Accent On Christian Education

A Theology for Christian Education, by Nels F. S. Ferré (Westminster, 1967, 224 pp., $4.95), Christian Education in Mission, by Letty M. Russell (Westminster, 1967, 159 pp., $1.85, paper), The Recovery of the Teaching Ministry, by J. Stanley Glen (Westminster, 1967, 125 pp., $1.85, paper), and Straight Talk About Teaching in Today’s Church, by Locke W. Bowman, Jr. (Westminster, 1967, 151 pp., $1.95), are reviewed by Edward L. Hayes, assistant professor of Christian education, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.

A strange subordination of the teaching function pervades the life, work, worship, and proclamation of the Church. This rather disquieting note is sounded in all four volumes. It might seem somewhat pedestrian if it had come from religious educators. However, a leading theologian, a New Testament scholar, a pastor-turned teacher, and an East Harlem parish worker here strike an amazing similar note.

An underlying conviction that Christian theology must be transposed into the educational key provides the impetus for theologian Nels Ferré’s A Theology for Christian Education. His attempt to integrate education and theology ought to be welcomed by scholars in both liberal and conservative camps. Ferré decries the subordination of church education: “To underplay education is to impoverish the life of the church.”

The author tackles the whole gamut of theological involvement in Christian education. He contends that Christian theology can no longer operate with presuppositions of either substance philosophy or process philosophy, and his reshaping of theology does not leave education untouched. His effort to integrate psychology, sociology, and philosophy is admirable. Such efforts, Christian and secular, have been meager.

Ferré concludes his work with a concise theology for Christian education, the substance of which reflects his concept of both the determinative Gestalt of the faith and the continuity of revelation. God is understood as Educator (viewed in relation to pedagogical process), Christ as Exemplar, and the Holy Spirit as Tutor. A theology for Christian education, Ferré contends, will help Christian education come into its own. The question remaining is, “What theology?”

Ferré’s and Glen’s volumes are by far the weightier of the four. J. Stanley Glen’s The Recovery of the Teaching Ministry, now published for the first time in paperback, carefully documents the contrast between sanctuary and classroom, the optional nature of the minister’s teaching role, the divorce of preaching from teaching, and the sublimation of truth to religious experience. His analysis deals a devastating blow to ambivalence toward church education. The greatest contribution in this volume is Glen’s synthesis of preaching and teaching.

Straight Talk About Teaching in Today’s Church is an eloquent plea to lift up the words teaching and teacher. It is hard to locate outspoken pastors, Bowman says, who exhibit a passionate, personal concern for the ministry of teaching. The teacher who wants sympathetic, non-technical help will find this an invigorating volume, regardless of how he reacts to the author’s ecumenical strategy for teacher improvement.

In Christian Education in Mission, Letty Russell expresses concern in quite another way. Christian education, she says, has been separated from other parts of church life. As a separate discipline, it never seems to have been exactly on the right foot. The Sunday school in particular appears as “a possession of the church that is applied as a ‘band aid’ to various problems of institutional survival.”

Miss Russell urges that instead of reshaping our ideas about education, we reshape our churches. She views education as something that takes place in a context. This vantage point is useful as long as there is a foundation for judging the validity of the context. But the author blurs that foundation somewhat. She rejects “morphological fundamentalism” with its rigid answers, and her only alternatives are freedom and courage to live with questions, intuition about truths, and the need to celebrate our freedom.

These four authors are not doing what is altogether too common of late—passing intemperate judgment upon the Church. Each in his own way offers positive assistance for the renewal of church education. The reader, whether he be pastor, professional theologian or educator, or lay teacher, will find helpful direction.

What’S An Evangelical?

Evangelicalism in America, by Bruce Shelley (Eerdmans, 1967, 134 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Ronald H. Nash, head, Department of Philosophy, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.

Shelley’s fine little volume marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the National Association of Evangelicals. One finds in it a short history of evangelical Christianity in Europe and America as well as a documented survey of the NAE’s first 2½ decades. Shelley also discusses the nature of evangelicalism and its relation to other movements in contemporary American Christianity.

Evangelical Christianity is not a denomination, religious organization, or theological system. It is, in Shelley’s eyes, more of a mood, a perspective, an experience. Modern American evangelicals continue to believe and preach the Reformation theology of Calvin and Luther and carry forward the evangelistic spirit of John Wesley and Charles Spurgeon. The major theme that runs through evangelical Christianity is the necessity of personal salvation. Evangelicals hold that conversion is a definite, decisive, and profound experience.

Evangelicals differ from liberals in their persuasion that doctrine is an essential ingredient of the Christian faith. Men gain God’s new life by believing the Gospel. Evangelicals are trinitarians who accept the deity of Christ and his atoning death; they look for a bodily resurrection and a future judgment; and they do not, like many liberals, think that what a man believes is irrelevant as long as he believes something. Evangelicals deplore the theological fuzziness so prominent in many American denominations; they regard it as unfortunate when even quasi-conservative religious groups exalt subjective religious experiences at the expense of sound doctrine. And it goes without saying that evangelicals are concerned about theological apostasy, whether it be Tillich’s camouflaged unitarianism or Altizer’s “Christian” Buddhism.

Evangelicals differ from fundamentalists in rejecting anti-intellectualism, theological nit-picking, and bitterness of spirit. The evangelical believes that a defense of the Gospel can be coupled with Christian charity and intellectual integrity.

Many otherwise conservative religious groups are wavering in their approach to the Scriptures. No one will question the genuine piety and theological conservatism of Southern Baptists, for example. But it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find professors in Southern Baptist colleges and seminaries who believe in propositional revelation. One sees an increasingly pitiful picture of devout theologians trying to maintain the verities of the faith while they reject the integrity and cognitive status of the only religious authority on which these doctrines can be based—the Bible. The result is that what one hears from Dixie these days sounds more and more like a nebulous mysticism. In contrast to this Barthian nonsense (i.e., noncognitive non-sense), evangelicals continue to maintain that the Bible is not only a revelation of God’s person but also a revelation of God’s truth. A denial of propositional revelation, evangelicals maintain, can only lead to a radical subjectivism that leaves the Christian without a foundation for his theology and without an apologetic for his faith.

Shelley does not ignore the shortcomings of orthodoxy, but as he says, “the church has known her periods of decadent orthodoxy but she has never witnessed a decadent evangelicalism. When the spirit of evangelicalism dies, the church will cease to exist.”

How Far To ‘Anything Goes’?

You and the New Morality—74 Cases, by James A. Pike (Harper & Row, 1967, 148 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by William C. Brownson, assistant professor of preaching, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.

This most recent contribution to the mushrooming “new morality” debate represents, in one respect, a distinctive approach. Bishop Pike harks back to his first professional discipline, the study of law, and applies to contemporary ethical problems the familiar case-study method. Most ethical theorists, he complains, deal in abstractions, using only a few scattered examples—generally “loaded” ones at that. Here is an attempt to ground ethical conclusions more securely in “the inductive process.”

Armed with his battery of case-studies (seventy-four, to be exact), Pike aims to show the bankruptcy both of code ethics (“founded on immutable laws derived from an infallible source”) and of antinomianism or “anti-lawism.” The major force of his attack is leveled against code ethics—the view most people accept, at least on the conscious level. Bishop Pike puts to the test four of the alleged authorities on which this type of ethics is based: the Ten Commandments, other biblical injunctions, the teaching of the Church, and natural law. All are found wanting. The various commandments, he says, sometimes make conflicting claims. Other biblical injunctions are seen to lead to absurdities when consistently applied. The teaching of the Church, when viewed historically, is a welter of contradictions. And as for natural law—who is to decide what that really is, anyway?

Antinomianism, on the other hand, is dismissed on the ground that it doesn’t really work; that is, there are too many other would-be antinomians around to spoil the fun!

With these two contenders disposed of, “situation ethics” is seen as the one live option. For Bishop Pike, this means that there are no “ready-made answers for particular decisions.” The following are recommended as guidelines for decision-making: taking a responsible approach, rating persons above things, valuing eros love supremely (Pike sees agape love as inadequate because it sees the other as unlovable, thereby treating him as a thing instead of a person, eros on the other hand, sees what is lovable in persons and loves it), adopting fulfillment and service as the style of life, giving serious attention to the Code (as representing generalizations of human experience), and being aware of “pertinent factors to be weighed.”

You and the New Morality is a stimulating book. There is no doubt that Bishop Pike has posed some “hard cases” for which no pat answers will do. And almost everyone will find much to agree with in his proposed guidelines for decision-making. The book is disappointing, however, from a number of perspectives. Christian theologians will look in vain here for any grounding of ethics in God’s self-revelation. Biblical scholars will wince at the superficial treatment of New Testament ethics, particularly as this appears in Pike’s caricature of agape. And those who see lawlessness as a major foe in our time may view this book as another sellout (though perhaps a well-meaning one) to the enemy.

Like others of its kind, the bishop’s approach seems sadly naive. He calls for objective analysis in a host of situations that are emotionally charged, to say the least. Although he ends by bringing the norms of Scripture in at the back door (the Code is to be given “serious attention”), the main drift of the book suggests that, after all, we have precious little to guide—or restrain—us. For many, it may be a short step from there to “anything goes.”

Reading for Perspective

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

• The Indomitable Baptists, by O. K. Armstrong and Marjorie M. Armstrong (Doubleday, $5.95). The stormy but glorious history of Baptists in America is vividly related by a former congressman from Missouri and his wife.

• The New Testament and Criticism, by George Eldon Ladd (Eerdmans, $3.95). Introduces evangelicals to a positive, creative use of biblical criticism—textual, linguistic, literary, form, historical, and comparative religion.

• Nothing But the Gospel, by Peter H. Eldersveld (Eerdmans, $3.50). A collection of biblical, literate sermons by the late minister who served as the voice of the Christian Reformed Church on the “Back to God Hour.”

Uniqueness Of The Old Testament

The Authority of the Old Testament, by John Bright(Abingdon, 1967, 272 pp., $5.50), is reviewed by Robert B. Laurin, professor of Old Testament, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina.

The life and relevance of the Church reside in its biblical preaching, since only biblical preaching carries the normative authority of the Word. This is the conviction that produced this important book. But the specific problem to which Professor Bright addresses himself is the manner in which the Old Testament shares in this authority. It is a centuries-old problem, found even in Paul’s dispute over the place of the Law in the Church. But here in this book we are given a most lucid and compelling answer to the problem as a whole.

The volume is divided into five parts, each of which often rambles and becomes repetitious, but each of which has a simple point to make. The first chapter deals with the nature of the problem of the Old Testament’s authority. The Church, by including the Old Testament in the canon, has shown its belief in its authority as a rule of faith and life. But in what way, particularly since much in the Old Testament is from a different religious and political and cultural way of life? The second chapter surveys the major classical solutions in the history of the Church, each of which has its modern counterpart. There has been the Marcionite approach of eliminating the Old Testament from the canon, or at least of relegating it to second rank. There has also been the church fathers’ approach of retaining the Old Testament through allegory and typology. Then there has been the liberal Protestant approach of separating teachings of abiding ethical validity from outworn and sub-Christian elements.

Bright rejects all three of these approaches. In the third chapter he offers his own detailed view of the authority of the Old Testament. In brief, it lies in its unique theology, expressed in one way or another in each text, and shared with the New Testament, though this theology is often presented in cultural forms and applications that must be rejected. The fourth chapter shows what this understanding means methodologically. One must exegete the Old Testament from the perspective of continuity and discontinuity with the New. The theology of the two Testaments is basically the same, so one may read the Old Testament for its plain meaning. But there is also a “new” Testament, so one must also read Old Testament theology in light of what it has become in the New. Finally, in the fifth chapter, Bright presents us with illustrations of what this means in practice. This is worth the price of the book. Not only are “easy” texts examined (Ten Commandments; Jer. 31:31–34), but also historically passé (Isa. 7:1–9), ethically deficient (2 Sam. 11:1–12:24), and culturally crude (Ps. 137; Josh. 11:16–23; 23) passages are explained.

