Baptists on the Boardwalk

About 20,000 Southern and American Baptists were in one place for their annual conventions last month, though not always with one accord. The place was Atlantic City, New Jersey, where delegates strolled up and down the boardwalk several times a day, past souvenir shops and honky-tonk “fun” arcades, to get to their meetings, luncheons, and caucuses. During the 150 years of organized denominational work they celebrate this year, Baptists have become thoroughly Conventionalized, if not Organized.

American Baptist Convention

The year 1964 could be called the year that white and Negro delegates to the American Baptist Convention, numbering 1,500,000 members, got specific on the subject of race.

They said some of the same things their national leaders were saying from the stage of the grand ballroom of Convention Hall, though not so eloquently; the real difference was that the delegates from the local churches were talking to one another.

They also went beyond the language of the resolution on race presented to the convention and talked, in the open forums, about the situations in their own churches, about racial intermarriage, and about “what will happen and how much are we prepared to have it happen” if integration is preached and lived.

In an afternoon forum on race and the Church there were usually several people waiting in line at the microphone for their turn to speak. One white pastor said he was told by one of his parishioners that if a Negro ever “crosses the door of this church I’ll kill him.”

“Would a Negro church take white people?” someone asked. “Yes,” was the answer. “We won’t make a big ado over you—neither will the Negro church say, ‘We won’t accept him because he has ulterior motives.’ ”

On the subject of racial intermarriage, one white pastor said, “I grew up in integrated churches. Races don’t marry. People do.”

Following the forums the American Baptists heard two leaders of the non-violent civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Rev. Ralph B. Abernathy, confront the convention with the issues.

“If the Southern Baptist and the American Baptist churches ever take more than a pronouncement stand and come to an action stand, we might come to integrated churches,” said Dr. King. He told reporters that Baptists should provide “massive financial assistance” to the groups in the forefront of the civil rights battle, integrate all church facilities including hospitals, and see the need for participating in direct-action movements. He also said that ministers should do more to educate their parishioners on the subject.

Dr. King was given the first annual Edwin T. Dahlberg Peace Award, named after a former president of the convention.

The discussion on race took in one of three main convention themes (the others were “Peace With Justice” and “Christian Unity”), but it extended beyond the one day scheduled for it.

Dr. King addressed the convention twice during the second day, and civil rights kept creeping into Senator Hubert Humphrey’s speech on “Peacemaking and Peace Keeping.” Humphrey is leading the fight in the Senate to pass the civil rights bill.

Harold Stassen, this year’s convention president, called for cloture, if necessary, in order to end the stalling on the civil rights bill.

A resolution on race, passed unanimously, supported direct action and direct demonstrations, and urged churches to support civil rights legislation.

One American Baptist leader said that he believed the resolution should be more specific. However, it has been called the strongest in ABC history.

About 35 per cent of ABC churches responding to a recent poll said their congregations were integrated. However, only about the same proportion—35 per cent of all ABC churches—filled in and returned the questionnaire.

The convention passed a resolution reaffirming “our belief in the United Nations as an essential instrument toward the eventual creation of a world community of nations.” The resolution also supported the U.N.’s “peacemaking forces,” urged the speeding up of disarmament, and recommended opening “more channels of communication” with China.

Dr. J. Lester Hamish, well-known evangelical pastor at the First Baptist Church of Portland, Oregon, was elected president for a one-year term.

GEORGE WILLIAMS

Southern Baptist Convention

A deeply divided Southern Baptist Convention rubber-stamped most budgetary and promotional suggestions of its leaders but shied away from any meaningful statement on the race issue and voted down proposed continuation of a five-year fellowship-type arrangement which was climaxed later in the week in a great “Jubilee Advance Celebration” with six other North American Baptist bodies.

Less than half the 13,000 registered “messengers” took part in the two major decisions, but they probably were a good cross-section of the “mass meeting” type of deliberative assembly which is impossible—on paper—but which works anyway, to the point of having proved no hindrance to the convention’s becoming the largest evangelical communion in America.

The new president of the 10,300,000-member SBC is Dr. W. Wayne Dehoney, pastor of the First Baptist Church of the Mississippi Valley city of Jackson, Tennessee, and immediate past president of the Southern Baptist Pastors’ Conference. Dehoney’s theological and social action position is considered to be almost at dead center, halfway between his predecessor, Houston’s Dr. K. Owen White, who leans slightly to the right, and his chief rival for the post, Richmond’s Dr. Theodore F. Adams, who leans slightly to the left.

Twelve men were nominated for convention president in a wide, surprise race (White could have had another term, but announced only days ago that his health would not permit continuation in the exacting position). In the runoff between Dehoney and Adams, the Tennessean won by a vote of 4,024 to 3,223.

At a press conference, Dehoney said he would not favor any “prayer amendment” change in the Constitution because he didn’t know who would write it. He ascribed the current conflict over school devotions to a “misunderstanding” of the Supreme Court’s actions. The new president blamed himself and other convention executive-committee members for the defeat of the proposal for a North American Baptist Fellowship. “We did not adequately express the nature of this vehicle,” he explained, and “Baptists are afraid of a superstructure.” He attributed the 2,771-to-2,738 defeat of the proposal to lack of clarity in definitions and poor timing.

The runner-up in the presidential race, Adams, was the floor leader for the defeated “fellowship” proposal and may have suffered from a backlash of sentiment, as well as from his ecumenical leanings as former president of the Baptist World Alliance and his close ties with American Baptists and other communions holding membership in ecumenical organizations.

Some opponents of the “fellowship” expressed fears of involvement with theological liberalism and “social gospel” extremism. Adams, a quiet man, fairly shouted his disagreement during the heated, 90-minute debate on the issue: “It’s not a matter of doctrine, it’s not a matter of unity, it’s a matter of fellowship.” Later he pleaded with his fellow-churchmen not to say, in effect, that “we’ve had fellowship for 150 years, but we’re going to pick up our marbles now, go home and think about it, and then maybe have fellowship with you other Baptists next year.”

The next day, the convention partially reconsidered and decided, indeed, to think about the matter for a year, through the medium of a study committee, and have another go at the issue next year in Dallas.

Over the weekend, Adams presided over the climax of the fellowship-oriented Jubilee Advance which has linked seven Baptist conventions since 1959. The celebration included a star-studded program (ex-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker of Canada, church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette, Baptist World Alliance President John Soren of Brazil, and Billy Graham).

A sense of history and glorious (or tragic) portent hung heavy over the debate and decision on the urgent race question. Missionaries and pastors saw the future as cause for alarm and foreboding unless Southern Baptists break their “thunderous silence” on the issue that has turned America’s streets and college campuses into parading grounds and police-dogged arenas. Others, harking to the drums of prejudice and massive misunderstanding among their people, foresaw only disruption and a crippling pocketbook strike and/or a massive membership exodus if the racial issue is pushed too hard too soon.

A hard-hitting report from the convention’s Christian Life Commission drew the battle lines. Calling for a victorious confrontation of the immorality of the age, the report ranged over “the barnyard morality of prominent movie stars, the sinister disregard for human life … on the highways, the callous rejection of the worth of human personality through the general ignoring of the Surgeon General’s report on cigarette smoking and cancer, the unconscionable invasion of the American home by the liquor industry, the bribed athlete, the disintegrating family, the high school girl in trouble, the corrupt labor leader, the big business price-fixer, the expense account chiseler … the dope addict … the distortions of hate-mongers, and the sabrerattling of an awesome military-industrial complex.”

Messengers found little fault with wide-ranging recommendations to confront these malignant evils with “a Christlike concern over anything and everything that warps human life or stunts God’s creatures” and a call for “a clear and pressing imperative to prophetic witness.” There was a minor dulling of the cutting edge of the call for the abolition of capital punishment as an affront to the spirit of the New Testament and a practical failure. Then came a major explosion over the commission’s forthright summons to involvement in community race relations.

Specifically, the Christian Life Commission asked Southern Baptists to commend institutions that have desegregated their ministries, to approve the “positive action taken by hundreds of Southern Baptist churches in affirming an open-door policy …,” to express gratitude to individuals and churches who are involved redemptively in race relations, to pledge support for “laws to guarantee the legal rights of Negroes in our democracy and to go beyond these laws by practicing Christian love and reconciliation …,” and to “give themselves to the decisive defeat of racism.”

A prominent Louisiana pastor, James Middleton, moved to strike the entire section and substitute a statement expressing full cognizance of the world situation in human relations and its effect on the worldwide Christian witness; recognizing the responsibility for so living and acting as to effect Christian solutions; reminding that Southern Baptists have spoken and have (at least to a degree) extended their ministries to all races; recognizing “the dignity of every human being as God’s creation” with a God-given right to full realization of his every capability; and calling for prayerful work for peaceful solutions on the local level, where alone “final” solutions can be found.

