The death-of-god movement displays less and less vitality with each passing month. It would seem that this quasi-religious phenomenon, centering as it does on the motif of mortality, is itself experiencing death-throes.

An oblique indicator that the cry “God is dead” is losing its force is the appearance of an anthology of “Readings in the Death of God Theology” (Toward a New Christianity, edited by Thomas J. J. Altizer). This volume—though it conveniently omits bibliographic reference to The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue (Inter-Varsity Press), which certainly marks at least one step in the decline of theothanatology—suggests that this “radical” movement has already reached the unenviable bourgeois stage of collected “readings.”

But an even more direct evidence that death-of-God is dying was provided last June 21, when Professor Altizer addressed a philosophy workshop at The Catholic University of America on “The Problem of God in Contemporary Thought.” Having found his position roundly rejected by virtually all strata of Protestant thought, Altizer emphatically stated that if there proves to be no possibility that Roman Catholic theology will move in the direction of his “totally christocentric” form of faith and the dialectical self-negation of God, then “I for one will be reluctantly forced to concede that an atheistic or death of God theology is a destructive aberration.” Quite a concession!

What has convinced Altizer that he should now put all his atheological eggs in a Roman Catholic basket? The answer is not hard to find, and it is an exceedingly instructive one for those Christians now celebrating the 450th anniversary of the Reformation.

Let us begin by recalling the essence of Altizer’s position: his affirmation of God’s death is a variant of archaic nineteenth century Hegelianism. He begins by rejecting the law of non-contradiction (on which all logical thinking is based) and substitutes for it Hegel’s so-called “dialectic logic” of perpetual thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, whereby religious truth undergoes self-negation and thus progressively rises to higher and higher levels, issuing out in a “God beyond God” and a “fully kenotic Word.” This totally hidden Christ (which must not be “identified with the original historical Jesus”) is encountered in the secular, profane present and even more fully in the apocalyptic “third age of the Spirit” growing in the crucible of today’s secularism. (See my The ‘Is God Dead?’ Controversy [Zondervan] and my chapter in Bernard Murchland’s The Meaning of the Death of God [Random House].)

At Catholic University Altizer effortlessly related these views to contemporary thinking in the Roman church. In contrast to historic Protestantism, which relies on the Bible as God’s sole and final revelation of truth, the modern Catholic thinker—whose greatest model is provided by the evolutionary theology of Teilhard de Chardin—conceives of a dynamic or evolving Christ. This Christ is progressively manifested in the growth of his Body, the Church—an organic development inseparable from the total body of humanity. “Once we are liberated from the root idea that the biblical and apostolic images of God have an absolute and eternal authority, then”—Altizer underscored the lesson for modern Catholics—“we can become open to the possibility that everything which orthodox Christianity has known as God is but a particular stage of God’s self-manifestation, and must in turn be transcended by the forward movement of God Himself”

Doubtless Altizer goes too far in his endeavor to create a one-to-one correlation between Rome’s world-view and process-thought Aristotelian logic, St. Thomas’s passion for objective, final truth, and the respect given through the centuries to the inerrant Scriptures and creedal verities are too much a part of Rome’s life to be brushed lightly aside. But Altizer is not mistaken when he points up the extent to which evolutionary, process thinking influences the contemporary Catholic mind.

Karl Adam, in his classic The Spirit of Catholicism, argued that true Catholic Christianity must not be seen in the “embryonic” state (its original biblical documents) but rather in its “progressive unfolding,” even as the oak must be seen not as an acorn but in its full maturity. Today many Catholics regard their church as a living organism that, as the extension of Christ’s incarnation, can creatively reshape its past: “reinterpreting” past pronouncements such as extra ecclesiam nullus salus (“outside the Church there is no salvation”) so as to give them totally new force. Once the Magisterium does reinterpret a past teaching, then all previous authoritative expressions of the teaching are held to carry this meaning: the past is rewritten in terms of the dynamic, living present. (See my paper “The Approach of New Shape Roman Catholicism to Scriptural Inerrancy,” forthcoming in The Evangelical Theological Bulletin and The Springfielder.)

To the Reformation Protestant, this procedure invariably suggests both the Marxist (dialectic, note well) rewriting of history and George Orwell’s 1984, where Winston, the citizen of a totalitarian world in which truth is continually “evolved” and “redefined,” comes to realize that his society has fallen into the epistemological hell of solipsism. The Protestant knows well—or ought to know well—that unless an objective Word from God stands over against the Church, judging it and proclaiming grace to it, the Church invariably deifies itself, thereby engaging in the worst kind of idolatry. When any corporate body lacking a clear external standard of truth grows in strength, it strives to become a standard to itself, a law to itself: a Leviathan, the “mortal god” described by Hobbes. Solovyov, in his Short Story of Antichrist (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Jan. 29, 1965), well showed that where objective revelational truth ceases to provide a firm criterion of action, no church has the holiness to withstand the blandishments of antichristic power. (Cf. my essay, “Evangelical Unity and Contemporary Ecumenicity,” The Springfielder, Autumn, 1965, and The Gordon Review, Winter, 1966.)

From all sides today efforts are being made to unite Christendom ecumenically on the basis of vague dreams of evolving, process truth (a particularly unfortunate example being the writings of Charles J. Curtis, who employs Söderblom as a bridge to join Protestant with Catholic à la Whiteheadian process-thought). Altizer delineated the issue precisely when he asserted at Catholic University: “Any genuine evolutionary understanding of God is incompatible with the idea of an original deposit of faith which is absolute and given or unchanging.”

Here is the watershed: Was God in Christ, objectively reconciling the world unto himself? Did he “once in the end of the world [appear] to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9:26)? Has God spoken with absolute finality in the Holy Scriptures, which testify of Christ? If so, process-theology in all its forms must receive the kiss of death. For only the Christ of Scripture, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, can offer Church and society a genuine Resurrection and Life.

In a dramatically bold legal gesture, a group of Soviet Protestants has asked the United Nations to intervene in behalf of victims of religious persecution. Their remarkable thirty-two-page plea, in the form of a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, is perhaps the best authenticated document of Communist repression of the Christian community ever to come out of the U. S. S. R.

“We would not turn to the international organization if we had only the slightest hope that our applications to the government in the U. S. S. R. would have a positive result,” the group declares. “But cruel war against the unregistered congregations widens.”

The letter, which reached the West on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, appeals repeatedly to legal guarantees under Communist law and indicates thorough familiarity with the Soviet penal code. An English translation is being distributed by the European Christian Mission in London.

“We intercede with you, U Thant, to organize a committee for the examination of the condemned believers,” the group pleads.

An appendix identifies 202 Protestants now said to be imprisoned and gives a virtually complete listing of names, addresses, legal citations,¹Slavic temperament undoubtedly underlies many spontaneous and unnecessary violations of Soviet law. The law and the authorities’ interpretation of it nonetheless represent something considerably less than religious liberty. dates of arrest and sentence, and number of dependents. Most of the alleged offenses took place in 1966, though some are recorded from as late as August of this year. Many more Protestants have been arrested, the letter says, but the information about them could not be collected.

The letter is signed by “The Council of Relatives of Prisoners” and gives a Moscow address to which a reply should be sent. The group is obviously part of the bloc of Protestants who have broken with the so-called Evangelical Christian Baptists sanctioned by Moscow authorities.

The letter charges that the faction is not allowed to have places of worship unless they are registered with the government and that all new congregations that have applied for registration have been refused.

The letter also says that the government has confiscated chapels in at least eighteen cities. Two homes where believers met for worship and prayer were bulldozed. Soviet militia have broken in on services and dispersed or arrested worshipers.

As a result of the intimidation, Protestants have begun to hold services in open woods, but they have been harassed by authorities there, too.

In Kiev alone, the letter declares, there was a wave of eighty-five arrests in ten to fifteen days.

Apartments of believers are searched repeatedly, and children are interrogated and taken from their parents. Prisoners are forbidden to have Bibles. At Barnaul, a religious prisoner is said to have been tortured to death.

Although the letter is a well-authenticated document that deserves sympathetic attention, little is gained by appealing to the U. N. The organization is powerless to intervene in cases where its Declaration on Human Rights has been violated. A U. N. spokesman said its policy is neither to confirm nor to deny receipt of such letters, of which it gets a great many. Normal procedure, he said, is to delete identification and then send the letter to the government concerned.

The letter recalls the incident in Moscow in January, 1963, when thirty-two evangelicals broke into the U. S. Embassy to present a list of religious grievances. The list was sent to Washington and to U. N. headquarters, but its effect has never been officially traced.

The letter is apparently being distributed quite widely in Great Britain. An agency of the British Council of Churches last month reported that it had before it “disturbing evidence of the persecution of Christians in the U.S.S.R.”