The book is exciting reading and if considered seriously should do much to restore powerful biblical preaching to modern pulpits.

Authority: Pragmatic Or Ordained?

Ordination and Christian Unity, by E. P. Y. Simpson (Judson, 1966, 184 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by James Daane, director, Pastoral Doctorate Program, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

A Baptist bias and an ecumenical urge combine to discover a road without barriers leading to Christian unity. The author, Ervin Peter Young Simpson, professor of church history at the Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, dispatches apostolic succession, the traditional conception of ecclesiastical authority, the laying on of hands, and the threefold ministry as having no other foundation than their pragmatic usefulness in meeting the needs of the Church as these emerged during the Church’s historical development.

None of these orders or structures of the Church’s ministry, according to Simpson, is prescribed by the Bible. Aside from the injunction that the Church carry on its ministry decently and in order, the Bible enjoins no specific order. Any and all orders are “permissible when they do not contradict the spiritual principles of the scriptural revelation, undesirable when they obscure that revelation, and unacceptable when they contradict those spiritual principles.” In short, any order of the Christian ministry, any structuring of church authority, is acceptable if it is thought to facilitate the Church’s ministry.

The ministry of the Church in any or all of its forms belongs to the bene, the welfare, of the Church, not to the esse, the essence. Only the action of the Holy Spirit is essential to the Church. There are no offices in the Church ordained by Christ or the apostles and vested with an authority that is to be exercised by the occupants. Christ alone is the authority in the Church, and he has not, it is urged, deposited any of his authority in any office, nor delegated it to any occupant of such an office. Spiritual authority, says Simpson, cannot be delegated. The only authority in the Church is found in those people who, under the gift and operation of the Holy Spirit, possess a high quality of inner spiritual life. The laying on of hands conferred no authority; it merely indicated the selection to special service of persons who already had persuasive authority in their inherent spiritual quality. Such personal spiritual authority, says Simpson, cannot be transmitted. Even Christ’s authority in the world was of this personal, morally persuasive kind.

The Church, according to Simpson, cannot be an institution that mediates God’s grace; the sacraments as media of God’s grace are always conditional, dependent for their effectiveness on human cooperation, since God by his Spirit only operates directly upon the individual in the “I-Thou encounter.” Thus no earthly, human, institutional medium can be a necessary medium, nor the particular medium chosen by God, for the mediation of divine grace. One would think that such a view is not only unrelievedly individualistic but inconsistent with the motif of the Incarnation. But Simpson surprises us by asserting that if there is any extension of the Incarnation, it is the Holy Spirit!

What, it must be asked, does Simpson do with Paul’s injunction that elders be appointed in every church and that they, for the sake of their office, be honored? Simpson does urge that Jesus did not institute a presbytery to rule over his church. But about this injunction of Paul he says nothing, unless he is indirectly addressing this obstacle to his position when he warns against an extreme biblicism that regards the Bible as “completely inerrant and wholly supernatural” and as “an infallible guide book,” and when he suggests that the way to avoid “the Scylla of bibliolatry and the Charybdis of complete liberty” is to grant “ultimate authority” to “the gospel of God” to which the Bible testifies. He also asserts that even the apostles do not belong to the esse of the Church (though Paul asserts that they, with the prophets, are the foundation upon which the Church is built). Further, Simpson sees Paul as carrying the motif of the synagogue and Peter the motif of the temple, and sees in the first the error of Reformation Protestantism and in the other the error of Roman Catholicism.

But even these arguments are not enough to lead one to dismiss Paul’s injunction and accept a view of the Church and its orders and structures based on an unrelieved individualism and on a spiritualization of the whole reality of God’s redemptive action in Jesus Christ—a spiritualization that contends that God can pursue his redemptive business with actual, historical sinners only by directly confronting the individual sinner, and even then, only if the sinner is willing. For this carries the view that if the sinner is not willing, God’s entrance into the concrete historical situation remains unsuccessful—a position consistent with Simpson’s idea that the Holy Spirit is the only real extension of the Incarnation.

This book is the product of a capable scholar. No reader will doubt it. But the author has not shown himself capable of subjecting the views of his tradition on the Church—its ministry, its authority, its sacraments—to the critique of the Bible.

There is little possibility that Simpson’s kind of spiritualization of the Church and the order of its ministry, which reduces the esse of the Church to pure pragmatics, will show the road the whole Church will tread toward unity. Indeed, Simpson is really interested, not in the unity of the Church, but, as his book’s title suggests, in Christian unity, a unity of Christian individuals who never attain corporate reality, and who do not wish to, since God deals only with individuals. Neither the Reformed, nor the Lutheran, nor the Anglican, nor the Roman Catholic, nor the Orthodox, nor the Coptic churches will take seriously this view from the left field of the Reformation on how to achieve unity. None of these believe that God deals only and directly with the individual, and none, therefore, will accept a merely pragmatic view of the Church and of its ministry and sacraments.

As was said, Simpson with facile dispatch rids himself of the biblical teaching about offices in the Church that carry authority which its incumbents exercise both over those who acknowledge such authority and over those who reject it. Simpson recognizes no authority in the Church, nor in Christ himself, except that which carries its own persuasion. If the Church, the Christ, and the Gospel have no authority but this, how, we ask, shall the Church exercise discipline over those who remain unpersuaded, and how shall Christ one day judge all men according to the Gospel?

Simpson has a Church that is only for believers; a Church that has no authority, no gospel imperative for a sinner, unless he on his own recognizes and acknowledges its moral-spiritual authority; and hence a Church with a Gospel that has no inherent authority either to discipline a sinner in this life or to judge him in the Last Day. Much is wrong in the various sectors of the Christian Church—but not enough to gain acceptance of this road to that unity for which the ecumenical movement hopes and prays.

How It All Began

Religion: Origins and Ideas, by Robert Brow (Inter-Varsity, 1966, 128 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by James I. Packer, warden, Latimer House, Oxford, England.

With the modern decline of conviction about the truth of Christianity has come a new interest in “religion” as a world-wide human phenomenon. In this situation, Brow’s ground-clearing introductory survey of the forms that religions have taken in East and West, and of the options of belief and behavior with which they confront us, will prove a very useful tool, particularly in student work. Brow knows his way around, particularly in the area of Indian religions (he worked in India for many years), and has a flair for the thumbnail sketch. His book is packed with information presented in a neat and palatable form.

Particular theses are of striking interest. In the first part of the book, Brow shows convincingly that the hypothesis of monotheism, with informal animal sacrifice, as the earliest religion fits the evidence better than any doctrine of religious evolution through animism and magic. He brings out well the character of the new departures in Eastern religion in the sixth century B.C. as essentially reactions against priestcraft, and helpfully isolates Unitarian ethicism (Zoroastrianism, Islam, Sikhism, “liberal” Christianity, and modern Judaism) as a typical pattern of reactionary simplification.

In the second part, Brow points up the parallelism of J. A. T. Robinson’s “end-of-theism” thinking and the “modified monism” of Hindu Vedanta philosophy. Robinson has now forsaken the “ground of our being” image, but as long as he believes that the essence of the Christian position is to see “reality as personal” he will continue to be vulnerable to Brow’s criticism that it is really a refined monism that his theology voices. Perhaps Robinson’s real problem, like that of Tillich, is that he is too naturally religious to be consistently Christian.

There are small flaws. Unhappy references to Berkeley and Oliver Cromwell show Brow off his beat. There are some over-simplifications. The mysterious “Unity” in the diagram of monistic positions on page 34 is probably Radhakrishnan’s position, but neither text nor index makes this clear. All in all, however, this is a reliable and very recommendable book.

A Many-Sided Ethic

Biblical Ethics: A Survey, by T. B. Maston (World, 1967, 300 pp., $6), is reviewed by Reginald Stackhouse, professor of philosophy of religion and ethics, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario.

T. B. Maston wrote this book out of a conviction that one of the greatest needs in the Church is a deeper understanding of what the Bible says about ethics. To meet this need he surveys, clearly and comprehensively, the ethical teaching of both Old and New Testaments book by book.

Running throughout the work are certain basic convictions that Maston claims are found all through the Bible and must be upheld emphatically by the Church today. One is the centrality of the ethical dimension of the Christian life. This dimension is not simply an addendum to the one that connects God and the believer, nor is it an option that the believer is free to accept or reject. It is a fundamental part of the believer’s relation with God, because, Maston writes, “religion and ethics are thoroughly integrated in the Bible.”

The Bible shows that God himself is the true foundation of Christian ethics, says Maston; this means that no moral code is the beginning and the end. The author does not discount the need for a moral code nor suggest that the Bible fails to provide one. What he does is show how that code is mandatory because it comes from God, not because of anything intrinsic in it.

The still popular notion that the Old and New Testaments teach different ethics is shown to be a shallow misunderstanding. The two testaments share a basic outlook and, despite any particular differences, find a unity in their common belief that the ethical life is a response to God.

Maston shows a welcome perspicacity in refusing to accept glibly the current catchphrase approach to Christian ethics. Yet at the same time he is careful not to close his eyes to the truths writers are now advancing. He rightly asserts that no single term can describe biblical ethics because all refer to different aspects of the Bible’s many-sided message. We must therefore give attention to all of them—a covenant ethic, a koinonia ethic, a love ethic, a will-of-God ethic, and the like.

What is even more necessary is that we heed Maston’s appeal to see how the real vitality of the Christian ethic depends on its arising from a fellowship with the living Christ, without whom not even the right words form the Word of life.

Book Briefs

This Is Living: Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, by Leonard Griffith (Abingdon, 1967, 159 pp., $3). Spiritual treasures from the “uncomplicated” book of Philippians that enrich the life of the man in Christ.

The Word of Reconciliation, by H. H. Farmer (Abingdon, 1967, 105 pp., $2.75). Farmer considers Christ as reconciler, prophet, priest, and king and tells what his saving work means in the lives of men.

Search for Identity: A View of Authentic Christian Living, by Earl Jabay (Zondervan, 1967, 150 pp., $3.95). The chaplain of the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute claims that a major cause of emotional problems is the loss of a sense of identity, then shows how faith in Christ leads one to a proper sense of personal identity. Recommended.

Religion and Contemporary Western Culture: Selected Readings, edited by Edward Cell (Abingdon, 1967, 399 pp., $7.95). Readings that present leading positions on the relation of religion to culture, art, literature, philosophy, psychotherapy, science, and the socio-economic and political orders. The evangelical viewpoint is studiously neglected.

The New Christianity, edited by William Robert Miller (Delacorte Press, 1967, 393 pp., $6.95). The rise of the new theology is traced in this anthology of writings by William Blake, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Buber, Tillich, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Robinson, Altizer, Cox, and others.

Systematic Theology, by Paul Tillich (University of Chicago and Harper & Row, 1967, 912 pp., $12.50). Tillich’s three volumes published in 1951, 1957, and 1963 combined under one cover.

Living for a Living Lord: Devotions for Women’s Groups, by Lucy J. Pelger (Concordia, 1967, 97 pp., $2.95). Thirty brief, meaningful evangelical meditations for women’s groups.

The Catholic Avant-Garde, by Jean-Marie Domenach and Robert de Mont-valon (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, 245 pp., $5.95). Describes post-war efforts to modernize Roman Catholicism in France and pave the way for church-wide aggiornamento.

Handyman of the Lord, by James W. English (Meredith, 1967, 177 pp., $4.95). A challenging account of how Negro minister William Holmes Borders sought for forty years to meet the spiritual and social needs of the people of Atlanta.