Middleton’s substitute motion was approved via secret ballot. One report said the margin of approval was about 800 votes.

TOM MCMAHAN

Portals And Portents

Behold, I have set before thee an open

door, and no man can shut it.—Rev. 3:8

The first Christian convert in Sinak Valley was a small man with stooped shoulders and a gray beard. Missionaries called him Tile-bu. They had preached to his tribe for two years without apparent success. The breakthrough came one day in January, 1961, when during a tribal festival the dark-skinned Tile-bu dramatically set fire to his fetishes in the front yard of his grass-covered hut. Neighbors warned that such effrontery before the evil spirits would cost him a blight on his pigs and sweet potatoes. But in the ensuing days and months Tile-bu, in his primitive way, spearheaded the evangelization of his tribe. Today there are nearly a thousand baptized Christians in the Sinak Valley of West Irian.

Accounts like these encourage even a denomination like the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which has one foreign missionary for every eighty-three church members in North America. And at the CMA’s sixty-seventh annual General Council in Columbus, Ohio, last month, such reports gave special meaning to the council theme, “Behold, an open door.”

“The overseas work of the CMA,” said the Rev. Louis L. King, foreign secretary, “enjoyed a year of marked prosperity in 1963.” Despite chronic political turbulence in key fields, not one of the 871 active CMA missionaries was obliged to leave his post.

Especially precarious is the situation in Southeast Asia, where more than half of all CMA missionaries are assigned. Even as the 1,042 council delegates met, pro-Communist Pathet Lao forces launched a major offensive in Laos.

But the CMA version of the open door policy tolerates no let-up in effort. Dr. Nathan Bailey, a seemingly indefatigable president, stresses that “only as our home base is consolidated and enlarged can we hope for advance in our work abroad.” He urges the constituency to strive for a 10 per cent annual rate of growth. Also to be overcome is a problem of recruitment now being felt by many missionary boards.

Focal point of interest at this year’s council sessions was a proposed doctrinal statement, the most explicit and detailed in the 77-year CMA history. Debate on the 832-word creed was delayed until next year.

Dr. Kenneth C. Fraser, vice-president, announced plans for a Christian retiral community and conference center on a seventy-one-acre waterfront tract near Ft. Myers, Florida. Scheduled to be built over a five-year period are: accommodations for 600 senior citizens, a 2,000-seat auditorium, a 50-unit motel, swimming pools, and a golf course. An adjacent 450-acre area is being reserved for a private housing development for Christian families.

What of the portals of the future? Will the CMA be willing to regroup to confront effectively what council guest J. Sidlow Baxter called the “sophisticated obstinacy” of the domestic front?

The thatched-roof chapel in West Irian’s Sinak Valley still attracts naked witch doctors, but a storefront mission in Pennsylvania’s Beaver Valley retains little appeal for anyone. There are hopeful signs that the CMA constituency with its pioneering missionary spirit may be willing to move with a changing society. Tomorrow’s doors invite experimentation in proclaiming the Gospel at resorts, in high-rise apartment chapels, and through new means.

- More from George Williams

Theology

Current Religious Thought: June 5, 1964

Addison H. Leitch

A young Baptist friend is about to graduate from the seminary, which reminds me that we have come to that time of year when men do graduate from the seminary; and this in turn reminds me that a few years ago when I was teaching in a seminary, we used to wonder out loud just how well prepared seminary men are for the ministry.

All this interlocked just last week with a request I had to speak to a meeting of young ministers somewhat along the line of the nature of their ministry. I think the men who had been chosen for this conference had been out in the ministry of the Church for a very short time and had been brought together for a kind of refresher course. So the season of the year, long thoughts about former days at the seminary, and some preparation for addressing this group of men set several ideas in motion. I had, once again, a few “current religious thoughts.”

I was reminded of a conversation I had with one of our seminary graduates one day. When I seriously asked him at what points he thought we might improve our curriculum, he told me with more seriousness than you might guess that what he had needed most in his ministry was a course in “mimeographing and chauffeuring.” He thought he had been spending more time at these activities his first few years than anything else. A little more conversation along the same line took us beyond the mimeographing level to the whole theory and practice of the ministry.

What was really bothering him, and what remains a daily bother to most men, is how to adjust the old, old problems of form and content. There is no way at all for the Church to operate as a purely spiritual institution because we are not pure, spiritual beings. The plain fact of our physical bodies requires that we get together sometime somewhere; we are subject to time and space. And as soon as we get together sometime and somewhere, we are in business, with all the busyness of heating a building, hiring a janitor, raising a budget, and getting out mimeographed notices. Some men think that administrative routines take at least 60 per cent of their time, while some might cry out plaintively about a higher figure. Every man I meet is concerned about the problem, and none has a solution. Old heads get used to the problem, but the man just setting out in his ministry is appalled to discover the “realities” of his profession.

A variant on this problem can probably be called “the ideal and the actual.” One young minister said to me, “Do you think my elders are really Christians?” I think they probably are; but the difficulty with a seminary course is that we spend so much time on the headliners like St. Francis of Assisi and Bonhoeffer that by the time we are out of the seminary, Christianity is out of focus. This is not to say that people ought not to be Christians like Bonhoelfer; but it is to say that most of the Christianity around, including the church session, may have a better sense of direction than score of attainment. Here again the old minister has made some marvelous and moving discoveries about some of the deeps in people, and he may well have some assurances that a great deal of faithfulness is around. But the impact of the almost endless expediencies with which the church buffets the young preacher is almost enough to defeat him.

Sometime you must read George Adam Smith on Isaiah where he talks about the “three Jerusalems”—the Ideal, the Actual, and the Prophetic. Smith sees Isaiah as a young man with a great vision of what Jerusalem could be plus plain perception of what it actually was, but with also the prophetic discovery that it would take some kind of a “suffering servant” to close the gap between the actual and the ideal. Only the recognition of this solution in suffering can save the man of vision from disillusionment. This is what Christians are supposed to know ahead of time: that there is no crossless redemption. Maybe young ministers need to be reminded of it.

Once he is out of the academic environment, the young minister’s next frustration seems to be the impossibility of “keeping up” on reading and study. I have yet to meet the man in any field of endeavor who has enough time to read, and anyone with any kind of mind at all has stacks of books just begging for his time. Here again we face it. We must realize that this is the way things are and this is the way things will continue. I read recently in the public press that a chemist has to read 200,000 pages a year just to “keep up” in his field. Chemists have “abstracts,” and I know that doctors can subscribe to digests of medical journals for tape recorders. I wish some enterprising outfit could read and digest and record for ministers. Even if this were done, however, the battle would never be won; and this, I suppose, is at least part of what John Oman means by his expression “the sacrament of failure.” All this helps keep us humble, in spite of what we think we know when we come out of the seminary. Humility and patience are not bad virtues with which a young theologian could exercise himself.

By an acceptance of things as they are instead of a frustrating fretting, we may find half the battle already won or at least put in its proper perspective. This, it seems to me, is the immediate maturity that young men should seek.

I think I find that these problems are forcing seminarians into some evasions. Too many of them are planning to go on for further academic training because they know there is still so much to read and study. Too many of them are resolving the difficulties that face them in that “more or less Christian session” by becoming assistant or associate pastors so that somebody else has to face the ambiguities of decision. Too many of them are trying to discover in “the nature of ministry” something other than the pastorate because they are not called to mimeographing and chauffeuring. If these are evasions (and where they are evasions, the evil day is simply put off), the Church suffers, and some of these men never mature. The pastorate itself is the live end of the whole church enterprise; when men pull away there, the whole army retreats. Right now there are hundreds and hundreds of vacant churches. Not all of them can possibly be successes, but we are not called to success; we are called to faithfulness.

This fortnightly review is contributed in sequence by J. D. Douglas, British editorial director, CHRISTIANITY TODAY; Philip E. Hughes, editor, the “Churchman,” London; Harold B. Kuhn, professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky; G. C. Berkouwer, professor of dogmatics, Free University of Amsterdam; and Addison H. Leitch, professor of philosophy and religion, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.—ED.

- More from Addison H. Leitch

The Vigil for Civil Rights

Groups of clergymen and seminary students descended on the nation’s capital last month in an effort to speed up passage of the civil rights bill.

Services were being held daily at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill. Seminarians, meanwhile, determined to maintain a round-the-clock vigil at the Lincoln Memorial.

In one demonstration, a group of men and women reportedly numbering about 160 gathered at the church for a two-hour service, then marched to the Capitol. They paused en route on the steps of the Supreme Court Building to utter prayers commemorating the tenth anniversary of the decision outlawing public school segregation. The demonstration was sponsored by the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race.

