Second of Two Parts

In the first part of this article (March 3 issue) we surveyed various views of the Atonement: recent studies in the theological giants of yesterday; the call for an objective Atonement by theologians of the Word; the emphasis on Isaiah 53 by the biblicists; the view of scholarly classical Calvinists; and particular themes (Christ as Victor, Christ our Representative, Christ identified with us, and Gospel and myth in Bultmann).

Vi. The Basis For Assessing Various Views

The Word. In seeking to assess the positions of recent writers on the Atonement, we must keep two things in mind: first, that we seek the biblical understanding of the manifold aspects of Christ’s entire work for his people; and second, that this understanding is revealed by the Holy Spirit shining on the Word and is received only in faith.

As we come in sight of Calvary, we are to take the shoes from off our feet, for this is holy ground. As Calvin warns us, to understand God’s sovereignty we must not stop short of what the Word teaches, lest we charge the Holy Spirit with folly in revealing that which we ignore. Nor dare we presume to push our curiosity beyond what God has revealed. Thornwell used the same principles in seeking to interpret the scriptural meaning of the Cross: Go all the way that the Bible leads, and do not go beyond what is there set forth in order to make the logical patterns more complete. Calvin does not hesitate to assert that in an ineffable manner God both loved and hated us at the same time. G. C. Berkouwer continually calls on us to stop where the Word stops, even though that leaves us with unsolved paradoxes. Against abstract theologizing and philosophical transformation, O. Michel battles for the genuine biblical meaning.

We proclaim that God acted directly in the reconciling process and in all his triumphant victories in Christ; but when we say this, we do not deny the satisfaction wrought by Christ in his human love and death as our representative and our substitute. We magnify the grace and love of God, but not in such a way as to establish a hierarchy in the divine attributes that would minimize his righteousness, justice, holiness, and wrath. In his infinite wisdom, God does not vindicate one attribute at the expense of the other aspects of his character. As glowing love is the foreground of the Cross, so justice is its somber background. This presentation of ours, like any other human presentation, may put the picture out of focus. Our intention and striving must ever be to understand our Lord and his gracious work for us on his own biblically revealed terms.

The illumination of the Spirit, that is, faith. Now, only in faith can the mystery of the Crucified One be understood. The reconciliation was wrought for us in his death, but the Gospel of reconciliation is committed to the Church. In preaching we call for faith and repentance. By the grace of the Spirit, the risen, living Christ confronts sinners as the Word is faithfully proclaimed in the Church. Only by the grace of the Spirit does the preacher have the intestinal fortitude to proclaim the Cross in its full Bible proportions. As the Reformers confessed: “The teaching that one is criminated for all is a message that natural reason can never accept; only by the Spirit are our hearts opened to receive the Word of the Cross.”

And the Cross is the very heart of our faith. Ethelbert Stouffer has pointed out that sola fide (faith alone) really means sola cruce (the Cross alone)—it does not magnify my faith as a work or a merit. Faith is necessary, but it is not meritorious. It is a self-alienating principle that denies all worth to me—or even to my faith—and casts me as a helpless, hell-deserving sinner exclusively on that which Christ did for me in his whole life, and particularly on his Cross. Thus I stand with no trust in myself but with all my trust in God’s mercy, which is available to me through Christ’s merit.

Faith, on its intellectual side, as John MacLeon points out in his Scottish Theology, is a cordial acceptance and a hearty approval of God’s way of saving sinners through Christ and his work for us.

In his great work on The Slavery of the Will, Luther insisted that the Holy Spirit is not a skeptic. T. F. Torrance in Theology in Reconstruction reiterates this today:

Surely then the New Testament makes it abundantly clear that the Holy Spirit is given to those who believe in Jesus and that we grow in grace and in knowledge of Christ as we surrender to the creative impact of the Holy Spirit upon us, but that unbelief grieves the presence of the Spirit and quenches His power among us. What else is unbelief but resistance to the Holy Spirit and what can obstruct the renewal of the Church and destroy its witness more than just unbelief? Let it be said quite bluntly that what we need urgently is renewal of faith; of belief in Jesus Christ as in reality God Himself incarnate among men, of belief in the Cross as indeed the objective intervention of God in human existence for the salvation of mankind, and of belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead in body as the first-fruits of the new creation [pp. 356, 357].

Sir William Hamilton long ago pointed out that the limits of our knowledge are by no means the limits of existence. And James B. Mozley described such doctrines as Original Sin, the Trinity, and the Atonement as mysterious truths. Of these we have a real but indistinct conception. Here is the place for faith, for reasonable faith does not require full intellectual comprehension. Where reason staggers, there faith worships. “Justice is a fragment, mercy is a fragment, mediation is a fragment; justice, mercy, mediation as a reason for mercy—all three; what are they but great vistas and openings unto an invisible world in which the Cross is the point of view which brings them all together.”

To this we would add, in the words of A. M. Hunter, “Paul’s faith bears not so much the grammarian’s as the sinner’s touch. It is the theology of the converted man, of one who could say, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am’°” (Interpreting Paul’s Gospel, p. 20).

Vii. Resulting Affirmations

This rapid survey leads to several conclusions. First, the Atonement is the great central message of the New Testament, even as the Cross is the symbol of the Christian faith. The four Gospels are passion narratives with extended introductions. The Epistles glory in the Cross. The Book of Revelation focuses upon the Lamb in the midst of the throne, standing as it had been sacrificed. As to the Church, the Cross has always been, as R. W. Dale said, “the symbol of her strength and the prophecy of her victories.”

Then the Cross was God’s mighty act in Christ for man’s salvation. Leon Morris asserts that “in the New Testament there cannot be the slightest doubt but that the Cross is the great central divine act which brings men salvation.” All that Paul was and all that Paul hoped for was centered in the action of God in the Cross. The great stress in Barth’s theology has ever been on the event, the deed—yes, the act—of God. For Bultmann, God acts in the Cross; that is the eschatological event.

Jeremias has shown that such indefinite passives as, “This is my blood of the covenant which is shed for many for the remission of sins,” “This is my body which is broken for you,” have as their implied subject God; that is, God broke my body for you (passiva Dei). With this accords Isaiah 53:10, “It pleased the LORD to bruise him …,” to make his soul an offering for sin, and Second Corinthians 5:18, “All things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ.…” While Christ is the propitiation, yet it is God who set him forth to be a propitiation (Rom. 3:25).

On a visit to Richmond and Atlanta a generation ago, William P. Paterson told the Atlanta pastors: The preaching of religious experience has been powerless to regenerate religious experience; but the preaching of God in his objective reality has always produced great religious experience. At a time when the philosophy of religion has turned Hegelian thought into a so-called Death-of-God Christianity, it becomes God’s believing people to affirm the mighty acts of God, both (with Pannenberg and his school) in Christ’s cross and resurrection and (with the Bultmannians and those of some other schools) in the bringing of men today to existential decision. In Romans, Paul never asserts with the Pietists that it is our magnificent faith that justifies. He repeatedly asserts that it is God who justifies.

Over against the Altizer dirge, let the trumpets of Zion sound forth at every opportunity the joyous fact that God is the living God who has acted and does act. Instead of introducing the recital of the Apostles’ Creed merely as the expression of our faith, why not use some such introduction as this: “Using the Apostles’ Creed, let us confess the living God in his gracious acts for us men and for our salvation.”

Again, this mighty act of God in the Cross of Christ is the act of the Father’s grace. We do not have a God whose mind or disposition has to be changed from harshness to mercy by a commercial bargain. Rather, “God is the subject of the reconciliation in the sense that the initiative originates in His heart. He did not need to be moved, but rather, eternal love moved him in the divine apriority of the initiative to reconciliation” (G. C. Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, p. 258). The eternal, unfathomable love of the Father’s heart is revealed in the giving of his only Son. This love of the Father precedes and is revealed in the Christ, who declares, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” With his parables of grace—the lost coin, the lost sheep, the lost son—Jesus manifests the joy in the heart of the heavenly Father and among the angels of heaven upon the return of some of the lost children, who apart from him would be far from God. Over Luke 15 we may write, “He who has seen me receiving publicans and sinners, and eating with them the covenant meal, has seen into the heart of God. For the living God is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Further, this act of God’s almighty grace was wrought in Christ and is received by us in him and for his sake. That mighty act of God in Christ and his cross changed the whole objective relationship between the Holy One of Israel and his guilty creatures. In place of the wrath of the Judge, it gives us the face of the Father. God is for us in Christ in a way that he is not apart from Christ. Thus Calvin can say that no man is loved by God except in Christ and that the sole pledge of God’s love is Christ, without whom the signs of wrath and hatred are everywhere evident (Institutes III. ii.32; III.xxiv.5; III. ii.7).

In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us that true grace is costly because it condemns sin, and is grace because it justifies the sinner. It is costly because it cost God the life of his Son—“ye were bought with a price”—and what cost God much cannot be cheap for us. It is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

To open the way of fellowship between God and man, God the Son became man also. The Father gave his only Son to bring us back to his arms of love. Christ suffered, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God. The Judge came to deliver us from the wrath to come by putting himself under that load of guilt and the wrath it entails and bearing it in our stead.

Although Vincent Taylor admits that Jesus and Paul have such elements in their teaching, he shies away from the word “substitution.” Jeremias has shown that the basis of the thinking of both the primitive Church and Jesus was Isaiah 53; and even one as radical as Rashdall admits (in The Idea of Atonement) that this chapter does teach penal substitution. Norman Snaith (I Believe in …) finds that Isaiah 53 means substitution and concludes, “One fact stands out stark and plain: that death on the cross was a substitution.” J. D. Smart (The Creed in Christian Teaching) explains the substitution in this way: “Jesus took the burden of our guilt upon Himself as though it belonged to Him. Because of His love for us and His hatred of all that separated us from our true life in God, He made Himself one with us that He might make us one with God.”

