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The ‘1967 Confession’ and Karl Barth

“For the most part” the new confession “follows the weaker or less orthodox elements and abandons those features that keep Barth more strictly in line with his Reformed foundation.”

There is an impression in some circles that the proposed United Presbyterian “Confession of 1967” is substantially an expression of Barthian rather than Reformation or biblical doctrine. Apart from the role of Dr. Markus Barth on the committee, the probable reasons for this are that (1) the language is in the new dogmatic style, (2) an impression of neo-orthodoxy is given, and (3) there are general parallels to Barth’s dogmatic presentation. Whether or not the confession is close to Barth’s theology in detail, however, is a more doubtful question that can be settled only by rigorously comparing it with his Church Dogmatics.

The understanding of confessions and their role forms an obvious starting point, for Barth, who had a hand in the Barmen Declaration of 1934, devotes several pages to this question. Parallel ideas in the proposed new confession would seem to be that confessions are subsidiary and reformable, that they can and should have a place as concurrent standards, and that they ought to contain something of general as well as purely local concern (“The Confession of 1967,” lines 10 ff.; Church Dogmatics I/2, 20, 2).

Barth, however, also demands that a confession should be evoked by an inescapable issue. The Presbyterians’ Special Committee on a Brief Contemporary Statement of Faith is in difficulty here: in the first place it has behind it the weak explanation that “a short Statement of Faith written in these times … should be of interest and value …” (“Minutes of the General Assembly,” 1957, I, 143), and in the second place the whole idea of a dated confession inevitably suggests passing opinion rather than burning conviction. The difficulty is met by (1) referring to the need for response to “a major watershed such as the eighteenth century” (in the background essay by committee Chairman Edward A. Dowey, Jr., included in the committee’s report), and (2) speaking of the search for a subject for reformulation (in the “Introductory Comment and Analysis” that precedes the confession text in the report). But the first reference leads to little positive conviction in the confession, and the artificial search shows few signs of the necessary concern. Barth, in fact, believed that a good confession (like Barmen) should be ready for the risk of a damnamus (“we reject and condemn”); it is hard to see how the “Confession of 1967” fits in with this understanding, for, when it comes to the point, it will not even come right out with a rejection of inerrancy!

The structure of the confession also calls for notice. It is basically soteriological, Christological, and ecclesiological. The main theme, reconciliation, is treated under the two heads of God’s work and the Church’s ministry, with an eschatological addendum. Part I on God’s work is trinitarian in treatment (on the basis of Second Corinthians 13:14), but precedence is here obviously given to Jesus Christ. At first glance this seems to be an outworking of the Christological emphasis characteristic of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, and it is obvious that the interrelating of Christ’s work, the Spirit’s ministry, and the Church’s mission follows the general structure of Church Dogmatics IV/1–3. Closer analysis, however, shows that for all the Christological stress, Barth’s work is quite different and more orthodoxly trinitarian in arrangement. Thus, it begins with prolegomena (Trinity and Word) in I/1–2, moves on to God in II/1–2, then to God the Creator, III/1–4, and only then to God the Reconciler in IV/1–3 (with a projected but unfinished conclusion on God the Redeemer in V). In fact, the outline of Church Dogmatics would provide a more comprehensive confession than is possible if one theme alone is made the subject. (Barmen, of course, achieves concentration in answer to a specific challenge, that of “German Christianity” under Hitlerite totalitarianism.) Another important structural point is that Barth rightly sees the need to introduce the doctrine of Scripture in the prolegomena; he solves the question of priority of God or Scripture by dealing with the latter in the context of a first trinitarian statement. In contrast, the “Confession of 1967” raises the question of Scripture only under I, 3, B, though in fact it already presupposes its doctrine in the preface (lines 11 ff.).

When we turn to lines 40 ff. of the confession and then to I, 1 (“The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ”), we find many echoes of Barth, especially Church Dogmatics IV/1–3. Thus we might refer to the “God with man” of line 41 (C.D. IV/1, 57, 1); the emphasis on Christ’s presence in the Church’s ministry (41; C.D. IV/3, 69); the bearing of our judgment (56 f.; C.D. IV/1, 59, 2); the different images for the Atonement (61 ff.; C.D. IV/1, 59, 2); the exposure of sin by Christ rather than the law (82 ff.; C.D. IV/1, 60, 1); sin in the relations to God, fellow man, (self) and world (84 f.; C.D. IV/1, 60, 1); and the wrath of God as the expression of his love against all that opposes him (96 ff.; C.D. IV/1, 59, 2). In the shorter section I, 2 (“The Love of God”), we are again in the same circle as that of Church Dogmatics when we read of God’s showing power in the form of a servant (104; C.D. IV/1, 59, 1); or of his appointing the world of space and time as the sphere of his dealings with men (109 f.; C.D. III/1, 41, 2); or of life as a gift and task (118 f., a common German play on Gabe and Aufgabe); or of Christ as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel (131 ff.; C.D. II/2, 32, 2; IV/1, 57, 2).

EXEMPT?

I am a Christian.

I believe That Jesus is God’s Son and that he died

And rose again, and that it was for me;

This is my faith, such as it is,

And in this faith is all the hope I have;

But in the office where I work

Are men and women too

Who do not know this Way at all;

And there I am; I speak no word

For I am there, you see—

I, who am filed with envy,

Self-conceit and ridicule.

I see the need they have; and, God,

I dare not say a word, though I know well

How you have said, “Go, ye …”

I fear that I am one who bears your Name

But keeps his fingers crossed.

DONNA G. HUMPHREY

On the other hand, there are other no less striking differences. Thus the whole treatment of Jesus Christ in I, 1, A lacks the depth and comprehensiveness of Barth’s threefold presentation of Christ: the Lord as Servant (Priest), the Servant as Lord (King), and the True Witness (Prophet) (C.D. IV/1–3). Moreover, the use of “images” for biblical statements of the Atonement seems to go beyond what Barth says, and there is nothing comparable to Barth’s strict outworking of the judicial aspect, especially with its emphasis on representative substitution. In this respect there is also complete divorce from the important thought in Church Dogmatics that Christ is both elected and rejected (C.D. II/2, 33, 2), and rather oddly only the “risen Christ” is described in the confession as “savior of all men” (69 ff.; why not “crucified and risen Christ”?). Universalism is perhaps more categorically excluded by the confession than by Church Dogmatics (77 f.: “To refuse life from him is to be separated from God in death”), though this seems to have Arminian implications that Barth tries, if not always successfully or consistently, to avoid.

A final important matter in these two sections is that Barth, in the great patristic tradition, insists that one cannot deal adequately with Christ’s work apart from his person (hence the great Christological section in IV/2, 64, 2). The confession, however, merely states that “the Trinity and the Person of Christ … are recognized as forming the basis and determining the structure of the Christian faith” (lines 31 ff.; committal to Chalcedon?). The text fails even to give Christ his title as God or Son of God, except in a less precise way in lines 41 and 134. Barth is surely on the right lines when he explicitly works out his soteriology in terms of Christ, not merely as Priest, King, and Prophet, but also as God, Man, and God-Man.

The doctrine of the Word of God under I, 3, B (“The Communion of the Holy Spirit: The Bible”) is also strongly reminiscent of Barth’s teaching. Thus Christ as Word incarnate (lines 175 ff.), along with the word spoken through faithful preaching and reading of Scripture (187 ff.), recalls Barth’s Word incarnate, written, and proclaimed (C.D. I/1 and 2). The confession’s use of the term “witness” for Scripture (175 ff., 180, 183, and so on) is also in line with Barth’s discussion in Church Dogmatics I/2, 19, 1. Further points of similarity are the categories of recollection and expectation (cf. 180 ff.; C.D. I/2, 14, 2–3); the stress on the “present” character of God’s speaking (187; C.D. I/2, 19, 2); insistence on the truism that the biblical words are words of men (192 f.; C.D. I/2, 19, 2); and concentration on the historical and relative thought-forms and ideas of the Bible, with at least the implication that they are inadequate or erroneous (193 ff.; C.D. I/2, 19, 2).

It would thus appear that the “Confession of 1967” adopts substantially the view of the Word, and specifically of the Bible, found in Church Dogmatics. It does this, however, without the many important (if not wholly sufficient) safeguards that Barth incorporated into his work. Thus Scripture is for Barth the word written, whereas the “Confession of 1967” does not call it this but lumps it with faithful preaching as word proclaimed. Again, Barth gives the Bible precedence over preaching and thus accords it true normativeness, whereas the confession puts faithful preaching before reading, thus preserving normativeness only by way of the “faithful.”

Barth also accepts, though he does not emphasize, the original giving of Scripture by the Holy Spirit and the uniqueness of the prophets and apostles within God’s work of salvation (C.D. I/2, 19, 2; 21, 1). We look in vain for this note in the confession (except perhaps in 127 f.). Two noteworthy references to the Scriptures occur in the material accompanying the confession in the committee’s report: “The Holy Scriptures are the unique and normative witness to this work of Christ” (in Leonard J. Trinterud’s essay “Confessions of the Church: Times and Places”) and “It is not a witness among others but the witness without parallel, the norm of all other witness” (in the “Introductory Comment and Analysis”). Yet the confession itself does not accord to Scripture the uniqueness Barth strongly insists upon (an insistence not tempered by any such weak statement as the confession’s “… to whom the Holy Spirit bears witness in many ways,” lines 176 f.). Again, Barth argues that God speaks through the very words of Scripture—a version of verbal inspiration which involves him in the practical “fundamentalism” of which Niebuhr complains but for which there is no parallel in the confession. It should also be noted that when Barth makes Christ the hermeneutical key, he is in fact much more precise than the confession with its vague, clumsy, yet restrictive interpretation, “in the light of its witness to God’s work of reconciliation in Christ” (191 f.).

Finally, Barth recognizes in the Bible a direct, absolute, and material authority (C.D. I/2, 20, 1) that goes far beyond the imprecise “normative witness” of the confession (178). If I understand the confession rightly, it is ascribing to Scripture a historical normativeness that as such has the recognition of the Church (177 ff.). Now, this is true and important; but, as Barth points out (C.D. I/2, 20, 1), authority at this level is still indirect, relative, and formal. In virtue of its special position as given and used by the Spirit, however, Scripture has for Barth a direct, material, and absolute authority that frees it from dependence on the Church’s decisions (e.g., respecting the canon) and that makes it superior in principle to every other authority, whether tradition, fathers, councils, confessions, or teaching office. At this critical point, Barth undoubtedly sides with Reformation orthodoxy, whereas the confession with its generalization leaves the way open for accommodation not only to liberalism (“he will continue to speak to men … in every form of human culture,” 200 f.) but also to Romanism, with its list of relative authorities differing only in degree (infallible pope as well as normative Scripture). Failure at this point, of course, destroys the whole thrust of Church Dogmatics in its attempt, on the basis of the scriptural principle, to state a pure evangelical dogmatics in contradistinction to Romanist error on the one side and liberal Protestant on the other. For this, a witness that is directly, absolutely, and materially normative is required.

Time and space do not allow us to speak of Part II of the confession, where we would in any case be hampered by the lack of Barth’s definitive ethics of reconciliation in the projected Church Dogmatics IV/4. Enough has surely been said, however, to justify certain conclusions. First, the “Confession of 1967” undoubtedly reflects many elements of Church Dogmatics. Secondly, it is highly selective in its use of Church Dogmatics. Thirdly, it seems in the main to adopt generalizations without the delimitations that are so important in Barth. Fourthly, it also follows for the most part the weaker or less orthodox elements and abandons those features that keep Barth more strictly in line with his Reformed foundation. Finally, comparison with Church Dogmatics, quite apart from other criteria, brings to light many weaknesses in the conception, structure, and statement of “Confession of 1967.”

In sum, this is a “Barthian” confession only in a diffused and refracted sense. It would in fact be far stronger theologically, and more rather than less positive from the standpoint of orthodoxy, if it were in many respects closer to Church Dogmatics, though this would still leave it open, with Barth’s work, to the final and conclusive scrutiny of the “normative witness.”

WE BUILT A TEMPLE

We built a temple, beautiful and tall;

we made it stronger than a Berlin-wall.

We built an altar brighter than a star,

where we could pray, forgetting hate and war;

where we could find a refuge from the heat

of human anger in the violent street.

We heard the gentle voice of one who told

of Him who talked of peace in days of old.

Calmed were our souls till it would almost seem

that Calvary was rather like a dream.

Here we, caught in a tranquilizing trance,

could meditate in holy arrogance.

