An objective and timely inquiry into the activities of religious representatives in Washington

Church lobbyists are exerting increasing political pressure in the nation’s capital. Their accelerated activity is eliciting cries of both joy and pain in the pew. Conservative church members contend that clergymen should stay in the pulpit and out of politics. Liberals praise political involvement as the recovery of the church’s historic prophetic function. (The word “church” or “churches” is used here in a generic sense to include denominations, organizations, and associations of congregations of all three major faiths—Protestants, Roman Catholic, and Jewish.) Despite differences back home, Washington church representatives are intensifying their efforts to influence both legislative and executive branches of government.

The churches’ pivotal role in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a heady experience. Clergymen discovered they carried a clout. Political pressure accomplished in a few months what moral suasion had failed to do in a century.

“The 1964 experience no doubt spurred the churches on to play a bigger role,” says Rabbi Richard G. Hirsch, director of the Reform Jews’ Religious Action Center in Washington, D. C. “As a matter of fact, the churches’ activity may have done more for them than it did for the bill.”

Albert Saunders, secretary for national affairs of the United Presbyterian Church, reinforces Rabbi Hirsch’s appraisal. “Suddenly,” he says, “we in the field of religious social action found ourselves playing the role of the political power group—and many of us liked it.”

Senator Richard B. Russell, Georgia Democrat, who led the unsuccessful fight to defeat the civil-rights bill, has expressed the same thing in different words. “There were many ministers who, having failed completely in their effort to establish good will and brotherhood from the pulpit, turned from the pulpit to the powers of the Federal Government to coerce the people into accepting their view under threat of dire punishment,” the senator charged on the Senate floor.

Nearly every mainline denomination has a full- or part-time representative in Washington. Many churches gain dual representation through their membership in the National Council of Churches, which has a well-staffed Washington office. Smaller conservative churches support the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU) in a rear-guard action revolving around the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Church lobbyists cover the political waterfront. It’s a rare bill indeed that fails to attract the attention of one or more church “government watchers.” This means the church lobbyist must determine priorities to get his work done. The author recalls the afternoon he stopped in the office of the Department of Social Responsibility of the Unitarian Universalist Association to interview the department’s executive secretary, Robert Jones. The secretary was talking on the telephone.

“I’ll do what I can but I’m working on the U. S.-Russian consular treaty this week,” he told his caller, hanging up. “That was a gal from the Leadership Congress on Civil Rights,” he explained. “She wants me to contact the congressional committee that provides technical aid to help schools integrate. But you can only do so much,” he said, with a gesture of futility.

Many church representatives visibly wince at being tagged lobbyists. They believe their activities are more accurately described by use of the words “education” and “information.”

“Actually I spend more time arranging seminars, speaking, writing articles, answering queries, and interpreting statutes than anything which could remotely be called lobbying,” explains Lewis I. Maddocks, Washington secretary of the Council for Christian Social Action of the United Church of Christ.

Under the loose wording of the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act of 1946, the church representatives are not lobbyists in the legal sense of the word. (The Friends Committee on National Legislation, primarily a pacifist pressure group, is the only church-related organization that registers as a lobby.)

The Congressional Quarterly in one of its publications entitled Legislators and the Lobbyists gives the following three definitions of a lobbyist:

1. In its broadest sense, the term “lobbyist” is often used interchangeably with the term “pressure group” to mean any organization or person that carries on activities which have as their ultimate aim to influence the decisions of Congress, of the state and local legislatures, or of government administrative agencies.

2. In a somewhat narrower sense, “lobbyist” means any person who, on behalf of some other person or group and usually for pay, attempts to influence legislation through direct contact with legislators.…

3. In a third and still narrower meaning, “lobbyist” denotes anyone who is required to register or report on his spending under the terms of the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act of 1946.…

Church lobbyists appear to fit into the first category: they do attempt to influence the decisions of Congress—even though they are striving for ideological gains rather than special privilege or financial gain.

The Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act of 1946 defines a lobbyist as:

[One] who by himself, or through any agent or employe of other persons in any manner whatsoever, directly or indirectly, solicits, collects, or receives money or any other thing of value to be used primarily to aid, or the principal purpose of which person is to aid, in the accomplishment of any of the following purposes:

1. the passage or defeat of any legislation by the Congress of the United States;

2. to influence, directly or indirectly, the passage or defeat of any legislation by the Congress of the United States.

The escape hatch is the phrase “to be used primarily to aid, or the principal purpose of which person is to aid.…”

One of the primary reasons why church officials shy away from the word “lobbyist” is that it has direct bearing on their churches’ tax-exempt status. The Internal Revenue Code grants tax exemption to religious and other non-profit organizations if “no substantial part” of their activities is “carrying on propaganda or otherwise attempting to influence legislation.…” The key question here is, “What is “substantial”?

A 1955 Federal circuit-court case indicated that if political activities take up “less than 5 per cent of time and effort” of the organizations, then these activities would not be considered “substantial.” The lobbying act specifically exempts testimony before congressional committees, publications, advertisements, and so on.

“The Council for Christian Social Action receives only about 2 per cent of the United Church of Christ budget,” says Maddocks. “Here the so-called lobbying activities of the UCC could hardly be called substantial.”

The Rev. James L. Vizzard, Jesuit director of the Washington Office of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (RLC), is more at ease than many of his peers with the word “lobbyist.” A veteran observer and shaper of public affairs in Washington, Father Vizzard explained his political philosophy:

“When I was studying at Georgetown University, I asked a Jesuit priest who had been in Washington a long time where you draw the line on lobbying.

“ ‘The only distinction is whether your lobbying is successful or not,’ he replied. I thought it was a good answer.”

Father Vizzard began testifying before congressional committees in 1950 in behalf of migrant workers. “Except for the Quakers, I was pretty much alone then,” he says. “We were prophets crying out in the wilderness. But since 1955, there has been a considerable growth in church representation. We have seen a shift in emphasis from so-called church interests to dedication to the common welfare.”

How do church officials distinguish political issues from moral issues? Is the church exceeding its competence by becoming involved in issues ranging from foreign policy to space control? Do church conventions and governing bodies that issue pronouncements on a panoply of topics have a direct pipeline to God denied to the average man in the pew?

Maddocks of the United Church of Christ has an answer to these questions usually asked by critics.

“I cannot separate the gospel message from the economic, social, and political affairs of men,” he says. “This does not mean that one position on a public issue is the Christian one and that the opposite is unchristian. It means, rather, that two Christians can disagree.”

To illustrate his point, Maddocks used an analogy:

“I had a father who, certainly by any standards I consider valid, was a Christian. He was a fair man, a man who was pathologically honest, who always treated people in a Christian way.

“But he and I didn’t agree at home. I am a liberal Democrat and he was an ultra-conservative Republican. But I never lost respect for my father and he never lost respect for me. We would discuss issues and disagree. He would discuss them from his standpoint of values, and I would discuss them from the standpoint of my values. Therefore, I didn’t say I had the Christian position on things and he had something less than that.

“Those who disagree with what their church is saying should oppose the issue, not the right of the church to speak out on issues. If you see religious implications in all public issues, you do not have to try to determine which issues are political and which are religious.”

In a paper outlining his rationale for “A Relevant Ministry in the Nation’s Capital,” Maddocks wrote:

“In order to appreciate the Christian’s responsibility in political action, we need merely to recognize that Christianity is concerned with the welfare of people, and that politics in a democracy is based on government by consent of the people; therefore, Christianity, and thus the Christian, must be concerned with politics.”

An opposing view is set forth by the National Association of Evangelicals in a Kiplinger-style letter written by Clyde W. Taylor, general secretary and director of public affairs.

“The church’s prophetic and evangelistic voice must not lose its spiritual authority by speaking on every other matter, which it is neither competent nor authorized to do,” Taylor wrote.

Referring to the 2,000 clergymen and laymen who picketed the White House in February, 1967, to protest the United States’ involvement in Viet Nam, Taylor set forth the NAE position:

“As a group we have no mandate to speak for or against this involvement in Viet Nam. We do have a responsibility to minister to our men in service, to bind up the wounds of those who suffer. We as individual Christians must find the level of our commitment in these major issues; we must find our own perspective on Viet Nam.”

Individual action versus organized response is one of the major issues on which the church is divided. Conservatives generally hold that social conditions are of secondary importance to man’s spiritual relationship with God. Although they do insist on social involvement, conservatives say, it should not overshadow the church’s prime responsibility of bringing God and the individual man together.

Dr. C. Stanley Lowell, associate director of POAU and a Methodist minister, is one of those who believes clergymen are confusing their roles. “The clergyman has the right to be involved in politics to the same degree as any other U. S. citizen—to vote or run for office,” he says. “But when a minister attempts to throw a divine aura on every issue, he is violating his trust as a minister.”

Presbyterian Saunders thinks it is time for churches to make a thorough reappraisal of church-state relations. “Simplistic statements supporting the church’s involvement in any public effort that appears to serve the betterment of mankind are dangerously irresponsible,” he said shortly after being appointed to his Washington post last fall. “There are varieties of involvement by the churches in public programs, and means and ends must be seriously studied in each instance. Otherwise, precedent could be established that would condition the future interaction of church and state in ways that undermine the integrity and effectiveness of each in its mission to the world.”

Saunders warned that churches have a tendency to rush in where angels fear to tread just to get where the action is. Sounding a word of caution, he proposed that before taking a position on any issues, the church should ask the following questions: Why should the church speak to this problem? And what does the church have to say, or what can it do, that can be legitimately related to the genius of its own tradition, and that will permit it to retain the vital element of independence from the political power structure in order to witness to, and effectively interact with, that structure?

Lobbying assumes a variety of forms and shapes. Buttonholing congressmen in corridors is considered ineffectual and passé. (A notable exception to this rule was the ecclesiastical activity on behalf of the 1964 civil-rights bill.) And rarely do church representatives appeal to congressmen on the basis of their mutual denominational connections.

Church lobbyists recognize that pressure from a congressman’s constituents has more influence than direct confrontation by a church bureaucrat. (“We are aware of the impact of communication on legislation,” says Dr. C. Emanuel Carlson, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. “Folks who talk about indirect lobbying as being more effective than direct lobbying are correct.”) Congressmen are quick to discern whether the church spokesman has broad support back home or is a “general without an army.”

The church lobbyist can travel numerous avenues to reach his goal. He obviously cannot ply decision-makers on the Hill with the traditional unholy trinity of wine, women, and folding money. But he can influence legislation by bringing in experts to testify before committees, sponsoring seminars on various issues, distributing pamphlets informing churchgoers how to contact congressmen, releasing statements by important church leaders to the press, and deluging Congress with church resolutions and position papers when a bill is in committee or comes up on the floor for voting.

Some Washington representatives are handicapped at times and limited in movement by their church’s cumbersome machinery. The policy of the highly structured Methodist Church, for example, is formulated every four years by the General Conference. While this 900-member, unwieldy body seems to speak on everything in general, it often overlooks specifics. Thus The Methodist Church—which has the largest Protestant staff in Washington, operating in a five-story building across the street from the Capitol—could not participate in the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. The General Conference had not given its approval.

Alert lobbyists, however, learn to improvise when the need arises. Herman Will, Jr., associate general secretary of The Methodist Church’s Division of Peace and World Order, recalled the time when it looked as if the Senate Appropriations Committee would not vote funds for food aid to Communist Poland and Yugoslavia. Believing Congress should not mix politics with empty stomachs. Will wanted the committee to know how his church felt.

“I drafted a statement urging that food be sent to the two countries and wanted Bishop John Wesley Lord to sign it and send it out,” Will said. “But the bishop was out of town on vacation. I finally got in contact with him in the evening.

“He said my statement expressed his sentiments and to go ahead and send it out. We had copies on the desks of all the members of the Senate Appropriations Committee by the next morning,” Will said.

The churches win friends and influence politicians the most when they speak with one voice. Again Exhibit A is the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The three major faiths were so united in purpose on this issue that for the first time a Roman Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and a Protestant minister testified in Congress in July, 1963, with a joint statement read by a single spokesman.

Concerned clergymen have picketed, verbally protested, called on congressmen, and bought full-page newspaper advertisements to register their opposition to the Viet Nam struggle, but with a singular lack of success. Congressmen recognize that this is an issue on which honest men differ. Even the so-called monolithic Roman Catholic Church has internal differences about Viet Nam, if statements by Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Spellman can be taken at face value.

Churches also are finding themselves allied with liberal labor and civil-rights groups in a coalition of “conscience and power.” This is an imposing alliance for which politicians have a growing respect. The coalition has resulted in such broad-based groups as the Leadership Conference on Civil. Rights, with more than 115 participating organizations, and the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty.

In the ecumenical climate produced by Vatican II, warm, refreshing breezes have blown on the Washington scene. A generation ago, Protestants acted as if their primary mission was to counter, and if possible cancel, the Catholic influence rather than to be a positive force on the legislative process. POAU made its appearance in Washington twenty years ago when Presbyterians, Southern Baptists, and Methodists banded together to block the appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican.

Now Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic spokesmen consider their common political objectives stronger than their theological differences. Doctrine no longer divides. Social issues form the rallying point—or the battleground.

Most Washington church representatives are on a first name basis with one another and would much rather cooperate than compete. This results in frequent crosspollination of issues. It is not at all unusual to find the same pamphlet on the current crusade displayed in half a dozen church offices.

Lobbyists seek the advice and consent of as many of their colleagues as possible before starting a campaign. The prevailing trend is to seek interdenominational backing for specific goals. The National Campaign for Agricultural Democracy is a prime example. The idea came from a Jesuit (Father Vizzard), the organization is housed in the Methodist Building, and the director is a United Church of Christ minister (the Rev. Eugene Boutillier). Purpose of the organization is to get farm workers in general and grape-pickers in particular protected by the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act.