In The Cross in the New Testament, Leon Morris concludes, “While the many-sidedness of the atonement must be borne in mind, substitution is the heart of it.” Man can do nothing to bring about his salvation but must rest on what God has done for him in Christ. In giving himself in our stead, Christ satisfied the claims of God’s holy justice. “Not only did Christ win a victory, but He secured a verdict. He wrought salvation powerfully, but also legally.” The Confession of 1967 teaches: “He took upon Himself the judgment under which all men stand convicted.” For A. M. Hunter, the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree with the theories that deal in “satisfaction” or “substitution,” that make use of the “sacrificial principle” that Christ’s sufferings were what we can only call “penal” (The Work and Words of Jesus, 1956, p. 100).

And lest we misunderstand, this blessing of Christ for us—so that with his stripes we are healed—comes to us only as we are engrafted into Christ. Our catechism properly describes baptism as a sign and seal of our engrafting into Christ, of remission of sins by his blood, and of regeneration by his Spirit (see also Institutes III. ii.24).

Finally, the grace of God manifested in the Cross of Christ was triumphant. We boast not of any victorious life of our own; rather, we proclaim the ever-victorious Christ. He is the Hero who came of his own free will to meet all the charges against us, to answer all Satan’s accusations. Where the first Adam failed, the final Adam conquered.

There are such mysteries here that Luther was led to say that God overcame God, and Calvin to say that God, in an inexpressible manner, both loved and hated us at the same time. Christ overcame, first, in the things of God. By meeting to the full the requirements of divine justice and thus vindicating its every claim, he so won that Satan, the accuser of his brethren, fell from heaven.

Thereafter Christ has conquered and is ever anew conquering over all his and our enemies—over Satan with his venom, over death with its sting, over the curse of the law, over the prejudices of men. As his written Word is faithfully expounded, the living, risen Word by the power of his Holy Spirit confronts the sinner, “casts Saul of Tarsus in the dust, all bruised and wounded, and draws him behind His chariot of victory” (A. Lecerf, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 240). As he conquered in his own Cross, so is he conquering throughout history, often by the sufferings of his people. And he will keep on conquering until even Anti-Christ, Satan, and death are destroyed.

This discussion can come to no better conclusion than to quote the words of the Heidelberg Catechism, that heroic confession written by Ursinus and Olevian and issued, at the risk of his life and his electoral dignity, by Frederick the Pious of the Palatinate:

My only comfort in life and death is that I, with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, who with His precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from the power of the devil, and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head: yea that all things must be subservient for my salvation.

The Apostle Paul’s consuming passion was the Cross of Christ

If ever there was a dogmatic statement, this is it: “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). It is dogmatic in personal resolve, and it is dogmatic in expression. In some ways it might be considered the life-long theme of the Apostle Paul. Certainly it is the theme of the First Epistle to the Corinthians; it runs as a leitmotiv from beginning to end.

These Christians, among whom there was strife, were reminded that “other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (3:11). If they were to account to Paul for what they had become, it was because they had “not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel” (4:15). If there seemed to be urgency in the way Paul went about his task, it was because the time for doing the Lord’s work was short (7:29). If there was a readiness on his part to sacrifice everything, it was because he did not want to put any obstacle in the way of the Gospel (9:12). If it seemed to them that he was blowing only one note on his trumpet, it was because he desired that the trumpet yield a certain sound, a note that would come through loud and clear (14:8). If they wanted to know what gave him confidence, they should remember that the risen Lord had also appeared to him, last of all, as one born out of due time (15:8).

This was an ordered preoccupation. It did not mean that the Apostle Paul was unconcerned with the other articles of faith or other issues in life. But all other matters were subordinate to and oriented toward this central truth.

Then as now, a church without this coherence in its gospel preaching could not be a cohesive church, let alone a Christian church. Yet in the Church today, doctrine or any dogmatic utterance, if not denigrated, is at least greatly de-emphasized. Recently, in a sermon by one of today’s angry young churchmen, the Lutherans were compared to the Pharisees of Jesus’ day because of their concern for doctrine. The not very subtle jibe was meant to charge the church with failing to reach modern man because it is coming to him with doctrines that are “irrelevant” to the issues he faces.

Paul would not buy that criticism. He reminds the Corinthians that “when I came to you, [I] came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (2:1, 2).

The Apostle had one consuming passion in life, a compelling dogmatic urgency. Need we ask where the cross stood in Paul’s life? He’ll tell us: front and center! “We preach Christ crucified,” he told these Corinthians (1:23a). “God forbid,” he wrote to the Galatians, “that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (6:14a). After a life of taking beachheads under fire, the Apostle said in his farewell to the elders of Ephesus: “But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24). And in a similar vein he wrote to the Philippians: “Yea, doubtless, I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord [objective genitive!]; for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ” (3:8).

Just what did Paul see in the Cross? The religion of Jesus? Jesus as the first real Christian? The ideal or the spirit of Christ? Something to be inspired by? A faith to live by? A martyr who conquers his enemies, even in defeat? A symbol of human potential who gives the world fresh hope? Each of these possibilities smacks of the theology of glory (theologia gloriae), or ascent theology, which seeks by human power and prowess—through reverence, devotion, self-denial, self-sacrifice, and a host of other qualities—to make the ascent to God via a self-chosen “celestial ladder.”

To preach the cross in that way is to obscure it, and Paul would condemn the attempt. “God forbid!” Christ sent him, he says, “to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect” (1 Cor. 1:17). He had not been assigned to decorate the cross, to modify it, to beautify it, to make it more acceptable. Christ crucified meant blood, death, deepest humiliation and degradation. It also meant expiation, substitution, atonement, ransom, reconciliation, and justification—all stirring realities that are not irrelevant even today when preached in connection with the cross.

Jesus on the cross achieved something we could not, the “blotting out” of “the handwriting of ordinances that was against us” (Col. 2:14a). The cross became through him, by his death, the instrument whereby God reconciled the sinful world unto himself (Rom. 5:10 and 2 Cor. 5:19). It became the instrument whereby we draw near to God by the blood of his Son, as he told the Ephesians (2:13), whereby we have peace by the blood of the cross, as he wrote to the Colossians (1:20). “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7b). Now “we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins” (Eph. 1:7a).

Christianity without this positive, dogmatic teaching and content, preached without this sublime dogmatic conviction, is not Christianity, no matter how spiritually or joyfully we go about religion. Luther charged Christendom with the solemn task under God: “Unum praedica, sapientiam crucis!” “Preach one thing, the wisdom of the cross!” This alone is genuine Gospel. And this Gospel, of which the Apostle Paul speaks and which human wisdom always rejects, alone is genuine Christian theology, theologia crucis, theology of the cross.

Some years ago, in the hills of California, an outdoor theater was dedicated with this inscription: “Amongst our eternal hills we build a shrine, sans creed, sans dogma, inspiring all mankind.” There were such places in Paul’s day too, and such formless and supposedly creedless theologies. But Paul had an answer for them all: “foolishness!” These made him all the more determined. “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” No other resolve should more move Christian believers today—to grasp firmly the reality of the Gospel and to be dogmatic when it matters.

BEYOND THE NIGHT AND THE SLOUGH

When I had passed through

The mystic dark night,

The pilgrim’s slough—

Immersed into

A dizzying and overreaching Light,

“Make, Divine Spirit,”

I cried, “Holy Breath,

Thy Breathing mine

And my breath Thine

That I breathe wholly now, and beyond death.”

All past is bygone—

Expired—and the night

Lighted by One

By whom a sun

Seems black in the contrasting: Light of light.

HENRY HUTTO

‘Christian burial’ needs re-evaluation in light of the evangelistic task

What does the Church say about the Gospel through the way it buries the dead and ministers to the bereaved? Are its burial practices consistent with the messages of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ alone? Or do they imply a vague but convenient universalism, a universalism that avoids all painful confrontation between the Gospel and the world? Hard answers to these questions call for re-evaluation of the so-called Christian burial in the light of the evangelistic task.

Inherent in the evangelistic plea—“be ye reconciled to God”—is the recognition that all men are not yet reconciled. God gave his only Son so that all men could be saved, but not all have received that precious gift. There are those who are Christians. There are those who are not. And this distinction does not end automatically at the moment of death.

Yet much of our funeral practice takes no account of this. Often Christian burial is offered to all, whether or not they have openly professed faith in Christ; whether or not they have served him in the Church; and whether or not they have manifested the fruit of the Spirit.

In the day of death, the clergyman is often called in as chaplain of a “community religion” that has little in common with the austerities and boundless joys of the Christian faith.

The implication is that the Church makes no distinction between the overtly Christian soul and the non-Christian soul—after death. The world may easily conclude, therefore, that it doesn’t matter whether or not one lives as a Christian, since he will receive the benediction of God at the end anyway. Thus, in the world’s eyes the Gospel is reduced to a thing of little importance, and the word spoken at the burial is regarded as a human invention for cushioning the hard emotional impact of death. This practical universalism in burial practices continually suggests to the world that the Church does not mean what it says when it speaks of the necessity of decision, repentance, and faith in Jesus Christ.