The persecution is not limited to Christians. It extends to adherents of the Jewish faith, and Jews in the West, well aware of the suffering, are becoming increasingly vocal about it. They have been purchasing large amounts of newspaper advertising space to call attention to the plight of Soviet Jews.

No corresponding effort is being made in behalf of Soviet Christians, whose plight is as bad or worse. So far, the American religious establishment has settled for exchanges of Communist-approved churchmen as its way of identifying with the Soviet Christian community. The latest such exchange is taking place this fall between the Church of the Brethren in the United States, which sent a three-man team and a translator, and the Russian Orthodox Church, which is scheduled to send a three-man team to the United States this month.

In contrast to American indifference, German Protestant leaders plan extensive research on the persecution of Christians around the world. The plan was prompted by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Christians of the Ibo tribe in Nigeria some months ago.

The persistence of widespread repression of religious activity in the Soviet Union is, of course, an indirect tribute to religious faith and to the believers there.

“The fifty years of Soviet struggle with religion add up to a case study of ideological failure,” says Peter Grose in the New York Times. “It is the doctrine of atheism, not faith in God, that is dying in Soviet Russia today.” He adds that “an intricate police operation is seeking to penetrate and control the church that could not be destroyed.”

Grose thinks the prevalence of middle-aged and elderly persons among the worshipers may not be so significant as it seems; many Soviet citizens, he says, “do not feel like disclosing their convictions until they have reached their professional peak or retired on a pension.” One Western resident of Moscow is quoted as saying he was “willing to bet that fifty years from now those churches will be just as crowded as they are today—and still with old people.”

The perennial plea of Soviet Protestants is for more Bibles. Religious News Service reports that since 1917 the Soviet government has sanctioned only three printings of the complete Bible: 25,000 copies in 1926, another 25,000 in 1956, and 10,000 in 1957. To capitalize on the demand, Soviet government publishers have been issuing various interpretations of scriptural accounts and revised narratives of biblical events.

Bill Kapitaniuk, Canadian-born evangelist of Ukrainian origin, reports that Siberia is experiencing a new surge of Christian faith. The reason, he says, is that believers who were shipped there years ago have influenced those who came later to populate rising cities and industrial areas. Kapitaniuk, who is working with the Slavic Gospel Association, estimates that since his last visit to the Soviet Union, in 1965, about 1,000 new churches have been formed. He adds: “The Communist tactics appear to be a mixture between wanting to crush the Church and destroy it, and yet at the same time not wanting to drive the Church underground where it would be harder to control.”

PROTESTANT PANORAMA

A Southern Baptist church near the Little Rock, Arkansas, Air Force Base lost five families when it decided to pioneer and solicit Negro members. Since then, however, membership and giving have nearly doubled.

The Southern Baptist Convention joined two Negro Baptist denominations in a six-night inter-racial revival in Harlem.

The 400,000-member Baptist association in North Carolina will now require its churches to limit membership to immersed persons, possibly forcing out Myers Park and St. John’s churches in Charlotte.

Fifty persons from eight Baptist denominations met in Chicago to lay plans for a 1968 evangelism congress and the 1969 Crusade of the Americas. The council of the non-participating American Baptist Convention sent best wishes to ABC members involved in the planning.

Baptist Bible Seminary, affiliated with the General Association of Regular Baptists, will move next year from Johnson City, New York, to a 153-acre campus in Clark’s Summit, Pennsylvania, purchased from a Roman Catholic seminary.

A Methodist home near Washington, D. C., cut off from federal medicaid for alleged discrimination, was reinstated.

The American Lutheran Church Council will discuss in February background reports on whether to recommend that the denomination join the National Council of Churches in 1968.

The Reformed Churches in the Netherlands synod decided a 1926 declaration of the literal historicity of Genesis 1 and 2 is no longer binding on members; it now permits an understanding of the stories as myths or symbols. An accompanying statement affirmed the authority of Scripture and limited interpretation to the bounds of the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism.

A nationwide evangelism drive by Portugal’s thirty-six Baptist congregations led to 750 converts. Wide publicity in the press was used, and four Lisbon dailies carried news accounts.

Methodists in Cuba will form an autonomous church at a February conference.

PERSONALIA

The Rev. Howard B. Spragg was promoted to executive vice-president of the home-missions board for the United Church of Christ, to replace the retiring Truman Douglass. The press announcement claimed the agency “has led the ecumenical movement in American Protestantism.”

The Rev. Tom Foley, a Presbyterian from Jackson, Missouri, will be first Protestant chaplain at New York’s Kennedy Airport.

Albert H. van den Heuvel, formerly of the World Council of Churches’ youth department, is the new director of the communication department. He is a minister of the Netherlands Reformed Church.

The Rev. Robert Caul of the Graymoor Friars became the second Roman Catholic priest on the faith-and-order staff of the National Council of Churches.

Alvin Plantinga, philosophy teacher at Calvin College (Christian Reformed), won a $10,000 Danforth grant to study the relation between epistemological problems and the nature of scientific hypotheses.

Raymond J. Davis, general director of Sudan Interior Mission, was appointed president of the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, which marks its fiftieth anniversary this year.

Church of England vicar Stephen Hopkinson has a hunch that homosexuality may be a socially and morally desirable answer to the population explosion. Honest.

Deaths

MRS. RUTH KERR, 73, Baptist laywoman and president of the Kerr Glass company who founded Westmont College as the Bible Missionary Institute in 1937; in Burbank, California.

HUGH MURCHISON, 71, California stock broker, radio executive, and Presbyterian elder, who served the Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles and several other evangelical organizations.

W. P. Baugh, 95, oldest active Anglican priest in Canada until he retired from three rural parishes last year; said never to have taken a vacation; at Morin Heights, Quebec.

MISCELLANY

The World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church will sponsor a joint conference on world economics next April, probably in Africa. The WCC planner is evangelism staffer Philip Potter. “The gap between rich and poor nations” will be a major topic.

Toronto taxi drivers and druggists will hand out cards advertising the suicide-prevention telephone service of “the Samaritans,” led by Anglican priest Andrew Todd.

The Register quotes the archbishop of Quito, Ecuador, as saying that by the end of last month the nation’s Catholic Church had given up more than half its land as part of an agrarian reform program.

Only Muslims in Israeli territory had access to Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock for the holy day marking Mohammed’s brief assumption into heaven. The next day, the constituent assembly of the World Islamic League in Mecca urged a holy war to regain the shrine city.

The “Freedom City” begun in Greenville, Mississippi, by National Council of Churches staffers will have fifty families build permanent homes under a $200,000 grant from the war on poverty, plus private gifts. Further east, at Grenada, a Negro Methodist church was burned Sunday, October 29; church officials call it arson.

Georgia’s new Sunday closing law was ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court, but Governor Lester Maddox may try another version. Maddox reportedly has asked state legislators to pledge not to smoke or drink.

The Montgomery, Alabama, Baptist Association voted to continue the ban on federal or state aid to its hospital.

A House committee killed for this year the proposal to make more long weekends by putting five national holidays on Monday.

Arizona’s Supreme Court approved state welfare payments to the Salvation Army on the grounds that the “true beneficiaries” are poor people, not the Army.

The U. S. Supreme Court reversed three lower-court convictions involving nudist magazines, some of which opponents said were aimed at homosexuals.

The student government at Wheaton College in Illinois pulled out of the U. S. National Student Association because it meddles in partisan politics too much. After CIA support was revealed earlier this year, Brandeis, Amherst, and Michigan also withdrew.

“A Pentecostalist is a person who thinks he’s arrived because he speaks in tongues.”

These are not words from a critic of the “charismatic renewal,” which continues to penetrate the historic denominations and Roman Catholicism. This is Pentecostalist David J. du Plessis, World Council of Churches gadfly, speaking to a Presbyterian congregation. Sharing the platform last month was renowned Presbyterian John A. Mackay, former president of Princeton Theological Seminary.

“Forgive all the Pentecostals for all their blunders, but don’t shun the experience,” du Plessis continued. He was talking about the baptism in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues, an experience that twenty years ago you probably didn’t admit to unless you belonged to a Pentecostal church.

Du Plessis’s comments typify a counter-trend: In many Pentecostal circles the big issue isn’t tongues anymore; it’s the total ministry of the Holy Spirit. Unlike the cork-popping new wine of Pentecostal revivals following the 1906 Azusa Street Mission meetings—which resulted in the Pentecostal churches—the characteristic of the charismatic renewal of the sixties is reformation from within. For instance:

• A charismatic communion of more than one hundred Presbyterian (U. S. and U. S. A.) ministers maintains an aura of anonymity and meets with minimum publicity. Last month twenty gathered in Austin, Texas, with Mackay and J. Rodman Williams, professor of systematic theology at Austin Seminary. Stated aims: avoiding the quenching of the Spirit, and becoming a “leavening rather than a divisive force in the Church.”

