Revelation in History

Fourth in a Series (Part I)

The long failure of German theology to reject the existential-dialectical notion that the historical aspects of the Christian revelation are dispensable gave to Continental dogmatics something of the atmosphere of an exclusive private club. Membership was restricted mainly to scholars who shared the speculative dogma that spiritual truth cannot be unified with historical and scientific truth. They therefore emphasized the kerygmatic Christ at the expense of the Jesus of history, isolated Christianity from answerability to scientific and historical inquiry, and detached theology from philosophic truth.

Meanwhile British and American theologians and exegetes—whether conservative or liberal and despite sharp differences over the role and outcome of historical criticism—retained a lively interest in historical concerns. Most Anglo-Saxon biblical scholars still repose bold confidence in the historical method. They view the Gospels somewhat as historical source documents, carry forward the research effort to reconstruct the life of Jesus, stress the kerygma’s connection with specifically historical factors, and assume generally the concrete historical character of divine revelation.

The current renewal of European interest in biblical history and its bearing on divine revelation encourages many scholars to hope that for the first time theologians and exegetes in America, Britain, and Europe as well may at long last join in theological conversation. Since British and American scholars currently hold a considerable head start in their commitment to historical concerns, some observers feel that non-Europeans could in fact wrest away the theological initiative long held by the German professors.

Most of today’s unrest in Bultmannian circles results from the present sprawling interest in historical questions. Some pro-Bultmannian scholars, of course, still invoke radical historical criticism in support of existentialist exegesis; Conzelmann, for example, insists that the bare fact of Jesus’ historical existence is the only datum that can be historically fixed. Even the post-Bultmannian “new quest” for the historical Jesus reflects a continuing loyalty to Ritschl’s and Herrmann’s subordination of the knowledge of God to faith or trust, so that its historical interest does not lead to evangelical results. But many post-Bultmannians at least share Fuchs’s emphasis that “the historical Jesus of the nineteenth century was not really the historical Jesus, but [that] the Jesus of the New Testament, the Jesus of revelation, is.” Bultmann’s kerygmatic Christology closed the door in principle to any movement behind the kerygma to the historical Jesus. At the same time, he nowhere explains why, on his premises, any continuity whatever is necessary between the historical cross and the preached cross of the kerygma; nor why, since he insists on this limited continuity, other historical aspects embraced by the kerygma must be excluded.

Yet what sets off post-Bultmannian interest in the historical Jesus from that of the Heilsgeschichte scholars is its refusal to regard the historical Jesus as decisive for faith, and also its emphasis that faith requires no historical supports. The salvation-history scholars, by contrast, investigate the revelation-significance of God’s acts in history.

Some post-Bultmannians, it is true, take a position at the very edge of Heilsgeschichte concerns. Günther Bornkamm, for example, argues that the Heilsgeschichte concept cannot be renounced but must be redefined. “Faith must be interested in history,” says Bornkamm, “because the name of Jesus in our confession is not a mere word but an historical person.” Yet he centers historical interest in the content of Jesus’ preaching. He rejects antithesizing history and experience, and stresses that while revelation does not (as he sees it) take place in “history itself,” it does occur in the encounter “which belongs to history.” Unlike Heilsgeschichtescholars, who locate the meaning of history in sacred history, Bornkamm insists that the essence of history is still to be decided. “We are ourselves part of the drama of history and salvation-history. The meaning of history is not given as a Heilsgeschichte drama or series of past events of which we are spectators, and to which we need only relate ourselves to accept the divine gift.”

Bornkamm complains, moreover, that Ernst Kasemann’s view of the relevance of Jewish apocalyptic for Christian faith is contestable. Käsemann, who presses the question of the meaning of certain acts of God for Christian proclamation, stresses over against Bultmann that the real center of primitive Christian proclamation was not the believing subject but rather the interpretation of the eschatological teaching with its anticipation of final fulfillment. The New Testament message, he says, is the proclamation of an apocalyptic event.

Historical Revelation

Heilsgeschichte positions differ from post-Bultmannian perspectives in emphasizing that the saving deeds of God supply a ground of faith: Christian faith is faith not only in the kerygmatic Christ but also in the historical Jesus. All Heilsgeschichte scholars insist on an integral connection between the saving deeds of God and Christian faith.

Not all members of the salvation-history movement today speak unreservedly of historical revelation, and none would go the distance of the old Erlangen Heilsgeschichte school. Their approach sometimes does not transcend an application to New Testament studies of Gerhard von Rad’s positions in Old Testament study. Von Rad rejects the old Erlangen view of history as a process whose inner meaning can be demonstrated, and his emphasis on the Old Testament as a collection of confessional traditions of salvation-history leaves the historical and confessional factors unsurely related. He does not regard Jesus’ life and work as a direct fulfillment of particular Old Testament prophecies and promises; rather, with the contemporary Heilsgeschichte school, he views Jesus as fulfilling the general Old Testament picture only in the broad sense of archetype and type. All Heilsgeschichte scholars reject the bare Religionsgeschichte view that Jesus incarnates the universal spirit or idea; they look instead in the direction of Von Rad’s emphasis that the Old Testament must be interpreted (independently of all developments of non-biblical religions) as the history of God which was fulfilled in Jesus Christ; and that the New Testament must be interpreted (independently of all religious developments in the old world) as the fulfillment of the Old Testament.

While a mildly conservative New Testament scholar like Goppelt of Hamburg is congenial to these positions, some conservative scholars view the Heilsgeschichte wing as little else than a more positive movement of the critical school. The problem is dramatized by the fact that many Heilsgeschichte scholars, for all their larger emphasis on biblical history, still hesitate to regard the meaning of salvation as objectively given and accessible. Instead, they continue to speak of religious experience or decision as a fulcrum of revelation. Although he insists that the Old Testament is strictly a Heilsgeschichte process, Goppelt refuses to hold that divine revelation is given in history, and retains a dialectical perspective despite differences with Bultmann and Barth. Invoking the Lutheran formula of “in, with, and under,” he asserts that it is too much to say that the Word is revealed in history.

For the sake of clarity we shall compare the viewpoints of the Heilsgeschichte scholars and of the traditional conservative scholars. Both schools agree that divine revelation and redemption are objective historical realities. They both admit that the sacred biblical events, like all past happenings, are not accessible to empirical observation, although from written sources these events are knowable to historians by the same methods of research used in the study of secular history.

What, then, of the meaning of the biblical events? Surely even the immediate observers, whether Pharisees or apostles, could not have learned this by mere observation. The spiritual meaning of these sacred events is divinely given, not humanly postulated. Here again Heilsgeschichte and conservative scholars agree.

But how is this divine meaning of sacred history given to faith? Conservative scholars insist that the historian need not shift to some mystical ground or suprarational existential experience to discern it. For the New Testament documents as they testify to divine deed-revelation give or are themselves divine truth-revelation; that is to say, the divinely given interpretation of the saving events is contained within the authoritative record of the events themselves. Or to put it another way, the divine saving events include, as a climax, the divine communication of the meaning of those events, objectively given in the inspired Scriptures. While nobody can infer the meaning of the biblical events from empirical observation or historical inquiry, the doctrines of Christianity are accessible to the historian in the form of the New Testament verbal revelation of God’s acts and purposes. Historical investigation deals with the scriptural documents that record the historical disclosure of God’s suprahistorical redemptive plan. When conservative scholars assert that God’s revelation in history is not found by scientific research but is given to faith, they mean that the Holy Spirit illumines the minds of men to accept the scriptural revelation of the meaning of the events of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. That the truth of apostolic interpretation is grasped only by faith and our acceptance of Scripture is a work of the Holy Spirit is a constant evangelical emphasis.

The Heilsgeschichte scholars compromise the conservative view because of their prior critical rejection of the historic Christian understanding of revelation in terms of the infallible divine communication of propositional truths. Their emphasis falls instead upon individual spiritual encounter not only as the focal point of illumination but as the focal point of the revelation of divine meaning. While they insist that revelation is objectively given in historical events, they suspend the knowability of the meaning of that revelation upon subjective decision and isolate it from divine truths and doctrines objectively and authoritatively given in the inspired Scriptures.

A Case In Point

Werner Georg Kümmel of Marburg, a spokesman for the salvation-history school, insists that divine revelation “exists only in response,” although his exposition of this perspective includes many conservative facets.

“Revelation is given not only in history but even in historical events and the interpretations connected with these events. Historical critical research is therefore indispensable for faith that wants to know about the events and the interpretation connected with them. But research can find out only the events or the reflex of the events (e.g., of the resurrection of Christ) and the claim of the participants to interpret these events in the way God wants. Whether this claim is correct, research cannot find out, but only faith. So we never find revelation in history by scientific research. But we can clarify and make clear that their claim and our faith attached to this claim are founded in an event that really gives the sufficient ground for this faith. So faith does not depend on historic research but needs it as soon as faith begins to reflect on itself, for faith does not only need the certainty of the event-basis but also the good conscience of not being built in the air.”

As Kümmel sees it, by historical research one finds in scripture both the sacred events and the meaning adduced as the kerygma connected with those events. But, he insists, the unbeliever cannot disallow “the factuality of the events and the factuality of the interpretation given them by the apostolic witnesses, (whereas) the validity of these interpretations is grasped only by personal response in faith”—in response, moreover, that must be “a reasoned response.” Apart from his disjunction of fact from meaning (and not simply of objective event from subjective appropriation), it should be clear that Kümmel struggles to elevate the meaning of saving history above a theology of decision. Yet he balks at an objectively-given scriptural interpretation which is to be appropriated, as in the conservative tradition, as authoritative propositional information. For Kümmel distinguishes proclamation from information and, moreover, subjects the scriptural meaning of salvation-history to possibilities of critical revision. In view of his appeal to “the character of faith as response to a proclamation and not to an information,” and of his consequent insistence that the believer “cannot simply repeat what has been said by others, but must try to understand and, perhaps, to reformulate or to criticize the aptness of the apostolic interpretations,” one must ask Kümmel what post-apostolic criteria and what non-historical ways of knowing are available for this task. Surely we cannot object to the need for understanding (what Paul said), rather than mere unintelligible repetition; but what is it to criticize Paul’s interpretation? Does this mean that we can amend or replace the scriptural interpretation with one of our own? That may not reduce to a “theology of decision,” but it does imply the acceptance of a norm inconsistent with and independent of Scripture. By distinguishing proclamation from information, moreover, Kümmel seems to imply that proclamation contains no information, hence is not true as an account of what happened.

