NEWS: Ecclesiastical Affairs

A half-dozen Church of England clergymen are publicly at odds with the hierarchy and long-standing tradition.

One man has indicated he is resigning from the ministry of the Church of England (following in the footsteps of two other evangelical clergymen who resigned in recent months), one minister has resigned his parish, and two others are defying their bishop by refusing to baptize babies.

More public dissent is expected to follow in the next month or two.

The Rev. David L. Gardner, intimating to his parishioners that he is leaving the Church of England, said that the Thirty-nine articles, the Prayer Book, and the Ordination Service do not adequately express “the present theological position of the Church,” and that there is “no pretense” that it does.

Mr. Gardner, vicar of Alne, Yorkshire, attacked the “disastrous travesty of the truth” involved in the doctrine of baptismal regeneration and the unscriptural view that presumes that “the Church of God should be in any way subordinate to Parliament, especially when Parliament could become almost totally non-Christian.”

The complaints of the other three clergymen also involved infant baptism. The Rev. George H. Forester, vicar of St. Paul’s, Beckenham, says he is resigning his parish because he no longer believes in the practice, but hopes to remain within the Anglican Communion.

The Rev. Richard Vick and the Rev. Christopher Wansey, both of the diocese of Chelmsford, have simply said that they will not baptize babies. Mr. Vick declared that the practice was unscriptural and suggested dedication instead, and Mr. Wansey said that infant baptism “not only eviscerates the sacrament but also deprives that child of the privilege and unique experience of adult baptism in later years. This is a deprivation that the Church should not follow.”

Mr. Vick was told by his bishop that he should resign if his decision was final.

Some Anglican observers have assailed the dissenters, most of whom are evangelicals. “We hope that a statement will soon be forthcoming from the highest authority to remind dissident clergy of their plain duty and their solemn oaths,” said the Church Times, an independent Anglican weekly.

In refusing to baptize infants, the ministers are in breach of ecclesiastical law and are liable to suspension for three months.

The issue has flared up at a time when a shortage of ordinands has closed one or two liberal colleges (and when evangelical colleges are bursting at the seams).

Ballot Boycott

Dr. Martin Niemoeller came up with another controversial suggestion last month and was promptly denounced by West German Protestant leaders. Niemoeller urged voters to cast only blank ballots in the 1965 general elections as a protest against “dictatorial” rulers. He claimed that West Germany’s political parties ignore the people’s views on issues of world peace and disarmament.

Bishop Hanns Lilje of Hannover, chairman of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany, branded the proposal as “a wrong means to promote world peace.” Similar views were expressed by Dr. Joachim Beckmann of Dusseldorf, president of the Evangelical Church of the Rhineland, and Dr. Hermann Dietzfelbinger, of the Lutheran Church in Bavaria.

Niemoeller, retiring president of the Evangelical Church of Hesse and Nassau, charged in an article in the Voice of the Parish, a publication affiliated with the Confessional Church founded in 1933 to uphold the Christian faith against Nazism, that democracy existed in West Germany in name only and that the three parties on the ballot were “power greedy” and “no longer interested in the people’s welfare.”

The parties are the Christian Democratic Union (with its Bavarian affiliate, the Christian Social Union), the Social Democratic Party, and the Free Democratic Party—all represented in the coalition government set up in October, 1963.

In condemning Niemoeller’s proposal for what amounted to a “boycott” of the elections, Lilje said it was “a just concern for an orderly state that should cause men to use the available means of a democratic state order with conscientiousness and care.”

“Therefore,” he stressed, “the command of the hour is not abstinence [from voting], but rather a responsible and courageous participation in public, political, and civic life.”

Conceding that Dr. Niemoeller’s “provocatory utterances” stemmed from a genuine concern about peace, Lilje said that nevertheless he was urging the “wrong method” in proposing that the people express their will for peace by voiding ballots.

Beckmann said he shared Niemoeller’s concern about West Germany democracy, but he did not believe that an election boycott was the correct way to counter democracy’s shortcomings.

“One cannot guard against the danger of dictatorship by invalidating ballots or abstaining from the polls,” he said.

The Church In The North

Newly developing Eskimo communities are creating a need for many more churches and missionaries, according to Anglican Bishop Donald B. Marsh, who made an eight-week tour to recruit workers.

He said in London last month that at least two young married clergymen have agreed to serve this diocese of 1½ million square miles.

“For the first time in the Arctic,” he said, “communities have been formed with three or four hundred people living in each. As a result, the Eskimo is now having to adjust himself to a totally new way of life.”

In an effort to educate the Eskimo, he said, the Canadian government has tried to change the Eskimo’s nomadic way of life by providing wooden houses in small communities. Problems of finding employment have developed, however, and relief programs apparently will be necessary for a considerable time.

He said that the establishment of churches and provision of pastoral leadership in the new communities is a pressing need as more and more Eskimo Christians are for the first time experiencing a normal church life.

Liberty Or Enslavement?

Full religious liberty in Spain would mean the “enslavement” of the consciences of the country’s Roman Catholic majority, according to a prelate who is regarded as a spokesman for conservative elements among the Spanish hierarchy.

Titular Archbishop Luis Alonso Munoyerro of Sion, military ordinary of the Spanish armed forces, clearly had in mind the declaration on religious liberty scheduled to be a top-priority item on the agenda of the Second Vatican Council’s fourth session.

In an interview with a Madrid monarchist daily, the archbishop urged Spaniards to be “circumspect” in the matter of religious liberty, stressing that they should not “join the chorus of those champions of liberty who judge the success of the Vatican Council by whether it produces the enslavement of the conscience of Catholic people, and among them the Spanish people.”

Archbishop Munoyerro’s remarks were regarded by observers in Madrid as especially significant in view of proposed legislation to grant greater freedom to the country’s Protestant minority. Although the projected law would retain the present ban on Protestant missionary activity, it would enable the Protestant churches, among other things, to operate schools and publish newspapers.

Arch bishop Munoyerro buttressed his warning against full religious liberty by charging that an international conspiracy was trying to “make Catholic unity disappear from our fatherland.”

He described a newspaper editorial, subsequently traced to the New York Times, as typical of the enemies of Spain who want to deprive her of her Catholic heritage.

The archbishop said their religious heritage enabled Spaniards to drive the Moors out of Europe, to make an impact on the Council of Trent, which fought against the Protestant reform, bring the Gospel to Latin America and the Philippines, “and, ultimately to free Europe from Communism by the defeat Spain inflicted upon it in our crusade of liberation.” The “crusade” referred to was the Spanish Civil War.

Ecumenical Accreditation

Another well-known evangelical seminary seems assured of full academic accreditation. The American Association of Theological Schools announced last month that its Commission on Accrediting had recommended Gordon Divinity School “on the basis of accreditation schedules completed by the school and evaluation by teams from the commission.” Under a newly adopted procedure, accredited membership in the AATS is granted only by a vote of delegates to the organization’s biennial meeting. The next meeting is scheduled for 1966.

Also recommended for accreditation at the 1966 meeting was Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. The Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Virginia, was accepted into accredited membership in a special category of “Schools of Religious Education” contingent upon favorable action by the American Association of Schools of Religious Education upon the agreement approved by AATS.

For the first time, an Orthodox school has won recognition from AATS. St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminar)’, a Russian Orthodox institution in Tuckahoe, New York, was recommended to the 1966 biennial meeting for associate membership along with Ashland (Ohio) Theological Seminary.

It appears, moreover, that Roman Catholic theological schools will soon be operating under AATS, which is the officially recognized accrediting body for North American seminaries. The AATS reports:

“Confronted with inquiries about or applications for membership from eight Roman Catholic theological schools, the committee first affirmed that such membership in conformity with our standards would be to the advantage of theological education in the United States and Canada, then instructed the staff to deal with such applications as with those from any other schools and appointed a special committee for counsel to the staff.”

Succeeding Mr. Oikumene

Who will succeed the retiring general secretary of the World Council of Churches, Dr. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft?

The fourteen-member WCC Executive Committee thought it had come up with the answer last summer in the Rev. Patrick C. Rodger, a Scottish Episcopal priest who has been executive secretary of the Faith and Order Department of the council. Announcement of his nomination by the Executive Committee raised a furor, however, presumably not over Rodger himself but over the propriety of making public the selection in a way that made it seem to be a sure thing. Angered members of the 100-member Central Committee came forth with heated reminders that they alone were entrusted with the final choice.

This month the Central Committee meets at Enugu, Nigeria, to consider a successor. Visser ’t Hooft, who will be sixty-five this year, is widely regarded as ecumenism personified; one highly placed source regards his leaving as “the retirement of omnicompetence.” He has a chain of service as WCC general secretary dating back to 1938, when the organization had only provisional status.

It is unlikely that the Central Committee will fail to accept Rodger. There is a possibility however, that the post will be divided into two or more offices.

The Winds Of Change

A prominent American Baptist clergyman is changing denominations this month.

He is the Rev. Harleigh M. Rosenberger, who has resigned as president of the American Baptist Ministers’ Council and as pastor of the Jefferson Avenue Baptist Church in Detroit to become the pastor of the United Church of Christ in Rochester, New York.

“I have always had a great ecumenical concern,” said Dr. Rosenberger in explaining the move. “I am certainly not leaving as a protest.” He also said his call was to a specific congregation rather than to a generalized ecumenism.

A United Church of Christ official said that the denomination includes pastors coming from other denominations.

Both the American Baptists and the United Church of Christ hold to the autonomy of the local congregation. Members of both churches have attended the Consultation on Church Union—a six-way merger plan; the United Church of Christ participated officially, and the American Baptists were observers.

The United Church of Christ baptizes infants, and Baptists dedicate them. However, Dr. Rosenberger has indicated his willingness to baptize infants. He also said that there were no major doctrinal differences between the two denominations.

NEWS: Special Report

Students probe opportunity to serve. IVCF convention shows evangelical vitality, broadening social interest.

Gathered in the mammoth University of Illinois Assembly Hall, 7,000 youthful delegates lifted hearts and voices in climactic lines approaching the pitch of a battle cry:

We are on the Lord’s side,

Savior, we are Thine!

Perhaps it was their way of repudiating student escapades at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, and Seaside, Oregon. Or perhaps the Congo martyrdoms had stirred a new measure of spiritual vitality. Whatever the reasons, the Seventh Inter-Varsity Missionary Convention held during the last five days of 1964 could show the world an army of Christian collegians in a sincere quest for purposeful living and service.

