In this panel leading churchmen discuss Communism from a Christian point of view. The panelists are Dr. Daniel Poling, president for life of World Christian Endeavor Union and chairman of the board of “Christian Herald” magazine; Dr. D. Elton Trueblood, professor-at-large of Earlham College, where for twenty years he was head of the philosophy department, except for two years on leave as religious advisor to the Voice of America; and Dr. Charles W. Lowry, Episcopal theologian and president of the all-faith Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order. Moderator is Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY.This is one of a filmed series of thirteen half-hour discussions prepared for public-service television and for use by discussion groups. The series, “God and Man in the Twentieth Century,” was produced by Educational Communication Association (P.O. Box 114, Indianapolis, Indiana 46204).

Henry: Gentlemen, there are very different ways of looking at Communism. Some say that Communism is a “Christian heresy” concerned for Christian ethics but on an atheistic base; others say it is demonic, that the powers of darkness are at their height in this pagan cause. What do you say?

Trueblood: I would say that Communism is a religion, and only as we see it as a religion, though a secular religion, will we understand its power.

Poling: My answer would be comprehensive and inclusive. I would say yes to both parts of the question.

Lowry: Arnold Toynbee introduced the unfortunate idea that Communism is a Christian heresy. I think it is even more anti-Christ than the Gnosticism of the first century, which the elder John denounced as anti-Christ.

Henry: Well, Dr. Lowry, why do you hesitate to dignify Communism as a Christian heresy?

Lowry: Because I think that is both complimentary and misleading. Communism is systematically organized and determined to eliminate Christianity, to extirpate the very name and influence of Jesus from history. It is bitterly anti-Christ in a most literal sense.

Poling: I go along completely with Dr. Lowry. I’m bound to look at Communism through my eyes as a Christian. And that of course affects my attitude toward the particulars that will inevitably enter this discussion.

Lowry: I think the matter of looking as a Christian is most important.

Henry: Well, are there elements of the Christian religion that Communism unwittingly borrows, Dr. Trueblood?

Trueblood: Yes, I think there undoubtedly are. That is, there is no doubt some genuine concern for the poor, and this has been a part of the Christian faith ever since the Beatitudes. So we can wholly agree with Dr. Lowry and still see that it is a mixed composition.

Lowry: In addition I think it’s most important that Karl Marx, by what I think we have to call a process of unconscious thinking, used biblical modes of thought. I think this is most interesting. Salvation, redemption, and—a big word—eschatology, or last things: these things are all within the framework of Communist thinking.

Poling: I think there was an inevitability about what Karl Marx said and the way he said it. The influence, which no doubt he was frequently unconscious of, of Christianity upon his life through his family, through his tradition—all that was involved in what he had to say, and the best of Karl Marx comes right out of our Christian tradition.

Henry: On what basis does Communism tolerate the churches?

Trueblood: I’d like to say a word about that. When I was in the Voice of America, of course we heard many broadcasts from Russia. They make it a great point that they give the churches absolute freedom of action. But “freedom” is a very ambiguous term. What they mean is that people can gather together for worship. But when they begin to influence public life in other ways, this simply is another story.

Poling: When they do meet, they meet under surveillance; they’re always under careful inspection and indeed under guidance, and what they say they say with those restrictions, conscious that they’re being watched.

Lowry: It’s most important, I think, for us to keep in mind that the constitution of 1936, which is the present constitution, guarantees only freedom of worship or freedom of the cult alongside freedom of anti-religious propaganda, which means there is no educational possibility or youth possibility or social-work possibility for religious people.

Henry: There are some who think that the Communist strategy is to tolerate the churches only insofar as they become instruments useful to the social revolution by promoting revolutionary goals. Would you have an impression on this?

Poling: Very definitely. In my own experience, with one group that came it was discovered that there was a member of the secret police who had been duly ordained and was in the group. It’s indicative of the approach that is always made by the government to what it calls freedom of worship. It is freedom insofar as it strengthens the hands of the government itself. I don’t think that there is much doubt about that. And aside from that, there is no freedom of worship.

Lowry: A major of Soviet counter-intelligence who defected and was in my office several years ago told me that when he was being trained, along with other people of the secret police and counter-intelligence, they used to joke with one another and say “Perhaps you’d better go into the priesthood.”

Trueblood: I think we can understand their position by looking at it as an extreme form of what many people in this country want. There are many people in this country who are very much in favor of religion as long as it doesn’t get into the schools, as long as it doesn’t get into government, as long as it doesn’t get into business. They are delighted to have religion—period!

Henry: Simply as an exercise of private devotion and …

Trueblood: And as a cult. They’re not opposed to prayer, for example. But they wouldn’t allow a thing like Dr. Poling’s Christian Endeavor Society.

Henry: And they would certainly reject any significance for God in public life, wouldn’t they?

Trueblood: Decisively.

Lowry: In 1918, when they were getting under way, they emphasized very much the notion of religion as a private matter. At that time it was believed it could be handled by simply making it private and then claiming, as in a way they still claim, that every citizen could do as he pleased.

Trueblood: It has helped me to realize that what this really means is segregation. They’re wholly willing to have religion as long as it is segregated to its own realm. And what worries me so in our country is that this is getting to be a very popular view here.

Poling: You know, Dr. Lowry, what you’ve called our attention to, and we’ve forgotten it very largely, is what the direct action was in 1936, when they declared their position. I’ve come to the place where, remembering Mein Kampf and Hitler, I believe what they say is their purpose and program and plan. They may change it from time to time, but only to strengthen it as they see it through the eyes of the apparatus.

Lowry: I claim to be one of the relatively few people who have read Mein Kampf from cover to cover in both volumes, in preparation for a trip to Germany in 1939.

Henry: Dr. Trueblood, you’re an intellectual. You’ve spent most of your life on the university and college campuses of America. Does it give you any concern that Christianity as a system of thought has such a paltry place in the academic dialogue today while the Communists in their country deliberately commit the young intellectuals to an atheistic system of thought?

Trueblood: You’ve hit something that’s very close to my heart. I am deeply worried about this, and I think some change has to come if we are to have recovery. What I think is so bad is that we are doing in our way in the university communities what the Russians are doing in their way. It’s not the same method, but it often has exactly the same result, namely, that the people suppose Christianity is completely obsolete.

Lowry: I wonder too whether there isn’t also a tremendously grave danger in that on our campuses, among the intellectuals of America and of the world, there is, it seems to me, the notion of a kind of semi-Marxism, namely, that salvation is going to be found by man through the environment, through manipulating and changing the environment. This eclipses completely anything religion has understood by salvation.

Trueblood: Yes, Dr. Lowry, our danger is not from the avowed Communists; they are rather few. I know some of them.

Lowry: I know a few.

Trueblood: But I cannot name very many. I can name you hundreds, however, who are really giving aid and comfort to what is fundamentally the Marxist philosophy.

Poling: Dr. Trueblood, to me the most encouraging thing at this point—and this question is the most important question, it seems to me, that you’ve asked us—is the fact that millions of young people themselves are in revolt against this. Take that demonstration in London recently, when Billy Graham asked all under twenty-five years of age to indicate their presence; it seemed to me that everybody there was under twenty-five—or else that they were prevaricating.

Trueblood: You mean at Earls Court?

Poling: I mean at Earls Court. The great London campaign. And my own experience with young people today is that again and again they’re in revolt against what seems to be this academic trend in the United States, all over the country. To me it’s a great encouragement. You cannot get for this position, which you have so succinctly stated, audiences that even compare in numbers of youth with the great crowds that gather when there is a presentation of the positive and dynamic evangelical message.

Trueblood: If it is presented unapologetically. That’s the difference.

Henry: There are groups of churchmen, as you know, who have insisted that we ought to recognize Red China and that Communist China should be admitted to the United Nations. What do you think?

Poling: Well, I thank you for that question. I hoped you would ask it. And so that the figures will be accurate I brought this statement. In the summer of 1966 I was responsible for initiating a poll in which 150,000 Protestant clergymen were asked three questions: Do you favor the admission of Communist China to the United Nations? Do you favor recognition of Communist China? And do you favor accepting the condition imposed by Communist China for possible entrance to the United Nations, namely, that Free China be excluded from the United Nations? Now of the 150,000 polled—and this poll was made by a commercial organization—nearly 32,000 replied. Of the 32,000, 72.9 per cent said “no” to the admission of Red China to the United Nations, and 71.4 per cent said “no” to recognition. But on that other question, 93.7 per cent of the Protestant ministers polled said “no” to the exclusion of Free China from the United Nations.

Lowry: Dr. Poling, the return there of 32,000 is pretty good, isn’t it?

Henry: It’s a remarkable percentage.

Poling: Very remarkable. You see, it’s better than 20 per cent, and 10 per cent on a poll of that kind is considered pretty good. We said that we would keep their identities secret unless they wished to be identified—and over 12,000 said, “We wish to be identified with this.”

Henry: Do you consider the supposed cleavage between Russian Communism and Chinese Communism a hopeful sign?

Lowry: Well, there is no question, Dr. Henry, that this has had a very decisive effect on many trends and many developments. Of course, it’s still early, and we can’t tell for sure, naturally, how it’s going to come out. But the whole tendency for various regimes in Eastern Europe to take more independence, to try to reach for it—the whole idea of polycentrism, which, for example, the Italian Communists play up—is the result of this. It has had a very fundamental effect. We can’t tell, of course, what the outcome will be. It depends on whether there is ever a reconciliation, which Brezhnev and Kosygin came in to try to effect, and which is one reason Khrushchev went out.

Henry: They’re still both Communist. Ought we to make a one-and-one identification between the Western powers and Christianity? Dr. Trueblood, what would you say?

Trueblood: You simply cannot honorably make that identification. Many of the Western powers are only quasi-Christian. They do have some Christian basis in their background. The simplification is what is evil here. It is wrong to simplify by saying we’re all Christian. It is wrong to simplify by saying we are merely secular. Both of these are erroneous statements.

Henry: What is the great strength of the Western world?

Trueblood: I think the great strength is that we have these residual elements of self-discipline, of respect for the individual, of equality before the law. We don’t always demonstrate these, but they are great ideas.

Lowry: Let me say a word on that. It seems to me that we could put this by saying the power of tradition, and tradition is described, I think, by what Dr. Trueblood said. Now, in contrast, Communism is the most radical view that has ever come before mankind because it wants to drop and to destroy all tradition; only the future counts.

Poling: You know, Dr. Lowry, I think the great word in there as I listen to Dr. Trueblood and to you is opportunity—that’s what we still have.

Henry: The deliberate commitment to a free society that makes possible on an open mass-communications media like this a discussion of concerns like Christianity and Communism.

Trueblood: Now, I like this very much; but, Dr. Lowry, I’d like to challenge you on this word “radical.” I’d like to uphold the idea that the Christian conception is the most radical that the world has ever seen. This idea that every human being, whatever his color, whatever his beginnings, is one who is actually made in the image of the living God, and one for whom Christ died—I think this is the most radical idea the world has ever seen.

Henry: What is the great weakness of the Western world?

Trueblood: That we suppose these lovely things, such as equality before the law, can exist as cut flowers separated from their sustaining roots. We’ll find that they will not, that they will wither.

Lowry: I agree with that. I think we can put it perhaps even more strongly and say that unbelief and apostasy and failure to really hold and rejoice in and believe the great things that have come down to us—I think this is the tragic weakness of the West.

Poling: Of course, there’s another word that comes into this picture right now, and it’s the word “indifference”—our failure to accept dramatically, dynamically, positively, the responsibility for the maintenance of these things. We have our freedom as an inheritance from the past, but here’s our responsibility: to pass it on unimpaired, strengthened.