“All scripture is inspired by God and is profitable … (2 Tim. 3:16a). “The Office of Minister of the Word is to preach and teach the Word of God,” says the Constitution of the Reformed Church in America. This is a lifetime calling. No preacher can ever finish proclaiming the whole Word of God.

People today need to know the Bible as a whole and the whole counsel of God through the Bible. The preacher’s job is to explain the whole Bible or as much of it as he can during his life.

Take one book of the Bible and preach all the way through that book with as few interruptions as possible. Divide the book into sections. Treat each section in one sermon.

Read the passage of Scripture until it speaks to you. Read at least six versions in English to observe shades of meaning. Read the passage in as many other languages as you can read easily. Make a brief outline of what the passage says to you. Then check with a concordance, a Bible dictionary, and several commentaries. Finally, pray and think through the application to the congregation.

Let the Holy Spirit guide in your selection of two or three books of the Bible to expound during the year. Give about one-third of your life as a preacher to the Gospels, about one-third to the Acts, Epistles, and Revelation and about one-third to the Old Testament.

Select some great expository preacher as your model. Mine is John Calvin. During twenty-five years in Geneva, with sometimes as many as seven sermons a week, he managed to preach through most of the Bible once. If you do not wish to read the Middle French of Calvin, select some English or American preacher. Study carefully the sermons of one of the great preachers, for example F. W. Robertson, Charles H. Spurgeon, Alexander Maclaren, George Adam Smith, John Bunyan, D. L. Moody, Horace Bushnell, Phillips Brooks, or James S. Stewart.

In preaching from the Old Testament you will have to make some selective adaptation of the consecutive expository method. John Calvin preached 159 consecutive sermons on the Book of Job. I found my congregation getting a little tired of sermons from Job after I preached thirty. Calvin preached 200 sermons from Deuteronomy. I have never had the nerve to do more than twenty-four, though Deuteronomy is a vital book with which to meet talk about “the new morality.”

However, after you have become accustomed to the discipline of the expository method there is no reason why you should not preach at least 100 consecutive sermons on the Gospel According to Matthew. If you study as thoroughly as does D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, you will preach 300 sermons in about six years from Matthew.

In your work as pastor and teacher you will draw from many parts of the Bible during the course of a year. In your daily devotions you will study and meditate upon at least twelve books of the Bible. As a Bible school teacher you will study intensively at least four more books of the Bible. And it will occur to you that certain books of the Bible are especially ripe for the times.

You will have to balance the appropriateness of a book of the Bible in addressing the moral climate of the era over against the long-term preparation required for a thorough exposition of a Prophet, a Gospel, or a Letter.

If you live near a Bible college or a theological seminary, take advantage of any courses in books of the Bible offered to graduate students. I have always been grateful for courses in “Preaching from John” and “Preaching Values in Mark” under the late Andrew W. Blackwood. Also helpful were the courses in Jeremiah and Mark under the late Howard T. Kuist. Dr. Emily Werner in courses on Luke and Acts pointed the way to popular-style exposition.

After it becomes clear to you which book of the Bible you are going to study carefully, prayerfully, and thoroughly in order to preach it, begin your preparation by reading the book once each day for thirty days. Make an outline on a newspaper-sized sheet of paper or cardboard or a series of sheets of paper. A paragraphed Bible may help you to note the most logical units for preaching. Make as many inductive observations à la Ruskin as you can. Let God speak to you through the pages of Holy Writ. Note topically as many detailed applications as come to you clearly.

Next you should compare the results of your prayer and study with what has been written by authorities on the book of the Bible you are hoping will become alive to others through you. You should have on file a collection of Bible-book studies. From 1956 through 1961 CHRISTIANITY TODAY published a series of articles on the “Bible Book of the Month.” Most of these articles included excellent lists of books for further study. Interpretation sometimes carries invaluable Bible-book studies. Popular introductions to the Bible such as The New Bible Handbook, published by the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, contain useful suggestions for analyzing a book of the Bible. Most dictionaries of the Bible also provide useful comparisons at this point. Finally, make sure you own five or six of the best commentaries on the book of the Bible you are preparing to expound.

When you have finished all this, you will have done more than half the work of preparing your series of sermons on a book of the Bible. Moreover, you will have allowed a large place for subconscious incubation controlled by the Holy Spirit. The final detailed preparation for each sermon can then be completed in about one full working day. Every preacher develops his own system of final preparation. Perhaps I have allowed necessity to be the mother of invention, but I find one hour per day for six days better than one straight eight-hour day.

The consistent use of the expository method imposes certain limitations upon the preacher. (1) He must have a quiet study. (2) Since the total preparation of a sermon using the expository method requires, on the average, about two full days, the minister’s life should be free from petty distractions, such as fund-raising. The preaching of the Gospel should be supported by tithes and offerings, in order that the work of the Holy Spirit may not be frustrated. (3) The pastor’s participation in the social life of the congregation will not be great. He can enter into selected social activities. Otherwise he should save his time for prayer and study. (4) The expository method is best adapted to long-term pastorates. Having served nearly nineteen years in one church, I find I have hardly completed half of what I ought to have done. It is difficult to see how a man could develop a solid program of expository preaching with less than five years in one place.

The rewards of Bible exposition are great. Most worshipers follow the Scripture lesson with open Bible in hand. They are vitally interested in what the Bible has to say to them.—The Rev. LEROY NIXON, Queensboro Hill Community Church (Reformed Church in America), Flushing, New York.

A song popular some years ago Started out, “Me and my shadow, strolling down the avenue.” This points to an undeniable fact: no man can escape his shadow.

A truth of far deeper significance that applies to all men but particularly to Christians is that each of us casts a shadow of influence on other lives, either for good or for evil. The Psalmist expresses the gravity of this thought in a prayer, “Let not those who hope in thee be put to shame through me, O Lord GOD of hosts; let not those who seek thee be brought to dishonor through me, O God of Israel” (Ps. 69:6, RSV).

Our Lord himself uttered the warning: “Temptations to sin are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin” (Luke 17:1, 2).

Christians can be woefully careless in this matter of example and by their carelessness contribute to the downfall of others.

The believers in Corinth were confronted with the problem of pagan rites involving the placing of food before idols. This food was then often sold in the market, and a controversy soon arose over whether Christians should buy or eat such meat. Paul went on to tell them that eating meat had no significance one way or the other, but that the effect of a careless attitude could be disastrous for a weak Christian. He concluded, “Therefore, if food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to fall” (1 Cor. 8:13).

How many today are willing to take Paul’s position? I fear that many of us, convinced of our own freedom and of the rightness of our behavior within that freedom, forget that “none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself” (Rom. 14:7). We live in the presence of God, who sees and knows all. We also have about us a host of persons—some of whom we do not even know, perhaps—who look to us to set an example.

Paul speaks of this in forceful terms: “Then let us no more pass judgment on one another, but rather decide never to put a stumbling-block or hindrance in the way of a brother.… Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died.… Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God.… Happy is he who has no reason to judge himself for what he approves” (Rom. 14:13, 15, 20, 22).

For us to set some sort of example is as inevitable as for light to produce a shadow. A good example is a reflection of the indwelling Christ. A good example glorifies Christ; a bad one shows the triumph of self (and Satan) in our lives.

Furthermore, the Christian’s example has both a positive and a negative aspect, produced by what we do and by what we do not do, by what we say and by what we refrain from saying.

Sinful acts can “cause the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme,” as David’s adultery did. How tragic when those who bear the name Christian are guilty of thus demeaning the name of Christ and hindering his cause. The Christian’s outward behavior should reflect resources beyond himself, and standards pleasing to God rather than the world.

Few would deny that the growth of juvenile delinquency in our day is mainly due to the bad example, in word and deed, set by so many adults. Christians are not without blame. Often they so conform their behavior to that of the world that it can be said that their salt has lost its savor and their light its power.

Setting a bad example by carelessness or thoughtlessness is common, even among Christians. Questionable jokes that suggest some uncleanness, witty remarks that show an irreverent attitude, careless behavior that implies evil—all these things take their toll of our moral influence. Paul’s admonition, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2a) bears directly on the example the Christian sets before others.

How easy, too, to harm our influence by fits of temper, hasty words, unworthy deeds! All about us unbelievers are walking in spiritual darkness. It is tragic indeed when Christians, who should reflect the light of the living Christ to all around, only deepen the darkness by careless behavior that hides the light of Christ within. Many unbelievers have no interest in the doctrines or principles of Christianity, but they are uncomfortably keen-sighted about the practices of professing Christians.

The answer to the question of our example to others is not to be found in some pietistic set of rules. It is a matter of living in the conscious presence of the Lord, trying to please him in word, thought, and deed. This inevitably reflects itself in our example to others. The Apostle Paul advises, “Abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thess. 5:22, KJV). This means simply: if there is a question or even a suggestion of evil, avoid it.

This is not negative Christianity. A Christian should certainly live a life consistent with his profession. Inevitably some will sneer, and occasionally some will persecute. One of our privileges as Christians is to accept the offense of the Cross.

No man ever set a more consistent example of righteousness than the Prophet Daniel. When a plot was hatched to discredit him with the king, his enemies said, “We shall not find any ground for complaint against this Daniel unless we find it in connection with the law of his God” (Dan. 6:5). Then, when it was decreed that for thirty days no petition was to be made to anyone other than the king, Daniel went to his house and “prayed and gave thanks before God, as he had done previously” (Dan. 5:10b). This he did three times a day before an open window, knowing that his enemies would see and accuse him. What an example to all who would be faithful to the heavenly vision, regardless of the apparent consequences!

It has been said that people judge far more by what they see than what they hear. Certainly the influence of the Christian rests in large measure on his behavior. Pious words may come easy, but true Christian character produces upright living that people see. Such an example brings glory to God.

Christian character, the source of a good example, is a matter of day-to-day living, judging things and events in the light of God’s laws and holiness and patterning one’s behavior accordingly. It involves looking beyond the immediate to the eternal, but with the realization that those around us are also looking—not at God, but at the things in us that either honor or dishonor him.

Only as Christ lives in us can we be a good influence. The shadow of our example falls behind us, affecting for good or ill all touched by it.

For good or for ill? That is the question.

Dear Foes Of Tars And Nicotine:

Pity the poor cigarette manufacturer. Not only must he label cigarettes as hazardous to health, but the F.C.C. has recenly ruled that opponents of smoking must be provided air time to offset commercials for cigarettes. Now comes a new plan from Baptist pastor Wilbur E. Rees that may further shred the profits of the tobacco industry.

Suppressing an urge to launch a tirade against tobacco, for which Americans annually spend nearly $3 billion more than they spend for all religious and charitable causes, this Pocatello, Idaho, minister suggests that each denomination market its own brand of cigarettes. Says he: Lutherans could come out with “Martin Luther Kings” (giving 10 per cent to the SCLC for use of the name). Episcopalians could produce “Lucky Pikes,” known for doing a slow burn. The Mormons could advertise “Come on over to the LDS side.” Presbyterians could sell “Calvin Cools” and the Catholics, “Vatican Viceroys.” The Baptist pitch could be that theirs is the only one guaranteed to burn under water.

What a boon the Rees plan would be for the churches! Revenue from cigarette machines in the narthex would make the every-member canvas unnecessary. Smoke would fill the temple every Sunday. Ushers would no longer have to sneak a smoke outside. In fact, they could be replaced by cigarette girls who would pass ash trays rather than collection plates. Nicotine-stained teeth and yellowed fingers would become signs of piety, and emphysema the mark of utter saintliness. Though the sanctuary’s blue haze would dim parishioners’ view of their pastor, he could, between drags, remind them that “it’s what’s up front that counts.” Genesis 24:64 (look it up in the KJV) would become a favorite sermon text.

Let’s forget the Surgeon General’s report and develop our own sanctified cigarettes. Coupons on the backs of packs could finance a mission to pagan tobacconists in North Carolina. Holy smoke, what a creative ministry!

