Theologically conservative churchmen in Great Britain displayed their willingness this month to rally round an ecumenical flag. At their first National Assembly of Evangelicals, many indicated a desire to suppress minor differences in favor of a collective approach on key issues. The three-day conference at Westminster, organized by the Evangelical Alliance, saw a number of far-reaching proposals put forward.

“If we are to meet this challenge, we must stand together,” said the Rev. Peter Johnston, vicar of Islington, who presided. “The situation is too desperate to allow for unnecessary overlapping, let alone unseemly rivalry between us.”

Among resolutions put before the conference was one calling on the alliance to set up a group of Anglicans and Free Church representatives “to study radically the various attitudes of evangelicals to the ecumenical movement, denominationalism, and a future possible ‘United Church.’ ”

The resolution was approved, with the proposal that the group report in about a year to a subsequent assembly session. Some Congregationalists complained that this would be too late to help them in their “battle of conscience” about union with the Presbyterians, to which the Congregational Union of England and Wales is committed.

Other resolutions defined “certain fixed points beyond which evangelicals cannot go in pursuit of church unity in Britain.” One of these, for example, rejected “apostolic succession” completely; but in the course of debate there was some rewording, and acceptance of bishops within a “United Church” was finally construed as possible. It was emphasized, however, that the acceptance would not imply that this was the only means of validating the ministry.

Other limits laid down by the conferees held that the Bible must be the final authority on all matters of doctrine and conduct and that there could be no approval of the doctrines of the Roman Catholic mass or of any suggestion that the united church’s ministry was in any distinctive sense sacerdotal.

Religious News Service quoted observers who saw as “unexpected” the evangelicals’ expressed willingness to cooperate fully in a unity movement. The conference brought together Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and others. Observers from the British Council of Churches and from Australia and Europe also were on hand.

Schism Season

Yes, that was the chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania crawling up over a church gate so he could unlock it from inside and let the bishop in.

And those were shouted questions from the pews during worship at Cincinnati’s Revelation Baptist Church, hurled at the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, key aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On October 7, dissident members filed new charges that their pastor used high-handed tactics and committed financial abuses in running the church.

And it was another pastor’s comments against King that vexed the faithful at Harlem’s huge Abyssinian Baptist Church. The Reverend-Representative Adam Clayton Powell, veteran Democrat, threatened to quit his pulpit of twenty-eight years, then offered to reconsider if the parishioners gave him a vote of confidence.

All in all, it was a bad season for intramural ecumenism.

Baptist bloodshed is commonplace, but it isn’t often that the sedate surface of Episcopalianism is rippled with such a furor as that at North Philadelphia’s Christ Episcopal Church. The rector, the Rev. William Vaughn Ischie, Jr., 39, was ordained a Syrian Antiochian Orthodox priest last month. He submitted to the authority of the local Metropolitan and reported that all but twenty-five of his 350 members were “in process of converting to the Syrian Orthodox faith.”

What was Bishop Robert L. DeWitt to do? He charged Ischie with misconduct and insubordination and got a court order to evict him.

Ischie replied, “What he says means no more than if the Grand Lama of Tibet had said it,” and locked up.

DeWitt finally got through the front door and celebrated communion for a congregation of six, while about 200 persons joined Ischie for prayer in the rectory.

The Cincinnati case has been droning on for weeks, and some Sundays the sanctuary has sounded like a courtroom. After original charges by some laymen last month in Common Pleas Court, Shuttlesworth raised counter-charges against the laymen. The latest charges followed a judge-conducted audit report attended by 700 members. Another church meeting, judge and all, was forthcoming.

Personalia

Religious Heritage of America presented its annual leading churchmen awards this month to Dr. Herbert H. Richards of the Cathedral of the Rockies in Boise, Idaho; Wallace E. Johnson of Memphis, president of Holiday Inns of America; and Mrs. Pearl Glenn Herlihy, director of the Martin Luther Foundation of Delaware. Special citations went to Dr. Jarrell McCracken of Word Records, religious film producer Dick Ross, and Religious Editor Harold Schachern of the Detroit News.

W. Maxey Jarman, chairman of Genesco, Inc., was honored this month with the American Churchman of the Year award conferred by lay associates of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

New bride Beverly Barnes said right after the wedding, “This one doesn’t count.” Then she and the groom, Lutheran James L. Barkenquast, Protestant chaplain in Moscow, went from the Soviet “wedding palace” to the American ambassador’s house for a religious rerun conducted by an Anglican priest.

Protestant Panorama

The Methodist Church is setting up a special fund to repair and rebuild church properties hit by Hurricane Betsy. A special offering was to be taken in Methodist churches across the nation on October 17.

Merger of eleven seminaries related to the American Baptist Convention with other Protestant seminaries is being promoted by the denomination’s Board of Education and Publication. The board promised “substantial support” to those seminaries that meet its criteria, including seven newly adopted “guiding principles.” A board statement said it would be policy to provide theological education in a broad ecumenical perspective and to prepare graduates for both academic and professional vocations.

Miscellany

Roman Catholic Archbishop George Andrew Beck of Liverpool, England, dropped a verbal bombshell in Rome last month when he announced that the Beatles might perform at the opening of a new cathedral in Liverpool in 1967. “We are planning a festival of art and music in general,” he said, “and this would include a pageant or mime on the theme of Christ the king.”

The U. S. Supreme Court is being asked to rule whether it is constitutional for a state to bar voluntary prayers in public schools. At issue are two prayers uttered by kindergarten pupils in Whitestone, New York: “God is great. God is good, and we thank him for our food”; and “Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we cat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you. God, for everything.”

Park Street Church (Congregational) in Boston plans a $1,000,000 expansion project. An eight-story auxiliary building will be erected at the rear of the church, located next to the Boston Common. With its 217-foot Christopher Wren spire, it is considered one of the finest examples of church architecture in the nation.

They Say

“Except for a few fanatical ecumenists, there is no widespread interest in the Blake-Pike plan.”—Dr. Charles C. Parlin, a president of the World Council of Churches and one of the architects of the proposed Methodist-Evangelical United Brethren merger.

Deaths

DR. EVALD B. LAWSON, 61, president of Upsala College and a Lutheran clergyman; in East Orange, New Jersey.

DR. MARY FLOYD CUSHMAN, 95, renowned Congregational missionary physician in Africa; in Laconia, New Hampshire.

DR. ANTON T. BOISEN. 89, pioneer researcher in religion and mental health who is credited with founding the profession of mental hospital chaplains; at Elgin. Illinois.

The National Council of Churches unveiled its new Division of Overseas Ministries in Nashville this month. No business was transacted at this first assembly, but three days of speeches and discussion indicated an emphasis on the shape of the secular world, which strongly influences mission strategy.

The biggest new development was the announcement that NCC will ask its constituency to raise $250,000 for relief of Viet Nam refugees, including a contribution to a similar World Council of Churches program already under way.

The presence of about 500 delegates, many from overseas, representing sixty or more agencies and a constituency of nearly 50 million, showed how fully the division has survived the loss of many participating agencies when the Foreign Missions Conference of North America was incorporated into the National Council fifteen years ago. Its continuing vigor is expressed materially in the expenditure of about $60 million annually.

The new division was formed January 1 of this year by a merger of the NCC relief and welfare department with the foreign missions division. The basic committee and department structure has been retained, with slight revision of terminology.

The assembly theme: “Mission: The Christian’s Calling,” will be echoed in the missions program for all NCC churches during coming months. In his keynote address. Dr. David M. Stowe, executive officer of the division, discussed the “shape” of the calling: first the organizational structure, then the shape of things in the world.

His penetrating analysis interpreted the context in which the mission calling must be fulfilled. As other conference speakers approached the theme from their own angles, a marked degree of similarity emerged, particularly in treatment of world tensions.

Among formative forces, Stowe cited “the maturing … of applied intellectual power”—human intelligence as a creative factor of decisive significance. Other world characteristics, he said, are an insistence on measurable results as a criterion for meaning, the signs of emergence of one cosmopolitan world civilization, nationalism and revolution, and such geographic factors as the almost certain dominance of China in eastern Asia and the increasing polarity between developed and underdeveloped societies.

Internationally known theologian Dr. Arend Theodoor van Leeuwen excited the thought of the entire company with two profound lectures. Delegates murmured reactions like “provocative” and “stimulating.”

The guest from Holland said Communism has deprived Christianity of mission fields, “but we owe to it the immense service of a total and radical criticism of our whole Christian and missionary tradition.”

Then, in one of the few concrete thrusts of the conference, he called for “an independent center for basic, comprehensive research and for preparing long-term policy.” It would have an interdisciplinary team free from existing organizational frameworks. He added:

“The center should have an outspoken lay character. It has radically to break through the separation between theology and exact science. It has to develop a method whereby the familiar theological approach is irresistibly drawn into the orbit of the exact sciences and whereby, on the other hand, the exact sciences are challenged to give fundamental answers which bear an implicit theological character.”

To this point, the job was well-done. No one who had paid half-heed to the scholarly addresses could have avoided some new precipitate of understanding and knowledge. But beyond this, the Nashville meeting ran out of steam. At longer range, the talks seemed truncated, largely limited to statement of the problems.

Fascinating as the analyses were, their relevance was obscure. What, after all, did they have to do with the conference theme, which implied the traditional concepts of “calling” and subsequent evangelism under the Great Commission?

It seemed more like a gathering of diplomats. Or a sales convention, where the salesmen diligently studied their territories, but were not quite sure what the product was they were selling, or whether it was of any value.

For instance, some responses reflected a defensive attitude, and perhaps embarrassment lest intellectual respectability be compromised by association with the simplicities of the Gospel. One speaker warned that “the amateurism and sentimentality of most Christian ministries overseas is no longer acceptable.” There must be technical competence. And, again, “In theological enterprise, missions must take leadership in the growing movement toward a genuinely secular Christian faith—that is, an understanding of our belief not in terms of archaic philosophical concepts, but in terms relevant and luminous in meaning in the scientific, world-affirming and world-understanding age in which we are set.”

The speakers did indicate there was a sense (not too well defined) in which Christianity might bring a theological ingredient to the formula of life, and thus make some distinctive contribution. But that was about all.

There was intellectual stimulation in Nashville, but little inspiration. As one speaker put it, “there were no trumpet calls.” And no rallying of troops either.

The well-planned missionary strategy session had almost everything it needed. Just one essential was lacking—a forthright testimony of souls being made alive in Christ.

Christian Students In Politics

Actions taken at the National Student Christian Federation’s 1965 assembly reflected the growing involvement of students in political affairs.

The 125 voting delegates approved establishment of a “political commission” for the NSCF in Washington and called for a national conference on “the need for and right to dissent from governmental policy, including, for example, the right or duty of individuals to refuse participation in specific types of military operation even when in military service.”

Delegates also voted to send a letter to President Johnson condemning the escalation of war and the bombing of North Viet Nam.

NSCF is a federation of five national denominational campus movements together with the YWCA, the YMCA, and several related student organizations. It is affiliated with the National Council of Churches.

The NSCF political commission will be housed in the NCC’s Washington offices and headed by Rix Threadgill, a graduate student at George Washington University. Among the aims of the commission is the formulation of strategy for student activity.

A proposal was voiced calling for a representative group to travel to Communist China in 1966 as a means of protest against U. S. policy in Asia. Financial sources for such a trip were claimed, but not identified. The proposal never reached the point of a floor vote.

