The Autocracy of Automation

With the advent of automation,” said the late President Kennedy, “we have now entered into the Second Industrial Revolution.” The language is appropriate. The first Industrial Revolution saw businessmen utilizing the new technology with zest while the unemployed workers reacted with violence, smashing and setting fire to the hated factories.

Automation has revived the atmosphere. Business is eager, with the confidence of inevitability. Edwin Shelley, executive vice-president of United States Industries, declares that in twenty years there will be only supervisory personnel used in the manufacture of such products as autos, appliances, and packaged foods. Sir Leon Bagrit, managing director of Britain’s Elliott-Automation Ltd., has said, “In this country, automation is a matter of life and death.” Labor, on the other hand, has reacted with passion. The number one problem in new contracts is job security. The AFL-CIO continues to prod the administration to adopt more vigorous economic policies and create more jobs.

But the practical solution of unemployment, as important as it is, is only the surface of the total problem of automation. For automation is the reflection on a technological level of a cultural complex, the effect of which is to drain man of individual dignity and worth. Pitirim Sorokin calls our Western culture one that simultaneously glorifies and degrades man. Ours, he says, is an “age of the greatest triumph of human genius.” At the same time, contemporary science with its mechanistic materialism, contemporary philosophy with its positivistic and pragmatic emphases, and contemporary art with its preoccupation with the pathological—these all proclaim a gospel of degradation.

It has been said that the ultimate question behind all our struggles is this: What is the truth of nature and the end of man? Our ideologies are in reality anthropologies. What is man? Is man nothing more than a physiological complex, the highest reaches of blind chance? Is man a creature whose death, as a modern philosopher says, is of no more importance than that of a rat? Is man a pointless mass of cells? Is man, as automation seems to imply, a temporary asset, whose replacement only awaits electronic refinements?

If man is no more than this, then his existence is meaningless. “When looms weave by themselves,” said Aristotle, “man’s slavery will end.” He was wrong; those looms may be harbingers of an even greater slavery—the bondage of man to the despair of a pointless existence.

It is a bondage made possible by the significance of work to the quality of human life. Automation threatens man at both a crucial and ah inescapable point—his daily work. A person’s self-image is greatly affected by his work. Jung made a direct correlation between vocation and integration. Integration of personality is aided to the extent that the person has a sense of calling to his work.

This sense of calling has faded out along with the sense of the dignity of the work. Until the panic of 1837 the dignity of the worker was a basic assumption of the American factory. With the depersonalization of the worker, however, the dignity of the work was dealt a mortal blow. This idea of dignity, which gave the medieval stone mason a satisfaction in his work that has eluded the modern assembly-line worker, died; and it died, as Max Lerner says, “not in the ‘dark, Satanic mills’ but in the lighted, ingeniously laid out, scientifically organized assembly-line plants, and in the spacious headquarters and offices of the great American corporations.”

As a result, man’s work has become a source of emotional stress. Studies made by Walter Buckingham show that although automation has increased physical safety, emotional safety has suffered. Skilled machinists now exhibit the greatest incidence of gastric ulcers; those who work with computers rank among the highest of workers in susceptibility to heart attacks. Loneliness is a problem, and one British union has already demanded “lonesome pay.” The assembly-line worker lost the satisfaction of being a craftsman, but he at least had close contact with others who shared his misery. Automation may rob the worker of even this mite of emotional support.

Whatever the long-range effects of automation may be, one thing is certain: the years directly ahead are of critical importance. Automated man is neither doomed to degradation nor predestined to dignity. His fate depends upon what happens in the next few years.

It is at this point that the Christian Church must speak. If automated man is to be a man of dignity, he must be a called man. He must recapture the sense of vocation in his daily work. And in addition, since that daily work will no doubt continue to demand a smaller portion of his time, he must find creative uses for his leisure. The Church has a ministry at both these points.

There must be a lucid teaching of the concept of vocation as it is expressed in the Scriptures. This was clearly enunciated during the Reformation but has since passed into obscurity. Luther declared that “even the milkmaid can milk cows to the glory of God.” He insisted that every Christian was called to serve God in his own work and station of life. The monk who prayed was no better a servant of God than the woman who scrubbed floors. This lifted work from merely a means of procuring money to a task given and approved by God.

Such a conception is a distinctive element of the Christian faith; it is the only view conducive to a healthy doctrine of man. The Greeks considered work vulgar, the lot of slaves. Their disdain for the labor of the hands was as strong as their admiration for the labor of the mind. At the other extreme, the materialists view only those who are able to produce goods as worthwhile elements of society. Both of these lead to a degradation of man—the Greek because it honors only an intellectual elite and the materialistic because it makes man a means to the end of production.

The Christian view exalts man by insisting upon the importance of all work and of every worker. In the 104th Psalm, which lists the many works of God, the culmination of them all is human labor. It is interesting to note that Jesus, Peter, and Paul all had trades in accord with their Jewish heritage, which made craftsmanship and trades an important part of life. To destroy a man’s work or the dignity of his work was to destroy a part of the man himself.

Kierkegaard has rightly said; “To work is the perfection of the human. Through working the human being resembles God, who also works.” When a man therefore works for his daily fare, says Kierkegaard, we are not to think of him as merely supporting himself; he is working with God. The Christian Church must help its people to recapture this sense of calling, the sense of being an integral part of God’s working. Only this will restore to the worker his worth as an individual. The threat of meaninglessness, which hangs over modern man like a contemporary Sword of Damocles, can be banished only through the power of the recognition of the call of God.

Sin Is All One

Sin is all one, and so, Soul,

Be not deceived, nor set degrees

Upon your transgressions, saying,

‘This is a small matter, and so please

Without a full repentance

restore me fully.”

Were you to use the whip

or crown of thorns

It would not hurt Me more

Than when you just forget

that I am here.

They pierced My side and hands,

the most through ignorance,

And hurt My side and hands alone;

But you, My friend, avoid My glance,

And place within My heart a stone.

STANTON R. GAYLORD

Robert H. Lauer is pastor of Salem Baptist Church, Florissant, Missouri. He holds the B.S. in electrical engineering from Washington University, St. Louis, and the B.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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Evangelicals in Government

Donald A. Kruse

Evangelicals have problems with government—what it is and what it should do, what involvement they should have with it, and how it relates to the work of the Gospel. There are those who think government a kind of necessary evil to be avoided as much as possible. Others believe that government should be actively involved in the propagation of the Christian message by using such means as Bible reading and religious observances in the public schools and by lending at least moral support to foreign missions. Paradoxically, there are some who accept both these views. Undoubtedly the great majority of evangelicals have convictions that fall somewhere between these two extremes.

As government has bulked larger and larger in America during the past generation and as it will continue to do so in the future, it becomes more and more urgent for evangelicals to develop a clearer understanding of government and its philosophy.

Government is more than just a matter of traffic policemen and tax collectors. All of us are constantly involved with government: student loans in college, service in the armed forces, government employment agencies, FHA mortgages, Social Security—these are some of its many manifestations. It is no longer—if in fact it ever was—appropriate for any American to declare that he is not interested in government.

Scriptural foundation for the legitimacy and honor of government is plain. St. Paul said, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1). He also urged Christians to pray for all in authority to the end that we may lead “a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Tim. 2:1, 2). Obviously the Bible has no place for anarchy or negation of government.

But what, for the Christian in the United States, is the role and purpose of government in society, and what should the Christian response to government be? According to the bedrock of American political philosophy, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” That short credo still animates our political life in the United States. Springing from it, the following goals are specified in the preamble to the Constitution: to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” No evangelical Christian need take exception to such a political creed or debate such goals.

Government in America is the institution that attempts to translate our national goals into reality. It aims to accomplish this task through policies and programs. For example, to “provide for the common defence” is a goal for which the policy of strategic deterrence through myriad individual weapons programs, such as the Polaris and Minuteman, is the means.

To say we have a consensus regarding national goals does not mean that we cannot debate governmental policies and programs. At this point there should be honest disagreement. Witness the policy debate on the partial nuclear test ban treaty, on the Russian wheat sale, on the TFX aircraft. On both sides of those issues there were patriotic Americans who were at one about the goal of maintaining national security; the disagreements were over the best way to do this.

A Binding Responsibility

Consider next the essential question of the Christian’s attitude and responsibility to government. Surely we evangelicals should accept our civic and social responsibility with a vigor second only to that of our commitment to Christ. The Christian life includes a binding responsibility for meeting the full needs of man; the spiritual needs of humanity have the primacy, but they are not isolated from other human problems. This means nothing less than full concern for the spiritual, social, political, and economic welfare of our fellow man. How else explain our designation as “the light of the world,” “the salt of the earth,” and “the leaven”?

In our scriptural and traditional emphasis that the Christian’s life is a pilgrimage in a corrupt environment and that his true home is eventually with God, we need reminding that as uniquely free men in this world we must be deeply involved in all of human life. This means that the whole creation is a fit subject for Christian enjoyment and exploration. As Paul says in First Timothy 4:4, “Every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.” Thus we are called to social commitment, and this must surely include involvement with government.

Too long have evangelicals shied away from political responsibility. We have excused ourselves on the ground that government meant “dirty politics.” It meant, we said, graft, favoritism, influence-peddling. Even at best, government seemed to negate the virtues of hard work, independence, and private initiative. We were not active in the electoral process or in the effort to get the best possible men to stand for public office because the whole process seemed to smack of compromise, smoke-filled rooms, and unscrupulous maneuvers. Sometimes we did not even bother to vote.

We were not interested in working in government or serving in appointive positions. The appointed jobs, we assured ourselves, came as a result of “pull” or “payoff.” As for the civil service, we endorsed the caricature of bureaucratic paper-pushers tied up in a seniority system that rewarded a person for his caution, mediocrity, decision-phobia, devotion to the status quo, and passion for job security.

Such criticisms are not without some validity. The purpose of this discussion, however, is not to defend the structural defects of government but to remind evangelicals of the overriding good in the goals, policies, and programs in American political life. In short, evangelicals must take with new seriousness the role of government in American life today. Beyond even the most controversial programs of civil rights, area redevelopment, aid to education, public power projects, and farm controls lie the ultimate goals of a society of free men equally permitted to enjoy the complete privileges and responsibilities of citizenship, including—most importantly—the freedom to worship according to the dictates of conscience.

Not all government activities are necessarily right. As in every human endeavor, the actual is hard to square with the ideal. American political goals are not easier to attain just because they are good ones. Many government policies in pursuit of national and local goals may be poorly conceived, many programs may be poorly administered, and many people working in government may be poorly qualified. Thus, welfare programs may help the lazy as well as the needy, and the zoning administrator who allows an exception for an industrial firm in a residential area may be guilty of poor judgment if not venality. But these defects should surprise least of all persons the evangelical, with his realistic awareness of human sin, and should not discourage him from continuing to work for fuller attainment of ultimate goals. Laxity is inexcusable, even though man’s imperfections and frailties prevent us from full realization of goals.

Reasons For Unconcern

But what about the reasons for lack of evangelical concern for government? There is the general apathy and lack of interest—not peculiar to evangelicals—that result from involvement with the immediate problems of family, work, and other personal interests. But beyond such relatively passive deficiencies there are others, such as parochialism and anti-intellectualism, of which evangelicals have their share. These smack of a world of restricted interests in which those looking from outside see, unfortunately, hypocrisy and pharisaism.

It is ironic that our parochialism seems rooted in a great asset—interest in the spread of the Gospel. We become so single-minded in our burden to preach and convert that we forget some of the concomitant social imperatives of the Gospel. Consequently, we appear only half-heartedly interested in questions of injustice, ignorance, hate, poverty, and war. But there is nothing sacrilegious in attacking human needs simultaneously on two fronts, the social as well as the spiritual.

As to our anti-intellectualism, this too comes from over-emphasis on an evangelical strength—other-worldliness. As the old saw goes, we have carried our heavenly-mindedness to the point that in some things we are no earthly good. Sure of the transitory nature of this world and the certainty of eternal happiness, we have been inclined to be too little concerned for present-day secular problems, including those of government.

Moreover, we have been content to remain naïve and poorly informed about the issues of society in the 1960s, particularly the definition and purposes of government. Thus some of us have been easy prey to strange, reactionary political ideas and groups that embarrass Christ’s Church.

Not all evangelicals are guilty of unconcern toward government. Many evangelicals have been associated with reform movements throughout the history of the Western world and the United States. Indeed, it is precisely because of their vision and success that by comparison so many evangelicals today seem to be less socially minded. We need once more to invoke the names of Wilberforce, Beecher, Bryan, and scores of others.

While the role of government in society has been presented favorably in this discussion, it is essential that we avoid any possible confusion between government and the Gospel. Government is for the regulation of society; the Gospel is for the salvation of the individual. In this world we cannot expect the Gospel to regulate society, if for no other reason than that it is not universally accepted; nor can we ever expect government to change individuals. The two forces operate on different planes, by different means, for different purposes.

Evangelicals looking at government should continue to keep in mind the Master’s simple but definitive advice, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” The things of Caesar are the tasks of regulating human society. We may be supremely thankful that the broad foundations underlying and nurturing the laws and policies of American life do not conflict with Christian principles, as happens in some other societies. But we must also remember that Caesar’s things are different from God’s things. Therefore, we cannot expect or ask government to advance as a deliberate policy the things of God. That remains the task God has given to his Church and his followers. What we must render to Caesar is the fulfillment of our civic responsibilities with a zeal and alacrity similar to that with which we render to God his things.