Two objections are often raised when church leaders insist on making distinctions between people at the time of death and burial. The first objection is that the burial service is not actually for the dead but for the comfort of the living. In some churches this is simply untrue; and even in churches where it is true, the problem re-emerges at the point of finding valid words of comfort for the bereaved. The Episcopal Prayer Book, for instance, implies throughout that the deceased is a “faithful departed in Christ.” Although Episcopal clergymen do have the option of using other devotions for those not among the faithful, the majority use this burial order indiscriminately. In non-liturgical churches the manner of conducting the service is left entirely to the discretion of the ministers; perhaps many face the problem squarely.

Yet the question remains: What word of comfort can a minister who is true to the biblical Word honestly address to the mourners of a non-Christian? When the deceased has lived an openly Christian life, there is no end to the comforting assurances of God. But these assurances cannot honestly be given in the case of one outside Christ. The death may in fact be a stark tragedy. Is it true Christian concern for the living to shield them from the fact that a life lived outside Christ is not pleasing to God? Hope can be offered to the living on condition that they will put their own trust in Christ; but any hope for the living based on the assurance of the salvation of the non-Christian deceased is spurious, with no warrant in the Word of God.

We may be reluctant to pile sorrow upon sorrow, and reluctant we should be. Yet it is a betrayal of the living to cover over the fact that life without Christ is indeed tragic and that the certainty of death is a reminder of the need for eternal life in Christ. If the gospel doctrine of salvation is true, the kindest thing we can do for any man, including one who is bereaved, is to deal honestly with the facts that affect his eternal welfare.

The second and more serious objection is that the Church has no right to make judgments on the state of a man’s soul at the hour of his dying. That is true. We remember the dying thief who received gracious pardon in the closing hour of his life. Such is the grace of God that, even after a life of depravity, a man may enter the Kingdom through repentance and simple trust. Any person who has died may have turned to the Lord for salvation with his last breath, and the Church on earth would know nothing of it. The Church cannot say with certainty that any particular man is lost to God forever.

Yet neither can it say with certainty that one who has not openly confessed Christ before men and served him in his Church is “right with God.” The most favorable thing the Church can say is that it does not know whether this person was born again; his judgment is in the hands of God. Moreover, it is hypocritical and dangerous for the Church through its ministers to pretend that the life of one who lived outside Christ is cause for Christian praise and thanksgiving when death comes, whether or not he is saved through a last-minute act of faith.

Still, this is exactly the note that is often struck at burial services where Christian pastors officiate. Many times everyone present knows that the deceased did not profess Christian faith and had scarcely any relation to the Church. Nevertheless, he is eulogized as if he were a saint, and the ringing certainties of the Gospel are applied to him with the same confidence with which they would be applied to St. Peter himself.

To use the Episcopal Prayer Book as an example again: the soul of the departed is commended to Almighty God “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” These are fitting words for one who has lived unashamedly as a believer in our Lord. But they are peculiarly inappropriate for the myriad of those whose only overt connection with Christ and his Church is an unacknowledged childhood baptism and a year or two in Sunday school.

Surely, in the interest of evangelism, Christian burial practices ought to make some distinction between those who have lived lives of open confession of Jesus Christ and those who have not.

The distinction need not imply that the Church is making an infallible judgment on the eternal state of a man’s soul. But it does need to indicate that there are certain distinguishable marks of the Christian life for which the Church can give thanks to God in the presence of death, and that the lack of these marks makes the giving of thanks impossible. It is the Church in the person of its leaders that is asked to do the burying and speak the appropriate words. And the Church has the authority to apply its own standards, under the guidance of the Spirit, to any activity in which it participates. Whatever standards a particular church may use to designate a member “in good standing” can fairly be used in determining what attitude that church should take toward providing Christian burial when it is requested. Persons who are under discipline or who are outside the church’s fellowship should be treated accordingly.

Most Americans are surprised to learn that Canada is the largest country in the Western hemisphere (6.5 per cent larger than the United States) and, aside from Soviet Russia, the largest national territory in the world. Since 1967 is Canada’s centennial, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will devote its March 31 issue to our enterprising neighbor. This special issue will portray the religious situation in a land of 20 million inhabitants, assess the present situation in its churches, and propose programs of evangelical and evangelistic advance.

In recent months CHRISTIANITY TODAY has opened a branch editorial office in suburban Toronto at 1125 Leslie Street, Don Mills, Ontario, with J. Berkley Reynolds, minister in the United Church of Canada, as Canadian editorial representative.

From April 6 to 12, I shall be addressing audiences across Canada from Vancouver to Halifax on current theological trends.

Growing Canadian interest in CHRISTIANITY TODAY is evidenced by the fact that among new subscribers in recent months there were more than 500 Canadians. The special offer of a free copy of The New Testament in Four Versions with a one-year subscription at $5 is still open to new subscribers both in Canada and in the United States. Orders should be posted to 375 West Center Street, Marion, Ohio 43302.

In the months since the International Seminar on the Authority of Scripture that took place at Wenham, Massachusetts, during June of last year, numerous articles and letters-to-editors have appeared dealing with biblical inerrancy. Having established a reputation for volubility at the seminar (Dr. Ockenga seemed ready to give me a prolixity prize at the final session), I find myself emotionally compelled to enter the postmortem fray.

But what I have to say will be quite brief, since my concern is restricted to one key problem, which kept cropping up under various guises throughout the ten-day seminar: the question of induction vs. deduction in relation to the inerrancy of Scripture. I was amazed to find that a number of the seminar participants (generally exegetes) associated the historic Reformation, evangelical conviction that the Bible is factually errorless with a “deductive” process of reasoning from such passages as Second Timothy 3:16, while preferring personally to leave the question of factual error open on the “inductive” ground that every problem passage of Scripture warrants interpretative consideration sui generis.

Such arguments have been making headway even without Dewey M. Beegle’s Inspiration of Scripture (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 26. 1963). Thus Robert H. Mounce, in his June, 1966, Eternity article entitled “Clues to Understanding Biblical Accuracy,” asks his readers the (to him) rhetorical question, “Are we to argue deductively that inspiration logically necessitates Cape Kennedy accuracy, or shall we adopt the inductive approach and ask Scripture to define its own terms?” In my judgment, even if we blast the “Cape Kennedy” straw man from this question, we are still left with a query as misleading as, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

The great Wittgenstein, in a famous remark, claimed that the aim in philosophy is “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Let’s see if we can extricate the contemporary theological fly from the inductive-vs.-deductive fly bottle.

First and foremost, we must grant the priority of induction in setting out a doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Why? Although all investigative operations involve the interplay of deduction and induction—together with a liberal dose of what Peirce called imaginative retroduction (see my paper, “The Theologian’s Craft,” American Scientific Affiliation Journal, September, 1966)—only inductively justifiable results necessarily jibe with the phenomenal world. The only purely deductive procedures are logical or mathematical in nature, and they at best offer only a “scaffolding” for the world of fact, not an account of any particular facts. Independently of the Bible, no one has any right, on alleged “deductive” grounds, to pronounce on the nature of scriptural authority.

But (and a more important “but” cannot be imagined) to affirm the primacy of induction in the inerrancy issue in no way establishes the view that factual error can be compatible with a proper inspiration doctrine. “Induction” is not a monolithic, simplistic procedure in which one stares at one problematic fact at a time and then draws conclusions from these facts. Actually, one does not know how to treat particular factual problems until one has a gestalt or pattern in which to fit them. This gestalt is, of course, inductively derived from the material to be analyzed; but, since it provides the structure for understanding the particulars, its significance transcends that of the details. Unless it is properly induced, further induction will be fruitless.

Let us take some non-biblical literary examples. In understanding modern stream-of-consciousness writing (e.g., portions of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; his Ulysses; parts of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), the reader is hopelessly led astray by the indicia of the narrative until he discovers, through the express teaching of the novel, the actual age of the characters involved. Having learned this, he has an inductively derived gestalt for understanding the particular problems of the stream-of-consciousness narration; to reverse the procedure would be to lose all hope of meaningful interpretation.

The wild hilarity of Frederick C. Crews’s Pooh Perplex (in which he “analyzes” Winnie-the-Pooh from the standpoint of “varying critical persuasions,” such as the Marxist and psychoanalytic literary schools) stems from an intentional overlooking of the gestalt principle. Each interpreter hopelessly misconstrues Pooh, not because he doesn’t employ genuine, inductively derived indicia from Milne’s book, but because he never determines the gestalt: the fact that Winnie-the-Pooh is a children’s book, not a treatise on class war or the Oedipus complex.

To know how to treat biblical passages containing apparent errors or contradictions, we must determine what kind of book the Bible is. A doctrine of limited biblical authority derived from passages manifesting difficulties is as false an induction and as flagrant a denial of the analogy of Scripture as is a morally imperfect Christology derived from questionable acts on Jesus’ part. In both cases, proper induction requires that we go to the express biblical teaching on the subject (Jesus’ deity; Scripture’s authority) and allow this to create the pattern for treating particular problems.

And how does one correctly determine the nature and extent of scriptural authority? Not by staring at genealogical difficulties or ancient king-lists as (to use Luther’s figure) a cow stares at a new gate, but by going directly to the Bible’s central character, Jesus Christ, who declared himself to be God incarnate by manifold proofs, and observing his approach to Scripture.

Christ’s attitude toward the Old Testament was one of total trust: nowhere, in no particular, and on no subject did he place Scripture under criticism. Never did he distinguish truth “in faith and practice” from veracity in historical and secular matters, and he told the Evil Foe in no uncertain terms that man lives “by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4, quoting Deut. 8:3). To his apostles, under whose scrutiny the New Testament would be written, he promised his Holy Spirit, who “shall bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26, cf. 2 Pet. 3:15, 16).