World Series Christians

At least four members of the Minnesota Twins baseball club openly profess Christ as Saviour, according to the Evangelical Beacon. One is pitcher Jim Kaat, who made his World Series debut this month with a 5–1 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers. The others are relief pitcher A1 Worthington and infielders Jerry Kindall and Bernie Allen.

The Beacon, published in Minneapolis by the Evangelical Free Church of America, said that all four have testified of their faith before church groups.

Evangelism Among Airmen

A dozen Bible study groups were formed at Colorado’s Air Force Academy this fall. They are part of a campaign by the Navigators and astronautics teacher Captain Jerry White to assist the sixty men among the academy’s 2,870 cadets who made decisions for Christ during Billy Graham’s recent Denver crusade.

Each person has been contacted personally, as has been done with the eighty Lowry Air Force Base men who made decisions. There are also weekly Bible studies at Lowry and at Denver’s Christian Servicemen’s Center.

During the crusade, buses brought 200 cadets to one of the Graham meetings, and he spoke on campus. Seventy Christian cadets took crusade-related courses in counseling.

London’S Christian Cabaret

The Salvation Army, ever willing to experiment with new ways of presenting the Gospel, is now operating a Christian nightclub in the center of London.

The main ingredients at the Rink Club are non-stop entertainment with rhythmic Christian groups prominent, a bar selling food and drink (non-alcoholic), and friendly Salvationists mixing freely with the customers. There are no strict rules, and the atmosphere is informal so that the youths feel at ease.

Some older Salvationists have expressed doubts, worrying that this medium tends to prostitute religious feelings. But the young people of London are showing a lively interest, and more than 100 regularly turn out each Saturday night.

Cabaret evangelism has been used in the United States as well, and new church coffeehouses recently appeared in Philadelphia and Washington. At the end of this month, some Britons formerly on a Billy Graham crusade committee plan to open a coffeehouse, the Catacombs, in the city of Manchester.

The Rink Club, managed by Lieutenant David Blackwell, began early this year with a four-week trial, and caught on. The Salvationists involved report patrons willing to discuss religious matters but reluctant to consider committing their lives to Christ. If results warrant it, the Army will make the club an official activity and open other ones.

DAVID M. COOMES

Polls And Piety

England’s Gallup Poll last month came up with a curious report on religion. Some examples:

• Most people consider religion irrelevant to daily life. Yet they think churches achieve much in social welfare and should continue.

• They consider religion old hat. Yet nearly all demand religious instruction for their children.

• The percentage who hear sermons drops yearly. Yet the men who preach are generally respected, thought to be doing good work for good motives with little reward.

• Some 78 per cent see no connection between churchgoing and leading better lives. At the same time, 60 per cent believe one must be dishonest to get ahead, and two-thirds are either apathetic about or in favor of cheating on tax returns.

• Two-thirds of the English believe the influence of religion is decreasing. Two-thirds would like religion to have more influence.

How? Even though 94 per cent identify themselves with a denomination, church involvement lags. Church attendance is now estimated at 10 per cent, and only 12 per cent say they read the Bible regularly.

The poll divided believers into three major camps: Anglicans (67 per cent); Nonconformists (13 per cent); and Roman Catholics (9 per cent). The latter two showed the most kinship in matters of doctrine.

Despite all the downward trends, nearly half of the English claim to say private prayers regularly, and an overwhelming 86 per cent believe in God.

Similarly, a United States survey this summer by the Louis Harris Survey found that an amazing 97 per cent believe in God. Half said they attend church weekly. Twenty-seven per cent considered themselves deeply religious, and 63 per cent somewhat religious.

A less publicized but significant survey earlier this year by the American Association of Advertising Agencies tested general reactions to such amorphous forces as fashion, labor, family life, religion, and—of course—advertising. Of all topics, people said they had the strongest opinions about religion. Next to family affairs, it was the most important topic of conversation. And religion rated low among things considered irksome or needing change. Advertising didn’t fare nearly so well.

After surveying Gallup’s survey, the London Times remarked:

“It is almost as if the Christian churches have done their job too well. Their ethical teaching has become an ingrained part of our culture; most people still accept that they ought to be ‘good,’ despite some new emphases in the concept of what constitutes being good. But now that the social and anthropological function of the churches has fallen away, what else is there in the shop to buy?…”

Firing Squad Faith

Solemn shots barked at 5 A.M. in Saigon’s central market. Five men convicted of murder and rape fell before an October firing squad. Americans considered the timing of the executions bad, fearing it would give Communists a pretext for killing more Americans held hostage.

This chess game was the prominent factor, not the criminals themselves, but Saigon Press noticed that one of them “touched his hands in prayer” as the twenty soldiers readied their carbines.

That fifth man was one-armed, one-eyed Nguyen Thanh Nhan, who was convicted for multiple murder, rape, and robbery in 1960. Soon after entering prison, he became a Christian and spent most of the past five years witnessing in two prisons where he had been held.

Nhan, who freely confessed his guilt, prayed and gave his testimony with a native pastor from Saigon’s International Protestant Church two hours before the dawn execution. The pastor stood by as the shots rang out.

A Philippine Council

Conservative Protestants in the Philippines formed a cooperative council after ten months of planning. The Philippine Council of Fundamental and Evangelical Churches has a constituency of 20,000, but an estimated potential of 240,000.

Reaction of the National Council of Churches of the Philippines (representing about four million persons) varied from subdued approval to veiled apprehension. Typical was Dr. José A. Yap, NCCP’s administrative secretary, who saw no objection as long as the new council’s purpose was to obey the divine mandate to preach the Word, rather than to be a divisive force in the Protestant minority.

But one reason for founding the PCFEC was a lurking fear among independents that the NCCP might declare itself the official voice of Protestantism before the government and become the accrediting body for foreign missionaries.

The conservatives plan their next General Assembly in 1967. Meanwhile, leaders are working to mobilize more dynamic evangelism.

The Rev. Fred Magbuana, a Conservative Baptist minister, is PCFEC president. He foresees a revitalized conservative witness that will produce evangelization on a national scale.

Besides the Conservative Baptists, members include the Christian and Missionary Alliance, International Foursquare Gospel Church, independent local churches, and such evangelistic groups as Inter-Varsity.

EUSTAQUIO RAMIENTOS, JR.

Korean Blacklist

South Korea’s two most respected private universities, one of them Protestant, reopened late last month after a furor about government intervention.

Ever since students toppled the Rhee regime in 1960, demonstrations have been a sensitive matter. August’s violent riots against the treaty to normalize relations with Japan were quelled with a show of military power. Later, the Chung-hee Park government blacklisted twenty-one teachers and hundreds of students at eight universities as “political agitators.”

Only Yonsei and Korea Universities refused to remove the alleged offenders; they wanted to conduct their own investigations.

A Yonsei official explained: “If the accused are guilty of breaking government laws, the government should punish them. But if they are to be expelled for breaking university regulations, then the university must be allowed to fix the blame and determine the penalties. Only so can the academic freedoms of private institutions be preserved.”

Yonsei, founded by Presbyterians in 1915, is now interdenominational and has both undergraduate and graduate seminaries. Nine of its 4,800 students and four of 288 professors were blacklisted. Two of the professors, however, proved to have no connection with Yonsei.

Two weeks after the government closed the schools, the impasse ended. The universities disciplined several students for inciting to violence, and five professors resigned. Satisfied, the government let the schools open September 18.

SAMUEL H. MOFFETT

Pope Paul VI, in an epochal 8,000-mile peace mission, thrust the Roman Catholic Church back into the global mainstream this month. His fourteen-hour visit to New York was the most dramatic intervention in world affairs by a pontiff since Pope Pius IX excoriated liberalism with his Syllabus of Errors more than a century ago.

This time the papal word was largely affirmative and guarded. “Will the world,” he asked the twentieth General Assembly of the United Nations, “ever succeed in changing that selfish and bellicose mentality which, up to now, has woven so much of its history?”

“It is hard to foresee. But it is easy to affirm that it is towards that new history, a peaceful and truly human history, as promised by God to men of good will, that we must resolutely set out. The roads are already well marked out for you, and the first is that of disarmament.”

The slender, sixty-eight-year-old pontiff coined a new rallying cry for peacemakers during his thirty-two-minute speech:

“No more war! War never again!”

The carefully executed events of October 4, which cast a virtual daylong spell over news media, built prestige for both the United Nations and Roman Catholicism. What these events meant for Christendom as a whole will not be clear for a long time.

Whatever the long-range impact, Pope Paul chose to avoid summit-type ecumenical confrontations during his visit. The closest he got to a genuine, top-level interfaith encounter was at Holy Family Church, where he stayed for twelve minutes. It was an ecumenical enclave of sorts, built around contingents of about forty each from the Protestant and Orthodox Church Center for the U. N., the Jewish Center for the U. N., and the Catholic U. N. groups. The Pope exchanged pleasantries with the crowd and accepted an illuminated scroll with the swords-plowshares inscription from Isaiah 2. He reiterated the dominant peace theme and encouraged his hearers to “work even more strenuously for the cause of peace—a peace based on the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all men.” Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish representatives were seated in an area adjacent to the sanctuary proper, a spokesman explaining the arrangement as a deference to Orthodox Jews who for doctrinal reasons preferred not to sit in the sanctuary.

Somewhat paradoxically, Paul VI was propelling the church into the international limelight at a time when some observers thought they saw his papal authority waning. Even the Pope himself played down his role in the U.N. speech:

“He who addresses you has no temporal power, nor any ambition to compete with you. In fact, we have nothing to ask for, no question to raise; we have at most a desire to express and a permission to request: namely, that of serving you in so far as we can, with disinterest, with humility, and love.”

To most it was apparent that Pope Paul aimed to avoid a display or promotion of Roman Catholic distinctives. Except for a reference to the “Queen of Peace” in farewell remarks at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, Mary was kept out of the picture. One reference was made to the Pope as the “vicar of Christ,” in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where decades of decorum were broken with shouts, whistles, and applause. There were no special embellishments over his person, no thrones, and no crowns.

On television, Bishop Fulton Sheen aroused hostility with a humorous quip on the papal plane having become airborne: “Our father, who art in heaven.”

The Pope’s U. N. speech was so general that it was received with disappointment in some quarters. He made no electrifying proposals, offered no grand schemes, held out no specific alternative to the war-weary world. Yet many echoed President Johnson’s suggestion that the papal visit may turn out to be “just what the world needs to get us thinking of how to achieve peace.” Others viewed the Johnson observation as an invitation to keep the Pope in the forefront of the political scene.

The only two real surprises in the U. N. speech were the Pope’s request that the world body not encourage “artificial” birth control and his indirect but quite plain plea in behalf of U. N. membership for Communist China.

By contrast, Pope Paul sidestepped any endorsement of several religious liberty measures now before the U. N.

From the religious standpoint, the Pope’s plea for personal conversion was especially significant (see editorial, page 25). Also noteworthy was the somewhat obscure reference, complicated by the use of the papal “we,” to his feeling that the trip was a fulfillment of a divine mandate:

“We appreciate the good fortune of this moment, however brief, which fulfills a desire nourished in our heart for nearly twenty centuries.… We here celebrate the epilogue of a wearying pilgrimage in search of a conversation with the entire world, ever since the command was given to us: Go and bring the glad tidings to all peoples. Now, you here represent all peoples.”