At the same time, 3,500 Methodist college students and campus ministers met at Lincoln, Nebraska, for the Eighth Quadrennial Conference of the Methodist Student Movement. At Richmond, Virginia, the Eighth Quadrennial Youth Convention of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. drew 540 students.

The Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, convention, sponsored by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in the United States and Canada, drew its record turnout from nearly a thousand campuses. Almost too restrained at the outset, the students proved to be earnest seekers and intent listeners. Only on the last night did an unruly element protrude. Announcement of a ban on picture-taking by Dr. John W. Alexander, IVCF’s newly appointed general director, was greeted by a defiant succession of camera flashes. When Alexander was left speechless, the crowd roared in good humor. That episode aside, delegates behaved in a way becoming their collective destiny: tomorrow’s missionary task force.

The Urbana convention has become the world’s leading trade fair of the foreign missions enterprise and the most productive medium of missionary recruitment.

“It’s a candidate secretary’s dream,” said Dr. Horace L. Fenton, associate general director of the Latin America Mission. “These delegates badger us from early morning until late at night. What’s more, they voice important concerns, not things like ‘what’s there to eat on the field?’ ”

One missionary representing a major denominational board reports that more than 50 per cent of its candidates for overseas service have had IVCF contacts. To buy up opportunities, that board sent four staff members to man its displays. Another missionary board executive said that fifteen of its 1964 recruits had attended Inter-Varsity’s last convention.

A total of ninety denominational and independent missionary boards were represented by convention displays. The exhibits stretched across nearly a half-mile of concourse corridors in the circular, ultra-modern hall. Walkways were remarkably clean. indicating a minimum of waste among the 1,000,000 or more pieces of literature that changed hands during the convention.

The cresting interest of denominational boards in Inter-Varsity candidates provides a widening wave of evangelical missionary commitment within mainstream churches. It also works to diminish the embarrassing number of conservative missionaries abroad who avoid an ecumenical identification or association.

Among the delegates were the editor-in-chief of the student daily at Yale, a nephew of Kenya’s Tom Mboya, a drama student from Korea, and the son of a missionary martyred in Bolivia. In all, some seventy-five denominations were represented, including Roman Catholicism: at least eight trainees for the priesthood were on hand. In the absence of a category of “observers,” under which they had proposed to attend, they registered as delegates.

The breadth of concern among delegates carved out new avenues of involvement for Inter-Varsity. Questions sent to panel discussions by the students dealt largely with racial justice and Roman Catholicism. Student sensitivity to these issues obviously will encourage Inter-Varsity to regard them as focal points for future campus discussion and planning.

As new general director, the 46-year-old Alexander assumes responsibility for the movement’s strategy. His credentials include a distinguished academic career at the University of Wisconsin and visiting professorships at Harvard and UCLA. He comes to an organization which has been plagued by internal strife despite a realization of unparalleled opportunities for Christian outreach on secular campuses throughout North America. The academic world ignores Christianity before exploring it, he says, and thus rejects an unknown.

IVCF’s response to the temper of the times was stamped indelibly on the convention program. Easily the most electrifying suggestion to come out of the panels on social issues was one which challenged missionary boards to reject financial aid from churches which deliberately encourage segregation. Further underscoring the intensity of the racial problem was panel member Ruth Lewis, who was one of the first Negroes ever to enroll at the University of Alabama and who is now studying for a doctorate there. Arthur Glasser, home director of China Inland Mission—Overseas Missionary Fellowship, predicted that missionaries’ concern for racial justice would be “determinative.”

The Rev. Ruben Lores, a native of Cuba who has been appointed evangelism program coordinator for Latin America Mission, admonished Christians not to take social issues lightly. Evangelicals in the Latin American situation, he said, must press for political evolution, rapid social reform, industrial development, and fair trade agreements.

The most interesting platform personality was P. T. Chandapilla, 38-year-old general secretary of the Union of Evangelical Students of India. Chandapilla, clad in a white linen dhoti and shoeless, exhorted students to make their life their message. His own volatile spirit encouraged a more militant approach to evangelism.

Students also will remember the quietly persuasive appeal for Christian unity voiced by Executive Secretary I. Ben Wati of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, the plea for “a lifetime of Bible study” uttered by the Rev. John R. W. Stott of the Church of England, and the articulate delineation of the convention theme—“Change Unparalleled, Witness Unashamed, Triumph Unquestioned”—by Dr. Eugene Nida, translations secretary of the American Bible Society.

Evangelist Billy Graham told a crowd of 13,500 that the academic world is losing its influence among students because it avoids the issues of sin, suffering, death, and the purpose of history. Only the Bible, he said, speaks to the ultimate situations.

Other highlights of the convention program included a memorial service for martyred missionaries and a New Year’s Eve communion service.

The morning-to-night schedule mapped out for delegates left little time for informal social contacts. Even the couple who spent their honeymoon at the convention were obliged to frequent the residence-hall Bible studies and prayer meetings. Couples who did manage to pair off during the proceedings were more likely to be thinking of a future together on the mission field than of an enchanted evening under Urbana’s cold, starless sky.

From The Big Ten

The Urbana convention was a homecoming for Dr. John W. Alexander, the new general director of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in the United States. Alexander was born in the Urbana area and won his undergraduate tuition by playing a D-flat clarinet in the Illinois Concert Band.

Alexander is giving up a distinguished academic career to join IVCF. He leaves the University of Wisconsin as chairman of its Department of Geography. He had also been an assistant dean of its College of Letters and Sciences.

Alexander succeeds Charles H. Troutman, who will continue with IVCF in another rapacity.

Raised a Free Methodist, Alexander is now a member of Park Street Congregational Church, Boston. In Madison, Wisconsin, he and his wife have been attending a Conservative Baptist church. They have four children.

Following undergraduate work at Illinois, where he earned Phi Beta Kappa honors, Alexander served as a gunnery officer aboard an aircraft carrier during World War II. He earned a master’s and doctor’s degree at Wisconsin and stayed there to teach. His accomplishments include a pacesetting 660-page textbook on economic geography published by Prentice-Hall in 1963.

One of his first aims in Inter-Varsity is to attract more revenue and to increase staff salaries. Another is to cultivate contacts and extend cooperation in denominational student ministries.

The Gospel Provides A Sequel

Ten years ago a young Buenos Aires accountant named Eduardo Burgos murdered his mistress and cut the body into small pieces. The sensational press of Argentina made the most of the sordid story, and the case of “Burgos el descuartizador” (Burgos the quarterer) was played up from virtually every angle.

The sequel to the story is now being published by the same papers, and all reports stress the unusual feature of what would otherwise have been a very ordinary event: While in prison, Burgos heard the Gospel and was converted. The change in his life impressed jailers and judges and influenced them and public opinion in his favor. His sentence was shortened because of good conduct, and last month he was freed.

In statements made to the press Burgos, in a humble simple manner, told how the Lord had saved him. The Gospel had not had such a good press in Argentina since the visit of Billy Graham in 1962!

Burgos is one of many convicts reached in Argentina by a group of Plymouth Brethren who specialize in prison work. A former gangster, converted while serving his sentence, is now a full-time worker with the group. Evangelical churches have been formed by groups of converted inmates in two prisons. In the city of Villa Maria the head of the local prison is an evangelical, and the government recently paid tribute to “the astounding success of his social and spiritual work.”

A. CLIFFORD

Congo: Present With The Lord

Fifty years ago last year C. T. Studd went to the Congo to establish the first work of the World Evangelization Crusade.

Late last fall WEC received a telegram beginning simply, “Following glorified.” On the list were William P. McChesney, Phoenix, Arizona, Muriel Harman of Victoria, British Columbia, Cyril Taylor of New Zealand and James Rodger of Dundee, Scotland.

The U. S. State Department did not confirm the telegraphed news, but hostages rescued at Wamba late in December said that the rebels had singled out “the American” there for a particularly brutal death, first trampling him and then throwing him into the river. McChesney was the only American known to be in Wamba.

The sole WEC missionary still unaccounted for was Miss Winnifred Davies of North Wales.

Other WEC missionaries who were previously unaccounted for, some of whom were feared dead, are now known to be alive and safe. Among them are: Miss Daisy Kingdon of Jamaica, Miss Patricia Holdaway of New Zealand, Miss Elaine Aitken of Coventry, England, Dr. Helen Roseveare of London, Miss Elaine de Rusett of Australia, Miss Florence Stebbins of London, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Scholes of Blackbull, England, Mr. Brian Cripps of London, Miss Amy Grant of Wolverhampton, England, and Mr. and Mrs. Aubrey Brown and their four children of Canada.

The Unevangelized Fields Mission reported early this month that five of its people who were missing are now known to be alive and safe. They are Mrs. Chester Burke of Calgary, Alberta, whose husband is still missing, Mr. and Mrs. George Kerrigan. Miss Louie Rimmer, and Miss Olive McCarten, the last four from Great Britain.

A UFM spokesman said that eighteen others previously unaccounted for are still missing and presumed dead, although their bodies have not been found. Clothing of one person was found by a river; the passport of another turned up in Leopoldville.

The killing of McChesney brought the total of known Protestant missionary deaths in the Congo last year to eleven. A Vatican paper said that more than forty Roman Catholic missionaries died at the hands of Congolese rebels during the latter part of the year. The number of Congolese killed by the rebels since the rebellion began last May is estimated at 10,000.

The Christmas Carpenters

Last October the Antioch Baptist Church, a Negro church in Mississippi, burned to the ground after a civil rights meeting. December 25 found sixty whites and Negroes there for a Christmas service.

The church had no roof and no windows, but there were pews made of boards and cement blocks. After the congregation had sung the last Christmas hymn, they picked up their tools, which were scattered around the church, and set to work on the roof.

The students, who called themselves “Carpenters for Christmas,” had determined that the church, located in Ripley, Mississippi, was going to have its Christmas service as usual. Some of them had earlier participated in civil rights activities in the area.

At the end of the service, a Negro woman rose with tears in her eyes to present the students with boxes of fruit and candy. They hoped to have the work completed before going back to their colleges.

During the building of the church, a few firecrackers were thrown and shots were reportedly fired at a worker’s car, but no injuries were reported.