Your filter-brained friend, EUTYCHUS III

Evangelical Togetherness

Your plea (“Somehow, Let’s Get Together,” June 9) to discover our agreement on the essentials of Christianity and then find the organizational form for a general cooperation is excellent and very much needed.

Indeed, your idea is one of the most exciting propositions to come my way in a long time.… The kind of fellowship you are suggesting would give men like me not only a voice but a witness.

Let us make sure that the purpose of getting together is not to oppose any other group. Let there be room enough that it never becomes narrow or overly dogmatic. Let it emphasize not only commitment but joy.

BISHOP GERALD KENNEDY

The Methodist Church

Los Angeles, Calif.

I was appalled by your editorial. As a theological student and an evangelical I resent the implication that evangelical theology must manifest itself in such blatant sectarianism.

You are asking evangelicals to deny the very tenets which make them evangelical.… It is the Church, its ministry and sacraments, which is the basis and focal point of all truly Christian fellowship.

RICHARD A. BOWER

Pasadena, Calif.

Indeed, we must get together. Christ himself gave us the reason when he prayed “that they all may be one … that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” …

Can we afford to ignore the legions of skeptics who challenge the validity of a faith which seemingly cannot engender peace or unity of spirit among its adherents?

PAUL RADER

Director

Reality Evangelism

Minneapolis, Minn.

The item in the current Newsweek magzine, [reporting on your suggestion for] a coordination of the fundamental denominations, was excellent. I wholeheartedly endorse such a move toward a closer relationship.

O. H. BERTRAM

Good Shepherd Lutheran

Toledo, Ohio

I agree wholeheartedly. Undoubtedly there are many likeminded. But the big question is the “How.”

HAMMELL P. SHIPPS, M.D.

Vincentown, N. J.

This country’s evangelicals have needed a “voice” to speak out clearly that they might rally around a common cause! The clarion call should do the following in progressive steps: (1) Raise pertinent questions which will evoke response and discussion; (2) provide the “machinery,” formal or informal (I prefer the latter), to set in motion a tremendous witness to the power of the Gospel through the lives of individual Christians who are one in purpose and essential doctrines; and (3) arouse our nation’s evangelical believers from lethargy, apathy, and/or a state of perplexity in order to demonstrate their faith and works as the answer to the folly of a diluted Gospel and Bible.

Step one has been taken boldly, yet wisely, in my opinion, by your editorial.… I am registering my keen desire and anxious hope that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has sparked, and will continue to kindle, a fire of unity and love that will cause millions of evangelicals to step out together as a spiritual force in America, not unlike that unity which was brought about at Pentecost by the Holy Spirit.

WALTER W. SCOTT

Executive Vice-President

American Sunday-School Union

Philadelphia, Pa.

Evangelicals need a unity that produces the same dynamic of Holy Spirit baptism which was experienced in the early Church interpreted and applied today in whatever frame of reference our various disciplines may require.

The Berlin Congress was a solid thrust. It was the work of God through his Son and the fervency of the Holy Spirit in action. This is what the Church needs today.… I always say, “Expect a miracle.”

ORAL ROBERTS

President

Oral Roberts University

Tulsa, Okla.

There is a real ringing note sounded in this article that is drastically needed in our day.…

During the summer of 1966 we were able to rally together some concerned evangelicals, and we began to press forward to begin an area-wide fellowship. September of 1966 was the beginning of such a group, and it has been just fantastic what has happened since. The group is called “The Hudson County Evangelical Minister’s Fellowship” and serves the twelve communities of the county encompassing a population of almost 611,000. There have been between twenty-five and thirty clergy who have shown an interest in the organization since its inception.

RONALD H. BROWN

Summit Avenue Baptist

Jersey City, N. J.

You said that “particularly among young evangelicals” there is a beginning of real interest in this type of fellowship and cooperation. In my connection with the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, I have found that one’s denomination is of very minimal importance. What is important, however, is that one is a Christian. From this frame of reference, the campuses of some thirty nations are being evangelized. And in the United States, splendid work has been accomplished because young evangelicals have put aside petty differences and emphasized their spiritual oneness in Christ.

EDMUND C. DE LA COUR, JR.

Providence, R. I.

The editorial is very provocative and specific. I feel that it will be of benefit to the evangelical cause.

CHARLES W. CONN

General Overseer

Church of God

Cleveland, Tenn.

The fragmentation of evangelicals and their resultant limited influence and power derive from several facts, in my judgment:

1. The evangelical “movement” (which has never really been a “movement”) has been associated with aggressive individualists who have built programs around themselves, the maintenance and survival of which have become their major concern, and have isolated them from leaders of like spirit.

2. Evangelical bodies, such as those comprising the NAE, have often so zealously committed themselves to narrow theological positions or stereotypes that they regard with mistrust any group which diverges the slightest degree from their criteria. This has made genuine integration of effort on the part of the fundamentalist-oriented groups of evangelicals all but impossible.

In consequence of the above, the “major denominations” have looked askance at the “evangelical bodies,” and the latter have set about with perfervid zeal to demonstrate to the former what they, “the great unwashed,” can accomplish! This puts it a bit strongly, to be sure, but the great gulf has been fixed.

Taking such matters of common observation into account, I would urge an evangelical movement which would include the large sections of the “major denominations,” as well as the saner leadership among the presently self-isolated “evangelicals.” Billy Graham has done much to demonstrate the strength of effort which can be realized by across-the-board cooperation. Such fine evangelical causes as the Gideons draw their membership from churches of the large denominations as well as from the so-called sects. Referring to the chart on page 25, the strategy I urge would involve a total constituency of something like 40,000,000 Protestants.

THOMAS B. MCDORMAND

President

Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

My conception of the togetherness of Christians does not involve the idea of organic union. The respective denominations should be a fellowship based on the things they hold in common as believers in Christ Jesus. Their method of approach and different interpretations of life’s problems should not be discouraged or destroyed, but they should make Christ the center.

J. H. JACKSON

The National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc.

Chicago, Ill.

Viet Nam’S Offensive

Please stop talking about Viet Nam (Editor’s Note, June 9). What you say is extremely offensive to me and all other liberal evangelical Christians.… There are so many people who equate evangelical Christianity with Puritan ethics-theology that it behooves us Christians to keep our heads in the mainstream of twentieth-century thought.…

People, even Christians, who think in terms of black and white, “Communist aggression” and “American benevolence,” offend me. However, I think that with Christ’s help I can overcome this prejudice. It would help immensely if my favorite magazine would stop printing such … material.

ANDY FINCKE

Havertown, Pa.

Cannot the label of “aggression” be more properly attached to a foreign power which foists an unpopular and corrupt military dictatorship upon a country that has done it no harm, and then devastates that land by bombing and burning for not accepting such a magnanimous gift?…

It amazes me that intelligent evangelicals like yourself can be aware of widespread moral corruption within this country (and not least among its legislators) and apparently quite unaware that American activities elsewhere in the world could be other than benevolent.…

I do not see why I should assume that in 1967 Communism is to be equated with the devil as wholly unmitigated evil.

D. W. DOERKSEN

Madison, Wis.

Pentecostal Pluses

The article on the “pluses” in the Pentecostal churches (“What We Can Learn from Pentecostal Churches,” June 9) should certainly make us perk up our spiritual antennae. May we have more along this line. I was happy to see that Dr. Bell had an excellent discussion on this theme in his layman’s column.

KEARNEY FRANTSEN

Makoti Lutheran Parish

Makoti, N. D.

J. S. Murray certainly brought many matters into sharp focus, and wrote most helpfully.…

One wonders at times if Pentecostals have a creed based more on experience than on the Bible. It is apparent that their experience is regarded as standard. This and this alone is “the full Gospel,” and every saint in church history, regardless of the greatness of his life and deeds, if he did not have what they are pleased to call “the baptism,” both the man and his works are somewhat deficient.

Like J. S. Murray, nevertheless, I wish to learn from them, for God is working in their midst, though I do not regard this as his endorsement of all they do and say.

HARRY B. MORRIS

Belle Mead Baptist Church

South Somerville, N. J.

I was very happy to read more on the Holy Spirit. As a member of the non-Pentecostal portion of Christianity, I feel a void in understanding on the part of laymen and ministers about the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of Jesus Christ in the world today.

JOHN P. RHODES, JR.

Memphis, Tenn.

Of Thermodynamics And Entropy

A. E. Wilder-Smith (“Darwinism and Contemporary Thought,” May 26) wrote that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin “postulates all this [complexity-consciousness tendency in matter] without a single reference to the laws of thermodynamics, which govern the behavior of all matter as we know it today.”

If Dr. Smith had read the index of Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man (Harper, 1959) he would have found three references to “thermodynamics” and five to “entropy” (the second law of thermodynamics). If he had read page 65 he would have seen Teilhard’s attempt “to explain the interplay of tangential arrangements in terms of the laws of thermodynamics.”

I agree with the basic thesis of Dr. Smith’s article. But we need not make a magician-entertainer of God in order to believe the creation account.

Dr. Smith effectively demolishes a Darwinism which postulates a “spontaneous” generation of life, but he throws Teilhard into that class unadvisedly, I think. Perhaps he should write a separate critique of Teilhard—after reading him.

EDWARD H. PITTS

Editor

Present Truth Messenger

Live Oak, Fla.

There are specific reasons for thinking that the spontaneous appearance of order is compatible with thermodynamics. Dayhoff et al. (Science 146:1461, 1964) have calculated from thermodynamic principles and experimental data that starting with certain proportions of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen in the gas phase at 277° C and one atmosphere pressure, there form spontaneously small amounts of hosts of complex molecules, among them pyruvic and lactic acids and alanine. The experiments of Miller and Urey (Science 130:245, 1959) show that under hypothetical primitive earth conditions where the products of gas reactions can condense biochemically interesting molecules form, and the amount of alanine becomes quite large. Fox (Science 132:200, 1960) reports the spontaneous formation of small protein molecules from a mixture of amino acids heated dry at temperatures between 150° and 200° C. The point of quoting these experiments is that they show the spontaneous appearance of order under conditions where “intelligent technique” is not employed.…

We must distinguish carefully what a biologist friend of mine, Dr. Robert MacArthur, calls the Little Theory of Evolution from Grand Theories of Evolution. The Little Theory is purely scientific, limited as science is limited. A Grand Theory, such as the one Simpson espouses, consists of the Little Theory plus a faith statement, such as, “That is all the explanation there is.” Clearly a Christian Grand Theory is possible where one accepts the Little Theory and adds the faith statement, “And that is how God does it.” When one sees this distinction one realizes there can never be a head-on collision between Christian faith and science but only between Christian faith and other faiths, such as scientism.…

C. P. S. TAYLOR

Asst. Prof, of Biophysics

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, B.C.

One of the objections … against the evolutionary progression of biological organization is that such a concept violates the second law of thermodynamics.…

However, fundamental to this line of reasoning is the assumption that the earth is an energetically isolated system. This is clearly not the case. For example, virtually all energy used by organisms in maintaining life processes is derived from outside the earth through the steady influx of solar radiant energy. Green plants “fix” this energy photo-synthetically. Bound up chemically in plant tissues, it is then available to animals as food energy for maintenance, daily activity, growth (an increase in organization), and, according to current theory, gradual change with time. As long as the system has an energy input, the objection to evolutionary concepts on the grounds that they ignore the second law is not pertinent. This vitiates Wilder Smith’s main thesis.

The implication here is not necessarily that evolution has occurred. But it is not possible to utilize this particular argument to show that evolution has not occurred.

LION F. GARDINER

Department of Biology

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Woods Hole, Mass.

Unfortunately, Dr. Wilder Smith has misunderstood or misrepresented current biological theories.…

The earth has never been considered a “closed” system with respect to energy (which is the issue at stake in entropy). Nor is a living organism closed to energy. Life would cease to exist were it not for the continuing flood of energy from the sun. (The origin and maintenance of life “costs” the universe.) Furthermore, there is adequate experimental evidence that more complex molecules are formed from simpler ones if energy is added to the system.

