A Blessing on Baccalaureates

The U. S. Supreme Court issued a significant new ruling this month on the role of religion in public schools. In effect, the court’s action gave a new lease on life to baccalaureate services. But more than that it seemed to serve notice that the court is not intent upon wholesale removal of religion from public life.

The constitutionality of public school sponsorship of baccalaureate services has been seriously questioned since the court’s 1963 ruling against prayer and Bible reading in the classroom. The new ruling, however, shows that school boards that canceled baccalaureate services acted hastily and without warrant.

Veteran observers in Washington interpret the court’s latest order as indicating that it does not intend to pursue enforcement of a stricter line of separation of church and state.

“Constitutional lawyers will get the message loud and clear,” one source predicted. They will readily see, he added, that the court is not about to consider an end to the chaplaincy or even to the removal of the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.

The new ruling came in response to an appeal of a Florida Supreme Court decision that upheld Bible reading and prayer in public schools as well as baccalaureate services, a religious census of pupils, and a religious test for teachers. The U. S. Supreme Court reversed the state court’s ruling on Bible reading and prayer, as expected, but dismissed the appeal on the other matters “for want of properly presented federal questions.”

It was felt especially significant that comments on the order were written by Justice William O. Douglas, in view of the fact that Douglas is known to hold the most extreme view of church-state separation of any member of the court.

His comments, specifically endorsed by Justice Hugo L. Black, asserted that baccalaureate services and the religious census “do not present substantial federal questions, and so I concur in the dismissal of the appeal as to them.”

Douglas said he did feel the religious test for teachers ought to be argued as a substantial question. The “test” consists of the fact that in Florida applicants for teaching positions are required to answer the question, “Do you believe in God?” Religious attitudes are also considered in making promotions.

Justice Potter Stewart, the lone dissenter in the earlier Bible-reading and prayer decisions, “would note probable jurisdiction” of the Florida appeal as a whole “and set it down for argument on the merits.”

Though many observers see this month’s order as a clarification of the court’s intent, others feel that not all anxieties have necessarily been put to rest. These others believe that a test case posed by litigants who persuasively pose a “hardship” brought on by religious exercises might win a hearing from the court.

The Florida case, decided June 1, was taken to the nation’s highest court by four Dade County (Miami), Florida, parents—two Jewish, a Unitarian, and an agnostic.

Their failure to win a reversal from the U. S. Supreme Court on religious exercises in public schools—excepting classroom devotions—may spell a move to reinstate baccalaureate services in localities where the practice has been dropped. It means an opportunity for clergymen and church laymen to prod their school boards to introduce the religious element at appropriate points in the curriculum. There is a widespread feeling that many school officials have misused previous court decisions as an excuse to eliminate religious facets against which they were prejudiced anyway.

Compromise In Congress?

The House Judiciary Committee wound up hearings this month on proposals to override the Supreme Court’s ban on prayer and Bible reading in public schools. More than 150 persons testified before the committee during the hearings, which extended from April 22 until June 3. Informed opinion in Washington was that something less than a Constitutional change such as proposed by Republican Representative Frank J. Becker of New York was in the offing. Sentiment seemed to be growing instead for a congregational declaration on the role of religion in public schools, a declaration that would merely reflect the viewpoint of the lawmakers and encourage religious practices other than daily prayers and devotional Scripture readings in the public schools. A declaration of this nature indicating “the sense of Congress” would not have the force of law.

Pentecostal Landmark

Some 10,000 persons traveled to Springfield, Missouri, to attend the fiftieth anniversary convention of the Assemblies of God, largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. The four-day April meeting featured missionary speakers from around the world and some 170 workshop sessions. No business was conducted and no legislation enacted.

North American Baptist Fellowship

The name of the organization shall be the North American Baptist Fellowship. The purpose of the organization shall be: (a) to continue the gains and values growing out of the Baptist Jubilee Advance program (1959–1964); (b) to make possible opportunities for fellowship and the sharing of mutual concerns; (c) to cooperate with all departments of the Baptist World Alliance. It shall have no authority over any Baptist Church nor undertake any work for which the member bodies are responsible.

Under this definition the majority of Baptists in the United States may soon be brought under a permanent framework of organizational cooperation for the first time in well over a century.

Present plans call for the new structure, the North American Baptist Fellowship, to be composed of the seven Baptist denominations of North America that hold membership in the Baptist World Alliance.¹ If all seven groups join it would mean a constituency of some 22,000,000 church members.

First to indicate official willingness to join was the American Baptist Convention. In voting endorsement of the new fellowship at their annual sessions in Atlantic City last month, ABC delegates asked for an expansion of its purpose. The convention requests that (b) in the stated purpose be amended to read: to make possible opportunities for fellowship and instruction and the sharing of mutual concerns at the local level as well as at continental meetings.

The whole idea did not fare so well on the floor of the Southern Baptist Convention. SBC messengers voted against the new fellowship, then decided to refer the question to a committee for reconsideration next year.

The other Baptist denominations involved will vote on the measure in coming months. The fellowship will come into being as soon as five bodies grant official approval.

Some Southern Baptists expressed fears that the proposed fellowship would be the first step toward an ecumenical organization. Proponents flatly denied any such intent.

Opposition also developed on grounds that distinctives would be blurred on the local level. Ecumenists, on the other hand, see a projection of denominationalism onto the continental level.

A few Southerners voiced anxieties about “fellowship” with Negro churches. One group suggested the name of “North American Baptist Communications Group.”

The specific tasks of the proposed fellowship are still somewhat nebulous. Dr. Theodore F. Adams, noted Southern Baptist churchman and a leading proponent of the fellowship, says that what it does “would be up to the leaders.” Adams said it could not be called a counterpart of the European Baptist Federation because that group “was tailored to fit their needs.” The EBF coordinates missionary efforts.

One obvious if minor task would be to operate such joint endeavors as the World’s Fair display initiated by the Baptist Jubilee Advance program.

During the ceremonies that climaxed the six-year Baptist Jubilee Advance effort in Atlantic City last month, credit for initiating the idea of the North American Baptist Fellowship was given Dr. C. Oscar Johnson, former president of the Baptist World Alliance. Johnson first suggested a North American BWA arm in 1948. Baptists in the United States have not had a comprehensive cooperative program since the Southern Baptist split in 1845.

Race And Polity

A major storm was brewing among Southern Presbyterian churches this month in the wake of their General Assembly’s action aimed at desegregation.

The Synod of South Carolina, embracing 331 churches with more than 66,000 members, adopted an overture stating that the April assembly “did not have the authority to instruct” presbyteries to receive Negro churches within their boundaries. It asks the assembly to “reconsider its action … in the light of Presbyterian polity and procedure.” In a separate action the synod urged its eight presbyteries to take the Negro churches within their bounds “as soon as possible.”

The overture questioning the assembly’s authority was initiated by the Harmony Presbytery, which earlier voted refusal to comply with the assembly’s order. A presbytery in Alabama also has voted rejection of the request to integrate.

A First In Canada

To the accompaniment of a red-coated Royal Canadian Mounted Police band and choir, 500 leading Canadians assembled in an Ottawa hotel one morning this month for the country’s first national interreligious prayer breakfast.

The Speaker of the House of Commons, Allan MacNaughton, described the gathering as unique and expressed hope that it would become an “annual event in Canada’s Christian calendar.” Officials in the Canadian capital city said there is every likelihood it will.

Religious News Service, reporting on the breakfast, quoted MacNaughton as saying it represented “the best example of the ecumenical force at work in the world today.”

Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson and opposition leader John G. Diefenbaker read the Scriptures. Edmond Michelet, a member of the Constitutional Council of France, and Boyd Leedom, a member of the National Labor Relations Board in the United States, made brief addresses.

One of the Scripture passages included the verse from Psalm 72 reading: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea.” It was that passage to which the fathers of the Canadian confederation looked a century ago when their country was being named the “Dominion of Canada.”

Leedom said Canada and the United States had been granted an unparalleled opportunity for development of people and resources and must live up to their great heritage. The civilizing force has always been God’s men, he said.

Michelet said all the prophets did not belong to Bible times. He said he considered the work of the International Council for Christian Leadership, with which the prayer breakfast officials are affiliated, to be that of a prophet.

The gathering was a major extension of the Parliamentary breakfast group of members of Parliament. This meets once a month.

Following the breakfast, a seminar on Christian leadership was held under the auspices of ICCL.

Uniform Rainfall

Metsad Gozal, the site of an Edomite fortress destroyed by David around 1000 B.C., yielded some of its secrets to members of a spring expedition jointly sponsored by the Israel Department of Antiquities and the Protestant-oriented Israel-American Institute for Biblical Studies.

The excavations, directed by Dr. Y. Aharoni of the Hebrew University, further revealed that rainfall in the Dead Sea area has changed little since the days of the judges, but that in earlier times it was much heavier. The fort is located at the north end of Jebel es-Sodom, about three miles north of modern Sodom.

Salt sedimentation was found on two levels, indicating that the fort had been covered by rising Dead Sea water on two different occasions: first around 1000 B.C., and again in about the sixth century A.D.

A discovery of particular importance came to light as the excavators uncovered a wall built with a row of timbers between each two rows of the huge stones that made up the lower wall of the fort. This exact type of construction is described by Ezra (5:8; 6:4) as the method of building the walls of the Second Temple in 520 B.C.

150 Route De Ferney

The World Council of Churches is setting up shop in its new headquarters building in Geneva. Staff members moved into their new offices several weeks ago. Construction work continues on a library, assembly hall, and exhibit area. A dedication date has not yet been set.

The new WCC address is 150 route de Ferney. The building, which also houses offices of the Lutheran World Federation and the World Presbyterian Alliance, is located on the north side of Lake Geneva.

Since its inception in 1948 the WCC had occupied a cluster of quaint but rickety buildings on a hill south of the lake.

Songs In Mourning

In life Prime Minister Nehru of India declared himself an atheist. In death, however, persons of many religions paid him tribute. Prior to the start of the funeral procession Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Sikhs chanted prayers, sang hymns, or read scriptures. Some Christians sang “Lead, Kindly Light” and “Abide with Me.” Evangelicals in India will remember Nehru, who died May 27, as the one chiefly responsible in declaring India a secular state with freedom to preach the Gospel (see also the editorial on page 22).

- More from Dwight L. Baker

Presbyterians Press Social Claims

James Daane

The 176th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. met last month in a spirit sometimes reminiscent of 1776. Below the Mason-Dixon line for the first time in decades, the United Presbyterians announced from Oklahoma City continuing concern with and involvement in the problems of the nation and the world.

For the first time in its history the General Assembly elected a Negro moderator, Dr. Edler G. Hawkins; he was chosen by a 465–368 vote over the Rev. A. Ray Cartlidge. Hawkins, a native New Yorker, has been pastor for twenty-six years of St. Augustine Church in the Bronx, a church which he organized with nine members after graduating from New York’s Union Theological Seminary. The church now has more than 1,000 members. In a nominating speech Attorney J. Vernon Lloyd of Danville, California, said that Hawkins’s election would be “more eloquent than any sermon,” and Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, the denomination’s stated clerk, interpreted Hawkins’s election as indicative of the direction the church wants to go and the measure to which “we have become color blind.”

This diagnosis proved correct. The 841 commissioners of the 3.3-million-member denomination adopted amendments to its form of government that make it a violation of church law for a local congregation to exclude anyone from its membership because of race. Steps were also taken to wipe out racially segregated presbyteries, one all-Indian and some all-Negro, by 1967. The assembly also set a precedent in deciding that its boards and agencies, as well as standing program committees of synods, presbyteries, and sessions, may, after obtaining approval in each instance, become members of non-ecclesiastical agencies to learn from them and work cooperatively with them. This will permit these units of the denomination to participate in and even join various racial organizations and their demonstrations.

The commissioners also issued a call to “all church bodies, pastors, and members of the United Presbyterian Church to re-double their efforts to support and be involved in those groups—church, private, and governmental—that are working to bring about racial freedom and justice.”

The pronouncement of the 172nd General Assembly on civil disobedience—which does not in every instance forbid civil disobedience—was reaffirmed after the assembly was told that in some cases the best way to test the legality of a law was to break it and thereby bring it to the courts for adjudication.

Moderator Hawkins told reporters that he had participated in civil rights demonstrations and would do so again if the necessity arose.

On the last day of the assembly an overture from the Presbytery of West Tennessee reached the floor requesting that the church “refrain from inviting the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and any and all others who share his persuasion to disregard and violate constitutional laws, to speak at its sessions”; the presbytery further requested that the church “remind the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake … to cease and desist from all violations of duly enacted laws of this land.…” The assembly decided to take “no action” on the overture and instead commended “the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake for his courageous action and witness in the area of race relations; … we affirm his right and his duty as Stated Clerk to speak and act in consonance with the pronouncements and actions of the General Assembly.…” A prolonged, dramatic silence greeted the call for the negative vote, indicating the intended rebuke had been turned into a unanimous commendation of Blake for his action in a segregated Maryland park which led to his arrest.

The assembly expressed itself on other social matters: it said that “acute poverty” should be recognized “as a gravely moral issue” in an affluent society where more than five million families live on less than $38 a week, and urged its Board of National Missions “to provide leadership in initiating specific denominational strategies of action against poverty.” The testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere was condemned; hope was expressed for negotiations that will ban underground testings; and a summons was issued to all the governments of the world that are not yet signatories of the nuclear test ban. A call was also issued to the United States government “to stimulate world trade for the benefit of the less-developed areas.” Another call was issued to President Johnson to convene a White House conference on community development and housing in order to “focus national attention on the overlooked and unmet needs of urban areas.”

Despite floor protests that it violated the principle of separation of church and state and was utterly unrealistic in our present world, the assembly adopted a proposal that “urges the President and Congress to make preparations for the conversion of our military economy to a peacetime economy and for the retraining that may be necessary.”

The church reaffirmed its position on prayer and Bible reading in the public schools as unconstitutional. Amid spirited opposition the assembly reaffirmed its support in principle of “federal tax aid to public elementary and secondary school systems”; amid even more spirited opposition it declared support for a “program of federal aid to public school systems that would encourage shared-time arrangements to permit students enrolled in private or parochial schools to obtain a portion of their education in the public schools.”

In the area of public housing, the assembly urged the various judicatories of the church “to analyze federally assisted low and middle income housing programs in local communities, and to press for adequate administration and creative use of existing programs to achieve housing on an integrated basis.”

A seven-point proposal on smoking presented by the Commission on Church and Society was adopted; the proposal expresses concern about the health hazard of “widespread use of cigarettes” and misleading advertising, and calls for establishment and support of “withdrawal clinics.” Added to the commission’s report was an amendment that provides a program to educate youth on the hazards of smoking. A floor amendment calling on the assembly to summon the church’s membership to “voluntary abstinence” was defeated.

United Presbyterians contributed almost $298 million to their church in 1963, an increase of $9 million over the 1962 figure. Wide concern was expressed over the spiritual condition of the church, which in 1963 experienced a drop in infant baptisms, in adult baptisms, in church school pupils and teachers, and in students for the ministry. The Standing Committee on Theological Education announced that “84 per cent of our churches do not presently have any candidates for church vocations.”

The Rev. Robert H. Stephens of Summit, New Jersey, retiring chairman of the Commission on Evangelism, declared that the “slipping statistics” might have something to do with the fact that the church, having done all kinds of good things for people, has perhaps “done everything for them except offering them Christ.” He called for an evangelism that pleads for decisions, conversion, and nurture in the Church. Against the claim that “everything we do is evangelism,” he countered, “It ain’t necessarily so.”

United Presbyterians have been conducting a study of the nature of the ministry, including the matter of ordination, for the past six years. A special committee assigned to this study reported that its proposals were “not as radical as the times and the Gospel demand.” Its report also declared that “anyone who has followed” its “interim reports must realize that it intends to recommend to the General Assembly and to the presbyteries a change in the confessional standards of the Church which will modify the legal authority of the West-minister Confession and Catechisms. But at present our Form of Government is basically dependent on those confessional standards and could not be thoroughly revised without revising the Confession as well.”

The report declared, “It is now quite obvious that a congregation-centered parish as an institutional pattern cannot fully meet the needs of an urban society.” To meet the need of a more diversified ministry, the committee suggested only two ordinations: one for the “ministers of the church catholic” and one for “ruling elders.” The ordination of deacons would be eliminated, and ministers who served in “administrative” functions would be called “deacons.” This would make, for example, the church’s stated clerk, Eugene Carson Blake, a deacon.

The whole matter was referred for further study, but it serves to point up the massive theological fermentation going on, not only in the United Presbyterian Church but in many other American churches as well, concerning the nature of the ministry and the Church.

For the first time in its history, the assembly received a Roman Catholic prelate, Bishop Victor Reed of the Oklahoma City-Tulsa Diocese, who greeted the commissioners as “brothers in Christ” and commended the church for its contributions to Christian unity.

In a press conference in which Moderator Hawkins told reporters that the civil rights bill was a “good package of minimums,” he also expressed his desire, as moderator, to see the Roman Pope. He thought it would promote a “climate of spirit, contact, and knowledge of each other” and would be a “tremendous experience.”

The assembly authorized its Committee of Nine to participate in drawing up a plan of union with the Consultation on Church Union. This consultation grew out of the so-called Blake-Pike proposal of 1960 for a united Protestant church, “truly catholic, truly reformed and truly evangelical”: it now includes six denominations, which comprise one-third of American Protestants. In making the authorization, the assembly retained the right to reject the plan “if the bases of the consultation’s proposed plan were later judged unsatisfactory.”

The assembly noted that the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) has put to the Reformed Church of America, with whom it is discussing union, the question of “advisability” of expanding this discussion to include the United Presbyterians and other Reformed churches. In view of this development, the assembly decided to select a committee of twelve, if the Reformed Church of America is willing to include the United Presbyterians in its current discussions with the Southern Presbyterians.