Trueblood: And we have a kind of indifference that is really naïve complacency. We think these things will do themselves. They won’t.

Henry: Is it a matter of life or death for the Church, for Christianity, to win the Communists?

Poling: No, in the long look, no. But so far as I’m concerned, it is for me in my time life or death. It’s one of those immediate, compulsive responsibilities, in other words. But in the long look “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun.…” In other words, we have two matters here: we have that which is immediate and we have that which is continuing, so that Christianity and the Church are not defeated however the conflict immediately results.

Lowry: Dr. Poling, I think that from the divine standpoint you’re right, of course. But looking at it from the human standpoint and the confrontation and the challenge to us as individual Christians, I’m not sure; I think there is an urgency and maybe a crisis here, an element of crisis, that we have ducked. There is a certain scandal in the fact that Christianity has not felt driven to go out and, in the power of the Spirit of God, attempt to make contact with Communists and to find the way under God and in Jesus Christ to change the climate, change the nature and configuration of the world we’re in.

Poling: Brother, do I go along with you on that!

Henry: Are there any encouraging developments, Dr. Trueblood, in the Christian confrontation of Communism?

Trueblood: No. Is that too short an answer?

Henry: Yes, say a little more.

Trueblood: On the whole, we have not really presented anything of sufficient vigor. So far as I can see, there are very few campuses where the Christian movement has anything like the power of the new left. I’m sorry to say that. But I think it’s true.

Lowry: I don’t differ in substance with that. I would say that the failure of Communism to root out Christianity in its own countries is a slightly encouraging sign. I would say also that the way in which the cold war has developed so that there is much more openness between frontiers and movement around both of the Communists and of people in touch with Communists—this gives opportunities. I think, in other words, that the opportunity is present.

Poling: Well, there are many colleges and universities where what Dr. Trueblood has said is not completely true, where you have a tremendous sweep of dynamic Christianity. I can name them one by one, and two by two, and three by three. They are not on the front pages because it’s not news. It’s commonplace, it’s what they are doing day after day and week after week.

Henry: Well, what is the real answer to Communism?

Trueblood: The real answer to Communism is a more revolutionary faith than theirs. And we have it if only we would understand it.

Lowry: It seems to me that the real answer to Communism in terms of effecting anything—of course state power has a role, and we mustn’t neglect that—but in the end something has to reach the soul of man. I believe that the key here is the Holy Spirit. If we look back, we see that the Holy Spirit and men and women in the power of this Spirit alone were able to go against all the powers of the world and of the states and nations and Caesar. I think this has somehow got to come again. Christians have got to believe that God lives, that God is God, that the Holy Spirit is with us, and find the way to reach mankind so deeply that there will be a transformation of the whole life and the whole ambiance of the world.

Poling: I think a Methodist “amen” is good here! There is just one answer, and that answer continues to be Jesus Christ. If the evangelicals of the world, those Christians who believe this, were to unite, we would see again the same revolutionary achievement that was seen in the early Church, when those disciples—a mere handful—went out with the Holy Spirit thrusting them forth to turn the world upside down. He is the answer, and his formula is today the formula: The Gospel of Jesus Christ—personal first and social always.

Trueblood: And, Dr. Poling, we’ve got a long history of this. You can see that, though I want to be realistic, I certainly don’t mean to be discouraged. We have always been a minority. We were certainly the tiniest minority in the ancient pagan world. And I believe that if we understand ourselves, our message, and our position, we can be a great power in the present pagan world.

Lowry: Dr. Trueblood, in the Old Testament the Jews believed in the little group, the residue, the remnant.

Trueblood: And they were a minority in their whole world.

Lowry: Yet by the power of these ideas and the power of God, they have transformed the whole world.

Henry: This biblical remnant is the only remnant that can be the salt of the earth. There are other remnants, and sometimes they impose their will upon the majority. But in the long run there is only one remnant that can be a preserving force in the history of the earth.

Trueblood: But it has to keep its salty character to do this, you remember.

Henry: Precisely.

Trueblood: If it loses that, it is good for nothing, do you remember that?

Lowry: If it loses its salt, its savor, too bad.

Trueblood: So mild religion isn’t worth anything.

Henry: Dr. Polling, you’ve had a lifetime in Christian Endeavor. Do you think that the young people of America are still looking for a cause?

Poling: Always they look for a cause, and always they find a cause and give themselves in dedication to the cause. That is our opportunity.

Henry: Do you feel that Christ can fill the vacuum of the collegiate and university mind?

Poling: There is only one answer: yes. He has and he does and he will.

Henry: Out in the television audience there are multitudes of lonely and solitary people who wonder how in the clash of twentieth-century events—a clash that so often takes place in the clouds above them because of its staggering comprehensiveness today and its world involvement—they can really count for anything.

Trueblood: They feel so helpless.

Henry: Now, what can we say to a person like this?

Poling: Well, all I know is, of course, my humble experience, and after all that’s my ministry, isn’t it, finally? I’ve found the answer for myself, and I present it to my family and to those I may reach—in the words of St. Paul, “I can do all things through Christ.” That’s the answer to frustration, to everything.

Lowry: I certainly agree. But I think, too, that the student of the Bible, the person who knows the Bible, knows the way that nations were on the map, and the way that God operated through the nations even beyond their own knowledge—this is just like today. I think the reader of the Bible can be very contemporary.

Henry: Dr. Trueblood, is there anything about the twentieth-century confrontation of paganism that is different from the job that the early disciples of Jesus had on their hands with the Great Commission?

Trueblood: I cannot see that there is anything different. I know that many people think there is; they say that we’ve got a whole new set of problems and therefore must have a whole new set of answers. But I believe this is completely superficial. A man can hate his wife at six hundred miles an hour just as much as he can at six miles an hour.

Henry: There is only one answer, and that is the same answer the apostles proclaimed.

Trueblood: The notion that technology changes the fundamental questions is just a very superficial philosophy.

Henry: Thank you very much, gentlemen, for an illuminating panel. The future does not belong to any ism; it belongs to the God of the ages. And in the generations to come, men will sing the praises, not of the Communist myth, but of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Thank you for a good hour.

Second in a Series on the Church in Politics

If we could ask a Christian of the fourth century what he thought of the problem of church and state, he would likely reply, “What problem? There used to be one, but there just isn’t any more, and there never will be one again!”

At last the years of anxiety, persecution, and suffering were over: the emperor himself had become a Christian! God had heard the prayers of the martyrs, and now the hand of God could be seen clearly. Surely the raising up of the Emperor Constantine, and all his military and political successes, pointed to a new era of divine blessing.

Indeed, the emperor thought so himself, and he set about to be an active, thankful instrument of God’s providence. He began to return the church property that had been confiscated during the persecutions.

In Africa, however, problems arose immediately. Here there were two competing churches: the rigorous Donatists, whose refusal to compromise with the pagan state in the past had entitled them, they were certain, to regard themselves as the only true Christians; and the more relaxed “Catholics,” who believed in ignoring the records of Christians in the old days of persecution as much as possible. When the state gave the property to the “Catholics,” the Donatists protested. When a church council ruled against them, they petitioned the emperor for another one. And when the outcome was the same, they appealed directly to the emperor, asking the state to overrule the church! Again they lost, this time before the imperial supreme court. Still the Donatists refused to yield and be reconciled to the rest of the church.

Unfortunately, now that the status of his court had been ignored, Constantine thought it necessary to use force in carrying out the court’s decision. He confiscated Donatist places of worship and then used troops to put down the riots that ensued. Constantine was sure that God wanted all men to worship together in brotherly concord, and he believed that, when necessary, the state should further that aim.

The Donatists, on the other hand, took the Bible mechanically and were certain that the church was in the world to suffer at the hands of the state. Not only did past persecution prove that they were the true church; the obvious facts of everyday life continued to prove it also. These “only true Christians” were Berber peasants who were forced to pay confiscatory taxes to absentee or indifferent Latin landlords, in this way suffering at least financial martyrdom for Christ’s sake. The Donatists were also confirmed in this view by the status of the other church. Almost all the “Catholic” laymen were owners of vast estates, and the church itself was a great land-owner. Even worse, the “Catholic” clergy not only were excused completely from the very taxes that ground down the peasants but also received state subsidies. If the true church was made up of sufferers, then obviously the subsidized church couldn’t be Christian at all.

Constantine had given a privileged economic and political status to the church because he was convinced that her intercession with the God of heaven was vital to the prosperity of the empire; he saw no difficulty whatever in identifying the church with the upper classes. But the Donatists certainly did, and it is not at all surprising that they responded in kind by organizing guerrilla bands in monks’ clothing. These guerrillas brained over-zealous debt-collectors with clubs, because Scripture forbade the carrying of the sword. If the imperial church was identified with the status quo, the peasant church was identified with revolution, even to the point of establishing an independent state. The political-economic pressures tried on the Donatists could now be turned against the Catholics.

The revolution could not long resist the empire, however. Not only was the army used to crush political enemies of the state; it was also turned against the church that had fostered the rebellion. The Catholic bishop Augustine reluctantly concluded that coercion was the final answer, for at least it appeared to work. If the intention is correct, force may be employed: “Love God and do as you will”—that is, crush the Donatists! Although they disagreed on everything else, the two churches came to agree on the role of the church in politics. The state—either the established state or the revolutionary one—could be used as much as possible for religious ends. Indeed, the force of the state could be called upon to establish either church as the true one.

The key to recognizing the true church—either as “persecuted” or as “unified”—is of more than purely practical value, for it involves a judgment as to which is the primary motif in Scripture’s own description. Is the true church the “persecuted” church or the “unified” church? The answer to this question involves a religious judgment. State support of a particular group tends therefore toward an official state theology. This tendency became more apparent as the emperor gave increasing attention to the older dispute about the deity of Christ.

Constantine had broadened the local discussion on this point into an ecumenical council, held in his palace in Nicea. He himself presided. When Arius was condemned as heretical, the emperor thought it wise to impose a secular penalty also and to send him into political exile, thereby making certain that he could have no further disturbing effect. When Arius claimed to be ready to accept the spirit of Nicea, however, the emperor’s concern for unity enabled him to overlook the fact that no real commitment had been made to the specific content of the Nicene creed; and he asked for Arius’s reinstatement. When Athanasius, the leader of the orthodox party, refused to believe in Arius’s orthodoxy and to receive him, the emperor then banished Athanasius! The teaching of the church had come to be determined by whatever doctrine, or lack of doctrine, the emperor thought would contribute most to harmony within the empire.

The situation that arose from the division of the empire at Constantine’s death was even more complex. Although Athanasius’s own Alexandrian church supported him and his doctrine, he was deposed by an Eastern synod. Appeals to the rest of the church were ignored in the name of the “independence of the East.” The Eastern churches could then use the force of the state to impose their will upon the Alexandrian church, with no interference permitted from the church as a whole. The church’s only defense against the petty actions of the sectional synods, so easily coerced by a local ruler, appeared to be the ancient prestige of the Roman church and her bishop. Thus, for the church to protect itself against political interference, the only course seemed to be submission to the protection of Rome.

All this hardly seemed to influence Constantius, the successor to Constantine in the East. He felt he had unified the church with another simple, non-technical creed. Granted, it didn’t say as much about the deity of Christ as some wished; but how could the objections of Christians who were outside his responsibility be important to him? He was sure that the prosperity of his reign showed God’s approval of his theological policies. Apparently the providence of God could demonstrate not only what was the proper opinion for the whole church, as in Constantine’s day, but also what was true for part of the church; Constantius was even sure that providence preferred an ambiguous creed to a precise one. When he secured power over the whole empire and over the church, his policies became even clearer: bishops were given the choice of rejecting the orthodox doctrine of Athanasius or being banished. The will of the emperor was literally the law of the church!