We built a church out in the suburbs, far

from where the noisy, frantic people are.

We built a ghetto out of shining stone;

walled in from Man, we serve our God—alone.

LON WOODRUM

Pastor-a-Go-Go

Has the preacher become a promoter, planner, pusher, and performer, rather than a prophet and pastor?

In this age of “heat ’n eat,” “brown ’n serve,” and “chili ’n pour” we have turned more and more to religious innovations such as “dial-a-devotion,” “drive-in church,” and a general juke-box religion. The average pastor finds himself caught up and borne along on the tide of it all. (I speak as one who has spent nearly twelve years as pastor of various churches and who is now a pastor in a “specialized setting” as an Air Force chaplain.)

More and more I have found that there are forces that push the pastor. He must “be a success” at all cost, “go-go-go.” He must be “all things to all men”; but, unlike Paul, he is expected to be all of them at the same time. His call is to be Prophet, Priest, Pastor, Promoter, with the emphasis on the first three. However, he often wakes up to find that he is Promoter, Planner, Pusher, and Performer, with hardly any time to be any of the former.

The peril of this is that we may grow stale, go to seed, or become mechanically professional. For, you see, one could promote, plan, push, and perform even if the Holy Spirit did not exist. God could very well be on the sidelines, or not be considered at all, if our ministry consisted only of these things.

It is possible for us ministers and Christian workers to get so busy doing things for Christ, running Christlike errands, that we fail to see that the spiritual life is being Christlike. God has called us not just to do something but to be something. When one finds his spirituality lacking, his first impulse is to do something. Often what he needs is first of all to be something, to be what God wants. Those who do God’s work without being what God wants are the ones the world sees as hypocrites. Ultimately God’s cause is hurt rather than helped.

There are some defenses against this kind of mechanical professionalism. We need a bigger view of God and Christ. Often our God is too small, limited to certain programs, a certain church, a particular denomination. The story is told of a Japanese Christian in this country who had just heard a sermon by a famous preacher. Asked what he thought of the sermon, he replied, “From listening to him you get the idea that God is a white man, an American, and a Baptist. But everyone knows that God is a yellow man, a Japanese, and a Methodist.”

We need a bigger view of the Church. It is the only institution Christ founded. It is not primarily a money-raising institution, or a cultural center, or a museum or library. Rather, it is the only institution charged by Christ himself with the responsibility of teaching and preaching the Word of God. It is the only institution concerned about man’s soul and eternal destiny. The Church is in the business of changing lives, redirecting energies, recovering what is noble in man.

We need a bigger view of our own lives and ministry. First, we need to ask ourselves whether we are being what God would have us be. The basic question concerns, not what we are doing, but our attitudes and our status before the Lord. Perhaps the starting place is a renewal of dedication—not to our own breathless little program but to the Lord Christ himself.

Above all, we are called to live lives of holiness. Sometimes we cringe from that word, but this is still our first requisite for being used by God. We are never criticized for being too holy, only for not being holy enough. People expect us to be what we are inviting them to become. Self-imposed holiness is not the way to Christ, but Christ is the way to true holiness. We may be the “good organizer,” or the “good mixer,” or some other kind of good fellow; but if our lives are not primarily characterized by holiness, we must ask ourselves what place Christ really has in them.

We are called to be saints. A saint is not simply someone who has been elevated to religious prominence; he is first of all a person in whom Christ lives. The early Christians were called saints, holy ones; and we today, if we are the New Testament kind of Christian, are obligated to be saints also. We are called to live the spiritual life, which has been described as adoration of God, adherence to God, and co-operation with God.

The world is crying out today with a need as deep as the inmost part of the human soul. Some clearly feel their need; others feel only a dissatisfaction and an uneasiness they cannot explain. What they need is not more planning, promoting, or pushing, but a real demonstration of old-fashioned piety. The world needs someone who can say with serene confidence, “This is the way; walk ye in it.”

How to Decide the Birth-Control Question

Does the Bible provide some insight into the marriage relationship that will help answer growing questions on birth control?

The English Renaissance exegete and saintly “Oxford reformer” John Colet, a close friend of Erasmus and Thomas More, is supposed to have remarked: “Better that no one should marry.” Whereupon someone asked, “But Dean Colet, then what would happen to the human race?” Taken aback, the Dean of St. Paul’s pondered the question, then suddenly brightened and said, “Why then the end of the age and our Lord’s coming could not tarry!” This tale may well be apocryphal, and certainly Colet eventually acquired a positive view of the marital state (Seebohm informs us that he advised More to marry and entrusted the control of St. Paul’s school to married burghers); but the story typifies some of the confusions that have attended theological thinking on the subject of marriage and childbearing across the centuries. Christians have often manifested strange blind spots in dealing with the theology of marriage, and current discussion of birth control by both Roman Catholics and Protestants is the unwitting manifestation of a theological perplexity that extends far beyond specifics such as the “rhythm method” or “the pill.”

Roman Catholics: Marriage As A Means

The attitude of the Roman church toward birth control is well known, though its rationale is seldom comprehended. Rome has never been happy with the principle of birth control. Limitations on childbearing in marriage are indeed permitted (preferably by sexual continence, but also today by the so-called natural rhythm method); however, such limitations are regarded as exceptions, applicable in cases of ill health, disease, acute poverty, serious temptation to sin, and so on. The use of “unnatural” (i.e., mechanical) birth-control devices stands condemned by papal decree; indeed, in 1930, the famous encyclical Casti Conubii declared that artificial contraception is “an unspeakable crime” and “shameful and intrinsically immoral.” Widespread debate is presently going on in Roman Catholic circles over the legitimacy of the birth-control pill (see The Pill and Birth Regulation: The Catholic Debate, ed. by Leo Pyle; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1964), but Pope Paul has as yet given no indication that the pill trill be classed with “natural” birth-control methods. The Pope’s conservative statement of June, 1964, and his reported directive to the Ecumenical Council to re-endorse the affirmations on birth-control made by Popes Pius XI and XII suggest that Rome still looks with grave concern upon any techniques that would limit offspring in marriage (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Dec. 17, 1965, p. 34).

Critics of Rome have often gleefully pointed out the strange inconsistency that holds up the celibate state as an ideal for the clergy and at the same time seems to do all within its power to encourage childbearing on the part of the married. This is not, however, a genuine inconsistency at all, as one can see if he understands the theological base of the Roman view of marriage. Celibacy is most definitely regarded as the ideal state of life, permitting undivided attention to things spiritual (cf. the “marriage” between nun and Christ symbolized by wedding ring and white vesture). Marriage is of value not as an end in itself but as a means to an end. What end? As the Corpus Iuris Canonici makes clear (1013, Par. 1), and as the Holy Office reasserted in 1944 (Denzinger, 2295), the primary purpose of marriage is the generation and raising of children; other aspects of the marriage relationship must be viewed as contributory to the procreative purpose. Even the progressive Vatican II Schema 13, which endeavors to set marriage in a more Christocentric framework, twice states that “matrimony and conjugal love are by their very nature ordained for the procreation and education of children.” Rome is thus quite consistent in making every effort to discourage birth control, and in taking particularly strong measures against all attempts to limit birth by techniques in opposition to the “natural law” doctrine fundamental to all Thomistic theology.

The traditional Roman view of marriage and birth control has been a source of embarrassment to its advocates and a fruitful base for criticism by moderns who resent religious authority. It is pointed out that, pragmatically, fewer and fewer Roman Catholics accept the procreative “marriage as means” interpretation of their church. Thus in a 1956 survey of the marital relationships of English women, Chesser found that of his sample of Roman Catholics 47 per cent were practicing birth control; and in 1959 Freedman and his associates, in investigating the contraceptive practices of American wives, discovered that even among the Roman Catholics who were regular churchgoers, 26 per cent were using birth-control devices considered gravely sinful by the Church.

The application of “natural law” thinking to the birth-control issue seems especially bizarre, since it is difficult to see why man can legitimately control “natural” phenomena such as vegetation and animal population and yet cannot without sin control his own numbers in the face of severe population pressures. As one writer has put it, a fixed law of nature dictates that male Caucasians grow hair on their faces; but it is not sinful to use a razor—whether straight or electric! And why is the use of mechanical contraceptives more “unnatural” than the application of the rhythm method? The latter obviously creates an unnatural pressure on the married couple to restrain their desire during one phase of the menstrual cycle, whereas the use of contraceptives or birth-control pills permits intercourse when natural desire dictates. The rhythm method, according to Dr. John Rock of the Harvard Medical School, himself a Roman Catholic, “is to be considered an unnatural method, for it is during the fertile period that the whole psychosomatic psychology of the healthy, normal female is prepared and intended by her primate nature for coitus” (Medical and Biological Aspects of Contraception, Boston: Lippincott, 1943).

Secularists And Liberal Protestants: Marriage As An End

More important, however, than these specific objections to the Roman Catholic theology of birth control has been the rise of a very different philosophy of marriage in modern times. This is the view, nourished by the courtly love tradition of the medieval period and the romantic movement of the nineteenth century, that sees the union of man and woman not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. The twentieth-century ideological shift from essentialistic to existentialistic patterns of thought has greatly accentuated the new view of man-woman relationships; as the distinguished French medical scholar Chauchard puts it, “To speak of natural law is to produce an easy indifference. Modern man sees himself as free.… He refuses every constraint” (Apprendre à aimer; régulation des naissances et morale sexuelle, Paris: Fayard, 1963, p. 62). When combined with a thinly disguised contemporary humanism, the result is a sex ethic (not limited to marriage) that sees in the love relation per se the fulfillment of human aspirations and the manifestation of God-as-Agape. Thus we arrive at the so-called new morality of the Bishop of Woolwich and the permissive sex ethics of numerous moderns—philosophies that, in radical contrast with Roman Catholicism, absolutize the love relation with hardly a second look at procreation.

The attitude toward birth control arising from such an existentialistic-humanistic context is easily predictable: Birth control is no longer a theological problem; “we are faced with a problem that must be solved at the purely biological level” (David J. McCallion, “Human Population Pressures and Birth Control,” Canadian Journal of Theology, July, 1960). The ethics of birth control becomes situational and ad hoc. As a car sticker my wife saw yesterday expressed it: “Trouble Parking? Try Planned Parenthood.” The overpopulation issue engulfs birth-control thinking, resulting in weird volumes such as retired Army Colonel Alexander J. Stuart’s Overpopulation—Twentieth Century Nemesis: A Condensed, Objective Study of Procreation—from the Amoeba to Modern Man (New York, 1958). Even a respectable work like The Population Explosion and Christian Responsibility (1960) by Richard Fagley, an official spokesman for the World Council of Churches, focuses chief attention on the economic and technological aspects of population growth and sees the ecumenical movement, with its united witness to an overpopulated world, as “the way forward.”

Though liberal Protestants and secularists have readily identified the erroneous reasoning in Roman Catholic birth-control doctrine, they have, strange to say, fallen into a more acute form of the same error. Roman Catholic “natural law” thinking is a variety of what G. E. Moore in his Principia Ethica called the “naturalistic fallacy”: the assumption that the descriptive (what is) automatically gives rise to the normative (what ought to be). But the liberals commit this same blunder with far less “justification” (since they have neither absolute church nor inerrant Scripture to interpret nature for them). The overpopulation problem in itself does not establish the morality of birth control, any more than it would establish the morality of war as a means of reducing the population. And the situational ethic of agape-love, as I emphasized in a previous article in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (“The Law’s Third Use: Sanctification,” April 26, 1963), leaves man with no guideline for the content of ethical action. Love is a motive, not a structure, and one makes a severe logical “category mistake” to think that it can serve both functions. A reliable revelation of God’s divine will is sine qua non for man’s ethical decisions in the realm of marriage and birth control as in all other areas of life. In Holy Scripture, one has the key to interpret God’s hand in nature and human life and the guideline for love’s operations.