Donald A. Kruse, a career Foreign Service Officer, is a graduate of Wheaton College (A.B.) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.A. in political science). Currently serving with the Department of State in Washington, he has held posts in Canada and Luxembourg. In this essay Mr. Kruse speaks individually and not officially.

- More from Donald A. Kruse

Theology

Spiritual Concern in Independent Education

Peter C. Moore

Among the millions of students who will attend the nation’s secondary schools this fall there is a significant minority estimated at some 100,000 who will enter non-sectarian and Protestant independent schools. Of this group some from all over the country will be headed for New England’s historic preparatory schools and academies. They will be heirs to generations of the kind of learning that produced Henry L. Stimson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Robert Taft, and John F. Kennedy, not to mention an impressive number of the business and professional leaders of the nation. Others will head south and west to the newer but increasingly excellent boarding and day schools that are to be found in most of the states.

Fast disappearing is the old idea that these boys and girls are either children of split families or maladjusted and chronically undisciplined progeny of the rich, white, upper-middle class. Most will be on their way for one reason: their parents want them to have superior preparation for college. Since nearly 300 of the leading preparatory schools place their entire graduating class in college each year and the average for all such schools is over 95 per cent of the senior class, the parents know what they are doing. They also know that the day of the socially elite school is pretty well past and that scholarship aid is increasingly available to all well-qualified applicants.

Those who go to these schools for the first time this fall will find differences from their former public schools. Classes will be smaller, the opportunity for personal attention from teachers will be greater, scholastic expectations will generally be higher, and there will be a heavy emphasis on the academic subjects—languages, history, mathematics, science. These students may also be surprised at religious observances: Bible reading and prayer at morning assembly or expected attendance at daily evening chapel, a midweek religious assembly, or, in many schools, required courses in Bible, ethics, or theology. If they attend a boarding school, on Sunday there will be either chapel or regular attendance at local churches. For some students all this will be a necessary chore, an undesirable part of going to an otherwise good school. For others, with church backgrounds or without, it may be the beginning of a strong faith and a new life.

Founded On Conviction

Many independent schools (the more accurate way to refer to private schools, signifying freedom from state support and control) were originally motivated by the desire to provide education with a Christian emphasis. Close to the roots of American education are such historic schools (still flourishing) as New York’s Collegiate School, founded in 1638 by the Dutch Reformed; Boston’s Roxbury Latin School (1645), with its Puritan heritage going back to John Eliot, the “Apostle to the Indians”; and Philadelphia’s Penn Charter School (1689), named for the great Quaker, William Penn. In 1850 there were well over 6,000 private academies scattered throughout the East, South, and Midwest, most of which grew out of Christian conviction. As a movement, the academies lost out largely through bankruptcy and through the post-Civil War growth of state-supported public high schools; but they were the precursors both of our modern system of public secondary education and of the present independent secondary schools.

The traditional concern with spiritual values continues in most independent schools today, despite the lack of formal church affiliation on the part of the majority. There are signs, in fact, of a renewed concern among school personnel for religious commitment in education—partly a reaction, no doubt, to the increasing biblical and theological illiteracy and to the moral relativism and decay of the times. Few schools do nothing at all in religious education. Many see their independence as entailing a privilege and a responsibility to expose students to the beliefs that shaped Western civilization and American democracy and to help them to an authentic relationship to God.

Serving these schools across the country as a clearing house for religious materials, ideas, and programs and also as a catalyst to Christian concern and commitment is the Council for Religion in Independent Schools, an interdenominational voluntary association of individuals and schools (elementary as well as secondary). Its roots go back more than a hundred years to the beginnings of a Bible society at Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and a prayer meeting at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts. Later, at the turn of the century, when student Christian work was given great impetus by men like John R. Mott and Robert E. Speer (inspired by conferences at Dwight L. Moody’s Northfield Schools), a movement began that in time gave birth to a host of offspring. Since those days, the Council for Religion has grown into a national organization that seeks to influence the whole school program, while maintaining its primary concern for personal religious commitment.

The council exists to serve some 500 schools within their own traditions. Its support comes from the whole spectrum: non-sectarian schools like Emma Willard School in New York, St. Louis Country Day School in Missouri, and Thacher School in California; Episcopal schools like St. Paul’s in New Hampshire, Groton in Massachusetts, and St. Mark’s in Texas; Quaker schools like George School, Westtown School, and Germantown Friends School in Pennsylvania; military schools like Culver Military Academy in Indiana; evangelical schools like Stony Brook School in New York, McCallie School in Tennessee, and the Westminster Schools in Georgia.

Through its placement service the council may assist a school in finding a chaplain or Bible teacher. It may offer aids for worship or a list of recommended chapel speakers in the school’s area. The council suggests courses in Bible, ethics, or theology, and is currently working on a religion curriculum and assisting in the production of a textbook for study of the New Testament, written by Professor Bruce M. Metzger.

The council seeks also to be a catalyst, stimulating concern where it is faint, encouraging Christian faith in students and faculty who have doubts and hesitancies, pointing out to school directors the importance of the Scriptures in our whole Western educational tradition, and exposing students and faculty to able speakers. All this is done in a variety of ways. Each year in all regions of the country the council draws some 2,000 boys and girls together for weekend and one-day conferences. Colloquia bring; together faculty and headmasters in different regions to consider such matters as the emotional and spiritual nature of adolescence, contemporary literature in the light of the Christian faith, and methods of teaching the Bible and religion. Every second year a three-week summer institute at Yale University, jointly sponsored by the council and the Yale Master of Arts in Teaching Program, seeks to draw teachers into dialogue with outstanding professors of the humanities, the sciences, and theology. The institute takes seriously the unity of all truth in God and hopes to clarify the relation of the teachers’ own subjects to the Christian world view. Triennial national conferences gather hundreds of school heads and teachers to consider such topics as “Education for Decision in the Modern World” (Colorado, October, 1962), while regular contact is kept with schools through a quarterly bulletin, Religion in the Schools, and through visits by the council staff to speak in classes, chapels, and assemblies and to talk informally with interested groups of students.

Danger In The Grades Rush

Independent schools today face critical issues. Increasing competition for places in college and rising entrance standards are exerting pressure on them to step up their curricula and intensify their academic programs. Students and faculty frequently say that there is no “time” to stop and think about life’s great commitments and values. Yet preparedness for college involves preparedness for life, and those who neglect the latter in the feverish rush to educate an advancing generation do so to its peril. The spiritual vacuum with which many go to college shows up sooner or later in dropouts, boredom, and moral chaos. Knowledge is useless unless the never-ending stream of facts can be channeled into a total world view. The Council for Religion is convinced that the wisdom that puts earthly knowledge into divine perspective has been revealed in Jesus Christ. While avoiding the twin dangers of indifference to and overprecise definition of specific doctrines, the council (not in itself a doctrinal organization) is committed to the proposition that “God was in Christ reconciling the “world to himself,” and it encourages alignment with this broad commitment.

Skepticism is the fashion of the day. As the headmistress of a distinguished girls’ school put it: “Twenty years ago when I first arrived, the question in all the girls’ minds was ‘Will I follow Jesus Christ?’ Today it has become ‘Can I believe in God?’ ” No answer to the latter can be given in indifference to the former.

The great danger in the otherwise encouraging increase in concern for spiritual values in independent education is that the Central Person will be forgotten, that as Redeemer and Teacher and Example he will be bypassed in favor of a more pluralistic “secular” approach. The extreme of this tendency can be seen in one headmaster whose distress about moral laxity in his school led him to institute a required course in ethics based upon decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Preparatory school students see the falsity of bringing God in as a kind of deus ex machine to justify middle-class morality. But they respond to a clear and forthright portrayal of Jesus Christ, whose flesh-and-blood revelation is the only basis for Christian ethics.

The vitality of the spiritual life in any given school depends upon a number of factors. Most crucial is the director’s own commitment and concern. But individual members can by a consistent witness have a remarkable effect upon a whole school community. Curriculum time given to Bible and ethics courses is of great importance, as are chapel programs; but like a great frozen waterfall they can sometimes give the impression of mightier movement than there really is.

Lastly, there are the students themselves. They bring to their schools either an emerging faith or a void that may quickly be covered by a callous. The independent schools may perhaps be the place where some of our future leaders will learn of him who said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” and “If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.” There is cause for thanksgiving that in independent education across the country there are those who see the need and the opportunity for spiritual renewal and are responding to what they see. For them Macedonia is not far.

Peter C. Moore is director of the Council for Religion in Independent Schools. He is a graduate of Yale University (A.B.); Jesus College, Oxford University (B.A.); and the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts (B.D.). He has served as the vicar of All Souls’ Episcopal Mission, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

- More from Peter C. Moore

New Paths in Christian Higher Education

James Forrester

Patterns for higher education in the United States are presently undergoing radical evaluation and revision. If Christian colleges are to solve the problems of rising costs, increasing enrollments, expanding knowledge, faculty growth, and relationship to constituency, they cannot escape answering the same questions that secular institutions are facing. In fact, these questions are particularly pressing for the Christian college. Many educational leaders believe that small, church-related colleges are confronted with three possibilities: to lose their identity by being absorbed into the secular community, to suffer educational and spiritual erosion, or to accumulate impossible financial burdens within a decade.

Many Christian colleges have little or no endowment, a constituency somewhat indifferent or uninformed, and students whose fees pay on the average only 40 to 45 per cent of their general and educational costs. The millions of dollars attracted to prestige colleges and universities from government and industry often are not sought by Christian institutions or are not made available to them. Yet there is abundant evidence to show that the challenge to their existence that has confronted them throughout their history has led to prayerful and creative answers. The response of some Christian colleges has put them in the front line of advance. Tarkio, Upland, and Gordon are among those committed to the trimester calendar and to techniques of instruction and counseling fitted to the individual student so that his capacity for Christian leadership will be related to society. From colonial days to the present, Christian colleges have had a way of outliving the educational prophets who predicted their early and inevitable demise.

The urgency now leading to the modification of traditional concepts in education comes from both external and internal sources. The challenge of the Soviet Union in scientific and technological advance in the fifties set the stage for the National Defense Education Act—the most significant participation of the federal government in higher education since Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act. Internally, with the changes brought about by automation and computer-accelerated research, individuals are seeing in their own education the guarantee of personal and social productivity.

In this changing scene much is expected of Christian educators. There is a Christian obligation to assess changes and to relate the educational ministry of the Church to present-day needs. Higher education cannot be neutral about religious values; it must always function within a positive or negative theological frame of reference. It seems clear that the prevalent mood of higher education is concerned about the vacuum of values in our culture. But so long as it is assumed that, to become a critical thinker, a student must be disengaged from the faith and ethics of his family and left ignorant of the free-enterprise heritage of his country, youth will be bewildered. To find integrity amid the prevailing world view and to have a sense of cultural continuity is essential to the discovery of personal identity. Evangelical education with its promise of personal fulfillment in Christ can uniquely help the student answer the question, “Who am I?”

But Christian education must do more than insist upon Bible courses as a sign of its theological validity. It must teach such courses with awareness of problems facing students today. It must also develop in its chapels, living areas, seminars, and informal activities an atmosphere of Christian fellowship and open-minded discussion conducive to understanding the biblical faith and the nature of man and society. Christian concepts must be integrated with all the academic disciplines. Thus it may be hoped that graduates will make a Christian impress upon their day by serving Jesus Christ.

Three specific challenges confront evangelical Christian educators. In the light of scientific gains, they must think through philosophical implications of the biblical presuppositions regarding God, man, and the world. They must also restate the justification for the Christian college. And they must assess the adequacy of their programs in terms of calendar, curriculum, and teaching techniques.

A ‘Cosmic Cheshire Cat’

The dominant philosophical framework of higher education comes from naturalistic humanism. The conviction that man’s ultimate predicament lies in his sinful nature with its alienation from God, its bent to evil, and its dependent finitude, has been replaced by the Greek idea that man’s predicament stems from his ignorance of himself. Instead of a saving God in Jesus Christ reaching out for the redemption of men by the Cross, we have the messianic prescriptions of a heady and pretentious scientism. The result is a radical secularism that finds its endorsement among certain worldly intellectuals, such as Aldous Huxley, who prophesied that “the advance of natural science, logic and psychology has brought us to a stage at which God is no longer a useful hypothesis.… A faint trace of God still broods over the world like the smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat. But the growth of psychological knowledge will rule even that from the universe.”

Christian education has no quarrel with science or with the scientific approach to the phenomenal world. But the critical issue is epistemological. Secular education has not faced the fact that man, if he is to be objectively seen as “a thing” or an organism, must also be known as a person. The universe of knowledge must allow for ways of knowing data other than scientific ones. A full view of truth cannot fail to consider God’s revelation of himself and of his Person. The biblical revelation must be seen and affirmed as complementary to scientific knowledge. The descriptive offerings of science need the normative values of the Bible if men are to find wholeness in a broken world.

Christian educators are uniquely responsible to lay this whole (and holy) view of the world and life alongside the alternatives tacitly assumed or actively propagated in higher education. If this is to be done effectively, Christian college faculties must give themselves to the discipline of rethinking and restating the epistemology basic to their commitment to Christian higher education.

In addition to the obligation of theological and philosophical integrity, Christian higher education must meet two other demands. One is educational excellence in faculty, curricula, and student achievement; the other is the plain fact of economic reality.

For Student Self-Feeding

Characteristic of current changes in higher education is the shift of emphasis from professor to student, from forced feeding by the professor to independent study by the student. Instead of regarding the lecture as the chief means of teaching, educators now emphasize learning by whatever other techniques can be effectively used.