Inerrancy? Yes. Induction? Yes. The way out of the fly bottle? Approaching Scripture always and everywhere as did the Lord Christ.

Would you believe that the name of Pope Paul VI was booed at a rally near Vatican City last month? First time in fifty years, according to the Washington Post. The vocal venom came at a meeting of 1,000 persons who favor a liberalized divorce law for Italy. The Pope had said that civil divorce is a “sign of pernicious moral decadence” and had asserted church supremacy on the issue granted under the 1929 concordat between Mussolini and Pope Pius XI.

Or would you believe:

That two days after the Pope overruled a decision in his own diocese against joint prayer with Protestants for unity (after the service in question had already been canceled), a Vatican spokesman said ecumenical prayer remains “an open question” and the Pope’s ruling was an “exception.”

That Britain’s Father Wilfrid Stibbs, 54—former director of the international Legion of Mary—no longer believes in papal infallibility, and quit the church like his now-married friend Charles Davis. Or that Father Herbert McCabe, editor of a British Dominican monthly, stayed in but commented on the Davis turmoil that “the Church is quite plainly corrupt.” Or that the order’s director then banned McCabe from editing or writing.

That Monsignor Victor Popishil, a canon lawyer, writes in Diakonia that the church’s belief in the absolute permanence of marriage is “historically unfounded and theologically unjustified.”

That the hierarchy in France sent the Vatican a 4,000-word statement that rejects the concept of “a list of propositions to condemn” and says the “questioning of conscience” by Catholics should not be stopped by “authority alone.” They were replying to a worldwide Vatican directive last summer to watch for errors cropping up in Catholic teaching.

That liberal Catholic Professor Leslie Dewart contends in a special Commonweal issue on God that “the classical concept of God has become unviable. It can no longer enter fully and integrally into the life of believers themselves.”

That Archbishop Karl Alter started an investigation of the University of Dayton to see if theology teachers were being heretical.

That Monsignor Ivan Illich, director of a Mexican center that trains missionaries for work in Latin America, charged in America that the thousands of workers and millions of dollars sent to Latin America from U. S. Catholics in recent years have done great harm—for instance, by creating “a satellite to North Atlantic cultural phenomena and policy.” Cardinal Cushing, the Latin bishops, and the Vatican’s apostolic delegate to the United States all denied the criticisms.

That John F. Donnelly quit as president of the National Council of Catholic Men after learning that the five U. S. bishops in charge of lay organizations had no intention of conferring with NCCM leadership.

That two priests sent on a five-day disciplinary retreat after joining a Texas farm workers’ protest march said it was just a matter of “church protocol.”

That failure of real-estate investments forced the Salvatorian Fathers last month to sell three of their six seminaries. Or that the American Federation of Priests, founded by suspended priest William DuBay, is also losing money but is still surviving with thirty dues-paying members.

That Catholic grade-school enrollment dropped nearly 250,000 in the current school year, the first major loss since World War II. Or that eleven Chicago priests are opposing a $250 million fund drive, largely for schools, because the church is “fighting a losing battle” in maintaining a separate school system, which “is financially impossible.”

That a new catechism for six-year-olds from Paulist Press now in use in fifty dioceses in the United States discards the traditional question-and-answer approach in favor of modern teaching methods to help children “enter into a personal relationship with the triune God.”

That TV star Fulton J. Sheen, new bishop of Rochester, New York, is bucking a Vatican emphasis by having youths confirmed in church membership around high school graduation instead of at age 9 to 12. Or that the National Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a memorandum that deliberately failing to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday is not a sin, and not abstaining from meat on Lenten Fridays for “light” reasons is not a mortal sin. Or that a bishop in Chile has stretched Pope Paul’s permission for mother superiors to distribute Communion to their nuns: he let the head of a convent administer the sacrament to all parishioners.

That Cardinal Suenens of Belgium favors selection of future popes by a representative synod of world bishops rather than the College of Cardinals. Or that Catholics in Canada may restore the long-neglected order of permanent deacons to give married laymen a part in the ministry. Or that the Cleveland diocese is asking members to nominate and vote on names for a new bishop.

That the right-wing Catholic Traditionalist Movement last month began distributing protest cards for members to put in the offering basket instead of money. They state:

“I shall resume my customary contributions as soon as you will resume the celebration of at least one Mass each day, including Sunday, offered according to the traditional Liturgy; entirely in Latin, at a real Altar by a priest not facing the people, and conducted in a quiet atmosphere without hymn-singing and without lectors or commentators.”

Surprise.

Protestant Panorama

An open letter from Disciples of Christ executives asks denomination members to increase the “financial and personal resources of our brotherhood” to help the church meet the world’s overwhelming needs. The letter notes that “our stewardship has not enabled us to meet even those needs which, through our actions in assemblies, we have selected as our particular responsibility within the world church.”

A Lutheran Church of America agency is calling for a broad new appeal for capital funds. The church’s Board of American Missions voted to request the denominational executive council to approve such a church-wide appeal in view of rising costs. New ministry demands are said to be draining off the amount transferred each year to church property loan funds.

Whatever the Episcopal Church eventually does about resigned Bishop James A. Pike, he “does not have a seat or a vote” in the House of Bishops. So says John Henry Esquirol of Connecticut, chairman of the bishops’ constitutional committee. According to Esquirol, the ruling by his committee passed without dissent at the last meeting of the house. The question arose after Pike resigned as leader of the California diocese but retained his ecclesiastical rank.

Personalia

Two clergymen of the International Council of Christian Churches were reported expelled from the Cameroun, where they had come to confer with local Presbyterian pastors. Some days earlier a group of the pastors had walked out of their General Assembly, vowing to continue their denomination in defiance of a merger vote. The Christian Beacon blamed a pro-union Presbyterian police chief for the expulsion.

Army Chaplain (Colonel) James A. Connett, a Methodist, was chosen “Chaplain of the Year” by the Reserve Officers Association. He is a paratrooper.

Three Anglican bishops and a Methodist leader have been reported arrested in Communist China and placed in an “indoctrination” camp. The Church Times of London says the churchmen and other leading Christians were imprisoned by the Mao regime.

Dr. Arne B. Sovik was chosen executive secretary of the Board of World Mission of the Lutheran Church in America. Sovik, a clergyman of the American Lutheran Church, has been associated with the Lutheran World Federation for the past twelve years.

Ralph L. Keiper was named to a professorate in pastoral theology and evangelism at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver. Keiper is now employed by the Evangelical Foundation of Philadelphia and serves as an associate editor of its monthly publication, Eternity.

The board of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School last month put outgoing president Robert J. Arnott on immediate “leave of absence” until his resignation becomes effective this summer. While BBDS seeks a new president, the seminary will be administered by Richard Hoiland, retired executive of the American Baptist Convention’s Board of Education and Publication. (See Dec. 23, 1966, issue, page 35.)

A Presbyterian, Penry Jones, takes over the religious broadcasting department of the British Broadcasting Corporation this month. He is the first layman and the first non-Anglican ever named to the post. Until now he has been religious broadcasting officer of the Independent Television Authority.

General Secretary Edwin Tuller of the American Baptist Convention goes to Viet Nam this month on a preaching mission to servicemen for the National Council of Churches. President Arnold Olson of the Evangelical Free Church is traveling there also, under the aegis of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Deaths

ALBERT W. T. ORSBORN, 80, who headed the Salvation Army from 1946 until 1954; in Bournemouth, England.

GEOFFREY O’HARA, 84, a Presbyterian from Canada who wrote the popular church solo “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked” and other religious songs; better known by the general public for the World War I-vintage stuttering song “K-K-K-Katy”; in St. Petersburg, Florida, of anemia.

Miscellany

Enrollment in Lutheran elementary schools fell off last year for the first time since 1942. There was also a drop in the number of schools.

Mississippi’s Committee of Concern is allocating the last $300 in its treasury to the Shady Oak Baptist Church, which burned to the ground January 20. The committee has been instrumental in rebuilding forty-two burned Negro churches in Mississippi during the past two years. Its chairman, Episcopal Bishop John M. Allin of Jackson, has issued a plea for more donations.

Despite full-scale resumption of hostilities after the four-day Lunar New Year cease-fire in Viet Nam, informed analysts kept detecting a smell of settlement. A few vocal clergymen added to the complexities with continued insistence that the U. S. government yield enough ground to Hanoi to bring the warring factions to a conference table.

Two unrelated developments last month dramatized the Church’s implication in the war: the sudden death of an octogenarian pacifist who had just returned from North Viet Nam, and the flurry of publicity over a poem by a teen-ager, already a church dropout, who is “concerned” over American use of napalm in Viet Nam.

But the most prominent ecclesiastical personality to make his views known is still Pope Paul VI. After granting a half-hour audience to U. S. Senator Robert Kennedy, the Pope issued pleas for extending the Lunar New Year truce. North Viet Nam’s President Ho Chi Minh responded with a tirade against the United States.

In New York, the Rev. A. J. Muste, 82, held a news conference to answer questions about his newly formed Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam. A few days later Muste died in his apartment of an apparent heart attack. The tall, gaunt Presbyterian clergyman had just returned from Hanoi and talks with Ho Chi Minh to report Ho’s “offer” to meet with President Johnson in Hanoi. He had been a pacifist for fifty years and since 1948 had refused to pay income taxes because the money was spent for armaments.