The predicament of the Heilsgeschichte scholars, therefore, lies in regarding history as an avenue of divine disclosure but suspending the meaning of that revelation upon subjective factors. If Bultmann was content to connect Old and New Testaments in decision (and even then viewed the former only in terms of negative antithesis), while Heilsgeschichte scholars insist on connecting them historically, the contemporary salvation-history school nonetheless compromises objective historical revelation in a manner that suspends its meaning upon personal response. The intelligibility of revelation remains a matter of private decision. The dilemma confronting this salvation-history compromise is reflected by Nils Ahstrup Dahl of Oslo: “I don’t want to say that all religious affirmations are only subjective emotive affirmations, but I find it hard to state the alternative without surrendering what I want to preserve—the right of historical research to establish truth.”

This bifurcation of divine revelation into a deed-revelation in history and a meaning-revelation in experience has propelled the problem of history to new prominence. In fact, the debate over the definition and meaning of history has become so technical that few scholars any longer feel wholly at home in it. In barest terms, history involves these questions: What relation if any exists between event and meaning? Does one method grasp both event and meaning? Are there bare events as such or only interpretations of historical process? What relation exists between Christological faith and historical fact?

Heinrich Ott, Barth’s successor in Basel, contends that no historical facts whatever exist. Significance is an integral and constitutive element of all historical reality. Reality impresses itself upon us in the form of pictures which we interpret, and from which we abstract “facts.” Hence history, he says, is always of the nature of encounter: all reality merges factual, interpretative, and mythical elements. “God’s seeing”—his purpose and goal in historical events—is said to exclude a purely subjective notion of history, and thereby limits the danger of relativism. But because we stand within history, argues Ott, we can never transfer ourselves to God’s standpoint. It is through the Spirit’s inner testimony that “the knowledge of faith” assures us of having rightly understood the Christ-event.

Instead of detaching historical investigation from the philosophical presuppositions of twentieth-century dialectical-existentialist theory as well as from nineteenth-century naturalism, some recent scholarship stresses an existential relation to history in which historical continuity yields to “personal-ontological continuity.” Hardly surprising, therefore, is Ott’s acknowledgment that “the mystery of historical reality, its ambiguity and depth” are more likely to multiply the historian’s esteem and awe than to reward with striking results the axioms on which historical research is presently conducted.

Many graduate students find the current climate of conflicting exegetical claims so confusing that they are tempted to identify the “assured results” of historical research simply with “what most scholars (now) think.” The definition of history remains so much in debate that more radical students think of history only in terms of historical documents plus the imagination of historians.

Oscar Cullmann views salvation-history as a revelatory activity in which God’s plan is unfolded. His Basel colleague Karl Barth absorbed history into the decrees of God and emptied it of revelation-content by locating justification in creation and by viewing all men as elect in the man-Jesus. For Cullmann, the options are not so predetermined as to nullify revelation and decision in history, although Cullmann objectionably puts time in the nature of God as the means of preserving a genuine distinction between what has happened and what will happen. The concrete historical character of divine disclosure is a controlling emphasis of Cullmann’s thought. God acts in the contingent temporal sphere, and divine revelation takes place in “sacred history”; at the center of this line of time, which reaches from creation to consummation, stands Jesus of Nazareth as the absolute revelation of God. There can be no Heilsgeschichte without Christology, and no Christology without a Heilsgeschichte that unfolds in time, Cullmann contends. While he emphasizes Jesus’ work more than his person, Cullmann insists that one can assuredly possess authentic Christian faith only if one believes the historical fact that Jesus regarded himself as Messiah—a complete inversion of Bultmann at this point. Thus Cullmann views the history of salvation as the locus of divine revelation, anchors revelation in the dimension of historically verifiable facts, and assigns to historical knowledge a relevance for faith that is more in keeping with historical evangelical theology.

Many Heilsgeschichte scholars push Cullmann outside their circle, however, because—like more traditionally conservative men such as Jeremias and Michel—he speaks of Jesus’ messianic self-consciousness (a predication equally distasteful to the post-Bultmannians, Eduard Schweizer excepted). Cullmann’s critics complain that his historical critical investigation is dominated by theological presuppositions—from which they presumably are scot-free in achieving contrary exegetical results!

To be continued…

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Theology

In the Wake of the ‘Honest to God’ Storm

Ilion T. Jones

The publication of Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God may turn out to be one of the important religious events of our times. If that happens, the reason will be not so much the contents of the book as what it has provoked. It has brought out into the open many things that have been lying dormant, awaiting the propitious moment or appropriate motivation for expression. In particular, the appearance of Robinson’s book may ultimately be credited in large part with bringing these three things to light: (1) the real nature of liberal theology; (2) the predicament of liberal theologians; and (3) the concern of Christian laymen.

The Nature Of Liberal Theology

By “liberal” theology is meant the kind associated with Bultmann, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and Heidigger, and popularized by Bishop Robinson. Professedly this theology is an attempt to re-interpret the Gospel in the light of modern knowledge and concepts. Actually it replaces the Gospel, as this has been commonly understood, with one of the theologians’ own devising. Therefore it must be labeled a heresy.

The distinctive feature of this heresy is not that it rejects the traditional interpretations of the Christian Gospel, as has been done by many previous heresies, but that, omitting from consideration whole segments of the New Testament, it builds a theology merely on what is left and on alien elements imported from non-biblical sources. By this procedure evangelical, or New Testament (the terms are interchangeable), Christianity is transformed into another religion. This is widely recognized by writers in both religious and secular publications as what is happening today.

In the first place, liberal theologians disregard “God” in the New Testament and then proceed to characterize Christianity variously as “non-theistic religion,” “religion without God,” and even “atheistic religion.” Though some of these theologians seem to retain the deistic conception of God as the original power or intelligence that set the machinery of the universe in operation and then went off and left it run itself thereafter, all of them agree that God can no longer be thought of as a person with whom human beings can have personal communion.

A “non-theistic religion” is a contradiction in terms. Theism means belief in a God or gods. Religion means the worship of a God or gods. Every religion in the history of the race, with the doubtful exception of Buddhism, has believed in a Divine Being. Most assuredly Christianity and its predecessor Judaism, out of which Christianity emerged, cannot in any sense be called “non-theistic” without doing violence to both the Old and New Testaments, to everything Jesus himself said and did, and to everything his followers wrote about his teaching, his work, and his person. Belief in the existence and activity of a personal God with whom human beings may have intimate fellowship is the heart of the Bible. Thus it is preposterous to speak of Christianity as a “religion without God.”

Secondly, liberal theologians disregard judgment and discipline in the New Testament doctrines of love and forgiveness. We are told so often and so glibly that God loves us “anyway,” and that he accepts us and forgives us unconditionally, that some people are led to think of forgiveness as automatic. A press dispatch reported that the first words of a teen-age lad on being apprehended for murdering a young girl were, “God will forgive me! God will forgive me!” That boy must have been listening regularly to the preaching of some liberal minister. The forgiveness of God offered in the Gospel is not that cheap, not that easy.

William Hamilton, professor of Christian theology in Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, concludes an article on today’s theologians (“Thursday’s Child: The Theologian Today and Tomorrow,” Theology Today, January, 1964) with a quotation and approval of this passage from Bonhoeffer:

Atonement and redemption, regeneration, the Holy Ghost, the love of our enemies, the cross and resurrection, life in Christ and Christian discipleship—all these things have become so problematic and so remote that we hardly dare any more to speak of them.… So our traditional language must perforce become powerless and remain silent, and our Christianity today will be confined to praying for and doing right by our fellow men. Christian thinking, speaking and organization must be reborn out of this praying and this action.

That is equivalent to saying that “love” is the only thing Christian theologians today can properly proclaim, and that love must be separated from atonement, redemption, regeneration, the Cross, the Holy Spirit, and the life in Christ. Yet we can safely assert, and assert it categorically, that this is not the Christian doctrine of love. The Christian doctrine of God’s forgiving, redeeming, suffering love is inextricably linked with the doctrines of judgment, discipline, confession, repentance, and atonement.

Jesse J. Roberson, a liberal Methodist minister in southern California, says that one of the fatal weaknesses of modern liberalism is to suppose that the basic elements of human nature can be eradicated through “the medium of some apparently free-floating entity sentimentally called love” (“Liberalism’s Fatal Weaknesses,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, April 24, 1964). O. Hobart Mowrer, a research professor in the psychology department of the University of Illinois, takes Christian ministers to task for dealing lightly with the doctrines of love and forgiveness. He says that the clerical sin lies in the “practice of assuring others, individually or collectively, of divine pardon in a quite premature and abortive way”—i.e., of offering forgiveness to guilt-ridden man by “letting him off easy,” “without confessing and making amends.” All of this he labels the doctine of “easy grace” (“The Almighty’s Unmighty Ministers,” The Christian Century, October 17, 1962).

Thirdly, liberal theologians disregard moral discipline in the New Testament. Some of their favorite themes are: Traditional Christian standards of conduct are a form of legalism; Christian morals are a form of moralism; the refusal of Christians to engage in certain worldly dissipations is a form of negativism or Puritanism; and the holding up of certain great virtues as ideals is a form of self-righteousness. These cliches have been reiterated so many times in books, articles, lectures, and sermons that apparently those who hear and read them are coming to believe them. Many people, especially young people, seem to have concluded that moral discipline in any form is the unpardonable sin.

Legalism, moralism, negativism, and self-righteousness should indeed be censured. But there are valid forms of moral discipline that have been part of the Christian Gospel from its beginnings. Inherent in one’s acceptance of Christ and commitment to him and to his way of life is the obligation to exert every effort to conform one’s life to this Christian commitment. Large portions of the New Testament exhort believers to assume this obligation. The New Testament also makes it clear that the Christian’s moral discipline is his response to God’s unmerited grace. By exercising moral vigilance the grateful Christian offers God’s grace a maximum chance to work in him, with him, and through him. So Paul exhorted the Philippians: “… work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12, 13, RSV). Grace and moral effort are joined together in the Gospel. What God has joined together let no theologian put asunder.

In the fourth place, liberal theologians disregard piety in the New Testament. Another of their cliches is to charge that piety is piosity. There is indeed such a thing as exaggerated, false piety. But genuine piety—honest devotion to prayer, private meditation, and public worship—is, like moral discipline, integral to the Gospel. Mysticism, in the sense of experiencing and being affected by the presence and power of God, of the divine Spirit’s meeting the human spirit, is inseparably a part of our Christian faith.

But the derogatory word “piosity” has been used so often in some theological circles that sincere piety, in the form of private devotions, the meeting of small groups for prayer and meditation, chapel exercises, prayers at the opening of classes and at public lectures, has been disdained and sometimes even discontinued in theological seminaries.

Because liberal ministers and theologians omit large sections of the New Testament and bring in alien elements to take their place, it is now charged that liberal theology is offering us an emasculated Gospel. In his article, “Christian Theology and the Challenge of Its Parodies” (Theology Today, January, 1964), Roland Mushat Frye, speaking of “honest-to-god” (sic) theologies, calls them “parodies of the Christian faith,” and says that their rising influence threatens to “emasculate the church’s message”:

Perhaps the greatest threat to Christianity today is the presence within the church of clergy and theologians (some of them leading theologians, in unhappy fact) who tend to correlate Christianity with their own pseudo-sophisticated understandings of culture to the point where Christianity is essentially cancelled out. Only the traditional Christian words remain, but they are in effect stripped of their distinctively Christian content and remain empty husks.