A statement delivered to senators said that “the emergency we face as a nation requires immediate and dramatic action if the potential for major civil disorder is to be lessened and the realization of freedom and justice for all our citizens is to be achieved without further unnecessary delays.”

The marchers were welcomed on the Capitol steps by Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Republican Senator Kenneth B. Keating of New York. Both are leading proponents of the civil rights bill.

Humphrey praised the group as “good citizens who come in the great American tradition of petition.”

Keating similarly hailed religious support of the pending legislation and said that church groups are leading the effort to obtain a cloture vote which would limit debate on the bill.

The procession then moved into the Senate gallery, where debate on the civil rights bill was under way. Later dividing into small groups, they visited individual senators to press for passage of the legislation.

The speaker at the service that morning was Dean Francis B. Sayre of Washington Cathedral (Episcopal). His sermon noted that “it’s strange that we should have to review these ABC’s here every morning, while some who are sworn to uphold the Constitution twist and turn like the snake round Eden’s tree to evade the express command that we should love our neighbors as ourselves.”

“Law,” he declared, “which might not be the author of love can at least reflect it, protect it, guarantee its sacredness to all.…”

The daily services as well as the Lincoln Memorial vigil were to continue until a civil rights bill is passed. Both activities are somewhat an outgrowth of an interreligious convocation on civil rights held in Washington in late April. More than 5,000 persons attended.

The seminarians got some encouragement at the end of the second week with the appearance of President John C. Bennett of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, Father George H. Dunne, assistant to the president of Georgetown University (Roman Catholic), and Dr. Bernard Mandelbaum, provost of the Jewish Theological Seminary. They stood watch for forty-five minutes.

The regular shift is for three hours. A schedule is kept around the clock. Thomas Leatherwood, chairman of the vigil, said that numerous schools had indicated a “willingness to take part since reading about it in newspapers. “Several hundred seminarians will participate,” he said, noting that more professors were also expected.

Protestant Panorama

Mrs. C. E. Williams was elected ruling elder of Covenant Presbyterian Church, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, less than two weeks after the 104th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) ratified legislation providing for ordination of women as deacons, elders, and ministers.

Mrs. Williams is believed to have been the first woman named to a session (ruling body) under the change.

The Central Methodist Mission of Sydney, Australia, plans construction of a new evangelistic center costing some $2,240,000 to replace facilities heavily damaged by fire in February.

Chief Justice Earl Warren assisted in the dedication of a 301-foot bell tower constructed atop the Episcopal Cathedral in Washington, D. C. He observed that the interaction of religion and the state is “as fruitful and unfettered as we have the strength to make it.”

Miscellany

One person was killed and 200 were injured when worshipers rushed to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem for the celebration of the Eastern Orthodox Easter.

A relief agency of the World Council of Churches agreed to seek worldwide support for a “project of aid and reconciliation” in the Mississippi Delta. A global appeal for funds and personnel was issued by the National Council of Churches.

The Far East Broadcasting Company, a missionary radio organization, is dictating the Scriptures over the air for the benefit of listeners in Communist China. Reports have already been received of Chinese listeners who are writing the Bible portions as they are dictated.

Ground was broken last month for construction of a new Baptist college at a site between Dallas and Fort Worth. The faculty and equipment of Decatur Baptist College, located forty miles away, will be moved to the site to form the new school’s nucleus. It will be known as Dallas Baptist College.

Central Alaskan Missions, Inc., began a new radio ministry this spring with a 5,000-watt station in Glennallen, Alaska.

Major Protestant denominations in Spain formed a Spanish Evangelical Council as an outgrowth of a yearly congress supported by the Spanish Baptist Union, the Federation of Independent Churches, the Spanish Evangelical Churches, and the Spanish Reformed Episcopal Church. Plymouth Brethren elected not to join the council.

A minority element of the British Consultative Committee of the International Council of Christian Churches that opposed a severing of relations with the parent organization announced a reorganization under the original name. The breakaway group now calls itself the Bible Christian Unity Fellowship.

A new college will be built in Jamaica under joint sponsorship of Anglican, Baptist, Congregational, Disciples of Christ, Methodist, Moravian, and Presbyterian churches. It is expected to open in 1965.

Personalia

Dr. Bernard Hillila named dean of California Lutheran College in Thousand Oaks, California.

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale was chosen “1964 Clergyman of the Year” by Religious Heritage of America, Inc. J. C. Penney was named “Lay Church Man of the Year,” and Mrs. Dale Evans Rogers was designated “1964 Church Woman of the Year.”

Military Chaplains Association presented its annual Citizenship Award to entertainer Bob Hope. The citation commended Hope’s “personal interest in members of the armed forces … in his tireless, unselfish efforts to bring them warmth and cheer by personal visits and performances in their far flung outposts.”

Dr. J. Theodore Mueller is retiring as professor of systematic theology at Concordia Seminary.

They Say

“The burst of national self-consciousness, of self-determination, of self-improvement has in no small part been due to the teaching and influence of Christian missions.”—Dr. Harold J. Ockenga.

Deaths

THE RT. REV. WILLIAM BLAIR ROBERTS, 83, retired Episcopal bishop of South Dakota; in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

DR. HOWARD TILLMAN KUIST, 68, professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary; in Princeton, New Jersey.

CARL A. GUNDERSEN, 69, treasurer of the National Association of Evangelicals; in Chicago.

DR. HENRY ORR LIETMAN, 59, editor of The Garden of Prayer, a United Presbyterian devotional guide; in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

POLLY JOHNSON, 24, gospel recording artist; one of forty-four persons killed in the crash of a Pacific Airlines plane in California.

Evangelism in the Rain—In California

Evangelist Billy Graham conducts another television crusade across the United States this week. Hour-long films taken during services in San Diego last month will be shown on about 200 television stations on three successive evenings.¹ Similar television series in the past have drawn responses numbering in the millions.

Graham’s crusade in San Diego—nine services in ten days—was plagued by rain and unusually cold temperatures. For only the second time in twelve years the weather forced cancellation of a crusade service. Nonetheless, an aggregate of 180,000 heard the evangelist proclaim the Gospel in San Diego, and 8,690 of them signed decision cards.

Perhaps the most encouraging statistic was the percentage of inquirers: an average 4.8 per cent of the attendance. The average for all Graham’s meetings around the world is 3.19 per cent.

A youth night service drew an attendance of 21,000 with 1,634 inquirers. This number represented a 7.78 per cent response, which spokesmen for Graham said was the largest at a regular crusade service ever recorded in the United States.

Methodists And Evangelism

A resolution commending evangelist Billy Graham was adopted last month by delegates to the quadrennial General Conference of The Methodist Church in Pittsburgh.

It was proposed by Chester A. Smith, 79-year-old layman from Peekskill, New York, and a dean among General Conference delegates.

“We would commend Mr. Graham for his good work in spreading the Gospel and hope that he has many more years of doing so,” said Smith’s resolution. It was approved without opposition.

Graham, in San Diego at the time, also received a telegram of encouragement from Bishop Gerald Kennedy of Los Angeles. Referring to the closing service of the San Diego crusade Kennedy told Graham, “I shall be praying for you on Sunday night.” All services were held in San Diego County’s Balboa Stadium. A crowd estimated at 35,000 turned out for the closing meeting, larger than any attendance ever recorded by the San Diego Chargers of the American Football League.

A highlight of the crusade was Graham’s appearance aboard the aircraft carrier “Constellation,” where he preached to some 2,500 persons—Navy personnel and their families and friends. No invitation for public confession was given aboard the ship, but Graham closed his sermon with a personal appeal for sturdy faith and deep commitment to Christ.

A feature at one of the stadium services was the testimony of Vonda Van Dyke, “Miss Arizona of 1964.” She told the crowd of her discovery that “being a good girl” and devoting her talents to the service of Christ was not enough—that she must commit her entire life to him. She told of the joy in finding the meaning of Christ’s promise, “I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly.”

Graham came to San Diego from Phoenix, Arizona, where he had conducted a three-day crusade at Arizona State University’s sports stadium (temporarily bereft, said a spokesman, of its nickname, “Sun Devil Stadium”). He preached to a total of 104,000 persons, and counselors reported that 4,239 of them signed commitment cards. The largest crowd, 38,500, came on the closing Sunday afternoon service.

The evangelist continued to have a distinct appeal for young people, particularly teen-agers. In San Diego he laid down ten rules for them:

“1.—Avoid the wrong company.

“2.—Watch your eyes; you cannot help the first look but you can help the second look.

“3.—Watch your lips. Refrain from telling dirty or off-color stories.

“4.—Watch your heart. Don’t let evil thoughts stay in your mind long.

“5.—Watch your dress. I know a girl who always dressed provocatively until she was converted to Christ. Now she says, ‘I dress as though Christ were my escort each evening.’