Biblical Christianity: Marriage As Analogy

And how does the Bible view the problem area we are confronting? To answer this question we must move beyond proof-texting to the focal center of scriptural teaching on marriage. This center is not to be found in the first two chapters of Genesis, so often cited in isolation, but in Ephesians 5:22–32, which quotes Genesis in the context of the New Covenant in Christ. Understood in the light of New Testament fulfillment, marriage cannot be regarded simply as a means (“Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth”) or unqualifiedly as an end (“They shall be one flesh”). Rather, it is seen as an analogy—indeed, as the best human analogy—of the relationship between Christ and his Church. After having connected husband-and-wife with Christ-and-the-Church by no less than three hōs’s (“as”) and two kathōs’s (“just as”) in ten verses, Paul concludes with a summary statement on the marriage relation: “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” When and only when marriage is viewed as the “type” of which Christ-and-Church are “antitype” can we avoid the Hegelian-like dialectic extremes of the Roman and liberal Protestant views of marriage and birth control. Specifically:

1. As Christ’s relation with the Church is a total love relation, not just a means to an end, so one must not view marriage simply as a procreative function. Where birth control can contribute to “subduing the earth” in order to achieve a better total human relationship, it is not to be condemned (cf. William E. Hulme, “A Theological Approach to Birth Control,” Pastoral Psychology, April, 1960). By the same token, the psychosomatic wholeness implied in Christ’s incarnation for man’s salvation condemns the Manichean and neo-Platonic depreciation of the flesh that colors so much of Roman Catholic celibacy teaching. No better counteractive exists to all such functional misunderstandings of marriage than the writings of Charles Williams, the late Christian poet and friend of C. S. Lewis (Shideler well titles her treatment of Williams’s thought The Theology of Romantic Love).

2. Yet neither is the human love relationship an end in itself. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given marriage”—why? Because “when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away”; in the full manifestation of the antitype the type is embraced and disappears. Thus the love relationship between male and female must never be absolutized. It is truly meaningful only insofar as it reflects the Christ relationship. Apart from this it becomes idolatrous, taking on demonic quality despite its lack of genuine ultimacy. The present state of American mores and morals is sufficient evidence of the appalling consequences that attend the isolation of sex from God’s revealed will.

3. In light of the divine analogy of marriage, we can see the centrality of children to marital union. Christ did not give himself up to death as an isolated deed; he did it to “bring many sons unto glory” (Heb. 2:10). As the union of Christ and his Church does not exist for its own sake but to bring others to spiritual rebirth, so the marital union is properly fulfilled in natural birth. And since natural birth precedes spiritual birth, as creation precedes redemption (John 3:3–12), so the Christian home can be the greatest single agency for nurture in the twofold sense; thus did the Reformers view it (cf. Lazareth’s Luther on the Christian Home). The burden of proof rests, then, on the couple who wish to restrict the size of their family; to the extent possible and desirable, all Christian couples should seek to “bring many sons unto glory.” After all, as C. G. Darwin pointed out at the University of Chicago’s Darwin centennial, those who restrict their birth rate will ultimately be engulfed by those who do not: “Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenetivus.” The Christian application of this principle is obvious.

4. Sexual relations outside marriage are unqualifiedly to be condemned, not for the naturalistic (and logically questionable!) reasons set forth by Bertocci (“Extramarital Sex and the Pill,” The Christian Century, Feb. 26, 1964), but because they violate the high analogy of Christ-and-Church. Thus Israel’s prostitution of God’s grace through idolatry was symbolized by Hosea’s wife, who lived as a woman of the street, and Paul expresses revulsion at the thought of those who are “members of Christ” becoming “one flesh” with harlots, thereby violating the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:13–20). The crux of Paul’s argument against illicit sex is the analogy relation—that Christians “are bought with a price.” So the use of birth-control devices outside of marriage is not to be tolerated. And the hypocrisy of gas-station dispensers “for prevention of disease” is to be made clear in no uncertain terms.

How practically are Christian marriage partners to decide the birth-control question? Within the framework of the analogy relation, they are to consider it personally and prayerfully in light of their own physical, emotional, financial, and spiritual situation, and in light of the population picture in their area of the world. (The answer will not be the same for Christians in India and those in Canada; for those led to lucrative vocations and those led to pioneer missionary work.) They will act responsibly, remembering that irresponsibility is equally possible at the Roman Catholic antibirth-control and the secularistic pro-birth-control extremes. Viewing marriage as neither means nor end, but as the great analogy of Christ’s work of salvation, the Christian will seek to do all he can to make his marriage evangelistic—generatively and regeneratively. He will consider with all seriousness such proposals as that recently made by the Rev. Eldon Durham, who, in the face of the severe and rapidly growing population problem in so many parts of the world, advocates that Christians “begin to constitute families by means of adopting the unwanted, the disinherited, the dispossessed and the rejected children” of the earth (Time, Dec. 3, 1965, p. 77). Though such a suggestion must not be used to justify non-childbearing in American marriages and irresponsibility or immorality on the part of couples living elsewhere in the world, is not the proposal genuinely analogous to the “grafting” of the Gentiles unto the tree of salvation (Rom. 11)? Surely the childless Christian couple is here offered a superlative privilege and opportunity.

But however he is led to fulfill his personal responsibility before the Lord of the Church, the Christian stands free from the shackles of legalism and from the chaos of libertarianism. “If the Son shall make you free,” said Jesus, “you shall be free indeed.” On the basis of this merciful freedom in Christ the Apostle beseeches us as a reasonable act of worship to present our bodies “a living sacrifice holy, acceptable unto God.”

Ten Questions to Ask Christian Scientists

Is Christian Science true to the Bible? Or does it exalt Mary Baker Eddy’s writings above the Scriptures?

Christian Scientists claim to be true members of the body of Christ. Their leaders who have met for discussion with Presbyterians (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, September 10, 1965, p. 39) acknowledge that one of their motives is to establish Christian Scientists as Christians. Is this claim well founded? Is Christian Science faithful to the Scriptures? Is Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, its official textbook, “the voice of Truth … uncontaminated by human hypotheses,” as the book itself asserts (pp. 456, 457)? Let us ask ten questions of Christian Scientists, get answers from their own writings, and compare these answers with the teachings of the Bible.

1. Does Christian Science have a source of authority above the Bible? On the surface it would seem that Christian Science accepts the Bible as its final source of authority. In Science and Health we read, “As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life” (p. 497). In practice, however, Christian Scientists accept the Bible only as interpreted by Mrs. Eddy, whose Science and Health is really their ultimate source of authority. This book, as we saw, is said to contain “the revealed Truth uncontaminated by human hypotheses.” Though Christian Science is said to be “unerring and Divine” (Science and Health, 1934 ed., p. 99), the Bible is often said to be in error (ibid., pp. 139, 521, 522, 542). As a matter of fact, Christian Science completely reinterprets the Bible so as to read into it meanings poles removed from its intent. So, for example, Genesis 1:1 is “explained” as follows: “This creation consists of the unfolding of spiritual ideas and their identities, which are embraced in the infinite Mind and forever reflected” (ibid., pp. 502, 503). In their Sunday services, Christian Scientists follow readings from the Bible with extensive readings from Science and Health. As Charles M. Braden has pointed out, Christian Scientists accord to Science and Health an authority equal to or greater than that of the Bible, “since the true meaning of the latter is known only through the interpretation given it in Science and Health” (These Also Believe, p. 209).

The use of a source of authority above the Bible is condemned by Scripture itself. In Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man asked that his brothers still on earth might be given an additional revelation besides what was found in the Bible of that day; specifically, that Lazarus might be sent to them from the realm of the dead. To this Abraham replied, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31). Here Christ clearly disavowed the need for any source of revelation superior to the Bible. Any group that considers a human writing superior in authority to the Bible cannot claim full loyalty to the Word of God.

2. Does Christian Science deny the personality of God? For Christian Science whatever is good is God, and whatever is not God does not really exist; God is the divine Mind, and Mind is all that truly exists. God is “All-in-all” (Science and Health, p. 113); God is “Divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind” (ibid., p. 115). Is God personal? “God,” says Mrs. Eddy, “is infinitely more than a person … can contain”; he is “a divine Whole, and All, and all-pervading intelligence and love, a divine, infinite Principle …” (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 16). Since for Christian Scientists God is not above the universe but is identified with it as the All, we must conclude that the God of Christian Science is not personal.

The Bible, however, teaches most plainly that God is personal, quite distinct from the universe he has created. This is clear from Genesis 1:1, and from a passage like Psalm 90:2: “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” God is said to be displeased (Ps. 2:5), indignant (Ps. 7:11), angry (Num. 11:1), and rejoicing (Zeph. 3:17); he is said to choose his people (Eph. 1:4), and to reject evildoers (Jer. 7:15, Rev. 22:19). Surely such activities can be ascribed only to a person.

3. Does Christian Science deny the Trinity? The doctrine of the Trinity has been a keystone of the Christian faith from the beginning. But according to Christian Science, “The theory of three persons in one God (that is, a personal Trinity or Tri-unity) suggests polytheism, rather than the one ever-present I AM” (Science and Health, p. 256). Despite this flat denial, Mrs. Eddy felt compelled to make certain concessions to the trinitarian conception: “Life, Truth, and Love constitute the triune Person called God,—that is, the triply divine Principle, Love” (ibid., p. 331). But this kind of “trinity” obviously bears no resemblance to the Trinity of Scripture. A little later Mrs. Eddy defines her trinity in still different terms, suggesting that Christian Science is equivalent to the Holy Spirit of traditional Christian theology: “God the Father-Mother; Christ the spiritual idea of sonship; divine Science or the Holy Comforter” (ibid.).

Can a movement that rejects both the Trinity and the personality of God still claim to be Christian?

4. Does Christian Science deny the reality of matter and thus of creation? Matter, according to Christian Science, is mortal error, an illusion, unreal; therefore God could not have created a material universe. Since God is all and all is God, this all cannot have been created by God. For Christian Science, therefore, the narrative of creation in Genesis 1 is not a record of God’s calling a universe into existence at a certain point of time; it is rather an allegorical description of something that had no beginning and will have no end: the unfolding of the thoughts of God (ibid., pp. 502, 503).

According to Scripture, however, God is by no means to be identified with the universe he called into being: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). “By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God …” (Heb. 11:3). To reject the distinction between God and creation is to rob God of his sovereignty and to drag him down to the level of the universe.

5. Does Christian Science deny the reality of sin? Christian Science teaches that sin is a delusion and an illusion. “The only reality of sin, sickness, or death is the awful fact that unrealities seem real to human, erring belief, until God strips off their disguise” (Science and Health, p. 472). In other words, though sin may seem real to man, it is not real to God.

Christian Science denies the historicity of the fall of man. Adam was not a historical person; he is a synonym for error. So the story of the fall is simply an allegory picturing what is unreal and untrue. When one asks Mrs. Eddy, “If God made all that was made, and it was good, where did evil originate?” one gets the amazing answer, “It never originated or existed as an entity. It is but a false belief” (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 45).

The Scriptures, however, depict sin as a tragic reality, and the fall of man as the saddest event in history. Only against the somber background of man’s sin can one perceive the glory of the cross of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). If sin is not real, the whole Bible is a lie.

6. Does Christian Science deny the reality of disease? Mrs. Eddy says, “The cause of all so-called disease is mental, a mortal fear, a mistaken belief …” (Science and Health, p. 377). Disease, she says further, is an illusion and a delusion: “Man is never sick, for Mind is not sick and matter cannot be” (ibid., p. 393). Since disease is considered to be wholly a mental phenomenon, the cure of disease is also mental: the removal of mental and spiritual tensions that produced the symptoms mistakenly interpreted as illness.

But the Bible pictures pain and disease as real, and as having been brought into the world by man’s fall into sin (Gen. 3:16, Isa. 33:24, Rom. 8:20–22). As Mrs. Eddy admits, Jesus himself often called diseases by name (Science and Health, p. 398). Luke informs us that Dorcas was truly sick (Acts 9:37), and Paul tells the Philippians that Epaphroditus had been “sick nigh unto death” (Phil. 2:27). Paul, in fact, even prescribed a remedy for Timothy’s stomach trouble (1 Tim. 5:23).

7. Does Christian Science deny the reality of death? Death is defined in Science and Health as “an illusion … the unreal and untrue.… Any material evidence of death is false, for it contradicts the spiritual facts of being” (p. 584).

But what do the Scriptures say? With the utmost lucidity, the Bible teaches that death entered the world as the penalty for man’s sin (Gen. 2:17, Rom. 5:12), that Christ came into the world to abolish death (1 Tim. 1:10), and that in the world to come, because of the redemptive work of Christ, there will be no death (Rev. 21:4).

8. Does Christian Science deny the deity of Jesus Christ? The answer to this question is not simple, for Christian Scientists distinguish between Jesus and Christ. Jesus, they say, was a man who lived in Palestine many years ago, and Christ is the name for a certain divine idea: “Jesus is the human man, and Christ is the divine idea; hence the duality of Jesus the Christ” (Science and Health, p. 473). What is the relationship between Jesus and Christ? The invisible Christ (“the ideal Truth, that comes to heal sickness and sin through Christian Science”) became perceptible in the visible Jesus (ibid., p. 473, 334); Jesus—who was no more than a man—presented and demonstrated Christ, the divine idea. We should therefore have to say that Christian Science denies the deity of Jesus and the personality of Christ.

