God In The Mists

Exploration into God, by John A. T. Robinson (Stanford University Press, 1967, 166 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, editor ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.

There is “a crisis in theism, that is, in the traditional case for belief in the existence of a personal God,” writes the Bishop of Woolwich. He offers Exploration into God, lectures given at Stanford, as a guide to what 1968-minded intellectuals can believe.

Bishop Robinson is at his best as a theologian fashion-model, parading recent styles in religious thought with a flair for holding public interest. His book is highly readable. But as serious theology it is disappointing.

As an opener Robinson lifts the curtain on his own theological pilgrimage, noting a debt to medieval mystics (mystery), Kant (autonomy), Kierkegaard (subjectivity), Buber (I-Thou), Brunner (encounter), and many others. One is left with the feeling that the bishop likes many of the things he samples but has yet to coordinate them into a compatible meal, let alone a permanent diet.

He opposes Bultmann’s “undue historical scepticism” and “heavy” reliance on Heidegger’s existentialism, the tendency of left-wing extremists to equate the meaning of God with statements about man, Tillich’s reliance on a Platonic ontology, and the secular erosion of evangelistic outreach. He sympathizes with Bonhoeffer’s detachment of Christian faith from a religious apriori, Bultmann’s translation of personalistic language about God into personal relationship detached from the biblical cosmology, and Tillich’s desire to find an option between supernaturalism and naturalism, between theism and atheism. But this is a long way from an articulate theology.

The central Christian emphasis, as Robinson sees it, is that the personal is the ultimate reality in life, the deepest truth about all relationships and commitments, the controlling category for interpreting everything.

By no means, however, is this to be equated with the Judeo-Christian insistence on a personal supernatural God who exists independently of the world as its transcendent creator and immanent preserver. That view, contends the bishop, poses a needless barrier to modern belief; indeed, it is, on his authority, dispensable. For one abreast of modern enlightenment (and Oriental theology), it is in fact—or rather, presumably—intellectually impossible. What survives the dismissal of the objective existence of God as a supernatural Person, we are assured, is “the reality” that biblical theism sought to safeguard: “the God-relationship as utterly personal and utterly central.”

Since interpersonal relationship is inherent in the definition of personality, the concept of a supernatural God existing independently of man and the world is said to be excluded. Nowhere is the reader told that in orthodox theology a social relationship within the triune God fulfills this requirement independently of the universe.

Robinson proposes to mediate between recent theories of secular salvation (Gogarten, Cox, Van Buren) and of cosmological salvation (Whitehead, Teilhard, Tillich) by offering a “creative synthesis,” a “both-and” rather than an “either-or.” He shares their common rejection of the supernatural; their insistence that no dimension of transcendence can be accommodated outside immanent natural process; their dismissal of ontological knowledge of God; their repudiation of the antitheses of faith and unbelief, church and world, good and evil, redemption and judgment.

The 1968-brand theology shares the recent modern forfeiture of intelligible divine revelation. Not only does it defect from Reformation theology; it also signals the collapse of the Barthian emphasis on the supernatural Creator and Redeemer whose personal disclosure defines his nature and deeds. The neo-orthodox emphasis on divine self-revelation gives way to human exploration, and the self-manifested God is lost in subjective postulation.

Robinson would hesitate to admit he is writing theological fiction, but he warns us not to expect literal truth about God. God statements are statements about God-in-relation to us; “literally nothing can be said about him without falsification”; we speak of God directly only “as if.” We have no conceptual knowledge of the supersensory.

But, in an apparent attempt to escape the illusory and to convert the postulatory into the veridical, Robinson wavers between Kant and Schleiermacher. The term “God” designates a relationship to personal reality. God is “the within of things.” He writes, “The need to speak of ‘God’ derives from the awareness that in and through and under every finite Thou comes … the grace and claim of an eternal, unconditional Thou who cannot finally be evaded by being turned into an It.”

Yet not even Robinson’s semantic skill is adequate to quasi-universalize and quasi-objectify the existential and subjective. The divine-personal may supply the unity that makes sense of the diversity of our experience, but does this rise above postulation? The evasion of the metaphysical objectification of God as a free personal supernatural Being, in the interest of a concept of God as a subject outside me that imposes obligations on me, has Kantian overtones; it recalls Kant’s notion that the practical moral reason gives laws to itself.

If, on the other hand, God is really in all, and all is in God (panentheism)—as Robinson contends—then no absolute distinction remains between good and evil. On this premise, we must look for the divine in Hitler and Buchenwald, and in Communism.

In some writings Bishop Robinson has significantly contributed to biblical studies. But in this latest book he manipulates the Bible in a noteworthy way. He voices concern because Van Buren seems not to be saying about God “what was intended by classical Christian theology and Christology”; against the secular destruction of the entire dimension of transcendence he appeals to the “whole witness of the Bible as interpreted by the Christian Church.” Yet, beside recasting John’s Logos-passage to support a view unknown to the apostles, he makes the Hebrew reluctance to use God’s name to imply God’s ineffability, while he invokes the Old Testament use of various divine names to encourage freedom in the use of God-language that presumably says nothing meaningful about God outside or beyond man’s God—relationship. He appeals to the text, “If we love one another, God abides in us,” in his attempt to replace the view that God is a personal supernatural being with another view of ultimate reality at its deepest level. The Bible’s extension of the attitude of worship to the whole creation is made to support the view that all reality is a Thou. The divine command against image-making is turned against those who view God as a supernatural personal Being. The New Testament reference to God “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) is said to teach that in Christ panentheism is already a reality.

Whatever merit this work has in articulating modern theory, it has little value as a reliable reflection of the religion of the Bible. And as a contemporary statement, it lacks not only creative originality but theological lucidity and precision. If Van Buren abandons the concept of God as misleading and superfluous (because he refers the divine to a different “reality” than the historical Christian faith), does Robinson’s retention of the concept not mislead his readers? If the biblical doctrine of God must be so radically changed to become acceptable to the modern mind, would it not be more candid for Robinson to abandon his attempt to find scriptural support for the revised theory—and to admit with linguistic theologians that the language of divinity has here been reduced to functional significance only?

Bishop Robinson’s exploration halts short of a third heaven, and is grounded by fog and poor visibility. In the current crisis over the reality of God, evangelical Christians will recognize his views as part of the problem rather than as a pointer toward solution. Where the modern crisis in theism demands precision in theological content, the Bishop of Woolwich offers us only the promise of still another book.

Shotgun Approach On C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith, by Richard B. Cunningham (Westminster, 1967, 223 pp., $5), is reviewed by Joan Kerns Ostling, writer-editor, United States Information Agency, Washington, D. C.

Four years after C. S. Lewis’s death, books about him continue to dribble from the press, attesting both to the loyalty of Lewis’s fans and to the convenience of his writings for those who need to satisfy doctoral dissertation committees. Richard Cunningham, now a faculty member of California’s Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, admits that his study evolved out of the latter by “cold calculation” when he was a Th.D. candidate at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Using a shotgun approach rather than aiming at a thematic target, Cunningham concludes that “Lewis himself is his finest Christian apology” in his expression of “Sorge,” care or concern. Cunningham, though he obviously is entranced by Lewis’s imaginative writings and takes his didactic works seriously, views this “Sorge” as a quality that transcends even his wit and scholarship, and that also rises above his “inexcusable neglect of the results of the best Biblical scholarship,” his “occasional theological weakness,” and his “sometimes too simple approach to difficult problems.”

After reworking the now familiar materials of intellectual biography, the author touches on Lewis’s view of the contemporary apologetic scene by brief treatments of philosophy, psychology, natural science, education, government, and society. He notes especially Lewis’s “penetrating psychological insight,” though he faults him for overstating his case against liberalism and for painting issues in black-and-white terms.

Stressing reason and imaginative understanding as the preliminary underpinning for Lewis’s apologetics, Cunningham provides a competent discussion of his author’s approach to epistemology. He evaluates Lewis’s theology and apologetic arguments as traditional and orthodox, defending him against charges that he held to a Docetic Christology and a Manichean moral theology. He correctly interprets Lewis’s bibliology as broader than the views of conservative evangelicals (“fundamentalists,” in his terms) and shows how the insights of a great literary critic can be applied to the principles of biblical interpretation.

In his assessment of Lewis as prose artist, Cunningham prizes his brilliant use of the vernacular to clothe old religious ideas in new language and his stylistic mastery of communication through use of metaphor, analogy, allegory, and myth. He criticizes Lewis’s occasional substitution of bludgeon for needle, presentation of forced choice without alternatives, and violation of technical rules of logic in such famous arguments as Mere Christianity’s “if the universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.”

But most of this territory has been covered by previous Lewis writers—especially by Chad Walsh in C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptic (an excellent book, but written while Lewis was in mid-career and now out of print), and in Clyde S. Kilby’s The Christian World of C. S. Lewis and in several unpublished Ph.D. dissertations.

Where Cunningham’s book is the “original study” promised in the preface, it betrays his “chronological snobbery.” Sneering at Lewis’s concept of timeless eternity as “a boy’s approach to difficult problems,” Cunningham suggests Lewis might have been well advised to read Cullmann or the later Barth. But Lewis’s view of time is firmly rooted in the Augustinian tradition.

Sympathetic to Lewis in contrast to Bultmann on myth, Cunningham nevertheless judges Lewis’s concept as incapable of dealing with “such borderline events of the incarnation” as the resurrection and ascension, events that the New Testament records as “open only to the eyes of faith.” This reflects the author’s own critical perspective, as does his charge that Lewis’s failure to distinguish between John and the Synoptics weakened the thrust of Miracles—though Miracles was written as a philosophical defense for the possibility of miracles, not as a work of biblical criticism.

The Cunningham study adds little that is new to an understanding of Lewis.