• Ecumenical, Inter-Church Team Ministries, based in Newhall, California, promotes “full Gospel” conferences “in all branches of the Christian Church, as well as in seminaries, universities and colleges.” Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Lutherans were among those who testified to receiving “the baptism” at an ICTM seminar last month in Chicago Guideposts editor John Sherrill, author of the glossolalia-approving They Speak With Other Tongues, is a board member.

• Stratford Retreat House sponsored a ten-day “charismatic airlift” to Jerusalem last month. Led by “Spirit-filled” Bible teachers and preachers, it was a follow-up of a London airlift two years ago with Oral Roberts, Harald Bredesen (Reformed Church tongues-speaking minister), and the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship.

“Imagine,” beckons the brochure, “preaching and testifying and handing out Hebrew tracts in Jerusalem … praying in the Upper Room for a new infilling.…”

Noisiest—and most open—promoters of the “second baptism” among non-Pentecostals are members of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship. Du Plessis recently told several thousand persons from twenty-two denominations that FGBMF has been bridging the gap between Pentecostals and “mainliners.” But he privately swatted its Madison Avenue techniques, which “exploit well-known men to boost the movement.”

Federated American Baptist-Disciples of Christ minister Don Basham told the audience he kept his Spirit baptism secret for nearly five years for fear of public reaction. His case is typical. After an initial outburst of publicity and a round of church tongue-lashings, denominational charismatic cells largely moved underground. But the movement is spreading—quietly, cautiously.

Pentecost Revisited

The Assemblies of God has called for an extensive evaluation of the Pentecostal movement—the first in its fifty-three-year history—to point out overall strengths and weaknesses. The denomination’s 13,000 churches and missions have agreed to abide by the committee’s recommendations when they are presented to the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America in St. Louis next August. Assemblies Superintendent Thomas Zimmerman said the study is “an attempt to be relevant.”

Trying to count tounges-speakers within non-Pentecostal churches is like sizing up an iceberg by observing the part above water. Du Plessis estimates more than 1,000 Catholic converts this year alone. Episcopalians Dennis Bennett of St. Luke’s, Seattle, and Bishop Chandler W. Sterling of Montana, head of the American Church Union, estimate that 10 per cent of the Episcopal clergy (about 700) speak in tongues.

Bennett touched off the modern glossolalia movement and split his Van Nuys, California, church in 1960 when he announced from the pulpit he had spoken in tongues. Now Bennett and Presbyterian pastor James Brown of Parkesburg, Pennsylvania, pack their churches with late-night weekend audiences without official opposition.

Bennett, who recently married Rita Reed—sister of surgeon William Standish Reed, a tongues-speaking columnist for Christian Life—says about one-third of attenders are older teen-agers and collegians. His “Spirit-baptized” people win three or four persons to Christ every week, he says.

Numerous Baptists have spoken in tongues, but no one hazards a guess on just how many. Michigan American Baptist official Francis Whiting has supported the charismatic movement. Lutherans, Methodists, Christian Adventists, and Mennonite Brethren also are involved.

In addition to outbreaks of tongues at schools like Princeton and Yale after lectures there by du Plessis and Church of God Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson (who now claims to be “King of the World,”), Pentecostal cells are flourishing among Catholics at Duquesne, Notre Dame, and Michigan State, and lately at Iowa State and Holy Cross (Worcester, Massachusetts).

Personalities who use the tongues experience devotionally include Catherine Marshall LeSourd, authoress and wife of the late Peter Marshall; Coleen Townsend Evans, former actress and wife of Presbyterian minister Louis Evans, Jr.; and New York Times feature reporter McCandlish Phillips.

Tongues-speakers are not stigmatized as they were five years ago, but there are detractors among ultra-conservative elements, especially Dispensationalists (tongues were for Pentecost, not today), and some liberals (excessive emotionalism).

Campus group leaders have come cheek-to-jowl with the tongues issue. Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ forbids its 1,100 staffers to speak in tongues, even in private devotions (it’s divisive).

Critics from all sides raise the sticky question: Are tongues real language or mere sounds? Bennett claims a truck-driver parishioner speaks fluent Mandarin under Spirit influence. American Bible Society linguist Eugene Nida analized scores of tongues tapes, concluded it was nonsense. Hartford Seminary Foundation Professor William Samarin is seeking tongues-speakers for an “unbiased investigation.” Some apologists, citing Romans 8:26, say non-language glossolalia can be Spirit-inspired.

Insiders in the Order of St. Luke say there is a shake-up over reported infiltration of spiritualism. The nub of the contention is that healing, speaking in tongues, and discerning of spirits all are listed by Paul (1 Cor. 12) as gifts of the Spirit.

The once charisma-chary Bishop James A. Pike now says a “second baptism is a valid spiritual experience.” But Assembly of God pastors warn against séances and shun “communications with the dead” through mediums. Warns Gordon Swanson of San Bruno, California: “It’s the keen edge of the demonic; you can no longer recognize the power of the blood of Christ.”

Presbyterian elder statesman Mackay is obviously impressed with the charismatic renewal: he calls it “the most significant and influential movement of our time.” And the white-haired Scotsman foresees a more cordial rapprochement between Catholics and Pentecostals than between adherents of mainline denominations.

Charismatic communion provides a powerful, personal appeal, and a sense of excitement often disdained in formal, mainline churches.

Proffers Mackay: “The future of the Church could be with a reformed Catholicism and a matured Pentecostalism.”

PROGRAM-PANNING

The American Baptist Convention’s evangelism program needs an overhaul. Despite diplomatic language, that was the brunt of a report this month from the Executive Committee of the ABC’s General Council.

The evidence was old but impressive (see June 9 issue, page 35): official complaints from New Jersey and Ohio, frequent unofficial complaints from groups of ministers, and estimates by some regional executives that three-fourths of their people “are unhappy with our existing program.”

The evangelism report, to be voted on by the General Council at its January 31-February 1 meeting, played down many local complaints as just passing the buck to national headquarters. But the theologically diverse study committee named by President L. Doward McBain found at least a “seeming neglect of the more ‘familiar’ forms of evangelistic effort” and a failure of the national staff to sell its “new forms.”

Since the General Council has no actual authority over the home-mission society, the report can only nudge the agency to make its own study of the problems and to mend its ways. Among suggestions for reform are better leadership in winning new church members, and balancing of the staff and program to include traditional views.

A major gripe has been withdrawal of national funds from support of regional evangelism executives. The report absolved evangelism Secretary Jitsuo Morikawa from charges that he dosen’t believe in personal salvation, but Ohio’s complaint about his universalism was not mentioned.

After the General Council voted for the evangelism probe in May, Morikawa flatly denied in a home-mission paper that he was a universalist. He then offered a complicated explanation of his “who knows?” position on the subject.

Morikawa’s major interest is mission to secular city structures. One-third of the General Council’s upcoming crammed agenda will be spent touring his Philadelphia projects. At the next meeting, a home-mission staffer is supposed to react to the report, but the response is predictable. Executive William Rhoades said it includes nothing his board hasn’t already considered.

The home-mission staff’s sensitivity is seen in reaction to a rather bland, rather conservative series of three editorials on evangelism ideology in the denominational monthly Crusader. The paper didn’t mention any names, but headquarters suddenly worked out a brand-new set of guidelines for ABC publications, reportedly including a call for “sympathetic treatment” of denominational programs. This month a General Council committee, after intense debate, added an appendix guaranteeing editorial freedom. The compromise version will be presented at the next meeting.

In contrast to the home-mission controversy, the ABC foreign-mission board this year quietly came out with a balanced policy statement, the first since 1933. It begins, “the basic aim of the Christian mission is to proclaim and exemplify the Gospel of Jesus Christ by word and deed. The personal dimension of this outreach is to bring men everywhere into a redemptive and transforming relationship with Jesus Christ.… The wide dimension requires the involvement of all Christians, individually and collectively, in bringing the Christian Gospel in all its fullness to bear on every aspect of human life and society.…”

The General Council’s future agenda also includes a proposal for a three-year study, to cost up to $100,000, of denominational reorganization. Among the issues are closer ties between General Council and the independent agencies, representation of regions in the General Council, and giving full program-planning responsibility to the office of General Secretary Edwin Tuller.

THAT ROMANESQUE SYNOD

“Forty years ago,” the gray-haired woman told the overcrowded auditorium, my Protestant fiancé and I went to my priest to ask him to marry us. When my husband-to-be heard what the church required of him he got up and walked out, never to go to church again. I followed him. Not until last year did I return to the church as a widow, because I felt there had been a real change.”

