POVERTY, CHASTITY, AND OBEDIENCE

If you drive north in western Iowa, the likelihood is that you will pass Sioux City, and the stockyards, and what must surely be the largest dunghill in the world (Ps. 113:7, KJV). This I did, and then headed east to a small town to make a commencement address. When I stopped at a service station to get my bearings, I asked the location of the high school. The boy said, “Catholic or public?” Thus spoken we have the only two divisions in the public thinking of American religion. During the last war a man could specify for his dog tag Catholic, Jewish, or Protestant; if he was nothing, he was given a Protestant dog tag because he was neither Catholic nor Jewish.

At the restaurant later I found out that the boy waiting on me was going to be in the graduating class, and he assured me that in their town you went either to St. Mary’s or to the public school. “And what kind of a Christian are you?” I asked. “I’m a Lutheran, I guess,” he said. Iowa has some good Lutheran colleges, so I asked him what college he planned to attend. He told me, “Guess I’ll go to Iowa State,” so apparently he was more public than Lutheran. I should have liked to have had time to look into the plans of the boys of St. Mary’s to see how the church colleges of Rome are making out in the State of Iowa.

Things won’t be so bad after the ecumenical movement gets us all together. We won’t have to worry about St. Mary’s and public because maybe the public will become St. Mary’s.

There may be a few bumps on the road ahead, however. Most of our “Protestant” seminaries are pushing hard now for “the new morality.” Meanwhile Time magazine (May 21, 1965) gives us the startling news that there are 8,600 Jesuits active in the United States. Just how are the ecumenical-minded seminaries getting ready to unite their new morality graduates with 8,600 men who have taken the vows of chastity?

CONFESSION 1967

May I congratulate your anonymous editorial writer responsible for “Presbyterians Find a New Vocabulary” (June 18 issue). Doubtless it will raise the wrath of many Presbyterians.…

Stick with us, friends. Pray for us. For who knows but what God may see fit to bless even errant Presbyterians.

Central Park Presbyterian

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

What is there about a group of honest, concerned United Presbyterians seeking, among other things, to give contemporary expression to their faith that bugs you so?…

May we suggest that you relax a bit; listen more; understand better; and then take pen in hand to address reasonable men, even though to disagree with them.

Faith United Presbyterian Church

Medford, N. J.

With genuine pleasure I read that an Omaha minister had nerve enough to say (News, June 18 issue) he … would have to walk out of the present U. P. denomination if some of the ideas presented at the General Assembly at Columbus went through, which they did.…

Atlantic, Pa.

I was surprised and disappointed at your slanderous skirmish with the poor United Presbyterians.…

If your job ever becomes available, don’t call me and I wouldn’t call you because I would not want to be in your position.… Sand Lake Baptist

Averill Park, N. Y.

That the new confession proposed “confirms the widening impression that many churchmen no longer have an authoritative divine Word for men in all ages and places” is a statement one could not make if he really understood what the new confession is trying to say.…

Presbyterian Church

Alexandria, Neb.

It is gratifying to know that the United Presbyterians are moving out of the narrow confines of sectarianism in the direction of the Catholic fullness of worship in Word and sacrament.…

South Gate, Calif.

I have the distinct impression that you would have liked to carry Carl McIntire’s picket, saying, “I told you so in 1933”.…

Okmulgee, Okla.

TAKE YOUR PICK

The June 18 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY is exceptionally filled with a wide variety of interests of vital importance. I enjoyed reading every page of that issue.

The article by Dr. Lindsell on “Who Are the Evangelicals?” is a sparkling jewel of that issue. I like especially these two sentences: “If a man is an evangelical, he is theologically conservative. If he is theologically liberal, then he is not an evangelical.” First Covenant Church

Los Angeles, Calif.

One of the stupidest things that I have ever read in a Protestant publication is the [article] by Harold Lindsell in the June 18 issue.

“If he is theologically liberal, then he is not an evangelical.”

I do not think Mr. Lindsell stands to that degree in the wisdom of God to make any such statement.…

I imagine that it is rather difficult to get faggots in Washington. So we use CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Campbell, N.Y.

BY WAY OF SUGGESTION

In re “Great Evangelistic Events Through the Centuries” (June 18 issue): I seriously question the evangelical concern of a few groups or individuals mentioned by the compilers.…

Long Beach, Calif.

Even allowing for space limitations in your list … I am absolutely astounded to note that you did not include the tremendous ministry of Charles Haddon Spurgeon!

First Baptist

Pine Mountain, Ga.

• Somehow his name fell out of the list.—ED.

THE PULPIT

I must take this opportunity to express … my deepest gratitude and appreciation especially for your recent issues and particularly for the June 4 issue.

Hats off to David L. McKenna for his most insightful, stimulating article, “The Jet-Propelled Pulpit.” It’s about time someone reminds us that we are preaching to meet needs.…

Three cheers too for N. Gene Carlson’s challenge to “save us” by a return in the pulpits of our land to expository preaching. How in the world are we ever going to get this point across to so many preachers who have obviously long ago run dry? Isn’t it a pity that so many men preach their own message and then try to justify it by “proof-texting”?

Moody Bible Institute

Chicago, Ill.

Your plain and practical issue, concerning preaching and the preacher, was a refreshing breeze upon the academic deserts of our day. We must continually remember our “high calling.” We must go back to the Bible.…

North Syracuse Baptist

Church North Syracuse, N.Y.

While there is much in the editorial (“Crisis in the Pulpit,” June 4 issue) with which I can agree, I find that CHRISTIANITY TODAY does not stand where it suggests we stand—in the “world of human sin and need,” and “in the dusty commonplaces of life”.…

The world is full of sin and need; maybe the preacher is mindful of his own. Life is dusty; but “Crisis in the Pulpit” is like smiting the dust “that it may become lice throughout the land.…”

First Baptist Church

Meredith, N. H.

“The Best Way to Preach” by N. Gene Carlson is definitely one of the best articles I have read on the subject of expository preaching. It should encourage many clergymen to back away from their often dry-as-dust topical sermons and to move ahead with messages enriched with the clarity and the authority of God’s precious Word.

The Guidance Press

Scarborough, Ont.

Editor and Manager

There is no question of the supreme value of expository preaching; but I realized some months ago that there is an even greater question the preacher must face at his homiletical work table. It is this: What is the main message I must spell out for my people this Sunday, and (after that is determined) what is my best way to present it?

I simply cannot believe that expository preaching alone is the one best way to preach the Gospel. Such preaching has brought many blessings to my people; but I preach an equal number of topical sermons, and I find it hard to believe that God does not bless that method fully as much as the other.…

Some topics which I feel must be put across in the pulpit do not readily lend themselves to the textual and expository approach.…

St. Peter’s Lutheran Church

Hay Springs, Neb.

CONFESSIONS OF A NEW PH.D.

I suppose that Frank E. Gaebelein’s article, “The Aesthetic Problem: Some Evangelical Answers” (Feb. 26 issue), more than anything else, gives me the courage to express my ideas publicly. If the area of aesthetics is, as Gaebelein maintains, a comparatively new field for evangelical Christianity, then perhaps my thoughts, added to those of others, may afford a sort of beginning. Perhaps they can furnish some preliminary material upon which others may labor, modifying, correcting, and systematizing as the case may be.

While the experience of writing my dissertation on “The Significance of the Variants of 1578 in the Evolution of Ronsard’s Poetic Technique” is still fresh in my mind, I should like to share it. Since my topic seemed to me to be about as far removed as it could possibly be from what a Calvinistic Christian would normally choose, I was constantly haunted by certain perplexing questions and misgivings. The more I enjoyed my project the more I wondered if what I was doing could really glorify God. I enjoyed it, for my subject was almost purely analytical and creative. Almost every day the light dawned. And yet despite my conviction that all truth is God’s truth and that one way to glorify God and to enjoy him forever is through the discovery and contemplation of truths, it did seem that the area of particular truths upon which I seemed to have been led to concentrate were rather far down in God’s scale of values.

The questions which kept recurring had to do with the poet, with the poetic object, and with the time factor. Strangely enough, so long as I concentrated upon the poetic technique, I had no problem. Concerning the poet, I would ask myself whether it was right for a Christian—particularly a Calvinist—to make a sympathetic study of one who championed the persecutors of the Huguenots. Would it not have been wiser to have left to a non-Christian the task of finding out what was good in the works of one who did not—in my estimation, at least—seek to glorify God? When it came to the poetic object, I wondered whether an artistic portrayal of an ignoble thought or emotion could be beautiful and certainly whether it could be worthwhile. What was the relationship between beauty and goodness or between beauty and truth? Was it my duty as a Christian to append to my aesthetic evaluation of the various representative poems and their modified versions an ethical evaluation as well? Probably what worried me most of all was the time factor. Was it right in my case to embark upon a project which would take many hours from other activities, activities which from the average Christian’s point of view would surely seem much more worthwhile? Each time these questions came to mind I almost always concluded in the same manner. Did I not know that I was where I was supposed to be for that day? I would have to trust my Lord and Saviour to show me the next step. In the meantime, I would continue with my immediate goal.

The task I had set for myself was to attempt to understand what the poet was seeking to accomplish and then to judge his efforts from the aesthetic point of view only. In other words, by means of a formal analysis, I sought to discover the poem’s inner workings. I evaluated the complete poem on the basis of its integration and unity of effect. The harder I tried to put myself in the poet’s place, the better I understood why he did what he did and the more I marveled at his genius. I felt less and less inclined to criticize him even from the aesthetic point of view. His solutions for his structural problems aroused nothing but the most humble admiration for his genius, perseverance, and ability to learn from his past mistakes. Through this study I began to understand and, in a measure, to share the humanist’s humility before genius and particularly before the great creative thinkers of the past. Frankly I see nothing unchristian in this experience. I do not see how we detract from God’s glory, if we admit that he has given great gifts to unbelievers as well as believers. The more perfectly we understand what these gifts involve, the more we magnify the God who can dispense such talents. As for concentrating on someone who hated Calvinism, if I was able to be objective, does this not prove that Christianity and scholarship are not opposed as some seem to think?

I now feel that my time has been well repaid in learning to use a method which is going to prove very useful. It is a technique I never could have begun to master, had I not been able to forget momentarily all thought of judging the poet or the poem from an ethical standpoint. Of course, after one has completed a formal analysis, there is nothing to prevent making ethical judgments. Whether or not the Christian critic ought to append an ethical evaluation to a poetic analysis would depend, I should think, on the circumstances. In any case he would surely want to view everything in the light of God’s Word, for himself if for no one else. However, if I have learned anything at all in writing my dissertation, it is the danger of making one’s ethical evaluation too soon. It is important to be certain that one has discovered the total intrinsic form. If one has missed the irony and sarcasm, for example, that sometimes show that the poet himself disapproves of the ignoble thought or emotion that is being portrayed, then there is no conflict between the poetic truth and the ethical truth. One only makes himself and the Christian position in general look ridiculous if he finds something that is not there. One task for the Christian critic or teacher, therefore, is to be sure that the work is understood before it is submitted to this kind of test.

I am still trying to think through the relationship between aesthetics and the Christian world view. Dorothy Sayers may be right in finding no contradiction between poetic truth and theological truth (The Man Born to be King, p. 19). In the meantime, my experience may encourage other beginning Christian scholars to persevere and to trust that an all-wise God has his reasons for placing them where they are, reasons he will divulge in due time, provided they have in the first place sought his preceptive will.

Valparaiso, Ind.

FOR SHUFFLING THE LINEUP

Your article, “The Hospital Chaplain” (June 4 issue), was of real concern to me. I am chairman of the Counseling Services Committee of the local county Council of Churches. We are developing our services at the present time, and one of the major innovations we are presenting is that on the therapy team a clergyman is to be included.…

Our position (mine particularly) is that on the road back to health from illness there are several items to be considered: the functioning of the physiological organism, the central nervous system (mental, conscious and unconscious), the will, attitudes, wishes, and desires along with aspirations and value systems; that is, the body, mind, soul, and spirit are integrated in the well person. Surely in dealing with shame and guilt, with pseudo-guilt and with real guilt, the clergyman ought to be included on all therapy teams.

Kingsburg, Calif.