Reading For Perspective

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

• The Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Missions, edited by Burton L. Goddard (Nelson, $25). The faculty of Gordon Divinity School has compiled an abundance of information on Christian missionary agencies throughout the world.

• A Question of Conscience, by Charles Davis (Harper & Row, $6.95). A brilliant English priest-theologian sensitively but forthrightly gives his personal, theological, and ecclesiastical reasons for yeaving Roman Catholicism.

• The New Testament from 26 Translations, Curtis Vaughan, general editor (Zondervan, $12.50). For every phrase of the King James New Testament, the editors provide several variant readings from twenty-five later translations to help clarify the meaning of the text.

The Natives Are Restless!

The Protestant Revolt, by James De-Forest Murch (Crestwood Books, 1967, 326 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Benjamin E. Sheldon, minister, Sixth Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C.

James DeForest Murch has given us a factual, heavily documented survey of what he calls the “revolt” against domination by the “liberal establishment” in the major American denominations and particularly in the National Council of Churches.

Taking each major denominational grouping separately, he presents certain historical facts that show the involvement of that group in the trend toward liberalism and control by the “liberal establishment.” Then he shows how individuals, institutions, and movements within these denominations have rebelled against this. The historical data is accurate and up to date, and it is helpful to have it all here in one place.

But the effort to show the emergence of a strong grass-roots revolt is somewhat unconvincing. I believe Dr. Murch is grasping at straws when he identifies the “revolt” with some of the splinter and separatist groups like the Circuit Riders and Carl McIntire’s American Council of Christian Churches. Furthermore, the fact that Southern Baptists and Missouri Lutherans are now outside the NCC is not real proof of a revolt, for there is evidence within these bodies of an increasing tendency to move closer to conciliar connections.

However, I do think that the “revolt” is coming. The pressure of COCU and the current mood of extreme social activism are fanning the sparks of dissatisfaction and restlessness among the rank and file in the major denominations. Dr. Murch’s book may be a preview of this revolt, and I hope he will be able to give us the story of it when it comes.

Ways Of Being In The World

The Structure of Christian Existence, by John B. Cobb, Jr. (Westminster, 1967, 156 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Jerry H. Gill, assistant professor of philosophy, Southwestern at Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee.

This book is presented as “an inquiry into what is distinctive in Christianity and into its claim to finality.” Rejecting the more traditional method of presenting the uniqueness of Christianity by comparing it with other religious and/or intellectual systems, Cobb focuses his attention on various modes of existence—ways of being in the world.

After laying out definitions of such terms as “structure,” “existence,” and “psyche,” Cobb delineates various historical existence structures along two lines: the chronological and the modal. From primitive existence, which was characterized by mythical symbolism and the dominance of the unconscious, there was a slow but steady progression through civilized existence to axial existence, in which rationality and reflective consciousness dominate. Although this was a chronological development, it is important to bear in mind that no age or group of people is wholly devoid of characteristics of the other forms of existence. Cobb agrees with Jaspers in placing the emergence of axial existence in nearly every civilization between 800 and 200 B.C. With this emergence came the full awareness of individuality and freedom.

Since the dawn of the “axial age,” mankind has developed a variety of modes of existence, which, though different, are all forms of axial existence. Cobb considers Buddhist existence, (which seeks to overcome the identification of the self with rational consciousness by denying individuality), Homeric existence (which seeks to objectify outward reality by means of rational categories), Socratic existence (which seeks to objectify inner reality by identifying the self with reason), prophetic existence (which seeks to understand all reality in relation to a transcendent deity), and Christian existence (which seeks to combine the idea of a transcendent deity with an awareness of his present immediacy). Cobb sees the distinctiveness of the Christian style of life in the radical freedom, responsibility, and love that it both demands and makes possible.

Once again rejecting the more customary approaches to the finality of Christianity, Cobb argues that Christian existence is able to fulfill prophetic, Socratic, and Buddhist existence in a way in which none of these are able to fulfill it themselves. The core of this claim is the possibility for self-transcendence inherent in the structure of Christian existence. Although he realizes that this claim will always be contested, Cobb remains convinced of its truth.

This book is stimulating and clearly reasoned. That it is nearly devoid of footnotes and of scholarly debate with other thinkers will be considered a strong point by laymen and a weak point by professionals. For my part, I found the chapters dealing with non-Christian existence the most illuminating and thought-provoking. Those on Christian existence are not especially helpful or original. In short, the book is better as an analysis of various forms of human sensibility than as an explication of Christian existence.

Death By Default

The Premature Death of Protestantism, by Fred J. Denbeaux (Lippincott, 1967, 155 pp., paper, $2.25), is reviewed by Gerald B. Hall, pastor, National Evangelical Free Church, Annandale, Virginia.

With his title Fred J. Denbeaux, professor of biblical history at Wellesley College, suggests his disapproval of the death-of-God theology, that form of contemporary Protestantism which denies its historic past and seeks to gain acceptance from the world through polemics. To him, the Church has abandoned its distinctive function, that of remaining an eccentric voice proclaiming that God has inseparably joined himself with man in human culture. In trying to make itself marketable in the secular world, he says, the Church has resorted to an empiricism that rejects the validity of its historical legacy. It attempts to identify with its culture and in so doing denies its responsibility to remain distinct from, and yet an influence upon, that culture.

At the other extreme, he criticizes the Protestant tradition that assumes that the Church and civilization must exist in rigid separation. He asserts that “the church cannot be truly the church if it either isolates itself from or identifies itself with civilization.”

Denbeaux develops what he considers the mediate position. He distinguishes between the “world” and “civilization.” According to Genesis, he says, civilization is the product of man’s God-given ability to “make.” Every person is a “maker,” and the collective exercise of this ability is civilization. “Worldliness” is man’s turning his creative ability against God and toward himself. Innocent “making” is good, but when making becomes the object of his trust, man becomes worldly, and “isms” develop. Although Professor Denbeaux does not specifically state it, he implies that the process of making civilization will consummate in a healed society in which no worldliness exists.

The task of the Church is to encourage innocent making. It is to criticize society when it becomes engaged in worldly making, but it must never condemn it for exercising its God-given ability to make. The Church is to assert that God and his transforming power are present here and now, and that God has entered the world so that “man might make the world just and true and beautiful,” a world “whose destiny is to become the kingdom of God.”

Most of the book is occupied with the application of this thesis to problems of culture that confront the Church today. In discussing politics, Denbeaux applies the “making” of justice to capitalism and Communism. In the realm of sex, he calls for the “making” of a meaningful order out of the sexual chaos brought upon us by two extremes—Victorian moralism and the modern reduction of man to a glandular morality. He discusses the metaphysics of pleasure and the nobility of man’s humanity with fresh and stimulating insights.

One weakness of Denbeaux’s synthesis is his failure to define clearly his key terms, such as “church” and “legacy.” He uses terms of historic Christianity in a misleading way. A casual reader would not realize that a radically different theology lies beneath the familiar terminology.

Denbeaux condemns the use of a polemic but has added his own to the rapidly growing reservoir of humanistic criticism of Christianity. He claims the Bible for his source, but his hermeneutic eviscerates it of any firm meaning. “The Bible does not have a fixed doctrine of the world,” he says. “It does not even have a fixed doctrine of the church. The Bible has no frozen logic. Rather it has a voice, a word which speaks to every man who hears while he tries to thread the needle of life.” He speaks of the need to retain the “legacy” of the Church but censures the “crypto-Calvinism of CHRISTIANITY TODAY which attempts to make a monument of a fluid legacy.” If what he says is right, if we are dealing with truth in only a personal or subjective framework, how can truth be communicated at all? lust what is the legacy of the Church if it is not principles or doctrines?

The author’s selective use of biblical quotations to buttress his views is praiseworthy in that it shows recognition of some form of authority in Scripture. But it is an example of the too common practice of viewing the Bible as a smörgasbord from which one may choose whatever suits his taste. Denbeaux’s incipient universalism, vague conception of redemption, and disregard of the pronouncements of Scripture against sin and the eventual judgment of corrupt civilization simply reflect a theology fashioned by something other than the Scriptures.

A Plea For Soviet Christians

Christians in Contemporary Russia, by Nikita Struve, translated by Lancelot Sheppard and A. Manson (Scribner’s, 1967, 464 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Blahoslav S. Hrubý, managing editor, “Religion in Communist Dominated Areas,” New York City.

Publication of this English edition of a book that won wide acclaim in France is a great service to the American Christian community and also to the general public. At a time when confusion and superficial knowledge about the religious situation in the Soviet Union abound, this scholarly and fascinating account is most welcome.

Nikita Struve, grandson of the economist Pierre Struve, is a member of the Russian émigré community in Paris, where he teaches at the Sorbonne and edits Le Messager Orthodoxe. He based his book on official documents, anti-religious publications in the U. S. S. R. and also the very few religious ones, and Soviet literature. These sources were supplemented by private letters from Soviet citizens and reports from Western tourists (Struve took care to confirm the authenticity of all these).

He begins with the October Revolution of 1917, traces the years of harsh persecution and schism that nearly brought an end to the organized Orthodox Church, and tells of its sudden “resurrection,” as he calls the time of Stalin’s change of attitude toward the church after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. After Stalin’s death in 1954 there was a brief period of relative freedom. This ended abruptly in 1958, and in 1959 the Soviet government began another drive to liquidate the church.

Struve analyzes the external relations of the Moscow Patriarchate with the Orthodox and other churches and with such bodies as the World Council of Churches, the Vatican, and the (Prague) Christian Peace Conference. He sees a paradox in the fact that the Moscow Patriarchate’s external affairs have increased at a time when its internal activity is practically paralyzed. Readers of this well-documented presentation can easily conclude that in facilitating the external relations of the Orthodox and also of the Baptists, the Soviet government shows itself eager to create abroad an image of good church-state relations while at home the fight against religion goes on as before.

