We entered this year with the burden of last year’s tensions. The international tensions of 1966 are the tensions of 1967, and now, as then, they bear hard on the whole of human existence. The relations between East and West, the volcanic rumblings from China, and all the other sore spots of international life are of deep significance for everyone.

But some people are so taken up with the disturbances of the present that they lose perspective on the past. Our a-historical way of thinking is in part an estrangement from the past; and this estrangement, like all others, is an impoverishment. For our time shares this with all other times, that it cannot be understood or explained in isolation from the past.

Deep and primitive forces help define the course of affairs and help bind us to the affairs of yesterday. The Church, too, has this consciousness of being bound with the past. It knows it cannot cut itself loose from the past, for remembrance of things past is close to the heart of its existence. It keeps hearing the permanent command: “Do this in memory of me.” And Paul writes: “Remember that Jesus Christ … was raised from the dead (2 Tim. 2:8).

As Israel lived out of its memory of the past, of the Exodus, of all the acts of God that were decisive for Israel’s history, so the Church lives out of its memory of the unique past recorded in the message of the Scriptures. Witnesses to Christ’s resurrection went into the world, not to declare generalized eternal truths, but to tell of their vivid past experience with the living Lord. This does not imply, of course, that the Church should try to withdraw from the present, as though it had no interest in the world of today, let alone the future. Rather, it is to say that the Church’s interest in the present and concern for the future rise out of what happened in the past, out of the redemptive events that took place in history.

Closely connected with its special interest in the past—with the unique events of the past—is the Church’s interest in its own history. This history is not a collection of incidental facts of antiquity, in the style of archaeology. It is like an account of a wrestling match: both falls and rises are included. It is the story of a struggle to keep the truth of the Gospel and to carry it to the ends of the earth. The Church, living in new and changed times, always experiences a renewal of its calling in terms of the present world. So it has come to know its own day. CHRISTIANITY TODAY is, in my opinion, a happy expression of awareness of this responsibility to meet the challenges of new times precisely because of the unchanging character of the Gospel.

Awareness of the Church’s past must take into account not only the Gospel but also the chasm-like divisions of the Church. The word of Paul still sounds today: “Is Christ divided?” But the facts of the past still make it hard for us to translate our answer to Paul’s question into concrete action today. The Gospel is clear in its picture of the one Shepherd and the one flock; but we are stuck with the terrible divisions of the Church. And no one can deny that the credibility of our message is encumbered with these divisions as with a dark shadow. We all have ecumenical concerns, but none of us has the redemptive word that solves the ecumenical problems. Many of us have an awful sense of powerlessness.

This year, 1967, we are especially reminded of the fissure in the Western church that opened up in 1517—four and one-half centuries ago. A fact of the Church’s life seems to be that once a break occurs, healing it is almost impossible. The break between East and West has lasted for more than nine centuries. Divisions seem to take root in history with a depth and finality that can scarcely be altered.

What is the state of affairs after the 450 years of division in the West? Much has changed, especially during the last twenty years, not only in personal relations between representatives of the two sides but also in the climate in which the two churches meet. There is a growing awareness that we have often struggled against caricatures of each other. It is not that the Reformation arose out of a misunderstanding on the part of the Reformers but that, after the break occurred, the distance between the churches grew so large that neither could see the other clearly. Each side looked at the other in unreal perspective. Bitter polemics bred more bitter polemics. And the conflict caused us to lose sight of the truth about each other.

In our time, we are busy trying to find out where the deepest differences between us lie and what the decisive issues are that keep the churches apart. The answers are various. Some say that it is the difference between Scripture and tradition. Others, the differences over offices and hierarchy. Still others, the disagreement about the sacraments, or the issue of justification by faith alone.

Actually, none of these is to be isolated from the others. Each issue overlaps and influences all the others. I have never been satisfied with any effort to localize the issue in a single point. But the efforts still go on. And they must keep going on, because we are not permitted the luxury of a fatalistic point of view about the differences.

One thing in the present dialogue is very encouraging: we are not polemicizing from a distance. This means that we are no longer able to concentrate on each other’s weak spots. We have to face each other at the point where each stands on what he considers his strong point. For instance, we have got to meet Rome on the basis of its stand on Christ’s words to Peter recorded in Matthew 16.

Meeting another at his strongest point is always harder than thumping away at his weak point in his absence. And it carries a great responsibility. We cannot get away with tricky arguments and debater’s tactics. Together we must plunge deep into the whole witness of the prophets and the apostles. This kind of dialogue is bound to have results, for it is centered on a study of the Gospel.

What sort of results? We cannot predict with certainty. But when a dialogue is undertaken, not to beat the other person in debate, but to come to a clearer understanding of the Gospel, good fruit must be borne. When we seriously attempt to fathom the full dimensions of the separation, we are certain to benefit. For here, caricatures fall away, and the real problems become more clear. This kind of discussion is going on all over the world. Here in my country, the Netherlands, countless publications witness to its existence.

Four and one-half centuries is a long time. But we are not allowed to lose courage—not if we are children of the Reformation. For we believe in the perspicuity of the Scriptures; and we believe they are perspicuous for others as well as for ourselves.

In this year, the 450th anniversary of the Reformation, we must not be overcome by illusions, to be sure. But neither ought we to be overcome by a sense of hopelessness. For we believe, not in the divisions of the Church, but in the one living Lord.

As faithfully as the birds fly south each autumn, flocks of young Canadians stream down across the border onto U. S. campuses. Although their numbers are not staggering, they are enough to nettle Canadian educators and church leaders. Partly to offset educational migration, Canadians are taking a hard look at how well their college opportunities compare with those in the States.

It has been a long time since a major new religious school was founded in Canada. But this year there are live prospects for such undertakings in two of the nation’s biggest cities: Toronto, Ontario, and Edmonton, Alberta. The Toronto effort is for an evangelical liberal arts college with a relatively limited enrollment. The Edmonton prospect is by far the more ambitious: it would be an interdenominational university financed by the government and operated by cooperating churches.

After seven months of conferences, agreement in principle was reportedly reached on the desirability of working for an ecumenical campus in the Edmonton area. The discussions have been among Lutheran, Anglican, Baptist, United Church of Canada, and Roman Catholic representatives. Spokesmen for the Alberta Ministry of Education say the government is willing to put up the money for the school if the churches can come up with workable plans.

The idea of an interdenominational university was first suggested by Alberta Premier E. C. Manning, an ordained Protestant minister and an outspoken evangelical. He offered the idea as an alternative to pleas by the churches for independent denominational colleges throughout the province. Some planners have been quoted as saying they want to see the university open for classes by 1972, with 10,000 students a goal for 1975.

Edmonton, capital of Alberta, is Canada’s fourth-largest city (behind Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver), with a population nearing 400,000. Less than 1,000 miles from the Arctic Circle, it is the northernmost major metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere. Its winters are not so severe as the geographical position suggests, however. The city is located just east of the Rockies in the meadow and aspen-grove country of central Alberta.

From Toronto, appeals are going out for an initial $100,000 to provide for the opening of classes this fall at the proposed new Richmond College. The campus is to begin in buildings owned by the federal government along Lake Ontario and leased to the college for $36,000 a year. Because the Department of University Affairs of Ontario has refused to grant a charter until the college is in actual operation, degrees in arts and science will be given on the basis of a Manitoba charter.

There is considerable opposition to the Richmond College concept, mainly from the Toronto Graduate Christian Fellowship. Crux, the fellowship magazine, argued that Christian students and faculty ought to be witnesses on the secular campus rather than moving into isolation. As an alternate, it was suggested that a Christian research center or Christian college be established as part of a secular campus.

Chancellor of Richmond College is John Wesley White, a Ph.D. from Oxford who is an associate evangelist with the Billy Graham team. His brother, Hugh White, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, is dean of education. The Rev. Elmer S. McVety, a minister of the Christian and Missionary Alliance who has an M.A. from Winona Lake School of Theology, is president. McVety is a brother-in-law to the White brothers.

Personalia

John Leo, associate editor of the liberal Catholic lay weekly Commonweal, will join the New York Times May 1 as a roving correspondent covering sociology, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and intellectual trends.

Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary of Berkeley, California, announced the appointment of Dr. Vernon L. Strempke as professor of pastoral theology and director of field education.

Dr. Mariano Di Gangi will become Canadian Director of the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship in mid-June. He is now pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia. His new office will be in Toronto.

Miscellany

A proposal to sanction participation in Episcopal communion services by non-Episcopalians “where the discipline of their own church permits” will be brought before the denomination’s House of Bishops in September. The proposal by the Episcopal Joint Commission on Ecumenical Relations is in reply to a request from the bishops for a study of communion discipline.

Intercommunion is the primary point at which Protestant denominations might well work toward greater cooperation and unity in “faith and order,” according to American Baptist Convention President Carl Tiller. He told a ministerial meeting that American Baptists ought to initiate a program of inviting other denominations to discuss the theology of communion and the prospects for intercommunion.

A new Regional Church Plan commission will spend the next four years framing strategy for the 3,500 Protestant churches in the thirty-one-county New York City area, where nearly one-tenth of America’s population lives. Ten denominations and nine church councils are cooperating.

Motive, a monthly published by the Methodist Board of Education and recognized as the publication of the interreligious University Christian Movement, was awarded a certificate of special recognition by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Ghana’s military government waived stipulations to allow citizens of South Africa to attend a Bible-society meeting at Winneba. When the country was ruled by Kwame Nkrumah, South African visitors were required to sign a declaration repudiating their government’s apartheid policies.

Latin America Mission is opening an Office of Worldwide Evangelism-in-Depth. The new agency will offer aid to Christian groups around the world in the saturation-evangelism methods that the mission has used very successfully in Latin America.

Japan’s largest Protestant denomination, the United Church of Christ (Kyodan), adopted a statement publicly confessing the church’s guilt and complicity in World War II. The declaration acknowledged that the Japanese church actively cooperated in the war, failing thereby to uphold the purity of the faith.

The Korean Methodist Church ended a six-month deadlock over the election of a bishop when, on the 114th ballot, it chose as its new head a 67-year-old pastor and educator, Dr. Hong-Kyu (Fritz) Pyun. The church is Korea’s second largest Protestant denomination, with 225,000 members in 1,243 congregations.

They Say

“What I hope is that Protestants who hold to orthodox Christian beliefs will stand with us. You may be sure that Protestants who really don’t believe the Virgin Birth is important, who don’t really believe that God became Man, who don’t really believe Jesus Christ was resurrected, will not care—it is understandable that they should be pleased to see some Catholic theologians coming around to their way of thinking.

“But those Protestants who hold to these fundamental Christian beliefs, who unfortunately have often been farther apart from us than other Protestants, should unite with us to meet these challenges to Christian orthodoxy.”—Editor Dale Francis in Our Sunday Visitor, “National Catholic Ecumenical Weekly.”

Deaths

GEORGES PHILIAS VANIER, 78, Canada’s first Roman Catholic Governor General; in Ottawa.

KENNETH JOSEPH FOREMAN, 75, who taught at Davidson College, Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, and Union Theological Seminary of Richmond, and was widely known for a folksy sermon, “The Engineer’s Got to Know Where His Hind End Is”; in Montreat, North Carolina.

HARRY MILTON SHUMAN, 88, retired president of the Christian and Missionary Alliance; in Deland, Florida.

ISAM B. HODGES, 72, co-founder and first president of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary; in San Leandro, California.

They’re widening the roads to the Portuguese hill town of Fatima, stepping up train service, building 1,500 prefab houses, and talking about a helicopter landing pad. Chartered airline tours from the United States are selling at $505 to $895 a seat.

To hundreds of millions of Roman Catholics who venerate the Virgin Mary, May 13 is the fiftieth anniversary of her first reported appearance to three illiterate peasant children at Fatima. Since the apparitions won church recognition in 1930, Fatima has become one of the world’s major Marian shrines, centering on a large basilica with a 213-foot tower. Even in an off year, Fatima draws 1.5 million pilgrims (who get special indulgences in purgatory for making the trip) and 17,500 masses are recited.