All this indicates that the person of Jesus is not really important for Christian Science, since Jesus only demonstrated a divine idea. We are not surprised, therefore, to find Mrs. Eddy saying: “If there had never existed such a person as the Galilean Prophet, it would make no difference to me” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 318).

The Scriptures, however, emphatically teach that “Jesus” and “Christ” designate the same person, and the two names often occur together. That Jesus was not just a man but was fully God is clearly stated in John 1, verses 1 and 14: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.…” That the name Christ did not designate a divine idea but a person is evident from the words of Peter’s confession, “Thou are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). By suggesting that it is not really important whether Jesus existed or not, Christian Science cuts the very heart out of the Gospel.

9. Does Christian Science deny the vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ? According to Christian Science, Jesus did not atone for our sin by shedding his blood on the cross. This view is not surprising, since Christian Science denies the reality of sin. If sin is not real, why should it have to be atoned for? Mrs. Eddy says, “That God’s wrath should be vented upon His beloved Son, is divinely unnatural” (Science and Health, p. 23).

What, then, do Christian Scientists say Jesus’ work was? He demonstrated the truth: the divine idea that sin, disease, and death are unreal. More specifically, the work of Jesus was to set us an example of the kind of life we must live. “His consummate example was for the salvation of us all, but only through doing the works which he did and taught others to do” (ibid., p. 51). A typical Christian Science way of describing Jesus is to say that he was the “Way-shower” (ibid., pp. 30, 228). What brings salvation, therefore, is not a living faith in the person of Christ but an acceptance of divine truth: “Christ is Truth, and Truth is always here,—the impersonal Saviour” (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 180). Mrs. Eddy calls faith in the person of Christ a species of scholasticism: “Scholasticism clings for salvation to the person, instead of to the divine Principle, of the man Jesus …” (Science and Health, p. 146).

The Scriptures, however, teach most plainly that salvation is impossible without faith in the person of Jesus Christ: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). That Christ had to make atonement for sin by dying on the cross is also clearly taught: “Who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness” (1 Pet. 2:25). What Mrs. Eddy rejects as “divinely unnatural” the Bible affirms: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Gal. 3:13). Christ bore the curse for us, that he might fill us with his blessing. The Jesus of Christian Science, therefore, is a far cry from the Jesus of the Scriptures. Fallen man needs more than a Way-shower; he desperately needs a Saviour.

10. Does Christian Science hold the biblical view of salvation? To determine what Christian Scientists teach about salvation is difficult, since at this point they involve themselves in hopeless contradiction. On the one hand Mrs. Eddy insists that, since sin and evil have no real existence, the way to get rid of sin is simply to stop believing in it: “To get rid of sin through Science, is to divest sin of any supposed mind or reality.… You conquer error by denying its verity” (Science and Health, p. 339). On the basis of a statement of this sort, sin is just a bad dream, and we must all learn not to believe in bad dreams. Yet other statements in official Christian Science literature give the impression that sin has some reality after all: for instance: “The way to escape the misery of sin is to cease sinning. There is no other way” (ibid., p. 327).

In Christian Science, therefore, salvation from sin occurs in either of two ways: when one ceases to sin, or when one stops believing that there is such a thing as sin. But one can hardly hold both views at the same time, for how can one stop doing what he believes to have no real existence? In either interpretation, however, the death of Christ has nothing to do with salvation.

As we saw earlier, however, the Bible leaves us in no doubt about the reality of sin. It further teaches that man can by no means simply quit sinning: “Everyone that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin” (John 8:35). Man’s salvation is secured through the death of Christ as an expiation for sin; Christ is said to have “put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9:26). Man receives this salvation through faith in Jesus Christ: “… whosoever believeth on him [shall] not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Justification, acceptance as God’s child, and the forgiveness of one’s sins are received through faith apart from the works of the law (Rom. 3:28). And only through living union with a personal Christ (not an impersonal principle) is man enabled to turn away from sin and to live for God: “He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit; for apart from me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5). It is certainly clear that Christian Science teaching on salvation bears not the slightest resemblance to the soteriology of historic Christianity.

On all ten points, therefore, the teachings of Christian Science are contrary to Scripture. Can a Christian Scientist, then, call himself a true member of the body of Christ? Only if he repudiates most of the teachings of his church. And why should this person then remain with a group whose teachings he has thrown overboard? If one wishes to be true to Scripture, he must reject Christian Science.

Come Alive, Daniel!

“Show us how to get on with King Science, whom the turn of history has put over us.… Call us back to the faith that stems from the Red Sea.…”

If you can, Daniel, come alive and point the way for us in this our jaded decade. Rise up from Sheol and speak to us with that ring of authenticity and integrity with which you spoke to the classes and the masses of the jaded decades of your day.

In heathen Babylon you accepted impossible assignments when most of your brethren hung their harps and their hopes on willow trees. You had to say what you had to say, even if kings came in on the brunt end of your sight and your insight. It’s the likes of you that we need these days, Daniel. No, it’s you that we need.

There is this matter of our acquiescing to science. We must reckon with it even as you and other Israelites had to reckon with Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylon. Princely, admirable, and winsome it is—even as Nebuchadnezzar was—and it has in it the capacity for doing God’s bidding even as that heathen king had.

If you were here, Daniel, you would show us how to get on with this king whom the turn of history has put over us. You yourself were youthful and unspoiled when unfaith began to rule over you; and yet you did not yourself take up with it. You always went so far with it, but no farther. You studied three years at its seat of learning but maintained the Israelitish faith of your green and growing years. You ate at its table what was worthy, but nothing else. Your “act of existing” was in its milieu, but three times daily—and always—you had contact with environs of a higher order.

In the old world northeast of the Hellenic area, and even here in what we call the new world of the West, Daniel, there are many who still mean to follow your God but who have bowed down to King Science—afraid to offend even the least among his devotees. Our friends say that the new king is right, that there are no interventions in our world from God and the angels nor from Satan and the demons. Strangely enough, they think people will not bow down to God if he is likely to intervene in the natural order. With all of their yen for rapprochement with science, they yield too much.

If you were here, you could help us in this matter of bowing down to this king—who is not so irreligious in himself, but who consorts with the irreligious at far too many points.

Also, Daniel, you could help us on these new moral theories that are wedging their way into God’s own citadels. Way-out moral theorists—some of them bishops, if you please—would have us sowing wild oats while serving the Lord, as long as it supposedly advances the good of other persons. (Perhaps you will not know what bishops are. They occupy places of prominence among ministers of the Most High, being specially charged to defend the faith.)

A few of these bishops and not a few ministers of lower status are telling us that as long as we love other persons, and desire their well-being, we can violate all the old moral regulations. Fornication is not even frowned upon. And you will not believe this: adultery too can be sanctified by this principle of love.

As you might suppose, this view is gaining wide acceptance in our society. It is just what people have been looking for—a rationale for sin, a way of accommodating the Holy God to man’s exceeding sinfulness.

You yourself, Daniel, did a few daring things in your time. We still have the writing that tells of your standing up and standing out for Yahweh in the midst of kings and lions. We understand that you took them all on—all the men who said simply what they knew the kings and the commoners wanted to hear. That was something, how the Lord made you his mouthpiece when only about three other persons shared your heart.

And prepare yourself for this one, Daniel: A few prophets and priests, set aside to do the work of Yahweh, are saying that God is dead. One is not always sure what they mean by this, but just now the rumor is on everyone’s lips. It is filling the pages of religious journals and spilling over into the secular press. Sometimes it seems to be just God as he has usually been conceived who is supposed to be dead: he is not living, nor personal, and he cannot be thought of as near us or far from us. At other times they seem to be saying that he really is dead. You would not know about Darwin and Nietzsche and Freud, but they seem to have sired this line of thought. Another theologian, recently deceased, who said that God does not exist as an objective reality, is credited with nourishing it. In our country a man named Hamilton, and another named Van Buren, and one called Altizer, are causing a bigger hullabaloo than Ahab’s four hundred prophets ever did. Atheists have often hawked their unholy wares. But there is something different about this new species: they seem to say that God did exist but now does not, and that he died in our time. There is even the suggestion of suicide.

To some of us this seems to be a colossal transference. God, they feel, no longer answers them; and since nothing could possibly be wrong with these persons themselves, they conclude that the God who does not answer them must have died. Young and cavalier, they propose a journal and a society to further their views.

There is a mite of arrogance in some members of the God-is-dead clan, while in others there is more of hollowness and lostness. If you were here, Daniel, you could tell how the living God really did deliver you and your three friends. You could tell how he responded to your worship, how he opened up to you the dreams of kings and a whole panorama of what was yet to be. Ezekiel spoke glowingly of your wisdom, indirectly, saying of God, “Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel” (Ezek. 28:3a). And Ezekiel compared you with Noah and Job as one of the three stand-out men of righteousness up to his time (Ezek. 14:14). Even your heathen enemies had to admit that “the spirit of the holy God” was in you. Come alive, then, and jolt us with a word that will dispel this pratter and save the pratterers.

Also prominent just now, Daniel, is the issue of whether ordinary history is important. Some talk about meta-history or primal history, in distinction from what history means in plain language and on our street. They are saying that Messiah’s resurrection took place on some unordinary plane of history. A reporter for the Jerusalem Times, unless he were already a believer, could tell nothing of that stupendous miracle. Such men urge sheer faith, not faith that is supported by historical fact, on the part of God’s people. Others urge faith in the incarnation of God’s Son, but without the “easy” support of the doctrine of a virgin mother. A Swedish bishop calls the virgin birth a “rationalistic explanation” of the incarnation. And we have a highly controversial German theologian in Marburg who discounts the historical character of the whole Christian faith.

Now Daniel, you are perhaps aware that only a little after your time a pagan named Plato appeared in Greece and discounted concrete history, saying that particular things and events are not important and that only concepts or ideas are real. Well, there seems to be a kind of kinship between this fellow Plato and some who depreciate concrete, historical matters today. Late in the last century, Ritschl tried to divorce the faith from factual matters, and he seems to have influenced those who depreciate history. Scientism, of which I was speaking a while ago, is also responsible for a kind of faith-without-fact religion.

About half a millennium after your time, Daniel, there lived two contemporaries, Tiberius Caesar the emperor and Jesus Christ the Messiah. Four main documents tell posterity of Tiberius Caesar, and the documents are quite universally accepted. Four main documents, which we call the Gospels, tell of Jesus Christ, and many scholars discount their veracity. No doubt a major reason for this is that some influential scholars have no mind for the miracles reported in connection with Jesus Christ. The Christian faith, which is what your kind of faith flowered into, is based upon a multitude of miracles, which scientism does not allow; and so these men have divested the faith of miracle, feeling that they have thereby done service to the faith.

The truth is, Daniel, that you yourself came off far better in the den of the lions than you have in that of the critics in recent generations. Your own history has been denied. It was earlier said that there was not even any Babylonian captivity, but on that point the critics have acquiesced to archaeological data. A few scholars deny that Ezekiel had any part in the captivity, and legions of scholars say that you had no part in it. They say that the Daniel (or Danel, as it is in the Hebrew) referred to in our Prophecy of Ezekiel is an earlier, extra-Israelitish saint; and that you lived some four centuries later and perpetrated a fraud in pretending, in your writing, to have lived through the seventy years of Babylonian captivity.

If you were with us, Daniel, you could clear up many things about the import of history. No other among all the ancient writers of Scripture saw details of what was to come as clearly as you did. You saw the connection between history and redemption.

Come alive, then, and call us away from Plato and Ritschl and back to the faith that stems from the Red Sea and the Chebar and Bethlehem and Golgotha and the Empty Tomb.

Come to think of it, Daniel, we have a legacy that you left us in twelve chapters. Besides, if men heard not the Messiah when he was here—so he warned us—neither would they hear Moses, nor Elijah, nor you, were you all to rise from the dead, while their hearts were hardened.

Whether you make it back or not, therefore, Daniel, we shall carry on. We shall engage ourselves with the foolishness of preaching that Gospel of Christ which is God’s power of salvation to all who believe, to the orthodox first and also to the unorthodox.

Theological Doctorates

John Warwick Montgomery

College and university bulletin boards across the land are sporting the University of Chicago Divinity School’s eye-catching poster announcing its new degree program for ministerial training: a 4½ year “Doctor of Ministry” course (see Jan. 7 issue, p. 48).