Louis Cassels, religion columnist and reporter for United Press International, in an article last summer discussed Bishop Robinson’s book and the Christian theologians who share and promote his views. He declared that these theologians have “undertaken to defend Christianity by abandoning its basic precepts,” that they are “casting overboard doctrines which have been at the core of Christian teaching for 2,000 years.” All this he labeled an “emasculated Gospel.” He also reported reactions to Robinson’s book by two of the Bishop’s fellow Englishmen: Alasdair MacIntyre of Oxford “welcomed the Bishop into the atheistic fold,” and the Archbishop of Canterbury said that he didn’t see how the book could be read as anything other than a repudiation of orthodox Christian belief.

Predicament Of Liberal Theologians

In the first place, the liberals are divided into so many schools of so many shades of opinion voiced by so many spokesmen that taken as a whole their theology is a conglomeration of viewpoints. This is obvious to anyone who reads the reports of various theological conferences such as the Consultations on Hermeneutics held in 1962 and in 1964. To the outsiders not yet initiated into the company of the theologically elite—and they include the great majority of us—the theologians seem to be like the man who jumped on his horse and rode off hurriedly in all directions. The pity of it is that many of the systems of theology imported from Europe over which they are fighting are already outmoded or repudiated in theological circles abroad.

Secondly, liberalism is now frequently subjected to the charge of being intellectually dishonest. Frye’s article says that “the use of the traditional Christian vocabulary, without reference to Christian content, can only be regarded as an act of intellectual dishonesty.” He also declares: “To anyone who has a scholarly acquaintance with linguistics and semantics, and with the history of ideas, those maneuvers would be ludicrous were they not so tragic.” Louis Cassels states that the attempt to “reinterpret the Christian Gospel” was carried on, until recently, “in theological doubletalk which few laymen could follow.” And Jesse J. Roberson charges his fellow liberals with being afflicted with the malady of “intellectual dishonesty,” or with what Walter Kaufmann of Princeton calls “double speak.”

In the third place, there are indications that the liberals are an uneasy, unhappy lot. Despite Roberson’s designation of himself as an “unreconstructed liberal,” he shows in his article that he is bewildered and saddened by what he calls “the inglorious failure of liberalism.” Still he does not (apparently because he cannot) offer a better theology than that which failed him, and he lays the blame on the personal failures of liberals rather than on their deficient and dishonest theology.

One of the most amazing articles in many a day is the one by William Hamilton from which a few lines have already been quoted. It reveals a wistful longing for something Hamilton and his fellow theologians have lost, and resembles a personal confession intended to relieve inner guilt. “The theologian … is a man without faith,” he admits. “He really doesn’t believe in God, whatever that means, or that there is a God, or that God exists.… Something has happened. At the center of his thoughts and meditations is a void, a disappearance, an absence.”

“Does the theologian go to church?” Hamilton asks. His answer is a resounding “no.” He quotes with approval these lines of Thomas J. J. Altizer of Emory University: “Contemporary theology must be alienated from the Church … [and] the theologian must exist outside the Church, he can neither proclaim the Word, celebrate the sacraments, nor rejoice in the presence of the Holy Spirit: before contemporary theology can become itself, it must first exist in silence.” Hamilton also asks, “Is this theologian reading the Bible?” His answer is: “Of course, he is forced into a kind of affable semi-professional relationship with Scripture in his daily work.… But the rigorous systematic confronting of Scripture, expecting the Word of God to be made manifest when one approaches it with faith or at least with a broken and contrite heart, this has gone.…” Concerning the theologian’s “loss of God, of faith, of church,” Hamilton concludes: “In the face of all this, he is a passive man, trusting in waiting, in silence, and even in a kind of prayer for the losses to be returned.”

If Professor Hamilton’s views are representative of those of other theologians in comparable positions in other Protestant seminaries, then Protestant churches have great reason to be perturbed about their professional theologians.

Concern Of Laymen

For some time leaders of the major Protestant denominations have been engaged in campaigns to enlist laymen in study of the Bible and of theology. These campaigns have included church-wide conferences for ministers and laymen, lectures in theological seminaries, study groups of various kinds, and the distribution of literature designed to acquaint laymen with the writings of liberal theologians in general and, lately, with Bishop Robinson’s book in particular. Unquestionably these campaigns are producing results, although not necessarily the kind hoped for.

Intelligent laymen are studying the Bible. They are reading liberal theology. This could become as important for the Church of our times as were the lay groups that studied the Bible and Christian theology preceding and during the Reformation period. And modern laymen are excited by what they are learning. They are thinking independently. They are asking incisive and disturbing questions.

If anyone wishes to verify this, let him read the increasing number of articles along this line appearing in our religious journals and in the religion sections of our secular press. Let him also circulate among the lay officials of the local churches of his denomination and listen to what they are saying.

Laymen are asking questions like these: “Why have our church leaders deliberately embarked upon a national campaign to promote the writings of extreme liberals whose theology is so manifestly out of harmony with our New Testament faith? Why are our theological seminaries preparing young ministers to preach that theology? Isn’t the New Testament the only authentic, historical record of our Christian faith now extant? Isn’t that where we are supposed to go to find out what the Gospel is? Are not Christian theologians supposed to have accepted Christ, committed themselves to the study of evangelical Christianity, and obligated themselves to teach and defend it? Then why do they attack that Christianity, or deny it, or substitute for it some other religious or some philosophical system?”

Laymen are also asking: “What has gone wrong with preaching? Why do preachers now talk almost exclusively in technical theological terms that are actually a foreign language to their parishioners?” And they are right in saying, “We find that sort of preaching deadening. It leaves us spiritually starved.”

Protestant laymen who read the article in Time (November 8, 1963) entitled “The Jargon that Jars” surely understood what the writer, presumably a perplexed layman, meant when he spoke of liberal theologians’ “slicing” their concepts so fine that a “new lingo” is required to understand them. They also understood his remark that the theologians appear to have invented a whole brood of complicated terms just to “intimidate the outsider.” These readers must have silently thanked the writer for quoting Methodist Bishop Gerald Kennedy and theologian Nels Ferre as saying that such language is “almost unusable in the pulpit” and is “not essential for preaching God’s Word.” And they would also have appreciated the report of a conference where “the ministers saw a great gulf fixed between the ministry [and, by inference, the ‘people’] and theologians,” the reason being that “theology with its polysyllables and stratospheric talk just did not communicate the Gospel to the ‘frontier’ where real people apparently live.”

Laymen are asking: “Why is the Church trying to make professional, technical theologians of us laymen?” This concern was presented by two elders, one a townsman and the other a university professor, when they spoke to the new pastor of a Presbyterian church in a university community. Said the townsman, “We townsfolk hope you will not ‘go university,’ as so many of our pastors have tried to do.” The professor said, “We university people hope you will continue to preach sermons instead of giving lectures from the pulpit, as some of your predecessors have felt impelled to do.” In the ensuing conversations each elder in his own way said that it is a mistake for a minister of a church—in a university community or anywhere else—to talk to his congregation in highly specialized terms such as those a professor uses in the classroom or before members of learned societies; that he should remember that all men, regardless of their place in society, have the same spiritual needs and that when they come to church they want to hear sermons that feed their souls, not academic theological lectures. They urged their pastor to preach the Gospel in the language of God’s Word in which it is found. For they believed the study of the Scriptures to be his field, and they considered him an expert in scriptural interpretation, teaching, and preaching.

Yes, it is possible that the publication of Honest to God may prove a blessing in disguise. If like the Apostle Paul we believe that God is involved in the affairs of his world and that “in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28), we may live to see, as did Paul, that what at first seemed a hindrance to the Gospel later turned out for “the furtherance of the Gospel.”

- More from Ilion T. Jones

Theology

Honest to God: Good Grief

Addison H. Leitch

The good Bishop of Woolwich, John A. T. Robinson, has started something he will be a long time getting stopped. He turned out a book that became a best-seller in no time at all. Now he has the difficult task of explaining himself. It’s a pity, in a way. The poor man will be spending years now saying, “I didn’t mean that” or “I didn’t mean it that way.” In a second little book, Christian Morals Today, comprising a series of lectures given in October, 1963, in Liverpool Cathedral, Robinson reflects upon his difficulties. He remarks rather plaintively, “I tend to classify my engagements at the moment by whether they were contracted before or after the flood—the date of the flood for archaeological purposes being the 19th of March 1963.” It is not difficult to understand what he means. Response to his book has broken out in all kinds of places and with every degree of approval and criticism.

We might strike a rather plaintive note, too. It looks as if we shall not rid ourselves of Bishop Robinson for a long time to come. One thinks of old Origen, who warned against saying anything gymnastikos, to which our word “gymnasium” is related. He was warning us against saying something in conflict that we might have to defend, even though we hadn’t planned on the conflict in the first place. We all do this. We get something said, and then, since it is our own brainchild, we feel called upon to defend it to the death, even though it didn’t mean a great deal to us when it all started. One of my friends still thinks that Robinson was writing “tongue in cheek.” Whether this be true in some parts of his book I can only wonder. One thing is certain: if the Bishop had to do it over again, he would have to write a bigger book with much sharper definition and fewer inconsistencies. This is why I suppose he will have to spend the rest of his days answering in the press, clarifying and defining on radio and television, and giving lectures on various points of his position. The rest of his days he will hear the “patter of little feet” (what quarterbacks hear in American football), and he will never know when he is going to be hit from the blind side.

The book, as we all know, is popular from its choice of title to its last illustration. It is very well written and commands attention from men and women in all walks of life. In these ways the book is an unqualified success. Theologically and religiously it could be a disaster.

The book is scripturally unsound. Robinson very plainly rests his case on many recent theologies, primarily those of Tillich and Bultmann. (It would be interesting to know whether either of these great thinkers accepts Robinson as a proponent of his position.) Since he has chosen to build on these two men, he must know, and his readers ought to know, that the scriptural position of both Tillich and Bultmann, however much it may be acceptable in some circles, is highly debatable in others. And it is definitely a sharp breakaway from the position of Scripture and of every church, including the Bishop’s. No church and no creed is ready to accept the stance that this Bishop in the Anglican church has chosen for his own. It is even highly debatable whether Barth’s view has been accepted as a creedal position by any denomination, and of course Barth represents another position over against the Bishop’s. In other words, Robinson represents a theological position of a minority group, even in terms of a shift from the old orthodoxy into neo-orthodoxy. This in itself makes him highly suspect and raises puzzling questions, first, about his wide acceptance, and second, about the willingness of his church to let him continue officially and publicly with what he has to say.