ONE LAD TO ANOTHER

I appreciated the penetrating review of my recent book, Jesus and the Kingdom, by Professor Waetjen (June 4 issue). He raises several points which indeed call for clarification. May I, however, be permitted to point out that several of his questions are already answered in the book. (1) “It is strange that so little is said of Jesus’ works of healing and restoration.” In fact, quite a bit is said; pp. 145–54 discuss Jesus’ victory over Satan, which is the spiritual reality behind the demon exorcisms; pp. 154–60 have as their background the messianic acts of healing and restoration mentioned in Matthew 11:2–6; and pp. 207 ff. expound the miracles of healing as an anticipation of the messianic salvation. (2) “It is even stranger that nothing is said about the death and resurrection of Jesus. This appears to have no place in the eschatological teaching of Jesus on the Kingdom of God.…” As a matter of fact, the significance of Jesus’ death is discussed on pp. 320 ff. (3) An “unresolved question” is the connection between “Jesus teaching on the Kingdom, his death and resurrection, and the beginnings of the Church.…” The neglect of such a basic question would indeed be a serious oversight, for it involves the all-important contemporary question of the continuity between Jesus’ teaching and the primitive kerygma. This very problem is recognized and discussed, and a positive solution suggested on pp. 266–69. Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom is not, therefore, “abstracted from his death and resurrection.”

I do not think I misquote Frost, as the review suggests. What is called a quotation is in fact my summary interpretation of what I understand Frost to mean, and this summary is based on an exact quotation cited on p. 52. The problem here is that Frost’s language is extremely technical and must be interpreted within its own particular content.

Heidelberg, Germany

DISCUSSION CONTINUED

Mr. Stuber’s response (Eutychus, June 18 issue) to the March 26 editorial about John R. Mott, in relation to the surrender of spiritual principles which John R. Mott promoted, is of great concern to me.

Mr. Stuber stated: “In fact, the YMCA is now in one of the best positions of any organization to be the Christian demonstration center for the application of the kind of Christianity advocated by Dr. Mott”.…

Mr. Lansdale, late general secretary of the National Council YMCA, has referred to the YMCA as a “sleeping giant.” If this is true and the YMCA is in a position to become a Christian demonstration center to follow Mott’s advocation, then those of us who are YMCA secretaries will have to find Mott’s Saviour in today’s world; or in other words, “the giant” must awaken and be counted.…

The unfortunate truth is that “Christian” for many YMCA secretaries means anyone, regardless of his religious beliefs or in spite of the fact that he hasn’t trusted in the finished work of Christ for the remission of his sins, who is sincere in what he believes in spite of God’s Word.

I am persuaded that Mr. Stuber is correct about the YMCA being in a unique position as a demonstration center for the basic Christianity Dr. Mott believed in, if fellow secretaries will: (1) Call upon Christ for regeneration ourselves by the Holy Spirit and (2) those who have experienced this new birth, call upon Christ for a new demonstration of his power to change lives spiritually and physically, in the context of today’s world.…

Extension Work Secretary

Young Men’s Christian Association

Washington, D. C.

Do you know the main weaknesses of the popular critical approach to the Gospels? A New Testament scholar presents a list of flaws.

A key issue in theology today is the relation between faith and history, or, to state it precisely, the historical integrity of the biblical witness to Jesus Christ. In the forefront of the discussion looms the Synoptic problem. Just how sturdy are the foundations of saving history? If the kerygma be historical to the core, the Gospels can scarcely be otherwise without exposing a fatal weakness in biblical Christianity.

The challenge of radical form criticism is therefore serious, for it threatens to undermine our knowledge of the historical Jesus and remove the grounds of our whole proclamation. Far from restricting itself to a neutral analysis of the material, form criticism has attempted a new synthesis that systematically extracts the supernatural out of history, leaving us with a “Christ” we cannot know and a “Jesus” we cannot worship. The form criticism being treated here is that radical brand which views the gospel accounts as primary witnesses, not to the life of Jesus, but to the beliefs and practices of the primitive Church. It is marked by a heavy dose of historical pessimism, intentionally aimed, it would seem, at weakening the historical basis of the kerygma.

The force of the following eleven propositions is to show that radical form criticism actually impedes truly historical research and is destructive of Christianity. The theses aim to expose weaknesses in the form critical argument and to offer an alternative methodology.

1. Primitive Christianity is stamped by the impact of the person and work of Jesus Christ. No other explanation can possibly account for the rise of the Church and its theology. But form criticism reduces Jesus’ influence to near zero, supplying instead the story of how the “tradition” wrote the first life of Christ! It is assumed that virtually all reliable recollection about Jesus was either annihilated or suppressed in the brief interval that separated his earthly life from the period of gospel preaching, but such skepticism is untenable.

2. At the outset of the apostolic age, we are confronted by a messianic belief in Jesus and an affirmation regarding his resurrection. Radical form criticism, however, denies Jesus’ messianic self-consciousness and his bodily resurrection. It thus creates for itself a riddle at the genesis of Christianity. Several imponderables are put in the place of the Gospel: Why was Jesus executed at all if not for messianic pretensions? Did martyrs die for a “Christ” who was no more than a geometrical point that had position but no magnitude? The riddle is insoluble if no claims of Jesus underlie this messianic faith and no empty tomb supports the Easter message.

3. Members of the early churches were as interested in details about Jesus “for his own sake” as we are, and found in their midst informed persons acquainted with these details. It is idle to suggest, as form criticism often does, that no biographical motive lies behind the Gospels. Luke’s prologue (1:1–4) alone is sufficient to demonstrate the unity of history and faith in the minds of first-century believers. It is only a fanciful existential hermeneutic that can happily suspend the historical affirmations of the Gospel in the thin air of myth. The Gospels are basically didache, not kerygma—that is, they supply information about the life of Jesus helpful in various ways to the Christian walk.

4. The apostles played a decisive role in the early years of the Church. The Book of Acts describes the strategic control they exercised over the spread of the Gospel. Jesus had intentionally selected them for training in evangelism (Mark 3:14). The picture painted by form criticism of the free creation and flow of tradition is quite unhistorical. After his conversion, Paul visited Jerusalem and conferred with Peter (Gal. 1:18). The verb he uses has the nuance of “consulting a person to acquire information.” There was an authoritative source of information about the facts and doctrines of Christianity in the apostolic collegium in Jerusalem from which Paul derived his “tradition.” The disciples of Jesus were not translated to heaven at the Resurrection. They remained to lead the community Christ founded. Their presence prevented the occurrence of precisely the situation envisaged by form criticism. It guaranteed the continuity and integrity of the historic Christian faith.

5. The great and unwarranted assumption of radical form criticism is that the community exercised a large creative role in the production of gospel tradition. This assumption violates the temporal framework of the New Testament, whose vision is oriented backward to the Resurrection and forward to the Parousia, and which stresses the receptive character of faith. We are witnesses and stewards of saving history. It is a passive role of preserving, proclaiming, waiting. Paul, for example, kept clear in his mind the distinction between his own words and the words of Jesus (1 Cor. 7:10, 12, 25). Form criticism creates a host of extra problems by following its assumption through to the bitter end. The New Testament knows nothing of this creative role.

6. The evidence opposes the hypothesis that Christian ideas and practices were historicized by being read back into the Gospels. Certain concerns in the early Church we know well—e.g., circumcision, tongues, Gentiles, Spirit, churches. But none of these receives any considerable treatment in the Gospels. On the reverse side of the coin, the parable form and concepts like “son of man” and “kingdom of God” seldom appear in the same guise in the Epistles or Acts. Apparently, then, the gospel writers were careful to respect the boundary between the pre- and post-Resurrection period of history.

7. Form critical arguments are often circular. From a gospel account, a setting in the community is reconstructed, and this is used to explain the origin of the story. The confusion arises from mixing up possible motives for preservation with ultimate origins. Obviously the pericopae were recorded to meet a pastoral need in the churches. Papias told us that in the second century. But it is foolish on that account to conclude that the material was simply invented. Indeed, Bultmann carries the logic to absurd limits, in that he trusts a chunk of tradition only when it contradicts some known belief or practice in the Church! We meet genuine history, in his estimation, only at those points in which Christians disobeyed their Lord. This approach is unworthy of a reputable historian, let alone a faithful Christian.

8. In its analysis of the “biology of the saga,” form criticism is oblivious to the small time lag separating the historical facts and the written documents. Mark was written in the sixties, if not the fifties. The teaching tract “Q” circulated in the forties. Paul received his account of the tradition in the mid-thirties. Many of the apostles and associates of Jesus lived throughout the entire period in which the Gospels were recorded. Where is the time for the creation, collection, and collation of these community sagas? The events of Jesus’ life were not hidden from public gaze (Acts 26:26). There were witnesses for both the defense and the prosecution of Christianity. The development of German folklore, for example, required centuries. The Gospel exploded into life in the midst of well-attested history, almost fully grown at birth.

9. Form criticism seldom responds to external evidence. The older approach of orthodoxy held perhaps too uncritical an attitude to the witness of the Fathers. But the new radicalism seems to doubt whatever the tradition says. Hans Conzelmann, for instance, cares little for the extensive archaeological confirmation of the Book of Acts. The testimony of Papias regarding the production of the four Gospels has a strong claim to authenticity—e.g., that Peter stands behind Mark’s Gospel. But if this is so, the edifice of form criticism is severely shaken; for any thought of the controlling influence of the apostles goes contrary to the assumption of the free creation of material.

10. The obvious analogy to the transmission of gospel stories is to be found in rabbinic practices. Christianity was conceived in a Jewish milieu and adopted numerous forms and procedures from Judaism. In form, Jesus’ teaching resembled that of the rabbis. Like Isaiah before him, he gathered disciples to himself to entrust to them his teaching. These disciples assumed positions of leadership in the infant Church and passed down the deposit of teaching. The Church was not a rabbinic academy. Yet the parallels in her handling of the tradition are numerous and striking. And the comparison, developed by Harald Riesenfeld and Birger Gerhardsson, offers a substantial guarantee of the accuracy and continuity of the tradition. The Gospels as historical records can command our deepest trust.

11. Form criticism has become an instrument for the extension of the “new quest” of the historical Jesus. It is not an autonomous literary science aiming only at classification but an editing device designed to rid the Gospels of the supernatural Christ. The Jesus we now meet is a prophet who called for decision in the light of impending divine action, whose existence was “authentic” and truly “free.” He wears in fact a Bultmannian face. But this is a Jesus the Gospels know little of. Stripped of his claims, his miracles, his predictions, his resurrection, he is as emaciated a figure as the old quest could present. Harnack offered a teacher we cannot worship, and Bultmann offers us a phantom Christ we cannot know (historically).

The argument presented above severely reduces the role of form criticism as it has been practiced by many. Indeed, it goes further than simply rebuking its practitioners for over-enthusiasm. It contends that form criticism as a method applied to the Gospels is vastly overrated. For it is a speculative attempt to demonstrate the transmission of materials that are primarily historical. Hence its results have been fragmentary, mutually contradictory, and largely unfruitful. Our initial concern is with historical research, which attempts rather to elucidate the meaning of the data in the context of the first century. Our aim is exposition, not reduction.

A story or saying in the Gospels is not one penny the better or the worse for having a form critical label attached to it. But as practiced today, radical form criticism actually impedes truly historical research and challenges the legitimacy of biblical Christianity. Evangelicals must stand up to resist the tide. At stake are the integrity of the Gospels and the reality of our Saviour.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

Reflections on the Lord’s death for sinners …

The Bible takes on a new glow once the Gospel is apprehended as the gentle understatement of Love it so truly is. The wonder, for example, is not in the fact that our Lord pardoned Peter but in the way he thrice asked him, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?,” and then fully restored him with the serene assignment, “Feed my lambs.… Feed my sheep.”

The beauty and uniqueness of the Gospel pertain to the whole of the incarnate life of our Lord, nay, to the very miracle of the Incarnation as summed up in the basic assertion that God was in Christ. Seen aright, it is the whole of this incarnate life from the manger of Bethlehem to the Cross of Calvary that constitutes the gentle understatement of Love. Think of the lowly birth in the stable; of the baptism in the Jordan; of the call to fishermen and tax-gatherers; of the talk with the woman of Samaria; of the ministry of healing to humble folk; of the tribute to the centurion; of the unassuming ways of forgiving again and again; of feeding the multitudes; of warning against despising the little ones; of telling homely parables; of dining with publicans; of washing the disciples’ feet the night in which he was betrayed.

Truly the very core of the Gospel is reached the moment a man realizes that the Good News lies in the intimation of a Lord who is “gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy,” anxious lest any of his children should perish, eager that they all should have life, and have it abundantly.