Not all the details of fourth-century controversies concern us today, but some aspects stand out as relevant. It is clearly dangerous for the church to stress the “providential” character of a particular government or movement, for the state is likely to conclude that whatever it does, even without specific biblical warrant, has some kind of divine authority from which there can be no appeal. This is tyranny. It was this kind of thinking that led to the Catholic state’s use of force against the Donatists, the Donatist rebellion against the empire, and, even worse, Constantius’s suppression of orthodoxy in the name of unity. Some will say that God desires to work his will through the most unlikely means, simply because he has done so in the past, or that the outcome is the most important thing. But both arguments are wrong. Since only a few decades have passed since the “German Christians” saw the “providential” raising up of Hitler as an indication that Nazi policies were the will of God, this should not be difficult to remember. Nobility of purpose or desperateness of need cannot substitute for the truth of revelation.

But how can the church avoid this outcome? The ancient church found it advantageous to unite around Rome, to find in her a rallying point from which a defense against the tyrannical state could be organized. Surely the principle of uniting was correct and is still useful. Moreover, it also appeared possible to unite against ecclesiastical injustice at the local or regional level, for a broader-based synod should be able to consider a question more objectively and more biblically than a local one. But how easily the appeal to a truly ecumenical council turned into the extra-conciliar (and ordinarily extra-biblical) authority of the bishop of Rome! There is no point in the church’s exchanging one tyranny for another.

Even today the church may still attempt to resist a civil wrong by turning to a council, only to discover too late that it is one that employs a policy-making criterion other than Holy Scripture.

The church may even try to control the state. This is what the Western medieval church attempted. However, there are problems in politics and society for which Scripture has no specific answers. How easy it becomes for the church to help itself out of such a difficulty by finding God’s will in a “natural law.” And how much more fascinating than the Gospel become the intricacies and deductions of that natural law and its theology. How easy it is for the church to ignore the Gospel as irrelevant to its “real” task of controlling society!

Perhaps the modern church can still try to maintain a “harmony” of state and church, as the Eastern church continued to believe it could do. But that harmony seemed much easier when Constantius’s old policy was perpetuated: for the sake of peace, refuse to take seriously the necessity of continuing theological discussion with all its accompanying “discord.” Civil unity might well demand the suppression of fresh study of Scripture. It is far easier to appeal to the harmony so providentially established in the past.

There can be no doubt, of course, that the situation confronting the American churches today is far different from that in the days of the Christianized Roman empire. The state is essentially democratic and thus basically opposed to an imperial or autocratic rule. And the church is pluriform. Christianity itself has led to a decentralization of authority and a tolerance of religious beliefs unknown for the most part in the Constantinian age. Nevertheless, it would be dangerously superficial to conclude that the constitutional safeguards or the pluralistic character of modern society make revival of the ancient dangers impossible. Not only is civil government becoming increasingly centralized; so is the church. Denominational differences are losing significance. Certainly there is already an ecumenical theology.

Nor is an official state religion absolutely unthinkable on the American scene. Some semi-religious groups now maintain their tax-exempt status with difficulty, and many complain that the ecumenical organizations, which are just as much involved in attempts to influence legislation, have no such problems. The orientation of the theologies to be taught in tax-supported universities and schools is perhaps not yet clear, but it would be surprising if it were anything but the customary “neutral,” moralistic sort, which explicitly repudiates the exclusive claims of the Gospel. To be sure, there is no question of state direction of individual belief. But Christianity is an evangelistic religion, and the direct or indirect state promulgation of the “inclusive” faith is an attack upon its evangelistic effort. The Iron Curtain definition of religious freedom may not be greatly different in principle from that toward which our own land appears to be moving. It is a freedom to believe but not to evangelize.

Christians dare not become blinded to the implications of the Word of God for all areas of life. Evangelical opposition to the social gospel’s shameful neglect of man’s eternal welfare must not become opposition to the Scripture’s social implications. But it is one thing to make common cause with men of pagan faith for the advancement of a particular program, and quite another to accept the coalition religion they may also desire to promote in the name of unified action. It is equally wrong to make united opposition to a particular movement a quasireligion in its turn. Thus Christianity is not to be equated with, and is certainly not to be consumed by, either “socialism” or “anti-Communism.”

Awareness of the needs of the day must not be allowed to obscure the eternal truth and significance of the Gospel of the one Christ. Christians have been called to point to the commandments of Christ, but only within the context of the good news about him and his lordship over the world.

“All deep things are Song,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in Heroes and Hero-Worship. “It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls.” “See deep enough,” he continued, “and you see musically.”

The “deep things” prod us to sing. So we understand the singing of Paul and Silas in a dank, dark jail at Philippi; so we understand Jesus’ singing a portion of the Hallel with his disciples in their meeting that night before the Day of the Cross. So we also understand the praise-filled chant of the psalmist, “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God” (Ps. 40:3a, RSV): this was after he had been drawn “up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog” (v. 2), and his steps made secure. All men suffer. All men sing. Song shows the soul as “blue” or blessed. Our singing is our faith—or our sense of fate.

Realizing this, we sense the character of the Negro spiritual. These songs witness to faith in God. They show a creative adjustment to a life that could have soured the soul. They speak from a dignified depth of spirit that refused to believe life was without a managing God. These songs are “profiles in courage.”

Need we remind ourselves of how they arose? The spirituals arose in hearts made bold by God to sing against a background of continuing crisis. They are songs in the night: the night of slavery for a disinherited people snatched from their homeland, transported in irons across a wide ocean, and thrust into a hard life in a new world. Behind them was their native land, their cherished traditions. Before them was the cruel treatment of men who regarded them not as men but as flesh-and-blood machines. As weary decades dragged by, the slaves were forced to struggle for an essential human dignity and the will to live. The process was hard, but in time an optimism developed; dark moods and mystic primitivism gave way to the enlightening and heart-lifting Gospel. New insights captured their thinking and challenged their lives.

The influence of the Bible upon the spirituals is traceable in line after line. The story of the Hebrews held deep implications for these singers. The picture of God they saw there granted the Negro slaves the consolation they needed to be patient under stress. No one can understand the spirituals if he is not sensitive to the source of their exciting strains. Biblical faith influenced the mood of expectancy that underlies “Go Down, Moses.” And biblical faith stands behind the sense of discovery and identification that makes the songs about Jesus so personal to the soul.

Done made my vow to the Lord,

And I never will turn back,

I will go, I shall go,

To see what the end will be.

My strength, Good Lord, is almost gone,

I will go, I shall go,

To see what the end will be.

But you have told me to press on,

I will go, I shall go,

To see what the end will be.

Historian Arnold J. Toynbee has traced the creative response of the Negro to those conditions of servitude and suffering. He wrote,

The Negro has adapted himself to his new social environment by rediscovering in Christianity certain original meanings and values which Western Christendom has long ignored. Opening a simple and impressionable mind to the Gospels, he has discovered that Jesus was a prophet who came into the world not to confirm the mighty in their seats but to exalt the humble and the meek.

Toynbee has further disturbed us with this suggestion:

It is possible that the Negro slave immigrants who have found Christianity in America may perform the greater miracle of raising the dead to life.… They may perhaps be capable of kindling the cold grey ashes of Christianity which have been transmitted to them by us until, in their hearts, the divine fire glows again. It is thus perhaps, if at all, that Christianity may conceivably become the living faith of a dying civilization for the second time [Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgment of volumes I–VI by D. C. Somervell (Oxford, 1947), p. 129].

The core of the Negro spiritual is that the soul can know and trust his God, that good will come, that right will win—because God will handle our lives. Hebrew history influenced this faith. And the life of Jesus spoke with mystic closeness to the need of the soul in trouble. His arrest, trial, and crucifixion-faith spoke with decisiveness to their intent to hope and wait. They could steady themselves in all distress by watching Jesus:

Dey crucified my Lord,

An’ he never said a mumblin’ word.

An’ he never said a mumblin’ word.

An’ he never said a mumblin’ word.

Not a word—not a word—not a word.

In fact, the Christian virtues were all seen in connection with his life. Religious experience was viewed as a real relationship with God and Jesus, not as some ethical venture. Closeness to God and Jesus depended upon certain responses of the heart, to be sure; but the point was closeness to God and Jesus, not merely correctness of life. The importance of this for personal steadiness cannot be overemphasized. This whole matter is fundamental to a vital Christian experience.

The creators of the spirituals were deeply concerned about the inner life of the soul. They sensed, quite rightly, that the real quality for courageous living comes from the depths of the heart. They sought an inner possession by which conditions and contacts, however dastardly, could be managed—as Jesus had managed them. These singers did not want to hate, because Jesus had a ready love against the misdeeds of the unloving.

Down on me, down on me,

Looks like everybody in the whole round world is down on me.

Talk about me as much as you please,

I’ll talk about you when I get on my knees.

Looks like everybody in the whole round world is down on me.

These singers understood that to “love your enemies” was a real essential for walking humbly with God.

But there were times when love did not flow freely from the heart. There were times when the heart’s attitudes provoked alarm and dismay, when there was passion and the strong impulse to deal with life on purely personal terms. Conscious that this whole inward affair needed a proper handling, penitent as he faced the inner demands of the walk with God, one creator voiced the longing of so many, many others when he sang:

It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord,

Standin’ in the need of prayer.

It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord,

An’ I’m standin’ in the need of prayer.

Tain’t my mother or my father

But it’s me, O Lord,

Standin’ in the need of prayer.

Tain’t my mother or my father

But it’s me, O Lord,

Standin’ in the need of prayer.

Always and increasingly, these were men in quest of God and his guidance. The desire was deep within them to “be like Jesus.” Spiritual experience with him—and like his experience—was a primary concern.

In how many settings did they think of Jesus in connection with themselves? In as many ways as they had seen in the New Testament and in the demands of their own days. Consider some of their thinking about him.

1. Jesus could give them character aid. That is the hope behind the prayer,

Lord, I want to be a Christian

In-a-my heart,

In-a-my heart.

Lord, I want to be a Christian

In-a-my heart.

2. Jesus grants guidance and companionship in life.

Oh, my good Lord, show me the way.

Enter the chariot, travel along.

3. Jesus hears prayer with the interest of a concerned friend.

Steal away,

Steal away,

Steal away to Jesus.

The readiness of Jesus to help is highlighted in “Steal Away.” Even nature is his tool to summon the singers into his presence—“He calls me by the thunder,” one line puts it. Another song is full of trust in his help, saying,

Just a little talk wid Jesus makes it right.

The friendship of Jesus with the soul took into account his own understanding of life under torrents of abuse, as this song tells:

Oh, nobody knows de trouble I see,

Nobody knows but Jesus.

Oh, nobody knows de trouble I see, Lord,

Glory, hallelujah.

The insistence, then, was rightly upon closeness with Jesus. He was a concerned helper, a companion, a brother, although he was also Lord. He was alive, near, ready, listening. These singers knew that their lives were-being lived under his scrutiny and concerned supervision. They believed this and they sang this.

4. Since such a relationship was essential, hypocrisy was discouraged and honesty stressed.

My Lord’s a-writin’ all de time.

Oh, he sees all you do,

He hears all you say,

My Lord’s a-writin’ all de time.

5. Jesus was considered personal supervisor of the Christian’s death. So, then, not even death was to be feared; it was to be entered in courageous trust.

You needn’t mind my dying,

You needn’t mind my dying,

You needn’t mind my dying.

Jesus goin’ to make up my dying bed.

The Negro spirituals, rightly understood, are songs of aspiration and longing. There is the longing for heaven. There is the longing for freedom and fulfillment of life. There is the longing for friends separated by the selling process or by death. There is the longing for fair life and for the end of a cruel night of dispossession. And sometimes there is the open longing for death as the most immediate release from it all.