Robert M. Hutchins, formerly of the University of Chicago and now president of the Fund for the Republic, in addressing the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges this year, said, “If I were a university president today, I would try to change my institution and higher education in fundamental ways” (“Reflections on the Role of Liberal Education,” Liberal Education, May, 1964, p. 249).

Some Christian colleges have changed from a nine-month to a twelve-month year, from fifty-minute class periods to longer ones, from required curricula to flexible programs for accommodating the slow learner and the gifted student. They have branched out beyond the traditional classroom lecture to the use of closed-circuit television, language laboratories, programmed learning, and team teaching. Christian education need not mean the status quo in method. If methods, curricula, and calendar had not changed with changing conditions, we might still be conferring the B.A. for the completion of the “trivium” (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), or the M.A. for the “quadrivium” (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). There is a vast amount of information with which the contemporary student must become familiar and which he must integrate into his spiritual frame of reference. For this task the old patterns may well need revision.

The trimester calendar plan that some Christian colleges have adopted is simply a revision of the semester program into three periods of either fourteen or fifteen weeks. When schedules are rearranged and programs held to a maximum three-course limit, capable students can complete the work for an accredited bachelor’s degree in three years. Such acceleration is important to pre-professional students, who can thus enter graduate school a year earlier. And such acceleration also hastens the day when the student can become a self-sustaining member of the adult Christian community and of society. Slower students can elect the more leisurely pace and graduate in the traditional four years.

Since the economic factor is important to the survival and effectiveness of every college, the use of a multi-million-dollar capital investment for two-thirds of a year is difficult to justify. From the standpoint of stewardship on the part of evangelical colleges, the trimester program has genuine merit. By adding a third term, the same faculty and facilities can handle approximately one-third more students than the number possible under the conventional program. Assuming that, as in Gordon’s case, 57 per cent of those eligible to elect the third trimester do so, the operating budget will show an income from fees that would otherwise be impossible. Economies in time are startling if the semester and trimester plans are compared. Under the old semester program the number of days from freshman orientation to graduation is 1,363, whereas under the trimester program it is 1,073. Time for holidays and vacations under the semester system is 567 days, as against 326 under the trimester program.

For the faculty member, the trimester program should prove more remunerative. There is no reason why a Christian with the Ph.D. who is “called to teach” in a Christian college should be penalized financially to the extent that family economic concerns become an almost impossible burden. If this happens, he must either “moonlight” or yield to the temptation to turn to the secular college or university. The Committee of Fifteen for the Fund for the Advancement of Education predicted that even if all the Ph.D.’s being produced by the nation’s graduate schools were to go into college teaching, “we would by 1970 need approximately 350,000 more college teachers than we shall probably train in our doctoral programs” (F. W. Strothmann, The Graduate School Today and Tomorrow, Fund for the Advancement of Education, 1957, p. 7). The Christian college must attract and retain qualified professors. Under the trimester program, it should be possible for the faculty member to be free of professional duties for a full, salaried term every third year. In the case of the younger man still in a doctoral program, this time should prove valuable both to him and to the college.

To An Organist

“Through Jesus Christ our Lord”

You wait for that—

And when those words are said

Your hands obedient fall upon the keys

And strike—for us to sing thereby—

“Amen” …

“Through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Would God our hands not only

But our heart and head

Obedient answered, when those words were said:

And every inmost hope, each thought, each word

Echoed “Through Jesus Christ our Lord”—

And when those words were uttered, then

We answered with our life,

“Amen!”

SAMUEL M. SHOEMAKER

Proponents of the traditional semester calendar argue that students need the long vacations for maturing or for earning money. According to Dr. Hungate and Dr. McGrath of Teachers’ College, Columbia University, “There is little evidence to support the argument that the summer vacation results in intellectual maturity, or that there would not be greater growth in learning if formal schooling were continued during this period. Common sense suggests the reverse” (A New Trimester Three-Year Degree Program, The Institute of Higher Education, p. 7). As for student finances, it could be advantageous to complete the degree work in three years rather than four. If borrowing is necessary, repayment can be made from earnings a year sooner.

Experience at Gordon in one year of trimester operation suggests some modifications to accommodate slower students in science and modern languages. In the main, however, there are demonstrable advantages in the new program of motivating students to do independent research. The library has never seen more use. There is a greater ferment of intellectual discussion, and twice as many students are named to the dean’s list. Except for baseball, the athletic program is not seriously changed. Students have been able to participate in extramural activities to a very satisfactory degree. As for the faculty, each man is given greater potential usefulness and can thus serve more students. The advantages of year-round use of facilities as well as the gains in financial stability through greater enrollment and reduction of prospective capital expense in facilities are immediately apparent.

The goal of Christian higher education—to produce dedicated and effective graduates—can be more consistently achieved if educators will overcome the natural resistance to change. America has reached greatness as “a nation under God.” Christian educators have, through their insistence upon excellence to the glory of God, the opportunity of contributing to their country and to the service of their Lord a body of informed and capable Christian youth.

James Forrester is president of Gordon College, Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. A native of Scotland, he received his B.A. at Queens University, Canada, M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. He was an Air Force chaplain in the Pacific during World War II.

- More from James Forrester

Theology

Scientists and God

Martin J. Buerger

Many today tell us that the rapid advance of modern knowledge is giving man mastery of the world and that mastery of the universe is just around the corner. They imply, therefore, that man is self-sufficient. This viewpoint had begun to pervade our thinking well before the Russians launched Sputnik. And now that we have emulated them and have even orbited men, the feeling is becoming general that we have begun to master the universe itself. As a result, some think that we no longer need God and that he should therefore be dropped from our lives. Not only is this the Communist view; it is also that of many sophisticated Western thinkers.

But what would the world be like if we should succeed in eliminating God from consideration? A comparison of the West, which was deeply influenced by Christ, with that part of the world which was not influenced by him answers the question. The two worlds are not the same. The non-Christian world thinks differently about right and wrong, about the sanctity of life, and about the place of women in society. Without detailing such differences, let us simply note that the Christian idea of right and wrong derives from the concept of sin and is absolute; that the Christian view of life comes from the concept of the equality of all persons before God, as does also the Christian view of women. The non-Christian views on these subjects are based essentially on the idea of the tyranny of the stronger. Those in Western civilization who advocate the elimination of God overlook the fact that our very freedoms are part of our Christian heritage.

A position often implied and sometimes openly expressed is that every scholar knows man to be self-sufficient and that no real scientist believes in God any more. This is simply not true. Consider some evidence, beginning at my own institution of learning.

A few years ago a conference of M.I.T. faculty and religious leaders was called to discuss the best ways to meet the spiritual needs of the Protestant and Orthodox students on the campus. A number of professors attended. But what was particularly significant was which ones attended. At M.I.T. there is a category of distinguished faculty members known as Institute Professors. Three such professors had been named to this top honor at the time of the conference. Of the three, two took part in the conference. A year or so later, one of them gave the baccalaureate sermon, in which he took his stand as a professing Christian before the graduating class and attending faculty. Obviously it cannot be said that these Institute Professors are able to believe in God because they do not meet the standards of real scientists. On the contrary, they are leaders in their fields; all of them have pulled out of their fertile brains ideas that have created new fields for other scientists to follow.

Some Who Believed

The generalization that scientists do not believe in God will not bear scrutiny, for some of the greatest scientists have believed. A seventeenth-century example was Sir Isaac Newton, who was such a pious man that he always doffed his hat when God was mentioned, and who wrote extensively on the Scriptures. Newton was clearly no run-of-the-mill scholar; on his work all physics rests, and even Einstein needed it as a start for his own great work. In the same century as Newton lived the French scientist and mathematician, Blaise Pascal. One of the greatest mathematical minds of all time, he was a profound Christian; his Pensées, one of the world’s great books, is a landmark in Christian philosophy.

A modern example of a world-renowned scientist who was a believer was John von Neumann of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. It was he who led in the development of the high-speed digital computers that have so changed the course of present-day science. All mathematicians know him for his great contributions to pure mathematics, and in 1956 he received the $50,000 Enrico Fermi award for his basic scientific contributions. A Nobel Laureate is also among the believers—Professor Victor F. Hess, who in 1936 received the Nobel prize in physics for his discovery of cosmic rays.

These scientists happen to be among those who, in addition to being first-rank scholars, have made their religious convictions publicly known. But there are many more who have not made them known. After all, only occasionally in science does an opportunity arise for a man’s convictions to stand revealed. In my own field of crystallography I know most of the several hundred internationally prominent scholars; yet save for a few instances when I was present for a revealing conversation, I have not learned their individual religious or anti-religious feelings. Nevertheless I can name some Christians among them who would not object to being counted. One of Switzerland’s greatest crystallographers, Werner Nowacki, is a Christian, as is Spain’s greatest authority in this field, José Luis Amorós, and also one of America’s leaders, José Donnay. And J. H. Robertson, a well-known Scottish research scientist, is a Christian. I once heard Robertson, a Presbyterian, and Amorós, a Roman Catholic, argue a religious point; each spoke as a dedicated Christian and each was proud of his faith. England’s leading woman crystallographer, Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, is a Quaker. She is a professor at the University of London, a fellow of the Royal Society, and vice-president of the International Union of Crystallography, and she was decorated by the Queen for her outstanding scientific work.

A curious fact is that Russia’s most distinguished crystallographer, Academician N. V. Belov, is a believer who can no longer practice his Orthodox faith because Russia has banished God. Belov knows more about symmetry and, with his students, has determined the arrangements of atoms in more silicate minerals than any other man on earth. And is it not significant that, even in Russia, there is a believer among the greatest scientists? One is reminded of the biblical statement, “I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to Baal” (1 Kings 19:18; Rom. 11:4).

Are there advantages for a scholar in being a Christian? As a scientist, I believe that there are immeasurable advantages. Consider a small boy who wants an answer to a question. Ordinarily he will go to his parents. Later, when he is in high school, he may go to his teacher for an answer. Still later, in college, he may approach his professor. If one day, however, he finds himself a professor and a question arises that he cannot resolve, then what is he to do? Perhaps he can obtain an answer from an authority greater than himself. But suppose that he himself becomes an authority in a specialized field, and there arises something in that field which puzzles him. What can he do to get an answer?

Fortunately the Bible gives us a method for such a problem: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (Jas. 1:5). This marvelous invitation encourages all of us, scientists included, to approach not just a higher authority but the Highest Authority, the One who designed the universe, the interrelations of which are a part of what the scientist seeks to know. There is only one price for this service: one must believe the invitation. Anyone who believes is invited to ask and is assured an answer.

Asking implies prayer. Prayer is a way of getting in personal touch with the Creator of the universe, by which is meant not only the physical universe but also the logic with which it is put together. The judgment with which a man handles the knowledge of the universe and its logic is called wisdom, and James invites us to improve this judgment by going to the Ultimate Authority. But this invitation must not be construed as a blanket promise that any prayer will be answered according to the petitioner’s desire. If two persons have a contest—say, a wrestling match—and both pray for victory, it is difficult to see how both prayers can be answered as the petitioners wish. There may at times be two answers, one of which may be “No.”

The Maze In Perspective

But Christians have another great promise that will help them even when the answer is “No.” This one is stated in Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Here we learn that no matter how bad things appear to be, they happen for our eventual benefit if we love God. Only the Creator of the universe could fulfill this promise; yet a simple analogy may help our finite minds to understand it. If you are required to make your way through a maze, the path must sometimes be what seems a retrogression instead of an advance toward the goal. Only someone who sees the whole maze in perspective can direct you with certainty through it. God is in exactly this position, because he sees the whole, because all things are present before him, and because he sees the end from the beginning.

The Bible records many examples of this principle. A classical case is that of Joseph, who said of his brothers’ selling him to the Ishmaelites: “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive” (Gen. 50:20).

But to return to the subject of prayer, although the answer to a particular prayer may be “No,” nevertheless we are promised that a request for wisdom is generally answered. But is this really true? Can one depend on it? By experience I have found that one can, and I am sure that my experience is not unique.

On occasion I have invented theories. Now a theory never occurs to its author in complete and final form; it commonly arrives as a sudden flash of basic ideas that must be explored and developed. These nearly always present knotty problems. A number of these situations that have presented themselves to me have appeared to be quite beyond my powers to resolve; yet since the theories came out of my own imagination, I could hardly expect to consult someone else about them. But all such problems exist in the logic of the universe God created. Thus I knew for a certainty that I could get help from God, and whenever I asked for this help I received it.

One case was remarkable. I had struggled for days to resolve a curious dilemma in which I obtained different answers by two different routes. Finally I remembered to pray for wisdom, and while I was in the very act of framing my request to God, the solution came to me in wordless form. It seemed a fulfillment of Isaiah 65:24, “… before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” To be sure, this verse is taken out of context, but it is very much like what Christ tells us so directly in Matthew 6:8: “… your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.”

Receiving wisdom is, of course, only one of the benefits God gives the believer. But one does not serve God primarily to obtain benefits. No one can be persuaded to serve God if he does not believe in God. If he does believe, then serving God is a natural consequence of being part of God’s family, and the earthly advantages are wholly subsidiary to the family relationship.

Does the scientist need God? Can the scientist afford to ignore this shortcut to knowledge of the things that his curiosity drives him to study? Many do ignore it, but many believing scientists have found God’s promise of wisdom to be true.

Martin J. Buerger is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a world-renowned scientist in the fields of crystallography and mineralogy. He has been chairman of the faculty and director of the School of Advanced Studies at M.I.T. This essay condenses a commencement address given at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, Long Island, New York.