Speeding The Light

Missionary Aviation Fellowship plans to take delivery in March on its first multiengined aircraft, a $90,000 Aero Commander 500B earmarked for service in West Irian.

MAF officials say the sleek, twin-engine Aero Commander was chosen because of its speed and payload. It is a well-proved model similar to that approved for use by President Eisenhower during the late 1950s. It is expected to do the work of 2.75 Cessna 185s, the single-engine planes now employed by MAF in West Irian. The resulting savings in personnel will help to alleviate a problem stemming from the government’s reluctance to grant visas to prospective new missionary pilots.

MAF, which started out on a shoestring in 1944, now has a total of thirty-seven planes and 158 people serving missionaries in fifteen countries. In twenty years of operation MAF pilots logged some 10,000,000 air miles without a fatal accident.

Focus On The Great Commission

Next year Christians from all over the world will meet in Berlin to discuss the urgency of the Great Commission.

This is the objective of the World Congress on Evangelism, according to Billy Graham, honorary chairman, and Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, congress chairman and editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Discussing the congress with newsmen, Graham said that Christianity is losing ground because of a “lack of emphasis on evangelism,” and that an evangelistic renewal is needed inside the Church as well as outside.

“The involvement of church members in incidents of racial violence and hatred is one proof that we still have plenty of evangelizing to do right at home,” Graham declared.

He also said, however, that the South has made “tremendous progress” in race relations.

The Congress on Evangelism is sponsored by CHRISTIANITY TODAY as a tenth-anniversary project. It will be held October 26 to November 4, 1966.

The incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ through His virgin birth is a basic truth of Christian faith. God became man. This is not merely a phase in time, but the sublimest fact of eternity. Only through human birth and normal development could Jesus become our eternal High Priest, our Kinsman-Redeemer.

Leviticus 25:47, 48 sets forth God’s rule of redemption. The Israelite who had sold himself into slavery could be redeemed only by one of his brethren. The redeemer must be a kinsman! Here we have one of the reasons for the incarnation. It follows that God must become man in order to be our Kinsman-Redeemer.

God became our Kinsman. As we ponder this, our heart is filled with overflowing awe. The message of the incarnation is the message of the “Kinsman” who came to be our Redeemer. How we rejoice in this truth! But our rejoicing is tempered with sadness as we think of our kinsmen according to the flesh who do not know of Him who came to save His people from their sins.

Our mission can be your instrument for taking the Gospel to the Jews. It is a worldwide work with over 50 missionaries, reaching Jews for Christ. Your prayers and fellowship are needed. The promise of Gen. 12:3 will bring you much personal blessing. Try it and see for yourself.

The Future of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Harper & Row, 1964, 319 pp., $5), is reviewed by Paul K. Jewett, associate professor of systematic theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Few books contain really new ideas, and perhaps it would be too much to say this one does, for it is obsessed with the hundred-year-old idea of evolution. Yet no one has ever surveyed the implications of this idea for the future of man with the scope and daring vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Most books perish with their times, but these essays, twenty-one in all, are more relevant now than when they were written. Certainly Teilhard is no orthodox theologian; he is a mystic and a scientist. This combination makes for a lot of inchoate heresy, but there is never a dull moment and there are no barren passages.

One might ask why we have been so long in hearing about Teilhard. One obvious reason is that his ideas were suppressed by the Roman hierarchy of his day; also, he wrote in French (Protestant theologians are accustomed to look to German books for original thinking), and his French is formidable. A special word of appreciation is due, therefore, to the translator of this composite volume, Mr. Norman Denny. Even in English such terms as “noogenesis” and “noosphere.” “unanimisation,” “organicity of the universe,” “para-biological epiphenomenon,” “hominisation,” “compacity,” and the like hinder one’s progress in speed reading.

In a word, Teilhard’s thought is that once we have perceived ourselves and all our universe as moving, we can no more speak statistically of cosmology and biology and anthropology but must think in terms of cosmogenesis (the evolution of the cosmos), biogenesis (the proliferation of the tree of life), and anthropogenesis (the ultra-socializing of humanity turning in on itself because of the explosion of population and the sphericity of our planet). The science of sociology, then, is really an elaboration of biology, and Teilhard’s word for it is “anthropogenesis,” or more often “noogenesis.” But man cannot be an end in himself. Secular science has regarded this problem of the irreversible character of the evolutionary process with averted glance, assuming man has millions of years before the physical system runs out in the cold death. But this turns man into a living fossil, which is after all but a form of death, and cuts the nerve of the psychic mechanism of evolution. Teilhard’s suggestion is a paroxysm in the noosphere which he calls “Christogenesis,” the culmination of the whole evolutionary process. The word “paroxysm” is as near as he comes to the language of the catastrophic and apocalyptic with which the New Testament describes the Parousia of Christ. Ordinarily he thinks of millions of years for this event to be achieved. Indeed the radical difference between the vertical, punctiliar view of the Second Advent in the New Testament and the slow horizontal connotation of the word “evolution” is perhaps the most perplexing aspect of Teilhard’s thinking about the future of mankind. Apparently evolution will bring in the “fullness of time” when, in a way beyond imagining, mankind, become fully human in Christ, will transcend the present cosmic system that God may be all in all. The reader should especially consult chapter 18, “The Heart of the Problem.”

With An Arched Back?

A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, by Gleason L. Archer, Jr. (Moody, 1964, 507 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Charles F. Pfeiffer, associate professor of ancient literature, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan.

Alongside the Old Testament introductions of Edward Young and Merrill Unger, the conservative student will now place A Survey of Old Testament Introduction by Gleason L. Archer, Jr. Dr. Archer, like Drs. Young and Unger, is competent in both Semitic linguistics and Near Eastern archaeology—areas of study that are necessary for any serious work in Old Testament scholarship today.

Part I of Archer’s book, entitled “General Introduction,” is concerned with Old Testament manuscripts, early versions of the Old Testament, and the history of the canonization of its books. The authorship of the Pentateuch receives extended treatment, and Archer presents a detailed refutation of the viewpoints that are commonly linked with the name of the nineteenth-century scholar Julius Wellhausen. Evidence is presented for the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch both from Scripture itself and from archaeological studies. Dr. Archer points out Egyptian words used in those portions of the Pentateuch dealing with Egypt, and shows that the author had a thorough knowledge of Egyptian geography. The authenticity of the Patriarchal narratives is deduced from comparisons with the Nuzi texts and other archaeological discoveries.

Archer notes that archaeologists such as W. F. Albright maintain “the essential accuracy of the Pentateuch” and hold that its contents are much earlier than the period during which they were finally edited (p. 165). His failure to follow up this suggestion is, in the mind of the reviewer, a weakness in his treatment of the problem. In his zeal to demonstrate Mosaic authorship Archer spends much time refuting Wellhausen, but he does not come to grips with the real problems of Pentateuchal criticism. Conservative Old Testament scholars generally acknowledge both pre-Mosaic and post-Mosaic elements in the Pentateuch, along with its essentially Mosaic core. Archer does admit that the account of Moses’ death (Deut. 34) is “demonstrably post-Mosaic” (p. 244), but otherwise he leaves little room for the hand of a later editor.

The non-specialist may be confused when able and devout Bible students differ on matters that appear somewhat technical. It may seem best simply to say, “Moses wrote all of the Pentateuch,” and to assume that ancient concepts of authorship and of history have always been as they are today. This, however, is to close the eyes to genuine problems both of biblical interpretation and of human logic. If a later writer was justified in adding an account of Moses’ death, would it have been wrong for him to change the pre-Israelite name Laish to Dan, as we find it in Genesis 14:14? Edward Young suggests this possibility (Introduction, p. 61). If that is allowable, is there any reason why an editor could not have added, in a suitable context, “the Canaanite was then in the land” (cf. Gen. 12:6, 13:7)? A mechanical view may insist that Moses must have written everything traditionally ascribed to him, but then why omit the account of his death? Stories have been handed down which tell of the aged lawgiver seated at his table with tears streaming down his face as he receives by dictation from God the account of his impending death. If the conservative scholar does not need to accept such viewpoints, and the reviewer agrees with Archer that he does not, he may acknowledge without apology the presence of other post-Mosaica in the Pentateuch.

In the section on “Special Introduction” (Part II) Archer gives a scholarly discussion of each Old Testament book, and in each instance his conclusions accord with traditionalist attitudes. He favors the Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes, although many conservatives (including Young) feel that the text of the book demands a date later than the Solomonic period. Archer mentions favorably the view that the Book of Job was written by Moses.

Dr. Archer has familiarized himself with the views of those with whom he disagrees, and he attempts to be fair in his discussion of debatable points. His book will be particularly appreciated by traditionalists who are seeking a scholarly defense for the views they hold. Many conservatives will feel that he has set up artificial terms for divine revelation, and that those terms do not accord with biblical fact. To say too much may be as harmful as to say too little in demonstrating the truth of Scripture and its relevance to human needs.

CHARLES F. PFEIFFER

The Truth Is Vice Versa

The World Upside Down or Rightside Up, by Paul Bretscher (Concordia, 1965, 150 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Although the Beatitudes are commonly memorized by children, few parts of the New Testament are more difficult to interpret. Each beatitude is a very simple statement. The difficulty in interpretation derives, as Bretscher shows, from the fact that even though the interpreter be a Christian, his perspective and outlook, his categories of thought and evaluation, are forged in an opposite set of beliefs and values. Who really believes that the truly blessed man is the one who is poor in spirit, or the meek, or the one who hungers and thirsts after righteousness? To understand a beatitude, one must see all things wholly differently than he ordinarily does. He must stand on his head, allow his values to be transvaluated, or, in Bretscher’s words, see the world as it really is: upside down.

To see life from the perspective of the Beatitudes, one must be able to use language in such a way that words carry a cargo of meaning opposite from the usual; for even our words and concepts are forged from the contrary perspective of the upside-down world.

Bretscher reaches for language to stab home the radical perspective of the Gospel. He finds it with extraordinary success, for his attempt to show that the world looks upside down to the Gospel and the Gospel looks upside down to the world is as readable and simple as the Beatitudes themselves. The reader does not feel that this is the usual kind of religious writing. The book is more like a mirror in which he constantly sees himself and, at the same time, the utterly radical character of the Christian faith.