Laymen sometimes are confused by what they consider an ambivalent stance by the churches on the church-state principle. The strongest opposition to Senator Everett Dirksen’s (R.-Ill.) prayer amendment has come from church leaders. Clergymen charge that permitting prayer in the classroom would infringe on the First Amendment. At the same time, churches are serving as the primary channel for translating federal funds into anti-poverty programs in communities across the nation.

Sargent Shriver, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, boasted in a speech in San Francisco in December, 1965, that the OEO had scored a breakthrough in church-state cooperation. “Three or four years ago it was practically impossible for a federal agency to give a direct grant to a religious group,” he declared. “Today we have given hundreds without violating the principle of separation of church and state.” POAU sharply dissents.

Shriver’s statement points up the prime factor in the increased cooperation between churches and state. The federal government has expanded to the point where it is now, for better or worse, a tremendous force in the entire economic and social life of the country. Congress is now studying and acting on problems that once were considered the private domain of the churches.

“There are a growing number of areas in which the modern welfare state and the church have a concurrent interest and common concern,” states a recent Lutheran booklet on Church and State, A Lutheran Perspective. “These now center in the fields of health, education and social welfare. Both the church and the state operate schools, colleges, hospitals, homes. As population booms, problems grow and costs soar, the state is gradually assuming its communal responsibilities more directly by taking over many of the social functions performed earlier by the church.

“We have therefore rejected the position of an absolute separation of church and state in favor of a mutually beneficial relationship in which each institution contributes to the general welfare and the common good by remaining true to its own nature and task.”

The booklet, produced by twenty-two Lutheran scholars, describes the distinctive mission of the church as that of proclaiming the Word of God in preaching and sacraments, worship and evangelism, Christian education and social ministry. The purpose of the state is to establish good order, peace, and justice in a sinful world. The Lutheran scholars advocate an institutional separation of church and state but call for functional interaction. They support their argument with a quote from the U. S. Supreme Court:

The First Amendment does not say that in every and all respects there shall be a separation of church and state. Rather it studiously defines the manner, the specific ways, in which there shall be no concert or union or dependency one on the other. That is the common sense of the matter [Zorach v. Clauson, 1952].

But conservatives warn that growing government intervention should be resisted rather than welcomed. They point out that where the state becomes totalitarian it monopolizes welfare and penalizes the churches.

Although idealistic in principle, religious lobbyists are pragmatic in practice. Many offices operate on austere budgets; others are more generously financed by their denominations. An educated guess, based on figures available, is that the total operating budget of the church lobby amounts to about a million dollars annually.

Religious lobbyists are sophisticated professionals who know where the power lies in Washington and who daily are refining their techniques for manipulating this power. This church lobby is a growing pressure group that public officials may either damn or praise but seldom can afford to ignore.

Today a new conflict has developed between religion and the scientific method, and it is nowhere more evident than in the pages of twentieth-century theology. The former struggle was concerned with factual data and their interpretation—data in nature as opposed to data in the Bible. The new conflict is concerned with the absence of any factual data and with the place that faith should have in compensation.

In his book Jesus Christ and Mythology, Rudolf Bultmann grapples in the closing chapter with the isssue of religious knowledge. The activity of God, he assures us, does have an objective reality; likewise, our faith in God’s activity is no mere psychological exercise but relates to the real action of God in his speaking to our existence. But when faced with the question of how one knows that God acts (either in the present or in the past), Bultmann must describe the act of God as something “not visible, not capable of objective, scientific proof” (p. 61). Rather, we know God’s action only by “faith.”

Traditional theology has insisted that the Christian faith is derived not from an empirical scrutiny of the universe but from a revelation from God. Yet the revelation itself, notably the incarnate ministry and resurrection of Jesus Christ, was, in fact, visible and objective. Whether received in faith or not, the revelation was public, and men were and are responsible on the basis of its clarity. Paul fastened his Areopagite appeal for repentance on visible, objective truth-claims: God has given assurance of judgment to all men “in that he hath raised him [Jesus Christ] from the dead.”

Much contemporary theological thinking, however, is characterized by (1) a depreciation if not exclusion of evidential foundations for faith and (2) an emphasis on faith as an act of cognition, in which knowledge is furnished merely by believing.

The insulation of religion from external objective fact is apparent throughout the contemporary religious scene. In an article entitled “How is Theology Possible?” John Macquarrie says, “When challenged to produce the credentials of his subject, the theologian cannot in the nature of the case offer a proof, but he can describe this area of experience in which his discourse about God is meaningful …” (New Theology No. 1, p. 33). In the same volume, Eduard Schweizer of Zürich, speaking of the Easter event, declares, “Even if we had the best sound film of a Jerusalem newsreel of the year A. D. 30 (or whatever it was), it would not help us much since it could not show what really happened on that day” (pp. 45, 46). Then what will? “Only Easter, the revelation of the Spirit, shows what really happened.” And, again, the role of faith as a foundation is advanced: “Historical facts never create faith, only faith creates faith” (p. 51).

Modern theology’s presumed goal is to protect the Christian position from any and all criticism, but the price is enormously high. The furniture of Christianity has been moved into the water-tight room of faith to protect it from the flood of criticism. But isolation from criticism means also, in this case, isolation from reliable knowledge.

Finding the roots of this epistemologically fatal approach is not difficult. They are in Kierkegaard’s notion of faith as sheer risk and in Barth’s concept of non-objective revelation. What was latent in Barth has become patent in Bultmann and his progeny.

If revelation is not linked clearly to public history (historie), faith may very well not be linked to reality. This divorce of faith from fact is vigorously pointed up by the Cambridge unreconstructed liberal J. S. Bezzant. In a paragraph dealing with the theology of Bultmann he says:

It is even said that Christ crucified and risen meets us in the word of preaching and nowhere else. Faith in the word of preaching is sufficient and absolute. There is no possible philosophical natural theology, next to no reliable historical basis of Christianity. Believe the message, and it has saving efficacy. But what is the ground for believing? The answer given is Jesus’ disciples’ experience of the resurrection. But this is not, he [Bultmann] holds, a historical confirmation of the crucifixion as the decisive saving event because the resurrection is also a matter of faith only, i.e., one act of faith has no other basis than another act of faith [Objections to Christian Belief, p. 90, emphasis mine].

Bezzant’s closing barrage against this approach, the bluntness of which is typically Bezzant, is also worth including:

… when I am told that it is precisely its immunity from proof which secures the Christian proclamation from the charge of being mythological, I reply that immunity from proof can “secure” nothing whatever except immunity from proof, and call nonsense by its name [p. 91].

But, in the eyes of many modern theologians, the absence of evidence for faith, far from being nonsense, is a positive virtue. Bultmann even compares it with the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith and announces that “the man who desires to believe in God must know that he has nothing at his disposal on which to build this faith, that he is, so to speak, in a vacuum” (Jesus Christ and Mythology, p. 84). Similar expressions run all through the current literature on the subject of the historical Jesus; for example, “This conception of the person of Jesus [as divine Saviour] rests on faith and not on historical knowledge” (Jacob Jervell, The Continuing Search for the Historical Jesus, p. 74).

Radically different is the New Testament picture of faith. In the New Testament, faith always draws its life from valid evidence of God’s reality and power. A typical specimen is Paul’s statement in Second Corinthians 1:9. Certain events had impressed the Apostle that “we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead.” Here faith in God has a foundation in an earlier sample of his power so that Paul is not advocating a blind leap (“nothing at his disposal on which to build this faith”); rather, his faith is informed by objective evidence of God’s trustworthiness.

Similar examples abound. Peter in his sermon on Pentecost preached “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus … God raised … up” (Acts 2:22–24, RSV). This passage is valuable not only to show that the apostles put no premium on the lack of objective evidence but also to show that divine revelation was open to public view. Whether accepted or not, it still carried with it compelling indications of its divine origin.

The prologue to Luke’s Gospel takes the same approach. Luke declares that he has foraged among all the available historical data—eye-witnesses, “narratives” of former writers, the lot—to the precise end that Theophilus “may be sure of the reliability of the information” he had received. John, in his first epistle, speaks of “seeing,” “hearing,” and “handling” the Word of life—an impressive statement of the objectivity of historical revelation.

It takes very little reflection to see why faith must be rooted in something objective. Faith, as Charles Hodge reminded his generation, “is limited by knowledge. We can believe only what we know, i.e., what we intelligently apprehend” (Systematic Theology, III, 84). Without an evidential foundation, the believer is in company with the queen in Alice in Wonderland, who could believe half a dozen impossible things before breakfast.

All this is not to say that the clear evidence of God’s revelation in history cannot be rejected. A Roman soldier can stand beside the empty tomb in Joseph’s garden and completely miss—or, better, suppress—the obvious significance surrounding it, just as a modern historian may choose to explain the origin and unique growth of the Christian Church without any reference to the central message of the early Church—the empty tomb. Indeed, as sinners neither the soldier nor the historian can afford to acknowledge clear revelation, for this acknowledgment would have dramatic implications for his personal life. However, the equivocation of a revelatory event like the resurrection is always awkward and frequently foolish, as the earliest attempt demonstrated (Matt. 28:11–15).

Special revelation, like natural revelation, can be mentally resisted, explained away, ignored, denied. But its clarity is nonetheless a sufficient basis for responsibility before God, as Paul announced even to men who categorically denied the possibility of resurrection (Acts 17:16–34).

To recognize divine revelation, to submit to it, to have life imparted from it, always involves the activity of the Holy Spirit. How else can we explain the response of that other Roman soldier who, standing by a crucified Jew when he looked least like the Son of God, confessed his deity! The soldier by the empty tomb—an example of man’s stubborn blindness; the soldier by the cross—a monument to great grace. The evidences can be resisted. But they are tools in the hands of the Spirit, and accepted they are the basis on which true faith can rest.

When men, through grace, cease to resist the clear statement of revelation and submit to its claims, they exercise “faith.” Edward John Carnell’s definition of faith is especially serviceable in our day: “Faith is a resting of the heart in the sufficiency of the evidences” (Introduction to Christian Apologetics, p. 365). To such a definition one could say more but never less. For New Testament faith is not faith in a vacuum; its roots are sunk deeply into the public ministry of Jesus Christ, his death “under Pontius Pilate,” and his resurrection reported to us by his apostles, to whom he “showed himself alive … in many convincing ways, and appeared to them repeatedly over a period of forty days …” (Acts 1:3).

Can it be that, in the twentieth century, the weakness of the Church is traceable to its neglected foundations? “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

Does contemporary scientific thought in the physical and biological sciences tend to substantiate the Darwinian postulates? Or do the discoveries of the last one hundred years actually weaken the case for organic evolution and the spontaneous origins of life? Several factors call for a severe modification of the Darwinian system and compel a return to creationism as an increasingly valid scientific stance.

Principles Necessary To Validate Darwinism

In scientific circles it is well known that, in a closed system, entropy tends to increase with the passage of time. This is merely another way of saying that a clock (or the universe) tends to run down and that entropy is a measure of the amount of unavailable energy in the system, a measure of how far the clock has run down. In a wider but equally valid sense, entropy is a measure of the order (or disorder) of the molecules in a system, for, as a system runs down, it becomes more chaotic or disordered. This, too, is only to say that complicated molecules (highly organized ones) have an innate tendency to break down to simpler, more stable, less energetic ones.

In some cases it looks as if this general law of thermodynamics is not respected, as when, for example, finely ordered crystals separate out of an apparently unordered liquid phase. It appears here as if order has arisen spontaneously out of chaos. This apparent spontaneous increase of order would run counter to the universal laws of thermodynamics, if it were true. But actually it is not. A true spontaneous increase in order (= decrease in entropy) out of previous chaos has not really occurred. What has happened is that previously hidden order in the molecules in solution has manifested itself in crystallization.

The formulation of these thermodynamic laws is the result of scientific observation over the past hundred years on earth and in the whole known cosmos. They are universal; this is the way things go, universally. But these things do not happen only in physics and physical chemistry; they happen in us, too. Each one of us has arisen from an incredibly small sperm and a somewhat larger ovum. Although early investigators thought they saw a tiny homunculus in the sperm, out of which a real man grew, in reality the sperm and the ovum appear to be much less “ordered,” less “energetic,” than we adults are. The sperm and ovum have no legs, arms, brain, liver, kidney. Thus it looks as if our personal development from what might be considered relatively “simple” sperms and ova, to our complex adult form, with eyes, nose, head, legs, and so on, would represent a “spontaneous” increase in order (= decrease in entropy) as we become differentiated. And indeed, in one way it is, in that we do organize billions of molecules at the expense of metabolic energy, which were before unorganized to this extent, into one human body.

But in reality all this increase in order is “secondary,” since it is master-minded by an incredible “primary order” previously hidden, but nonetheless very much present, on the genes and chromosomes in the sperm and ovum. In the grown adult we see manifest or “expanded” what was previously hidden in a few microns of gene material. In the adult a “decompression” or order, previously highly compressed on the gene, has taken place. Thus, this adult order in us has not “arisen” just spontaneously; it was already there, but in compressed form, in the fertilized ovum right from the start.

If order did arise, even in the growing adult, really “spontaneously,” then scientists would get worried about the validity of the laws of thermodynamics, which have always been observed to hold universally until now. We know now that, in accordance with these laws, even such apparent “vagaries” as the color of eyes and the type of temperament are not really vagaries; they are firmly fixed chemically and are ordered right in the germ cells.

Darwin, when he formulated his theories of the origin of life one hundred years ago, had no knowledge of either the laws of thermodynamics (they were just being worked out by Clausius, Clapeyron, and Kelvin at that time), or the laws of heredity (Mendel’s laws were unknown to him, though published in Darwin’s lifetime). Darwin in his day could therefore assume with impunity that order did arise spontaneously from chaos, that life did arise spontaneously. Today, in the light of scientific discovery, we can no longer do this.