Static over this move is heavy in the American Association of Theological Schools. The question of revamping the standard B.D. program came before the AATS when the School of Theology (Methodist) at Claremont, California, announced that it would offer a “Doctor of Religion” degree and Chicago made known its plans to grant the D.Mn. Coupled with these specific institutional plans came a request from the Methodist Association of Theological Schools for an immediate study of the B.D. question.

At the last biennial meeting of the AATS, in June, 1964, discussion of these petitions was hot and heavy, and recently a pamphlet of some sixty pages has been prepared by Jesse Ziegler, associate director of AATS, to acquaint theological faculty members with the issues. The confidential nature of the pamphlet precludes specific discussion of its contents here, but no tales will be told out of (divinity) school if we point out the obvious: Many AATS seminaries are deeply disturbed over a unilateral move that could give a few schools distinct advantages in the theological student market, which (apart from evangelical-conservative vitality as displayed at Inter-Varsity’s Urbana Missionary Conventions) appears to be steadily diminishing. The suspicion seems to exist that in the growing competition for students, Chicago and Claremont may have created programs grounded more in self-seeking Eros than in the Agape that “seeks not her own.” Ziegler thinks that most AATS schools would rather fight than switch.

The pros and cons of dropping the B.D. in favor of professional magisterial-doctoral programs are fairly clean-cut. Advocates of the new move argue: (1) the unfairness of granting only a second bachelor’s degree after three (or four) years of graduate work, when in medicine the student obtains a doctorate for a comparable period of study, and when in arts the master’s can be obtained in only one year beyond the B.A.; (2) the precedent of elevating nomenclature in other fields (the master’s degree is now given in library science as the first professional degree, whereas a few years ago a B.L.S. was granted for approximately the same course; the University of Chicago and a few other institutions now give successful law school graduates the J.D. instead of the traditional LL.B.); (3) the need to upgrade ministerial education through improved seminary programs; and (4) the prestige of the doctorate.

On the negative side, those who want to retain the B.D. offer compelling counterarguments:

1. Centuries-old tradition and good sense have established three ascending levels of attainment in academic fields, as represented by the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees. If a higher degree is granted for beginning work in the field, that degree is cheapened and confusion is inevitable. Medicine offers no proper comparison, for the M.D. is really a courtesy doctorate—a concession to the fact that “doctor” has been long established as a term of direct address for a physician (in England the M.B. is still the first professional degree, yet British general practitioners are called “doctor” anyway; in the United States, the academic hood for the M.D. is bachelor length, and the next professional degree is a master’s—Master of the Medical Sciences!). As for the fact that a B.A. can become an M.A. in one year, it must be remembered that the M.A. represents a specialty begun on the B.A. level. Theological students are taking up a new field in seminary and therefore should not receive a degree implying advanced attainment.

2. True, in some other professional fields higher degrees have been recently introduced on the first professional level. But the effect on the continuing education of the professional has been harmful. When the professional librarian received the B.L.S. as his first degree, he often went on to take the M.L.S. later in his career; now that all library school graduates in the United States receive the master’s degree, relatively few do post-graduate study. How many recipients of the D.Mn. or Rel.D. will take further graduate study? How many M.D.’s obtain the M.Med.Sci.?

3. If our real concern is to upgrade theological education, why does this require a change in degree nomenclature? The Harvard Law School has refused to follow the trend to a J.D., but students still trample one another to be admitted to the Harvard LL.B. program. Why? Obviously because of its quality.

4. Doctoral prestige is a big consideration among the clergy, as the “degree mill” scandal of a few years ago made very clear. But do we solve this problem by conceding to what is very plainly the old unregenerate Adam? If a person so very badly wants a doctor’s degree without language requirements or thesis research, there is always optometry and chiropractic!

When we ponder the educational upgrading and prestige considerations involved in the new theological degree programs, we get to the real heart of the matter. Chicago’s poster states: “It is not enough to tinker or maneuver with traditional forms of preparation for the ministry”; instead of the “body of information” presupposed by the B.D., the new D.Mn. will evidence “a thorough re-working” and lead to “radical inquiry.” Here is betrayed contemporary theology’s awareness that something is seriously wrong with the present state of theological education. Enrollments in mainline seminaries are going down, in spite of the fascination that the new theology, the new morality, and the like are supposed to have for college students. And the prestige and status of the Protestant clergy are low.

Chicago’s program will be concerned with “our culture and the role of theology in that culture” during the first two years and standard theological fare if and when the prospective ministers go on to the D.Mn. The obvious value judgment here ironically reinforces the very tendency that has come near to killing theological education in the twentieth century; the substitution of non-revelational bases for thorough grounding in Holy Scripture. (I remember a divinity school M.A. of a few years back who didn’t know what a concordance was—and who, when I explained it, said, “Only a fundamentalist would use that.”) The “culture” of 1966 will no more appeal to students or answer their life questions than did the sociological liberalism of the twenties, the dialectic theologies of the thirties and forties, the Bultmannianisms of the fifties, or the recent death-of-God theology. Only the saving Christ of Scripture can make true theologians. As the Reformers well put it; “Quod non est biblicum, non est theologicum.”

Clergy Press Role in Peace Talks

This month’s U. N. discussion on the war in Viet Nam was something of a diplomatic victory for Pope Paul VI. It was he who had suggested, two days before the United States renewed air strikes against North Viet Nam, that the U. N. mediate. The Pontiff, in an address to Italian Catholic journalists, put it this way:

“Who knows if U. N. arbitration, entrusted to neutral nations, might not tomorrow—we wish it were even today—solve the terrible question.”

President Johnson responded the same day. Joseph Laitin, assistant White House press secretary, said the Chief Executive was “very grateful for the Pope’s interest in peace and for any suggestion he has for achieving it. We are giving prompt and full study to the latest suggestion.”

Less than forty-eight hours later Johnson was giving a speech explaining to the world why the United States had resumed bombing the north after a thirty-seven-day lull. He asked for an emergency meeting of the U. N. Security Council and said a resolution would be presented that “will be responsive to the spirit of the renewed appeal of Pope Paul.”

At the U. N., United States Ambassador Arthur Goldberg unveiled a draft resolution that for the first time put the nation on record for arbitration of the Viet Nam dispute.

The Pope again proved to be an instrument for a new peace initiative in behalf of Viet Nam. Many observers had given credit to the Pontiff’s December peace pleas as the means by which a Christmas truce and bombing lull were achieved.

In New York, leaders of the newly organized National Emergency Committee of Clergy Concerned About Viet Nam issued a statement that deplored the resumption of U. S. bombing but also welcomed placement of the Asian conflict before the United Nations.

The Rev. William Sloan Coffin, Jr., Protestant chaplain at Yale and executive secretary of the national CCAV, and another leader of the group, President John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary, issued the CCAV steering committee statement.

“While we are shocked at the intransigence of the Hanoi government,” it said, “we are unpersuaded that our own government has exhausted every possibility for peace. After more than five years of hatred, suspicion and bitter fighting, thirty-seven days of efforts to find peaceful solutions were not enough.”

The churchmen were plainly disappointed that the bombing lull had not drawn Hanoi to the conference table. A number of pacifism-oriented clergymen had contended last year that a bombing lull would demonstrate the peaceful intentions of the United States and would induce the Vietnamese Communists to negotiate. The failure of the Reds to respond to the U. S. and Vatican peace initiatives may have left some clergy a bit disillusioned, but others have indicated they will press their dissent. Some new suggestions appear to be a virtual lobbying campaign in behalf of the Viet Cong politicians.

The CCAV statement declared that “our continued refusal to grant the National Liberation Front a seat of its own at the conference table, our continued fighting and our own troop buildup which during the peace offensive more than matched the infiltration from the North—all were not conducive to a negotiated settlement of the war.”

The statement asserted that “the claim that the whole war is due to aggression from the north is misleading the American public.”

The Rev. Richard Neuhaus, Brooklyn Lutheran pastor who is a co-chairman of the New York CCAV, which led to formation of the national group, said it appeared certain that Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish clergymen who have been strongly urging Viet Nam peace negotiations now will turn from largely verbal expressions to more active demonstrations.

Vatican Radio said that resumption of bombing should not lead to abandonment of hope for a peaceful solution. “It would be a mistake to allow ourselves to slip into a blind fatalism,” it said. “All is not yet lost. It is possible to try again, to find our new ways.”

The station said “events seem to be making us forget the joyful hope … of the beginning of negotiations for peace.” It echoed Pope Paul’s plea to the journalists for U. N. arbitration and added, “It is comforting to be able to record that the hope of the Holy Father was favorably received by public opinion at large, by the Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant, and by one of the combatants.”

Even as the Pope was intervening, reports from Saigon said that a Vietnamese Roman Catholic priest was beheaded and his church and house burned to the ground by Communist terrorists who overran a refugee village about fifty miles from the capital.

In Washington, the Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order issued a statement supporting American policy in Viet Nam. The statement said: “The truth is, incontestably, that had we not ‘escalated’ by sending in U. S. combat troops in force, it would have been all over before now—except for the Communist shouting and the general Asian alarm.” Among those singing the statement were retired Episcopal Bishop Noble C. Powell, former dean of Washington Cathedral; Episcopal Bishop Alfred L. Banyard; U. S. Senate Chaplain Frederick Brown Harris; Father Charles S. Sassassa, S. J., president of Loyola University of Los Angeles; Msgr. Patrick J. Ryan, former Army Chief of Chaplains; and Rabbi Norman Gerstenfeld.

A new issue on the Viet Nam conflict was raised last month by board members of the Progressive National Baptist Convention during a meeting in St. Louis. They charged that more Negro than white soldiers were being sent to fight in Viet Nam.

“Something is drastically wrong and unjust in pursuing such a discriminatory policy.” said a resolution approved by the board.

The Progressive Convention was formed in 1961 by a group that left the all-Negro, 5.5-million-member National Baptist Convention. U. S. A., Inc., over the issue of “tenure” for denominational officials.

Miscellany

The New York State Catholic Welfare Committee stepped into the state’s controversy over divorce laws by asking the legislature to postpone action on a so-called “reform bill.” Another state-church dispute seemed to be in the making in a report from Syracuse stating that Jesuit missionaries had proposed joining the Peace Corps. An official of the National Council of Churches’ Delta Ministry backed the demands of some seventy jobless and homeless Negroes evicted from a deactivated air base at Greenville, Mississippi. Episcopal Suffragan Bishop Paul Moore, Jr., of Washington, D. C., who is chairman of the Delta Ministry, said the government is obligated to provide housing for the group.

South Africans held a special day of thanksgiving prayer for abundant rains which fell on parched farmlands. Earlier, they had held a national day of prayer for rain to ease drought-stricken areas.

Publishers’ Weekly reports The Gospel According to Peanuts, the study in comicstrip theology by Robert L. Short, was the second-best-selling paperback book of 1965. Number one was William Golding’s penetrating fable of original sin, Lord of the Flies.

The value of parochial school education in Lutheran churches is minimized in a preliminary report issued last month by Dr. Ronald L. Johnstone, research director at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. The report concludes that “our system of formal Christian education has simply not accomplished as much as we have hoped or thought it was achieving.”

Two Swiss missionaries and a prominent Baptist clergyman were among thirty persons killed in the crash of a DC-3 in Haiti last month, according to Ecumenical Press Service. The Swiss were members of the Gay Vagabonds Overseas, an independent missionary group. The clergyman, a Haitian, was identified as Pastor Robert Rocourt.

The Defiant Traditionalist

Father Gommar A. DePauw appeared this month to be well on his way toward becoming the most controversial Roman Catholic priest in the United States since Father Coughlin.

Father DePauw as founder and president of the controversial Catholic Traditionalist Movement has been engaged in a campaign against changes in the church brought about by the Second Vatican Council (see Feb. 4 issue, p. 45). Father Coughlin became famous in the thirties for his radio talks on politics.

DePauw, ordered by Lawrence Cardinal Shchan to cease his priestly ministry, defied the directive, insisting that he was not under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Baltimore.

Methodist-supported Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, enrolled four Negroes last month. They were the first members of their race ever to register as fulltime students in the 140-year-old school.

Personalia

President Johnson was named honorary elder of the National City Christian Church in Washington. On his first Sunday in office, however, the Chief Executive was obliged to attend the “Red Mass” at St. Matthew’s Cathedral (Roman Catholic). The mass, held annually in behalf of those in law, is conducted by priests clad in scarlet vestments. Johnson braved a blizzard to attend.