- More from Martin J. Buerger

Christian Youth in Soviet Schools

J. C. Pollock

In the Soviet Union of the sixties, atheist State and vigorous Christianity are battling for the souls of children and youth. Mikhail Petrovich Kashin, deputy minister of education in the Russian Federal Republic, said in a broadcast on October 10, 1963, “Religious influence is a terrible enemy which we often underestimate. Do not think, Comrades, that the Church and the sects only influence the older generation.… The schools—and all of us—must wage a persistent struggle against [religion], and must not be inactive in the hope that the Church will die away by itself.”

From the earliest days of a child’s life the State would like to exert atheist influence. Because christening in church is still frequent among Orthodox (Baptists, of course, do not practice infant baptism) and in Party eyes is “a degrading, barbaric and pernicious ceremony,” Leningrad Soviet decided in August, 1963, to open two “Palaces of the Newly Born,” complete with a “beautiful and solemn ritual” during which the birth certificate would be presented to the parents, together with the congratulations of the City Soviet and a medal portraying Lenin in an armored car with the Neva River for background. By mid-1964 no special “Baby Palace” had yet been built, but similar presentations were already held in Latvia as part of the nation-wide campaign, begun in 1959, to offset religious ceremonies by colorful secular substitutes, while Lvov (formerly a city of Poland) claims great success for its marriage and family “Palace of Happiness.”

But christening can often be dismissed as the initiative of grannies. As a Western correspondent in Moscow said, “In many families you will find an old hag in the background who hurries the baby round to the church, often without consent or knowledge of the parents.” The font is of little relevance to the advance or retreat of religion in Russia.

The vital battleground is the school. Soviet children go to school at seven, and some to a primary school at five. The leaving age has been raised from fourteen to fifteen, 1964 being the year by which every Soviet child is to receive eight years of compulsory education. The most able continue for another three years to reach the eleventh and highest grade and leave at eighteen. Eight years is enough to give a thorough grounding in the Communist, materialist outlook.

Atheism is not in the curriculum as a subject, in the manner that divinity or Scripture generally appears in many Western schools, but it hovers in the background. “Teaching should be organized,” runs an article in Sovetskaya Estoniya of October 23, 1963, “so that every lesson in any subject should help to form the ideology of the schoolchildren.” This policy is often ignored. As the senior lecturer at a pedagogical institute near Bryansk wrote in January, 1964, “Some teachers instead of unmasking religious ravings shy at the very mention of God.”

A teacher who is keen will constantly make atheist points. In history lessons the Orthodox Church’s opposition to the Revolution will be emphasized. In chemistry an experiment to prove the components of bread will evoke a gibe at the doctrine of the Eucharist. In biology and natural science “the churchmen’s myths about the divine creation of man and everything living on earth are exposed.” A lesson on astronomy refers to Galileo’s persecution by the Inquisition. An introduction to the marvels of flight and space exploration will produce the comment, “Religion first forbade any thought that man could fly.” This curious statement is based on a story of the father of the Wright brothers, a Presbyterian minister, who is said to have remarked in 1875 (when they were small boys) that the idea of flying was blasphemous! If the views of such an obscure individual may topple God from his throne, there is no reason why he should not be put back again by reflection that Leonardo da Vinci not only painted the sublime “Last Supper” but designed a flying machine.

The force lies not in such childish points but in the all-pervasive environment of school, the assumption of a materialistic universe and of the absurdity of religious belief. Unless acquainted with a Christian home, Soviet schoolchildren never attend divine service, or read or hear about God except in a negative sense. It is taken for granted and drummed into them that the educated, cultured, progressive person has no religion, which is for the elderly and uncultured.

Toward A Systematic Atheism

That is not enough. In April, 1963, the Minister of Education wrote that “we do not want our boys and girls to grow up merely ignorant of religious questions. We want them to become convinced, militant atheists.” Science and Religion complained in December, 1963, that: “In the overwhelming majority of cases the theoretical store of the seventeen-year-old is confined to the completely just but unsubstantiated statement: ‘God does not exist.’ ” In 1962 a special course in “The Fundamental Bases of Scientific Atheism” was introduced to higher educational institutes. It is optional in the R.S.F.S.R. (Soviet Russia proper), compulsory in the Ukraine and Lithuania. The students regarded it “as a tenth-rate subject and have a poor attendance at lectures.” Yet the course is vital, Komsomolskaya Pravda has urged, because of “the very interesting character of religious preaching in the churches.” Early in 1964 the Party announced that chairs of scientific atheism were to be established in certain universities and pedagogical institutes.

The majority of schoolchildren, from homes where religion has been dead a generation, swallow the atheist attitude, slogans and all, as is shown in a delightful letter from a seventeen-year-old boy received by the Far East Broadcasting Company in June, 1963: “Hello! I am a high school student (11th grade). I openly denounce you on behalf of Soviet Youth. Your hysterical pronouncements about god are useless. Would you not be better off, if you were to stop them? They do not bring the desired results anyway. Your priests are rotten with dishonesty. What can you say, you, the weak descendants of the bourgeoisie? If you have the rebuttal, you can forward it to the following address.…”

A growing minority of Soviet youth, however, come from believing homes, and thus from the day they first hear anti-religious fairy tales at primary school are subjected to tension: at home taught to pray at mother’s knee, at school taught no God exists; at home learning that all things bright and beautiful are given by a loving Creator, at school laughingly told Christ is mythical and religion an evil deception. Parents have the legal right to instruct their children in religion at home, and a large number of teachers are genuinely careful neither to interfere with this parental freedom nor to “insult the feelings of believers,” especially in families of priests and pastors.

The Moral Cripples

But the official attitude deplores such sensitivity. “Imagine what happens,” said a Moscow broadcaster in July, 1963, “in those cases where the school and family act on the child from different ideological and spiritual points of view.” Broadcasts and articles continually attack the “harm done to young children by religious instruction at home.” The Party line knows nothing of a little child’s wondering trust in a heavenly Father, a child’s instinct of adoration; to a Communist, a small boy or girl will be religious only by parental pressure or brute force. A religious child must by definition be unhappy, repressed, retarded, “a moral cripple”—the phrase comes again and again. “It is incumbent on the school to fight so that the children of religious parents shall not grow up into moral cripples but into real builders of Communism and fully developed people.”

A Western reader may be confused by this talk of “moral cripples” and “outraged human dignity.” He can understand a Soviet schoolmaster’s dismissing religious parents as unenlightened, backward, or deceived, but why immoral?

To Communists this is the crux of the matter. They maintain that a child is a moral cripple unless he is growing up to be a “new Communist man,” self-sufficient, proud, scornful of meekness, head held high in the manner of W. E. Henley’s “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul,” and Swinburne’s “Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.” Because the Christian kneels he must be a miserable creature; because he owns a Master he must be a cringing slave: “A pickpocket takes a man’s money or his watch, a bandit inflicts a mortal wound, a burglar steals all the valuables in a house. But the ‘brothers and sisters in Christ’ distort a man’s very mind, steal everything from him, deflect him from happiness in life to dreams of bliss after death and kill his pride and his confidence in his own powers.” The Communist is a stranger to the spiritual secret learned by Paul and countless Christians since, “When 1 am weak, then am I strong,” to the truth expressed in the old hymn:

Make me a captive, Lord,

And then I shall he free;

Force me to render up my sword,

And I shall conq’ror be.

The Communist tries to stifle the deep-rooted human instinct that Augustine expressed: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,” and bends his energies to produce “Communist man.”

In this the Party youth organizations play the primary role, from the day the child becomes, at the age of eight, a Little Octobrist and goes on to be a Pioneer wearing the red three-pointed scarf. Membership is not, in theory, compulsory, though there are increasing instances where a child has been enrolled against the parents’ wish or its own. A child who is not a Pioneer will miss much of the fun of camps, games, and social activities, and be damaged in school career. Membership of the Komsomol (for youths aged fourteen to twenty-six) is, on the other hand, more selective.

Many evangelical parents permit their children to become Little Octobrists and Pioneers, conscious that isolation may be more hurtful than indoctrination. There must be cases of children forbidden the Pioneers who grow up to be Party members and atheists, just as there are many Pioneers who reach manhood or womanhood strong Christians.

Wherever school and Party organizations take their task seriously, the small child is pressed into the accepted mold. “Twenty children in sectarian bondage—that was a blot on the school. A fight for each one began,” tells a village headmaster from the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Republic. Each of the different teachers concentrated on two, “and thus every little ‘pray-baby’ got his good guide—a teacher whose task it was to drag him out of the sectarian bog into which the children, thanks to their parents, had already put a foot.”

Where a Christian couple are determined to prevent atheist indoctrination, and teachers or Party equally determined the other way, stronger measures are used: the parents can be deprived of parental rights and the children sent to be brought up in a State home or in an “Internat,” one of the new experimental boarding schools. Deprivation of parental rights is becoming lamentably frequent. Or custody can be given to another member of the family.

Christians And The Komsomol

Open advocacy of Christ is extraordinarily hard for a Soviet adolescent. Membership in the Komsomol (Young Communist League) is an almost essential requirement for the making of a successful career, even in sport: few if any of the Soviet athletes at the Olympic Games of 1964 would not be members. And atheism is built into its constitutions. Plenty of Komsomols are violent atheists; the majority will at least be careful to parade the appropriate sentiments and slogans.

The whole dilemma of Christian and Komsomol was mirrored in a peculiarly painful way by a letter that Komsomolskaya Pravda printed on December 20, 1963, because the writer seemed to be a possible convert to atheism.

He was a twenty-two-year-old Moldavian, who wrote that his parents were evangelical Christians. “From my earliest years they taught me to pray to God and to love my neighbor as myself. When I went to school, nobody hindered me from learning. On the contrary, my father helped me and punished me for carelessness.” When a senior, the boy read books and went to the cinema. “My father did not forbid me to do this either and always only warned me that I should conduct myself decently. At school I was very interested in astronomy and chemistry.”

He did not join the Komsomol, “because I knew that there was no place for me there; you see I believe in God and go to meetings of believers and everyone in our village knew this very well.” When he was called up he did excellently in the army because he did not smoke, drink, or swear (“I am not boasting, but I am telling the truth”). Officers and fellow soldiers respected him.

In the army he naturally had joined the Komsomol, and it had since meant much to him. What was he then to do? “I have still got a grain of faith in God.” He could not bear to leave the Komsomol; yet to deny God and turn atheist would be to betray his mother’s deathbed wish and “my conscience will torture me all my life.”

He asked the newspaper for advice. But he did not give his name, because if his Komsomol comrades heard of his doubts “every type of explanatory work will begin.” He knew what “individual work with believers” could be like.

Expelled For ‘No Offense’

There is no reasonable doubt from evidence which trickles out that Christian youth are discriminated against in the allotment of coveted places in institutes and universities, although an outstanding brain would almost certainly be accepted; his political education would be intensified. Science and Religion also admits cases, claiming them isolated, “when on various pretexts but essentially for the same reason, students in senior classes who have committed no offense and have been making entirely satisfactory progress, have been expelled from their higher educational establishments.”

In the summer of 1963 a girl at the Moscow Engineering and Economics Institute was ostracized and later expelled because she was a believer. And the “twenty-three-year-old son of the regent of the Baptist community” of Frunze in Central Asia, a footwear worker, had a rough time at the technical evening institute when students and teachers decided to help him out of his darkness. They bombarded him with questions, made him see an anti-God film, told him to read atheist Bible commentaries and parodies. He had been an able, regular student until this persecution, which not unnaturally induced a reluctance to attend classes and an increase of time spent teaching the Baptist youth group, which met in private houses. After an evening at the institute at which he suffered particularly unwelcome attentions he resigned. And was miserable. He wanted technical education, wanted to do well. Swallowing his pride, he sought to withdraw his resignation. The director told him it was for his works collective to decide. A meeting was called which “became a real atheistic tribune.” They grilled him for five hours, but Aleksandr would not apostatize. Like Luther his attitude was, “Here stand. I can do no other.” The collective refused to recommend his reacceptance.

More young men and women are dismissed from institutes because they are believers, or find entry closed, than Science and Religion cares to admit. Among Soviet youth, as in other sectors of the nation, the Christian faith not only refuses to die; it is virile.

J. C. Pollock, an Anglican clergyman, is a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge University (M.A.), and of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and is known for his writing. Among his books are “A Cambridge Movement” (a history of Inter-Varsity Fellowship) and biographies of Hudson Taylor and Dwight L. Moody. This essay is a condensation of Chapters XV and XVI of his forthcoming book, “Russian Evangelicals,” to be published by McGraw-Hill (copyright © 1964 by J. C. Pollock).

- More from J. C. Pollock

Books

Book Briefs: July 31, 1964

Modern Theologies: As Seen From The Gospel

Christian Faith and Modern Theology, edited by Carl F. H. Henry (Channel, 1964, 448 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Addison H. Leitch, professor of philosophy and religion, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.

Once again Dr. Henry has gathered together some evangelical scholars, and we are indebted to him and to them for this excellent book. Increasingly, by way of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and by these publishing opportunities, Carl Henry is giving self-consciousness and self-respect to one of the major trends in modern theology. He has become a rallying point in another kind of ecumenical movement, and the world of theology is more and more appreciative of his efforts.

This book is made up of twenty chapters in which twenty authors seriously approach what the title of the book indicates. After a chapter by Hermann Sasse introducing us to twentieth-century European theology, a chapter by James I. Packer on twentieth-century British theology, and a chapter by Eugene Osterhaven on twentieth-century American theology, the authors pursue the important subjects that normally appear in any systematic theology. The opening chapters of historical setting are excellent and in my estimation would have great value published as a separate book or booklet. They are, of course, an excellent introduction to the remainder of this book.