Two Premises Of Modern Biology

Modern biology starts from rather opposite premises to those mentioned above. From the Communists in the East to Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, Sir Julian Huxley, and Dr. Harlow Shapley in the West, most biologists believe in one of two explanations of the origin of life.

1. The first hypothesis is that this earth was once devoid of life and that the elements in some primeval ocean over the course of millions of years began to organize themselves, to “wind themselves up” spontaneously, to become more energy-laden, to become simple amino acids, polypeptides, simple proteins, nucleotides, and finally living protoplasm. They believe that this happened without interference from without (i.e. the system was “closed”). In their eyes (and here the Communist scientists are one with our leading scientists in the West), there is absolutely no question of any supernatural agency’s having any part in this development. Once a living cell had arisen spontaneously, it divided and began competing with its own progeny for food, habitat, and so on. This competition in the struggle for existence allowed the “best” to survive and killed off, at the same time, organisms less adapted to their surroundings. Thus, according to this almost universally accepted scheme of thought, once life was present on the earth, the process of natural selection took care of “spontaneous” evolution to higher and better forms of life. Sir Gavin de Beer, my former zoology professor at Oxford (now at London), says that natural selection is simply a mechanism for achieving a high degree of improbability (Endeavour XVII [1958], No. 66). Thus man was, in this view, produced by spontaneous processes followed by natural selection, and thus will superman be produced inevitably in the course of time. One will not find a single university in the Communist world, or, for that matter, in Europe, that does not base its fundamental biology on these premises; and with the exception of certain denominational colleges and universities, this is true also in the United States. In the biological and natural sciences, it is practically impossible to obtain a Ph.D. anywhere in the world (with the exceptions noted) without subscribing to this scheme.

2. The second hypothesis assumes that the first germ of life did not originate on earth but extraterrestrially. It may have been brought here by a meteor or other accident. Once, however, it was here, natural selection took over and spontaneously produced man out of it. I cannot go into this postulate here, because it merely pushes back the problem of origins into outer space.

“Scientific” Dogmatism

Sir Julian Huxley, Dr. Harlow Shapley, Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, and their colleagues are all unanimous in maintaining that the concept of God has been elbowed out of scientific reckoning by these schemes of thought. Huxley (London) maintains, for example, that “Gods are peripheral phenomena produced by Evolution” (The Observer, July 17, 1960, p. 17). Again: “After Darwin it was no longer necessary to deduce the existence of divine purpose for the facts of biological adaptation” (Rationalist Annual, 1946, p. 87). Science (April 1, 1960) reported that in a lecture before the American Association for the Advancement of Science on “The World into Which Darwin Led Us,” Simpson (Harvard) stated that modern development in the biological sciences had made the religious superstitions (Christianity was obviously meant) so rampant in North America intellectually untenable. Everything we see had come about spontaneously, produced by the laws of the universe we know about.

Shapley (Harvard) is equally dogmatic on these matters: “There is no need for explaining the origin of life in terms of miraculous or the supernatural. Life occurs automatically wherever the conditions are right. It will not only emerge but persist and evolve” (Science News Letter, July 3, 1965, p. 10). One can only ask Dr. Shapley whether he can name even one instance where life has been observed occurring automatically, or even one instance where, having so emerged, it has been observed to persist and evolve to higher forms. A scientist should report on observed facts and not on his speculations as though they were observed facts. No scientist is taken in by this sort of speculation; but the public is knowingly deceived by it, not being in a position to distinguish scientific observations.

If what these famous men say is true, then creationists and believers in God are behind the times and are obscurantists. They must be third-rate intellectually and should not advertise their ignorance by protesting. I am convinced, however, that it is not the creationists who are obscurantists but the Darwinists themselves, who indeed seem not to base their statements and speculations on known scientific laws. My conviction is based on the following reasons.

If life originated on earth—neglecting for the moment the second scheme mentioned above (extraterrestrial origin of life) as not solving any problems—then the earth was at one time a “closed” system with respect to life (supernatural interference being by definition excluded). Experimental science has shown, pretty clearly, however, that, in such a closed system, higher order energetically and otherwise does not arise spontaneously out of molecules in random distribution (i.e., order does not arise spontaneously out of chaos). Billions (literally) of experiments, conscious or unconscious, have been carried out in the past one hundred years and unanimously support this observation about the arising of higher, more complicated and energetic molecules from simpler ones, such as would have been necessary to support the postulated first simple forms of life. Every can of sardines, for example, offers a favorable closed system for spontaneous generation of life. Proteins, carbohydrates, fats, water, salts, oxygen are all present and in proportions favorable to life—the sardines were once alive! Closed and left to themselves, billions of cans of sardines have shown the laws of thermodynamics to be perfectly obeyed—the sardine molecules, slowly but surely, decompose to simpler, more stable, and less energetic forms. Life has never in one single instance arisen. Pasteur proved this.

But how could one get life into such a can of sardines? Apart from injecting a germ of life into it (i.e., opening the closed system and inoculating the sardines with living bacteria, or eating them ourselves, so that dead sardine molecules get metabolized into our living ones), there is another possibility. Theoretically, it would seem possible soon to get a good team of biochemists to work on them, to combine the various nucleotides and so forth with one another as has been done with certain dead virus molecules, and to produce thereby a higher molecule type capable of bearing life—that is, instead of opening the system to “life” we open it to intelligent technique. This has not been done yet in the case of sardines, of course, but might be possible.

But what would be proved by this feat? Simply that something we call human intelligence, combined with advanced biochemical technique, is capable of “reacting” with dead matter, so as to reorder it and raise it to a state capable of bearing life processes. One could shake the constituent sardine molecules up in a test tube for an indefinite period of time (i.e., act without intelligent technique) if one wished to prove that order does not spontaneously arise out of chaos—and on theoretical grounds we may rest assured that it will not within statistically defined limits. But “open” matter and molecules to suitable “biochemical intelligence” (whatever that may be defined as being) and we know immediately what the answer may be: reduced entropy, higher order arising out of chaos, more energetic molecules, maybe even life from the dead.

Now Christians maintain just this, that Intelligence (which they call God) did “react,” according to laws now becoming known, with dead matter (molecules), and life from the dead resulted. The “system” was opened to intelligence. This upsets no thermodynamic apple cart. The system is “open” (to “outside” influence) here, whereas the Darwinist assumption that order in a system closed to “outside” influence resulted spontaneously, does conflict with known laws of nature. Which side is being obscurantist here?

A Few Objections

The Darwinist endeavors to escape this difficulty by postulating that there were conditions in nature at original biogenesis that we have not been able to reproduce in our laboratories yet. If one could repeat, they say, in the laboratory these conditions of yesteryear, then life would again “arise spontaneously.” Dr. Shapley, for example, states what amounts to just that. Is this possible?

Life today consists of exactly the same material elements as at biogenesis. The hydrogen, oxygen, sulphur, phosphorus, carbon atoms, and so on, must be exactly the same today as they were at the beginning, for if their physical or chemical properties had changed in the passage of time, then life could not have remained the same or been continuous. That is, the properties of carbon always must have been the properties of carbon today. One cannot even change oxygen for sulphur in the body or even carbon for silicon without endangering life. Even the exchange of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) for hydrogen has far-reaching consequences in some cases. So the physical and chemical properties of the elements making up the physical basis of life now must have been constant from the beginning. This means also that the conditions necessary for chemical reactions between the same elements and leading to life, must be the same now as at biogenesis. The conclusion we must obviously draw, then, is that life, if it is going to arise today, must do so under the same chemical and physical conditions as at biogenesis yesteryear. The life-bearing elements and their reaction properties are still the same.

The consequences of this for biogenesis are twofold:

1. The same laws of thermodynamics had to be followed at biogenesis as are followed now. These laws can easily be summed up in assuming that spontaneous order never occurs out of chaos in a closed system—that would collide with the laws of thermodynamics (which must be the same today as then) we know! This is a basic law governing the behavior of all elements as we know them.

2. Today we have already discovered at least some experimental conditions necessary for synthesis of life that the Darwinists say they are still looking for! For we have found that only if a “technical intelligence” (however we like to define this), be it in the form of a God or man, gets to work on synthesis (“forming”) of molecules can we expect a higher order capable of bearing life to arise out of chaos! That is, life results only if we “open” a dead previously “closed” system either to technical intelligence or to previously living matter. If that is true today, it must also have been true at biogenesis, for the properties and laws of matter must have remained unchanged since biogenesis. We conclude, then, that life can appear in a closed system only when we open it to outside influence.

The True Position Of Darwinists

This reduces the position of the Darwinists and Neo-Darwinists to the following: they are maintaining that dead matter and dead molecules are capable in themselves, under conditions now unknown, of behaving creatively, i.e., in the reverse sense to what is demanded by the known laws of thermodynamics. One may put it differently: they maintain that dead matter and molecules are capable of producing results we can only ascribe to “technical intelligence” or life. In our scientific and other experience, only “intelligence” or life orders. Now, in the eyes of the Darwinists, “dead nature” has itself become creative; dead nature has ordered simple molecules to more complex ones capable of bearing life. Dead nature, according to this scheme, has assumed the properties of “intelligence,” of life itself—which brings the problem of teleology among the Darwinists into a penetrating light. This reduces the Darwinist to ascribing creative properties to dead matter; that is, dead matter is quite simply a kind of creative god to them. But the laws of thermodynamics demand just that “dead nature” be not creative but subject to destruction. This is the true impasse between creationism and Darwinism.

Father Teilhard de Chardin, S. J., whose Darwinistic writings have swept Europe in the last decade, has recognized this impasse such as few Darwinists do and ascribes boldly to all matter the spark of Life. Primitive molecules, according to Teilhard, have an innate urge to psychic pressure build-ups, ending irresistibly in man or superman as the noosphere develops. But he postulates all this without a single reference to the laws of thermodynamics, which govern the behavior of all matter as we know it today.

Surely, since ordering of chaos obviously has occurred to produce life, it is more scientific to maintain that, in view of our thermodynamic experience, an outside “intelligence”—at present maybe unknown to us—has done this ordering originally. And where, in our experience, does intelligence ever reside, if not in a person, even though it may be here a Superperson?

Conclusion

It seems that in biological circles and in everyday life a catastrophic lapse of logic passes as sound currency and is constantly used against the creationist position. It is commonplace reasoning today to assume that, because the biochemists are reputedly on the way towards synthesizing life in the laboratory, therefore God is explained away. The achievement of synthetic life is being awaited with gloating as the final nail in God’s coffin. But is this reputable logic?

Every year I publish scientific articles on my synthetical experiments in leprosy and tuberculosis chemotherapy and report exact methods of synthesis and biological testing of the products. Assume now that a colleague reads my articles, finds the results interesting, and decides to repeat the work himself. After a year or so he finds all my methods exact (I hope!) and the biological activities of the synthetic products correct. He, in turn, reports his results in the scientific literature and in the conclusion summarizes that he has repeated my experiments and confirmed my results. Therefore, he announces that the Wilder Smith postulate is in reality a myth! That is, I do not exist, because he has repeated my work! How could one conceive such lack of logic?

But, when one thinks it over, this is the precise position of the Neo-Darwinists and their colleagues today. Man is on the way to rethinking God’s thoughts after him, repeating his “experiments,” maybe repeating his work in the synthesis in the laboratory of molecules capable of bearing life. Man has “read” God’s “publications” thoroughly in the study of the cosmos and nature and is now verifying and repeating to some small degree his creative thoughts. We are coming up with secondary “publications” on results he has already achieved. And the conclusion is drawn that therefore God does not exist and is a myth! The one who did the pioneering work is infinitely greater than the one who copies. The infinitely greater nature of this pioneer is illustrated by the supreme concentration of information on that masterpiece, the genetic material: the total properties of the human and other races for all generations down to today were present in the genes of the first pair. But perhaps the really supreme thought is that the Intelligence behind all this invites us to know and love him by making himself understandable to us in God incarnate.

Our colleague for the past three years, Dr. Harold Lindsell, has accepted appointment as professor of Bible at Wheaton College. Here at his alma mater an attractive teaching-and-writing arrangement will enable him, among other things, to complete several long—postponed books. His new duties begin in September, and we extend sincere congratulations to him and his family.

In recent weeks CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S paid circulation bounded to new heights, at one point touching 159,397. We are hopeful of further gains as the remaining free list is phased out during the months ahead, and we appreciate the confidence of our many readers. Our switchover to computerized circulation regrettably involved an exasperating interruption of some subscriptions; but these difficulties are being quickly overcome, and readers will find their patience amply rewarded. Advertising linage is up also; the first four months of 1967 showed a gain of 10.6 per cent over the same period a year ago.

The TV panel series “God and Man in the 20th Century” is currently being featured by WBEN-4, Buffalo (Sundays, 11:30 A.M.); WFIL-6, Philadelphia (Sundays, 8:30 A.M.); WHTN-13, Huntington, W. Va. (Tuesdays, 7:30 A.M.); CSPR, Springfield, Ill. (Thursdays, 6:30 P.M.); and WYAH-27, Portsmouth, Va. (Fridays, 9 P.M.) It has already been shown by WVUE-12, New Orleans, and will soon be featured in many other cities.

William temple once pointed out that a commandment-keeping Christian is less likely to find himself in doublecolumn headlines than he who utters ecstatic gibberish in a public place.

Similarly, a sick bishop who reproduces aging German radicalism with just the right amount of charming diffidence is a much better journalistic bet than 1,000 Christians met in conference to discuss the pre-eminence of Jesus Christ.

The sparse coverage accorded by the secular press to last month’s National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele University, England, reflects the ways and values of the world. None of my Anglican brethren, whom I joined for the occasion, is likely to draw the wrong conclusions of Thielicke’s young pastor (adapted here at no extra charge): “Take thine ease, my dear soul, by thy truth thou hast produced a laudable volume of non-news, and mayest regard thyself as justified.… We thank God we are not rat-catchers or ear-ticklers like those pundits yonder after whom half of Fleet Street is running. Our lack of news value testifies to our orthodoxy.”