Why Fatima? Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, perhaps America’s leading Catholic apologist, points out that Fatima was the name of Mohammed’s daughter and that in Islam she ranks second only to Mary among women. Thus, the Fatima miracles are “a pledge and a sign of hope to the Moslem people.”

The Fatima fiftieth, besides heightening piety and tourism, will be a boost for Mariology, that much-neglected topic of the post-Vatican II era. Major theological meetings are scheduled at Fatima in May and August. Pope Paul VI has named Curia Cardinal da Costa Nunes as his representative, and there is talk that he himself will come.

Part of the excitement about Fatima is the CIA-style story of the “third secret” told by Mary to the children. Twenty-four years after the fact, Sister Lucy, the only one of the three children still living, said they had seen a vivid vision of Hell in July, 1917. Mary had then asked frequent recitations of the Rosary and special masses, and had warned that unless Russia were consecrated to “My Immaculate Heart,” there would be wars and church persecution.

But a third part of Lucy’s rendition was put in a sealed envelope to be opened in 1960. Just last month, Cardinal Ottaviani confirmed rumors that Pope John XXIII got the envelope from Portugal in 1960, opened it, decided not to make the secret public, and “put it in one of those Vatican archives that are like a bottomless well.”

With Sister Lucy silenced by the church, curiosity continues and rumors linger. Presbyterian preacher Paul H. Rutgers complains this month in the Camden, New Jersey, Catholic weekly about “churchmen playing ‘I’ve Got a Secret.’ ” He hints that the Vatican uses secrets to “keep the interest up.”

There has been some speculation that Paul, who has a strong interest in Mary, will endorse with his full dogmatic power the generally-held ideas that Mary is “Co-Redemptrix” and “Mediatrix.” The Fatima anniversary would be a logical time. But Father Juniper Carol, founder of the Mariological Society of America, who would like to see new elevation of Mary, doubts Paul will do it because “he has been bending over backwards to be sympathetic to you Protestants.”

Mary is quite contrary for Catholics and Protestants in an ecumenical age. In fact, she is probably the most divisive issue next to the papacy. Is she a humble Jewish peasant girl, the Queen of the Universe, or both?

The history of attempts to explain Mary has strange twists. The Koran teaches she was born without sin and lived a sinless life—an approximation of the “immaculate conception” dogma. Thomas Aquinas, the giant of medieval Catholicism, rejected the idea. But Martin Luther believed it (despite a couple of lapses), prayed to Mary, and taught she was the “Mother of God” and a virgin all her life—which covers most of the distinctive beliefs Catholics hold today (see box below).

After the Reformation, Catholic devotions and Marian theology began to rise, reaching a high point in the mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile, Protestant interest in the Saviour’s mother faded. But in 1967, many think Catholic Mariology has passed its high point, and some Protestant scholars are trying to revive interest in Mary.

On St. Patrick’s Day, Catholic University announced it will offer a summer course on the role of “Our Lady in Protestant Theology.” The teacher, Father Donal Flanagan of Ireland’s St. Patrick’s College, is writing a book on Mariology after Vatican II.

The ecumenical mood has reached even Father Carol’s Mariologists. Next year, Arthur Cochrane of Dubuque Theological Seminary (Presbyterian) will speak to the society. Cochrane has said that “God adopted us in Mary’s one son to be His children, and in this sense to be Mary’s children.”

In January, Arthur C. Piepkorn of Concordia Seminary (Missouri Synod Lutheran) became the first non-Roman to speak to the Mariologists. Starting with the Bible as understood by “the primitive church,” Piepkorn thinks considerable agreement can be reached on Mary as Theotokos (Mother of God), her “place in the church as the first of the redeemed,” the “probability of her intercession for the church,” and other aspects of honor.

Another Missouri Synod scholar who wants to interest Protestants in Mary—Yale’s Jaroslav Pelikan—thinks it’s ironic that the Protestants “most vociferous in defending the virgin birth are the most closed to Roman Catholic rapprochement, and those who sit lightly on the virgin birth are the most friendly to Roman Catholics.”

Pelikan says Catholics, especially in devotion and speculation, isolate discussion of Mary from Christ, while Protestants overlook “the Christological context. You cannot long speak about Christ without dealing with Mary.”

Closer yet to the Roman view are the “Catholics” within the Anglican communion. In a 1957 survey of superiors at Anglican monasteries, all twenty-five who responded believed Mary is the Mother of God, sixteen believed in the immaculate conception, and fourteen believed in the assumption. The Catholic-leaning U. S. weekly Living Church, in a random survey among all U. S. Episcopal clergy, found that a substantial minority believed Mary was a virgin all her life and a fair number held other Roman Catholic doctrines. Episcopalians interested in promoting honor and devotion to Mary can join the Living Rosary of Our Lady or the Society of Mary. Last summer, Living Church marked the traditional Feast of the Assumption by declaring Mary to be the Mother of God and asking the denomination to “commemorate St. Mary on her traditional ‘birthday into eternity.’ ”

Most Episcopal advocates of the new Mariology are conservatives. An exception is Norman Pittenger, who wrote a semi-official doctrinal guide with lames A. Pike and has opposed the historical Virgin Birth. Pittenger has called for a “chastened” devotion to “our Lady” and has asked non-Romans to recognize her “unique place.”

If Mary was not the virgin mother of the Son of God, however, special honors seem irrelevant to most. By and large, the big names of modern Protestant thought have taken a low view of Mariology. Mary has been diminished by Emil Brunner’s denying that the Virgin Birth is an essential doctrine; by Rudolph Bultmann’s calling it a myth and saying the deity of Jesus refers to his significance for faith rather than his nature; and by Paul Tillich’s asserting that Jesus only became the Christ to his followers.

Conservative Protestants outside the Lutheran and Anglican camps are often disinterested, if not antagonistic. No doubt this is a reaction against such Catholic extremism as the 1965 English translation of Mary of Nazareth by Igino Giordani, which carries the imprimatur of Cardinal Spellman. The book says the “divinely enlightened” St. Gertrude declared that “the three Divine Persons have in (Mary) a Daughter, a Spouse, and a Mother; and under these three titles love her with an infinite love.” Thus, Mary is apparently the mother of God the Father and Holy Spirit as well as Son.

Giordani speculates that Mary was at the Last Supper, “was crucified with him” in vicarious suffering, became “an authority” in the apostolic church and thus helped Paul and John in their New Testament writings, and visited Ephesus and other mission frontiers. He also believes “the building up of the New World was accomplished with the inspiration and help of Mary.”

Similarly, Richard Cardinal Cushing considers Mary the “patroness of America,” tracing the idea back to Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria. He calls the grandiose Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D. C., a “luxury gift to Mary” in return for her blessings on America. The shrine, largest Catholic church in the United States and seventh-largest in the world, is still being completed. Two chapels will be dedicated this year.

Marian Primer: Meaning Of Key Terms

Mother of God—Developed in the early church with the idea of Jesus’ full deity (Jesus is God, Mary is his mother). Affirmed at Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431). Retained by some Reformation statements. Title appears in the Mass and “Hail Mary,” is used by Eastern Orthodoxy and “high” Protestants.

Perpetual Virginity—Mary never had sexual intercourse, and bore only Jesus. Widely held in early Church. Made doctrine at Chalcedon (451), thus believed by Eastern Orthodox. Defended by Luther. Appears several times in the Mass. Held by many Anglicans, some Lutherans.

Immaculate Conception—Mary was conceived without original sin and lived a sinless life. Idea has long, complex development. Generally accepted in Catholicism by fifteenth century. Some Reformation writers held her sinless or near-sinless in deeds. Declared Catholic dogma in 1854. Believed by many Orthodox but not as essential doctrine.

Assumption—Mary, at the end of her earthly life, was assumed in body and soul, directly into heaven. Marked by a holy day in most Eastern churches by the fifth century, later in the West, and came into common belief. After immaculate conception decree, eight million Catholics petitioned pope to make assumption a dogma. Decreed in 1950; those who dare to deny or doubt it have cut themselves off from Catholic faith. Believed by most Orthodox but not as essential doctrine.

Mediatrix—“No one can approach Christ except through his Mother” (Pope Leo XIII, 1891). “My salvation depends upon Mary’s mediation in union with Christ, because of her exalted position as Mediatrix of all Grace …” (catechism in My Sunday Missal). Vatican II used the title and said Mary’s “intercession continues to win for us gifts of eternal salvation,” but added that this shouldn’t detract from Christ as the “one Mediator.” Not an article of Roman faith as such.

Co-Redemptrix—Mary suffered with Christ “and nearly died with Him when He died,” thus she “may rightly be said to have redeemed the human race with Christ.” (Pope Benedict XV, 1918). “The Virgin of Sorrows shared the work of redemption with Jesus Christ” (Pius XI, 1923). Widely held, but not dogma.

Death On The Compound

A 26-year-old woman missionary teacher was stabbed to death this month in Bandung, Indonesia. Miss Patricia May Groff, of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had just begun her work in January. She served under the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

A few hours after Miss Groff’s body was found on the mission compound, police arrested a 20-year-old man. He said he had killed her for someone whose name he refused to disclose. According to the Indonesian press agency Antara, the man behind the murder is a Chinese.

Miss Groff was trained at Nyack Missionary College and Oneonta, New York, State Teachers College.

Resurrection In New Zealand

A major controversy over the resurrection of Christ has stirred New Zealand’s Presbyterians. It started last year with a provocative series of articles in the denomination’s Outlook magazine by Lloyd Geering, Principal of Knox College in Dunedin.

Broadly, what Geering did was deny the historicity of the resurrection stories along the lines of Howard Williams, a prominent London Baptist who said in 1964 that it doesn’t matter whether the empty tomb created the faith of the disciples or the faith of the disciples created the empty tomb.

To conservatives, however, it matters as much as the difference between truth and falsehood. Alarmed church members formed the Association of Presbyterian Laymen. The clergy rallied to Geering’s side with some strength, and there seemed real danger of a split in the denomination.

The Dunedin Presbytery met in a mood of apprehension late in 1966. A carefully worded compromise saved the day for the scholars and disarmed the laymen. It said that many Presbyterians do not agree with Geering’s thesis, but that it “does not deny the resurrection of Christ.” The statement also supported “the principle of free inquiry in all matters concerning the Christian faith.”

It is doubtful that the end has been heard of this matter. The conservatives feel that they have surrendered much for unity, and that Knox is still in the hands of those not to be trusted to propagate traditional doctrines. It will be interesting to watch future recruiting for the ministry, and the likely growth of coherence among the denomination’s conservative laymen.

E. M. BLAIKLOCK

Keeping Tabs On Red Religion

Many American Christians see the National Council of Churches as giving aid and comfort to the Communist world through leftist-oriented reports and pronouncements. Few realize that the council also sponsors the best running account of Communist repression of religion: the semimonthly newsletter Religion in Communist Dominated Areas.

Last year RCDA made public the growing anti-government dissent among Orthodox and Baptists in the Soviet Union. This month it is printing details on the Baptist uproar gleaned from an atheistic Ukrainian publication. In the works is a report on what RCDA calls “brutal suppression of religious activities of dissenting Baptists in Kiev and other places.”

RCDA consists largely of direct translations of articles selected from more than one hundred Soviet, East European, and Chinese publications. A brief comment accompanies each article. The maroon-trimmed first page always features a photograph or drawing. The February 15 issue showed a satirical cartoon from a Moscow publication contrasting the Oriental lines of an old shrine with the sleek, squared-off look of a modern building.

RCDA is put out by a pair of experts on Eastern Europe. The editor, 72-year-old Paul Anderson, an Episcopalian, served as a YMCA representative in Russia through the Bolshevik Revolution after a four-year stint in China. He has written two books on religion in Russia and has served as negotiator and translator in clergy exchange visits between the United States and the Soviet Union.

