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Theology

Judgment of the Theologians

Protestant Christianity no longer responds to any one final authority. The sad result of its theological defection from the biblical norm shows in the chaotic condition of Continental religious thought. For the third time in a century the supposed bulwarks of Protestant theology are falling and scholars are seeking new strongholds.

Many questions are being asked in Europe, some of them of special interest and significance for America. What future remains for the “theology of the Word of God”? What theological development and progress can be expected in the days ahead?

But, preoccupied only with each other, the theologians seem wholly unaware of their fading prestige in the world of thought.

Is this chaotic condition in contemporary theological thought a sign of God’s judgment upon the theologians? Has their persistent compromise or sacrifice of the message of the Holy Scriptures made them victims of their own confusion?

Theologians frequently remind us that divine judgment must “begin at God’s house,” a theme well-entrenched in modern dogmatics. Could it be, however, that they themselves have overlooked one of the subtler points of the biblical message—namely, that even theologians are not exempt from God’s scrutiny?

When theology was queen of the sciences, theologians recognized the indispensability of Jesus and of the apostles for understanding contemporary man (theologians included). But now that modern theologians have made themselves indispensable to the “understanding” of Jesus and the apostles, theology has become the slave of speculators. What God may be proclaiming in the history of our times is that modern theologians and their theology are quite unnecessary for the well-being and on-going of his Church.

Many theologians on university-related faculties seem oblivious of their fallen status; they seem unaware that their colleagues no longer give them the same academic esteem that scholars in other disciplines enjoy. One reason for this demotion is the apparent inability of modern theologians to communicate their convictions intelligibly. It is true that the frequently changing frontiers of dogmatics now necessitate conquering novel terrain with countless hazards of discussion. Nonetheless the physical scientists escort their colleagues over equally devious paths and do so successfully. This leads some academicians to ask whether the theologians—in the midst of their strongly asserted individualistic preferences—are perhaps using ambiguity to conceal their insecurity.

It is not only simpletons who cannot understand these theological subtleties but also some other scholars, whose own fields of specialty are highly complex; they stand amazed in the presence of the verbiage concealing Jesus the Nazarene.

But we do not believe that the theologians are deliberately clouding the atmosphere. Amid the confusion they have brought about, they are simply trying to market what is non-intelligible; that there are few takers in academic circles should surprise no one. Is it perhaps a sign of divine wrath and judgment that the theological leadership of major denominations is wielded predominantly by those who are content with changing fashions of doctrine, or who establish these changing fashions? The fundamental question for the cult of the professional theologians is simply this: What is God saying to them, to the theologians, who claim to be specialists in what he is saying to others? What is God trying to teach them in the historical fact that Protestant theology is suffering its third collapse in the twentieth century? Is he telling the theologians that they no longer know what the Word of God is?

As the religious thinkers of Europe look into the near future, what do they anticipate? While a few scholars wonder if German theology is approaching an era of divine chastisement, apparently none senses that judgment may already be in process. “It is likely,” thinks Adolf Köberle of Tübingen, “that in a short time dark events and judgments of God may come over us. The future of European theology hangs heavily on events in world history.”

The future, says Emil Brunner, is “a matter of the Holy Spirit. Bultmann does not even acknowledge the legitimacy of the term; for him the Holy Spirit belongs to ‘the myth.’ ” “Communism,” continues Brunner, “is still the greatest and most powerful ideological opponent of Christianity. Truth does not play a role in Communism, and totalitarian power can do away with theology.”

Most scholars abroad look for a generation of action and reaction in the realm of religious thought, a time of adjustment and readjustment, of combination and recombination. The course of European theology has been determined in the past so largely by the prevailing winds of philosophical speculation that Tübingen professor Otto Michel says candidly: “No man can predict the future. Spiritual developments are rooted deeper than the theological emphases of the professors. Yet they hang together with the philosophical currents and cultural and historical phenomena which often prove decisive.”

No new philosophical current as powerful as Hegel’s or Kant’s or Heidegger’s has appeared on the German horizon. The voices of Moses and Isaiah, of Jesus and Paul are permitted to say only what the critics allow. Younger theologians evidence a rationalistic drift to philosophy of religion. No clear alternative to the broken Bultmannian perspective is yet in view. While a few strong voices are rising, each distinct from the others, none speaks comprehensively and influentially enough to warrant recognition as an established alternative to Bultmann.

One thing is clear, however. No one anticipates a golden era of theological prosperity in Europe. The conservative scholars on the seminary faculties are a woeful minority, and are often isolated. Thus any decisive shift in the outlook of Continental theology is less likely to issue from an evangelical counter-thrust than from some novel philosophy. As a successor to Heidegger’s existent, such a philosophy may accommodate Christian motifs to new forms of speculation. Or in a context of some dark turn in European history it may either plunge the Continent into bleak despair and unbelief, or prompt men in their anguish to seek afresh the God of the Bible.

Predictions concerning the future of theology differ in perspective and intensity. “The dialectical theology is secure,” says Rudolf Bultmann, despite its present turbulences, “and it has a future.” Wilfried Joest of Erlangen, who agrees that the division of Bultmann’s empire need not signal an end-time for dialectical theology, notes, however, its drift toward more extreme positions: “The Bultmann school is separating into diverse shades of emphasis.… It assumes even more radical forms among some of the Mainz professors.” According to the Göttingen New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias, “the hopeful sign and promise of a fruitful future in German theology exists through the evident turning from Bultmann’s presuppositions. We must now labor as carefully as we can to get at the words of Jesus and the content of his message.”

Two others, individualistic enough to preclude their attachment to any school of thought, should also be quoted here: Ethelbert Stauffer of Erlangen, now retired, and Helmut Thielicke of Hamburg. In these next years, says Stauffer, who is sometimes pictured by other New Testament scholars as “a twentieth century Renan, though not so sentimental,” “the Church will find it necessary to stand in the forefront of all human concerns, and we shall see the rise of a new Christian humanism.” “In 1916,” observes Stauffer, “Barth’s Römerbrief said a nein! to humanismus. The Nazi era divided Church from humanismus and Hitler fought both and conquered. What is needed now is not Khrushchev’s socialistic humanism but a new Christian humanism in which the Good Samaritan can lead us on.” Thielicke hopes that the present dead-end street in dogmatics will encourage new interest in the widely neglected realm of theological ethics: “The crisis of modern preaching lies in the fact that it speaks only to the ‘inner man,’ instead of addressing his socio-cultural situation.”

Yet in one major respect the present age of European religious thought differs from the recent past, and particularly from the generation that Barth called to a fresh hearing of the Word of God. This new generation is the one that has already heard the summons to “the God who reveals himself” and yet has turned away to Bultmannian and post-Bultmannian positions.

What will be the plight of a future generation whose spiritual confusion is compounded by the fact that the Barthian “rediscovery of special revelation” and the message that God speaks is for it an already by-passed option?

While Barth’s Wort-theology crumbled the defenses of the old liberalism, the new liberalism traced its own ancestry to the Wort-theology! What is the destiny of those who meet the plea for special revelation with deliberate detachment, who reject it as an incoherent and unconvincing option of dialectical theology?

Otto Weber of Göttingen captures the sorry mood in this observation: “Bultmann stressed that there is a Word of God even if he was unsure what it is. Bultmann’s students all speak about ‘the Word.’ But now we are already seeing a movement away from the certainty that there is such a Word.”

“Sometimes I fear the end of Protestantism in such a generation,” confesses Köberle of Tübingen. “But in a dark hour, many may long again for a firm foundation and for living bread” and by God’s grace “ears may be open again to the old unshortened Gospel.”

At present the prospect of a rediscovery of “the old unshortened Gospel,” by the theologians at least, does not seem very bright, for the chaos of contemporary theology rests in the frontier realm of the problem of religious knowledge. It is a strange fact of modern European theology that while most of its theologians stress special divine disclosure, they differ woefully as to its nature, content, and significance.

“The basic problem remains Christology,” insists Wilfried Joest of Erlangen. “The real issue is the meaning of the person of Christ for the Word of God, for truth, and for justification. Is he only the prophetic mouth of God, or is he present in the Word?”

But what is this Word? Notes Peter Brunner of Heidelberg: “If the Church does not experience a new awakening—not necessarily in the eighteenth or nineteenth century sense of pietistic renewal—then we shall not have a real renewal of theology. The prophet Amos speaks of a time when people go through the land and ask for the Word of God and there will be no Word of God. This bad situation must be turned by God’s grace into a good situation, or there is no hopeful future for German theology.”

Theology

One Simon a Tanner

James Black

Text: [Peter] lodgeth with one Simon a tanner, whose house is by the seaside … (Acts 10:6).

When a great idea bursts upon the world, its first and perhaps worst battle is to free itself from the ropes and cords that its own prejudiced friends try to fasten round it. Like the young bird in the shell, it has to crack the covering and get free. Our Lord’s great declaration of salvation and redemption to all men everywhere provides a striking instance of this. For the first thing that the early Christians themselves tried to do was to bind and tie His universal message to the old Jewish narrow system in which they had been brought up.

This is easily understood. These men and women were Jews by birth and religion: and they had no idea at first that any break-away from the Temple or the Synagogue might be needed. For years, although they had become Christians, they went every day to their devotions in the Temple. Ananias, for example—the man who helped Paul to escape in Damascus—is described as “a devout man according to the Law,” although he had become a convinced Christian: and James, our Lord’s brother, who was the Head of the young Church in Jerusalem, worshipped regularly and faithfully in the Temple, according to his life-long custom.

In fact, there soon arose an active party among the converts who argued that a Greek, a Roman, a German, or a Briton, if he wanted to become a Christian, must first become a Jew and must observe the full rites of the ancient system of Moses.

If this attempt had succeeded, we now see clearly that the so-called Christian Church might have become merely a new form of Jewish nationalism, and certainly its universal appeal and redeeming quality would have been lost for the Gentile world. In other words, the big free dream would have been shackled—tied down with ropes and strings by its own friends.

How was the young Church saved from this disaster?

The happy answer is that fortunately the dream itself was so galvanic and so self-expanding that it burst the ropes as if they had been threads. One by one, these man-made strings were snapped, until the message of Jesus was set free in its own natural fullness, free to enlarge and expand itself in its native power, free to win all men of every nation, heritage, or tradition, free to be itself, and free to proclaim the illimitable mercy of God without controls or conditions.

In the story of Simon the tanner, I imagine that we can see and even hear the first rope snapping. In principle, the future of the Church was settled in this apparent casual incident.

It is common knowledge that the Jews divided the concerns of life and religion into the clean and the unclean: and their ceremonial worship was very strict—and still is fairly strict—on this question of the clean and unclean. In particular, certain animals were regarded as ceremonially unclean; for instance, the pig, the camel and the coney: and in the same way, certain trades and occupations were put by them under the same dark shadow. One of the most despised of these occupations was the now fully honourable trade of tanning—the reason being, no doubt, that the tanner must handle the hides and skins of dead animals, and might even have to deal with the skins of unclean animals! No tanner, therefore, was regarded as clean or was allowed to have his house or his business premises inside the sacred city walls.

This accounts for the fact that this man Simon the tanner was forced to live outside the environs of Joppa, down by the unfrequented seashore—and let us remember that the seashore in those days was an outcast and derelict place, possessing none of the romantic or seasonal attractions it has for us to-day! Nothing is just so modern as our love of seaside resorts.

We can readily understand, then, the underlying bitterness of ostracism and aversion in this short sentence: “One Simon a tanner, whose house is by the seaside.” By compulsion, he had to live and work there, beyond the protection and amenities of the town, because no one would have tolerated him or his business inside the city walls. “Unclean, unclean!”

When Peter came to Joppa, we are told that he lodged “with one Simon a tanner, whose house is by the seaside.” Small as this fact seems, it represents nothing less than a revolution—a revolution of outlook and custom. What did this fact imply?

Go back five years before this, and say to Peter, “We are glad you have come to Joppa, but we are sorry that the town is so full that we haven’t a stray corner to put you up. But if you don’t mind, we shall lodge you tonight with a man called Simon, a tanner, whose house, of course, is outside the city walls.” What do you think Peter would have said?

We know that before he met Jesus, this disciple had a considerable gift for strong language, pungent and scathing. Indeed, even after he became a disciple, he could use his native talent in the court-room at Jerusalem with oaths and curses. I leave you then to imagine what his language would have been, had you told him five years before this that he was to lodge with Simon, a tanner. To put it mildly, he would have said, “Not on your life! I would rather sleep on the moors, in a hay-loft, or even in the streets. But I will not lodge on any account with an unclean tradesman like this tanner whose house is by the seaside.” And that would have been that!

I do not imagine that when he came now to Joppa, Peter had in any way thought or argued the matter out in his own mind. But I do suggest that when he did go down to Joppa and actually agreed to stay with Simon the tanner, his act helped to snap the first rope that bound the young Church! For in so doing, he broke with the whole ancient Jewish tradition of the clean and the unclean.