For New Yorkers suffering from a water shortage, a newspaper strike, and, for only the fifteenth year in the last fifty, having to do without a World Series in town, the Pope was a welcome subject to cheer about. The pontiff got a relatively “cool” reception, police having advised people to stay home and the weather having further encouraged indoor TV viewing. A cold snap, the first of autumn, had blown in during the night. Temperatures plummeted down near the freezing mark. A raw wind whipped the city, prompting the Pope to abandon an open-top Lincoln Continental modified with elevated seat. He made his rounds with another Lincoln, this one from the White House fleet with only the special benefit of a glass roof.

At least two bomb threats were reported, but both seemed to be the work of cranks. The only outright hostility evident was the picketing of a Roman Catholic group seeking the ouster of James Francis Cardinal McIntyre because of his conservative stand on racial issues.

Evangelicals, who tend to regard any action of the Pope as a power play or publicity quest, were respectfully silent. One small band of evangelicals, however, seized the opportunity for a quiet evangelistic effort. Outside Yankee Stadium, where Paul VI celebrated a mass for peace before 90,000, young men distributed copies of a tract by Dr. George Wells Arms, “I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church,” asserting that the universal church of the Apostles’ Creed is composed only of those who have received Christ as Saviour.

The Pope’s call on President Johnson at the Waldorf Towers, climaxed with a private discussion lasting forty-six minutes, was reported to be a general discussion of world affairs.

As if to perpetuate the success of the trip, rumors began spreading that the Pope is considering a round-the-world tour, including a more extended U. S. visit, that could take as much as three months out of the coming year.

A Negro Bishop

The Very Reverend Harold R. Perry is the first acknowledged American Negro to be a Roman Catholic bishop.

Perry, 49, a native of Louisiana, was appointed auxiliary bishop of New Orleans on the eve of the Pope’s trip to New York. He said: “I am the first Negro bishop. The others did not consider themselves Negro.” He referred to the Most Reverend James Augustine Healy, a mulatto who was bishop of Portland. Maine, in the late nineteenth century.

The new bishop said there were 164 Negro priests and 800,000 Negro laymen in the United States.

The Pilot Was Presbyterian

Pope Paul’s pilot on the flight from New York to Rome was TWA’s George C. Duvall, 56, a Presbyterian and board member of the Chicago Bible Society.

The men had met earlier this year when Duvall gave the Pope a copy of The 500th Anniversary Pictorial Census of the Gutenberg Bible, which he had helped prepare.

Meanwhile, In Rome …

The Pope’s visit to the United Nations overshadowed an important debate at the Vatican Council about secular affairs. At times it sounded like a group of Protestants arguing about political pronouncements by the National Council of Churches.

At issue was “The Church in the Modern World,” Schema Number 13, which could prove unlucky to a rather smooth-running council. Already the need for textual revision forced a one-week recess in floor action in mid-October.

A bishop writing in America capsulized one major viewpoint on Schema 13 thus:

“If we hold the Church is a divine, supernatural society, then she should stick to preaching the gospel. Moreover, she has no competence beyond this. The text will get the Church criticized for being a busybody.”

One problem is Schema 13’s range. It encompasses five categories of human problems: marriage and the family, the advancement of culture, economic and social life, politics, and the “community of nations.”

Another problem is that it is written for all men, not just Catholics. This has produced a watered-down stand, in the view of Vienna’s Francis Cardinal Koenig: “Because of the desire to address also non-believers, there is danger of some reduction in truth.” Even though the schema is a secular statement, he said, it should include topics the current text has evaded, such as “sin, the truth of the cross, the need for penitence, and hope of resurrection with Christ.”

Similar criticism was made by a key Protestant observer, the World Council of Churches’ Lukas Vischer. He said the schema’s stress on solidarity with the world shows a temptation that Protestants also face: to neglect the Bible’s teachings on God’s judgment of the world.

“The Gospel not only brings reconciliation of the world with God; it brings division between men. The Gospel teaches liberation from sin, but it does not make the struggle with sin less real on that account,” Vischer said.

A statement is definitely forthcoming, since 98 per cent of the 2,222 bishops have voted that a decree based on the present draft be adopted. At first, the schema was scheduled to be issued without debate as an encyclical from the council expressing “the sense of the house,” similar to documents from World Council of Churches assemblies.

Among the many criticisms of the phrasing of the text, one highlighted the problems of catholicity. Josyf Cardinal Slipyi, exiled Ukranian Rite archbishop, said the schema “uses mostly the terminology of the West and reflects too much the western mentality. The world includes Eastern Europe and the East as well as the West.…”

Among other things, the bishops were trying to decide what Schema 13’s approach to atheists should be. A surprising appeal for a hard line came from Father Pedro Arrupe, leader of the Jesuits. With an evangelistic tone, he pointed out that Catholics now constitute 16 per cent of the world’s population, whereas a few years ago they were 18 per cent.

But French Archbishop Francois Marty said: “The faithful are rubbing shoulders with atheists almost continuously in their day-to-day life.… Our texts sound more like a condemnation and open no doors to honest dialogue with atheists.…” In another reflection of liberalizing attitudes, there were kind words for the work of renowned atheist Sigmund Freud. Sergio Mendez Arceo, speaking for ten Mexican bishops, compared Freud’s work to that of Copernicus and said psychoanalysis should have a place in Schema 13.

Another great Schema 13 issue is war and peace. Despite praise of peace by Popes John and Paul, there was great difficulty in applying the idea to specifics. Two touchy sections are on conscientious objectors and foreign policy.

One Roman quipped that if the Vatican should explicitly support conscientious objection, the Italian army would disappear overnight. Certainly this civil liberty, generally accepted in America, is anathema to Latin countries where it is not tolerated.

A persistent “peace lobby,” a small group of active laymen, not only wants to keep this statement in the final version but hopes for a condemnation of the policy of “aequilibrium terroris,” the balance of terror or deterrence, which intrinsically includes total war as a threat and a possible effect. In effect, this would condemn the military policy of the United States and the Western alliance in general.

The thrust of the schema on laymen, another floor topic, is reflected in Schema 13. It was revealed that the draft of Schema 13 was submitted to five laymen for their opinion, under strict pledges of secrecy, and that they all endorsed it. Also, the announcement of a third World Congress of Laymen for October of 1967 (previous ones were held in 1951 and 1957) implied that laymen would have a special part in applying the results of Vatican II.

Another little-noticed but significant action was presentation of the schema on the pastoral office of bishops. It not only affirms the principle of collegiality but also calls for reorganization and internationalization of the Curia and Vatican diplomatic corps, both traditionally composed of Italians. Initial approval was lopsided.

Birth Control Bombshell

A remarkable declaration against current Catholic birth control dogma added new urgency to the Vatican debate on marriage doctrines in Schema 13.

The report from thirty-seven top American Catholic scholars, pigeonholed for half a year, says traditional church arguments against contraception are “unconvincing.” A majority of the group declared “contraception is not intrinsically immoral.”

The conventional teachings do not take into account “the findings of physiology, psychology, sociology and demography,” the statement said, “nor do they reveal a sufficient grasp of the complexity and the inherent value of sexuality in human life.” The majority asserted that special family problems “may demand the continuance of sexual communion even if a new pregnancy cannot be responsibly undertaken.”

The minority disagreed but said the evidence against the present stand requires that the issue be kept open for continued study. This seemed a practical approach, with fast-moving scientific developments in anti-ovulant pills and other contraceptive devices to consider.

The special papal commission that just recently received the report has found it impossible to agree on how to advise the Pope. Persistent rumors say the Pope will soon issue his long-awaited birth control decree; Britain’s John Cardinal Heehan expects it before year’s end.

Pope Paul admitted his perplexity in a recent news interview: “We cannot remain silent. But to speak out is a real problem. The Church has not ever over the centuries had to face anything like these problems.”

Although Paul has said he will handle this issue himself, some bishops want to cite contraception in Schema 13. The discussion of marriage in the schema draft has a conservative flavor that upsets liberals like Montreal’s Paul-Emile Cardinal Leger. He said its emphasis on procreation and education of children as basic marriage aims neglects the fact that, above all, marriage is “an intimate community of life and love.”

In related questions, the council discussed whether remarriage should be permitted if a spouse indulges in adultery, if an innocent spouse is abandoned, or if a spouse becomes permanently insane.

The ‘Deicide’ Dilemma

“Deicide” is the key word in controversy about Vatican II’s revised draft on Jewish responsibility in the Crucifixion.

Dr. Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary charged that “not to condemn the demonic canard of deicide … would mean condoning Auschwitz, defiance of the God of Abraham, and an act of paying homage to Satan.”

The vacillating council is criticized if it uses the word and criticized if it doesn’t. Last year’s draft mentioned “deicide” and explicitly rejected the term that has played so large a role in the history of anti-Semitism. But an earlier version, like the newest one, omitted the idea.

Some delegates contend deletion of “deicide” implies denial of Christ’s divinity. Others say inclusion would imply a collective guilt that has no biblical basis.

But the new schema pleased both Catholic liberals and Jewish observers by specifically condemning anti-Semitism for the first time. The draft says no Jew, then or now, is responsible for Christ’s death except those directly active in prosecuting him. Most delegates contend that even these men weren’t guilty of deicide, since they did not know Christ was God.

The document not only discusses Catholic attitudes toward Judaism but states that the church “rejects nothing that is true and holy” in any of the major world religions.

It buries the historic hatchet with Islam, which is cited for its monotheism, reverence for Jesus, honor for Mary, and emphasis on moral life and divine judgment. Buddhism and Hinduism rate less enthusiasm, but Catholics are urged to seek fellowship with all peoples.

Jerusalem In Five Pages

Cities of the New Testament, by E. M. Blaiklock (Pickering and Inglis, 1965, 128 pp., 15s.), is reviewed by David F. Wright, lecturer in ecclesiastical history, New College, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Professor E. M. Blaiklock holds the chair of classics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and for this reason we are not surprised that when he turns to the New Testament his forte lies in the elucidation of its historical and cultural background. In his latest work twenty-three cities are covered from this standpoint, sixteen in the order of Paul’s journeyings from Antioch to Rome and six as the addressees of the John of Revelation. The two groups are separated by Alexandria, which, though acknowledged to have “only a precarious place in this list of cities” (albeit the author believes Apollos to have been converted there), curiously receives the longest treatment of all.

Details of historical origins, prehistorical legends, local pagan cults, local trade and industry, archaeological discoveries—such is the staple diet that Professor Blaiklock offers, though he is often ready to serve up some of the quainter fruits in his vast storehouse of classical learning. He is always on the lookout for independent corroboration of the New Testament narratives and owes a considerable indebtedness to the pioneer work of Sir William Ramsay. There is a great deal here to illuminate the Acts and the Epistles for the Bible student, and to set them firmly amid the living flesh and blood of the first-century world.

Yet this reviewer admits to some disappointment both in the basic outlines of the work and in some of the details. Space does not seem to have been allotted on the basis of importance; hence the breathless compression of the five pages on Jerusalem. We perhaps discern the author’s classical bias in the omission of cities (towns?) from the Gospels, such as Capernaum, Tiberias, Samaria, and even Gerasa, whose remains constitute probably one of the best-preserved examples of a Roman provincial town and which has at least as good a claim to inclusion as Alexandria. We certainly detect the classicist in the enthusiastic chapter on “Athens, Intellectual Capital of the World”—which, of course, it had long since ceased to be by the first century of our era. A map or two would have been of immense help in following the geographical information.