RCDA’s managing editor is the Rev. Blahoslav Hruby, 55, a Czech-born linguist who fled the Gestapo on a bicycle and crossed the Pyrenees on foot before coming to the United States. He was a U. S. Army intelligence officer during World War II and worked for Radio Free Europe before joining the council. He and his wife can together handle translations from twenty languages. They live in a Manhattan apartment with their 16-year-old daughter, who spent last summer taking intensive Chinese language training at Columbia University. Between issues of RCDA, Hruby likes to go mushroom-picking (“I specialize in edible mushrooms”).

RCDA grew out of a research project occasioned by a visit of American churchmen to the Soviet Union. Members of the delegation liked the information so well they suggested a continuing report. The newsletter was begun in the spring of 1962 with financial help from United Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Methodists.

RCDA runs eight pages per issue and costs ten dollars a year. It is now mailed to people in fifty countries, but circulation totals a mere 1,600, including many free copies sent to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The publication costs the NCC’s International Affairs Commission about $40,000 a year, and in 1966 the project went $17,000 in the red despite hundreds of hours of volunteer labor. Continuing deficits seem likely unless circulation can be substantially increased.

Competition for the budget dollar is keen among NCC agencies, and some people have campaigned against RCDA. They contend the reports do not contribute to the principle of coexistence.

But Hruby, a part-time Presbyterian minister, can preach a sermon of rebuttal on that point. “A fruitful dialogue cannot take place if we do not know the facts,” he says.

“The Communist governments are sensitive to this kind of publication,” Hruby adds, “and they seem to be less offensive in their policies concerning churches behind the Iron Curtain because they know that violations against religious freedom in the Soviet Union are reported. It is apparent that the Soviet Embassy and other embassies of Communist countries are eager to have good relations with RCDA.”

Fixing Easter

Slowly and quietly the Christian world moves toward adoption of a fixed date for Easter. Most likely choice: the first Sunday in April.

Since the Council of Nicaea in 325, Western Christians have observed Easter according to the Gregorian Calendar, on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring—which means anywhere between March 22 and April 25. Most Eastern Orthodox calculate the date a little differently.

A fixed date for Easter came up for discussion several weeks ago in the British House of Lords. The body reserved decision until after the World Council of Churches Fourth Assembly in 1968. The WCC is conducting a survey among member churches. The Second Vatican Council endorsed a fixed date but did not specify any preference.

Race-Track Evangelism

Despite threats of unseasonal tropical showers on Barbados, West Indies, the grandstands at Garrison Savannah race course—built for last November’s independence celebration—were filled to overflowing night after night.

The occasion was a crusade led by San Francisco evangelist Bob Harrison and Philadelphia singer Jimmie McDonald. Between meetings, the team went from one end of the 166-square-mile, ham-shaped island to the other. They spoke at high schools and were heard on radio by a large part of the coral island’s 250,000 people. They lunched with the Governor-General, headed a Rotary Club program, and held a prison service.

Setting aside finer points of theology and practice, clergymen from nine groups ranging from Bajan Pentecostalists to Irish Methodists cooperated in the campaign. Each service was climaxed with an invitation to commitment. Some 530 converts were recorded.

WILBERT FORKER

These Modern Neros

Shakespeare might have had a word for last month’s strange affair at Cambridge University—“a Roman by a Roman valiantly vanquished.” The occasion seemed unpromising of high drama: an address on “The Proper Formation of Conscience” given to the (Roman Catholic) Fisher Society by seventy-three-year-old Archbishop Thomas Roberts, S. J. Widely regarded as the enfant terrible of the English hierarchy because of liberal views on contraception, intermarriage, and abortion, the retired prelate was sharing something of this with his student audience when he was stopped in full flight by the acting chaplain, Father Joseph Christie, a fellow Jesuit.

Christie accused the archbishop of heresy and terminated the meeting. “The time comes when a man must stand and be counted,” valiantly said this spiritual counselor of 600 undergraduates, “and my time has come.… People are sick and tired of listening to criticism of the holy Church, and it is time someone stood up against it.”

For his part the archbishop, who retired in 1950 from the see of Bombay, said it was like accusing a judge of being crooked, and demanded that the heresy charge be justified or withdrawn. Father Christie, evidently rather enjoying the whole business, said he did not “give a damn” about the reaction, and added with modest satisfaction, “It must be the first time that an archbishop has been stopped in his tracks like that.”

Meanwhile English Roman Catholicism is deeply divided over the sacking of a Dominican priest-editor. Petty bickering at high level involving the Apostolic Delegate in London and the Dominican Master-General in Rome has spread to the English bishops. Four of these and (incredibly) Cardinal Heenan himself have associated themselves with the lay movement protesting editor Herbert McCabe’s dismissal.

From Wales, however, warnings by the Archbishop of Cardiff professed to smell anarchy in the “new crusade against authority” led by “the modern Neros who fiddle while Rome burns.” The allusion may be obscure, but that it was widely welcomed among the lower echelons underlines the fact that to be a Roman Catholic in England today is a perplexing business.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Germany: The New Resistance

Strong resistance to modern theology is developing in Germany. A confessional movement known as “No Other Gospel,” focal point of the resistance, is gaining momentum rapidly.

Early in January the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, obviously skeptical of the NOG movement, published a tongue-in-cheek interview with Dr. Gerhard Bergmann, one of its leaders. But by the end of the month the magazine was inviting another spokesman for NOG to write a critical review of the liberal theology that the movement opposes.

The influential weekly Christ und Welt warned, “People are clearly mistaken who use the slogan ‘modern theology against congregational piety’ and presume that on the one side we have the theologians and on the other a more or less emotional, traditionalistic and thus vague piety. For on the other side we discover quite a number of influential theologians, and not just the older ones, but generally speaking, the theological youth.”

German Lutheran bishops devoted an entire session in mid-January to the current theological unrest. Clearly afraid of a split, they tried to keep contemporary German theology and the NOG movement within ecclesiastical bounds. But their indictment of modern theology was much stronger than their indictment of the Bible-defending conservatives represented by NOG.

The bishops warned NOG not to forget “the inherent tension of God’s Word in human mouths.” The modern theologians were told not to forget that the “Crucified One is more than an example of solidarity; he heals the world and reconciles us to God.” Both groups were asked not to judge each other falsely.

NOG grew out of a small group of concerned pastors who several years ago began meeting in the town of Bethel and soon were known as the Bethel Circle. The leaders were Paul Tegmeyer—who died recently—and Helmuth Frey. These pastors wanted to do something about the growing influence of theologian Rudolf Bultmann upon the young theologians. They said that 80 per cent of the German pulpiteers were preaching a message conditioned by Bultmannian presuppositions and methodology.

Their concern was at first shrugged off by most German church leaders, who didn’t even find time to discuss the matter personally with the men of Bethel. But a new situation developed when philosopher Dorothee Sölle, a German exponent of the death-of-God theology, spoke at the mammoth Christian Kirchentag convention in Cologne in 1965.

Within a few months the Bethel Circle had blossomed out into a statewide organization to oppose Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian theology, to defend scriptural authority, and to call the church back to her confession. A mass meeting on March 6, 1966, in Dortmund drew a crowd of 20,000. The speakers included Dr. D. Wilm, moderator of the Church of Westphalia, which claims 3,619,114 members and is the biggest and most conservative of the West German regional churches.

The Dortmund meeting sparked formation of committees in all the independent regional churches. In the Rhineland eighty-six pastors and elders formed a working committee. In Brunswick 100 pastors published Eighteen Theses Against Modern Theology. In Lower Saxony independent confessional groups met and formed a provincial union. Since then these regional groups have formed a national organization led by Westphalian pastor Rudolf Bäumer.

NOG made headlines when it requested a meeting with the Kirchentag presidium and got it. The Kirchentag movement sponsors a five-day assembly every other year with a climaxing rally that draws hundreds of thousands. When Kirchentag leaders took time out for discussion with NOG, people realized that the new movement was something more than a small group of conservative grumblers.

NOG asked the Kirchentag presidium to avoid speakers who repudiate biblical and confessional truths and specifically requested the rejection of two proposed speakers: Dr. Heinz Zahrnt and Dr. Ernst Käsemann. The presidium refused. Instead, it asked NOG to appoint some men who would be received as speakers and chairmen on the platform of the 1967 Kirchentag in Hannover. NOG turned down the compromise proposal.

Thus the discussion ended in a deadlock. NOG let it be known that it would boycott this year’s Kirchentag, declaring that what is clearly forbidden for a local church (namely, to invite a preacher who rejects biblical truths) must also be forbidden for the Kirchentag.

Not all German Protestant conservatives are happy about NOG. Some feel that even though it is a revolt against extreme forms of modern theology it does not insist upon complete scriptural authenticity. One conservative professor observed that NOG representatives “are fighting us evangelicals who accept the truths of the whole Bible.”

Not until the Hannover Kirchentag is held the last week in June will the influence of the competing movements be more clear.

JAN J. VAN CAPELLEVEEN

The battle-scarred Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM)—the nation’s most bitterly attacked and fiercely defended “Head Start” program—swung back into action this month, revived by an $8 million grant grudgingly given by the U. S. Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

Jubilant liberal churchmen boast that the grant represents a major victory for the “church lobby” similar to its success in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Clergymen claim it was Vice-President Hubert Humphrey’s intervention at their behest that got the money.

“The Church got emotionally swept into this matter,” says Theodore M. Berry, director of OEO’s Community Action Program, which funds Head Start. The nation-wide Head Start project provides preschool experience for poor children with an emphasis on parental involvement.

CDGM holds a warm spot in the hearts of liberal churchmen because the staff of the National Council of Churches’ Delta Ministry provided impetus and leadership during CDGM’s early days. The Board of Missions of the United Presbyterian Church designated its Mary Holmes Junior College in West Point, Mississippi, as legal recipient (grantee) for CDGM-earmarked funds.

CDGM has been hit by both the Left and the Right since its inception in May of 1965. White Mississippi politicians charged the program was run by civil-rights activists and northern troublemakers. Black nationalists regarded mere acceptance of federal funds as corrupt. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members working with the group quit in disillusionment, calling the program a sell-out. CDGM supporters hail it as a grassroots crusade against poverty, oppression, and the White Power Structure.

Aaron Henry, NAACP state president, states bluntly: “It’s the biggest industry in Mississippi.”

Facts support Henry’s view. OEO channeled $7 million through CDGM in its first year. By the end of last summer, CDGM was operating 121 centers for 9,135 children and employing 2,272 persons. The centers served the children hot lunches, provided medical and dental care, and exposed many youngsters for the first time to books, blocks, and blackboards.

The project was continually criticized by Mississippi congressmen and the local press. Over $100,000 was spent by the OEO Office of Inspection and the General Accounting Office in investigating CDGM.

Last October 2, OEO chief Sargent Shriver cut off CDGM funds. He charged payroll padding, nepotism, mismanagement, and failure to involve white Mississippians. His announcement triggered a three-month struggle that attracted national headlines and resulted in a church-labor-civil rights coalition dedicated to reversing Shriver’s position.

On October 14, seventy-five urban-church specialists from three Protestant denominations flew to Washington to picket OEO. Five days later a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, paid for by the ad hoc National Citizens Committee for CDGM, pleaded in bold headlines, “Say it isn’t so, Sargent Shriver.” The leftist New Republic thought it spotted a political conspiracy: “In part, Shriver’s decision was in response to pressures from Senator [John] Stennis [Democrat of Mississippi] and represents the desire of the White House.”

Administration critics became even more agitated when Shriver began showering anti-poverty gold on newly created agencies in Mississippi. A bi-racial group of loyalist Democrats, called Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP), got a $3 million grant. MAP, led by Henry, LeRoy Percy, Hodding Carter III, and leading Southern Baptist layman Owen Cooper, was promised $7 million more to conduct its own Head Start program.

Dr. John David Maguire of Christianity and Crisis magazine, a former Mississippi Freedom Rider, later wrote: “The President seemed to think that turning over the Head Start program to a new bi-racial board of ‘moderate’ Mississippi Democrats would provide him with a sufficient powerful political base to rally a loyalist Democratic Party and take the state in 1968.”