Muste’s new movement was understood to be a more radical protest group than the ad hoc “Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam,” which held a two-day rally and demonstration in Washington several weeks ago and called a three-day fast consonant with the beginning of Lent and the Lunar New Year (see Feb. 17 issue, p. 48). Another “visitation” to Washington was scheduled for March 1.

In Philadelphia, the United Presbyterian Board of Christian Education announced that the Defense Department had canceled 13,000 subscriptions to a junior-high Sunday-school publication because of a poem on napalm. The poem was composed by Barbara Beidler, 13, of Vero Beach, Florida, and published by Venture, which paid her one dollar for it. Barbara’s parents are members of a Presbyterian church in Vero Beach. Barbara, however, doesn’t attend much any more. Her poem—which her father had not seen until the controversy hit the front pages—goes like this:

All was still.

The sun rose through silver pine boughs,

Over sleeping green-straw huts,

Over cool rice ponds,

Through the emerald jungles,

Into the sky.

The men rose and went out to the fields and ponds.

The women set pots on the fire, boiling rice and jungle berries, and some with baskets went for fish.

The children played in the streams and danced through the weeds.

Then there was the flash—silver and gold

Silver and gold,

Silver birds flying,

Golden water raining.

The rice ponds blazed with the new water.

The jungles burst into gold and sent up little birds of fire.

Little animals with fur of flame.

Then the children flamed.

Running—their clothes flying like fiery kites.

Screaming—their screams dying as their faces seared.

The women’s baskets burned on their heads.

The men’s boats blazed on the rice waters.

Then the rains came.

A rag, fire black, fluttered.

A curl of smoke rose from a lone rice stem.

The forest lay singed, seared.

A hut crumbled.

And all was still.

Listen, Americans,

Listen, clear and long.

The children are screaming

In the jungles of Haiphong.

Upon learning of the cancellation, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a Presbyterian layman, reversed his department’s ruling and announced that Venture was being put back on the recommended curriculum roster for U. S. military chaplains.

Kennedy, during a ten-day trip to Europe, fanned rumors that secret negotiations on the Viet Nam war were under way or imminent. He was reportedly rebuked for his remarks by President Johnson.

In Nashville, two prominent churchmen wired Secretary of State Dean Rusk to say that he had “hardened the U. S. position” on possible peace negotiations with North Viet Nam.

A Christian To Lead Nazareth

For the first time in seven years, Nazareth, Israel, has a Christian mayor. He is Musa (Moses) Iktaily, a Greek Orthodox farm-machinery salesman who was chosen as a compromise candidate after round-the-clock negotiations.

For six years, Seif ed-Din Zoibe, head of a large Muslim clan in Galilee, had been mayor of the predominantly Arab Christian town that was the home of Jesus. After a 1965 election deadlock in which Communists suddenly won half (six) the city council seats, a Muslim cousin of the former mayor, Abdul Aziz Zoibe, agreed to serve as mayor, but this compromise failed last year.

So another vote was held late in 1966. The Communists held five seats and demanded concessions. Then Seif ed-Din Zoibe, now a member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), further fragmented the picture by offering to return as mayor. But townsmen charged that his regime had been corrupt. Iktaily, whose brother is Israel’s only Arab judge and whose wife is a public school headmistress, emerged as a dark-horse candidate. The Iktailys have a married son who is studying medicine in the United States.

DWIGHT L. BAKER

L.B.J. To Worship ‘Privately’

Calling it a “private matter,” the White House last month announced that the time and place of the First Family’s church attendance will no longer automatically be made public.

This ends a long Washington tradition in which Presidential church attendance has generally been given advance announcement, at least to the press corps.

The Rev. George R. Davis, pastor of National City Christian Church, which the Johnsons often attend, expressed approval: “I believe the President has every right to privacy in his worship.”

But at least one other Washington clergyman disagrees. Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, pastor of Washington’s National Presbyterian Church, which has issued pew-reservation receipts to nine former Presidents, rebutted: “What a public figure of his eminence does in a public institution (a church) is in the public domain.”

Bible In Wax

Eve ate the apple at age 20. Daniel was in the den with African lions. Christ was blond and blue-eyed. Or at least so says Frank L. Dennis, a Washington, D. C., public relations man turned waxworks kingpin, who is spending $250,000 to convert an old pipeorgan factory into America’s first Bible History Wax Museum.

The museum, scheduled to open in the nation’s capital in late June, will have seventeen tableaus of events from Creation to Crucifixion. Each will be accompanied by an appropriate King James Scripture portion. The total effect, Dennis hopes, will be to “stimulate interest in the meaning of various events in the Bible.”

The Bible Museum will be waxworks number nine for Dennis. The others, located across the country, deal with American history. The departure this time comes from a recognition that the Bible “is fundamental to our whole way of living.”

The museum will depict scenes from both the Old and the New Testament. A figure of Lot’s wife will turn to salt at the touch of a button. Noah will be loading the Ark in the rain. Jesus will be shown as a “teen-ager” working as a carpenter and later on, walking on the water at “three in the morning.”

Future expansion plans include a wing on important religious leaders.

Along with the religious significance, non-aligned Protestant Dennis expects his new museum to be big box office as well. An American history museum he now operates in the city saw 700,000 people pass the cashier last year.

Misappropriating a biblical term, Dennis added, “We expect the Bible History Museum to do damn near as well.”

WILLIAM D. FREELAND

Under New Management

Faced with a $1.5 million debt that hasn’t been reduced in three years, trustees of Bibletown, U. S. A., in Boca Raton, Florida, are putting a new man in charge—evangelist Torrey Johnson.

He replaces flamboyant founder Ira Eshleman, who seventeen years ago began turning the former Air Force radar station into the nation’s biggest winter Bible conference and built two 150-acre residential communities near the grounds.

The biggest monkey on Bibletown’s back is a 2,500-seat auditorium completed in 1960 for $1 million. It is the center of a thirteen-week winter program that draws Christian tourists to Florida’s sunny Gold Coast.

Meanwhile, a tax battle with local officials is in process. The auditorium and a Sunday school building have been ruled tax-exempt, but still in question is an $8,000-a-year levy on 105 motel units and other facilities.

ADON TAFT

The Making Of A Marxist

How does a youth “converted” in an evangelical Baptist church, active in youth work, and “called” to the ministry, end up a Communist?

Ask Steve Hamilton, 22, who now awaits sentencing for trespass in last year’s University of California student uprising. Hamilton is one of several well-known revolutionists at UC’s Berkeley campus who had planned to become clergymen. Mario Savio had his sights set on the Jesuit priesthood. Stewart Albert had planned to be a rabbi.

Hamilton says that while attending Wheaton (Illinois) College and working in a Chicago slum Sunday school, he began reading liberal theologians and soon found himself doubting the relevance of traditional Christianity.

Restless, he explored the Episcopal Church and attended laying-on-of-hands services. After transferring to the Berkeley campus, he decided to enter the Episcopal priesthood and was confirmed by Bishop James A. Pike, whose “courage and convictions” he is said to have admired. Through classes with Pike and other Episcopal contacts, he became involved in civil-rights protests.

When police “roughed him up” during his first arrest, Hamilton says, he turned completely against the “establishment.” In 1964, he represented the University Church Council in the leadership of the campus Free Speech Movement, which led student strikes.

During this period, Hamilton absorbed the Communist interpretation of history after taking a course that presented Marxism “sympathetically.” By 1965, he had discarded all theological belief. To him, “the height of irrelevance during an era of social struggle” was a theologian droning on for hours about “the ground of being.”

Communism has wrought drastic changes in Hamilton’s moral outlook. He now feels no guilt about the use of violence—even murder—by those attempting to bring about “change.” He considers himself a true atheist. As for Christ, “he disappeared with the theology, I guess, and I haven’t thought about him since.”

Another 22-year-old ex-evangelical in the Bay Area is Patrick Taggart. As a teen-ager in the First Baptist Church of Chatsworth, California, Taggart was active in church youth activities and Youth for Christ and served as a counselor in Billy Graham’s last Los Angeles crusade. But he said he was ousted from church leadership when he began to discuss “liberal” ideas. He left for the Bay and met Lois Murgenstrumm, 21, who introduced him to the Satan-worship cult in which he is now the right-hand man. The girl served as a nude “living altar” during a recent well-publicized satanist wedding (Feb. 17 issue, page 49).

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

The Consultation on Church Union got its tenth participant last month, the all-Negro Christian Methodist Episcopal Church with its 466,718 members. In May, CME representatives will meet those from other denominations to discuss the pending giant Protestant merger.

Whatever happens at that session in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the major U.S. ecumenical question of 1967 is whether the Episcopal Church as a whole will love COCU in September as its delegates did in May.

The Episcopal ecumenical commission recently announced its plans for the September General Convention in Seattle. It proposes that the church authorize its delegates to negotiate a specific merger plan. The delegates from COCU’s two biggest members, the Episcopal and Methodist Churches, lack this authority, although several other denominations have approved such escalation. The ecumenical commission also wants the U.S. church to “commend” COCU to the worldwide Lambeth Conference next year. The General Convention won’t meet again until 1970, and the next Lambeth Conference is in 1978, so both proposals are important in the COCU timetable.

Virginia’s Bishop Robert F. Gibson, Jr.—ecumenical commission chairman and former chairman of COCU itself—said COCU executives who met last month thought the merger timetable “has clearly slowed up over what we thought possible” at the last COCU meeting in Dallas, where “Principles of Church Union” were approved.

Gibson is confident the Episcopal Church will vote to continue with COCU, but is less certain it will approve entry into specific negotiation. His panel’s proposal could be amended to freeze talks at the present ambiguous level.