It is doubtful whether in the light of Van Unnik’s Tarsus or Jerusalem: The City of Paul’s Youth we will ever again be able to speak with confidence, if at all, of Tarsus as the scene of Paul’s early years. Was Tarsus (p. 21) or Damascus (p. 15) the locus of Paul’s first preaching? Is there really any evidence for Troas as the place of Paul’s final arrest? What is anyone but an expert to make of the tantalizing mention of the “Nazareth Decree” (pp. 41, 86)? The Codex Bezae is described as “Beza’s version,” and the chapter on Corinth could have been much enriched with archaeological data concerning the quite possible site of the synagogue (Acts 18:4), the bema (the tribunal of 18:12 ff.), and the meat-market (1 Cor. 10:25, RSV). The calculation of the size of the Christian community at Rome (pp. 86, 87) goes astray by not allowing for the influx that must have followed Constantine’s conversion; scholars like Harnack, Lietzmann, and Baus judge Gibbon’s estimate if anything too high for A.D. 250! The author’s statements concerning the legal status of Christianity in the Empire are wide of the mark; it was never “officially proscribed” (p. 104—cf. pp. 100, 101) till the third century. All in all, we are sure that the professor could have done much better.

DAVID F. WRIGHT

Justification And Justification

The Wesleyan Bible Commentary, Volume V: Romans through Philemon, by Wilber T. Dayton, Charles W. Carter, and others (Eerdmans, 1965, 675 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Donald W. Burdick, professor of New Testament, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.

Here is a commentary whose distinctiveness justifies its existence. Written by Wesleyans and for Wesleyans, it is meant to provide an exposition of the biblical text in the tradition of John Wesley and Adam Clarke, but based on recent scholarship and couched in contemporary terms. The theological slant of the volume, however, is not so extreme as to make it impractical for students of Calvinistic persuasion. While the treatment is non-technical, the text in cludes helpful discussions of first-century customs and historical backgrounds, as well as an enlightening use of the Greek text, always explained in terms understandable to one who reads only English. A thorough analytical outline and an introduction, sometimes rather brief, precede each epistle.

Several of the seven authors insist that justification is more than forensic. Both Wilber Dayton, on Romans and Galatians, and Charles Carter, on First Corinthians, assert that in justification, righteousness is not only imputed but imparted. Exception must be taken to George Turner’s comment on Philippians 2:5–11 that Christ “divested himself of many divine prerogatives that he had as God” including “omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence” (p. 464). While the desire to be non-polemical is commendable, some may wish for a stronger presentation of Wesleyan theology, especially in comments on such passages as Romans 8:28–30. Others may find the rather extensive use of previous commentaries to be a weakness. On the whole, however, and in view of their stated purpose, the authors have succeeded in producing a commentary profitable for both pastors and lay people.

DONALD W. BURDICK

The Content Is Good

The Master Plan of Evangelism, by Robert E. Coleman (Revell, 1961. 126 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Harold Lindsell, associate editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Jesus, the Master, had a plan for evangelizing men. Coleman has analyzed the plan and found eight guiding principles which are neatly outlined for the reader: (1) Selection—men were his method; (2) Association—he stayed with them: (3) Consecration—he required obedience; (4) lmpartation—he gave himself away; (5) Demonstration—he showed them how to live; (6) Delegation—he assigned them work; (7) Supervision—he kept check on them: and (8) Reproduction—he expected them to reproduce.

The bibliographic material contained in the footnotes is impressive. The author breathes out a spirit of passion and concern for the lost. He has put his principles to the test in his own evangelistic outreach. The dust jacket contains high commendations from splendid sources.

No one will take exception to the points the author has made. Many will take exception to the way he writes. The book reads like a first draft, as shown by the following samples taken at random: “This principle of establishing a beachhead in a new place of labor by getting with a potentially key follow-up leader is not to be minimized”; “the patience with which Jesus brought this out to His disciples reflects upon His consideration for their ability to learn”; “He found the distraught father with the sick child having a fit before the helpless disciples”; “that is why His demands upon discipline were accepted without argument”; “Christ gave a special gift … for the purpose of perfecting the saints to do the service they have each to perform”; “He concentrated Himself upon those who were to be the beginning of this leadership.” The publisher cannot escape his responsibility, either. He should employ a first-rate copy editor.

Strangely, this is a good book badly written.

HAROLD LINDSELL

The Beginning Is Where?

Pascal’s Recovery of Man’s Wholeness, by Albert N. Wells (John Knox, 1965, 174 pp., $4.25), is reviewed by George Ensworth, lecturer in pastoral theology, Westminster Theological Seminary, Chestnut Hill. Pennsylvania.

Albert N. Wells, minister of the Laurinburg, North Carolina, Presbyterian Church, received his Th.D. from Princeton Seminary, where he studied Pascal extensively under Emile Cailliet. In this little volume he attempts to show that Pascal’s concept of order in life can bring “wholeness” to the “splitness” of today’s life and thought. For one who has never read the religious writings of this seventeenth-century Christian mathematician and scientist, this book will be a good introduction. Wells has written a lucid biography of Pascal showing his development as a Christian philosopher climaxing in his Pensée 792. In this Pensée Pascal describes life as being of three orders: the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual. Although Pascal saw certain truth on each level, there is discontinuity in the ascending order from physical to spiritual. One cannot reason from a lower to a higher order. According to Wells, Pascal leans heavily on Augustine to show that meaning and continuity in the orders come only when one starts “with man himself.…” “Faith in God was for Augustine the existential beginning …” (p. 42). It seems to this reviewer that to consider beginning with “faith in God” as “starting with man” is a reflection of Wells’s own thinking rather than Pascal’s or Augustine’s. Would they not consider faith in God as beginning with God?

Wells shows how important philosophers since Pascal have failed to realize “wholeness” because they have tried to reason from a lower to a higher order. This is a helpful section for anyone concerned about the relation of science and religion, but the impression is given that the problem of modern man is an intellectual discontinuity rather than a spiritual discontinuity caused by man’s guilt before a holy God.

If one can overlook the heavy existential emphasis, there is a refreshing attempt in the early chapters to make God supreme. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom …” (Prov. 9:10). But the concluding chapters in which the author attempts to show Pascal’s relevance to today are very disappointing. Wells lets his own view of the world and life show too much. Although trying to keep faith in God supreme, he seems to fall into the error of making experience the final authority. In the last analysis he sees a Christianity that must be subjected to the corrective influence of modern science and thought, the very thing Pascal wished to avoid! For this reviewer the author has failed to make existentialism intellectually more acceptable.

GEORGE ENSWORTH

An Injustice To Christianity?

Athens or Jerusalem?, by L. A. Garrard (Allen and Unwin, 1965, 185 pp., 21s.), is reviewed by Martin H. Cressey, minister, St. Columba’s Presbyterian Church, Coventry, England.

The author, a distinguished Unitarian who formerly was principal of Manchester College, Oxford, and now is professor of philosophy and religion at Emerson College, Boston, here sets out his convictions about liberalism past and present. Many early Church Fathers, medieval scholars, and Enlightenment philosophers tried to produce a synthesis of biblical thought with Hellenic, Platonic, Aristotelian, or Stoic thought. Conservative and liberal readers alike will appreciate Dr. Garrard’s useful survey of these attempts, even if they do not accept all his summary comments (e.g., the Lutheran group of churches “has been largely characterized by emotional pietism”).

The real debate about this book will center on its first two and last chapters. In the first two, Dr. Garrard argues that, while there is in the sixty-six books of the Bible a unity of theme that makes them a unique collection, there is also a variation in theology that takes back into Scripture the kind of comprehensive diversity which he wishes to see in the Christian community today. He quotes with approval E. F. Scott’s statement that “the effort to harmonize the New Testament teaching does an injustice to Christianity itself, which is identified with one given form of belief, while it embraces many.” In particular he argues that there are in the New Testament teaching about Jesus “two fundamentally different main lines. One … is in the main adoptionist. Jesus became divine, or perhaps only the Lord’s anointed, at some specific point in his career.… The other view is concerned with the Incarnation of a pre-existent Divine being.… It is not really possible to accept both views at once.… It is very doubtful whether either is particularly helpful to us today.”

If all this is true, then the Church ought indeed to tolerate diversity and becomes sectarian if it does not do so. If all this is true, Dr. Garrard is right in his strictures upon the World Council of Churches for adopting a trinitarian formula. To accept his view would not, be it said, lead to pure relativism. The liberal does not necessarily hold that all religions have an equal contribution to the truth about God. “There is nothing in the liberal faith that precludes him from believing that Christianity is the best of existing religions or committing himself in personal loyalty to Jesus as his master.” Nor does liberalism in religion necessarily imply a blurring of all sharp distinctions. Dr. Garrard has no use for a tolerance which is “a huddling together for warmth in the face of the chill blasts of growing popular indifference to all forms of organized Christianity.” The last chapter of the book is indeed a helpful restatement of what liberalism means over against certain hostile distortions of its intention.

The basic question remains whether the liberal commitment of personal loyalty to Jesus is or is not an appropriate response to the teaching of Scripture. Those who disagree with Dr. Garrard, and they will be many, must be ready to search the Scriptures with him.

MARTIN H. CRESSEY

Mission Failures

Christian Missionaries and the Creation of Northern Rhodesia, 1880–1924, by Robert I. Rotberg (Princeton University, 1965, 240 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by Virgil A. Olson, professor of history and missions, Bethel Theological Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota.

The recent cry in Africa has been, as James Scherer entitled his book, Missionary, Co Home! Bewildering questions are raised when the modern mission situation is surveyed: Why do nationals who have been trained in mission schools turn against the Church and the missionaries? Are these revolutionary forces in African nationalism that oppose missionaries the result of Communistic agitation?

Rotberg partially answers these disturbing modern queries by presenting a documentary probe into the formative history of missionary action in Northern Rhodesia. Culling his material from correspondence of missionaries, diaries, interviews, and field studies, he further documents the findings of the famous sociologist and missionary leader Maurice Leenhardt, who came up with many of the same conclusions two decades ago.

The book does not overlook the heroic dedication of men and women, nor is their zeal for winning Africans to Christ minimized. And this is the story that we have usually heard. Why, then, the apparent failure? Why are missionaries often looked upon as foes rather than friends of Africans?

This interestingly written report is the record of equating Christianity with Western civilization and imposing this form upon tribal communities; of a blind disregard of cultural mores, in which national Christians were forced to live under the most stringent Puritan ethic; of imperialistically minded servants of God who kept nationals in a state of servility; of racial discrimination; of limited confidence in national leadership, and the like. The author concludes the text and aptly summarizes the study as follows: “In terms of their early aspirations, missionaries had sown the wind, and apparently, reaped the whirlwind.”

Rotberg, who is assistant professor of history at Harvard University, has done a great service for missions. Hopefully missionaries, mission administrators, and others interested in missions will read this documentary carefully. A word to the wise should he sufficient.

VIRGIL. A. OLSON

Book Briefs

Architecture in Worship: The Christian Place of Worship, by André Biéler (Westminster, 1965, 96 pp., $3.75). A sketch of the relationships between the theology of worship and the architectural conception of Christian churches from their beginnings to our own day.