The woman may have been influenced more by the rebellious Roman Catholic press of Holland or the violently anti-Roman spirit of the Catholic teach-in she addressed at Dordrecht than by the Synod of Bishops in Rome. For that same day the bishops rejected all but a few minor changes in church attitudes on mixed marriages.

Only thirty-three prelates backed the proposal to recognize marriages that have not been performed before a Catholic priest. The liberals felt let down, especially by their North American colleagues who belonged to the majority of 125 that rejected major changes.

Apparently secular newspapers were also disappointed. Although they had given the synodical Roman holiday tremendous coverage at first, they said little about its romanesque results.

During the vital, final voting week, the synod’s news releases were cut to minimum length. What had started as a highly significant meeting collapsed into a rather dull symposium.

The Dutch Catholic journal Time, seeking to explain the abatement, stressed the important advisory task of the synod: “… it threw pre-conciliar laws and resolutions drafted by the Curia into the wastepaper basket of history.”

Undoubtedly the best work was done in the field of “dangers that threaten the faith.” After voting down a catalogue of errors enumerated by Cardinal Ottaviani’s office, a committee of bishops drafted a far more pastoral report that was accepted with an overwhelming majority. In it, the bishops propose formation of an international committee of theologians to advise the pope. It was a clear vote of no confidence in Ottaviani’s colleagues.

The Pope’S Operation

“Procedamus in nomine Domini.” With that order on November 4 from Pope Paul VI (“Let us proceed in the name of the Lord”), six doctors began surgery for removal of his enlarged prostate gland. It was the first internal operation ever done on a pope. The chief surgeon was Dr. Pietro Valdoni, who in 1948 saved the life of Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti by removing three assasin bullets. First medical reports after the operation indicated there was no sign of cancer. The 70-year-old pontiff was up and around in a few days and was expected to make his first public ceremony December 8.

The bishops recommended:

• That the pope publish a positive pastoral encyclical on church teachings.

• That bishops, not the pope, be allowed to give dispensations to mixed couples to marry outside the Catholic Church.

• That the Apostles’ Creed, not the longer Nicene, be read during Mass, and that three portions of Scripture be used in services instead of two.

• That rules for reforming canon law be heavily amended.

As the bishops sat down to vote, Pope Paul received his eastern friend Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras, who was on a precedent-shattering visit to the Vatican. They decided to keep in touch with each other, especially about pastoral problems like mixed marriages. The patriarch’s conclusion was: “I am too old to see the recovery of the unity of our churches, but I’m sure it will become a reality.” Then he was off to visit the World Council of Churches offices and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The visit had worn out Paul so much that his doctors forbade him to attend the synod’s closing meeting. Long-proposed surgery soon followed (see box below).

Only once did the Pope call the bishops’ meeting “important.” He didn’t say why he thought it was, nor what he would do with the results of the month-long deliberations, nor whether there would be a second meeting.

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

LAY POWER IN LUBBOCK

Despite the chilly snowfall outside, Texas Baptist laymen debated hotly and won a larger role in the affairs of the 4,000-church state convention. The 3,000 delegates at Lubbock this month supplanted the largely inactive Texas Baptist Brotherhood with a new lay organization, Texas Baptist Men, which has increased power to act on missions and missions education. The delegates endorsed virtually all recommendations of the controversial, investigative Committee of 100, created by the convention last year to head off demands for a separate laymen-only organization.

Many committee recommendations sought increased efficiency in the state’s billion-dollar Baptist empire. Other accepted proposals strengthened the Christian Life and Welfare Commissions and expanded evangelism among military men and laymen. A major rejected recommendation would have required that one of the top three state officials be a layman.

Also at Lubbock, the Church Loan Board came under fire for encroaching on private business in two speculative California real-estate deals, in which the board stands to turn a million-dollar profit. The Baptists also urged a “sweeping investigation” of laxity by the state liquor control board.

MARQUITA MOSS

ANOTHER BISHOP STEPS DOWN

Chandler W. Sterling of Montana will become the second Episcopal bishop to resign when he steps down next July after eleven years in office. Resigned Bishop James Pike left leadership of the Diocese of California last year.

Sterling is president of the American Church Union (Anglo-Catholic wing of the Episcopal Church) and a supporter of the charismatic movement within the historic denominations (see page 39)

The 56-year-old prelate, who has favored direct church involvement in areas such as civil rights, says he has no definite plans for the future.

In his resignation announcement, he noted that bishops traditionally remain in office until retirement. But the custom is passing, he said, along with the “paternalistic nineteenth-century religion” that fostered it. Sterling said he was under no pressure to resign.

WHAT EVANGELICAL TEENS WANT

Evangelical teen-agers want church guidance on sex, marriage preparation, and job choice, and favor racial integration, according to a poll described at last month’s meeting of the National Sunday School Association. The survey was made of 2,646 youths between the ages of 14 and 19 who belong to thirty-seven conservative denominations and professed to having “received Christ as Saviour.”

William Greig, Jr., California Presbyterian and first lay president of the NSSA, called it “a very honest attempt by the conservative wing of American Protestantism” to see how to minister more effectively to youth.

The study showed a great majority do not approve of teens lying, cheating, gossiping, having premarital sexual intercourse, breaking speed limits, drinking, or reading lewd literature. Three-fourths were willing to attend a racially integrated Sunday School or live in a mixed neighborhood, but most opposed interracial marriage.

Ants And The Incarnation

The man who created the controversial Parable film for the New York World’s Fair has a sequel-just in time for Advent season—on the Incarnation theme. The Antkeeper, written and directed by Rolf Forsberg and produced by the Lutheran Church in America, was released to TV stations last week.

In the half-hour color film, a Mexican Indian gardener and his son raise a colony of winged ants who ruin their Eden. The ants are tempted into another garden and lose their wings. Then the son is born into the society as a red ant who tries to teach love. Eventually the ants turn on him and tear him apart.

For some reason Forsberg denies that his work is an allegory of the Incarnation story. “If people see God in the gardener and themselves in the ants, fine. But the story can be enjoyed in and of itself. The beauty of the film is that it leads the imagination outward and lets the mind come to any number of conclusions.”

The narrator is Fred Gwynne, who plays a Frankenstein monster on the TV series The Munsters. The essential ant photography was done by Robert Crandall, insect expert for the Walt Disney nature films. Insects as actors are a first in films, Crandall says. It took him three months to get one five-second scene showing friendship between red and black ants, which are natural enemies.

One source said complete findings will show, however, a considerable difference between what the teens profess and what they admit actually doing. The full report is due in 1968.

JOHN NOVOTNEY

DEATH-OF-GOD PSYCHIATRY

O. H. Mowrer, heralded as a leading figure in the movement to mesh religion and psychiatry, says “the Church must decide whether it wants to be theistic or non-theistic,” and leans to the latter. “Theism is in trouble,” says the University of Illinois psychiatrist. “It has become a stumbling block for greater numbers of people.” In past ages it has provided neither the “power” nor “an adequate psychiatry” to deal with deep-seated human problems, he told a symposium last month sponsored by Roman Catholic Marquette University.

In his view, religion can exist with or without God, since its purpose is “reconciliation of ruptured relationships.” Mowrer, much-publicized proponent of “integrity therapy,” postulates that a disturbed person is separated from others because of secret guilt. Restoration to valid relationships comes as the therapist helps the patient confess and, make restitution for his wrongs (see review, October 27 issue, page 32).

“In many ways mine is a works religion,” he conceded. Mowrer is unsure whether God exists, and is sure Jesus was not divine. Raised a Presbyterian, he left the denomination in college, later returned and took a church office, then quit because he could no longer accept the Westminster Confession. But now the confessional stand has changed, he noted. “I’m not sure if I should be in or out.”

BARBARA H. KUEHN

New York State this month held the first major plebiscite on church-state separation since the concept was added to the U. S. Constitution in 1791. And nearly three-fourths of the 4.7 million voters opposed the new state constitution, with its weakened limits on state aid to church schools.

The dramatic, lopsided “no” vote followed weeks of intense religious lobbying and confusing political endorsements (see box below). National Catholic Reporter said the pro-constitution drive showed “a militant fervor unequalled” in the history of the state’s Catholic bloc. The lay weekly Commonweal said you’d have to hark back to the Massachusetts birth-control furor of the forties “to find anything quite like it.”

Thus Glenn Archer, chief of the strictly separationist Americans United, had special praise for Catholic laymen. “Born free, they have now voted to preserve this birthright for their children,” he exulted. Since 41 per cent of the electorate is Roman Catholic, for the constitution to lose a sizable chunk of the laity had to reject explicit pleas from the hierarchy. As it turned out, the charter not only failed in New York City but couldn’t carry the city’s Catholic strongholds, Queens and Staten Island.