Henry scoffs at the Maguire analysis. “I am sure the White House was not involved. Berry called me and asked if I could help organize a group to carry on the program because CDGM could not legally be refunded.”

The church-labor-civil rights leaders, gathered under the umbrella of the Washington-based Citizens Crusade Against Poverty (CCAP), dispatched a ten-man inquiry team to Mississippi. Not very surprisingly, the group returned a strongly worded twenty-one page report refuting the charges against CDGM.

Shriver stood his ground. He said the report added nothing new and “therefore OEO does not foresee any change in its position.”

The “church lobby” made its most potent pitch for CDGM in the plush suite of Vice-President Humphrey in Miami Beach’s Fountainebleau Hotel. About a dozen clergymen gathered in Humphrey’s suite after his address to last December’s NCC General Assembly.

The genial Vice-President was in an expansive mood. He knew many of those present by their first names. They had worked closely with him when, as Senate majority whip, he led the bipartisan effort to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Humphrey reiterated the administration’s appreciation. He then asked about current NCC-sponsored programs and whether he could be of help.

“Mr. Vice-President, we need your help right now,” interjected Dr. Truman Douglass, executive vice-president of the Board for Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ. He told Humphrey about the plight of CDGM.

“We do not operate this program.” Humphrey said, “but if we can’t find a solution to this sticky question I think we should close shop.” He promised to get to work on it right away.

“It was the force of that conversation with Mr. Humphrey that night that is as important a factor as any that led to the refunding of CDGM,” says Dr. Kenneth Neigh, general secretary of the Board of National Missions of the United Presbyterian Church.

Humphrey’s pledge to the churchmen was made on December 7—a date former Navyman Shriver shouldn’t have overlooked. The NCC assembly adjourned December 9. The next day, Douglass was having lunch in the National Arts Club in New York City when he got a call from Washington.

“It was the Vice-President,” says Douglass. “He said OEO had offered to give CDGM an $8 million grant and he hoped we would agree to it.”

Negotiations that had been stalled for months suddenly began moving again. CDGM board members came up from Mississippi and closeted themselves with OEO officials. All this time, Humphrey obviously was keeping the pressure on.

Neigh and Douglass both received calls in New York City from Humphrey on December 16. The Vice-President said a settlement was in the offing and advised Neigh to come to Washington. When Neigh walked into the CCAP basement offices, a call was waiting him from Humphrey. Neigh said the Vice-President assured him OEO would make the grant. That evening Shriver issued a statement saying he was “delighted that OEO has been able to resolve its problems with CDGM.” He emphasized that the grant was made only after CDGM agreed to tighten its overall operation and follow OEO guidelines. One provision was that the United Presbyterians accept fiscal and administrative responsibility for CDGM.

“That was just a slick public-relations job by Shriver,” says Neigh. “There is no change at all in our responsibility. Over-emphasis of our part makes it look like we are in violation of the church-state principle.”

Actually, both sides made concessions. CDGM’s scope of operation was cut back from twenty-eight counties to fourteen. The board of directors was enlarged, and a guarantee was given that six of its nineteen members will be white. OEO backed away from its demand that Harvard-educated CDGM director John Mudd be replaced. Mudd stays in Mississippi.

CDGM board chairman James F. McRee, a 48-year-old Methodist minister, says that “if it hadn’t been for the churches, the full story may not have been told.”

OEO’s Berry, tamping the tobacco in his pipe, remarked: “If this will in any way strengthen the churches’ interest in the War on Poverty, then let them enjoy the luxury of their boast. I think CDGM would have been refunded even if the churches had not been involved.”

Grape Lobbyist Picked

The bitter battle between grape growers and pickers in Delano, California, spread to Washington, D. C., this month. The Rev. Eugene Boutillier has been ordained by a church-labor coalition to lobby for the striking grape pickers.

Boutillier, a United Church of Christ minister who has walked the picket line in Delano, will head the National Campaign for Agricultural Democracy (NCAD). His office is in the Methodist Building across from the Capitol.

The minister’s goal will be to get grape-pickers in particular and farm workers in general under the National Labor Relations Act. This would mean the NLRB could enter the Delano dispute, enhancing pickers’ chances of gaining recognition for their union. He will register as a lobbyist—unlike most religious representatives.

U.S.I.A. Religion Troika

The U.S. Information Agency chose an interfaith capital trio as religion advisors, replacing Executive Director Edgar Chandler of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago, named in 1960 and inactive of late. Msgr. George Higgins and Rabbi Richard Hirsch—Catholic and Jewish social action directors—and Methodist District Superintendent Edward Carroll will check for accuracy and sensitivities in religious material.

Hargis Vs. Internal Revenue

Billy James Hargis says his militant, anti-Communist Christian Crusade lost federal tax exemption because it politicked for legislation to permit school prayer. “LBJ and his administration are not beyond using departments of the government to harass those who disagree with them,” Hargis contends. He charges that the Johnson administration has singled out his organization as an example to other fundamentalists.

Hargis argues that it is unfair for his group to lose exemption while the National Council of Churches and other tax-exempt groups continue to lobby in Washington on legislative matters. He said that his finances are in good shape and that chances are good for reinstatement of exemption in a court appeal.

Meanwhile, Christian Herald reveals this month that Hargis was the author of the famous 1951 speech in the U.S. Senate by the late Joseph McCarthy attacking the late Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam.

The Reign’S The Same

The final version of Spain’s new law on religious freedom is turning into a disappointing document that is ecumenical only in that it restricts Protestants, Jews, and progressive Catholics alike.

The new law, passed overwhelmingly in a nationwide referendum, was weakened by last-minute changes made by the Spanish Cabinet presided over by Generalissimo Franco. The final text is expected to win parliamentary approval in a few weeks.

Protestants fear the alterations will limit, if not prevent, spreading the Gospel by writing or over radio and television and may prohibit making converts.

Baptist pastor Jose Cardona of Madrid, secretary general of the Evangelical Defense Commission, called a meeting of all Protestants for March 20 to determine what their attitude should be toward the new law.

Objections are aimed primarily at the rewriting of Article 9, covering communication, and the elimination of Article 12, governing the organized activity of Spaniards “moved by their religious beliefs.”

The first version of Article 9 granted “rights of individuals and religious communities to ‘dissemination’ of their faith by word of mouth and written word.”

The new text substitutes “teaching” for “dissemination.” Cardona points out that in Spanish “dissemination” has a much wider meaning than “teaching” and that the change may presage renewed difficulties over unauthorized “propaganda” and “proselytism” by religious minorities.

Article 12 would have permitted Spaniards “moved by their religious beliefs” to set up educational, cultural, and social establishments. The total suppression of this article indicates that Protestant churches may be restricted to devotional activity.

Similar restrictions are a recurring complaint of Catholic Action leaders, another group of Spaniards “moved by their religious beliefs,” who feel that certain forms of religious activity should be carried on outside the walls of churches.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy has cracked down on Catholic Action groups, suspending all activity of the organization on a national level and confiscating Action publications. The hierarchy also dismissed the editor and entire editorial board of the Catholic youth weekly Signo, one of the most outspoken and controversial Catholic voices in Spain.

Suppression of Catholic activity has been most notable in Barcelona, where a year ago police beat more than 100 demonstrating priests.

Cardona, taking a broad view of the new law, says, “It is the best we can do at the moment.”

A high government official commented, “Nothing else was possible within the present political realities of Spain.” Apparently, the reign in Spain is mainly the same.

College, Hospital Cut Church Ties

For the first time, a Southern Baptist college has been freed from church control so it can get federal aid. Action formally releasing Kentucky Southern College from the state Baptist convention was taken March 11 by the convention executive board.

Only days before, the Arkansas Baptist Convention had severed official ties with its medical center in Little Rock to enable the center to apply for federal funds.

Kentucky Baptists last June prohibited public aid, though they relaxed the policy in November to permit federal loans. President Rollin Burhans said his 800-student college would die without federal aid. The seven-year-old school joined the Baptist convention in 1962, but the Baptists’ $420,000 in aid has fallen far short of a pledged $2 million. Burhans puts immediate college needs at $5 million.

To help out, the Baptists granted $300,000 immediately, another $200,000 by July, and $77,010 annually for five years to repay loans. But the Baptists balked at assuming responsibility for a $898,000 loan to the college last year.

Burhans predicts that “every church-related college that does not have tremendous endowment funds” ultimately will have to cut church ties to maintain “quality Christian colleges.” Maybe, he said, Kentucky Southern will become a Baptist “satellite.”

DOUGLAS N. KANE

A Statesman’S Secret Faith

Dag Hammarskjöld: The Statesman and his Faith, by Henry P. Van Dusen (Harper & Row, 1967, 235 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Sherwood E. Wirt, editor, “Decision,” Minneapolis, Minnesota.

This is a moving book about a great spirit of our time. As far as I know, only one man was fully aware of Dag Hammarskjold’s secret faith before the appearance of the spiritual diary he kept for thirty years. That man was Billy Graham. The evangelist had learned in private conversation what none of the personnel of the United Nations secretariat, over which Hammarskjöld presided for nearly a decade, had apparently discovered: that the lonely Swede had a strong personal faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. This fact was brought out in Graham’s statements at the time of the African plane tragedy, when the evangelist’s tribute, unlike others from around the world, referred to Hammarskjöld’s deep devotion to Christ.

In this volume Van Dusen helpfully documents the evidence of Hammarskjöld’s faith by relating the entries in Markings (the diary) to significant events in the statesman’s life. He shows that a “crisis” and a “conversion” seem to have come late in 1952. “I said Yes to Someone,” Hammarskjöld wrote of the experience. It was about this time that Hammarskjöld became General Secretary of the United Nations.

Van Dusen notes that from this period scriptural references began to proliferate in the diary. Curiously, there were no references to the Apostle Paul; yet the four Gospels were quoted repeatedly, as were the Psalms. “The God whom Hammarskjöld knew,” concludes Van Dusen, “was the God of the Psalmists and of Jesus Christ.”

Hammarskjöld also leaned heavily on certain Christian mystics, notably Thomas a Kempis, John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart. He was captivated by the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The profundity of his devotion to God, as it comes through in ejaculation found throughout the Markings, puts to shame much of our conventional evangelical patter. He writes:

Thou

Whom I do not know

But Whose I am.

Thou

Whom I do not comprehend

But Who has dedicated me …

Van Dusen is at some pains to establish the lack of resemblance between Hammarskjöld’s mature faith and the Lutheran piety of his parents (his father was prime minister of Sweden front 1914 to 1917). Difference there was; and yet in Hammarskjold’s own single public confession he said, “Experience and honest thinking has led me in a circle; I now recognize and endorse, unreservedly, those very beliefs which were once handed down to me.” He wrote in his secret diary, “Only one thing counts: faith … which reality seems so thoroughly to confute.”

Charles Malik of Lebanon and others have drawn attention to the gaps in Hammarskjöld’s expression of that faith. Admittedly, he was not a brand-name Protestant. But in the diary that forms the basis of this interpretative volume, he was not seeking to witness to men about his love for God. He was actually communicating with God and trying, in some measure, to jot down what God was saying to him. No wonder Markings became a best-seller!

Van Dusen, president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, has done his work well. His commentary on the diary, his painstaking research into Hammarskjöld’s life, and his defense of the man’s personal character are a notable contribution. The world that Hammarskjöld tried so valiantly to hold together owes a debt to Van Dusen for giving us this perceptive insight into his life.

‘Christian Atheism’ In Canada

A Church Without God, by Ernest Harrison (McClelland and Stewart, 1966, 149 pp., $4.50; also Lippincott, 1967, $3.95), is reviewed by J. Berkley Reynolds, Canadian editorial representative,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The Rev. Ernest Harrison is Canada’s own God-is-dead theologian. His chief responsibility when he headed the religious education department of the Anglican Church of Canada was the production of the Anglicans’ new Sunday school curriculum, and on his recommendation Pierre Berton was commissioned to write The Comfortable Pew.