In a letter to Southern Presbyterians the 176th General Assembly declared that it has “directed its Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations to cooperate with your Commission on Inter-Church Relations and to give fullest attention to these conversations throughout this year and to report back to our 177th General Assembly the conditions conducive to union and that make union imperative now.”

Methodist Merger

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, in a resolution adopted at its quadrennial General Conference in Cincinnati last month, called for speedy completion of plans for merger with two other Methodist Negro bodies. They are the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The AME Church, with some 1,500,000 members, is the largest of the three. The Zion Church has 770,000 communicants and the CME, about 450,000. Present union plans have a target date of 1968.

Meanwhile in Indianapolis, where the Zion Church was holding its quadrennial session, an invitation to merge with the Evangelical United Brethren Church and The Methodist Church was extended by Bishop Reuben H. Mueller, EUB president. The EUB Church has 758,000 members, and The Methodist Church has 10.2 million.

Toward ‘A Brighter Sunday’

A disgusted commissioner at last month’s Church of Scotland General Assembly was heard to lament: “Fancy spending two hours discussing a piffling subject like the Sabbath when there are far more important things on the agenda.” To which could have been made the crushing retort of the small boy told that millions of people in China would be glad to have those prunes: “Name one!”

With perhaps one exception, no other item during the assembly’s nine-day deliberations raised as much interest as the Christian use of Sunday, included in the report of the Church and Nation Committee. The convener, the Rev. John R. Gray, is always good value, and as usual he went straight to the heart of the matter. His committee had again been widely misunderstood. The report (published in advance) did not advocate a continental Sunday, nor did it seek to revise the Westminster Confession. Mr. Gray then made an extraordinary attack on Britain’s most popular daily, which is owned by an aged peer of Canadian origin. “I would not wish to spoil anyone’s eighty-fifth birthday,” he cried, “but that man’s newspaper has grossly and persistently misrepresented the report.” (Next morning that man’s newspaper unrepentantly said that if it owed Mr. Gray an apology it was “for being too slow in catching up with his shifting attitudes.”)

The convener said his committee could find no warrant in Scripture for the prohibition on any day of the week of quiet and healthful recreation involving no labor for other people, nor for the transfer of regulations applicable to the Jewish Sabbath to the Christian Lord’s Day.

Evangelicalism is not always happy in its spokesmen on such occasions, but in this case what was said from that viewpoint was said cogently, winsomely, and with biblical authority behind it. The significant feature was that the speakers were not (as might have been expected) from the more conservative Highlands, but were Lowlanders, and of the younger generation. They pointed out that what Mr. Gray’s report dealt with was a strict legalistic Sabbath which simply does not exist in Scotland. Whatever church and nation were suffering from, said the Rev. George M. Philip of Glasgow, it was not a rigid Sabbatarianism that was strangling true religious life. The committee, he alleged, “paints a picture of the population slaving day after day and being denied a breath of air and a moment of ease at the weekends.” Thus, in the name of pleasure, Sunday with all its moral and spiritual significance was disappearing from the lives even of church members. The Rev. Eric Alexander of New-milns charged the committee with trying to become in the report as little different from the world as possible, and added: “That policy has consistently failed since Lot tried it in Sodom.”

The report nevertheless won the vote. Despite Mr. Gray’s disclaimers to the contrary, subsequent newspaper headlines showed unmistakably what editors had understood, and what readers will understand, from the assembly’s approval: that the Kirk had given its blessing to “Sabbath golfers” and to “a brighter Sunday”—whatever that means.

Another row blew up over an innocent-looking deliverance wherein the Inter-Church Relations Committee invited the assembly to “welcome” the continuance of informal meetings with Roman Catholics in Scotland. Dr. Harry Whitley (who proudly quoted an ex-moderator’s description of him as “the greatest non-theological factor in Church disunity”) wanted the meetings merely “noted,” because they had profoundly disturbed many ordinary people. He was rash enough to quote John Knox, a predecessor of his at St. Giles’. That was enough to bring the heavy artillery of a line of former moderators to bear against him, in the name of “charity.”

One of them, Dr. A. C. Craig, famous for his 1901 Vatican visit, said that critics of the meetings who thought Presbyterians were selling the pass “simply do not know what is going on.” It was an unhappily worded statement, for much of the criticism derives from the fact that the meetings concerned are held in secret. Then, incredibly, Dr. George MacLeod, as staunch an ecumenist as ever set foot on Iona, rose to support Dr. Whitley, who, he revealed, had even asked the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Edinburgh to preach in his pulpit. The debate moved along intriguingly till the professional Protestants took a hand and predictably ruined their case by gross overstatement, making the assembly “welcome” the meetings after all.

Another tense debate evolved when a young minister, the Rev. J. L. Scott, moved “that the assembly instruct the Panel on Doctrine to investigate the issues involved in Church members who are under vows to Christ, being members also of societies involving secret ceremonies and secret binding oaths.” He frankly admitted that he was thinking especially of the Masonic Lodge, but disclaimed any animus against it—and no one who heard his engagingly candid speech could sense any prejudice.

Disclosing that some of the most loyal members of his own congregation were Masons, he pointed out that the Church of Scotland had never given guidance to men who had no way of knowing what the vows were before they came to take them. Pressure was often put upon young ministers to join, with the suggestion that here was a way to get alongside men. “Ought we who have been set free by Jesus Christ,” he asked, “to risk our liberty by entering on such vows?” Masons might argue that their vows included nothing incompatible with civil, moral, or religious rights—but that was the assurance of Masonry. The Christian looked to his church for guidance, because “for a Christian there is nothing that cannot be brought to Christ’s standard of judgment.”

After some discussion in which several elder statesmen of the Kirk confessed and defended their Masonic links and asked the house to reject Mr. Scott’s proposed investigation, the vote substantially favored him. A piquant factor is that the Panel on Doctrine charged to carry out the enquiry is about equally divided, for its convener and half of its members are Masons. The panel will report at next year’s assembly.

The assembly had earlier: elected Dr. Duncan Fraser of Invergordon as moderator in succession to Professor James S. Stewart: set up a special committee to consider the possibility of directing ministers because of the Kirk’s 140 vacant charges; declined to set up another special committee despite Dr. George MacLeod’s customary eloquent plea to review the issues raised by modern war; heard that the new notorious incident of the nude at last year’s Edinburgh Festival was merely “a silly piece of pretentious vulgarity”; and heard from its Foreign Missions convener that for the second year in succession no minister was in training at the Kirk’s missionary college.

Meanwhile, across the street in the Free Church Assembly the new moderator, the Rev. Angus Finlayson of North Tolsta, attacked the national Kirk’s attitude to Sunday, saying she had shirked her duty, “capitulating to the clamour of the age and to the claims of the modern mind.”

Regarding the ecumenical movement Mr. Finlayson said: “The Pope has assumed the role of a director of traffic. Not long ago we commemorated the Reformation and its leaders … who in their day directed religious traffic … back to God and his Word. Now Rome is rerouting the creedless churches of Christendom back to what she regards as the one true church, and foremost in the van are those who but a short time ago vied with us in celebrating the liberty won for them by the Reformation.” The Free Kirk Assembly was further enlivened when the chair in which sat the assistant clerk collapsed and he was deposited on the floor. He was unhurt.

J. D. DOUGLAS

- More from James Daane

Books

Book Briefs: June 19, 1964

When To Pad The Expense Account

Ethics in Business, by Thomas M. Garrett, S. J. (Sheed & Ward, 1963, 190 pp., S3.95), is reviewed by Clarence Bauman, assistant professor of theology and ethics, Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana.

This book is written on the assumption that in principle everyone favors business ethics. Its purpose is to inform those who know most about ethics of the realities of business, and to assist those in the business world in developing moral principles that are rationally valid and realistic.

The author introduces the dilemma of business ethics by a descriptive analysis of the conformist whose failure to assume personal responsibility is ascribed to the popularized Freudianism and behaviorism characterizing our age of the “buck-passer.” Moral failure is blamed on either the environment, irresistible impulses, or complex unconscious drives, while social adjustment and conformism are proclaimed as the new gospel of the American way of life. Consequently, for the company man ethics and morals are reduced to an uncritical acceptance of the social standards and mores of his firm, which soothes the conscience of its employees with the comforts and security of the corporation setup. In so doing the corporation cultivates a pseudo-scientific contempt for free will and moral obligations by a scrupulous avoidance of any form of suffering, sacrifice, or self-discipline. To compensate for this personal demoralization, corporations provide medical plans, model homes, and even neckties bearing the corporate insignia, to provide a pseudo self-respect for one’s identification and a feeling of social community.

The flight from personal responsibility is accelerated by the mechanization, rationalization, and automation of management decision and by the absence of public consensus on moral issues. To avoid undue conflict with either reformers, liberals, or conservatives, business enterprise assumes as little social responsibility as possible, and for the rest does what is profitable. To temper this indictment of corporation enterprise, the author finds comfort in the fact that the Harvard Business Review at least pays lip service to higher ideals, even if only as a result of enlightened self-interest.

The author devotes a chapter to man, business, and society, and their centrality in determining notions of responsibility. He concludes with the observation that a corporation best serves the public welfare when it serves its own long-range interests.

Perhaps the most theologically rewarding chapter is the one on the meaning of work. We are told that work is not a penal activity nor a means of human perfection, though in itself it is not an obstacle to holiness. Apart from being a means of earning a living, work is seen as collaboration of man with the Creator to restore the world to harmony. On this assumption the author grapples with the problem of how to transpose the discontent, drudgery, frustration, and meaninglessness of much of labor—such as advertising cosmetics, selling toy balloons, or peddling whisky—into the ideal; how to convince man of the cosmic significance of his work when he realizes the futility of the values for which he labors.

The reader is overwhelmed with the enormity and difficulty of inspiring some degree of moral discernment relevant to business practices when price-fixing, bribery, and cheating are so common that an honest man of the old-fashioned sort seems a rarity in a moral atmosphere “in which honesty itself has largely become a question of convenience, expediency or social conformity, rather than a matter of principle” (p. 64). Not infrequently the author endorses broad mental reservation in preference to outright falsehood, as in the case of the junior executive who plays cards rather well but is instructed by his superior to lose so as to gain a client’s good will. Father Garrett advises that when the expense is for the benefit of the company one’s conscience need not be disturbed over “padding” the business expense account.

The book opens up numerous other areas of moral ambiguity, such as (a) the problem of psychic privacy in a nontherapeutic situation in which the corporation for motives of profit violates the personal dignity of the employee by psychological tests that force him to reveal the inner secrets of his personality as the price for being hired; (b) the widespread use of the computer, operated on the assumption that the ultimate goals of men can be expressed mathematically; (c) the awesome success of economic brainwashing by persuasive advertising techniques; and (d) the problem of waste and planned built-in obsolescence essential to an economy whose growth depends on increase in consumption.

In all this the author points to the need for a professional code of business ethics so as to encourage internal checks and balances in preference to government control. He himself has provided in the appendix two such tests to rate one’s integrity quotient.

In conclusion, Father Garrett directs attention to the religious dimension on the grounds that “enlightened self-interest and purely rational considerations are often not enough to move men to virtue.… In short the certitudes of faith are needed to complete the work of ethics” (p. 174). Charity is advocated as “the antidote for a spirit of calculating obedience,” as “the force that breathes life and holiness into the decisions of mere men” (p. 175).

This book is an elaboration of the theme “that ideals must be aided by prudence lest good will destroy itself” (p. 22). But there is no mention of the more radical question whether being in Christ actually means accepting our involvement in the sinfulness of the economic order as our destiny; whether the real task of Christian ethics is merely to console ourselves with the inevitability of compromise as a prerequisite to human existence and civilization. There is nowhere a hint as to the spiritual significance of the poverty of Christ for those whom he instructs not to fear the threats (including economic threats) of this world, nor to be tempted by its wealth. The voluntary poverty of Jesus and Paul might inspire Christians to subordinate the material aspects of life to the spiritual. But when the Church is caught up in a society in which acquisition of wealth is the chief criterion of success, this is not likely to happen. And treatises on business “ethics” that assume the dissociation of economic interests from kingdom presuppositions are part of this moral ambiguity.

CLARENCE BAUMAN

True Story

Angel at Her Shoulder, by Kenneth L. Wilson (Harper & Row, 1964, 256 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by E. H. Hamilton, missionary, Presbyterian Church in the U. S., Taipei, Taiwan, Free China.

Although this story reads like fiction, it is certainly true. The reviewer has for nearly twelve years worked in Formosa alongside that little “ball of fire” Lillian Dickson and her equally remarkable husband Jim Dickson. And although the reviewer has made frequent trips into the high mountains and to the leprosarium and other places with the Dicksons, this book reveals many things about this intrepid couple that even he did not know.

It is almost unbelievable what God has done through these two dedicated lives to “preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives.” Of Lillian and Jim Dickson, as of King Solomon’s court, it might be said, “The half has not been told!” But Kenneth Wilson has told a fascinating story. This book will certainly become a best-seller in the religious field.

E. H. HAMILTON

Shocking Nonconformist

Laughter in Heaven, by Henry C. Whitley (Revell, 1964, 189 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by J. D. Douglas, British editorial director, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

It was generally considered an extraordinary choice when ten years ago Harry Whitley went to St. Giles’, Edinburgh. Brought up in the Catholic Apostolic Church (he wrote a biography of Edward Irving), he engaged in pioneer youth work in the Edinburgh slums, then entered the ministry after coming under the spell of George MacLeod.

Whitley’s first parish was in industrial Port Glasgow, and much of his book is concerned with the fifteen years he spent there. The location is Scotland, but the account of a minister’s dealings with his people is for all places and times. He writes with humor and pathos, discernment and compassion. He quotes an old gate-man’s comment that is not irrelevant to the present decline of the Clyde shipyards: “Once iron men came in here to build wooden ships, today wooden men come to build iron ships. Once men came here to build ships, now they come to collect pay pokes [i.e., envelopes].”

After a short ministry in Partick, where he scandalized the fashionable by dirtying his hands painting dreary tenements and consorting with the poor, he was selected for John Knox’s pulpit in Scotland’s mother church. It has not tamed him. “It is now my solemn conviction,” he announced on one memorable occasion, “that there can be no renewal of Christ’s Church in Scotland until the powers of the Woman’s Guild are considerably curtailed, and their purpose and existence severely scrutinized and criticized.” The resultant furor could be paralleled only if some Republican pundit attacked the raison d’être of the DAR.

The continuing pressure on him to conform must be tremendous—he said himself that at St. Giles’ there were temptations to sell his soul that honors might come—but he is still the fearless crusader. There is something of the showman about him, and he displays no small conceit of Harry Whitley on occasion; but readers of this entertaining biography will love the man. His criticism of the current talks with Roman Catholics in Scotland carry the greater weight because in his first parish he had the local priest as a close friend. Dr. Whitley is, moreover, that rare bird: a critic in high places who realizes that a verification of one’s references is a necessary condition of the luxury of outspokenness.

J. D. DOUGLAS

To Write A Better Bible

Reason in Religion, by Nels F. S. Ferré (Nelson, 1963, 336 pp., $7.75), is reviewed by David H. Freeman, chairman, Department of Philosophy, University of Rhode Island, Providence.

In this book, Ferré seeks to determine the relation between reason, primarily conceived of as man’s ability to order and direct experience, and religion, understood as the conviction that there are harmful or beneficial powers beyond ordinary experience.

The four main sections of the book deal with reason as related to God, to man, to history and nature, and to the world religions. Reason enables faith, as the distinctive function of religion, to avoid error and inconsistency. It teaches us that God stands out from all finite things as the ground, power, and purpose of the cosmic process of development. The nature of what is beyond ordinary experience is, however, best seen in human life and history, the highest manifestation of which is found in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus, called the Christ. For although we cannot know how well Jesus knew God, and although the historic details of the Resurrection are confused and tangled, nevertheless, through Jesus, God came to be understood as unconditional, universal, eternal love.

God is the companion of persons and community. As an objectified realm, creation is in God; and yet it is also qualitatively external to God. It is grossly unfair to man and unworthy of God to believe that death settles man’s fate once and for all. It may be that every life that God has created will be perfected before any life can reach its destiny in God. In any case, however, the notion of an eternal hell is to be rejected; the nirvana of Buddhism is in fact closer to Christ than is the doctrine of eternal punishment.

To make room for its universal message of love Christianity must undergo a radical reformation of the faith. It may be possible to maintain a continuity of institution. However:

Certainly we should send to the slaughterhouse mythological Christianity, and dare to put the knife unshrinkingly even to our own ideological son of traditional Christianity. We must heed the Jewish and Muslim protest in the name of genuine monotheism and declare once for all that we do not worship Jesus of Nazareth [p. 313].

Dr. Ferré regards the New Testament as a “mixture of high and holy faith and truth, on the one hand, and uncritical mythology, on the other …” (p. 310).

The critical question remains, namely, how does Dr. Ferré know how to separate the mythological from what is true and holy? The spirit of Dr. Ferré may pant “to write better Scriptures for a new age” (p. 314), but the rejection of the work of the Holy Spirit results in a speculative cafeteria-style religion in which anyone is free to select whatever is regarded as of ultimate concern.

The God that Dr. Ferré would have us worship is not the God revealed in the New Testament but the product of his own imagination.

DAVID H. FREEMAN

Three Myths?

The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism, by Jules Isaac (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, 154 pp., $4), is reviewed by James Daane, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

The strength of this book derives from the virtues of the author and the sins of the saints. The late Jules Isaac was an accomplished French historian, and his treatment of anti-Semitism carries the weight of his profession. But what makes the book even more uncomfortably forceful is the mass of Christian anti-Semitism that it adduces, and the telling way in which Isaac uses the admission of many Christians that the New Testament records are replete with contradictions and distortions. He further disturbs the Christian conscience by the reminder: “A true Christian cannot be an anti-Semite; he simply has no right to be one.”