Remember, all these converts were still wholly Jewish in their ideas and customs. As we have seen, they regularly attended the Synagogue: they went to the Temple and offered sacrifices: they observed the full Jewish ritual and lived under the strict law of Moses. Especially in regard to the clean and the unclean, they had no notion as yet of the real meaning of Christ’s command, “Make the inside of the cup clean.”

Well, Peter came down to Joppa on this occasion.

So far, there were few converts in the town. But one of them, praise God, was this man Simon, the tanner, whose workplace and home lay out of the town, where he and his proscribed trade could not be an offence to his scrupulous Jewish brethren.

Rather diffidently—almost with a stutter and a very uneasy smile—he said to Peter, when he arrived, “I wonder, sir, if you would care to lodge with me? Fortunately, I have plenty of room in my house, and I think I can look after your comfort. But I ought to say, sir [here his smile must have become rather twisted and anxious]—I ought to say, sir, that I am one Simon, a tanner, who is compelled by our Jewish law to live outside the city walls. But, of course, if you are unwilling to come, I’ll understand at once.” And we can imagine how he must have feared, from old experience, a rude or (perhaps worse) a frigidly polite refusal, or some faked excuse that the Apostle was already engaged.

God bless you, Peter! I believe that at the moment when the man asked you to lodge with him, you got one of the shocks of your life! I think perhaps you were flummoxed and were completely taken aback at the moment. Then you remembered Jesus, and you said in a flash, “What would Jesus, my Lord and Master, do?”

And so, as quickly as you could, to cover your previous hesitation, you said, “My dear Simon, I’ll be honoured indeed. Yes, I’ll gladly stay with you in your house.” And you put your arm through his—whom no Jew had willingly touched for years—and you said, “Give me my little bag, and we’ll go straightaway to your house by the seaside,” and you went through the town arm-in-arm, bless your soul. I am sure that two men went down that narrow street with a new revelation in their hearts—you, Peter, who saw for the first time that your Master comes to all equally, clean or unclean, Pharisee or sinner—and Simon, a despised tanner, who for the first time walked that street as if he were treading on air. For he was a man now, equal with any and all, a really honoured man at last!

If you think of it, this is the first bursting of the ropes that threatened to shackle the free Gospel of Jesus. For it is the clear proclamation—in act, if not in words—of the liberating and ransoming Gospel of His love. What silly and narrow prejudice of man could possibly remain when the great Gospel came in and cut the ropes men tie about God and the human sold?

And now let us sit down and apply it to our own concerns.

There are as many, as vicious, as brutal, as Satanic prejudices today as ever cursed the social and religious life of Peter’s generation. If these prejudices are new or different—questions of race, land, blood, rank, class, or privilege—they are only the more devilish and hateful for that. For we are forming and enforcing them in spite of centuries of Christian teaching! Perhaps the old test may still sift many of us into Christian or non-Christian, or at least sub-Christian. Can we go down and lodge with one Simon, a tanner, whom people have kicked out and compelled to live outside the pale of the city—yes, and not patronize him, or talk down to him, or condescend to him, or blush for him, but regard him as our open equal, at whose table we can sit, not as if we were conferring an honour, or doing something for which we should get a pat on the back? If we act as if we were “honouring” someone, then we are not supping with Simon, but supping with the Devil! There is no real Christ in our hearts—the liberating, enfranchising power of Jesus—until all the little rotten arrogances of the prideful world and all the insolences of assumed privileges are blown clean out of us with the bursting of the ropes.

A few years after this, in a quiet gathering at Ephesus, the converts were having a Communion service. A new member was welcomed at the door. The simple Christians were glad to receive him, for he was a man of some influence and power. One of the disciples said, “Perhaps, my friend, you will take that seat over there—you see, that vacant seat on the other side.” The man hemmed and hawed for a moment and then whispered, “I say—ahem—you will excuse me, won’t you, but the man you are asking me to sit beside is—ahem—my own slave.” The disciple was silent for a moment, and then said with courage, “Yes, and why not?” “But,” said the man, “you know—er—he is my own slave!” “Yes,” said the disciple again, “and why not?” And then the man squared his shoulders, walked round the room, shook hands with his own slave, and sat humbly down beside him. Praise God!

When a thing like this takes place—master sitting humbly beside slave—Peter linking his arm with an unclean tanner—the ropes of human prejudice and custom, and all the cursed cords of shame, begin to crack for ever. This proclaims the glorious message that people may be outside the pale of the city, and yet be inside the pale of Christ.

Don’t let any of us try to dodge this terribly modern issue, more ghastly now than ever. Prejudice still runs red like a trail of blood through our social, political, and religious thinking. Let us believe and practise the following Christian affirmations.

1. There are no inferior races fit only to serve us and the likes of us. To believe in race inferiority is merely out-dated barbarism. What has the pigment of a man’s skin to do with the colour of his soul? All men are of one blood before God—equal in need, response, and capacity—and are made in God’s image. Be we white, black, brown, or yellow, to believe anything else is not only unchristian doctrine but also anthropological nonsense.

2. There are no inferior classes who are born to fetch and carry for our clean and dainty hands. There are, of course, natural differences of gifts and aptitudes among men, but there is no difference in their quality, capacity, or destiny. To believe otherwise argues a stupid view of the dignity of human labour, the worth of man, the ends of life, and the purposes of God. Classes, as we use the term, do not exist in the thought of Jesus. His is the one perfectly “classless” society.

3. There are no inferior people to whom we can graciously unbend or condescend. There are, of course, vulgar and common people everywhere in every so-called grade of society: but the worst vulgarity of all is the vulgarity of conceit, pride, affectation, vanity, the arrogance of riches, and the insolence of intellect. I praise God that Jesus gave His finest blessing to the “meek and lowly,” those who are essentially humble of heart.

4. There is no clean or unclean except what comes from the inside. We are not made dirty by our hands but by our hearts, or filthy by our clothes but by our minds. The world must live by honest dirt: and the only real “muck” I know is the muck in men’s thoughts. If you and I ever think some man, some job, some work, or some class unclean, the uncleanness is only in our own thinking. It is our type of mind that makes our type of world.

5. Jesus preached a glorious equality. Men and women equal! British and foreigner equal! Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Afghan, Negro, and American equal! Do I touch any of us on the raw? If so, it is not I, but Jesus, who stabs us. And He cuts the sore only that He may drain the poison.

Peter had his prejudices like any one of us. No doubt he called them “honest” prejudices. (I wonder why we always call them honest?) He believed, as so many of us do, that there are natural grades in life—things clean or unclean, chosen or outcast, privileged or common, precious or cheap. But as he allowed the power of the Gospel to liberate his soul and cleanse his mind, he was able to cast his prejudices to the clean winds of God and to stand in the freedom and equality of Christ.

It wasn’t done all at once: but though it took time, it was sure. For one cannot have Jesus and prejudice in one’s heart at the same time. And the cleansing process began here—yes, here—when in the strength of Jesus, Peter, formerly so biased, snapped the ropes that held him down, and went along that narrow street, arm in arm with an outcast, out through the city walls, and lodged with one Simon, a tanner, whose house was by the seaside.

If he hadn’t done it, what?

I wonder how long it would have taken Peter to go out and preach to the whole world the full Gospel of Christ’s grace, if he had stood on his false dignity and refused to accompany Simon, the tanner.

Remember—it is a final secret—one little liberation, nobly answered, alone makes us fit for the next!—From Days of My Autumn, by James Black (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1950). Used by permission.

Theology

Current Religious Thought: September 11, 1964

J. D. Douglas

Equal in area to New York State but with a smaller population, Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Nazis in 1939 and by the Communists in 1948. Today it reflects all the good and bad features of a Soviet satellite. It takes four years and a large deposit to get a car, but there is a superb state health and welfare program. A system of informers operates against those churls who find life even in a Socialist Republic less than idyllic; but there is no serious juvenile delinquency, and people can walk the streets of the city of Prague at night in perfect safety.

About nine million Czechoslovaks (65.5 per cent) are baptized Roman Catholics, and 1¼ million are Protestants. Prominent among the latter is Dr. J. L. Hromadka, dean of the Comenius Faculty (current student enrollment about thirty-five). A fulsome eulogy earlier this year by New Testament professor J. B. Soucek purports to show how Hromadka by successive steps found liberation from various kinds of bondage. These stages included “the complacent glorification of culture prevalent in the years of his youth,” his “entanglement in the nationalistic sentiment,” “timid anti-bolshevism,” the equally narrow-minded anti-catholicism” current after World War I, and his “desperately clinging to the past forms of social and political life.” Thus, says Soucek, he has reached his present position courageously and without regret, seeking “the way of a christian and of the church in the midst of the rising socialist society.…” We might have hoped for more precise definition of terms here, as Soucek builds up the image of a man battling his way gamely through intellectual perils, toils, and snares, trying the spirits, and eventually choosing a sphere of service in which church and socialism work hand in hand for a better tomorrow.

Is this a complete likeness of the enigmatic figure who turned his back on the United States in 1947 after having held a professorship at Princeton Theological Seminary and who later joined Britain’s Red Dean in charging the Allies with using germ warfare in Korea? A little investigation might suggest that here is no latter-day socialist. In a penetrating and well-documented account of Hromadka’s theological politics, Dr. Matthew Spinka tells how at a convention in Prague as long ago as July, 1923, Hromadka declared that the “frequently derided and proscribed atheistic, materialistic socialism” could not be “brushed aside with a mere phrase ‘materialism’ and ‘atheism.’ ”

Twenty-five years later, at the WCC assembly in Amsterdam, Hromadka was already recognized as spokesman of the Eastern Europeans at a time when the Communist coup d’état in his homeland was barely six months old. He denies that Communism is either totalitarian or atheistic. “Its atheism,” he asserts, “is rather a practical reaction against the forces of the pre-socialistic society than a positive philosophically essential tenet.” He suggests that it is in many ways “secularized Christian theology, often furiously anti-Church.” The official report of Hromadka’s address on this occasion was significantly less anti-Western than the version published in Hromadka’s own periodical in Prague. (See M. Spinka, “Church in Communist Society,” Hartford Seminary Foundation Bulletin, June, 1954.) The vision of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin as Christians unawares is as intriguing and as theologically confusing as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s conviction that he will meet atheists in heaven. Both interpretations would tend to make a Party member very cross.

Despite an earlier avowed purpose of “Christianizing” the regime (a course endorsed by Karl Barth), Hromadka now evidently supports all its policies except the blatantly anti-religious. Eighteen months ago in Dresden, he said proof was available that soon after World War II certain “circles in the West” were preparing to liquidate the Soviet Union. He blames the United States chiefly for making West Germany a bridgehead for the economic, military, and diplomatic fight against the Soviet Union and charges Western propaganda with “casting the shadow of prejudice and false ideas” on East Germany. No one who reads such utterances with their maddening lack of precision, or who heard Hromadka’s keynote address at the Christian Peace Assembly this year, is likely to get the impression of a non-partisan quest for peace. Indeed, one sometimes gets the oddest sense of martial music just offstage.

Matthew Spinka a decade ago, in a remark still relevant, concluded with customary shrewdness: “Dr. Hromadka’s experiment in cooperating with the Czechoslovak and other Communist regimes is not without its positive value: for had he not made it, no one could tell whether this was a possible solution of the acute problem of the relation of the Christian churches to Communism. Now we know that it is not.”

In Prague I found the Second All-Christian Peace Assembly devoid of a strong eschatological note. Peace was the great preoccupation, in pursuit of which it is necessary (here I quote from the movement’s aims) “to concentrate all energies of Christian believers.” Many earnest Christians have been beguiled by the challenge offered in this dangerous half-truth. It goes far beyond Bonhoeffer’s reasonable statement (approved by the CPC) that in the past Christians had done much to further the various wars and that they should now do as much (or more) in a common Christian campaign for peace.

A godless regime (J. L. Hromadka has not proved it otherwise) would have liked the much-publicized findings of the Prague assembly less if an old lesson had not been overlooked: that true peace involves not merely the absence of conflict but the presence of God.

Southern Baptists: An Election Probe

Charges of “ballot stuffing” at the last two Southern Baptist Convention annual meetings are likely to be a major topic of discussion for the SBC Executive Committee this month.

SBC leaders are said to be deeply concerned over broad accusations leveled by Dr. Joe W. Burton, convention registration secretary. Burton, also Sunday school publication editor, says “confidential reports” have convinced him that ballot-stuffing took place in Atlantic City last spring and also the previous year in Kansas City.

At least one member of the Executive Committee has indicated he will bring up the matter when the group meets in Nashville September 23 and 24.

Burton made the charges in a letter to editors of Baptist state papers. “My point has no reference to which side of any issue anyone may have supported,” he said, “but has only to do with reported actions aimed at causing one vote to count more than another’s.…”

Dr. Wayne Dehoney, who was elected president of SBC in May on a second-ballot 4,024–3,223 vote, branded Burton’s charges as “impulsive and irresponsible.” He made a counter-charge that Burton conducted elections at SBC meetings of the past two years in “an irresponsible manner.”