Harrison is the advocate of a “new freedom” and is bent upon eliminating historic creeds and ancient liturgies of the Church. The church to which he addresses himself in A Church Without God is obviously not one of strong evangelical growth. He calls her “Mother Church.” And he claims she is now dead. Her authority is gone. The hospitals and schools she built are operated by the state, and nobody takes seriously her self-created creeds. People are free to think for themselves.

After he has asserted his views on the death of “Mother Church,” Harrison goes on to proclaim his own “Christian atheism.” In this he goes beyond Robinson, Altizer, and Hamilton, who created problems by believing in a onetime existence of God. Says Harrison, “I am on the staff of an Anglican parish in Toronto. I claim to be a Christian and an Anglican; yet I can say, in all seriousness, that there is no God.”

Harrison gives five choices for Christian atheism, which includes the belief “that there never was a God, that there is no God now, and that there never will be.” Strangely enough, this is followed by the call to “walk more freely into the presence of Jesus Christ.” He doubts whether this Jesus believed in God or arose from the dead. He suggests that perhaps Christ had sexual intercourse with women “and maybe got drunk.”

Not surprisingly the direction Harrison has chosen soon leads him to discard the Bible as objective revelation. The Bible is only one of the many contexts in which we live our lives, and the Christian must be free even to reject the Bible as a context. Harrison sees as the converse of this a literalistic interpretation and fails to deal with the conservative evangelical approach.

Having pushed the Bible aside as God’s norm or standard, he very easily moves into the new morality and an espousal of situational ethics. The Ten Commandments are relative. Love is the rule. “Every situation must be judged on its merits, and there is only one test which may legitimately be applied: is love fulfilled?” Any action is right by any standard, if there is trust and love. He miserably fails to define love or to indicate its source. Marriage no longer provides a true test for the rightness or wrongness of sexual intercourse. The real point is whether or not it is meaningful to both parties.

As a striking example of current “Christian atheism,” this book is an eye-opener. Besides the pathos that is very evident in Harrison’s own religious life, his book also reflects the lethargy of his own church, which he feels is incapacitated. Evangelicals should take warning from this author lest they substitute forms for the pure content of the Gospel and end up with “A Church Without God.”

Acclaim For A Christian Poet

The Dumbfounding, by Margaret Avison (W. W. Norton, 1966, 99 pp., $4.50; also, George J. McLeod, $5.75), is reviewed by David D. Stewart, associate professor and chairman, Department of German, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario.

The most recent book by Margaret Avison offers what most of us have learned to do without. Here is first-rate Christian poetry, received with enthusiasm by avowedly secular critics such as A. J. M. Smith, who calls The Dumbfounding “the most significant book of poetry published by a Canadian since the modern movement got under way more than a score of years ago” (Canadian Forum, September, 1966).

One is struck by the range and concreteness of Miss Avison’s verse. She has observed keenly and compassionately the world around her, and combines unobtrusive scholarship with a fine, pawky humor. Very many of the poems in this volume describe commonplace sights and situations: bleak city rooms (“the taps listen, in the unlighted bathroom”), seeds in their store-bins, biding their time; weary winter trees; pigeons in the morning park (“… and beauty/is fan-tailed, gray and dove gray aslant, folding in / from the white fury of day”). At the same time, this is distinctly “poésie engagée.” It does not get stuck in the foreground of description and detail; rather, it reveals a very large poetic vision, which shows us the world so well because the poet has seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ: “In thy light we see light.”

One of the many graces of Miss Avison’s book is that there is no discontinuity in vision or style between the poems that treat things of the everyday world and the more obviously metaphysical ones, such as “The Word” and “The Dumbfounding,” in which Christ is addressed in worship. Just as it is in our here-and-now language that the incarnate Saviour meets us, so for the poet there is no hermetic Christian diction of piety.

Running through the collection is a “metaphorical counterpoint” based on the images of man’s lost estate and God’s redemptive coming used by John in the first chapter of his gospel: word, life, light, face. Thus in “The Earth that Falls Away” Miss Avison sketches the ancient and modern ways in which men enact John’s statement about loving darkness rather than light. When Christ comes we fear his gaze: “In the intolerable hour / our fingers and fists / blunder for blindfolds / to have you in our power!”

In one of her most searching poems, “The Mirrored Man,” published before her conversion in her collection Winter Sun, Miss Avison had written:

All of us, flung in one

Murky parabola,

Seek out some pivot for significance,

Leery of comets’ tails, mask-merry,

Wondering at the centre

Who will gain access, search the citadel

To its last, secret door?

And what face will the violator find

When he confronts the glass?

This motif of facelessness, being finally left alone or unnoticed in the universe, is picked up, now in Christian affirmation, in the poem “… Person, or A Hymn on and to the Holy Ghost”:

Let the one you show me

ask you, for me,

you, all but lost in

the one in three,

to lead my self, effaced

in the known Light,

to be in him released

from facelessness,

so that where you

(unseen, unguessed, liable

to grievous hurt) would go

I may show him visible.

Because this poet has seen and knows modern secular man so well, capturing his self-awareness in her verse, both Christian and non-Christian readers alike will be prepared to follow her when she tells us what she knows of God. And it is a very great deal indeed.

In The Cultural Context

Ancient Orient and Old Testament, by K. A. Kitchen (Inter-Varsity, 1966, 191 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Marvin R. Wilson, chairman, Division of Biblical Studies, Barrington College, Barrington, Rhode Island.

Here is a scholarly work that merits the attention of every serious student of the Old Testament. K. A. Kitchen, lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Oriental Studies at Liverpool University, invites the reader to “view afresh the Old Testament writings in their proper Ancient Near Eastern context.” This book is not an exhaustive treatment of the subject; rather, it aims to give some idea of the kind of contribution a study of the Ancient Orient ought to make to the study of the Old Testament by employing a wide sampling of cultural, historical, critical, and linguistic topics. In this task Kitchen succeeds admirably. His work is extensively documented, and the copious, up-to-date bibliographical listing are alone well worth the price of the book.

Kitchen is interested in re-examining the foundations through an inductive approach based upon a personal control of much of the primary source-material. His discussions are candid, forthright, and for the most part dispassionate. He interacts to a considerable degree with the pertinent Egyptological data bearing on the Old Testament, an area too often neglected in the past. In my opinion, however, he passes over too lightly the evidence accumulated by Professor Cyrus Gordon of an East Mediterranean cultural continuum shared by both Hebrew and Greek civilizations (cf. p. 81).

Reading for Perspective

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

• Christian Reflections, by C. S. Lewis (Eerdmans, $3.95). The devout faith and brilliant intellect of the late Cambridge scholar and Christian apologist illuminate vital topics of culture and religion. A must for C. S. Lewis enthusiasts.

• A Christianity Today Reader, edited by Frank E. Gaebelein (Meredith, $7.95). An inviting sampler of choice articles, editorials, news stories, book reviews, and features published in CHRISTIANITY TODAY during the past decade.

• Theology of the English Reformers, by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (Eerdmans, $5.95). A compendium of writings by English reformers (e.g., Tyndale, Latimer, and Cranmer) that shows the biblical basis of their teachings.

In developing his thesis, Kitchen takes several chapters to discuss Hebrew chronology. Since, in his own words, “no appeal whatsoever has been made to any theological starting point,” he feels free to go where the evidence leads him. Kitchen dates the patriarchs from 2000 to 1700 B.C. He prefers to date the Exodus after the accession of Rameses II and sets the limits for the Exodus as roughly 1290 to 1260 B.C. and for the beginning of the conquest about 1250 to 1220 B.C. The resulting interval about 300 years between the Exodus and the early years of Solomon (c. 971/970 B.C.) is explained on the basis of other lists of kings in the Ancient Near East, which are not “synchronous histories” (as found in the Book of Kings) but rather contemporary or partly concurrent (not all consecutive) lists. Kitchen deals with First Kings 6:1 by stating that “in the Ancient Orient, chroniclers and other writers often used excerpts from fuller records and this might explain the 480 years—a total of selected figures (details now unknown) taken from a larger total.” The reader can appreciate the author’s approach to the solution of a complex problem whether or not he fully accepts his conclusions.

In addition to historical problems, Kitchen discusses Hebrew contacts with Near Eastern religions. His treatment of the Sinai Covenant, which interacts favorably with Mendenhall’s view, is most enlightening. In later chapters the author deals with matters of literary criticism (documentary hypothesis, form criticism, and oral tradition), linguistic study (Ugaritic contributions are particularly noted), and related topics.

Kitchen’s volume is a significant stride in the direction biblical studies must take if they are to keep abreast with recent discovery. In reading this work, one is impressed anew that the Old Testament Scriptures can be properly understood as biblical revelation only when they are viewed as part of the warp and woof of the East Mediterranean culture in which the Hebrews dwelt.

Canadian Church Growth

The Church Grows in Canada, by Douglas J. Wilson (Ryerson Press, 1966, 224 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Donald C. Masters, professor of Canadian history, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario.

Dr. Wilson, editor of religion for the Montreal Star, has produced a useful volume tracing the establishment and development of the various religious groups in Canada, not only Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, but also non-Christian cults like the Unitarians, the Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. He begins with the church in New France and ends with the Canadian Council of Churches.

Although his own viewpoint is obviously liberal, Wilson makes a commendable attempt to be fair to everybody. He is reasonably fair to the Salvation Army and the Pentecostals and very favorable to the Unitarians, of whom he writes:

Though the Unitarians as a body may be cool or often uncommitted to basic Christian tenets, they are warmly alert to the needs of suffering humanity, always seeking to add service to their avowed goal of a fellowship in widening experiences. Personal and social integration dominate their questing search.…

He devotes a great deal of space to the movement toward church union in Canada and is a strong advocate of the great instrument of cooperation between some of the Protestant Churches, the Canadian Council of Churches. “The separate denominations and churches,” he says, “will have to dwindle in importance, while concerted efforts through the Canadian Council of Churches or other national bodies will have to increase.”

In my opinion, Wilson does not give enough recognition to the role played by the more scholarly exponents of conservative religious opinions. Anglican evangelicals like Bishop Benjamin Cronyn, Edward and S. H. Blake, and James P. Sheraton, Presbyterians like D. H. MacVicar and Sir William Dawson, and comparable figures in other denominations made an important contribution to Canadian Protestantism in the nineteenth century. They have had many worthy successors in our century who have exercised a profound influence in the work of interdenominational bodies such as the Canadian Bible Society, the Gideons, and the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Wilson’s book contains a section on the liberal Student Christian Movement but does not mention the conservative IVCF.

In his section on “The Task Ahead,” the author gives a sympathetic account of “the message” of the early Christian Church. In these days of radical theology, it is encouraging to read of the earliest Christians that “supremely it was in the Incarnation that they found the unique and perfect climate to these divine interventions [the mighty acts of God in human history].” I wish Wilson had seen fit to include a clear reference to the Atonement, a doctrine so basic in orthodox Christian thinking. His failure to do so is probably indicative of his differences with conservative Christians.

An Excellent Appetizer

The Cross in Canada: Vignettes of the Churches Across Four Centuries, edited by John S. Moir (Ryerson Press, 1966, 247 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Clarence M. Nicholson, principal, Pine Hill Divinity Hall, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The Canadian Centennial has occasioned a great deal of historical research in Canada, and this useful, sometimes amusing book is one of its ecclesiastical products. We are given selections from records of our past, from the coming of Jacques Cartier to our present ecumenical endeavors.

American readers will be struck by the similarity of the story of the labors and adventures of Canadian pioneers to their own sagas of early days, both east and west. Alongside Captain John Smith, there is the even more heroic figure of Father Brébeuf. Rand and Evans are Canadian counterparts of Williams and Brainerd. We even have a Canadian copy of William Jennings Bryan in the exuberant William (Bible Bill) Aber-hard.