“6.—Watch your recreation and amusements. Be careful about the films and TV shows you watch.

“7.—Be careful what you read. The newsstands are filled with pornographic literature; avoid them like a plague; they stimulate your emotions.

“8.—Watch your idleness. Too much leisure and idleness … is harmful in many ways.

“9.—Have Christ in your heart and life.

“10.—Take a delight in the Word of God. The Bible says, ‘Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee.’ ”

Graham’s remaining schedule for 1964 calls for crusades in Columbus, Ohio, July 10–19; Omaha, Nebraska, September 4–13; and Boston, September 18–27.

The Tie With Missouri

A poll of the more than 300 congregations of the Lutheran Church—Canada failed to produce the necessary two-thirds vote to declare independence from the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod of the United States.

A spokesman said that Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan had voted for autonomy, but that the ballot in Ontario and other eastern areas showed a 50–50 result, dropping the overall total below the two-thirds requirement.

Whither The Becker Amendment?

A co-sponsor of the proposed constitutional amendment to allow public school devotions sees little hope for its passage in the present session of Congress.

Republican Representative Delbert L. Latta of Ohio said that it will have been “talked to death” if hearings on the amendment continue through the middle of June as scheduled.

Latta pointed out that it would take several more weeks for the House Judiciary Committee to agree on appropriate language after conclusion of the hearings. By that time lawmakers will be anxious to adjourn for the political conventions.

Another Washington observer noted that “even if the House should by the required two-thirds vote submit an amendment for ratification to the states, there is virtually no prospect of Senate action this session since that chamber has been tied up for weeks by the civil rights bill and has a big logjam of other legislation pending for summer action.”

Republican Representative Frank Becker of New York, chief sponsor of the amendment, has protested the length of the hearings (they began April 22). He has indicated he may press for a discharge petition, which would take the measure out of the committee’s hands and bring the debate to the House floor.

The chairman of the committee, Democratic Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, has repeatedly indicated his opposition to the amendment.

Reason To Support

Seven years ago, while he was minister of the New West End Synagogue in London, Rabbi Louis Jacobs wrote a book called We Have Reason to Believe. Although some of the views he there expressed reflected a “modernist” tendency by Jewish standards, he was appointed two years later as a lecturer and tutor at Jews’ College by Dr. Israel Brodie, the chief rabbi. Since then Manchester-born Dr. Jacobs has published several other books and is recognized as probably the foremost theological scholar among Britain’s 450,000 Jews. However, when the principalship of the college became vacant, the chief rabbi declined to appoint Dr. Jacobs but took the post himself in a temporary capacity.

This spring the fashionable New West End Synagogue, once more seeking a minister, sought no further than its former one and duly elected him. Dr. Brodie disagreed, and after an angry meeting at which eighty-one synagogues were represented, the Council of the United Synagogue upheld the chief rabbi and ordered the removal of the entire board of the offending congregation when they insisted on adhering to their choice.

Dr. Jacobs, 44-year-old Ph.D. of London University, attributes the decision to his acceptance of the findings of modern biblical scholarship, and adds: “As a rabbi in Israel, responsible by tradition to God alone and to no other rabbi, I shall of course continue to expound my views, confident that very many thinking Jews in this country and outside it have too much love and respect for Judaism to wish to see it tied to such a theory.”

Last month the question about where Dr. Jacobs would now expound his views was answered when his supporters, who include a number of nationally known figures, voted to constitute an independent, orthodox congregation, to be named the New London Synagogue. A member of the deposed board has asked Dr. Brodie: “Do you want to go down in history as the man who was responsible for splitting Anglo-Jewry from top to bottom?”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Day’S March Nearer Rome

Earl Alexander of Hillsborough, leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, startled that august assembly a few weeks ago by asserting that the Church of England is moving steadily Rome-wards. The occasion was the presentation of a measure to clarify the present law that has been generally understood as requiring that the holy table in church be made of wood and be movable. The Bishop of Chester, Dr. G. E. Ellison, sought freedom for those who might wish the table to be of some substance other than wood and to be immovable.

There was here something of a parallel with the vestments controversy, where Parliament is due to be asked to pronounce legal something hitherto done illegally. Both issues had been passed through the Church Assembly against strong evangelical opposition. “The only real thing behind a stone table,” argued Lord Alexander, “is to turn it into an altar, the kind of structure on which, according to the Old Testament, sacrifices were being made.” Despite the shaking of the mover’s episcopal head, the noble lord suggested this was merely another stage in the surrender by the state church to those who were gradually returning to Roman Catholic doctrine and practice.

“It is a sad sight,” he concluded, “to see prelates hurrying to see this sort of measure through, and I am equally shocked to find some of the prelates we had regarded as well grounded in evangelical faith and practice beginning to vote for measures of this kind.” Prelatical eagerness was not apparent, for only five bishops out of twenty-six had bothered to attend, and they listened to the outburst in silence. The measure was approved.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Enterprising Danes

How can churches get started in new housing developments? Where may congregations meet until there are enough resources to erect a permanent building?

In the United States, congregations often begin by meeting in a school. In Denmark, the Diocese of Aalborg of the state Lutheran church is using portable buildings. They follow a similar pattern and are prefabricated of wood with seats for 100 persons, a vestry, and a room for baptisms. The architect was inspired by an early Scandinavian form.

The diocese erects these churches quickly in new housing developments. When the community becomes more established and a permanent building is constructed, the portable church is moved on to a new location.

African Birthday

One of Africa’s youngest communions, the Association of Evangelical Churches of West Africa, celebrated its tenth anniversary last month by setting aside a Sunday for prayer and thanksgiving.

Ten years ago the Sudan Interior Mission, conscious of the need for their churches in Africa to be responsible for their own affairs in an independence-minded continent, encouraged formation of the new church organization.

Conservative in theology and strongly evangelistic, the AECWA has a baptistic structure, with individual autonomy for churches but coordination in the hands of a General Assembly. A secretariat in the Northern Nigerian city of Jos handles the office work and provides liaison between church and government. The SIM does not exercise any authority in the AECWA’s affairs, although church executives work in close harmony with the mission.

The AECWA started with some 400 churches. Now it has more than 900, with an attendance of more than 300,000 and with 650 pastors and evangelists. The AECWA missionary arm has a total of eighty-five missionaries, some going to remote tribes where they must learn “foreign” languages.

W. HAROLD FULLER

Breakthrough On The Pill?

Medical science is on the brink of discovering a pill for family planning that would be acceptable to the Vatican hierarchy. So predicted the Roman Catholic Primate of Belgium, Leo Josef Cardinal Suenens, at a press conference last month in Boston.

He said that the Roman Catholic Church cannot be expected to change its teachings on contraception but that “unchanging doctrine must be applied to new situations” in modern times.

“There are really two questions involved,” he declared, in the birth control pill.

“One is medical, the other moral,” he said. Medically, the question is whether the pill in question is a direct sterilizing agent or whether it merely regularizes natural functions so that a woman will know, three or four days in advance, when she is able to conceive a child.

“The moral answer depends on the medical answer. Naturally, we cannot accept direct sterilization, but I am told that a pill will be available very soon that avoids this.”

The cardinal was asked about a controversial article on birth control pills written by Father Louis Janssens in the primate’s own archdiocese of Malines-Brussels. Cardinal Suenens replied he has given the priest “liberty of research in order to clarify the problem.”

Father Janssens, a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, has given qualified endorsement of the pill as a morally legitimate means of spacing children. The pill in question is being promoted by Dr. John Rock of Harvard University, a Catholic physician whose views have stirred considerable controversy.

A Growing Gap

A record total distribution of 34 million Scripture portions during 1963 was reported by the American Bible Society at its 148th annual meeting in New York last month. The figure represented an increase of nearly three million over the previous year.

The society plans intensive effort to increase its output inasmuch as “the gap has been growing between the number of the world’s people who can read but for whom Holy Scriptures are not available,” according to the convention report.

Pay Now, Die Later

A U. S. Senate subcommittee investigating frauds through the mails in land sales was told last month of a racket that uses “religious overtones” in defrauding the aged to purchase misrepresented burial plans.

The president and general manager of the Denver Area Better Business Bureau, W. Dan Bell, and New Mexico Special Attorney General Richard N. Carpenter told the subcommittee of “pay now—die later” schemes.

One case cited involved a Denver organization that sold Texas burial plans, using such names as “Our Chapel of Memories—Praying Hands Division,” the “Order of Praying Hands,” and “Lawn Haven Memorial Gardens.”

The Better Business Bureau representatives said the names were deliberately used to cover up illicit and misleading practices. The religious association led buyers to believe the transactions were honest, they said.

Part of the program was selling caskets, which originally cost $96.50 on the installment plan, promising that a price that ballooned to $637.50 included complete cost of the buyer’s funeral, the subcommittee was told.