There is a wealth of valuable information on other vital subjects, such as theological schools and studies, secret Christians, anti-religious propaganda, and recent trials (evidence of new persecution and harassments). Five valuable appendices contain the most important documents on religion in the Soviet Union: (1) historical documents on church-state relations, (2) legislative documents, (3) a list—provisional and incomplete—of Russian Orthodox bishops, who have been martyrs for their faith, (4) information on the formation and situation of Russian émigré churches, (5) two Moscow priests’ protest against harassment of the Orthodox Church.

The author’s inquiry into the position of Soviet Christians concludes on a somber note. He does not share the naïve optimism of some “instant” experts who, after spending a few days in the Soviet Union, without knowing the language, return saying that churches are full and that Communism is no longer a problem. Struve addresses a few probing questions to Western Christians about their silence on the grave situation of Christians in the Soviet Union. His plea should be heard throughout the world:

And yet Russian Christians beg, sometimes with tears in their eyes, those Western tourists whom they meet, to tell those at home what circumstances are really like and to pray for them. For long, for too long, the West has remained silent. The establishment in Paris in February 1964 of an information committee on the position of Christians in the U. S. S. R. and the ecumenical meeting held on the 11th March at the Palais de la Mutualité are the first signs of some awakening of public opinion. ‘Christ is in agony in Moscow; we cannot sleep while it continues.’ It is greatly to be hoped that this appeal by Francois Mauriac will be heard throughout the world [p. 337].

Unfortunately, this voice was not heard in the United States, and at the end of 1967 there was still no American ecumenical committee on Soviet Christians (and Jews and other religious groups). One hopes that this book will challenge freedom-loving Americans to awaken from complacency and take an active part in the movement of solidarity with those who struggle for freedom of religion and the human spirit in the Soviet Union.

The Dignity Of Matter

A Theology of Things, by Conrad Bonifazi (Lippincott, 1967, 230 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by William W. Paul, professor of philosophy, Central College, Pella, Iowa.

At the beginning of the third volume of his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich mentions that there is a great need for a “theology of the inorganic,” one that would speak to the problems raised by philosophical naturalism and relate the material world to other dimensions of existence. A Theology of Things attempts to meet this need.

A strong tradition in Christian theology that is centered in a concern for the salvation of man’s soul has led some Christians to a desire to escape the imperfections of material existence and to enjoy the glories of the supernatural world. Conrad Bonifazi, who teaches at the Pacific School of Religion, means to correct this by arguing for the polarity between mind and body and for a genuine interplay between persons and things. Emphasis is placed upon an ecology that sees man’s freedom and cultural development as very much influenced by the prescriptions of his natural environment. He apparently wants to keep a pluralistic or multi-dimensional view of reality rather than reducing existence to either the materialistic or idealistic position. With Husserl and the Greek thinkers, Bonifazi defines “phenomenon” as “that which displays itself,” though “the display is for those who experience it.”

Actually it is not always easy to determine just what his position is on philosophical and theological issues. The book is full of quotations; many are provocative, but most are presented without context or critical evaluation. The reader gains a feeling for the author’s orientation rather than a sense of clear argument. For example, a few lines selected from such thinkers as Augustine, Ambrose, and Luther are used to justify Feuerbach’s sweeping judgment that in the history of Christian thought “nature, the world, has no value, no interest for Christians. The Christian thinks only of himself, and the salvation of his soul.” Then Bonifazi suggests that there is a hint of a “Christian estimate of the dignity of matter” to be found in men like Anselm and Aquinas. With some pains the reader may discover that to achieve this “Christian estimate” is to learn to think creatively about all existing things and to bring the “truth” of their reality into one’s own experience.

The modern writers who appeal most to Bonifazi are men like Marx, Engels, Herder, Nietzsche, Sartre, Unamuno, Buber, and Teilhard de Chardin. Consider, for example, the Nietzsche of the Dawn of Day. “His good news is to accept the world in its totality, together with man—even in his irresponsibility.… His formula is amor fati, love of ‘that which has been spoken by the gods.’ ” Now, it is good for readers who have thought of Nietzsche only as a voice of pessimism and nihilism to be reminded of his occasional “joyous affirmation of the world.” But again the crucial questions are not discussed. What does it mean for Nietzsche to accept the world? Shall we love uncritically and remain indifferent to evil and irresponsibility? Even the philosopher wishes to transvalue all human value systems. What does it mean to love things “spoken by the gods” when there are, according to Nietzsche, no eternal facts, absolute truths, or sovereign, divine purposes in the world?

If the author’s main point is that the material and personal are inseparable in experience, a spokesman like Unamuno serves him well: “Through love we get to things with our own being, not with the mind alone, we make them fellow-beings.” I suppose that what the Spanish philosopher meant was that as we seek out the intrinsic value in things and come to love or participate in it, in some sense we make those things a part of ourselves. Bonifazi seems to sense this interpretation but then confuses the reader by claiming that “genuine love of the world means that the world is loved for its own sake.”

But enough of ambiguities. The book has an excellent point to make: that when we consider the universe as “personal,” we will no longer merely conform to it nor seek to exploit it:

If material things cannot be liberated from man’s parasitic interest and stupid infatuation, and from the frenzy of his accelerated productivity, he himself shall not taste freedom.… A personal universe demands that we treat the world in such a way that our thinking about it and our handling of it release within us the power of becoming human, and elevate the status of things themselves through the treatment they receive [206].

This is a significant thesis for a philosophy of things, a thesis that should have led the author in two directions, one practical and the other theological. On the practical side, it must be said that the book contains no depth study of the problems raised by modern man in his treatment of his physical environment or of the issues that comfort him in a technological age. And if “theology” implies a distinctively Christian view, its presence in this book’s title is hard to justify. Bonifazi makes some appeal to “biblical tradition addressed from our present-day Weltanschauung,” but generally he is concerned with a “personalistic” mood rather than theological content.

A theology of things remains to be written (though as I pointed out this author has provided an important thesis for it). To develop the theme from a practical point of view, one might consider the position taken by Emil Brunner in Volume II of Christianity and Civilization, Leslie White’s treatment of technology and religion in The Evolution of Culture, and Harvey Cox’s contention in The Secular City that the secularization of man is the work of God. Bonifazi mentions none of these writers. Nor does he mention Calvin, who gives attention to the different ways in which the Bible talks about the “world” and opposes both license and abstinence with an acceptance of the goodness of the material and cultural world, with an attitude of gratitude and stewardship (Institutes, III, 19). To Bonifazi’s thesis we might add the following one from Henry Van Til’s The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1959, p. 195):

God’s world, the created universe, is an object of love and joy. This is the place where God wants man as his cultural creature, and man has no right to shun the world or to hate it, for he would thereby deny his calling and be a rebel. For God has placed his creature here to be his co-worker in fulfilling the law of creation and the creative purposes of the Master Artist.

Book Briefs

We Jews and You Christians, by Samuel Sandmel (Lippincott, 1967, 146 pp., $3.95). The noted Jewish biblical scholar examines historical attitudes and events that have traditionally separated Jews and Christians, and points out fertile areas for future understanding.

The Salt of the Earth, by Carlos Monterosso (Prentice-Hall, 1967, 156 pp. $4.50). This novel draws a contemporary portrait of Jesus from fictionalized accounts by John the Baptist, Judas Iscariot, and Thomas the Doubter. Monterosso sees Jesus as a cunning revolutionary but distorts Scripture to arrive at the portrait.

Protestant-Catholic Marriages Can Succeed by Paul and Jeanne Simon (Association, 1967, 122 pp., $3.95). A married couple—he’s a Missouri Synod Lutheran, she’s a Roman Catholic—draw upon their own experience to show that in God’s grace marital unity can be achieved despite denominational division.

I Offered Christ, by Franz Hildebrandt (Fortress, 1967, 342 pp., $5.50). A scholarly study of the Lord’s Supper from the stance of classical Protestantism.

Know Why You Believe, by Paul E. Little (Scripture Press, 1967, 96 pp., $1.25). Little wades into key issues of Christianity—existence of God, deity of Christ, the Resurrection, reliability of the Bible, possibility of miracles, relation of science and Scripture, the problem of evil—and offers satisfying, biblically sound answers.

The Bible Through the Ages, by H. Thomas Frank, C. William Swain, and Courtlandt Canby (World, 1967, 246 pp., $15). A beautiful book that traces the development of the Bible and its transmission through the centuries; a treasury of information and of 175 Bible-related illustrations and art reproductions.

The Layman’s Bible Commentary: Volume 1, Introduction to the Bible, by Kenneth J. Foreman, Balmer H. Kelly, Arnold B. Rhodes, Bruce M. Metzger, and Donald G. Miller; Volume 19, John, by Floyd V. Filson; and Volume 20, Acts of the Apostles, by Albert C. Winn (John Knox, 1967, 171, 155, and 136 pp., $1.75 each). New large-print editions of these commentary volumes; an excellent resource for students of Scripture.

Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, by Friedrich A. Hayek (University of Chicago, 356 pp., $6.50). A Hayek anthology, including some previously unpublished essays; this distinguished economist’s criticism of reigning prejudices in political and social science merits wide reading.

Jesus, Persons, and the Kingdom of God, by Royce Gordon Gruenler (Bethany Press, 1967, 224 pp., $4.95). An example of how existential presuppositions both illuminate and distort biblical Christology, anthropology, and eschatology.

Psychology and Personality Development, by John D. Frame (Moody, 1967, 191 pp., $3.95). A Christian doctor uses case studies to help individuals understand the implications of personality development in the Christian life.

Paperbacks

Fifty Key Words in Theology, by F. G. Healey (John Knox, 1967, 84 pp., $1.65). Succinct and enlightening explanations of fifty important topics in theology such as “existentialism,” “immanence and transcendence,” “myth,” “predestination,” and “trinity.”