We have missed the deeper meaning of the Lord’s Supper in the measure we have allowed the sacrament to be taken out of this context of the gentle understatement of Love, often to be made into a pretext. First, a pretext to keep away persons singled out as notorious evil-doers. These, it is felt, should not presume to approach the Lord’s table unless they repent, then make proper restitution to those they so obviously have wronged. The least that should be expected is that they should profess their honest purpose to comply as soon as this may conveniently be done. And so a privilege has occasionally been granted the self-righteous in a sanctuary decently arrayed for the administration of a forbidding sacrament. Old Roger Chillingworth might well have a reserved place in the front pew at the time of so exclusive a celebration, in spite of that “something ugly and evil in his face” giving “evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne puts it. Pray God, Chillingworth never accedes to the pulpit or to the manse!

Examining Oneself

Yet there admittedly is danger in unworthy participation in the Lord’s Supper; hence the long-established practice of self-examination in the light of God’s holy commandments. We hear the familiar words, “Ye who do truly and earnestly repent of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbors, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in His holy ways: Draw near with faith, and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort; and make your humble confession to Almighty God.” Whereupon should follow what the Order for the Celebration calls an acknowledgment of “our manifold sins.”

The very comprehensiveness of this confession of “our manifold sins” may cause us to miss the gentle understatement of Love which truly makes of the Communion service an epitome of the Gospel of God. The overall impression left by this general confession is that it somehow entitles us to partake of the sacrament. The plain truth is that the sole reason we may partake of the sacrament is that we have been graciously invited to do so. Supposing we fully take this into account, a new danger is likely to dog our steps even then—namely, a sense of self-gratification at having accepted the invitation. We had to, anyway. No feigned excuse could possibly avail, we knew, at the bidding of so unique a Host, whether a piece of ground had been bought, new yokes of oxen had to be tried, or a wife had been married. We have, moreover, had the tact to realize how grievous and unkind a thing it would have been to have stayed away from a table so lavishly provided that it lacks nothing at all but the invited guests.

Such intricacies have hidden from us the further truth—I was going to say, the blunt, naked fact—that the only ground for the invitation in the first place is that God justifies the ungodly. He bids them come. He bids them come just as they are, and even goes to the length of providing the proper garment. He bids them come though they hardly dare hope for anything but condemnation. He bids them come though despair may be brooding over them, pressing upon their heart like a horrible nightmare. He so loved the world that he gave … Ah, that is the hitch! He gave, while the hardest thing for man is to do nothing but receive. This is what makes faith so hard, for to have faith is to receive, to receive as only a candid child can receive.

Old Tacitus knew about this. He remarked in his Annals (IV, 18) that “good things bestowed are pleasing to one only so long as he thinks he can return the favor; as soon as they go beyond this, however, gratitude yields to hatred.” The trouble with Tacitus is that he had been so badly informed around the year A.D. 100 that in his reference to one “whom the procurator Pontius Pilate had caused to be executed during the reign of Tiberius,” he apparently took “Christ” for a proper name. He did not know the name “Jesus” at all. His reference to Christianity, moreover, was to “this scourge” that originated in Judea, then sprang up again as a pernicious superstition in Rome, “whither everything horrible and shameful pours in from all over the world and finds a ready vogue” (Annals, XV, 44). We need not pause to lament the plight of a city whose innocence could so easily be defiled. What is of interest is the naturalistic context of the judgment rendered by Tacitus with regard to man’s instinctive abhorrence of overwhelming benevolence. This context provides the proper setting for a study in contrast between the self-vindication of a pagan pride, on the one hand, and on the other the childlike receptivity of a faith exulting in God’s munificence. It is the natural man, therefore, the pagan within us, who shrinks from divine bounty.

The Divine Pointer

Our sensitivity may further be sharpened as the personal character of the gift of grace is magnified. Heed this eager insistence in the words of institution now singled out for the sake of emphasis: “Take.… This is my body which is broken for you.… This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” The way a man responds to this divine pointer discloses the measure of his faith. At the climactic moment of “The Mystery of Jesus,” Pascal heard the Crucified One say to him, “I thought of thee in my agony; I have shed such drops of blood for thee.” He then crumpled at the foot of the Cross, uttering the words of ultimate surrender, “Lord, I give thee all.” Most, if not all, of us still linger far behind so holy a dedication. The best that can be said of us is that this more directly personal understanding of our Lord’s words makes us unbearably uneasy. And yet the new stress just laid upon the words of institution is invited by the Lord himself. As we hear them afresh, they are pointed directly at each one of us: “… broken for you … shed for you.”

By this time, our life is acted upon like those seeds exposed to X-rays. Mutations are called out. A velleity of self-vindication faintly moves our lips: “Have I not in all candor confessed my sins, Lord? Thou knowest I truly repent.” This imperfect volition is of no avail, except for a vague awareness of its futility. What matters is that the look of the Lord is now upon us. We dare not look up, and yet we know what that look is like. Such must have been the luminous gaze that overwhelmed Peter when the Lord said to him for the third time, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?” For this is the same impression that overwhelms us at the moment the invitation takes on a personal overtone and these words and phrases emerge to haunt us in a silent confrontation: “Take … broken for you … shed for you.”

Then, under the enigmatic tenderness of that gaze, as the invitation is represented to us as almost an allusion to our condition, there suddenly flashes upon us, unforeseen and unsought, the insight, “Broken by whom, Lord? And who caused thy blood to be shed?” Flow amazing the kaleidoscopic simultaneity of the scenes a man willsuddenly behold, once he has been put on his mettle in a crisis situation! I once faced a German firing squad only to be saved by a miracle, and I think I know.

“Broken for me … broken by whom? Shed for me … who caused that blood to be shed?” The flash and outbreak of an oppressed conscience leave us hopelessly beholding the disciples asleep while the man Christ Jesus is left alone to the wrath of God Almighty; beholding Jesus betrayed with a kiss by one of his own in the dark; Jesus mocked, smitten, struck on the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns; the populace in league with the rulers and the chief priests crying out all at once, “Away with this man, release unto us Barabbas”; Jesus crucified between two thieves; Jesus in torment amid blasphemy and derision; his disciples scattered abroad, running for their lives.…

“Surely, Lord, had I been there I should not have joined in that desertion; I should not have joined in that betrayal; I should not have joined in that blasphemy and denial of all justice.”

Yet my heart is no longer in that protestation of loyalty. And all this while the same look is still upon me that was upon Peter when for the third time he heard the question, “Lovest thou me?”

Out with the sin that lieth at the door! Each time I have indulged in gossip, envy, cheating, or backbiting, each time I have secretly rejoiced in iniquity, in some form of harm done to others or suffered by them, I have broken that body, caused that blood to be shed. I seem to hear a distant hammering, a driving of nails through those hands that were raised only to serve, to heal, or to bless. Now I know that the man I have been has had a part in that hammering over there. Nay, as out of the whirlwind, the piercing dart, the thrust of Nathan to David, has struck me also: “Thou art the man!”

How petty in this situation, how inadequate, however sincere and well-intentioned, the general confession of my sins that precluded my partaking of Communion! How sordid my rebukes to those who are in truth my fellow sinners! Remember Baudelaire’s Dedication to the Reader of his Flowers of Evill? “To thee, hypocrite, my fellow-creature, my brother!”

Broken by whom, this, our Lord’s body? Who caused this blood to be shed? We are all in this evil thing to the hilt, every one of us. We have had intimations of this fact in our best moments. It is high time that we should see it the way it is: “Thou art the man!”

The point, however, is that our Lord never said it, never intimated the fact. And down to this day he merely gives, saying: “Take … This is my body which is broken for you.… This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” And that same mysterious tenderness is still on his face. As we accept his invitation, the blessing of that same unassuming look is upon us that was upon Peter—the third time. May we then be granted the grace to discern in his words of institution the gentle understatement of the Love “which moves the Sun and the other stars.”

The glow within the Bible is the radiance of that Love.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

Can Protestantism escape relativism in theology?… If so, how? By accepting agnosticism? By turning to Rome? By revitalizing the Reformers?

By definition a labyrinth is a complex or indecipherable maze. Calvin used the word to describe the confused state of the mind as it stood before the problems of the universe without the light of revelation. And extensive reading in contemporary theology shows that it too is a labyrinth. Degeneration of faith has gone so far that some theologians engage in a kind of self-flagellation for their Christian belief, as if it were a sin against the modern mind to believe anything.

When Protestant theology abandoned the concept of revelation as the disclosure of the infallible truth of God and gave up the corollary that Scripture is this revelation in written form and thus the authoritative norm and controlling canon in theological construction, it inevitably entered the labyrinth. Or, to put it another way, when Protestant theologians destroyed the one principle that makes the knowledge of God scientific, they destroyed the possibility of theology. Into the resultant vacuum came the endless reinterpretations of Christianity that in turn created the labyrinth of contemporary theology.

Many forces caused the destruction of the one possible principle of scientific theology. The Renaissance, the new humanism, the Enlightenment, all turned their backs upon the past and thus rejected the light from the ancient writings of the prophets and apostles in Holy Scripture. Descartes’s principle of radical doubt as the starting point in philosophy eventually infected all of modern philosophy with radical doubt that inevitably extended to the authenticity of Holy Scripture.

In the progress of modern science from Copernicus and Galileo to Einstein and Heisenberg, Christian revelation was replaced by the view of the universe created by modern science as the natural backdrop of philosophy, ethics, value, art, and politics. Radical biblical criticism dissolved the Old Testament into a patchwork of redactions so filled with historical errors, ancient mythology, and sub-Christian ethics that it could not be taken seriously in situ as an authentic part of revealed Scripture. The critics reduced the Gospels to fanciful reconstructions of the uncritical religious community of the early Church and demoted Paul to a Hellenistic synthesizer, with the resulting conclusion being that the New Testament presents us with no materials on which to base a valid Christian theology.

With the destruction of the historic doctrine of Scripture as the authentic Word of God and therefore of the principle of control in the construction of all theology, there no longer exists a single principle of control in modern Protestant theology. The demolition of the unique principle for the construction of Christian theology mean that orthodoxy—i.e., orthos (“correct”) theological statements justified from the canon of Holy Scripture—no longer exists as a vital option in recent theology. The converse of this is that if no single version of Christianity can possibly be the true or orthodox one, then several interpretations are required, for perchance each of them will in some sense reflect a valid aspect of the Christian faith. But to say this is to ask for the labyrinth in Protestant theology.

At this point, a bit of digression is in order. The labyrinth also prevails in philosophy. Philosophers have not agreed on any one principle, except in the most vague and general criterion that philosophy should reflect reality. Because no fundamental principle informs philosophy, we have such utterly diverse works as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein) or Being and Nothingness (Sartre).

But science is completely different. Scientists know the unitary principle that informs their discipline. Positively it may be called the principle of verification; negatively, the principle of falsification. Thus a Christion American, an atheist Russian, and a Buddhist Chinaman may set off an atomic explosion, because they follow the unitary principle of science. Philosophers endlessly disagree because they have no unitary principle; scientists form a worldwide society—with differences, to be sure—because they have a unitary principle.

At Ease With Young Turks

Returning to theology, we affirm that in its present labyrinth no orthodoxy is possible. The only thing possible is a cafeteria of options. And John Cobb can write on Living Options in Protestant Theology and ignore orthodoxy as an option. The spirit of modern theology is to encourage the production of all sorts of options. Even religious theists who see nothing special in the Bible or in Jesus Christ are honored among our Christian theologians and given important chairs of theology in our seminaries and graduate schools. The situation has degenerated to the point that some young Turk calling for a total and radical reconstruction of Christian theology causes little apprehension within the Church. One can almost hear the sigh: “Well, thank God [sic], his ideas at least show that we are not in a rut.” We may not be in a rut, but we are certainly in a labyrinth!

For modern theology there are many practical consequences of this labyrinth. For example, seminary professors are almost uniformly hired because they are technicians, and because they hold degrees from prestigious universities and have published scholarly books and articles. Great theological convictions, deep loyalty to the historic versions of the Christian faith, authentic sainthood—such things are no longer the coin of the realm. Calvin’s insistence that piety inform all theological learning provokes a smile as a bit of anachronistic pietism. As a result of all this, our important seminaries are noted, not for Christian depth, but for a team of “all-American” theological specialists.

Another practical consequence of the theological labyrinth appears in denominational life, which is conducted on the ground that all expressions of the Christian faith deserve representation. Attempts to call a denomination back to its historical creedal foundation are branded as divisive. Cooperation with denominational structures is the sine qua non of pastoral success. Preachers who march on Selma are in good standing, because they do not disturb denominational structures; preachers who speak in tongues are disciplined because they are like monkey wrenches thrown into the well-oiled machinery of denominationalism. To be outspoken on social issues is to be called prophetic; to be outspoken on the spiritual and theological bankruptcy of a denomination is to be labeled a crank.

What are the alternatives to the labyrinth of modern theology?