Yet, as John Webster Grant points out in his introduction, there is a significant difference in the relation of the Canadian churches to the national community, when compared with the American experience. The theory of the relation of the church to the state was developed within a different historic situation here. As Grant says of the Canadian churches, “While abandoning claims to the privileges of establishment, they remained National in conception.”

John Moir has selected the documents with competence and a light hand. Echoes of the church union debates of the 1920s are balanced by a gentle caricature of Canadian churchmen done by Stephen Leacock. This is an excellent appetizer for a larger course in Canadian history.

Evangelical Impact—Then And Now

Protestant Church Colleges in Canada: A History, by D. C. Masters (University of Toronto, 1966, 225 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Leslie K. Tarr, administrator, General Baptist Seminary, Toronto, Ontario.

“Higher education in Canada owes a tremendous debt to the Christian churches.” After reading Dr. Masters’ history, one can hardly contest his conclusion. The book is a documented tribute to the influence of Canadian churches upon higher education. As the foreword points out, “all but a dozen of the universities of Canada had their origins as church-sponsored institutions.”

The study shows that most of the Protestant church colleges were established by persons committed to an orthodox viewpoint. The present picture? “There are few advocates of the older Evangelical position in the independent or affiliated church colleges. With the possible exception of Waterloo Collge [Waterloo Lutheran University], most of the church colleges, in so far as they were concerned with religion at all, were liberal, neo-orthodox, or existentialist in tone.”

Today only four of the original nineteen church-related liberal-arts colleges are independent—Acadia, Bishop’s, Mount Allison, and Waterloo Lutheran. (And are there not rumblings at Acadia?)

In sharp contrast to the strong evangelical roots of Canadian higher education is the present lack of evangelical impact. Probably the greatest influence is had by men—like Dr. Masters—who are teaching liberal-arts subjects in the secular universities.

Masters’ fair and thorough treatment should impress any reader. He has obviously studied his sources and has delved even into the student publications, which often reflect faculty thinking.

One suspects that the tribute paid to the early professors at Brandon College could have been paid to many of these Canadian educational pioneers: “They were contributing their brilliant talents … with a zeal as great as that of any missionary, and under conditions similar in primitiveness and stringency.”

As a Baptist who has a reputation (totally undeserved!) for loving contention, I did miss mention of the Crowe case at United College in Winnipeg and the more recent scuffle at Acadia. Were these incidents not related to the church-academic tension in higher education?

Masters’ fine study is one of three in a series. The others will deal with English and French Catholic colleges.

Three Centuries Of Evangelism

History of Evangelism, by Paulus Scharpff, translated by Helga Bender Henry (Eerdmans, 1966, 373 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by Mark W. Lee, chairman, Department of Speech, Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington.

The subtitle of Scharpff’s work clarifies the scope of his study: “Three Hundred Years of Evangelism in Germany, Great Britain and the United States of America.” Consequently, readers should not expect a report on the leading evangelistic efforts of the early centuries of the Church or on striking occurrences in modern times (e.g., the Swedish movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century or the Korean early in the twentieth). A closing section written by Kenneth L. Chafin provides a short summary of evangelism in America during the last fifty years.

The translation into English of History of Evangelism appears at a time when recent high-level discussions of the need for total Christian witness have had broad circulation among laymen. Numerous ministers have reported the happenings of the World Congress on Evangelism and the NCC convention in Florida. Nearly all significant religious journals and many secular ones have reviewed these meetings also. Scharpff’s book may contribute to the enthusiasm that will rise, it is hoped, from this investigation of evangelism.

The pietism that arose in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the starting point for Scharpff, although he includes a short beginning review of several important movements during the centuries from about 1000 until 1600. He believes that evangelism, as we know it, could not function fully in earlier times because of the prevailing religious and political restrictions.

Scharpff reveals his understanding of the use of the various means of sacred persuasion. Tracts, Bible portions, and hymns, as well as preaching, have been important methods for evangelism. Luther’s hymns, for example, were considered as effective as his sermons. But in every period, preaching has been the dominant means.

In my opinion, Scharpff’s style either was not fully developed or suffered in translation. The use of superlatives and descriptions that are not discreet in meaning, the phrase interpretations, and extraneous remarks suggest that his editing of his work was inadequate. And the repetition of a number of religious clichés suggests an unimaginative approach. Sometimes compact, sometimes comprehensive, the book is not consistent in those virtues; it is unevenly written. Many passages are pedantic and deal with minutiae rather than movements, causes, and effects. Although one can be inspired by Scharpff’s vignettes and instructed by his references to the origin of various methods, the book lacks the strength of unity. Revision would have given him a much better work, but the illness that led to his death must have prevented final editing.

Much of what is written by evangelicals lacks literary craftsmanship; perhaps this pernicious weakness is itself a barrier to effective evangelism.

History of Evangelism has striking omissions, such as the story of evangelism among Pentecostal groups and in small evangelical denominations. Furthermore, in order to communicate effectively the story of evangelism, a Christian scholar will have to wrestle with the repeated questions being raised about the matter. Note the book by William G. McLoughlin, Jr., Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham, and others. Some of the questions are: Why are there so many excesses related to evangelistic efforts? Why are the movements so often ephemeral or transitory? Yet perhaps Scharpff was interested, not in answering questions, but in sharing an inspiration he had felt for decades.

Book Briefs

Thy Kingdom Come, by John E. Hines (Morehouse-Barlow, 1967, 123 pp., $3.95). The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church invites men to a new life in the Kingdom of God. A popular presentation—interesting but superficial.

Pew Asks: Pulpit Answers, by W. R. Clarke (Christopher, 1967, 161 pp., $3.95). Actual questions posed by contemporary laymen answered candidly and sensibly by a Presbyterian pastor.

Faith and Philosophy, by James Richmond (Lippincott, 1966, 224 pp., $3.95). A discussion of the contribution of philosophy to religion, from Hume and Kant to Barth and Braithwaite.

Creeds, Councils, and Controversies, edited by J. Stevenson (Seabury, 1966, 390 pp., $9). A collection of documents that illuminate church history, A.D. 337–461.

The World Treasury of Religious Quotations, compiled and edited by Ralph L. Woods (Hawthorn, 1966, 1,106 pp., $15). Fifteen thousand dandy bits of knowledge and opinion that could brighten dull sermons and add luster to any minister’s reputation for erudition!

The Art of Being a Sinner, by John M. Krumm (Seabury, 1967, 128 pp., $3.50). With biblical insights and literary allusions, Krumm fascinatingly discusses the meaning, effects, and cure of sin.

God with Us: A Life of Jesus for Young Readers, by Marianne Radius (Eerdmans, 1966, 286 pp., $4.50). An attractive, readable, and challenging presentation of the life of Christ for young people.

Beacon Bible Commentary, Volume IV: The Major Prophets, by Ross E. Price, et al. (Beacon Hill, 1966, 694 pp., $5.95). A sound exegetical exposition of the major prophets by Church of the Nazarene scholars. Upholds such traditional views as the unity of the Book of Isaiah and sixth century B.C. dating of Daniel.

Preaching as Counseling, by Edmund Holt Linn (Judson, 1966, 159 pp., $3.95). A study of Harry Emerson Fosdick’s pulpit theory, which centered on a specific problem in the life of the individual. His sermonizing method includes many sound principles but does not achieve the immediate and long-range results that expository preaching achieves.

Paperbacks

The Christian Alternative to Socialism, by Irving E. Howard (Crestwood Books, 1966, 155 pp., $2.50). From a Christian perspective Howard defends free-market capitalism and criticizes planned economies.

Youth in Crisis, edited by Peter C. Moore (Seabury, 1966, 146 pp., $2), Charles Malik leads off a series of essays on the crisis facing young people and the responsibility of the schools to them. Be sure to read Frank Gaebelein’s address, “The Christ of Crisis,” but go easy on the immature ramblings of William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

The Grace of God, by Samuel J. Mikolaski (Eerdmans, 1966, 108 pp., $1.65). An excellent study of the centrality of grace in the relation between God and man. Considers Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrines of grace along with that set forth in Scripture. Recommended.

Freeway to Babylon, by Talmage Wilson (self-published, 1966, 312 pp., $1.50). The second edition of a book written and published by an experienced Presbyterian missionary in which he calls attention to the deterioration of theology in his church.

Doomsday Cult, by John Lofland (Prentice-Hall, 1966, 276 pp., $3.75). An illuminating sociological study of the functioning of an unidentified cultic group: steps in conversion, methods of proselytization, and maintenance of cultic life.

Dear Subjects Of The Kingdom:

The religious carousel continues to whirl and so does Homer A. Tomlinson: King of the World, Bishop of the Church of God (Queens Village, N. Y.), and National Chairman of the Theocratic Party.

You may recall that at 3 P.M. on October 7, 1966, King Homer assumed the Throne of David in Jerusalem. He there proclaimed, “We’ve reached the land of corn and wine.” (Corn, si! Vino, no!) Then, returning home, he began to enroll loyal subjects for $2 a month in his 1967 Campaign for Righteousness.

The approaching 1968 election, however, has made King/ Bishop/ Chairman Homer turn his attention to the Theocratic Party, which he founded in Fulton, Missouri, in 1960. Recently his reverend majesty proposed that the U. S. capital be moved to Fulton and the U. N. capital to Ecclesia, his 330-square-mile domain near Jerusalem. But choosing the party presidential candidate was a problem. Although he had been his party’s candidate in ’60 and ’64, Homer realized that as reigning King of the World he could hardly condescend to run for the Presidency. So Bishop William R. Rogers, his olive-branch-carrying emissary to Viet Nam, was tapped as the party’s ’68 nominee.

Bishop Rogers has vowed to hit the campaign trail with “Joshua-Jericho Exploits.” He will walk seven times around every county courthouse in the fifty states expecting to see “walls of unrighteousness” fall. If the bishop covers all 3,130 counties, he will have done 21,910 laps. Such a vigorous candidate will certainly deserve consideration both at the polls and at Dr. Scholl’s.

But the candidacy of Rogers poses unprecedented questions for the American electorate. If elected, will not Rogers as President pay homage to Homer the King? Will not Theocratic Party plans spell doom for Washington as the citadel of democracy? Will not our national sovereignty be lost in the international shuffle at the court of Ecclesia, King Homer’s Camelot?

In short, can we afford the luxury of Homer’s Kingdom of Righteousness? That, Mr. and Mrs. America, is the theo-political question we must answer.

Theocratically, EUTYCHUS III

Christian University: Pro And Con

“The Need for a Christian University” (Feb. 17) was the cry of a prophet in the wilderness of higher education today. I find myself in complete agreement.… The greatest need for a Christian university is to provide Christian teachers for our little Christian colleges. Without a Christian university, where do we find men with excellent preparation, men with doctoral preparation, to staff our church colleges?

You are pleading for a great cause. I am not certain that a Christian university can be created today. With taxation in our land sheer confiscation of property, I doubt that the money can be raised. But a Christian university is the greatest need of American higher education. So keep crying, even if you are crying in the wilderness. And there are some of us who do stand ready to help beat the bushes to find the dollars that will implement your vision. But do not settle for less than an excellent university.

J. STANLEY HARKER

President

Grove City College

Grove City, Pa.

The best option we have is with Christian faculty who are willing to evangelize within the context of the secular university. It has been my experience that it often takes only a few outspoken faculty to influence the course a university will adopt. Unfortunately, the Christian professor has been strangely silent. I make two requests: First, pray for faculty members on secular campuses instead of condemning them. Second, eliminate the dying Christian colleges and propel Christian faculty into the main currents of our world.…

DANIEL W. GREGG

Minneapolis, Minn.

Keep plugging away for this. If we could get one university that would present the realities of life within the framework of a world view that is more than natural—one that is supernatural—this would be one of the greatest contributions to our Western civilization that we could possibly have.… I sincerely believe that peoples’ hearts are hungry for this type of education, and I know that it is very needed.

C. E. AUTREY

Director, Division of Evangelism

Home Mission Board

Southern Baptist Convention

Atlanta, Ga.