While denying that there is “evidence from any source” giving basis to the registration secretary’s charges, the SBC president commented:

“It is conceivable, however, that an isolated incident may have occurred as there were over 13,000 messengers [delegates] attending the convention. Anyone could have entered the building off the boardwalk.”

Protestant Panorama

A Minnesota district convention of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod will ask the parent denomination to declare a new translation of Martin Luther’s Small Catechism unacceptable. The translation was a joint project of the three major U. S. Lutheran bodies.

The Assemblies of God plan to establish a “depository of Pentecostal theology” in the Springfield, Missouri, headquarters. The project will seek to assist researchers in connection with the current interest in glossolalia.

Miscellany

Roman Catholic bishops in California issued a document condemning racial discrimination last month. It made no specific reference, however, to a controversial proposal on which Californians will vote in November. If passed, the proposal would abolish a law against discrimination in housing transactions and permanently bar the legislature from considering “fair housing” legislation.

The new Complete Protestant Bible, a revised version of Luther’s translation, will go to print this fall as the first book to be published jointly in both East and West Germany since the erection of the Communist Wall and the subsequent enclosure of East Germany.

Twelve U. S. Senators introduced last month a proposed constitutional amendment that would add the words “under God” to the Preamble to the Constitution.

Protracted negotiations over the disposition of Russian church properties in Israel were climaxed with an agreement providing for purchase of virtually all the properties by Israel at a cost of $4,500,000. Originally donated by members of the Czarist imperial family to the Russian Orthodox Palestine Society, the properties include pilgrims’ hostels and large buildings in Jerusalem and Nazareth, and valuable real estate in Tel Aviv and Haifa.

New church construction took a surprisingly sharp upturn during the summer, according to the U. S. Department of Commerce. Estimated July construction was $91,000,000, $2,000,000 ahead of the same month of 1963, the first month this year that church construction has been ahead of the 1963 level.

Alice Lanshina, head of the Lumpa religious cult whose rampage in the remote bush country of Northern Rhodesia cost more than 500 lives, surrendered last month and called on her followers to end their “holy war.”

An American archaeological expedition led by Professor Ernest Wright of Harvard University has unearthed the Old Testament city of Shechem, the first Palestinian site mentioned in the book of Genesis. The expedition unearthed layers of the ancient city from Islamic, Christian, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Canaanite periods.

Protestant leaders in New South Wales, Australia, are protesting a new syllabus for state-operated primary schools which, in separating general religious teaching from social studies, emphasizes that Christian religious beliefs must be discussed only as part of the study of general religious philosophical beliefs.

Personalia

Dr. Arthur B. Rutledge was named executive secretary of the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board.

Mrs. Robert T. Fetherston was elected president of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference, the first woman ever to hold the office.

The Rev. William Haverkamp was appointed editor of De Wachter, Dutch-language weekly published by the Christian Reformed Church.

Mrs. John M. Ballbach was appointed dean of women at Moody Bible Institute.

Dr. Lewis Webster Jones will retire as president of the National Conference of Christians and Jews next summer.

Theology

Did the Spirit Come?

Howard Carson Blake

A British teen-ager, the daughter of a delegate, uttered the obvious sequel to the prayer theme, “Come, Creator Spirit,” of the nineteenth General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

The delegate quoted from her letter: “I hope He came.”

Had the Spirit come? The host city of Frankfurt am Main was not visibly shaken during the eleven-day proceedings, but some felt that there were indeed moments when it was clear that all present were responding to a presence, not merely to a spoken word.

One such time was marked by the storm of applause that greeted the first reading of a committee report on Roman Catholicism. “First we express gratitude for the ‘new climate’ and rejoice with our Roman Catholic brethren in the signs of renewal in that church.” It was not merely these precisely spoken, yet warm words of the committee chairman, Dr. Ermanno Rostan, moderator of the Waldensian Church of Italy, that sparked this response. It was rather a feeling on the part of many that in our time God’s Spirit is breathing new life into his whole Church through the sudden and unexpected opening of doors long closed. Bitterness had been purged out of Dr. Rostan, and he ably defended the report. Adoption was by an overwhelming majority.

Another high moment came at the adoption of a recommendation concerning racial questions. Two delegates from South African churches had urged an amendment for words of the report that they felt could be misused in their country to encourage violence. They won rather unexpected support from Dr. Wilhelm Niesel,1Niesel, reportedly a staunchly conservative theologian, is known chiefly for his studies on Calvin. moderator of the Reformierter Bund of Germany, who had just been elected to a six-year term as president of the alliance. Among those arguing against the amendment was Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S. A. The vote was more than 90 per cent against the proposed change.

The final text declared that the “exclusion of any person, on grounds of race, color or nationality, from any congregation or part of the life of the Church contradicts the very nature of the Church.”

That statement added that “Christians are called to protest, in the light of God’s Word, not only in words but in action and to participate in responsible efforts toward the establishment of racial justice and equality. In that involvement they will ask for the personal guidance of the Holy Spirit and count on the advice and support of the Church. Now as violence and revolutionary action are spreading, it is of primary importance for the Church to be prepared through serious study of the Holy Scripture and of the political situation to help its members face responsibility under the guidance of Jesus Christ, Lord of Peace, such hard problems as civil disobedience of violent action. In any case, Christians participating in the struggle for racial justice will remember that God is love and that their ultimate vocation is to exercise among men a ministry of reconciliation.”

Services were held in a large, windowless university lecture hall with closely set wooden seats. The atmosphere was not conducive to worship, still less to spiritual fervor. Dr. Ralph W. Lloyd, retiring president, tried to keep spirits up. But his efforts to keep order were handicapped by the substitution for the familiar gavel of a small bell of the type once used to call the maid from the kitchen—back in the days when there were maids.

A colorful note was provided by costumes worn by West African and Asian delegates, a red fez on a man from the United Arab Republic, and the great variety of physiognomies and complexions. Two ever-smiling observers from the Vatican sat faithfully in one corner of the hall.

Council debates focused on four main themes, the first being “Come, Creator Spirit, for the Re-Making of Man.” Many laymen felt lost in a sea of theological terms. And many representatives of the younger churches found the long theological discussions not merely boring but basically irrelevant.

The remaking-of-man report, optimistically labeled “final draft,” was cut to ribbons by the theologians. The Germans especially complained of the confusion between humanism and Christianity. On the final day a new “final draft” was approved for transmission to the churches. But since satisfactory clarification of the disputed sections had proved impossible, the whole matter was referred to the theological department of the alliance.

One of the basic theological problems that emerged in this discussion and also at several points in later reports was how to identify the work of the Spirit outside the life of the Church. No Reformed theologian was willing to limit the action of the sovereign God, but the question of identifying the true actions of the Spirit in the outside world demands a considerable exercise of discernment. Since there are no clearly defined criteria for such judgment, a tendency to follow personal preferences is all too easy.

The second theme, asking the coming of the Spirit “For the Renewal of Worship and Witness,” was received far more easily. The ensuing report declared a consensus “that a more frequent and a more joyous celebration of the Lord’s Supper is badly needed in many of our Reformed churches.”

In discussions of the third theme, “The Calling of the Churches Together,” an unsuccessful attempt was made to tone down emphasis on the sinfulness of division. Dr. Niesel defended the role of world confessional alliances, saying that they served as an introduction into ecumenism for many younger and smaller churches. Readiness to continue talks with the world body representing Congregational churches, talks that could lead to a merger of the two bodies, was also stressed.

Section Four, “For the Redemption of the World,” embraced the debate on racial problems and dealt also with “Peace” and “New Forms of Ministry.”

Delegates voted a resolution that would welcome an agreement among the churches of the world for fixing the date of Easter. Another resolution specifically requested the alliance executive committee and the Vatican observers to remind the Roman Catholic Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity that “a great strain is caused in ecumenical relations by the present practices of that church with regard to mixed marriages in most countries and by the restrictions of liberty of worship and witness and by civil disabilities suffered by minority evangelical churches in some countries.”

The growth of the alliance was itself a matter of some concern. This year’s council was by far the largest ever, with 419 delegates from 96 churches participating, as well as more than 300 fraternal delegates, consultants, observers, staff, and officially recognized visitors. A resolution to cut the size of the council in the future was adopted; it affects only the medium-sized and larger churches and will change the balance in favor of representation from smaller churches.

The Church: Place And Mission

In the small town of Zeist in the beautiful heart of Holland, the International Association for Reformed Faith and Action spent eight days stressing the importance of the Church’s faithfulness to its Lord in the midst of the ideologies and temptations of the time. The IARFA brought to its fifth International Reformed Congress last month six speakers from five countries to discuss the general theme, “The Church: Its Place and Mission in the Modern World.”

An element of continuity was achieved through daily Bible studies under the guidance of Dr. J. Cadier of Montpellier, France. The studies underscored the import of the scriptural letters to the churches of Asia (Revelation 2; 3).

Dr. P. Ch. Marcel, the French pastor who is president of the IARFA, placed the theme in its present reality in his opening address. The great danger to the Church comes from within, he said, noting evidence (1) in the reduction of God and Christ to the purely human level, as in Robinson’s Honest to God; (2) in the attempt to identify Christ with the Church, as if the latter automatically represented the former; and (3) in the fusion of Church and world, so that little remains of the distinctiveness of the faith. This (con)fusion was described as leading to an unbiblical universalism, so that even atheism is looked upon as an instrument of God, and to the denial of absolute norms for life, as in today’s sexual morality. Marcel asserted that Christianity has become humanized instead of humanity’s becoming Christianized.

The Church can challenge the world, said Dr. L. Coenen, German pastor and editor, only through a radical subjection to the norms of the New Testament. He charged that Protestant churches have become hierarchical and juridical establishments, and that “officials” carry the responsibility in our too-large congregations, which can hardly function as the body of Christ in which each member, fitly framed together, has his function and place. He challenged the congress to decide whether the New Testament church knew our “special offices” of elders, deacons, and preachers, who mainly perform the Church’s tasks today, and whether these tasks should not be the organic, harmonious expressions of every member of the body of Christ.

The idea was emphasized still more by H. Kleinert, a lay Christian from the Rhineland, who pointed out that the New Testament does not know our distinction of clergy and laity. He said that the Church is effective only when all its gifts, distributed to every member, can function in the Church’s action.

Dr. W. Stanford Reid of McGill University, Montreal, said that Christians today must learn from the Reformation. He noted that the Reformation was the work not of theologians and synods but of the Spirit of God. Implied were a rediscovery of God’s sovereignty and the rejection of church hierarchy; these lead to a God-focused life, lived in the patterns and structures of creation and providence, on the basis of redemption liberating man from sin so that the whole world can become the theater of human endeavor.

The Rev. E. L. H. Taylor of the Church of England said the Lord has judged the West by two world wars because the idols of scientific humanism have been worshiped. He declared that these idols can be broken only through a return to the biblical view of human life as religion, a view which cuts off the de-humanization and neutralization of existence as favored in the political and educational policies of the West. He insisted that the Church must be distinct from the world and suggested that it might be necessary to establish Christian schools, unions, and political parties.

Nineteenth-century individualism, said Dr. Herman Ridderbos, Dutch New Testament scholar, can be overcome by the new insights into the Word of God, which teach that the unity of the Church is a visible unity, since the Church is Christ’s body. According to Ridderbos, this unity can be visible in the Church as an organism, in the many Christian activities which cross denominational lines, but must also be present in the institutional church. He warned against two extremes: the one often found in the small seceded churches which often look upon themselves as the only perfect manifestation of Christ’s Church; the other found in the attempt to found a church transcending historical differences.

The congress at Zeist followed similarly convened meeting at Montpellier, France (1953); Detmold, Germany (1955); Strasbourg, France (1958); and Cambridge, England (1961). The IARFA is an association of persons who have tried to exert a unifying influence among Reformed-evangelical Christians since 1953.

BERNARD ZYLSTRA

The New And The Stable

An address by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., highlighted the European Baptist Conference at The Hague last month. The Negro Baptist integration leader’s appearance was televised to the Netherlands, West Germany, Denmark, and Sweden through a Eurovision network hookup.

In his televised sermon and in an earlier address to the conference, King stressed the obligation of the Church to support equal rights and opportunities for all men.

Citing the worldwide social and technological revolution, he declared that “the Church cannot say ‘let us go back to the quiet, stable world’ without violating the word of God that he makes all things new.”

King called on all Christians to “work together, seek together, and suffer together” in the face of worldwide challenges. He urged increased aid to developing nations of the world.

On international affairs, King welcomed the offer of Pope Paul VI to intervene in conflicts threatening world peace. However, he suggested that perhaps churches have “lost their right” to speak on world affairs because of Christendom’s failure to stop two major wars.

Forecast Of Tensions

Increased tension, disruption of order, and possibly violence as a result of the racial revolution were predicted by the national general secretary of the United States YWCA, speaking last month in Beirut, Lebanon, at an international YM-YWCA conference.

The YWCA official, Miss Edith Lerrigo, declared that “the years ahead are bound to be painful, costly, and in some places tragic.”