Isaac sees three main roots of Christian anti-Semitism of which after careful historical research nothing remains, he says, except the perversity of the habit. Isaac admits that any decent theology must, in interpreting history, go beyond history. But he insists that the Christian theology which sustains the myths of anti-Semitism does not go beyond but rather violates the facts of history.

The first historical myth that fosters anti-Semitism is the Christian theological insistence that the Diaspora following the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 is a punishment of God upon the Jews for crucifying Christ. Isaac dismisses this by pointing out that the Diaspora had been going on for centuries before Christ and that as a matter of fact a considerable number of Jews remained in Palestine long after A.D. 70.

The second myth is the Christian theological contention that the religious life of the Jews during the time of Christ was in a degenerate state. Isaac insists that it was, on the contrary, marked by a high virility. He cites religious writings from the time and sees in the recently discovered information about the Essenes additional proof of spiritual virility.

The third myth is the theological contention of Christians that in crucifying Christ the Jews became guilty of deicide (killing God) and that they are therefore a people under a divine curse. The facts, says Isaac, are quite the opposite. Jesus never claimed to be God. He was crucified with the cooperation of a few renegade Jews, but chiefly by the decision of Romans who feared his messianic claims and who, unlike the Jews (who were eager for them), regarded them as a political crime. Further, it is “ridiculous and unintelligible” to charge Jews with deicide, he argues, for the unshakable foundation for belief in one God came from the bosom of the Jewish people. Nor could the illegalities of Jesus’ trial as recorded in the New Testament be true, for they are, says Isaac, simply contrary to Jewish procedure. Since illegalities are illegal, they cannot occur. This is as convincing as the assertion that six million Jews were not exterminated in Nazi Germany because that would be immoral.

Isaac’s argument that the Romans were the chief promoters of the Crucifixion is also unconvincing, since he admits that Jesus hid his messianic claims. Moreover, it leaves the Crucifixion of Christ without motivation. The argument that the Romans bear chief responsibility for the Crucifixion of Christ is unconvincing as long as no adequate motivation can be found in the Romans for desiring the Crucifixion.

The author wields what many people will regard as a heavy argument when he urges that the sin of a few renegade Jews cannot be laid upon the Jewish people as a whole.

Isaac docs not succeed in eliminating all the historical factors on which he thinks anti-Semitism to rest. Hence in the end the matter turns on theological interpretation, specifically on how one thinks of Christ. If he is the Son of God, then the sin of killing the Son of God stands. If he is the Son of God, then the Jewish religion only revealed the degeneracy of its virility in crucifying Christ. If he is the Son of God, the One who can act for others and through whom God deals with all men, then the ground falls away from the insistence that the sin of a few Jews could not bring punishment upon a whole people and that the Diaspora could not be a divine punishment on the whole nation.

Little remains of the force of Isaac’s argument except that derived from the anti-Semitic sins of the saints—which is plenty. Indeed, Isaac is often right. It did take the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews, 1,800,000 of whom were children, to awaken the Christian conscience about anti-Semitism. And he often turns profound Christian beliefs against the Christian, as when he urges that Christians are not concerned with the sins of others (Jewish guilt for the Cross), and when he reminds us that Jesus prayed forgiveness for his slayers and that Jesus, according to Christians, died not only for Gentiles but for all men.

This book, written by Isaac when he was eighty-five and his first translated into English, should help quicken the Christian conscience about the evil of anti-Semitism. It will show Christians that after almost 2,000 years they have not yet made clear that Jews are under judgment, not for the Crucifixion, but for rejecting the crucified and living Christ who comes to them in the preaching of the Gospel. Readers of this book will find it hard not to listen sympathetically to this man, a man whose wife said to him as she and most of his family went to death at the hands of the German Nazis, “Save yourself for your work; the world is waiting for it.”

JAMES DAANE

Caught In The Middle

The United States and the Middle East, edited by Georgiana G. Stevens (Prentice-Hall, 1964, 184 pp., $3.95; also paper, $1.95), is reviewed by Francis Rue Steele, home secretary, North Africa Mission, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.

“No policy is poor policy” might well serve as a candid description of the United States’ early approach to the problems of the post-war Middle East. That the situation needs correction and is undergoing change is the thesis of this book published by the American Assembly, Columbia University. The purpose of the assembly, as stated in the introduction of the book (p. 8), is to provide materials for discussion in order to “help an informed public make up its mind about American policy.” Seven volumes have already been issued, six in revised editions, on other aspects of American policy.

The present book opens with an introductory chapter by the editor. This is followed by six chapters entitled, “Middle East Background,” “Social Modernization: The New Man,” “Economic Modernization,” “Regional and International Politics in the Middle East,” “The Arab-Israeli Conflict Today,” and “United States Policy and the Middle East,” by such experience observers as William Sands, William R. Polk, A. J. Meyer, J. C. Hurewitz, Harry B. Ellis, and Richard H. Nolte respectively. This slender volume is a mine of pertinent facts clearly and simply presented. Benefiting from their vantage point in time, the writers set events over the past score of years in the Middle East in perspective alongside similar developments elsewhere around the world. Here too we find the breakdown of European control leading to the founding of many smaller political units often ill-prepared to manage their own affairs apart from outside advice and assistance. Inevitably these new countries are drawn into the conflict for control of man and markets engaging the West and East in what is known as the cold war.

In the Middle East three main factors—American inexperience, the anomaly of Israel, and the tension of Arab versus Muslim loyalty—have made resolving American interests with local aspirations exceedingly difficult. For some years American policy seemed characterized by inexpert attempts to “line up” followers from among the newly emerged countries by threats and bribes. Ignorance and inexperience were perhaps largely responsible for such actions as the United States moved into the power vacuum created by the withdrawal of British and French influence. As often as not, well-intentioned plans produced enemies rather than friends. Certainly a vacillating policy could produce only confusion, even among friends. It would appear, then, that further illumination from an outside source might indeed be helpful. (Mr. Polk alone of the contributors is in government service, and he only since 1961.)

The conclusion that is reached by the writers is that, first of all, a plain, positive policy must be developed which is farsighted and feasible. Then it must be applied with firmness and understanding by men of stature and skill. It is encouraging to discover that these writers find significant improvement in the conduct of American foreign policy.

For reasons of political, economic, and even missionary concern on the part of America’s evangelical Christians, this book should be studied carefully as an aid in interpreting present and future developments in one of the world’s most crucial spots—the Middle East.

FRANCIS RUE STEELE

The Latter-Day Saints Today

The Latter-day Saints in the Modern Day World: An Account of Contemporary Mormonism, by William J. Whalen (John Day, 1964, 319 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by J. K. Van Baalen, author of The Chaos of Cults.

Behold the latest—and by that token in many respects the best—book on the Latter-day Saints. It is free from passion, ridicule, calumny. The early history of the “Saints” was such that many of the older books, both pro and con, contained much of all this. Like Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Saints of today prefer to ignore most of their early history, which certainly gave occasion to firm opposition though not always to the manner in which the opposition was manifested. Quite objectively the author relates the main facts of the Saints’ history. The bulk of the book, however, describes the Saints as they are and operate today. (Incidentally, the name Mormon is now accepted by the Utah Saints but is rejected by the other followers of Joseph Smith, who are dealt with in a brief chapter. As to the original “scholarship” of the movement, Smith interpreted the word “Mormon” as meaning “more good” and claimed that it was a combination of English and Egyptian.)

The Mormons have a president whose “power rivals that of the Pope” (the reviewer thinks excels would be the better word, since the president is free to announce an infallible “revelation” at any time and all by himself—a power that neither the Pope nor the president of the Witnesses possesses). They have twelve apostles, a council of seventy, a patriarch, presiding bishops, “stake” presidents, ward bishops (i.e., non-salaried pastors), and a two-fold priesthood. They are, in short “probably the most elaborately organized and disciplined religious structure of modern times.”

In this fantastic and huge organization Dr. Whalen sees both the strength and the weakness of the Mormons—their strength because it affords an unequaled hold upon the membership and because every Mormon’s ego is flattered with an ecclesiastical office and resounding title: a boy (only!) becomes a deacon at the age of twelve, an elder (lowest rank in the lower or Aaronic priesthood) at eighteen or nineteen. There are an unlimited number of priests, and the ideal of every loyal Mormon is to become a high priest—and to become a “god” in the hereafter.

The earlier Adam-God doctrine is no longer held; but that our God was a man upon some other planet before coming to this earth is now held and taught. The heresy of a Trinity consisting of a flesh-and-bones God the Father, a similar God the Son, and a Holy Spirit who is “a personage of spirit” is still taught today, as the thousands who hear the free lectures on Temple Square know.

A strong point of the Mormon organization is that it is virtually impossible to get anywhere in Mormonism without a recommendation from the local bishop, and that once this has been obtained, the president himself makes the appointment to the office.

The leading Mormons are immensely rich (there are 300 millionaires) and have controlling interests in the stock of huge business corporations owned by the church. The income of the church is well over a million dollars per day.

Other strong points of the Saints are their solidarity, their truly unequaled sacrifices for the church, their high standards of morality and ideal concept of family life (in spite of the fact that polygamy, now not mentioned, remains an essential point of doctrine), and their welfare program. And they are growing in political influence.

Dr. Whalen’s book gives the first (so far as this reviewer knows) authentic description of the secret rites in the twelve temples: 47,745 “ordinary” baptisms plus 2,566,476 ordinances for the dead in 1962! It also describes the six lessons whereby converts are made.

Weaknesses of Mormonism are said to lie in their antagonistic attitude toward Negroes; in their flimsy training of missionaries; in their insistence that they are “the only Church” (in a more and more ecumenically minded age); and in the incongruity between their tremendous drive toward college and university education and their simultaneous insistence upon the impossible myths that underlie the system.

Here, then, is an important and excellent volume. The author of The Chaos of Cults humbly and gratefully admits that he has learned much from Whalen’s book.

One or two minor flaws in this superb book are that the author is so objective that he remains totally silent on the unethical methods whereby the Mormon hierarchy acquires farms and the like in states where they are numerically strong, and that he is also silent about First Corinthians 15:24, upon which the farce of “baptism for the dead” is based and of which Professor Jean Cadier has proposed a simple and (to the reviewer) satisfactory exegesis.

But what are these amid so much that is good? Every church library should have at least one copy of this book and keep it circulating among its membership.

J. K. VAN BAALEN

Hazardous Occupation

The Pastor’s Wife and the Church, by Dorothy Harrison Pentecost (Moody, 1964, 316 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Thea B. Van Halsema, author of Glorious Heretic and This Was John Calvin.

The girl who marries a minister finds her “full-time job in the work of the church … the most hazardous and dangerous occupation a woman can have.… Only the best adjusted … and thick-skinned will ever come through the experience emotionally and mentally unscarred.” But “I feel sorry for anyone who is not a pastor’s wife.”

Running the gamut of these feelings, Mrs. Pentecost shares her own twenty-five-year experience and covers in practical fashion everything from one’s calling and training to children, counseling, clothes, and calories. The book is intended also for congregations, but its greater value would seem to be for young women facing life in a parsonage or still in the first years of this experience. Seasoned pastors’ wives may find it interesting to compare their experiences and convictions with those of Mrs. Pentecost, as well as to re-evaluate their goals and the use of their time.

No two congregations are alike, nor are any two ladies of the manse. It remains for each pastor’s wife, novice or experienced, to chart her own course prayerfully so that her service to her family and her church will be as effective and enduring as she can make it.

The basic things, fortunately, do not vary. “The greatest reward that a minister’s wife can have is to know that she is needed, trusted, and looked up to as a godly woman who knows the Word and has power with the Lord in prayer.”

THEA B. VAN HALSEMA

Paperbacks

Council Speeches of Vatican II, edited by Hans Küng, Yves Congar, O. P., and Daniel O’Hanlon. S. J. (Paulist Press, 1964, 288 pp., $1.25). The only primary documentation now available from the Second Vatican Council; contains key speeches of considerable interest.

The New Group Therapy, by O. Hobart Mowrer; The Roots of Consciousness, by David C. McClelland (Van Nostrand, 1964, 262 pp., 219 pp., $1.95 each). Though the titles might suggest something else, these are extremely interesting books.

The Significance of the Synoptic Miracles, by James Kallas (Seabury, 1961, 118 pp. $3). The author strives for a theology of miracles and protests modern attempts to “demyth” them. He believes the New Testament must be understood on its own terms, and he writes in the no-nonsense fashion of a man who has miles to go before he sleeps.

Nuclear Disaster, by Tom Stonier (World, 1964, 226 pp., $2.45). A scientist writes on the “unthinkable”: what would happen if a twenty-mega ton bomb fell on a great American city. His sobering answer to this terrifying question describes the attack, the aftermath, and the legacy of nuclear attack.

Reformation Europe 1517–1559, by G. R. Elton (World, 1963, 349 pp., $2.95). A quite readable account of the religious and theological history of the Reformation by an author the book identifies but little.

Christ’s Preaching—and Ours, by Michel Philibert (John Knox, 1964, 55 pp., $1). A study of the difference and similarity between preaching and teaching in the “preaching” of Jesus. Translated from the French.

Handbook for Church Weddings, by Edward Thomas Dell, Jr. (Morehouse-Barlow, 1964, 64 pp., $1.50). Much practical advice by an author who regards weddings as a kind of worship service.

Marx and Engels on Religion, introduction by Reinhold Niebuhr (Schocken Books, 1964, 382 pp., $1.95). First printed in 1957.

The Holy Bible (World, 1964, 1021 pp., $1.95). The King James Version in a quality paperback.

The New Morality, by Arnold Lunn and Garth Lean (Blanford Press [London], 1964, 154 pp., 5s.). A discussion in strength and depth of the nature and consequences of the current revolt against Christian morality. The authors contend that once the revolt is at full swing in a nation, the nation can last no longer than a generation.

Book Briefs

Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: The Story of Egyptology, by Barbara Mertz (Coward-McCann, 1964, 349 pp., $6.95). A chatty, popular story of Egypt chiefly in terms of archaeological research.

Focus on Prophecy, edited by Charles L. Feinberg (Revell, 1964, 256 pp., $3.95). A discussion of biblical prophecy as it relates to the Jews, to the Gentiles, and to the Church.

Luther’s Works, Vol. 27: Lectures on Galatians 1535, Chapters 5–6, 1519, Chapters 1–6, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (Concordia, 1964, 441 pp., $6). In addition to chapters live and six of the lectures Luther delivered on Galatians in 1531, this volume contains all six chapters of the discourses he based on the same book of the New Testament almost fifteen years earlier.

Concise Dictionary of American Biography, Joseph G. E. Hopkins, managing editor (Scribner’s, 1964, 1,273 pp., $22.50). Each of the 14,870 articles of the original many-volumed Dictionary of American Biography is presented in concise form in this single volume. A very valuable and useful reference work, limited by the consideration that it includes no one who died since 1941.

The Art of Staying Happily Married, by Robert W. Burns (Prentice-Hall, 1963, 223 pp., $3.95). By the famous “Preacher of Peachtree Street” who has counseled thousands of couples on the art of marriage.

Evangelism in the Acts, by C. E. Autrey (Zondervan, 1964, 87 pp., $2.50).

The Child in the Glass Ball, by Karin Stensland Junker, translated by Gustaf Lannestock (Abingdon, 1964, 256 pp., $4). A courageous mother’s story of hope for retarded children.

Intermarriage: Interfaith, Interracial, Interethnic, by Albert I. Gordon (Beacon Press, 1964, 420 pp., $10). A very extensive survey of the problems of, possibilities of, and attitudes toward intermarriage in the United States.

Bernard of Clairvaux, by Henri Daniel-Rops, translated by Elizabeth Abbott (Hawthorn, 1964, 232 pp., $4.95). An interesting account of an interesting man.

Living with Myself, by William E. Hulme (Prentice-Hall, 1964, 160 pp., $2.95). Informative reading on how to get along with yourself.

The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, by William Haller (Harper & Row, 1963, 259 pp., $5). The purpose of this book is to show how Foxe’s Book of Martyrs led the English to regard themselves as the Elect Nation on whom all history converged, and how it became the pivot for molding the future history of England and America. Scholarly and interesting.

Mary Mother of All Christians, by Max Thurian (Herder and Herder, 1964, 204 pp., $4.75). A Reformed Protestant monk discusses the biblical texts delated to the life of Mary and thus provides a book in which Protestants will learn what they have in common, and what they do not have in common, with Roman Catholic Mariology.

Reprints

Jesus the Master Teacher, by Herman Harrell Horne (Kregel, 1964, 212 pp., $3.50). The author, best known for his opposition to John Dewey’s progressive education, discusses not the content but the form of the teaching of Jesus. Foreword by Milford F. Henkel. Date of first printing not given.

In Christ: The Believer’s Union with His Lord and The Ministry of the Spirit, by A. J. Gordon (Baker, 1964, 209 pp., 225pp., $2.95 each). Evangelically sound, stylistically very good; by the man who gave his name to Gordon College and Gordon Divinity School. The first was published first in 1872, the second in 1894.

Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, by Ashley Montagu (World, 1964, 503 pp., $7.50). A scientific analysis and evaluation of race. First published in 1942.

The Spirit of Protestantism, by Robert McAfee Brown (Oxford, 1961, 264 pp., $5). The kind of writing that invites reading, elicits both approval and disapproval, and thus stabs the Protestant into self-discovery.

Ideas

What about the Becker Amendment?