I appreciated the point about fragmentation in education in “The Need for a Christian University.” Many students find their studies unrelated to real life, and those who have changed disciplines along the line notice even more the cleavage.…

HOWARD ANDERSEN

Manchester, England

The current colloquium over a Christian university or a Christian college on a secular campus interests me very much. The idea of a national institution for advanced study in Christian thought seems reasonable to me. Dean Snyder’s plan for a Christian college is quite a different matter. Implicit in his plan is the assumption that Christians should acquire secular knowledge in a way different to that of other students. I question this assumption. The intellectual forum of the secular arts classroom is perfectly adequate for secular instruction.

ANGUS M. GUNN

Assistant Professor

The University of British Columbia

Vancouver, B. C.

As an evangelical Christian who attended both Christian schools and a state university I believe that the type of institution Snyder suggests would help students to be useful Christians as well as informed citizens.

ROBERT CLOUSE

Assistant Professor of History

Indiana State University

Terre Haute, Ind.

John Snyder’s proposal is our only hope for evangelical faith plus academic relevance. Christian students have to pay for residence anyway. Secular universities are glad to provide the plant and the specialists. At little cost we could add an evangelical perspective in every discipline and the stimulus to real excellence. My only criticism is that Snyder’s article should have read, “Why Not A Christian College on Every Major University Campus?”

ROBERT BROW

Toronto, Ont.

There can be no doubt that the “Christian stake in higher learning has come upon hard times.” This is indeed unfortunate, and we are paying a high price for the same. We trust that your committee recently appointed to investigate possibilities for the formation of an Institute for Advanced Christian Studies will meet with an encouraging response.

STUART E. MURRAY

Principal

United Baptist Bible Training School

Moncton, New Brunswick

Anti Anti-Catholic Polemic

I was surprised that an editorial like “Sinning by Defection” (Feb. 17) would appear.… To launch an anti-Catholic polemic by making Fr. Winfrid Herbst and the diocese of Rome the normative voice for Roman Catholicism is just about as fair, honest, and Christian as for a Roman Catholic to ridicule evangelical Protestantism by making snakehandlers and Carl McIntire its official spokesmen. Anyone who knows anything about Catholicism today knows that Father Herbst’s syndicated column remarks about a Catholic’s conversion to Protestantism reflect a pre-Vatican II mentality. That mentality is no longer represented by any leading thinker in Catholicism with whom I am familiar.… To use words such as “apostasy” and “excommunication” as Father Herbst does is contrary to the whole mood and vocabulary of the council documents. This fact is especially significant when it is realized that those documents themselves have been so worded as to win the approval of both “progressives” and “conservatives”.…

Can an evangelical professor at a Catholic college not expect his colleagues to leave diatribe to unbelievers and to write the kind of constructive criticism which most Catholics who read CHRISTIANITY TODAY would sincerely welcome.

LESLIE R. KEYLOCK

Assistant Professor of Theology

St. Norbert College

West De Pere, Wis.

I, too, read the item in Our Sunday Visitor and remember thinking, “I hope no Protestants read this.” I see by your editorial some did.…

However, it seems to me rather inconsistent for evangelicals who eschew the ecumenical movement to deride certain Catholics for being—although you do not use the word—un-ecumenical.

In our small New Hampshire town we have been holding infrequent ecumenical prayer services for two or three years in which we rotate meetings in each of the participating churches, which include Congregational (UCC), Methodist, Baptist (ABC), Episcopal, and Roman Catholic. This represents all the churches in town save one: a Conservative Baptist congregation. (One wonders how they expect to convert us heathen if they refuse to associate with us.) When the pastor of that church came to found his congregation he made the statement that, as far as he was concerned, there was not a single Christian church in town and that his congregation was to be the first.

If this were an isolated event I would not even mention it; but, judging from the several evangelicals I have known, this offensive and boorish holier-than-thou attitude is almost a trademark. These evangelicals that I know love to brag (they call it “witnessing”) about how many times they go to church in a week, their daily Bible reading, or their tithing. (I confess, the most annoying part about their bragging is their complete lack of interest when, in retaliation, I point out that I know many Catholics, including myself, who do the same things.)

But the most annoying trait of evangelicals—as long as I’m in a complaining mood I might as well let it all out—is their use of phrases such as “Christian”.… as though they have a copyright on the title Christian.…

We—evangelicals and Catholics—are much closer to each other, theologically, than either of us are to more liberal Christians, and in a world where, percentage-wise, Christianity is losing ground, I believe we really need each other.

JAMES K. GALLAGHER

Exeter, N. H.

Paranoidal Reaction?

Many of us find it interesting that some found [part of my] invocation (“Give a vision of breadth and depth, and of encompassing magnitude and charity, that no narrow dogmatism may obscure the glory of thy Kingdom”) to be “more a swipe at Graham than a prayer to God” (“Billy Graham Faces Berkeley Rebels,” News, Feb. 17). Is someone trying to justify “narrow dogmatism,” or is it a paranoidal reaction?

S. F. NISHI

Episcopal Ministry to the University

Berkeley, Calif.

Indigenous Campus Witness

Martin L. Singewald in “New Religious Approaches to the Campus” (Feb. 17), has forgotten the most potent force for reaching the “90 per cent of the students [who] have no contact with organized Christianity”: the other 10 per cent. Professional Christians on campus are not looking for “outside help.” The Church has failed to reach the campus precisely because it is outside. Christianity on campus would profit more from “inside” help—committed students and faculty who through an indigenous fellowship can give a corporate and sustained witness to their Lord.

WILLIAM T. MCCONNELL

Albuquerque, N. Mex.

One wonders if it isn’t Dr. Singewald who is “too little, too late.” After all, Gospel Blimp Incorporated has been around for a few years now.

Dr. Singewald’s ten suggestions generally reflect his impersonal bent. Newspaper ads, book distributions, concert series, exhibits, and so on, all have their place, but they are secondary tactics, and their success will always depend on nose to nose encounters.…

FREDERICK N. WAGNER

Portland, Ore.

It would probably help considerably if the student’s religious affiliation were indicated on his college entrance papers and a list sent by the colleges to the indicated denominations.

From there on it should be a breeze for churches in a university city to seek out their members and include in their curriculum interesting programs for college young people.…

MRS. ROBERT A. WELSH

Ashtabula, Ohio

Cover Comment

We are honored to find that the Richard Halliburton Memorial Tower, which stands on our campus, was impressive enough to be selected as the visual representation of “Christian Higher Education” (cover, Feb. 17).

KEN BERRYHILL

Director of Public Relations

Southwestern at Memphis

Memphis, Tenn.

As i write this, a friend lies in the intensive-care ward of a large hospital where the most advanced types of cardiovascular surgery are performed. He has undergone, apparently successfully, a very difficult operation on two of his heart valves.

The blood supply was basic to his illness. And the objective of the operation and the surgeon’s procedures all centered in one element—blood.

To live, the body needs properly circulating blood. Life depends on adequate functioning of the heart. The surgery performed on my friend depended on the supply of blood to every part of the body throughout the operation.

A person may be completely healthy, with no disease of any kind. But an uncontrolled hemorrhage means certain death.

If the heart does not function properly, the circulation of blood is impaired, and the too familiar phrase, “died of heart failure,” appears in the obituary column.

Without an artificial heart pump and an extra supply of compatible blood, modern cardiac surgery would be impossible. Internists, cardiologists, and surgeons all recognize the vital role of blood in human life.

So, too, without blood there can be no spiritual life. Without the blood of Jesus Christ, shed on the Cross of Calvary, there is no remission of sins. A bloodless religion may appeal to the sophisticate and the esthete, but it has no power and offers no hope now or for eternity.

A look at some of the older hymn books reveals the place the blood of Christ had in the hymns of the past. Many of the newer and more vital churches continue to use these hymns. But in the hymn books of many major denominations, most if not all references to the blood have been eliminated. True, the music of some of the old hymns leaves much to be desired. But others are bright and theologically true. One may not care for the tune of the song that begins, “What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus,” but its theology is firmly grounded in scriptural teaching.

Just how serious is the questioning or denial of the “blood atonement”?

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, calling to mind the bloody sacrifices with which the people were so familiar, goes on to say: “A man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned [or “poured scorn on,” as Phillips translates this phrase] the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:28, 29, RSV).

The vital importance of the blood atonement is expressed in such verses as: Christ “entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:12); “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (v. 22b); “But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (v. 26b); and, “By a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified (10:14).

Going back in history, we find that sacrifices are implied in the account of God’s giving coats of skins to Adam and Eve. And they are explicitly mentioned in the account of the Passover experience of the children of Israel in Egypt: “The blood shall be a sign for you, upon the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Ex. 12:13a).

In the Bible, blood typifies life: “The life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life” (Lev. 17:11).

All through the Bible the covenant of redemption is associated with blood. Moses said, “Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words” (Ex. 24:8). Zechariah speaks of the “blood of the covenant” (9:11), and in the New Testament Christ and his apostles speak of the new covenant: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor. 11:25a), and, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28).

The death of the Son of God on Calvary is inseparably linked with forgiveness and cleansing from sin. The New Testament writers tell us that we have forgiveness and peace through his blood. We are told that there is no other way, that by Christ’s shed blood we have access to God, that for the one who believes it means justification and regeneration.

Many have said that there is no one satisfactory theory or explanation of the atonement. Be that as it may, the fact remains that Christ’s shed blood is basic to that doctrine, and we are saved from the guilt and penalty of sin because of his death on the cross. “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures”—this is a categorical statement that all should heed.

Involved in the fact that the Son of God shed his blood and died for our sins is the enormity of sin itself. A low view of sin means a low view of the atonement. Once we look at the price paid for our redemption, we begin to realize the awfulness of our sin. The Apostle Peter states the fact in words no one can misunderstand: “You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Pet. 1:18, 19).

This recurring theme of a sacrificed and bleeding lamb, central agent in the Passover feast, coupled with John’s words, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29) and the fact that Christ died at the Passover time, are overwhelming evidence of the significance of the shed blood of Christ on Calvary.

How can any speak of this as a “revolting” doctrine when it is the basic means of God’s redemption of the sinner? True, it convicts us of the enormity of sin; but at the same time it brings heavenly comfort as it reveals the love of God. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. That he did this by pouring out his life’s blood will be the theme of the redeemed throughout all eternity.

John, in his vision of the triumphant Lamb, writes: “Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals.…” Why? “For thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation, and hast made them a kingdom and priests to our God …” (Rev. 5:9, 10).

Thank God for “Jesus Christ … who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood” (Rev. 1:5).

Margaret Avison, winner of Canada’s highest literary honor, was captured by the “Light that blinded Saul”

Contemporary Christian poetry has found a new and arresting voice—that of Margaret Avison, long a free-lance writer and now an English teacher at the University of Toronto’s new Scarborough College, whose second book, The Dumbfounding, was brought out last summer by Norton (New York) and McLeod (Toronto).

There is nothing new about her remarkable ability as a poet. Her work has been acclaimed ever since she was a teen-ager, and she won the coveted Governor General’s Medal, Canada’s highest literary honor, for her first collection of poems, Winter Sun, published in 1960. What is new, however, and what gives her work much significance for the Christian student of contemporary art, is that just over four years ago Margaret Avison, then in her mid-forties, was overtaken by the

… Light that blinded Saul,

blacked out Damascus noon,

and became a Christian. Later she became an active member of the evangelical Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto, and she still manages to keep one afternoon a week free for work at a downtown rescue mission. The Dumbfounding makes her conversion known to the literary and intellectual world, in language they can appreciate. Thinking Christians would do well to become familiar with it.