‘For Such A Time’

Cleveland, Tennessee (population 18,000), a suburb of Chattanooga, got a vote of confidence last month from the 200,000-member Church of God, which has its world headquarters there. The church’s General Council turned down a recommendation of its Supreme Council that the headquarters be relocated in a more cosmopolitan area such as Atlanta, Memphis, or even nearby Chattanooga. Instead the General Council voted to erect a new $1,500,000 office building in Cleveland and renovate existing facilities.

In another important policy decision, the church, one of the largest Pentecostal bodies in the United States, voted to increase its Executive Committee from four to six members.

Both decisions, made at the Church of God’s fiftieth General Assembly in Dallas last month, reflect rapid growth. The church originated in 1886 with a group of eight persons. Now it has some 6,366 churches and missions and is represented in all fifty states and in sixty-eight foreign countries. The foreign membership totals 454,952. U. S. membership is most concentrated in Tennessee and several adjoining states.

Assembly delegates voted without dissent a resolution affirming equal rights for all Americans. The statement said that “no American should, because of his race or religion, be deprived of his right to worship, vote, rest, eat, sleep, be educated, live and work on the same basis as other citizens.”

“No Christian can manifest a passive attitude when the rights of others are jeopardized,” the resolution continued. “Christian love and tolerance are incompatible with race prejudice and hatred.” Members were urged to “support that which assures all people those freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution” and to “continue to practice the love and brotherhood it preaches.”

The theme of the Dallas meeting, “For Such a Time,” taken from the story of Esther, emphasized the church’s evangelistic spirit.

Program For The Deprived

Delegates to the 152nd Seventh Day Baptist Conference, held in Salem, West Virginia, last month, called on the entire denominational constituency to “commit themselves to a more vigorous and Christlike program for the extension of love, mercy, and justice to persons deprived of their rights as free members of society.” A resolution adopted by the delegates noted that “any limiting qualifications of race as to church membership or attendance are not in harmony with the teachings of Christ.”

Salem was also the site of the first World Consultation of Seventh Day Baptists last month. The two-week conclave drew delegates from seven countries.

Scanning The Spectrum

“Spectrum of belief” is no mere catchword among members of the American Scientific Affiliation. At the annual meeting last month at John Brown University, Siloam Springs, Arkansas, ASA members demonstrated both the common basis of their faith and the range of their diversity in a program that focused on the origins of the universe, life, and man.

Professor John A. McIntyre led off with a paper that criticized the evangelicals’ lack of social concern, called for more imaginative biblical interpretation, and suggested that scientific research could glorify God as much as evangelistic activity.

More of the spectrum became evident the next day in an exchange of views of the “three-story universe,” Dr. J. Oliver Buswell, Jr., saying that the Old Testament did not assume such a universe, and Dr. Alder T. van der Ziel maintaining, “We read our own ideas into the text. Why not go to the text?” Dr. Buswell, dean of the faculty at Covenant Seminary, replied, “That’s my point.”

One of the more vigorously debated topics was the “Can Scientists Create Life?” question, which came up principally in a paper by Dr. Duane T. Gish, who has done pioneer work in biochemistry and biophysics. “The nature of the origins of life may be beyond the realm of scientific investigation—I certainly believe that they are,” said Dr. Gish.

The convention also included three papers proposing three possible dates for the creation of man—50,000 to 60,000 years ago (Professor James Murk of Wheaton College); 10,000 years ago, or not much before the development of agriculture (Dr. Stanley D. Walters of Greenville College, Illinois); and several hundred thousand years ago (Professor James O. Buswell, III, of Wheaton College). A fourth position would place Adam at the very beginning of tool-making man. Since all of these post-difficulties, Professor Buswell said it was a matter of choosing “which set of problems you want to be stuck with.”

In the concluding lecture of the convention Dr. Buswell took vigorous but charitable exception to the lovers of the kind of paradox that means genuine contradiction. “If something that the Bible declares to be true seems to be false, for me the only proper attitude toward the problem is to study, and pray, and wait for further light, while I cling to those plain anti simple truths which are clearly revealed and not contradicted,” said Dr. Buswell.

The ASA, which was founded in 1941 by five scientists of evangelical Christian conviction, has grown to 1,200 members. In recent years the group has included more and more evangelicals involved in pioneer scientific research, such as Dr. Gish of the Upjohn Company, Dr. McIntyre of Texas A and M, Dr. L. Evans Roth of Iowa State University, and Dr. Wayne U. Ault, of Isotopes, Inc. During the same general period, the group has broadened its spectrum of belief while retaining an evangelical orientation.

Since last year’s meeting, however, some members, led by Dr. Walter E. Lammerts, a geneticist, have formed the Creation Research Society, which has been variously characterized as a split, a revolt, and a protest movement. Although some CRS members are indeed critical of what they see as compromise by the ASA on vital issues, those talked to at the convention deny a split. One of them said that as far as he knew, all the old ASA members had retained their ASA connections. Some explain the existence of the new group by saying that the CRS is engaged in a specialized study of the evidences of creation, and that it is designed to provide an adequate forum for such studies.

The CRS statement of faith is longer and more specific than the ASA’s two-point statement: “(1) The Holy Scriptures are the inspired Word of God, the only unerring guide of faith and conduct. (2) Jesus Christ is the Son of God and through His atonement is the one and only Mediator.”

The CRS statement includes reference to the historical and scientific accuracy of the Bible, a universal flood, and a “creation week,” though opinions in the CRS on a literal six-day creation period tend to vary. Moreover, the ASA includes members who would not deny many points in the CRS statement.

The ASA has also changed its concept of mission over the years. A decade ago one objective was to supply information to ministers and theologians in order to keep them from crawling out on precarious scientific limbs. More recently the ASA has endeavored to keep its own members informed on theology so that they would not crawl out on precarious theological limbs. The ASA has close ties with the Evangelical Theological Society and Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. It will meet concurrently with the IVCF Faculty Fellowship next year.

GEORGE WILLIAMS

Controversial Guest

America faces greater moral and religious problems than those of an economic and social nature, Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, said last month in an address to 12,000 members of the American Lutheran Church’s Luther League youth organization.

“For the first time in history we have technical ability, thanks to automation, to satisfy the massive material needs of humanity,” he said, “but we still need to develop the ability of filling the needs of the inner man.”

Both at his introduction and at the conclusion of his address, Reuther received a standing ovation from the crowd in Cobo Hall, Detroit.

The enthusiastic reception for the labor leader was a sharp contrast to the message of some literature distributed outside the convention hall. Pamphlets told the young people, “You’re being misled.”

The labor leader was the subject of a pre-convention controversy. The church council of an ALC congregation in Los Angeles charged that he is “strong for the Soviet Union” and “denies God.”

An ALC spokesman countered that Reuther “has done an outstanding job in ridding [his] union of … Communists.”

The Mass In English: Some Theological Surprises

On August 24, in St. Louis, a Roman Catholic Mass was celebrated in English for the first time in the United States. Kiel Auditorium was comfortably filled by nearly 11,000 persons, including some 180 Protestants. The Mass in English was part of the program of the twenty-fifth Roman Catholic Liturgical Week, which is the largest single gathering of Roman Catholics and an annual opportunity for bishops, priests, nuns, and especially lay people who are committed to the renewal of the church through changes in the central act of worship.

For Protestants the English Mass was of deep interest. Its setting was modern and plain, like that of a modern play. The altar was a simple, unadorned block, and choir members sat on wooden cubes on each side of it. The service was preceded by fifteen minutes of singing directed by a song leader who was at a desk to the side of the altar. The singing was from a prepared booklet, and its purpose was obviously to acquaint the congregation with the songs for the service to follow. From a desk on the other side the congregation was guided through the service by John Mannion, executive secretary of the Liturgical Conference. His guidance characterized the whole service—an interplay of high formality and warm folksiness.

Celebrant of the Mass was the Rev. Frederick R. McManus, associate professor of canon law at Washington University and consultant for the Pontifical Commission on Sacred Liturgy which was established for the Second Vatican Council. In a brief homily before the Mass he put forth the role of every member of the church: “You are the body of Christ.” Not all are apostles or “successors of apostles,” but all must serve in “adoration and renewal.” He offered prayers for “those others in Christ” and for “Jewish believers.”

In the Mass itself, a procession of laymen brought the bread to the altar to be blessed along with the wafer of the priest. Normally this bread is touched only by a priest or a nun. Disappointing, however, was the fact that in the canon—to the Roman Catholic the most sacred part of the Mass, during which the hosts are consecrated—the-celebrant spoke in Latin and almost inaudibly. It was reported after the service that although this was not as much as the Liturgical Conference would have wished and was not necessarily in line with the forward-looking views of McManus, it did represent the best wisdom of the group on how far they could go in this first use of English.

Theologically, there were some surprises. Mannion, in introducing the service, explained the Mass as the “offering of Christ to the Father in sign.” The altar was not against the wall but out in front, and the celebrant faced the congregation. The introduction to the reading of the Gospel spoke of “breaking the bread of God’s Word,” and the Mannion referred to the reading as the “peak” of the service. The congregation stood for this reading. Mannion was not robed but wore a grey business suit. The singing was enthusiastic and the leadership of the choirs beautiful. A new hymn, “God Is Love,” was led by its Negro composer, Clarence Joseph Rivers.

Asked what meant most to him, a young priest answered, “That English was used at all.” Donald Quinn of the press room, a Roman Catholic layman, said, “My spine tingled when the ‘Our Father’ was said in English, and when we were dismissed in English.” The whole great congregation was joyous, and the enthusiasm after the service was contagious.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

The Week that Almost Wasn’t

Malay-Chinese race riots in Singapore left twenty-two dead, hundreds injured, and a unique evangelistic project in jeopardy last month.

The threat melted into victory, however, as the Asian Evangelists Crusade began on schedule and drew 4,000 persons nightly to the Singapore National Theater. The crowds were easily the largest ever to gather for gospel services in the city’s history.

Yet less than twenty-four hours before the start of the crusade a curfew had been in effect that kept all of Singapore’s population indoors nightly. The fifteen evangelists from seven countries who pooled their efforts to sponsor the crusade had seriously considered calling the whole thing off. No one knew how long the curfew would continue, or whether the riots would flare anew!

On August 1, the crusade’s opening day, it was announced that the curfew would be lifted until midnight. The group regarded it as a spectacular answer to prayer that the curfew lifted for the entire week of the meetings—dates which had been set a year in advance—before public meetings were again banned because of further disturbances.

The crusade, planned in conjunction with the Asian Evangelists Conference the following week, featured a different country each night, with an evangelist from that country as speaker. Represented were Formosa, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. A total of 903 persons registered decisions for Christ and were individually counseled in one of four languages. The evangelistic campaign was the first ever sponsored by Singapore churches.

Television Crusade

One-hour telecasts on some 200 stations across North America this week will enable millions to share the benefits of evangelist Billy Graham’s July crusade in Columbus, Ohio.

In most areas the telecasts will be seen on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings (September 8–10).

The television audience will hear three of the sermons Graham preached in Columbus. Meanwhile, the evangelist will conduct crusades this month in Omaha and Boston.

A corps of young people distributed 100,000 handbills and tickets house to house. There were more than 400 counselors and some 250 choir members.

At the three-day evangelists’ conference the following week, participants hammered out a bold strategy to reach Asia’s increasing millions with the Gospel. They adopted a six-point program:

—Sponsor biennial campaigns and conferences in key Asian cities.

—Conduct city-wide gospel rallies.

—Form and encourage the dispatch of international gospel teams.

—Promote systematic village evangelism.

—Encourage and train a new crop of evangelists.

—Operate a clearing house for information and intercessory prayer.

The conference was planned by a committee of missionaries and laymen, including representatives of Malaya Evangelistic Fellowship, The Navigators, Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Singapore Bible College, and Singapore Youth for Christ.

Navigators representative Roy Robertson noted the need to promote with national evangelists a “more aggressive, coordinated program for public proclamation of the Word.”

Much of the committee’s action is credited to the spearheading influence of evangelist Gregorio Tingson of the Philippines, who insists that nationals take responsibility for stepping up Asian evangelism.

Another result of the conference was the establishment of an Asian Evangelists Commission, which promptly began laying plans for a crusade and conference in Bombay in the spring of 1966.

Theology

A Grass-Roots Drive for Spiritual Recovery

The summer of 1964 seems to have given birth to a rank-and-file movement for spiritual recovery in mainstream Protestantism. New organizations are springing up to combat theological dilution within the large American denominations. Behind the drive is a renewed spirit of determination, especially among laymen, to demonstrate the integrity of the Scriptures and their supreme relevance to modern problems.

Foremost in the movement as of now is an organization called Concerned Presbyterians, composed exclusively of members of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern). But similar groups are emerging in at least three other large U. S. denominations.

Champions of orthodoxy have long chafed over theological deviations and neglect of spiritual priorities in leading religious bodies. In the forepart of this century, however, these protests resulted mostly in defection and schism. The new approach is to work within the framework of existing denominations and to seek recovery of their historic purpose through established channels.