Yet Keele 1967 will loom large in the annals of Anglican evangelicalism, which had never attempted anything like it in size or scope. Superbly organized, with the strongest team fielded as speakers and the Archbishop of Canterbury himself opening the proceedings, it might have failed dismally. It didn’t. Opportunities were given and taken for evangelicals to commit themselves on issues both vital and contemporary.

One result was that the 10,000-word congress Statement dealt with areas where the evangelical voice has all too seldom been heard in modern Britain. Thus part of the section on “The Church and the World” reads: Christians should be involved with people at every social level. The Church should be a caring community welcoming in Christ’s name addicts, criminals, the hungry, the homeless and all in need. More important than any specific proposal is our concern to recover a vision of the Church involved prayerfully and sacrificially in all the problems raised by an affluent, leisured but bewildered society.” (How has this heresy grown up in England since F. D. Maurice’s time, that a proper social concern must necessarily be at odds with the biblical and reformed position?)

The document showed a near unanimity on topics where tension was anticipated. Effectively exploded was the myth of a substantial minority for whom secession from the Church of England was both probable and imminent. Delegates proved Erasmian almost to a man: the call was for reform from within.

The current state of Anglican-Methodist unity proposals was coolly appraised. While looking forward to an eventual merger, the Statement emphasizes that it “should be with substantially the whole Methodist Church.” Anything that needlessly divides Methodism for the sake of union would be opposed.

This once more focuses attention on the three-pronged assault likely to be launched when the final report is produced by the Anglican-Methodist negotiating bodies. Besides Anglican and Methodist evangelicals, the “higher” echelons of the Church of England (even apart from the Anglo-Romans who were always against the report) are beginning to make felt more clearly in the Church Times their criticisms of a proposed union—which (I suspect) they had hoped would be scuppered without their having to show their hand.

But to return to the Keele Statement, it was interesting to note that the Church of South India pattern maintains its appeal among Anglican evangelicals as a fitting basis for church union. The congress called for the Church of England to enter into full communion with the CSI (with which no province is yet in communion), even although Philip Hughes pointed out that with the passing of time the CSI’s internal problems have increased rather than diminished.

Turning to the Church of Rome, the Statement presents surely the most irenic attitude ever officially recorded by Anglican evangelicals: “many fundamental Christian doctrines in common … rejoice also at signs of biblical reformation … [no reunion at present, but] welcome the new possibilities of dialogue … [and] recent appointment of a team of evangelical theologians to confer with Roman theologians.” This might not produce a Protestant night of the long knives, but from the extreme right will come dark mutterings of the they-shall-smart-for-this variety.

Among other notable features, the Statement called for an end to indiscriminate baptism and for a recognition of the Lord’s Supper as the central service of the Church of England. It urged the establishment of a royal commission on abortion, and the need for greater cooperation among evangelical missionary societies.

The Church Times, largest Anglican weekly, was predictably peevish about certain aspects of Keele: bishops made “merely an optional administrative convenience” … the ministry regarded as little different from the laity … the prospect of general intercommunion as an immediate possibility. Yet even in this quarter there was generous praise: “It is good, in view of so much modern radical faithlessness within the Church itself, to have a categorical re-affirmation of allegiance to the historic faith of the Church based on the Bible and expressed in the Creeds.”

Twenty-two years ago there was published Towards the Conversion of England—the report of a commission on evangelism set up by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Widely acclaimed at first, it was soon inexplicably forgotten (the names of some of those associated with the report, including the present Bishop of Southwark, make surprising reading today).

We hope this will not be the fate of the Keele 1967 Statement, scheduled for publication this month. If evangelicals have really seen the folly of trying “to be the light of the world from a rather remote lighthouse” (Norman Anderson’s phrase), and feel convinced of the value and relevance of this Statement in speaking to the condition of the times, then we can expect that steps will be taken, not only to bring and keep it before the eyes of the Church, but to relate it to and implement it in every parish in England. As this goes on, the shedding of party and denominational labels may be no bad thing.

“What did you think of Keele?” I asked a participant who still believes in straight answers. His reading, not always sound, apparently takes in Emerson, for his reply included an expression of hope that the impact of the congress might not be drowned out for others by the thunder of what we were. Only he put it much better than that.

It is doubtful whether any gathering in the history of Anglican evangelicalism compares in size or scope with last month’s National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele University, England.

The congress began with an address by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, and closed with issuance of a remarkable 10,000-word “statement” from the 1,000 delegates on theology, evangelism, ecumenism, and social affairs.

Previously, committee chairman John R. W. Stott had said the Keele assembly was “due to the remarkable development of evangelical life in the Church of England since the Second World War. During the last twenty years, evangelical Anglicans have grown in numbers, scholarship, cohesion, and confidence. This is a matter for thanksgiving to God. It is not to be viewed as the expansion of a sinister ‘party’ fired with fanatical ‘party spirit.’ On the contrary, it is the welcome increase within our national church of those who believe and love the biblical gospel, and who long to see the whole Church renewed in faith and life through submission to God’s Word and Spirit.”

In the same tone, Ramsey, not always seen as an ally by evangelicals, said, “I greet you all in the love and service of Christ, the Lord of all of us.” He then gave a thoroughly biblical exposition on the centrality of the Cross.

Congress delegates had received an advance copy of a symposium volume edited by J. I. Packer, warden of Latimer House, Oxford. In the packed program (fourteen full sessions in rather less than three days), each of the nine contributors had half an hour to form groundwork for the congress statement that was to come.

Packer presented the first case, denying with Stott that evangelicals are a divisive camp. But he said that in an age of secular mind and secular society, “there are things that need to be said … that will not be said unless we evangelicals say them.” He then sketched a history of the modem philosophical tradition which makes it hard to believe in the living God. “We proclaim a grace greater than we find in the doctrine of the individualists,” Packer said.

There was a fine spirit evident throughout the congress, not least when session chairmen were splendidly ruthless in diverting red herrings and dismissing minor points. It is no contradiction of this to add that cheerfulness kept breaking through, as in the pawky wit of Philip Hughes (who else would dare to correct Stott’s Latin in public?).

Observers were present not only from Anglican societies of other traditions, but also from the Congregationalists, Methodists, Salvationists, and Roman Catholics.

Interests of the Orthodox of Thyateira were well-served by their Metropolitan, and there was something at least parenthetically reassuring about the presence of the BBC’s Head of Religious Programmes.

A warm invitation to the closing day’s service of Holy Communion went to “all delegates and observers who are baptized communicant members of a Christian church, and who can come to the table with repentance, faith, and love.”

In this spirit, ecumenism and such specific ecumenical problems as open communion loomed large in the congress statement. Perhaps most significant was a friendly word for Rome, but the document also endorsed Anglican-Methodist union, on terms as favorable to Methodism as possible (see Current Religious Thought, page 54). Of particular interest within evangelicalism was the third of the statement’s six sections, on “The Church and the World,” which dealt with a variety of social issues (see following story).

Of more significance within the Church of England will be the assertions about the Church’s message and mission. The evangelicals reaffirmed belief “in the historic faith of the Church, in an age when it has come under attack from both outside and inside the Church,” and then proceeded to spell it out in seventeen topical paragraphs.

Turning next to evangelism, the statement calls it the work of all Christians, not just specialists, and hails “the great evangelistic campaigns of our day.” It says Anglicans should share their wealth and manpower with churches in newer nations and in turn benefit from their “spiritual vigour.” The evangelicals also confess failure in reaching the “industrial inner city and new housing areas” and urge appointment of full-time evangelists.

The statement welcomes sympathic dialogue with non-Christians but rejects “as misleading the statement that Christ is already present in other faiths. We cannot regard those true insights which non-Christian religions contain as constituting a way of salvation.”

Sampler On Social Issues

Besides discussing doctrine, denominational affairs, and ecumenical strategy, the statement issued last month by the National Evangelical Anglican Congress (story above) dealt with a host of issues facing Christians in society. Excerpts follow:

Separation—“Misunderstanding of the biblical summons to ‘separation from the world’ has sometimes diverted Evangelicals from grasping, or even giving thought to, the nature of the world and the contemporary situation. We call on all Evangelicals to study and be involved in the contemporary world.…”

Social Action—“We must work not only for the redemption of individuals, but also for the reformation of society.… As a member of this world the Christian is called to support the State in all rightful activity and to challenge it in the areas where its responsibilities are not being fulfilled. [Social concern] may be expressed in four ways: by individual Christian action in daily life; by Christians playing a full part with others in secular activities; by the work of voluntary Christian societies; and by the work of the Church corporately.”

“We welcome the existence of the Welfare State. We regard it as an acceptance by the State of its responsibility under God.”

Automation—“Both Church and State ought to recognize the peculiar human problems which arise from the movement and closure of industries, often due to technological development, particularly in towns dependent on one particular industry. An expansion in retraining facilities is urgently needed. Management faces severe temptations to be callous and to treat men as dispensible pieces of machinery, and Trade Unions face increasing temptation to hold industry to ransom.”

War—“It is the urgent duty of Christians to pursue all means to maintain, or where necessary to restore, peace with justice and freedom. We nevertheless recognize that it is a government’s first duty to uphold law and justice, and that even war may be justified in the resistance of aggression or the restraint of such manifest evils as genocide.”

Race—“We … condemn racial discrimination in all countries and are especially concerned at the appearance of it in our own country in the spheres of employment and accommodation.… Christians who are themselves prejudiced must look to Christ to set them free.”

Sex—“We assert that marriage is the divinely ordained state in which complete sexual fulfillment is to be sought. Pre-marital and extra-marital intercourse are therefore contrary to this principle and are responsible for much unhappiness.”

Divorce—“We accept one fundamental standard, but we believe that we may rightly take our part in framing a civil law of divorce which will best combine such concessions to human frailty and sin as the circumstances of society may require, with maintenance of the greatest possible stability in marriage.”

Abortion—“We urge that questions such as alleged rape, the possibility that the embryo might be malformed, and social considerations, should not be regarded as grounds for abortion unless the mother’s health is in danger.”

Situation ethics—“We confess that legalistic attitudes have in the past obscured our witness to Christian liberty and we see ‘situation ethics’ as warning us against doctrinaire and insensitive attitudes to people’s needs. Nevertheless there is a form of ‘situation ethics’ which is in effect altogether lawless since it disregards God’s moral law in scripture and fails to realize the inability of love as a motive to set standards for itself and achieve them.”

Personalia

Southern Rhodesia expelled United Church of Christ missionary B. Neill Richards, 31, a professor at Epworth Theological Seminary in Salisbury. No reason was given.

Robert J. McCracken, 63, native of Scotland who succeeded Harry Emerson Fosdick as pastor of New York City’s prestigious Riverside Church, will retire because of a heart ailment.

Harold Martin, education minister from Blytheville, Arkansas, is believed to be the first Southern Baptist to become a full-time professional with the National Council of Churches. He will be promotion assistant for the NCC’s overseas communications agency, RAVEMCCO.

Presbyterians United for Biblical Confession plans to continue as an organization, with evangelistic emphasis as its next project. Retired pastor E. G. Montag was replaced as executive secretary by the Rev. Bruce Thielemann of First Presbyterian Church, McKeesport, Pennsylvania.

Winston H. Taylor, Washington, D. C., director of Methodist Information, was chosen president of the Religious Public Relations Council, replacing W. C. Fields of the Southern Baptist Convention, who had just won the presidency of Associated Church Press.

The Rev. Wilson O. Weldon, a Greensboro, North Carolina, pastor, is the new editor of The Upper Room, Methodist devotional guide of vast circulation.

The Australian Council of Churches elected as president A. Bramwell Cook, a territorial commander in the Salvation Army and formerly a medical missionary to India.

Famous gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, 55, won a divorce from her saxophone-playing husband of three years. It was her first marriage, his second.

Wake Forest College (Southern Baptist) got a $1 million library endowment from Mrs. Nancy Reynolds Verney, an heiress to the Camel cigarette fortune.

Mrs. Dorothy Sheridan, 30, of Barnstable, Massachusetts, a Christian Scientist who refused medical treatment for her five-year-old daughter’s respiratory illness, will be tried in Superior Court for manslaughter because the girl died.

Norman L. Trott retires this fall as president of Wesley Theological Seminary (Methodist), Washington, D. C. His successor is the Rev. John L. Knight of First Methodist Church, Syracuse, New York.

John M. Costello, California hospital chaplain, will teach practical theology part-time at Concordia Theological Seminary, Springfield, Illinois, and advise institutional chaplains for the Illinois Council of Churches.

J. C. Thornton, philosophy teacher at Australia’s Canterbury University, resigned from the Anglican ministry because he doubts the existence of a supernatural God.

Surveying Surveys

Fifty-seven per cent of those polled think religion is “losing” its influence on American life, four times the percentage a decade ago (Gallup Poll).

Contributions for religious purposes made up 48 per cent of America’s 13.5 billion in philanthropic giving last year (American Association of Fund–Raising Counsel)

Twice as many Jews find bad feeling against Roman Catholics in 1965—after Vatican II’s decree on Jews—than in 1952 (Gallup Poll, for Catholic Digest).

More than 30,000 Americans have converted to Judaism since 1954 (Ascher Penn, in the second volume of his Yid-dish-language Judaism in America).

A “rather high percentage” of seminary students are in some form of psychotherapy, perhaps because of the demands of the ministry, or their knowledge about psychiatric services (the Rev. Robert Carrigan in the Journal of Religion and Health).

Nearly three-fourths of 12,000 women respondents are often “offended by explicit sex scenes or overly frank dialogue” in movies, leading McCall’s magazine to say that moviemakers, guided “only by box-office results, may be missing the true response of the American public to their work.” The least-liked movie of 1966 was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Miscellany

Eastern Orthodox scholars are planning to produce an “American Orthodox Bible,” a revision of the Revised Standard Version, starting with New Testament. The Old Testament is more troublesome because of Orthodoxy’s dependence on the Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation; the RSV is based on Hebrew manuscripts.