The Bishop And The Bible

Even if we identify his position with that of Bultmann, he does not throw his emphasis where Bultmann throws his; Bultmann’s “New Testament Theology” rests on Paul and John with virtual discard of the Gospels, while Robinson continues to look for what sound like “proof texts” wherever they light at hand. And what shall we say of his use of that Scripture which he does accept? One illustration will do. In speaking of the prodigal son he emphasizes that the boy in the far country “came to himself.” This is far enough for Robinson to prove his case that the God “down there” or even “in there” is nothing more than the ground of our own being. He interprets “came to himself” in his own peculiar way, while evading the fact that in the same parable the boy “came to his father.” Robinson is not above using Scripture to suit his thesis and can twist the story of the prodigal son to prove that a man’s reconciliation, in the long run, is to himself and not to God. This sets before us very bluntly the plain fact that the God of Bishop Robinson does not look much like the God of Scripture.

The book is theologically thin. In addition to playing fast and loose with any understanding the Church has had regarding God and the Fatherhood of God, Robinson gives no solid treatment of man or of sin, or of the Redeemer and the Christian hope. Although he tries to clarify theology by a shift in terms, his introduction of new terms leads only to greater confusion. It is hard to see what is gained by a change of vocabulary in theology anyway. Words have been hacked out by hard debate during centuries of church history, and they have their value as coin of the realm. To introduce his own vocabulary—such as “Ultimate Reality” or “Ground of Being” for God—does not really clarify. Rather, it demands now, and will certainly demand in the years to come, endless explanation. If the problem is that biblical and creedal language have been forced into anthropomorphic terms, do we not recognize that the Bishop, in his own struggle for new language, is forced in the same direction? His book would not have been possible without his concern for popular language; the trouble is that his own popular language lacks the exactitude of the words of long usage. His terms, and even the ideas they convey, are really useful only to scholars well grounded in philosophy. On his own terms the Bishop digs up more snakes than he can kill.

The book is philosophically superficial. If the problem we face is how a living God can at one time be both transcendent and immanent, then Robinson gives us no new answer. He shifts the ground from transcendence to immanence and thereby seems to deny the being of God or the person of God, except in and through people. The normal shift of such thinking will land him eventually in pantheism. Spinoza had the same problem. Surely the Bishop knows that this question is as old as Western thought. A variation of it divided Plato and Aristotle as they struggled with universals versus particulars. Plato’s solution was that a thing like “Beauty” has its own reality, whether we do or do not have “beautiful things.” Aristotle argued that there are beautiful things for which the term “Beauty” is simply a name and not a reality. Significantly, in their later writings Plato tended toward Aristotle and Aristotle toward Plato, for both faced the mystery of how ultimate reality participates in the individual item or how the individual item participates in reality. There seems to be no answer to this mystery for minds like ours, but we should not dismiss the mystery of the structure of reality by dismissing one or another of the two truths that created the mystery.

This old argument dominated philosophical debate in the Middle Ages and did not down in the breakthrough of the Renaissance. Such great thinkers as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton hoped that man could escape the tyranny of revelation by giving attention to things as they really are on this good earth. Humanism and science both focused on the here and now. Galileo tried with all his might to make all relations mechanical and mathematical, and all these men gave wonderful impetus to science in the new day. But their mechanisms would not stand still. They were caught in the problem of first cause for the series of cause and effect. When they tried to examine nature purely objectively, they could not escape the subjectivity of the examiner. This Descartes made plain. No one can concentrate on “beings” without eventually having to consider “Being.”

We still find the mystery beyond resolution in a far greater book than Honest to God. A far greater bishop than Robinson, William Temple, made it plain in Nature, Man and God that the objective examination of nature leads to the examination of man in nature, which leads to the transcendence in man as such and finally to the transcendence of God. Western thought has had to resolve the mystery of being in one of three ways: by making God everything (Spinoza), or by making God nothing (the positivists of our day), or by accepting a Being who is all in all but who, nevertheless, has the power beyond our powers to set over against himself other beings. Robinson, who knows better, has tried to tell us that we must from now on resolve the mystery by denying to God his existence.

Interestingly enough, the biblical revelation was already ahead of the philosophers as early as the call of Moses. The Bible as usual does not explain philosophically but allows the truth to stand as it is: the God who calls Moses from the burning bush is no other than “I am that I am that I am” (God of all being), and he is also the God of “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” who enters into personal covenant relations with his people.

The Theological Question

How God does all this we do not know. That he does it we must endlessly maintain. The theological question, not the theological answer, is this whole wonderful structure of reality, a God who is Everything, able to create us as something over against himself and to sustain us by the Word of his power. The question runs through the whole of reality, not only in the mystery of creation “out of nothing” into something, but in the marvelous inner relations between God and his people in sovereignty and freedom, in inspiration and response, in prayer and in providence. To usher all this out in order to satisfy “the modern man” (whatever he is) is to offend both sound philosophy and joyful, hopeful religion.

Wilhelm Windelband, speaking of another matter in his History of Philosophy, lends us words and thoughts for this subject before us: “The nature of man consists in the inner union of two heterogeneous substances, a mind and a body, and this marvelous (metaphysically incomprehensible) union has been so arranged by God’s will that in this single case the conscious and spatial substances act upon each other.” Windelband is speaking of man, but he is illustrating the mystery of which we have been speaking—the marvelous union of two realities, neither of which can be denied and both of which, in some sense, are interlocked. If we would back up Paul’s emphasis on union with Christ, we would recognize how Paul is most himself when he is able to say, “For me to live is Christ,” or again, “It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me.” This denies neither the existence of Christ, nor the existence of Paul, nor the union of both. Paul is not lost, but his whole life is enhanced. So also the illustrations are valid of husband and wife, of foundation and building, of vine and branches. We must think afresh, beyond Robinson and his ilk, of the mystery of our being, which can hold to the individual persons and the union at the same time. This kind of thinking will serve us in other problems, such as the person of Christ and the nature of the Trinity.

The book is ethically naive. Bishop Robinson is not the only writer of our time to keep hammering away at legalisms and moralisms in order to establish the ethic of love. Long ago Aristotle raised a nice question against Socrates’ emphasis that “knowledge is virtue.” “Yes,” said Aristotle, “but what of the passions?” What of the passions indeed? What about sin? If we believe the Bible instead of Robinson, sin is a condition, and the natural man needs to be born again. In his lost condition he is incapable of obeying God, and even in his saved condition there is still “the old Adam.” The law is our safeguard for ourselves and for others and for our relations in society. Even for those who would be governed entirely by love, “What of the passions?” My most loving acts are discolored by a conflict of motives and a readiness to rationalize. I am not willing to believe, even if Robinson does believe it, that love alone will control a young couple as they decide their behavior. “After all,” they say, “we love each other”—but I say, “What of the passions?” They each will contribute personal rationalizations in determining their behavior. “After all,” they say, “we love each other”—but do they at the same time love their parents, their possible children, the society that has nurtured them and to which they owe a contribution? As Richard Lovelace put it, “I could not love thee, Dear, so much, loved I not Honor more.” Even the greatest love needs a point of reference above or beyond itself.

When To Walk Away

More than this, the law is the “schoolteacher toward Christ.” There is no question whether we are to move toward that freedom with which Christ set us free. The only question concerns the point at which any of us can say that he is ready to walk away from his teacher. My own judgment is that love will motivate us to keep the law, and that any love we express will never be apart from the law, although it can be beyond the law. The fact that I love my wife does not mean that I have no requirements laid upon me in my relationship with her. It does mean, happily, that in the positive expressions of love I may blow the lid off the bonds of the law. I can always do more than the law requires, but never less. Robinson is very naïve and reflects his loose use of Scripture and therefore his superficial view of sin, if he thinks that any segment of Church or society is ready to break away from the law.

The book is a frightening symptom. Since it is short, even Robinson is aware, as we with every sympathy are aware, that he couldn’t say everything about everything. But because it is a short book and an incomplete book, it is a poor guide for theology or ethics. What is disturbing, of course, is its enthusiastic reception by all kinds of people. In a book entitled The Honest to God Debate, Robinson tells “why I wrote it”: he says, “The traditional imagery of God simply succeeds, I believe, in making Him remote for millions of men today.” I don’t believe that Robinson makes God any less remote. Men have received this book from a bishop of the Anglican church, not to clarify their faith, but, in many, many cases, to support their unbelief. It sounds particularly good coming from a bishop, but they knew all along that much of this religious stuff was nonsense.

The book is a symptom, moreover, of the genuine ignorance, not only of the man on the street but of confessing Christians, about the faith. This very superficiality makes Honest to God sound much more plausible than it is.

A further symptom of the times is that a bishop who on the one hand has promised “to teach and exhort with wholesome doctrines” and “to banish and drive away all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word,” and who on the other is able to say that John’s statement, “The Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world,” or Paul’s statement, “There is one God, one mediator between God and men …, who gave himself a ransom …,” are merely mythology—that such a man still holds office in a creedal church, that he is not banished for heresy and apparently cannot be banished for heresy. This is indeed a strange, strange thing. I am beginning to believe (and some would think this a happy fact in our day) that it is virtually impossible for a man to be removed from church membership or church office for heresy. The reason is probably that to be a heretic a man has to take a stand in opposition to a fixed body of truth, and no church seems to have the conviction any more to say what that body of truth is. We can be Anglicans “in general,” which means that eventually we can be Christians “in general,” which means that the doors are wide open to universalism and eventually to a world religion of eclecticism.

That the Church needs new power and new direction no one can deny. That Bishop Robinson believes he has caught hold of a useful handle for increased leverage, no one can deny. But I think he is fundamentally wrong if he believes that by changing the language to fit the day—or, more specifically, by changing the thought by changing the language—he will somehow make the Gospel more palatable. The problem of the Church is not to listen to the world and thus adjust the Gospel; it is to get the world to listen to the Gospel, which is eternally and everywhere true.

- More from Addison H. Leitch

Theology

Today’s Golden Calves

James H. Buswell

Yesterday I bought a gleaming gilded lamp for our living room. The light can be adjusted every which way and its intensity varied to suit the reader. My wife and I have looked for this kind of illumination for years. At last we have it!

When I padded downstairs this morning, my first act was to snap on this golden lamp. Then I stepped back to admire it and its almost magical effect on our recently remodeled living room. Even though the lamp is an inanimate, manufactured product, I came dangerously close to bowing down and worshiping.

As I slid into the easy chair under its soft light, with an effort I tore my mind from the lamp to my Bible. It dawned on me that for the moment the lamp was more inspiring than the Bible. And in my devotions I read the words of Jeroboam in First Kings 12:27–29: “If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto their lord, even unto Rehoboam King of Judah, and they shall kill me.… Whereupon the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold, and said unto [the people], It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold thy gods.… And he set one in Bethel, and the other put he in Dan.” Was I also finding it easier and more exciting not to go up to Jerusalem and worship the one true God? Was I being dazzled by what I could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch instead of by the unseen presence of the Spirit of the living God?