Archaeology and the Living Word, by Jerry Vardaman (Broadman. 1965, 128 pp., $ 1.50). A small book with lots of biblical information for the layman about the world of the Bible.

Signs and Wonders Upon Pharaoh: A History of American Egyptology, by John A. Wilson (University of Chicago, 1964, 243 pp., $5.95). An engaging account of America’s share in the exploration of ancient Egypt.

The Image of God, by Theodore Parker Ferris (Oxford, 1965, 184 pp., $4.25). A striking combination of sense and theological nonsense.

Salt of the Earth: An Informal Portrait of Richard Cardinal Cushing, by John H. Fenton (Coward-McCann, 1965, 242 pp., $5).

The Compassionate Christ, by Walter Russell Bowie (Abingdon, 1965, 320 pp., $5.50). A devotional, very readable running reflection on the Gospel of Luke. Its theological interpretation rakes rather than plows the field.

Dialogue on the Way: Protestants Report from Rome on the Vatican Council, edited by George A. Lindbeck (Augsburg. 1965, 270 pp., $4.75).

Introducing Old Testament Theology, by J. N. Schofield (Westminster, 1964, 126 pp., $2.75). Brief, scholarly, with appreciation of Old Testament theology.

The Dividing of Christendom, by Christopher Dawson (Sliced and Ward, 1965, 304 pp., $5.95). Lecture material covering the period from the Reformation to the French Revolution. Roman Catholic scholar Dawson is the first occupant of Harvard’s Roman Catholic chair—the first in a U. S. Protestant seminary. Profitable reading.

I & II Samuel: A Commentary, by Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg, translated by J. S. Bowden (Westminster, 1964, 416 pp., $7.50). A theological (not dogmatic) interpretation; refreshingly lucid and readable.

Olavus Petri and the Ecclesiastical Transformation in Sweden, 1521–1552, by Conrad Bergendoff (Fortress, 1965, 267 pp., $3.75). A sympathetic yet critical evaluation of Petri’s influence upon the Swedish church. Petri, a sixteenth-century man, had Luther for a teacher.

New Testament Introduction: The Gospels and Acts, by Donald Guthrie (Inter-Varsity. 1965, 380 pp., $5.95). First-rate scholarship deals with all the critical problems of authorship, date, and composition of the four Gospels and of the Book of Acts. May well become a standard work for a long time.

Speaker’s Resources from Contemporary Literalure, edited by Charles L. Wallis (Harper and Row, 1965, 282 pp., $4.95). It’s hard to conceive of situations in which much of this material would be useful.

The Brothers Harper, by Eugene Exman (Harper and Row, 1965, 415 pp„ $7.95). A unique publishing partnership and its inffuence on the cultural life of America from 1817 to 1853.

Reprints

Unitive Protestantism: The Ecumenical Spirit and Its Persistent Expression, by John T. McNeill (John Knox, 1964, 352 pp., 84.50). A scholarly but easy-to-read discussion of the history and theology of Protestantism, written to show that authentic Protestantism has always been “ecumenically minded.” One new chapter added to original edition.

History of Palestine and Syria to the Macedonian Conquest, by A. T. Olmstead (Baker, 1965, 664 pp., §9.95). A good history; first published in 1931.

Protest against pornography branded as “admirable” and “puerile”

Smile The Clouds Away

About the poorest advice anyone has ever given me—and, by the same token, the poorest advice I have ever given anybody else—is, “Don’t worry.” The way my mind works, the effort to quit worrying is just another one of my worries.

Two solutions have presented themselves recently, and the first one seems to work pretty well. I try worrying on purpose. I pick out a really good worry and try to concentrate on it; and, since my powers of concentration aren’t too good, the very act of trying to worry drives the worry out of my mind. There are no guarantees that this will work for you.

Last week I tried a different scheme. I tried to sort out my worries and classify them under some general headings. The results were awful. You have no idea how many worries you have until you really get around to The Large View. People want me to work out some answers on Viet Nam, Red China, and Formosa, the new revolution in Russia, the Islamic invasion of Africa, the population explosion, the starving people of India, the new morality, the election of 1966, the poverty program, the race issue, the new confession, and the like—after, of course, giving a little thought in passing to geriatrics and vitamin deficiencies. So our dog has an infection in the middle of her back and we have water grass growing in one corner of our lawn.

In the midst of this I have a word for our preachers who want to be up and at ’em so their congregations will know that they are aware of the relevance of the Gospel. All they do to me is preach to my anxieties. Maybe we could use an official word on the “Balm in Gilead.” Maybe they could tell me, in the midst of all my worries, the one thing needful.

EUTYCHUS II

Four-Letter Words

In his article “The Church Faces the Problem of Pornography” (Sept. 24 issue), Hillyer H. Straton … reminds us that “four-letter words” are objectionable, not because they always refer to what is indecent or unmentionable, but because no gentleman uses them in public. The four-letter word is not more obscene than the phrase “sexual intercourse.” Either is obscene if in its context it lures the reader of a story or the viewer of a picture into a sinful act. There are many unrefined folk who interlard their conversation with these words, with no evil intent or interest in their meaning, just as many of Shakespeare’s lower-caste characters call whatever they dislike “whoreson”.…

WILBUR L. CASWELL

Patterson, Calif.

Dr. Straton has done an admirable job of analysis, and he goes on to offer a prescription for the sick patient.…

I believe every pastor can do something about this threat by personally approaching the owners of drugstores and other public places that have newsstands in his immediate community, urging them to discontinue objectionable magazines, cheap novels, and so on.… One thing I point out: You have to keep going back and back. The owners will quickly tell you that while they are busy here and there, the agents for this filthy trash will come in and consign their dirty and profitable wares.

LOUIE D. NEWTON

Druid Hills Baptist

Atlanta, Ga.

His contention that the Church should merely maintain support for the past, and claim identification with the opinions of other disciplines, is incredibly puerile.…

K. L. PEARSON

Tucson, Ariz.

Water, Tears, And The New Birth

Re “The New Birth” by Billy Graham (Sept. 10 issue): This is a well-written, impassioned appeal to the inner consciences of many people who are greatly confused over their spiritual well-being.…

Jesus explained to Nicodemus that he must be born of the water and of the Spirit in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (the Church) (John 3:3–5).…

The physical birth is achieved after continuance through the various stages with which all of us are familiar. The undebatable harmony of the Scriptures relative to the new birth proves that it is also accomplished in progressive stages: hearing, faith (Rom. 10:17); repentance (Luke 13:3); confession (Rom. 10:9, 10; Acts 8:37) being the essential stages prior to the last stage or actual birth—baptism (Mark 16:16; Acts 2:38).…

BERRY W. WYMAN

Vista, Calif.

He docs his usual exceptionally fine job except for one thing …: When he mentions how to receive Christ he leaves out baptism, which is the scriptural symbol of the new birth.…

GEORGE WASSON

South Walnut Street Christian Church Bloomington, Ind.

It is a most valuable essay and sums up with admirable clarity those great fundamental truths connected with our salvation which are so deeply cherished by all evangelicals.…

On page 15 Dr. Graham sets out the wording of the prayer which he has used so often in his counseling work. The prayer begins, “O God, I acknowledge that I have sinned against Thee. I am sorry for my sins.…”

I must admit that there is no scriptural justification for suggesting that sorrow for sin is an essential precondition of salvation. It is obviously desirable, but it is not essential.…

Repentance is certainly a condition of salvation; but repentance is an act of the will which enables the sinner to turn back to God and to receive by faith the unconditional gift of salvation by grace. Penitence, on the other hand, is a Christian virtue inculcated by the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer as part of the process of sanctification.…

Jesus said. “Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out.” He has never yet rejected any man on the grounds that he is too bad a sinner, or that he is not sorry enough, or even that his theology is unsound. The only condition is that he should come.

I would therefore venture to suggest that Dr. Graham’s prayer could with advantage be altered to read, “O God, I acknowledge that I have sinned against Thee, and I am willing to turn from my sins.…” That is all that is necessary. Our blessed Lord has promised to do all the rest, and he will do it.

PETER W. WILSON

Reigate, Surrey, England

It was a wonderful testimony in itself to find the essay “The New Birth” … right next to the editorial “What Is the Church For?” …

One gave the answer to the other.…

MRS. CHARLES ERIKSON

Red Bank, N. J.

We are a small church working in a small university town, and this essay seems good to be put in the hands of our college students.

If it is available, will you please forward me 100 copies?

KENNETH E. WISE

Grace Baptist Church

Moscow, Idaho

I must tell you how greatly I enjoyed and appreciate the plan of these quarterly bonus inserts in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. The one by Billy Graham was particularly helpful. I think there is no living man that is doing quite the work that he is doing in presenting the saving fundamentals for the masses.…

I would like a dozen copies to send to different individuals.…

L. E. FROOM

Washington, D. C.

• Regrettably, no reprints of “The New Birth” are available. The material was excerpted from Evangelist Billy Graham’s new book, World Aflame.—ED.

College Critique

In the next to the last paragraph in the first column (News, p. 45, Sept. 24 issue) there is stated a relationship between Upland and Messiah Colleges and the Church of the Brethren. No formal relationship has ever existed between these two colleges and the Church of the Brethren.…

CLARENCE H. ROSENBERGER

Dir. of Church Relations

Juniata College

Huntingdon, Pa.

• Our mistake. Messiah and the late Upland should have been identified with the Brethren in Christ.—ED.

The greatest error is the omission of Texas Christian University from the list of church-related colleges.…

MONTE L. GRAVENSTEIN

First Christian Church

Fredonia, Kan.

• TCU is indeed one of the biggest. Our sourcebook credits it with 6,201 full-time students.—ED.

More Than The Weather

Re the letter of Melvin Roy (Sept. 10 issue): This rather sharp criticism lacks cogency. Quite evidently the broad context in Galatians demonstrates Paul’s independence from merely human authorization. Yet at the same time we cannot evade the apparent force of the verb “to visit” (ἱστορῆσαι) in 1:18. Peter and Paul did not spend that fifteen days talking about the weather. The verb itself most probably suggests a consultation designed to improve Paul’s acquaintance with the life and ministry of the historical Jesus whom Peter knew firsthand. W. D. Davies, in The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge University Press, 1964, pp., 453–55), cites convincing parallels in both Rabbinic texts and Greek papyri to support this exegesis. Galatians 1:18 is only one of a series of witnesses in the New Testament to the historical continuity existing between the kerygma of Jesus before the Resurrection and the message of Paul after it. No doubt the brevity of my argument in Proposition Four led to Mr. Roy’s query. My “theology” is an exegetical one, as Paul’s is a historical one.

CLARK H. PINNOCK

Asst. Prof, of New Testament

New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary

New Orleans, La

Whump-poing! As phony as the charge of the Ajax white knight, but with an aim just as sure, the onslaught of the new television season slams America in the pit of the stomach. Men of science (see them marching in white coats) have given TV power … power … power to blast you out of the kitchen and drop you in a programmed channel.

There you will sit for hours, avoiding twenty million other Americans by watching the same programs. Saturation is about complete. More than 90 per cent of American households have television sets, and the average set runs for five or six hours every day. Never were so many joined in one cult at one time; never did the common act of so many mean so little. Americans do not really work together, live together, or pray together; they only escape together.