Although many Episcopalians think COCU is inevitable, its most conspicuous opponent, Canon Albert J. duBois, is “much more hopeful” COCU can be stalled than he was when he began a two-month series of two-night stands across the country. DuBois, 60, is the veteran executive director of the American Church Union, an organization of 11,000 Anglo-Catholic or “high” churchmen.

He finds many Episcopalians who had no previous interest in ACU and disagree with its liturgical slant are backing its drive against COCU. He also reports a significant increase in financial aid from bishops.

Also on tour against COCU is ACU President Chandler W. Sterling, the bishop of Montana, whose mailing address in Helena—Last Chance Gulch—may be prophetic.

The ACU case is presented in the current issue of its monthly American Church News. Essentially, the argument is that COCU is a move toward Protestantism at the expense of closer relations with Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. (Bishop Gibson’s commission asserts it is trying to move in both directions.) The ACU’s objection to COCU agreements on the ministry, bishops, and apostolic succession seems to be that the COCU church will not be the Episcopal Church. From the non-Episcopalian’s point of view, the Episcopal negotiators have won more concessions within COCU than any other denominational team.

The Episcopal delegation includes such high churchmen as Peter Day, the denomination’s ecumenical officer, and Bishop Stephen F. Bayne, Jr., who directs liaison with the world Anglican Communion. Another delegate is Chicago’s Bishop Gerald Francis Burrill, one of nineteen bishops who belong to the ACU. Last month, he opened the year’s discussion of COCU in the Episcopalian by saying the denomination must decide “either to obey our Lord’s command to be one and to enter willingly into the difficult, often painful, negotiations with all other Christian bodies” or to “be satisfied to be a sect, isolated from the rest of Christendom.”

Asked to comment on the ACU criticisms, Burrill said they are “not valid, on the whole,” but he agrees with its concern about the “position and impact” of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, traditional doctrinal standards of the Episcopal Church now questioned by Bishop James A. Pike and some other liberals.

The American Church Union points out that the COCU “Principles” consider the creeds as corporate, historic “symbols,” but “it is not stated, however, that anyone has any obligation to believe” them. The Apostles’ Creed, it fears, may become “an interesting historical relic,” rarely used. The status of Nicene is even more vague.

The ACU, which also dislikes the National Council of Churches, fears that the COCU church will be another NCC, run by the same people but carrying more authority, since it will be the Church rather than a voluntary council. “The sorry record of the National Council of Churches gives us a very dependable indication of what the leadership in the new COCU Church will do.… We will be bound by its heretical publications and the many distressing resolutions it chooses to set forth.” And ACU envisions an administratively muscle-bound, undemocratic church full of bureaucratic parasites.

The ACU questions whether the united church would be “truly evangelical.” “In the absence of a definite standard of beliefs for teaching, it is not likely that the new COCU Church would have much Evangelistic force in its effort to reach out for conversions.”

Although a denominational official said the ACU is an “extreme” minority, duBois claims to be more in tune with the grass roots than the COCU delegates. Many active laymen are conservative (most of ACU’s membership is lay), and he points out that a majority of Episcopal clergy are converts from other denominations, and thus many are unenthusiastic about losing Episcopal distinctives. He is convinced that if the denomination votes to join COCU, some members will form a continuing Episcopal church.

To duBois, “the ecumenical movement is forcing us to a decision on our very nature.” The Episcopalians have traditionally straddled the Protestant-Catholic fence. DuBois says many Episcopalians want to do nothing to cut off channels to Rome, and “are willing to accept the pope as a visible head of the church—a chairman of the board—but not as a monarch.”

Bishop Gibson thinks the ACU is “over-interpreting” what the COCU “Principles” are: “They are asking for more definition than anybody else has.” He calls the ACU statement “a misinterpretation of what Dallas did do and what it tried to do.”

Most of the Episcopalians who will vote on COCU this fall will be chosen in diocesan conventions this spring. The COCU resolution must pass with a simple majority in both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies (priests and laymen). The bishops’ approval is considered automatic, so the real action will occur in the other house, where each diocese has one vote. If the lay and clergy delegates within a diocese disagree, their votes cancel each other out. Any eventual merger proposal would need to pass two General Conventions in a row, with a two-thirds majority in each house.

Evangelistic One-Upmanship

About forty evangelism specialists of the American Baptist Convention braved Chicago snowdrifts last month to plan strategy for the next two years, but the biggest evangelistic controversy in the ABC got little attention.

Just before the meeting of state evangelism executives with national evangelism director Jitsuo Morikawa and his staff, the ABC General Council had repeated and re-explained its previous decision to boycott a hemispherewide, pan-Baptist Crusade of the Americas in 1969. The ABC plans instead to boost its own “Faith and Work” curriculum and handle evangelism on its own terms with ABC-aligned churches in Latin America.

The vote showed the gap between the ABC and the much larger and more conservative Southern Baptist Convention, prime mover of the 1969 crusade. But the ABC stereotype of the SBC must have taken a jolt when Wayne Dehoney, former SBC president and chief planner of the forthcoming crusade, proposed that Roman Catholics join with Baptists in the campaign. “We are hopeful, and happy that a spirit of evangelism and outreach based on the proclamation of the Gospel and New Testament faith is breaking loose in the Catholic Church.” He said Methodists and Southern Presbyterians also are interested.

Several of the state and local ABC units represented at the Chicago meeting plan to cooperate with the crusade on their own, which is fully permissible under Baptist autonomy.

The Chicago conferees mainly discussed internal efforts from headquarters such as “Action-Reflection” visitation and more efficient follow-up when ABC members move to a new community. A leading ABC figure said the lack of a pro-crusade drive in Chicago probably means the issue will be raised at the national convention in May.

Southern Baptists are still smarting from comments by Morikawa at the November meeting where the ABC first shunned the crusade. He belittled the old-style evangelism of Southerners and Pentecostalists and criticized the preeminent crusade role of the SBC, which he said has not faced up to its racial responsibilities. ABC President Carl Tiller, in his February report, said many members are losing confidence in the General Council and the “convention superstructure.” He said that many also believe the ABC evangelism program “does not meet the needs,” and that “restlessness” exists on interchurch strategy. Tiller, whose congregation belongs to both ABC and SBC, hopes for better relations across the Mason-Dixon line. To help things, Tiller has agreed to serve, as an individual, on the laymen’s committee for the 1969 crusade. His term as ABC president runs out this spring.

Confession Of 1967

The controversial Confession of 1967 appeared headed toward adoption last month. Religious News Service reported February 16 that out of ninety-one presbyteries known to have voted on the document, seventy-six had approved it. Favorable action by two-thirds or 126 of the 188 presbyteries is required for passage.

After Hash, A Barbecue

Should Christians send their children to Sunday school? Resigned Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike provided both the question and an answer when the National Council of Churches staged its annual Division of Christian Education meeting in Dallas last month. Generally it added up to a “no.” He said the “no” for the benefit of some 1,000 professional Christian education workers. Then he qualified it a bit: children should not be sent to “most” church schools, he explained. He would recommend only the kind that does not teach anything that has to be “unlearned” later, and that means that the supernatural would not be taught, and nothing about heaven and hell, and certainly nothing about a once-for-all conversion. Just the natural—“if true”—not the supernatural, said the bishop. Let the children stay home and read the funny papers (unless they are the blood-and-thunder sadistic kind), he counseled.

Pike addressed only one of sixteen sections meeting simultaneously, with other groups scattered across downtown Dallas.

Another Episcopalian almost stole the headlines from the former bishop of California. He was Malcolm Boyd, principal speaker at the meeting of adult workers, which specialized this year in approaches to young adults. Boyd chose the occasion to announce existence of the “underground church,” made up of those who are impatient with the existing practices of organized churches.

Defining members of the underground church, Boyd said, “These people are refusing to worship God merely along denominational lines. They ignore official structures and hierarchy. They regard Protestant-Catholic reunion as having already taken place. Their fellowship includes priests, pastors, laymen, nuns and even many Jews.” He said they celebrate the Lord’s Supper together at mealtimes, as the early Christians did.

He explained that the builders of this nameless revolution have decided simply not to worry about ecclesiastical and doctrinal differences, which bore them and seem futile. They are for Pope John and against Cardinal Spellman. The martyred Dietrich Bonhoeffer—along with a few secular figures such as Albert Camus—is a saint in their canon. But by and large they try to avoid too much celebrity worship.

The priest and sometime night-club performer said some of the underground church members go to church and some do not. He found an immediate reaction in the audience of adult workers, and somebody decided to call him phony, even though he had earlier said that all members of the underground church reject everything that is phony.

The adult workers, in seeking better understanding of young adults, spent some time one evening visiting bars, “gay” hangouts, and other habitats of unchurched young men and women.

Youth workers heard from another controversial minister, Howard Moody of Judson Memorial Church in New York City. He spoke of the need to move from “the apathy of the fifties to the action of the sixties.” He suggested that leadership of young people has moved from the academy and temple to the streets, and urged the development of “mobile ministries.” He asked youth workers to help the church find a new morality and get over its pietism.

Workers in week-day religious education had among their speakers Rabbi Arthur Gilbert, who stressed a need for objective teaching of religion in schools but rejected any devotional use of religion in schools and Bible study as such. He thought the teaching of religion in history would be more acceptable to the entire community than teaching the history of religion.

The sixteen sections all met independently, and the only time that all 1,800 registrants were together was at a concluding barbecue and fellowship luncheon.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Second Thoughts On Structure

Last fall the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren General Conferences voted to unite into what is to be known as the United Methodist Church. Now some top executives of the two denominations want to change the terms of the pending merger.