The Case for Creation, by Wayne Frair and P. William Davis (Moody, 1967, 96 pp., $.95). Pertinent arguments to show that the “fact of evolution” cannot be proved by present available evidence. Designed for laymen and students.

Forever Triumphant: The Secret of Victory in the Christian Life, by F. J. Huegel (Bethany Fellowship, 1967, 86 pp., $1). The Christian becomes “more than conqueror” over the world, the flesh, and the devil by surrendering to Christ, who has already achieved the ultimate triumph.

This installment of “The Minister’s Workshop” marks the beginning of a new series. The series just concluded offered practical help on preaching. This one will offer practical help for the day-to-day pastoral counseling ministry, with articles on such problems as marital discord, alcoholism, homosexuality, pre-marital planning, child-parent relations, business ethics, retirement stresses, and spiritual-psychological problems such as guilt, anxiety, depression, and hostility. We hope the new series will help pastors to provide the intelligent and compassionate counseling distressed people rightly expect when they look to the Christian Church for help.

The first visit I made in my first parish was to a man of sixty dying of cancer. Although he was under continuous sedation, the sedation wore off while I was there, and the terrifying pain reasserted itself. I can still see his anguished face and his groping, grasping hands pleading for the next needle. I did not know what to do. I had never experienced pain, and the man was a stranger to me. The words that suggested themselves to me seemed an utter irrelevance, almost an impertinence.

Since then, I have been by countless beds of pain. Since then, too, I have come to know what real pain is. Whether dull or sharp, pain is always accompanied by the fear that it may become overwhelming. And sometimes the fear seems as terrifying as the pain.

What can a minister say to one who is suffering crippling pain? Sometimes very little—sometimes the less said the better. One of the things I learned to appreciate was the consideration of some who lingered for only a few moments and said little.

Yet when opportunity comes, God’s message must be given. What is it? It must be the same message given to those not in pain. We have won the right to speak to sufferers only if we have witnessed to them faithfully while they were well. One can have only contempt for the man who thinks he can wait till some member of his congregation is laid on his back before he confronts him with his need for God and the sufficiency of Jesus Christ. If our preaching is biblical, we speak often about suffering and pain, for it is in every page of the Bible.

Even so, there may be some special emphases, and here the guidance of the Holy Spirit is essential. Some time ago a minister friend and I visited a police officer who had been in an accident with his cruiser and was in great pain. He said to us: “I wish I knew why this has happened to me.” It was hard to know what to say, but eventually I hazarded this: “You know, sometimes God has to put a man on his back in order to get a look at his face.” We could not say more, for pain demanded quiet; so we left with a handclasp, a smile, and a prayer.

If the sufferer is not a Christian, it is doubly hard to know what to say. The Holy Spirit must give the right word, though the general bent of our witness may be clear. We can certainly say that God can use trouble as a means of revealing his grace. We can also say that even under the assault of pain, Jesus Christ can reveal himself as a living reality, and can transform the suffering so that it does not become a hardening influence. For this is really one of the greatest perils confronting people who pass through pain—that it should anesthetize them against the knowledge that God is near and able to help. I always try to get the sick one to join me in earnest and honest prayer, and I always try to leave behind the promises of God. God alone is a refuge and strength in the midst of catastrophe. And his Word has an uplifting, transforming power that defies analysis.

I have never known a deathbed repentance. Others have—I know and I am thankful. But my own experience has taught me that a suffering man is too taken up with his pain to think of higher things. How necessary that we be faithful in dealing with our people about their sin and their Saviour!

Speaking about pain to a true believer is easier. One can look ahead to a day when sin and suffering will be no more, and one can also point out that all the woes of humanity are scanned and probed and enlightened by the Scriptures. No other book mirrors human suffering—its intensity, its universality, its varied forms, its perplexities—as the Bible does. Yet through it all there is no hopelessness or despair. On the contrary, a vein of sacred joy runs through all the pages of revelation, and the ultimate issue prophesied by the Bible is a new creation from which suffering and pain are banished. I can recall some moments of unsurpassed blessedness as I have talked of these wonders in a sick room.

Then, too, it is right to recall that the men of faith revealed in the Scriptures do not demand that God justify his ways to them. Inevitably they ask questions about suffering. They wrestle with the problem of such an intrusion into a universe fashioned by a God whose name is love. But they do not blame God. They do not angrily demand that he explain or defend his conduct. God is real to them, even in the valley of suffering, and we hear them singing even there.

In the midst of heartache Habakkuk utters some of the noblest words ever spoken: “Yes I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation” (3:18). Job is perplexed at his suffering. There is no rational category into which he can fit it. But, though for a time it seems he is going under, he doesn’t. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (13:15a). This is his answer, similar in spirit and content to that which Peter gives in one of the New Testament’s most glorious passages on the question of pain: “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you. But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy” (1 Pet. 4:12, 13). This is Christian realism and optimism at its best. Faith trusts in God and knows that mercy and truth are one, that chastisement is always in the end God-glorifying, that “all things work together for good to them that love God.”

In the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, when one of the mission’s members is overtaken with sickness the report is always phrased in this way: “God has entrusted our fellow-worker with suffering.” This seems to me to be the right approach. From suffering God can extract multiple blessings. The Lord wants us prepared for the highest service; therefore he tests us in a thousand ways. Testing can be a true token of his love, his confidence that we are strong enough to endure it and will remain true to him even when he has withdrawn the outward evidences of his care.

And how wonderful it is to experience the reality of his presence with us through days of pain. “I will never leave thee.” “When thou passeth through the waters I will be with thee.” Amy Carmichael has said, “Joy is given, sorrow is only lent.” Let it be our counsel to all we meet in the valley of suffering that they use this lent thing to draw them nearer to their Lord and to make them more tender toward others who will pass that way.

—WILLIAM FITCH, Minister, Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto, Canada.

What happened to the seed of the Gospel that was planted in your heart? Is it bringing forth a harvest for righteousness, or has it disappeared?

Many of our Lord’s parables were left for interpretation to those who in spiritual matters had seeing eyes and hearing ears. But the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:1–9, 18–23) was explained in detail, not only for the disciples but for all who down through the ages have desired an explanation of the world situation and of what happens when the Gospel is preached.

In this graphic story our Lord tells of the dangers that beset all to whom the Gospel is preached—the attacks of Satan and the various kinds of erosion of faith—and also of the blessings that proceed from the believing and faithful heart.

The seed is, of course, the Gospel of God’s redeeming work in Christ, and the different kinds of ground are the hearts and minds of men to whom the Gospel is preached.

This parable, like the rest of the Bible, teaches that there is a vast difference in the ultimate destinies of the souls of men, and that there is a sense in which we are directly and personally responsible for accepting or rejecting the grace of God.

Strange to say, some have interpreted this story as proof that one-fourth of those who hear the Gospel are saved. Jesus was speaking, not about percentages, but about four kinds of hearts.

The hard ground. Some who hear the Gospel are spiritually obtuse—not through ignorance, but through a willful indifference to the good news. Satan snatches away the seed, leaving the hardened, barren heart as it was before. (One wonders in passing why, when Jesus spoke so specifically about the person and work of the devil, so many deny that he exists.)

The Apostle Paul also describes the hardened heart and offers an explanation: “Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God” (2 Cor. 4:3, 4).

This condition is unrelated to intelligence. The unintelligent and unsophisticated can grasp spiritual truth and accept it, and the wise and prudent of this world may be spiritually blind. Thank God for the fact that the good seed cannot be snatched away from the humbled and softened heart that turns to him in simple faith!

The rocky soil. This is the heart of the person who weighs the benefits of the goodness and mercy of God against the temporary discomfort of becoming an alien in a hostile world, against the demands of the Christian life and the suffering it sometimes entails, and, after the Weighing, turns back to the world. In such a person the seed is lost; something else takes its place.

The Apostle Paul, after suffering untold trials, persecutions, and personal loss, evaluated the choice in these words: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18).

God never promised his children freedom from trouble—only the grace to bear it. He never promised freedom from persecution; in fact, Scripture says that “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12). But always we are assured of his grace.

Jesus, speaking of the one whose heart is like rocky soil, said, “When tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away” (Matt. 13:21b). Can you “take it” for Christ? There are tens of thousands in the world today who stand as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, suffering for his name’s sake. They put you and me to shame—we who have never suffered anything but rather have ridden on the wave of a popular religion without depth.

Thorns. Ah, here we are on truly dangerous ground—more dangerous than tribulation or persecution, because the danger is so pleasant to take.

The normal pressures of everyday life can choke the seed of the Gospel into unfruitfulness if “doing” and “being” take precedence over the things that will last for eternity. Economic success, affluence, the pleasant sense of material sufficiency, the “delight in riches” of which our Lord speaks, can destroy the Gospel’s effect.

To forget that man does not live by bread alone is to suffer a perilous lapse. Letting tangible things take precedence over the unseen but real blessings of God is a sure way to spiritual oblivion—and how many follow that course!

When the affairs of this world loom above those of God’s Kingdom, man stands on the brink of disaster. Paul says, “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18).

A man may revel in every comfort and luxury this world can afford, only to have them all vanish in the reality of God’s eternity. He who says to his soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease—eat, drink, be merry,” will one day hear God say, “Fool!”

The good soil. When the seed of the Gospel falls on good ground, a tremendous change takes place. A man hears the word, and the Holy Spirit enables him to understand it. What once seemed foolish to him becomes the most wonderful thing in the world. He hears the word as God’s truth, believes, and obeys. The Bible describes the process: “Man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved” (Rom. 10:10).

That is only the beginning. The harvest is seen in a transformed life and in a consistent witness to others, so that a person’s salvation, his newness in Christ, is multiplied in the lives of others who also hear and believe.