As I ambled into the kitchen to have breakfast, the mental picture of those two golden calves bothered me. I listened to the radio while eating. Within ten minutes I was urged to “have fun” with a new motor boat. I was told that “the leading automobile dealer” had a superb car for me that is more than mere transportation—it’s solid driving comfort. The virtues of a costly ham were depicted in a way to set me drooling. A luring baritone made our television set seem like a product of the dark ages. In honeyed tones I was urged to take a local plane to Detroit and then fly by jet to Florida—all on the installment plan. All powerful appeals to the physical senses—and all “golden calves” of a sort!

Most of us live much nearer to Bethel or Dan than to Jerusalem. Our world is full of marvelous material “things,” and it is easy as baking a frozen pie for us to become—heart, soul, and pocketbook—church-going materialists. Superfluous merchandise is forced on us, but few try to “sell” us on the merits of Christianity. We can buy a roomful of fine furniture on thirty days’ free trial. But what about the free gifts of God? It is easy to love those things that add comfort and pleasure to the lives of those we love and to our own also. But it is far from easy to love and serve the invisible God.

Daily the Christian is bathed in the perfumed aura of materialism, the lure of golden calves. We worship God or Goods through the insistent urges of (1) our needs and (2) our desires.

Consider our needs. How they have changed! It is obvious that we need food, clothing, housing, education, transportation, medical care, and relaxation. In the satisfaction of any of these needs, however, we all too readily step across the line and buy what we desire instead of what we need.

A banker friend recently died. He was an odd duck for these times! He never owned a car; he walked to church and took a bus to work. For fifty-six years he was treasurer of his church, wisely and sensibly helping to advance its programs. He gave liberally to missions. This gentleman may have desired more “eating out,” expensive clothing for himself and his wife, a finer home on a fashionable street, and luxurious transportation. But he worshiped few if any “golden calves.” He and his wife satisfied actual needs and gave the rest to the Lord.

It is our desires that shatter our Christian fortitude and cause us as a nation to spend more for cigarettes than for world missions. We plunge into long-term debts for homes, cars, boats, furniture, appliances—and then there is no tithe left for the Lord. Yet the Christian should begin his budget from the tithe.

Few of us, no matter how devoted, would care to go back to the life of half a century ago. I remember those days well. Their luxuries have become the “musts” of today, and products then undreamed of are now common. Of course we must live in the world of Now—in it, as the Bible urges, but not of it—but do we? Where do we draw the line between what we require and what we desire?

Dr. John C. Slemp, editor of Missions magazine, tells of a trip he made to Japan in 1952, when “a spiritual vacuum” occupied the lives of these people. In 1961 he returned to Japan and wanted to know whether the vacuum had been filled. “ ‘Yes, it has been filled,’ missionaries and nationals alike told me,” Dr. Slemp said, “but not by Christianity. Rather, as is all too true here in the United States and other lands, it has been filled by sports, television, material goods; by golf on Sundays, excursions, hiking.… Now the people were carefree, and their one aim in life appeared to be the pursuit of a good time.”

Our days are filled with tangibles. God may have become only “an ever present help” in time of trouble. The divine glow of the Christian life does not go out suddenly; it just fades out because we cannot touch, sec, taste, hear, and smell the Lord’s presence.

To the question, “How may I become less material and more spiritual?” there is only one answer. It batters down the door of selfishness. It makes the transition from our boots to the other fellow’s shoes a delight. Love for God and for our neighbor is the answer.

Golden calves, like our lovely lamp, often lose their luster. But those who are constrained by the love of Christ will not set their hearts on things.

- More from James H. Buswell

Theology

Justification by Faith—God’s Free Gift to All Who Believe

Robert Paul Roth and Calvin D. Linton

The Apostle Paul begins his Epistle to the Romans, which has rightly been called the most profound book ever written, by showing that God’s wrath rests on mankind universally because all men have sinned. Consequently the human race can be spared from doom only by God’s own intervention. Then in six verses (Romans 3:21–26) that are probably more packed with meaning than any other comparable Scripture passage, Paul sets forth the dynamic answer to man’s lostness—that in justification God imputes divine righteousness to all who have faith in Jesus Christ.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY here presents exegetical and expository studies of these immensely important verses by two prominent Christian scholars—one a Lutheran, the other a Presbyterian—who represent major traditions stemming from the Reformation. The exegesis is by Dr. Robert Paul Roth, professor of systematic theology in Northwestern Lutheran Theological Seminary, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The exposition is by Dr. Calvin D. Linton, dean of Columbian College and professor of English literature in The George Washington University in the District of Columbia.—ED.

PROFESSOR ROTH’S EXEGESIS OF ROMANS 3:21–26

But now the righteousness of God, which had been witnessed by law and prophets, is manifested through faith in Christ to all and upon all who believe.

Here we begin the passage Luther called the very center and kernel of all Scripture. Until now Paul has been speaking of the wrath of God upon all iniquity, which consists not in a sentence of punishment but in deliverance of man into unbridled wickedness. Sinful men are given up freely to their own devices. Because man in sin has been the author of his own destruction, he can in no way overcome unrighteousness by a righteousness of his own. But now in a marvelous reversal God comes in mercy to the wandering sinner and brings him to righteousness by a plan that was witnessed in the holy history of Israel through law and prophets and is now miraculously manifested in Jesus Christ.

The law may be understood here as a reference to the divine imperative of the covenant God made with Israel as it was repeatedly established in the circumcision of Abraham, the decalogue of Moses, the kingdom of David, and the temple of Solomon. The law witnessed that God was a holy God who required nothing less than the same holiness in his people. But the law was never without the promise that preceded it. And the prophetic hope of Israel, also repeatedly expressed from Abraham to the writing prophets, proclaimed the faith that what God demands he gives. His holiness is his grace, and this grace came in fullness in Jesus to all and upon all who believe.

The Egyptian family of manuscripts reads eis pantas tous pisteuontas while Koine, D, G, 33 and the Clementine vulgate read eis pantas kai epi pantas.… It would seem that the latter should be accepted according to the textual canon that the more difficult text is preferred, since it is easier to think that one phrase was dropped than that one was added. There is also the more important consideration of the structure of Paul’s thought. Since he has been speaking of the wrath of God upon all wickedness (orge theou ap’ ouranou epi asebeian kai …, 1:18), it is most striking here to have him speak of the righteousness of God upon all who believe.

There is no distinction among men, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

While the wrath of God is universal in its condemnation of all unrighteousness, it is really the universal gift of God’s righteousness that breaks down all human barriers. It is the glory of God that he suffers for his creatures, both in his providential care in creative work and in his predestined love in redeeming work. When this suffering glory is manifested in the life and death of Jesus, our little lights pale into common shade. No moral or mystic or religious or aesthetic or intellectual or political or economic or social advantage can be claimed by one man over another. Not even the Jews who were near God as his chosen family can boast before the Gentiles who were far off, for Christ is our peace, who has pulled down the dividing wall between us (Eph. 2:14).

But we are made righteous by the gift of God’s grace through the redemption won by Christ Jesus.

When Paul says God justifies by grace, he rejects a mechanical or causal connection between God and man. Our righteousness comes to us as a gift that has been won for us by the sacrifice of Christ. We are freed from the enemy that enthralls us; and this is a real franchise, not just a declared one. To speak of a mere declaration of freedom from sin without including a real redemption and bestowal of holiness is to human salvation what a docetic revelation is to Christology, a mock façade. God’s redemptive work is not like the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the Negro slaves but left them in a condition in which they were not respected as free men. But on the other hand, this new freedom is not ours unless it is exercised in love; for while we are free from sin, so long as we remain in the flesh we are still not without sin.

… whom God set forth as a mercy seat to wipe out sin by the blood of his sacrificial death.

It is clear from the grammatical construction that Paul intends to say that God is the agent of redemption as well as the one who suffers in the sacrifice that accomplishes it. Proetheto is an aorist middle form of protithemi. In the middle voice the subject participates in the result of the action and is emphasized as the agent. God is the actor in redemption who also suffers the action. It is precisely this sacrifice that is his glory.

There has been much debate over the translation of hilasterion. Luther renders it “Gnadenstuhl,” the vulgate has “propitiatorium,” King James has “propitiation,” and the New English Bible has “expiating.” Literally the reference is to the cover of the ark of the Covenant in the holy of holies (Hebrew: kapporeth, Lev. 16:12–15). Propitiation is an offering to God to please him, thereby changing God by winning his favor. Expiation is an offering intended to atone for sins by covering them, thereby changing man by cleansing him. The ritual of atonement in the holy of holies was not a pagan sacrifice appeasing an angry god, nor was it simply a human work symbolizing ethical ablution. For this reason perhaps “mercy seat” is the best translation because it puts the center of action in God, where it squarely belongs, and yet preserves the whole mystery. God is truly and mysteriously changed in this sacrifice, and so is man. God was in Christ reconciling the world (man’s sin is expiated) to himself (God is propitiated).

Christ is the mercy seat because he does now what the ark of the Covenant formerly did. The old mercy seat covered the testimonies of the ark behind the veil of the temple, yet also marked their presence among men so that the place of God’s mercy could always be found. Now Jesus displays as well as covers the secret of God’s kingdom. The veil of the temple has been rent, and Jesus is the new center of worship because he is the seat of mercy; but yet he is covered in mystery because his mercy can be received only in faith. Moreover, just as the ark was covered because whoever touched this box would die, Christ is the cover for God’s wrath, which is too terrible for human eyes to see. And finally, Christ is like the mercy seat in that blood was sprinkled on it in the Day of Atonement sacrifice. The critical moment of atonement was not the death of the sacrificial victim but the sprinkling of the blood on the ark and the people. So also Christ’s work is continuous in his intercession in the heavenly holy of holies and in the eucharistic celebration of the Christian family in which each new generation is sprinkled with grace afresh.

… thereby showing God’s righteousness to be a suffering on the part of God in which he both forgives past sins and bestows forgiveness in the present upon all who have faith in Jesus.

God is himself righteous in that he makes us righteous. Here is the key to the New Testament teaching on atonement. God made us in his image to have dominion over the earth. All things God made were good; in them all he was pleased. But in the Fall man came under the hot displeasure of God’s wrath. This brought man the curse of death, which extended to all under man’s dominion. But Jesus was sent by God to redeem man from this curse, and this he did by identifying himself with man in all respects, standing under the same curse as man. Yet Jesus was pleasing to God. Thus God’s wrath was removed, and Jesus became the first-fruits of resurrection. To say that Christ is God’s Son in whom he is well pleased means that in Christ Jesus, God was pleased to suffer many things and be crucified!