The great virtue of Bretscher’s book is that he not only opens up and analyzes the secrets of our hearts and thoughts but also refocuses human life and the profound Christian truths contained in the simple Beatitudes in terms of the basic religious categories of man’s works and God’s grace. The meek man, the man poor in spirit, the hungry man, is he who joyfully lives out of the grace of God.

Even apart from its considerable literary force, the book is remarkable. Unlike so many “religious” books, it is not just a psychoanalysis, a moralistic discourse, or a pious writing—it is all of these things within a theological-biblical perspective.

Bretscher shows what those things are that we call the world and the Gospel; they are not what they seem. He cuts deep into that mystery which is the Gospel and that which is everyday life. His book helps those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

JAMES DAANE

Liturgy In The Bible

Worship in the Early Church, by Ralph P. Martin (Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1964, 144 pp., 13s. 6d.), is reviewed by David F. Wright, lecturer in ecclesiastical history, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

New Testament scholars have of late devoted a great deal of attention to the liturgical features of the apostolic writings, and to the evidence they provide for a reconstruction of the worship of the earliest Christian communities. Dr. Martin, a lecturer in theology at the London Bible College, is spending 1964–65 as associate professor of biblical literature at Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota. In this introduction to the whole subject, which is as good as one could hope for in such short compass, he surveys the indispensable biblical foundation for a proper reconsideration of Christian worship in the present day.

Many a student of the Bible will be surprised at the amount of New Testament material that originated in the context of worship. How many hymns can you point to in the Epistles? Where would you turn to discover what Paul considered the basic elements of a normal service of worship? Certain aspects of current scholarly treatments of such issues (with which Dr. Martin is thoroughly familiar) make one thankful that the author has been aware of the danger of “pan-liturgism” (p. 109). On the other hand, evangelicals must beware lest they refuse to see those parts of the New Testament that have a more “churchly” setting than previous interpretation has recognized. The balance and scholarly undergirding of this work, with its concern to be above all severely biblical, give this reviewer confidence in recommending it.

Whatever the title leads the reader to expect, the book is in fact occupied almost exclusively with the New Testament; later Christian writings are cited only as an aid to understanding scriptural texts. It may be pointed out that the Martyrdom of Polycarp surely ought to be dated about A.D. 155–56 rather than in the early years of the century (p. 64), and that Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians comes mainly from about 135, according to P. N. Harrison (p. 72). On the difficult question of “baptism for the dead” (1 Cor. 15:29), the exegesis of M. Raeder endorsed by J. Jeremias (Infant Baptism in the First Four Centuries, p. 36 n.) suggests a practice of submitting to baptism in order to be reunited with dead relatives or friends who were themselves baptized (p. 103). But these small points detract little from a very valuable book, one well grounded in the Old Testament background that is so essential for a right understanding of such central themes as the Last Supper.

DAVID F. WRIGHT

A Variety Of Choices

Peloubet’s Select Notes 1965, by Wilbur M. Smith (W. A. Wilde, 1964, 499 pp., $2.95); Arnold’s Commentary 1965, edited by Lyle E. Williams (Light and Life, 1964, 330 pp., $2.50); Tarbell’s Teacher’s Guide 1965, edited by Frank S. Mead (Revell, 1964, 382 pp., $2.95); Higley Commentary 1965 edited by Knute Larson (Lambert Huffman, 1964, 528 pp., $2.95); The Douglass Sunday School Lessons 1965, edited by Earl L. Douglass (Macmillan, 1964, 475 pp., $3.25); Rozell’s Complete Lessons 1965, edited by Bill Austin (Zondervan, 1964, 319 pp., $2.95); Standard Lesson Commentary 1965, edited by John M. Carter (Standard, 1964, 448 pp., $2.95); The International Lesson Annual 1965, edited by Horace R. Weaver (Abingdon, 1964, 445 pp., $2.95); Illustrating the Lesson 1965, by Arthur H. Stainback (Revell, 1964, 122 pp., $1.50); The Gist of the Lesson 1965, edited by Donald T. Kauffman (Revell, 1964, 128 pp., $1.25); and Points for Emphasis 1965, by Clifton J. Allen (Broadman, 1964, 215 pp., $.95), are reviewed by Frank E. Gaebelein, co-editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

In the volumes listed above in the order of their total years of publication, the Sunday school teacher has a wide variety of helps from which to choose. From the venerable Peloubet’s Notes, now in their ninety-first year of publication, to The International Lesson Annual, which is in its tenth year, each of these annuals follows its own distinctive paths of exposition of the International Sunday School Lessons and presentation of helps for teachers, lesson outlines, illustrative stories, blackboard illustrations, and visual aids.

Peloubet’s Select Notes, oldest of the annuals, is in a class by itself for amount of expository material and wide-ranging quotations from the evangelical literature of the ages. There is little of the trivial in Peloubet’s. The bibliographies are solid, the illustrations generally illuminating. The amount of space given teaching devices is less than in most of the other annuals. Doctrinally Peloubet’s is one of the most dependable of the lot. It makes real demands upon the teacher, but those who use it well should be thoroughly prepared.

In Arnold’s Commentary, now in its seventy-first year, the emphasis is less upon the classic literature of exposition than in Peloubet’s and more upon teaching method. Expository material is simply and clearly presented. Illustrations are usually well chosen, and many relate to contemporary life. The doctrinal position is soundly evangelical.

Another annual with a long history is Tarbell’s Teacher’s Guide, now in its sixtieth year. Here the expository material is generally adequate, the suggestions for teachers good, and the illustrations particularly effective. A helpful feature is the background material for teachers. This is a good, workable aid written from a rather broad evangelical point of view.

The Higley Commentary, now in its thirty-second year, presents the greatest variety of material. Its verse-by-verse commentary is comprehensive. In addition each lesson contains about a dozen special features, such as “Teacher’s Target.” “Real-Life Illustration,” “Evangelistic Emphasis,” “Points that Pertain,” and “Superintendent’s Sermonette.” There are several pages of questions and answers for each lesson, including even a page to cut out and give to pupils. The doctrinal emphasis is consistently conservative. One wonders whether a commentary of this kind may not perhaps do more than its share of the teacher’s work.

The Douglass Sunday School Lessons, of which the present volume is the twenty-eighth, is notable for its adherence to conservative Reformed scholarship and its thoughtful explanation of lesson passages. The teacher is not confused by a plethora of various devices and methods, although there are suggested discussion topics together with practical hints to teachers. Lessons are clearly outlined and doctrinal points as adequately discussed as space permits.

Among the newer commentaries, Rozell’s Complete Lessons, now represented by this eighteenth annual volume, is characterized by a step-by-step presentation of the lesson passage rather than by verse-by-verse exposition. Each lesson follows a clear outline; illustrations are not given separately but as they fit the body of the lesson. Suggestions to teachers are also embodied within the lessons. Thus the teacher has before him what amounts to a full transcript of each lesson. Doctrinally the presentations are evangelical.

The Standard Lesson Commentary presents an unusually large amount of material. Along with the verse-by-verse commentary, each lesson contains introductions for the teacher, practical applications, outlines, chalk talks, and other materials. This is a handsome volume, printed on a better quality of paper than the other annuals. As with most of the others, the theology is evangelical.

The International Lesson Annual is in its tenth year. It presents the lessons clearly and succinctly with a good emphasis upon social application and effective teaching method. Of the major commentaries, this one is the loosest theologically. The author of the textual comments on the lessons of the first quarter writes from a naturalistic point of view that makes Christ’s temptation symbolical rather than temptation through the person of Satan. Similarly, the key lessons on the Crucifixion and the Resurrection communicate little of the saving meaning of these central events. The exposition of the lessons for the third quarter has a much firmer theological structure. But it is regrettable that an annual with so many good points should reflect such an equivocal view of Scripture and should fail at crucial points to make the Gospel clear.

The three smaller lesson aids are of varying value. The book of illustrations by Stainback, while not without some merit, suffers from carelessness of statement (e.g., “intelligent” for “intelligible,” p. 74; “conscience” for “consciousness,” p. 56) and a certain mediocrity of material chosen. But both The Gist of the Lesson and Points for Emphasis are excellent condensed aids for the teacher. They are admirably to the point and stress the essential biblical truths.

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN

Book Briefs

Great Expository Sermons, by Faris D. Whitesell (Revell, 1964, 192 pp., $3.50). Classic sermons that demonstrate different approaches to expository preaching. With a brief biographical sketch of each preacher and short analyses of the sermons.

A History of Israel, by Leonard Johnston (Sheed & Ward, 1964, 181 pp., $3.95). For those who would like to see what a Roman Catholic scholar does with the Old Testament.

History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century, by J. B. Bury (Schocken, 1964, 217 pp., $5). The famous J. B. Bury’s account of the papacy during the years 1864 to 1878. F. C. Grant has added brief sketches of the prevailing climate prior to the first and prior to the second Vatican Council.

Protestant Churches and Reform Today, edited by William J. Wolf (Seabury, 1964, 156 pp., $3.95). In response to Hans Küng’s invitation, six young theologians consider the weaknesses within their various churches that hinder renewal and reunion. The book shows what Protestants think when they reflect on the ecumenical movement.

Living Above: Inspirational Devotions for Women’s Groups, by Betty Carlson (Zondervan, 1964, 120 pp., $2.50). Popular, well-written, and soundly evangelical devotionals.

Never Lose Heart, by Max Merritt Morrison (Doubleday, 1964, 143 pp., $3.95). Good, light, hearty reading.

A survey of the membership of the Evangelical Theological Society discloses that many conservative scholars concentrate their interest upon a few lively concerns, and that wide gaps exist in evangelical research.

From the responses of 112 members CHRISTIANITY TODAY has learned that two out of three evangelical scholars think biblical authority is the main theological theme now under review in conservative circles in America. Of these scholars, more than half trace this development to pressures for doctrinal redefinition resulting from recent theological speculations about the nature of divine revelation.

One in three conservative scholars singles out ecclesiology, or the doctrine of the Church, as the critical area in contemporary theological study. Eschatology (the doctrine of the end-time) and the nature of God were listed as other priority concerns. The respondents put soteriology, the saving work of Christ, in fifth place, and the doctrine of sanctification in sixth place, as theological areas under special theological pressure for critical modification.