1. We may be honest in following through the logic that the labyrinth implies. If Christianity really is compatible with any number of interpretations, then it is obviously not true. If any other science were to break with its fundamental principle of knowledge, it would cease to exist. If Christianity has no fundamental principle of knowledge that controls its statements, then, in keeping with the rugged honesty of the logic involved, we ought to abandon it. Any logician will agree that a proposition compatible with all possible conditions is no proposition at all.

2. We may return to Roman Catholicism, in which the revelation of God still has control over theological utterances. In spite of all the forces and stresses of the past few centuries, the Roman church has remained loyal to its anchorage in divine revelation. Is not this the resolution of the labyrinth? But as confusing theologically as the times are and as inviting as the Roman ark seems to be, we cannot retreat beyond December 10, 1520, when Luther burned the Canon Law and the Papal Bull.

3. We may follow Gerhard Ebeling (Word and Faith, p. 51—one of the most courageous pages in all modern theology) and simply keep up the program of destruction. We must burn and burn, criticize and criticize, until we eventually find that version of Christianity which withstands the most vicious critical attack. Ebeling admits that this is a terrible course to follow and that it will involve many dark and confused hours. But to him this is the only way out of the labyrinth.

4. We may return to the synthesis of the Reformers, which was characterized by four programmatic principles: (a) The Holy Scriptures are the infallible authority of God and therefore the principle of the construction of Christian theology functioning as both the source and norm of theology. Thus an orthodox theology is possible, although many of its details remain open questions. (b) It is the Holy Spirit who establishes the Christian faith in the believer, in the Church, and in the world. (c) Jesus Christ is the norm, substance, and criterion of both scriptural exegesis and the construction of Christian theology. (d) There is to be the fullest use of the best of human scholarship in the interpretation of Scripture, in the criticism of Scripture, and in the construction of Christian theology.

Scripture And Scholarship

Yet in all this the authority of the Word of God must not be compromised. If scholarship is not exercised under the Word of God, then the concept of the Word of God is empty. In the modern debate, Barth is right as against Bultmann, for if the Word of Scripture is capable of the radical criticism Bultmann suggests, this Word is not truly God’s Word. Thus the Reformers were to this writer sounder than religious modernism, Bultmannism, and the new hermeneutic, because for them the criticism of Scripture could never be merely a technical matter.

But this does not mean we ought to have a mere repristination of Luther and Calvin. It does not mean that theology will be simply a rehash of citations of Scripture texts mixed with quotations from Luther and Calvin. Neither does it mean a denial of the vast biblical knowledge gained in recent decades, or a defense on pietistic or obscurantist grounds of the Reformers’ synthesis. The pressures of modern theological learning would crush this kind of theological program. Orthodoxy must critically and creatively come to terms with the forces behind the mentality that abandoned the fundamental principle making theology a science and governing its intellectual construction.

What Biblical Authority Means

The Scriptures as the infallible authority in theology are under constant misrepresentation in contemporary theology. (a) That the Bible is infallibly authoritative does not mean that all the Bible is on the same level, so that a verse in Numbers is as important as a verse in Romans. (b) To affirm the infallible authority of Holy Scripture is not to deny progressive revelation. Certainly the law of love in the New Testament (Rom. 13:8–10) is advanced over the Mosaic rules. To insist that conservatives have no sense of the progress and movement in Scripture is just to reveal that one has not really exposed himself to the best in conservative exegesis. (c) To regard the Bible as infallibly authoritative is not to drain faith of all its existential juice and make it equivalent to assent. The Reformers insisted that faith means trust (fiducia). Therefore, evangelical theology does not reduce itself to the “theological faith” of Roman Catholicism but rather retains in all its force the dynamic character of faith taught in the New Testament. (d) Nor does the full acceptance of biblical authority mean that conservatives are afraid of the existential, the symbolic, the mythological. But we have sturdy respect for truth. We simply do not see how issues of truth can be settled in terms of existential sobs, symbolic pictures, or mythological ambiguities. We want all the life, vitality, existentiality, emotion, and voluntarism there are in religion, but never at the expense of truth. We wait for those who believe otherwise to show us how they can thread their way through these alogical and non-rational materials and show how to differentiate truth from error. (e) We do not believe that we can produce a theology of glory, i.e., a perfect and inerrant theology. We agree with Luther that, in our brokenness of sin and in the partial character of revelation, we must be content with a theology of the Cross. We therefore admit that within the orthodox and conservative camp differences will always exist. But such differences are not the same as the differences created by those who scrap the orthodox calculus—the modernists, the liberals, the Bultmannians, the followers of Bishop Robinson, and the adherents of the new hermeneutic. In principle, differences within orthodoxy can be settled, though our sinfulness and brokenness prevent this; but in principle differences cannot be settled within modernist, liberal, and existentialist versions of Christianity. Therefore the latter perpetuate and complicate the labyrinth, with all the spiritual agony and ecclesiastical confusion it produces.

If there is to be a revitalization of the historic orthodox position in contemporary theology, certain matters of policy must be followed.

1. The optimism of modern man born at the Renaissance and nurtured by the advance in all departments of human knowledge must be seriously challenged by a fresh investigation of the doctrine of original sin. The invasion of sin into reason itself requires the absolute necessity of special revelation. As long as we deny this invasion of reason by sin, we shall be optimistic about man. Modern science, modern education, modern learning have neither challenged nor negated this fact.

The same thing holds for theology. Only that theology which can come to terms with the invasion of reason by original sin, and which shows the possibility of theology in view of this very invasion, is a realistic and biblical theology. Therefore, Christian theologians must point out with great power that, despite all our modern advancements, humanity still exists within the pale of original sin.

2. Christian theologians must show that philosophy without revelation does as a matter of fact wander in a labyrinth. Calvin’s judgment that philosophers exhibit a shameful diversity (Institutes I, 5, 12) is still true. We do not wish to belittle philosophy. It has made great progress in refining logic, in developing rational alternatives in ethics and value theory, in showing the nature of concepts, in working diligently with the problem of perception, in showing what is involved in any metaphysical system, and in tackling such diverse but important subjects as aesthetics and political philosophy.

But philosophy too comes under the judgment of original sin. It cannot be modern man’s secularized substitute for theology. The ultimate answers to the great questions about man, nature, and God can be found only in the pages of revelation. For this confrontation with modern philosophy no pietistic or fundamentalist eschewing of philosophy will do. The criticism must come from those Christian theologians who have fully exposed themselves to the great philosophical options of the past and present.

3. Christian theologians must show that science and Christian faith are not inimical. At present, there is no uniform plan among evangelical theologians as to how this is to be done. One method, essentially Platonic in orientation, is to show that scientific knowledge is useful and pragmatic but is philosophically empty. Or it may be pointed out that the presuppositions of science are outside science and can be supported only by theology—i.e., the ethical basis of all scientific work; the uniformity of nature, which can be grounded only in the doctrine of creation; or the use of logic in science, which can rest only upon man’s being in the image of God. Others may attempt to show that science is but part of man’s mandate to culture as the lord of creation and hence is a biblically sanctioned activity. Still another approach is based upon language analysis. Scientific explanations are of one order, theological explanations of another. They do not conflict; rather, they exhibit the principle of complementarity. The same phenomenon may be described from two different perspectives, each perspective valid in itself, although no principle of harmonizing the two is forthcoming. Thus it can be shown by one of the foregoing methods that the supposed cleavage between science and historic Christian theology is fictional rather than real.

4. The most difficult problem facing the Reformation synthesis in theology is certainly that of biblical criticism. Ebeling, in his famous essay, “The Significance of the Critical Historical Method for Church and Theology in Protestantism” (Word and Faith, pp. 17 ff.) certainly put his finger on a raw nerve.

The Reformers were aware of the critical understanding of the Scriptures and knew that a critical treatment of the Scriptures must accompany their theological use. Luther’s rejection of the Apocrypha and his free attitude towards such books as Esther, James, and Revelation are examples of his openness to criticism. Calvin’s occasional admission in his Commentaries of insoluble difficulties in the text and his thesis that critical problems of Scripture are to be settled by humanistic scholarship and not by church fiat are typical of his hospitality to criticism. But in none of this did the Reformers ever think of challenging the Holy Scriptures as the infallible source and norm of Christian theology. It was only in subsequent developments in theology that the theological norm of the Reformers was broken.

Even the most consistent fundamentalist admits the necessity of textual criticism, because one cannot translate the Bible until he has first determined the text. The same fundamentalist must also engage in the historical study of the canon, because that which he considers the Word of God is a specific list of books settled upon at a specific time by synagogue or church. Again, the same fundamentalist must say something about authorship, dates, and integrity of the books of the Bible, even if he only painfully reproduces the most traditional views.

The Reformers’ synthesis demands that if the Scriptures are the infallible document of revelation, they must be authentic. From the scraps to which radical criticism reduces the Bible no great Christian theology can be built. But neither can evangelical scholarship accept uncritically a whole battery of presuppositions about the nature of authenticity. In this writer’s opinion, the most trying and difficult days immediately ahead for evangelical theology have to do with the necessity for it to come to terms with what the authenticity of Scripture really is. Evangelical scholarship must show how it can intelligently interact with biblical studies, remain free from obscurantism, and yet maintain the theological authority and literary authenticity of Holy Scripture. A major step in this direction has been the publication of The New Bible Commentary and The New International Commentary. And an increasing number of young evangelical scholars give promise of effecting the synthesis between valid criticism and biblical authenticity.

The labyrinth prevails! And it poses these alternatives: agnosticism; a retreat to the absolutes and infallibilities of Roman Catholicism; the endless burning of options as advocated by Ebeling; or the revitalization of the synthesis of the Reformers. To this writer, it is only the latter that can end the labyrinth of contemporary theology. For only the synthesis of the Reformers can truly make Christian theology a science instead of a mere congerie of opinions.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

What is the Communists’ strategy for dealing with churches in Red China? A veteran journalist reports on the fate of Christians and evangelism.

All activities in mainland China today are influenced by the increasing necessity being forced on the leaders in Peking of keeping the Communist revolutionary spirit alive. The recent and continuing “socialist education” campaign and the “intensify the class struggle” movement, both initiated to overcome the growing disinterest among second-generation Communists, sternly remind all concerned with education and information media of their “special charge” in molding the Communist party’s image of “worthy revolutionary successors,” and of their disappointing record to date. As one newspaper, the Canton Southern Daily, explained the task on December 18, 1964: “We must educate and influence the younger generation with proletarian thinking and socialist trends and splash bright red colour on the pure souls of children.” It is against this background that any evaluation of the state of Christianity in Communist China must be made.

While there is no evidence that the Chinese Communist authorities have reason to fear a resurgence of revitalized Christianity after fifteen years of uneasy coexistence and adjustment, there is evidence of a concern in Peking over the part religion could play in the present widespread second-generation weariness—to put it cautiously—with austerity, slogans, incessant meetings, and unproductive sacrifice. The possible threat from religion in this present phase seemed to become apparent in 1963; since the winter of that year increasing numbers of articles have appeared in Communist periodicals indicating that the leaders are aware of an unhealthy and even dangerous interest in religion.

As a professional journalist based in Hong Kong, I have found that it is one thing to collect information on broad lines of policy from China, and quite another to get first-hand authoritative reports of the political or religious situation. In seeking the following information I interviewed as many Christian leaders, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, as possible in Hong Kong and Macao, questioned recent arrivals from the mainland, and read all the official, monitored reports put out by the leading government and news agencies. But what, in my opinion, has made all the foregoing really significant has been my opportunity to talk with a former leading Chinese Communist party official who had been in charge of the Communist religious policy at a high level since the Communists came to power, but who recently escaped to Hong Kong. He has been using the code name Hsiao Feng for reasons of security.

Hsiao Feng, a senior cadre member of the Chinese Communist party working with civil affairs and a non-religious man, was given sole responsibility for managing religious affairs in Canton when the Communists took over in 1949. What was decided in discussions in other cities, especially Peking, came to him in the form of detailed minutes and official memoranda, so that he was fully informed of Communist party treatment of religious activities throughout the whole country. Since arriving in Hong Kong, moreover, he has been receiving at least two letters a week from friends and former colleagues. He was responsible for meeting religious delegations to mainland China, for escorting them, and, of course, for briefing the various Chinese church leaders as to what their replies should be before the delegations ever set foot in China.

His primary responsibility as a senior ranking cadre member in the bureau concerned with religious affairs, he states, was to ensure the extinction of religion from Chinese society. But this was not to be brought about by “rough or severe measures.”