Some firms also sold crypts and mausoleums that did not exist, the witnesses testified. They said trading stamps were offered to those who would permit the salesman an opportunity to present his sales talk.

The peddlers would emphasize to the elderly the fact that prices for funerals would be substantially higher at the time of the person’s need, the witnesses told the committee.

The buyers were said to have been led to believe that the funerals would be conducted by a mortuary of their choice, but when the need arose, the requested funeral homes had not been apprised of the transaction.

Senators were informed that the buyers’ money was to be held in escrow but that investigations on local levels failed to turn up the funds.

A Protest Fast

A 37-year-old Protestant Episcopal clergyman conducted an eighteen-day hunger strike after being arrested while protesting de facto racial segregation in Chester, Pennsylvania, public schools.

The Rev. Clayton K. Hewett, rector of the Church of the Atonement at Morton. Pennsylvania, was jailed for ten days, then hospitalized after three days of “complete fasting” without liquids. He remained under detention and continued the fast, taking only water, juices, and vitamins in the hospital.

Hewett called off the fast, according to Episcopal Bishop Robert L. DeWitt, after Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton intervened in the Chester school situation. DeWitt said the minister would receive special training to continue work in the field of civil rights.

Hewett’s wife voiced support publicly of her husband’s actions. Asked about her own well-being, she said: “I’m doing fine. I think he’s 100 per cent correct—and so do our children. His beliefs are based completely on Scripture.”

The Hewetts are parents of six children, three boys and three girls ranging in age from six months to sixteen years.

Hewett began his fast weighing 180 pounds and dropped to 150.

On Furlough

Dr. Bob Pierce is taking a year’s leave of absence from his post as president of World Vision, Inc., in an effort to regain his health. Pierce has been suffering from diabetes and, as a spokesman put it, “sheer exhaustion.”

Dr. Richard C. Halverson, minister of Fourth Presbyterian Church, Washington. D. C., was named acting president of the missionary relief organization.

The World Vision radio broadcast will be temporarily discontinued, but all other activities are scheduled to continue without interruption. Ground will be broken within a few weeks for a new headquarters building in Arcadia, California.

Film And Record Laurels

A Civil War film drama produced at Bob Jones University took top honors in a competition sponsored by the National Evangelical Film Foundation.

The film, Red Runs the River, was chosen as the best of the year. Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., university president who played the leading role, was named best actor, and Katherine Stenholm, who directed, was cited as best director. The school’s cinema arm, Unusual Films, won recognition for best camera work.

About 600 students, faculty, and staff members participated in the making of the film. It tells of the Christian conversion of General Richard S. Ewell, hero of the Confederacy, through the influence of Stonewall Jackson.

This is the thirteenth year that “Christian Oscars” have been given by the NEFF. Other winners this year were Fernanda Mistral in Lucia (World Wide Pictures), best actress; City of the Bees (Moody), best documentary; Where Jesus Walked (World Wide Pictures), best musical; “The Story” (Ford Philpot—Good News), best television program; I Saw the Aucas Pray (Kent Films), best missionary film; Nehemiah (Broadman Films), best Bible story; Parables of Nature (Cathedral Films), best filmstrip series; and Born to Witness (Family Films), best youth film.

Record awards were given Norman Nelson (World), best male vocalist; Doris Akers (RCA), best female vocalist; 16 Singing Men (Zondervan), best choir; Nelson Brothers (Supreme), best quartet; Dean McNichols (Christian Faith), best organist; Constantine Kartsonakis (Diadem), best pianist; Howard and Dorothy Marsh (Zondervan), best duet; Salvation Army (World), best instrumental; and “Songs for Children” (Christian Faith), best children’s record.

Winners In Religious Journalism

Each spring a shower of citations descends upon religious journalistic enterprises from assorted organizations interested in communicating faith more effectively. The honor roll this year includes:

—Lee E. Dirks, staff writer for the National Observer, chosen to receive the 1964 James O. Supple Award of the Religious Newswriters Association “for excellence in reporting the news of religion in the secular press.”

—The Detroit News (Harold Schachern, religion editor), the Hamilton (Ont.) Spectator (Charles Wilkinson, religion editor), the Northern Virginia Sun (Mrs. Beryl Dill Kneen, religion editor), television station WCCO-TV of Minneapolis, television station WBBM-TV of Chicago, and radio station WINS of New York City; given Religious Public Relations Council Awards of Merit.

—Eternity (“Periodical of the Year”), Advent Christian Witness, Latin America Evangelist, Leader, His, Team, The Park Street Spire, Today, selected as “Magazines of the Year” by Evangelical Press Association. United Evangelical Action, The War Cry (Chicago edition), Team, Decision, Light and Life Evangel, Gospel Banner, Trails, His, The Banner, and The Evangelical Beacon won awards for content and graphic appeal.

About This Issue: June 05, 1964

A Christian layman issues a plea for meaningful preaching (page 5).… A biographical article describes the ministry of the late Alexander Maclaren of Manchester (page 7).… A librarian tells ministers how they can get the most out of local libraries (page 10). This issue is a special one for pastors with a number of features designed to be of practical help.

We are called to be ambassadors, says Craig Skinner, but we tend to behave like diplomats. His forceful article beginning on the opposite page is based on Second Corinthians 5:14–20.

Our News section includes a report of commemorative Baptist assemblies in Atlantic City.

Theology

A Drama in Four Acts

James S. Stewart

Text: “Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry” (2 Tim. 4:11b).

The story of John Mark, the deserter who made good, could be written as a drama in four acts. But first, by way of prologue to the drama, a question arises. How came Mark to be accompanying Paul and Barnabas on their hazardous adventures?

This is easily enough explained. Barnabas was Mark’s own cousin and was no doubt eager to give the younger man a share in the great work of carrying Christ’s commission across the world.

John Mark came from a home that had played an outstanding part in the life of the Church from the first. His mother, Mary, had put her house at the disposal of the Jerusalem Christians. It was there, in an upper room of her house, that they met for weekly worship. It was there that Peter had gone after his dramatic escape from prison. Indeed, the probability is that it was this same upper room that had seen the Last Supper on the night of Calvary, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, and the birth of the Christian Church. Mark was the son of that home. Happy the young man who begins life in a home where God has an altar and Jesus is a familiar friend!

So we pass on from the prologue to Act 1 of the drama. This act bears the title “Recantation.” To begin with, all went well. Mark felt he had found his vocation. There was all the glamour of novelty about it—new places to visit, new friendships to make, new claims to stake out for Christ. But as the days went on, one thought began to trouble him. Were they not wandering too far from their base? Paul, with his far horizons and beckoning visions, seemed determined to carry the campaign into the unfamiliar and dangerous hinterland of Asia. Now Mark had not bargained for this. “The risk is far too great,” he told himself. “It is not worth it! I must remonstrate with Paul.” But when he endeavored to raise his objections, he found that he could scarcely say a word, for there was something in Paul’s face—a burning, passionate eagerness and a glowing, resolute determination—that silenced his stammered protests. There seemed to be no alternative—he had to go on. But all the time his nerve was beginning to fail him, and he knew it. What a wild, savage, God-forsaken land this was, and up among those mountain fastnesses what nameless perils might be lurking! And Jerusalem was so far away, and his heart so terribly homesick! Many a night he would have given anything just to have heard the temple bells again, or to have stood on Olivet and seen the sun flaming down the western sky. So the struggle went on in Mark’s soul, till at last there came a crisis.

It was in the dead of night, and Paul and Barnabas were asleep; but Mark was wakeful and was striding up and down by himself in the dark. Take a long look at him, I beg you—for there is a man at the crossroads with Christ, a soul facing one of those decisive hours that come to all of us sooner or later. “I can’t go on,” he is saying. “I ought never to have come. O home, home—I’m weary for my home!”

And then another voice speaks, very quietly and tenderly. It is the voice of Jesus. “You are not going to leave me, my friend? You surely can’t be leaving me now? Do you not love me any more?”

The man blurts out, “Yes, Lord, I do, you know I do! With all my heart I love you. How can you say such a thing? But, Lord, I don’t think I was built for this. I’m not a Paul or a Barnabas. I’m not like them with their iron nerves and their lion hearts. I’m just one of your ordinary people, Jesus, and it is asking too much of me!”

Then again the quiet voice speaks, but sadly now. “I do not compel you, friend. You are free to return if you must. But I died for you, my son, and this is hard, hard for me!”

“But don’t you see, Lord, I can’t go on? You must see that. I have tried my best, I have indeed. But I am not made for this kind of life, and it is not fair to ask me. Can’t you understand?”

At that a new voice, a third voice, comes breaking in—that of the Tempter. “Let Christ go, then. Let him go! Sell him and be done with it. Recant, man, recant!”