The compromise of the authority of the Bible noticeable in many mainstream Protestant denominations is viewed as a lamentable surrender of scriptural perspectives to modern critical speculations. The result of the critical assaults has been to qualify the historic Christian view of the Bible by multiplying doubts over historical and propositional revelation, plenary inspiration, and verbal inerrancy.

The evangelical reply to this critical trend, the survey discloses, is not one of simple and naïve negation. Since the Bible is a mooring that holds Protestant Christianity from drifting aimlessly on a wide sea of subjective speculation, the case for scriptural authority calls for clear exposition. The conservative emphasis on divine revelation and on the deeds of God as the foundation of Christian faith is studied and positive.

Yet the replies confirm the judgment that affirmations of the high view of Scripture in the catalogues of evangelical seminaries, colleges, and Bible institutes do not reflect the extent to which some faculties are struggling with the issue of reaffirmation or redefinition. A plea is widely sounded for interpreting the Bible “in the light of its revelational purpose.” At times this formula is taken simply as a warning against seeking scriptural solutions to questions that the sacred writers never intended to answer (for example, the effect of chemicals on moral decisions). Sometimes its implications are broader, so that the reliability of Scripture is limited to doctrinal and moral elements at the expense of historical and scientific content, the net result of which is a refusal to view the Bible as a document of unbroken divine authority. Even the Evangelical Theological Society membership, predicated on subscription to the Scriptures as the Word of God written, now includes scholars who contend for poetic-mythological elements in Scripture and urge a new view of saga and myth.

Emphasis on divine confrontation and human encounter tends to weaken some expositions of a completed past revelation, and to give a neo-evangelical and almost neo-orthodox character to subjective-experiential factors at the expense of objective orthodoxy. Doctoral dissertations written by some conservative American scholars under neo-orthodox teachers at Edinburgh, Basel, Princeton, and Drew attest this conformity to present theological pressures. Instead of trying to justify this existential emphasis on the basis of Luther and Calvin, however, these neo-conservatives criticize the early Reformers as well as their more recent exponents, Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield in particular. A noteworthy feature of this neo-conservative negation is that it has not issued in any consistent or stable alternative to the position it criticizes; in this respect it is a theology with a fluid notion of religious authority and is particularly vulnerable to considerable further pressure.

Yet even in these circles there remains the recognition that without the authority of Scripture Protestantism too many soon become merely an echo of a decadent society. All evangelical scholars repudiate the reduction of thus saith the Lord to “it seems to me.” They deplore “demythologizing” as only a modern revival of unbelief of an ancient gnostic type. They abhor radical philosophical postures. They reject the far-out theories that religious concepts are only symbolic and not normative or informative, and that theological language has no fixed or absolute significance. They reject the existential view of revelation as mere subjective act or event. While they seek rapprochement with modern science, they are wholly undisposed to rule out the miraculous, to subordinate divine factors to human, or to locate the center of religious authority in man’s experience and thus to substitute a rationalistic for a revelational understanding of the supernatural.

In evangelical circles the tension over the Bible does not spring from a desire to accommodate Christian realities to a secular world view. In the question of how God acts in nature and history the character and words of God are seen to be at stake. If he does not act in the way the Bible says (or “means”), the result is a different religion from historic Christianity. Many significant expositions of the Protestant position still view Calvin’s Institutes as a major contribution to the doctrine of Scripture as revelation.

Nonetheless tension arises in evangelical circles through the inordinate pressures of contemporary scientific theory about the antiquity of man. Christian anthropologists are by no means agreed on an interpretation of the data, but those who insist that homo sapiens is hundreds of thousands of years old make little effort to correlate this conclusion with an insistence on objective historical factuality in respect to the fall of the first man, Adam, and its implications for the entire human race. Among many evangelical biblical scholars, moreover, one can discern an assignment of priority to salvation-history over revealed truth. Thus an emphasis on the God who acts and on his concrete historical revelation tends to replace that on the God who speaks and acts; interest in a dynamic deity acting in history comes to supplant interest in verbal inspiration. The Bible may survive as a religious document through which God still speaks uniquely, but it no longer is assigned objective authority in the classical Protestant sense, for the unchanging factual character of revealed truth is in doubt. The most recent effort in this twilight zone, Dewey Beegle’s book on The Inspiration of Scripture, satisfied neither conservative, neo-orthodox, nor liberal critics, since it blended elements from all three positions. Beegle later protested that the publishers (Westminster Press) had deleted important evangelical sections of the volume.

Debate over the Bible seems again to be hardening into a “party struggle” over the nature of revelation and authority. Liberal, neo-orthodox, and conservative scholars now all appeal to a “Word of God,” but they do not mean the same thing. Liberalism balks at objective authority and pole-vaults over the miracles of the Christian religion; neo-orthodoxy hedges over revealed information and plays leap-frog with the miraculous. Neo-orthodoxy discusses revelation in God’s “acts” from the vantage point of psychology of religion alongside an oral tradition and source-theory of Scripture. Every evangelical effort to bridge the gap to non-evangelical scholars ends up with an impossible demand for the surrender of verbal and plenary inspiration and propositional revelation as well.

Evangelical scholars are fully aware that the doctrine of the Bible controls all other doctrines of the Christian faith. “A correct view of the Bible (its inspiration, nature, and authority),” insists one theologian, “is prior in importance to any other doctrine.” “Dilute or dismiss the authority of the Bible and other doctrinal matters will not long remain in the center of discussion,” comments a New Testament professor, “since no authoritative voice remains to decide what they shall be.” Another scholar comments: “The doctrine of Scripture is fundamental to all others. The source of knowledge governs the results. Even the doctrine of Christ and salvation depends on it.” “Without an authoritative Bible,” remarks another, “even the authority of Jesus Christ is eroded; deep down all the major problems involve the question of biblical authority, for it affects all the realms of doctrine and life, including the life and witness of the Church.” And another spokesman puts it thus: “The formal principle of Protestantism is the objective and sole authority of the Bible. The material principle is salvation by grace alone. Both are undermined by the view of the Bible which is becoming dominant today.”

It is noteworthy that no contemporary Protestant theologian has dealt exhaustively with the subject of biblical authority in the context of the broadest ecumenical dialogue. Evangelical discussion often concentrates on objections to the conservative view, or on rear-guard controversies within the conservative camp, to the neglect of a comprehensive statement of its own position. The evangelical critique is oriented to liberal and neo-orthodox deviations, and it is ill-prepared for dialogue with Roman Catholieism at a time when Rome is assigning new scope to the Bible and restudying its own view of church authority. Meanwhile a growing role for church authority in ecumenical circles, along with an unsure position on the role of the Scripture, leaves the ecumenical dialogue open and vulnerable to both Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic counter-claims. Everyman perforce will have some authority—if not the Bible or the Church, then his own reason, tradition, or “experience.” The ecumenical Protestant loss of an authoritative Bible has shaped a vacuum which, for a time, is likely to be filled by ecclesiastical commitments but which ultimately could be filled simply by church decree, whether post-Protestant or Roman Catholic.

Evangelicals do not dispute the fact that for a time at least Christianity may function with an impaired doctrine of Scripture. But it does so at its own peril and inevitably must then lose much of its essential message. The strength of the evangelical view has been demonstrated in manifold ways in the aftermath of the liberal erosion of Christian authority. Evangelist Billy Graham’s emphasis on what “the Bible says” attests the enduring grip of scriptural revelation on needy human hearts. The Christian colleges graduate a steady stream of ministers and missionaries whose doctrinal stability is evident in a time of theological flux, and send an expanding task force of devout laymen into the metropolitan and rural areas of American life. The Evangelical Theological Society promotes scholarly inquiry premised on the full authority of Scripture and provides association and fellowship for scholars convinced of the inadequacy of non-evangelical views. The superiority of the conservative view has been effectively argued in many volumes. The literature includes such symposiums as Revelation and the Bible (Carl F. H. Henry, ed.), The Infallible Word (N. B. Stonehouse and Paul Woolley, eds.), and Inspiration and Interpretation (John F. Walvoord, ed.). Noteworthy volumes are J. I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God; Bernard Ramm, Special Revelation and the Word of God; Edward J. Young, The Word of Truth; Wick Broomall, Biblical Criticism. Related contributions include G. C. Berkouwer’s The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, Gordon H. Clark’s Karl Barth’s Theological Method and Reason, Religion and Revelation, Paul K. Jewett’s Emil Brunner’s Concept of Revelation, and Cornelius Van Til’s Christianity and Barthianism. The appearance of The Holman Study Bible and The Harper Study Bible attests the continuing interest in Scripture study by readers holding a high view of the Bible.

If the strength of American evangelicalism rests in its high view of Scripture, its weakness lies in a tendency to neglect the frontiers of formative discussion in contemporary theology. Thus evangelicals forfeit the debate at these points to proponents of sub-evangelical points of view, or to those who assert evangelical positions in only a fragmentary way. One can understand why it is necessary to emphasize continually that the best precaution against burning down the house of faith is not to play with incendiary criticism. But when the edifice is already afire, the extinguisher needs to be concentrated immediately and directly on the consuming path of the flames.

The element missing in much evangelical theological writing is an air of exciting relevance. The problem is not that biblical theology is outdated; it is rather that some of its expositors seem out of touch with the frontiers of doubt in our day. Theology textbooks a half century old sometimes offer more solid content than the more recent tracts-for-the-times, but it is to the credit of some contemporary theologians that they preserve a spirit of theological excitement and fresh relevance. Evangelicals need to overcome any impression that they are merely retooling the past and repeating clichés. If Bible reading has undergone a revolution through the preparation of new translations in the idiom of the decade, the theology classroom in many conservative institutions needs to expound the enduring truths in the setting and language of the times. Unless we speak to our generation in a compelling idiom, meshing the great theological concerns with current modes of thought and critical problems of the day, we shall speak only to ourselves.

Almost every evangelical scholar, moreover, voices some complaint about the present theological situation, but only a minority share in the burdens of conservative scholarship and contribute concretely to an evangelical alternative. There is presently no better framework than the Evangelical Theological Society to enlist conservative resources in a coordinated theological offensive, although the society has not as yet effectively marshalled its forces.