The tube is still one-way. TV scans live audiences in the thousands at its sports spectaculars, but it cannot zoom in on the loners and Adams families in the millions who sit and watch at home. But the viewers are never forgotten. Audience-measurement experts count the hands that twist the dials. From the samplings of National Arbitron (or Trendex or Nielsen ratings) they will tell the sponsors how many people are learning that hexomonia is stronger than dirt. They do it with formulas—sure to impress the makers of hexomonia. Artists may avoid formulas, but industrialists love them; commercial television is an industry. Critical praise won’t save a single show doomed by this month’s Nielsen rating.

It takes a formula to beat a formula. To determine what millions will watch, find out what they are watching and give them more. The medium is still too costly for gambling on fresh approaches: will Jesse James stake everything on the cards to top the gambler in the back room? You bet your boots he will, and so will “Paul Bryan” running for his life on another channel the same night. The producer won’t gamble with a hero who won’t gamble!

The only thing safer than applying the formula is copying the way another show with a high rating has already applied the formula. No one is supposed to miss the family resemblance between the Cartwrights of Bonanza (NBC) and the Barkleys of The Big Valley (ABC). The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC) began as a copy of movie spy James Bond and has ushered into the Bondage a new version of Amos Burke—Secret Agent (ABC); a female counterpart, Honey West (ABC); and an integrated spy team in I Spy (NBC). The Wild, Wild West (CBS) puts the secret agent to work for Ulysses S. Grant, but with a railroad carload of preatomic gimmicks. Since the original Bond series was a slap-happy caricature of the sexy spy story and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. spoofs Bond, the next step was predictable. Get Smart! (NBC) spoofs the spy-spoofs and at last the TV audience is laughing. Smart, of course, is the spy. His shoe-telephone rings in a symphony concert; he stumbles out to a closet to answer it, locks himself in, shoots out the lock to escape, and emerges at last from the unequal struggle with Mr. Big, the midget-sized villain, to utter a memorable closing line. As the crook blows himself and his ship to pieces with a charge of Inthermo aimed at the Statue of Liberty, Smart sighs, “If only he could have turned his evil genius into … niceness!”

A few doses of such parody could be amusing; McHale’s Navy has managed to stay funny for almost half the time it has been on the air. Yet the spectacle of TV running in circles after its tail grows tedious, even when the dizzy hound is in color.

The new shows offer little hope of a change in pace or formula. “Turn on the ACTION,” as the ads demand, and you have tuned in on Formula One: E = SV2 (Escape equals sex times the square of violence). The action shows may be spiced with sex, but violence carries the wallop. The scene is indifferent: war, the West, espionage, the underworld—any battleground will do, except, of course, one that would involve the viewers too directly: Viet Nam and race riots must be avoided.

Why all the violence? Is the mass audience masochistic? Do coddled Americans want to be punched in the stomach or nailed in a barrel?

The answer seems to be simpler. It’s almost impossible to stop watching a fight, particularly if you are identified with one of the combatants. I know. I had expected a headache when I accepted a week of watching for this article. What I got was a stomach-ache as I took classic clobberings with Robert Horton of Shenandoah, Lee Majors of The Big Valley, Ivan Dixon of I Spy, and half the cast of Laredo. The worst was the vicious cruelty suggested in a beating administered to Roy Thinnes of The Long. Hot Summer by the old residents of Frenchmen’s Bend, allegedly in Faulkner country.

But while you are being kicked in the stomach you can’t stop looking. You will therefore stay in the channel and hear about the underarm deodorant that pays for this illusion of mayhem.

And next week? The millions come back for more, because life seems to gain in meaning when you watch a man fight for it.

Of course not all the action shows use the formula the same way. Combat, a veteran series, avoids gimmicks and works for human drama. Somewhere near the opposite end of the scale is Amos Burke, where violence is flippant and meaningless and sex is thrown into the limit of the NAB code and the ABC network censorship. Laredo, one of the new shows, has a built-in bantering tone; two of the principals kid their hapless hero-comrade and the script. But the banter was curdled in sudden, incongruous slaughter at the end of the first show when the bogus Indian “Lazyfoot” was hit with a knife in the back. The bored scriptwriter seemed to have forgotten that the formula still uses human life—and death.

Enough violence? Then turn on the FUN. Formula Two states that entertainment equals stars (E = S). Stars may be stacked in ranks, as in variety shows, or given individual settings as in Jackie Gleason’s wry pantomimes.

Variety shows like Hullabaloo present a surrealistic version of old vaudeville. Stars in outlandish costumes writhe with the mike: “Ah gah choo, babe!” Sudden seizures of expression crack the face mask above the rocking pelvis. Again, a strange detachment. Is this a satire? Are the performers mocking the act?

The viewer who wants reassurance will flip to a different sort of fun—the situation comedy. Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, based on Jean Kerr’s book, brings some fresh ideas and an English sheep dog to the domestic comedy pattern. Gidgel is the normal teen-ager implausibly billed as a “surf bunny,” but the second program had the interesting thesis that lascivious dances are innocent for the high school crowd but spell trouble for grown-ups. Mona McClushey is a slight vehicle for the talents of Juliet Prowse. She plays a movie actress married to an Air Force sergeant who wants to be the head of his house.

My Mother, the Car is a formula derived from crossing Bewitched with Mr. Ed, the talking horse. Mother is reincarnated as a 1928 Porter. The show is as silly as the idea. It is not, however, the silliest new series. That award goes to Lost in Space. This program loads a rocket ship with a fantastic payload: the space family Robinson, an evil scientist, a robot, and all the blinking lights and whirring noises in the studio. The rocket goes into “hyperdrive” and escapes the galaxy. Very good. TV follows it. Very bad.

Such is the “New Year” of TV: blossoming with color, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It includes technical triumphs, skilled performances, talented people, but it does not look at life—it looks away. The “Big” new programs do not answer the big questions; they scarcely dare ask them. The old morality play of the good guys and the bad guys is still a formula for Westerns, but it is losing to the Loner with blood on his hands, the Fugitive fleeing unjust retribution, and Shenandoah, man of lost identity, seeking what he fears to find.

The religious figure appears only as the fanatic seeking vengeance of Jesse James, or the confused preacher whose pacifism is a hazard on the frontier. The most meaningful questions of the new season, overplayed though they are, may be found in Run for Your Life. A man whose months are numbered sees life differently. The threat of death is “a hand erasing all life’s equations and writing new ones.”

To the Christian Church the greatest threat of television is not its incitement to violence or lust but its banality. Christians are watching when they ought to be praying. A recent study of TV audience attitudes showed that most people feel guilty about the time they waste. The editor asks. “Why these Calvinistic hesitations about televiewing, in contrast with the self-satisfaction associated with reading?”¹Gary A. Steiner, The People Look at Television (New York: Knopf, 1963, p. 59).

Tell him, somebody.

Now for our concluding commercial: Don’t miss A Charlie Brown Christmas, Thursday, December 9. 7:30–8:00 P.M. EST, on CBS.

The hour has struck for our “conversion,” for personal transformation, for interior renewal. We must get used to thinking of man in a new way; and in a new way also of men’s life in common; with a new manner, too, of conceiving the paths of history and the destiny of the world, according to the words of Saint Paul: “You must be clothed in the new self, which is created in God’s image, justified and sanctified through the truth” (Ephesians IV, 23).

The hour has struck for a halt, a moment of recollection, of reflection, almost of prayer; a moment to think anew of our common origin, our history, our common destiny.

Today as never before, in our era so marked by human progress, there is need for an appeal to the moral conscience of man. For the danger comes not from progress nor from science; indeed, if properly utilized, these could rather resolve many of the grave problems which assail mankind.

In a word, then, the edifices of modern civilization must be built upon spiritual principles which alone can not only support it but even illuminate and animate it.

We believe, as you know, that these indispensable principles of superior wisdom must be founded upon faith in God.… To us, in any case, and to all those who accept the ineffable revelation which Christ has given us of Him, He is the living God, the Father of all men.

The Pope who uttered this eloquent appeal for transcendent justice and moral renewal at the United Nations General Assembly had spanned a greater distance than that of his one-day flight from Rome. As all are aware who have stepped from a medieval city to a modern metropolis, he has markedly moved away from predecessors who once made all European states west of Russia feel the sway of papal power. If the conception of the world as a single empire-church remains Rome’s fundamental policy, Paul VI had no spectacular show of world power to exhibit at the U. N. “You have before you,” he asserted, “a humble man … and among you all, representatives of sovereign states, the least invested if you wish to think of him thus, with a minuscule … temporal sovereignty.”

Gone are the days when Henry IV was forced to beg for mercy from the pope while shivering in the cold with bare head and feet. Gone also are the days when King John of England was deposed by the pope and received his kingdom again only after signing a document “freely” offering and granting “to God and the holy Apostles Peter and Paul and the holy Roman Church, our mother, and to our Lord the Pope Innocent and his Catholic successors, the whole realm of England and the whole realm of Ireland … for the remission of our sins.” In a time of Communist-vs.-free world tension, resurgence of non-Christian religions, exploding world population, and pervasive secularism, when Christians of all affiliations have increasingly recognized themselves as a minority, Paul VI wisely cast himself in the role of persuader rather than compeller.

President Johnson conferred with the Pope in New York. In a precedent that may prove controversial, the platform of the United Nations was turned over to a world religious figure; Pope Paul was welcomed by Assembly President Amintore Fanfani of Italy, who kissed the Pope’s ring in an act of public obeisance. Television and radio networks allotted preferential time and treatment, and the day’s activities were carried on a public service basis from the moment of the Pope’s arrival through the Yankee Stadium mass.

The papal plea for peace in a world on the brink of atomic war, for international understanding in a time of global rivalry, and for a new era of world brotherhood included little that had not been heard before. But much that Paul said needed to be said again, emphatically, and with all possible urgency. And it will stand repetition by many others until words have become deeds and hope has become reality.

Every civilized human heart could applaud the plea for universal peace. Only the barbarous want war. But no biblically literate Protestant could give more than lip service to John F. Kennedy’s aphorism quoted by the Pope, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” This is still God’s world. God is still its true Sovereign, and Scripture does not sanction the notion that he may permit all mankind to be wiped out in an atomic holocaust.

The Pope’s advocacy of the laying down of arms leads to a problem. While he rightly said that “as long as man remains that weak, changeable, and even wicked being that he often shows himself to be, defensive arms will, unfortunately, be necessary,” neither he nor any of us knows of a time when men have been other than weak, changeable, and wicked, nor do we anticipate a time when all men will be righteous. Therefore, the problem persists of how a peaceful world is to be maintained by wicked men. To be sure, in his closing moments Pope Paul called for a world built upon spiritual principles. But the record of the United Nations is such that its principles are repeatedly accommodated until it has become more a showplace of strength than a temple of justice. Thus one must look with skepticism on the statement, “Is there anyone who does not see the necessity of coming thus progressively to the establishment of a world authority, able to act efficaciously on the juridical and political level?” In response to the Pope’s proposal favoring a world political authority, a multitude of thoughtful people still say No. For such an authority may betoken the closing days of this age even more than the wickedness and injustice of the present hour.

When the Pope spoke of his own humility and of his minute temporal sovereignty, a great number of non-Catholics could not but have questions. Many still think that if one were pope, his first spiritual duty would be to cease being pope, if that office implies being Christ’s vicegerent and spokesman for the whole Church. The Pope also preserved the fable of political sovereignty so boldly expounded by some of his predecessors. Yet Jesus himself, whose vicar Paul VI asserts he is, made no claim to any political sovereignty but said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The claim of the Roman pontiff to unique political and spiritual sovereignty is not reconcilable with the New Testament.