Remember who told this story and gave its interpretation: the Lord of History, the God of Glory, the Creator and Preserver of all; the One who is, who was, and who is to come!

He who is wise will beware of the dangers that surround him—the “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places,” the diversions and cares of the world, those urges and tendencies to do evil that are ever within us.

Surely we will be wise to search our own hearts and lives to see what has priority. The seed of the Gospel has been sown in our hearts; what has happened to it? The first seed described in the parable was destroyed by the devil, the second by the world, and the third by the flesh. Have the world, the flesh, and the devil had their way in our hearts and destroyed what should have changed our lives for now and for eternity?

The Holy Spirit gives life. It is he who takes the seed of the Gospel and brings forth an abundant harvest in the lives of those who believe and obey.

Dear Viewers of the Future:

Once again it’s time to consider the annual prophecies of our “Fearless Forecaster,” the Rev. Richard Buchman. This ingenious Congregational minister has migrated from Brooklyn to Milwaukee, but he’s still issuing predictions. Here are some of the religious events he foresees for 1968:

In March: “A college chaplain, invited to deliver a Lenten sermon at a union service in suburban Detroit, will tell his listeners to ‘tear down their bourgeois idols, close up their irrelevant churches, and give their tainted money to the poor.’ Moved by his oratory, they will do just that, thereby depriving the chaplain of 98 per cent of his salary.”

In April: “The new bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York will be installed by the Reverend Doctor David H. C. Read, Rabbi Balfour Brickner, and Muhammad Ali. Questioned about this unique arrangement, the bishop will reply: ‘This is just what Cardinal Spellman would have wanted.’ ”

In June: “A commission of the National Council of Churches will advocate urban rioting as ‘a Christ-act against the pagan and self-deluded power structure in these apocalyptic times.’ Reached later at his summer home in northern Vermont, the chairman of the commission will say: ‘We are simply trying to follow Jesus.’ ”

In September: “Fifteen denominational magazines will publish editorials condemning one of the candidates for the Presidency as ‘a thoughtless, insensitive Neanderthal mired in the slime of pre-Christian, inhuman reaction.’ Asked about their tax-exempt status, the editors will argue that ‘it would be inaccurate and misleading to assume that our rejection of one candidate implies our acceptance of the other. We are simply trying to follow Jesus.’ ”

1967 was a boffo year for clerical antics: pouring blood on public records, proposing homosexuality as an answer to the population explosion, offering churches as sanctuaries for draft-evaders, staging hippie happenings, showing films of go-go dancers at a church conference. It’s hard to see how they can be one silly millimeter more outlandish in 1968. But, along with our Fearless Forecaster, I predict they’ll try.

EUTYCHUS III

Prognostically,

ECHOES FROM THE TRUMPET CALL

After reading “Blow the Trumpet” (editorial, Dec. 22), I thought it to be good to write and tell you that I am, for one, giving my life in its totality for the “long charge” of which you wrote. I am convinced of the need to unite our spirits into one “global evangelical voice,” and I want you to know that whatever that entails in the future to count me in.

D. WILLIAM BERRY

Vaux-sur-Seine, France

CHEERING THE POETS

Many have written to the editor about articles they liked and didn’t like. But it seems to me they just take the Christian poet for granted.

Three cheers for the excellent poetry published, especially “Hiding Place,” by Margaret Clarkson (Dec. 22). Would that more of us preached like that.

L. A. KICKASOLA

The Methodist Church

Friendship, Minotola,

Forest Grove, N. J.

TWO SIDES OF THE COIN

The December 22 issue gives considerable publicity to the dispensational interpretation of the Bible, viz., Dr. Gaebelelein in the panel discussion, Dr. Smith’s essay on the second advent, and the news article “Israel: Things to Come.”

Does CHRISTIANITY TODAY endorse the dispensational view as the only valid approach to biblical interpretation? If so, would it not be proper to inform readers that there are millions of Christians who agree with the late Dr. J. Gresham Machen that premillennialism “is coupled … with a false method of interpreting Scripture which in the long run will be productive of harm” (Christianity and Liberalism, p. 49) and who dissent from equating dispensationalism with the biblical view of history and Christian eschatological expectations?

TH. N. SCHULZ

Amsterdam, Holland

In the issue arriving five days before Christmas, what to my wondering eyes should appear but an actual non-condescending word relative to a dispensationalist, i.e., Dr. Charles C. Ryrie (“Israel: Things to Come”). And, believe it or not, there are others in the dispensational camp who share his moderation.…

Your kind word was long overdue, but a sincere word of appreciation for being objective.

HOWARD PARK

Birmingham, Ala.

PROFITABLE DEBATE

In your December 22 issue I notice a short article from the debate between Playboy’s spokesman and Dr. William Banowsky of Lubbock, Texas.

I have a copy of this debate, and I found it all very interesting and very profitable. I feel that it is material that should be in the hands of every religious leader today to help combat this anti-Christian philosophy.… It is printed in booklet form and may be obtained from Christian Chronicle, Box 4055, Austin, Texas 78751.

C. A. FEENSTRA

Evangelist

Sioux Center, Iowa

MOSTLY EUTY-CUS-ING

I have appreciated CHRISTIANITY TODAY through the years.… I been encouraged by the evangelical conservative position the paper has taken.

However, I was deeply disappointed in the December 8 Eutychus III letter and “What if …” cartoon. I feel that this type of sarcasm is completely out of keeping with the Spirit of Christ.… It is this type of attitude that has given the evangelical cause such a black name in the eyes of people that we, as ministers, rub shoulders with every day.

JOHN J. DEYOUNG

Clarksville and Olive Branch Methodist Churches

Clarksville, Ohio

I take strong exception to the tasteless statements of Eutychus III about the Christmas street kettles of the Salvation Army. Your columnist ought to personally experience what it means to stand for days at one of these stations and he would be a little more charitable and a little more appreciative.

CHARLES DOWDELL

The Methodist Church

Malvern and Pleasant Grove, Ohio

I have just renewed my subscription to what I thought was the finest paper of its kind, when I read what Eutychus III had to say about Dr. McIntire. I think it was unchristian, and entirely uncalled for. I have listened to him, and never did I hear any “baloney.” I pray God may send us a few more like him before it is too late.

CLINTON FRITSCH

Hendersonville, N.C.

I always read Eutychus first. He reaches me. Theological journalism, by and large, today reminds me of a snowstorm—you know something is falling but you never can quite get your teeth into it! Forty-dollar words, new words, coined words, undefinable words, redefined words. Eutychus says what he means frankly, bluntly, and honestly. When I disagree with one of his remarks, at least I know why I want to hit him in the mouth. So, Eutychus, you keep on coming through loud and clear and perhaps we can convince some of these theological “geniuses” that your kind of dialogue would reduce the total amount of dialogue.

WILLIAM SOLOMON

St. Elmo Presbyterian Church

Chattanooga, Tenn.

WORDS ON FAIRNESS

As a subscriber and careful reader I was gratified at your firm opposition to the misnamed “Fairness Doctrine” (“Should the Critics Be Stifled?” Editorial, Dec. 8). Like so many sociological “liberal’ coercive measures, it is another sad milestone on the road of our descent into the morass of federal thought control.…

However, I must enter a gentle and good-humored objection to my daily news-analysis program (“The Voice of Americanism”) or to me personally being referred to as of the “extreme right,” or “free swinging,” or as using “slam-bang attacks.” These epithets are neither accurate nor fair, about my approach at least.

I meticulously document from authoritative and original sources my indictment of anti-Christian Communist or socialist movements or persons. Further, I am given to understatement rather than overstatement in what I say. Please don’t mistake angry opposition to the leftists, particularly among the clergy, as irresponsibility. As a graduate of two colleges and three seminaries, all accredited, I hope I have earned the right to be considered a careful student if not a scholar.

W. S. MCBIRNIE

Director

Center for American Research and Education

Glendale, Calif.

There are many of us who feel that “independent broadcasters” exercise not a legitimate right to free speech but rather take every occasion to air personal views and even deride those who disagree. This constitutes not free speech but an abuse of the same, and we can only rejoice twice over at the new FCC “personal attack” rule.… We feel no personal injustice being done to curb the right to use the airways freely by men who put personal views above those of the Church. The public is often unable to distinguish the views of the Church at large or even of various groups which represent it from those who proclaim endlessly that the Church has failed to conform to their own opinions. The views of such men are often divisive, ill-informed, and usually “against” rather than “for” some particular doctrine. As far as I can discern, the new ruling does little more than protect against the image of a divided church (it often is, but not in the way or extent as portrayed on the air) … The FCC ruling simply recognizes that a freedom for one man is not a freedom if those who would disagree have no effective way to answer back. The FCC thus speaks for the “freedom of the listener,” which should be as valid as that for the broadcaster.… We welcome the decision: it is at least a start toward radio broadcasts that truly “minister” to the listening public rather than occupy the airways for personal power or prestige.

RICHARD B. LAWSON

First Presbyterian Church

Salida, Colo.

A MATTER OF NO MATTER

Was Christ really black or was he white (“Black Christ,” News, Dec. 8)?

What in the world does it matter? The most important thing in the world is that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.…

Mr. Clege says there is no escape for the Negro. Mr. Clege, let me remind you that there is no escape for black or white except through the blood of Jesus Christ, and that means that [color] does not matter.

CHARLES E. BURGESS

Heflin, Ala.