DEAN LINTON’S EXPOSITION OF ROMANS 3:21–26

Here the very hinge of the Gospel turns, opening the door of God’s grace and at the same time setting the angle in direct opposition to the natural inclinations of man. Through Isaiah God has declared, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” and in this passage the difference is made blindingly clear.

How ineradicable is man’s desire to bring his own imagined virtue and wisdom to support God’s in any transaction of reconciliation! Instead, he learns that he has nothing to bring, no counsel to offer, no possession to use for barter, no inducement to parley. Rather, he stands in the body of death, bearing the doom of God’s righteous judgment against sin, lacking even the wit to recognize his own hopelessness. He brings a mind not merely less than God’s, but at enmity against it; an understanding so bent by sin that the truth of God strikes it as folly.

All this Paul has driven home with mounting power in the preceding verses, not so much bending human pride as razing it, leveling it to the ground, and sowing salt upon the ruins. Arrogance dies hard. When urged to make his peace with God, John Stuart Mill is said to have replied, “I was not aware that we had quarreled.” Nicodemus approached the Lord Jesus, the very embodiment of God’s awful holiness (as Paul here makes clear), with the blandness of one man of moral and social conscience speaking to another. “When God made man,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “I think he somewhat overestimated his capacity.” The angels, forever in the blaze of God’s glory and righteousness, must shudder at such things, as they shuddered when Satan, swollen with pride, pitted his created might against the majesty of the Creator.

“Ye must become as little children,” Jesus had taught. And one can imagine no greater contrast than that between the naturally trustful, unself-conscious faith of a child and the calculating, narrow-eyed, hypocritical self-righteousness of a proud man, seeking advantage in a contest of feints and tricks, professing himself wise and becoming a fool (Rom. 1:22).

Worldly wisdom tells us to study the great men of the past, the truly virtuous, the compassionate, the wise. It tells us that virtue and vice, righteousness and sin, are not irreconcilable opposites but mingled comparatives, as all human progress shows.

Not so, Paul replies. The problem is sin, and the difference between sin and righteousness is no more capable of gradation or calibration than that between death and life. And death is the heritage of the sinner, for all flesh has sinned and come short of the glory of God.

The law was given to demonstrate this, “that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:19b, 20).

These are the words that lead us directly to the “door” of verse 21; and the last word is “sin,” which sounds like the serpent’s hiss. To its accompaniment, every feeble candle of man’s cherished self-righteousness gutters and goes out in darkness.

But a new light begins to shine, God’s light, pure and unstained by mortal corruption. Brighter than Sinai it shines, at first a thing of terror, for it reveals the sinner, “guilty before God.” “But now,” Paul begins—for the first time, fully, visibly—“But now the righteousness of God … is manifested” (v. 21).

And at once, before continuing, he tells us two key truths about this newly manifested righteousness. First, it is “without the law,” which is to say transcendent to it, operating in a higher realm, not in one of deserved approbation for attempted obedience to the code but in the realm of grace, unmerited favor. And, second, it is “witnessed,” attested to, by the “law and the prophets.” Though it transcends the law, it is in perfect harmony with it (“If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil,” Jesus challenged—John 18:23); tested by the law, this righteousness is found perfect. Also, it has been prophetically authenticated; it is fulfillment, culmination.

In sum, this is “even the righteousness of God” himself, the immeasurable measure of all morality, the flame of God’s perfection which consumes as filthy rags man’s highest pretensions.

Still this light blazes destructively to the sinner, just as the very presence of the Lord Jesus condemns the unholy. But now is the revelation, the incredible good news of the love of God to sinful man; for this very righteousness, perfect, eternal, transcendent—this righteousness is offered the sinner, for it “is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe” (v. 22). The one requirement is not an act, nor an achievement, but only the condition inherent in the nature of a free gift: it must be received—“unto all and upon all that believe.” Now “belief,” as we know, in the New Testament has the force of “faith.” And the object of that faith, which is, again, the sole requirement, is a Person, “by faith of Jesus Christ.”

Here the inspired word permits no ambiguity, no argument, no room for equivocation. Either, like little children, we hear and believe; or, still clinging to shreds of imagined self-righteousness, we reply, in effect, “Thy way, O Lord, is not my way.” Hear David: “Teach me thy way, O Lord …” (Ps. 86:11).

In verses 24 and 25, Paul tells us by what motive and by what means the sinner may be covered in the enveloping cloak of God’s own righteousness. The motive power: “Being justified freely by his grace.…” And the means: “through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

God requires no exchange, for man in his poverty has nothing, and God’s grace, flowing from his inexhaustible love, needs none. The redemption, the rescue, the snatching of the sinner from the jaws of death, is as sure as the eternity and might of the Son of God, even Christ Jesus.

Then Paul explains how God can save the sinner and not, to the compromise of his justice, condone the sin. It is because our faith is in the One who himself paid the full penalty for our sins. God has not condoned our sins but condemned them, and the sentence, death, has been carried out on the Son, “whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood …” (v. 25). Thus this redemption is in the Lord Jesus, whom we must “put on,” in faith. And that faith must embrace acceptance of Jesus’s death in our behalf; faith, that is, “in his blood.” “In that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:10, 11).

All of previous Scripture, with a harmony explicable only on the assumption of divine authorship, leads up to this focus of God’s redemptive grace, the Cross. By it, Paul declares, God manifests his righteousness, “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (v. 26). That he is the Just One, no theist can doubt. But that he is also the justifier, saviour, and redeemer of the sinner who believes in the Son and his atoning blood—this is the wonder of the Gospel, the great truth man could never know save as God reveals it to him.

In the light of this wondrous truth, where, Paul asks, is human pride and boasting? “It is excluded,” for “a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” And: “Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: by whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in the hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:1, 2).

- More from Robert Paul Roth and Calvin D. Linton

Theology

Into an Ever-Opening Future

Many think that Christianity and happiness live on opposite sides of the street, but in truth both live in the same house. Contentment is found only where life is gratefully accepted as a gift from Another. And only where the Giver is thanked does happiness dwell.

Despite considerable evidence, the relation of gratitude to human happiness is commonly overlooked. Experience shows and the Bible teaches that life does not consist in abundance of possessions. People are happy who cherish the good things of life. But abundance without gratitude is joyless. That a thankful person is a happy person is a rule with no exceptions.

It is often said that Americans enjoy a greater prosperity than any other people have ever enjoyed. But is this true? That ours is the most affluent society in all history is not in doubt. But do we really enjoy our abundance? In our very busy factories and offices and on our hurried and crowded streets, few faces reflect quiet satisfaction or radiant happiness. Unparalleled affluence has not brought us happy contentment.

When harvest comes, the happiest celebrants will be, not those whose tables are most weighted with the fruits of the field, but those who, sitting down to little or much, pause to give thanks and exclaim from their hearts, “Surely, God is good.”

What is the Christian religion but the summons to accept all of God’s good gifts with thanks? In Christianity, gratitude motivates all human life and action. In this deepest thankfulness lies our greatest happiness.

Failure to accept the blessings of life with thanksgiving leads to joyless depreciation of all things: of God, of neighbor, and of cultural and material possessions. When the good gifts of the heavenly Father are accepted without gratitude, they are soon treated without respect. And then they may be abused. The man who respects his neighbor does not assault him on the streets. He who regards others as a gift of God to be accepted with thanksgiving does not by loveless invasion violate the sexual mystery of another. Nor does he wantonly destroy property in purposeless vandalism. People and things, and life itself, are respected only when accepted with thanks. Where this occurs, happiness dwells.

The relation between thanklessness and abuse is written large in our national life. The motive of crime, immorality, vandalism is never joy. This the Apostle Paul taught us long ago. In Romans he describes pagans by saying, “neither were [they] thankful,” and goes on to show that they respected nothing—neither God, whose glory they changed into that of bird, beast, or corruptible man, nor human beings. For the pagan is, says Paul, “without natural affection,” both men and women changing “the natural use [of sex] into that which is against nature.” The pagan’s attitude of thanklessness and his abuse of all God’s gifts are not unrelated.

Elsewhere in this epistle, the Apostle points to God’s gift of justification through faith, a gift that should create our greatest joy and elicit our deepest thanks. That “the just shall live by faith” (or as Anders Nygren translates it, “by faith the just shall live”), means that the person who is justified has received from God the right to live.

“The wages of sin is death” is a solemn declaration that the sinner has no right to live and therefore no future. But God’s gift of justification through faith in Jesus Christ means that we who are sinners have nonetheless received from God the right to live. This is freedom: to have the right to live, to have an authentic future, one that in all its ever-receding horizons will always be without sin, death, condemnation, and hell.

It is a symptom of deep spiritual malaise when men refuse to accept joyfully and thankfully from God the right to live a life that moves into an ever-opening future. Such refusal is literally a “sickness unto death.” Those who are unwilling to respond to God’s incomparable gift of life with thanks and joy are also unable to understand the meaning of happiness and gratitude for the lesser things of life—roast turkey, pumpkin pie, and all that goes with them.

Minister’s Workshop: November 6, 1964

Paul S. Rees

THE PICTORIAL POOL

Part II

The preacher may not have eye appeal—most would win no beauty prize—but his sermon should. This was the point that engaged us last time. We return to it.

How preach in pictures? What do we do since, as the late Leslie Tizard of famous Carr’s Lane Church in Birmingham put it, “few people without academically trained minds are capable of really abstract thought”?

Chief among all picture books, as we noted earlier, is the Bible itself. Here the faith of heaven takes the form of earth. Here theology achieves color and concreteness. Here outgoing redemptive love is not a benign notion: it is a forgiving father running to put his arms around a returning prodigal.

Yet steeping the mind in the varied imagery of Holy Scripture need not prevent our ranging abroad in fields strewn thick with the finest flowerings of literary skill.

None can doubt that Shakespeare’s genius lay not only in his shrewd reading of human types and traits but also in his rare ability to fashion phrases and mobilize metaphors whose effect it is to hang pictures on the walls of our minds. Think of Macbeth’s plea to the physician on behalf of the murder-haunted Lady Macbeth:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

It isn’t easy to describe the melancholy landscape of a lost and lonely soul. Shakespeare does it as vividly as if he were depicting a mountain canyon livid and shaken under a summer storm. Let the preacher pay heed to how it is done.

Or take the colorful, dramatic quality found in a famous passage by Bernard Shaw in his St. Joan. “Oh, your voices, your voices,” exclaims the cynical King Charles to the ingenuous Joan of Arc. “Why don’t the voices come to me? I am the King, not you.” “They do come to you,” retorts the confident Joan, “but you do not listen to them. You have not sat in the field in the evening and considered their message. When the Angelus rings, you cross yourself and are done with it; but if you prayed from your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air, after they stopped ringing you would hear the same voices as I do.” With souls as with radios, there’s a wave-length to which we must be attuned.