The Pope’s plea for the repudiation of war through disarmament also needs to be read in the context of the New Testament and especially of the words of Christ, who is the Prince of Peace. Whether or not we are living in what Scripture calls “the last days,” this is, as even leading scientists have observed, an apocalyptic age. Granting the sincerity and good will of the supreme pontiff of the Roman church, parts of his message sound strange when read in the light of Christ’s description of the end of the age in his eschatological discourse recorded in Matthew 24 and Mark 13. All Christians should agree about the need for personal transformation and renewal. But underlying the Pope’s plea for peace through disarmament there seems to be the concept that final and enduring peace will come through human agencies, such as the United Nations, which in its aspect of brotherly cooperation he called “the world’s greatest hope.”

Scripture speaks differently. It holds forth as the world’s greatest hope Jesus Christ, who is sovereign over all churches, all nations, and all men; who said he would return not to a world where men have made peace but to a world in tribulation; and who promised through his own reappearing the realization of that most often repeated prayer, “Thy kingdom come.” To say this is not to urge the least slackening of human effort toward what the Book of Common Prayer calls “peace in our time.” But it is to place humanity with its sin and failure at the feet of the only true hope of the world, Christ the coming King.

We Americans with our traditional hospitality have welcomed Pope Paul with his urgent words in behalf of peace. Would that all those who have accorded him such deep respect might echo in their hearts the welcoming prayer that closes the Bible, “Even so, come Lord Jesus.”

The Hayneville Verdict

To accept as just the acquittal of Thomas L. Coleman in his trial for manslaughter at Hayneville, Alabama, requires a gigantic suspension of disbelief that few Americans can muster. In principle United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was right in pointing out that such a verdict is the price to be paid for the jury system. Yet to make no other comment is too facile a dismissal of an agonizing situation. This latest addition to the depressing list of civil rights slayings for which no judicial penalty has been paid entails a terrible hazard. It may seem futile to voice a protest at the inadequacy of the charge against the killer of Jonathan Daniels and his acquittal after a trial in which testimony characterized by the Assistant Attorney General of Alabama as “perjured” was accepted by the jurors. But such things must be protested, lest we become accustomed to condoning murder.

God’s law that declares “Thou shalt not kill” cannot be set aside in favor of any unwritten law of local mores. Perversion of justice is the ultimate lawlessness. This is what the verdict from the Hayneville courtroom is saying to us, and the national conscience has reason to be troubled.

The christian faith is based squarely on the revelation of divine truth God has given in the Holy Scriptures. Man frequently seeks to substitute his own opinions for this revelation, with disastrous results.

The proposed “Confession of 1967” of the United Presbyterian Church would shift the basis of faith from revelation to opinion. Because of the clarity of an analysis of this “confession” prepared by John S. and Margaret White Loomis, Presbyterians of Winnetka, Illinois. I have asked their permission to quote it in full.

Bible-believing Presbyterians should be concerned about the proposed “Confession of 1967.” This new confession seems to be based upon the premise that a restatement of doctrinal beliefs is necessary from time to time. But doctrines of the Christian faith, based upon the Bible, will not and cannot change. They are timeless truths, given to us by God, and God’s truth cannot change.

It is true that new views on the application of our faith may sometimes be needed to meet changing conditions in the world; but should not these views be set forth in a separate document and not embodied in a “confession of faith”?

This new confession undermines the authority and divine inspiration of the Bible. The Bible is placed on the back shelf, leaving us with nothing basic to rely on. The confession says, “The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate.” It is true that God did reveal himself in Christ; but we know this only because the Bible says so! God reveals himself to us through his written Word, our Holy Bible, which we as Christians accept as the infallible (in the original manuscripts) and inspired Wind of God, not just “a normative witness.” The Bible is always referred to as the Word. “When ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God …” (1 Thess. 2:13).

All we can really know about our Lord Jesus, about God the Father, and about God the Holy Spirit comes to us from the Bible, his written revelation to us and our only authority on all things spiritual and eternal. Inspiration may come to Christians through the indwelling Holy Spirit, but the revelation of heavenly truth comes to us only through the written Word of God.

About the Bible this new confession says: “The words of the Scriptures are the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written.” But where in this statement can we find any hint that these writers were writing under the inspiration of God through the Holy Spirit? We believe that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Tim. 3:16a).

The Presbyterian Church in the past has taken a strong stand for the doctrine of inspiration, and a failure now in the new confession to proclaim that the Bible is the inspired Word of God constitutes a denial of this inspiration. To us, the inspiration of God is the very heart and soul of the Bible and the basis of our Christian faith. Without it we have nothing. This proposed confession pointedly omits certain other basic Christian doctrines, also.

This vital truth about the inspiration of the Scriptures should be emphasized and proclaimed by our church. The human writers of the Bible proclaim its divine authorship; why can’t we?

Throughout the new confession there is a tinge of universalism that is in direct contradiction of the Bible. The theology of reconciliation is emphasized in a vague and misleading manner that at times implies that all men are or will be reconciled and saved. But our Lord said that “few there be that find it” (Matt. 7:14).

All Christians should know that our Lord Jesus, by his act of reconciliation on the Cross, removed the barrier of sin between God and man. By this act alone no one was saved, but the way was opened for all men to receive God’s gift of salvation and eternal life by repenting and believing in Jesus Christ and by receiving him as Saviour and Lord. This message of salvation is not properly proclaimed in the new confession.

The new creed implies that the substitutionary atonement on the Cross is an “image of a truth which remains beyond the reach of all theory in the depths of God’s love for man.” The Cross is hard to understand, but Christians believe it through faith. The Atonement is a great scriptural truth and not merely an image of a truth.

In this new confession too much emphasis is placed upon the social gospel, as if the principal duty of the Church is to improve the earthly welfare of men. As Christians we know that the job of the Church is to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:1–4) in order to try to win all men to him. Of course we must be concerned about human welfare, but we must keep a sense of proportion. In this welfare work we try to bring about a more abundant life for a person for the next ten to eighty years. But how about the next billion years?

The committee that drafted this new confession included in the proposed “Book of Confessions” the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds and others. They also included the Westminster Confession, because it is “demonstrative of the actual process of confessional utterance.” But the “Confession of 1967” nullifies certain basic truths proclaimed in the Westminster Confession. The committee admits that the proposed creed is in part “an intended revision of the Westminster doctrine on the Bible, which rested primarily on a view of inspiration and equated the Biblical canon directly with the Word of God.”

In effect, this new watered-down and confusing confession has erected a large umbrella under which modernists, liberals, neo-orthodox, and Bible-believers may all stand together. Apparently each may choose his doctrinal beliefs from the various creeds and write his own bible. It has been said that this new creed has “made legal” the unscriptural beliefs that have been held and taught by a large number of ministers and seminaries in the United Presbyterian Church. In the effort to formulate a creed that could in part satisfy all, it appears that truth has been diluted.

All concerned laymen and ministers of the United Presbyterian Church who do not approve of this new confession should make themselves heard. Fear of causing a division should not be considered. Certainly our Lord Jesus wants us to “hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering” (Heb. 10:23a). Remember what he said: “Suppose ye that I am come to bring peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division” (Luke 12:51).

If this confession is adopted without basic changes, Bible-believing Christians will be faced with a hard decision—whether to leave the denomination or to stay and “earnestly contend for the faith …” (Jude 3) from within. Our answer has to come from God. All must seek his will and pray for guidance. The Holy Spirit will lead us.

Yes, says the author; therefore we must get rid of the misconceptions that dominate the theological thought of our churches

To answer this serious question properly, we look first at a profound change that has occurred on the religious scene of the Western world during the past fifty years. About the turn of the century, European—and to a certain degree even American—Catholicism was deeply stirred by a book that had appeared in 1897 and had gone through seven editions in two years’ time, Catholicism as the Principle of Progress. Written by Hermann Schell, professor of apologetics at Würzburg and author of a famous dogmatics, it gave expression to the grave concern of all educated Catholics who realized that their church had lost the leadership in all fields of human culture. Catholicism meant to modern man backwardness, cultural inferiority, while Protestantism, the predominant religion of the leading world powers, seemed to have gained the undisputed leadership not only in politics and economics but also in literature and philosophy, in historical research, and in the natural sciences and technology.

The modernist controversy which was raging through the Catholic world under Pius X seemed to confirm this verdict. A deep feeling of frustration took hold of the young Catholic academics of all faculties. University professors had to be relieved of the anti-modernist oath that was otherwise demanded from all teachers of theology. Schell himself, who was aware of the great possibilities of Catholicism in the modern world, was suspected of modernism and had to revoke some of his propositions. This he did as a faithful son of the church, but he died of a broken heart. The turn of the tide began in 1914. With the death of Pius X and the accession of Benedict XV, the modernist controversy abated, and the First World War not only changed the political scene in the entire world but also shook modern civilization to its very foundations. A great devaluation of the standards of the nineteenth century took place.

It is against this background that one must see the rise of Catholicism in the last half century—its growing influence on modern man, especially on highly educated people, and the corresponding change in the evaluation of Protestantism. In Denmark, the Catholic Bishop of Copenhagen complains of the unhealthy disproportion in the membership of his small church, with its many converts from the academic professions. Sweden was the land of a “Luther Renaissance” after the First World War. But this theological movement had no influence on the comparatively small section of the nation that had any interest in religion. Even the theologians who are looking for a “normative theology,” now that the time of a mere historical theology seems to have come to an end, seek it, not in the great Lutheran tradition of the past, but either in a somewhat nebulous ecumenical doctrine of the future or in Catholicism. Catholics can teach in the theological faculty of Upsala. The shocking breakdown of the old doctrinal standards, of church order (e.g., in the ordination of women, which is contrary to the law of the Lutheran Church as based on Scripture and the confessions), and even of the moral standards of the Ten Commandments (this church discusses seriously whether premarital intercourse must, in view of the facts of present Swedish life, be regarded as sin under all circumstances) has led the Church of Sweden to the brink of an outward catastrophe that for the time being is prevented only by the Establishment. And this may go overnight if the growing agnostic or even atheistic “humanism” wishes so.

In Germany, where this humanism is organizing itself as “the Third Church” (besides Catholicism and Protestantism), the situation is similar. The Lutheran ministry is undermined by the theology of Bultmann and his disciples, the moderates among them being the most dangerous because their nihilism is hidden behind some orthodox phrases and pietistic sentiments. It happens again and again that candidates who have passed their examination declare that they will not seek ordination. As one of these honest men declared to his bishop (this happened in the church from which Bultmann comes), “I could perhaps preach on an ordinary Sunday. But how could I preach at Christmas or Easter? I cannot preach on myths.” He is right. The gaps are filled with girls who crowd the theological lecture halls. Some of the bishops, pious and conscientious Lutherans, refuse to ordain them. But most of them have no objections, especially since the new hermeneutics (is not that the art of making the Bible say what we want to hear?) and the “evangelical” understanding of the New Testament (which makes obedience to Christ’s commandments “legalism”) support them, to say nothing of the great authority of Karl Barth, also on their side.