The current grass-roots drive makes no effort to conceal its distrust of the National Council of Churches. It is committed to no specific alternative. But the NCC is deplored as providing the machinery for achievement of liberal programs while its leadership is insulated from any need for answering to individual church members for its actions.

Inasmuch as it is virtually, by definition, a campaign for the recovery of theological orthodoxy, the movement’s objective, as one spokesman put it, is simply “revival in the Church.” The main goal is to reestablish the priority of the Church’s challenge of men and women to the necessity of spiritual regeneration. Also important is the Church’s responsibility for grounding believers in scriptural truth. In many churches ministers are under increasing criticism for the investment of time and energies in ecumenical and social concerns while the primary task of evangelism is neglected. In addition, the complaints of the laity increase over the neglect of orientation in basic biblical doctrines by many Protestant pulpits.

These biblical priorities seem to run afoul of current interest among some Protestant leaders who contend that redemption is a concept now best applied to certain programs of social reform. The Church’s political involvement in select public issues1Two generations ago the emphasis was on pacifism; a generation ago it was on prohibition; presently it is on civil rights, relief for the needy, and rapprochement wth the Communist world. is regarded by many denominational officials as an ultimate test of genuine moral concern.

The alternative view of the new crusaders is that the Church’s job is to see that individuals are confronted with the necessity of spiritual commitment and equipped to serve in their separate vocations as the salt of the earth.

The group known as Concerned Presbyterians was organized last month during the annual Presbyterian Journal Day observance at Weaverville, North Carolina, in the mountain resort area near Asheville. The Journal, an independent weekly (circulation: 22,500), will reflect the group’s emphases. Goals of the organization, listed in a resolution to Journal directors, include concern for “the integrity of the Word of God … a return to serious and intensive prayer … a new zeal for evangelism and world missions … a new seeking for the power of the Holy Spirit … a new dedication to love and concern for one another in Christ.…” The group also called for “union with Reformed bodies who are obviously and sincerely dedicated to the Reformed interpretation of the Scriptures” and “a plan for the use of the funds contributed to our Church’s causes that will enable individuals and churches to give as the Holy Spirit leads them, with the assurance that the funds will be used only for the purposes for which they were given.” Named as co-directors of the steering committee were Kenneth Keyes of Miami, former president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and Roy LeCraw, former mayor of Atlanta.

The grass-roots drive is expecting counter-criticism, since ulterior motives are frequently ascribed to reform movements in ecclesiastical circles. For this reason, participants are zealous not to embrace the cooperation of those whose antipathy to the NCC rises out of wrong reasons (e.g. racism).

The new crusaders stress that social concern falls within the proper province of Christian thinking, but they deplore its replacement of evangelistic priorities and its attachment to political methods and programs.

Their battle for recovery admittedly faces a formidable institutionalism that resists any turnabout. Some laymen, realizing that the institution holds a whip of security over its clergy, expect little help from ministers. Others are more optimistic. They refuse to contemplate any growing cleft between laity and clergy and see limited signs of denominational renewal in areas where ministers themselves are concerned and active.

Sit-In Settlement

Nine clergymen were released from a Tallahassee, Florida, jail last month after serving four days of sixty-day sentences imposed as a result of sit-in demonstrations in 1961. The men—four white and three Negro Protestants and two rabbis—chose the jail terms instead of $500 fines after three years of unsuccessful appeals (including one to the U. S. Supreme Court).

“We received no preferential treatment, and the other prisoners were very congenial,” commented Dr. Robert McAfee Brown, well-known United Presbyterian churchman.

A tenth minister, the Rev. Ralph Lord Roy, paid the $500 fine after his request to join the other clergymen “within a few days” was turned down by the judge. Roy said pressing pastoral duties made it necessary to remain in New York. He recently became minister of two Methodist churches.

Members of a freedom-riding group testing discrimination in interstate transportation terminals, the ministers were charged with unlawful assembly after attempting to integrate an airport restaurant. A Florida appellate court ruled that they had pursued their demonstration to “unreasonable lengths imposing unreasonable burdens on others.” The ministers had canceled flight reservations repeatedly, frustrating attempts by the airlines to accommodate other would-be travelers.

The Amish Dilemma

A bill is being considered by Congress to exempt the Old Order Amish from participation in the social security program, and Treasury Department legal experts say “there is no valid constitutional objection to the proposed exemption.”

Republican Representative Richard S. Schweiker introduced the measure, which would permit members of churches whose established doctrines forbid participation in such programs on religious grounds to waive their benefit rights and be exempted from social security taxes. While the Old Order Amish have been in the forefront of the campaign for such a law, other groups which proscribe insurance also would be relieved of the dilemma.

The administration has not indicated support of Schweiker’s bill, but an opinion from Treasury Department General Counsel G. d’Angelot Belin sees no constitutional bar.

The government, which has maintained a moratorium on collections of the tax from the Amish, has proposed that members pay into social security and, upon retirement age, the money paid as “taxes” be refunded in monthly installments equal to the social security benefits for which they would ordinarily qualify.

Amish leaders have contended that the tax is really an insurance payment and understood to be such by the government itself. The sect, and many small ones similar to it, believe that individuals, by fruitful industry in their younger years and reliance on God throughout life, should look to no outside sources for help in their old age.

In the last few months, in anticipation of settlement of the crisis, Internal Revenue Service has quietly placed liens against many properties, particularly in Pennsylvania, in an effort to collect taxes held in abatement by the moratorium. Two years ago tax agents impounded horses and livestock of Amish who refused to pay the tax. The impounding stopped after a wave of public protest.

The Nominees

Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, selected last month as the Democratic party’s nominee for Vice-President, is a member of the First Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) of Minneapolis and holds affiliate membership in a Methodist church at Chevy Chase, Maryland, a Washington suburb.

Humphrey and President Johnson will run on a platform that takes no stand on the controversial prayer amendment proposal. By contrast, the Republican platform supports, with qualifications, a constitutional amendment “permitting those individuals and groups who choose to do so to exercise their religion freely in public places.”

On the eve of the Democratic convention Johnson entertained evangelist Billy Graham and his wife at the White House. The president attended Sunday services at the National City Christian Church where Graham spoke. The evangelist also called on Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater at Goldwater’s invitation.

Winona Breaks Fuller Link

Trustees of the Winona Lake (Indiana) School of Theology voted unanimously last month to invoke a reversion clause in their December, 1961, agreement with Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. They requested immediate return of the title to the Indiana campus.

The initial agreement, which climaxed a decade of consultation and planning, made the Winona Lake school the summer division of Fuller. Some 130 students were registered this year.

Reasons for the “drastic and necessary” action, according to Winona President John A. Huffman, were multiple. These included, he said, “gradual deterioration” of Fuller’s doctrine of the Scriptures; the signing of Fuller’s statement of faith with “mental reservations” by some Pasadena campus faculty members; the elimination of English Bible requirements from the curriculum; and the projected phasing-out of the master’s degree program at the Winona school.

A Question Of Language

The Rev. Malcolm Boyd, Protestant Episcopal clergyman and sometime playwright, was reprimanded by the Bishop of Michigan this month for using profanity in one of his dramas.

Although he was not named, Boyd, chaplain at Wayne State University, was obviously the clergyman singled out for criticism by Bishop Richard S. Emrich in a church newspaper. The bishop noted that a one-act play written by Boyd was “banned because of its profanity by the radio station of a great university.”

The twelve-minute drama, Boy, a social protest play, was turned down by the Michigan State University educational television station because it includes the words “damn” and “nigger.”

Emrich stated that “since the clergyman preaches and practices high and sensitive standards in race relations, it astounds me that his standards in language are so low.”

A Bid For Attention

Religious “non-commercials” may soon be seen as well as heard.

The United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., which has tested several low-pressure radio spot announcements by Stan Freberg and is now beginning to run them in major U. S. cities, is contemplating a similar campaign on television, according to Richard Gilbert, executive director of the church’s radio and TV division.

No dates have been set, no one has been commissioned to do the spots, and there is some uncertainty about where to get the money. However, Mr. Gilbert says that “we are pushing ahead to see if we can develop some TV spots.”

The original radio announcements reached the general public in the form of the cold print of advance press publicity, a medium for which they were not designed and which exhibited them at their least effective. Mr. Gilbert says they are at their best when sandwiched in between layers of “top forty” tunes, rock n’ roll, and the other elements that make up the daily fare of radio.

Freberg’s reputation for “goofy, spoofy” commercials; the fact that he uses a swinging group of forty-five singers and musicians; and the whole ambience of show business surrounding the venture—it is these things, perhaps, that have evoked such comments as “nauseous,” “most offensive,” and “grotesque.”

According to Mr. Gilbert, most of these comments come from people who have only read about the spots, not heard them. Speaking for the program are these points:

• Most people who heard the spots in the cities where they were tested remembered them and reacted favorably to them.

• Since the announcements do not make a “religious” sound, they have been able to escape the limbo to which most religious programs are consigned—the early-morning devotional hour, prayer after the late-late show, and the “Sunday ghetto.”

• In Detroit and St. Louis, the two cities where the pilot tests were run beginning last August, research showed that 99 per cent of those who had heard the announcements got the message straight; moreover, 75 per cent of those polled in Detroit and 79 per cent in St. Louis said that the spots made them “wonder about living with God.” One denominational official said that he considered the tests “wildly successful.”

Mr. Freberg, who took on the assignment as a kind of mission, waiving his usual fee, says he uses an “espionage approach” to “sneak up on” the listener.

“I believe,” says Mr. Freberg, “it [the program] is the first major step the Christian Church has taken in broadcasting to attempt to reach the subconscious mind of the young American, who will do anything in his power to snap off anything of an even remotely religious nature.”

One of the three spots he developed goes like this:

First voice: Look, I’m quite self-sufficient … I made myself what I am, thank you.

Second voice: But don’t you think all of us, occasionally, could use a little divine … uh …

First voice: (Ahem) Gee, I’ve got to run … here’s my card anyhow … I’m a vice-president now …

Second voice: Well good …

First voice: Yes indeed.

Second voice: But your name … it’s just penciled in here …

First voice: (Ahem) Well, there’s a big turnover in personnel. You know how it is.

Second voice: Uh-huh. Well, that’s just about how it is in life, isn’t it?

First voice: Pardon?

Second voice: We’re all just penciled in.

Music:

“Where’d you get the idea

You could make it all by yourself?

Doesn’t it get a little lonely, sometimes,

Out on that limb … without Him?

It’s a great life, but it could be greater—

Why try and go it alone?

The blessings you lose may be your own.”

GEORGE WILLIAMS

Unpopular Alien

Two Americans have consistently hit the British headlines during the past months, and both have been handled roughly. One is Barry Goldwater, whose policies have perhaps been imperfectly understood in many quarters. The other is “Big Jim” Taylor, leader of one section of the Exclusive Brethren (see “The Uttermost Farthing,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, News, May 8). Delegates to a Methodist conference roared applause when the Brooklyn draper was compared unfavorably with Lenny Bruce, who had been refused entrance to Britain as an undesirable alien. Taylor’s teaching was described in the House of Lords as “the antithesis of Christianity,” but the Home Secretary had earlier ruled that he could not be excluded because he had broken no law.

Last month more than a thousand Brethren met for a three-day conference at Dorking, near London, evidently undismayed by the fact that five times that number have left the movement during the past four years in protest against the leader’s instructions about separation from unbelievers. This doctrine has resulted in broken homes, suicides, and untold distress. Sixty examples of such were collected by Mr. R. Gresham Cooke, a Conservative Member of Parliament whom the elusive Taylor reluctantly agreed to meet for discussion. Mr. Cooke interrupted his holiday and returned to London for the occasion, but Taylor did not keep his promise. Eventually an unsigned telegram came from New York, saying, “Will not meet you for substantial reasons.” The substantial reasons were said to have been not unconnected with the manhandling “Big Jim” had received from some irate women the previous day. Mr. Cooke is now preparing further representations to Parliament to debar Taylor from future visits to Britain, while company director Leslie Pearson, whose Exclusive wife has left him, is contemplating an appeal to the American Senate.

A reliable source not given to humor tells of Taylor’s advice to a worried brother who had found a television set in his motel room: “Take a sheet off the bed and cover it.” British comedians have not been slow to realize the immense possibilities in this line of thought.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Adventure In Adversity

From their “picture window on the Wall’ in their parish house apartment, the Rev. Ralph Zorn and his wife have a clear view into East Berlin and Communist Germany.

“It makes an interesting evening’s diversion for us,” Zorn says. “Hulda and I and the five kids may take turns with the binoculars. Sometimes when we focus on the Communist guards we find they are looking right back at us. Kind of eerie.”

Zorn, formerly a Lutheran pastor in the United States, has for two years served an Evangelical church in West Berlin some 500 yards from the notorious, Communist-erected wall that divides the city. At least four tunnels have been dug by East German refugees under the wall into his parish. He attempts to minister to both East and West Berliners and as an American citizen is able to make regular visits to the Communist side.