And then a great silence. But in the morning, when Paul and Barnabas rose to continue their journey, there was no John Mark there. And they went on their way alone. The tragedy of a soul’s recantation!

Now I know what some of us are thinking. All this was long, long ago. Conditions have changed completely. Christian discipleship is far simpler today: no danger of our deserting Christ through fear!

But are we sure? Suppose we single out one particular kind of fear. What about the fear of unpopularity, of being left on the shelf (as we say), of being passed over or made to suffer for our convictions? Does that never breed deserters?

Have you never stood at this particular crossroads with Christ, finding yourself suddenly confronted with the choice either to stand up for Jesus and let the world’s good graces go, or else to muffle your Christianity and keep the favor of some social set? Once when Wilberforce rose to speak in the House of Commons, “Ah,” said a sneering member, “the honorable and religious gentleman!” That sort of thing stings; and there is a bit of us—“the natural man,” Paul called it—that hates being stung, and would rather do anything, even blunder into open disloyalty and sin against God’s Christ, than stand out against the conventions of the world or the opinion of our fellow men. Unpopularity—that is one fear at least that still has the power to make souls desert Christ.

There are others: the fear of sacrifice, for example; the fear of losing ambitions on which our hearts are set; the fear of having to give up something in thought, desire, or habit that we know ought to be given up (this is one of the sternest struggles of life, and until a man has fought through it he is not right with Christ); the fear of God’s daily discipline; the fear of the cross. Are we not all in this together? Yes, in some degree we have all played our part in this first tragic act—the act of recantation.

We go on now to Act 2, which bears the title “Remorse.” Here we see Mark back in Jerusalem. The homesick man has come home. Away yonder among the mountains of Asia he had thought, “If only I could see Jerusalem, how happy I should be!” Well, here he is in Jerusalem. Is he happy now? Look at him.

Everything was the same—the streets, his home, the temple bells, the sun flaming down behind Olivet, everything the same; yet somehow there was a subtle difference. All the dear familiar things had lost their savor. Happy in Jerusalem? Call him rather the most wretched man on earth. After recantation, remorse.

Words cannot measure the remorse that gripped John Mark in Jerusalem, but the grip of it was agony. “Would God I might live those days through again!” he thought. “If only the thing had never happened! O God of mercy, turn time back, I beg, set me where I was before this dreadful thing occurred. I can’t have been myself then! For I do love Jesus. I swear I love him still. Lord, give me that bad hour back!”

I think I can see him at night, unable to sleep, rising from his bed, pacing to and fro in that upper room of many memories. “Where are Paul and Barnabas tonight?” he is wondering. “And where is Jesus?” I see him going down a Jerusalem street at noonday, and now and again people—his own Christian brethren—look strangely at him as he passes, then turn and point: “See, there is the man who deserted! Would you believe it?”

I see him at last one day sitting at the Communion table. He is listening dully to the familiar words. “This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you.” The bread comes round, and then the cup. But just as he lifts it, something happens. He pauses and looks at that cup in his hand, for within him a voice has begun to speak—a voice unheard by any of the others there, heard only in Mark’s own soul. “This is Christ’s blood,” says the voice. “And if this is blood in the cup, and if it is the blood of Jesus, and if it was given for you, then what—in the name of all that is honorable—are you doing here? Jesus is out on the lonely, dangerous ways, seeking the lost and the perishing, and this is the blood of that agony. Will you dare to drink it—you? Look well into that cup, Mark, for you are crucifying Christ afresh, and there are drops of the blood of that second crucifixion in it. Look well into the cup!” And the man sits with the cup in his hand, staring at it. (Have we ever sat like that, confronted with the agony of Jesus, and knowing that some unclean thought of ours, some selfish slackness, some wretched little self-indulgence, was the cause of it?) And then I see him suddenly setting the cup down untasted, rising from the table, and leaving the room—and that very night, do you know where he is? Out from Jerusalem, out on the great north road, with his face set towards Paul and Barnabas and Christ again!

So we come to Act 3, and the title of this is “Restoration.” You know the story—how Mark returned to Paul and Barnabas; how Barnabas welcomed him eagerly but Paul refused to have anything to do with him (surely if Jesus had been there, it would have been Barnabas’s way, not Paul’s, he would have taken); how that unhappy dispute led to a quarrel, and the quarrel to a parting, Barnabas going off with Mark, and Paul with Silas; how this splendid coward redeemed his reputation and proved himself a true hero of Christ, so that even Paul relented in the end and took him to his heart again; and how when the great Apostle lay waiting his death in Rome, it was of Mark that he kept thinking. “Take Mark,” he wrote to Timothy, “and bring him with thee; for he is profitable to me for the ministry.”

It would be a great thing, the Gospel of Jesus, even if it applied only to those who had fought the good fight and run the straight race all their lives. But blessed be God, it is more than that, far more; and if the Christian preacher and evangelist has the gladdest and most thrilling task in all the world, it is because he has been authorized by God to proclaim the forgiveness of sins, the removing of their guilt and the shattering of their power. What is the Gospel? Hope for the hopeless, love for the unlovable, heroism for the most arrant coward, white shining robes for the most ragged, clean-hearted purity for the muddiest, inward peace and a great serenity for spirits torn and frantic with regret. There is a most moving scrap of conversation in George Macdonald’s Robert Falconer. “If I only knew that God was as good as that woman, I should be content.” “Then you don’t believe that God is good?” “I didn’t say that, my boy. But to know that God was good and kind and fair—heartily, I mean, and not half-ways with ifs and buts. My boy, there would be nothing left to be miserable about.”

If you have once seen Jesus, as the men and women of the New Testament saw him, there is nothing left to be miserable about. And there is everything in the world to set you singing! If I were to stand here and preach to you a limited gospel; if I were to tell you of a Christ who is the Lover of some elect, sky-blue souls who have never known the bitterness of self-despising and remorse, but not the Lover of all the world; if I were to suggest that there are depths of shame and humiliation and defeat from which the heights of heaven cannot be stormed—I should be preaching a lie.

“Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” Was Jesus shocked when he saw them coming? Did Jesus ever turn round and say, “Ah, I did not mean you! I can go down deep to rescue the perishing, but not quite to such depths as that”? No, he saw them coming, lame and lost and lonely and sin-scarred and disillusioned and miserable, and he lifted up his eyes to heaven: “I thank thee. Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that the Gospel of grace works even here! I thank thee that thou hast sent me to restore to these thy broken children the years that the locust hath eaten.” And he took them to his arms, God’s bairns who had got hurt, and let them sob the whole sad story out. Then—“That is finished,” he said. “Behold, I make all things new.” Do we today believe it? Take your own life, take the saddest recantation there has ever been, take the most locust-eaten year you can remember, take the thing that may be hiding God for you at this very moment. Lay that at Christ’s feet. Say, “Lord, if Thou wilt …!” And see if, for you, the ancient miracle is not renewed, and the whole world filled with glory.

And so we end with Act 4 of Mark’s story. We have watched his recantation and his remorse, and then his restoration. The title that this final act bears is “Reparation.” How did Mark atone? How did he repair the damage he had done? He became an evangelist. He wrote a book. He gave the world a Life of Jesus, the first Gospel to be written. We can be sure of this, that multitudes of people in those old, far-off days who had never seen Jesus in the flesh met him in the pages of Mark’s book, and entered—under the evangelist’s guidance—upon the high road leading to salvation. Still today, after all these years, Mark is introducing men and women of every race and religion to Jesus and setting them face to face with the redeeming Son of God. That was his reparation—was it not a glorious one?

What, then, of ourselves? We who have wounded Christ so often—is there any reparation we can offer? We cannot be evangelists like Mark, we say. It is not given to us to write Gospels for the world to read. But think again! Is it not? The fact is, there is not one of us who cannot compose a Life of Jesus. You can write an evangel, not in books and documents, but in deeds and character. You can make men see Jesus. You can live in such a way that, even when you are not speaking about religion at all, you will be confronting souls with Christ—his ways, his spirit, his character—and making them feel the power and the beauty of the Son of God. It may be that, all unknown to you, one soul here or another there will owe his very salvation to that Gospel of yours; it may be that someone will rise from among the throngs around the judgment seat on the last day and pointing at you will cry: “There is the man to whom, under God, I owe everything! It was reading the Gospel of Christ in that man’s life that redeemed me.” And Jesus will turn to you with glad and grateful eyes. “Come, ye blessed of my Father—inherit the kingdom!”—Condensation of Chapter XXIII, “A Drama in Four Acts,” from The Gates of New Life, by James S. Stewart. © 1940, Charles Scribner’s Sons. Reprinted with the permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

- More from James S. Stewart

The Minister’s Workshop: The Preacher as Steward

Paul S. Rees

This is written in India. One of our themes in a conference where approximately 1,100 ministers are assembled is Christian Stewardship.