When biochemists learn to put together a self-reproducing molecule that can be described as “living,” they will be manipulating raw materials and energy, but they will not “react with” matter in any meaningful sense. In my opinion, it is either nonsense or heresy to say that God “reacted” with matter.

I have found that a more adequate approach to my colleagues has been to point out that Huxley, Shapley, and Simpson are talking religion and not science when they deny the existence of God. My colleagues understand this distinction, and it provides an excellent opportunity to discuss the meaning of the Christian faith.

V. ELVING ANDERSON

Professor of Genetics

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minn.

Dr. Smith has, in keeping with fundamentalistc tradition, made the unnecessary assumption that creationism (an unfortunate word) and evolution are alternative and mutually exclusive views. This of course is a direct consequence again of failing to make the distinction; evolution is one thing, evolutionism quite another.… Science works of course by both inductive and deductive reasoning. As a result of induction, one proposes a model, an hypothesis, which seems to fit most of the evidence and on the basis of the model deduces certain predictions. Science is full of such models, which are just tentative explanations or interpretations of observed phenomena.… No one who is in the least bit self-conscious of the method he employs in science regards these models as anything more than tentative explanations; they are not facts but scientific interpretations of observed phenomena.

My point then is this: To consider a scientific model which seeks to make explanations exclusively at the level of the natural world as an alternative to a world-and-life view, which seeks ultimate explanations, implies a serious misapplication or misunderstanding of the methods and ways of science.

CALVIN D. FREEMAN

Asst. Prof, of Biology

Cleveland State University

Cleveland, Ohio

“First” Error

My reference (“The Canadian Churches,” March 31) to the first religious service in Canada being conducted at the present site of Fort Churchhill, Hudson Bay, in 1619, is in error. The Rev. Douglas Dittrich, St. Jude’s Pro-Cathedral, Anglican parish of Frobisher Bay in the Arctic Diocese, has informed me that Sir Martin Frobisher’s chaplain conducted the first Canadian service at Frobisher Bay in 1578.

JAMES R. MUTCHMOR

Toronto, Ont.

Third in a Series on the Church in Politics

When the power of the Roman Empire began to decline in Italy and Western Europe after the transfer of the capital to Constantinople in A.D. 330, the church and especially the bishop of Rome moved into the vacated sphere of influence. The bishops of the church had begun to act as civil judges during the days of Constantine. Because they were more just and more efficient than most of the secular judges, their popularity increased. More and more cases were taken to them. The ecclesiastical taste for influence in civil affairs grew, and in the middle of the fifth century it was Pope Leo I who saved Rome from capture by the Huns under Attila and mitigated the terrors of the Vandal capture. The pope was engaged in civil affairs.

The symbolism of what was to come was acted out by a relatively weak pope, Leo III, when on Christmas day in 800 he placed upon the head of Charlemagne a crown of empire and inaugurated the Holy Roman Empire of the West. Charlemagne did not acknowledge that he had instigated the pope’s act in any way. The conclusion was unavoidable that the officer at the head of the church administration was conferring civil authority and power upon the ruler of the state.

Only sixty-five years later, Pope Nicholas I wrote to the emperor in Constantinople a letter breathing rebuke and contempt. In it he stressed that the bishop of Rome was the ultimate court of civil appeal in all of Christendom.

This claim to dominance was set forth much more clearly by the extremely able and dedicated Pope Gregory VII. Gregory served the ecclesiastical administration in Rome for many years under a number of popes before he himself obtained the office. He was convinced that the church could do its work properly only if it were free of interference from the civil state. He wanted to stop civil rulers from making appointments to church offices and from using their influence to dictate to church officials who should be appointed.

Gregory summed up these ideas for his own use in a remarkable series of propositions, among which are these:

That he [the pope] alone may use the imperial insignia; that all princes should kiss his feet, and his alone; that he may depose emperors; that he may absolve the subjects of wicked rulers from their allegiance.

At this point we are a long way from the separation of spheres under Moses and Aaron. We are also a long way from the days when the state was attempting to crush varying opinions in the church and to direct its theology. The pope is now sitting upon the circle of the earth as the vicegerent of God. He is determined to control all activity, civil or religious, political or ecclesiastical, and to bend it to the performance of his wishes.

To further this plan Gregory declared early in 1076 that the emperor, Henry IV, was no longer the governor of the German and Italian empire over which he had ruled. His subjects were not only released from the obligation of obedience; they were forbidden to obey him.

In this action Gregory, the officer who ruled the church, was claiming to rule the state also. Unfortunately for his personal prestige, he was a sincere and honest man, despite his espousal of this false political philosophy. Sincerity and honesty in so bad a cause came to a poor end. Henry put on a very impressive show of repentence, and Gregory, as a shepherd of souls dealing with apparently genuine penitence, restored him to good standing in the church. Thus the pope’s attempt to control the empire failed.

But the claims of the church did not lessen. They rose to their greatest height under Pope Innocent III. As the great English medievalist Margaret Deanesly says, Innocent was “a greater force in the secular politics of Europe than either emperor or national king.” It was he who forced King John of England to make England a papal fief. And it was he who deposed one emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in favor of another. Papal temporal authority reached its peak with Innocent.

His successors did not moderate the claim but found themselves less able to exercise it. Innocent had expressed his idea very effectively in a simile: “As the moon derives its light from the sun … so the power of the King derives the splendor of its dignity from the authority of the Pope.” Not only did he force temporal sovereigns to obey him; he also gave them orders. He told crusaders whom to fight and whom not to fight. In 1204 the new Latin emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin, was informed that with the aid of the Roman see he would be able to retain his dominion but that he would lose it if he failed to obey the pope.

But Pope Boniface VIII, when he tried to make good the same claims a century later, found himself in a very thunderous atmosphere. The barons of England refused to admit that either England or Scotland was a papal fief. Boniface’s dealings with Philip IV of France led directly to the pope’s death, for Philip was even more brusque and violent than Edward of England in rejecting the pope’s claims.

One of the most remarkable documents of all time dealing with the church-state relationship was given to the public in 1324. Its title was Defender of Peace, its author Marsiglius of Padua, a former rector of the University of Paris. Marsiglius was forthright and definite in rejecting the whole medieval system of the temporal claims of the papacy. No bishop, Roman or other, might subject anyone to temporal penalties apart from the permission of the body of citizens. Marsiglius put the authority of the civil state into the hands of its people. This view, though at that time far ahead of the possibility of realization, held great promise for the future. Marsiglius wanted the church to return to apostolic poverty. Temporal power was the last thing it should have, he believed.

Perhaps the last effective exercise of the papacy’s temporal power on the grand scale was the bull issued in 1493 by Alexander VI, one of the most unworthy occupants of the papal throne. This bull “by the authority of Almighty God … and of the Vicariate of Jesus Christ” granted sovereignty to Spain over all the lands to be discovered beyond a line drawn north and south through a point one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands.

On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, then, no modification of the temporal authority of the church was contemplated.

Martin Luther’s ideas on this matter were entirely different from those of Alexander VI. He reacted strongly against the papal procedures and followed the line of thinking that Wyclif had begun to defend in England in the fourteenth Century. Both civil and ecclesiastical dominion come from God. The existing church, because of its evil character, deserved no dominion at all, certainly none over the state. Wyclif presumably would have had the state reform the church. Luther was forced to entrust the organizational reform of the church to the civil government of the local state for lack of a better authority. But he conceived of this as temporary and without principal foundation. The theologians of Lutheran orthodoxy developed, however, a willingness to permit the state to determine the faith that was to rule the teaching and worship of the church within its borders. The proper situation was not restored in Lutheranism until American Lutherans built their churches in the United States on the principle of separation. The state did not supervise the church, nor did the church attempt to order the state.

The great pioneers of the view that the state should leave the church to develop without civil guidance were the Anabaptists, who began to present their ideas in Zürich in Zwingli’s day. Their gift to Christian people in bringing this idea to widespread attention was of the utmost value. However, the ground from which their idea sprang was not biblical. The state was not looked upon as a God-established entity for the control and direction of certain areas of life. Instead it was thought to be an unfortunate necessity in this sinful age, here for the purpose of controlling sin but unnecessary in a truly Christian society. Thus the area of Moses’ leadership of the people of God was exscinded from their life as much as possible. The state was left to be an institution where sinners tried to control other sinners without enjoying the true favor of God.

Progress toward a more biblically balanced view of the state and its relation to the church was made in Geneva in the time of John Calvin. But as modern criticism of the actions of the Genevan state in the cases of Castellio and Servetus shows, the church was not yet properly restricting itself to permitting the state to conduct only civil functions. It was still encouraging the state to interfere in spiritual affairs. An obvious example of this was the participation of a prominent Genevan, Theodore Beza, in the Colloquy of Poissy, a conference arranged by the French state so that it might take further steps to regulate the churches of France. Instead of defending Reformed theology in a state tribunal, the Protestants should have been urging the state to leave the church to its task and to restrict itself to its own duties.

STATURES

Suppose that, gaining heaven,

We’d find ourselves as tall or small

In spirit statures, visible to all,

As we deserve.

Some bishops might be centimeters high,

Some housemaids would be giants.

You? And I?

On earth grasshopper-statured souls

May still succeed;

On streets celestial they would not

Make speed.

ELVA McALLASTER

The principles that were to lead Reformed churches in this direction did begin, however, with Calvin. He refused to accept state direction of the content of worship and pressed for greater freedom in determining its frequency. The Institutes clarify the direct responsibility of the civil magistrate to God and, in a famous passage near the close, point out that even the subordinate magistrate may have a duty to God that supersedes his responsibility to his superior civil authority. This is important. The magistrate receives his responsibilities directly from God. He does not depend on the church to tell him God’s orders; he learns them himself from the Word.

The right of the Christian citizen to be free from tyranny and to bring the state into its proper sphere was upheld increasingly by leaders of Reformed thought. The author of the Vindication Against Tyrants in France, George Buchanan with his Law of Government Among the Scots, Samuel Rutherford with Law is King—these leaders were trying to free men from oppression so that they could assume their proper responsibilities as citizens before God. They were operating on the sound and biblical principles of the church and the state as separate divine institutions, each charged with its proper task, each doing its divinely imposed duty without interfering with the other. Buchanan was trying to do away with the idea, to use his own words, that “what Christ commanded is to be valid only if the Bishop of Rome approves” (tr. Duncan H. MacNeill, p. 45). The commands of Christ come directly to the conscience of every Christian.

One of the grandest days in Scottish history came when Andrew Melville faced the young king, James VI, and said:

Sir, as I have told you before, so I must tell you again: there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is King James, the head of the Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the head of the Church, whose subject James VI is, and in whose kingdom he is not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member.

Here speaks the true voice of the Scriptures and of their application to human history. Each kingdom is God’s kingdom, but each has its own sphere of operation. When both perform their duties faithfully, the result is thorough harmony in principle and in operation.

The Bible teaches that faith in God is the foundation for all attempts to meet human need. The Christian Church meets the spiritual needs of men. It teaches them how to face their own relation to God, and it teaches them how the grace of God operates. When that grace has worked in the heart of a man, he becomes concerned about human need. As a Christian citizen he, not the church, goes out to do battle with the social ills of men. The Christian must battle social ills. The church tells him so. They must be fought, and fought on Christian principles. But it is the citizen, not the church, who goes to the war.

The church teaches men how to find the spring of the energy for the contest against wrong. The Christian does the fighting.

“Missionary, go home!” Nationalistic demands for the withdrawal of missionaries have received much attention in recent years.