“[Chinese] Communists adopt another course,” Hsiao said, “by which they can derive some benefit from religions, reform the nature of religions, and make the religions serve Marxism-Leninism. Even in its most confidential documents the Chinese Communist party does not use the word ‘destroy’ or ‘ruin,’ as is also the case in purely theoretical journals or the press when religious problems are referred to.”

In support of this he quoted what Hsi Chung-hsun, vice-director of the propaganda department of the C.C.P. Central Committee, said at the first National Conference on Religious Work held in Peking in 1953:

Outright prohibition is useless; it will only hurt our Party. Religion is a form of social consciousness. If we prohibit it by administrative order, fanaticism will result, possibly bringing with it religious riots. Therefore, if we are to destroy it, we must do it gradually by other methods.

These methods were being used by the Religious Affairs Bureau when Hsiao Feng left China for Hong Kong, and still are. Briefly, his interpretation of his duties and analysis of his department’s activities in the ten years he was in charge, from 1953, is as follows:

The provisional Constitution of State had said that “the people of the People’s Republic of China shall have freedom of religious belief.” But, Hsiao says, except for regulations for the protection of religious buildings and objects of religious and cultural value, there was no detailed regulation issued by the central government (or by provincial, municipal, or district governments) for implementing this constitutional provision. “We only had a secretly understood way of dealing with religious affairs and personal interpretation of this religious policy.” The actual management of religious affairs was the responsibility of the subsection on “social organizations” of the “social affairs” section, which in turn was a section of the Civil Affairs Bureau. The only work guide the Civil Affairs officials had was Foundations of Leninism, by Stalin.

Hsiao’s own directives to religious leaders and church workers were for them to follow the directives of the Party’s Central Committee. The three main directives were: (1) People who believe in a religion have freedom; (2) people who do not believe in religion also have freedom, including the freedom to be against religion (but religious believers were not usually allowed to hear the last phrase); (3) people have freedom to change religious belief.

In practice this meant that all religious activities of any group could be held only in that group’s place of worship—e.g., Christian activities in churches, Buddhist activities in monasteries or nunneries. The reason given for this approach was that it “protected” religious activities from being disturbed by non-religious people, and at the same time protected non-religious people from being disturbed by the religious. Thus Christians could sing hymns only in their churches, Buddhists could not liberate living creatures out of doors, and Buddhist or Taoist priests could not be engaged to conduct a ritual for the dead in a private home. Even more strictly prohibited were pilgrimages to holy places, street distribution of tracts, and street meetings.

The application of these directives resulted in a redistribution of Christians among the various denominations. A Catholic or Protestant could change his faith if he chose. One could join several groups at one time. Anyone could introduce some different “religious” idea into his church or could openly oppose the accepted doctrines, rules, and practices. Since it was impossible to obtain permission to establish a new church, the only way for any new group to be established was for it to take over the authority or position of one already in existence. According to Hsiao, the indigenous Christian Assembly (Little Flock)—a group similar to the Plymouth Brethren in the West—has been the greatest beneficiary of this movement, not only in Peking but also in other leading cities in China. The Roman Catholic Church was the most resistant, but the authority of the priests was undermined gradually and it became difficult for them to enforce discipline. For instance, it was impossible for them to enforce the rule that a Catholic should not marry a non-Catholic.

The Three-Self Movement

When interreligious and interdenominational conflicts arose all over the country because of these directives, the officials concerned with religious affairs were instructed not to get directly involved but to take advantage of such conflicts in order to bring participants into conformity with Communist party principles. The Three-Self Movement, with its concern for self-propagation, self-support, and self-government of the churches, was under government pressures to receive no foreign funds and in every way to dissociate itself from agencies outside China. The aim was for “an autonomous church in China.” The propaganda department of the Communist party sent out an order saying: “The Party neither prohibits nor supports the development of religion, but seeks actively to lead religious people to carry out the Three-Self Movement and gradually reduce religious influence.” This policy has produced two trends of major importance to the future of Christianity in China: increasing secularization of the churches associated with the government-sponsored Three-Self Movement, and the growth of “underground home congregations,” to use Hsiao’s own term.

According to Hsiao, the bureau that deals with religious affairs held a secret “National Religious Works Meeting” every year at which the conditions and activities of every religion in the country were reported, examined, and discussed. Various policies were planned to deal with the different situations, and the conclusions were presented in a confidential document for members. Hsiao claims that by the time he left China, the emphasis of the Three-Self Movement was no longer “self-propagation, self-support, and self-government”; it now seeks to indoctrinate all priests and pastors in political and current affairs, and to make every church activity conform to government policy. The Peking leaders hope that politics will replace religion and that the church will become simply a propaganda organization.

The conclusion of the last “National Religious Works Meeting” report was that Catholics were more united, stricter, and more conservative religiously than Protestants. The Protestants, with their many sectarian contradictions, were easier to control. The “social gospel” Protestants were enlightened, comparatively speaking; the fundamentalists were conservative and obstinate, and were opposed to the Three-Self Movement. Fundamentalist pastors were reckoned more likely to become “objects of struggle” in any political movement. Catholicism was viewed as being reactionary and obstinate, openly opposed to the Three-Self Movement, while Protestantism was seen as crafty and cunning, participating in the movement while secretly trying to upset it.

The Central Committee directive instructed each religious affairs division throughout the country to “infuse Marxist thought into positive doctrines which can be used in each religion.” This was taken to mean that each religious affairs leader had to search out influential and reliable persons—Party members, if possible—in the various churches, who, after strict tests, might be absorbed into a “hidden strength” organization. Their task would be to collect secret information about other church leaders or members, train themselves to manage church affairs, and in time replace older pastors.

The Union Theological Seminary, Peking, is supposed to be free from government control; but it is run by influential Party members, and most of the students are government-selected and are expected to carry out the above policy. Although there is a smaller proportion of Party members in Nanking Theological Seminary, the policy is still the same, and the results can be seen in the diminishing number of applicants for the ministry. The Union Theological Seminary in Canton was closed down altogether in 1960 “because of a shortage of personnel.” In their teaching, the new Communist-line graduates oppose “supernatural sermons,” especially those dealing with the “final judgment” of Catholicism, the “second coming of Christ,” and “the last days of the world” of Protestantism. The Christian Assembly (Little Flock) was ordered to “abolish its women’s meetings, its weekly breaking of bread, its personal interviews with church members before the breaking of bread, and its rule against women speaking in church.” All men and women are equal in the New China, and all Christians must now preach world peace, patriotism, love of the people, and “support for the actual world.”

Religion On Record

The officials in charge of religious affairs keep a confidential record of every preacher and administrative worker of every religious organization. This record contains his (or her) photograph, a sample of his writing, his biography, and a list of his activities regarded as political. Catholic priests and fundamentalist pastors who “emphasize the conflicts between religion and the world, or the thought of dying for one’s religion,” with texts taken from the Bible, cannot be prohibited openly since this is their legal right (“This,” Hsiao says, “is a very difficult problem”), but they are called to the religious affairs department office to be “persuaded and educated.” They are also warned that this is being recorded against them in their report; and officials wait until they find evidence of some other misdemeanor and use all the evidence in a “determining judgment.”

The second major trend to result from the government’s religious policy is connected with the first: because of the increasing secularization of churches, there has been a proliferation of “underground home congregations.” Until 1958 there was no law against having meetings in private houses; but because of the growing number of these groups (whose exact figure was never known), and the Communist conviction that the successful early spread of Christianity in China was due to this method, it was decided to stop the spread without actual banning or persecution. Party members would go to church leaders and “persuade” them to discourage church members or persons known to be gathering in houses, to “keep the meetings in the church, since house meetings are beyond the scope of religious activities recognized by the authorities.” Hsiao told how he had closed the Kwangchow Christian Assembly when he discovered that members were distributing a pamphlet entitled “Christians and Communist Party Members,” which stated that because Christianity and Communism professed different faiths, cooperation between them was impossible. The church was declared a “reactionary group” and closed by government order. But the congregation, although scattered, began to gather in small groups in houses, while continuing to petition the municipal and central governments to restore their church to them. It was decided officially that to give them back their church would be better than to run the risk of multiplying clandestine “underground home congregations.”

Jack Chow, Hong Kong-based correspondent for the “Voice of America,” is from mainland China and an outstanding Christian. In 1962 he wrote an article, entitled “Invisible Church on Mainland,” based on interviews with new arrivals in Hong Kong. In it he describes the growth of “home fellowship groups”—which he says are still multiplying.

One of the arrivals, the wife of a former professor at Peking University … says that there are many such small groups formed by people whose churches have been either shut down or taken over by the Communists.

They meet irregularly but not infrequently at different homes for prayer meetings, Bible study and fellowship. They preach privately whenever and wherever possible. They have won many souls who have found God a great help in time of trouble.

This widespread and significant development was confirmed to me from other very divergent sources recently. A non-Christian Chinese merchant friend of mine now living in Hong Kong who visited Peking last year called on a longtime bank-manager friend who had become a Christian at a private house meeting. In the ensuing conversation and later correspondence, my Chinese friend’s wife has become a Christian. Another Chinese doctor has just heard from her doctor brother in Sinkiang, who writes glowingly of opportunities for witness and encouraging conversions. And one of the Catholic priests I have interviewed also says that news from his former parish in Anwei Province indicates that Roman Catholics, too, are leaving the large churches for the more personal meetings in private homes, ministered to at considerable risk by Chinese priests and lay believers.

T. Leo Brannon is pastor of the First Methodist Church of Samson, Alabama. He received the B.S. degree from Troy State College and the B.D. from Emory University.

The voice of the prophet who faithfully and without favor proclaims the Word of the living God is urgently needed today. The authentic prophet (and his kind still exists) is unlikely to meet with popularity. His message will be belittled as outmoded, irrelevant, and puritanical. People will say: “Prophesy good things, not evil. Tell us that all is well, that all is subjective, that all is relative; don’t speak to us about absolutes and about judgment.” But the true prophet is one who cannot keep silence. The Word is as a lire burning within him, and he must speak, whether the people heed or whether they spurn his message. We are thankful, therefore, that the voice of two witnesses has been raised again through the publication of another book by Sir Arnold Lunn, the distinguished Roman Catholic author and Alpinist, and Mr. Garth Lean, who is an Anglican. Like their earlier book, The New Morality, which was published last year, the new volume entitled The Cult of Softness sounds a call of alarm to our Western world.

The point is made that the cult of softness “is a recurring phenomenon in the history of nations, and becomes pronounced in a period of decline, as was the case in the sunset of the Roman Empire,” and the warning is given that “today the Communist nations, who are less infected by the cult of softness, may be destined for a role in the modern world analogous to that of the barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire.” This, of course, will be prophetic fare of the most unpalatable kind to those who are intent on the soft and selfish way of life. The joint-authors, however, are not prophets of inevitable doom. Their main purpose is to call our civilization back to the old paths before it is too late. In their judgment, the most disquieting feature of our age is to be seen in the open revolt against absolute standards. They produce an amplitude of evidence to prove their case.

The lostness of contemporary “culture” which frenetically attempts to locate meaning in the meaningless, normality in perversion, and the absolute in the relative, and for which the only standard is the repudiation of all standards, finds expression in the theater, where homosexuality and the lavatory are now approved themes; in the incoherent blatherings of avant-garde “poetry”; in the vulgar impostures of modern “art” that would insult the intelligence of a dog; in the novel that canonizes filth as a form of beauty; in the situation-“ethics” that reduces morality to the relativity of inter-personal relations; and in the “theology” that banishes the absolute of the Gospel and the objectivity of God.

Again, in the field of crime and social justice the doctrine is rapidly becoming fashionable that the real victim is the criminal, whose actions are conditioned by heredity and environment and irresistible impulses for which he is not responsible, and who therefore must be pampered and not punished. The doctrine is put forward on compassionate grounds. “But,” our joint-authors ask, “is it compassionate to tell people that they cannot help committing crime? Does this fill a weak man with hope and resolution? Or does it encourage him in the illusion that resistance to temptation is useless? We may also ask whether this attitude is compassionate towards the victim of the crime.” It would be difficult to imagine anything more destructive of the dignity of man, let alone the health of society. Dostoevsky had something to say of the advocates of this kind of doctrine in Crime and Punishment: “Their point of view is well known,” he wrote; “crime is a protest against bad and abnormal social conditions and nothing moral. No other causes are admitted. Nothing!… Human nature isn’t taken into account at all. Human nature is banished. Human nature isn’t supposed to exist.”