It is impossible to give a critical analysis of each of the chapters. Of most value to me was the effort to relate evangelical theology to the great movements in modern theology. Nearly all the authors not only face such men as Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Tillich, Niebuhr, and Kierkegaard, but face them fairly, with many fresh insights and, I think, with a strong apologetic for the historic Christian faith. I believe that any reader can from this one book find a clue or a focus for the almost overwhelming impact of modern theological movements. We all remember with gratitude the primary effort of Hordern in his book A Layman’s Guide to Protestant Theology. Here in this volume we have a better approach and one with considerably greater depth. It seems to me that careful reading of this book could be for every man a first step in the understanding of the theology of our day. And theological education being what it is, this book could also be highly instructive to the new seminary graduate by impressing him with the scholarship and appeal of the evangelical approach, so frequently neglected in the seminaries. One is constantly impressed by the balance of these writers and the irenic spirit with which they approach their work.

Certain points for negative criticism come to mind. The first is to be expected in a book of this type with a variety of authors and approaches (even though their unanimity is amazing): it would have been helpful if each author, without becoming too mechanical, had followed something of a loose basic outline. After a number of chapters in which each theological subject is lined up against modern theologians, we then have chapters where these theologians are almost entirely neglected. This makes for some imbalance and left me with some feeling of frustration. I think of this particularly in the chapter by Roger Nicole where he makes his point of departure primarily the works of Dr. Vincent Taylor. He has every reason, of course, for choosing Taylor as representative; but in company with the other authors, even though he makes his own case, he does not help us see questions of redemption over and against Barth, Bultmann, and the like, as clearly as was done in the other chapters. This occurs also in Vernon Grounds’s thesis supported, as it is, primarily on the work of Kierkegaard. Here Kierkegaard is highly relevant, and the thesis has worked out splendidly; but the chapter does not follow the general thrust of the book.

It seems to me that there could have been closer “working agreement” among C. Gregg Singer in his particular approach to history, John Gerstner in his approach to the Scriptures, and Gordon Clark in his approach to the sciences; not that the three should necessarily find complete agreement, but that some of the standards or viewpoints they set up might be closer to those of the other contributors. For my own education I felt that Gordon Clark’s chapter was the best. Those who follow him in the text do not always look at things as he does, and the total impact of the book or of the evangelical cause is in my estimation thereby weakened. The “showdown” in the evangelical approach lies not so much in the authority of the Scriptures (this comes through strongly in every page) but in the specific questions of inspiration and inerrancy. Closely allied is the question of the use of reason over against the more intuitive approach. I am not satisfied that in this volume one can find the establishment by reason of either inspiration or inerrancy, although such is generally assumed. If these things are to be “proved” by reason, then they must stand on reason whether a man is committed to the Christian faith or not. I cannot feel that the Reformed tradition can argue Scripture apart from the combination of Word and Spirit; but as Seeburg has said, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is “the Achilles’ heel of Protestantism.”

None of these writers would deny this work of the Spirit in the use of Scripture; but as soon as we open the door to the Spirit on the Word, we open the door to the very sort of thing that Barth and company insist on establishing. Can a man without the blessing or the guidance of the Spirit of God accept the authority of Scripture? Does this action of the Spirit come by reason or by evidence, or does it not come by the free hand of God directly to the mind and heart of a believer? This whole area needs to be reworked with great care in modern evangelical theology.

Time and space prevent my more personal comments on the chapters. Every writer has given us the gifts of his mind and heart to our profit. This is a good book, and once again we are in Carl Henry’s debt.

ADDISON H. LEITCH

St. Augustine And Apartheid

The City of God and the City of Man in Africa, by Edgar H. Brookes and Army Vandenbosch (University of Kentucky, 1964, 144 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, chairman, Department of History, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.

This small volume, containing two lectures given at the University of Kentucky by Dr. Brookes of the faculty of Natal in South Africa and two supplementary chapters by Army Vandenbosch, is one of the finest expositions of the plight and promise of contemporary Africa that this reviewer has seen. It is not difficult to understand why these two lectures left such a deep and abiding impression on faculty and students who were fortunate enough to hear them, for their effect is in no way lost on the printed page. Dr. Brookes, an associate of Alan Paton in the activities of the Liberal party, which advocates the abandonment of the apartheid policy in South Africa, analyzes the woes and the problems of that state and its people with a fairness and sympathy of understanding that is most unusual in attempts to deal with the racial unrest for which South Africa has become famous, or infamous. Although he at no time seeks to justify its stringent policy of racial segregation and subjugation, he is careful to give an accurate portrayal of how Smuts and the other liberal leaders of the early decades of the present era fell into the predicament. But even in his indictment of the apartheid policy, Dr. Brookes breathes a certain warmth and understanding that allows the American reader, perhaps for the first time, to comprehend the depth of the problem and the difficulties that lie in the way of a solution.

The title of the book is derived from the events of the fifth century, when the people of North Africa received from St. Augustine a vision of the City of God that made them determined, according to the authors, to acquire the freedom to realize their vision of the City of Man. The authors find a parallel between the Africa of that era, which was facing the inroads of the barbarians, and the Africa of the twentieth century, which is engaged in the task of freeing itself from the yoke of European colonialism. Indeed, the intense feeling of nationalism may yet make a mockery of the vision that the African leaders have received from St. Augustine. The only real weakness of this book is its misinterpretation of St. Augustine and its forced application of Augustine to the present conditions of Africa.

The book is almost mandatory reading for anyone who seeks to understand contemporary Africa, whether he be liberal or conservative in his theological and social views. The tremendous insights of this little work far outweigh the defect mentioned above.

C. GREGG SINGER

Different Eyes: Same Vision

Slavery, Segregation and Scripture, by James O. Buswell III (Eerdmans, 1964, 101 pp., $2.50), and My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic, by William Stringfellow (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, 121 pp., $3.95), are reviewed by Tunis Romein, professor of philosophy, Erskine College, Due West, South Carolina.

Relating these authors to each other and to their books is like playing fruitbasket upset: Professor Buswell, an expert in anthropology, assumes the role of a Bible student, and Mr. Stringfellow, a lawyer, writes with unapologetic flourish about theological issues. Although the two authors share more or less the same side of a common subject, they seem uncommonly different in background and outlook. Harvard-trained Stringfellow seems to be perfectly relaxed when discussing his theology over beer, whereas Buswell, educated at an evangelical stronghold where he now teaches, Wheaton College, could conceivably feel a bit awkard with such easy-going informalities.

Buswell, educationally nurtured in the North, centers his attention on racial bias in the South; in this he is somewhat like old Amos, who left his sycamore trees in the South and bore down on social injustices in the Northern Kingdom. Likewise Stringfellow centers his book on a cultural setting much different from his own background; his writings are infused with a first-hand forcefulness by virtue of a seven-year residency in the notorious New York community of Harlem. Stringfellow’s account, which he terms an “autobiographical polemie,” is personal and aggressive, whereas Buswell’s book reflects more the impersonal, scholarly, and perhaps scientific demean of a professor carefully documenting his work and methodically developing his arguments with a minimum of personal reference.

Buswell’s book is an interesting counterpart to Thomas Gossett’s recently published account of the history of race in America, with a similar historical approach and comparative study between prevailing points of view both past and present. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Buswell’s book is the comparative study between early Southern justification of slavery and contemporary Southern justification of segregation. Interesting, too, are the similarities between early abolitionist impatience and the impatience of today’s radical integrationists; both groups exhibit a seemingly misguided impetuosity that tends to botch up the works.

Stringfellow’s book is a worthy counterpart to a widely read earlier book on Harlem, Come Out of the Wilderness, which reported on the Parish Ministry. Stringfellow was introduced to his work in Harlem by the Parish group—all of which suggests some kind of social-gospel setting in the sense of a vigorous crusade against economic, social, and political injustices, by means of which cometh the Kingdom of God. But, surprisingly, not so with Stringfellow. Although he says he is as much for correcting these injustices as the next man, first things must come first: it is wrong to assume that the Church must correct social and economic evils before the Gospel can be preached; it is wrong to assume that one must feed people before preaching to them. The Gospel, Stringfellow argues, is relevant to all sorts and conditions of men in all times and places. The churches have also supposed that “mission follows charity. They have favored crusades and abandoned mission.… Mission does not follow charity; faith does not follow works.… On the contrary, mission is itself the only charity which Christians have to offer the poor, the only work which Christians have to do.…” Speaking of the Bible, the author, while paying his respects to critics and specialists, offers a lively testimony to the Word of God as the common man knows it, and to the fact that it “lives by God’s own initiative and generosity in this world, apart from whether or not men listen … apart from human wisdom and scholarship, apart from tampering with or manipulation of the Bible, apart from the interesting and even sometimes true view and opinions of men, apart from any hardness of heart.…”

A final comparison of these two vigorously anti-racist books points up an ironic twist: My People Is the Enemy seems to have its origin in a liberal setting but winds up with rugged, old-fashioned biblical doctrines about faith and salvation; whereas Slavery, Segregation and Scripture, elaborated from a clearly conservative Protestant perspective, ends with a climactic chapter defending contemporary anthropological theories against reactionary attacks, with the “Scripture” part somehow lost in the shuffle, but surely not intentionally. In some ways perhaps academic pilgrimages through cloistered halls of ivy are equally as hazardous as walking the darkly violent streets of Harlem.

TUNIS ROMEIN

Step Right Up, Folks …

Psychotherapy: A Christian Approach, by E. N. Ducker (Allen & Unwin [London], 1964, 123 pp., 21s.), is reviewed by Philip G. Ney, resident psychiatrist, Allan Memorial Institute, Montreal, Quebec.

The author of this book professes “to present the comparatively new science of Psychology as a handmaid of Religion,” and claims that his material comes from practicing psychotherapy for twelve years in this “specialist service as part of the Ministry of the Church.” There are chapters dealing with the Christian’s fear of psychotherapy; the Church’s legitimate role in psychotherapy; the bad effects of authority, parental inconsistency, and self-punishment upon personality; fantasies; and the effects of emotion in the production of physical illnesses. There is finally a criticism of Bishop Robinson’s controversial book, Honest to God.

The book is of limited value. To an apprehensive religious person it may act as a “softening up” introduction to psychology, and to church people it may be a stimulus to discuss psychology. Unfortunately its main appeal lies in those segments of case histories and dreams about which almost any generalization can be made. The main value of the book is that it nicely illustrates what a book on Christian psychotherapy should not be. It is poor Christianity and poor psychotherapy.

Although this may be one Christian’s approach to psychotherapy, there is actually nothing distinctively Christian about it. The author uses biblical symbols and sees great religious significance in dreams, but for the rest his book is a mixture of Freudian, Kleinian, and chiefly Jungian theories of psychology. He claims great effectiveness for his treatment: “I have treated many cases of asthma and in every case with finished treatment, they have become free from their complaint, through psychotherapy.”

From what the present reviewer can infer, the author does not use the accepted method of interpreting dreams but simply appeals to Jungian archetypes and says that they obviously mean “thus and so.” At the same time he states, “In the course of analysis the Christian therapist will studiously avoid any imposition of his view.” He grossly oversimplifies the relation of physical disease and emotions when he asserts that “the physical aspect entirely disappears when the patient attends to his emotional problems,” and that “sufferers from specific disorders reveal a definite character pattern.”

What will disconcert most medical experts is the author’s apparent inability to discern who should receive his psychotherapy. He asserts that the therapist should be trained to recognize problems he cannot deal with, but he himself offers his therapy to one who believes she is impregnated by the Holy Spirit. Patients with such delusions may become worse with the type of psychotherapy this writer appears to offer.

He finally states his view of God, which is not Christian but Jungian: “God is the archetype of Being at its fullest and richest and as such it is indispensable to man.”

Christian psychology should be encouraged, but it needs the rigorously controlled research of science and the insights God himself provides. Those who are seriously interested in this field may learn a lot about how not to do it from this book.

PHILIP G. NEY

The Heidelberg Catechism

Guilt, Grace and Gratitude, edited by Donald J. Bruggink (The Half Moon Press, 1963, 226 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by James Daane, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

This book is a new commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, which had its 400th anniversary last year. The Reformed community owes its authors, all men of the Reformed Church in America, a debt of appreciation for commemorating this event in such a substantial way.

The Heidelberg Catechism was originally composed to heal the breach between Calvinists and Lutherans. Though it failed in this, it is the finest religious document to come out of the Reformation. For a very long time it was employed to instruct men in the essentials of the Christian faith and served as a basis for preaching from the pulpit. Although it bears marks of its historical origin, its use today as a basis and guide for preaching would bring considerable more substance to many a pulpit.

The title of this book is taken from the three divisions of the catechism. The first deals with man in sin; the second with man in grace; the third with the manner in which the sinner should show his gratitude for being saved by grace.

The approach of the Heidelberg Catechism is pedagogical and confessional. It presents the Christian man from within faith asking questions and giving answers about his sin and God’s grace.

Thus the first section shows that the knowledge of sin comes, not from experience or from reading the newspaper, but from divine revelation. The knowledge of sin no less than the knowledge of grace is given by God. The second section deals with the Apostles’ Creed and the sacraments and shows that salvation comes by God’s grace in Christ. The third section deals with the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. The last is said to be the “chief part of thankfulness,” and both are discussed from the viewpoint that gratitude for God’s gracious redemption in Christ is the motivation for all Christian living.