ON COMMUNICATING CHRISTIANITY

I would essentially agree with Dr. John Montgomery’s analysis of the content of the major presentations made at the McMaster Teach-In on Christianity (Letter to the Editor, Jan. 5; cf. “Montgomery Versus Pike,” News, Dec. 8). Furthermore, I would emphasize that Dr. Montgomery’s own paper was a serious scholarly contribution of importance. The others were talks, not papers, and in the case of Bishop Pike, disjointed with little internal logic. If I were a professor grading seminar contributions there is no question but that Dr. Montgomery would get a high honors mark, while Pike would be failed. But I was a reporter commenting on a news story, and the occasion was not a seminar but an attempt to communicate to students the relevance of Christianity in today’s technological society.…

A few of the students probably appreciated as I did the significance of the material presented by Montgomery and Pollard. However, many of the evangelical students spoke with evident distress of the adverse impression made on their friends by the conservative presentation. Some new Christians and seriously seeking students were simply “turned off” by Montgomery. Liberally oriented theological students were confirmed in their impression that they could dismiss conservative scholarship as pre-Kantian rationalism with no heart for contemporary human problems and, therefore, irrelevant. Pollard’s inability to “hear” questions confirmed the caricature of the conservative held by many. These are characteristic reactions given to this reporter in questions put to over 10 per cent of the students present selected at random. (The actual student audience was no more than 300, emphasizing an initial failure in communication by the student sponsoring committee.)

This massive failure in communication, despite the excellence of the material, was, I still believe, the essential news story—and it turned on precisely the issue of relationships which Dr. Montgomery dismisses.

H. W. SUTHERLAND

General Director

Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship

Toronto, Ont.

THE BEST OF BOTH

I must confess that the personalities of so many ardent fundamentalists are so abrasive whereas the personalities of many liberal churchmen are so amenable that I sometimes have a tendency to think that the more rational and pleasant liberals might be more nearly correct than are the repulsive and sometimes ignorant fundamentalists. Somehow your publication always helps me to distinguish between truth and passion.

PAUL R. HOLLINGER

Station Manager

WDAC-FM

Lancaster, Pa.

I read every issue with ever-increasing interest because CHRISTIANITY TODAY changes with the times but is anchored to the Rock.

LANEY L. JOHNSON

Throckmorton, Texas

Only a genuine faith can win a world-wide hearing

William Graham Cole relates that Khrushchev is said to have asked the Russian cosmonaut Titov after his journey in space whether he had seen anyone “out there.” Titov said, “Yes, I really did see God.” Khrushchev responded, “I knew that already, but you know our policy, so please don’t tell anybody.” Titov’s next interview was with the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, who also asked whether he had seen anybody “out there.” Titov, faithful to his instructions, replied, “No, there was no one.” And the patriarch’s response was, “I know that already, but you know our policy, so please don’t tell anyone.”

That story suggests the tragic twist to church and state in this late afternoon of our lives. What now terrorizes our most holy faith is not outside anti-faith, contemptuous as that has become. The really chilling threat to the world as well as to The Way is false witness from within. And before we make what might well be a last plea to the world for faith in Christ, we who profess it must first make sure our faith is genuine. Our hope of winning the world is waiting for the Church to regain confidence in its own Gospel.

Dr. Joseph Sizoo told of the easygoing prison chaplain who routinely asked men condemned to die whether they were prepared to repent of their evil lives and accept Christ. One morning a criminal spat his refusal to this chaplain, who stood at a safe distance from the gallows. As the condemned man pointed to the New Testament tucked under the chaplain’s arm, his indignation shook the prison walls: “If I believed half that story you have there, I’d crawl on my hands and knees over cut glass all the way to London to tell them.”

Countless pulpit tape recorders routinely murmur words like that chaplain’s to pews full of desperately needy men. The pity is they do not believe. Countless conscientious church workers have not the slightest notion of what it is to exult in the riches of Christ. Weary ministers and members have no confidence in the prayers they say at the bedside. The ring of the resurrection has gone out of the voices reading at the graveside. No one is even surprised now that he habitually leaves church wholly uninspired after saying or hearing such high-sounding assertions. Many will not confess their emptiness even to themselves.

The benediction pronounces “the peace that passeth all understanding,” but God knows most of the congregation have never known such peace. Christians are promised the joy the world cannot give nor take away; yet they often possess very little of it. If Christians were accused of lacking these precious treasures, they would self-righteously insist they were long-time members (or ministers) in good standing. To admit how unhappy and lost they feel would be too embarrassing and too painful.

We cannot see the pallor of the Church and the feebleness of its witness without feeling that for the vast majority Christianity had become a social convention. Might not a huge reason for the contrast between our time and Pentecost be that the resurrection from the dead is being preached and professed by those who have not been resurrected? As an old man said, “We can’t give what we ain’t got.” Surely it is now as Isaiah said it was in his day, “This people draw near me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote” (Isa. 29:13).

A Christian should be exhilarated by the knowledge that prayer is answered, by the realization of distance between the way he felt unforgiven before and the way he feels forgiven since. True faith distinguishes between “before” and “after” God. The fruits of the faith shake the ground under our feet when they fall. They can be tasted and savored; they are blessings to be counted, one by one, in front of someone ready to hear about them. I cannot imagine what it means to be Christian unless one’s heart has been both broken in shame for his sins and strangely animated by God’s tender mercy—not merely in abstract “growth” but in dramatic encounters.

The condemned prisoner was right. If we had an inkling of what it is to know God, if we even half-believed in this burning news of Christmas and Easter, it would be hard, even impossible, to keep it to ourselves. No man in darkness can have the lights come on without having it shown to him.

I am not proposing an abandonment of doctrinal belief, nor condoning the rampage of rejection all around us. I am simply asking for a fresh and honest confession of doubts and fears we have too long officially pretended did not exist. I do not know where else to begin if we want to win a hearing in the world. Peter’s acknowledgment of his treason, Paul’s revelation of his despicable intentions in Damascus—these disarmed unbelievers into admitting their own sin and accepting the Saviour. How could Pentecost have happened if the disciples had assumed the Spirit was already in their midst? The only way Pentecost could come was through their honest admission that the Spirit was absent, that they were powerless to live and serve as they knew they should.

The miracles of Christ happened to men who found courage to confess their helplessness. Not until that desperate father finally abandoned his front of self-sufficiency was he open to suggestion from a Saviour. And his prayer—“O Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief”—reflects not only honesty about his poverty of faith but sorrow. Instead of bitterness, there was longing. If we could die for shame for our apostasy, our resulting resurrection would raise the whole world. We have been so preoccupied with reproaching the world that we have forgotten our footing—“to believe.” If we only believed, the world could not contain the consequent outpouring of God’s power.

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

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, began with six members in 1830 and today claims more than 2,500,000. Many Mormon young people give two years of their lives to propagating the faith; there are currently about 12,000 of these missionaries actively at work.

Mormons claim to be the “restored” church of Jesus Christ and hold that all other ecclesiastical bodies are in error. They also say that they accept the Bible as “the word of God as far as it is translated correctly” (Articles of Faith, 8). Many people have the impression that the Mormon teachings are not basically different from those of historic Christianity. Is this true? Let us ask the Mormons ten questions, get answers from their own writings, and compare these answers with the teachings of the Bible.

1. Is the Bible the final source of authority for Mormonism? The answer is a decisive no. To begin with, Mormons claim that there are many translation errors in the Bible as we have it today—though they will not make the same admission about the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, felt he should revise the Bible on a number of points, and among the things he added to it is a prediction of his own appearance (Genesis 50:33 in the Inspired Version of the Holy Scriptures).

The inadequacy of the Bible is clearly expressed by a statement in First Nephi 13:28 (Book of Mormon) to the effect that many “plain and precious things” have been taken away from the Bible since it was first written. Accordingly, Mormons have added to it three other sacred books: The Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price. Joseph Smith once said, “I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 194). “Any other book” certainly includes the Bible. Doctrine and Covenants contains additional “revelations” allegedly given through Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, among them the “inspired” instructions about two practices that are very important in present-day Mormonism: baptism for the dead and celestial marriage. The Pearl of Great Price is a smaller volume containing the opening chapters of Smith’s revision of the Bible (“The Book of Moses”), the “Book of Abraham,” which is a polytheistic rewriting of the first chapters of Genesis, and other writings.

Mormon writers base their teachings primarily on the Mormon Scriptures rather than on the Bible, which they relegate to an inferior place of authority. They believe that the president of the church is able to receive further revelations from God, and that these revelations could conceivably alter even the doctrines contained in their Scriptures. It is clear, then, that Mormonism is not a part of the Christian Church, for its chief source of authority is books other than the Bible.

2. Does Mormonism teach the spirituality of God? No; it teaches that both the Father and the Son have material bodies. “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:22). In Articles of Faith, for many years a standard Mormon doctrinal textbook, Joseph Talmage says, “It is clear that the Father is a personal being, possessing a definite form, with bodily parts and spiritual passions” (p. 41).

This teaching implies that there must be female gods as well as male gods. John A. Widtsoe, a prominent Mormon author, puts it this way: “There are males and females in heaven. Since we have a Father, who is our God, we must also have a mother, who possesses the attributes of Godhood” (A Rational Theology, p. 69).

Surely scriptural teaching about the omnipresence of God (e.g., 1 Kings 8:27; Ps. 139:7–12; Acts 17:27, 28) rules out this view of Deity. Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman are plain: “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24, ASV).

3. Does Mormonism believe in one God? There has been a development in Mormon teachings on this point. The Book of Mormon, first published in 1830, clearly teaches the unity of God: “And now, behold, this is … the only and true doctrine of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, which is one God, without end” (II Nephi 31:21). But later Joseph Smith himself, the “translator” of the Book of Mormon, denied that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God; they are three distinct gods, he asserted. In fact, in a sermon he said, “I will preach on the plurality of gods.… The doctrine of a plurality of gods is as prominent in the Bible as any other doctrine: (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 370). Since, according to Mormon teaching, the latest “revelation” is the most authoritative, we conclude that Mormonism today teaches a plurality of gods.

Brigham Young, second president of the Mormon church, said, “How many Gods there are, I do not know. But there never was a time when there were not Gods and worlds …” (Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 22). From Widtsoe’s Rational Theology we learn that the gods are in an order of progression, that they vary in their stages of development (“God,” “angel,” and similar terms denote “beings of varying degrees of development”), and that God the Father is simply the supreme god—that is, the god who has reached the highest stage (pp. 66 ff.).