Specific areas of theological concern meanwhile press for evangelical attention. A comprehensive statement of evangelical theology from American sources, comparable to Berkouwer’s Studies in Dogmatics in The Netherlands, remains a necessary project. To serve its purpose, such an effort must give attention to the theological frontiers of special interest to the contemporary religious dialogue. The great issues of authority, revelation, history, the canon, and ecumenism call for sustained study. There must be room also for specialized studies that may not seem particularly relevant to present developments at the frontiers of current religious thought, in view of the fact that theologians converse over mobile fences. But contemporary Christianity is face-to-face with a major transition time in theology, and this affords evangelicals a providential moment for earnest engagement.

Just now the theological debate has moved closer to central evangelical concerns than it had for several decades. In the current controversy over the connection of revelation and history, and of revelation and truth, American evangelicals have a strategic opportunity to contribute at the moving frontier of contemporary theological dialogue.

Health, Wealth, And Happiness

Recently the Harris Survey polled the American people about “their biggest disappointment in life” and asked, “What one thing, if you had to choose, do you look forward to most in your life?”

The largest proportion of those polled indicated that death in the family and poor health or disability were the biggest disappointments in life. In answer to the second question, the greatest number indicated that their fondest hope was for good health for themselves and their families. The answers generally reflected a preoccupation with mundane and material things.

No one can gainsay that we ought to care about the things of this life. Too long the Communists have proclaimed that the Western world, governed by the Christian ethic, has been unconcerned about man’s material condition and has preached only about “pie in the sky some day by and by.”

But in our normal and rightful interest in health, money, and other matters, we tend to forget spiritual concerns—concerns which do not rule out an interest in material things but which demand that an order of priority be established. We are to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and then our other needs will be met (Matt. 6:33). Perhaps, however, the most searching words linking spiritual and physical considerations come from the Apostle John in his letter to Gaius. He says: “I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth” (3 John 2). It may be that the sick and the poor in and out of the churches would find better health and improved material welfare, if they were first to give attention to their souls’ health.

A Code For Cigarette Advertising

A tardy but helpful step toward self-regulation of advertising has been taken by the cigarette industry. A new code, to be administered by Robert B. Meyner, former governor of New Jersey, carries with it disciplinary power to the extent of a §100,000 fine for tobacco companies violating its provisions. The code bans advertising designed to reach persons under twenty-one; curbs radio or television advertising immediately before or after programs for minors; prohibits cigarette advertising in comic books, newspaper comic pages, and school and college publications; forbids distribution of cigarette samples at colleges; prohibits advertising that features athletes or other famous persons who would appeal to youth; and proscribes representation in advertising of persons who seem to be under twenty-five years of age.

The implication is clear that the industry is at last recognizing the adverse effects of cigarettes. Although the code makes impressive reading, its adoption is but a small step toward solution of a gigantic problem. Realism compels the comment that, aside from the wise provision banning cigarette advertising in publications designed for youth and the distribution of samples on college campuses, the remainder of the code may have comparatively little effect. Those who know youth realize that the chief reason for adolescent smoking is the desire to emulate adult status. Moreover, the practical question arises how persons appearing in advertising can possibly be identified as at least twenty-five years old. So long as cigarette smoking by adults is portrayed as socially acceptable and desirable, youth will continue to seek this kind of adult expression.

More important than this code is the implementation after July 1 of the ruling of the Federal Trade Commission requiring tobacco companies to present in their advertising and labeling the health hazards of smoking. The industry’s response to this ruling will prove whether it is willing to submerge its own advancement in deference to the public welfare. Once again we suggest that the ultimate solution of the tobacco industry’s dilemma is for it to diversify its resources into other fields. Some tobacco companies have already begun to do this; may many more follow their example.

‘Life’ Magazine And The Bible

Thoughtful men cannot leave the Bible alone. Many who reject its claim to truth study it more diligently than those who accept it as God’s truth. This strange fascination with what they do not accept as truth is testimony to the uniqueness of the Bible and to its power to draw men to itself.

Life magazine recently devoted a special double issue to the Bible. Life is not a religious magazine. It is neither ready nor willing to stand before its millions of readers and say, “The Bible says.…” But it does know about reader appeal, and its issue about the Bible gives its readers what they like.

Life’s treatment of the Bible is in many ways able. The illustrations of great art are superb and much of the attending commentary of scholarly caliber. Yet in some important ways the treatment is disappointing.

To plan this issue Life chose Dorothy Seiberling, its art editor. According to Life’s managing editor, George P. Hunt, Miss Seiberling had but a “layman’s knowledge of the field,” but “Dotty, with characteristic thoroughness, locked herself up with books and Bibles from March until May and produced a complete prospectus for [the issue].…” Yet “in spite of all her study [!],” Miss Seiberling, we are told, received the “help of leading scholars.”

Miss Seiberling wrote the opening essay. In the first paragraph she asserts that the Bible is the most influential book in history and explains why it contains many errors. She then proceeds to show that another of the Bible’s burdens is its “internal contradictions and crudities.” After thus rendering her textual and higher critical comments, she offers her theological judgment that the Bible is a story of how “God seems to develop from one kind of deity to another.” Sometimes Yahweh is a “primitive, desert storm god” and sometimes Elijah’s “still small voice” (which, she suggests, may be the voice of conscience). Isaiah’s assertion that the God of Israel is also the God of the Assyrians is “one of the most dramatic pieces of effrontery in religious history.” And Miss Seiberling, latterly turned theologian, informs her readers that Second Isaiah’s suffering servant was the “discovery” that “Israel’s faithful humility would … atone for the sins of the whole human race,” completely bypassing the classical Christian interpretation of Isaiah 53.

In her commentary on the biblical writings from Creation to Abraham, she asserts that the opening material of Genesis was to the ancients “matters of fact” but to man today is only “matters of faith”; Eve’s response to the serpent contains “the sort of exaggeration any flustered woman might make.” God’s word to Abraham that his seed would be a blessing to all nations because of Abraham’s obedience provokes this comment from Miss Seiberling: “This was the last time Abraham ever heard from God, probably for the plain reason that there was nothing more to say.” She theologizes further to inform her readers that the Fall of Man was also the “Rise of Man,” and that God appears to have reacted to human sin “as much out of anxiety as anger.”

Surely Life could do better than to assign the task of an overview essay on the nature and significance of the Bible and a commentary on the early part of Genesis to its art editor. The editors can hardly be unaware that Miss Seiberling, a theological layman, could not begin to master centuries of monumental biblical scholarship. Her repeated assertions that “scholars say” and “scholars regard” have a hollow ring, coming as they do from a layman incompetent to judge between scholars of varying positions.

What might have been a deeply significant treatment of the Book of books is, in fact, deeply disappointing. Generally, the articles by prominent theologians never get beyond the position (announced by Miss Seiberling) that the Bible is the story of man’s quest for God. Professor E. A. Speiser, for example, says that if “Genesis is to be believed,” Abraham left the culture of Mesopotamia because he was called of God to go to an unknown land. But Speiser asserts, “We must assume that Abraham found the spiritual conditions … of Mesopotamia wanting … and the great biblical processes he set in motion began as a protest against that failure.” Human discovery, not divine revelation, is the pervading approach. There is a general consensus among Life’s writers that research and recent archaeological discoveries increasingly support the historicity of the Bible records. Yet this leads, not to recognition of God’s self-disclosure in history, but to the progressive human discovery that there must be a God who is Lord of history. As Art Editor Seiberling says, “Generations acting in this faith have enabled the theory that God rules history to pass a pragmatic test.” But in this view, man discovers the God who has not revealed himself.

Universalism And Missions

In a large missionary conclave several years ago some representatives of a leading denomination bewailed the “creeping universalism” in their ranks. They meant by this that many adherents, while not calling themselves universalists, believe that all men will ultimately be saved.

Certain corollaries accompany universalism. They include a denial of the doctrines of eternal punishment and final judgment. More than this, universalism negates the idea that men outside the Christian faith are without hope and perishing. The Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim, the animist and polytheist, all inherit the Kingdom of God, in the universalist view.

Certain churchmen and scholars are now calling for a theology of universalism. Some argue that, since God is “not willing that any should perish,” he must save all men, otherwise he is no longer a sovereign God. They fail to weigh the clear teaching of Scripture and its overwhelming evidence that men who reject Christ are eternally separated from a holy God and that there is a divine judgment “unto death” as well as unto eternal life. Indeed, our Lord himself spoke more about eternal separation or hell than about missions.

Universalism quenches foreign missionary endeavor. Christians quickly grasp the point that, if all men are finally saved, it makes little difference whether they are reached with the Gospel here or hereafter. Why should Christians dedicate themselves for service overseas? Why should they give of their substance for missions? Why should they pray for the salvation of the lost, if it is already determined that all men must some day be redeemed? And what difference does it really make whether a man gets to heaven sooner or later, so long as he gets there at last? Why condemn the non-Christian religions? Indeed, why disturb people in their beliefs or lack of beliefs, since belief or non-belief, trinitarianism, unitarianism, theism, atheism, agnosticism, or any other “ism,” makes no difference anyway.

The only reply to this kind of reasoning is the “thus saith the Lord” of the Scriptures. The Christian goes to the end of the earth precisely because Christ commanded him to go, and Christ commanded him to go because those who die without Christ and the Gospel are lost.

Universalism likewise breeds a new kind of missionary who needs only to reassure every man everywhere that what he is, what he believes, or how he acts is ultimately immaterial. This missionary will urge men to come now in order to enjoy the felicity of the Kingdom of God sooner. Still, the recalcitrant is going to be saved, despite any failure to embrace Christ in this life. The only experience to which anyone is called is an already accomplished salvation for all men that comes perilously close to determinism, even though the universalist guards against this by thinking that all men will come of their free choice in the end.

Universalism is unbiblical. Being unbiblical, it cuts the nerve of Christian missions; and cutting the nerve of missions, it cuts men off from any hope of the Kingdom of God and exposes them to an eternity of separation from his presence. Universalism is to our day what circumcision and legalism were to the Galatians in Paul’s day. It is another gospel, not the Gospel of the Christ of the Scriptures.

God, the Creator

Where shall we begin in our study of that great system of revealed truth that the Bible contains? I think we ought to begin where the Bible begins, with God as the Creator and Ruler of the world.

There are many today who insist that we ought to begin at another place, with a consideration of the human life of Jesus. In fact these people often tell us that that is where we ought not only to begin but also to end.