All the material of the catechism is treated by nine men; every treatment is new, fresh, and confessionally true. Howard Hageman’s general introduction is excellent, and Donald J. Bruggink’s treatment of the sacraments especially perceptive. At least one man’s treatment is more apologetic than expository.

This is an excellent little commentary. Some of the exposition is rightly and fruitfully critical. It touches on, rather than explores, the full rich dimensions, of the teaching of this catechism. Yet it gives as much as one could expect from a brief commentary; perhaps it will also trigger a more massive, contemporary commentary on this catechism which for all its age is still highly relevant for today.

Many a teacher or pulpiteer would become more relevant if he were less afraid of being regarded as a bit “old-fashioned.”

JAMES DAANE

A Special Language?

The Language of the Gospel, by Amos N. Wilder (Harper & Row, 1964, 143 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Samuel J. Mikolaski, professor of theology, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Professor Wilder’s book, sub-titled “Early Christian Rhetoric,” reflects his dual interest in poetry and the New Testament. In seven brief chapters (six of which were the 1962 Haskell Lectures at Oberlin College) he discusses the literary forms of the New Testament such as dialogue, poetry, parable, story. This is not an exercise in historical literary criticism but a discussion of certain affinities between the message and language literary forms.

A chief value of this book by the Emeritus Professor of New Testament Interpretation from Harvard is the presentation of a highly personal, mature interest in the relations between Christianity and its literary forms. For this readers will be grateful.

Crucial to his argument is the primacy of oral utterance to early Christians; yet much of the book concerns literary forms and habits. There is a certain unevenness of historical allusion and logical structure. To be sure, this need not indict the chapters as individual essays, but there is some difficulty in regarding them as a sustained argument.

A number of propositions seem hard to accept without more argument to support them. Do New Testament glossalalia mean simply increased power of language (p. 13)? Does primitive man call an obect into being by naming it, rather than seeing and naming it, and is this what the naming in Genesis means (p. 14)? The view that the literary modes of the New Testament throw light on its faith and sources of faith requires larger development. Need it be claimed that New Testament literary forms are novel to accommodate its message, any more than that the koiné is not Holy Ghost language as was once thought (pp. 18, 26, 50)? So far as it goes, the argument that forms of early Christian literature were determined by the life-orientation, world-view, and social patterns of those times is unconvincing. The suggestion that the personal dramatic (oral?) character of the Gospel necessarily involves confrontation, “not instruction in the ordinary sense” (p. 62), seems to imply that Christians were dramatized, mesmerized, or un-manned into the Kingdom—an idea clearly inconsistent with Professor Wilder’s considered theological judgment. Why is it that in the nature of the case the Gospel demands parabolic form (p. 79)?

But as an introduction to the position that for the Christian, gospel language is more fundamental than graphic representation, and that faith and hearing are more important than sight and touch, the book should whet the appetite of many for further inquiry. Correlation of the spoken and written forms of the word so far as the truth-functions of language for revelation are concerned awaits fuller development in our day.

SAMUEL J. MIKOLASKI

Keep Em Guessing

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, by C. S. Lewis (Geoffrey Bles, 1964, 159 pp., 12s. 6d.), is reviewed by J. D. Douglas, British editorial director, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

To inflict this book on a conventional type of reviewer is mental cruelty, for here is C. S. Lewis at his most maddening. Right away he draws the fangs of potential critics by employing the device (found also in The Screwtape Letters) of giving only one side of a correspondence. When he adds the occasional reminder that he is no theologian, Lewis has built the kind of platform most suitable for an individualist, and one from which can issue his best and his most exasperating talk.

In this present volume he is again both the despair of the rigidly orthodox and the scourge of liberalism. He twists the tail of the prudish by a casual remark about something profound a friend had made to him “in the pub at Coton.” He shows his low opinion of the New Morality by the merest side-glance at “the poor Bishop of Wool wich.” Novelty in worship is especially abhorrent to him, and he quotes approvingly the man who said, “I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks” (p. 13).

When the reviewer is made uncomfortable by catching a fleeting glimpse of his own face in the glass (and Lewis is an adept at that), he is tempted to conclude that the mirror is distorted, and to take refuge in the reassuring thought that Lewis of the unique pilgrimage is not always orthodox. And indeed he is not. He admits he prays for the dead (p. 138), and couples this with an engaging plea for something akin to purgatory. Nevertheless, the conservative who takes a long hard look at the final chapter will find a scathing attack on “liberal Christianity,” which, says the writer, “can only supply an ineffectual echo to the massive chorus of agreed and admitted unbelief.” Lewis asks if we have ever met, or heard of, anyone who was converted from skepticism to a “liberal” or “de-mythologized” Christianity. (Well, have we?) He had earlier stressed that fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom, and denied that he had ever encountered a single person “who fully disbelieved in Hell and also had a living and life-giving belief in Heaven.”

Letters to Malcolm cannot be skimmed over, or the reader is likely to miss thought-provoking, sermon-inspiring statements like this from page 83: “For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.” This book calls also for discernment in that Lewis curiously takes advantage here and there of his non-professional status theologically to get across views not always either systematic or logical. Yet one is never quite certain in such places that he is not writing with tongue in cheek, and we are left guessing to the end. Knowing Lewis, it seems likely he intended it that way.

J. D. DOUGLAS

How They Dig Up A City

Gibeon, Where the Sun Stood Still: The Discovery of the Biblical City, by John B. Pritchard (Princeton University, 1962, 176 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by Bastiaan Van Elderen, associate professor of New Testament, Calvin Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

One of the major problems in any science—a problem that is too often ignored out of sheer frustration—is the presentation of the scientist’s endeavor in a way that is comprehensible to the layman. Attempts to do this generally fail either because the scientist finds his material too technical for anyone but a person educated in his field or, more simply, because he can’t write.

This problem is no doubt complicated in archaeology because of the aura of the mysterious and romantic in which this science is shrouded; the general public conceives of archaeology as a consistent series of exciting finds and is often disappointed to discover that much of it is meticulous, painstaking (and even dull), hard work.

Professor Pritchard, who possesses an excellent gift of communicating, has proved in this book that, although archaeology is not particularly glamorous, it is significant. He does not gloss over the scientific detail of the excavation at Gibeon but employs a narrative style so effectively that one is inclined to read the entire book at one sitting.

The book synthesizes the results of four seasons of excavation at el-Jib, the site of Gibeon, a city that is referred to some forty-five times in the Old Testament and is possibly most noted for the ingenious strategem by which its citizens thwarted the unsuspecting Joshua in his conquest of Canaan (Josh. 9). Pritchard begins by describing in some detail the process of excavating and the identification of el-Jib with Gibeon. In the second chapter he examines the biblical references to Gibeon. In four succeeding chapters he reports the results of the four seasons of excavation—specifically the water system, the winery, the general indication of everyday life as revealed in house and wall structures, and the necropolis. The final chapter presents a history of the city drawing upon literary and archaeological sources.

As a book “written for the general reader who is concerned with the contribution that archaeology has made to the biblical history of the site” and “offered to the archaeologist and biblical historian with the hope that it may be of service to them” (preface, p. viii), Gibeon succeeds admirably. It is to be hoped that this success will inspire other archaeologists to do the same sort of thing. However, it is not only in its obvious, immediate relevance to the excavation at Gibeon that the book has value. As a description of archaeological procedures and the disappointments and rewards of an excavation, it can serve as a technical introduction to the subject for the layman, as well as providing valuable comparisons of methodology for the advanced student or archaeologist.

In a review of Pritchard’s The Ancient Near East in Text and Pictures in the Saturday Review, Nelson Glueck said that working through that two-volume set was “the next best thing to going on a fascinating archaeological expedition.” Perhaps that credit belongs even more to Gibeon.

BASTIAAN VAN ELDEREN

Timely Subject

The Second Coming, compiled by H. Leo Eddleman (Broadman, 1963, 112 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by Glenn W. Barker, chairman. Biblical Division, Gordon Divinity School, Wenham, Massachusetts.

Nine popular messages on the coming of Christ are contained in this interesting little book. Seven of the authors are recognized leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention, three being past presidents. The other two contributions come from the editor and the executive editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Although the men are premillenarian, this is not the concern of their presentation. They desire rather to express, over against an eroded view of liberalism, what the promise of Christ’s return means in terms of a view of the world, history, the Church, and the everyday behavior of the believer. Naturally not every effort in the book is equally helpful in this regard. Some of the authors, despite their desire, end in the periphery of the discussion. Whereas there is a wholesome dependence on the Word of God to support the visible and personal return of Christ, there is less success in determining from the Scriptures the precise significance of the event.

It should be remembered, however, that most of the men are not professional scholars but ministers to the Church. If defects are thought to appear in their presentations, the faults may be due not so much to the contributors, themselves as to the failure of evangelical scholars to provide a comprehensive biblical approach to this subject. The least that these men have accomplished is to remind the evangelical church that Christ’s return is a primary tenet of the Christian faith and informs the whole of Christian truth.

The timeliness of the subject matter, the obvious rhetorical skill of many of its proclaimers, and the need by those in the pulpit for a sane biblical approach to the topic will give this publication significant circulation among the preachers of the land.

GLENN W. BARKER

Book Briefs

Mission in the Making, by F. Dean Lueking (Concordia, 1964, 354 pp., $7.50). The missionary enterprise among Missouri Synod Lutherans, 1946–1963.

Mandate to Witness: Studies in the Book of Acts, by Leander E. Keck (Judson, 1964, 173 pp., $3.75). Prepared for study groups by an author who feels that our century, like the first, is one in which the task of witness must be carried on in a non-Christian milieu.

The Analyzed Bible, by G. Campbell Morgan (Revell, 1964, 600 pp., $8.95). Not really a Bible at all but an excellent book-by-book analysis and condensation.

Theological Investigations, Vol. II: Man in the Church, by Karl Rahner (Helicon, 1963, 363 pp„ $7.50). One of the most competent Roman Catholic theologians deals with questions concerning “man in the Church,” and raises questions about the Christian who is not a member of the Roman Catholic Church. For the professional theological student.

Black, White and Gray: 21 Points of View on the Race Question, edited by Bradford Daniel (Sheed & Ward, 1964, 308 pp., $5.95). Including those of Governor Wallace, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harry Golden, Roy Wilkins.

The Christian in the Material World, by Giovanni Battista Cardinal Montini, now Pope Paul VI (Helicon, 1964, 72 pp., $1.95).

The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Christian Apocalypses from Daniel to the Revelation, by H. H. Rowley (Association, 1964, 240 pp., $5.95). Revised; first published in 1944.

The Twilight of Evolution, by Henry M. Morris (Baker, 1963, 103 pp., $2.95). The author contends that evolution is declining in status with men who hold biblical presuppositions.

Personality and Sexual Problems in Pastoral Psychology, edited by William C. Bier, S. J. (Fordham University Press, 1964, 256 pp., $5). Proceedings of the Institute of Pastoral Psychology held in 1955 and 1957 at Fordham University. An aid for pastors.

Preaching Values from the Papyri, by Herschel H. Hobbs (Baker, 1964, 123 pp., $2.95). Forty chapters discuss forty New Testament Greek words found in the papyri for the purpose of throwing light on their New Testament usage and meaning.

Persons Can Change, by F. Gerald Ensley (Abingdon, 1963, 128 pp., $1). The author in the name of Christianity counters the old claim: people don’t change.

Modern Religious Poems, edited by Jacob Trapp (Harper & Row, 1964, 304 pp., $4.95). Some of the best religious poetry of the twentieth century.

Paperbacks

New Theology No. 1: Its Vitality and Variety Demonstrated in Fifteen Recent Articles, edited by Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman (Macmillan, 1964, 256 pp., $1.95). Various articles gathered from various publications; from the pens of Protestants, one Roman Catholic, and one Jew. A good sampler of what is being said across the theological board.

Missionary Principles, by Roland Allen (Eerdmans, 1964, 168 pp., $1.45).A very sound discussion of very basic missionary principles.

Baptists—North and South, by Samuel S. Hill, Jr., and Robert G. Torbet (Judson, 1964, 143 pp., $2). A Southern Baptist and an American (Northern) Baptist discuss their differences.

The Revelation of St. John, by Abraham Kuyper (Eerdmans, 1964, 360 pp., $2.25).A significant, highly devotional commentary on the last book of the Bible and the last literary production of a competent Christian scholar.

Death of a Myth, by Kyle Haselden (Friendship Press, 1964, 175 pp., $1.75). Author seeks to destroy the myth that Spanish-American people are compatible with Roman Catholic but not Protestant Christianity.

Infant Baptism and Adult Conversion, by O. Hallesby (Augsburg, 1964, 109 pp., $2).A popular but scholarly Lutheran defense of infant baptism.

Ecumenism and the Bible, by David Hedegard (Banner of Truth Trust [London], 1964, 240, 4s. 6d.). A critical evaluation of the ecumenical movement by a conservative. First printed in 1955.

Paul and His Interpreters: A Critical History, by Albert Schweitzer (Schocken Books, 1964, 255 pp., $1.95). First published in 1912.

The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus’ Messiahship and Passion, by Albert Schweitzer (Schocken Books, 1964, 275 pp., $1.95). First published in 1914.

Why Love Asks You to Wait, by Irene Soehrcn (Concordia, 1964, 24 pp., $.25). An excellent discussion of premarital sex addressed to young people.