But woven throughout these songs is the deep longing for the felt love of Jesus for the soul. These singers were greatly influenced by such a faith. They sought value in themselves and a means by which that value could be strengthened despite their lot. They sought to discover a quality about themselves that would endure. They sought diligently for a material out of which they could fashion a structure for faith. And all this they found. For these men found Jesus. In a faith directed by biblical truth, they found an experience with Jesus and with God. It was the central issue of their total selves, and they gained a strategic mental and spiritual advantage for life. These men were not only aware of life but also seriously aware of God, who created and controls it.

Are Christians Alert to a New Avenue of Witness?

Suddenly rock ’n’ roll is not just an obnoxious noise coming out of too many transistor radios; it is a sound wedded to our way of life. Madison Avenue sells soda pop with it. Jackie Kennedy dances to it. Time does a cover story on it. And the Beatles make millions from it. It’s with us, and it’s going to stay.

If it is true that you can learn more about a nation from its songs than from its laws, then pop music, especially the newly emerged “message music,” is the pulse of the coming America.

Message music is not a style of music, like rhythm and blues or swing. It is a song in any style that speaks directly or indirectly to a basic problem of mankind. Not all rock ’n’ roll songs are message songs. Most of them are about the traditional topics of popular songwriters: love desired, love fought for, love gained, and love lost. But there are songs that are far more serious. They speak of fear, anxiety, war, loneliness, hope, and the difficulties and contradictions of life in the twentieth century. These are the message songs. They started with the folk-music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and they are a measure of American life.

One of the outstanding features of folk music was its honesty in dealing with the problems and frustrations of man. The words stung:

But I’ve learned to accept it,

Accept it with pride;

For you don’t count the dead

When God’s on your side.

“If I Had a Hammer” became a byword in the civil-rights marches and demonstrations. The folk artists decried public apathy:

How many times can a man turn his head

And pretend that he just doesn’t see?

After a while the folk-music surge subsided, but it left in its wake a group of writers and performers who had seen that pop music can be more than entertainment, that music does not have to be written to be played in the background, that significant ideas can be presented through the medium. Effects began to be seen in adult pop music. But the greatest effects were felt in the teen-age market, where rock ’n’ roll had been wedded to folk music to produce folk-rock, an ideal medium for the “message.” Thus “Eve of Destruction” became the number-two song on the Billboard Hot 100, with over one million sales:

The eastern world it is explodin’,

Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’.

You’re old enough to kill but not for votin’.

You don’t believe in war but what’s that gun you’re totin’?

And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’.

Other message songs that were about war were “Broomstick Cowboy” and “Good News Week.” “Well Respected Man” spoofed the hypocrisy and monotony of the adult generation. “Sounds of Silence” spoke of anonymity:

In the wavy light, I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more,

People talking without speaking,

People hearing without listening,

People writing songs that voices never shared.

In January, Billboard listed message songs among its Hot 100. “Dead End Street” had been on the list four weeks, “Communication Breakdown” was in its seventh week. Current fan magazines are running the lyrics of possible future hits: “Who Am I?,” “A Hazy Shade of Winter,” “Behind the Door” (“To bare and die, the years go by / To wed in spring, the funeral tier / And still they go a-mating.”), “Going Nowhere” (“This world will not be happy / Until they see everybody going nowhere”).

Frustrations, longings, inherited problems too difficult to master—these provide the subject matter for many of the current message songs. Songwriters like Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, Sonny Bono, and Pete Simon and Art Garfunkel are speaking to the sensitive areas of modern man’s existence: They lay bare hypocrisy, hidden fears, the doubts and inadequacies of our generation; they reveal the difficulties of living when the “times they are a-changin’.”

Many adults wonder how teen-agers are related to the music they listen to and sometimes argue that the “messages” are not really an adequate expression of the feelings and beliefs of young people. There does seem to be, however, some correspondence between the “messages,” a minority of popular songs, and the actions of a minority of the teen-age population. For example, during the time when many college students were participating in civil-rights marches, “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” were high on the record charts. While students demonstrated against the Viet Nam war, their transistors blared “Eve of Destruction,” “Broomstick Cowboy,” and “Good News Week.”

At the same time it must be remembered that the value of a work of art, or of a prophet, is not to be determined by the degree to which it represents the consensus. Amos did not represent the feelings and beliefs of his time, but his insights were nonetheless true. In fact, it is this feature that should cause us to ask, “What is being said to our young people?” “Who are the people who plant seeds in the minds of our teen-agers?” This question alone should cause us to listen to the “caterwauling” that forms such an important part of the young person’s milieu.

What value and possibilities does “message music” have? First, much of the message music of the past five years has forced the modern youth to look critically at himself and his world. It has stripped him of the veneer of self-righteousness. This is the negative witness that can lead to real concern and honest self-evaluation. Second, message music has, to a lesser extent, served in a positive way. For example, “Kicks,” by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, received an award from Synanon for criticizing the use of dope among teen-agers. Third, message music opens a new avenue of witness for the evangelical church. Great care should be taken in making use of this, of course, but making music that is both commercial and thought-provoking from the Christian point of view is possible. If it is done, the message should not be so obvious as to be offensive, nor so veiled that it is not communicated.

All this must sound strange to those of us dedicated to a pulpit ministry. Yet the Gospel must be communicated. If it is hidden, it is hidden to those who are lost (2 Cor. 4:3). If seeds can be planted on a “Top 40” show, then so be it. Unorthodox? Certainly. So were a prophet wearing a yoke and a child named Loammi.

How the New Testament faces unbelief and heresy in the churches

First of Two Parts

In October of this year, 450 years will have passed since Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg. Usually this act of Luther is regarded as the beginning of the Reformation. As such it meant the beginning of the separation of a large section of Western Christendom from the Roman Catholic Church.

It is true, of course, that Luther and the other Reformers always rejected the charge of being schismatics, maintaining that they were the legitimate continuation of the Christian Church. Not they but the Roman Catholics were the schismatics, they said. Luther wrote, for example:

I say that the pope and all who knowingly abet him in this matter are heretics, schismatics, under the ban and accursed, because they teach differently from what is in the Gospel, and follow their own will, against the common usage of the whole Church. For heretics and schismatics are men who transgress the doctrine of their fathers, separate themselves from the common usage and practice of the whole Church, and causelessly, out of sheer wantonness, devise new usages and practices against the holy Gospel. That is what the Antichrist in Rome does.… He is himself the chief cause and sole author of all schisms and parties. This is plain as day, and all history proves it [Works of Martin Luther, Philadelphia, III, 72].

In actual fact, however, it cannot be denied that the Reformation also meant a separation from the existing church.

Unfortunately, the Reformation’s act of separation has been repeated again and again within Protestantism itself, and only in this century have serious attempts been made to overcome this seemingly endless process of division. In this respect all Christians, and evangelical Christians in particular, cannot but fully endorse the aim of the ecumenical movement, namely, to bring all Christians in one place together around one communion table.

Yet in recent years the word “separation” has been heard time and again in evangelical circles. Some instances of this are not surprising, because in large sections of the evangelical world there is a strongly separatist mentality. In our day, however, the word is heard even among evangelicals who, on the basis of their theology, have always been strongly opposed to the very idea of separation. There are several reasons for this fact:

1. Many evangelicals are worried about the development of the ecumenical movement. They feel there is not enough emphasis on the pure Gospel, that a spirit of indiscriminate inclusivism seems to be dominant.

2. In recent years neo-liberalism has invaded many churches and also many seminaries. Seventeen years ago the evangelicals of the Church of England could write in their report to the Archbishop of Canterbury:

While the liberal element, at least within “protestantism,” has been vindicated, the rationalist influence of a negative-minded modernism has already receded and seems unlikely to gain a place within either tradition save as an insignificant eccentricity on the part of a tolerated minority” [The Fulness of Christ, p. 49].

Since then Bultmann, Tillich, and Robinson, not to speak of the God-is-dead theologians, have made a tremendous impact upon the thinking of many of the younger ministers and church workers. Even the Roman Catholic Church of today is wrestling with Bultmannianism.

3. Even apart from the extremes of neo-liberalism, there is the fact that from many pulpits, especially in the larger denominations, a greatly reduced or even diluted Gospel is being preached.

No wonder the issue of “separation” is being raised. Yet we should be very careful in raising this option. We may fall into serious sin. For we are dealing not with a merely human association or club but with the Church of Jesus Christ.

Separation And Separatism

What do we mean by “separation”? We must distinguish it from some other terms, often used in close connection with it or even interchangeably. The first term is schism. In the early Church, this term was quite common and was often used in close relation to the word “heresy.” In fact, at first the two were almost identical, as we see in First Corinthians 11:18, 19, where “divisions” (schismata) and “factions” (haireseis) are almost used as synonyms. Gradually, however, the ancient Church distinguished the two, using heresy to mean false doctrine and schism an orthodox sect. In other words, schism in its original meaning always refers to a division in the church that is due to causeless differences and contentions among its members. The separating party leaves a church that is itself still faithful to the Gospel.

Separation denotes a different situation. Here a group separates itself from the main body because that body has become unfaithful to the Word of God. It is unfortunate that often any separation is simply termed a “schism.” To mention an example, the breach between the churches of the East and West in 1054 and the following centuries was clearly a schism. There were no real doctrinal differences (apart from the “filioque” question). The Reformation of the sixteenth century was not a schism (at least not from the point of view of the Reformers) but rather a separation. The same can be said of several secessions in the nineteenth century, as, for example, in 1834 and 1886 in the Netherlands. Often, in the case of separation, those who leave the church are forced out by the parent body.

Separation must also be distinguished from separatism. This term denotes the ecclesiology and practical attitude of those who leave their church prompted by a wrong spirit. Separatists make no attempt to reform the church from within, nor do they have any understanding of or concern for the visible unity of the church; instead, they are motivated by some form of ecclesiological perfectionism that compels them to abandon the existing church and establish a new one. I have no appreciation whatever for any form of separatism, even if I share its concern for the purity of the church.

A Biblical Answer

But what of separation? Is it ever permitted? Are there any objective norms?

Naturally we must concentrate on the New Testament. Yet we cannot completely bypass the Old Testament. Those who condemn all separation often appeal to the Old Testament on two points. First, they point to the attitude of the prophets, who, in spite of the terrible corruption of the church of their days, never separated from it in order to establish a new people of God with a separate cult. In my opinion, however, this argument is completely untenable, for it loses sight of the peculiar situation of Israel as the theocratic nation of God. The application of the national-church (Volkskirche) idea to the New Testament church by the Reformers of the sixteenth century and by many defenders of the established-church concept in our own day not only is without any scriptural warrant, but also has led to an externalization of the church.

A second argument against separation is at times derived from the Old Testament concept of the remnant. As the Old Testament church was preserved in the faithful remnant, it is said, so true believers have a duty to preserve the church today by staying in it. However plausible this argument may seem at first glance, it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the Old Testament concept. A. Lelièvre rightly states:

After the resurrection, the culmination of the history of salvation precludes the principle of the remnant. In this respect the Acts is especially clear and significant in its allusion to ever-increasing numbers.… There can no longer be this movement of reduction in the case of the new covenant, for it is a movement which is entirely characteristic of the Old Testament: it is a pattern inherent in the process by which the coming of Christ is prepared. The Christian Church is not the remnant, but rather the new humanity of the future springing from the remnant which Jesus Christ embodied in his own person [von Allmen, Vocabulary of the Bible, p. 356].

It is evident that every application of the concept to the New Testament church, and in particular to the true believers in a corrupted church, reveals a historical misunderstanding.