No question before the country today, with the possible exception of the civil rights issue, goes deeper constitutionally and religiously than the proposed Becker amendment. If volume of mail is an indication, this so-called prayer amendment is for many citizens of greater importance than the civil rights bill. And while, as in the latter case, heightened feelings make it an explosive issue, substantial constitutional and moral problems are likewise involved. The need is to see the central issues behind the pejorative slogans of some proponents and some opponents of the amendment.

Simplistic solutions, based upon emotional responses to partial knowledge, can hardly provide adequate answers to questions on which thoughtful, patriotic, and godly Americans differ. Nor should weighty constitutional and legal problems inhibit discussion. The Supreme Court is an august body, entitled to respect. But it is not infallible, and criticism of its actions is an American privilege. Therefore, it is incumbent upon informed Christian citizenship to take time to ask and answer the question, “What about the Becker amendment?”

The proposal of such an amendment stems from two recent Supreme Court decisions—the first, ruling against the action of the New York State Board of Regents in composing and promoting a non-denominational prayer for use in the public schools of the state; the second, ruling against the devotional reading of the Bible and the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools in Pennsylvania and Maryland. The former opinion (delivered June 25, 1962) stirred greater immediate reaction than the latter (delivered June 17, 1963), although the court’s reasoning against a state-composed-and-promoted prayer seems subsequently to have been better understood than the more subtle argument against the prescribed practice of reading a short portion of the Bible without comment and repeating the Lord’s Prayer. The dissatisfaction of many with other decisions of the court and the concern of large numbers of religious people about the trend toward secularism in public education have probably contributed to the unpopularity of the prayer and Bible-reading rulings. Many thousands believe that the Supreme Court placed a taboo upon the Bible in public schools and banished God from them. Out of the chorus of opposition to the action of the court has come the call to correct it by amending the first article of the Bill of Rights. Of the large number of amendments proposed—more than 150—attention during the hearings before the House Judiciary Committee this spring has been focused upon the one submitted by Representative Frank J. Becker of New York, H.J. Res. 693.

Many people, representing various shades of theological convictions and including numbers of evangelicals, are supporting the amendment. On the other hand, leaders (evangelicals also included) of virtually all major Protestant denominations are opposing it. And, as the hearings have been extended because of the many asking to testify, important principles are becoming clear.

The opinions in Engel v. Vitale (the Regents’ prayer case) and Abington School District v. Schempp (the Bible reading and Lord’s Prayer case, which includes Murray v. Curlett) comprise a book of 151 closely reasoned pages. Questions of constitutional law, political science, history, philosophy, education, and religion are involved. But this is not to say that the debate is beyond the comprehension of the layman in these fields. It is an American principle that the ordinary citizen is capable of coming to valid conclusions upon important and difficult issues and of expressing these conclusions through the ballot and free speech. That clergymen, lawyers, educators, and others are testifying and being widely reported means that an important process of education is going on.

What, then, are some main considerations relating to the Becker amendment? And in the light of them what conclusions accord best with evangelical conviction?

To begin with, it is necessary to know what the Supreme Court in Engel and in Schempp did and what it did not do. It did rule unconstitutional a state-composed-and-promoted prayer and state-prescribed devotional exercises consisting of Bible reading and the Lord’s Prayer, even though pupil participation was officially voluntary. It so ruled on the ground that no state agency has any business setting official forms of worship. And it also concluded that, because of the readiness of children to conform and because of the weight of official sanction of such worship, the option of voluntary participation was invalid.

But the court did not banish God from the schools nor sanction atheism. It did not remove all prayer and Bible reading from the public schools. It went out of its way to declare that “religion has been closely identified with our history and government,” and it reaffirmed the court’s recognition (when in Zorach v. Clauson it supported released-time religious education in New York City schools) that “[we] are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being” (cf. Mr. Justice Clark’s Majority Opinion in Schempp). Moreover, it asserted “that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion.… It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic equalities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistent with the First Amendment” (Majority Opinion in Schempp). The court based its action upon a strict concept of neutrality. “The place of religion in our society is an exalted one, achieved through a long tradition of reliance on the home, the church and the inviolable citadel of the individual heart and mind.… In the relationship between man and religion, the State is firmly committed to a principle of neutrality” (Majority Opinion in Schempp). Those who agree with the court approve its strong interpretation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment and believe it has done both religion and the state a service in keeping the two apart.

Yet there are many who, for various reasons, do not agree with the court. For them its actions are incompatible with our national religious heritage and tradition, unrealistic in failing to see the impossibility of neutrality in education, and constitutionally questionable in the application of the First to the Fourteenth Amendment; they see the decisions as a long step on the road to secularism and as an absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment. Such objections are not inconsiderable. It may be that in its zeal to preserve a strict separation of church and state the court has fallen into a kind of absolutism and that its application of the First to the Fourteenth Amendment will not bear close historical scrutiny. And it may also be that its emphasis upon religious neutrality has loaded the scales for secularism and that the removal of the recognition of God through formal devotional exercises is a deprivation. Perhaps the court ought not, as some say, to have ruled on the cases. But it did rule, and the practices it removed from the schools were religious practices.

Consider now the remedy proposed in the Becker amendment. Its advocates see in it a means for correcting the court, and the right of the people to amend the Constitution is indeed beyond question. Section I is not so much an authorization of prescribed devotional Bible reading and prayer as a removal of limitations upon them. Thus it would open the door in our religiously pluralistic society to a variety of state-prescribed devotional exercises. Section II anticipates possible future decisions against the practices it specifies. Section III states that the practices from which the amendment removes limitations are not an establishment of religion.

What are some objections to this proposed remedy? First of all, the fact that in our national history no amendment to the Bill of Rights has ever been adopted bespeaks the need for greatest caution. The article to be amended with its precise definition of church-state separation stands as a unique American contribution to government, basic to our most precious liberties and worthy of being preserved intact.

Again, by removing present limitations upon state-prescribed religious exercises, Section I of the amendment is dangerous. Under it there is nothing to prevent such practices as the devotional reading of the Bible and the Book of Mormon (in Utah and Idaho, for example) or the recitation of the “Hail Mary.” Moreover, Section I offers only a piecemeal rather than a basic remedy, and its voluntarism is not a true option in view of the pressure of conformity and of official sponsorship of prescribed devotions. As for Section II, it may well be unnecessary because of the court’s idea of permissive accommodation of certain aspects of religion to education, as in Zorach, and because of Mr. Justice Brennan’s recognition of this in concurring in Schempp that “there may be myriad forms of involvements of government with religion which … should not in my judgment be deemed to violate the Establishment Clause.” Among these involvements he mentioned military chaplaincies and prayers in legislative bodies.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.…

From the First Amendment to the Constitution

‘The Becker Amendment’

Section 1. Nothing in this Constitution shall be deemed to prohibit the offering, reading from, or listening to prayers or biblical scriptures, if participation therein is on a voluntary basis, in any governmental or public school, institution, or place.

Sec. 2. Nothing in this Constitution shall be deemed to prohibit making reference to belief in, reliance upon, or invoking the aid of God or a Supreme Being in any governmental or public document, proceeding, activity, ceremony, school, institution, or place, or upon any coinage, currency, or obligation of the United States.

Sec. 3. Nothing in this article shall constitute an establishment of religion.

Sec. 4. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by Congress.

What, finally, about evangelical response to questions posed by the Becker amendment? It is our opinion that, in view of the peril of weakening the classic expression in the First Amendment of our religious liberty, in the light of what the Supreme Court did in Engel and Schempp to maintain (overstrict though it may have been) full separation of church and state, and in consideration of the weaknesses of the proposed amendment, it does not merit support. While we recognize that other evangelicals feel differently, nothing in the present debate has changed our position respecting the unconstitutionality of state-prescribed devotions in public schools (see editorials in the July 20, 1962, and the August 30, 1963, issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY).

Yet there are aspects of public education today that cause evangelicals deep concern. Chief among them is the steady undertow of secular naturalism that is manifest in much educational philosophy and practice and that may well violate the neutrality concept upon which the ruling in Schempp was in good part based. Indeed, the question has yet to be settled whether secular naturalism in public education infringes upon the free-exercise clause which balances the establishment clause of the First Amendment. We believe that Christians who stand for strict church-state separation in public schools should protest secular naturalism as a trespass upon their right to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. As the Committee on Religion and Education of the American Council on Education stated in 1947: “To vast numbers of Americans the denial of the supernatural in the classroom is a negation of their faith and to make such denial is to bring religion into the schools with a vengeance.… Religious people have every right to resent and resist an attack on their faith in the name of academic scholarship.”

We also believe that an effective mitigation of the trend to secularism may be the development of public school courses in the literary and historical study of the Bible, as suggested by the Supreme Court. To those who consider such teaching useless, evangelicals reply that the Word of God is not bound and that no school board or teacher can nullify God’s promise that his Word will not return unto him void. Let evangelicals, therefore, lead in urging public schools in their communities to teach the Bible as literature and history.

Another means of withstanding the trend to secularism may be shared time, which offers a collaboration between religious schools and public schools that, according to competent legal authority, may be constitutional and that in some communities is already being practiced.

The challenge is for us to lengthen the cords and strengthen the stakes of Christian education. Education is a total process. The public school, though essential, is not the whole of it. Equally and even more essential are the home and the church. Furthermore, it is a constitutional right for parents able to do so to choose independent Christian schools for their children. What is needed is a renewal of educational commitment in home, church, and Christian elementary and secondary schools. The Supreme Court decisions and the debate on the Becker amendment are a summons to responsible evangelical interest in and support of public schools, which remain a bulwark of democracy, and a spur for evangelicals to back wholeheartedly and sacrificially the agencies of Christian education open to them.

Jawaharlal Nehru

In Jawaharlal Nehru a giant figure passes from the scene, and a particularly agonized sector of this planet knows a profound loneliness.

In retrospect the man and his career seem to form a concatenation of contradictions. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, the handsome, cultivated, and sensitive Indian once said: “I have become a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.”

Molder of modern India and her prime minister for the seventeen years since independence, he tirelessly fought British dominion and spent years in British jails, but he scolded the Indians for not being more like the British.

He loved peace and was dedicated to the non-violence doctrine of his beloved leader Mahatma Gandhi; yet he used troops in Goa, Kashmir, Hyderabad, and Junagadh.

His friendliness toward the giant Communist powers that menaced his borders was coupled with hostility toward Indian Communists, hundreds of whom he jailed.

While maintaining his doctrine of nonalignment with Communist and Western power blocs, he asked for American and British help in India’s struggle to resist Chinese invasion.

He was an aristocrat who became a socialist, but he moved from a doctrinaire Marxism to become a pragmatic planner who accorded a significant role to private enterprise.

In religious and superstitious India, he was a devotee of reason. He studied many religions—Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism—and pronounced himself an agnostic. At one time he sought to point India from extreme religiosity to science. But in 1961 he spoke often of the need for “spiritual solutions” to India’s problems. “Yes, I have changed,” he told an interviewer. “The emphasis on ethical and spiritual solutions is not unconscious; it is deliberate.… I believe the human mind is hungry for something deeper in terms of moral and spiritual development without which all the material advance may not be worthwhile.… The old Hindu idea that there is a divine essence in the world, and that every individual possesses something of it and can develop it, appeals to me.”

In 1954 Nehru suggested a restriction on the number of foreign Christian missionaries that has reduced missionary personnel in India by about 20 per cent, but he often reminded Indians of the need for religious freedom. “Christians are as much Indians as anyone else,” he said. “They must have full opportunity,” he added in the course of condemning a movement that demanded Hindu domination. His advocacy of a curb on Christian missionaries, particularly in border areas, was politically motivated, he said, noting that foreigners were looked upon with suspicion in certain areas.

But if Nehru’s actions frequently did not fit into logical compartments, neither did the staggering immensity of India’s problems, which he made his own. He sought to leap the centuries without benefit of a totalitarian state, shunning the role of dictator that some tried to thrust upon him. He sought unity for a country terribly divided by sects, castes, languages, tribes, and clans. It seemed at times that only the mystique of his own person prevented the shattering of a brave show of unity.

Upon his successor, Lai Bahadur Shastri, falls an awesome burden as a subcontinent, and even Asia itself, hang in the balances. Lacking Nehru’s towering personal stature, he now must face the problems of poverty and disunity within and the problems of China and Pakistan without. Their resolution is in grave doubt. But he may swing his country closer to the West. And the West could breathe a sigh of relief that it would not be dealing with former defense minister Krishna Menon, left-leaning neutralist who was toppled from power by the Chinese invasion—a curious benefit from a dastardly act.

Pandit Nehru once proposed his own epitaph: “If any people choose to think of me, then, I should like them to say: ‘This was a man who with all his mind and heart loved India and the Indian people. And they in turn were indulgent to him and gave him of their love most abundantly and generously.’ ”

The Last Battle In Asia?

It is hard to see how the United States can avoid more direct intervention in the prolonged, bloody struggle for South Viet Nam.

“The battle in Viet Nam is the last one in Asia,” says the foreign minister of South Viet Nam, Phan Huy Quat. “If the misfortune happened to the free world of losing it, then even the ultimate sanctuaries, such as India and Japan, would be of little strategic value.”

Unfortunately, the current strategy for ridding South Viet Nam of Communist guerrilla forces seems inadequate. The new government in that country apparently realizes that victory entails a combination of military, political, economic, and social programs. But real progress continues to elude us.

Thus there emerges, on the one hand, agitation for more aggressive tactics to root out the guerrillas. On the other hand, an alternative—to accede to the demands for so-called neutralization—is what Secretary of State Dean Rusk rightly regards as “a formula for surrender.”

A particularly distressing aspect of the situation is the apathy of our allies toward possible loss of Viet Nam. The United States is again left holding the bag. Even the Vietnamese themselves apparently manifest some measure of indifference. One wonders to what extent the American image abroad has contributed to this apathy and unconcern.

Transcending The Meaningless

Twentieth-century man is not the same as the man of the sixteenth or the fourth century. If sixteenth-century man was driven by the anxiety of sin and guilt, twentieth-century man is haunted by a sense of meaninglessness that drains all purpose and joy from his life. Sin, like most other things, has a history, and in the process sinful men have changed.

The distinguishing mark of twentieth-century man is his sour and bitter view of human life. Many intellectuals, among them novelists, playwrights, social critics, and philosophers, regard life as a disease and human existence as a curse. They accept Jesus’ assessment of Judas’s life as their own, convinced that it would really have been better had they never been born. And masses of unreflective people instinctively regard the struggle of their lives as an aimless journey from an erratic sexual act to a final nothing.

Modern men are paying the price for refusing to take sin seriously. The bitter price is to read evil, irrationality, and death into the fabric of human life.

No view of life takes sin more seriously than the Christian view. Yet Christianity regards evil as an additive, something with which man has contaminated life but something God can and does remove through Jesus Christ. Thus the Christian can admit the full dimensions of evil and yet greet life with an affirmative attitude. For him to be alive is a blessing, a divine gift to be enjoyed. Life is a good thing. At the heart of reality is a transcendent divine goodness that created the world good and is greater than all its acquired sin and evil. The Christian with the Psalmist, therefore, sees the growing grass as a sign and guarantee that the mercy of God endureth forever. At the altar of redemption he sees room in the divine grace for the sparrow, for at the altar of God the sparrow finds a place to build her nest and raise her young. Even the existence of the sparrow is good—how much more human existence!

In a recent issue of the Manchester Guardian Weekly, Anthony Burgess assesses Franz Kafka. Kafka in his novels is said to present us with the public symbols he wrought out of the lonely agony of his inner life to purge the nightmare of his soul. Yet these projections of his private agony are not a “pilot for our pain” leading us into the harbor of redemption. Kafka, as Burgess admits, never found the harbor of Christianity but died alone in his sea of private darkness. It is not true—as Kafka’s own life demonstrates—that the nature of our sin and evil must first be learned from such artists as he, and that only then will the answers of revealed religion be understood. Our sin and loneliness can be understood only within the Christian faith. Outside it, they appear as darkness, not light, and only confuse and mystify. They do not lead to redemption. Until evil is seen in the light of God’s creation and redemption of the world, our abortive agonies and struggles are viewed as the very fabric of man’s life and world, a view that excludes redemption and ends in bitter cynicism.

Only within a Christian understanding of evil can life be accepted as good.

Theology

God’s Only Way Is Also Man’s

L. Nelson Bell

One of the inescapable facts of the Gospel is that God had no other way to redeem men than to send his Son into the world for that specific task.

From this proceeds the second inescapable fact, that man has no other way of salvation than through faith in the work of God’s Son.

Basic to these two is the fact and nature of sin and its effect on mankind. That sin is an offense against a holy God and that it separates man from his Creator is self-evident. But the magnitude of the offense can be judged only in the light of the magnitude of the cost of redemption, and of God’s love that made it possible.

Many observations can be made about the Cross. Viewed from God’s standpoint, it is the focus of his cleansing love. But man must see it as an instrument of torture and death, and if he is to see himself as he is he must see on that Cross the perfect, pure, and holy Son of God.

There is no meaning in the Gospel until we realize the necessity of judgment. To minimize the enormity and universality of sin is to miss completely the witness of Scripture and the nature of the unredeemed heart. Not for nothing did Paul argue about justice and self-control and future judgment as he witnessed to Felix.

Let us make this plain: We are talking about God’s only way to save the sinner and about the sinner’s need to recognize that he has no alternative but to accept God’s way.

Our Lord categorically said: “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” The Apostle Peter affirmed the same truth—“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

Man’s obligation is not to look for another means of salvation but to receive God’s means—his only means.

It seems unfitting to speak of God as facing a dilemma, but it can be reverently assumed that God was confronted with just that—either to let man be irrevocably alienated from him or to offer his Son as the means of cleansing, forgiveness, propitiation, and redemption.

And it is certainly fitting to say that man’s dilemma is his own inability to save himself and the necessity of receiving God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness in the person of his Son.