During one of his trips last winter Zorn called on a 70-year-old widow who lived alone. He found her cutting apart one of the beds in her flat—just to have firewood.

Zorn related numerous similar experiences when this correspondent visited him recently during a tour of Berlin. He spoke of dreadful circumstances in which Christians in East Germany, particularly younger ones, have been targets of ridicule and discrimination because of their faith.

“I know of a ten-year-old girl who attends church regularly,” he said. “Sometimes on Monday morning, when she arrives at school, she will be taunted by her teacher. On one occasion the teacher and all other students in her class pointed their fingers at her and shouted, ‘Stupid Christian girl.’ ”

Teen-agers in East Germany who avow their faith probably forfeit any opportunity to attend college. Zorn showed me a silver pin with a cross on it.

“In East Germany, it takes real conviction to wear this pin,” he said. “If you do, you’re immediately susceptible to ridicule and attack. Any young person who wears this quite likely sacrifices his chance for higher education. Yet thousands do wear the pin unashamedly.”

Zorn at 38 is a handsome, youthful man with a heavy shock of hair and deep blue eyes. He grew up in New Jersey, studied at Concordia Seminary (Missouri Synod), St. Louis, and held pastorates in Charlotte, North Carolina, and New York City before going to Germany.

Mrs. Zorn is a German who came to the United States to study. The couple met while she was a foreign student in North Carolina.

Zorn’s church, called the Church of Peace, was constructed seventy-five years ago. The former pastor left at about the time of the construction of the wall. The red brick structure includes a tall steeple, a vigorous, noisy system of bells, and some artistic wood carvings near the pulpit. It is located in a poor section of West Berlin.

“Berlin really doesn’t have the slums of Latin America or Asia,” said Zorn. “But this is the worst section.”

He declared that in contrast to East Berliners, whose faith apparently has been strengthened through persecution, West Berliners are indifferent toward spiritual things and few attend church. “They suffer from the stifling environment of a state church,” he said.

To help arouse interest among young people Zorn and his wife promote an intensive program of recreation at their parish house, believing that “sometimes you can spread the story of Christianity at the ping pong table instead of the pulpit.”

Zorn is uncertain about his future as a clergyman. He may devote his career entirely to a ministry in Germany. Or he may return to the United States.

“Working and living so close to the Wall, so close that you see it every day, you understand about the complexities of life and politics here,” he said. “If there ever was a need to apply the principles of the Christian Gospel, it is here in this divided city. The solutions lie not so much in money as in people. We need dedicated Christians to come here and work.”

ROGER SWANSON

Suspected Subsidy

A “subsidization of sabotage” is what a Dutch Reformed journal in South Africa calls the World Council of Churches’ $56,000 contribution to assist political prisoners there.

An editorial in Kerkbode, official organ of the largest of the Dutch Reformed churches in South Africa, says the money is not given out of sympathy with the needy but to support persons who take issue with a certain political policy.

Indicting Makarios

Petrusblatt, weekly organ of the Berlin Roman Catholic archdiocese, sharply criticized Archbishop Makarios, president of Cyprus, for “promoting force, terror, and hatred and playing with war.” It called the Greek Orthodox leader “a nuisance for the world, Christians and the Church.”

“Should one not expect of a bishop of a Christian Church that he would rather try everything to reconcile conflicts on his island?” Petrusblatt asked, adding:

“It is not our business to find out whether the Greeks or the Turks are more to blame for the situation, but the annoyance which Makarios causes falls back on the whole of Christianity.”

In New York, meanwhile, the leading American Orthodox churchman came to the defense of Makarios. Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America deplored what he called the “abusive attacks,” including “scurrilous lampooning in vile cartoons” of Makarios in the American press. The U. S. churchman said that while it may seem “strange and untenable” that the leader of Cyprus Greek Orthodoxy also is the elected leader of the country, the “history of centuries-long Greek persecution and enslavement at the hands of the Turks” makes Archbishop Makarios’s role “eminently explainable and consistent.”

About This Issue: September 11, 1964

Back at his desk after a sabbatical leave spent on three continents, Editor Carl F. H. Henry contributes the first in a series of essays on the theological situation in Europe today. The essays reflect interviews with leading Continental theologians and New Testament scholars, among them Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Emil Brunner, Helmut Thielicke, and Anders Nygren.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY welcomes to its editorial staff as associate editor Dr. Harold Lindsell, former vice-president and professor of missions at Fuller Theological Seminary. An ordained Baptist minister, he holds the B.S. degree from Wheaton College, A.M. from the University of California (Berkeley), and Ph.D. from New York University.

This issue’s masthead also announces the advancement of Dr. James Daane to the post of assistant editor.

The Minister’s Workshop: The Pictorial Pool

Paul S. Rees

The best preaching is pictorial. It brings listeners into an experience of seeing the truth. Far from despising imagination (as if what is imaginative is in the nature of fantasy or of the fantastic), it uses it, exploits it, plays up to it, in a score of legitimate ways. After all, the mind’s ability to form images is one of its most extraordinary endowments.

The sermon’s pictorial elements are many, and in the hands of a master craftsman they are as rich and varied as the colors on a Murillo canvas. They include everything from a well-turned phrase of half-a-dozen words to an illustration that requires a full five minutes to unfold.

I once went fishing with some friends on Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Before we started from shore our guide had asked what we wanted to “go after”: black bass, speckled perch, catfish, or what. It was not enough for us to say we wanted to fish. He had to know what we wanted to catch lest he take us to the wrong part of the lake.

The preacher’s pool of pictorial possibilities is a big one. He needs to know where to go for what will best serve his purpose.

To begin with the obvious, let him draw from that inexhaustible reservoir—the Bible. It is no accident that sermons on the parables and on Bible characters achieve a level of audience interest several notches above the average. They have a cinematic quality. Theology in abstract propositions can be leaden. Yet thrown pictorially, dramatically, on the screen of the mind, theology is lively, exciting, and congregation-involving.

To be sure, this type of preaching has hazards. It can be casual, superficial, cheap. It can defeat itself if the imagination runs riot, mistaking sheer fancy for eternal truth. On the other hand, such masters of this type of sermon as Whyte, Matheson, Macartney, and Buttrick tell us once for all that it need not be stupidly banal: it can be enrichingly brilliant.

After all, what Bible-character sermons do is to make truth understandable by making it “seeable.” The sermon thus becomes a species of incarnation—the Word made flesh. And the effect? “We beheld …!” Here is the bull’s-eye that is struck by the old Arab saying: “He is the best speaker who can turn the ear into an eye.”

But the Bible as a source of picture-preaching has offerings to make to us other than biographical or parabolic. It abounds in words and phrases that spark the imagination. It is a treasury of metaphor and simile.

You let out your line, for example, in the Book of Judges, and your “trawling eye” begins looking for signs of a “strike.” Presently you have this in hand: “But the Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon,” which, you quickly note, reads in Hebrew, “The Spirit of the Lord clothed himself with Gideon.” Frail human flesh suddenly becomes invincible because the might of the Lord takes it over and wears it like a garment, moves about in it to the achievement of the divine purpose!

Or this: “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Whether we have eyes to see it and humility to confess it or not, the nature of reality is such that in the end evil is doomed and righteousness is vindicated. We may make fools of ourselves but not of God. His is the last word.

The Bible’s waters swarm with similitudes. Let the preacher make them his own. Or, at the least, let them suggest others that, with disciplined hand, he can place in his sermon to give vividness and zest and interest to this tremendous thing he has to communicate.

Preaching pictorially can be done only, as Paul Scherer has reminded us, “by exchanging the commonplace phrase, the torpid, sluggish word, for words that glow and move and have some being, leaving those that lie down on the page with their four legs in the air, for others that gird their loins to run and not be weary, to walk and not faint.”

It was not, let me frankly say, with the following sermon in mind that I expressed the foregoing thoughts. But having come upon James Black’s Days of My Autumn, I found in it this sermon on Simon, the tanner of Joppa, which has in it, again and again, the glint of the pictorial.

For nearly thirty years Dr. Black occupied the distinguished pulpit of St. George’s West, Edinburgh. To many of us he is best known for his Warrack Lectures entitled The Mystery of Preaching. The sermon presented here was preached in the 1940s.

For one thing, the preacher wraps his theme—prejudice and exclusiveness as contradictions of the universality of the Gospel—around the figure of a man. The focus on the little-known tanner immediately imparts freshness to the approach.

Furthermore, the imagination is evoked in lively fashion by the conversation that the preacher fancies between Peter and anyone who might have predicted that the apostle would lodge under the same roof with a despised tanner. The imputed outburst, “Not on your life!” is a delightful piece of conversational updating.

Notice will be taken, also, of the vividness and vigor of such phrases and clauses as “the big free dream would have been shackled,” “the first rope snapping,” “the ropes men tie about God,” “the cursed cords of shame,” “the muck in men’s thoughts,” and “the clean winds of God.”

Keep an eye open, finally, for the good use that is made of our Lord’s familiar figure, “Make the inside of the cup clean.”

Books

Book Briefs: September 11, 1964

Political Science: A Christian Estimate

Independence and Involvement: A Christian Reorientation in Political Science, by Rene de Visme Williamson (Louisiana State University Press, 1964, 269 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Edward P. Coleson, chairman, Department of Social Science, Spring Arbor College, Spring Arbor, Michigan.

Professor Williamson prefaces his volume with an urgent plea that Christian scholars relate both their religious convictions and their secular learning to the task of seeking “an adequate frame of reference or approach within which we can work out solutions to our problems.” He therefore offers his book to members of the learned community as a contribution “to the great task of re-thinking their professional fields and occupational problems in terms of the Christian faith.”

The book offers much of value. The minister who may not be interested in the soul-searchings of political scientists will yet find large sections of the book interesting and useful, such as the study of the relation of church and state. He will enjoy and profit from the well-documented discussion on the religious views of the Founding Fathers, including some who are less well known. The Christian whose “image” of George Washington is that of a fervent Christian, on his knees in the snow outside the camp at Valley Forge, may be shocked with Williamson’s characterization: “Washington, too, was a Deist with a strong sense of Providence and religious feeling, but there was nothing specifically Christian about his convictions.” It must not be assumed, however, that the author de-emphasizes the importance of our Christian heritage: as he points out, even “worldly” members of the Constitutional Convention, whose personal lives were shocking then and would still be to most of us, still held, as did Gouverneur Morris, that “the most important of all lessons is, the denunciation or ruin to every state that rejects the precepts of religion” (p. 223).

For those less interested in beginnings there is a lively discussion of civil rights. Since Dr. Williamson comes from the “Deep South” and even believes, quoting Calvin, that the Southerner should not attempt to escape from the dilemma by moving to areas where civil rights is not an issue, his thoughts on the subject are fascinating. However, extremists on either side of the issue will find little comfort in his words.

Scholars in several fields, from the social sciences to philosophy and religion, will find much in Professor Williamson’s book to challenge them and hold their interest. Since he has attempted a synthesis of political thought in the light of Christian principles, his work is necessarily wide-ranging both in time anti in treatment of contemporary scholarship. Persons who are interested in the problem and in the general area of study but lack a background in the field will also find the book readable and helpful. Those acquainted with social theory generally will find much that is familiar: Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Burke, and others, and the practical outworking of their social philosophy in our institutions down to the present. Philosophers and theologians will meet familiar figures from Moses and the Church Fathers to Tillich, Barth, Brunner, and Father Murray, a contemporary Catholic scholar who has “assigned himself the formidable task of proving that Roman Catholicism and the American tradition are compatible.” The reader must not assume from this implied criticism of the Catholics that the author is narrowly sectarian. He states that it is his purpose to make common cause with Christians of all persuasions in the task of “Christian reorientation,” although he is convinced “that this basic Christian core is purest in the evangelical Calvinist Reformed tradition.”

Although the author’s candor and forthrightness may be offensive to some, I appreciate it, even when I do not share his views. There has been too much of a tendency in our time to blur lines and confuse issues. Williamson suggests that he will be stepping on toes, as indeed he will. And since he covers a large field, many toes will be involved. He points out the failings of the Christian community down across the centuries quite frankly, including the shortcomings of his Calvinist brethren; yet he is sure that applied Christianity is the hope of the world. And he does not confine his critical attention to the Church. He discusses the contradictions of conservatives and the limitations of liberals.

In view of his general practice of pointing out the shortcomings of almost everyone, it is interesting to know where he himself stands politically. He is “a lifelong Democrat,” not surprising in the Deep South, and “has generally supported liberal candidates for office and the liberal side of most public issues.…” However, he does “not share the liberal philosophy.” He finds himself “more in sympathy with conservative philosophy” but is repelled by conservative candidates and policies.