But what of another demand: “Missionary, come home”? This demand is more disturbing, because it originates among the very people whom Christ charged to “make disciples of all nations.” Some Christians are saying that recruiting preachers for overseas service is anachronistic. The idea of foreign missions, they say, is simply a drab remnant of the nineteenth century, an embarrassing reminder of Western civilization’s now defunct superiority complex—nothing less than Christian imperialism.

Any missionary with an ounce of self-respect will weigh evidence that might suggest he is wasting his life, as will those Christian leaders involved in promoting missionary support. God forbid that we should continue to enlarge our mission crew in an age that requires missionary automation!

From personal experience, I am willing to concede a high degree of validity to two often used arguments against sending missionaries overseas. One is, perhaps, the oldest of the anti-missionary arguments, and the other perhaps the most modern.

The more venerable objection has to do with the difficulty the American missionary encounters as he attempts to adjust to a new environment. No matter how sincere and capable he is, the critics insist, the missionary can never succeed in becoming one with the people of another culture.

Who would deny that this objection is based upon fact? Only a thin river separates the state where I was born from the country where I serve as a missionary, but I am reminded daily of the profound disparity between my own psychological and cultural heritage and that of my Latin brothers.

Elisabeth Elliot’s recent novel, No Graven Image, tells the story of Margaret Sparhawk, missionary among the Quichua Indians of Equador. Margaret decides one day that she will begin to dress like the Indians. Donning the native costume, she walks down the village street and knocks at the door of Rosa, an Indian friend. Rosa looks at her in silence, a half smile playing on her face. Finally, she asks the young missionary why she is wearing runa clothes.

“I wear them in order to be like you,” Margaret replies.

“Like us?”

“Yes.”

“You want to be like us?”

“Yes, Rosa, I want to be.”

“And … your nice clothes? Did you throw them away?”

“No, I have them.”

“What will you do with them?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes, when I go to the city, I will wear them.”

“Thinking to yourself, ‘Today I am white’?” (Elisabeth Elliot, No Graven Image [Harper & Row, 1966], p. 167).

And Margaret realizes that, though she might wish it, a white North American can never become a Quichua Indian.

There are other problems besides differences in dress, of course. One finds himself not laughing at a joke the nationals find uproariously funny. Or ignoring a custom. Then, there’s the language. My face still burns when I remember a sermon I preached about Paul and Silas in the calabozo, the dungeon. Not until after the service, on the way home, did my children tell me that I had put Paul and Silas in a calabaza, a pumpkin!

The problem of adjusting to a strange environment is very real.

The other objection is a more recent one. The missionary, like it or not, is identified with a nation regarded by many as an imperialistic power. And sometimes the fact that one is a Yankee weighs more heavily with people than the fact that one is a fellow Christian. One missionary remembers with dismay the day he raised his hand to vote in a hotly contested issue in a national convention. As the votes were being counted, he looked around. Suddenly he realized that some of his national brethren saw, not a fellow Christian who was voting according to his conscience, but a Yankee who was raising a white hand.

Yes, it would be foolish to deny that the foreign missionary faces an increasingly complex problem in his attempt to communicate the good news of God’s plan of redemption. To the difficulties I have mentioned, a dozen others might be added.

Yet I undertake my second tour of missionary service with an even greater enthusiasm than I felt at the hour of my appointment eight years ago. The argument that follows is admittedly more like a testimony than a theological treatise. But I offer it as evidence that sending missionaries is not an option but an obligation for the Church.

In the first place, we must continue to send missionaries because God continues to call them.

What impelled Noah to keep hammering away at the ark for many years, even though his neighbors made sport of the “dry-land sailor”? What made Abraham pull up stakes and move into a strange land? Why did Moses the stutterer march into Egypt, his knees trembling to make a preposterous demand of the most powerful king on earth? And why did Paul move from Lystra to Ephesus to Philippi to Athens, and finally to Rome, in the face of persecution and death?

Beneath the seemingly absurd behavior of these men was their conviction that they acted under orders from God. God gave Noah a vision of the earth covered by flood waters, implanted in Abraham the dream of a mighty nation flowing from his loins, untied Moses’ tongue, and gave Paul itching feet.

God still takes the initiative. We never know what new adventure awaits us tomorrow.

I am a missionary because God took the initiative. I was neither a missionary nor a missionary’s son. After twelve years in the pastorate, I ardently desired to spend the rest of my life in that fulfilling ministry.

Then came an opportunity for graduate study. One day as I listened to a returned missionary in the seminary chapel, I found myself overwhelmed by the immensity of the world’s need for Christ. Was this, I wondered, a call to foreign missions?

Later that morning, feeling I had to share my experience with my wife, I hurried over to our apartment. When I entered, she was standing at the sink washing dishes. I walked into the kitchen, stood behind her, and said, “Dear, I think God may be calling us to be foreign missionaries.”

My wife dried her hands on her apron and turned and faced me. “He may be calling you,” she said, “but he certainly hasn’t called me!”

Two years passed. I had completed my residence and was working on my doctoral dissertation. Once again I sat in chapel one day and heard a missionary speak. This time there was no overwhelming emotional experience, only an inner voice that said with absolute certainty: “I want you in a foreign country.”

Now I was sure; God had called me. But what of my wife? My family now lived a hundred miles away, in the city where I was pastor. That afternoon I returned home and later, after the children had been put to bed, told my wife what I now knew to be true: God’s will for my life was foreign service.

I don’t know what I expected—certainly not what happened. My wife smiled and said, “So that’s what it meant!”

She explained that that morning, at the very hour I was in the seminary chapel, she had been reading the Bible. Suddenly she had found that the words were blurring before her eyes and tears were falling. She had let the Bible drop into her lap and for half an hour had been acutely aware of God’s presence. She had been waiting for an opportunity to ask my opinion of her experience.

Now we both understood better than ever before the kind of God we serve—a God who has a plan for the world’s redemption and who in his own time reveals to each of us our role in that plan.

Is it not preposterous to argue about whether Americans should go overseas to tell others about Christ? As if it were for us to decide! The decision is God’s to make, and as long as he calls, Christians must go.

In the second place, we must continue to send missionaries because the only adequate expression of God’s love is love incarnated.

The apex of God’s dealing with men was the advent of Jesus Christ. Across the centuries, God spoke through miracles and through his prophets; but only when his Word became flesh did the angels sing with such abandon that they were heard by the shepherds in the hills.

Today we have many means to convey the message of God’s love: the printed page, radio, television, even the gift of money. Yet Paul’s words, “How shall they hear without a preacher?,” are as urgently relevant today as the latest callup of troops for Viet Nam. All other methods must ever remain secondary to that of one person touched by God’s love telling another person face to face what this love has done for him.

In 1960, soon after I joined the faculty of the Baptist Seminary in Torreon, Mexico, an experience demonstrated to me God’s predilection for person-to-person communication of the Gospel.

One Sunday morning as I drove down the highway on my way to a preaching engagement, I passed the village of Albia. Albia was no different from hundreds of other pueblos in northern Mexico—a few dozen adobe huts perched forlornly on the blowing sands of the desert. But I felt strangely attracted to the little village.

Thereafter, every time I drove by Albia the same thing happened—a subtle quickening of the conscience. “Why this place?” I asked myself. Within a fifty-mile radius of Torreon there were hundreds of other villages without an evangelical witness. Was there something special here?

At last I concluded that, for some reason, God wanted me to enter the village of Albia. Christmas week my family and I played Santa Claus to the village. We learned from the mayor that 167 families lived in Albia, and we prepared for each one a bag which contained fruit, cookies, candy, and a copy of the Gospel of Luke.

Christmas morning my oldest son and I went from door to door, leaving the simple present “in the name of the Lord.” At each house we asked permission to enter and read the Bible. But by sundown we felt like the disciples who had fished all night and caught nothing; not a single person had invited us in.

We returned to the car and started home, our spirits low. Had it all been an illusion? Had I deceived myself into thinking that God had led me to Albia?

Then, at the edge of the village, we met two young men. We should return the following Sunday, they told us, and visit Mr. Roman. Mr. Roman and his family were with friends in another village today, but they’d be home next Sunday. And Mr. Roman was the only man in the village who owned a Bible, the young men said.

The following Sunday, I returned to Albia. Domingo Roman and his wife were seated in the dirt before their little house, shelling corn. As I entered the adobe-enclosed yard, he jumped to his feet, smiled, and said, “You must be Sr. Carter. They told me about you!” Hurrying into the house, he returned with a Bible. “At last God has sent someone to interpret this book for me,” he said.

I spent the rest of the afternoon explaining the Bible to an avid congregation of two. They invited me to return the following Sunday, and the next. Soon Mr. and Mrs. Roman accepted Christ, and with them their three oldest children. In the months that followed, nephews, nieces, and cousins were converted. Today there is a strong congregation of believers in the village of Albia.

Could God have worked his miracle of redemption in Albia without the intervention of a missionary? Of course—but he chose to use a missionary.

Just before Christmas, 1965, my family and I arrived in the United States for a furlough, after spending the final years of our first term of service in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The day after Christmas, a letter arrived from Pedro Herrera. Pedro, a bright-faced young man with only two years of Bible-school training, was pastor of a mission in a good-sized city. We had helped him initiate the mission and had worked closely with him during the first months of its existence. We had also helped him pay a hospital bill after his wife’s serious illness.

The purpose of Pedro’s letter was to wish us a “Merry Christmas” and to say the following: “I want you to know that my wife and children and I love you and your family with all our hearts. We love you, not just because of what you did for us, but because we saw the love of God in your lives.”

Missionary come home? Impossible, when the missionary knows for a certainty that God has called him to leave his home and make a new home in a foreign land. Missionary come home? Indeed not—not as long as the missionary is conscious that, despite his inadequacies, God still manages to reveal his love through the missionary’s life.

Second of Two Parts

What is the real nature of the church? One of the basic ideas in both the Old Testament and the New Testament is that of the people of God. In their great struggle for the rediscovery and restoration of the true nature of the church, Luther and the other Reformers strongly emphasized this idea. The church is not primarily the organization (still less, the buildings); it is “the holy believers and the lambs that hear their Shepherd’s voice” (Smalkald Articles, Part III, xii). The church is essentially a spiritual reality: “A holy congregation of true Christian believers, expecting all their salvation in Jesus Christ, being washed by his blood, sanctified and sealed by the Holy Spirit” (Belgic Confession, Art. 27).

This does not mean that the church is only invisible. The Augsburg Confession clearly states: “The Church is the congregation of saints in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments rightly administered” (Art. 7). The Belgic Confession, like many other Reformation confessions, speaks of the notae (marks) by which the true church is known. The church, though in essence spiritual and therefore hidden, is also visible in the offices and their administrations. There is no contrast between the two. The one church is hidden and visible at the same time. Unfortunately, in evangelical circles the two have time and again been divorced. To many the church is the invisible church. The visible church is thought almost a necessary evil, at best the external hull.

What does the New Testament say about the unity of the church? Two aspects are found alongside each other throughout the whole New Testament. On the one hand, there is the given, existing unity, founded upon and realized in Jesus Christ (John 10:16; 17:20, 21). On the other hand, there is the constant call to realize this unity in the actual life of the church (Eph. 4:3, 13). These two aspects are not contradictory; they belong together and complement each other. Because believers are one in Christ, being members of the one body, they must always strive to manifest this unity in the world. A call to unity is necessary, because the manifestation of the unity is constantly threatened. There is the danger of unnecessary schism. There is danger of heresy. The New Testament emphasizes heresy in particular, because the unity in Christ is no indifferent, colorless unity but always a unity in the truth.

This comes clearly to the fore in John 17: the unity in Christ is immediately linked up with “keeping the word,” that Jesus received from the Father and transmitted to his disciples. H. Berkhof rightly says:

The New Testament is not interested in unity “as such.” Unity can be of all sorts: it can be purely human, even Satanic. All depends on the centre around which it is being formed.… The unity of the Church consists in the fact that together we conform to the apostles’ witness about Jesus Christ, as this has been transmitted to us in the New Testament [Gods ene kerk en onze vele kerken, p. 19].