The New Testament condemns all unnecessary schism (1 Cor. 1:10 ff.; 11:18, 19; Gal. 2:12). All such schisms are “works of the flesh” (Gal. 5:20). Throughout the whole New Testament there is a tremendous emphasis on the unity of the church.

Yet there are also other aspects that may not be ignored. First, there is the fact that gradually the New Testament church separates itself from the Jewish church. It is a rather slow process; but it is inevitable, because Israel as a nation refuses to accept Jesus as the Messiah. In fact, because of its opposition to Christ it actually becomes the “synagogue of satan” (Rev. 2:9), while the New Testament church is seen as the true “Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16).

Secondly, there is the teaching of Second Corinthians 6:14–17. This passage has often been used by separatists as a direct commandment of the Lord to separate from a church that has become unfaithful, but this application is not warranted. Paul is not speaking of the church but of the world. Hodge, in his commentary, rightly notes that the “Hoi apistoi are the heathen.” Yet he also points out that the principle has a wider application. “The principle applies to all the enemies of God and children of darkness.” How it has to be applied in the case of an unfaithful church must be decided by the teaching of the whole New Testament. A straightforward appeal to verse seventeen (“Therefore, come out from them and be separate from them”) in defense of separatism is an oversimplification of the issue.

Of much more importance for our subject is a third aspect of New Testament teaching, the clear commandment that heresy is not to be tolerated in the church. Throughout the New Testament, heresy is condemned in the strongest terms and believers are told to separate themselves from heretics. This separation, however, is accomplished not by the believers’ withdrawal from the church, but by the expulsion of the heretic (Gal. 1:8, 9; 2 Tim. 3:5; Tit. 3:10, 11; 1 John 4:1 ff.; 2 John 7–11; Rev. 2:14).

This, I believe, is the sum of the direct teaching of the New Testament on our subject. The results are rather meagre; but this is not surprising, for the New Testament does not know our situation! Although W. Elert is right when he says of the false teachers in Paul’s days: “From the apostle’s warning we must conclude that the false apostles had established themselves in the congregation,” he is equally right when he adds that Paul disposed of them, making his decision “on the basis of his apostolic authority” (Eucharist and Church Fellowship in the First Four Centuries, pp. 48, 49). Only after the days of the New Testament did heresy gain a foothold in the church.

Does this mean that we have no biblical norm for our present-day problems? Definitely not! The New Testament remains normative also for our subject. It does not deal directly with our questions, but indirectly it gives the final answer by what it says about the true nature of the church and its unity. We should never make the mistake of isolating the problem of “separation.” It is an aspect of a much wider question. [To be Continued]

During the month of June the NBC radio network’s Sunday morning “Faith in Action” program (8:15–8:30 Eastern time) is being devoted to three panel discussions abridged from the current television series “God and Man in the Twentieth Century.” Another panel, “Is the Sunday School a Lost Cause?,” scheduled June 18, brings together Congressman John B. Anderson (R.-Ill.), Dr. Richard C. Halverson of International Christian Leadership, and me in echoes of a larger panel that drew 2,000 persons to Philadelphia’s Baptist Temple during the 150th anniversary of the American Sunday-School Union. The June 25 panel on “Last Chance for the Twentieth Century?” will present a scientist, a historian, and a Bible scholar in a discussion of what the future holds.

Over Memorial Day weekend, two dozen leading university professors and leaders of evangelical campus work gathered at Airlie House, the well-known “think tank” near Warrenton, Virginia, for a Consultation of Christian Scholars. They discussed obstacles to Christian faith and conduct on the secular campus today and proposed ways of coping with them. A future issue will be devoted largely to their discussions and findings.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences devoted the Winter 1966 issue of its journal Daedalus to a symposium on “Religion in America.” Thirteen contributors, chosen from a fairly broad spectrum of our American religious scene, attempt to assess the status of both institutional and “spiritual” Christianity and Judaism, with a view to a possible projection of the nation’s religious future.

Giant problems stalk the terrain these authors seek to cover. These problems touch the center of our national scene: the relation of the Church to society, the inter-relationships among major religious institutions themselves, and the tendency of the Church to “establish” itself, whether legally or sociologically. Although the writers address themselves to many issues, they seem most concerned with the emergence of what may be called a “folk religion” and with the several elements that may combine to produce this. The tension between the sacralism of such a culture-religion and the New Worldliness appears in many guises and elicits a variety of responses.

A pivotal question is whether American culture is to continue to be shaped without reference to God. If so, then what will occupy the role theism left vacant? What symbols will replace the concepts of divine sovereignty, providence, redemption, and judgment? Some suggest that the figure of Jesus (often regarded as a paradigm for the Church, or for social service) will afford an integrating center, so that “God talk” will yield to a bold new symbolism in theological language, a symbolism deriving its content from secular and sociological sources.

It is suggested that the existential mood, which tends to be psychologically oriented, is giving ground to a new mood related to current social crises—race, economics, law enforcement, sexual morality, and the like. If this is correct, what shape may theological formulation be expected to take? There is no lack of contenders. Some, disillusioned with institutional forms of Christianity, will follow Bonhoeffer in his insistence upon some such category as “worldly Christianity.” Others will propose a sharpening of the now-blurred categories of classical theological liberalism, so as to afford a framework for a new formulation in which the frank involvement of theology with cultural surroundings will be accepted as given.

Looming large in the discussions is the alleged irrelevance of the churches to modern life, particularly in its urban form. The classic explanation is that traditional supernaturalism is alien to the thought-modes of modern man and that irrelevance thus lies in a failure to shed the trappings of historical Christian theological language. But one author ventures to quote the view, expressed recently by a critic of the God-is-dead movement, that ‘much of the churches’ social irrelevance stems from their tendency to dilute the categories of Scripture in a mindless accommodation to society.” To this the evangelical can assent heartily.

Major problems of approach concern the panelists. Most of them reject the view that the task of the churches should be understood chiefly in terms of the preservation of stable institutions. The choice seems to be between the activist minority, bent on revolutionary change, and the melioristic majority, more grateful to the past than the activists. No one seems willing or able to propose a final answer at this point.

The recurring question is, however, to what extent the Christian Church should try to adapt its theology to the kaleidoscopic movements in the current social scene. Those favoring a thorough accommodation seem to opt for the more promising path of conformity. Those contending for the validity of the essential core of Christian confessional truth face the staggering problem of teaching the thoughtful part of our world to understand the language in which this truth is expressed. Few, it seems, are willing to undertake this bold task.

A generation ago, a symposium of this sort would scarcely have included such a chapter as “Is There a Third Force in Christendom?” By a religious “third force” the author means an agency that is either indicative of or (possibly) causal to a significant shift in religious alignments. On the whole, this chapter is balanced in its treatment of the movements that stand between the avant-garde of the radical theology and the melioristic standard-bearers of the religion of the major denominations. What is new here is the stress upon the pluralistic quality of the “Third Force,” especially the inclusion within it of the younger and restless elements in the Roman Catholic Church.

The chapter contains its provincialisms. It mentions Wheaton (Illinois) College as “one of the very few accredited fundamentalist colleges” and makes no mention of accredited theological seminaries of evangelical commitment. Its author identifies—too easily, we think—the evangelical movement in America with the 1964 candidacy of Barry Goldwater, and speaks from a very limited inductive base when he writes that “the new evangelicals are the spiritual hard-core of the radical right.” It is the experience of this writer that his colleagues were far from being of one mind in October/November of 1964; and further, that thoughtful evangelicals today are far more charitable in their treatment of President Lyndon B. Johnson than many of those who in 1964 evangelistically endorsed his platform as embodying the Christian ideal.

Again, it appears naive to write, as the author of this chapter does, that the priority given by evangelicals to foreign missionary endeavor “unquestionably results from their alienation from their own culture.” One wonders whether this writer has any acquaintance with the biographies of such missionary leaders as J. Hudson Taylor, Charles Cowman, or C. T. Studd—to name a few.

The attempt to sever the motivation of the evangelical missionary societies (especially the “faith missions”) from that of the nineteenth-century missionary endeavors is related to a more general tendency—that of portraying the evangelical cause today as unrelated to the major evangelical trends within the established denominations prior to the period of the dominance of theological liberalism.

What is the probable future shape of religion in America? None of the authors ventures a definitive reply. Some see it shaped, in some part at least, by a rising pietism, derived from impulses parallel to those prevailing in evangelical Christianity, if indeed not in some measure determined by them. Some see activistic participation (perhaps identification) as the wave of the theological future. Yet others see the emergence of a sort of social-establishment Christendom.

Only one author seems to regard as a live option the possibility that the Holy Spirit may operate instrumentally to bring new light—and with it, new forms—to the spiritual life of the nation. It seems clear that, should this occur, the Spirit’s moving will come upon many who at the moment show little acquaintance with him.

American nuns are beginning to kick the habit. The evidence is unmistakable.

Last year the number of nuns decreased by 4,750—the first major decline in years. But more important than the nuns who quit are the nuns who stay and fight the system.

“Sweeping changes in the rules and practices of religious orders are on the way,” predicts Sister Aloysius Schalden-brand, a college philosophy instructor, with heady optimism. “Old restrictive rules are tumbling as the store of energy within the convents bursts its bounds, and nothing will stop that process now.”

Though she sounds more like a suffragette than a sister, her attitude reflects the spirit of a growing group coming to be known as the “new nuns.” Having vowed to be poor, chaste, and obedient, they are suddenly aware of a responsibility to themselves to be revolutionary as well.

“There has been a dramatic change in the involvement of the American sisters,” says Sister M. Audrey Kopp of Marylhurst College. “They want to be relevant.”

Predictably, the reaction of the hierarchy is mixed.

“Sisters are, or are rapidly becoming, the best educated, the most prophetic, the most dedicated and farthest out in front in their desire to implement the new mind of the church,” says Auxiliary Bishop Joseph M. Breitenbeck, vicar of Detroit’s 6,000 nuns. “Not to utilize fully this great resource of the church would be tragic.”

But to others in the church (probably the majority), the real tragedy is the new nun herself.

One mother superior who has had to deal with this new spirit in a convent says that the new nun represents an extremely small minority who are not so interested in relevance as in simple rebellion. “They want all the benefits of being a nun, without any of the restrictions.”

Whether for rebellion or renewal, however, the new nun is restless, and the focus of her attack is the complete control of her life by the convent.

There are now in this country 176,000 nuns scattered through 480 orders. Whatever her rank, each nun is regimented in her life—from dress to vocation—by a rigid chain of command that leads ultimately to Rome.

In the eyes of the church, a nun accepts her vows so she may more perfectly serve God. Any differences she may have with the system are to be resolved through simple obedience. The growing view in the convent, however, is that the system often produces suffocation and should be reshaped.

The search for a new role for religious orders dates from Vatican II and the church’s increased emphasis on social action. The council called for convents to be “modified according to conditions of time and place and outdated customs done away with,” and instructed each order to conduct a self-study.

The new nuns hope to translate this spirit into action. The convent, they say, should promote social involvement, not restrict it. Where there is a conflict, it must be the system, not the sisters, that change.

Catholic Growth Lag?

The official annual directory published last month shows record totals for U. S. Roman Catholics in membership (46,864,910, including children) and clergy (59,892) for calendar year 1966. But there were signs of a possible decline on the horizon.

The number of converts (117,478) was the lowest since 1953, and candidates for the priesthood dropped 6 per cent. While high school and college enrollment rose, the elementary school total dropped 122,108, to 4,369,845. There were 84,096 fewer infant baptisms in 1966 than in 1965.

The convert figures, watched by Catholic traditionalists, have dropped since Vatican II. But over the past decade, Catholic growth has amounted to an impressive 35 per cent, compared to a 15 per cent increase in Protestantism.