Dr. Grant L. Stahly, 30-year-old microbiology professor at Ohio State University, is joining the faculty of Malone College (Quaker), in Canton, Ohio. Stahly is chairman of Malone’s trustees and former assistant dean of arts and sciences at OSU.

Sir Francis Ibiam of Nigeria was chosen to receive the 1966 Upper Room Citation. Ibiam, a Presbyterian layman and noted political leader, is one of the presidents of the World Council of Churches.

Lt. Commander Hugh Franklin Lecky, Jr., first Navy chaplain to receive the Purple Heart as the result of action in Viet Nam, was named Chaplain of the Year by the Reserve Officers Association of the United States. Lecky is a clergyman of the Lutheran Church in America.

The Rev. Gilbert W. Kirby was chosen principal of London Bible College. Since 1956 he has been general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance.

Evon Hedley was appointed executive secretary of Christian Business Men’s Committee International. He was formerly director of development for World Vision, Incorporated.

They Say

“Whether Swedish sex smorgasbord, the Italo-French influence, or the close-to-home Anglo-American productions, there’s no question that samplings of recent film product point up that there’s little left to censor cinematically. The gamut from rape to rampant sex, homo to overly frank boudoir enactment has been the scheme of things in pix that range from A Stranger Knocks to Darling, The Silence to What’s New Pussycat?, The Sandpiper to Repulsion, Marriage on the Rocks, The Art of Love, 491, Strange Bedfellows and other ‘sin’-amtic excursions.…”—Editor Abel Green in Variety, reviewing 1965 movies.

Church Film Panels Snub ‘Greatest Story’

A National Council of Churches’ film awards panel decided The Greatest Story Ever Told wasn’t. It snubbed the widely publicized film extravaganza, as did Catholic film judges, and gave no religious film prize for 1965.

A Hollywood member of the awards panel quit in protest: the Rev. Frederick Essex, film-broadcasting director for the American Baptist Convention. Methodist Bishop Gerald Kennedy, who is West Coast chairman for the NCC Broadcasting and Film Commission, tried in vain to get the full BFC to overrule the panel nominations and honor The Greatest Story.

The George Stevens film has been praised by leading churchmen—including NCC President Reuben Mueller and Archbishop Iakovos—and panned by sophisticated secular critics.

The BFC awards were announced February 3 at a hotel in the New York theater district. The week before, the panel had spent two hours discussing The Greatest Story, then voted it down by a narrow margin. It was the only film discussed in the religion category.

Awards chairman Thomas Trotter, dean of the Claremont, California, School of Theology (Methodist), said The Greatest Story was judged “a mish-mash of historical and biblical tradition,”1For instance, in having Jesus recite words from First Corinthians. and added that the NCC “copyrighted the Revised Standard Version so none of this could happen.”

He said the film also failed the “pertinence” test by dealing “with Christian tradition without engaging in any contemporary issues” and by “obscuring such issues by its interpretative slants.” “Given the historical time in which we live, the Church must speak with a prophetic edge,” he said, no matter what “little old ladies in Pasadena” think. He doubts a historic, biblical film can be artistically viable.

To Kennedy, all this sounds as if the critics think the Bible story, treated by itself, is irrelevant. The bishop admits The Greatest Story has its faults, but he thinks it is the best Hollywood version of Christ’s life so far, and the snub “makes us look funny.”

Trotter commented that the panel cannot nominate a film just because it’s “a good try.”

One award was particularly popular: the one given to The Sound of Music as exceptional family entertainment. A day before the NCC decision, the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures also gave its family award to The Sound of Music, which was the only American film to win a Catholic award (the NCC limits its choice to American productions, a policy which is unpopular among film followers and is being reconsidered).

The Catholic prizes were perhaps even more controversial than the Protestant-Orthodox choices. The office praised two films, Darling and Juliet of the Spirits, which had been classified by the old Legion of Decency as “morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations.” Darling was called the best film for adult audiences, and Juliet was chosen for the best foreign-language film. Other awards went to Nobody Waved Goodbye (youth) and World Without Sun (education).

The Pawnbroker also got a shady Catholic rating because of a bare bosom scene. It won an NCC award among films which honestly portray man’s struggle to “realize the full potential of his humanity.” Three films were honored for enhancing understanding of the “family of man”: A Patch of Blue, Nothing But a Man, and The Eleanor Roosevelt Story. The children’s film award, like the religious one, was withheld.

The Rev. William F. Fore, executive director of the NCC commission, said the categories used in the second annual awards reflect “a new attitude among mainstream Protestants” toward feature films. “We are primarily concerned with encouraging honest portrayals of the human situation.”

The Catholic awards also mirror change. They are the first since the December conversion of the National Legion of Decency into the Office of Motion Pictures, and represent a change from banning bad films to promoting good ones. Saturday Review film critic Arthur Knight told the NCC meeting this constructive approach is the best way to affect standards in movie production. He said churches can also help avert film censorship by classifying films so mature adults have free choice but children are “protected” from what society doesn’t think they should see. Thus, the state would have “adult viewing ages” just as it has adult drinking ages.

Focus On Alcohol

Top churchmen in Massachusetts are appealing for more programs to deal with the alcohol problem. They issued a joint statement last month asking wider alcohol education plus social and legal controls. Among those signing the appeal were Richard Cardinal Cushing, Episcopal Bishop Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr., Methodist Bishop James K. Mathews, and Dr. Forrest L. Knapp, general secretary of the Massachusetts Council of Churches.

They declared that in the per capita rate of alcoholism, Boston was second only to San Francisco among American cities and that Massachusetts ranked fourth among the states.

The statement was approved at a luncheon sponsored by the North Conway Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to the study of alcoholism and its problems.

In Richmond, Virginia, the U. S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that states “cannot stamp an unpretending chronic alcoholic as a criminal if his drunken public display is involuntary as the result of the disease.”

‘Practice Drinking’

Researchers in alcoholism have stumbled on a bizarre but hopeful phenomenon: a venereal disease drug, metronidazole, has the side effect of eliminating a person’s craving for alcohol.

But Harvard psychiatrist Morris Chafetz pins his hopes not on chemical cures but on education on how to drink. Chafetz recently told the New York Academy of Sciences that elementary school children should “practice drinking” so they can develop a “healthy attitude” and learn to control it.

In Chafetz’s design, teachers would spike pupils’ drinks with something subtle like sherry, then increase dosage as they grew older. They would be told of hazards in over-drinking, and benefits of light drinking such as facilitation of social relations, relaxation, and a feeling of well-being.

Booze barons had no immediate comment, but reaction was fast and hot from other quarters. One outspoken critic was Harold E. Hughes, an alcoholic who broke the vice, salvaged his career, and even got elected governor of Iowa as a Democrat.

Hughes called alcohol “the greatest poverty-creator in America.” Telling students they can’t drink doesn’t work, he said, but schools should report drinking’s dangers. Chafetz-style instruction in imbibing was tried in France, the governor added, and it didn’t work.

‘Truth On The March’

Protestant church leaders in Manila say they are encouraged over the response to a weekly telecast inaugurated in late November by evangelist Gregorio Tingson. The half-hour program is the first of its kind in the Philippines.

The potential of the telecast is impressive. There are more than 200,000 television sets in the Manila area. In addition, relay arrangements take the programs from Manila stations into neighboring provinces. Greater Manila alone has a population of more than 3,000,000.

Tingson is the main speaker for the Sunday afternoon evangelistic telecast known as “Truth on the March.” Instrumental and vocal music is provided by members of evangelical churches in the area. Several local business enterprises have pledged financial support, and one donated office space.

EUSTAQUIO RAMIENTOS, JR.

The 70–30 Plan

The trouble with Christian radio stations is that evangelism often fails because only Christians tune them in. At the National Religious Broadcasters’ twenty-third and largest convention, held in Washington. D. C., last month, 200 delegates got some advice in attracting outsiders.

The advisor was Dr. Sigurd Aske, an erudite Norwegian Ph.D. who directs the three-year-old Radio Voice of the Gospel in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This $2 million station is a project of the Lutheran World Federation.

Aske said airwaves are cluttered with “objective, John 3:16 sermons which never touch the human situation enough to make an impact. True preaching is only prophetic if it has to do with the people you talk to … with a sense of geography,” the way Amos preached in the Old Testament.

Aske is no social gospeler. He flatly rejected the “fallacy” that the “Gospel is made relevant only by diving into all sorts of social issues.” This produces the temptation to convey “cultural influences, not the Gospel,” he said.

Aske advocates thorough knowledge of the non-Christian cultures a broadcaster is speaking to and says “audience relations” is even more important than programming. Thus, RVOG enlists local believers to encourage listening by non-Christians and to monitor their reactions.

His program formula is 30 per cent direct proclamation of the Gospel and 70 per cent “indirect,” which means basic informational and cultural offerings that “express Christian concern for the listener,” such as child-care features and agricultural advice.

He said circumstances forced RVOG to undergo the “slow, laborious process” of developing good news programs. The station has made inroads this way, since unbiased, non-national radio news is hard to get in Africa and Asia.

The results? Forty per cent of the listener letters from the Near East are from non-Christians, which Aske considers “revolutionary.” The Lutherans plan to import their African concept to Tokyo and Hong Kong and open new stations.

Two members of the Federal Communications Commission spoke at a luncheon and supported FCC policies on religious programming, which were criticized at NRB last year by another commissioner, Lee Loevinger. Kenneth A. Cox said it is proper for the FCC to ask how much religious programming a secular broadcaster offers, since it is one of several valid types of public-service programming.

Cox said “religion has seldom, if ever, been the deciding factor” in station license renewal. However, if there were two identical petitions for a broadcast band and one prospective owner offered free time to the three major faiths while the other proposed to sell all his religious time to anyone with the money, Cox said, the FCC would favor the first applicant. Also, he said, the FCC would look askance at a renewal application if the owner promised more religious programming than he actually offered.

FCC Chairman E. William Henry backed current policies and said. “I don’t foresee any change.” A change to Loevinger’s view might require the FCC to deny radio-TV licenses to any religious organization, so this forecast was greeted warmly by the NRB audience, which now includes many more religious station owners than previously as a result of an organizational change last year.

Second Thoughts On ‘Secular City’

Harvard’s Harvey Cox revisited his Secular City last month and presented some modifications on ideas contained in that fast-selling paperback.

His forum was the seventh meeting of the exclusive American Society of Christian Ethics (limited mostly to professors with Ph.D.’s in the field). Most of the sessions convened at Garrett Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois, with some held at Seabury-Western Seminary across the street. The assembly was informed at a banquet that Northwestern University students refer to the two schools as “East Jesus Tech” and “West Jesus Tech,” respectively.

In the tradition of the Christian Century’s series “How My Mind Has Changed,” Baptist Cox said his immersion in Bonhoeffer had supplied negative stress (phrases like “the end of the religious age”). But he now thinks the book was too hard on the organized church and is ready to talk about “the secular reappropriation of our mythological past.”

Cox explained that what he really wished to oppose was the “triumphal church” that endeavors to promote its future for its own sake. Cox’s name has been linked to the “death of God” discussions, but he specifically disengaged himself from Paul van Buren’s literal rejection of God’s present existence.

He called his Secular City an attempt to integrate the transcendental theology of Barth with the dynamic sociology of Talcott Parsons. To the kind of epistemological question that has always troubled Barth (how do you know when the Holy Spirit is present in social action?), Cox blithely affirmed that “only the hermeneutical community with its eyes of faith discerns ‘where the action is.’ ” Whereupon the inevitable query came from the floor: “Carl McIntire’s church or yours?”

Franklin H. Littell of Chicago Theological Seminary moved into the sphere of this latter question in a sparsely attended historical seminar on “right-wing threats to America.”

Littell lashed out at both the Communist far left and the Fascist-reactionary far right. A particularly telling argument was that in spite of the support John Birchers receive from certain “defrocked radio preachers,” the far right, like the Nazi Deutsche Christen religion, is “without history or creed and beyond all objectivity of law or sacrament.” Thus top Bircher Robert Welch writes that the rightist cause is hospitable both to fundamentalists and to convinced rationalists.

But Littell left several listeners (including Cox) uncomfortable when he asserted his laudable social liberalism in pugnaciously illiberal terms (“I won’t listen to anyone who won’t listen to me”).

Half a day was devoted to “wars of national liberation,” which means Viet Nam these days. American foreign policy won articulate support, particularly from two Roman Catholics.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

Bishop Pike Stirs up New Storm

A new theological storm is brewing around Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, who only last September was charged with heresy by his ecclesiastical peers.