Damnation is no longer a popular word, except on the lips of the profane. But Scripture is too clear about the ultimate end of the unrepentant to ignore what it has to say. If the wages of sin is death, if the state and end of the sinner is separation from God, if the choice is heaven or hell, then surely we need to find out what God says about these things and what he has done on man’s behalf.

We are confronted with a dual situation. God had no alternative but to send his Son. Man has no alternative but to accept this gift. Much of man’s indifference stems from his failure to realize what God has done and why he did it. Not only so, but man is faced with the necessity of accepting in faith that which he is unable to explain.

The appeal to faith is not a subterfuge; it is the sole means by which God’s dilemma and man’s only hope can be brought into focus. Some deplore any position that leaves no alternatives, but life is full of such situations.

If the Scriptures are to be taken as authoritative in matters of faith and practice, then even a casual search will show that God’s love and redemptive plan are offered to man as his only way out.

If there were an iota of capriciousness in the divine offer of salvation, if there existed even the suggestion that the way is not plain or that it is only partial, either in provision or effect, there might be room for human argument.

But the offer of forgiveness is universal, and its effect is universal to all who will accept. That man should carp about the necessity of accepting God’s gift before it can become his is one of those perversions of human nature that can be resolved only by the Spirit of God.

The finality of Christ as God’s way to redeem man can be denied only by denying the revelation of his love and mercy.

Christ has no legitimate competitors, nor are there other sources for man’s relief. Christ precedes and transcends all others. At no time in human history has he not been “standing in the shadows” as the One who is, who was, and who is to come. He is and always has been the determining factor, and in his own time he will ring down the curtain of human history and merge time with eternity, of which he has always been a part.

On the one hand, had God had some other way whereby to overcome the power of sin, it is reasonable to think he would have exercised it. At the same time, the fact that the Bible reveals no alternative for man but to accept redemption on God’s terms and in his way should put an end to quibbling and lead men to receive joyfully that which is spoken of as “such a great salvation.”

Man’s view is so infinitesimal within the panorama of eternity that he should realize the futility and perverseness of questioning God’s plan. That God has abundantly revealed this to men makes any questioning all the more irreverent and foolish.

The writer once heard a scholar declare: “I refuse to try to ‘get by’ on the basis of what you claim Christ did for me.” That refusal was his privilege, as it is the privilege of men of all times, but this in no way invalidates what Christ did on Calvary or the fact that the salvation effected there is God’s only way for man.

Again we are thrown back on the height and depth and breadth of man’s need and the transcendent fact that Christ meets that need to the fullest.

A correspondent recently questioned our right to speak of God as having “concern” for sinful man, saying that because he is sovereign such a word is out of place. But is “love” out of place in speaking of him? Can we not speak of his mercy? Of course we can, and when we say God was and is “concerned” about man we are reflecting the overwhelming thought that this “concern” went the limit to provide a way out for man.

Confronted, then, with God’s only way, how can we do less than accept that way as our only hope? This is the very antithesis of legalism. It is accepting as fact that for our need there is a solution—one solution—and that God’s “whosoever” includes us and every other sinner.

We readily admit that there are deep mysteries in the sovereign grace of God. It could not be otherwise. Paul caught the temper of the unregenerate in these words: “Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?” (Rom. 9:20).

We are confronted with two amazing truths: God provided the only way of redemption, his Son and his Cross; and man too has an only way, God’s Son and his Cross. Thus we find that God’s only way is also man’s—and it leads to an eternity with him.

- More from L. Nelson Bell

Eutychus and His Kin: June 19, 1964

DANGEROUS DEAL

A man we could afford to have around these days because we surely need him is Fiorello (“The Little Flower”) La Guardia. He could cut through cant just a little faster than anyone else, and he certainly was a refreshing administrator—maybe because he never paid any attention to paper-shuffling.

One day somebody called him a radical, and to this “The Little Flower” responded, “I am as radical as the Lord’s Prayer.” Since the word “radical” comes from the same root as the word “radish” and actually has to do with radix or root, it is not necessarily a bad thing when a man is radical. I suppose what La Guardia had in mind was a phrase like, “Thy kingdom come … as it is in heaven.” We pray it all the time. It has frightening possibilities. If peradventure the Kingdom should come today, what would have to go?

I think La Guardia would be able to give us some guidance on freedom marches. Heaven knows we are due and overdue for a few demonstrations in behalf of our Negro friends and fellow citizens. What puzzles us is the relation between means and ends; it will be a sad day if we get them their rights by a method of wrongs. It is somewhat like hating your friends in order to love your enemies, and that sort of thing won’t do either in terms of building the Kingdom.

How often have you prayed, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”? Debts and debtors can be translated into all kinds of wrongdoings. You can’t really forgive unless you have really been hurt. There is no use going around saying there are some things you just can’t forgive, because that puts you in a kind of a bad relationship to God the forgiver. Some people in the present social uprisings find people on the other side quite unforgivable as they work away at their Christian witness. This is passing strange.

And by the way, did you ever think that the Prodigal Son asked for what he had coming to him—and surely got it!

EUTYCHUS II

SCOPE

I have three things to say about “The Glories of Heaven” (May 22 issue). It was refreshing, heavenly, and down to earth!

ARTHUR M. ROSS

Asst. Prof. of Bible

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

CALVIN AND LIBERALISM

I was most interested in the fine articles about Calvin in the issue of May 22. Especially did the article about “Calvin the Expositor” catch my attention. Most striking is the very great similarity between the “four expository principles” as discussed there and the basic principles of biblical interpretation as practiced by the so-called liberal school of “modern” biblical criticism.…

Though trained at “liberal” Boston University, and therefore undoubtedly prejudiced, I sense that a great many Protestants pay lip service to the principles of the great Reformers while practicing an essentially Roman Catholic approach to Scripture and doctrine. Too many have become the new dogmatists, refusing to re-examine and test the traditions of the Reformation in the light of the most recent “careful grammatical and historical exegesis of the text” (Calvin’s first principle in the article cited).…

VINCENT S. HART, JR.

Trinity Methodist

Sequim, Wash.

OUR PREMATURE CREDULITY

It was interesting to find CHRISTIANITY TODAY less tolerant than the Orthodox Presbyterian Church of a challenge to rethink a traditional ecclesiastical policy (Editorials, “The Church and the Mission Hospital,” May 22 issue)! The unexpected symptom of premature hardening of the credulity was evidently triggered by a flaring of indignation at what you misconstrued as another case of the reduction of Christian social responsibility by reactionary evangelicals (a theme close to your heart we know but, be assured, to ours also).

The minority and majority at our General Assembly were not divided as to whether Christians ought to sponsor hospitals—that, we all agree, is not debatable. But Christians exist as individual believers abroad in the world as well as in organized church institutions, and to pronounce it undebatable that the church rather than a private Christian society is the proper agency to conduct medical “missions” would be to assume a stance on the problematic interrelationships of church, state, and private society that would be incredibly pontifical, especially in 1964. It would then have been more in keeping with the image of CHRISTIANITY TODAY if your editorial had applauded a serious attempt to develop in a relevant way the biblico-theological principles implicit in Christ’s lordship over culture as well as cult. And speaking of images, you quite failed to project the real Herbert S. Bird—my good and witty friend simply is not the snapping turtle type.

MEREDITH G. KLINE

Westminster Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

Your editorial … did not get its teeth evenly into the real point of the discussion at the recent General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Thus it contained a most lamentable distortion of the position of my good friend and ministerial colleague, Dr. Meredith G. Kline. Permit, then, this attempt to correct the “bite.”

The question before us had nothing to do with whether social and moral evils are the proper concern of evangelical Christians. Neither Dr. Kline nor those who support his position can be fairly charged with “tending in the direction of neglecting good works for fear of exposing themselves to the social gospel”.…

HERBERT S. BIRD

Willow Grove, Pa.

CIVIL RIGHTS

I read it (Editorial, “Civil Rights and Christian Concern,” May 8 issue) as soon as it came … and find myself in complete agreement with it.… It is an excellent job!

HOWARD CARSON BLAKE

First Presbyterian Church

Weslaco, Tex.

There is a great deal of cunning in that editorial, but absolutely no depth. The cunning is in seeming to be well versed on the subject at hand, in seeming to be Bible based, in seeming to be objectively Christian, and in seeming to infer that the civil rights bill before Congress at this moment is truly Christian and constitutional. You leave yourself an out on the latter point when you write that “the bill should and probably will be amended,” but then to offset that weakness, you advocate writing senators in favor of passage of the bill without any specifications as to what amendments would be required to make it conform with true justice and within the framework of the Constitution which it certainly is not under its present writing.…

HOWARD L. FREEMAN

Hudson, N. Y.

The best I have ever read on the subject. It is both concise and comprehensive; it is a challenge as well as an indictment of evangelical beliefs and conduct.…

W. N. TAYLOR

Milton, Ill.

The action of the National Association of Evangelicals in passing a civil rights resolution (News, May 8 issue) was flagrant and unauthorized impertinence to a degree that many of us who have pulled out of the National Council in revulsion because of their unauthorized sounding off, may find that we should re-examine our affiliation with what we have considered a more conservative and scriptural organization.

No group of a few hundred individuals can fairly and honestly represent a nationwide constituency on such a controversial secular matter, and it was arrogant effrontery for them to pretend to do so. The leadership of the NAE owes its membership an apology for such high-handedness. Be assured that the Evangelical Methodist Church does not join its voice in such an expression, and if its representatives at the meeting did not voice their objections, they were acting for themselves and not for the church.

ELTON CROWSON

Publicity Chairman

Wesley Evangelical Methodist Church

Memphis, Tenn.

I was particularly intrigued in reading the article titled, “Plain Words on Civil Rights” (News, May 22 issue).…

If he is the right kind of minister, the modern preacher feels himself an ambassador of God, not for a small section of life, but for all life! However, he is beginning to wonder whether he can be in true line with the prophets of old and take only a timid and academic attitude toward the political and social evils around him.…

JOHN F. PALM

McGregor, Minn.

CUE FROM LENIN

I have followed with interest and instruction the several series of articles you have carried in your fine journal on Christian higher education. In all of these series of articles, as in the current May 8 issue, the rationale for this education has been, for the most part, admirably set forth.

And yet … nothing is ever really said in support of Christian elementary and secondary education. It seems to me that, if Christian higher education is so necessary, Christian elementary and secondary education is all the more necessary.…

Christian educators are, I would think, ready to take a cue from Lenin when he said in regard to his own philosophy and its inculcation, “Give me the child for the first eight years of his life, and I’ll have him.” To practice Christian education at the college and university level only is logically and psychologically, to say nothing of theologically, almost too little, too late.…

JOHN SPYKMAN

Muskegon Christian School

Muskegon, Mich.

STRICT TIMEKEEPER

[Eutychus’s] comments on invocations (May 8 issue) struck home when I was asked to “bless” the rodeo we had last weekend. The inanity of the situation was revealed to me in the following incident.

Before the invocation I stood talking with a lady timekeeper who was puffing vigorously on a cigarette. As I stood up to give the invocation I noticed the lady put out the cigarette as we bowed our heads.

After finishing the prayer I sat down next to this same lady. She promptly re-lit her cigarette. She said to me, “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you? In our church we aren’t supposed to but I do if the preacher is not around.” I said it was all right with me if she did. Then she added this comment, “You’ll notice I did put out my cigarette during your prayer, preacher. After all, I do have some respect for religion. You see, I’m not all bad.”

WAYNE C. JARVIS

Central Methodist

Lincoln, Ark.

T. S. ELIOT

I read the article “Distinctives of a Christian College” (May 8 issue) with considerable interest. As an English teacher in a church-related college, I fully support Mr. McDormand’s plea for that “faith [which] must inform the best teaching of history, philosophy, literature, science, and the social sciences.”

One comment, though, concerning a problem which Mr. McDormand seems to raise. Having made the claim that “contemporary literature echoes and re-echoes the wistful longing of modern man,” the author reinforces his claim by a reference to T. S. Eliot, “whose poetry repeatedly reflects this distressing frustration of the human soul devoid of faith.” Granted, the early Eliot poetry (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men”) clearly does reflect such depression, but Eliot’s tone changed markedly after he became a member of the Anglican church in 1927. Such later poems as “Ash Wednesday,” the “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’ ” or “The Four Quartets” are significant for their dramatic depiction of man’s road from disillusionment to faith in God. And especially in the drama cited, “The Cocktail Party,” a clearcut choice resulting in salvation is made. Celia Copplestone, who, as Mr. McDormand suggests in the quotation he gives, is “imprisoned in a realm of the finite and transitory,” does make a decision for service as a missionary, even going the ultimate road of martyrdom by being sacrificed a victim staked to an ant-hill. Likewise, Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne, out of the depths of a “painful sense of impoverishment,” do find a measure of peace through the psychological and priestly ministrations of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, the unidentified, probing guest.

Since thus the three characters just mentioned do not evidence, in the final analysis, a “painful sense of impoverishment” due to the workings of the fourth character, Sir Henry, but instead find an “awareness of [their] true identity,” one wonders if Mr. McDormand has not done one of our most ably distinctive and articulate defenders of the faith an injustice.

ROBERT D. CRIE

Asst. Professor of English

Nyack Missionary College

Nyack, N. Y.

THE DISTINCTIVES

I commend your courage for publishing and L. Nelson Bell for writing the article, “Recognizing the Distinctives” (Apr. 24 issue). It was an article that needed to be written, and Mr. Bell wrote it in superb fashion.

“Asleep in the Deep” by Eutychus II was also greatly appreciated.… His column never fails to delight me.

PAUL W. FOLK

Vera Cruz, Pa.

SIX DAYS A WEEK

Mr. Ronald C. Doll’s article, “Prayer, the Bible, and the Schools” (May 8 issue), advocates Protestant churches follow the Roman Catholic Church in teaching religion to our children, leaving “secular education to the public school.” Presumably he sees nothing wrong with this view or he wouldn’t advocate it. The Roman Catholic Church following Greek philosophy and not the Bible can do this, but this writer is firmly convinced that Bible-following Christians ought not.…

CHRISTIANITY TODAY could perform a desperately needed service in Christian circles if it presented to the ministers and Christian public the nature of that education which is consistent with the Bible. Many ministers with whom this writer is acquainted don’t seem to see the nature and necessity of such education, as Mr. Doll doesn’t. If they did, those ministers would bend every effort to start private Christian day schools and use their education plants six days a week instead of one!

JOSEPH S. GREENE

Bellevue Christian School

Bellevue, Wash.

TO THE HEART

Dr. Bernard Ramm has reached the very heart of Christian higher education in his article, “The Roots of Christian Humanism” (May 8 issue). All too often Christian young people have been persuaded that education in the Scriptures, to the neglect of the liberal arts, is sufficient to prepare them for a life of vital Christian witness. The world demands to be faced on its own terms, and if Christians are not prepared to meet the world on those terms, then there is little hope of meeting the world at all.

Christian colleges cannot afford to neglect the liberal arts, nor can they afford to demand less than the best of their students. Christian colleges must not become havens of “Christian charity” for mediocre students!

ALAN H. KELMEREIT

St. Davids, Pa.

Ought to be put into the hands of every administrator and every faculty member in every Christian college and Bible school in the country!

VIRGINIA R. MOLLENKOTT

Prof. of English

Nyack Missionary College

Nyack, N. Y.

Why should Christian educators fear the liberal arts because these studies have enslaved some? We need a conquering Christianity. The liberal arts are useful tools for biblical studies when harnessed by such men in Christian education. Since God made humans and gave them the Bible to study, to live, and to proclaim, why should not the two be essentially advantageous for an effective Christianity today?

ROBERT J. HUGHES III

Elbing, Kan.

THE PEACE CORPS

The reference to “Religion and the Peace Corps” (Editorials, Apr. 24 issue) is the first information I have had [of] the relation of the members of the Peace Corps to religious (Christian) schools and churches in the several countries where the United States government is using these young people.…

MARSHALL E. BARTHOLOMEW

Geneva, N. Y.

APPROACH TO STUDENTS

I have just finished reading … “The Word and the Campus,” by Ernest Gordon (May 8 issue). I agree with the author, “The campus is crying out for God’s Word.”

I have the unusual opportunity of complete working freedom at the local junior college. The attendance at the school this next year is to be around 600. Whereas this is a small school in contrast to the larger universities, 600 students can present a challenge and burden which only Christ can make real.

One of my first mistakes made while working with these students was to expect scholarly repudiation of Christianity. Because of such expectations I stocked my study on campus with the best of apologetic books. However, I have come to the conclusion that though we need to be ready “to give an answer” (reasoned defense), most of the students are just waiting for some minister to be friendly (even human), and to tell them the personal demands of the living Lord Jesus Christ in and upon their lives. I am amazed after my three semesters of working on campus of the desire of students to know the simplest of gospel truths.

Not too long ago a panel of ministers discussed the relationship of science and religion. The name of Christ was not mentioned a single time. The students went away firmly believing that religion has nothing to offer them. Instead of being defensive with regard to science, the ministers should have gone on the offensive with regard to what Jesus Christ has done for us, who he is, and what he can mean to the modern college student.

HAROLD R. MILLER

Bethel Baptist

Iowa Falls, Iowa

OLDER THAN IT LOOKS

Conservative Christianity rejoices in the announcement (Apr. 24 issue) that the Reformed Presbyterian Church, General Synod, and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church are exploring church union. There was, however, one slightly misleading feature in the article, namely, the possibility the united church would be “141 years old.”

The Reformed Presbytery in North America was reconstituted in May of 1798. For a time … the synod (organized on May 24, 1809) only met biennially. But then the split of 1833 produced the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America and the Reformed Presbyterian Church, General Synod. Because the latter body has met annually (with two exceptions) since 1842, their synodical meetings now number 141 while the former, meeting biennially more times, only lists 134 sittings.