The small group of specifically Christian poems near the center of this book, far from detracting from her previous stature as a poet, actually seem to have added to it. The internationally known critic and Canadian expatriate A. J. M. Smith, professor of English at Michigan State University since 1936, now poet-in-residence there, and the dean of contemporary anthologists, wrote an article on “Margaret Avison’s New Book” for the September, 1966, issue of the Canadian Forum. In it he describes The Dumbfounding as “the richest, most original, most fully and deeply engaged, and therefore the most significant book of poetry published by a Canadian since the modern movement got under way more than a score of years ago.” To Miss Avison he ascribes the quality of “isolated superiority,” and he forthrightly states that “the superiority transcends originality and technical mystery and derives ultimately from the purity of her response to experience (all experience) and the significance of her faith.” Smith cites certain of her new poems as being “among the finest religious poems of our time” and declares that they “are explicitly acts of worship and submission, the fruits, one must surmise, of a peculiar grace.” Another reviewer has called her Canada’s “most accomplished poet” (Toronto Evening Telegram, Dec. 17, 1966).

Margaret Avison’s poetry, though difficult, holds rich rewards for the diligent student. No smooth, facile style is here; rather, one meets with abruptness, starkness, often downright ugliness—which, however, is shot through with shafts of unutterable beauty. She has a most delicately tuned ear that finds beauty in off-beats and half-rhyme, and word music in internal syllables rather than in the more conventional word endings or initial consonants. To me, what most makes her style distinctive and enjoyable is her use—always unexpected, though it recurs often—of sudden flights of startlingly beautiful, half-coined words of great loveliness and vivid imagery, often in a poem where much bleakness is found, so that the reader is continually being—to use Wordsworth’s phrase—“surprised by joy.”

Thus when in the title poem, which tells of her discovery of Christ, she begins,

When you walked here,

took skin, muscle, hair,

eyes, larynx …

we may be slightly repelled at her expression of the Incarnation; her blunt

Dust wet with your spittle

cleared mortal trouble

may seem a rather bald way of describing Christ’s miracles; while her words about the Resurrection,

we hoped so despairingly for such report

we closed their windpipes for it,

may strike a jarring note on our sensitivities. Yet in the same poem we find her soaring:

Yet you are

constant and sure,

the all-lovely, all-men’s way

to that far country.

Winning one, you again

all ways would begin

life: to make new

flesh, to empower

the weak in nature

to restore

or stay the sufferer;

lead through the garden to

trash, rubble, hill,

where, the outcast’s outcast, you

sound dark’s uttermost, strangely light-brimming, until

time be full.

In Searching and Sounding, she writes of her all-too-human flight from some of the Gethsemane-like experiences into which God led her as a new Christian:

I run from you to

the blinding blue of the

loveliness of this wasting

morning, and know

it is only with you

I can find the fields of brilliance

And as I run I cry

“But I need something human,

somebody now, here, with me.”

Running from you.

The sunlight is sundered by cloud-mass.

My heart is sore, as its

bricked-in ovens smoulder,

for I know whose hand at my elbow

I fling from me as I run.

But you have come and sounded

a music around me, newly,

Dwarf that I am, and spent,

touch my wet face with

the little light I can bear now, to mirror,

and keep me

close, into sleeping.

In The Christian’s Year in Miniature, she speaks of Christ in Gethsemane:

Unsullied one, though midnight

is lucid to your heart,

here, in God’s unspeaking

you are set apart.

Of his burial, she goes on:

The garden, awaking

to a terrible day-swell

knows the rock-sweet, the pulse-set

of Emmanuel.

Then, in an act of committal, she concludes:

Only in your possession

can such Life go on.

The crux of Margaret Avison’s conversion was reached when she realized for the first time, and finally and forever, that, as she later put it, “Jesus Christ is alive.” This theme runs through many of her religious poems, such as First and Person, the first two poems she wrote after her rebirth (following several puzzling months of silence). In Person she describes herself as being in a sealed tomb, “beneath steel tiers, all walled,” “barred in every way.” Then comes the realization of the living Christ.

“I am.” The door

was flesh; was there.

No hinges swing, no latch

lifts. Nothing moves. But such

is love, the captive may

in blindness find the way:

In all his heaviness, he passes through.

Again, in The Word, where she examines the implications of our forsaking all for Christ and of his being forsaken of the Father, we find the person of the living Christ coming to the fore:

But to make it head over heels

yielding, all the way,

you had to die for us.

The line we drew, you crossed,

and cross out, wholly forget,

at the faintest stirring of what

you know is love, is One

whose name has been, and is

and will be, the

I AM.

Another Person very real to the new believer is the Holy Spirit. In … Person, or A Hymn on and to the Holy Ghost, she voices her dependence upon him. In closing, I quote this poem in full.

How should I find speech

to you, the self-effacing

whose other self was seen

alone by the only one,

to you, whose self-knowing

is perfect, known to him,

seeing him only, loving

with him, yourself unseen?

Let the one you show me

ask you, for me,

you, all but lost in

the one in three,

to lead my self, effaced

in the known Light,

to be in him released

from facelessness,

so that where you

(unseen, unguessed, liable

to grievous hurt) would go

I may show him visible.

In these days when it is so imperative and yet so difficult to communicate the Gospel effectively to our contemporaries, we could learn much from a close study of the poetry of Margaret Avison.

Can the Canadian Church demonstrate that its life and Gospel are relevant for the second century of Canada’s life as a nation?

A few years ago Dr. Ian Rennie, Canadian Presbyterian minister and church historian, summed up the historically church-dominated nation of Canada as “the last of the Puritan lands.” But in this centennial year of 1967, that description is very nearly a part of yesterday. New forces are at work on the Canadian scene. The Church is clearly in danger of seeming quite irrelevant to the younger generation of Canadians struggling to stand free of their past and forge a new culture with exciting, creative possibilities for tomorrow. Recent waves of immigrants have frequently brought with them both bitter disillusionment with the Church as they have known it and a much freer culture. Mix these with the heady wine of space-age achievements and the result is a generation of new Canadians whose life style is increasingly incompatible with the essentially Victorian traditions of the Canadian church.

The most pressing challenge facing the Canadian church in 1967 is, therefore, whether it can demonstrate that its life and Gospel are relevant for the second century of Canada’s life as a nation. There is no question whether Jesus Christ is relevant. But there is a considerable question whether the Church is prepared to prove him so in its own experience by dying to its past and living exposed to the future and to God. If it is not, it will be dismissed by the new Canadian generation as “phony” and “powerless,” and that will be that.

Many Canadian Christians see this challenge and are striving to meet it. The sixties, for instance, have seen an unusual emphasis on mass evangelism. Through the efforts of Crusade Evangelism, under Barry Moore, and the Leighton Ford Crusades, evangelistic campaigns have been held in more than 200 Canadian towns during the past six years.

One important by-product has been the training in personal work given to thousands of Canadians. To this has been added the influence of organizations specializing in man-to-man evangelism, such as the Navigators, Operation Mobilization, and, more recently, Campus Crusade. Personal evangelism may actually be on the increase in Canada. It will get another major boost through the Sermons from Science Pavilion at Expo ’67. Here the inquirers, expected to number more than 90,000, will be counseled by hundreds of Christians drawn from the whole spectrum of the Church across Canada and trained in special classes held from Vancouver to Halifax this past winter.

Yet in the opinion of many, this evangelistic effort, impressive though it is, simply does not meet the heart of the challenge presented to the Church in 1967, for at least two reasons. First, it is in the main not continuing evangelism. Second, it is still oriented to church buildings and programs, even if “church” moves temporarily to an auditorium.

If the new Canada is to be won for Christ, it must be won through continuing evangelism. This evangelism must be indigenous to the community—even to the segment of society—it seeks to win. It cannot be merely the work of the professional ministry, and it cannot be limited to formal programs inside church buildings. Those who wish to reach the new Canada must rethink the implications for today of the command, “Go into all the world.” Is “the world” to be understood only spatially, or must it also be understood culturally and socially?

What are the new worlds for evangelism that the Canadian church faces in 1967? Some of them still have geographical frontiers—the opening north country, for instance, with mushrooming towns such as Prince George, British Columbia. These are not the mining settlements of an earlier era. They are linked by air and TV to great cultural and political centers and are in effect, therefore, extensions of the big cities, the principal features on the changing face of Canada.

Here, in the cities, are the large immigrant populations, such as the 220,000 Italians who live in south-central Toronto. Sixty per cent of Toronto has arrived since the end of World War II. Despite valiant efforts, particularly by the older denominations, these new arrivals are largely outside the Church and indifferent to it.

Cities produce most of the modern universities, which have suddenly become very important to a nation caught in the squeeze between the curtains of the cold war. A new university is being established each year, and soon junior colleges and community colleges will be appearing at the rate of five or ten a year. The prospect appalls a church newly reawakened to the strategic urgency of this field.

The cities have also spawned the teen-age sub-culture, a world so dynamic that it affects the whole of society around it. Many churches and groups such as Youth for Christ, Young Life Clubs, and Inter-School Christian fellowship seek to penetrate this world; but for the most part they reach the church-related teenager, not the troubled youth or the swinging set. There are a few striking exceptions. Some fresh, exciting evangelistic attempts, such as coffee-house programs, are meeting the teen-agers on their own ground and-providing the informality, social acceptance, and free-wheeling discussions they want. Another bright light has been the success of camping programs, particularly week-end camping. Both Young Life and Inter-Varsity’s Pioneer Camps have led the way beyond the usual church-oriented camp.

The big metropolitan centers of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver also house the huge apartment cities, which are almost antiseptically free of the influence of the Church. To reach them may call for modern Priscillas and Aquilas willing to have a “church in the house” ministry through their apartments. Would local churches be willing to encourage this? Almost certainly it would mean rethinking the regular church program.

A major feature of the new millionaire cities is the extensive business and cultural life developing at their heart. So far there is little to be seen in Canada of the ministry to downtown white-collar workers and members of executive business clubs that is carried on in London, through the Anglican parish of All Souls, Langham Place. Here is a significant world almost untouched. It also holds a key to the inner-city slum areas. Many in these districts are antagonistic to the Church. They see that some of their problems are created or perpetuated by business leaders in the city who sit on church boards in the suburbs but fail to bring these two worlds together.

And here at the heart of the city is the entertainment world, and the world of the arts, and the world of communications—newspaper, radio, and television. John McCandlish Phillips, an evangelical who is a noted New York Times reporter, has said, “There are virtually no Christians working as news editors and reporters on major newspapers in the United States.” Is it any different in Canada? There are a few evangelical Christians who are earning the right to be heard in the Canadian artistic world, such as Margaret Avison, leading Canadian poet and lecturer in English at Scarborough College. But no real evangelistic challenge to this world yet exists.

And how can we seize the opportunities for communication which these worlds offer? So far, for instance, there is almost no really effective evangelistic use of TV in Canada. True, money is a problem. Yet one suspects that perhaps the real question is whether Canadian Christians can be free enough and imaginative enough to do more than televise the preaching of a sermon. The absence of effective witness through the arts and the mass media is particularly serious in view of the fact that this part of Canadian life probably more than any other (even formal education) holds the shape of Canada’s spiritual and moral future.

Perhaps the most dramatic and unexpected frontier to open in Canada is French Canada. Almost overnight, barriers have started coming down between Roman Catholic French Canadians and French-speaking Protestants. Veteran observers of the French Canadian scene speak with astonishment of the new openness. But the number of French-speaking evangelicals able to meet this unprecedented opportunity is desperately small, particularly on the level of the university-educated French Canadians, who are leading the “revolution” in Quebec.

These are some of the new worlds emerging in the fast-changing Canada of 1967. Their frontiers are not distant points remote from the Church. They are just across the street. They are the thresholds to the real life of Canadians, with which the Church is largely out of contact. These worlds the Church must learn to “go into.” In doing so, it will undoubtedly suffer the loss of many cherished ways and privileges; but it must remember the parable of the man who sold all he had to buy the field that had in it the pearl of great price. How highly does the Canadian church value the men and women for whom our Lord stripped himself of privilege and glory and then died?

This question shows that the actual frontiers for evangelism in 1967 are within the Church, not outside it. They are emotional and spiritual. Do we love our neighbor? But this question implies an even more basic one: “What do we really know of God in experience?” This is the crucial question being put to us by the new Canada in its increasing unawareness of our existence.