Co-promoter with Dr. Eugene Carson Blake of a proposal to restructure American Protestantism, Pike is now quoted as repudiating the biblical doctrine of God as a supernatural, personal Being independent of the world. In the February 22 issue of Look, Senior Editor Christopher S. Wren asserts, having interviewed Pike, that the controversial California cleric has switched instead to the speculative notion of an impersonal Ground of Being promoted by the late Paul Tillich.

“I’ve jettisoned the Trinity, the Virgin Birth and the Incarnation,” Pike is quoted as saying. His views on these doctrines were among issues brought against him in the Episcopal House of Bishops in September. But at that time a committee report was accepted stating that “the sincerity of his profession of the Catholic faith is not questioned.” Pike in turn reaffirmed his “loyalty to the Doctrine, Discipline and Worship of the Episcopal Church.”

In the Look article, Pike is described as having thought at the time, “If they only knew what I had in my briefcase.” It was the manuscript for a new book, What Is This Treasure?, in which he expounds his latest revised view of spiritual truth. The book is scheduled for publication next month by Harper and Row.

Pike’s thought, his style, and perhaps even his strategy have apparently been influenced by Honest to God, the best-seller of Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson. During a sabbatical at Cambridge, Pike has become friendly with Robinson, and he is now sometimes referred to as “the American Bishop of Woolwich.”

In the forthcoming volume, Pike rejects the idea that Jesus Christ was supernatural in his being or his work. The bishop now depicts Jesus, according to Look, as a country carpenter turned itinerant preacher. “God didn’t choose Christ … Christ chose God.” And Jesus is said to differ from “other good but mortal men” only in degree, not in kind.

Look declares that “Bishop Pike could well tempt another heresy hearing, but he looks pallid beside the ‘God is dead’ theoogians who have caught attention in his absence.”

There is no doubt, however, that Pike is a prime mover in the promotion of new structures and forms for the Christian Church in our time. The Blake-Pike plan for the merger of major American Protestant denominations at first centered attention on organizational restructuring. But the theological controversies associated with Pike have set the debate in the context of theological restructuring as well.

Bishops Challenge Altizer

“The moral question emerges: whether any individual can in good conscience receive his livelihood from an institution, participate in its advantages and benefits, and at the same time publicly and aggressively oppose the basic commitments on which it is founded.”

In these terms the College of Bishops of the Methodist Church’s Southeastern Jurisdiction analyzed the predicament of Emory University and its “death of God” theologian. Professor Thomas J. J. Altizer. The bishops formally condemned Altizer’s views but did not call for his dismissal. Their statement merely said: “We are confident Emory’s trustees … will make clear to all persons the declared purpose and commitment of Emory University.”

Altizer, a professor of religion with tenure at Methodist-related Emory, is an Episcopal layman. He is the best known of a group of new theologians who contend that the death of God is “an historical event.”

The ‘Danger’ Of Evangelism

Potshots at Baptists in general and Billy Graham in particular, plus an appeal for an American super-church, came out of a conference on evangelism in Berkeley, California, last month.

Graham represents a “danger to the Kingdom of God,” said Dr. Colin W. Williams, an associate secretary of the National Council of Churches’ Division of Christian Life and Mission. Williams said Graham “misunderstands the Gospel, and thus misleads people and gives them too narrow a view of conversion.”

“If he were a rogue, he wouldn’t be nearly the danger he is,” said Williams. “But he’s a good man, and people listen to him.”

The conference in which Williams issued his attack on Graham was sponsored by the American Baptist Churches of Northern California, a group composed of 220 churches with 70,000 members. More than 100 ministers were present, and most of them were described as ready to take issue with Williams.

Williams, a Methodist, criticized statements made by Graham during a Houston crusade meeting last fall when President Johnson was in the audience. Graham indicated at that time his support of U. S. action in Viet Nam.

“The tragedy of evangelism today is mirrored in that one tragic speech,” Williams charged, maintaining that the problem lies in Graham’s “unquestioning loyalty to American beliefs that remain un-judged by God.” Spokesmen for Graham dispute the accuracy of the latter statement, pointing out that the evangelist has challenged “American beliefs” many times. Perhaps his best-known criticism is that of the Supreme Court decisions on public school prayers and Bible reading.

Williams rebuked Baptists for their traditional insistence upon congregational independence and called for the formation of “one large church body with a limited form of episcopacy with built-in balances providing for both congregational freedom and authoritative power for church leaders.”

“A unified impact must be made upon society’s power structures,” he said. “The church cannot do it through scattered independent congregations.”

He told the Baptist ministers that “the time is long past due for them to adopt a form of church government that provides for greater central authority. The Baptist belief in congregational independence is not only behind the times but it is heretical and stands in the way of God’s purpose for the world today.”

The views expressed by Williams run counter to the arguments of NCC spokesmen who maintain that the council does not take a theological position but seeks to embrace both liberal and conservative positions. Some observers fear the statements by Williams may reflect a new line to be promoted by leaders of the National Council.

Doctrinal Dispute

A protest against theological deviations accompanied the resignation last month of Dr. Leonard Gittings as professor of missions and comparative religion at Berkeley Baptist Divinity School. New concepts are finding acceptance at the American Baptist Seminary, he charged, and these depart from the historic faith of the Church and the essential teaching of the New Testament. Gittings laments, moreover, what he regards as indifference on the part of church people generally and denominational leaders in particular.

A number of American Baptist seminaries are reported to be under persistent pressure to initiate ecumenical programs.

Revising The Scofield

Since the invention of printing, the Bible has been the world’s most wanted book. The appearance during recent years of a host of new versions in updated language has made the demand greater than ever. But the venerable King James Version of 1611 still leads all others in sales. And among editions in which the KJV is published, the perennial front-runner is the 57-year-old Scofield Reference Bible of Oxford University Press. At least three million have been sold, says the publisher, and the annual rate continues to show a gradual climb.

Competition in the study-reference Bible field is getting stiffer, however. Some of it is provided by the same publisher’s Oxford Annotated Bible, which combines notes based on higher critical views with the Revised Standard Version text. The Westminster Study Bible, which first came out in 1948 with the KJV text, is also available now in the RSV.

Based on theologically conservative perspectives are Thompson’s Chain-Reference Bible, the Holman Study Bible, the Harper Study Bible, and Scofield.

Scofield has spelled sales success despite the fact that theological liberals and even a considerable number of evangelicals shun its dispensationalism. Its wide appeal seems to lie chiefly in its systematic notes, which give the Protestant layman and popularly trained minister extensive explanations in terms they readily understand. Scofields are now available in some fifty styles and bindings.

As a youngster, Cyrus Ingerson Scofield moved with his Protestant Episcopal family from Michigan, where he was born, to Tennessee. He won a medal as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War and afterward became a lawyer under the tutelage of a St. Louis firm. Converted at 37, Scofield went on to become a leading Bible expositor and for a time was associated with Dwight L. Moody. He won wide recognition in a day when destructive biblical criticism was gaining ground rapidly. His reference Bible, the product of seven years’ work during which he was assisted by a group of leading Bible scholars, came out in 1909 and sold slowly. An improved edition was published in 1917, and sales rose sharply after World War I. By 1930 a million copies had been sold.

In 1954, Oxford University Press appointed a committee headed by Dr. E. Schuyler English to start work on the first major revision of Scofield’s work (Scofield died in 1921). The revision is now due to appear in book stores in about a year. It will retain the King James text, but with archaic and obsolete words and phrases replaced. Changes will be made in the notes in the light of recent archaeological discoveries and increased textual knowledge. New footnotes will be supplied, chain references will be expanded, and tens of thousands of marginal references will be added. Ussher’s chronology, now in general disrepute among scholars, will be discarded.

American Baptists Shun Blake-Pike Talks

The American Baptist Convention’s General Council voted 2-to-1 this month against joining the Consultation on Church Union. The secret ballot at a New York meeting followed a measured, ninety-minute debate and three months of discussion, meetings, and letter-writing within the denomination.

In view of the ABC’s general openness to inter-church cooperation, the decision was a significant defeat for plans to expand COCU (alias Blake-Pike talks) beyond the six mainline denominations now involved.

In formal terms, the council backed the recommendation of its Division on Cooperative Christianity that the ABC retain status as a COCU observer. That report was offered at the council’s last meeting (see “COCU on Ice?,” Dec. 3, 1965, issue, page 42). The key vote killed a substitute motion that would have proposed full COCU participation to the ABC’s annual meeting to be held in May in Kansas City, Missouri.

The forty-six-member General Council, as a between-conventions legislature, could technically bring American Baptists into COCU without specific convention authorization. But the step is generally regarded as too sensitive to be taken in that way.

Also, the council decision could be challenged from the floor in Kansas City, but both ABC President Robert G. Torbet and Chicago’s Robert Middleton, leader of COCU advocates on the General Council, say they doubt this will happen.

The council vote reflected grassroots sentiment. Council members had received 876 letters (not counting duplications) since the last meeting, of which 564 favored observer status and 192 a full COCU role, while 120 wanted to cut all ties with COCU. Responses came from 182 local congregations that voted on the issue.

The results of this unusual exercise of Protestant democracy troubled the Rev. Theron M. Chastain of Salina, Kansas. In the debate, he said the letters “showed no comprehension” and included “caricatures of other groups which were beyond belief … cock-and-bull stories about their neighbors.” Thus, while he favors COCU, he voted against it because the ABC membership is “utterly unprepared” for such a step. He advocated five or ten years of “intensive education.”

The vote was also affected by a letter from COCU Executive Secretary George L. Hunt answering ABC questions. He said the consultation talks of unity only in terms of organic union, and that the ABC and others are welcome “to come in on the basis of the work we have already done.”

While the COCU plan of union isn’t due until May, the proposed multi-denominational merger undoubtedly will include a historic episcopacy, baptism of infants as well as adult believers, and a common liturgy and creed. All are hard for Baptists to accept.

Parker Burroughs, an ABC administrator from Cleveland, feared the results of COCU rejection on the denomination’s “increasingly disillusioned crop of seminarians.… If we appear to be isolationists, out of the mainstream of American church life, we will lose their membership.” Baptist students at Yale, Andover Newton, and Colgate Rochester seminaries had been among those pressing for COCU.

Ecumenical Summit

The first formal meeting of high-level Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox representatives took place in Baltimore last month. The day-long discussion climaxed the ecumenical movement’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

On hand were more than a dozen members of the U. S. Catholic Bishops’ Commission for Ecumenical Affairs, some twenty Protestant participants, including the heads of several major denominations, and five ranking Orthodox prelates.

Starting the day at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the group went through a service that included a hymn, special prayers for unity, Scripture lessons, the Apostles’ Creed, a meditation, litany, and more prayers.

Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, Archbishop of Baltimore, joined the group at lunch and gave a message of greeting.

But Mrs. Frank C. Wigginton, a vice-president of the National Council of Churches, said, “We must be in the mainstream of the Baptist movement.” And Seattle’s Robert W. Beach doubted that young people are leaving the ABC because it has no liturgy and doesn’t baptize infants.

Another fear, unmentioned in the debate, is that big-city churches favoring COCU will leave the ABC. This fear is the reverse of the contention by COCU opponents that participation would cause many congregations to withdraw. Members of the COCU camp had called that argument “blackmail.” Schism is an ever present hazard in the ABC’s loosely knit “free church” structure as compared with the centralization likely under the Blake-Pike proposal. But the council apparently agreed with Maryland’s Carl W. Tiller that “God’s blessing is not dependent on huge size or uniformity.”

COCU advocate Robert Middleton gave one of the most impassioned speeches: “The world is facing a crisis of belief. All other considerations fall into insignificance.… Structures are provisional and functional—the Gospel is the important thing!”

The Lutherans Revamp

The National Lutheran Council met in New York this month to make joyful arrangements for its own funeral. Next November it gives way to the new Lutheran Council in the U.S.A., which will bring the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod under an inter-church umbrella for the first time.

Besides housekeeping chores, the NLC’s forty-eighth and last meeting brought predictable nostalgia, serious words about church involvement in the federal Great Society, and sober words about the National Council of Churches.

The NLC campaign for Lutheran unity bore fruit in recent years when its eight member denominations merged into two, the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church. With the addition of Missouri Synod and the tiny (20,000 members) Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, the new council will represent more than 95 per cent of America’s nine million Lutherans.

But Missouri Synod persists in some separatist ways, such as staying outside the Lutheran World Federation. So at the New York meeting considerable time was spent in setting up yet another Lutheran entity, a U.S.A. committee for the Lutheran World Federation, to absorb international projects now handled by the NLC. The heir apparent to lead this organization is the NLC’s executive director, Dr. Paul C. Empie. Missouri’s insistence on a separate university ministry also forced the LCA and the ALC to form another new agency to carry on joint campus work presently under the Lutheran Council.