The Origins of Sectarian Protestantism: A Study of the Anabaptist View of the Church, by Franklin H. Littell (Macmillan, 1964, 231 pp., $1.45). First printed in 1952 under the title, The Anabaptist View of the Church.

Church and World Encounter, by Lee J. Gable (United Church Press, 1964, 111 pp. $1.60). A study of the evangelical academies that arose in response to the post-war German situation, which reflect light on the German churches and echo a warning for the future of American churches.

Theology

Current Religious Thought: July 31, 1964

G. C. Berkouwer

Biblical criticism is a phenomenon that characterizes our century. The Church has been preoccupied with the problems posed by it for more than a hundred years, and there is no sign that we will be free of it in our lifetimes. One response to biblical criticism has been to try to prove that in this case and that case the Bible was right after all, that archaeological discoveries have established the historical accuracy of the Scriptures. But this apologetic response to biblical criticism has not set restless hearts at peace.

In Protestant as in Catholic circles, however, scholarly energy has not been spent merely in rear-action apologetics; biblical students have been earnestly trying to get into the purpose and the nature of Scripture’s authority. In times like these, times that I insist are not without hopeful perspective for the Church, we must not be tempted to be simplistic in our answer to biblical criticism; we will do well to avoid the notion that it is possible to confine dangers to scriptural authority to a single group.

We ought, of course, to be against all hard-headed vivisection of the Bible. But we ought also to be aware that forms of biblical criticism pop up in unexpected places. There is, in fact, a kind of biblical criticism that rears its head among those who confess that the Bible is the infallible Word of God. Herman Bavinck had a sharp eye for this kind of criticism. He talked about the hostility for the Word that rests in the heart and that can come alive in many forms. And to this he adds these remarkable words: “Hostility to the Scriptures does not appear only, nor even in its most treacherous form, in the scientific criticism to which the Scriptures are subject in our day. The Bible as the Word of God meets resistance and unbelief in every natural man. The days of dead orthodoxy manifested a basic unbelief in the Scriptures that was as powerful as that expressed in the historical and critical approach of our unbelieving century.”

There are striking sentences for us, since we hardly think of biblical criticism in connection with dead orthodoxy. We associate criticism with such men as Wellhausen and others who deny the divine authority of the Scriptures. But Bavinck is warning us against the sort of criticism that is really a form of “unbelief in the Bible” and that lives among those who are unconscious of it. The worst critics may be those who would rebel against being identified with Wellhausen or Bultmann. Dead orthodoxy and biblical criticism—strange but possible bedfellows!

This means that we are not clear of danger with a confession about the divine inspiration of the Bible. Confess this as we may, we may also be perilously involved in the worst kind of criticism of the Bible, and in fact not be subjecting ourselves to the authority of the Scriptures at all. Consider the Pharisees. They had enormous respect for the law of God. Consider Israel, who “pursued the righteousness which is based on law” (Rom. 9:31) but never succeeded in fulfilling it. There may be zeal for divine authority that ends with Paul in persecuting the Church (Phil. 3:6). No one gets clear of danger by accepting a formal definition of the Scriptures as the Word of God.

There is a simple and profound reason for this. The Scriptures are never a formal matter. When we deal with the Bible, we can approach it only in terms of its authoritative content. The Pharisees accepted and defended the law as of God—in contrast to the multitudes who did not know the law—but they ended by taking away the key to the knowledge of the law (Luke 11:52). Their respect for the divine inspiration of the law did not spare them the worst kind of apostasy. This is the danger to which Bavinck was alerting us.

Bavinck believed that criticism of the Scripture occurs among many who are ready to contend for the formal authority of the Bible. This is often a covert criticism, but a treacherous one for all that. Bavinck did not take lightly the dangers to faith in the biblical criticism of such as Wellhausen. But he did recognize the treachery of a criticism practiced by those who would not come near the more familiar and open higher criticism. Paul said of Israel, who believed in the divine authority of the “writings,” that they were unwilling to subject themselves to the righteousness of God. In the same manner, those who today protest most loudly their adherence to the divinity of every letter of the Bible also run the danger of a camouflaged criticism of the Bible. We must be extra careful that we do not make a formal cliché out of our confession regarding the authority of the Scriptures. There are many forms of Christian faith expressed among people who are mortal enemies of biblical criticism, forms which are in fact only weird caricatures of biblical faith.

We can say something meaningful to the biblical critics of our time only as we subject ourselves to the message of Scripture. And this is no kindergarten task. The terrible divisions of the Church testify to the challenge of genuine subjection to the one message of the Gospel. Each division appeals to the divine authority of the Bible for its claim to authenticity.

Bavinck is right when he tells us not to make too quick a distinction between those who do and those who do not subject themselves to Scripture’s authority. For real subjection to Scripture must become manifest and clear in what we do with its message. We are not finished with criticism when we have said a No to higher criticism. We shall often have to say No to ourselves. We shall often have to say No to our own insidious and tendentious criticism of the Bible.

- More from G. C. Berkouwer

Engineering Peace in Prague

J. D. Douglas

Despite the counter-attraction of a parade featuring 100,000 Young Pioneers, many Prague citizens chose one Sunday last month to go to that same Bethlehem Chapel where Bohemian reformer Jan Hus preached five and a half centuries ago. There they joined visitors from more than sixty lands in a service to inaugurate the Second All-Christian Peace Assembly. Officiating were Dr. J. L. Hromadka, dean of the Comenius Theological Faculty; Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad; and the veteran German pastor Martin Niemöller. Rays of sunlight streamed through the tall Gothic windows as ancient Slavonic chants, delivered in the rich bass voices of Orthodox bishops and archpriests, alternated with Protestant hymns sung in different tongues. The gay turbans of Mohammedan mullahs and the saffron robe and shaven head of a solitary Buddhist monk from Nepal stood out even in that congregation of varied and colorful ecclesiastical attire.

Later, at its first meeting in Prague’s Municipal House, the assembly heard the keynote address from its president, Dr. Hromadka, who the previous week in Geneva had led a delegation to discuss with World Council of Churches leaders the relation between the two bodies, and matters of common concern. In four languages above the platform were blazoned words from Malachi 2:5 that formed the assembly theme: “My Covenant Is Life and Peace.” In discussing the Church’s responsibility in the world, the ex-Princeton Theological Seminary professor attributed the turmoil in Southeast Asia to “the fifteen-year-old unsettled problem of People’s China, her unity, and her participation in international bodies, notably in the United Nations.” Referring to events in the Portuguese colonies and the South African situation, the 75-year-old churchman stressed that these involved Christians who were “trampling on human dignity, freedom and civil rights.” He called for a campaign “to bring it about that countries abandon the use of force and violence in settling their differences; that atom-free zones be established; and that all nuclear tests, including underground tests, be suspended.”

Dr. Hromadka had received a personal letter of greetings from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both Premier Khrushchev and President Novotny of Czechoslovakia responded warmly when the assembly sent greetings to various leaders, including Prime Minister Douglas-Home, who also replied, and President Johnson, who did not.

The first list issued of those attending made no distinction of category but lumped together delegates, observers, guests, and journalists, according to country, as “participants.” Having provoked some indignant complaints, this was eventually superseded by four separate lists. These showed some 265 delegates from Communist Europe and the U. S. S. R., 270 from other European countries (71 of them from the United Kingdom), and a further 176 from thirty non-European countries (including 65 from the United States). There were also 73 observers, 74 guests, and 52 journalists (CHRISTIANITY TODAY was the only U. S. or U. K. journal listed).

Western delegates included a large proportion of young people of both sexes (the average age of the British contingent was about thirty), but those from Communist countries, possibly excepting East Germany, were of a much older generation and were mostly ecclesiastics. It was impossible to ascertain which churches were represented officially, for some delegates had come on their own initiative. Those who were not delegates were put in an invidious position when told that, contrary to prior correspondence, they were the guests of the local committee but could contribute the equivalent of their hotel bills to the Christian Peace Conference.

Right from the start the dice were loaded against the non-German-speaking press, for simultaneous translation equipment was not made available to journalists. Strenuous protests were met with vague allusions to “technical difficulties” involved in extending for a further six feet wiring that already covered several hundred feet. This left many dependent on the official translation of major speeches and such documents as were made available in other languages, and on the inadequate English, if somewhat better French, of an amateur interpreter.

Paradoxically, further frustration was averted because the assembly did not permit free discussion in the plenary sessions, except for the closing stages. Challenged by CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S correspondent on the absence of such discussion, an official at first stressed its impracticability in a 700-strong gathering, but under attack quickly abandoned this position for different ground: “The Eastern Europeans do not conduct meetings according to Western democratic procedures.”

One-fifth of the assembly was German, and it was soon evident that visitors from the two states and from West Berlin had come to Prague with predetermined views on the vexed question of their divided fatherland. “This, naturally,” commented the following day’s news release rather naïvely, “endows the Christian Peace Assembly with an unexpectedly political flavour.”

An hour’s Bible study opened each day’s proceedings. Major conference addresses were given by delegates from the Malagasy Republic, Uruguay, Japan, the U. S. S. R., and the United States (Professor Harvey Cox of Andover-Newton Theological School). In addition to these, special interest attached to a speech by Professor Yoshio Inoue of Tokyo, who had maintained close contact with Chinese colleagues and was regarded in some measure as reflecting their views. The Chinese Protestants had declined to send delegates because (it was said) they felt that the gathering was “pro-Soviet.” Asking the assembly for “understanding and sympathy” for the policy of the Peking government, Professor Inoue warned against “absolutizing the policy of the Pax Russo-Americana as the Christian policy.” Agreement between Russia and America did not remove the danger to peace in Asia. “The formula may be the beginning of a solution of problems in Europe and elsewhere,” he continued, “but it is insufficient in Asia, where the American government keeps the Seventh Fleet in the straits between the Chinese mainland and Formosa, and where the unpopular Chiang government is being maintained by force.” At a later session when voting was called for on what was broadly a Communism-versus-the-West issue, he supported the former position.

During the closing stages, delegates were asked to approve a “Message to Churches and Christians” drawn up by a small working committee with scarcely a scrap of decent English among the lot of them. (The British member of the committee denied authorship of the English version but helped construct a readable amendment.) Sparks flew over the political implications of a sentence that read: “Too often Christian preaching is not yet free from overtones of the Cold War, of anti-Communist crusades, and of slogans of political propaganda.” Many Western delegates objected strongly and suggested that if “anti-Communist” went in, then “anti-Western” should go in, too. “The integrity of this whole conference is at stake on the vote we take on this particular proposal,” said one speaker, drawing loud applause.

A proposed alternative substituted for the offensive phrase “hatred against the political systems of other countries,” but speakers from the Eastern bloc did not like this. “We hear preaching from San Francisco which is political and not Christian,” shouted Archbishop Kiprian of Moscow; “when I preached in a Western city people came to me and told me I was preaching from the Gospel; in their churches they heard only political preaching.… Anti-Communism in their preaching is a reality, anti-Westernism in ours is a fantasy.”

The Rev. Harold Row of the United States, a minister of the Church of the Brethren, scoffed at the notion of the East’s total innocence and the West’s total culpability. A vote taken on the amendment made things worse, for though the Eastern bloc had evidently carried the day, the counting of hands was done in the most slapdash fashion, and the announced result of 388 to 110 was wildly inaccurate. When this was pointed out with admirable restraint by the British delegation, it elicited some bad-tempered remarks from Secretary-General J. N. Ondra, who took it as a personal insult that his staff’s arithmetic should be questioned. A sticky scene was avoided by the intervention of Archbishop Nikodim, who confounded the gathering by suggesting that perhaps “anti-Communist crusades” should be dropped from the proposed wording after all. The bearded Russian was rewarded by a most un-British kiss on both cheeks from Paul Oestreicher, religious broadcasting director of the BBC.

The assembly issued also an “Appeal to the Governments, Parliaments, and Authoritative Personalities of the World.” This condemned apartheid, urged that the U. N. prohibition on weapons to South Africa be respected, and supported the appeal for an economic blockade against that country, “where the ruling classes affront humanity, and thus bring about a serious threat to peace.” The appeal called also for a peace treaty involving East and West Germany, and peaceful settlement of the Chinese-Indian, American-Cuban, and Southeast Asian disputes. It deplored colonialism in such places as Angola and Mozambique, and suggested that economies in armament expenditure could represent a decisive contribution to the elimination of hunger. Communists spoiling for a fight would assuredly not find provocation in these findings.

There were times during the six-day proceedings when one felt the addresses were merely a background accompaniment to the blinding and utterly disruptive work of ubiquitous photographers. In the control of the sessions, little things were noticeable: long speeches, observations and warnings from the chair, time-consuming explanations on what might legitimately be discussed, frequent interventions by committee members, angry little asides from official sources, and a testy chairman who in the closing stages twice condemned applause for speeches by Western delegates, then betrayed himself by his own feverish handclapping after an Eastern contribution.

It was apparent that people came to the conference with vastly different motives. Many were genuinely and exclusively concerned with peace, some of them for non-Christian reasons. One of the dangers of an assembly like this, however, is that it provides a rallying point for malcontents of various sorts.

One sensed behind the movement a group of men, dedicated and united on essentials, who did the real work and fostered the recurring implication just behind the surface that while Communist preaching against democracy was a wholly laudable pursuit, Western preaching against Communism was a misuse of Christianity.

Miscellany

An Episcopal rector and a Roman Catholic priest jointly conducted a marriage ceremony in a Catholic church near St. Louis last month. The Protestant Episcopal Book of Common Prayer was used in the service, but the bride, an Episcopalian, was required to promise that she would bring up her children in the Catholic faith. The groom is a Roman Catholic.