New York spent ten years of agitation, six months of convention sessions, three million delegate words, and ten million tax dollars to revise the state’s 1894 constitution. The delegates decided to replace the “Blaine amendment,” which banned any aid to religious schools, with the wording of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Democrats, with an apparent eye on the Catholic vote, forced the constitution as a take-it-or-leave-it package, despite pleas for a separate ballot on the church-state question. The gamble was that conservative Catholics who feared higher spending under other charter provisions would vote yes in order to boost a parochial school aid. The one-package handling, and state aid itself, became the major campaign issues.

The strategy backfired. In addition, the mostly-Catholic Citizens for Educational Freedom overplayed its hand during its million-dollar drive¹By contrast, the state council of churches had a war chest of about $15,000. with a series of ads hinting that anybody who didn’t want state money to go to church schools was a bigot or a meany. One TV spot showed a tow truck hauling away a smashed car while the announcer sobbed, “Unless we have a new constitution, one out of every four kids in New York State—Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant—may never be taught to drive safely.”

Choosing Sides

Here’s how some of the New York State stars fell during the furious politicking over the proposed constitution:

Pro—The state Roman Catholic hierarchy and lay lobbyists, the Democratic party, Governor Rockefeller, Bobby Kennedy, New York City’s council president, state AFL-CIO executives, many Orthodox Jews, and some Lutherans and Episcopalians who sought more aid for their church schools.

Con—State and New York City church councils, many Protestant groups, Senator Javits, Mayor Lindsay, the lieutenant governor, Liberal and Conservative parties, League of Woman Voters, American Civil Liberties Union, CORE, three New York City dailies, city Episcopal Bishop Horace Donegan, most Reform and many Conservative Jews and such secular groups as B’nai B’rith—and Mrs. Helen Sweeney, a Roman Catholic who said she got $50 a week to spy on an anti-constitution lobby for a pro-constitution lobby.

Liberal Party Chairman Donald Harrington, a Unitarian minister, called the tactics “essentially dishonest.” Even Christianity and Crisis—New York-based Protestant journal that supports a liberalized reading in church-state matters—was ashamed. Another liberal voice, the Christian Century, lost its ecumenical cool long enough to charge that Catholic lobbyists were “determined to overthrow the church-state principles on which this country was founded and by means of which it has endured.”

Among Catholic money-raising plans to support the constitution was an alleged blind collection through a charity in the Diocese of Brooklyn. Laymen charged that parish funds were secretly “tapped” for the campaign.

The major irony in the constitutional fuss was that the new charter would have allowed taxpayers—for the first time—to challenge constitutionality of church-school aid programs. Sophisticated separationists were torn between having an aid ban without the right to legal challenges, or having the First Amendment plus the right to oppose grants in the courts.

Even with Blaine in force, New York church-school pupils get $38 million a year in state aid, under the “child benefit” loophole. The major categories are busing, $16.4 million; textbooks, $3.5 million; and health services, $3.3 million. The U. S. Supreme Court has agreed to rule this term on Flast v. Gardner, a New York suit challenging state and federal aid for books, guidance services, and reading instruction.

Repeal of Blaine is not a dead issue. Both Republican and Democratic legislative leaders are planning to work for repeal in the next session, and predict success. Presbyterians in Albany, the state capital, are pledged to work with Catholics to seek repeal.

The New York results may indicate not only an increasingly independent Catholic laity but disenchantment with the parochial-school idea. Not only the state’s system, with 640,000 elementary students alone, but church schools across the country are having trouble getting support. In Philadelphia the predominantly white parochial system is thinking of charging tuition because half the parishes are already behind in high-school assessments this year. A hot-potato move for Pennsylvania state help for church schools was postponed until after election day by the legislature.

In neighboring Maryland, a constitutional convention is trying to decide what to do about aid, as well as formal recognition of the Deity.

ACTIVISM ALL OVER

Church activists—and their critics—grabbed the spotlight in recent anti-war, civil-rights, crime, and vice skirmishes.

Jail doors clicked shut on Martin Luther King, Jr., in Bessemer, Jefferson County, Alabama, and—in Baltimore, Maryland—on Roman Catholic priest Philip Berrigan, United Church of Christ minister James Mengel, and two members of the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission. These four were charged with destroying property and records after they entered the U. S. Customs House and poured blood into Selective Service filing cabinets to protest U. S. policy in Viet Nam. The blood was a mixture of their own and that of ducks, the protesters said.

King and three Negro clergy companions surrendered to sheriff’s deputies at the Birmingham airport and served five-day terms for contempt-of-court convictions received in 1963. Small demonstrations against the jailings were staged in Baltimore and Birmingham.

At Yale’s New Haven, Connecticut, campus, University President Kingman Brewster, Jr., scored Chaplain William S. Coffin as a “strident voice of draft-resistance” after Coffin turned in fifty draft cards of students to Justice Department officials. The ruckus touched off a campus investigation. FBI agents withdrew after Divinity School Dean Robert C. Johnson charged their presence was disrupting classes. Coffin has also proposed that Yale’s Battell Chapel be used as a “sanctuary” for draft-resisters.

In a different style of protest, New York’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine apparently will remain unfinished as a symbol of the “anguish” of nearby slums. Episcopal Bishop Horace Donegan said last summer’s riots and the urban crisis had changed his mind about going ahead with plans to complete the seventy-six-year-old Gothic edifice.

In Philadelphia, a controversy over the Church’s role in civil disobedience prompted Negro Episcopal Rector Arthur Wooley to demand the resignation of his bishop, Robert L. DeWitt, who spoke out against civil disobedience.

In Cambridge, Maryland, Negro Bishop James L. Eure of the Churches of God in Christ padlocked the Rev. Ernest Dupree’s church to prevent the Black Action Federation from meeting there, and persuaded Dupree to resign as local president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Civil-rights and liberal groups put pressure on St. Louis Episcopal Bishop George L. Cadigan, and he decided to back down on his suspension of militant civil-rights clergymen Walter W. Witte and William L. Matheus. The two charged they were fired for civil-rights activities. Several church and rights groups picketed Cadigan’s office to protest their dismissal.

With a different militancy, crimefighting Presbyterian minister Albert F. Hill of New Rochelle, New York, recently organized brigades of housewife-spies to stamp out the “Mafia guerrilla army in our midst.” His petticoated-commandos use walkie-talkies and a movie camera in their crusade against organized crime and illegal gambling in the suburban city.

BEYOND BIAFRA WHAT?

The six-month-old civil war in Nigeria has left virtually the entire southern section of the country without a foreign missionary. Last month, several missionaries were still reported working in Biafra, the breakaway eastern regime which was near collapse under attacks by federal troops. But most had been evacuated.

Refusal by the United States to sell planes to the central government and its subsequent criticism of the Nigerian purchase of Communist planes has created serious anti-American feeling, Missionary News Service reported. However, MNS said, “there is no indication as yet of the extent of this on missionary relations with the people.”

Sir Francis Ibiam, former governor of Eastern Nigeria, who is currently one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, has reportedly written to Queen Elizabeth, returning the knighthood conferred upon him. He condemned both “Christian Britain and Communist Russia for their shameless support of Muslim Nigeria.”

Actually, about half of the 60,000,000 people of Nigeria are Muslim and one-fourth are nominally Christian. The federal head of state, military leader Yakubu Gowon, is an outspoken Christian, the son of an evangelist. He challenges the contention that the war is in any sense religious.

Gowon has ordered his men to treat prisoners humanely, not to molest women or children, and not to desecrate churches and mosques. There have been numerous reports of atrocities by federal troops against the 7.5 million Ibo people, who dominate the eastern region.

Nigeria, whose population makes it one of the ten largest countries in the world, has been a relatively fertile field for missionary effort. Particularly dramatic has been the “New Life for All” movement, an interdenominational effort along the lines of Latin America Mission’s “Evangelism-in-depth.” The movement hopes for a saturation campaign for the north of Nigeria by next year. Meanwhile, Sudan Interior Mission spokesmen say that “even if the East and West and North decide to work together, any peace will be a delicate, uneasy balance for years to come.”

WITTENBERG SOURS

Partly because Communists fear the Christian community and partly because East German authorities tried to make political hay of Martin Luther, the 450th anniversary of the Reformation at Wittenberg went sour.

A sample of the Communist tack is a quote in the Washington Post from Leo Stern, vice-president of the East Germany Academy of Science. Luther’s teachings, said Stern, “although cloaked in religious terms, were eminently political teachings.”

“The foundations of Luther’s teaching that man is justified by faith alone meant, under the circumstances … not only a proclamation of fundamental religious differences of dogma with the Catholic Church, but, at the same time, a revolutionary program of extraordinary political explosiveness,” Stern reportedly said.

Things got so bad at Wittenberg that even so eminent a bridge-builder as Eugene Carson Blake was miffed. Complaining of restrictions, Blake joined two other churchmen in issuing a statement that said they doubted they would have come if they had known of the hindrances in advance.