How can this be squared with biblical teaching on the absolute sovereignty and uniqueness of God? “Thus saith Jehovah the King of Israel … I am the first, and I am the last; and besides me there is no God” (Isa. 44:6). The entire Old Testament was directed against the polytheistic religions of Israel’s pagan neighbors; how can Mormonism justify its return to the polytheism so decisively rejected by the prophets?

4. Does Mormonism teach that men may become gods? Yes. To begin with, it insists that all the gods were once men. They first existed as spirits, came to an earth to receive bodies, and then, after passing through a period of probation on earth, were advanced to god-hood. The gods all moved through the cycle: spirit—man—god.

Man may pass through the same cycle. Joseph Smith once said, “Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves …” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 346). From Doctrine and Covenants (132:19, 20) we learn that men who marry according to the new and everlasting covenant whereby they are sealed to their wives for eternity will after this life become gods. Man first exists as a spirit creature without a body; he then comes to earth to receive a physical body from his earthly parents; and after a period of probation on earth he dies, only to be raised again. If he has faithfully observed the precepts of the Mormon religion, he will be raised as a god. Lorenzo Snow, first president of the Mormon church, put it succinctly: “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”

In Mormon theology, then, man is exalted to potential deity. All ultimate differentiation between God and man is wiped away. How utterly different from all this is the God-concept found in the Scriptures!

5. Does Mormonism accept the fall of man? Yes and no. It accepts the fall as a historical event but reinterprets it so that it becomes really a “fall upward.” In the Book of Mormon we read: “And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the Garden of Eden.… And they would have had no children.… Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy” (II Nephi 2:22–25).

How is this explained? Eve first disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit. At this point Adam found himself in a dilemma. God had previously commanded Eve and him to multiply and replenish the earth. But now, since Eve had fallen into a state of mortality and he himself was still in a state of immortality, they could not remain together. If they did not, however, they would not be able to fulfill God’s command to replenish the earth. But to yield to Eve’s request to eat the fruit would be disobedience also. Adam made his choice; he “deliberately and wisely decided to stand by the first and greater commandment; and, therefore, with understanding of the nature of his act, he also partook of the fruit” (Talmage, Articles of Faith, p. 65). Joseph Fielding Smith, current president of the Council of Twelve Apostles and a likely choice for next president of the church, puts it as follows: “The fall of man came as a blessing in disguise, and was the means of furthering the purposes of the Lord in the progress of man, rather than a means of hindering them” (Doctrines of Salvation, I, 114).

Obviously, such a view would have a great effect upon the rest of Mormon theology. By repudiating the deep seriousness of Adam’s sin, Mormons minimize the importance of the work of Christ. If man is not really a fallen creature, he does not need a Saviour.

How different is the Bible’s evaluation of Adam’s fall: “As through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin … through one trespass the judgment came unto all men to condemnation …” (Rom. 5:12, 18).

6. Does Mormonism teach equal opportunity for all races? As we have seen, Mormons teach that before men come to this earth, they exist as spirits. This pre-existent life is a time of probation, progression, and schooling, and not all spirits do equally well during it. Joseph Fielding Smith has this to say about the conduct of spirits in the pre-existent state:

There is a reason why one man is born black and with other disadvantages, while another is born white with great advantages. The reason is that we once had an estate before we came here, and were obedient, more or less, to the laws that were given us there. Those who were faithful in all things there received greater blessing here, and those who were not faithful received less [Doctrines of Salvation, I, 61].

Bruce McConkie gives a plain summary of what the Mormon Scriptures say on this matter:

Those who were less valiant in pre-existence and who thereby had certain spiritual restrictions imposed upon them during mortality are known to us as the negroes. Such spirits are sent to earth through the lineage of Cain, the mark put upon him for his rebellion against God and his murder of Abel being a black skin (Moses 5:16–41; 7:8, 12, 22). Noah’s son Ham married Egyptus, a descendent of Cain, thus preserving the negro lineage through the flood (Abra. 1:20–27).

Negroes in this life are denied the priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty (Abra. 1:20–27). The gospel message of salvation is not carried affirmatively to them (Moses 7:8, 12, 22), although sometimes negroes search out the truth, join the Church, and become by righteous living heirs of the celestial kingdom of heaven.…

The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence. Along with all races and peoples he is receiving here what he merits as a result of the long pre-mortal probation in the presence of the Lord [Mormon Doctrine, pp. 476, 477].

McConkie adds, however, that “certainly the negroes as children of God are entitled to equality before the law and to be treated with all the dignity and respect of any member of the human race” (p. 477). At this time Negroes may not be priests in the Mormon church; it may be, however, that a future revelation will remove this disadvantage and give them full equality. Many Mormon leaders have expressed the hope that such a revelation will be given soon.

7. Does Mormonism teach the unique incarnation of Christ? No. It does teach that Christ existed as a spirit person before he came to earth and that when he came to earth he received a physical body through Mary. However, this experience was not unique. All the gods first existed as spirits and then came to various earths to receive bodies. Christ’s experience was similar to that of every other god, and of many men.

It is important to remember that though Mormons may confess the deity of Jesus Christ, they do not mean by that confession what historic Christianity means by it. For them the difference between Christ and man is only a difference of degree.

8. Does Mormonism teach the vicarious atonement of Christ? Mormon writers do say that Adam’s fall required an atonement. Since the fall brought physical death into the world, Christ had to make an atonement to deliver us from death by providing for all men the right to be raised from the dead. This is a general salvation, a potential saving of all men from death through resurrection. When Mormons claim, as they sometimes do, that Christ died to save everybody, it is this salvation that they mean.

But Mormons also speak of individual salvation; by this they mean escape from hell and entrance into one of the three Mormon heavens. Since individual salvation depends on individual obedience, Christ’s atonement is not determinative for it (Talmage, pp. 86–91). Individual salvation is determined by meritorious action.

In this view, Christ’s death is a vicarious atonement only in a very restricted sense. Christ died to enable all people to rise from the dead. But his death does not save a person from sin; it only gives man an opportunity to save himself.

9. Does Mormonism teach the biblical view of the way of salvation? One of the great biblical doctrines is justification by faith; a man is saved from sin and adopted as God’s child, not because of his own works or merit, but solely by grace. Man “is justified by faith apart from the works of the law” (Rom. 3:28). But Mormonism rejects this. In fact, James Talmage calls justification by faith a “pernicious doctrine,” and adds, “The sectarian dogma of justification by faith alone has exercised an influence for evil” (op. cit., p. 479). Although Mormons admit that one must have faith in Christ, this faith must be accompanied by faith in Joseph Smith. Very revealing is this statement from Doctrine and Covenants (135:3): “Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer of the Lord, has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived in it.”

The main emphasis in Mormon soteriology, however, is on works. Individual salvation—entrance into one of the three heavens—depends on one’s merits. The more complete one’s obedience to the rules of the church, the higher place he will occupy in the life to come. Speaking of the highest degree of salvation, Joseph Fielding Smith says, “Very gladly would the Lord give to every one eternal life, but since that blessing can come only on merit—through the faithful performance of duty—only those who are worthy shall receive it” (Doctrines of Salvation, II, 5).

Surely this is not the Christian Gospel. It is the Galatian heresy all over again—that is, that a man is saved by faith plus meritorious works. About this heresy Paul uttered some of his strongest words: “Ye are severed from Christ, ye who would be justified by the law; ye are fallen away from grace” (Gal. 5:4).

10. Does Mormonism teach that all men will be saved? Very nearly. Mormons do believe there is a place of final punishment; but very few people will go there, only the so-called sons of perdition, whose sins have placed them beyond the “present possibility of repentance and salvation” (Talmage, p. 409).

The highest of the three Mormon heavens, the celestial kingdom, will be for those who have been most faithful on earth; here those who were celestially married on earth (married for eternity in a Mormon temple) will continue to live with their spouses and will continue to procreate children. The second heaven, the terrestrial kingdom, is for those who were less earnest and valiant in their service of God. This kingdom has room for those who reject the Gospel while they are on earth but who later accept it when Christ preaches to them in the spirit world. In other words, those who reject Christ in this life have a “second chance” to accept him after death. The lowest of the three heavens is the telestial kingdom, for people who live wicked lives on earth and are cast into hell when they die, but who are released from punishment after a period of suffering. Hell is thus seen as a kind of purgatory, with a door at each end.

The Bible does not permit the view that people who have deliberately rejected the Gospel in this life will be given a second chance. “It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment” (Heb. 9:27). Neither does Scripture let us think of hell as a school from which one may graduate into heaven. Jesus said with finality, “These shall go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt. 25:46).

On each of these ten questions the teaching of the Mormon church is contrary to Scripture. Although there is much in Mormonism that we may admire—the tremendous welfare program, the ability to get members involved in the work of the church, the willingness to sacrifice—we cannot classify Mormon teachings with those of historic Christianity. The Christ of Mormonism is not the Christ of Scripture.

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.”

What priorities do seminaries maintain in training ministers? Do scholarly concerns eclipse spiritual values and curtail evangelism?

While dining at a religious conference one day, I was startled by what I saw on a place mat. It was an advertisement for a prominent Protestant seminary, and in big print it said, “For a Learned Ministry.” As I read further I found out that this seminary was preparing men and women for a vocation that is “scholarly and effective.” The advertisement pointed out the academic qualifications of faculty members, boasting that they had “written fifty-eight books and numerous scholarly articles” and that they “lecture frequently at conferences.” Then came the climactic tribute, apparently intended to be overwhelming: “Their creativity has already made a significant impact on the theological thinking of this age.”