Analogies and similes that pack a punch and evoke a picture appear in the accompanying sermon by Professor Roberts. Take such a sentence as, “Words, like tax assessments, are now at one-fourth true market value.” Or, “How can duty call us to be good when we have to take an opinion poll, electronically tabulated, to decide what good means, and no one thinks to consult God?”

Note how highly contemporary are these image-creating allusions.

The reading of the poets is another exercise profitable to the preacher who wishes to enhance the imaginative quality of his sermons. How does one give color to the prosaic—and usually unwelcome—thought that we are getting on in years? Richard Le-Gallienne does it by fashioning a line that says, “Time’s horses gallop down the lessening hill.”

Or how does the preacher, aware of the hard, conventional coating that is frequently found on pious minds, stab his way through with some fresh word on the memorial aspect of the Lord’s Supper? William Clow of Glasgow did it, in a sermon on “The Primacy of the Atonement,” by suggesting that in giving us this service of remembrance Jesus was like the man in Robert Browning’s poem. “Evelyn Hope,” who stood sadly at the young girl’s coffin and, placing in her hand an ivy leaf, said:

So hush,—I will give you this leaf to keep:

See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!

There, that is our secret: go to sleep!

You will awake, and remember, and understand.

“So Christ,” says Clow, “set His Sacrament in the Church’s hand. As it wakes, it remembers, it understands.”

This art of turning the ear into an eye is not acquired in a day nor mastered in a lifetime. It commands a rich orchestration. Little things play their part—as in the use of brisk, bright, active verbs. Big things play their lordly role—as in the crafting of an illustration that blends magic for the imagination with medicine for the heart.

Then it turns out that what George Herbert says of the preacher becomes true of the preacher’s sermon:

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?

He is a brittle little glass:

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

This glorious and transcendent place

To be a window, through thy grace.

Ah, yes, “to be a window”!

- More from Paul S. Rees

Theology

Current Religious Thought: November 6, 1964

G. C. Berkouwer

I had just finished reading Michael Serafian’s book, The Pilgrim, Pope Paul VI: The Council and the Church in a Time of Decision, before arriving in Rome to attend the third session of the Vatican Council. The jacket of the book tells us that Serafian (a pseudonym) was a career church diplomat and enjoyed contact over a long period with many important religious and political figures. Serafian’s identity was soon known in Rome, but his person is not important. What is crucial is whether his analysis of Paul’s “pilgrimage” is accurate or not.

Serafian describes Paul as a pilgrim of the spirit who began his pontificate with the honest conviction that he would lead the church along the trail blazed by John XXIII but who gradually let himself be dominated by the conservative curial forces. Finally, in an intense and lonely crisis, he came to his independent decision that the period of John and the Johannine spirit had reached its end.

Serafian reports that some time between the eighth and twenty-third of November, 1963, Pope Paul decided that Cardinal Bea and his ecumenical outreach had gone too far and that the progressive movement within Catholicism carried with it so many dangers to the church that he, Paul, could no longer bear responsibility for them. In that critical month of November, Paul experienced a new mystical vision that led him to call the church back to its own house, to Romanism in the traditional form. Serafian concedes that Paul did not lose his world vision but insists that since that November the reorientation of the Roman church has been definite.

With this, the author suggests, the Vatican Council has really lost its hoped-for significance. The renewal of the church and the broadened ecumenical contacts would be overshadowed by internal concerns. Not surprisingly, a certain Roman Catholic newspaper, on publishing portions of this book, added editorially that Serafian’s judgment was supported by the historical facts.

Readers of Serafian also recalled the new tone evident in Paul’s first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, for in this letter Paul stressed heavily the continuity of the church with Trent and the First Vatican Council.

Moreover, the primacy of the Pope was strongly underscored in the encyclical. The papacy, the Pope wrote, was given us by Christ through Peter, a fact that must be believed by Catholics. But, asked Paul, do not many say today that “union with the separated churches would be easier to realize if the primacy of the pope were eliminated?” His answer was, “We ask our brothers to consider how untenable this notion is, not only because the Catholic Church would no longer be Catholic without the Pope, but because without the supreme, purposeful, and decisive pastoral office of Peter, the very unity of the Church of Christ would be destroyed.”

In saying this Paul was not saying something new. Pope John XXIII also said that the unity of the church was founded on “Peter as its rock.” John too said that the unity of the church was one of doctrine, government, and worship, sustained under the guidance “of the One Shepherd” and kept as one sheepfold within the one Father’s house. Still, the fact that Paul’s heavy stress on papal primacy was made in the current conciliar situation suggested to many that the great expectations for the Second Vatican Council were purposely being cooled. The hopes that the Counter-Reformation was now over and that a new encounter with non-Catholic churches was in the making seemed considerably dampened by Paul’s encyclical.

Paul talks a good deal about the “dialogue” but actually gives the word a meaning different from what it has had in the ecumenical discussion. In his usage “dialogue” comes to mean a conversation with all mankind—the non-Christian religions. Communism, and the like, as well as non-Catholic believers. This kind of dialogue becomes a form of mission. The dialogue as others had understood it meant a dialogue with fellow Christians and in particular with non-Catholic churches, a dialogue that gets its meaning and hope because underlying it is a sense of unity and fellowship in Christ. And only in this sense would a dialogue between the Catholic and the non-Catholic churches have any real meaning.

Still, there is reason to exercise caution before swallowing whole Serafian’s analysis of the situation. I found a good deal of severe criticism of it in Rome. Moreover, the first few weeks of the current session came far from establishing his thesis. The council fathers did not get the message that they were supposed now to pull in their claims for episcopal authority. I am reminded here of the lively discussion about the episcopate itself, about Mariology, and about religious freedom. There was simply no evidence that the council had fallen into the power of the conservatives or that this council would simply re-establish the conclusions that were made at the First Vatican Council.

We may expect that this Pope will do everything he can to soften the tensions between the conservative and progressive wings of the church and to bring them into a stronger unity. But this does not create a new crisis for the council. The conservatives give no hint that they are assured of victory; they appear to be fighting hard for their convictions in the awareness that no decision has yet been made in crucial areas.

The question whether these two wings can indeed be completely reconciled, during or after the council, remains. Will they unite, or will their differences become so hardened that even Paul will not be able to heal the breach? The council proceeds now at a terribly fast tempo, and decisions about many things (Mariology, collegiality, religious freedom, Israel, Revelation, to name a few) are unavoidable.

The realities of the situation in Rome are far more complicated than Serafian supposes. Following his analysis, one could guess that the punch has gone out of the council, that it has become uninteresting. Happily, this is not true. Forces have been let loose and made public in the Roman church that will be working for a long time to come. These will force the Catholic Church to continue the dialogue in a far deeper and more intense way than Ecclesiam Suam suggests.

- More from G. C. Berkouwer

New England Revisited

Revival may be arriving in New England incognito.

Several days of rain, followed by snow warnings, ushered in the melancholy days of advancing autumn as evangelist Billy Graham and eight or ten associates motored north from Boston last month for one-night crusades in Manchester, New Hampshire, and in Portland and Bangor, Maine. Those who witnessed Graham’s now famous tour of New England in 1950 could not help making comparisons. Then, as now, sparks of spiritual awakening could be seen against the bleak backdrop of religious indifference, theological tangents, and ecclesiastical excesses.

But this time the signs of hope came from unexpected quarters, and the surprise was such that some evangelicals were left feeling awkward and squirming.

The most astonishing aspect of Graham’s 1964 evangelistic foray into New England was the impact registered upon Roman Catholics, who dominate most of the region’s population centers. On one day’s notice, for instance, some 5,000 crowded into a gym at Jesuit-operated Boston College to hear Graham. Even Catholics gasped in disbelief at Richard Cardinal Cushing’s outright endorsement of the Graham crusade (a leading Catholic official in New Hampshire, it was reported, insisted that Cushing had been misquoted). The staff of the Graham Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair noted a sharp rise in the number of Catholic visitors following the Cushing blessing.

Another hopeful phenomenon in New England is the rise of home Bible-study groups. One of Graham’s aides who travels constantly said Boston has more such study groups than any other city in the world. They often include—and are sometimes started by—Roman Catholics. The Graham crusade is giving new impetus to the Bible-study movement.

Also encouraging to those who pray for revival was the outreach of Graham’s message. His rapport with young people becomes ever more apparent: the 45-year-old evangelist got a sympathetic hearing even in Boston’s notorious nightclub district. Among those who signed decision cards at Boston Garden were at least three call-girls.

In other respects, the religious outlook was still dim. The Massachusetts Council of Churches stood officially aloof from evangelical evangelism, having adopted a statement that purported to wish God’s blessing upon the Graham meetings, while withholding the council’s own support and participation. Much of the crusade spadework was accomplished through the 77-year-old Evangelistic Association of New England, an interdenominational organization now taking on new life.

Graham pounded away at sin, stressing that “everyone of us has a tiger in the tank … a beast within,” and that society is currently on a “moral toboggan slide.” But wheat and tares grow together, he would repeat, pointing out that signs of religious renewal abound.

Graham said little about politics. Newsmen were advised that an appearance with former Vice-President Richard Nixon in Augusta, Maine, was merely a meeting of old friends. Graham told newsmen in Portland that he hadn’t even informed his wife which candidate he would vote for.

One issue Graham did comment on was the Supreme Court rulings on public school devotional exercises. “The court needs to clarify its position,” he said, “for some in the public trust are misinterpreting the courts as having ruled out all prayer.”

Newsmen were also told of the evangelist’s plans for a new series of nonsegregated crusades in the South. Graham said that invitations had come from groups in such places as Jackson, Mississippi; Jacksonville, Florida; and Birmingham, Alabama, where last Easter Sunday 35,000 whites and Negroes sat side by side to hear Graham preach. Reorganization of the Graham team’s crusade schedule may be in order to accommodate the Southern crusade, but the cities have not yet been determined.

In observations on the international scene Graham expressed concern over the Kremlin shakeup. He predicted that the new Soviet leader might well pursue a tougher line.

Graham addressed a crowd of more than 7,300 in Manchester, a southern New Hampshire industrial city of 90,000 population. The Sunday-night rally was held in the city’s largest arena, which was filled an hour before the scheduled start of the service. The overflow crowd sat outside in an adjoining football stadium and listened by a public-address system. The weather was accommodating, two days of intermittent rain having ended that afternoon.

In Portland, the turnout was more than double the 3,000-seat capacity of the city’s largest auditorium. Graham spoke briefly to those standing outside, and George Beverly Shea sang. The overflow crowds were then escorted into two nearby churches, which were wired into the main auditorium’s amplification system. Later that night, Shea was stricken again with an allergy that had prevented his appearance in Manchester.