The number 141 therefore simply refers to the number of synodical assemblies, not the age of the denomination.

ROBERT MORE, JR.

Reformed Presbyterian Church

Almonte, Ont.

• One could trace the Reformed Presbyterian Church all the way back to the first century. We chose rather to report the age used on the floor of the assembly.—ED.

NOT THE LAST HURRAY

Hurray for the “social gospel” (Editorials, Apr. 10 issue)! You make its return sound like a terrible disease which keeps erupting. It is only the Holy Spirit bursting the bonds of “religion” and demanding that the worship of God enter life. But then you are also opposed to such worship.…

RICHARD E. NYSTROM

Christ United Presbyterian Church

Mars, Pa.

For those of us who have been studying the mountain of material issued by the social gospelers over a period of the last four decades, it is interesting to learn from your editorial writer that the social gospel ever departed!…

EDGAR C. BUNDY

Church League of America

Wheaton, Ill.

AIRY ARISTOPHANES

In your April 10 issue the article … “The Depersonalization of God” brought to mind The Clouds of Aristophanes, literary burlesque to be sure, yet undoubtedly reflecting the opinions of some minds in the fifth century before Christ. I quote some pertinent lines from the B. B. Rogers translation (Loeb Library):

Line 379: “No Zeus have we there, but a Vortex of Air.”

Line 423: “Now then you agree in rejecting with me The Gods you believed in when young. And my creed you’ll embrace, ‘I believe in wide space, In the Clouds, in the eloquent Tongue.’ ”

In line 627 Socrates swears by Chaos, Air, and Respiration.

W. S. HINMAN

Pine Beach, N. J.

FROM ICELAND: WARMTH

I see CHRISTIANITY TODAY regularly at the library of the U. S. Information Office, located not far from my home. Many of your articles are so informative. I surely had use for it when I a while ago wrote an article for the press here about Christianity in South America.

OLAFUR OLAFSSON

Reykjavik, Iceland

Theology

Works Count Too!

Charles N. Pickell

America is a nation of pragmatists. We like to have things proved. In a sense we are all from Missouri and want to be shown the validity of a proposition or the effectiveness of a mechanism. Confronted with a new proposal or gadget, we ask first, “Does it work?”

Strange to say, many of us evangelicals are less pragmatic in spiritual matters. Zealous to maintain the biblical truth of salvation by grace through faith, we too often fail to emphasize that works count too.

James, the brother of our Lord, saw this truth clearly. He was a pragmatist and wanted to see faith in action. He could not stand pious pomposity that professed faith but gave no evidence of it. James doubtless would have agreed with T. S. Eliot’s words in “The Hollow Men”:

Between the idea

And the reality,

Between the motion

And the act,

Falls the shadow.…

Between the conception

And the creation,

Between the emotion

And the response,

Falls the shadow.¹

James was aware of the hollowness of men. He saw the shadow that frequently falls between faith professed and deed performed; hence he asks, “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him?” (Jas. 2:14, RSV). He then goes on to draw a clear line of distinction between profession of faith and possession of faith.

There is a word in James’s question that casts considerable light on his point of view: “If a man says he has faith.…” James does not credit such a man with saving faith; the man only says he has faith. There is frequently a significant difference between what we say and what we do. This is precisely where the shadow falls that casts a pall over the testimony of much evangelicalism; while we talk of God’s love and grace, we are slow to demonstrate that love and grace in even the most rudimentary way to others. Bunyan describes Talkative in The Pilgrim’s Progress in these words: “He knows only to talk.… [He is] … as devoid of religion as the white of an egg is of savor.…” So are we if we do not implement our faith in practical ways. Some words of Browning also characterize the result of this condition: it renders faith “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.”

James’s point is that it is not sufficient simply to give assent to correct doctrine or to speak of personal faith in Christ. There must be evidence of the genuineness of faith through a growing Christlikeness. Jesus himself said, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21). Genuine faith will so unite a man to Christ that all his thoughts and actions will come under the constraint and control of the Holy Spirit. Thus faith and works are brought together.

By the manner in which he asks the question, “Can his faith save him?” James implies the answer. But lest there be any confusion, he shows that such faith is useless because it does not help others and dead because it is no more than the belief of demons.

First, he asks another question. “If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profità” (2:15, 16). Too often we have done just this. We have spoken of our concern for the souls of men and given testimony of our faith and the sufficiency of Christ to meet man’s needs. But we have only halfheartedly sought to deal with man’s physical needs—if we have done so at all. We have forgotten that our Lord ministered to the physical as well as the spiritual needs of men. We have forgotten that we are his body, his hands working and his feet moving in the world today. He works today, but he works through men. We live in a nation singularly blessed in material possessions. With less than 6 per cent of the world’s population, we possess or control, it is estimated, more than half of the world’s wealth. This places a special responsibility upon American Christians.

David Head in his little book, He Sent Leanness: A Book of Prayers for the Natural Man, points up the problem incisively. Following the general forms of prayer men employ, he puts on their lips the words that seem to be in their hearts, if one may judge by their actions, and he prays:

We miserable owners of increasingly luxurious cars, and ever-expanding television screens, do most humbly pray for that two-thirds of the world’s population that is undernourished.…

We who seek to maintain a shaky civilization do pray most earnestly that the countries which suffer exploitation may not be angry with the exploiters, that the hungry may not harbour resentment against those who have food, that the down-trodden may take it patiently, that nations with empty larders may prefer starvation to communism, that the “have-not” countries may rejoice in the prosperity of those that have, and that all people who have been deeply insulted and despised may have short memories.…

We pray … that the sick may be visited, the prisoner cared for, the refugee rehabilitated, the naked clothed, the orphan housed, and that we may be allowed to enjoy our own firesides, evening by evening in peace.…

Lord, be good to us.

Christ, make things easy for us.

Lord, deliver us from the necessity of doing anything.²

We may be shocked by such writing, but perhaps our shock is due not so much to its impropriety as to its accuracy. This prayer is too close to the thoughts of many hearts. We will pray for the needy but not help them. We will offer them pity but not show Christlike love. We fail in our witness but do not recognize our failure, and we excuse our inaction by saying we do not believe in the social gospel, as if social implications were totally unrelated to the genuine article. Let us not confuse the issue. The so called social gospel is not the Gospel, for it has emaciated the Gospel by removing the necessity of the new birth; but the Gospel does have social overtones we dare not ignore. To declare the Good News without doing good deeds is sheer hypocrisy.

‘Even A Cup Of Cold Water’

Jesus did not consider good works and social emphases unrelated. Listen to his words: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). “Whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he shall not lose his reward” (Matt. 10:42). Again, in his discourse on judgment in Matthew 25 Christ speaks of the righteous as feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming strangers, clothing the ill-clad, visiting the sick, and ministering to the prisoner, and then concludes: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” And John, the beloved, also speaks to the matter: “If any one has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:17).

Is it not ironical that, as D. C. Macintosh points out, “the cross of Christ has been commonly used by his supposed disciples to encourage them in not bearing the cross themselves”? Hiding behind the façade of orthodoxy, we neglect one of the most fundamental and orthodox truths of all, the compassion and constraining love of Christ.

James says this kind of faith is dead. It is mere form—words, words, words. So he says, “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith” (2:18b). He clinches his argument by pointing out that such faith is no better than that of the demons: “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe … and shudder” (2:19). The demons may believe and shudder, but neither their belief nor their shuddering can save them. Thus he leads into the difference between profession of faith and possession of faith.

If profession is not sufficient, what is? James would not discount the value of profession, but he would have that profession find expression in the common experiences of everyday life through good works.

This emphasis immediately raises questions and has caused men of such stature as Martin Luther to consider James’s letter “an epistle of straw,” because they felt it was fundamentally opposed to the teaching of Paul. This cleavage is only superficial, however, and Luther’s objections must be understood in the historical context of a church that had for centuries buried the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith beneath an intricate system of works.

The key to understanding James and Paul is semantics. We often use one word to mean two or more different things. A ball means one thing to an athlete and quite another to a debutante, and we may speak of the church as either a building or a people. Just so, the word “justify” may have different connotations. When Paul speaks of justification in Romans and Galatians, he refers to the internal experience of faith through which Christ’s righteousness is imputed, thus reconciling man to God. James, on the other hand, uses the word “justified” in James 2:24 more in the sense of vindication, evidence, or proof.

So, while Paul speaks of Abraham’s faith as the source of his justification, James speaks of his faith as being completed by his works (2:22). Paul speaks of Abraham’s faith before the birth of Isaac. James alludes to the offering of Isaac as proof of Abraham’s faith. Paul is certainly opposed to works as the ground of theological justification, but James does not suggest that works alone are a valid ground. On the other hand, Paul would have no quarrel with James’s view that faith, if it is genuine, must produce works. He says as much in several places. Speaking of God’s judgment he says, “He will render to every man according to his works” (Rom. 2:6); and, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body” (2 Cor. 5:10). Concerning the importance of works as the fruit of faith he says, “In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6); and also, “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).

For A Completed Faith

If the key to reconciling James and Paul is a correct understanding of their use of the term “justify,” the door is the word “complete.” James is saying, in effect, faith that possesses us will be completed by our works. We are, to put it another way, justified by faith alone, but not by faith that is alone.

James then calls to mind another whose faith was validated by works. Rahab was not a promising person; she had been an harlot and came of a pagan people. But in Joshua we are told of her faith in the living God and how she not only professed this faith to the spies sent out by Joshua but hid and protected them. Thus she enabled them to escape, though it meant placing her own life in jeopardy. God richly rewarded her for her faith; she became a mother in the Davidic line and is one of the four women named in Matthew’s genealogy of Christ. But the point James makes is that she not only said she believed; she also acted upon that belief. She was “justified by works and not by faith alone” (Jas. 2:24). Some who were proud of their heritage and faith may have disliked her inclusion with the people of God, confusing the elite with the elect; but she was a woman who possessed faith and whose faith possessed her so that she produced good works.

This is really all James is saying—that faith is evidenced by works or it is not genuine faith. “As the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead” (2:26). Or, as F. W. Robertson put it, “No man is justified by faith unless faith has made him just.”

Profession and possession go together. Profession makes a declaration. Possession acts, because that faith not only is possessed but also possesses us. We must both believe and do. But one more question remains: “Do what?” The primary need is to seek to be so saturated with the love of Christ that every deed will be Christlike. Yet because he is intensely practical, James gives some points as starters. In all he gives fifty-four clear commands for Christian behavior. Among them he urges meeting trial victoriously (1:3); being of single purpose (1:8); resisting temptation (1:12); visiting the needy and keeping oneself unstained by the world (1:27); showing no partiality (2:1); controlling the tongue (3); guarding against false judgment (4:11); living one day at a time (4:13); being prepared and looking for the Lord’s return (5:7); praying for the sick (5:13); and seeking the straying (5:19).

To be sure, one may score well on all of these and not be saved. But evangelicals do well to remember that faith is completed only by works, because “faith apart from works is barren.” Works count too!

A Collect For Compassion

There in the rudest tree

Where winter grips and rocks

The black indefinite cold,

Comes the small chickadee,

And like my soul, pipes

Anxious prayer, implores

An opening of doors,

Some crust and surety.

My hand, give him his bread!

May whirlwind God pause

From his storms and come

To me with Cup and Crumb.

ARNOLD KINSETH

Charles N. Pickell is pastor of the Wallace Memorial United Presbyterian Church, Hyattsville, Maryland. He received the B.A. degree from Juniata College and the B.D. from Western Theological Seminary, and he has also studied at Harvard and Andover Newton. His writings include “Preaching to Meet Men’s Needs: The Meaning of the Acts as a Guide for Preaching Today.”

- More from Charles N. Pickell

The Morals Revolution and the Christian College

David L. Mckenna

The true Christian college is always in tension with the world. This strained relation is not actively sought or artificially manufactured. It is inherent in the basic purpose of the Christian college. As an uncompromising academic institution with a sharp-edged Christian witness, the Christian college is ever at odds with intellectual ignorance and humanistic arrogance. Therefore, whenever the thought-life of the nation and the values of its people run counter to truth and righteousness, the Christian college as well as the Christian Church must speak.

We are in the throes of a “Morals Revolution,” defined by Robert Fitch as a “Sexplosion.” We are reaping the results of an “affluent, permissive and sex-suffused society.” The center of this revolutionary storm is the college campus, and its object is the college student.

The Morals Revolution has been heralded in the popular press by an avalanche of material dealing with the morals and morality of Americans in general and of college students in particular. In January, 1964, Time magazine led the way with an article on “Sex and the New Morality.” The Ladies’ Home Journal picked up the problem with an article entitled, “Too Much Sex on the College Campus.” Gael Greene’s book Sex and the College Girl was rushed into print. Then, in April, Atlantic came out with the feature “Must Colleges Police Sex?” and Newsweek created a national conversation with its sensational and alarming “The Morals Revolution on the College Campus.”

If these writings accurately reflect the size of the problem we face in the Morals Revolution and the extent to which it is altering the values and attitudes of college youth, then morality is one of the most timely and insidious problems facing the Christian college today. This is said with the awareness that the Morals Revolution has not yet, according to one of the recent articles, reached “the academic hinterland.” While many writers include the Christian college in this backwoods category, the implication is that the revolution is coming there, too. It is just a matter of time. Also, if the Yale senior meant it when he said, “Premarital sex doesn’t mean the downfall of society, at least not the kind of society that we’re going to build,” then this is our problem as well as Yale’s, Harvard’s, Chicago’s, and Vassar’s. If the Christian college is in the “academic hinterland,” it must now be a voice in the wilderness. While students in many colleges are using the Morals Revolution as a declaration of their freedom, students in the Christian college can use it as a declaration of their distinction. This is the time for us to respond!

The Creed Of Revolution

The response of the Christian college to the revolution will depend upon an understanding of the creedal statements of the new attitude toward sex. The recent magazine articles make it evident that the new morality does not simply reject traditional beliefs. It substitutes a doctrine of its own and gives its adherents slogans that have the ring of rightness.

First, Sex is Freedom. This slogan declares that sex has been changed from a closed to an open topic for study and conversation. From the long-standing taboo on sex as a subject for discussion in mixed company, the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Courses in the subject begin at the junior high school level, conversation among teen-agers and young adults is uninhibited, and the mass media use sex for advertising, headline stories, and dramatic plots. “Sexplosion” describes the burst of “sex” into the market, but “sexploitation” describes the distorted frankness.

Second, Sex is Security. This slogan is a reminder that sex has been transferred from the religious to the psychological sphere in the new morality. With marriage as a sacred institution of the Church, sex is holy, and a violation of the marriage vows is a sin. Out of the mechanistic and naturalistic backgrounds of psychoanalytical investigators, however, sex was morally neutralized. Its release became psychological expression and its problems became maladjustments. Consequently, sex is now the concern, not of religious morality, but of mental health.

Third, Sex is Fun. This creedal statement expresses the attitude that sexual health is gained by expression rather than repression. As noted in one recent article, every college student today is thoroughly indoctrinated with the Freudian manifesto that “repressed sex is bad; expressed sex is good.” But expressionism has not yet reached its peak. An intermediate step is sublimation, by which a person talks out or acts out the sex drive in such activities as music, art, and drama. Sublimation, however, now seems to stimulate as well as control sex because the line of expression is moving closer and closer to the actual act. Drama has reached the point where bedroom scenes are standard, and Broadway is just a step away from symbols, sets, and scenes that will portray the sex act itself. Repressionism may have had its evils, but the “fun” and “health” of expressionism seem to have no end but animalism and amorality.

Fourth, Sex is Love. This is the most insidious slogan of the new morality because it indicates that the criterion for sexual morality has been changed from a moral code to personal consequences. Time reported that the question about premarital sex is no longer “Is it wrong?” but “Is it meaningful?” The assumption is that sex is no longer a moral problem unless it makes you unhappy. This attitude comes out in teen-age morals. To some teen-agers sex is dirty if birth control methods are used. But if the relationship is the natural and uninhibited result of romance, then it proves the couple’s love for each other. As contradictory to common sense as this belief might be, it represents the new morality based on a blind personal happiness and an ambiguous belief that “Sex is Love.”

Fifth, Sex is Nothing. This slogan empties sex of its social implications and declares that the problem is one of individual responsibility. It is the follow-up of the role of the anonymous man in modern society, the man who is responsible only to himself and whose private life is his own business. This “live and let live” attitude has carried over into the new morality as belief in the privacy of action and responsibility that makes every man a law unto himself. It is not that men and women are insensitive to their social responsibilities; they simply assume that since “everybody is doing it,” it is “nobody’s business.”

Sixth, Sex is Status. This shibboleth indicates that the expectations for sex have been shifted from a double to a single standard. A significant facet of the Morals Revolution today is that women have been “emancipated” from the guilt and stigma of sexual involvement before marriage. Not only is a woman freed from the double standard; she is even given status by the evidence of her successful experiences. Some reports state that there are college women who are put under pressure by friends until they prove their freedom.

Action On The Campus

While the Morals Revolution may be described in the press, it is being acted out on the college campus. Although actions of many students have not yet caught up with the new morality, the minority is increasing in size and is setting the pace for others.

“Sex is Freedom” finds its expression in the obsession that college students have for the “realistic” discussion of sex. College dormitories have always been the center for supplementing the false ideas of the gang, clarifying the embarrassed talks at home, and warming up the cold facts of the classroom. In the Morals Revolution, however, the talk has reached the point of a pseudosophistication based upon experience. At one university a course in “Effective Living” was renamed “Affectionate Living” by the students and laughed out of the curriculum because the content was so far behind their experience.