In the sphere of theology, some much publicized churchmen are charged by our joint-authors with a seeming lack of intellectual integrity. “It is not honest to God,” they say, “and it is certainly dishonest to man, the man in the pew, for a priest to repudiate, if only by implication, the basic doctrines which he is ordained to preach.” These basic doctrines are defined as the belief in a personal God who hears and answers prayer, the belief in the deity of Jesus of Nazareth, and the belief that he proved his claims by miracles “and by the miracle of the Resurrection in particular.” A minister who rejects any of these basic beliefs is advised that he should join the Unitarians.

In this connection, they insist on the importance in theology of “semantic honesty,” or honesty in the use of theological terms. “It is dishonest to man,” they affirm, “to confuse ‘repudiation’ and ‘reinterpretation.’ The more extreme modernists who reject the Resurrection are not reinterpreting, they are repudiating Christianity.”

With reference to the ecumenical movement, they urge that the essential and only practicable way forward is for cooperation in the militant proclamation of the faith and morality of Christian orthodoxy. “We are convinced,” they say, “that there is a very real possibility of a great Christian revival if authentic Christians can achieve a courageous and co-ordinated resistance to the confident and militant secularism which has made such inroads on what was once a Christian civilization.” “But,” they add, “we need not only a concerted defence but still more a concerted attack, for defence was never intended to be the main activity of the Church militant.”

The cult of softness has eaten into the very Church itself. Brethren, let us rouse ourselves and march forward to do battle in the name of the Lord of hosts!

This fortnightly review is contributed in sequence by J. D. Douglas, Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, Harold B. Kuhn, G. C. Berkouwer, and Addison H. Leitch.—ED.

Man’s most desperate need is spiritual. But in the pace of the world today, this need is often obscured by physical, emotional, and social problems. It sometimes happens that a man seeks medical aid when he should sec his pastor. Or it may also happen that he asks for his pastor’s counsel when what he really needs is psychotherapy. These and related concerns are explored in the panel discussion moderated by Assistant Editor Frank Farrell and participated in by evangelical psychiatrists (see the opposite page); in the essay by Dr. Finch (page 7); and in a news feature (page 38).

The lead editorial (page 20) is relevant to Independence Day. Another major editorial considers the problem of premarital sex in the light of scriptural principles.

NEWS: Summary

What happens when a doctor finds that the one method he sees for saving a patient’s life conflicts with the patient’s faith? How can medicine and religion help each other in such problem areas?

Early this spring a dozen men, meeting in Salisbury, Maryland, began cautiously exploring these questions. The venture was noteworthy, for those taking part were medical doctors, national officials of the American Medical Association, and members of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious group that opposes blood transfusions and that has an active contingent in Salisbury.

Although the statement issued afterward was long on such phrases as greater “understanding” and short on details, the confrontation itself was termed unprecedented, and it will probably be followed by more meetings. The Witnesses informally invited two of the men to their New York headquarters for further talks.

The two men were the Rev. Paul B. McCleave and Arne E. Larson, the director and assistant director of the Department of Medicine and Religion of the American Medical Association, and the meeting was only one of a number of results of the department’s formation in 1961.

The aim of the department is to “create the proper climate for communication between the physician and the clergyman that will lead to the most effective care and treatment of the patient,” says a department brochure.

After getting advice from the leaders of fifteen major religious bodies and leading physicians, the department went straight to the local level, conducting, through county medical societies, pilot programs in twenty-seven counties. The idea has caught on to such a degree that 637 county society programs have been carried out, and forty-nine states have approved a program of medicine and religion. The Maryland Stale Medical Journal devoted most of its March issue to medicine and religion, carrying articles entitled “What the Clergyman Expects from the Doctor” and “What the Doctor Expects of the Pastor.”

The Department of Medicine and Religion is also beaming its message at hospital chaplains, young seminarians, and medical students. So far three state medical schools (in Kansas, Indiana, and South Dakota) have introduced programs on medicine and religion. Kansas University Medical Center offers a ten-hour course on the subject, and the University of Colorado is to begin a post-graduate course for physicians and clergymen.

The AMA’s venture in dispelling distrust on both sides and establishing rapport is one of a number of efforts stressing the care of the “whole man” that have grown up in the United States in recent years.

Under this heading come the Academy of Religion and Mental Health, the Committee on Religion and Psychiatry of the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. The last group has not yet solved the problem of general standards and accreditation, and for this reason it is viewed with some suspicion. However, a number of physicians and psychiatrists attended, as individuals, the AAPC’s last conference.

One of the pioneers in the field is the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, started in 1937 by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and a medical doctor, Stanley Blanton, who studied under Sigmund Freud and who is the present director. Until recently its activities have been confined to New York, but it is now opening three clinics in the West and Midwest and is expanding its pastoral training program. This group was instrumental in getting the AAPC started two years ago.

Are so many different organizations necessary? Wouldn’t it help to coordinate them?

Arthur M. Tingue, executive director of the AFRP, says that coordination would be “very useful” and that it is already developing to some extent. As an example he cited the merger of the Council for Clinical

Training and the Institute of Pastoral Care, made possible by a grant by W. Clement Stone, chairman of the board of directors of the AFRP.

The movement is still organizationally diffuse, but it is doing what its backers hoped it would—bringing together doctors and ministers, sometimes in bedside consultations with patients. But the AMA’s new department sees the present challenge still as establishing rapport and studying problems. Some of these are:

—How to clear up confusion in the roles of medicine and religion and still treat the “whole man” without dividing him into compartments;

—How long a doctor is morally bound to sustain the life of a dying man;

—How the churches should educate their people regarding the meaning of disease and death;

—Whether and when ministers should make referrals to physicians and psychiatrists, and vice versa;

—The role of the clergyman in shaping healthy public attitudes toward psychiatry and mental illness.

The last point was underscored recently by the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Stanley F. Yolles, who envisions a network of 500 to 600 community mental health centers throughout the country by 1970.

“It is apparent,” he said, “that, as community leaders, the clergy of all faiths have a very important part to play in developing and promoting the centers.… The clergy not only know a broad cross section of the population, but also know it in depth. From this vantage point they are in the best position, excepting perhaps for the family doctor, to make referrals. The neurotic and the psychotic are often frightened as well as confused, so it is important that the suggestion that they seek help come from a person in whom they have confidence.… Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy can often put the patient on the right track. But it is religion that can help him realize that the track leads somewhere.”

Protestant Panorama

The Methodist Board of Missions announced last month that it had become the recipient of a $2,000,000-plus bequest. The gift, from the estate of the late Holbert L. Harris of Arlington, Virginia, is one of the largest sums of money ever contributed to Christian missionary effort. The estate is in the form of income-producing property that is expected to support sixteen missionary couples a year. Before his death Harris donated to the board a $750,000 motel near Richmond, the income from which now supports three medical missionaries.

The Latin America Mission’s “Evangelism-in-depth” team in the strife-torn Dominican Republic has moved its base of operations away from the capital, Santo Domingo, and team members have been visiting other parts of the country without hindrance. The mission estimates that $5,000 will be needed to cover expenses incurred as a result of the Dominican Republic crisis.

The Rev. Peter Deyneka, director of the Slavic Gospel Association, preached at Sunday services in the Moscow Baptist Church to audiences of 2,000 and 2,500. In Leningrad he spoke at a Wednesday night prayer service attended by 1,000 people.

West Indian Methodists and Anglicans have concluded a series of talks on cooperation and possible union, and will resume the discussion in November in Barbados.

Miscellany

A silver plaque presented by Pope Paul VI to a Jewish children’s organization was sold at auction in England for $1,470. Proceeds will go to the Italian Anne Frank Haven for Youth Aliyah in Northern Galilee.

The Constitutional Court of Italy has upheld laws making public insult of Roman Catholicism a crime.

Four theological faculties (Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and one non-denominational) have formed the Association of Theological Faculties in Iowa. They are of, respectively, the Aquinas Institute of Theology, the Theological Seminary of the University of Dubuque, Wartburg Seminary, and the School of Religion at the State University of Iowa (Iowa City).

Personalia

Milo A. Rediger, former vice-president and academic dean of Taylor University (Upland, Indiana), was elected president of the university.

Kendig Brubaker Cully was elected dean of the Biblical Seminary in New York.

Dr. Kurt Schmidt-Clausen has resigned as general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation to accept a staff position with the Lutheran Church of Hannover, whose 3.8 million members make it the largest territorial church in West Germany.

John R. Beardslee, III, was elected to the Abraham Messier Quick Chair of Church History at the Reformed Church in America’s New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Dr. James Allan Munro was elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

Leslie R. Keylock has been appointed assistant professor of theology at St. Norbert College, West De Pere, Wisconsin, and will thus represent classical Protestantism at a Roman Catholic college.

The Rev. Dr. D. Reginald Thomas, minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Germantown, Pennsylvania, has been called to be the pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue, New York City, succeeding Dr. Paul Austin Wolfe.

The Rev. Claude A. Horton was elected president of Lorne Park College (Free Methodist), Port Credit, Ontario. He succeeds the Rev. Byron Withenshaw, who resigned.

Herman J. Ridder was elected president of Western Theological Seminary (Reformed Church in America), Holland, Michigan.

Ralph P. Martin, visiting professor at Bethel College and Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, was named lecturer in New Testament studies at the University of Manchester, England.

They Say

“As Student Body President at the University of California at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement controversy I was intimately exposed to many agonizing, painful hours and days of political strife between students, faculty and administrators.… Into this life of turmoil and frustration stepped Jesus Christ. I was encouraged by a Campus Crusade for Christ staff member to invite Christ into my heart and life and to let Him take over the controls. Although hesitant at first, I invited Christ in, and His calm, sure, confident way settled the deep unrest of my soul. I have begun to experience the peace and the great adventure of life which God said is available to all, if we but ask.”—Charles R. Powell, in Collegiate Challenge Magazine.

NEWS: Church Assemblies

Reformed Church Moves Toward Union

On a sticky hot June afternoon, delegates to the 159th annual session of the Reformed Church of America General Synod debated a proposal to begin drafting a plan of union with the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern). Arguments in favor of moving toward union were diversified if not profound. Some argued that the loss of the church’s name would be a gain, since comparatively few people know the name, and some think it representative of a “funny sect”; the 384,000-member church in fact claims to be the oldest with continuous service in the United States. Others argued that union would make for a more effective witness and deliver the church from its sectional character. The chief argument against union was based on the fear that merger with the 930,000 Southern Presbyterians might eventually carry them into a union with the 3.3-million-member United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., for which most delegates apparently had little heart and less stomach.

After a protracted but good-spirited debate, the proposal to draft a plan of union was adopted by a 246–16 vote. A similar proposal was approved this spring by the Southern Presbyterian General Assembly. If no delays are encountered, the merger could be consummated by 1969.

In other action of the General Synod, held June 3–9 at Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania, permission was granted the members of the Reformed Church to engage “in acts of civil disobedience.” In taking this stand, the synod adopted the position of the World Alliance of Reformed and Presbyterian Churches: “There may come a time in spite of efforts to correct it when a law prevails that keeps people from receiving justice and thus conflicts with the purposes of God revealed in the Gospel. At such a time … a Christian … may engage alone or with others in an act of civil disobedience … [if] … his actions are taken first in the spirit of a faithful servant of his faithful Lord, and in sight and knowledge of authorities, and with a full willingness to accept the consequences imposed upon him by society under existing law.” The synod also called on its classes (regional jurisdictions) “to sustain and encourage ministers and laymen in their churches who may find themselves in difficulties because of their adherence … to official pronouncements of the General Synod in the area of race relations.”

In response to an overture of the Particular Synod of Michigan that the General Synod withdraw from the National Council of Churches, delegates voted almost unanimously to retain their affiliation with the NCC. The synod also approved distribution among its membership of the booklet, “The Truth about the National Council of Churches.”

Sharing the concern of the World Council of Churches over the millions of evangelicals outside the ecumenical movement whose “theological convictions” and “missionary zeal” could enrich the WCC and the whole ecumenical fellowship, the General Synod placed the problem in the hands of its Interchurch Relations Committee.

The synod’s 294 delegates also called for:

• Preparation of a statement asserting the “church’s firm position against the abuse of alcoholic beverages”;

• A definitive statement of the Reformed Church’s position on the “so-called New Morality”;

• A change in the church’s constitution that would allow for the ordination of women to the offices of elder and deacon—a change that would require the approval of two-thirds of the church’s classes.

Delegates expressed disapproval of the “retention of capital punishment as an instrument of justice within our several states.”

The assembly elected the Rev. Donner B. Atwood of Pompton Plains, New Jersey, as its new president, to succeed the Rev. Gorden L. Van Oostenburg.

In a stirring address, President Don Lubbers of Central College, Pella, Iowa, described the serious problems facing the denomination’s three colleges, bluntly telling the delegates that “the colleges are asking the church if it wants to continue in the business of higher Christian education or not.”