Patriarch Athenagoras of Istanbul warned in an encyclical that intercommunion and confession between the Orthodox Church and other churches “does not as yet exist.”

The 1967 Greek Orthodox Yearbook reaffirms that “use of contraceptive devices for the prevention of children is forbidden and condemned unreservedly.”

Ten denominations and two foundations are joining in a National Council of Churches three-year pilot campaign to recruit promising college students for church careers.

The council of the Episcopal Diocese of California says its appeal for an end to criminal laws against homosexual acts between consenting adults does not imply “approval of such behavior.”

Governor John Love signed a bill making Colorado the first state to liberalize its abortion laws (see April 28 issue, page 43).

A radio station in Orillia, Ontario, that favors liberalized liquor laws cut off Baptist and United Church pastors as they were about to comment on the issue on their regular Sunday broadcasts.

A survey in Australia shows a missionary force of 4,416, an increase of 1,656 over 1959. Roman Catholics showed the greatest advance.

University College (Roman Catholic) and Trinity College (Anglican) of Dublin, Ireland, plan to merge under a single administration.

Baptists and other free churchmen in Finland are hoping for a change in the law that permits only Lutherans to teach religion in public schools.

South Africa has denied reports it plans to cut off immigration from predominantly Roman Catholic nations in Europe. Such a move has been urged by right-wing Dutch Reformed churchmen who fear immigrants are “diluting Afrikaanerdom.”

Rabbi George B. Lieberman of Rockville Centre, New York, sent a Passover message to Soviet Jews over the Voice of America noting “unbroken and unbreakable spiritual ties that link us together in prayer and in hope.” It was the first direct message from an American religious leader to the Soviet Union via VOA.

A thousand seminarians, “uncomfortable about accepting deferments not available to others,” have asked that “conscientious objector” eligibility be broadened, with the endorsement of chief executives from Union, Jewish, San Francisco, Chicago and Harvard seminaries. In another protest, World Council of Churches leader Eugene C. Blake said U.S. Viet Nam policy creates great “danger to human survival.”

Deaths

EDWARD JOHN CARNELL, 47, philosopher of religion and first president at Fuller Theological Seminary; noted evangelical scholar; in Berkeley, California, of an apparent heart attack on the eve of a speech to the Roman Catholic-sponsored National Workshop for Church Unity (see editorial, page 30).

J. THEODORE MUELLER, 82, professor at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, from 1920 to 1964; in St. Louis, a year after a severe stroke (see editorial, page 30).

WILLIAM A. IRWIN, 82, former Old Testament professor at the University of Toronto, University of Chicago, and Southern Methodist University, and member of the Revised Standard Version committee; in Wheaton, Maryland.

Growing tensions in the Roman Catholic Church between the conservative hierarchy and increasingly independent, liberal theologians broke into open revolt last month on two controversial fronts: birth control and academic freedom.

On birth control, a member of the Pope’s special commission leaked to the press highly secret position papers that showed dramatic division on the issue, with the majority opinion favoring contraception and rejecting the idea that the church’s historic stand is unalterable.

Meanwhile, at Washington, D. C.’s, Catholic University of America, the Rev. Charles E. Curran, a liberal-minded assistant professor, became the center of a dispute over academic freedom. Faculty and student body united last month to boycott classes for five days after the board of trustees, without explanation, failed to renew Curran’s teaching contract despite unanimous endorsement by his colleagues.

While the instances were individual, the issue in each case was the same: Who will control the direction of the church in its post-Vatican Council era?

This question sparked the dramatic confrontation late last month at CU, the church’s national university, whose administration includes all American cardinals and archbishops.

On the surface the issue appeared clear-cut: A professor in the School of Sacred Theology was fired without either stated charges or a hearing. The school’s faculty reacted swiftly in a move equally clear-cut. Their statement read:

“The academic freedom and security of every professor in this university is jeopardized. Under these circumstances, we cannot function unless and until Father Curran is reinstated.”

The following day the revolt caught fire across the whole university, and nearly all the 6,600 students and 600 faculty members joined the strike and refused to attend class.

For five days everything stopped. Black-robed faculty joined students on picket lines to carry posters reading: “Help Stamp Out the Middle Ages” and “Home Rule, Not Rome Rule.” On the university’s large, grassy common, the musical chimes from the austere Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (where Luci Johnson was wed) mingled with the singing of folk ballads like “We Shall Overcome” and “The Times, They Are A-Changing.”

For CU, times were indeed changing. On April 24, with a cold, setting sun shining on his face, the university’s chancellor, Archbishop Patrick A. O’Boyle, told a crowd of 1,500 expectant students: “The Board of Trustees has voted to abrogate its action.” Curran was rehired and promoted, and the administration agreed to meet with the faculty to establish procedures for governing any such future disputes. The teachers then met and called for a meeting with O’Boyle this month to negotiate for more faculty power.

It was a Berkeley-type showdown, but it happened on a Catholic campus, and few people missed the implications.

While outwardly the fight centered on the broader question of academic freedom, there were hints that the dispute had a darker side. Many faculty members admitted privately that they believed the action of the trustees against Curran was an attempt to censure him for his liberal views on various subjects, including birth control.

The board made its decision to let Curran go at a trustees meeting in Chicago in early April, during the national bishops’ meeting. The action, according to Curran, was based on a report to the board by a secret three-man committee of trustees that had been assigned by the board to investigate his teachings.

A teacher of moral theology, Curran has been a student of Germany’s Bernard Häring, a leading liberal Catholic scholar in moral theology who will teach at Union Theological Seminary, New York, this fall.

Outlining his own views last year in an interview (which he has since repudiated) in the National Catholic Reporter, Curran spoke out against the “absolutism” of the church’s moral decrees. While he indicated the need for enlightenment from Scripture on broad matters, the newspaper reported him as saying that “the greatest source of moral knowledge [where the Scriptures don’t speak directly] will come from the experience of Christian people”—not the Church.

When people find apparent discrepancies between the teachings of experience and the teachings of the Church, he said, Catholics are forced to ask the question: “How does the church arrive at its moral teaching?” The result is that the church’s traditional answers are undermined, as on birth control.

The trustees deny that Curran’s theology was a factor in the firing, but they have explained neither why he was dismissed nor why he was rehired. They wanted it clearly understood that his reinstatement did not include any kind of endorsement of his views. To establish the point, O’Boyle said, “This decision in no way derogates from the teaching … on birth control.”

Birth control, however, was unquestionably the issue last month when a member of Pope Paul’s advisory commission ignored a papal order of secrecy and released the documents to the press (see story below).

The three separate papers—a total of 20,000 words—reveal clearly the deep, behind-the-scenes division of the church’s scholars on the issue.

The commission’s majority opinion, expressed in two papers, supported contraception as a legitimate form of birth control, saying primarily that man has the right to intervene in natural processes to achieve proper human goals.

The minority report, however, calls the church’s present teachings on contraception “irreformable,” first because they are true and further because a change in position would tend to destroy confidence in the church’s authority to set moral standards.

“If contraceptives were declared not intrinsically evil, in honesty it would have to be acknowledged that the Holy Spirit … assisted Protestant churches, and that for half a century Pius XI, Pius XII and a great part of the Catholic hierarchy did not protest against a very serious error, one most pernicious to souls.”

But there is more at issue than doctrine, according to the minority. A softened stand on birth control, it said, would lead ultimately to increased sexual abuses.

The majority met head-on the charge that the integrity of the church’s teachings was in danger over the issue.

“In point of fact,” the majority stated, “we know that there have been errors in the teachings of the magisterium and of tradition.” The difficulty with the traditional view, according to the majority, is that it elevates natural law so that it becomes the voice of God.

Man has the right, the opinion asserts, to alter natural law through contraception (specific forms were not mentioned) because “sexuality is not ordered only to procreation.… In some cases intercourse can be required as a manifestation of self-giving love.… This is neither egocentricity nor hedonism.…”

In a second paper, the majority attempts to construct a view of marriage into which contraception could be fitted. While rejecting abortion and sterilization, it calls for educating couples to the responsibility of parenthood.

The paper ends with a plea for more research and suggests that the normal procedure of secrecy be suspended and the commission’s opinions be made public. When the commission’s documents were made public, it was without official approval.

The commission turned its papers over to the Pope last June, but there was no word when—or if—a papal statement will appear.

Coup In Catholic Reporting

Release of the full texts of a secret report from the Pope’s birth-control commission is a historic “scoop” for religious journalism. The decision of a member of the commission to leak the text, and the decision of the National Catholic Reporter to publish it, both indicate dramatic changes in the authority system of the Roman Catholic Church.

An NCR editorial defended publication on two grounds: (1) It isn’t a newspaper’s job to enforce security regulations within such bodies as the commission, and (2) a newspaper should “publish news of service to readers.”

As to the argument that public release of the documents will produce “undue and illegitimate pressure” on the Pope, NCR asserts that “while an informed public opinion is almost by definition a form of pressure, it is not undue or illegitimate.”

Sex And Mental Health

Premarital sex relations growing out of the so-called new morality have significantly increased the number of young people in mental hospitals. This was reported last month by Dr. Francis Braceland, former president of the American Psychiatric Association and currently the editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Braceland told the National Methodist Convocation on Medicine and Theology in Rochester, Minnesota, that “a more lenient attitude on campus about premarital sex experience has imposed stresses on some college women severe enough to cause emotional breakdown.”

NCR had hoped to discuss the ethics and handling of the release at a more leisurely pace, consulting various advisers within the church. But word came April 20 that Le Monde in Paris was on the verge of publication, so Editor Robert G. Hoyt rushed NCR’s recently received translation into print.

Why did the commission source give the documents to NCR? Hoyt says he doesn’t know but speculates that the source “decided the Pope was simply wrong to suspend judgment this long.”

Hoyt said he agonized over the possibility that publication would harden papal opposition to change but decided that “to look to possible consequences to that extent was improper.” NCR’s general position on birth control, he said, is that “change is required by theological developments, and the facts of the situation.”

Vatican press officer Monsignor Fausto Vallainc said the release is a “very serious” breach of secrecy vows. “Such indiscretions do not make examination of the problem especially serene,” he said. “They apply pressure that only stirs up agitation in public opinion.”

Hoyt said a week after publication that no American bishop had complained to NCR. Even those bishops who were privately displeased must have put NCR on their required reading list—if it wasn’t there already. The daily press service of the U. S. Catholic Conference didn’t carry a story on the birth-control documents.

Elusive Facts

America, national Jesuit weekly, has complained about a Playboy article by Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike in which he contends that the big Roman Catholic order realizes a yearly income of $250 million from stock holdings without paying taxes. (See April 14 issue, page 46.)

“To any Jesuit who knows the universal needs of the order in its schools, colleges, universities and missions, this allegation is so wildly irresponsible as to be almost funny,” America said, “Statements of this kind, however, have a persistent way of being repeated, once they get into print. And this is not funny.”

Pike conceded that the Playboy article contains mistakes because certain reports apparently were not checked. “I am afraid the errors can blur the main analysis of what I was trying to say,” he declared.

Pike had asserted that Jesuits own the controlling stock in the Bank of America, Phillips Petroleum Company, Creole Petroleum Company, and the DiGiorgio Fruit Company. A spokesman for the Bank of America said, “The statements by Bishop Pike in Playboy magazine are completely untrue and without even a small basis in fact.”

Still unreported is the actual extent of Jesuit stock holdings. Neither America nor the Bank of America shed any light on that question.

Methodist Omnibus

Speaking “only for itself,” the Methodist Board of Christian Social Concerns kept its mimeograph strangely warmed last month, passing resolutions favoring:

Withdrawal of U. S. troops from Viet Nam, Martin Luther King’s anti-war drive, an end to the military draft, conscientious objection on non-religious grounds, repeal of laws against interracial marriage, economic and other reprisals against South Africa, majority rule in Southern Rhodesia, prevention of a U. S. anti-ballistic missile system, a guaranteed annual income for U. S. families (sort of), inclusion of farm workers under NLRB, more federal aid to schools, a seat in Congress for the District of Columbia, et cetera …

Top Clergy Clash On Viet Nam

The two best-known Presbyterian ministers in Washington, D. C., collided on the issue of Viet Nam last month. After their debate in a presbytery meeting, the hawks beat a dove resolution 86 to 27.

The showdown came on a resolution by the Rev. George M. Docherty, of historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, calling for a stop to the bombing and the bilateral withdrawal of troops. Docherty charged the Viet Nam war will smell “in the nostrils of history for the next 100 years.”

The Rev. Edward L. R. Elson—minister of the National Presbyterian Church, Army Reserve chaplain, and President Eisenhower’s former pastor—attacked the resolution as ill-timed and harmful. In a sermon the following Sunday, he said ministers who picket and protest do so from limited data and an arrogance of conscience.

Pointing out that he has a son-in-law in the Army and a son about to enter military age, Elson said:

“I do not want my sons commanded by officers whose targets are limited by a resolution, or whose weapons are restricted by an irresponsible resolution adopted by a church body.…”

On the same Sunday, Docherty, successor to Peter Marshall, argued that the Church in its role as prophet is to speak loud and clear on political issues.

In an interview in his book-lined study, Docherty said he had been a pacifist from 1935 to 1943 while living in Scotland. After an agonizing struggle with his own conscience he found pacifism an impossibility in wartime. “I flagellate myself that I didn’t join the paratroopers the first day,” he admits. But Docherty believes America can’t win in Viet Nam and is there under false pretenses.

JAMES L. ADAMS

Nagaland Closed To Missionaries

External Affairs minister M. C. Chagla announced a few weeks ago that the government of India will not admit any more foreign missionaries to Nagaland, because of widespread political unrest there.

Chagla also said that Naga rebels have been seeking military aid from Red China. Nagaland, situated in the northeast corner of India and wedged between China and Burma, is vitally important for India’s security.