An East German Protestant bishop and two senior Lutheran clergymen from Wittenberg resigned from a state-organized commemoration committee in protest against Communist interpretations of the Reformation.

Numerous churchmen from the West were turned away at the border. Some had come long distances, hopeful of securing East German entry visas. (Some Communist countries do not normally issue visas in advance but instruct travelers to apply at border crossings.)

Dr. Eugene Smathers, moderator of the United Presbyterian General Assembly, was slightly injured when a car in which he was riding overturned in Czechoslovakia. Stated Clerk William P. Thompson and three other United Presbyterians were excluded from East Germany, but Markus Barth got in.

Dr. George W. Forell of the University of Iowa, described as the only American invited to speak at the East German Reformation ceremonies, seized the occasion for some candid commentary. The university’s news service released an English version of his lecture said to have been given in German.

Forell lashed out against “Utopians who see the historical process itself as the agent of redemption.” He noted that a prevalent kind of thinking “attributes a moral conscience to the evolutionary process itself. It is almost tragic how rapidly these optimistic theologians of evolution are crushed by the events that were to redeem mankind.”

“The same William Hamilton who only yesterday described the great changes taking place in the relationship of the races in the United States of America in terms of what he called ‘the new optimism’ stands today condemned as the typical false prophet by the events he so completely misunderstood,” said Forell.

“Hamilton quoted the sentimental song of the civil-rights movement ‘We Shall Overcome’ as evidence for the power of the new optimism produced by ‘the death of God.’ Today, only a few years later, these same young people in America sing ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ rejecting the naïve optimism of the civil-rights movement and demanding instead ‘black power,’ ” Forell declared.

He also criticized advocates of the new morality for assuming that “the life of love, the life of discipleship, is a simple human possibility, without the need for justification by faith.” And he called attention to Luther’s argument that the problem of man is man.

New Day For Japanese Christmas

An estimated 16,000 Christians live in Tokyo, the world’s largest city, and nearly that many persons responded to invitations to Christian commitment during Billy Graham’s crusade there (see November 10 issue, page 53). The attendance total for the evangelist’s meetings was 191,950.

The day after the final game of Japan’s World Series, Graham also drew a standing-room-only crowd of 36,000 at Korakuen Stadium for his closing meeting. The throng braved a cold north wind of fifteen miles an hour in the aftermath of Typhoon Dinah.

Students predominated in the audiences Graham attracted, and more than half the inquirers were in the 19-to-29 age group. Despite student unrest over the Viet Nam war, no anti-American demonstrations disrupted the meetings.

The ten-day crusade was probably the largest ecumenical Christian effort in Japan’s history. Japanese church leaders hailed it as a significant turning point in national church life.

“This is the rising sun of a new day for the church in Japan,” declared radio evangelist Akira Hatori, who served as Graham’s translator.

Anglican Bishop Tsunenori Takase said, “I believe from this day on the Church in Japan will be a missionary, sending Church rather than just a receiving church.” Shuichi Matsumura, a leader of the Baptist World Alliance, said that “our churches will never be the same again.”

Graham’s own comment: “This crusade indicates to me that regardless of race, nationality, or language, man is the same the world over and the message of Jesus Christ meets man’s deepest needs.”

NEW QUMRAN SCROLL

Another ancient parchment manuscript, tentatively called the “Temple Scroll,” has been found near the Qumran community in the Dead Sea area, according to the Israel Exploration Society. The document, said to be the longest found in the area, measures almost twenty-six feet and dates from the Herodian period (55 B. C. to A. D. 93).

Archaeologists say that the scroll contains previously unknown details of a temple and its courts, vessels, and service. The scroll apparently was in the hands of a Bethlehem merchant during the Israeli-Arab war last June and was obtained when Israel captured the city. Religious News Service said the merchant still claims ownership of the scroll and may sue to regain possession.

Hebrew University archeologist Yigeal Yadin says the scroll indicates that one group of Jesus’ followers joined the Qumran community shortly after the Crucifixion and influenced it to adopt some Christian doctrine.

The first Qumran scrolls were found in 1947 by Bedouin tribesmen who were seeking lost goats in hillside caves.

EVANGELICALS INHIBITED

During an annual retreat of evangelical mission executives at Winona Lake, Indiana, some criticism was expressed of the lack of evangelical interaction in the social sphere. An unofficial report on the retreat by a “findings committee” said: “The evangelical mind-set … has inhibited constructive thought and action. These attitudes may be summarized as follows:

“A fear that any form of social action or concern will pre-empt or displace evangelistic witness; an assumed correlation between a conservative theological position and a non-interventionist attitude toward social problems; an insensitivity and apathy because of generations of silence on social issues; a predominantly status quo mentality; a narrow view of the compass of Christian ethics and morality; an unwillingness to accept criticism and a persistent tendency to blame conspiratorial sources for social problems.”

The committee said the report merely expressed concerns that had come up during the four-day retreat, sponsored by the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, and did not represent a consensus of the 100 participants.

The committee urged Christians to express their convictions more effectively in personal as well as social righteousness.

Pursued By The Tiger

Christ the Tiger: A Postscript to Dogma, by Thomas Howard (Lippincott, 1967, 160 pp., cloth $4.50, paper $2.25), is reviewed by Virginia R. Mollenkott, assistant professor of English, Paterson State College, Wayne, New Jersey.

With the publication of Thomas Howard’s first book, a bright new planet swims into the ken of the evangelical reader. Unto us is born a writer—a writer whose passionate prose makes one simultaneously love and ponder, laugh and writhe. The honesty that lights every page of Christ the Tiger is nothing less than astonishing.

The title is neither a device to catch attention nor an attempt to cash in on Madison Avenue’s recent fondness for tigers. Drawn from T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” it goes to the heart of Howard’s concept of Jesus the Christ: “He has been the subject of the greatest efforts at systemization in the history of man. But anyone who has ever tried this has had, in the end, to admit that the seams keep bursting. He sooner or later discovers that he is in touch, not with a pale Galilean, but with a towering and furious figure who will not be managed.”

Howard admits at the outset that he is writing the story of one man’s experience. His childhood he describes as “a massive effort to get cozy,” during which he learned a “non-lunatic-fringe view of God” in his conservative Protestant home. During high school he scorned “the world,” which he defined as “sex, alcohol, tobacco, bridge, the fox trot, the races, and the movies.” It was “a highly specific vision and therefore eminently manageable.” But college, with its welter of options and its myriads of questions, forced him to “think of life in terms of quest rather than of arrival”; and the army gave him friends whom he could no longer see merely as potential converts.

Then, “in the cozy juvescence of Thomas Howard’s life … the world broke in and clobbered him.…”

He grooved all the grooves. Of the mind, of

The body. Art, sin, sex, love, words with ideas,

Ideas without words.…

In the course of his quest, Howard found he “must abandon the effort to insist on Love as the demonstrably operative energy behind human existence,” because life is “marked by limitation and outrage.” Finally, “in the frantic/Putrescence of the year came Christ the tiger.” Howard discovered that in the Incarnation man’s myths of perfection and beauty were actualized. Christ validated “our eternal effort to discover significance and beauty beyond inanition and horror by announcing to us the unthinkable: redemption.” Howard’s description of the meaning of redemption is soaring and sublime, a passage to be read aloud with tears of joy.

The intensity of this book is a demanding intensity; its questions are full of anguish and its terms are precisely defined. Its answers may seem unexpected and disturbing, but they are also large and liberating. Meeting Christ the Tiger is not only well worth the effort; for any person who wants with all his might to be authentic, it is an urgent necessity.

A Rising Star In Theology

Theology as History, “New Frontiers in Theology,” Volume III, edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. (Harper & Row, 1967, 276 pp., $6), is reviewed by James Montgomery Boice, assistant editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY

For years now the great era of dialectic theology in Europe has been passing, both in its Barthian and Bultmannian forms. In the decade following World War II, Bultmann stole much of the Barthian thunder. But Bultmann is now being deserted by his followers, and the leadership of the theological world is up for grabs.

Reading For Perspective

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

• Parents on Trial, by David R. Wilkerson with Clair Cox (Hawthorn, $4.95). The founder of Teen Challenge relates stirring experiences from his inner-city youth ministry and calls for responsible parenthood to help curb delinquency.

• A Varied Harvest, by Frank E. Gaebelein (Eerdmans, cloth $4.95, paper $2.45). Out of his life as headmaster, editor, and writer, Gaebelein offers choice essays on Christianity, education, public affairs, and mountain climbing.

• Beyond the Ranges, by Kenneth Scott Latourette (Eerdmans, $3.95). With gratitude that “God sent his whisper to me,” this Yale University professor emeritus, America’s foremost church historian, humbly and intimately describes his life as scholar and servant of the church.