“We believe that there is a need for redesigning the structure of the new United Methodist Church,” said a resolution adopted at a joint meeting of the Methodist Council of Secretaries and the EUB Council of Executives.

The Joint Commission on Union was asked to “set up a committee on redesigning the structure of the church, to develop succinct statements on mission (purpose) and to draft a plan of restructure.”

The commission met the next week and voted to set up fourteen committees, one of which was assigned the job of studying the restructure request.

The Methodist-EUB executives want the restructure action taken in 1968. That’s when the merger question will be up for ratification. A plan of organization and administration for the United Methodist Church has been drawn up but will not be voted upon until then.

Schism Out Of Ecumenism?

Six emissaries of the Evangelical United Brethren hierarchy plan to hold peace talks next month with fellow churchmen in the Pacific Northwest who want no part of a merger with Methodists.

Last fall’s EUB General Conference, which voted to unite the denomination with The Methodist Church, also recognized formidable resistance from congregations in Washington, Oregon, and Montana, and authorized the General Council of Administration to appoint a special negotiating team. The group is expected to visit the area in mid-April and try to persuade as many churches as possible to recognize the expected merger. If schism cannot be avoided, the negotiating team is understood to be planning concessions to avoid court fights over church property rights.

The resistance is primarily among theologically conservative churches that do not want to be dissolved into the more liberal Methodist machine. Some authorities estimate that as much as 85 per cent of the EUB constituency in the Pacific Northwest may refuse the merger. The eighty-two EUB churches in Washington and Oregon have a total membership of about 11,600. There are twenty-two churches in Montana.

At least six churches have already taken a congregational vote against participation in the merger. Virtually all the large churches oppose union.

A leading EUB minister has declared that anti-merger members “are not a belligerent people. We are a strong holiness movement abiding by the discipline of our church, rather than departing from it.”

There is already considerable talk of forming a new regional fellowship of the non-merger churches. A number of previously independent churches are also reported to be interested in such a move. Together they will be in a good position to court association with an existing national body. Four national holiness denominations have already made approaches to EUB churches in the Pacific Northwest.

Presbyterian Rules Retained

When the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U. S., meets this June in Bristol, Tennessee, it will follow the same procedural rules it used in 1966.

To Southern Presbyterians, that’s news.

Last October the denomination’s Permanent Committee on Assembly Operation caused a furor by announcing it would make sweeping changes in the rules. The agency, which makes the arrangements for the annual assembly, has now reconsidered and withdrawn the changes.

The committee claimed authority to amend the procedures from a motion passed at the end of the 1966 assembly. It was approved after several commissioners complained of the haste with which some business (notably the decision to become a full participant in the Consultation on Church Union) was handled. But differences of opinion later arose as to whether the minutes had recorded the motion accurately.

After objections to the proposed rules began to come in, the committee reviewed the whole matter. Tapes of the concluding minutes of the 1966 assembly were heard, and makers of two procedural motions were interviewed. When it was all over, committeemen said there was a reasonable doubt about how much authority had been given them and about the intent of the motions.

The proposed rules, which resembled some used at United Presbyterian assemblies, would have assigned only half of the commissioners to standing committees. (All Presbyterian U. S. commissioners have been serving on committees.) Another unpopular change provided that the retiring moderator, the stated clerk, and the chairman of the assembly operation committee (instead of the moderator alone) would appoint the chairmen of standing committees. Another was aimed at cutting down on lobbying.

Instead of going into effect at the 1967 assembly, the rules (with several important revisions) will now be submitted as recommendations for adoption and implementation at the 1968 assembly.

If the committee’s decision on the rules settled one hassle, another of its decisions might start a new one. It voted to hold the 1969 General Assembly in Mobile, Alabama. Officials of the United Presbyterian Church had been expecting the Southern church to join it and the Cumberland Presbyterians in San Antonio for simultaneous assemblies that year. Presbyterian U. S. proponents of closer relations with the other two denominations might seek to reverse the committee’s action and push for a family reunion.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

History And The Christian Faith

Vindications: Essays on the Historical Basis of Christianity, edited by Anthony Hanson (Morehouse-Barlow, 1966, 192 pp., $5); The Historical Shape of Faith, by Ralph G. Wilburn (Westminster, 1966, 240 pp., $6); and Christ the Meaning of History, by Hendrikus Berkhof, translated by L. Buurman (John Knox, 1966, 224 pp., $5.50), are reviewed by John Frederick Jansen, professor of New Testament interpretation, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas.

Different as these books are in scope and approach, they express a common concern that the Christian faith must take history more seriously than some tendencies in modern theology have done.

Vindications is a symposium of six essays by five British authors. Three of the essays deal with the historical skepticism that characterizes form criticism of the Gospels. R. P. C. Hanson objects to the tendency to deny any genuine historical or biographical interest in the Gospels and seeks to show that “if nothing is certainly original, then we cannot be sure that anything is certainly secondary.” He points out that the time between Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is remarkably short for such a radical transformation of the message of Jesus as some posit. Anthony Hanson carries this critique further by examining Nineham’s commentary on Mark to show that his approach could discredit the reliability of any historical document. One may ask whether the comparison with other ancient literature does enough justice to the specifically confessional character of the Gospel. A. R. C. Leaney shows the most appreciation of form criticism as he deals with the quest of the historical Jesus in recent discussion. All three recognize the legitimacy and importance of the form-critical method but object that often conclusions are based less on form analysis than on prior presuppositions.

Ralph Wilburn’s The Historical Shape of Faith relates Christian concern for history to the development of the idea of history. He begins with the eschatological view of history as seen in the New Testament and in Augustine. The New Testament discussion is not very satisfying; it is much too brief and settles for rather sweeping generalizations. But Wilburn rightly shows how the eschatological view was challenged and undermined in the Enlightenment, and how rationalism’s “light of universal reason” failed to take history seriously. He gives a readable summary of the direction that the understanding of history has taken, paying particular attention to Croce, Toynbee, and Collingwood. The remaining chapters examine the implications for theology, especially for Christology and for the quest of the historical Jesus.

This is an interesting book. One wonders, however, why the jacket claims that it is “the first book to analyze just what history is, to define the impact of this modern idea of history on the Christian faith, and to consider ways in which theology must respond.…” The same publisher gave us Alan Richardson’s History, Sacred and Profane in 1964, a book that receives no mention in the present volume and yet is, in my opinion, a more substantial work.

The last book is Hendrikus Berkhof’s Christ the Meaning of History (written in 1958). An apocalyptic era, he suggests, calls the Church urgently to a theology of history. But church dogmatics has too much left a theology of history to the sects. Berkhof proposes to appropriate the message of biblical theology, including biblical apocalyptic, for an answer to the threatening alternatives of wrong meaning and no meaning in history. Since Israel first saw history genuinely as goal-directed, he examines the significant Old Testament traditions from the Exodus faith through Daniel, criticizing the manner in which prophecy and apocalyptic are often set over against each other. The New Testament portrays Jesus Christ as both the End and the Beginning of history. That is why “consistent” and “realized” eschatology are complementary expressions of this End and Beginning, both in the life of Jesus and in the life of the Church. The new beginning is seen in the missionary endeavor of the early Church. Berkhof examines modern secularization and says: “Secularization is the child of the gospel, but a child who sooner or later rises against his mother. And yet, the mother would not be what she ought to be if she did not desire the child.”

The most important chapters portray the Crucified and the Risen Christ in history. Here Berkhof deals with New Testament apocalyptic, including such thorny questions as the future of Israel and the millennial hope. Finally, he deals with the Consummation, both as break and as connection with past and present history. Eternity is not “timelessness”—or else there is only break and no consummation of history. Yet Berkhof does not follow Cullmann’s tendency to minimize the break between time and eternity. In his conclusion, avoiding historical skepticism and predictive confidence, he points to the practical necessity of making relative decisions in the present. An epilogue, written in 1965, indicates that Berkhof remains opposed to the basic conceptions of the Bultmann school.

These three volumes show that Christian theology need not settle for an uncritical biblicism or a historical skepticism that is indifferent to historical foundations of the faith. Of the three, I found Berkhof’s the most rewarding.

Reading for Perspective

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

• Reformed Dogmatics, by Herman Hoeksema (Reformed Free Publishing, $14.95). A systematic treatment of biblical and Reformed theology, thirty years in preparation, that develops the traditional topics of theology, anthropology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology.

• Ancient Orient and Old Testament, by K. A. Kitchen (Inter-Varsity, $3.95). A British scholar applies ancient Near East data to problems of Old Testament chronology, history, and literary criticism and calls for a critical reassessment of widely held liberal theories and methods.

• Ring of Truth: A Translator’s Testimony, by J. B. Phillips (Macmillan, $2.95). The renowned biblical translator relates discoveries of the deep truths of God that have gripped his life during his long years of study.

Death-Of-Reader Theology

The Future of Belief: Theism in a World Come of Age, by Leslie Dewart (Herder and Herder, 1966, 223 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by David A. Redding, writer in residence, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.

The argument over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is nothing to our intricate theological needlework. The diversionary literature defining the death of God and refining the new morality grows more and more complicated and voluminous. Our debate has become so rarefied that it would have bewildered Dionysius the Areopagite. Surely it will amuse the next generation, with the brutally practical reaction it is sure to have.

The Future of Belief is a book about the author’s God. Mr. Dewart’s desire to release God from the prison of the past only means that He is to be incarcerated in a more effective one. The author adds his form of atheism to that of the Marxist and that of the death-of-God theologian. But in this book the reader dies before God does.