While the fight has not been without its minor victories, the new nuns still face the frustration expressed by Sister Claire Sawyer: “We are intelligent people, well trained in our professions, but too often we are treated like children.”

What nuns have on their minds is as important to the church as to the convent. Without the nuns, Pope Pius XII used to say, the work of the church is “almost inconceivable.”

If anything, he was understating the case. Nuns form the backbone of the labor force of almost every important church activity. More to the point, they do it inexpensively.

Nowhere is their presence more vital than in education. More than 100,000 nuns now work in Catholic education. The dollar replacement value of that contribution has been estimated at $200 million yearly.

With the increasing problems Catholic education is facing—a decrease this year of nearly 100,000 elementary and high-school students, for example, combined with fears of reduced federal aid to private-school children—a revolt among nuns could be devastating.

But while the power held by religious orders is great, the church’s hierarchy appears convinced that it is much more than they will ever use. As a result their demands often are treated as trifles.

Only reluctantly, for example, did church fathers invite a few women to attend the Vatican Council—and then only as voteless observers. In the convent, when nuns are able to enter into discussions on procedures, most often the talk is limited to secondary questions of dress or work conditions.

To many church conservatives, religious orders need to stay the same more than they need to change. If there is currently a revolt spreading among the nuns, the fault, they say, is more with the nuns who spread dissatisfaction than with the system itself. And they attribute the decline in the number of nuns to increased competition from other opportunities open to young people for social service, among them the foreign and domestic Peace Corps.

But to church reformers with their preoccupation for renewal, the question goes deeper.

“Open your eyes and count,” warns Rev. Blase Bonpane, vocational director for Maryknoll College. “They are quitting because they think they can be more Christian somewhere else. Does blindness have to be part of our life?”

The Protestant Nuns

The nun in Protestantism is rare. Only four major U. S. denominations have them, and the total number is probably under 2,000.

Known usually as “deaconesses,” they generally have no specific dress and few restricting vows beyond obedience. Often they are free to marry. Few live in convents.

The Methodist Church lists the largest group, with 390 now active. The Lutheran Church in America ranks second with 200. LCA nuns wear a uniform and are sworn to celibacy, unlike the 100 nuns of the third-ranked Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

The Protestant Episcopal Church has both deaconesses and nuns. The church’s forty-five deaconesses have no vows or uniform and are free to marry (though none ever have). The church also has an undisclosed number of nuns connected with fifteen independent orders. Like those in the Roman Catholic Church, Episcopal nuns live a convent life under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Women in Protestant religious orders work primarily in education and social service. Although all four denominations report recruitment campaigns, membership in orders has tended to remain constant.

Miscellany

The U.S. House of Representatives passed and sent to the Senate a bill to maintain federal aid for elementary and secondary schools. A controversial amendment to turn over control of funds to states (May 26 issue, page 44) was defeated, but a number of related compromises were incorporated. Several states forbid church school aid.

As a follow-up to the World Congress on Evangelism, one of the largest groups of French-speaking evangelicals ever assembled met in Lausanne, Switzerland, to discuss the theology and methodology of evangelism. Leaders were Scripture Union’s Maurice Ray and Jean-Paul Benoit, former evangelism director of the French Reformed Church.

The newsletter of the National Council of Catholic Men suggests that churches be required to pay taxes on unrelated business income. It recommends study of the issue by courts or Congress.

Militant Hindus are urging India to make conversion of Hindus to other faiths a criminal offense, as it is in neighboring Nepal.

The 124,000 Baptists in the western Congo are asking their government for legal recognition as a body independent of overseas control. Detroit Negro pastor Louis Johnson had complained to American Baptist missions officials about U. S. control and related policies.

The Lutheran World Federation plans to expand Radio Voice of the Gospel, its Ethiopia-based station, possibly to Angola, Mozambique, and Latin America.

Pope Paul ratified the four representatives U. S. bishops chose to go to this fall’s Synod of Bishops in Rome. They are Lawrence Cardinal Shehan of Baltimore, Archbishops John Dearden of Detroit and John Krol of Philadelphia, and Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh.

The Evangelical Press Association gave its “Periodical of the Year” award to This Day, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod monthly, and presented fifty-five other prizes.

The American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry is moving offices from New York to Chicago and will increase efforts to train clergymen in counseling.

In annual missions-giving marathons, The Peoples Church of Toronto raised $325,000, and Boston’s Park Street Church more than $300,000.

Georgia Presbyterians were told that the church’s well-heeled Thornwell Orphanage in Clinton, South Carolina, cannot be racially integrated because this would cause community discord, staff resignations, reduced contributions, and church conflicts.

In reaction to open-housing demonstrations in Louisville, Kentucky’s Transylvania Presbytery urged cities in its area to adopt open-housing ordinances, citing national pronouncements from the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

Governor Buford Ellington signed on May 18 a bill that repeals Tennessee’s law against teaching evolutionary theories on the origin of man. Only Arkansas and Mississippi retain anti-evolution statutes.

For the first time, a Roman Catholic unit has been elected a participating organization in a National Council of Churches agency. The Maryknoll Missionary Society will have a seat on the board of the NCC education department.

The Centennial School District in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, decided not to appeal to the state Supreme Court a ruling against distribution of Gideons Bibles to pupils. The books can be used if they have a “reasonable relationship” to curriculum. A district near Pittsburgh plans to distribute New Testaments under the rationale that they are great world literature.

Personalia

A decision by the administration of Waynesburg College not to renew the contract of Religious Life Director Dennis C. Benson was backed by a faculty vote of 34 to 21.

The Rev. Rodger Harrison, an American Baptist Convention missionary to Sweden, will become the chaplain to English-speaking Protestants in Moscow, on behalf of the National Council of Churches.

Bishop Ruben Josefson has been chosen Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala and primate of the Church of Sweden’s seven million members.

Paul Fromer, editor of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s His magazine, was elected president of the Evangelical Press Association.

Evangelist Billy Graham joined War on Poverty chief Sargent Shriver for a weekend visit of poverty programs in Graham’s home region of western North Carolina.

The new president of Union Theological Seminary (Presbyterian) in Richmond, Virginia, is the Rev. Dr. Fred R. Stair, Jr., 49, pastor of Atlanta’s Central Presbyterian Church, who was assistant to the UTS president from 1948 to 1953.

Joseph Wightman was installed as the president of Erskine College, Due West, South Carolina, in ceremonies that included an address by Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Dallas Cowboys football coach Tom Landry, named 1966 National Football Coach of the Year, told a meeting of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes that “ultimate satisfaction rests in religious belief.”

Accepting a Catholic Press Association award for the “most distinguished contribution to Catholic journalism,” the Rev. John Reedy, editor of the national weekly Ave Maria, said that “the most important development in the U. S. Catholic press in the last ten years was the founding of the National Catholic Reporter,” an independent weekly.

The Rev. Martin Duffy, white pastor of the predominantly Negro Mountain Vernon Heights Congregational Church (United Church of Christ), Mount Vernon, New York, has resisted an attempt by a group of members to have him dismissed for his work in civil-rights causes. The congregation voted 50 to 40 to retain him.

Richard L. Riseling has been named director of international affairs of the American Baptists’ Division of Christian Social Concern.

Orley S. Herron, dean of students at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California, will become an associate professor of education at the University of Mississippi.

Gamal Abdel Nasser flexed his military muscle last month, and suddenly the world tottered on the edge of a major armed conflict. Americans were preoccupied in Viet Nam, the British in Hong Kong, where Communist-inspired rioting persisted. But the Middle East situation worsened so rapidly that the eyes of the world shifted anxiously to the lands of the Bible. There were no immediate religious issues in the crisis, but overtones of conflicting faiths and ideologies were quickly apparent.

Nasser, the Muslim president of the United Arab Republic (Egypt), touched off the global concern—perhaps at the provocation of Israel. He demanded withdrawal of a 3,400-man United Nations surveillance force from the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, where Israel and Egypt meet. United Nations Secretary General U Thant, a Buddhist, quickly acceded, and the border-watchers were evacuated.

Then Nasser announced a blockade against Israeli shipping at the Strait of Tiran. To the Israelis, who have been forbidden by Egypt to use the Suez Canal, it seemed a deliberate act of aggression. The Gulf of Aqaba had been closed to Israel from 1948 until after the Suez war in 1957. Part of the price for withdrawal of Israeli forces from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was the opening of the water access to the port of Elath at the southern tip of Israel. Israel used it to receive oil supplies from Iran and to send important cash exports.

The immediate ecclesiastical effect of the crisis was the threat that North American and British Christian missionaries would have to leave their posts in the Middle East. That seemed to be a virtual certainty if major hostilities developed. Archaeological research (see story below) could also be seriously affected.

Meanwhile, Jewish leaders in the United States brought pressure on President Johnson to assert himself on behalf of Israel. Irving Fain, head of social-action programs for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, called on the chief executive “not simply to reaffirm a general interest in Israel’s security—but to make the kind of statement which cannot be misinterpreted—i.e., a statement of intention to keep the Straits of Tiran open for international shipping; a stern warning to the effect that armed incursion by Arab aggressors will not be tolerated; and a systematic effort to persuade Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union to join in this quest for peace.”

General Secretary R. H. Edwin Espy of the National Council of Churches sent a telegram to U Thant saying “We … consider the U.N. presence in the Middle East as essential to the prevention of a disastrous conflict.” Another telegram, sent to Arthur Goldberg, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., asserted that the “failure to secure the U.N. peacekeeping function in the Middle East now will be a severe setback to peace.”

Britain and France delayed action on the Middle East crisis. But the Soviet Union, which has been supplying arms to Egypt, quickly lined up behind Nasser and blamed Israel for “aggravating the atmosphere of military psychosis” in the Middle East.

Nasser also got expected support from the University of Al-Azhar in Cairo, a famous seat of Muslim learning dating back to about A.D. 968. The rector of the university, Sheik Hassan Maamoun, called the situation a “decisive battle in the history of religion and Arabism.” He issued a statement appealing to the world’s Muslims to support Nasser in the face of the “Zionist menace” and to “strike hard at the aggressor.”

Elath, the Aqaba port of the Israelis, is at or near the site of the Ezion-Geber of Numbers 32:35, where it is recorded that the Hebrews encamped while traveling from Kadesh-barnea to Moab. In First Kings 9:26, King Solomon is remembered as having built a fleet of ships at Ezion-geber. The site was excavated in the thirties by archeologists Nelson Glueck and Fritz Frank. Large-scale copper refinery installations were found.

Digging Solomon’S Wall

The eventful spring archaeological dig in Gezer, Israel, this year may well have rediscovered the third city wall and gate built by King Solomon. Positive proof may come within weeks. Gezer, twenty miles west of Jerusalem, was one of the half-dozen most important cities in old Palestine, and one of the largest. It was conquered by Joshua and the Israelites. As a Philistine center, it rose against King David. Solomon got it as a dowry when he married Pharaoh’s daughter.

The rediscovery tale began in 1958, when the well-known soldier-archaeologist Yigael Yadin uncovered the gate Solomon built at Hazor, and concluded that the ancient mound at Gezer would reveal another gate of Solomon if the excavator’s pick were sunk in the correct spot.

How did he know? Yadin, Israel’s first chief of staff, and now a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found the gate not by picking through the twenty-seven acres at the site, but by reading two books: the Bible and a sixty-year-old archaeological work by Britain’s R. A. Stewart Macalister. Macalister had set out to turn over every foot of soil at Gezer, but time and money ran out before the job was completed. His three-volume chronicle of the effort, though it leaves much to be desired by current standards of scientific accuracy, inspired future archaeologists to re-excavate the area.

