Four kinds of data are Worley’s basis for a critical evaluation of Dodd: word-studies of the use of preaching and teaching in the New Testament literature; recent studies in the speeches in Acts; information on intertestamental Jewish usage, practice, and background; and a variety of critical arguments by New Testament scholars. By the end of four chapters, Dodd’s thesis is as dead as a dormouse. (But I wondered whether the poor little dormouse merited all the ammunition expended on him; he was pretty sick before the shooting started.)

In the fifth and final chapter, which is the most readable in the book, Worley offers some practical advice about the Church’s educational program. The preaching-teaching task is one, not two, and must be stripped of its institutionalized distinctions (e.g., Director of Christian Education in contrast to Preacher). Preacher and church educator must take up and blend into one program the tasks of (1) teaching the Scriptures, (2) offering guidance in Christian living, including ethics, and (3) instructing in the history of the Church, as well as calling to commitment.

This is a helpful book, recommended for all who are responsible for the educational program of the Church. If they haven’t time to read the whole book, they should at least read the last chapter.

A Warm-Hearted Historian

Beyond the Ranges, by Kenneth Scott Latourette (Eerdmans, 1967, 155 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Sandford Fleming, president emeritus, Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, Berkeley, California.

This is a brief autobiography of a great scholar who is a warm-hearted Christian and missionary statesman. It deals with Dr. Latourette’s years of preparation, his brief period of missionary service abroad, cut short by ill health, and his long teaching and writing career, together with his constant participation in various kinds of Christian service. This is a challenging record of one whose life has been richly lived, who has always been primarily concerned with persons, notably students, and who brings to every task the carefulness and thoroughness of good scholarship.

Especially significant are Dr. Latourette’s accounts of the decisions he made at a YMCA summer conference in 1903 and of a physical and emotional crisis that came during his first decade on the Yale faculty. In describing the latter, he says he had become deeply concerned by “the seamy side of ecclesiastical and official religious life,” and had begun to doubt whether Christianity was really confirmed by its fruits. His release came through the recognition that the “fruits of the Spirit” are to be found in men and women both in humble walks of life and in high ecclesiastical and academic positions. Most striking is his witness to the validity of the evangelical faith: “Increasingly I rejoiced in the Gospel … I was confirmed in my conviction that when all the best scholarship is taken into account we can know Christ as He was in the days of His flesh.… I was convinced that the historical evidence confirms the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Christ. Increasingly I believed that the nearest verbal approach that we humans can come to the great mystery is to affirm that Christ is both fully man and fully God.”

In a brief review it is difficult to do justice to this intimate portrayal of one of the great Christians of our time. Always the reader is aware that here is a life constantly guided by the Spirit of God. Dr. John A. Mackay says it well: “In these fascinating pages we follow the career of a young saint who became a scholar and of an aged scholar who has not ceased to be a saint.”

One regrets only that this account of a noble life is so brief, realizing as he comes to the end how much more fully the story might have been told.

Electrons With Mentality?

Evolution and the Christian Doctrine of Creation, by Richard Overman (Westminster, 295 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by A. E. Wilder Smith, professor of pharmacology, University of Illinois, Chicago.

Dr. Overman has swallowed not only the evolutionary bait but the hook, line, and sinker as well. The scholarship of the book, insofar as it reports on the works of Whitehead (it is a Whiteheadian interpretation), Bergson, Bultmann, Brunner, Barth, Teilhard de Chardin, Lamarck, Darwin, and others, is impeccable. The reference citations are copious, except those to orthodox evangelical scholars. The general index is scanty.

Basically, Overman grapples with the problem of explaining the evolutionary upsurge of order out of the natural chaos surrounding us: “How are we to express this in the face of evidence that indicates man appeared on the planet as a result of a ‘make-do’ process with no intrinsic long-term goals?” “Design, we might say, was somehow thwarted by the swarming, purposeless Newtonian atoms.” Over against this surging force of disorder stands the “fact of evolution” with its high order in cells and complex organisms.