At times Dewart with his erudition sounds a little like Emily Post describing the proper way to extract a prune pit. Take this, for example:

But is it possible to transcend the conceptual dichotomy of God’s essence and existence?… If we depart from Greek metaphysics at their Parmenidean root, knowledge is no longer an immaterial “intrussusception” of reality, and the investigation of being is no longer guided by the equivalence of intelligibility and being.

These “come of age” theologians complain that all Christian expression that preceded them is adolescent and irrelevant. In a very knowing and humorless way, Dewart rushes into this thin air to deal with “the problems of integrating Christian belief with the everyday experience of contemporary man.” I had high hopes for this author, having just put down the most exciting book I’ve read in years by another Roman Catholic. But Dewart continues the rage of carrying religion off into a corner where only the very special coterie can look at it. The book is brilliant inside its own logic but far remote from contemporary man’s “everyday experience.”

Dewart does fluff up some issues on which theology has been sitting for ages. And he can be incisive: “Belief must bear upon the reality of God, not upon words or concepts.” “The Marxist counterpart is the rejection of the God who is truly that of the Christian faith, but who in fact is unfaithfully believed in by us.” The author offers a shakeup more illegible than mistaken, undisciplined rather than deadly. But, not content with knocking out windows, he goes on to knock out walls and leaves us no house at all. As he discusses such matters as the distinction between the essence and the existence of God, the atheistic and anti-theistic positions, and the possibility that God may or may not be a being, one suspects that he is not in the realm of The Future of Belief but in fantasy.

Books of this kind do not belong to prophecy, nor are they organic additions to Christian theology. The death-of-God mood is a revolt that rejects most ungratefully the past wisdom and genius of all those who have transmitted Christianity to us. This new conceit suffers under the illusion that we are smarter than the apostles and that Augustine and Luther are only adequate corollary reading for good secondary schools. Now, borne on the wings of modern enlightenment, we shall bravely free our lofty insights from the drag of yesterday. Such an attitude is that of a defensive teenager tooting his own horn, howling with reproof, rife with objection toward the masterpieces of the past. Having emerged so recently from two wars and trembling now within the shadow of another, how can we pontificate with such authority?

Do not the angels sing for Mr. Dewart? We shall wait for him to put his articulate pen to work on what Christ meant when he said, “Except ye … become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Dissecting 007

James Bond’s World of Values, by Lycurgus M. Starkey, Jr. (Abingdon, 1966, 96 pp., $1.45); and The Devil with James Bond, by Ann S. Boyd (John Knox, 1966, 123 pp., $1.75), are reviewed by Clyde S. Kilby, professor of English, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Dr. Starkey and Mrs. Boyd hold diametrical opinions on the work of Ian Fleming. Starkey believes that Fleming, through his hero, James Bond, glorifies sex, sadism, violence, snobbery, “gambling, guzzling, sports-car gunning, and gourmandising,” and a narrow nationalism. Mrs. Boyd proposes that Bond is in reality “a modern knight of faith whose adventures involve a gallery of modern demons who have been attacking contemporary mankind just as diabolically as Medusa and all the other legendary demons and dragons attacked mankind in ages past.” She thinks that Bond is indeed another St. George going about to slay the demons in contemporary society.

I do not find myself in much sympathy with either book. Starkey’s is not at all a study of Fleming and therefore has a completely unjustified title. Rather, it is a series of sermons against the evils he finds approved by Fleming’s hero. The sermons, which Dr. Starkey delivered over NBC television, are earnest, informative, and excellent in expression. They take Fleming, however, simply as a point of departure.

On the other hand, Mrs. Boyd makes a thorough examination, from her own point of view, of Fleming’s books. Her clever hypothesis is so intriguingly presented and so undogmatic that I think it might be palatable even to one as opposed as Dr. Starkey. She concedes that her view is “a little preposterous,” but she carries through on it so well that it becomes interesting for its own sake.

This is not to say that Mrs. Boyd is simply toying with her reader. She insists that the reading of all the Fleming novels in their chronological order will show the reasonableness of her argument. The spirit that has been missing in Western civilization, says she, is that of the image of St. George the dragon-slayer, an image that for generations captured the imagination of youth and benefited them. James Bond has such an image, says Mrs. Boyd, as partially proved by the fact that his novels have sold 45 million copies and sent 100 million people to see the movie versions. (Although both books were printed in 1966, Dr. Starkey reports only 18 million copies sold. It seems too bad that errors of this sort are allowed to pass both writer and editor.)

The thing that impresses me most about Mrs. Boyd’s book is not that she proves her point but the astonishingly wide backdrop against which she tries to prove it. She makes use of a large array of distinguished authority, particularly Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer. Although she sometimes marshals her material with strength, one often senses little more than ingenuity at work. I think she might have done better to forget Bond and use her insight and skill to try to show the need today of another St. George. There is indeed such a need.

I felt that I should not write this review without first reading one of Fleming’s stories. At random I picked up Dr. No. I discovered no St. George but only a salad of mystery entertainment, with a tart dressing of sex. On the whole, it seemed to be a very contrived performance. But then, Mrs. Boyd insists one must read not just one book but all. I did inquire of a James Bond fan (a Christian) and was told that the truth is probably halfway between Dr. Starkey and Mrs. Boyd. That is, Fleming, like many other popular writers today, dishes out lots of violence, drinking, and sex. At the same time his overcoming hero can become for some readers, a model—like Batman—of bravery and endurance.

Catalyst For Christian Writers

The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation, by U. Milo Kaufmann (Yale University, 1966, 263 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by John S. Ramsey, graduate student, University of Maryland, College Park.

The Protestant spirit, here and in England, has never been especially charitable toward imaginative literature; but in seventeenth-century England, the Puritan wing of the Reformation permitted the creative writer as little room for the practice of his art as the Tudor monarchs allowed the Puritan for the exercise of his religion. Yet within this heritage so inimical to the creative imagination, Puritanism discovered its most original genius and its most enduring work of art: John Bunyan and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

U. Milo Kaufmann’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation is a scholarly and penetrating analysis, marred only occasionally by its once having been a doctoral dissertation. It supplies a readable account of the theological forces within Puritanism antagonistic to imaginative literature, and it offers a convincing explanation for the artistic excellence of The Pilgrim’s Progress in spite of those forces. Indeed, Kaufmann suggests how the very restrictions of Puritanism upon the activity of the imagination defined a territory that Bunyan could imaginatively explore.

Significant in Kaufmann’s book is the fact that both in the Puritan reverence for the Bible as the sole authority for faith and conduct and in the corollary emphasis on the use of the Scriptures only for the discovery of doctrine, the creative writer’s imaginative devices were denied validity: His use of symbol, image and metaphor was not appreciated by his readers, since these literary devices communicated ambiguous suggestion rather than clear, unspotted doctrine. The Puritan spirit thus inhibited the poetic sensibility. And this inhibition reveals in part why modern Puritanism—call it orthodoxy or evangelical conservatism—has produced so few great writers, and perhaps no writers of the stature of those who have fashioned from their antipathy to the Puritan spirit a creative stimulus.

But Bunyan, Kaufmann shows, found his imaginative freedom for The Pilgrim’s Progress within the narrow boundaries of Puritan meditation, a discipline that urged the believer to reflect upon the Word (an exercise of making and preaching a Puritan sermon to oneself) and to meditate both upon heaven (a locus for infinite imaginative opportunity) and upon his experience (a process using memory and imagination in which the truth of the Scriptures was attested). Within these limits Bunyan’s imagination operated freely, as shown, for example, in his description of Christian’s sojourn at House Beautiful.

Moreover, Kaufmann’s demonstration of the importance of meditative traditions in Bunyan’s art places The Pilgrim’s Progress within the larger artistic context described by Louis Martz in his seminal works on this subject—The Poetry of Meditation and more recently The Paradise Within. Martz argues that much of the seventeenth-century religious poetry (which, incidentally, has been a major influence on a good deal of modern literature) was not ecstatic lyricism; rather, it was a poetry shaped by the rigorous formulas of medieval and Tridentine spiritual exercise.

The tradition of meditation, then, which seems to be a factor of artistic excellence in seventeenth-century English literature, is, according to Kaufmann, not exclusively the province of Donne and Milton, Herbert and Crashaw. Bunyan is there, too; his style, structure, and content prove it. Furthermore, Kaufmann’s study—and Martz’s studies, too—reveals that in the genre of meditative art, the best writers refused to oppose their antecedents; rather, they found in them a discipline for their art. The Pilgrim’s Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation is perhaps the catalyst needed by the aspiring writer suffering within the restrictions of contemporary, orthodox Protestantism.

Book Briefs

The Mercersburg Theology, edited by James Hastings Nichols (Oxford, 1966, 384 pp., $7.50). Selections from the writings of John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff, nineteenth-century German Reformed Church leaders whose ecumenical theology stressed sacramentalism.

Pioneers in Mission, edited by R. Pierce Beaver (Eerdmans, 1966, 291 pp., $6.95). A Christian missions scholar amasses an abundance of ordination sermons, charges, and instructions that shed light on early American missions to the heathen.

Christ’s Parables Today, by George K. Bowers (Beacon Hill, 1966, 139 pp., $1.95). Unravels some of the enigmas of Jesus’ parables about the King, his kingdom, his subjects.

Peloubet’s Select Notes 1967, by Wilbur M. Smith (W. A. Wilde, 1966, 436 pp., $3.25).