As a minor criticism, and disregarding politics, I might say that the author’s remark about Hoover’s “heartless and rigid cast of mind” is unfair, as is evident from Hoover’s notable record as relief administrator during World War I and in Russia. No doubt he was confused after 1929 and ineffective, confronted with problems quite beyond him. But certainly a reasonably objective evaluation of Franklin D. Roosevelt, again forgetting politics, does not come out as favorably as Professor Williamson gives it. It may be argued that no one can be objective about such matters, but comparing the revival of Western Germany under much less favorable circumstances certainly leaves little ground for enthusiasm—if the reviewer may be allowed an opinion. At least, even the most ardent New Dealers (this does not include Professor Williamson) have never called the New Deal “F. D. R.’s Miracle.” Nor do these remarks grow out of any unqualified admiration for the Republicans. They do point out the need of further investigation of our problems in the light of Christian principles—which may well be a task for some of the rest of us.

EDWARD P. COLESON

He Ministered To Evangelicals

The Christian World of C. S. Lewis, by Clyde S. Kilby (Eerdmans, 1964, 216 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by C. J. Simpson, professor of English, Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington.

Chad Walsh certainly was right when he called C. S. Lewis “apostle to the skeptics,” and he was the right man to compose the book by that name. Lewis was also minister to some already committed men; Clyde S. Kilby was the right man to approach the works from that point of view.

Though not really their apostle, Lewis appeals to a company of lively evangelicals for a variety of reasons. They like his content. They enjoy the vigor and the wit of his writings, especially when he employs it to challenge shallow believers and recalcitrant unbelievers. They admire a thorough commitment to high competence in literary scholarship that in him is compatible with deep religious conviction. They respond to his willingness to accept biblical images of revelation directly—though not materialistically—without reasoning them out of all heart power.

Kilby is one of these lively evangelicals. In The Christian World of C. S. Lewis he makes his own position clear; at the same time, with clarity and perception he talks about the several ways that Lewis made manifest his own response to the faith. For general or for scholarly readers, for those committed or not committed to Lewis’s sort of Christian view, the book supplies much of real value.

First is the significant factor that often justifies the making of another book: new or remote materials not readily available elsewhere. Both in the text and in the annotated list of sources Kilby employs letters, conversations, and unpublished papers and theses that add detail to the Lewis portrait and helpful material for the discovery of meaning. Thus the book contributes to evidence as well as to conclusions in Lewis scholarship.

Again, there is a rather thorough review of those of Lewis’s works that relate to a Christian position. Probably many readers have been inclined, as I have been, to scatter the reading of the works over almost as long a period as Lewis took to write them. With sufficient summaries to bring specific recall, The Christian World helps the reader to view the total production with something approximating equal freshness of memory. Some, I suspect, will not be satisfied now until they have reread some of the earlier writings, particularly the fiction. In any event, whether these pieces are reviewed or reread, the total understanding will be greater.

Finally, to aid this total view Kilby brings the good fruit of his long, appreciative study of Lewis. He interprets and synthesizes, moving in a connected way through Lewis’s logic and doctrine, his realism and fantasy, to discover valid patterns of meaning. Here, of course, is the open end of the book. Like the ghost in Hamlet, the meaning of an inspired man’s composition is too elusive and too sacred to be contained by another man’s propositions. We do it violence when we consummate the judgment; we give it its due when we explore and respond with mind and heart.

Kilby’s book is of a certain magnitude and is a complete work. But more needs to be done elsewhere with the start that has been made in The Christian World. As that book indicates, there is a Lewis-made literary world that exists because the author wanted to discover more and to reveal more about the total world that God has made. Kilby helps us to be somewhat more at home in that Lewis world, but his work must be accepted as just one way of our becoming conversant with the guides that Lewis has provided for an extensive, ongoing exploration. Lewis’s total work will be significant here; critical ideas regarding myth will cut some trails. And as both Walsh and Kilby have intimated, we may be surprised by the way space fiction anti stories that seem to be for a little child will lead us.

C. J. SIMPSON

Reporting The Gospel

Christian Primer: Adult Answers to Basic Questions About the Christian Faith, by Louis Cassels (Doubleday, 1964, 108 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by John Frederick Jansen, professor of New Testament interpretation, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas.

A distinguished journalist who has himself “arrived at the household of faith after a very long detour through the wastelands of skepticism” offers this little volume to others who have not yet found answers to their basic questions about the Christian faith. Mr. Cassels, religion columnist for the United Press International, has read widely and well, and he knows how to put the insights of the theologians into simple language. It seems that George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis are among his favorites, but he draws from many others also.

In eleven chapters the author deals with faith in God, Jesus Christ, the Bible, miracles, prayer, worship, and life after death, as well as with such persistent problems as the mystery of evil and with such contemporary ethical concerns as foreign aid. A lively style (“Could you pray for a first class stinker?”) does not call attention to itself because often a few words grasp a profound truth (“How long does it take to become a Christian? A moment—and a lifetime”).

The book expresses a warm evangelical faith. It does not denude the supernatural character of Christian faith, nor does it reduce this faith to purely existential terms (witness the criticism of Bultmann’s demythologizing). The author rightly sees the Resurrection of Christ as the foundation of Christian certainty and life. While gladly accepting the Virgin Birth as event rather than legend, he deplores the manner in which this doctrine has been distorted by its friends and by its foes. In regard to the chapter on the Bible this reviewer would ask whether the author’s intention is not obscured somewhat by language that suggests a different orientation (“It is to be expected that the Bible will show an evolutionary progress in man’s ideas about God …”). Rightly insisting on the place of critical study, one may ask whether putting it as the author does is helpful (“But to those who take the Bible seriously without taking it literally, it is both right and necessary to apply the tools of literary and historical criticism to the task of extracting its real message”). After all, the author makes it quite plain that he takes the Bible literally where it calls for literal acceptance. What he means to say is clear enough—the Bible is both the word of man and the Word of God. (“Why God should choose to communicate with men through the pages of this particular book is a question that Christians cannot answer. They can only affirm that it happens, and invite skeptics to try for themselves whether it be so.”)

In any case, it would be manifestly unfair to ask for a full discussion in a primer of such brief compass. Mr. Cassels knows what the Christian faith is, and he knows how to communicate this faith with persuasive simplicity and directness. May his tribe increase!

JOHN FREDERICK JANSEN

No Room For Syncretism

No Other Name: The Choice Between Syncretism and Christian Universalism, by W. A. Visser t Hooft (Westminster, 1963, 128 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Concerned over syncretistic efforts to create a single religion that will provide a single ethos for one world, W. A. Visser t Hooft, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, presents a brief survey of syncretism, past and present, and against all syncretism asserts the unique and universally valid claim of Christianity.

Syncretism is defined as the view that denies that any religion has a unique and final revelation of God and asserts that all world religions are particular and partial manifestations of religion-in-general.

Visser t Hooft sees four periods of syncretism and sketches each. The first occurred during the century prior to the Jewish Babylonian exile; the second, during the time of the Holy Roman Empire; the third, in eighteenth-century Europe. The fourth is the one facing Christianity today and is motivated by the desire to find an ethos that will give unity to the world as it becomes, to use Bishop Newbigin’s term, one neighborhood.

The author believes that syncretistic efforts today are a far greater peril to Christianity than is atheism. D. H. Lawrence, Carl Gustav Jung, Professor F. S. C. Northrop (The Meeting of East and West) of Yale, Professor W. E. Hocking, Arnold Toynbee, the Bahai movement, and Ramakrishna, all come up in the discussion of current syncretistic efforts. The author even cites former President Eisenhower, quoting his remark, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.”

Is the New Testament a product of syncretism? Was its borrowing of concepts from non-Christian thought syncretism? Visser t Hooft answers these questions with an emphatic No. He sees the threat of syncretism in the uneasy concern of the Colossian and Ephesian churches over the “elemental spirits” (stoicheion) and points out that Paul allays these fears by urging the cosmic significance of Christ, who is Creator and Lord of all.

Visser t Hooft pleads for a rejection of any and all attempts to syncretize Christianity with other world religions on the ground that Christ is the unique, once-for-all revelation of God, and the one who died for all, the one for the many. As such, Christ, and he alone, has universal significance for all men. If this is regarded by others as intolerance, says Visser t Hooft, “then Christians must accept the accusation of intolerance.” To surrender the universal character of Christ is to give up Christianity.

This understanding of Christ, of the implied unity of mankind, and of the corresponding nature of the Church and its mission to the world has come to greater clarity, says the author, through the ecumenical movement.

The book traces the history of the interrelations of the International Missionary Council, Life and Work, and Faith and Order, and shows that their history was the process in which this deeper understanding of the universality of Christ emerged.

This is a valuable and informative book. The argument is tight but lucid, and its author leaves no doubt where he stands. Examples of clear conviction: “The Christian Church must make it unmistakably clear that it believes in a universalism which has its one and only centre in the work of Jesus Christ. At this point there must be no compromise of any kind. We cannot participate in the search for a common denominator of all the religions, because the one foundation has been laid and the edifice of humanity comes tumbling down when that foundation is undermined.” Christianity, he urges, is not “a species of the genus religion … a subdivision of the general human preoccupation with the divine.” The furor created by the morality of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover betrayed the fact that even Christians failed to see the pagan religious syncretism of the book. “It is high time,” he asserts, “that Christians should rediscover that the very heart of their faith is that Jesus Christ did not come to make a contribution to the religious storehouse of mankind, but that in him God reconciled the world unto himself.”

JAMES DAANE

Faulty Perspective

Concise History of Israel: From Abraham to the Bar Cochba Rebellion, by M. A. Beek (Harper & Row, 1964, 224 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by R. Laird Harris, professor of Old Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

This is an interesting book, well written, compact, and often original in its approach. The viewpoint is that of higher criticism. Beek is from the University of Amsterdam (not the Free University) and is somewhat in line with the school of Alt and Noth in Germany.

Like Noth, Beek is a good historian at those points where he trusts the biblical sources. His reconstruction of the battle of Michmash, for instance, is very well done (pp. 64 ff.). He calls Second Samuel “a unique document in the biographical literature of the old world” (p. 73). Unfortunately, he mistrusts almost all the history of the first seven books and finds them full of legend and superstition.

The treatment of the history that falls between the Testaments is good. Since this book confines itself to the Jews, the New Testament history is understandably lacking, although the story does extend to A.D. 132.

The usual higher critical statements appear. We cannot reconstruct the story of the patriarchs (p. 14). Genesis was written “long after the events described” (p. 26). The Balaam story is a “legend” (p. 44). But Beck’s criticism is modern: Jeroboam’s calf was only a pedestal for the invisible deity (p. 95—but cf. Hos. 13:2). Elijah’s pouring water on the sacrifice on Mt. Carmel was a “strange water rite” to bring rain (p. 102)! The date of Deuteronomy seems to fall into the time of the Captivity, in distinction to the older critical date of 621 B.C. (p. 137). Our ideas of heaven and hell come from the Persian religion (p. 141). Daniel is, of course, of late origin (p. 168).

There are about thirty-five pictures and several helpful sketch maps. But a dozen or more typographical errors mar the text.

Beek gives us some new and helpful insights. For example, he suggests that Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 3 is a pseudonym for Nabonidus (p. 151). He holds that Ezra preceded Nehemiah, as has historically been held (p. 149), and says that the early Israelities were an “exceptionally literate” people (p. 59)—a judgment that is contrary to oral tradition theories. The book also is valuable in its citations from recent Continental literature. But its perspective is faulty.

R. LAIRD HARRIS

To Help The Pastor

Ministering to the Grief Sufferer, by C. Charles Bachmann, and Counseling with Senior Citizens, by J. Paul Brown (Prentice-Hall, 1964, 144 pp. each, $2.95 each), are reviewed by Frank Bateman Stanger, president, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

These two books belong to the “Successful Pastoral Counseling Series,” of which Russell L. Dicks is the general editor. This library of pastoral care covers the major problems that most pastors encounter in their ministry and has been prepared for the non-specialized minister serving the local church.

The twelve books in the series that have been published thus far deal with the following subjects: pastoral care, pastoral counseling, group counseling, the physically sick, the alcoholic, marital counseling, the childless couple, premarital guidance, the dying, deeply troubled people, and the two areas covered by the books now being reviewed. Five other volumes that are being prepared for publication concern preaching and pastoral care, teen-agers, college students, the unwed mother, and the serviceman.

C. Charles Bachmann, author of Ministering to the Grief Sufferer, is chief Protestant chaplain of the E. J. Meyer Memorial Hospital in Buffalo. New York. He writes out of a background of extensive training in psychology and pastoral care and wide professional experience as a chaplain and as a supervisor of institutional chaplains.

Bachmann believes that there are at least three requisites for the pastor’s effective ministry to the grief sufferer: (1) he must know about the grief process; (2) he must know and master himself; (3) he must have some mastery of the techniques of dealing with grief sufferers. To help the pastor be informed about the grief process, the author devotes the opening chapter, “The Meaning of Grief,” to a careful discussion of the varied reactions to grief and the necessary steps for the mastery of grief. Much attention is given to the subject of the pastor’s self-knowledge and self-mastery. The author contends that it is impossible for the pastor to help others unless his own self is whole. And concerning the third requisite, the author discusses extensively pastoral techniques for grief management, constructive and destructive ways of handling grief, and what to do when grief is denied or delayed.