To account for this evolution without invoking direct, supernatural interference in design, Overman assumes (in common with Teilhard de Chardin and others) that each basic unit of matter has a primitive “mentality” that ensures, without exogenous interference, an upsurge of order out of chaos: “This provides us with one reason for attributing to electrons some glimmering of mentality.…” Rock molecules, likewise, may have “flashes of conceptual novelty,” apples, their “consciousness.” An x-ray particle is conceived of as having a “pulse of emotion.” Electrons are “obedient.” Maupertuis’s idea that the Newtonian particles possess a “glimmer of mentality” is cited in support. An electron within a living body is maintained to be “different” from one outside it. With the help of this hypothesis, Overman and his friends try to relate the upward surge of evolutionary processes to the “subjective aims of actual occasions” in the atomic and subatomic world, which would otherwise be offset by the downward tendency towards chaos.

This line of thought seems to me, as a mere experimental scientist, to be a very shaky philosophical house of cards. We have no evidence, of course, of any “conceptual inwardness” of any non-living matter. In fact, the weight of experimental evidence is against such a proposition for the simple reason that mere compositions of matter, left to themselves, show no tendency whatever toward “conceptual synthesis” or toward mounting order leading to increased complexity and reduction of entropy. Decay and loss of complexity according to the second law of thermodynamics are the firm observations on which the success of modern science has been built. The only way the down-to-earth scientist knows of obtaining results that appear to be “conceptual”—i.e., that overcome the innate trend toward increased chaos and entropy—is through the intelligent (or conceptual!) application of energy.

On Overman’s and similar theories, non-living matter, left to itself, ought to show some sort of primitive conceptual trend toward higher order, even over the short experimental periods at our disposal. That it does not discredits all this sort of theory. It cannot. That the available energy is lacking (the sun’s energy is not available, as such, for such processes), discredits these fundamentally pantheistic theories involving “conceptual” atoms or electrons. Such theories are an attempt to avoid the necessity of the supernatural as an explanation for archebiopoiesis by attributing creative concepts to matter itself. Overman invokes the usual evolutionary hypothesis of huge time spans to allow this covert conceptual property of matter to reveal itself in upward evolution. (I have dealt with this whole problem in my book Herkunft und Zukunft des Menschen, which will soon appear in English under the title Origin and Destiny of Man.)

Besides these matters of principle, other indigestible fare is offered. The prodigious age of the coelacanth fish is mentioned, but the conclusion to be drawn from this—that species can be extraordinarily stable and not subject to transformism—is not drawn. More serious, in Overman’s thinking God is not omniscient and did not create by fiat, because that would have involved “capricious divine power.” Although God’s power is unrivaled, Overman says, it is not absolute. No mention is made of the fact of redemption in creation (Christ was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, Revelation 13:8).

The book is toilsome to read—the paper is poor and the type small—and expensive. It does contain a wealth of accurate bibliographical material which evangelical Christians would do well to know, and for which the author is to be thanked.

The Date Of Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy and Tradition, by E. W. Nicholson (Fortress, 1967, 145 pp., $3.25), is reviewed by Samuel J. Schultz, professor of Bible and theology, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

In these pages the reader is offered an excellent example of trends in Old Testament scholarship since the turn of the century. The author discusses the relation of Deuteronomy, a book that is crucial in Old Testament studies, to tradition, as held by a large segment of modern scholarship.

Nicholson retains the basic theory of DeWette (1805), popularized by Wellhausen, that Deuteronomy was written in the seventh century B.C. Reflecting the influence of form criticism and the traditio-historical investigation of Old Testament literature, he rejects the conclusions of the nineteenth-century critical school that regarded Deuteronomy as primarily projecting the ethical teaching of the eighth-century prophets.

Deuteronomic traditions, according to this author, had their beginnings with the sacral and cultic festivals in the pre-monarchial ampichtyony of Israel. These were adapted and modified during the monarchial period by the prophetic circles—not the Levites, as advocated by von Rad and Wolff—primarily in the Northern Kingdom. After the fall of Samaria (722 B. C.) this prophetic circle moved into the Southern Kingdom, where they embodied the basic principles of Hezekiah’s reforms. During Manasseh’s reign they composed the basic book of Deuteronomy—chapters 5–26 and part of 28. When the Deuteronomy-Second Kings corpus was composed some time after the fall of Judah (586 B.C.), chapters 1–4; 27; 29, and most of 31 were added. At a later date editorial expansion throughout Deuteronomy and the addition of chapters 32 and 33 may reflect the combination of Deuteronomy and the Genesis-Numbers corpus to form the Pentateuch.