All that we need to know about God, they tell us, is that God is like Jesus. We do not need to know how the universe came into being, they tell us, or whether there is a God who governs it in its course. These things belong to metaphysics, they say, not to religion. We are not interested, they say, in the question whether God is powerful, but only in conceiving of him as good.

Such is the view of those who use the phrase “the Christlike God.” That phrase, as it is commonly used, grates upon Christian ears. It grates upon the ears of those who believe not that God is like Jesus, but that Jesus himself is God.

Jesus certainly believed that God is the Creator and Ruler of the universe, and that belief belonged to the foundation of everything that he believed. Jesus held just that view of God which the persons of whom we have been speaking reject as being mere metaphysics. He put at the very foundation of his teaching and his life that divinely revealed metaphysic which is found in the first verse of Genesis. Everything that he did, with everything that he said, was based upon the great truth: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” God, according to Jesus, is the Creator and the absolute Ruler of the universe, bringing all things to pass in accordance with the counsel of his will.

To hold, then, that we can be indifferent to the question whether God is the Maker and Ruler of the world, is to treat Jesus himself with contempt, since it means that we reject what he himself put at the very foundation of his life and of his teaching.

But that view is not only derogatory to Jesus. It is also derogatory to God. What a low view of God it is to be sure when men say that they are not interested in the question whether he is powerful, whether he is the Creator or Ruler of the world, but are only interested in the question whether he is good!

If God is good only and not powerful, we are of all men most miserable. We had trusted him so implicitly; we had felt so safe in his everlasting arms. But now you tell us that our confidence was misplaced and that God really had no power to save his children when they call! Shall we believe you? Ah, no, my friends. Not if we are Christians.

But, people say, even if God is not thus all-powerful, even if we can no longer think of him as the sovereign Creator and Ruler of the world, even if we relegate these things to the realm of mere metaphysics, have we not at least something left? Have we not goodness left? Can we not find a higher and more disinterested worship—far higher, it would seem than that which Jesus practised—in the reverence for goodness stripped of the old vulgar trappings of power?

It sounds noble at first. But consider it for a moment and its glory turns to ashes and leaves us in despair. What is meant by a goodness that has no power? Is not goodness a mere abstraction except as it belongs to persons? As does not the very notion of a person involve the power to act? Goodness altogether divorced from power is therefore no goodness at all. The truth is that if you try to make God good only and not powerful, both God and goodness have been destroyed.

The Bible does indeed teach us that God is immanent in the world. He is not a God afar off. The devout reader of the Bible can say with Tennyson: “Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”

But if God is thus immanent in the world, he is also transcendent. The world is dependent upon him, but he is not dependent upon the world. He has set bounds to the world, but the world has set no bounds to him. It is the work of his hands, but he is from eternity. “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” Running all through the Bible is the awful separateness of God from the world. That is what the Bible calls the holiness of God. The Bible, unlike the pantheists, presents to us a holy God.

But the Bible also—and again unlike the pantheists—presents to us a personal God. The God of the Bible is not just another name for the universe itself, nor is he a name for a spiritual purpose supposed to run through the universe, or for any impersonal principle of goodness. It is clear that God is personal. He is not a force or a principle or a collective somewhat of which we are parts. He is a person, to whom we can say “thou,” a person who can, if he will, speak to us as a man speaketh to his friend, and who can, if he will, become to us a heavenly Father.

But what is needed first of all is that we shall stand in awe before his throne. We are living in an age when men have forgotten God. They have become engrossed in their own affairs. They have been puffed up in their pride. They have put God out of their thoughts. The result is that our boasted civilization is rushing rapidly to its fall.—J. G. M.

Cults are nothing new. In every age there are unorthodox or spurious religions that are usually associated in their beginning with a leader who claims a special revelation and are characterized by denials of and deviations from Christianity.

One of the strange signs of our time is that many beliefs long held by cultists but repudiated by the Christian Church are now becoming popular and respectable. Basic to this change is a departure from faith in some of the clear teachings of the Bible and the substitution of human speculation for divine revelation.

The Apostle Paul speaks of a time when men will appear “who will listen to anybody and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth,” a time when “evil men and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceivers and deceived” (2 Tim. 3:7, 13).

Paul is not being unduly severe. He is speaking of eternal issues and of those who would subvert them to their own ends.

As we look at the moral and spiritual decline of our time, the violence, delinquency, pornography, sex obsession, dishonesty, and general disregard for the laws of a holy God, we are inclined to think that these external manifestations of human depravity are supreme examples of sin.

This is not so. In the practice of medicine the acme of wrong is not disease itself but the refusal to use an available curative agent or operative procedure.

In the theological world man’s greatest sin is to ignore, subvert, or deny God’s provision for lost men. As Satan is pictured plucking up the good seed and sowing tares in its place, so at times we find the simple truths of God’s redeeming love and grace removed and replaced by man-devised ideas.

A stone is no substitute for bread, nor a scorpion for a fish; evasions cannot substitute for doctrines having to do with man’s need of salvation and God’s provision for that need.

For years the major denominations rejected the cults and clearly denounced their errors. Now in many places the devious doctrines of the cultists have been received into the framework of the Church and made a part of its teaching. This charge is not based on idle speculation. One has but to look at the literature of non-Christian cults such as Christian Science, Unity, and Jehovah’s Witnesses to see what is happening. Their denial of the doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, is now being publicly proclaimed by some prominent bishops and theologians.

When one reads some of the high-flown twaddle expounded by the cults, such as “Individualize yourself in the highest by affirming that in Spirit and in Truth you are all that God is” (Fillmore, a spokesman for Unity), one is reminded of certain unintelligible phrases current in respectable Protestant circles. “Wholly Other,” “Ground of Being,” “Ultimate Reality,” “Demythologizing”—the list of words and phrases that effectively hide truth or distort its meaning seems endless.

For decades the doctrines of the Russellites, now known as Jehovah’s Witnesses, were rejected in orthodox circles. Now the teachings of this cult having to do with hell (“the idea is Satanic, not of God”) have been embraced by many in the Church. These same cultists teach that the Resurrection did not occur. Now they have their counterparts within historic Protestantism.

The Christian Scientists’ concept of sin finds an echo among those who explain away the reality of sin or excuse it as the result of unfortunate circumstances over which the victim has had no control. It is popular in our day to blame our parents or our environment for the manifestations of sin in our lives. This is done by cultists and also by some liberal theologians.

The cults and liberal theological thought have many things in common. In part they center in the belief that God’s revelation in Scriptures is not final.

The cultists generally contend that they accept the Bible and its teachings, but they proceed to add to it through alleged special revelations to their founders. Christian Science adds to the Bible Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. In this Mrs. Eddy says, “The Bible has been my only textbook,” and goes on to reinterpret the Bible to her way of thinking. The Mormons add The Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants, all of which reinterpret the Scriptures. Jehovah’s Witnesses, founded by Charles Taze Russell, agree that it is better to leave the Bible unread provided one reads Russell’s comments on the Bible, than to read the Bible and leave his comments unread. So it has ever been.

The theological liberal also accepts “in principle” the inspiration and authority of the Holy Scriptures but with reservations that permit interpretations in direct conflict with the Word. One student at a large theological seminary recently said, “For a while 1 thought my professor in theology was making frequent references in class to the Apostle Paul, only to find that he was talking about Paul Tillich.”

The gradual erosion of absolutes in doctrine and their replacement by relativistic interpretations has opened the way for cultism to pose as intellectual Christianity.

This is not to attack intellectualism, nor to say that some involved in interpretation of scriptural truth in abstract terms are not Christians. But, as the pilferer of a five-dollar bill from the till cannot condemn the cashier who has taken a thousand dollars, so Christian leaders who have compromised in their own faith find it difficult to take an unequivocal stand for the inerrancy of the Scriptures.

Moral Rearmament, now completely dissociated from the Christian movement, never had its roots in true Christianity, for from the beginning it eschewed both doctrine and biblical authority. Now within the Church there is a form of syncretism that plays down Christian distinctives for the sake of an outward unity. This movement is growing in areas where organization takes precedence over the verities of the faith.

On the surface cultism and some modern theology seem irreconcilable, but underneath they have much in common. The theosophist, for instance, denies the vicarious atonement of our Lord, his unique deity, the Trinity, the authority of the Bible, and the doctrine of eternal punishment, How close this is to the views of many respected philosophers who claim the name of Christ!

That cultists and many respected theological personalities have parallel thrusts is not so strange as it might seem at first. For both have cut free the anchor of divine revelation and embarked on the sea of human speculation. Both are unwilling to accept the finality of God’s revelation in Christ. Both are anxious to deny what cannot be denied, or to supplement what needs no addition.

In each case there is the desire to make Christianity respectable and credible. But what is needed is simple faith in those things already so clearly revealed.

This is written, not to condemn, but to enlighten—to show that the relation between many of the once-despised cults and much to be found in liberal Christianity is uncomfortably close. Some may never have realized how far they have departed from the faith.

America is in a state of crisis. This is not because the paperbacks and the commentators say so, but because the red-necked racists, the wild kids on the beaches, the punks, the beatniks, the pregnant high school girls, the dope addicts, the vandals, the TV addicts, the sick readers of sick books, the sick viewers of sick movies, are saying so. The Communists are still dedicated to controlling this world and burying the United States. It is a time of crisis because the Chinese have the atomic bomb. We are at a new low in the choice given us in Presidential candidates in regard to spiritual matters. The spiritual poverty in Presidential candidates is greater than the material poverty of Appalachia. Moreover, the population explosion is causing a crisis in Christian numerical strength. In 1964 the Christian community accounts for 34 per cent of the world’s population, but by the year 2000 we will account for only 22 per cent.

We are in a state of crisis, also, because we are ministering essentially to materialists. The average American has never had so much and enjoyed it so little. The affluent member of the great society is desperately dissatisfied, tremendously restless. Vance Packard, author of The Hidden Persuaders, believes that Huxley was right in saying technology would destroy what we have known as beauty. Mr. Packard says that according to national figures we Americans change cars every two and a quarter years, friends every four years, and wives every seven years. We are lacking in a sense of basic worth, individuality, selfhood.

The morality of America is being determined by the producers and not by the consumers. The boys in the gray flannel suits on Madison Avenue have taken the place of the men in the black gowns and are false prophets. It is a time of crisis!