“Sex is Security” is being tragically acted out on the college campus. For those who need to belong, sex seems to be the gateway to security. Newsweek reported the feeling of two students who found the answer to their “existential loneliness” in a physical relationship. To them, sexual relief seemed to be a panacea for emotional problems.

“Sex is Fun” is a malicious creedal statement that supports expressionism in its sublimated or actual form. Among some college students, the line of sublimation began at necking, moved to petting, and now includes any love-making short of intercourse. All sorts of wild parties in which much damage to property is done are included in the “fun” classification. When the young people are arrested, the general attitude is that “the young must have fun.” They are in trouble because of damage to personal property, not to personal morality.

“Sex is Love” is a catch-all for rationalizing premarital sex among college students. If a couple’s intentions are honest in love (whatever that word means now), then why deny the full expression of love? On the surface, this thinking sounds unselfish and almost reasonable. The fallacy is that the “right” person can change from time to time. Therefore, as strange as it may seem, a college man or woman today could enter marriage having had affairs with several “right” persons and still be untainted according to the new standard.

“Sex is Nothing” is a shoulder-shrugging attempt to make the act and the actors in premarital sex innocent. A few months ago in Indianapolis a fraternity convention in a hotel turned out to be an orgy. A father who was told by police that his daughter had been arrested on a charge of drinking and indecency said, “Thank God! I thought she might have been in an accident.”

“Sex is Status” has become the vicious underlying attitude for social climbing on the campus. There is a driving pressure to conformity. In colleges that have “parietal” hours, the girls who do not visit men’s rooms or have men visitors have not yet “arrived.” The ultimate in status-seeking is the off-campus apartment for a trial marriage and an assurance of upward mobility by sex.

Each of these slogans has had a part in establishing firm beachheads of the new morality on college campuses. Students are exhibiting a raw frankness about sex and calling it a sophisticated realism. They are reacting violently against the attempts of the college to control the opportunities for sex, even in college housing. Students are brazenly flaunting their new freedom on the beaches at Fort Lauderdale and Newport. They are expressing attitudes that back up what one has called “an antinomian orgy of open-mindedness.” The revolution is upon us!

The Morals Revolution is a threat to the Christian college because the personal morality of its students is at stake. Students in the Christian college are not exempt from the influences, the pressures, the sights and sounds of a “sex-suffused” society. They probably have as complete a knowledge of sex as any other modern youth and are certainly motivated by the same drives. Put with this the fact that regulations in the Christian college are frequently geared to prohibiting immorality among the students, protecting the immature against themselves, and saving the reputation of the college. The irresistible force and the immovable object can create an explosion at any time.

The Code Of Silence

To this picture, add also the non-academic and non-regulated portion of student life in the Christian college. Obviously, the name “Christian” does not make a college immune to moral problems. The real question, however, concerns the social expectations and the sense of responsibility that exist in the college group. The philosophy of privacy has infected the Christian college, and the code of silence has even been applied to moral problems. When immorality becomes “someone else’s business” in the student mind, the basic foundation for Christian social responsibility has been shattered.

This brings up the final concern for the threat of the new morality in the Christian college. What are the actual attitudes of the students toward sex problems and moral values? A survey would probably show a gratifying conformity on the side of traditional morality. But what about the informal attitudes that guide behavior when the “ceiling authority” is removed? A recent survey, published in the National Review, entitled “God and Man” showed that although students at a church college formally expressed conformity to the campus mode of orthodoxy, informally they had the same doubts as students in secular colleges. To what extent would this formal commitment to traditional morality be present while at the same time the students were entertaining the informal attitudes toward sex that are characteristic of the new moraliy?

The threat is this: If the students in the Christian college are as knowing about sex and as bombarded with it as other students; if they live in an atmosphere of restriction for the presently immature and the potentially immoral; if they are pressured by a student climate to act in ways contrary to the basic purpose of the Christian college; and if they have informal attitudes toward sex that differ from their formal professions, then the tension of today will be the trouble of tomorrow.

A Plan For Striking Back

The new morality also gives the Christian college an unusual opportunity to take a distinctive stand and present a needed witness. This will require a program of resolution and action that strikes at the very points where the Morals Revolution is taking hold on the college campus.

First, the Christian college must put sex education within a through-going Christian perspective. Whether we like it or not, we cannot turn back the tide of frankness. We can, however, condition that tide for our students with the healthy, holy, and helpful perspective of sex from the Christian view. As suggested by Bertocci in the Christian Century, (1) the openness of sex must be shored up with religious, ethical, and scientific facts; (2) the integrity of the whole man must be acknowledged along the natural penalties for contradictory behavior; and (3) the idea of sex must be recognized as irretrievably social.

Second, the Christian college needs to rethink its regulation of student life from the standpoint of maturity and morality rather than control and punishment. This is a dangerous statement; it may seem to advocate parietal hours for visits from the opposite sex or a complete freedom of coming and going. To the contrary, the thought is that we need to look again at the problem in order to build a rational base for our regulation and then choose a line of distinction that supports our Christian witness. This new look would require three ingredients for success that are missing in many colleges: (1) faculty understanding of the maturity level and trust in the morality level of the Christian college student; (2) student commitment to the larger social responsibility of the college and to what Trueblood called “voluntary self-discipline”; and (3) open communication between the two groups.

Third, the Christian college must have a student leadership that reflects both the formal and the informal climate of the campus. Many colleges have a double-pronged “press” on almost all issues, including sexual morality. Others have a formal stratum of action moving in one direction while an informal stratum moves in another. Yet, social pressures have played such an important role in forcing the college student into the camp of the new moralists that it is reasonable to assume that social pressures on the Christian campus could also carry the student moral level to a new high.

Fourth, the Christian college must recapture the attitude of being a transforming community in order to provide force against the new morality. Reactionism against the changing moral code is an easy way out for the Christian college. Restrictions might be tightened, lectures increased, and books burned without changing the attitude of one student. If the response to sexual freedom and promiscuity is simply Victorian prudery or Puritan rigidity, then we shall win the battle and lose the war. Our hope in the moral struggle is to fight “freedom with Freedom.” In the Christian context, this is not a repressive struggle or a binding burden; it is the freedom of knowledge, thought, and action that comes to a man who has been overwhelmed with the inner conviction of God. To witness to the anxious, lonely, guilty, and bored generation that is falling victim to the Morals Revolution, our best weapon is the freedom of a man who really knows what it is to be redeemed. James Stewart testified to the freedom of redemption with the words,

To be awakened by a thousand trumpets

And feel it bliss to be alive in such

A dawn as this.

The Emancipative Revolution still has something to say to the Morals Revolution, and the Christian colleges today have a chance to say it.

David L. McKenna is president of Spring Arbor College, Spring Arbor, Michigan. He holds the A.B. degree from Western Michigan University, the B.D. from Asbnry Seminary, and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Before becoming president of Spring Arbor College, Dr. McKenna was director of The Center for Higher Education at Ohio State University.

- More from David L. Mckenna

Theology

Have Ye Not Read?

Wilbur M. Smith

On five occasions our Lord asked of different groups of religious leaders a question simple in itself but with manifold implications, “Have ye not read?” Twice he asked the question of Pharisees, twice also of the chief priests and scribes, and once of the Sadducees. All of these five occasions are described in the Gospel of Matthew; three are found in the parallel passages of the Gospel of Mark.

When the Pharisees complained that the disciples of Jesus were plucking grain on the Sabbath Day (Matt. 12:3–5), our Lord gave a dual reply by asking first, “Have ye not read what David did, when he was hungry?” (referring to 1 Sam. 21:6), and then, “Have ye not read in the law, that on the sabbath day the priests in the temple …?” (referring to Num. 28:8, 10). Later when the Pharisees asked him if it was lawful for a man to put away his wife “for every cause” (Matt. 19:4), Jesus answered by asking the same simple question, “Have ye not read?,” with reference to Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. Shortly after this, when the chief priests and scribes resented the children’s recognition of Christ as the Son of David (Matt. 21:16), Jesus replied, quoting Psalm 8:2, “Did ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?” After uttering the parable of the wicked husbandman to this same group of chief priests and scribes, he sealed the truth he sought to teach by quoting Psalm 118:22, 23, introducing it with the question, “Did ye never read in the Scriptures?” (Matt. 21:42). Finally, during Holy Week when the Sadducees attempted to trap the Lord with a question regarding an impossible hypothetical case of seven brothers’ successively marrying the same woman, he once again asked, “Have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God?” (Matt. 22:31), quoting Exodus 3:6.

From these five texts there stands forth the basic fact that Jesus insisted that the great questions of life can be answered from the Word of God. His replies clearly reveal also that whatever he did or said during his earthly ministry was fully justified by the Word of Truth. Perhaps it is not too elementary to call attention to the fact that Jesus in each case was referring to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and not to any philosophic concepts or principles of logic. He asked not simply, “Have ye not read?” but, “Have ye not read in the Scriptures?” He does not suggest in these passages that his listeners ought to be wide readers in contemporary Greek and Latin literature; his emphasis is exclusively upon the reading of the Word of God.

Looking again at our Lord’s oft-repeated question, it is necessary to insist that these men were able to read. Jesus would probably never have asked such a question as this of shepherds. He was addressing the most educated men in Israel, who as you and I, were able to read. And not only were they able to read; they were doubly privileged in that they could read the Word of God. No other people on earth at that time had this privilege. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had any divinely inspired volume. Those to whom Jesus spoke not only had read these Scriptures but continued to read them every day. Some of them preached every Sabbath from the Scriptures, and others were the official interpreters of the Word of God. Because they could read the Word of God, they had a responsibility to understand, believe, and obey it.

The word “read” is a far richer one than we might think. Even the desk-size American College Dictionary gives it twenty-five different definitions. The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that the Middle English root of our word “read” meant to deliberate, to discern, to have an idea, to think, to interpret thought, and then to peruse. The Greek verb means to know exactly or to recognize; and the noun form anagnōsis is the word actually translated knowledge as in Acts 13:15, Second Corinthians 3:14, and First Timothy 4:13. (There is a very interesting illustration of this matter of reading in John’s description of the inscription on the Cross, John 19:19–22.)

Omitting books that are trash, evil books false in their purpose, and ephemeral books, and confining ourselves to the best and noblest literature, to the records of what men have done, thought, suffered, and said, what worlds open to us through this portal of reading! Even apart from the literature of imagination, such as Hamlet, Faust, Les Misérables, and Oliver Twist, the whole history of the human race unfolds before us as we read. Never shall I forget the experience of sheer wonder when as a young man I first read Professor Breasted’s fascinating Ancient Times. What a privilege through biography to enter into the struggles, the joys, the achievements of great men—of scientists such as Agassiz, or teachers such as William Lyon Phelps and Bliss Perry, or preachers and theologians such as Alexander Whyte and Robert Rainy. And best of all, what iron enters one’s blood as he peruses the thought-provoking pages of Augustine’s City of God, or Bruce’s Training of the Twelve, or Fairbairn’s Place of Christ in Modern Theology.

But my present intention is not to encourage Christians to read the great books, although I have often done just this and shall no doubt do so again. My purpose is rather to underscore the kind of reading of which Jesus spoke—the reading of the Word of God.

Bible Reading In Decline

I am afraid it is true, as many are saying, that private, serious reading of the Bible has for decades been decreasing among Christian people. Some of the reasons for this should be particularized. People in the Western world today have more leisure than in the past. At the same time there are more pressures for their time than ever before. Listening to the radio and watching television carves out a large segment of time for millions of people, and I should judge that the ordinary Christian gives far more time to these things than to the Word of God. The vast amount of reading material today also tends to push Bible reading to the side. Who does not feel that he must read regularly at least one daily newspaper and one weekly news magazine? No group is more tempted by reading than the clergy, who seem to feel obligated to read the newest theological theories coming out of Germany and do not want to be embarrassed by not knowing the latest utterances of Tillich or Ferré. In 1963 alone, there were 1,459 new religious books published in the English language and 324 new editions of earlier works! No minister could possibly read even all the more important volumes of this staggering library. The layman knows something of these pressures, also. “The average business or professional man today, far from being a non-reader, [is] a continuous reader—in the sense that he [casts] his eyes over print.… The amount of paper that goes over any executive’s desk today is tremendous. One must not forget this in trying to understand why, if a business or professional man has an hour or two in the evening for relaxation, he might not choose to read” (Reading for Life, edited by Jacob M. Price, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959).

Moreover, there are many subtle temptations for Christians to substitute some other worthy activity for the reading of the Word of God. Visiting Rome and the art galleries of Florence or even traveling in the Holy Land is not a replacement for personal reading of the Word of God. Gregory, the Bishop of Nyssa, far back in A.D. 380, said something we should ponder: “Before I even saw Jerusalem, I knew that Christ was Very God. I knew that God was born of a Virgin before I saw Bethlehem’s stable. I believed in the Lord’s resurrection before I looked upon the church built upon its memory. This little profit alone did I get from my journey: I learned that our places at home are far more holy than those abroad.” Visits to mission stations around the world, important as they are, are never to be considered a substitute for Bible reading; neither is the distribution of the Scriptures, nor listening to television services on the Lord’s Day. Because of a forced confinement following surgery, I recently listened on four successive Sunday mornings to services on television in Southern California, and not once did these ministers, who I presume are believers, use a text or attempt to expound the Word of God. Now that we all have automobiles and substantial vacations, we must also be careful to remember that beholding the great scenic wonders and historic places of our land is not apprehending God’s revelation to us in his Word.

From mingling with ministers, I have learned that with many of them the personal study of the Word of God is the most tragically neglected area of their lives. Thirty years ago the distinguished Methodist preacher of the Broadway Tabernacle of New York, Dr. Charles E. Jefferson, in a Bible Sunday sermon entitled “Searching the Scriptures,” issued a warning needed more today than then:

Possibly we have been reading too many papers, too many magazines, too many novels. We have too much neglected the Divine Library which leads to One who can give us abundant life. Too many of our preachers have lacked the Biblical mind. They have the newspaper mind. Sermons have a fatal tendency to be like articles or newspaper editorials. The newspaper mind is of the earth earthy, and the modern novelist is an expert in exploiting the world, the flesh, and the devil.

In Scripture the greatest theme that can ever occupy the attention of men is unfolded—the incarnation of the Son of God, his perfect life, his holy and vicarious death, his glorious hope-begetting resurrection, his eternal pre-eminence, his judgment of the quick and the dead. What tragedy to know Heidegger but not Christ; to know Thomas Mann or Sartre but to be deaf to the inspired apostles. We must never forget that it is before Christ that men will someday stand. In the Scriptures and only there we find the will of God. It is not in the latest book about God by some skeptical bishop that we discover the truth about God but in his holy Word and through his only begotten Son. Not to know what the Word of God says about the great problems of life is to expose ourselves to innumerable deceptions, false teachings, and demon-inspired, man-exalting philosophies. Here is hope for men stained with sin and a revelation of the certainty of a life to come, whose very reality modern science almost unanimously repudiates. For us as believers it is more important to know who Christ was and what he did and said, what he now is doing as our high priest, and what he will do when he returns to this earth, than it is to know any other subject available to men. How many believers today, through the neglect of the Word of God, should take upon their lips the prayer of the Psalmist, which God will answer if it is sincerely uttered: ‘My soul cleaveth unto the dust: quicken thou me according to thy word” (Ps. 119:25).

Blind Readers

Let us go back to the question Jesus asked, “Have ye not read?” Of course, those of whom Christ asked that question had read the Scriptures. But though they had read them and could quote hundreds of passages, they had not entered into the deeper implications of many of these revealed truths. Thus they had constructed a system of error, were ethically insincere, and were blind to the fact that their Messiah stood in their midst. Many of them were living in disobedience to the very Word they defended and believed to be inspired. What a terrible condemnation of these Bible-believing Jews are the words of the Saviour recorded in the twenty-third chapter of Matthew.

It was eighty years ago that Professor Charles Augustus Briggs of Union Theological Seminary issued his still valuable work, Biblical Study. Though no paragon of conservatism, he began with this unequivocal statement: “Biblical study is the most important of all studies for it is the study of the Word of God which contains a divine revelation of redemption to the world.” In his chapter on “Exegetical Theology” is a statement transparently true but too seldom heard today in our seminaries or found in our more influential theological literature: “Unless theology freshens its life by ever-repeated draughts from the Holy Scriptures, it will be unequal to the task imposed upon it. It will not solve the problem of the thoughtful, dissolve the doubts of the cautious, or disarm the objections of the enemies of the truth.”

In the midst of so much secular reading, such contradictions of theological opinions, such a lowering of ethical standards, such a growing prevalence of deceiving cults, such a speeding up of life, leading to so much exhaustion and weariness amid the sheer fascination of this materialistic mid-twentieth-century world in which we live—if ever our souls needed the refreshing watering of the Word of God, its cleansing, its power as the Sword of the Spirit to beat back our diabolical foes, it is now. Whatever else we do, we must make room daily for time to feed upon the bread that comes down from heaven.

True Theology

The learned world is today studying the Scriptures too much as the learned world studied nature two thousand years ago. We philosophize and then see if the Word does not give us support. If it does, well; if not, then it is bad for the Word, and so we doubt it, we reject it, we turn away from it. There can be no great progress in biblical knowledge on this plan any more than there was progress in science in the earlier centuries of the Christian era. What is needed is another Bacon to appear, to change the method of Bible study and to induce the theologian to lay aside his theories and preconceived notions, and to inquire reverently what the Word of the Lord is. Oh, if the theologians would lay aside their systems and sit humbly at the feet of Jesus, the wonderful progress we should see in biblical science would correspond with the wonderful progress we are permitted to see in these days in natural science!

The nineteenth century has witnessed a most wonderful revival of learning concerning the book of Nature, which is one of the books of God. We can plainly see how the revival came about. It was because men ceased to think what Nature ought to teach and reverently inquired what she did teach. May not the twentieth century witness as great a revival of learning concerning the book of Revelation, which is another book of God? And if it should, can we not see how it may be brought about?