Macalister had discovered a casemate (double) wall and a four-entry gate, which he sketched and labeled “Maccabean Castle.” Yadin compared the sketch with Hazor and the wall found in the 1930s at Megiddo and theorized that they had been planned by the same ancient royal architect. And First Kings 9:15 affirmed the theory—it reports that walls were built at Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer.

The theory was tested in April by an expedition from Hebrew Union College under Harvard—trained archaeologist William G. Dever. They uncovered the “Maccabean Castle,” and it appears to be the Solomonic wall and gate Yadin had predicted.

A group of theological students from the American Institute for Holy Land Studies, working as volunteers with Dever, shared the general excitement as the entrance to the gate slowly came into view. The next day, the students were off to Megiddo, then Hazor, and one enthused, “We are probably the first in 3,000 years to view all three of Solomon’s gates which stood before his fortified cities.”

Positive proof on Gezer must await further work this summer, when archaeologists will seek undisturbed, datable pottery. From June 26 to August 4, the expedition will be joined by more than 100 students from the United States and Israel. Those following the prescribed course will get four hours’ credit for the summer of work. Besides digging, they will hear lectures from six scholars on the summer staff.

The Gezer work began in 1964 under Harvard’s G. Ernest Wright, assisted by Dever and another of his students, H. Darrell Lance. Dr. Nelson Glueck, who heads Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and its branch school of archaeology in Jerusalem, commissioned the work. Wright was succeeded by James F. Ross of Drew University, then Yale’s Marvin Pope, with Dever as field director. Lance, now with Colgate Rochester Divinity School, joins the group this summer as associate director.

Glueck said excavations will continue for the next six to eight seasons, to “salvage everything possible done by Macalister, published or unpublished.” The group also hopes to “excavate large areas of the untouched portion of the mound in order to fill in the gaps that exist in the history of the site.”

Macalister published so little evidence that most scholars had thought the mound was deserted during the tenth and ninth centuries B.C. Yadin’s hunch and the 1967 discovery that the structures do exist erases much of the doubt and opens the way for establishing positively that the area was occupied in Israelite times. The work of coming seasons promises to fill other historical gaps and add to the growing store of knowledge about the life and times of this land in the days of the Bible.

DWIGHT L. BAKER

India’S Muslim President

It took the United States 171 years to elect a Roman Catholic president. Last month, India chose a member of its Muslim minority as president (ceremonial head of state) just twenty years after the tumultuous religious partition with Muslim Pakistan.

Zakir Husain, 70, noted scholar and vice-president since 1962, defeated Hindu jurist Subba Rao both in the national Parliament and in the state assemblies. The Muslims—one-tenth of India’s 500 million population—apparently voted for Husain regardless of party. Though predominantly Hindu, India is officially a secular state under its 1947 constitution.

The third president of India is a great admirer of Gandhi and said after his election, “We have to talk less, quarrel less, work hard and ever harder, and hold together.”

T. E. KOSHY

Greece’S New Primate

The military junta that controls Greece has ousted highly conservative Archbishop Chrysostomos and replaced him with Archimandrite Jerome Kotsonis, a theologian who has worked with the World Council of Churches and supports closer ties with the Vatican. The new primate was elected by the Synod of Bishops, whose nine members had earlier been replaced by the junta. Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei later opposed the church changeover.

Internally, the move represents the success of the junta in bringing the church under its control—something that both the old government and Greece’s King Constantine had favored but were unable to achieve.

Internationally, the new archbishop raises hopes among ecumenically minded church leaders for more friendly relations between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

Preaching at his enthronement in Athens, Archbishop Kotsonis pointed to the need for Christians to put the basic principles of Christianity into effect regardless of doctrinal differences. “All of this can be attained,” he said, “only with the close cooperation of all the Christian Churches.”

At 62, he is exceptionally young to hold the church’s highest office. He is also the first non-bishop elected to that rank since 1920. He has been a chaplain to the royal family since 1949 and is a member of the central committee of the World Council of Churches and a professor of canon law at the University of Thessalonica.

Spain: Strings Attached

Protestants in Spain hardly know whether to feel happy or hurt about the final text of the religious-freedom law voted by a Cortes (parliament) committee last month. Final approval is scheduled at the July Cortes plenary session. “Private and public profession of any religion” is permitted, but only for those who accept a long string of regulations.

On the eve of the Cortes action, Protestant representatives held their yearly meeting in Valencia, and their verdict on the law was unanimous: Unacceptable, because the state will interfere with the affairs of the church. They decided not to accept the rules, even if it means loss of the new freedom the law promises.

Under the law, the 35,000 Protestants will be recognized on the same level as secular organizations. They must provide annual membership lists and financial reports to the government. The government must accredit new pastors and will tell seminaries how many new students they can accept. Church schools may be started only if congregations have the required number of children. No churches can accept foreign aid.

The new law says religious freedom is “based on the Catholic teaching and must be put in agreement in every case with the fact that Spain is a confessional state.” The Cortes discussion stressed that the Vatican had approved the law, and Protestants were mentioned only in a derogatory way. As Adolfo (named after Hitler) Munoz Alonso said, “This law will inaugurate a new political situation, and I must express my fears that a second step of the sects will be to ask for other liberties under the pretext of still being discriminated against.”

The law does not give Protestant ministers the exemption from military service granted Catholic priests. And Protestants will be required to attend the military Mass which accompanies the ceremony of loyalty to Spain.

Since non-Catholic worship, whether private or public, must be in places approved by authorities, Protestants fear the law could prevent even their private devotions at home. Also, most Protestant converts are won through home visitation and the law clearly forbids this.

Episcopal Bishop Ramon Sienes regrets that non-Catholic churches are considered “mere associations of private right,” and Jewish leader Don Samuel Toledano says, “We are considered to be second-class citizens of Spain.”

Come Down, Kingey

A version of the four Gospels in the “Scouse” dialect of Liverpool, England, will appear shortly. The cover will picture Christ on the cross, wearing a flat cap, open shirt, and dungarees, against a Liverpool background. The crucifixion scene reads:

“ ‘Come down, Kingey,’ dey yelled, ‘You’ve done some big talkin’. If yer de Son of God, get yourself out of this mess—den we’ll believe yer.’ ”

Liverpool’s Bishop Stuart Blanch says “it is a fine piece of work. In parts, it gets to the root of the real meaning of the Gospel, which may have been obscured in normal orthodox translation.”

The writer is the Rev. R. H. L. Williams, whose church is by the Liverpool docks. He was converted in 1949 under the ministry of noted evangelical Leith Samuel.

The Fatima ‘Obstacle’

Before he left for Fatima, Portugal, last month, Pope Paul admitted that “Marian dogma still constitutes one of the greatest obstacles to unity in one faith with the Catholic Church.” Even so, he said in an encyclical the same week that “all those who believe in the Gospel” are “obliged” to venerate the Virgin Mary, and that the church is entering a new “Marian era.”

The fiftieth anniversary of the reported visions of Mary at Fatima and the Pope’s interest in Mary are of great ecumenical significance (see “Fatima’s Fiftieth,” News, March 31 issue).

In his sermon during a low mass at the shrine attended by one million pilgrims, the Pope said “we have come to the feet of the Queen of Peace to ask her for the gift, which only God can give, of peace.” He meant not just a military ceasefire, it developed, but peace in the Roman church itself. The Pope issued a strong appeal against liberal theology:

“What terrible damage could be provoked by arbitrary interpretations, not authorized by the teaching of the church, disrupting its traditional and constitutional structure, replacing the theology of the true and great fathers of the church with new and peculiar ideologies, interpretation intent upon stripping the norms of faith of that which modern thought—often lacking rational judgment—doesn’t understand and doesn’t like.”

The sermon also remembered “all Christians, non-Catholics but brothers in baptism” and asked Mary for a “united church.” Earlier, the Pope had used mostly Bible texts in speaking about Mary to a group of Portuguese Protestants.

Besides multitudes of diseased persons visiting the shrine, the onlookers included famed Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who was visiting his Portuguese publisher. He said “it was a very impressive experience” and that he plans to write a poem about it.

The Pope’s five-hour Portugal visit included a nine-minute chat with dictator Antonio Salazar. The New York Times said the Pope has rarely been mentioned in Portugal’s government-controlled press since he visited India after it absorbed the Portuguese colony of Goa. But the papal audience was long enough to bring a protest from Algeria, which harbors several anti-Salazar rebel groups.

Besides Portugal and India, the Pope has visited the Holy Land and the United Nations in New York since his election in 1963.

The Fatima visit was seen on all three U. S. TV networks, in Canada, and in fifteen West European nations through Eurovision, which assigned two dozen cameras to the operation.

Everything was coming up roses in Portland, Oregon, last month, a week before the annual Rose Parade, especially for leaders of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. And if commissioners to its 179th General Assembly believed the roses had thorns, they raised surprisingly little protest.

The assembly adopted without alteration the controversial “Confession of 1967” and all but one report of the avant-garde Standing Committee on Church and Society chaired by Stanford’s Robert McAfee Brown. A report on “War and World Order” was approved after deletion of a provocative but non-essential section.

By accepting the “Confession of 1967,” the assembly gave final approval to the first major change in the denomination’s confessional standards in three centuries. The action to include the new confession along with eight other doctrinal statements¹The Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, the Scots Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Shorter Catechism, and the Declaration of Barmen. carried with it a far less publicized amendment of the ordination vows for ministers, elders, and deacons.

Candidates will no longer receive the doctrinal statements of the church—even the new one—as “embodying that system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.” They will promise only to be “zealous and faithful in studying the Scriptures, the Book of Confessions, and the Book of Order” (italics added). The presbyteries of the denomination had already accepted the alterations, 165 to 19.

Earlier, on recommendation of the steering-committee majority, the assembly had rejected a protest from four presbyteries that deletion of the Larger Catechism from the confessional standards of the church was unconstitutional. After an estimated four-to-one approval of the new confession, commissioners also rejected an amendment to delete the phrase “even at risk to national security” from a section urging peace among nations. The alteration had been proposed by the presbytery of Washington, D. C., which found the phrase “unnecessarily provocative.”

The practical thrust of the new confession is to engage the church in social concerns. And the church and society committee lost no time in claiming the assembly’s action as an endorsement of its efforts. Claiming that “the ‘Confession of 1967’ thrusts upon us a type of divine pressure,” committee chairman Brown added his own pressure on behalf of the committee’s resolutions, proposing that the commissioners adopt them without change. For the most part they did.

A crucial “Declaration of Conscience” on Viet Nam said the United States, “as the stronger nation,” has a moral obligation to take the initiative “leading finally to the negotiating table.” The first step: “an alternate to the bombing of North Viet Nam.” The statement also urged “renewed attempts to get all parties concerned to seek arbitration of the war through the United Nations” and “exploration of other alternatives, such as a purely defensive war behind the fortified Demilitarized Zone in South Viet Nam, with the subsequent pacification of the South Vietnamese countryside.” The assembly asked that its declaration be read from all pulpits on June 11. (Earlier, Princeton Seminary’s President Emeritus John A. Mackay had said the U.S. should never have gotten involved in Southeast Asia and that “we must withdraw.”)

Reminders from the floor that such proposals have already been tried by the United States provoked no comment from the committee. Nor did the suggestion that cessation of the bombing under present conditions may be as immoral as continuing it. A defeated motion would have qualified the recommendation for a halt to bombing by adding, “provided North Viet Nam gives evidence of its willingness to negotiate by cessation of hostilities.”