In the midst of this stands the Church, the Church of the living God, the visible body and bride of Jesus Christ, purchased by his blood shed on the Cross, declaring a fundamental message. There is a God! Man is not God. There is a Supreme Being, the God of history. In incredible love he speaks through the Bible, his revealed Word, which is trustworthy. God speaks through the fallible conscience of man. He speaks through the experiences of providence. But he speaks supremely through Jesus Christ, his virgin-born son who reveals God the Father, active in reconciliation, in redemption; the result is the miracle of the new birth. This good news is a power of God unto salvation by the power of the Holy Spirit, who produces a new creature in Christ. There is forgiveness. There is the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses from all sin—the sin of hostility toward our Creator; the sin of rejection of the love of Jesus Christ as seen through the Cross; the sin of self-ruination; the sin of alienation from God and his love; the sin of failure to reach the highest point of development for which we were born; the sin of refusal to love, refusal to be reconciled to ourselves and to our fellow men.

The Church proclaims also that this life is not all. There is life beyond the grave. There is resurrection. There is immortality. There is a heaven that is future. Meanwhile, life does not consist in the things man possesses.

This is the towering task of the Church of Jesus Christ. The glorious message of Jesus Christ is adequate and relevant. Let us proclaim it and live it in the market place of life. Let us tell it to the ubiquitous, good-time Charlies, those who are stalled in brooding despair; mangled by poverty; sullied and dispirited by plenty; fouled and misbegotten by pleasure; caught in the junk-furnished web of science; stuffed with a billion hamburgers and deafened by the cornucopian horn. We need to say to the empty materialist, “You must be born again. Jesus Christ has come to seek you.” This good news is compassionate, urgent, and contemporary.

We have been challenged to rethink the adequacy, the pertinence, the effectiveness of this Gospel. It must be exported beyond the institutional church to the plants, offices, labs, homes, and classrooms where the people are. Let the Baptist Jubilee Advance be a launching pad for an even greater quest for the soul of space-age man. God should be praised for a denomination that wants to reappraise with agony, wants to be identified with man in his need, wants to be relevant, and is willing to experiment. But let the results be in names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life and on the rolls of the institutional church.—DR. J. LESTER HARNISH, president, American Baptist Convention.

Revealed religion once again is being summoned to fight for its life. There is no need for panic. This is not a new battle but just another round in a long-continuing contest. Every generation has had to face attacks on “the faith once delivered.” And if we are now seeing the emergence of new attacks from both without and within the Church, we need be neither surprised nor dismayed. The enemy has new tactics, perhaps even a new visage. Yet we face the same old battle between faith and unbelief.

The lengths to which the opposition will go is evidenced by the wide acceptance of Bishop A. T. Robinson’s book, Honest to God. Robinson and others less well known are prepared to abandon every major tenet of the faith, including the very existence of the biblically revealed God, in order to accommodate themselves to an age when historic Christianity is declared intellectually “indefensible.”

This apostasy is not without practical results. Moral absolutes go the way of theological dogmas. Thus one Scandinavian cleric recently announced that the Church must stop condemning premarital intercourse in order to be relevant for a generation 80 per cent of which opposes its narrow-minded morality.

This latest attack on the faith unquestionably springs from human speculation. It is “new” only in its outward guise. It may offer a new “solution,” but like its eighteenth-century forefather, rationalism, and its first cousins, deism, liberalism, and agnosticism, it presumes to find the biblical faith unacceptable on an intellectual basis.

As in a refrain, we are told that the human race is coming of age—a claim Thomas Paine made almost two centuries ago. The simple, naïve religion of our forebears will not do. God is but a projection of the human mind. To our fathers he was the explanation of the mysteries of the universe. But we have unraveled these mysteries by scientific investigation and no longer need God to account for them. God, we are told, was merely a father image. An insecure race concocted him to calm their fears. Now we have grown up and do not need any Father in the skies to watch over us. Religion is for weaklings.

The Need Of A Weak World

Yes, religion is for weaklings. That is precisely the point. And it is illogical, if not outright absurd, for a world that is falling apart to dismiss Christianity because it is for the weak. Crime increases at a rate four times greater than that of population growth because people are too weak to walk the path of integrity. Mental patients fill more hospital beds than all other sick people combined because people are too weak to face the stresses of life. The race is so immature that heads of nations wrangle like spoiled children. Humanity is weak; men need God.

Not only is it true that religion is for weaklings (as the child learns in earliest Sunday school days, “Little ones to Him belong; they are weak, but He is strong”); it is also true that religion makes weak men strong. Men of religious faith (weak men transformed) were the hardy pioneers who built this mighty nation, carving it out of a wilderness. Some of their descendants, lawless hoodlums, godless and dissolute, prowl in our asphalt jungles, a threat to everything their forefathers built.

Irreligious people who are supposedly strong are often only untested. When everything goes fairly well they are strong, but a heavy affliction may often change their views. Then they find hope and comfort only in God.

This “weakness” of those who accept religion, used as an argument against God, is actually evidence for him. It shows that man was not designed to be self-sufficient. The Creator put basic needs in man that can be met only by a meaningful relationship with God. Yes, religion is for weaklings. Therefore, who of us can afford to be without it?

As for our vaunted intellectual superiority, let us remember that this is not the first generation to profess itself wise. Such an attitude was ancient history even in the days of the Apostle Paul, and in the first chapter of Romans he pictures the results of that attitude. Creation plainly reveals a great Creator. But man fails to live according to this revelation and refuses to glorify the God he knows exists. In need of some authority, godless man exalts his own intellect. Having deposed God, he installs his own mind on the empty throne.

Professing himself to be wise, he becomes a fool. He begins to serve money, power, fame, appetites. Then he begins to defend immorality as freedom and descends to perversion and utter degradation. This is no longer mere immorality or a lapse into sin. It is rather a complete denial of the principles of morality and capitulation to libertinism. Such people feel no shame; indeed, they glory in their lusts. Like the Sodomites, they demand absolute moral abandonment as their right. This whole process of deterioration may not occur in a single generation; yet it is the ultimate end of much unbelief.

Thus it is no surprise to Bible students that men who deny God because they deify their own intellectual biases go on to defend the “new (im)morality.” Some already espouse complete libertinism. When will such men realize that unbelief is no mark of intellectual superiority? Consider the overbearing smart aleck who rejects the entire Bible because no one can explain to his satisfaction where Cain got his wife. In citing this “proof” of Bible error, he only parrots what he has heard. Many better intellects could explain this “problem” to their complete satisfaction. His unbelief is no evidence of his intellectual superiority or of biblical error, but only of his own limited understanding and unlimited pride. Likewise, a problem that bothers the wisest of us might be no problem at all to an even greater intellect. Humility admits that God may understand some things we do not comprehend.

Belief does not require intellectual mediocrity or dishonesty, but only intellectual humility. The faith of the French genius, Blaise Pascal, demonstrates this. The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes Pascal as “a man whose genius gives him a unique eminence among modern thinkers.” In even more glowing terms, the Americana calls him “one of the greatest and most comprehensive geniuses that the world has ever known.” At the age of sixteen, Pascal astounded the greatest authorities of his day by his mathematical ability. Two years later he invented a calculating machine that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. His achievements ranged from laying the foundation of mathematical calculus to establishing the first public omnibuses.

There was a time when for Pascal the intellect was supreme, as is evident in a letter he wrote to Queen Christina of Sweden. But at the age of thirty-one he had an encounter with the living God that transformed his life. “The God of the philosophers and the scholars” gave place to “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob … the God of Jesus Christ … to be found only by the ways taught in the Gospel.”

“I have separated myself from Him,” cried Pascal. “I have fled from Him, denied Him, crucified Him.” But henceforth “let me never be separated from Him. This is the eternal life, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and the One whom Thou hast sent, Jesus Christ.” From then until the day he died, Pascal sought to persuade intellectuals to trust in Christ. He maintained that belief was as reasonable as unbelief, and that one had nothing to lose and everything to gain by trusting Christ.

The Rich Man’S Danger

Christianity does not condemn intellectual excellence any more than it condemns material affluence. But it recognizes the inherent danger in both, the danger of idolatry. The rich man (either in goods or intellect) may, instead of humbly thanking the Creator for his gift, feel he does not need God. Thus he worships the gift instead of the Giver, the creature instead of the Creator. This danger is both real and great. In fact, Jesus said that it is harder for a “rich” man to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. “But,” he continued, “with God all things are possible.”

Today’s intellectuals, many of whom are inside as well as outside the Church, have need to recall the experience of our Lord Jesus at the hands of the intellectuals of his day. Why was it that not one of the apostles was from the intellectual class? Paul indeed was a notable exception. But for Saul to become Paul, the camel had indeed to pass through the needle’s eye! Jesus’ choice of his apostles was not arbitrary. If he chose no intellectuals, it was because none was spiritually fit. As Paul said, “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise …” (1 Cor. 1:26, 27).

And so it will be with modern intellectuals who reject the God of the Bible. He will set them aside to dazzle one another with their fruitless debates, while he goes about his work in the world through common men who do not think they know more than he does.

Christ was no more acceptable to the intelligentsia of the first century than he is to the intelligentsia now. “None of the princes of this world knew [at that time, the divine wisdom], for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). The intellectuals were all in the dark. They could have given a dozen reasons for rejecting the “untenable claims” of Christ.

In Matthew 11:25 and 26 we read, “At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight.” The wise and the prudent today also must be converted and become as little children that God may reveal unto them his truth.

God has deliberately arranged it thus. (“So it seemed good in thy sight.”) Why? Because not everyone has the vaunted wisdom of the intellectual. Shall God so order his truth that it may be understood only by the intelligentsia? If it were intelligible only to geniuses, they would inescapably have the advantage. But anyone, whether slow-witted or brilliant, may and must come to God only through humility and simple faith.

Much is said these days about making our message relevant. But we need to ask, Relevant to whom? Is Christianity only for the gifted student or philosopher? There can be no argument against translating the solid substance of biblical teaching into plain, contemporary language. But to twist that substance into vague, speculative wanderings is not relevance. Nor can it meet the need of the masses!

So the battle rages. Let those of us who have the necessary mental capacity rise up to debate the wise of this world. But let us “beware, lest any man spoil [us] through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Col. 2:8). The battlefield of life is littered with the remains of men who “knew” too much and believed too little.

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.