I think that there are already intimations that biblical theology is to have a higher place than it has ever had before, and that systematic theology, theology of the creeds, is to occupy second place rather than first place in the estimation of God’s people. The Bible is being studied as never before. The Church is reverently standing before the Scriptures saying, “Lord, what wilt Thou have me to believe?” The true attitude of man before the book of Nature is the true attitude of man before the book of Revelation. We must stand as reverently before the one as before the other.

The modern scientist is a patient inquirer in the presence of natural phenomena. He gives the highest authority to what he sees and hears and feels, and not to what he thinks. He makes facts primary and theories secondary. And so by patient continuance in well-doing he has accomplished wonders in these latter days. So the Christian student should be a patient inquirer in the presence of God’s Word. He should give the highest authority to what is actually written and not to what he conjectures. It is only in this way that there can be progress in Christian knowledge: it is only in this way that theology can keep step with science—The Rev. Dormer L. Hickok, minister, 1882–1902, Historic First Church (Presbyterian), East Cleveland, Ohio. Reprinted by permission from Contact, published by Historic First Church.

Wilbur M. Smith, who is professor of English Bible at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, was one of the original professors at Fuller Theological Seminary and taught there for many years. Dr. Smith is the author of numerous books and magazine articles and has been the editor of “Peloubet’s Select Notes on the International Sunday School Lessons” since 1933.

- More from Wilbur M. Smith

Reunion and Reformation

Franz Hildebrandt

The ecumenical movement began with the Edinburgh Conference of 1910, when missionaries impressed upon the Church at home the consequence for Christian witness of “the scandal of our divisions” and proclaimed one visibly, organically united Church on earth as the manifest will of our Lord. Since then a great number of unions within and across the major Protestant denominations have come into being. Many more schemes are presently under discussion in all parts of the world; parallel with the conversations between Anglicans and Methodists in England run the discussions among six denominations in the United States on the basis of the so-called Blake-Pike plan. All this, we are told, is clearly of God; it is the leading of the Holy Spirit; and the pressures upon the Church from outside, the crises and persecutions to which she is exposed today in so many places, are the rod by which we are driven together.

Historians will have no difficulty in tracing the influence of Cardinal Newman upon the ecumenical scene of our day far beyond the sphere of the Roman church. Pius XII looked at non-Roman Christendom and observed that the separated bodies still held fragments of the truth. One Lord, one faith, one baptism—this may be granted to the Protestants, even though their churches, ministries, and Eucharists cannot be recognized. John XXIII went further in sending observers to the World Council assembly at New Delhi in 1961 and extending the hand of welcome and fellowship to the Protestant, Anglican, and Orthodox observers at the Second Vatican Council the following year. The council’s immediate concern is not with reunion as such but with renewal (aggiornamento, “spring cleaning”) within the household of Rome; but the “separated brethren,” no longer heretics or schismatics, are very much in mind and very much present in the debate.

Optimists have spoken of the end of the Counter-Reformation as the council’s aim or attainment. So far as this refers to the new inter-confessional climate, it is certainly appropriate; the changes of the last few years and months are positively staggering. Doctrinally, however, it is very much harder to accept the thought of the end of the Counter-Reformation. There is no evidence that Vatican II was starting from, or moving toward, a repudiation of the preceding councils. On the contrary, there was a special solemn commemoration in Rome last year of the quadricentennial of the conclusion of the Council of Trent (1563). That council condemned the Reformers’ teaching in no uncertain fashion, and its canons and decrees remain basic for the Catholic position. So, for the Protestant, remain the confessions of the sixteenth century and, for the English Protestant in particular, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. It is difficult to see that they are out of date or that they can be squared with the Council of Trent (Newman tried and, after his conversion to Rome, had to admit his failure). If they declare the truth for which Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer died at the stake, it is still the truth today. Thus the task before us is not the “healing” but the carrying-out of the Reformation.

The Reformers never broke away from the church to found their own sects or parties. It is a gross mistake to place the source of the whole movement in the private inspiration or “insights” of Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer. These men knew no plurality of churches, and they cared nothing for what Wesley would have called “singularities”; they knew only one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, by which they meant the congregation of faithful men where the Word is preached in purity and the sacraments are administered according to our Lord’s ordinance (Article 19). This to them was not a matter of new viewpoints versus old but a grim battle of truth against error; Luther, at the end of his life, insisted that “we are the true old Church” of prophets and apostles, known by the seven authentic marks of Word, Baptism, Holy Communion, Ministry, Absolution, Prayer, and Cross (meaning the suffering Church). In the midst of the intemperate polemic of his anti-papal writings, he remained conscious with fear and trembling of the peril of his lonely stand over against a majority not merely of contemporaries but of centuries. Yet the choice is not his; it is forced upon him by the Word of God which is the author of the Reformation. The Word, not Luther, condemns the abuses of Rome, and indeed condemns any deviation and distortion to which Protestantism falls guilty.

Doctrine, therefore, is primary, while order is always secondary to faith; this is a complete reversal of the current ecumenical trend. Our main burden of separation today arises at the point of recognition of orders and unification of ministries. The Bible, the historic creeds, the observance of the two sacraments we seem to take for granted, and our real troubles always begin with the fourth point—the Historic Episcopate—of the Lambeth Quadrilateral (1888). For the Reformers, as for the Wesleys, it was unity in the Gospel that mattered above everything else; and with such unity varying forms of ministry and church government—for instance, episcopal and non-episcopal—were fully compatible. John 8:31 does not read, “If you are among the right disciples, you will continue in my word,” but, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples.”

Three Great Tenets

What is the doctrine of the Reformation? It is summed up in three phrases: sola scriptura, solo Christo, sola gratia.

Scripture is the one source of revelation and the sole norm of the Church’s faith and life. Contemporary Catholics may go as far as to accept the formula, Sola scriptura in ore ecclesiae (Scripture alone in the mouth of the church), and Protestants will readily admit that Scripture itself historically viewed forms part of tradition, “apostolic” as distinct from “ecclesiastical” tradition; but such formal statements do not affect the fundamental issue. In the eyes of the Reformers, theological argument must be based exegetically, the case supported by chapter and verse, and the final appeal made to the Word of God. And without the daily ration of that Word the flock of Christ cannot be fed. The pulpit is missing in St. Peter’s church as indeed the Gospel is missing in countless Protestant churches. At this point judgment must begin upon the house of God. The Protestant will always be, with John Wesley, a man of one book; listening, to be sure to all voices of tradition, ancient and modern, as witnesses and commentators, but subjecting them as well as himself to the ultimate authority of Scripture, and keeping a clear distinction between what is “prescribed” in, and what is merely “agreeable” to, Holy Writ. Bishops, for instance, fall under the second category and can therefore never be made binding upon the Church, not even for the sake of union.

Solo Christo: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). This, too, remains a live issue between Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Not only do “the crownrights of the Redeemer” preclude any mediatorial role attributed to Mary and the saints; they also rule out, more importantly, any direct identification between Christ and the Church. The Church is neither the “extension of the incarnation” nor Christ in sacramental form. He is her Master and Lord; he is the head of his Body. The gulf that divides us here from our Eastern as well as from our Roman brethren became apparent when at Evanston in 1954 the Eastern Orthodox delegates felt unable to join in the Church’s confession of sin as drafted by the World Council; the mystical Body of Christ, they felt, could never be so convicted. In reply, we would have to read the seven letters of Revelation 2 and 3 where Christ stands vis-à-vis the “angels” (elders) and passes judgment upon his delinquent church: “I have somewhat against thee … except thou repent … to him that overcometh will I give …” (Rev. 2:4 ff.).

Finally, sola gratia: “By grace are ye saved … not of works” (Eph. 2:8 f.). For the Reformers this is the heart of the Gospel and the end of the Mass. Where Christ through the hands of priest and faithful at the height of the Roman service offers himself to the Father as the bloodless sacrifice for the living and the dead, there the Protestant must rise in protest. For “where remission of [sins] is, there is no more offering for sin” (Heb. 10:18). And if this meant for several of us who were observers in Rome that we could not in conscience attend the daily Mass with which each council session began, it means that the minister of word and sacrament can never become, or ever agree to be called, a sacrificing priest. Our deepest division lies here. Pope, Virgin, and saints could not ultimately stand between us, if Protestants could go to Mass and Catholics to our Communion. We are brethren in Christ, we can talk, work, pray together, and in joint prayer we can even use quite a few words from the Missal; but when we go to the Lord’s Table in our separate churches, it is two diametrically opposite interpretations of his last will that hold us apart.

At this point Reunion clashes with Reformation. The question we have to face can be stated in an analogy to the passage in which Jesus, when asked about the authority of his ministry, retorted: “The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven, or of men?” (Matt. 21:25a). “The Reformation of the sixteenth century, was it sincere, profound, religious, a genuine quest for truth on the part of admirable, though one-sided, perhaps tragically misguided men (as Catholic scholars today are ready to grant), or was it the work of the Spirit of God?” It makes all the difference in the world whether the Reformation can be written off as a past event—at best a tenable viewpoint, a partial and partisan aspect of Christianity—or whether, as the authentic voice of God’s own reforming Word, it is still norma normans for the Church.

The Constant Criterion

For us this is as crucial as is the episcopal succession for our Catholic brethren; it is the norm by which we are bound and from which we are not free to depart. “It is not necessary that traditions and ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly alike; for at all times they have been divers” (Article 34 of the Thirty-nine Articles); but it is necessary to be united in the understanding and preaching of the Word and the scriptural administration of the sacraments. Indeed, the true apostolic succession is not guaranteed by lineal descent through what Benjamin Gregory a hundred years ago called “digital contact”; it is found only where men continue “steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42). The constant test for every ministry is faithfulness to the Gospel; where this is lacking, no legacy or ancestry, however “historic,” can mend the defect.

Therefore, in the words of a sixteenth-century Catholic bishop, all attempts at reunion are fruitless without a preceding reformation. Paradoxically it could well be that Protestants in these days have again to learn this from Rome! Where does it leave the several denominations gathered in the World Council of Churches? Karl Barth suggested long ago to the battling Lutherans and Calvinists in Germany that they should learn to understand their differences in terms of schools rather than of churches, and this, it seems to me, is a profitable category that allows for wider application. Lutherans and Reformed, Wesleyans and Anglicans can legitimately live side by side, like sister seminaries within one tradition, or Oxford and Cambridge colleges within one university, or again Franciscan and Dominican orders under the roof of the one Roman Catholic Church. Such diversities of schools do not justify mutual excommunication; “… fellowship with all, we hold who hold it with our Head,” said Charles Wesley. And he said it in a hymn on the Lord’s Supper. Schools have indeed a duty and right to take their own tradition seriously as well as to encourage interchange of students and teachers. We have a great deal to learn and gain from tutors under whom we were not brought up—so long as they are tutors “unto Christ.” No one knew this better than John Wesley, who gave to the Methodist people in England Bengel’s Notes on the New Testament and to the Methodists in America the shortened Articles of Religion for their standard textbooks. Officially both Anglicans and Methodists still stand by the Articles; and if both could be brought to reaffirm them in earnest, the story and the future of our conversations would be very different indeed.

What world Methodism has to bring as its theological contribution to the treasury of the universal Church is, in fact, already indicated by this reference to its doctrinal standards. They are, apart from the Articles, a set of expository books: Wesley’s Sermons, Wesley’s (Bengel’s) Notes, and (unofficial but at least as important) Wesley’s Hymns. As a son of the Protestant Reformation, Wesley, the “Bible bigot,” can by definition be nothing else than commentator and annotator of the sacred text. He sees things in the New Testament that Luther and Calvin did not see with equal clarity (and vice versa). He sees that the cry, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” is followed by the assurance that “there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus”; that the doxology, “Of him and through him, and to him, are all things” is followed by the demand “that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God”; that the ascension of Christ into heaven is followed by the promise of his abiding presence in our midst, his hand raised in blessing rather than in parting, his power “confirming the word with signs following.” In short, Heilsgeschichte is not enough; the third article in the creed must follow the second and must be spelled out in order to make us see “what hath God wrought” in our own day. There is in Wesley and in Asbury a great deal of undiscovered material not just for evangelism in the narrower technical sense of that term, but for the evangelization of theology itself. And in mid-twentieth century, when theological jargon has for the ordinary Christian become as hideous as it is unintelligible, we can do with a dose of Wesley’s beautifully lucid English “for plain unlettered men”! Our gloomier prophets talk about the end of the Protestant era; to the open-minded student of Wesley, it would seem that the Protestant era has hardly begun.

Some Ecumenical Lessons

The ecumenical lessons to be drawn from all this are obvious. First, the scandal of our divisions is not, as we are persistently told to believe, the mere existence of separate denominations as such. That we come from different schools, refer to different headquarters, adhere to different forms of worship, ministry, and government, is not in itself hurting the Body of Christ or grieving the Holy Spirit. The real scandal, right across all denominations and within each one of them, is the absence of the Gospel from our pulpits, the uncertain sound of the trumpet at the moment of battle, the chaos of conflicting voices that makes it impossible for men to hear what the Spirit says unto the churches. Accordingly, prayer for unity is not petition for merger schemes, but “that all who profess and call themselves Christians may agree in the truth of Thy holy Word and live in unity and godly love.”

As with the Gospel, so with the sacrament: the scandal of our divisions is not in the variety of communion rules and rituals but in the absence of brethren, through exclusion or abstention, from the table of the one Lord. (I am speaking, of course, not of the insuperable barrier that exists between the sacrifice of the Mass and the service of the Lord’s Supper, but of canonical rubrics preventing communion between those who have no other grounds for keeping apart.) Where loyalty to one’s own church or school is put above obedience to our common Lord, where in the name of discipline or organic unity his open invitation is refused, where in the growing practice of ecumenical conferences attendance at one another’s Eucharist takes the place of full communion, there Christ is divided amongst us and his name blasphemed.

Wesley’s journal records an episode from his early days in Georgia that has a direct bearing upon our present situation: “I was impressed by a friendly letter from an excellent man, whom I had not heard from for several years. What Christian piety and simplicity breathed in these lines! And yet this very man, when I was at Savannah, did I refuse to admit to the Lord’s Table, because he was not baptized, that is, not baptized by a minister that was episcopally ordained. Can anyone carry High Church zeal higher than this? And how well have I since been beaten with my own staff!”

The Incomparable Treasure Of Scripture

Here is the spring where waters flow,

to quench our heat of sin:

Here is the tree where truth doth grow,

to lead our lives therein:

Here is the judge that stints the strife,

when men’s devices fail:

Here is the bread that feeds the life,

that death cannot assail.

The tidings of salvation dear,

come to our ears from hence:

The fortress of our faith is here,

and shield of our defense.

Then be not like the hog that hath

a pearl at his desire,

And takes more pleasure in the trough

and wallowing in the mire.

Read not this book in any case,

but with a single eye:

Read not but first desire God’s grace,

to understand thereby.

Pray still in faith with this respect,

to fructify therein,

That knowledge may bring this effect,

to mortify thy sin.

Then happy thou in all thy life,

what so to thee befalls,

Yea, double happy shalt thou be,

when God by death thee calls.

(From the flyleaf of a copy of the Geneva Bible printed in London by the Deputies of Christopher Barker, 1599.)

The New Testament knows only one fence around the holy table: “Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity” (Eph. 6:24). The water of life is offered without any further conditions to him who listens, to him who is athirst, and to “whosoever will—freely” (Rev. 22:17). In emergency situations we recognize this. When in Holy Week of 1945 in a cell at Dachau (so small that there was barely room for eight people to stand or kneel) only one pastor, Martin Niemoeller, was available and only one language, German, was understood by the different nationalities and denominations, he administered the sacrament to them all. Who would dare to call it “invalid” or “irregular”? The way to unity, said William Temple, does not lead through the committee room. It leads through the use of the means of grace that Christ himself has appointed: the supper that he gave to his disciples that they might abide in him, and the Word by which (John 17) they are marked as his own, united in his love, called out from the world and sent forth into the world to witness. Denominations and organic unity are hardly on the horizon of that chapter; the plea of the great High Priest is that his own may be kept in the truth and love of his Word and that through them the world may believe.

St. Paul laid down the final criterion: that “every way, whether in pretense, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice” (Phil. 1:18). The fullness of the Gospel in the New Testament sense is not a matter of quantity, a case of preserving or acquiring more or less of alleged historic substance of faith and order; it is rather the Gospel wherever it is in force “in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance” (1 Thess. 1:5). When will we learn to look for that instead of examining our ministerial credentials and suspecting our party labels? When will we be happy to rejoice wherever Christ is preached, be it by Billy Graham or by Reinhold Niebuhr, in CHRISTIANITY TODAY or in the Christian Century or by the Vatican Council? A realignment of evangelical forces, a proper dialogue not only with our Catholic brethren but also inside our own Protestant camp, is long overdue.

It is possible to speak the truth in love without betraying the Reformation cause. The day of All Saints in the church calendar follows the day of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. In all the churches we are called today to repent and do the first works: first not only in time (the recovery of our heritage) but also in importance (the priority of the Gospel). For the Reformation is by no means finished. Ecclesia semper reformanda—The Church is forever to be reformed.

Franz Hildebrandt is Philadelphia Professor of Christian Theology at Drew University (Theological School). He holds the degrees of Lic. Theol. (Berlin University), Ph.D. (Cambridge University), and Hon. D.D. (Kirchliche Hochshule, Berlin). Dr. Hildebrant was assistant to Dr. Martin Niemöller at Berlin-Dahlem. He was an observer for the World Methodist Council at the first session of Vatican Council II. This essay condenses an address he delivered at Asbury College.

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