Spain’s Roman Catholic archbishops, while agreeing “in principle” to the provisions of a draft law that would provide more freedom for the Protestant minority, advised the government that they endorse such liberty “to the extent appropriate for a Catholic country.” It was understood that sponsors of the measure will attempt to secure further concessions from the hierarchy before it is submitted to the legislature.

Deaths

CANON CHARLES EARLE RAVEN, 79, chaplain to Queen Elizabeth; in Cambridge, England.

DR. J. H. BAVINCK, 68, professor of missions at the Free University of Amsterdam; in Amsterdam.

DR. THOMAS HANSEN, 67, former president of the Florida Baptist Convention; in Gainesville, Florida.

Current church-union negotiations throughout tire world number 38 and involve 102 churches in 30 countries on 5 continents, according to a World Council of Churches survey.

A commercial syndicate is purchasing the late Percy Crawford’s UHF television station in Philadelphia for $219,000.

A famous cathedral in Carthage and about 120 other Roman Catholic churches are being turned over to the government under an agreement between the Vatican and the Tunisian Islamic republic. They are to be converted into museums or other public institutions, according to Religious News Service.

A self-governing conference is being created among the Methodist churches of the West Indies and Central America.

Personalia

Dr. Robert L. Stamper named president of The Biblical Seminary in New York.

The Rt. Rev. Ralph S. Dean appointed executive officer of the worldwide Anglican communion.

The Rev. Vaughn Fults elected moderator of the General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower named to receive the second annual “Family of Man Award” given by the Protestant Council of the City of New York.

The Rev. Joseph N. Petersen elected president of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod.

They Say

“No more painful evidence of near-apostasy in the Church exists than the fact that councils and synods can become mightily agitated over the fruits of religion but not over the Gospel itself.”—The Presbyterian Journal.

“The defense of the rights of the child—its right to be born or its right to be—is a major battle in a civilization acquiring the contraceptive mentality.”—Roman Catholic Bishop John J. Wright.

- More from J. D. Douglas

The Recession in Church Construction

Glenn D. Everett

After reaching a peak of more than one billion dollars a year for three consecutive years, the amount spent on the construction of new church buildings declined to an estimated $975,000,000 in 1963 and is going to drop another 8 to 10 per cent in 1964, according to the U. S. Department of Commerce.

Department of Commerce experts say they underestimated the 1964 decline, and a mid-year revised forecast due about the end of July will predict a level of not more than $920,000,000. Some forecasters feel it may drop as low as $900,000,000, which would be the lowest figure since 1958.

The latest report on building permits indicates that the number of religious buildings erected this year will be less than 5,000 for the first time in five years.

Why has this decline occurred after church construction held remarkably level at $1,013,000,000 in 1960, $1,003,000,000 in 1961, and the record figure of $1,035,000,000 in 1962?

The first and main reason is that churches are not gaining new members to the extent that they did during the post-war religious boom and thus are not under the same pressure to expand plants and establish new “daughter” congregations.

Second, the urgent needs for new church construction that built up during the depression years of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s have largely been fulfilled. Mid-city churches that felt under strong pressure to relocate or to replace old and inadequate sanctuaries have completed their building programs. Suburban churches and onetime rural parishes that underwent phenomenal growth have also succeeded in meeting their immediate needs.

A third factor is that the great population movement to the suburbs which characterized the post-war era has now slowed down. Building developers during the last two years have moved away from large, sprawling, single-family suburban developments to urban redevelopment and the erection of high-rise apartments on the city fringes.

When hundreds of homes are built in a new suburban development, a new community is created that requires schools, churches, and other facilities. But when a high-rise apartment development of several hundred units rises on a site near mid-city or in an old established suburb on the city’s edge, it is near already existing churches. Clergymen may find more worshipers in the pews as a result of the new housing development, but church administrators do not have to rush to build a whole new church to accommodate the newcomers as they do when new outlying suburbs suddenly mushroom.

A final factor that may account for 1 or 2 per cent of the decline is the use of lower-cost construction materials in place of the traditional stone and brick. The vast expanses of glass and open metal framework that characterize some new churches may not always please the traditionalists, but this type of building costs significantly less than the classical Gothic structure. (It is likely, however, that building committees use up most of the savings to erect larger buildings.)

One factor that can be ruled out, according to construction experts, is any lack of money in the mortgage market. Banks and loan companies found churches an unusually good risk in the post-war years. With plenty of money available on the lending market, congregations in most areas now have little difficulty in floating a loan when they want to build. At the present time, however, church groups are not rushing to apply.

The decline in church building is in marked contrast to construction activity in all other fields. While church construction was declining 8 per cent during the first five months of 1964 as compared with the same period of 1963, construction activity in general had increased by a record of 11 per cent. Construction of new housing units by private builders was up 12 per cent from 1963. School construction has been going forward, with a 9 per cent gain on the public level and a 4 per cent increase in private and parochial schools. Building of hospitals and institutions for the care of the elderly also is moving ahead, with a 20 per cent gain for public and 45 per cent increase for private institutions. Private social and recreational construction, which includes everything from YMCA’s to bowling alleys, shows a gain of approximately 12 per cent so far this year.

Church construction alone is dropping. No other field of construction measured by the monthly Census Bureau reports shows a decline in 1964.

The Big Shift

The Methodist Church took long strides in recent weeks toward racial integration of its government. All six of its jurisdictions recorded progress at their quadrennial meetings toward the voluntary restructure sought by the Methodist General Conference, supreme legislative body of the church. The Central Jurisdiction, which has embraced all Negro annual conferences, adopted a series of measures designed to spell its own abolition.

Meanwhile, the big shift of Negro conferences and churches to regional, integrated jurisdictions was already under way. The Washington and Delaware Conferences were the first to be transferred. They will join the Northeastern Jurisdiction, which also invited and received the transfer of Bishop Prince A. Taylor of Baltimore. Taylor thus becomes the first Negro Methodist bishop assigned to supervision over a region with predominantly white churches.

Eleven new bishops were elected by the jurisdictional conferences: W. Kenneth Goodson, Edward Pendergrass, H. Ellis Finger, Earl Hunt, W. McFerrin Stowe. R. Marvin Stewart, Dwight E. Loder, Thomas M. Pryor, Francis Kearns, Lance Webb, and James S. Thomas.

Lutherans And The Bible

The problems which plague and beset the Lutheran Church in general are manifold and there is a need for conservative Lutherans of all synods to study and discuss their common problems in … open forums.

So says a committee of the new and unofficial “Lutheran Free Conference,” which drew some 290 pastors, teachers, and laymen to Waterloo, Iowa, last month for three days of sessions centering on an eight-essay series, “The Bible Today.” The conference was convened by a group who are concerned about the “growth of liberalism in the Lutheran Church.” The assortment of participants included individuals from the Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, the American Lutheran Church, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, and other smaller synods. A second such conference will be held in 1965.

Something Religious

Religious Heritage of America, which promotes annual pilgrimages to Washington in the interests of “holding before the nation an awareness of the place and importance of religion in a democracy,” still is a somewhat obscure group after fourteen years of tour sponsorship. But its 1964 Pilgrimage Awards Dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel drew some 820 Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews and included a substantial portion of out-of-towners as well as local guests. The encouraging word for this year’s pilgrims was that President Johnson’s idea of a “memorial to God” in Washington could be interpreted as stimulus for a pet project.

Religious Heritage of America has for a number of years been promoting establishment in the nation’s capital of what it now calls a “Religious Freedom Center.” Johnson never has spelled out his own idea of a memorial, but the pilgrims apparently are satisfied that the two conceptions coincide—or at least that they are amalgamable.

Dr. Joseph R. Sizoo, noted religious scholar who is first vice-president of the group, said that Johnson “has been advised of our program to build a Religious Freedom Center in the Nation’s Capital and I am confident that he is pleased that we are following through on his suggestion for such a project.”

Originally, Johnson had suggested that International Christian Leadership spearhead a drive, but ICL is not enthusiastic about promoting real estate.

The plans for the “Religious Freedom Center” envisioned by Religious Heritage of America are tucked away in a filing cabinet. No public release date has been announced.

Pilgrimage awards this year went to Professor Edward W. Bauman of Wesley Theological Seminary, Mrs. Jo-Ann Price Baehr of the New York Herald Tribune, and Dr. Marion M. Preminger, who has been associated with the work of Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale was named Clergyman of the Year, James C. Penney was chosen Lay Churchman of the Year, and Mrs. Dale Evans Rogers was elected Churchwoman of the Year.

Evaluating Shared Time

More than 60 per cent of 183 public school superintendents polled in a National Education Association study said that on the basis of their experience with shared-time programs of instruction, they would recommend the practice to other school systems.

The NEA study report, believed to be the first nationwide survey in the field, did not attempt to reach any conclusion or recommendations as it highlighted the problems, advantages, and disadvantages of shared time (also called dual school enrollment).

The study was confined to arrangements in which non-public schools send their pupils to public schools for instruction in one or more subjects during a regular school day. All schools involved had enrollments of 300 or more.

The report is based on information drawn from questionnaires sent to school superintendents who had responded to an earlier NEA poll of school systems. The replies did not cover all shared-time arrangements in the country nor even a representative sampling of them, but they did produce some insights, spokesmen said.

Industrial arts, vocational education, and home economics were the subjects most frequently provided by the public schools. Others, in the order of frequency, included instrumental music, physical education, physics, chemistry, driver training, advanced mathematics, foreign languages, general science, and business and clerical subjects.

The question was asked: “In the light of your experience, would you advise other school districts to provide a program of shared time?” Sixty-three per cent of the superintendents answered yes, nine per cent said no, and the remainder either did not answer or gave qualified replies.

Government And Glossolalia

The Lutheran Medical Center of Brooklyn, New York, says it has been awarded a research grant by the U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare for a psychological and linguistic study of glossolalia.

It was reported that the study will be carried out by a professional team made up of a psychiatrist and a clinical psychologist, who are also seminary graduates and ordained ministers, and a linguist, Dr. Eugene A. Nida, secretary for translations of the American Bible Society.

Dr. John P. Kildahl, the psychologist, and Dr. Paul Qualben, the psychiatrist, will travel to San Pedro, California, and Glendive, Montana, where they will follow up an initial study conducted last year. Members of church congregations in these two cities who practice glossolalia will be given a battery of psychological tests. In addition, a control group made up of members of the same congregations who do not speak in tongues will be tested. One aim of the study is to determine differences in personality, if any, between the two groups tested.

In Minneapolis, meanwhile, the American Lutheran Church announced that it will terminate the services of one of its staff evangelists who says that two and a half years ago he received “the gift of the fullness of the Holy Spirit” which enables him to speak in tongues. The minister, the Rev. A. Herbert Mjorud, will be retained as a clergyman and will be eligible for a call to a congregation.

Guests For The Vatican

Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, preacher on the international “Lutheran Hour” radio program, says he has accepted an invitation to be a guest at the third session of the Vatican Council this fall. The invitation was extended by the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity.

Hoffmann, former public relations director for the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, will not be an official delegate-observer of his denomination.

Announcement of the invitation was made by Dr. Oliver R. Harms, president of the Missouri Synod, at the forty-seventh convention of the Lutheran Laymen’s League in Lincoln, Nebraska. It also was announced that the Rev. Norman L. Temme, who succeeded Hoffmann as the synod’s public relations director, will be at the Vatican Council session as an accredited press representative.

No Longer Among Them

After deliberating for two hours behind dosed doors earlier this month, the British Methodist Conference expelled one of its ministers. In a prepared statement on behalf of the assembly, Dr. Frederic Greeves, its president, said: “The conference resolved that in view of his refusal in two successive years to give the doctrinal assurances required annually of every Methodist minister and his declared intention to continue his refusal, the Rev. Walter Gill be no longer a minister among us.”

Mr. Gill, 49, married and the father of two children, earned $1680 in England’s industrial northeast as minister in West Hartlepool. After twenty-four years in the ministry, he is now required to leave his manse by the end of next month. Before the conference met he talked about his allegedly heretical views, chiefly his description of the Virgin Birth as “just a piece of mythology,” worthless as history.

He pointed out that this was the issue involved also in the last trial for heresy, when the accused man was Dr. Donald Soper. Another famous Methodist, Dr. Leslie R. Weatherhead, had been arraigned as a heretic because of his disbelief in eternal punishment. Both these men were acquitted: both became presidents of the conference.

“I am an ordinary Methodist minister,” said Mr. Gill, “operating in what might be called perhaps the backwoods of Methodism.” He plans now to get a job teaching religion in high school.

J. D. DOUGLAS

- More from Glenn D. Everett

Give Today

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Sin Is All One

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A Binding Responsibility

Reasons For Unconcern

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Founded On Conviction

Danger In The Grades Rush

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A ‘Cosmic Cheshire Cat’

For Student Self-Feeding

To An Organist

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Some Who Believed

The Maze In Perspective

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Toward A Systematic Atheism

The Moral Cripples

Christians And The Komsomol

Expelled For ‘No Offense’

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Modern Theologies: As Seen From The Gospel

St. Augustine And Apartheid

Different Eyes: Same Vision

Step Right Up, Folks …

The Heidelberg Catechism

A Special Language?

Keep Em Guessing

How They Dig Up A City

Timely Subject

Book Briefs

Paperbacks

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Miscellany

Deaths

Personalia

They Say

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The Big Shift

Lutherans And The Bible

Something Religious

Evaluating Shared Time

Government And Glossolalia

Guests For The Vatican

No Longer Among Them

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