Now I am certainly not opposed to scholarship in the seminaries. There have been great scholars in the Church—Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Hodge, and many more—and the product of their minds blessed by the Holy Spirit has been invaluable in the proclamation of the Gospel and in the progress of Christianity. What disturbed me about this advertisement was that there was no reference to spiritual values, to the faith and dedication of students and faculty, nor was there any suggestion that these things are important. There was no hint that this seminary tries to prepare students to witness for Christ or to preach the Gospel. One must conclude that its objective is to turn out learned graduates well trained by teachers who write scholarly books and lecture frequently.

As I reread the place mat, I remembered a letter I had recently received from another seminary; it stated that the seminary had no creed, and the accompanying brochure said, “It is time to reaffirm that the very core of the seminary is its concern for the scholarly pastor.…” All this brought a barrage of questions to my mind. What do they mean by a “learned” ministry? By an “effective” ministry? What does a trophy case filled with fifty-eight books and numerous scholarly articles prove about a faculty’s fitness for preparing students to proclaim Christ’s message of salvation? And what kind of books and articles were these? Did they have spiritual as well as scholarly value? Do “published” teachers rate higher in this seminary than those who might witness for Christ in less erudite ways?

What does “creative activity” include? What kind of “significant impact” has it made on theological thinking? Has it been good or bad? Have the faculty members of this seminary, directly or indirectly, led fifty-eight people to Christ? Have they led one? Have they tried to? Do they believe in apostolic evangelism and preaching the Gospel? Or are they trying to substitute scholarship for the gospel message proclaimed in the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit? Do they use their learning for the honor of Christ and the extension of his kingdom?

While pondering these questions, I remembered that the greatest teacher of all time never went to college, never wrote a book or an article, never delivered a formal lecture. When he talked about God to a little child or to a politician, he didn’t use five-syllable words and hundred-word sentences. Most of the apostles he chose were amazingly successful evangelists who went everywhere preaching the Gospel courageously and wisely. None of the twelve would be considered “learned” or “scholarly”—yet they certainly were “effective.” What was their primary qualification? It was this: They knew what they proclaimed, and they proclaimed it in the power of the Holy Spirit. The rulers and elders at Jerusalem, “when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, … marvelled; and they took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

A minister’s scholarly attainment is of great value when used for the glory of God and for the forthright proclamation of the Gospel. Many great preachers were scholars. And many scholars witness very effectively for the faith they hold. But scholarship must never be considered the most important qualification for the ministry, or the primary goal of the seminaries.

What a wave of evangelism would cleanse this country if every Protestant seminary gave top priority to turning out those who clearly “had been with Jesus.”

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.”

Rebellion, not obedience, is characteristic of our jet-age generation. This spirit is evident in our art, literature, and morals, in the revolt against law and authority, in the talk of the death of God. To be honest, even the most sincere Christian would have to admit that the word “obedience” irritates just a little. After all, he might be tempted to think, isn’t obedience an Old Testament teaching that has been superseded by a new relationship based on faith?

No one questions the emphasis on obedience in the Old Testament. Its teaching on the matter can be summarized: “Obey and you will be blessed. Disobey and you will be cursed” (cf. Deut. 11:26–28). Although sacrifices were important to the Israelites, the prophets continually reminded the people that “to obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam. 15:22).

Hearing the word of God is the basis for obedience in the Old Testament. In fact, hearing and obeying were so closely related that the Hebrew language uses the same word to convey both ideas. James Smart has observed that the verb “to hear” in Hebrew “significantly denotes not any passive receiving of words into the mind but the response of a man’s whole being” (The Old Testament in Dialogue with Modern Man, Westminster, 1964, p. 11). The Israelite needed no psychological or philosophical explanation for the doctrine of obedience; for him, hearing the word of God was tantamount to obeying it.

Someone has observed that Israel was in the kindergarten stage of religious experience. Since God had to deal with his people as with children, there was special emphasis on obedience. A child who refuses to obey parents and teachers never learns as rapidly as one who listens carefully and then tries to carry out the instructions. A child who refuses to learn the multiplication tables is not likely to become a mathematician; a seminary student who refuses to master Greek and Hebrew paradigms is not likely to become a Bible linguist. Israel’s story has often been called a “history of failure” because the people disobeyed God and thus thwarted his plan to bless the nation and use it as he desired.

Anne Sullivan very quickly learned the importance of obedience when she began to teach Helen Keller, who was then about six years old. Said Miss Sullivan to a friend, “I saw clearly that it was useless to try to teach her language or anything else until she learned to obey me. I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of a child” (Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, Dell, 1961, p. 265).

One might be tempted to think Miss Sullivan mixed the order of her words and really meant to say, “Love is the gateway through which knowledge and obedience enter the mind of the child.” The more carefully one considers this teacher’s words, however, the more one realizes that she expressed a profound truth, a truth significant not only for children but everyone else.

If we apply this observation to Israel, we can readily see why obedience is emphasized so strongly in the Old Testament. Israel could not really know or love God until it learned to obey him.

Obedience is also emphasized in the New Testament. That grace has taken the place of law does not mean that disobedience has replaced obedience. Jesus summarized the hundreds of laws that Israelites were required to obey into two simple commandments: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.… Thou shalt love thy neighbor …” (Matt. 22:37–39). He did not supersede God’s laws; rather, he clarified and simplified them.

Love is a distinctive emphasis of the New Testament, but Jesus links it inseparably to obedience. We read, “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me” (John 14:21a); “not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21); “if a man love me, he will keep my words” (John 14:23a). Jesus makes it clear that love is demonstrated by obedience.

His own obedience is expressed in Philippians 2:8: “… he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death.…” That this passage links humility and obedience is significant; obedience, whether divine or human, requires self-negation.

If we are completely honest, we will admit that obedience is the biblical doctrine most difficult to put into practice. We preach, teach, give a tithe or more, go to the mission field, may even be willing to die for the faith; but how many of us will at the end of this life be able to say: “I led every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (cf. 2 Cor. 10:5)? Total surrender is often talked about, but it is far easier to preach than to practice.

To obey God, man must step down from the throne of self and permit God to take his rightful place as Lord. But submission to another is contrary to man’s nature. “I am the master of my fate,” he likes to say. “I am the captain of my soul.” Paul insists in Romans 6, however, that one who thinks this deludes himself. No one is really his own master. He is the servant either of obedience unto righteousness or of sin unto death (Rom. 6:16).

The doctrine of obedience can shed a great deal of light on some of man’s most pressing problems. Human suffering, for example, especially the suffering of Christians, has always been among the most enigmatic facts of our experience. It can be partially understood in relation to the doctrine of obedience. Although Hebrews 5:8 (“Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered”) can never be understood fully, it does cause us to realize that we cannot expect any better treatment in this world than our Lord received. Some of us do not learn obedience unless we suffer, whether physically, mentally, or spiritually. If suffering produces obedience and if obedience is the gateway to knowledge and love (as observed by Anne Sullivan and demonstrated in the history of Israel), then trials can be the means of spiritual growth.

The doctrine of obedience also is related to the breakdown of modern family life. Do not most problems in the home stem from lack of obedience to responsibility? Family responsibility is summarized in the New Testament. The husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church (Eph. 5:25). The wife is to be submissive to her husband (Eph. 5:22; Tit. 2:5). Children are to obey their parents (Eph. 6:1). And parents are to avoid unreasonableness in their demands upon their children (Eph. 6:4). If each family member fulfilled his obligations in the spirit of these verses, problems in the home would largely disappear.

The alarming statistical decrease in conversions in recent years is partly explained by the lessened insistence upon obedience of children in the home. A well-known evangelist has pointed out that it is very difficult to win to Christ people who as children never learned obedience. If a person does not respect his earthly parents, how much more difficult it is for him to obey the Father in heaven. Parents who teach their children the importance of obedience are preparing them for salvation.

The doctrine of obedience can speak also to the Church today, which is charged with being irrelevant and no longer entitled to leadership. Some say that the Church’s primary need is guidance. But an even greater need is obedience—obedience simply to what we already know we ought to do.

Against the background of the riots and destruction that have convulsed our nation in recent months, it is well to recall that the New Testament emphasizes obedience to constituted authority (Rom. 13). The civilizations that have grown and prospered are those that have developed an elevated concept of law and order. When the people of a nation lose respect for its laws, when they take the law into their own hands, the result is always decadence and ultimate downfall.

Some think that to obey is to lose personal liberty. Actually, however, man achieves true liberty only through obedience—obedience to God. The angry young man, the rebel, the non-conformist, never really finds happiness. The only one who achieves that elusive goal of inner peace is the one who accepts the invitation of Jesus to put on his yoke, a yoke that he promises is easy and not burdensome (Matt. 11:28–30). The image of Christ is formed in the one who submits himself to Christ and obeys him.

Does this mean the Christian is to be a passive, weak milquetoast? Not at all. In fact, the Christian is the only one who has the right to be a rebel—not a rebel against God, as some confused contemporary theologians advocate, but a rebel against man and the world. Peter summed up the true spirit of Christian rebellion in Acts 5:29: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” Our generation tends to think that social and economic revolution is an invention of this century; it fails to realize that Christianity, which deals with the source of the ills that plague society—namely, the human heart—has always been the greatest revolutionary movement of all.

Obedience to Christ is the clearest expression of confidence in him. A person who says he has faith in Christ proves or disproves his words by his obedience or lack of it. To refuse to obey a request, whether of a friend, a parent, or someone in authority, is to say that we lack confidence in that person. The youngest child often learns more rapidly than his brothers and sisters. Why? Because of his confidence in them. He believes that what they do is right and good, and so imitates them readily. He who obeys God’s commandments demonstrates his confidence in God.

The neglected doctrine of obedience is contrary to the spirit of the times. Nevertheless it is a biblical emphasis, and it needs to be restored in our teaching and practice.

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.”