Adopted in a late-evening session were resolutions endorsing United Nations power “adequate to make, interpret, and enforce world law”; avoidance of anti-ballistic missile systems in the United States and the Soviet Union; increased aid to underdeveloped nations; economic protest against racism in southern Africa; Project Equality “as a responsible and effective ecumenical program to use the contracting and purchasing powers of churches in support of equal opportunity employers”; full diplomatic recognition of and a U. N. seat for Mao’s China; new emphasis on racial equality in housing, employment, and education; and a “rigorous evaluation” of the military draft, deferment for clergymen, and conscientious objection.

In other resolutions the General Assembly approved:

• Basic principles of a new plan for church education to replace many aspects of the Faith and Life Curriculum and methods. Union Theological Seminary Professor C. Ellis Nelson said many assumptions used in planning that curriculum “were not true.”

• A report on the marriage of divorced persons that stresses concern for the persons involved and removes the restriction requiring a one-year waiting period before remarriage.

• A special committee to study the feasibility of union congregations with members of other churches in the Consultation on Church Union.

• A policy statement defining the new evangelism, plus a conservative statement from the floor citing the Church’s obligation “to declare and explain what it means to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.”

Money Up, Members Down

United Presbyterians apparently are better at raising money than at winning converts, judging from statistics reported to the 1967 General Assembly (story above). A one-year drop of more than 10,000 was the first loss in total membership in recent history. Also down: number of churches, church school pupils, infant and adult baptisms, and ministerial candidates.

But total giving was $330 million, up $13 million from the previous year, and per-capita giving was $99.96, an increase of $4.21. The denomination’s much-publicized Fifty Million Fund, the biggest Presbyterian fund drive ever undertaken, substantially exceeded its goal.

“I have no easy explanation,” said Stated Clerk William P. Thompson. “We must face the harsh fact that our stewardship of the Good News has been faulty.” There was no discussion.

The assembly of 800 commissioners elected as moderator the Rev. Eugene Smathers, pastor of tiny Calvary Presbyterian Church in the Appalachian town of Big Lick, Tennessee. Smathers defeated Dr. William H. Hudnut, Jr., well-known national chairman of the Fifty Million Fund.

Before the assembly, with approval of the “Confession of 1967” almost assured, many delegates and visitors were asking, “Where does the United Presbyterian Church go from here?” Today the answer is clear. The church is moving toward increasing involvement in all social issues and a radical restructuring of its mission to “act” rather than “preach” the Gospel. Brown told a pre-assembly evangelism conference, “Politics is the vehicle through which the will of God is done in the world today.” Most commissioners were inclined to agree.

The A.B.C.S Of Evangelism

The American Baptist Convention’s General Council last month voted 23 to 15 to make a “study in depth” of the denomination’s evangelism program, even though the council has no authority over the ABC’s autonomous Home Mission Society and its controversial evangelism secretary, Jitsuo Morikawa.

As often happens, this General Council action was more important than anything that took place later in the week at the full ABC meeting in Pittsburgh. A middle-of-the-road resolution on evangelism, rewritten to the right after complaints from Ohio, got swift passage. Later, Oregon’s J. Lester Harnish failed by only six votes to get the three-fourths needed to reopen the evangelism debate. He sought an amendment endorsing the inter-Baptist Crusade of the Americas and urging American Baptists “at all levels” to cooperate. The General Council decision against the crusade is lamented by those interested in closer ties with other Baptists rather than with non-Baptist groups, and by those interested in traditional evangelism.

New ABC President L. Doward McBain, a flamboyant Phoenix pastor active in the National Council of Churches, said he wished the Harnish move had succeeded so that he could take it, rather than apologies, to the Southern Baptist Convention.

The crusade decision was a skirmish in the continuing war between ABC evangelicals and the headquarters emphasis on social action as evangelism. The most dramatic complaint among many in recent months was a petition from two-fifths of the ABC pastors in New Jersey.

In the General Council discussion, a series of state secretaries agreed generally with Pennsylvania veteran Wilbur Bloom: “We are headed for trouble. We must make some adjustments, regardless of how difficult it may be.”

In defense, home-missions chief William Rhoades, a layman who admits to no theological expertise, attacked the “divisive statements” from New Jersey and said it was “unfair to attribute emphases” to the national offices, because the planning involves state and local leaders. He said Morikawa’s program is “highly successful” and “offers a wide variety of options.” The Home Mission Society spokesman on the General Council, Mrs. Howard G. Colwell²Her son David, a United Church of Christ minister, is chairman of the Consultation on Church Union. of Loveland, Colorado, said she is as sure Morikawa is “a prophetic voice” now as when she introduced him as a new staff member while she was ABC president.

Morikawa believes, as he told the Pittsburgh Rotary Club, that “vast secular structures” should be part of the Great Commission “so that institutionally, men may respond to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.” Thus, much of his evangelism program involves social action—in New York City, Philadelphia, and Valley Forge (home of the ABC headquarters, known as the “holy doughnut”)—and “converting” the local church for secular mission.

In a panel discussion, President-elect McBain said that “in evangelism, we are confronting the individual with the claims of Christ. It begins with the individual. I would be delighted to discuss the Viet Nam war—it should stop today—but we must confront man with his need before God. If we leave him there, then we have left him in his impoverishment—moral as well as sociological.”

Layman Carl Tiller, in his last address as ABC president, said the denomination should “recapture a concern for souls” to reverse “our shameful twenty-year trend of fewer first decisions for Christ.” He noted that the ABC is the only one of the major Protestant groups in the United States to lose members since 1950.

Tiller and McBain see the ABC as a bridge between other Baptist denominations and the large U. S. denominations that are discussing merger.

The ABC is in no mood to review last year’s decision against joining the Consultation on Church Union. But delegates approved a general statement on Christian unity from the ABC’s new ecumenical executive, COCU-leaning Robert G. Torbet, that leaves the door open.

The ABC delegates rejected soft-toned statements from the resolutions committee, and urged the U. S. government to provide “contraceptive information and medically approved devices” to public and private agencies worldwide, to promote “effective population control.” They favored legal abortions in cases of rape, incest, mental incompetence, and danger to the mother’s health.

A carefully worded measure on “black power” cited the “legitimate need for disadvantaged groups” to organize as blocs to achieve “needed changes in society.” Curiously, ABC pacifists helped turn down by a slim margin an amendment that endorsed only nonviolent uses of power.

On Viet Nam, the doves managed to delete two statements commending President Johnson. Another successful amendment, from President Tiller’s son Robert, called for “mutual de-escalation” by the United States and North Viet Nam. A hard-to-oppose hawkish motion backed U. S. servicemen.

Moving With Cloud And Fire

How much should a 78,200-member denomination spend on higher education? For the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the question loomed large last month. Many have been wary of inroads upon the 85 per cent budgetary allotment for work overseas (currently about $5 million annually). They converged on Hartford, Connecticut, for the seventieth General Council ready for a full-dress debate.

The battle never came. Thanks to the work of a twelve-man study commission, a broad new education policy was adopted in a breeze. The commission’s fourteen recommendations were adopted virtually intact. The four CMA colleges’ primary responsibility—to train people for full-time Christian ministries—was reaffirmed, and a secondary responsibility was assigned: “to provide, as facilities and funds will allow, liberal arts training with a strong biblical emphasis.” A graduate school of theology and missions was authorized, and ground was laid for minimal educational standards for those commissioned by the CMA. The question of government subsidy for colleges was left open.

Credit for the policy formulation belongs largely to a soft-spoken 41-year-old Canadian who headed the study commission, Dr. Donald J. Trouten, academic dean of St. Paul (Minnesota) Bible College of the CMA. In drafting the commission’s sixty-six page report, Trouton drew liberally from his own 500-page unpublished Ph.D. dissertation for New York University, in which he traced seventy-five years of CMA educational changes. As if to reward him for the work, a delegate nominated Trouten for the post of general secretary of the CMA. Trouten withdrew his name after the Rev. William F. Smalley, who planned to retire, acceded to another three-year term.³In another election, Toccoa Falls Bible College President Julian A. Bandy was chosen CMA vice-president over the incumbent, Pittsburgh pastor K. C. Fraser, by a vote of 469 to 425.

The most interesting CMA educational innovation now under way is the bid of Canadian Bible College, Regina, to become an affiliated theological college of the University of Saskatchewan. Under a coordinated curriculum the student would get a B.A. from the university and the equivalent of a seminary education. It would take him six years, assuming he had had the Canadian thirteenth grade.

Officials of the Regina school feel their plan pursues the path laid down by an early Alliance educator, George P. Pardington, who observed back in 1912: “It cannot be shown from the Scriptures that the highest mental discipline and the deepest spiritual culture are to be divorced.” Pardington said God was challenging the Alliance to produce a race of intellectual and spiritual leaders. “The pillar of cloud and fire … is moving in that direction.”

Death Of A Newsweekly

The Sunday Times, interdenominational newsweekly that six months ago became the successor to the 108-year-old Sunday School Times, closed up shop abruptly last month.

The reason, according to a statement in its final issue, dated May 27: “The income … was not sufficient to continue publication beyond this date.”

As the Times’s board prepared to meet to decide its fate, Tyndale House, a publisher in Wheaton, Illinois, announced it expected to purchase the paper and merge it with the Christian Times, a smaller weekly Sunday School take-home it has been publishing since January.

The death of the Sunday Times represents the failure of the first attempt to establish a Protestant newsweekly in more than two decades.

Tyndale House said it would continue to publish the Sunday Times’s lesson material as long as there is a demand, but the paper’s tabloid news format will be absorbed into the eight-page, 8½–by-11-inch format of the Christian Times.

Bible Boom

The American Bible Society’s final figures for 1966 show a remarkable 50 per cent jump in U. S. distribution, to a total of 39 million Bibles, Testaments, and Scripture portions.

In the overseas reports, a 42 per cent increase was shown in the combined totals for India, Indonesia, Viet Nam, and Taiwan. The biggest increase was in Ghana, 319 per cent, because the government placed the biggest order in Bible Society history—520,250 Bibles for use in public schools.

The report showed the ABS spent $6.8 million in 1966.

Mobilizing The Poor

A major first step toward national coordination of church-backed social action was taken last month when ten interfaith groups created a non-profit foundation to develop and implement programs for mobilizing the nation’s poor.

The foundation, the Inter-Religious Foundation for Community Organization,⁴Charter members: American Baptist Home Missions Society, American Jewish Committee, Board of Missions and General Board of Christian Social Concerns of The Methodist Church, Catholic Committee for Community Organization, Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, Board of Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ, National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, Board of National Missions of the United Presbyterian Church U. S. A., and Foundation for Voluntary Service. was launched, according to its president, Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, to “provide the poor with the help they need to develop control over their own destinies.”

With two staffers and contributions of nearly $100,000 for the coming year, the foundation is confronting two problems: undue duplication and proliferation of projects among its members, and inadequacy and ineffectiveness of federally sponsored development programs.

The foundation will survey programs currently being conducted by its members and coordinate them under a system of priorities.

It will solicit money from private sources and then channel it to individual members working on projects.

Formation of the foundation points to the growing emphasis religious activists place on direct action aimed at specific problems.

IFCA’s goals closely parallel those of the highly controversial organizer Saul Alinsky, who himself heads a foundation that previously was used by some groups now in IFCA to organize projects at the local level. Alinsky’s most recent activities involved work with a coalition of religious and civil-rights groups against the Kodak Company over jobs for Negroes in Rochester, New York. But the differences between Alinsky and IFCA are as striking as the similarities.

Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation works under contract and becomes directly involved in organizing activities. IFCA, however, will only certify and fund projects that its members then carry out. Also, IFCA hopes to evolve a broad strategy for social action under which a wide range of religious organizations can be associated. Its leaders also hope it will be able to appeal for funds to a wider audience.

The response to the foundation has been encouraging. At least four more organizations are considering joining. Even before its formation, the foundation received requests for projects whose cost totals more than $750,000.