The Naga tribesmen, onetime headhunters, were converted to Christianity through American Baptist missionary work that began in 1897. Before a 1964 ceasefire, they had waged guerrilla warfare against the Indian government for ten years.

By and large the Christian Naga tribesmen are literate, and they have a political following even among the small minority of animists in Nagaland’s one million population.

The government of India has always been suspicious of foreign missionaries because of their alleged political influence upon the Nagas in their rebellion against India. India has also ordered the four foreign missionaries now in Nagaland not to evangelize.

Angami Zapu Phizo, a Baptist who leads the Naga Liberation Movement, arrived in the United States in mid-April to seek support for the independence of his state.

T. E. KOSHY

150 Years On Course

One of the oldest Christian organizations in the United States, and one that has veered little from its original purpose, is the American Sunday-School Union. It was founded in Philadelphia 150 years ago this week to promote establishment of new Sunday schools, and it is still doing so.

The ASSU currently employs 150 missionaries in thirty-nine states, ministering to some 100,000 children. The Sunday school is still a key facet of the operation, but activities have also branched out into vacation Bible schools, Bible conferences, nursing programs, and projects to deal with school drop–outs. Some 7,000 conversions are reported annually.

The ASSU has been under occasional pressure to broaden its outlook by moving away from the confines of the Sunday School approach, which undoubtedly was more relevant in the rural—oriented, mass—media—less nineteenth century. But ASSU leaders have thus far resisted efforts to replace “Sunday School” in the title with a more contemporary phrase.

A group of Philadelphia citizens founded the organization in a schoolroom at Fourth and Vine Streets on May 13, 1817. Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” helped to get it off the ground. Within ten years it had become the foremost publisher of children’s literature. In its first century, more than 100,000 Sunday schools were established.

The Invisible Evangelical

To Negro novelist Ralph Ellison, the Negro in American society is the “invisible man.” To the Negro in the conservative religious context, he is the “invisible evangelical.”

To help give that image some substance, a small group of Negro evangelicals four years ago formed the National Negro Evangelical Association. At its annual meeting in Philadelphia last month, broad outlines of its purpose could be seen taking form.

The NNEA seeks a dual role: First, to demonstrate to the larger (read white) body of evangelicals that there is an active, conservative Negro movement that wants first-class fellowship with white brethren, and second, to provide a rallying point within the Negro community for evangelistic outreach.

Attempts to achieve this double thrust can be seen in the NNEA’s membership in the overwhelmingly white National Association of Evangelicals while at the same time it organizes independent evangelistic efforts in a number of inner-city ghettoes, including Watts.

While seeking stronger ties with white evangelicals, Negro conservatives find it difficult to feel like a “true brother in the Lord” with whites. In his president’s report, Howard O. Jones, an associate evangelist with the Billy Graham team, observed: “White evangelicals must explain … how they can reconcile their love for Christ and loyalty to the Bible with race prejudice and bigotry.”

But the NNEA can be as critical of Negroes as of whites. Jones, in the same report, charged that most Negro churches “are absolutely blind to the need for a soul-winning ministry on a local and worldwide basis.”

The tone of such statements has caused some whites to charge that the NNEA stands for Negro separatism. Negroes aren’t flocking to join, either: membership stands at only 400.

The NNEA counters that it is no more “separatist” than predominantly white organizations (about one-third of its members are white). On the question of size, spokesmen point to NNEA’s youth and the fact that membership has doubled in the last two years. Next year’s budget is up, too—nearly 20 per cent, to $15,000.

WILLIAM D. FREELAND

Converse Ideas On Conversion

Delegate response to the featured theme of Christian conversion at the United States Conference for the World Council of Churches was characterized as one of “paralysis” by conference chairman Charles C. Parlin, a WCC president. After being exposed to divergent views by speakers at the Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania, meetings last month, participants showed little enthusiasm for probing conversion in depth or hammering out any kind of consensus. The conference offered little hope that the WCC is ready to formulate a conception of conversion acceptable either to non-WCC evangelicals or to the differing traditions found within its own ranks. The topic is to be discussed further at the Fourth Assembly of the WCC next year in Uppsala, Sweden.

The dominant view of conversion at Buck Hill Falls was less concerned with the believer’s eternal relationship to God than with his involvement in church mission to achieve international economic justice today. In the opening address, D. T. Niles, executive secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference, stressed that conversion means “to be converted to the Lord and his mission and to the Lord in his mission.” Referring to Christ’s high-priestly prayer, Niles claimed that Jesus “did not say simply that this world must believe in him, but that the world must believe that the Father sent the Son. The object of belief is the mission of Christ.”

In reply to a question from the floor about the condition of men who do not believe in Christ, Niles stated, “I am not prepared to say and Scripture will not allow me to say I am sure at the end everybody will be saved. I will not say and Scripture will not allow me to say I am sure that at the end somebody will be damned. All that Scripture makes me say is that damnation is a real possibility for anyone.”

The diverse understandings of conversion were shown most vividly by a three-man panel whose views roughly paralleled those of the ecumenical leadership, the Orthodox churches, and Reformation theology.

The Rev. William A. Norgren, executive director of the National Council of Churches’ Department of Faith and Order, asserted that “our new understandings of social questions seem to call for a theology of conversion which will be adequate to the present day.” He claimed that conversion experiences today lead people away from social action because Christian groups which stress the “conversion phenomenon” tend to be socially and politically conservative. He said it is impossible to draw a direct line from modern concepts of conversion to the Bible.

Father William Schneirla of the Syrian Antiochian Church advanced Orthodoxy’s sacramental conception of conversion. He averred that the good news must be proclaimed to all men so that those who believe “may be baptized into the Christian fellowship which is the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of God on earth, the Orthodox Church.” Said Schneirla, “By the supernatural effects of the visible, material washing with water and anointing with myron, all sins are forgiven and a new creature emerges from the fount.” Before an Orthodox churchman could agree to embrace new meanings of conversion, he said, it would be necessary to reconsider the tradition and dynamics of the church, and the advantages of such an undertaking have not yet been demonstrated.

The conference turned to a sympathetic member of a non-WCC denomination for the Lutheran perspective on conversion. Concordia Seminary’s Professor Richard Caemmerer of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod based his view of conversion on the Augsburg Confession of 1530. “The question emerges,” he concluded, “whether the Word of God affirming his love to the world in giving his Son into death and raising him again to life is essential for conversion. I speak only for myself but my faith says yes.… This is not a tenet to be debated, a theological position to be maintained against other theologians, but this is light to shine in life … an affirmation to speak with joy and with meekness.”

The political discussions were the liveliest. In one program, Dr. Eugene L. Smith called the Church to witness to the Lordship of Christ in international affairs, and India’s M. M. Thomas chastised the U. S. for its lagging foreign aid.

The conference as a whole proved to be a predictable, lackluster affair. If anything, it showed that the WCC leadership continues to be dedicated to converting the mission of the Church from proclaiming the historic Gospel that reconciles men eternally to God, to changing the world through socio-economic means.

ROBERT L. CLEATH

Not since Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959 have Americans heaped so much attention upon a Soviet citizen. Khrushchev showered his listeners with Scripture but disavowed the existence of God. The latest Soviet sensation, the 42-year-old daughter of the late Premier Joseph Stalin, refers to the Bible only obliquely but affirms belief in deity. And religion, she says, is a major factor in her repudiation of Communism.

“I was brought up in a family where there was never any talk about God,” says Mrs. Svetlana Alliluyeva. “But when I became a grown-up person I found that it was impossible to exist without God in one’s heart.”

Mrs. Alliluyeva says she was baptized in Moscow in May of 1962 by a Russian Orthodox priest whom she identified as Father Nikolai. He has since died.

“I was baptized in Moscow in Russian Orthodox Church, but it doesn’t mean that I prefer this church to others,” she added. “It was just the following of tradition, following the religion to which my parents and my ancestors belonged. I also feel the great sympathy with modern Hinduism of Rama Krishna and Girikananda and I feel greatest sympathy with Roman Catholic Church because in Switzerland I have met a lot of fine people who were Catholics and I also feel sympathy to which you know here as Christian Science. I don’t feel much controversy between these things and I do not want to attach certain label to my religious feeling.”

Mrs. Alliluyeva spelled out her convictions in an hour-long televised conference with newsmen in New York. She was flanked by lawyers Edward S. Greenbaum and Alan U. Schwartz, who screened and posed questions submitted by reporters in writing. More details were promised with the publication of a book she has written.

She said that hers was “a generalized belief in God. I believe that all religions are true and different religions are only the different ways to the same God. For me, for me the God is just the power of life and justice and when I am talking about God I am just talking about happiness to live and enjoy life on this earth.”

“I feel that humanity should be one,” she continued. “The people should together work much for good. Well … this is what is my belief in God. Maybe I am not clear.”

Mrs. Alliluyeva sought political asylum while on a visit to India, where she had gone last December to take the ashes of her late husband, Brajesh Singh. Soviet authorities had never recognized the marriage, reported to be her third. Singh, a member of the Indian Communist Party, also had other wives.

Her life in the Soviet Union, Mrs. Alliluyeva said, had included some comforts that others didn’t have. At this point she alluded to the words of Christ in saying that “as you know, people cannot live only by bread. People need also something else.”

Asked point-blank whether religion and Communism are compatible and whether they can exist together, she declared:

“I don’t think that class struggle and revolution can go hand in hand with idea of love which, with idea of love to—no, I don’t believe it can be joined together.”

The name Alliluyeva is her mother’s maiden name and is an equivalent of Hallelujah (“Praise Be to God”). Svetlana translates as “light of the world.”

Exercising restraint in answering reporters’ questions that lent themselves to comments critical of the Soviet Union, Mrs. Alliluyeva said nonetheless that she left seeking self-expression. She indicated that the atmosphere stifled Soviet intellectuals and that she became particularly distressed over the imprisonment meted out last year to a pair of writers, Andrei D. Sinyavsky and Yuli M. Daniel.

She also showed restraint in her evaluation of the United States, preferring to adopt a wait-and-see attitude on the matter of American citizenship. “I think that before the marriage it should be love,” Mrs. Alliluyeva observed in a statement likely to be quoted many times.

Is she convinced that American-style democracy is at least more conducive to being a writer than a society based on the so-called class struggle?

“Well,” she replied, “I believe, of course, your society has more democratic freedoms. This is what I believe and what I see. But I will see later what is your life like perhaps. Perhaps it is not so, so nice as it seems from the beginning. But, of course … there are more democratic freedoms here. There is no doubt about it.”

On the policies of her father: “Of course I disapprove of many things, but I think that many other people who still are in our Central Committee and Politburo should be responsible for the same things for which he alone was accused. And if I feel somewhat responsible for those horrible things, killing people unjustly, I feel that responsibility for this was and is the party’s, the regime, and the ideology as a whole.”

An interesting sidelight to her defection was the cancelation of a visit of Russian Orthodox churchmen to the United States. There was no public evidence that the two events were related, but it would doubtless have proved embarrassing for the churchmen to make American appearances while Mrs. Alliluyeva complained of Soviet repression. Reasons given for the cancellation included delay in getting visas, “urgent business, and the approach of Orthodox Easter.”

Mrs. Alliluyeva thus far has not traced the initiation of her religious beliefs to any writing or to the influence of any person. “Perhaps,” she said in reply to a question, “it is just what one may call religious feeling which some people have, some people don’t have and as when the person who was blind one day his eyes become open and he can see the world, and the sky, and birds and trees and so it is, it is like this, this is just, this is the feeling that comes, comes to you one day. After that I began to read more.”

She has not mentioned it, but Mrs. Alliluyeva’s father studied for the Orthodox priesthood, probably at the urging of his devout mother. Stalin attended the parish school in his native town of Gori, in Georgia, Transcaucasia. He enrolled in a Tiflis seminary in 1894, but plans for an Orthodox Church career faded when he joined a Marxist group, and he was expelled just before graduation for “disloyal” views.

Mrs. Alliluyeva’s sympathy toward Roman Catholicism developed during her six weeks in Switzerland, where she had gone after leaving India. Part of her time in Switzerland was spent in a convent at Fribourg where the nuns sheltered her. She attended two Sunday masses there and another—on Easter Sunday—at Fribourg cathedral.

A nun who had daily contact with Mrs. Alliluyeva found her “a profound believer who has centered her life on God. Her faith is certainly her greatest strength.” But there was no indication, the nun added, that she had any intention of becoming active in “any church.”

Mrs. Alliluyeva acknowledges that there are “many” in the Soviet Union who believe in God. How she reconciles this fact with her assertion that religion and Communism are incompatible was among the three hundred or more questions that went unanswered at her press conferences.

Monkeying With The Law

A Tennessee House bill to repeal the state’s renowned law against teaching evolution died in a tie vote in the Senate last month. A Senate version—evolution could be taught as theory, not fact—was killed in House committee.

Meanwhile, Gary L. Scott, 24, plans to charge breach of contract in his firing as a Jacksboro science teacher under the old law. He says he mentioned evolution in class but did not link man to the process, as the law forbids. Raised and baptized in a Detroit Church of Christ, he is now an agnostic and “more sour” on Christianity after recent fundamentalist attacks.

What Caused The Riot?

Nashville, home of America’s two biggest Protestant denominations, was hit by three ugly nights of rioting last month. The Tennessee Baptist state paper blamed it on “the hate spewed by a racist,” namely black-power agitator Stokely Carmichael.

Foy Valentine of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, agreed that Carmichael’s visit helped, but he said basic causes are poverty, injustice, unemployment, and de facto segregation faced by Nashville’s Negroes. Valentine, a member of the city’s human-relations council, urged an all-out attack on these problems.

Life And Death In Ulster

The Roman Catholic Church hasn’t changed in 400 years, won’t change in the future, and is even more dangerous than Communism, said the Rev. Ian Paisley during a visit last month to Bob Jones University.