Does this mean that divergent views can never be allowed to coexist in the one church? I do not think so. There is place for a variety of views, just as we see a wide variety of approaches and expressions in the New Testament itself. Yet there are definite limits. When the truth of the apostolic witness is rejected in its central affirmations, the New Testament itself speaks the “anathema” (Gal. 1:8, 9) or uses the term “antichrist” (1 John 2:18; cf. 4:1 ff.).

All this means, of course, that there is an enormous tension in references in the New Testament to the unity of the church. The relation between unity and truth can become so full of tension that a rupture is unavoidable. In the New Testament itself, this rupture means the expulsion of the heretics. The New Testament does not know the situation of a church in which error has obtained an official place. Yet it speaks to our situation, for it makes it abundantly clear that not all unity is naturally scriptural and that not all separateness is sinful. Everything depends on the answers to the questions: Is it a unity in the truth? Is it a separateness for the sake of the clear testimony of the Word of God?

At this point many will agree with the report of the Anglican evangelicals:

Hateful as schism is, we are not prepared out of hand to condemn all past divisions in the Church as wholly sinful. In our judgment, for instance, the subsequent history of the Roman Catholic Church has vindicated the action of the fathers of our Reformation in separating themselves from it, as it became clear that the Church of Rome was unwilling to be thoroughly reformed. If it be said that schism is always evil, it may be answered that unfaithfulness to the truth of God is yet more evil and that men, if they are faced by two evils, must humbly and courageously choose that which seems to them the less [The Fulness of Christ, p. 9].

Even the World Council of Churches admits that separation may be necessary in certain circumstances, for the final Report of Lund declared: “We are all agreed that ‘tragic’ is not too strong a word to express the effect of these divisions; that they sometimes become necessary is a sign of the presence of sin in the world” (Lukas Vischer, A Documentary History of the Faith and Order Movement: 1927–1963, p. 97).

An Ultimate Recourse

What must be done when error has crept into the church and found a firm footing, perhaps even an official place? All evangelicals, of course, agree that in such a case the church must be reformed. They all subscribe, at least in principle, to the well-known dictum: ecclesia reformata reformanda. But how should this reformation be accomplished? At this point evangelicals go different ways.

1. Separatists call for reformation by separation. One could call this the surgical conception of reformation. The classic example is the position of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, who believed that the church of their day was a “fallen” church and that a “restitution” (i.e., a return to the pattern of the New Testament church) was the only solution. Although few present-day evangelicals would go the whole way with the Anabaptists, many tend to believe that the church has “fallen” when doctrinal error is allowed to have a place in it or perhaps even to dominate it, and that it is the duty of the true believer to form a new church that is doctrinally and spiritually pure. Usually this whole position is deeply marred by two serious defects. First, no serious attempt is made to reform the “fallen” church. It is simply abandoned. And second, behind it all is an unscriptural perfectionism that looks for the “pure” church. This type of separatism is a dead end. It is not only unscriptural; it is also impractical, for there is no end to separation.

2. The second view of reformation could be called the medical conception. Here the believer refuses to leave his church, for he believes that the situation is never so hopeless that it cannot be improved. This believer differs from the separatist in two important ways. First, he maintains, at least in theory, that the church can be and should be reformed. Secondly, he wants to do this by spiritual means only and tries to avoid all conflict. Bishop J. C. Ryle wrote: “We ought not lightly to forsake the Church of England. No! So long as her Articles and Formularies remain unaltered, unrepealed, and unchanged, so long we ought not to forsake her” (Five English Reformers, p. 36).

Personally, I have a deep respect for all those who hold this view—and act accordingly! Yet I cannot share it. First, it does not take due account of the fact that by staying in the corrupted church to the bitter end one shares in the responsibility for what is going on in it. In his use of the Body-of-Christ metaphor, Paul made it abundantly clear that the church is an organism in which one member is co-responsible for another, and the single member for the whole body (1 Cor. 12; 2 Cor.6:14–16). Can we accept such a responsibility even for heretics who deny the fundamentals of the faith and who nevertheless are protected by the church—yes, who at times are even given prominent places?

Second, this position almost of necessity leads to endless accommodations and compromises. A recent example occurred in the New Zealand Presbyterian Church on the issue of the bodily resurrection of the Lord.

Third, is it really enough to denounce error, heresy, and laxity by preaching and writing only? Is it not also our duty to fight against it in the councils and courts of the church, thereby compelling the church to make its official position clear? The church-within-a-church “solution” has shown itself to be impossible.

3. The third way of reformation can be called the medico-surgical method. It tries to combine the good elements in both the former views. It agrees with the second that our primary task is to reform the church from within. But it goes beyond it by holding that all means have to be used, not only those of the Baxterian tradition (preaching, writing, and prayer) but also those of fighting heresy in the church councils and courts, both locally and supralocally. It further agrees that one should not easily leave one’s church; but it goes beyond this in its conviction that, when the church or denomination by its decisions and actions has shown its refusal to reject heresy, the time has come to leave. In other words, it agrees that separation is forced upon it by the unrepentant attitude of the church or denomination. The final and full responsibility, therefore, will always rest with the church or denomination that refuses to be reformed according to the Word of God. Personally, I believe that this approach to reformation is most in conformity with the New Testament.

When Do We Separate?

So far we have dealt with the matter from the purely theological angle. But what about the practical side? Is it possible to say something about the circumstances that necessitate separation? I think so. Naturally, we can talk in general terms only. Particular matters can be decided only in a concrete situation. This is the important element of truth in the so-called situation ethics. Yet it is possible to mention some situations in which separation is justified:

1. The church itself in its official doctrinal statements may oppose the Gospel and refuse to repeal its errors. This was the situation that faced the Reformers in the sixteenth century.

2. The church may compel the believer to believe or to do things that are clearly contrary to the Word of God. An example here is found in the Roman mass and in the practice of indulgences in the sixteenth century. Of course, in the concrete situation it may not always be easy to determine the weight of the issue. And sometimes the issue may focus on a point that in itself is not very important. But it may be serious in the situation as the straw that breaks the camel’s back. There is even a good chance that the “camels” will differ in opinion among themselves.

3. The church may no longer give freedom to believe or to do what is clearly demanded by the Word of God. One may think here of the prohibition against possessing or reading the Bible or attending Protestant services in the sixteenth century.

4. The church in its official capacity (the bishop or the assembly, perhaps, or, on the local level, the session) may refuse to deal with notorious heretics, in spite of protests or charges.

I have the impression that the first three of these situations do not often occur in today’s Protestant churches. Most denominations, officially, still have their original creeds and confessions, and even the more recent statements of faith are fairly pure in their positive affirmations—the real harm is usually in the omissions. There is also generally a considerable amount of liberty in the churches both for the liberal and for the evangelical. The real issue of our day is found in the fourth situation, the case in which a church refuses to deal with heresy. At this point, however, evangelicals disagree among themselves about which course of action to take.

Many evangelicals do not regard this point a sufficiently serious reason for separation, perhaps because they have never taken the first step toward reformation. They have never been outspoken and vigorous in their protest against unscriptural doctrines and practices in the church. Too many are content with the freedom that is left to them personally. Admittedly, this freedom is very important, and one cannot be grateful enough for it. But are we really doing our duty within this liberty? Do we really preach the full counsel of God? Or are we omitting certain aspects that might annoy or alienate people? Do we administer baptism only to those who are entitled to it, or do we conform to the unscriptural practice of more or less indiscriminate baptism? Do we really keep the Lord’s Table holy by barring unrepentant sinners from it? And what about discipline? Do we really exercise it on the local and the supralocal level? Do we protest against error and heresy, particularly when they appear—as they often do—in official church literature (church papers, Sunday school material, and so on) and in books by office-bearers in the church?

John Calvin once wrote to Margaret of Navarre: “A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward, if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent, without giving any sound” (W. Nijenhuis, Calvinus Oecumenicus, p. 255). As evangelicals we should realize that silence means co-responsibility for what is going on in our church. I am afraid that in this respect evangelicals are guilty before God and that the first act toward reformation must be confession of guilt. Those who have always been silent have no right whatever to separate from their church. Only those who have seriously tried to bring the church to reformation, and have found that the church not only refuses to reform but continues to protect error and heresy in fundamental areas of the Christian faith—only these persons have the right and the duty to separate.

The winds of freedom are beginning to stir within the Roman Catholic Church. Those who were present at the opening session of the Second Vatican Council were startled by the tension-filled debate that accompanied the reading of the report on Scripture and tradition. For in that debate—in St. Peter’s in the city of Rome, in the presence of the highest church officials—some Roman Catholic theologians defended the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptara, maintaining that it was and had always been the teaching of the church, despite the apparently contrary statements of the Council of Trent. No less surprising was the interest accorded the views of Protestant observers.

In many sectors of Catholic life one hears Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation honored, if not entirely exonerated. And the rebirth of interest in biblical studies that accompanied and fed the Lutheran Reformation is today strikingly paralleled—at least in some measure—within the church of Rome.

In its early days, to combat modernism the Pontifical Biblical Commission suppressed many attempts to employ the historical method in Old and New Testament studies; but today this is no longer true. Although the Biblical Commission is hardly progressive, it is not reactionary. It permits great freedom for many biblical and historical scholars and has contributed to a bold reassessment of biblical data, as in the long schema on the Church approved at the third session of Vatican II. Progressives like Hans Küng, Yves Congar, and Edward Schillebeeckx speak openly, and church authorities not only let them speak but even seem willing at times to listen to what they have to say. Some Catholic scholars state openly that they prefer Karl Barth to Thomas Aquinas. And many are well acquainted with Bultmann (and, we may add, seem overly in debt to his views).

Nevertheless, many feel that the winds of freedom are merely gentle puffs. Not even the visionary Pope John XXIII was prepared to allow progressives to discount the church’s claim to absolute and infallible authority in matters of faith and doctrine. Nor did either John XXIII or Paul VI hesitate to intervene decisively in Vatican Council proceedings when intervention seemed expedient. Apparently, neither pope has intended to grant unbridled liberty or to countenance modernism while extending a limited freedom to progressive theologians.

Why this caution? Part of the answer lies in the conservatism of the Roman Catholic Church, symbolized by the ultra-conservative Curia. But there is more to it than that. Years have passed since the great anti-modernist crisis, launched by Pope Pius X’s Pascendi dominici gregis encyclical of 1907 and highlighted again at mid-century by Pius XII’s Humani generis. But the specter of modernism still haunts the church. Although few exponents of the “new theology” would care for such a label, who can be certain of their leanings? Academic freedom has often been curtailed by the church, and disciplinary reprisals have sometimes followed upon unguarded expressions of heretical views; therefore who can be sure that the articulation of a slightly avant-garde theology does not actually conceal a radicalism that if unleashed would, from the Catholic point of view, be destructive both of the church and of Christian doctrine? That those within the Roman church, especially the popes, proceed with caution is thus fully understandable. And Protestants, who view the developments almost entirely from outside, should be especially careful to judge the spirits and to refrain from endorsing every wind of change as an expression, however belated, of the spiritual insights of the Protestant Reformation.

In attempting to assess the new climate within the church of Rome, Protestants should be aware of certain clear distinctions. At the very least, they should be aware of the distinction between progressives and modernists, even if in a given situation it is hard to describe a man as one or the other. A progressive within the Roman church is one who seeks constructive change, not to overthrow the dogmas of the church and the teachings of Scripture, but to enable them to become more clearly understood and more effectively proclaimed. Sometimes this legitimate aim results in a guarded reinterpretation of dogma. A modernist in the proper sense is one who, while pretending to maintain the dogma of the church, actually destroys it. Thus when Alfred Loisy, the French biblical scholar, accepted not only the historical method of Harnack but also Harnack’s view of the person of Jesus, he became a modernist and rightly suffered the disapprobation of his church. Lagrange, on the other hand, who was suspected of modernism because he also applied historical methods to the Bible, refrained conscientiously from attacking any dogma of the church and is now regarded as the great saint of biblical scholarship.