After fifteen years of efforts to revise the church’s liturgy, the General Synod sent down to its forty-six classes a revision of twelve of its obligatory liturgical forms. This action was preceded by much theological discussion, part of which turned on the question whether baptism administered in the Reformed Church was a baptism into this church or into the “Holy Catholic Church.” Delegates accepted the latter, but only as qualified by the term “visible.”

Although its membership totals 384,065, the oldest church in America increased the number of its congregations during 1964 only from 921 to 922. Yet the vitality of its 1965 General Synod showed that old churches neither die nor fade away, but live and revive as the Spirit moves within them.

Maturity In Schism

Encouraging signs of maturity were shown by Conservative Baptists at their May 31-June 4 annual meeting in Denver. They took with equanimity the news that a dissident group is breaking away. They displayed, moreover, a deep concern for relating their biblical thrust to contemporary ethical, moral, and social concerns.

The order of business was changed to allow time to discuss and pass a resolution on race relations. With hardly a ripple of dissent, the “messengers” resolved that:

“We, as Conservative Baptists, while proclaiming the saving gospel of Christ to the ends of the earth, be equally concerned to welcome to the hearing of the gospel in our churches people of every racial and ethnic background in our midst, and be it further resolved that in keeping with New Testament principles, membership in the local church be based upon faith, not race, upon personal relationship to Christ, not color, so that all who are ‘in Christ’ can participate fully in the worship and witness of the church at home and abroad, to the glory of God, without regard to race or ethnic origin.”

A small minority trying to gain control of the Conservative Baptist movement apparently had given up hope, and in preconvention sessions it voted to form its own organization under the name, “New Testament Association of Baptist Churches.” The most optimistic leaders of the dissident group predicted that 150 churches might unite with the new organization.

At least one leader of the splinter group has reportedly refused to endorse the new organization, feeling that “hard core” churches should align with the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. The ideology of the two groups is quite similar.

There are very few doctrinal differences between the “hard core” and Conservative Baptists generally. The separatists focus their criticism on the evangelistic ministry of Billy Graham.

In spite of the prevailing tensions, the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society reported a 13 per cent increase in giving. The society did not yet have a new general director to present to the constituency. The office has been vacant for over a year.

The Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society also reported that income had exceeded its budget. Its director, Rufus Jones, called for fifty missionaries for an inner-city ministry in twenty major urban areas in the United States. As an example of concern, the society plans to involve the entire constituency in a ministry in the inner-city area of Philadelphia when Conservative Baptists gather there for their 1966 annual session.

The messengers took a strong stand against glossolalia. They said that they do not believe “this so-called phenomenon of speaking in tongues, as taught and practiced by the modern tongues movement,” to be scripturally based, and that it “therefore cannot have any part in our Conservative Baptist church life.” But the messengers encouraged the constituency “to give greater emphasis to the total ministry of the Holy Spirit in our churches.”

The new president of the association is Dr. Herbert Anderson, minister of the Hinson Memorial Baptist Church of Portland, Oregon. Dr. Lloyd T. Anderson, minister of the Bethany Baptist Church of West Covina, California, was re-elected president of the Foreign Mission Society, and Dr. Russell Pavy, minister of the Bethel Baptist Church of Denver, was re-elected president of the Home Mission Society.

ROBERT P. DUGAN, JR.

Joining The Bandwagon

Some 7,000 Christian Scientists, attending the annual meeting of The Mother Church in Boston recently, were urged to climb on the ecumenical bandwagon.

The message from the Board of Directors made it plain that the time has come for members to seek “areas of agreement” with people of other denominations rather than regarding themselves as “entirely different or exclusive.” On the basis of its spirituality, “Christian Science has much in common with other denominations.”

The board called attention to the fact that “we are confronted with one of history’s deepest, most divisive social upheavals. Marking this upheaval is the churning drive of the individual to find the real meaning of life and to establish his legitimate place and identity in an increasingly complex and impersonal society.”

The directors stated that “social and governmental organizations … helpful and important as these efforts are … do not get to the root of the trouble.” They noted that “people everywhere are crying out for healing—healing in its larger and broader sense: the overcoming of sin and fear, of ignorance and sorrow.” “Sooner or later,” the message said, “both the individual and society must become willing to face up to the start and tragic results of rooting their faith in the disappointing promises of matter.” This reliance on matter not only “cuts men off from God” but “pulls them down and pulls them apart.”

The Christian Scientist solution to these problems is to be found in the working basis of their religious persuasion: the “understanding of God as divine love, all-inclusive spirit, is the one force [our italics] that can truly hold men together in understanding and harmony.”

Founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science has long been looked upon as outside the pale of the historic Christian faith.

Denying the reality of matter, sin, disease, and death, it has altered basic Christian doctrines beyond recognition. It adds to the Bible Mrs. Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures; is Unitarian (p. 256 of Science and Health); believes that the Comforter or Holy Spirit is Divine Science (p. 55); denies that Christ died on the cross (p. 44); rejects the deity of Christ (p. 361); and spurns justification by faith alone (p. 22).

From The Prairie

The Apostolic Church of Pentecost of Canada discussed plans at its annual meeting to expand its ministry in the heavily populated Province of Ontario. Described as “prairie-oriented,” the fellowship’s 130 churches are located chiefly in other provinces.

Plans call for groups of several married couples to move into communities where the denomination has no church and to establish one. Several couples have already volunteered.

The church, which combines Pentecostalism with a Calvinistic orientation, has 12,000 members and sixty foreign missionaries. The Rev. E. L. McRae was elected to the office of moderator for a three-year term.

In Montgomery, Alabama, eight days of evangelistic meetings with Billy Graham in mid-June produced a new potential for personal and social reconciliation in the estranged South.

The most explicit purpose of the racially integrated Montgomery crusade was to win individuals to Christ, and the 2,000 decisions recorded in the first five services reflected a bountiful harvest of changed lives. Some observers, moreover, were hopeful that the joint evangelistic effort of whites and Negroes in the “Cradle of the Confederacy” would conspicuously alleviate racial tensions.

Graham found the city resplendent with the bloom of crape myrtle, but Christians and unbelievers alike retained vivid memories of the historic racial tension in Selma and Montgomery three months before. The evangelist chose, therefore, not to issue any reminders. During the first part of the crusade he made only broad references to the race problem. The city proved generally tolerant of his stipulation of integrated seating, and the reaction of the local citizenry to this significant break in the segregationist pattern was surprisingly mild. The only occurrence to mar preparations for the crusade was the defacing of three billboards advertising the meetings.

“What is your god?” Graham asked the crowd at Cramton Bowl, the 24,000-seat stadium that is the site of the annual Blue-Gray football classic. “We all have something we believe in. You may even have a caricature of Christianity as your religion.”

The crusade began in the rain. A heavy, hour-long downpour delayed the start of the first service and soaked the crowd in the open grandstands. Hundreds left but about 8,000 stayed, and some struck up an impromptu song service while waiting out the rain. The service was held, and the sun eventually broke through to cheer the persevering.

After the rain of the opening day, most of the remainder of the week was cloudy and cool.

The weather was but one of the difficulties that had worried crusade organizers. All the preparations had to be completed in record time. “We had to do in six weeks what usually takes six months,” said Willis Haymaker, veteran organizer of evangelistic crusades. Graham’s choice of Haymaker to head the Montgomery effort was in itself a significant decision. The genial, 65-year-old Haymaker has laid the groundwork for scores of crusades dating back to Gypsy Smith in the 1930s. His experience and sense of diplomacy provided key ingredients.

The decision to hold a crusade in Montgomery was made in the early spring. As the racial crisis in March approached its climax, Graham dispatched three associates to Alabama. The team had received several invitations to hold a crusade, but it was unclear whether the interest of local pastors was intense enough to assure broad participation. Unanimous invitations from the two local ministerial associations convinced Graham. Several April meetings were scheduled in calmer areas of Alabama, and June 13–20 was set aside for Montgomery.

Would there be agitation from racists? Would white Christians refuse to participate side by side with Negroes? Where would committee meetings and planning sessions be held (the bi-racial crusade leadership was able to meet in few churches, for most white congregations still bar Negroes)?

The first public crisis was faced at the opening choir rehearsal. As the singers came in and took seats, they quite naturally segregated themselves. Pianist Tedd Smith broke the ice by sitting down with the Negro group and starting up a conversation. The mixing seemed to come easy after that, even though a white soprano complained that “I had to change my seat four times.”

Negroes outnumbered whites at the first choir rehearsal by about two to one. But more whites showed up as the crusade progressed. Eventually the race ratio in the choir, as well as in the audience, reflected remarkably well the whites’ two-to-one population edge over the Negroes in the city of Montgomery (population: 150,000).

Perhaps the most moving sights in Montgomery occurred at the close of each service, when white and Negro inquirers assembled to pray together on the Bermuda-grass turf in front of the platform. In a number of cases Negro Christians counseled whites who had responded to the invitation.

Such achievements will not easily be forgotten. National news media, however, took little notice of the crusade, and the outside world, which considers Montgomery a marked city, was left uninformed of the noteworthy advances. Montgomery is still best known for its resistance to racial integration, as a target of marchers, and as the place where the civil rights movement had its start with the bus boycotts in 1955.

Graham’s personal engagements in Montgomery included an 85-minute talk with Governor George C. Wallace, a Methodist, at the historic state capitol building (the first capitol of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president). They talked over Coca-Cola, and the tee-totaling, cigar-chomping governor was invited to attend the crusade. Wallace did not immediately indicate whether he would accept the invitation.

During the week, Graham also addressed a special meeting of more than 200 ministers and laymen and a joint session of civic clubs with some 500 persons in attendance.

All in all, the people of Montgomery seem to be giving the Graham team a warm welcome. The rapport stemmed partly from the fact that the evangelist and his closest associates are themselves Southerners. More significant was the gentle, patient reliance upon persuasion.

Attendance at the crusade increased each day, from the 8,000 of the opening Sunday to 15,000 by Thursday evening. Graham challenged his listeners in the middle of the week to invite enough people to fill the stadium on the closing Sunday.

Among the special guests participating in the crusade were Miss Ethel Waters, Negro actress-singer famous for her rendition of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”; Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, noted socialite who became a devotee of the Bible study movement after her conversion at Graham’s New York crusade in 1957; and Miss Carol Self (see succeeding story).

Thousands of feet of movie film were taken of the Montgomery crusade and will be edited into a special documentary for public showing. A number of prints of the film will be sent to Great Britain for use before the opening of Graham’s second London crusade, scheduled for 1966.

The local leadership of the crusade in Montgomery was in the hands of a thirty-member, bi-racial executive committee headed by a chairman and three co-chairmen, one of whom was a Negro minister, the Rev. A. W. Wilson, of Holt Street Baptist Church. Dr. J. R. White, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Montgomery, was chairman. Dr. Robert Strong, minister of Trinity Presbyterian Church, was a co-chairman, along with Robbins Taylor, a layman who is vice-president of the Standard Roofing Company in Montgomery.

Dr. Frank Tripp, noted Baptist hospital administrator and fund-raiser, headed the arrangements committee.

The crusade drew whites and Negroes from a wide area of Alabama. Some came from Selma, fifty miles away. Most of the more than 300 churches in the area were represented in the nightly crowds. Among these was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King became famous. The church, located across the street from the state capitol, is currently without a pastor.

No one would prophesy that the crusade meant an end to street marches, fire hoses, and cattle prods. Demonstrations in the Deep South have stirred the consciences of some. They have intensified prejudice and hatred in others. One pastor said that many people in the Deep South now see all major ecclesiastical and political issues in the light of the race question.

Upon such matters, the crusade had no spectacular effect. One Graham aide, a native of Mississippi, did predict that the meetings would provide a new basis for communication which could mean progress for the future. “It’s only a small step,” he said, “but it was worth taking.”

A Candid Confession

A comely coed, standing before a crowd of 17,000 at Cramton Bowl, candidly confessed to religious misgivings just hours before she took the platform.

Miss Carol Self, a junior at the University of Alabama, had been invited to give a Christian testimony to the youth-night crowd at the Billy Graham crusade in Montgomery, Alabama. That afternoon, however, she tearfully admitted to Dr. W. Stanley Mooneyham, a Graham team member, that she really had nothing to say, that she had fallen victim to a succession of doubts.

As she described it, “I had dedicated my life when I was sixteen and I was completely on fire for the Lord. But in college I began to have doubts. I even went through a period of atheism.”

Mooneyham, an ordained minister and moderator of the National Association of Free Will Baptists, offered sympathetic counsel that afternoon, and Miss Self, a Methodist, seemed convinced at last.