Bangor, with a population of about 40,000, was the smallest of the cities visited. More than 7,000 people jammed the Bangor Municipal Auditorium, and an undetermined number were turned away. Graham called attention to the Vatican Council’s new reaffirmation of the biblical teaching on hell, then asked, “Is it worth the chance?”

Graham was scheduled to close his 1964 New England crusade with a rally in Providence, Rhode Island, on October 28.

Protestant Panorama

The Young Women’s Christian Association voted to “open up voting privileges to all dues-paying members seventeen and over whether they had subscribed to the organization’s Christian purpose or not,” noted the YWCA’s annual report.

The Methodists and the Evangelical United Brethren scheduled a joint convention in November, 1966, to vote on their proposed merger.

The Board of Trustees of Davidson (N. C.) College took tentative action to require all faculty members to state their belief in “the fundamental teachings of evangelical Christianity.”

Miscellany

The Vatican will shortly resume negotiations with the government of Czechoslovakia in order to reach an accommodation similar to the recent Vatican-Hungarian agreement, press reports indicated. The chief purpose is to make possible nominations to the dioceses in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia.

An American archaeological team, headed by Princeton University Professor Phillip C. Hammond, Jr., completed the initial stratigraphic charting of the ancient city of Hebron and uncovered artifacts and architectural remains from every period of the city’s history of occupation.

The East German “National Defense Council” announced that objections to serving in the armed forces on “religious or similar grounds” will now be recognized.

World’s Fair pavilion totals at the end of the first season: Billy Graham Pavilion, 2,250,000 visitors; Protestant and Orthodox Center, 1,635,000; “Sermons from Science,” 560,000; “2,000 Tribes,” 542,000; the Vatican Pavilion, displaying Michelangelo’s Pietà, 13,823,037.

Dr. Gaston Cruzat, Latin American press officer at the Vatican Council, was fired after releasing contents of a memo, signed by fifteen cardinals, objecting to tactics of conservative members of the Curia to weaken council statements on controversial issues.

Personalia

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Baptist minister and civil rights leader, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964.

The Rev. Ian M. Hay was named the Sudan Interior Mission’s home director for North America.

Dr. Edward W. Bauman, 37, professor of theology and television Bible teacher, was appointed pastor of the historic Foundry Methodist Church in Washington, D. C.

Dr. James N. Bedford was elected president of Buffalo Bible Institute.

Episcopalians Embroiled in the World of Politics

Frank Farrell

The Protestant Episcopal Church generally gets a very good share of the Protestant publicity in the national press. But when its sixty-first General Convention met in St. Louis October 11–23, it faced highly formidable competition for the attention of the city—celebrating its 200th anniversary—to say nothing of the nation.

Already in progress was the World Series, which was to crown the Cardinals champions for the first time in eighteen years. And beyond the Olympic games, world events of great import marched in steady procession across the newspaper headlines to the extent that the Globe-Democrat cried out editorially: “Does the world have to move quite this fast?” The kaleidoscope included events and names like Nikita Khrushchev (removed the day the Cardinals won, so he got the second headline), Walter Jenkins (same day—he got the third), Harold Wilson (same day—he got the fourth), Brezhnev and Kosygin, Mao Tse-tung’s nuclear explosion, Pope Paul’s projected trip to India, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson’s campaign visit to St. Louis.

Sports headlines featured the transitions of Johnny Keane, Yogi Berra, Branch Rickey, and Red Schoendienst. The Episcopalians gave up Kiel Auditorium at their midway point for professional basketball and a symphony orchestra. At the end they were pressing forward to evacuate it the same day wrestling took over. They did make some headlines of their own. Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King addressed them two days before hearing of his award. But perhaps the most publicity the convention received was in connection with an affair not of its own making.

William Stringfellow, New York lawyer and prominent Episcopal layman, released a statement accusing Senator Barry Goldwater and Congressman William Miller of “transparent exploitation of racism among white citizens” and cultivation of the votes of “the ‘white backlash.’ ” Among the more than 700 Episcopalians who signed this statement were ten bishops. Many delegates expressed dismay when they learned that a number of newspapers had reported the statement as convention action.

Stringfellow said it was merely a statement to the convention. Taking steps to clear up the confusion, the convention expressed regret over the embarrassment caused and reaffirmed its “settled policy of strict neutrality toward all candidates for any and all offices at any level of government.”

But the Episcopalians held an important election of their own with no controversy. The Rt. Rev. Arthur Lichtenberger, sixty-four, was stepping down as presiding bishop, a post he had held since 1958, because of an ailment, Parkinson’s syndrome. He announced acceptance of an appointment as professor of pastoral theology at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The convention named as his successor the youngest man ever to serve in the office, the Rt. Rev. John E. Hines, fifty-four, Bishop of Texas. He spoke to the press of his fervent hope that the Episcopal Church would continue in the direction of unity with other churches.

As to the Church’s role in the political arena, he stressed that “it is the obligation of the Church to speak clearly and frankly about Christian responsibilities toward social and political issues, but not to espouse partisan views or give support to any candidate for office.” In Texas he has long spoken out against segregation and often criticized right-wing organizations for divisiveness.

Bishop Hines will presumably serve until retirement at age sixty-eight. Within Anglicanism’s scholarly circles, he has been termed one of the few “literate” American bishops. He was elected on the sixth ballot by the 197-member House of Bishops, the necessary concurrence being granted by the 700-plus-member House of Deputies, composed equally of clerical and lay delegates.

The question of church pronouncements in the area of politics was confined to the Stringfellow matter. The House of Deputies considered a resolution calling for immediate Episcopal withdrawal from the National Council of Churches, partly on the grounds that the NCC through its General Board, departments, and agencies “has engaged repeatedly in political and legislative affairs in a partisan manner, contrary to the practice and custom of the Protestant Episcopal Church.” Withdrawal would be effective until such time as the General Assembly and its General Board would “give the following assurances: (1) the General Board must definitely assume responsibility for the actions and pronouncements of all its various departments and agencies. (2) That it will close its Washington Office, which has definitely been used as a political lobby. (3) That the General Board, its departments and agencies will cease activity on political issues in a partisan manner.”

The resolution was soundly defeated by the deputies, who, however, rebuked the NCC in asserting that it “should refrain from engaging in efforts to influence specific legislation.”

“Statements should not try to give specific solutions to problems that must be decided by statesmen or others in specialized fields of competence,” the deputies declared.

Also on the issue of public pronouncements, the deputies laid down these guidelines for the NCC: Statements “should have as their primary purpose the setting forth of issues about which Christian people ought to be concerned”; “they should be so phrased as not to bring into question a Christian commitment of those who do not agree”; they “should avoid the impression that they offer the only specific solution to the problem.”

The deputies adopted a disposition that climaxed a 2½-hour debate on the Episcopal Church’s relations with the NCC. This matter has been a source of friction within the church for several years and has been a divisive issue since 1961, when the Joint Commission on Ecumenical Relations was directed to make a study of the NCC and report back to this year’s convention.

The commission, after two years of study, released its report in January. It urged increased participation in the NCC “as a means to strengthen the Christian influence in American and world society” and flatly stated that alleged charges of Communism against the NCC were “false.”

The bishops concurred with the deputies’ resolution on the NCC, but made an addition. The deputies had urged “our representatives to the National Council of Churches to seek to restrain the NCC and its departments and agencies from efforts to influence specific legislation,” and the bishops added the phrase, “except where issues are involved on which this Church has taken a stand through the General Convention, the House of Bishops or the Executive Council.” The deputies concurred.

In a major action concerning the future of their church, both houses adopted, substantially without change, resolutions proposed by the Committee on Mutual Responsibility which in effect embraced the challenge of the Anglican Congress meeting in Toronto in 1963 to recognize the interdependence of every church of the Anglican Communion. The resolutions adopted called upon the Episcopal Church to undertake “without delay” the evaluation and reformation of the church’s response to missions. A commission to be named the Mutual Responsibility Commission will be established to carry out the proposals. In addition, the resolutions call for the Episcopal Church to undertake projects totaling $6,000,000 during the next three years, over and above the budget for the general church program.

Of particular interest in view of the Second Vatican Council’s wrestling with the problem of Jewish guilt for Christ’s death was the strong statement on the subject adopted by this convention. The charge of deicide against the Jews was rejected and anti-Semitism was condemned. The convention also condemned “un-Christian accusations against the Jews.”

The corporate action of both houses came upon the heels of an early position paper on the subject issued by the bishops, which said that the charge of deicide against the Jews was “a tragic misunderstanding of the inner significance of the crucifixion.”

The bishops also emphasized that the crucifixion of Jesus was by some Roman soldiers at the instigation of some Jews and should not impute “corporate guilt to every Jew in Jesus’ day, much less the Jewish people in subsequent generations.”

“Simple justice alone,” the bishops said, “proclaims the charge of a corporate and inherited curse of the Jewish people to be false.… All men are guilty of the death of Christ, for all have in some manner denied Him; and since the sins that crucified Christ were common human sins, the Christian knows that he himself is guilty.”

Racial issues played a large part in the proceedings of the triennial convention. The deputies rejected a statement of Christian conscience that urged the Episcopalians to react against laws or special customs which are “in basic conflict with the concept of human dignity unto God.” Lay rather than clerical deputies cast the decisive votes.

The bishops later re-opened the racial issue by unanimously adopting a strong statement proclaiming that “racial discrimination, segregation or the exclusion of any person in the human family because of race from the rights and activities of the church … are contrary to the mind of Christ and the Church which is His body.” (The deputies later concurred.) The bishops were cognizant of the report that Federal Judge Thurgood Marshall, the only Negro member of the eight-member deputation from the Diocese of New York, bolted the convention in anger for what he branded “conservative and obstructionist” tactics on the part of the lay deputation in handling measures dealing with race issues.

The bishops later issued a statement endorsing civil disobedience in situations where existing laws deny “eternal and immutable laws.”

Bishop Henry Louttit, who had been nominated for presiding bishop, surprised some of the press corps with the statement: “I really believe the cause of Negroes’ rights is set back every time Northern demonstrators come in.”

Other convention highlights included:

• Exchange of greetings and good wishes between Bishop Lichtenberger and Pope Paul. This was the first Episcopal convention attended by Roman Catholic observers.

• Response by the House of Bishops to Bishop James A. Pike’s theological contention that the doctrine of the Trinity is a meaningless form of expression of the Christian faith. “As bishops we are obligated by oath to hold and proclaim that Faith,” the bishops’ corporate statement said. It also affirmed the right of bishops and priests to relate “the Christian Faith to the growth of human thought and knowledge, and the part that individuals play in this process.”

• Probable resolution of an issue that goes back to 1789: Should the church be called Episcopal or Protestant Episcopal? Heretofore, only the longer name was official; this year it was tentatively decided to recognize both. Final approval is expected to come at the General Convention in 1967.

- More from Frank Farrell

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