Who will give direction to a new generation of students and professors? Who will dominate theology for the final third of the century? The newest contender is Wolfhart Pannenberg, the thirty-eight-year-old professor of systematic theology at the University of Mainz, Germany, whose radical emphasis upon the nature of revelation as history is already regarded by many as an increasingly viable option in modern theology.

As leader of the Pannenberg “circle” (R. Rendtorff, K. Koch, U. Wilckens), the Mainz professor speaks for those who are dissatisfied with Bultmann’s radical skepticism in regard to biblical history and who question the basic disjunctions of faith from fact and revelation from history that characterize much modern theology. On the one hand, Pannenberg rejects existential theology, since it dissolves real history into the historicness of individual existence; on the other hand, he rejects the assumption of a superhistorical content of faith that is evident in Barth and others. Pannenberg’s objective, outlined in the original Offenbarung als Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1961) and carried a step beyond in the focal essay in the present work, is to create a theology in which faith can rest on fact. Faith is not mere knowledge, according to Pannenberg. Still less is it opposed to knowledge. Faith is God-given. Yet faith, if it is not to be mere illusion, must be founded on a revelation given in history and hence on a revelation demonstrable by objective historical research.

The distinction of the Pannenberg group, as over against the Heilsgeschichte school of Oscar Cullmann, is the attempt to locate revelation in the whole of history, in universal history, and to find the clue to that history in the proleptic character of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Pannenberg the resurrection is genuinely historical, though he allows that the language used to describe it is mythological.

For some time Pannenberg has written largely for European readership. Now through the work of Claremont’s James M. Robinson, the Mainz professor writes for American scholars and responds to their objections. In Theology in History, the third volume of the “New Frontiers in Theology” series, Pannenberg’s lead essay is followed by reactions from Martin J. Buss, Kendrick Grobel, and William Hamilton. Buss questions Pannenberg’s idea of universal history. Grobel examines Pannenberg’s arguments for the historical character of the resurrection. And Hamilton offers an unusual theological critique, questioning whether the historical method does not replace the internal witness of the Holy Spirit in Pannenberg’s epistemology.

In a final essay the young German professor responds to his critics, reserving his harshest words for Hamilton, whose remarks, he says, caricature his position. In these pages he reaffirms the necessity of faith for individual salvation, stressing only that faith must be based on knowledge and that theological knowledge rightly understood eventually leads beyond itself into faith. With these emphases Pannenberg’s work may well endure as long as that of the theological giants who have preceded him.

A Practical Tool For Ministers

Baker’s Dictionary of Practical Theology, edited by Ralph G. Turnbull (Baker, 1967, 469 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Robert N. Schaper, assistant professor of practical theology and dean of students, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

In name and orientation, though not in format, this volume follows Baker’s recently published Dictionary of Theology. The eighty-five contributors are properly representative of the varied specialties of the ministry. Where the articles have significant theological implication, the position is conservative and evangelical. Although the problems of practical theology do not lend themselves to doctrinal rigidity, this work casts the preacher and pastor against biblical imperatives and evangelical commitments. Presbyterians and Baptists are dominant among contributors, and there is thus a Calvinist influence. The only intramural problem of the book seems to be ecumenism. George Peters and Harold Lindsell find it theologically suspect, but Norman Hope is content to leave the history uninterpreted.

The book is self-described as neither an encyclopedia nor a history but a source book for pastors and students. It is arranged in ten sections, the first three (preaching, homiletics, hermeneutics) having to do with the sermon and the last seven dealing with various ecclesiastical tasks. Inclusion of hermeneutics in this volume is somewhat excessive, since this field is no more relevant to the task of preaching than biblical theology, church history, and so on. Strictly speaking, the volume is not a dictionary but a condensation of standard works on practical theology. Although the articles are somewhat uneven and in some cases repetitive (e.g., there is a section on “The Pastor as Worshiper” and another on worship), the busy pastor will be glad to have the essence of more elaborate volumes distilled in one readily available source.

Of note are the helpful bibliographies, especially the article by Ilion T. Jones on “The Literature of Preaching,” which is an excellent compilation and tells which works are in print.

Some of the theological trends within evangelical Christianity can be detected in this volume. One section is entitled “Evangelism-Missions”; yet the articles fall clearly into one category or the other, largely by geographical or historical criteria. The arrangement probably reflects the theological conviction of the unity of the mission of the Church. In the area of liturgy and worship, articles are heavily weighted toward a more formal liturgy and observance of the Christian year.

This is a reasonably useful tool. For the uninitiated, anticipating the many responsibilities of the pastor can be frightening. One might be encouraged if instead of being told of eleven different groups to whom the pastor should be a friend, he were simply told to be friendly. Perhaps this type of impracticality suggests why there has been no comprehensive book on practical theology since 1903.

The New View Of Original Sin

Christ and Original Sin, by Peter De Rosa (Bruce, 1967, 138 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Warren C. Young, professor of Christian philosophy, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Oak Brook, Illinois.

This author is a young Roman Catholic scholar in Britain, and his work reflects the thinking of the young Catholic scholars of today—perhaps best understood as the spirit of Vatican II. In dealing with two central theological themes, Christ and original sin, he presents briefly the traditional teaching of Catholicism and then devotes most of his study to contemporary discussion among Catholic scholars.

His discussion of Christ centers primarily on the mystery of Incarnation or the two-nature doctrine. The tendency in older Catholic theology was to overemphasize Christ’s divine nature and neglect his human nature—after all, is not Jesus God? As a result Catholic thought tended to docetism. Although there was no outright rejection of Christ’s humanity, in effect it just was not really there.

To correct this, De Rosa says, contemporary scholars want to get away from the “Jesus is God” approach and emphasize that Jesus was also fully human. Better to say that God became incarnate in a man, Jesus of Nazareth. God’s Son was not a puppet but a real man “called to make decisions and to learn obedience by suffering, called to endure in our humanity a condition of distance or exile from God.”

De Rosa makes an interesting point in dealing with the place of Mary in traditional Catholic thought. Since Christ was fully God rather than man, Mary in effect became the Mediator between God and man. Hence, he grants the validity of the charge made by some Protestants that in Catholic thought Mary has replaced Jesus as Mediator.

One has a feeling that De Rosa is writing to evangelical Protestants as well as to Catholics. Have we not also tended to neglect the real humanity of Christ in our zeal to stress his deity? No doubt this is often a defensive measure against a liberal theology that stressed his humanity almost exclusively.

In discussing original or Adamic sin, De Rosa says that most contemporary Catholic scholars view Genesis as a pictorial, not literal, presentation of theological truth. The basic elements in the Genesis story were taken over from neighboring communities, and these elements became the bearers of divine revelation. Adam, then, is to be considered not so much a historical man as the typical or universal man. And original sin is not the sin of a particular man but the sin of every man. “Original” sin is what results in us by reason of our birth into this condition of sin that precedes our own personal and conscious choices and inescapably effects us. The old view of original sin as something passed on through the race has no foundation. Indeed, the Jews “knew nothing of a sin handed on from parent to child.”

Furthermore, Augustine’s interpretation of Romans 5:12 is unjustified. The Douay version, following the Vulgate, reads, “Death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned.” Augustine believed that “in whom” referred to Adam. Actually the Greek should be translated, “Death spread to all men because all men sinned” (RSV). Many other theologians have pointed to this same error in Augustine’s understanding of Romans 5:12 and have insisted that this verse should not be used to support the doctrine of original sin.

Whether or not one can fully agree with the author, who claims he is presenting the views of others more than his own, one will profit by reading this very stimulating book. If for no other reason, it should be read as an excellent introduction to the theological discussion presently occupying the younger Roman Catholic scholars. We will surely be hearing more from this author in the years ahead.

A Denominational Danger Spot

Peace! Peace!: A Search for a Sincere and Alert Christian Perspective, edited by Foy Valentine (Word Books, 1967 162 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, chairman, Department of History, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.

This volume is a collection of addresses given at summer conferences sponsored by the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Offered as an honest and realistic attempt to deal with the church’s conception of political peace, these eleven essays fall short of their goal. Although there are frequent references to the Scriptures throughout the book, there is actually very little biblical foundation for the conclusions advanced.

The first chapter sets the pace for all that follows. In it Carlyle Marney not only fails in his attempt to set forth a foundation for political peace but seems to go out of his way to replace the Scriptures with a humanistic outlook. He goes so far as to say that “the Eternal gets His character and His name from us.”

All the writers show a great awareness of the predicament of contemporary man and the possibilities of atomic warfare, and their sincerity is obvious. But their approach to the problem shows nothing of the insight that is so evident in Peace Is Possible, recent essays edited by Elizabeth Jay Hollins.