Since Missouri Synod sees theological study as the starting point for cooperation, this is the only required facet of the new Lutheran Council’s program. Beyond that, each denomination will decide how it will use the other consultation services, in welfare, education, missions, public relations, and military personnel. Missouri Synod and the others will continue to cooperate in the Lutheran Church Center in Washington, Lutheran World Relief, and projects such as immigration service and film production.

Empie said ecumenism will be a major project for the new Lutheran Council’s theological studies division. Ecumenical talks with Reformed Churches, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodoxy are the outgoing council’s most publicized projects. Although Missouri Synod has joined in these discussions, continuation depends on what the new Lutheran Council decides.

Empie said the Augsburg Confession makes only two requirements for Christian unity: preaching of the Gospel and administration of the sacraments. Thus, Lutherans are under pressure to “distinguish between the clear biblical message of the Gospel, upon which there must be agreement, and human speculations on theological issues related to it—differences which do not justify denial of Christian fellowship.”

Lutheran ecumenical talks are in various stages. The NLC scheduled its second meeting with Roman Catholics in Chicago the week after the New York meeting, with baptism as the topic. These talks are starting with a point of accord—the Nicene Creed—but the meeting with Reformed representatives has what Empie called the “most controversial points.” He says the “Lutherans are in substantial theological agreement but have found a wide spectrum of views among Reformed representatives.” The last of the NLC-Reformed talks were to be held later this month, although individual Lutheran denominations may want to continue the effort.

The first meeting with Orthodoxy next October will start with each side’s describing itself and then move into the doctrine of the Church, an unusually wide-ranging topic for an initial meeting.

Church-state issues are another continuing Lutheran Council concern. Dr. Robert E. Van Deusen, Washington secretary for public relations, said the 1965 federal school aid bills “went a long way toward recognizing the Roman Catholic school system as an integral part of the American educational enterprise.” Parochial school aid is particularly important to Lutherans, since the Missouri Synod runs 1,374 grade schools, more than any other Protestant group. The synod modified its traditional ban on federal aid at last June’s convention, and local congregations are starting to participate, particularly in aid for disadvantaged children and libraries.

Van Deusen reviewed religious involvement in other programs and said the right of church groups to take positions on controversial issues is on a collision course with acceptance of public subsidies.

“A foreshadowing of it may be seen,” he said, “in the growing intensity of the feeling against those who, for religious or other reasons, oppose U. S. policy in Viet Nam. The time could come when an acquiesence to public policy is expected of church groups which receive public funds.”

Political statements had produced “growing disfavor” with the National Council of Churches, said Van Deusen, not only because of its advocacy of civil rights legislation but also because of a “genuine difference of opinion over the propriety of a church group’s speaking out on social and economic issues and engaging in political action.” He said the resistance has led to withdrawal of financial support and questions about the council’s eligibility for tax exemption. (LCA is the National Council’s only Lutheran member.)

The Rev. G. S. Thompson, executive secretary of the welfare division, said churchmen should not consider government welfare “a futile mirage which can never have substance in a sinful world.” “Political achievements for the betterment of men are, after all,” he contended, “the result of the Gospel.” However, he said, churchmen must not equate the material Great Society with the spiritual Kingdom of God, which is broader, and more important.

He said growing church dependency on government welfare raises the question at what point the church agency becomes “a tool of government.… However worthy the goal of government welfare programs may be, the Church and its agencies must always be solely responsible to the purpose of their Lord.” He called for research on church programs for needs unmet by government welfare.

Blossoms In January

“Getting Southern Presbyterians out of the magnolias and Dutchmen out of the tulips” is the way John A. Fulton describes the purpose of union negotiations between the Reformed Church in America and the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

The Louisville lawyer, a Presbyterian, gave the flowery illustration as his city played host last month to 130 representatives of the two denominations. The “consultants” came to snow-covered Louisville for a three-day meeting at the invitation of the formal negotiating group, the “Committee of 24,” headed by Fulton and a Reformed Church pastor, the Rev. Norman E. Thomas of Albany, New York.

A question that remained unanswered as the consultants returned home was whether the talks would lead both bodies into a more productive garden.

Facing a 1968 target date for submission of a plan of union, the committee sought ideas from throughout both churches. The seeds planted by the consultants were as mixed as their feelings about merger possibilities.

Cool toward any merger not including the 3,292,000-member United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., a small group of the consultants pressed for a doctrinal stance similar to that now being considered by the United Presbyterians. A majority in the theology sub-committee, however, recommended adoption of the confessions now in use in both denominations. Also suggested was a commitment to develop a comprehensive and contemporary statement of faith after union.

Writing a complete polity scheme into the plan was suggested, but it was proposed that a new liturgy could wait until after the merger.

Next on the agenda for the committee is the important job of culling and weeding. The plan will have to have the right combination to get the necessary approval in three-fourths of the presbyteries and two-thirds of the Reformed classes. The drafting of a plan of union is to begin immediately.

While the consultation was in progress, two overtures were being readied for presentation to the Presbyterian U. S. General Assembly asking for union with United Presbyterians. Unlike previous overtures, these asked for union of synods and/or presbyteries in Kentucky and Missouri. The overtures cite joint work now being carried out in these areas by the two denominations. Earlier, the Central Texas Presbytery (US) and the Brazos Presbytery (USA) had asked their highest judicatories for permission to unite. United Presbyterian Stated Clerk Eugene Carson Blake conferred on the strategy with Presbyterian leaders in Texas while on a recent trip there.

Agitation for union with the USA church is seen by some, especially those in the Reformed Church, as a threat to union between the US and Reformed churches. Several Reformed classes have overtured their General Synod to withdraw from merger negotiations because they regard them as a first step toward union with the USA church.

There is speculation, on the other hand, that some super-ecumenists are out to block the US-RCA union because they feel it will impede negotiations with the USA church and might even make harder going for the Blake-Pike talks.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Canada: Mobilizing Women

The Church Army in Canada, an evangelical Anglican organization, is beginning to recruit women for the first time in its history. With sixty male officers in Canada and eleven cadets under training at army headquarters in Toronto, the group sent its first woman, Miss Lyn Heffernan, to England for training at a school in Black-heath, Surrey. A spokesman said there are three or four more female applicants.

In recent years, there has been opposition to women membership from several areas of the church, according to Religious News Service. Such opposition has been based on the fact that there is already an Anglican Women’s Training College, which prepares deaconesses for more traditional roles in parish life.

CA officers—all hold the rank of captain—serve in downtown missions, courts, homes for delinquents, and isolated parishes and missions where no priest is available.

The Canadian spokesman declared that there is plenty of precedent for women CA officers in Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and East Africa.

A Vote For Women

The denomination known as the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands took a large step last month toward ordination of women. Its General Synod voted 66 to 2 in favor of the conclusions of a subcommittee, which specified women are to be accepted not as equal to men for ordination but within their own God-given gifts, and always beside men. The proposal now goes to the churches and regional presbyteries for recommendations. No women are to be ordained before these are considered by the next synod. Another committee is to give a report on how the tasks of ordained women should differ from those of men.

A move to give the office of deaconess to an ordained woman failed. Many who opposed the suggestion feared that such a step now would block ordination of women as elders and pastors later on.

The Reformed Churches of the Netherlands (the name is plural because the local church is emphasized) separated from the Dutch Reformed State Church during the last century. Their combined membership, 800,000, is smaller than that of the state church, but their Sunday morning attendance statistics are reported to be consistently higher.

The Reformed Churches’ synod accepted a proposal from the state church that the two groups send observers to each other’s synods. It also decided to apply for membership in the World Presbyterian Alliance.

‘One Race, One Gospel, One Task’

There will be approximately 1,200 attendants from about eighty-five countries, and yet only One Race. They will come from different cultures and from scores of church groups, but with only One Gospel. They will represent almost every position of Christian leadership, but with only One Task.

So the theme of the World Congress on Evangelism—One Race, One Gospel, One Task—is developed by Dr. W. Stanley Mooneyham, who is coordinating director.

The World Congress on Evangelism, a tenth-anniversary project of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, will be held in Berlin’s famous Kongresshalle October 26-November 4 of this year. Dr. Mooneyham, a special assistant to evangelist Billy Graham, has already taken up residence in Berlin to direct preparations. He and another Graham staff member, Dr. Victor Nelson, flew to Germany in January and will be remaining there through the intervening months.

A Historic Scope. Dr. Mooneyham raises hope that the congress will be “the largest evangelical transdenominational endeavor in evangelism ever held in modern times.” He also envisions it as “the most representative ecumenical gathering ever held for the specific purpose of creatively exploring the full implications of biblical evangelism.”

The meeting will be preceded by a major evangelistic crusade in Berlin to be conducted by Graham and his team. The evangelist is honorary chairman of the congress.

“Our prayer,” Graham has said, “is that through the medium of the congress the Church today will receive renewed power and a sense of urgency such as was characteristic of the early Church after Pentecost.”

Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and chairman of the congress, says the meeting comes at a “critical moment in church history.” He declares that “either spiritual forces will cushion and contain the violent flow of secular events or modern civilization will tumble through its rejection of the Judeo-Christian heritage.”

A global wave of prayer support for the congress is being sought. Dr. Henry notes that “the fervent prayers of the early Christians were crowned by the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, arch-persecutor of the early Church. Dare we pray that Mao Tse-Tung might even become the Billy Graham of Asia? Or that, in a time when many Protestants are minimizing their heritage of biblical theology, Pope Paul might emerge as the Martin Luther of the twentieth century?”

Most Prayed-For Event? Dr. Mooneyham has voiced the prospect that the congress will be “the most prayed-for event” in the history of the Church. He has issued five suggestions for Christians interested in supporting the congress through prayer:

1. Add the congress to your prayer list for daily intercession.

2. Request prayer for the congress in church prayer meetings and other public services.

3. Form a prayer cell to pray for the congress and for world evangelism.

4. Mention the congress in correspondence with Christian friends and urge their prayer interest.

5. Write especially to friends overseas and ask them to share a prayer burden for the event.

The program of the ten-day congress will be built around a series of major addresses on evangelistic and theological topics, special research papers, panel discussions, and reports on evangelistic progress. Each morning session will begin with a Bible study hour led by such well-known evangelical teachers and authors as Pastor Wilhelm Busch of Germany and Dr. John R. W. Stott of England. Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann of St. Louis, preacher on the “Lutheran Hour” radio broadcast, also will participate.

Anglican Bishop A. W. Goodwin Hudson of London will be a key program personality, presenting a major position paper on the theological basis for evangelism. After the papers are given, delegates will separate into six major groups to discuss them.

Graham heads the list of major evening speakers. He will be joined by Bishop Chandu Ray of Pakistan, Dr. Ishaya S. Audu of Nigeria, Dr. Akbar Abdul-Haqq of India, Dr. Kyung Chik Han of Korea, Dr. Gerhard Bergmann of Germany, and Pastor Fernando Vangioni of Argentina.

Worldwide News Coverage. More than 100 newsmen are expected to cover the congress. They will represent secular as well as religious newspapers, magazines, and television and radio networks and stations all over the world. Primarily because of limited seating in the Kongresshalle, only accredited newsmen will be admitted. Those accredited, however, will have access to the whole program; no closed sessions are anticipated. Accreditation is available to editors and reporters of bona fide news media on a first-come, first-served basis. A number have already been accredited.

The aim of the congress will be to face anew the duty and need of evangelism, the obstacles and opportunities, and the resources and rewards, and to encourage Christian believers of common faith and doctrine in a mighty offensive for the Gospel in the remaining third of the twentieth century.

The congress already seems to be having a beneficial effect upon evangelicals around the world. Letters report enthusiasm building as missionaries and evangelistically minded churchmen consider the great potential of such a representative gathering. There may be a special impact upon those working in areas where political conditions have hindered the spread of the Gospel and where response to evangelistic efforts has been minimal.

New Hymn Contest

A contest is under way for development of a new hymn to serve as theme song for the World Congress on Evangelism. Deadline for submission of entries is April 15, according to Dr. Donald P. Hustad, chairman of the congress music committee.

Hustad says the hymn should have the flavor of contemporary literature and must be strophic. It must also possess a common meter for each stanza, but the rhyme scheme need not be rigid.

Further details may be secured by writing Dr. Hustad, 5721 South Harvey Avenue, La Grange, Illinois 60525.

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