At the same time, Protestants should be aware that not all progressives are “reformers,” as Protestants generally understand that term. The progressives at Vatican Council II were united, not primarily in their doctrinal positions or on methodological grounds, but in an overriding concern for aggiornamento, a concern for renewal leading to a reconciliation between Rome and the modern historically minded and scientific world. Some of these men were quite orthodox from the Roman point of view. Others were modernists to the extent that they would openly attack some dogma, such as the Catholic view of transubstantiation. Some would be regarded as heretics, even in conservative Protestant circles. With some, such as Karl Rahner and Hans Küng, there is great difficulty in determining whether a new discovery of certain points of doctrine is, as they claim, only a recovery of what the church has always taught in all ages or is actually a defense of views that Rome even now would judge heretical. Only the future will tell the degree to which the “new” theology will encourage spiritual and theological reform.

Besides those who work within the church, there are others who despair of the possibility of reconciling Roman Catholicism with the modern world and who therefore leave the church for a secular life and ministry. Some leave it for very personal reasons. Often several motives are working together. The departure from the Roman church of British theologian Charles Davis, for instance, seems to have been based more on a rejection of the church’s authoritarian structure than on a rejection of its doctrine. And the distinctive tenets of the Lutheran Reformation seem negligible aspects of his thought. Thus Protestants should be as cautious about dubbing all those who have left the Catholic Church reformers as about casting all progressives in that role.

Protestant observers should also be careful about ascribing a rediscovery of Protestant doctrines—sola fide, sola scriptura, sola gratia—to the Roman church at large. True, some Catholic theologians, especially in Germany and France, implicitly and sometimes explicitly endorse some of these assertions. But their views are hardly universal in the church. And the future of their views, in light of the slightly hardening line of the Second Vatican Council on papal infallibility and other dogmas, is not completely encouraging.

An illustration may be found in the great doctrinal issue between the Jansenists, who were hounded out of France in the eighteenth century, and the Jesuits, whose theology has always dominated the Roman Catholic Church. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Jansenists demanded many reforms within the church, and many of these reforms have come about in recent decades. But the Jansenists stood for more than ecclesiastical and liturgical reforms. Jansenism was the last great attempt in the Roman church to overcome the Pelagianism of the Jesuits and return to the biblical theology forcefully expounded by Saint Augustine. The Jansenists insisted upon the total sovereignty of God in man’s salvation and deplored the idea that man could in any sense earn grace.

Even though many of the ecclesiastical reforms desired by the Jansenists were effected by Vatican II, the doctrinal emphasis of the Jansenists was strikingly lacking in conciliar debate. The concept of sin found in the council documents is superficial by Augustinian standards. Many of the speeches presupposed the ability of the natural man to know God and to cooperate with the divine grace. And many speakers revealed a tendency toward universalism. Thus Origen rather than Augustine seems to be the pater theologica of modern Catholicism. The task still falls upon evangelicals in all churches to renew Augustine’s profound doctrines of sin and grace as vital options in the contemporary theological debate.

This does not mean that Protestants should reject all that is happening within the church of Rome. On the contrary, they should applaud its new freedom and rejoice in its strong new attention to biblical scholarship. They should do this all the more in a day in which the Protestant churches appear to be disintegrating under the effects of a vagabond biblical and systematic theology.

But at the same time they must be aware that not all rebels, either Protestant or Catholic, are moved by the Spirit of God. They must look, not for freedom itself or for theological movement itself, but for signs of new awareness of the depths of man’s sin and of the total sovereignty of God in man’s salvation, wherever these signs may be found.—ED.

The recent publicity about the departure from the Roman Catholic Church of Charles Davis, a prominent theologian in England, has caused a certain dismay among clerical and lay “reformers” inside the Roman fold. Not many of these reformers are known to the public because of censorship, a censorship that is especially severe for priests—those who usually have the most to say. There are not many as outspoken in public as theology professors Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx, though a man like Archbishop Thomas Roberts, being somewhat independent because of his rank, has been able to speak. Even Charles Davis followed a course of restraint until the time when he made public his decision to leave the church.

There is indeed an intellectual ferment in the Roman church, chiefly in western Europe, but it is mostly confined to the university-trained clergy or to the more advanced members of some of the religious orders. Very little is known to the public. Ideas are sometimes revealed in private discussions, sometimes in lecture rooms, and sometimes in unpublished manuscripts, most of which are rejected by the ecclesiastical censors.

Individual thinking and personal initiative in research have been dangerous activities for priests. At the end of the last century, it was thought that Leo XIII had cleared the way for new freedom by declaring, as he opened the Vatican archives to scholars: “The Church has nothing to fear from the truth.” Some of Leo’s utterances on Bible interpretation were thought to encourage a new approach. Then came the reign of Pius X and his assistant Cardinal Merry del Val, a very traditionalistic Spaniard. In 1907 the pope issued a decree and an encyclical that strongly attacked modernism and commanded bishops to “purge their clergy of modernistic infection.” Some priests were excommunicated and several teachers were dismissed.

At Vatican Council II, Archbishop Pellegrini of Turin referred to this suppression in a speech advocating greater freedom of research for the clergy. This speech was but little reported and may have been bypassed deliberately. (Some account is given in Xavier Rynne’s The Fourth Session.) Pellegrini surprised his audience by stating that many clerics had suffered unjustly: “Who would dare to assert that … the rights and dignity of clerics, whether priests or bishops, or even cardinals, were always respected?”

The speech caused much discussion in the aisles, corridors, and coffee-bars of St. Peter’s. Nobody seemed to know what bishops or cardinals were involved. Many had heard of George Tyrell, the Jesuit theologian, who had died in loneliness and excommunication; some knew of Loisy, the rebel French critic of the Gospels, who had defied the Vatican on the basis of his convictions as a historian; others knew of Msgr. Louis Duchesne, who had seen his history of the primitive Church placed on the list of prohibited books; Msgr. Pierre Batiffol was remembered as having lost his university presidency at Toulouse; the Italians cited Father Ernesto Buonaiuti, who had maintained a spiritual witness in Rome itself until his death. But who had been the members of the higher clergy?

Pellegrini was probably thinking of men like Cardinal Mercier, suspect for having introduced a new interpretation of Thomism at the University of Louvain. There was also Cardinal Ferrata, an opponent of Cardinal Merry del Val, who reputedly was against the witch-hunt of the intellectuals. The future Benedict XV, Della Chiesa, was kept waiting for the red hat at Bologna for several years as a “potential heretic.”

During the modernist crisis, a powerful underground movement for repressing heresy was organized by a certain Monsignor Benigni. This was called Sodalitium Pianum (Fraternity of Pius), with the code name La Sapinière (The Pinewood). It was a very secret, international society with a group of members working independently and in the dark. The main object was to keep Roman agencies informed of any suspicious utterances or activities by members of the clergy, principally those in teaching positions. The society was suppressed by Benedict XV, who had once been on its list of suspects.

Tension relaxed somewhat after World War I. Then after World War II there came another crisis. During the war, many movements for a greater freedom had appeared, such as the worker-priest movement. After the war the forces of reaction were at work again. Several prominent theologians were removed from office. Some were banned from publishing. In certain religious orders there was a purge in which nearly all superiors were removed from office. Some priests were summoned to Rome, where they were asked to give an explanation of their opinions before the tribunal of the Holy Office. Some were menaced with public condemnation. Some were sent into exile and isolation.

Since the great exodus of the Reformation era, many serious thinkers in the Roman fold have maintained that the church can be reformed only from within. This may be only partly true; there is no doubt that the continual witness of the Eastern Orthodox and the Reformed churches has had an influence, perhaps more in this century of universal communication than ever before. Yet the example of the followers of Port-Royal—the Jansenists, as their enemies called them—is often cited. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Jansenists demanded many reforms in matters of use of the Bible, liturgy, and church government. Many of these demands have been met in this century, in particular by Vatican II. Today it is no longer heresy to spread the Bible in the language of the people, to put aside Latin in worship, or to reshape the Roman Curia in favor of the episcopate. The Jansenists suffered for their ideal of reform, and their witness inside the church is considered to have been an essential leaven.

Some progressive spirits have been able to follow the Jansenist example of working in comparative obscurity. Their main endeavor is through personal contacts; their publications are generally marked by prudent reservations. The sweeping changes of modern liturgists, which are hotly denounced as Protestant by the traditionalists, would not have been possible without the less extreme work of various pioneers, many of them Benedictine monks, such as Dom Lambert Beauduin. Dom Beauduin was able to achieve great changes in the attitude of Roman theologians toward Orthodox and Reformed churches. But his periodical, Irénikon, was often menaced by the Holy Office. Beauduin himself was once exiled for two years, and a ban was placed on his publication of further writings.

Yet, curiously enough, the leaven of change was at work. Archbishop Roncalli, for long years a friend of Dom Beauduin and a fellow “laborer in obscurity,” was elected to the papacy as John XXIII. The very name he assumed was instructive, at least for the initiated; it took the historians back to the days of powerful councils. John XXIII will go into history as the pope of Vatican Council II, a pope who defeated the conservative view that in 1870 Vatican I had put an end to councils.

The election of Angelo Roncalli is hailed by the reform groups as an example of how a struggling minority may suddenly achieve a breakthrough against odds. When Roncalli entered the election, he was able to rely chiefly on the support of the French, who had known and liked him while he was papal nuncio in Paris. The French group could rally progressives like Cardinal Gracias of Bombay and various anti-Curialists, reactionaries against the “personal rule” of Pius XII. This group gradually brought in neutrals who were not very enthusiastic about the men of the old brigade.

A tenuous and fragile force raised up John XXIII. As one who had served his apprenticeship in Rome, he knew the special hazards of office, even for popes. He sprang the announcement of Vatican Council II outside Vatican City, at the church of St. Paul. The expected delaying tactics of the Curia became plain and forced John to hasten the council preparations, lest he should die before anything could be accomplished. Even popes have frustrations in the Roman machinery of government.

Now the “reformers” are asking whether there is any permanence in their victory. The optimists are putting their hopes in the new episcopal senate which will open its first meeting on September 29. However, it is too early to foresee what direction this body will take. How successful will it be in overcoming the bureaucrats in permanent session? To what extent will it be controlled by the Curia, acting as advisers to the Pope in the nomination of members?

Undoubtedly Vatican Council II was a hopeful beacon. It revealed to the world and perhaps to an astonished Roman hierarchy that a majority were in favor of updating and change. A few of the “advanced” theologians were called in. But John XXIII died too soon. For in spite of a number of changes, there is still everywhere in the Roman system of government the firm pattern of authoritarian rule.

The fate of any “reformers” inside the Roman fold will remain uncertain. A departure like that of Charles Davis is looked upon as high treason, and the tragedy that may loom over some who are left is that of a slow extinguishing. The opponents, notably those wielding power, now have an excuse for denouncing “potential defectors” and “secret heretics.” There may be secret “court martials” for those left in the camp, or a more rigorous surveillance. Some may lose all chance of promotion or be subjected to acts of intolerance.

The most progressive Roman Catholic intellectual leaders have often debated whether a brother can leave in good conscience, knowing that his departure may make life harder for those left behind. He will be branded a deserter and his friends will be viewed as suspects.

Yet the question of intellectual and spiritual integrity remains. How far can one go against his personal convictions? Must he always remain silent and passive in confronting what he believes to be error? The old argument in the past has been that “blind obedience” and humility before the voice of authority show a true religious spirit. Today many feel that voices of protest are needed until in the Roman fold there is freedom for the public communication of ideas.