A chapter is devoted to grief resulting from causes other than the death of a relative or friend, with particular attention to personal rejection as an occasion of grief. And as a sort of an appendix, the three final chapters discuss “The Meaning of the Funeral,” “The Pastor and the Funeral Director,” and “Current Parish Patterns and Practices” in relation to grief reactions, death, and funeral practices.

I would offer but one criticism of the book. Does the author mean to give the impression that grief can be dealt with competently merely in compliance with sound psychological principles? Does he give enough emphasis to the necessity of the divine resources that are offered to the grief sufferer through Jesus Christ?

The author of Counseling with Senior Citizens, the Rev. J. Paul Brown, has served as the minister of pastoral care at First Methodist Church of Houston, Texas (7,000 members), since 1950. In his preface, he states his purpose: “The questions raised in this book are those I have faced while counseling with senior citizens. The answers are based on authentic information obtained through research and from applying the principles of pastoral care.… The book has been written with the intention that it be used as a guide for ministers, physicians, social workers, lawyers, senior citizens, and family members who are earnestly seeking to enrich the later years for the increasingly large number of aging persons among us.”

The author first discusses the role of religion in relation to the aging process and the emotional factors that arise with aging. He then goes on to offer detailed and practical suggestions to the pastor as he seeks to relate his church program to the aging, to meet the problems that arise in “the three-generation family,” to assist in the selection of a senior citizens’ home, to aid in the solution of the marital problems of senior citizens, to help in the financing of senior years, and to encourage the senior citizen to help himself.

There is an insistent emphasis upon the responsibility and privilege of both the pastor and the church to help senior citizens make their retirement years a time of fun, purposeful activity, service, satisfying personal adjustment, and continuing growth in mind and soul.

I recommend both of these books to every pastor. Their contents are spiritually motivated, practically oriented, pastorally reinforced, and clearly communicated. Each contains an extensive and valuable bibliography.

FRANK BATEMAN STANGER

Once Inside, Now Outside

Beyond Fundamentalism, by Daniel B. Stevick (John Knox, 1964, 239 pp., $5), is reviewed by Vernon C. Grounds, president, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.

How does fundamentalism look to an outsider who was once an insider? Reared within a tradition he now considers to be a kind of moss-covered, life-stultifying monastery, Daniel Stevick has, as he says, “leaped over the wall” and today enjoys the freedom of ecumenical Christianity. But he and some of his friends, both insiders and outsiders, have continued to discuss among themselves the foibles, merits, and disvalues of fundamentalism, and the result is this book—sympathetic, understanding, quite dispassionate, generally judicious, occasionally ironic. Throughout it is a sharp indictment of the monastic archaism from which Stevick advises disgruntled insiders to escape.

He does not write off fundamentalism as a cultural fossil. On the contrary, he recognizes that it is very much alive, a variant of the Christian faith cherished by millions of devoted believers whose fervor and sincerity are admirable, who have a “sheer passion” for their Saviour, many of whom are “kindly, gentle” people, “men and women of prayer, deeply taught by the Spirit.” Indeed, Stevick points out that fundamentalism has even been experiencing an intellectual renaissance under second-generation leaders characterized by scholarship, humility, and intelligence.

Yet while he acknowledges an “infinite debt” to this vigorous species of American Protestantism, Stevick emphatically rejects it. He can no longer tolerate its legalism, its pugnacity, its isolation, its narrowness, its anti-intellectualism, its suspiciousness, its obscurantism, its social unconcern, its “bad manners,” its unthinking clichés and stereotypes, its dismal architecture, its shallow worship, its insipid music, its unrealistic ethics, and so on! Granted that fundamentalism to its everlasting credit has “a firm hold on the essential Gospel,” it is nevertheless a system of theology and life that prides itself on being “irreformably” fixed, once-for-all-delivered.

More serious than all of this, however, in Stevick’s opinion, is its “sub-Christian concept of revelation.” Fundamentalists, even the enlightened, progressive “revisionists” among them, hold that the Bible communicates truth both propositionally and inerrantly; and Stevick brings up his heaviest guns to pound away at this bastion. What really makes fundamentalism an impossible option for Stevick is what he calls its unbiblical view of an inscripturated Book exempt from anything like historical blunder or factual blemish. Hence he argues that fundamentalism is not only graceless and irrelevant; fundamentally, he insists, fundamentalism is untrue. Its basic premise, an errorless Bible, is indefensible.

How does this criticism by an ex-insider strike fundamentalists who still find their spiritual home in what Stevick considers a stultifying monastery surrounded by a fog of illusory infallibility and finality? Some of them, he admits, are poignantly sensitive to the excesses and deficiencies of fundamentalism. And courageously, outspokenly, they have criticized themselves and their fellow fundamentalists. They have contended that in its essence fundamentalism is historic Christianity and that—Stevick also perceives this—what passes for fundamentalism in America today is all too often a neo-fundamentalism, a degenerate form of the faith championed by the original fundamentalists—Warfield, Orr, Griffith-Thomas, Machen, E. Y. Mullins, and others of similar stature. Thus the “revisionists” are battling to redeem contemporary fundamentalism from a crippling neo-fundamentalism that caricatures biblical faith. And they know what a desperately difficult fight they are carrying on—denounced from the right as Quislings, classified by the left as obscurantists. But they are persuaded that they must remain inside the framework of fundamentalism because the claims of truth compel them to do so.

Central to their understanding of truth is that very doctrine of a propositional, inerrant revelation against which Stevick fulminates. Curiously, the one place where he forsakes his objective stance is in attacking inerrancy: “Man was not made for the Bible, but the Bible for man! This logic decrees that God instead of submitting to tire law of the human, temporarily overrode it. In order to produce an errorless book, He carried these writers outside the human condition. He destroyed ‘the form of a servant,’ and then, the writings done, he remade it. Strange, capricious God! Strange, improbable doctrine! Heresy! Begetter of heresies!” (pp. 169, 170). But as “devout, brilliant and well informed” adherents of “verbal inspiration” (these are Stevick’s words) see the situation, if the doctrine of a propositional, inerrant revelation is abandoned, the seamless robe of Christianity will inevitably ravel out into the demythologized subjectivism of Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, or John Robinson. Fortunately, however, there is no reason to abandon that doctrine. Denying this, Stevick has moved “beyond fundamentalism.” Affirming this, the insiders refuse to move. Fundamentalism, especially neo-fundamentalism, admittedly has its vexatious problems, woeful shortcomings, and depressing blindspots. Yet fundamentalism, even when spurning its own heritage, is at least seeking to preserve the truth that has by grace been entrusted to it. And to move beyond God’s truth is eventually (watch what happens to second-generation disciples of ex-fundamentalists) to move beyond Christ.

VERNON C. GROUNDS

Business—Under God

The Christian as a Businessman, by Harold L. Johnson (Association, 1964, 188 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by Earle E. Cairns, chairman, Department of History and Political Science, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

How does the Christian in business reconcile theoretical theological ideals with the practical realities and problems of business? Can Christianity and commerce be reconciled without rationalization, compartmentalization, withdrawal, or compromise (p. 31)? This book suggests answers to these questions in business, defined in terms of decisions of policy for profit maximization (pp. 18, 19).

Business is pictured as an area of grateful service to God for his redemption. This doctrine of Christian vocation puts God at the center of existence. Christian love will lead to “enlightened unselfishness” in decision-making. Company rules, department, or organization will thus be means, rather than ends catering to self-centeredness. Business can also be an avenue of fulfillment of the divine order to master nature by technology in order to promote human good. Finally, in seeking profits the Christian businessman will practice stewardship of capital, labor, and raw materials in order to produce needed goods. Such is the author’s main rationale for Christian participation in business.

Because the Christian recognizes human sinfulness, the author believes he will accept countervailing forces of unions and government in a free market system. Here is something of a paradox that is not yet solved in this country. One feels that the author also goes beyond biblical truth with his assertion that man’s character is basically good (p. 154). Perhaps he confuses human depravity with human finity. Nevertheless, the Christian troubled by ethical problems he does or will face in business can read this book with profit and pleasure.

EARLE E. CAIRNS

Views Of The Kingdom

The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus, by Norman Perrin (Westminster, 1963, 208 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Bastiaan Van Elderen, associate professor of New Testament, Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Norman Perrin, assistant professor of New Testament at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, has with this volume made a significant contribution to the study of the Kingdom of God concept. The value of Perrin’s book, similar to Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, lies as much in his summaries and evaluations of various twentieth-century scholars’ interpretations of the concept as in his own views on it (in which he has been greatly influenced by his teacher, Joachim Jeremias).

Perrin deals with his subject in ten chapters. The first presents the background for the twentieth-century discussion: the coming of konsequente Eschatologie. In the next two chapters he presents the subsequent discussion from two focal points: (1) the Anglo-American liberal response to the challenge of Weiss and Schweitzer, and (2) the denial and triumph of apocalyptic. In the fourth chapter the author presents the “Realized Eschatology” of C. H. Dodd; although he appreciates Dodd’s contribution, Perrin offers some pertinent criticism of his emphasis. In Chapter V, “The Kingdom of God as both Present and Future in the Teaching of Jesus,” the author discusses the views of Cadoux, Guy, Hunter, Taylor, Fuller, Jeremias, Kümmel, and Cullmann.

Subsequent chapters are devoted to the theme “Son of Man,” to the views of Bultmann and the “Bultmann School,” to the Parousia, and to the American view of Jesus as a prophet. In each of these chapters, various views are presented fairly and with cogent evaluations and criticisms.

The tenth chapter deals with three significant areas in which further discussion is needed. The author here presents his own understanding of the Kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus as something involving a tension within human experience between present and future. “Far from discussing the manner and time of the consummation in the way so popular in Jewish apocalyptic—and in Mark 13 and its parallels—the teaching of Jesus seems to be concerned much more with the consummation as a certainty of future human experience, as it is concerned also with the present manifestation of the Kingdom in human experience” (p. 199). In this chapter the author also sets forth an attractive eschatological interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer in a discussion of the relation between eschatology and ethics in the teaching of Jesus.

Since the Kingdom of God concept has been extensively discussed in the twentieth century, it is inevitable that not every scholar’s viewpoint will appear in such a summary. Perrin has presented a representative survey.

This reviewer is not ready to accept all Perrin’s conclusions regarding the secondary nature of certain materials in the Gospels, e.g., Mark 13 (pp. 131–34). However, his arguments are well-formulated and challenging. His refusal to go to the extremes of Bultmann and others is highly appreciated. Some of the exegetical analyses in the final chapter are certainly provocative. It is doubtful that Perrin’s emphasis on human experience exhausts the meaning of Jesus’ teaching.

In the teaching of Jesus, the Kingdom of God concept is central. Dr. Perrin has performed a real service in bringing within the compass of 200 pages a resumé of the twentieth-century discussion. Evangelical scholars will do well to face the provocative approach set forth by Perrin and Jeremias to a concept frequently neglected or given a one-sided emphasis. A person seeking light on this concept will find this book valuable and intriguing.

BASTIAAN VAN ELDEREN

Book Briefs

The Chronology of the Amarna Letters, by Edward Fay Campbell, Jr. (Johns Hopkins, 1964, 163 pp., $5). Late Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptian chronology discussed in the light of the Amarna letters. Campbell evaluated evidence for a co-regency of Amenophis III and Akhenaton, seeking to determine the length of the co-regency and the period of Akhenaton’s independent rule. Emphasizes the need for new information to dispel the “almost incredible ambiguities” in present evidence before an exact chronology can be established.

Sermons Preached without Notes, by Charles W. Roller (Baker, 1964, 145 pp., $2.50). Evangelical sermons presented not merely for their content but for their demonstration of the principles, procedures, and homiletical devices that make for good sermonizing.

Beside All Waters, by J. H. Hunter (Christian Publications, 1964, 245 pp., $3.95). The story of seventy-five years of worldwide ministry of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

A Survey of Syntax in the Hebrew Old Testament, by J. Wash Watts (Eerdmans, 1964, 164 pp., $3.95). A revision of the original edition published in 1951. A helpful work for the serious student of Hebrew.

Old Testament Light: A Scriptural Commentary Based on the Aramaic of the Ancient Peshitta Text, by George M. Lamsa (Prentice-Hall, 1964, 976 pp., $8.95).

Living Personalities of the Old Testament, by Hagen Staack (Harper & Row, 1964, 147 pp., $3.50). Material presented by the author, under the auspices of the National Council of Churches, on a television series carrying the same name.

Observer in Rome, by Robert McAfee Brown (Doubleday, 1964, 271 pp., $4.95). An observer who attended the entire second session of the Vatican Council gives his first-hand account.

The Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible, translated and adapted by Louis F. Hartman (McGraw-Hill, 1963, 2,633 pp., $27.50). A valuable and scholarly dictionary of the Bible, produced by Roman Catholics, which will throw light on many Roman Catholic matters for Protestants. Translated and adapted from A. Van Den Born’s Dutch work.

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