Not only does this book lack a scholarly approach to the issues at hand: it also betrays great theological weaknesses. The obvious lack of insight into the nature of war and peace results from an almost total neglect of the implications of the doctrine of sin. The omission of any discussion of the sovereignty of God raises many problems. And there seems to be no awareness that God may well use war as a corrective judgment on peoples and nations from time to time. All these authors proceed on the humanistic assumption that war is the greatest of all evils, and their position suggests that peace at any price may well be the biblical imperative. One writer attempts to make a sharp distinction between non-violence and the biblical role of non-resistance.

When the writers turn to practical ways of securing peace in our world, they fall into some serious pitfalls. Some of the solutions they devise are quite unrealistic. Frank P. Graham resorts to the theory of evolution and offers the hope that the next step in the evolution of human beings will be a step away from nation states toward a more effective United Nations for the collective security of all member nations. The chapter on missions subverts the missionary enterprise from its biblical purposes and offers it as a vehicle for international peace.

This book leads one to conclude that committees like the Christian Life Commission are a danger spot for the evangelical life of the Southern Baptists and other major denominations.

A Solid Punch

To the End of the Earth, by Rolf A. Syrdal (Augsburg, 1967, 177 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Don W. Hillis, associate director, The Evangelical Alliance Mission, Wheaton, Illinois.

As a former missionary to China, foreign-missions executive for the Evangelical Lutheran Church and later the American Lutheran Church, and seminary professor, Dr. Syrdal is well qualified to write on mission principles and practices. His evaluation of the concept of missions during the various missionary ages merits careful study. And the book also offers much valuable mission history.

To the End of the Earth is well documented with quotations from such well-known authorities as Kenneth S. Latourette, Lesslie Newbigin, Hendrik Kraemer, Robert Glover, and Stephen Neill. But the most significant things are said by the author himself. For example:

During our present period of international tension and insecurity, of literal realism, impressionistic art, philosophical nihilism, man’s focus has been drawn to himself, and his attitude is one of frustrated cynicism. The result is an existentialism that goes no farther than Man’s experience for the moment. God, objective spiritual realities, and a divine goal are eliminated. To the extent that this spirit influences the people within the church, missions will be regarded as a vague, unrealistic dream of the past.

Just why this book discusses “mission concept in principle and practice” to the end of the earth and stops short of the end of the age—indeed, of the twentieth century—is not clear. Even his chapter on “Era of the Mission Societies” ends at the three-quarter mark of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, he makes almost no mention of the great interdenominational missionary movement that gave such impetus to the whole mission program in the closing decades of the last century.

Does he feel the principles and practices of such large and effective “faith” missions as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Sudan Interior Mission, and Wycliffe Translators have nothing to say to us about mission concept? Or does he have some homework to do in the biographies of Hudson Taylor, Fredrik Franson, C. T. Studd, Rowland Bingham, and the thousands of missionaries who have followed in their train?

The final punch in Syrdal’s book is solid and right to the chin:

The day of missions is not over till the day of the church is over. The church’s vitality is in its mission, to which it is called and driven by the Holy Spirit. This mission does not decrease because of difficulties or problems. There are different situations to be faced in each generation. Mission is increased by the addition of each new church in each new area of the world. Mission will continue till the consummation of our age in the return of the risen Lord.

And so it will.

Svetlana’S Tale Of Death

Twenty Letters to a Friend, by Svetlana Alliluyeva (Harper & Row, 1967, 246 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by David E. Kucharsky, associate editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This is the manuscript Svetlana Alliluyeva smuggled out of the Soviet Union. It is not the exposé some might have expected from the daughter of the late Josef Stalin. Nor is it the chronicle of a spiritual search others might have expected in view of Svetlana’s widely reported declaration of religious faith upon her arrival in the United States.

Instead, she presents a series of character sketches of the people who have been part of her life. The book gets to be a depressing tale of death as one by one the characters fall victim to political terrorism.

General criticisms of Soviet ideology abound, but Svetlana was limited by an all-too-obvious conflict of interest. The critique of the regime her father headed from 1929 to 1953 is tempered by her understandable regard for him.

“It’s true my father wasn’t especially democratic,” she allows in a staggering understatement. The reader is assured, however, that Stalin “never thought of himself as a god.”

Apart from references to a Protestant grandmother on her mother’s side, Svetlana says little about religion. She does give a succinct summary of her beliefs: “It seems to me that in our time faith in God is the same thing as faith in good and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Religious differences no longer have any meaning in the world today, where men and women of reason, intelligence and compassion have already attained an understanding of one another that transcends the boundaries between countries and continents, races and tongues.”

Svetlana is bound to write more. Let us hope that in future volumes the restraint and ambiguity that characterize her first book will yield to candor and objectivity.

Understanding World Religions

The History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding, edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa (University of Chicago Press, 1967, 296 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by James E. Aydelotte, assistant professor of religion and history, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.

In honor of its 100th anniversary, the Divinity School of the University of Chicago is sponsoring an eight-volume series, “Essays in Divinity,” by its alumni and faculty, both past and present. This first volume is largely the product of a 1965 alumni conference.

The introduction, a 1935 essay by Joachim Wach, sees the main task of the study of history of religions as sensitive, thorough, and objective research into the vital spirit of every religion. Mircea Eliade explores the discipline’s contribution to an understanding of the contemporary milieu. Joseph M. Kitagawa demonstrates “a hermeneutical principle which would enable us to harmonize the insights and contributions of both historical and structural inquiries.” Charles H. Long examines the relation between the phenomenological and historical methods.

Kees W. Bolle, rejecting any obligatory approach, advocates “a deprovincializing of Christian theology” to make it more useful hermeneutically. Thomas J. J. Altizer argues that in the Incarnation God fully and finally “abandoned or negated His transcendent form,” indissolubly linking spirit and flesh on earth; thus belief in the Resurrection is seen as a retreat to the past and a separation of God and man.

The remaining contributors discuss the discipline’s methodology in relation to their specialties. Philip H. Ashby concludes: “We seek to understand, and to do so we question, we re-enact, we seek to participate, and we are called upon to contribute our understanding to present and future religious man.” Charles S. J. White illustrates the subtle difficulties of participation in another religion.

Charles J. Adams questions the applicability of many of the discipline’s methods to any living “higher” religion. H. Byron Earhart advocates a methodology “capable of taking at face value the pertinent religious phenomena, analyzing them historically and structurally,” and interpreting them on that basis. Jerome H. Long examines the relation of symbol and reality among the Trobriand islanders.

Paul Tillich rules out the “orthodox-exclusive” and the “secular-rejective” approaches, as well as those based on supranatural or natural theology. He proposes “a theology of the history of religions in which the positive valuation of universal revelation balances the critical valuation”; “this phrase, a fight of God against religion within religion, could become the key for understanding” and directing this discipline.

The origin of these essays has produced a certain amount of “clubiness” that an analytical outside introduction would perhaps have overcome. The book will undoubtedly appeal to the increasing number of religion departments in state universities, and it is a valuable glimpse into present formative thinking about the study of history of religions. Methodology is seen as the “single most important problem.” There is serious questioning whether it is possible to analyze every religion with appreciative but objective participation, and whether one’s Christian faith, however tenuous and detached, enhances or precludes true knowledge of another religion. Like Archimedes, these scholars seem to be searching for some “neutral” place from which to understand all religions.

Book Briefs

Theologians at Work, by Patrick Granfield (Macmillan, 1967, 262 pp., $5.95). Interviews with sixteen working theologians (including R. Niebuhr, J. Pelikan, R. M. Brown. Y. Congar, K. Rahner, and A. Heschel), conducted by a Catholic theological professor and editor, provide intimate glimpses into the ideas and approaches of influential thinkers.

Gods, Graves, & Scholars, by C. W. Ceram (Knopf, 1967, 455 pp„ $7.95). Students of archaeology will “dig” this revised and enlarged edition of a work that considers archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Babylonia, the eastern Mediterranean, Central America, and elsewhere.

Your Influence Is Showing! by Leslie B. Flynn (Broadman, 1967, 127 pp., $2.50). Flynn uses a popular style and scores of inspiring true-life incidents to show the importance of a Christian’s personal influence on others.

The Land, Wildlife, and Peoples of the Bible, by Peter Farb (Harper & Row, 1967, 171 pp., $3.95). A naturalist offers a wealth of information on the habitat and inhabitants of the Holy Land. Beautifully written and illustrated for family reading.

Salvation in History, by Oscar Cullmann (Harper & Row, 1967, 352 pp., $6.50). The first American edition of the 1965 German book in which Cullman shows that the “event-interpretation” occurrences of salvation history are essential for a proper understanding of the New Testament. Reviewed in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, July 16, 1965. Read this book!