Paisley, fiery leader of anti-Catholics in Northern Ireland (Ulster), won headlines last year by insisting on going to jail (see August 19, 1966, issue, page 50). His appearance drew the biggest crowds fundamentalist BJU has ever seen—5,000 persons for each of four speeches, including the overflow.

Paisley claimed his nineteen-congregation Free Presbyterian Church and those of similar mind are “fighting a life-and-death struggle with Romanism,” and he criticized Billy Graham and ecumenical leaders for being soft on Rome.

He began the five-week U. S. tour at ally Carl McIntire’s Bible Presbyterian Church in New Jersey, where he was heckled by members of the Irish Republican Army.

DAVID PARTRIDGE

Demonstrating Against Death

The execution of 37-year-old murderer Aaron Mitchell in the San Quentin gas chamber April 12 ended an unofficial four-year moratorium on the death penalty in California. Even as potassium cyanide pellets slipped soundlessly into a vat of acid, demonstrators—many of them clergymen—protested the death penalty at the prison gates and ninety miles away at the state capitol.

At the execution hour, hundreds joined hands and sang, “He’s got Aaron Mitchell in His hand.” Father John Riley, a San Rafael Episcopalian, spread a pink blanket on the ground and held a communion service complete with silver chalice (and permission from Bishop C. Kilmer Myers).

Mitchell was sentenced in 1963 for shooting policeman Arnold Gamble while trying to escape after a tavern holdup. The bearded Negro had known little but crime and failure, and he attempted suicide by slashing his arm the day before the execution. As guards strapped Mitchell to the death chair he shouted, “I’m Jesus Christ!”

Besides the prayer vigils and picketing, Episcopalians were asked to toll church bells in protest. But a Modesto independent, the Rev. Donald Weston, urged people instead to ring bells in sympathy for Gamble’s widow and children.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Glide

“In spite of many mistakes,” declares California Methodist Bishop Donald H. Tippett, San Francisco’s controversial Glide Memorial Methodist Church is “evangelism at its best.”

The reason is apparently that at Glide, evangelism swings.

Recent pulpit “evangelists” included comedian Dick Gregory, radical organizer Saul Alinsky (“first time I’ve been in church in twenty-six years”), and John Handy’s jazz band. Objects of Glide’s brand of “evangelism” include homosexuals and prostitutes, dope addicts and disadvantaged minorities, would-be suicides and acidhead hippies.

The approach is as unique as the audience. Glide’s five ministers organize people with similar needs into self-help groups. The result, they say, is rapport, rehabilitation, and some “converts.”

The programs are usually controversial—and sometimes fruitful. The church faced strong criticism when it held a dance for Vanguard, a group of male prostitutes. However, Glide men report that some Vanguard members have eventually “graduated” to jobs in business and government. Glide has been praised for projects to help drug addicts and the mentally disturbed.

Conservatives complain that Glide ignores the Gospel. Tippett, a Glide trustee said to be theologically conservative, contends that the Gospel is being proclaimed but in the idiom of Glide’s “mission field.” Says he, “We spend great sums to train a man to speak Swahili, yet we criticize those who have learned to speak the language of people near us.”

In some cases, however, criticism is earned. The worst example, according to Tippett, was a February weekend “happening” held in the church by the avant-garde Artists’ Liberation Front. Some 4,000 showed up, and supervision collapsed. The results: Hindu rites in the sanctuary, crowded rock ’n’ roll dancing, some love-making and nudity, some sex movies, and mad confusion in general. Says Tippett, “things were done there that no one can defend.” Activities finally moved to nearby Ocean Beach, but not before $6,000 in damage had been done.

That’s a rather high price to pay for an experiment in reaching the city’s hippies, perhaps, but hardly out of reach of Guide’s resources. Through its own $6 million foundation and some church-controlled investments, Glide operates on an annual budget of $450,000. Of that money, only about $18,000 annually comes from the offerings of the 400 to 500 people who attend the church’s services.

The church was founded in 1930 through an endowment by Mrs. Lizzie Glide, who specified that money be used to create a center for evangelism. Its first pastor was Dr. J. C. McPheeters, conservative president of Asbury Theological Seminary, who served until 1948. With succeeding pastors, however, the church’s theology shifted, and its more conservative members drifted away. “A small conservative faction remains, but has not, says Glide’s executive director Lewis E. Durham, “impeded Glide’s program.”

Sixty-five people were received into membership at Glide last year, the majority from Roman Catholic backgrounds. Personal faith in Christ as Saviour is not asked for, according to Cecil Williams, minister of evangelism. Rather, he improvises varying statements of “Christian commitment,” such as, “are you committed to God’s revelation in history and how he is acting at the present time?”

Donald Kuhn, director of communications, insists that Glide’s ministers are abiding by the mandate of the trustees: that their aim be the conversion of persons to Christ. Director Durham predicts: “We are on the brink of a great revival.”

Tippett admits, however, that there is dissension (“due to lack of understanding”) in Methodist ranks over Glide’s questionable theological definitions and unpopular social causes (such as supporting liberalization of laws on homosexuals and siding with hippies against City Hall).

While local evangelicals disagree with Tippett’s “evangelism at its best” assertion, they agree Glide has succeeded in reaching the so-called unreachables of modern urban life where other churches have failed. A growing number of Glidelike operations are springing up in the city, linked to a forthright gospel message.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

New Sampler For C. S. Lewis Fans

Christian Reflections, by C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, 1967, 176 pp., $3.95) is reviewed by Robert L. Cleath, editorial assistant,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The late C. S. Lewis was considered by thousands of his readers to be not only a writer of great intellectual power and imaginative style but also a dearly loved friend. As an essayist, novelist, literary critic, and lay apologist for the Christian faith, he communicates in an especially personal way with those who share his deep devotion to Jesus Christ and appreciate his disdain for pomposity and fuzzy thinking. For many agnostics struggling to find meaning in life and for Christians stifled by the oppressive atmosphere of man-made piety, his writings are a breath of fresh air. They demonstrate that a thoroughgoing biblical supernaturalist can more than hold his own in the free-swinging world of ideas and can also be a connoisseur of cultural values. Lewis died in 1963, but his incisive thought and irrepressible spirit are still very much alive in Christian Reflections, a new collection of his essays ably edited by Walter Hooper.

Hooper has brought together fourteen of Lewis’s papers—some written for periodicals, others unpublished lectures delivered to societies in and around Oxford and Cambridge—that span the last twenty years of his life. His Christian insights are focused on such topics as literature, culture, ethics, “the poison of subjectivism,” church music, the Psalms, the language of religion, petitionary prayer, and biblical criticism. In each essay we find, as Clyde Kilby discovered in his study of Lewis’s works, “a mind sharp as a scalpel and intent as a surgeon upon the separation of the diseased from the healthy.”

Lewis’s reflections on literature show the quality of his thought in this volume. Although he was both a committed Christian and a world-renowned literary scholar, he had little to say about “Christian literature,” considering it possible only in the same sense that there might be Christian cookery. Yet he held that there was a Christian approach to literature that was based on imitation of life. An author, he claims, “should never conceive of himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own heart some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.” Thus Lewis put no premium on originality as such, nor did he look upon literature as a self-existent thing to be valued for its own sake. Rather, his concern was that an author should respond to his vision in his own way and thereby be the servant of truth.

These fourteen pithy essays embody many of Lewis’s most important concepts and attitudes. For example, he argues that there is no such thing as a new morality, since all ethical codes are derived from the moral law common to all men. Facing the question whether life is futile, he argues for the indispensability of logic in understanding the way real things exist. In another paper he demolishes the myth of the inevitable progress of man. When he considers the manner in which modern biblical critics have attempted to reconstruct the history of the text of Scripture, he shows how inimical their theories are to a valid understanding of the nature and structure of literature.

These are but a few of the vital ideas Lewis develops as he subjects a host of significant topics to vigorous analysis from his informed Christian perspective. The ponderous topics under discussion, however, should not lead anyone to shy away from the volume. Although Lewis is relentless in his logic, his conversational style spiced liberally with examples, metaphors, and wit makes the book a delight to read.

Lewis fans will surely greet this book with enthusiasm. And people who have not yet made his acquaintance will find Hooper’s sampler of essays an excellent introduction to the thought and personality of this engaging Christian writer. To the list of forty-odd books that have come from the pen of C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections is indeed a worthy addition.

Reading for Perspective

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

• One Race, One Gospel, One Task, Volumes I and II edited by Carl F. H. Henry and W. Stanley Mooneyham (World Wide, set $9.95). Major addresses and reports from the World Congress on Evangelism communicate the spiritual vitality and urgent message of the meetings.

• Biblical Ethics: A Survey, by T. B. Maston (World, $6). A survey of the development of ethics in the Scriptures, shows their climax in the life of Jesus and the writings of Paul and John, and argues for their contemporary authority.

• Service in Christ, edited by James I. McCord and T. H. L. Parker (Eerdmans, $6.95). Essays presented to Karl Barth on his eightieth birthday by a host of scholars on the Church as a servant to Christ and mankind.

The Presbyterianism That Was And Is

A Layman’s Guide to Presbyterian Beliefs, by Addison H. Leitch (Zondervan, 1967, 158 pp., $1.95), is reviewed by David A. Redding, writer in residence, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.

On the wall behind Addison H. Leitch’s desk hangs Winslow Homer’s classic seascape of two mariners taking their sextant reading in a stormswept twilight far out at sea. For twenty-five years across that desk have come the soundings Dr. Leitch himself has taken on the matters of life and death. Thousands from one end of the country to the other, either from hearing or from reading him, could “Take It from Here” to get their bearings.

Now we have his latest book, A Layman’s Guide to Presbyterian Beliefs. Living as close to him as I do, I can say quite frankly that I would not be writing this review if I did not approve the book as required reading for anyone who wishes to enjoy even a remote acquaintance with the Presbyterians.

Even if you are a Methodist or Roman Catholic, how are you going to indulge your prejudice against predestination until you are introduced to the subject? I believe that some radicals who will turn to this book to find out what Presbyterianism was may be stirred into accepting what it still is.

The chapter headings recall the stays by which reformed faith has been supported since Calvin incorporated it from Paul and Augustine. The volume begins by uncovering an almost forgotten main stay, “The Sovereignty of God,” and doesn’t rest till it reaches “Social Action.” And who could be better qualified to speak about “The Faith Once and For All Delivered” than a former Presbyterian seminary president and professor who did his Ph.D. thesis on The Relevancy of John Calvin to Modern Protestantism?

Here is no heavy tome but a paperback as hard to put down as others on the newsstand. Civil rights, we find, are just catching up to “The Holy Scriptures” instead of the Scriptures to them. And Leitch writes fearlessly on this moot subject: “One of the strangest facts about Calvinism and its descent through the reformed tradition is that where it is most Calvinistic, that is, where it is truest to its emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God, there it most surely releases the free energies of man.” Neither our emphasis on social action nor our superiority in science embarrasses the Word of God. Leitch quotes Kepler: “The Bible is not written to describe how the heavens go but how to go to heaven.”

It is fun to read a book written by a “comprehensive man” instead of a bookworm. This author is a happy combination of athlete and poet, as likely to quote Milton as to call a football play to sneak his points past our guard. He brings Stan Musial up to bat to explain predestination. God knows Stan had free choice. Then how could we anticipate his batting average year after year with such accuracy? Leitch does not parade erudition. He not only speaks our language but also has the uncommon courtesy to make himself clear.

Our author is not unaware of how irrelevant the Church has so often been; but rather than joining the literary mob as they alternately wring their hands and throw stones, he tries to do something about the problem. The materialist never tires of telling us that all we are hearing when we hear a violin is “the scraping of the hair of a horse over the stomach of a sheep”; but Leitch believes that it can make music, and so he makes many old definitions sing again with pertinence. Here is how he brings a sacrament up into the twentieth century:

A young man going into the military was offered a blank check or any other gift by his father. The father wanted so much to go with the son and support him in any way he could. The father had a habit of twirling a pocket knife on the end of his watch chain and interestingly enough, the boy asked for that knife. Wherever he went after that he carried his father’s knife, and in time of fear, or loneliness, or temptation he could take out the knife and manipulate it as his father habitually did; and all the good things of his family would come flooding in to support him [pp. 114, 115].

My impression as I read the book was not that it was about dated beliefs on their way out; rather, it is about beliefs that are coming back—and with a blessing, not with a vengeance. “God is dead” grabs today’s headlines, but after the “God stuffers” who have temporarily turned theology into taxidermy have had their day, the large words that Addison H. Leitch has restated so well will continue to stand out, urging men to “Stay On and Be Stayed.”

A Call For Revolution

Man in Community, edited by Egbert de Vries (Association, 1966, 382 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, chairman, Department of History, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.

The last volume in the series of four prepared for the Geneva Conference on Church and Society of the World Council of Churches is the most pointed and dangerous of them all. It brings together and enlarges upon the basic presuppositions set forth in the first three and draws some other conclusions. What emerges in these pages is truly frightening for both the evangelical Christian and the patriotic American. It reveals with startling clarity the basic cleavage between the liberalism of the World Council and evangelical orthodoxy. The theological liberalism of the four volumes in this series is here presented as the rationale for radical social, economic, and political action that the World Council is reflecting to its constituent members as the basis for a social revolution in their countries.

The opening chapter sets the stage. Its basic assumption is that philosophy has the right to develop new norms to deal with new social and economic situations. The days are gone when social rules and structures were to be regarded as having come to man by divine revelation. Modernity makes freedom possible, but the same modernity has also done away with the sacred (sacral) approaches to social, economic, and political issues. Theology has nothing to say to philosophy or to social and economic thought.