Nicholson correctly acknowledges that J. Reider, G. T. Manley, E. J. Young, and other scholars advocate the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. He reflects familiarity with some of the research into the form and content of Ancient Near Eastern covenant foundations but fails to acknowledge the incisive analysis and research Meredith Kline (Treaty of the Great King, Eerdmans, 1963) brings to bear upon the composition and authorship of Deuteronomy.

How Presbyterians Worship

Presbyterian Worship in America: Changing Patterns Since 1797, by Julius Melton (John Knox, 1967, 173 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by Clifford M. Drury, professor emeritus of church history, San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Francisco, California.

Here is an excellent historical review of the philosophy of worship and the development of liturgy in the Presbyterian Church. Julius Melton, who teaches religion at Southwestern University in Memphis, shows a thorough grasp of his subject and writes clearly and forcefully.

He points out the strong Puritan anti-liturgical feeling that the first Presbyterian immigrants brought to this country (more could have been said about an even stronger feeling that came from North Ireland) and skillfully traces the attitudes toward liturgy of both the Old and New Schools. Some questioned even the use of the Lord’s Prayer. Both schools were united in rejecting the Anglican prayer book; for the most part, however, the Old School was willing to adopt some guides for worship, while the New School was inclined to be free and independent.

In time anti-liturgical sentiment diminished. Among the factors leading to change were the introduction of better music, the use of Gothic architecture, the need for some worship guides for laymen, the need for a prayer book for use in the military chaplaincy, and developments in Christian education. In 1906 the General Assembly approved a prayer book for “voluntary use.” Since then there have been four revisions.

Melton brings on the stage a number of well-known Presbyterian leaders, such as Samuel Miller and Charles Hodge of Princeton; Charles G. Finney, the New School evangelist; Robert Baird and his two sons, Charles and Henry; and Charles Briggs, Louis Benson, and Henry Jackson Van Dyke, all of whom were active in the Church Service Society.

This book merits the attention of all Presbyterian pastors and seminary students.

Book Briefs

A Search for Strength, by H. C. Brown, Jr. (Word, 1967, 126 pp., $2.50). A seminary professor tells movingly and intimately how he faced his wife’s death and gives his prescription for victory over sorrow.

Luther and the Reformation, by Hanns Lilje (Fortress, 1967, 223 pp., $5.95). In a book handsomely illustrated with wood-cuts, engravings, and portraits, the Lutheran bishop of Hannover, Germany, sets Luther and the Reformation in their historical context.

The World of the New Testament, edited by Abraham J. Malherbe (R. B. Sweet, 1967, 186 pp.). A worthy volume on historical, geographical, cultural, and religious backgrounds of the biblical world.

The Risen Christ in the Fathers of the Church, edited by Thomas P. Collins (Paulist, 1967, 118 pp., $3.50). This Catholic work brings together statements on the Resurrection by Church Fathers from Clement of Rome to Augustine.

Divine Science and the Science of God, by Victor Preller (Princeton University, 1967, 282 pp., $8.50). A reformulation of Thomas Aquinas’s ideas about religious language in light of current analytic philosophy.

Once upon a tree …, by Calvin Miller (Baker, 1967, 128 pp. $2.95). Devotional essays on the Cross that show spiritual perception and deep faith.

Up Tight!, by John Gimenez with Char Meredith (Word, 1967, 168 pp., $3.95). An ex-junkie describes his life as an addict and tells how Christ delivered him from it. Stirring.

Hyper-Calvinism, by Peter Toon (Olive Tree [2 Milnthorpe Rd., London, W.4., England], 1967, 176 pp., cloth $3.50, paper $1.50). Toon offers an informed perspective of eighteenth-century rationalistic hyper-Calvinism, distinguishing it from the doctrine of Calvin. A first-rate work.

Billy Graham the Preacher, by James E. Kilgore (Exposition, 1968, 70 pp., $4). An interesting but superficial analysis and assessment of the preaching of the man heard in person by more people than any other speaker in history.