A facet of stewardship—not wholly unexplored before—has suddenly blazed before my eyes. I refer to the Apostle Paul’s profound feeling that he was a preacher under bonds to Christ and that the Gospel was his as an immeasurably sacred trust—a treasure both to be guarded and to be shared. Timothy, he writes, I want you to know that this is “the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted” (1 Tim. 1:11, RSV). The same compelling conviction emerges in First Thessalonians 2:4, which Phillips renders: “We speak under the solemn sense of being entrusted by God with the gospel.”

The preacher, then, in any fundamental understanding of his office, is not an inventor, not an innovator, not an experimenter. He is a trustee. He must be humble enough to receive, loyal enough to guard, sensitive enough to share.

With this concept of trusteeship as our clue, let us say two things about the preacher’s task:

1. Preaching is a liberating bondage. It is “bondage” in the sense of definition of content and aim. An essayist or a columnist can range the globe for his topics—from Telstar to telepathy, from brigadier generals to beatniks. Not so a preacher! Christ—Christ in all his offices and offers—is his endless theme. The Bible—the one Book put in his hands at the time of his ordination—is his unvarying textbook.

Does this crib and coffin him? If it does, he has misconceived his Lord and mishandled his Bible. To a man who had gone stale, Oswald Chambers once put the question, “What do you read?” The man told him he read nothing but the Bible and books directly associated with it. Said Chambers: “The trouble is you have allowed part of your brain to stagnate for want of use.” He then recommended to his friend a list of over fifty volumes covering philosophy, theology, psychology, and numerous other tracts of classical and contemporary thought. By accepting the challenge that Chambers flung down, the man experienced a renaissance of the mind and spirit.

In comment on this case Chambers wrote: “When people refer to a man as ‘a man of one book,’ meaning the Bible, he is generally found to be a man of multitudinous books which simply isolates the one Book to its proper grandeur. The man who reads only the Bible does not, as a rule, know it or human life.”

Thus the preacher’s restriction of theme need never be a constriction of thought. He takes his fetters with him into a freedom that is boundless.

2. Preaching is a responsible originality. Too many of our sermons are as unoriginal and undistinguished as circlets of flattened dough when a biscuit cutter has done its neat and nimble work. This judgment, I feel, rests heavily on my own preaching.

Most of us need a homiletical shaking-up. More of the imaginative, more of the drama of life itself, more of the language and idiom of the culture by which our listeners are constantly being conditioned!

Donald Coggan, Archbishop of York, tells a delightful story about a keen Christian speaker who was to give a Bible talk to a group of tough fellows in the Bermondsey section of London’s East End. His text was: “Two sparrows for a farthing.”

“ ‘Sparrers?’ ” he began on a note of derision. “We don’t sell no ‘sparrers,’ not in Bermondsey. Kippers is what e would ave said if e’d been ere. A pair of kippers sold for three-’aipence—that’s what e meant.”

“In a few more sentences,” said one observer, “he compared the worth of the least of these men with even the best kippers, and a dark corner of the Gospel was immediately flooded with a bright light.”

Yet what we extol in a fascinating incident such as this is not originality for its own sake. It must be responsible and relevant originality.

There is an originality, whether of secular vocabulary or theological faddism or sociological sensationalism, that dissipates more than it illuminates the Gospel. It reminds one of an acid assessment of American preaching by Canon Alec Vidler: “So far as I can ascertain, the paradigm of American preaching is: ‘Let me suggest that you try to be good.’ ”

The stewardship of preaching! As alluring as it is awesome! It means a bondage that is forever breaking into new freedom. It offers an originality that is forever tethered to responsibility.

- More from Paul S. Rees

Books

Book Briefs: June 5, 1964

An Indictment Of The Existential Mood

Jesus and Christian Origins: A Commentary on Modern Viewpoints, by Hugh Anderson (Oxford, 1964, 368 pp., $7), is reviewed by Samuel J. Mikolaski, professor of theology, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Few books on New Testament studies written in English since the death of James Denney have furnished the reader with the breadth of knowledge, linguistic competence, and theological perspicuity that Professor Anderson has in this volume. A British scholar, Dr. Anderson is now professor of biblical criticism and theology at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Without question this is an important book for all students of theology. Three aims appeal to me as central to the author’s purpose (1) to assess carefully the historical skepticism that pervades contemporary theology; (2) to assess the strength and weakness of the German and British-American scholars New Testament perspectives and to compare their work; (3) to do this having firmly in view a reasoned conviction of the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth, his death and resurrection, and of the finality of the apostolic Gospel.

Four chapters are devoted to the question of the historical Jesus in recent literature, tracing the line from Albert Schweitzer through the schools to Bultmann, the post-Bultmannians, and those who in Germany, Britain, and America have formed a tradition strongly critical of Bultmann. Careful attention is given to the Historisch and Geschichtlich, the claims of form criticism, kerygmatic theology, and the question of the faith and historical elements of the apostolic witness. Though this is a complex task, the author exhibits the subtleties and divergences of opinion within as well as among schools of theology. Anyone accustomed to short sentences and uncomplicated issues may find this book tedious, but the discriminating reader will follow the discussion with understanding, appreciation, and profit.

Dr. Anderson argues that though Bultmann is interested in history, his claims lead to a Docetic Christ against which some of his students have reacted; nevertheless, they (e.g., G. Bornkamm) leave much to be desired in their treatment of the New Testament factual data. For example, “But have ‘existential openness,’ ‘intuitive encounter,’ or ‘Easter faith’ allied to historical research really produced a new historical certainty in our time by bringing Jesus in his unmediatedness right into our generation? Hardly!” (p. 181). Conversely, while he sides with the historicists, Dr. Anderson reminds his British and American colleagues, and Dr. Stauffer, that sheer historical event and record are inadequate to the essential nature of the saving Gospel.

The final two chapters engage the questions inherent in the New Testament teaching on the Resurrection and the Cross. Students will find the detailed analysis of the gospel narratives and evidence of the Epistles, plus the critique of the authorities, helpful. The Resurrection “was not a radical transformation, a radical break with the past of Jesus of Nazareth, but God’s vindication and confirmation of this Jesus” (p. 240). Further, in the apostolic preaching of the Cross “there is an unbroken line from the historical Jesus to the Kerygmatic Christ” (p. 270). In a pungent summary we read, “If ever the theology dominated by existence philosophy, with its disinterest in and unconcern for the completely human features of our Lord, were to infiltrate the life of the churches in any strength, would they not very soon go hungry for want of the humanity of the Son of God?” (p. 306). Central to the Gospel is the once-for-all character of Christ’s death for the sin of the world. In the case of Paul, he says, “the death and Resurrection of Jesus, which happened once for all in Palestine, are utterly decisive in their significance for the religious experience of men” (p. 274).

I counted up helpful, detailed discussion of more than two dozen theologians as widely spaced historically and theologically as D. F. Strauss, W. Herrmann, A. Schweitzer, R. Reitzenstein, R. Bultmann, G. Bornkamm, E. Stauffer, J. Jeremias, O. Cullmann, G. Ebeling, C. H. Dodd, V. Taylor, T. W. Manson, and John Knox. Copious footnotes comment on the views of many more. Dr. Anderson’s technical excellence is apparent, though significantly unobtrusive—a sign of the highly theological and philosophical character of the issues in biblical studies today. More than two-score catch terms and phrases of the German theologians are handled lucidly. Numerous short notes on biblical questions occur; for example: “witness” signifying both “witness to facts” and “affirmation of beliefs or truths” (p. 263); the New Testament usage of the term “Son” (pp. 333, 334); the adoptionist interpretation of Romans 1:3–5 (pp. 338, 339).

Nurtured on the works of James Denney (as I was), convinced that the New Testament confirms the historical and theological reality of Jesus of Nazareth, his words and his deeds, for saving faith, Dr. Anderson has written a challenging apologetic for New Testament Christianity that is argued competently within the current milieu. Because I agree with so much, I find little to criticize in this book. Perhaps a recognition of the importance of analytical philosophy as a method for theology, as at Oxford, might have been helpful. This research bids fair to say important things to the historical skepticism that Dr. Anderson inveighs against. But the cogent argument for the combination of both the historical and the theological as essential elements for saving faith is the striking and refreshing keynote of this work: “How then, we ask, can Jesus be known to us? For my part, I am forced to acknowledge that he may only come to us of a surety through our receiving and responding to the apostolic testimony within the context of the community’s life and faith and worship” (pp. 315, 316). The Christian community is indebted to Professor Anderson, and to Oxford Press, for this book.