The next chapter frankly abandons the biblical ethic in favor of a situational approach. This approach is used to scrutinize marriage and the family. According to this, the Bible does not set forth a special doctrine of the family; it simply accepts the natural order in the family relationship. The book admits that modern sociology and other secular disciplines hold that the traditional concept of the family is not flexible enough to meet modem needs and should therefore give way to other forms of social organization. The author of this chapter then raises the question: What form of the family does God want? His answer is that God wants that form of the family which best equips people to meet the demands of modern society and which most helps them become persons.

The last section of this book deals with the general idea of advancing toward a secularized society. Because the Church as it exists today hinders the formation of wholesome personalities, it must aid in the creation of a secularized society. This secularization brings with it a state of human relations free from domination by any religion or ideology. The Church is to be used for the destruction of Western culture and the elimination of the last vestiges of a Christian society.

Obviously, this volume contains a lot of doubletalk. There can be little doubt that it is a basic repudiation of evangelical doctrine and presents a thinly disguised call for social and economic revolutions of a kind quite contrary to the biblical message.

How A Preacher Is Tempted

A Preacher’s Temptations, by James H. Blackmore (Edwards and Broughton, 1966, 120 pp., $4) and The Anatomy of the Ministry, by Gene E. Moffatt (Pendulum, 1966, 287 pp., $2.95), are reviewed by Richard P. Buchman, minister, The Cadman Memorial Church (Congregational), Brooklyn, New York.

The preacher can be forgiven his joy on those all too rare occasions when a young man tells him he has decided to become a minister. But he must bear part of the burden of guilt if that same young man, some years later, gives it up as a bad job and storms out of the pulpit disillusioned, bitter, and perhaps ruined. Here are two helpful books, written by men who have served in the pastorate and have uncovered just about all the things that can happen to the Lord’s faithful servants—and then some.

James H. Blackmore, director of public relations at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, lists forty temptations common to the clergy and does so with grace, humor, and commendable brevity. It seems downright unfair that the devil has at least forty ways to seduce us; but Blackmore takes the enemy seriously, and his words hit home. For instance, his discussion of the temptation “to think it all depends on us” is timely in this day when many a minister foresees the death of the Christian Church in a generation unless he does this or that right now. This, Blackmore points out, was Elijah’s sin at Horeb when he seriously underestimated the size of the Remnant. The author’s illustrations, scriptural and otherwise, are profuse and nearly always to the point. The book should be read before, during and after seminary, so long as the reader remembers that the Lord is able to pick up his fallen servants and make good use of them.

The Anatomy of the Ministry is a comprehensive attempt to deal with such questions as “just how and why a man becomes a minister, just what he is supposed to do, how well he should do it, and how well he does do it.” Drawing on the personal experiences of ministers and a wealth of statistics, Moffatt discusses the call, theological training, the demands of different pastorates, the problems common to all pastorates, financial realities, the role of the minister’s wife, and the ever-present temptations. In a chapter entitled “How the Mighty Are Fallen,” the author describes in frank and earthy terms the minister’s constant difficulties with that Old Debbil, Woman—his own and others. I knew we ministers were normal, but according to Moffatt, we’re unbelievable! Altogether his volume is a remarkable, fact-filled survey of the world’s grandest profession written by a man who knows it well and still loves it.

Japan’S New Religions

The Rush Hour of the Gods: A Study of New Religious Movements in Japan, by H. Neill McFarland (Macmillan, 1967, 267 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Gordon K. Chapman, veteran missionary, Tokyo, Japan.

The professor of history of religions at Perkins School of Theology has provided students of post-war religious developments in Japan with a perspicacious treatment of the so-called new religions. Although several treatises on this subject have already been published in English, this book is the first major effort by a competent scholar to interpret the new movements as a significant socio-religious phenomenon. And, though it is not within his avowed purpose, the author also suggests some of the reasons why these new indigenous cults, rather than Christian churches, have experienced rapid growth in the post-war religious vacuum.

McFarland is chiefly concerned with tracing the historical and cultural roots of these indigenous new religions and evaluating their actual or potential function in meeting the needs of frustrated souls in a technological society that is rapidly becoming urbanized. Although the Japanese have a reputation for religious indifference, evidence the author presents suggests that, at least in those affiliated with the five principal religions, the incidence of interest and active participation is rather high.

This is not to say that these new faiths are fully adequate for the needs of the present situation. They are too deeply rooted in the traditional folk religion of shamanism and ancestor worship and are irresponsibly eclectic and superficial in their approach to human needs. Often they provide a channel for religious escapism.

We must fully recognize, however, that these mushrooming cults are a challenge to the Christian forces to reexamine their method of carrying out the mission of the Church in Japan. In accordance with the peculiar genius of the Japanese people, the new religions have doctrinal teaching that is empirical and pragmatic rather than metaphysical or abstruse and is adapted to the intelligence of the average man. They present certain concrete goals that contribute to the physical, aesthetic, economic, and social well-being of their adherents. And they offer people an opportunity to be identified with a powerful and successful community that provides both the procedures of group dynamics and the processes of group therapy. Believers are encouraged to practice some form of self-expression and to engage in purposeful activity involving sacrifice, such as manual labor, acts of mercy and personal witness, and giving to costly building enterprises. Under charismatic leadership, laymen are urged to labor for the ideal of an earthly paradise of happiness and peace.

This excellent book is highly recommended to all who have on their hearts the evangelization of Japan.

Who Counsels The Counselor?

Person and Counselor: Responsive Counseling in the Christian Context, by Paul E. Johnson (Abingdon, 1967, 208 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Gordon Stanley, visiting lecturer in psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Pastoral counseling is a practical discipline that has emerged from the continuing dialogue between psychology and theology. This book, the author says, “is concerned with the dedication and preparation of the pastoral counselor.”

In his theoretical interpretation of counseling, Johnson speaks of the “psycho-theological ground of community,” a notion based on Buber’s I-thou theology of relationship. Johnson draws a close analogy between Christ’s role as mediator between sinful man and God, and the pastoral counselor’s role as a mediator between anxious man and other men. Naturally, this is a dangerous analogy, and Johnson rightly asks: “How can the pastoral counselor be this great?” This is a predicament that makes the pastor himself need a counselor: “For their sakes as well as his own, no counselor can afford to give counsel to others without accepting it for himself.” Do we have here, then, an infinite regress, with need for a counselor to counsel the counselors who need counseling, and so on?

The central thesis of the book is this: “Persons are not complete alone but seek fulfillment in relation to other persons. The counselor offers himself in a person-to-person relationship of accepting and sustaining responses. Across the bridge of this encounter, they seek to understand and communicate what they see and learn in searching together. The goal of this counseling is a continuing growth in all the relationships of the person’s life.”

This thesis is well illustrated in carefully selected case histories.

Although much of the language is cumbersome, the book provides worthwhile reading for those interested in exploring pastoral counseling. Readers should be forewarned, however, that this book only scratches the surface of a very complex field. It will disappoint the reader who wants a sound discussion of the relation between biblical theology and the psychology of counseling.

The Seminary Of Tomorrow

Education for Ministry, by Charles R. Feilding with the assistance of others (American Association of Theological Schools, 1966, 258 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by David W. Kerr, dean and professor of Old Testament interpretation, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

Tomorrow’s seminary, if it hopes to provide adequate training for its students, will be larger than almost all the present Canadian theological schools and many American ones. Only size, assuming a proper faculty-student ratio, will provide the kind of staff needed to guarantee a good professional education. The school will, of course, be located in or near a large urban center, since most of the world’s population with its problems is in the cities. It will be interdenominational in both its faculty and its student body, if it is even to approach the ideal in this ecumenically minded age. It will also be related to a university, so that the students will rub shoulders with men of other disciplines. All this and much more Charles Feilding tells clearly and with strong supporting reasoning in Education for Ministry.

For seminary faculties, administrators, and trustees, the book should be required reading. If some of the adjustments in program Feilding calls for are threatening, they are probably so only for those who recognize the strong element of truth in what is said and the consequent demand for action. The sheer force of economics makes the small school with its large overhead and limited facilities a non-profit corporation, even in academic and spiritual dividends.

If seminarians are to reach people where they are, they must aim primarily at urban and suburban ministries. But the suburban church receives only scant and somewhat skeptical treatment from Feilding. In fact, one of my few criticisms of this much needed volume is its apparent low view of the local church. In a well-developed summary of the history, purpose, and form of the parish, Feilding describes the present form of the local church as something of a deviation or deterioration. Admittedly, the present church, conditioned by its past history, has inadequacies and faults and a shortness of vision. Yet can we not apply here Feilding’s argument that the doctor does not inveigh against the ills of his patients but rather tries to heal them?

Feilding criticizes the local church as typically a one-man show that survives as a Christian fellowship as long as the illusion of a classless society can be maintained. Clinging to it, he says, are a false aura of respectability, false ideas of the spiritual, a false biblicism, and a pietism that keeps it from being an effective social corrective. In many cases it neither wants nor needs professionally trained ministers.

My reply is not that these charges have no basis in fact, though they may have become exaggerated through repetition. It is rather that unless pastors minister—and seminaries help their students to minister—to the up-and-outers as well as the down-and-outers, unless they speak the word of reconciliation to the suburbs and towns as well as to the inner city, the gospel imperative will not be fulfilled. Besides, the work of the diversified ministries, now in the early stages of development, must not be cut off from its chief means of visible support, the local church.

The best part of the book deals with field work. Every seminary administrator should study this material, with its prefatory chapter on supervision. Too often work has been confused with field work and field work with field education. On the list of jobs open to and apparently engaged in by some seminarians, it is surprising to find in second place the sale of liquor. The point is made, nevertheless, that some types of “secular” employment may have as much educational value for the student as church employment, particularly if the church work is unsupervised.

I recommend this book to all who believe that theological seminaries are a vital part of the total ministry of the Church of Jesus Christ. Its thesis—that the seminaries should convert our present system of theological education into genuinely professional education—merits consideration.

The Sudan Story

Last Days on the Nile, by Malcolm Forsberg (Lippincott, 1966, 216 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Francis Rue Steele, home secretary, North Africa Mission, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.

Sometimes what appears for the moment to be defeat turns out in the long run as victory. So it may be with the church of Southern Sudan.

Work began here late, as compared with other parts of Africa. It was carried out under great difficulties by a few brave missionaries. Now the missionaries have been expelled, and the national Christians must carry on alone.

The church of the Southern Sudan is not large. It has had little experience in leadership, and administrative facilities as well as educational programs are new and largely untried. Moreover, the climate and terrain makes fellowship and cooperation between small, widely scattered groups most difficult to maintain. But a start has been made, and future prospects are as bright as the faith of these brave people in the promises of God.

That is the story Forsberg tells. Beginning with the history of Egypt and the early Christian Church of post-apostolic days, he traces the rise and fall of Sudan’s political star under Egyptian, Turkish, British, and native leadership. His sharp delineation of linguistic, cultural, and especially religious distinctives between north and south help to explain long-standing rivalries and animosities that have never been resolved.

The northern section has always dominated the southern. And, being more strongly Muslim, it has resisted the preaching of the Gospel more vigorously. Therefore, most of the Christians are in the more backward south, and the northern Muslim administrators have chosen to believe that the influence of Christian missions has held back their plans to absorb and control the southern population. Hence they took the logical course; oust the disturbing factor—foreign missionaries. But it is not that simple. The people of the south have much closer ties with their cultural relatives in Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia, and, Christian or not, they resist absorption into the Arabized Muslim north.

Among the suffering southerners are hundreds of our brothers and sisters in the Lord who merit our prayers in their time of need. This book will help us to understand better and pray more earnestly for a church passing through tribulation.

Book Briefs

History of Christian Worship, by Richard M. Spielmann (Seabury, 1966, 182 pp., $4.95). An advocate of liturgical renewal traces patterns of worship in church history, claims the preaching service is useless today, and recommends more eucharistic worship.

They Beheld His Glory: Stories of the Men and Women Who Knew Jesus, by Alice Parmelee (Harper & Row, 1967, 275 pp., $4.95). Well-written word portraits of people who met Jesus Christ during his earthly ministry.

Documents of Dialogue, by Hiley Ward (Prentice-Hall, 1966, 525 pp., $8.95). An extensive collection of recent documents from Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox sources that shows the possibilities and practices of greater interfaith cooperation.

The Revelation of St. John the Divine, by G. B. Caird (Harper & Row, 1966, 316 pp., $6.50). Views the events described by John’s imagery not as the final crisis of man’s history heralding the great Day of God but as the disclosure to prospective martyrs of the sufferings of the Church and its purpose in God’s eternal purpose.

The Death of Man: A Critique of Christian Atheism, by J. V. Langmead Casserley (Morehouse-Barlow, 1967, 159 pp., $4.50). Admitting the absurd element in “Christian” atheism, Casserley nonetheless sees it as a valid social protest (with roots in positivism and existentialism) that may precipitate a more robust theism.

Paperbacks

The Bible and Sex Ethics Today, by C. G. Scorer (Inter-Varsity, 1966, 124 pp., $1.50). Scorer shows how biblical teachings on sex are consistent, realistic, and applicable for man today.

Adult Education Procedures: A Handbook of Tested Patterns for Effective Participation, by Paul Bergevin et al. (Seabury, 1966, 245 pp., $2.45). This practical handbook tells how to spark greater participation within adult groups.

The Gospel of Mark and The Gospel of Matthew, by Charles R. Erdman (Westminster, 1966, 213 and 253 pp., $1.25 each). Expositions first published in 1920.

Christian Social Teachings, compiled and edited by George W. Forell (Doubleday, 1966, 491 pp., $1.95). A well-seasoned pot-pourri of three millennia of writings on the relation of the Christian community to the surrounding world. Includes readings from the Bible, the Church Fathers, medieval thinkers, Reformation leaders, nineteenth-century theologians, and modern writers.

Men Made New: An Exposition of Romans 5–8, by John R. W. Stott (Inter-Varsity, 1966, 108 pp., $1.25). Stott stresses the results of justification: peace with God, union with Christ, freedom from the law, life in the Spirit.