When Mooneyham left, Miss Self recalled, the doubts returned. “I thought he had brainwashed me. I felt that I was just fooling myself.

“I said, ‘Okay, God, you better send him back,’ and about that time he knocked on the door.”

Miss Self, winner of a campus beauty contest, closed her testimony on a note of triumph, asserting that she had finally exercised her faith:

“I tried it,” she drawled. “Now I’ve got it.”

‘The Restless Ones’

An unusual plea in behalf of a new film appeared in the June issue of Decision. published by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Here is an excerpt from the plea by Dr. Sherwood E. Wirt, editor of Decision:

“I want the people in the church to see it.

“I want the people who never go to church to see it.

“I want some of our avant-garde clergy of Britain and America to see it—men like John Robinson and Erik Routley and George Target and Ted Gill and Malcolm Boyd and Harvey Cox and Don Benedict.

“I want Lyndon Johnson to see it.

“I want to have it shown in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Seaside, Oregon, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Newport, Rhode Island, and Selma, Alabama.

“I want it shown in the Greek Theatre of my alma mater, the University of California in Berkeley.

“I want the Gold Coast crowd on the Australian beaches to have the chance to see ‘The Restless Ones.’ And the Mods and Rockers at Blackpool and Brighton in England.

“I want the night lifers swarming the top of the Montmartre in Paris every night to have a look at it.…

“This is a picture that tells the world the truth.”

The 105-minute film produced by World Wide Pictures focuses upon the teen problem. It was shot against the backdrop of the Billy Graham evangelistic crusade in Los Angeles. Premieres are scheduled for mid-September.

After The Earthquake, Two Schools

“The tragedy in Alaska is that we have not been producing spiritual leadership,” says the Rev. John M. Gillespie, general director of Arctic Missions. In an effort to meet the challenge, two new Bible schools are to be established next year, one by Arctic Missions and one by Central Alaskan Missions.

Arctic Missions, whose headquarters is in Anchorage, will add a Bible institute to its high school near Palmer at a minimum cost of $65,000. The high school now has sixteen students. A number of its future graduates are expected to choose to continue their training at the new institute.

The thrust of the mission is toward the interior. Gospel teams sent to isolated interior areas have reported a number of conversions, says Mr. Gillespie.

Central Alaskan Missions has allocated eighty acres of land adjoining its headquarters at Glennallen for a Bible college. Each student will carry a Bible major. He will have the option, however, of a three-year diploma course, a four-year degree course, or a business course.

CAM’s priority project last year was a 5,000-watt radio station, which was completed just twelve hours before the Good Friday earthquake struck. The station did emergency duty for five days, then signed off to await final clearance from the Federal Communications Commission. “In all probability, KCAM is the only radio station to begin broadcasting as the result of an earthquake,” says a spokesman.

The Rev. Vincent J. Joy, CAM director, says that the freshman program for the new Bible college will begin in 1966 and that other classes will be added in succeeding years. Construction costs for the first year are being tentatively estimated at $100,000.

Free Time And ‘Freethought’

The Federal Communications Commission advised Mrs. Madelyn Murray last month that she is not entitled to free time from thirteen radio and television stations in Hawaii to reply to their broadcasts of religious services.

Mrs. Murray, who initiated a case against recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools that led the Supreme Court to hold such religious exercises in the classroom unconstitutional, now resides in Honolulu. She complained to the commission that the stations carried from two to twenty-eight hours of religious broadcasts a week but denied her organization public service time for a program to present “freethought,” which she described as “the opposite of religion in every respect.”

The commission, in a brief letter to Mrs. Murray, said that the stations had been asked to reply to her charges and that they told the FCC that “freethought” is not “a sufficiently controversial issue of public importance in their respective service areas to warrant presentation.” The stations also said that they believe “the mere broadcast of church services, devotionals and prayers is not the presentation of a controversial issue of public importance within the meaning of the fairness doctrine.”

The commission said it could find no fault with these replies. The licensee, they said, is required only to make a “reasonable judgment in good faith” on the merits of each situation “as to whether a controversial issue of public importance is involved.”

The FCC said its task in passing on any complaint is not to substitute its own judgment for that of the station owners but merely “to determine if the licensee can be said to have acted reasonably and in good faith.”

On the basis of the facts presented, the commission members told Mrs. Murray that they believed the stations acted with reasonable judgment in granting her occasional appearances on free public service time but denying her any regularly scheduled program.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Ncc On Right-To-Work

The National Council of Churches drew fire last month when it entered the political debate over right-to-work laws and threw its weight in congressional hearings for repeal.

Prior to the testimony of Dr. J. Edward Carothers, secretary of the council’s Commission on the Church and Economic Life, nearly a hundred clergymen sent protest telegrams to members of the subcommittee-holding the hearings.

“No person may presume to speak on this issue on behalf of the Council’s membership, inasmuch as member congregations have not been polled on the repeal or retention of Section 14 (b),” the clergymen said.

This section of the Taft-Hartley Act authorizes the states to outlaw labor-management agreements requiring employees to pay dues to unions as a condition of continued employment.

Dr. Carothers said that he made no claim to speak for the 40 million members of the NCC-affiliated denominations, but he also said that the NCC General Board supported the repeal of the right-to-work provision and that the board was broadly representative of member churches.

Nineteen states have “right-to-work” laws. They are favored by many leading churchmen (who regard enforced union membership as an impingement on workers’ rights) and by several religious minor ity groups (such as the Mennonites, Amish. Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Reformed, Protestant Reformed, and Plymouth Brethren) who oppose joining unions on grounds of conscience. Several churchmen testified for these minority groups.

Ncc: Between Church And World

What distinguishes a church organization from a secular agency? With “the world” registering so much influence on the program of the National Council of Churches, officials of that far-flung organization are beginning to ask that question aloud.

To members of the NCC General Board gathered in New York for their June meeting, General Secretary R. H. Edwin Espy suggested that the council should be careful not to lose its unique place in American life.

The council has been consciously increasing its involvement in “the life of the world” in recent years, Dr. Espy reminded board members. On the other hand, he continued, “there is a subtle sense in which the life of the world makes many of our decisions for us.” “There is scarcely a program of the National Council that is not affected, consciously or unconsciously, soundly or mistakenly, by the impingement of the world,” the general secretary said.

Secular life is shaping a new role for the NCC, from one end of the organization to the other, Dr. Espy told the board; the council “has become a new factor in the life of the nation.” Various government agencies, private organizations, institutions, and individuals are coming to the NCC for answers to their questions about religion, he reported. And churchmen of every rank and stripe are coming to the council for a word on the world. The NCC’s chief executive said this might suggest for the organization a role of “mutually recognized central telephone operator” through which church and world could call each other.

Beside the practical reasons put forward by NCC officials for council involvement in secular affairs, are there also theological ones? In bringing this question before the board, Dr. Espy said it may now be time to re-examine what have been the “common theological assumptions” of NCC personnel.

“For the most part heretofore we have assumed that we have these common assumptions,” he told the policy-makers. “But the world may be getting us into trouble not only practically but theologically.”

Will the NCC be forced to develop a theology of its own, over and above the theologies of its thirty member denominations? The question is being seriously discussed. Can the council continue without more than the minimum statement now in its constitution?

At this point there is “a certain ambivalence in our expectations of the ecumenical movement,” Dr. Espy reminded the board members. On one hand, he said, “it is not appropriate” for the council to have a theology if it is to represent a variety of denominations with creeds of their own. On the other hand, “it is not possible for it to represent the churches soundly and effectively without some common theological assumptions.”

The board, which had asked for some kind of theological study of secular involvement at its meeting last December, listened with interest. No formal action was taken. The general secretary said only that the requested study is “under way.”

Entering a new field of political activity, the board approved a policy statement opposing the proposed Dirksen amendment or any other plan that would change legislative apportionment procedures. The debate over the issue drew to the microphones some of the council’s top leaders. David B. Cassat, a United Presbyterian layman from Iowa who is council treasurer, made a rare speech against “the establishment” and the proposed statement. Quick to defend the document, however, was his denomination’s stated clerk, Eugene Carson Blake.

When the question was called, only 100 of the more than 250 board members registered a vote. The tally was 77 for the statement, 16 against, and 7 abstaining.

The vote pointed up a problem brought before the board by one of its member denominations. At its April General Assembly, the Presbyterian Church U. S. asked the NCC to amend its rules to provide that at least half the board members would have to record votes before a policy statement could be enacted. In answer, the board reaffirmed its current procedures “as being a responsible representative form of government.” Present rules for adoption of policy statements require the affirmative vote of two-thirds of the board members present and voting. However, as little as one-fourth of the total board membership can enact a policy statement.

Board members indicated that they were aware of mounting criticism over pronouncements. After much debate, the second resolution on Viet Nam in as many board meetings was passed. The document reaffirmed the February action calling for negotiation and asked the government to reappraise its policy, particularly the bombing of North Viet Nam. Suggestions that the NCC policy-makers were not competent to advise the government on such specifics were pushed aside as the resolution was approved by a loud voice vote.

Speaking out on another trouble spot where American troops are involved, the board associated itself with a cable sent from one of the NCC divisions to Santo Domingo “questioning our government’s unilateral military action and insensitivity to the implications of such action.…”

The board, meeting at New York’s interdenominational Riverside Church, also:

—Approved a resolution on world hunger, asking the government to change a number of its policies to provide more food for the undernourished.

—Sent to the churches a message on “Christian Responsibilities for Education Through the Week,” calling for support of public schools, for teaching “about” religion in the schools, and for more effective Christian education within the churches.

—Authorized a national-level “working group” to consider possible collaboration with the American Roman Catholic Bishops’ Commission for Ecumenical Affairs, and seated the first official Roman observer at a board meeting, Msgr. William W. Baum, executive director of that commission.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Antidote For Smut

Across this country there are 55,000 drugstores, as familiar to the American way of life as baseball or apple pie. One out of five of these drugstores is identified as a Rexall store, and this month many hundreds of the 11,000 Rexall stores have a new sign on their newsstands. The sign invites the customer to call any objectionable material to the druggist’s attention, with the promise that it will be removed.

A strictly voluntary effort, the program has met mixed reactions. Ministerial groups, parent-teacher associations, and the like are overwhelmingly enthusiastic. But in some cases the refusal of the druggist to accept objectionable publications brought an ultimatum from the distributor that he take everything or nothing. And in some communities the Rexall druggist announced that his newsstand was empty, because he was sticking by his convictions.

Asks druggist Harry Powell, president of the International Association of Rexall Druggists: “Do we have any more right to allow the poisoning of the mind than we do the poisoning of the body?” Parent of teen-agers himself, Powell conceived the idea and has paved the way by cleaning up the newsstands in his five Southern California stores.

Ataturk Undone

Although the bells of scattered Orthodox churches still sound out every Sunday morning in ancient Istanbul, it is the city of mosques—nearly 2,000 of them. Most famous of all religious edifices there is the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which was a part of Orthodoxy till the Ottoman triumph of 1453, when it was turned into a mosque. This church with its striking Byzantine features is regarded as having had a greater influence on the history of art than any other single building. Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938), father of modern Turkey, converted it into a museum and center of archaeological work.

A few weeks ago, out of the anniversary celebrations for the Islamic conquest of Istanbul there arose demands that the building once more became a mosque. A meeting organized by those advocating this significantly closed with a special prayer for the soul of the conqueror, Mohammed II.

Here is signified the fundamental division among the Turks at the present time. The religionists hold that Ataturk’s reforms damaged the cause of Islam; the progressives (including most intellectuals) support the reforms. Ataturk had decreed that the Koran be read, and the call to prayer given, in Turkish instead of Arabic; vote-seeking politicians have now restored Arabic. Pilgrimage to Mecca was formerly prohibited; Turkey today of all the Muslim states sends probably the greatest number of pilgrims—and millions of precious dollars sorely needed for internal economy are annually carried out for no tangible return.

Continuing disagreement about educational methods instituted by Ataturk has resulted in a national illiteracy figure of 60 per cent, but since his death in 1938 the mosque-building business is booming. The trend is thus reflected in the Istanbul daily Cumhuriyet for May 31, 1965, under the headline: “4,130 men of religion are trained each year, and 500 agriculturists.” Commented an agricultural expert: “Who will undertake the development of the country, we or the priests?”

Evidence suggests that the priests have a clear lead at the moment (a fact not unrelated to the parliamentary elections scheduled for October) and that Ataturk’s power is fading. He strictly forbade polygamy; today it is widespread. He separated church and state, but the religionists have made great strides in their aim to restore a thoroughly Islamic constitution.