Thus the Church of the Reformation perishes in the old Lutheran countries. Ranke, the great historian of the Reformation, once said: “The German nation has had one great love, and this was Luther.” It has been stated that today no one loves Luther any more. We could perhaps add: with the possible exception of some Catholics who have just discovered him. But who loves Luther in Germany, in the Scandinavian countries, and in the Lutheran churches of America, where they do not even understand him?

Will we forfeit the heritage of the Reformation? We Lutherans are rapidly doing so. We must leave it to the theologians of the other confessional groups that arose out of the Reformation, and that means first of all to the Presbyterians and Reformed and to the Anglicans, to answer the question for themselves.

What can we do about it? This question can be answered only if we are clear about the cause of this loss. This we shall understand if we realize what has been lost. It is the doctrinal substance, the confession, the dogma that belongs to the very nature of the Christian faith. Each of the churches that grew out of the historic events which we call the “Reformation” had its own confession. These confessions were not only divisive: they certainly contradicted each other in many and very important points, even to the extent of exclusiveness. One cannot confess simultaneously the Augsburg Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, the Helvetica, Gallicana, Scotica, and Belgica confessions on the one hand and the Formula of Concord on the other, or the Anglican Articles of Religion along with the dogmatic decrees of Trent (as John Henry Newman had to learn in his futile attempt to reconcile them in Tract 90). For Rome also had to undergo a Reformation, though a very different one, in the encounter with the “Protestant” Reformation, In many respects Rome was in 1563 a different church from what she had been in 1517, one of the confessional churches that had replaced the one medieval church of the West. And yet, what a surprising amount of agreement did exist among these confessions.

In the Smalcald Articles, written in 1537 in view of the council that had been summoned for the following year, Luther gives his program for what today is called the ecumenical dialogue with Rome. He divides the articles of faith into three parts. First, the “sublime articles of the divine majesty,” the trinitarian and the Christological dogma. “These articles are in no contention or dispute. Therefore we have not to discuss them at present.” Second, the main article of the Christian faith which teaches that Jesus Christ alone is our salvation and that we are justified by faith in him alone, together with the consequences of this doctrine, the rejection of the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass, the invocation of saints, and the claims of the papacy. No compromise is possible on these articles. The third part contains the articles on which a discussion is possible and necessary with “learned and sensible men” from the Roman church “or even among ourselves.” Here all the great doctrines of the Reformation are mentioned: sin and repentance, Law and Gospel, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the office of the keys, confession, and even the doctrine of justification. The seeming contradiction between Luther’s preparedness to enter into a serious doctrinal discussion with Roman Catholic theologians and his uncompromising “No” to the papacy is nothing else but the Sic et Non of the Reformation: the Yes to everything that is in accordance with the Word of Cod, wherever it is found, even in the papal church, and the uncompromising No to everything that is contrary to God’s Word, even in our own denomination.

If we men of an age that has lost the deep sense of religious truth look back at the confessional era of Europe from Augsburg 1530 to Westminster 1647, we are inclined to see only the disagreements and splits. No one should ever try to minimize the shame of these divisions, the sins from which many of them arose, and the human tragedies that followed them, though we should not indulge in the dreams of a golden age of an undivided Christendom (before 1517, or 1054, or 451, or 325, or before the last of the apostles died). But we must not overlook the strange unity that underlies all these contradictory confessions and binds together the confessors. It is not only what sociologists call “the solidarity of the loyal” (as, for example, the solidarity among Catholic priests, Lutheran pastors, Communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hitler’s concentration camps) that united the martyrs of various faiths in England and on the Continent. These men went to the stake to die for the Reformation or for the pope because they wanted to be loyal to Christ. They died with the same psalms on their lips. Their aim was, as the preface to the Augsburg Confession says of either side in “the dissension concerning our holy faith”: “to have all of us embrace and adhere to a single, true religion and live together in unity and in one fellowship and church, even as we are all enlisted under one Christ.” This was the great common possession of all Christendom in the age of the Reformation, the basis of all its confessions: the firm belief in the Triune God, as it is expressed in the ancient creeds, the Nicene Creed of the Church Universal, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Symbolum Quicunque for the Western Church. They all believed “in one Lord Jesus Christ,” as the Nicene Creed confesses him, “begotten of the Father before all ages, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.” They all believed that the words, “who for us men and for our salvation descended from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man, crucified also for us …” meant that this Jesus is our only hope of salvation. Even the Council of Trent speaks the anathema against any one who “asserts that the sin of Adam … which is in every man as his own sin can be removed either by man’s natural powers or by any other remedy than the merit of the one mediator our Lord Jesus Chris.…”

When this great common heritage of all Christians was lost, the heritage of the Reformation was also forfeited. We cannot relate here the tragic history of the dissolution of Christian dogma which began in England. When the last great confession of the Reformed churches was written at Westminster, the feet of those who would bury the heritage of the Reformation together with the common Christian faith were at the door. The great religious revolution began in the form of a highly spiritual piety. It was the revival of that “enthusiasm” in which Luther and Calvin had recognized the great enemy of the biblical faith of the Reformation. It is deeply related to the mysticism of earlier times, which, incidentally, was at the same time revived in the Roman church. According to the Reformation, my salvation rests entirely on what God has done for me in the history of salvation, in the incarnation of his Son, and in the atoning death of Christ and his glorious resurrection and ascension. Of this I can know only from Scripture and from the scriptural preaching in the Church, from the objective outward Word. In the external means of grace, the Word and the sacraments, the Gospel comes to me, the great promise, “for you.” In these means of grace there comes to me the Holy Spirit, who, “where and when it pleases God,” works faith, the saving trust in that promise. The revolutionary change consists in this, that the decisive encounter between God and man takes place no longer in the events of a sacred history about which I read in old books but in the immediate experience of my soul today. What matters is not that Christ was born in Bethlehem (so this may be regarded as a legend) but that he is born in me today (of this I am sure, for I trust my pious feelings).

The early Pietists regarded this change of emphasis from the objective facts of history, which they did not deny, to subjective experience as a mere clarification of the Christian faith. But the history of the Quakers, whose influence on the Continent cannot be overestimated, shows what is really involved in this shift from object to subject: the devaluation of Holy Scripture, which is now no longer the firm rock it was for the Reformers; the abolition of the sacraments of Christ as means of grace; the destruction of the confessional church and its replacement with what henceforth is called “undogmatic Christianity”; the beginning apotheosis of man, first the pious, the religious man, then the enlightened man whose reason becomes the supreme judge of everything and everybody, including God.

No one, of course, had wanted such a development. Such a religious revolution may begin with almost imperceptible changes in thought and terminology. If the theologians try to correct this, they are accused of hairsplitting. However, there are crucial situations in the history of the Church where theology must do some hairsplitting, fight for an “iota,” as the world calls it, namely, when only a hairbreadth separates the saving truth from pernicious error. In such cases, the Church needs theologians who with prophetic clairvoyance, or better, in virtue of the charisma of discerning the spirits, see where the narrow path lies between truth and error. Such a man was St. John, the Apostle, at the end of the first century, when the border between Church and pious Christian Gnosticism had become blurred. Such a man was Athanasius, in the middle of the fourth century, when, as the consequence of the constant interference of the emperors, even the greatest saints were not clear about the border between orthodoxy and the moderate forms of Arianism. Such a man was Luther, in the sixteenth century, in his fight against Rome and the enthusiasts for the sola fide, when he predicted what it would mean to the Church if people no longer understood the “crucified for us” of the creed in its full biblical sense. From the ranks of such men, he said, “will now come (and many of them are already at hand) those who will not believe that Christ has arisen from the dead, or that he sits at the right hand of God, and whatever else follows concerning Christ in the creed. These will knock the bottom out of the barrel and put an end to the game. For therewith the whole Christ will perish.…”

“Undogmatic Christianity” has replaced the Christian faith of the Reformation. This was the fate of Protestantism. The long line of its prophets and witnesses stretches from Fox and Penn to Francke and Zinzenclorf, Kant and Goethe, Schleiermacher, Ritschl and Harnack, Troeltsch and Tillich, Rauschenbusch, Fosdick, and the Niebuhrs. For three centuries Protestantism has followed this way that leads, and perhaps has led already, to the end of the Protestant churches. This is what Rome has seen for some generations. The Roman church is today reaping the harvest that Protestant theology has prepared for it.

For there is not such a thing as “undogmatic Christianity” because Christianity is essentially a dogmatic religion, perhaps better, the dogmatic religion. None of the great religions of India or of the ancient world has known anything like a dogmatics. Not even the “testimony” of the Mohammedans or the “Hear, Israel” of Judaism (Deut. 6:4; cf. 1 Cor. 8:6) is “dogma” in the sense of the Christian Church. We cannot enter into the question of the nature of the Christian dogma. Suffice it to say that it is the binding doctrinal content of that confession which Jesus demands from all men—from his disciples when he asks them, “Whom say ye that I am,” and from his adversaries when he asks them, “What do you think of Christ? Whose Son is he?”

We shall have a long way to go if we who claim the heritage of the Reformation are to get rid of all misconceptions that have grown up in three centuries and still dominate the theological thought of our churches. We shall have to rethink the doctrines that have been the common heritage of all Christians since the age of the Reformation. We shall have to study again the great creeds of the ancient Church, which are a product, not, as Harnack believed eighty years ago, of Greek philosophy in the Church, but of deep biblical studies. Through every clause of the Nicene Creed one can still hear the passage from the Bible on which it is based. We have to learn that der Sitz im Leben of the creed is the liturgy, as shown by the Te Deum, which is one of the greatest confessions in the twofold sense of confessio as praise of God and confession of the faith, dogma in the form of praise and prayer. And we have to learn that, according to the Old and New Testaments, the liturgy of the people of God on earth is inseparably connected with the eternal liturgy in heaven (Isa. 6: Rev. 4). If in this respect we have to learn from insights regained by the Catholic churches in East and West during the last two generations, they have to learn, and are beginning to learn from the Reformation, what the Bible means as source and standard of the prayer and the doctrine of the Church. To take one example, Lex orandi lex credendi (the rule of prayer is the rule of faith) is valid only if it is also inverted: Lex credendi lex orandi. Nothing is correct in the liturgy, the worship of the Church, that is not doctrinally correct.

These pages are written on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the old feast of the koimesis, the falling asleep, the death of Mary. In 1950, Pius XII declared it to be “a revealed dogma that … Mary … when she had finished the course of her earthly life was taken up, body and soul, into the glory of heaven.” Where has this dogma been revealed? Not in Scripture. It was unknown for many centuries. Hence even a proof from tradition cannot be given. What, then, is the source of the “infallible oracle,” as the breviary calls the papal definition that puts the Assumption of Mary dogmatically on the same level as the Ascension of our Lord? Not God but man is its source. “Enthusiasm,” piety that does not stick to the Word, “clings to Adam and his descendants … and is the source, strength and power of all heresies, including those of the papacy and of Mohammed,” says Luther in the Smalcald Articles (III, 8).

In the sixteenth century the Church of the Reformation stood lonely in a hostile world and gave, over against all forms of enthusiastic religion, its witness to the truth, the power, and the sufficiency of the written Word of God. Will we retain this heritage? Will we be able to give the same witness over against the new and much more powerful manifestations of the same old foe that have entered and almost destroyed our own churches? This depends largely on whether we still know the deepest nature of the Reformation. It began, as did every great new epoch in the history of the Church, and as did the Church itself, with the mighty call to repentance: “Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in saying, ‘Repent ye, etc.,’ meant the whole life of the faithful to be repentance.”