SAMUEL J. MIKOLASKI

Gospel On Campus

On the Work of the Ministry in University Communities, by Richard N. Bender (The Methodist Church, Division of Higher Education, 1962, 264 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by Leonard Verduin, emeritus pastor, Campus Chapel, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

An important word—“Methodist”—has obviously been omitted from the title of this book, for it was written by Methodists, for Methodists, and about Methodists. It speaks about Methodist campus problems and about Methodist solutions.

This volume on the Methodist ministry in university communities consists of twenty-six brief contributions by twenty-four persons selected from campus communities throughout the land—students, faculty people, administration personnel, pastors of campus churches. The fact that it is a Methodist book should prepare the reader for a wide range of opinion and outlook, for, as everyone knows, The Methodist Church is a very inclusivist Church. One does not expect, and certainly does not find, anything like consensus here as to what the problem and the solution are. That the book was written by a sheaf of writers also makes for multiformity and variegation.

It is not the Methodism of Wesley that comes to expression, but the Methodism of the past century. Although here and there one detects an awareness that old-line liberalism has had its day (as, for instance, with Ralph C. Dunlop, who speaks of a “return to classical Christianity, … to Biblical Christianity,” p. 88), it is the old liberalism that seems to go on unchastened (as, for example, with Deane Ferm, for whom “the old certainties are no longer certainties. This includes the Bible, the Church, the Apostles’ Creed, … the deity of Christ, the Trinity, the existence of God …,” p. 232 f).

To the present reviewer, the outstanding feature of all this is a greatly atrophied theology de Sacra Scriptura. Although we are told here and there that more Bible study would be a good thing on campuses, one looks in vain for the conviction, so much a part of original Methodism, that saving faith is in the first place a matter of Schriftglaube. The writers are prepared to say that “God has made himself known in Jesus Christ” (p. 19), but what is consistently omitted is that the same God who “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” has “at sundry times and in divers manners spoken in times past by the prophets.” The idiom is consistently that of “confrontation with Person”; little or nothing is said of “confrontation with Predication.”

The bête noire in this volume is “fundamentalism,” including the neo variety (which one of the contributors describes as “fundamentalism which has learned its university manners,” p. 202). One of the contributors, William E. Rhodes, Methodist chaplain at the University of Denver, informs us that “Billy Grahamism is one way not to work in higher education” (p. 194). Granted that Ann Arbor is not Denver, it remains a fact however that Rackham Hall at the former place was never more crowded to capacity than when Graham spoke from its podium.

The thinking that comes to expression throughout this book is the assumption that Christianity is simply the product of the culture in which it was launched, and that men who are of a widely different culture will for that reason stumble at it. Rhodes says: “The substitutionary atonement may be true [apparently he is not sure] but will have rough sledding” on a modern campus—as if it ever had any other kind of sledding! At another place we read that “persons addicted to the modern era cannot take seriously the assumption that sin is an infinitely heinous crime against God” (p. 202); but one does not have to be “addicted to the modern era” for that—all he needs is to be unconverted, in any age.

The reviewer does not desire to leave the impression that everything is wrong with this book, for it also contains much that is good and that everyone serving in a campus ministry will do well to ponder. For example: “The academic community is not in need of little stories about religion. It stands desperately in need of leadership capable of completely involving it in religious thought” (p. 120). The assertion (p. 188) that “the college community … involves people who have grown up in the church and yet have not the slightest knowledge of what the Christian gospel is all about” would seem to indicate that also upstate we have had enough of “little stories about religion.”

The volume is well published. Printing and general make-up are pleasing, and typographical errors are few. If a second printing takes place, the “rolls” on page 39 should, it seems, be replaced with “roles.” The “whom” at the top of page 67 should make way for the nominative form of the pronoun. These are minor defects, as is the “Parley” on page 65; but in a book of such sophistication typographical perfection is an asset.

LEONARD VERDUIN

Lost Purpose: Lost Identity

America Is Different: The Search for Jewish Identity, by Stuart E. Rosenberg (Nelson, 1964, 274 pp., $4.50) is reviewed by Jakob Jocz, professor of systematic theology, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario.

The author is a well-known and highly respected rabbi of one of the leading synagogues in Toronto. He is both a trained sociologist and a scholar in his own right. Dr. Rosenberg already has a number of books to his credit, and the present volume is a worthy contribution to the subject of Jewish identity.

Though primarily written for a Jewish public, the book will prove of considerable interest to Christian readers in that it throws some light upon the present state of Protestantism and also touches upon subjects that concern both Jews and Christians.

In some ways the problem of North American Jewry does not differ from that of any other Jewish community in the Diaspora. The basic problem facing the Jewish minority is that of national survival. Paradoxically, Jewish identity is better preserved under the pressure of anti-Semitism than under conditions of democratic equality. Discrimination may spell suffering for the individual Jew but acts as a mighty preservative of the group in that it keeps the community together. The real danger arises when outward pressure is removed so that the ancient defenses that work for separateness become redundant. Such is the case in North America.

The American experience is unique in Jewish history—America Is Different—in that for the first time the Jewish community found itself on an equal footing with every one else. In such a situation a new threat arises, namely, assimilation to the adjacent culture. In the past, Jewish separateness was founded upon Judaism, the distinctive faith of an ethnic group. But this is not a religious age. Today Jewish adherence to Judaism is as nominal as Gentile adherence to Christianity. Strangely enough, Rabbi Rosenberg takes this fact for granted and pleads not for a return to Judaism but for the preservation of the specific Jewish loyalties. His main emphasis is upon “Jewish culture,” though he is keenly aware of the shift from Judaism to Jewishness. Zionist activity, fund-raising, and ethnic loyalty have taken the place of genuine faith. This is his complaint. But Rabbi Rosenberg cannot have it both ways; once Jewish culture and Jewish faith are so assimilated as to become indistinguishable, it is inevitable that the stress should be on culture and not on faith.

For the attentive reader there arises the inevitable question: What is meant by “Jewish culture”? It certainly is not any more a religious culture. On Dr. Rosenberg’s own admission, religious differences are of little account in modern secularized society. At best, both Jews and Gentiles indulge in vague religiosity, or what the author calls “religion-in-general.” But since the war, and especially as a result of the creation of the Israeli state, there is a tremendous upsurge of ethnic consciousness: the Jewish community is determined to preserve its identity. To this end Dr. Mordecai Kaplan’s program of Reconstructionism has assumed new significance. His influence pervades all sections of the Jewish community from the extreme liberals to the orthodox. “Peoplehood” with emphasis upon ethnic loyalty and custom is given first priority. The result is that Judaism is now understood as the “bearer of a civilization” rather than loyalty to the God of Israel. Even within the orthodox camp Jewishness prevails over against Judaism, so that it is now possible to be a “nonobservant orthodox Jew,” as it is possible to be a fervent Zionist without going to Israel except for a visit. In this, too, America Is Different. But if Dr. Rosenberg’s analysis is correct, then ultimately “Jewish culture” in North America resolves itself into secularized Americanism with a tinge of Jewish sentiment. This raises the perennial question of the raison d’être of Jewish separateness in the Diaspora.

What is the purpose of Jewish existence outside Israel?

In the last pages of Dr. Rosenberg’s book there are hints that separateness has resulted in cultural achievements that justify the Jewish struggle for survival. But is it a good enough reason? In the past, Jewish separateness was motivated by religious loyalties; today it is prompted by the herd instinct. Perhaps Dr. Rosenberg is too harsh with the Jewish intellectual after all? At least he refuses to be deceived and draws the last consequences of his atheism—without the God of Israel the Jew loses the purpose for his existence. How is it that Rabbi Rosenberg has so much to say about “Jewish culture” and nothing at all to say about Jewish destiny as God’s covenanted people?

Perhaps in a future volume the author will present us with a theological exposition of Israel’s raison d’être as the People of God.

JACOB JOCZ

A Novel Witness

The Martyred, by Richard E. Kim (George Braziller, 1964, 316 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Clyde S. Kilby, chairman, Department of English, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

The story told in this novel revolves around half a dozen main characters and is concerned with the conduct just prior to their death of twelve Christian ministers shot by Communists in North Korea in the latter half of 1950. Though these ministers died ignobly, and though even the Reverend Mr. Shin broke the heart of Captain Lee by confessing he did not believe in God, the message of the novel is that there is no alternative for suffering humanity other than a voice speaking from “far beyond history.” Colonel Chang, who did not believe in God, nevertheless at his death left money for the purchase and distribution of Bibles.

The author, a young Korean, acknowledges his indebtedness to Albert Camus; but the least significant interpretation of the novel would be one of simple atheism. (Actually the publisher calls it a Christian novel.) I find in it less of Camus than of Ibsen. Like a surgeon exhibiting a human organ to his students, Mr. Kim holds up every facet of his problem, both Christian and anti-Christian, and examines it thoroughly. It is the method of Ibsen, though here I find less of mere brilliance and more of deep sincerity than in Ibsen. It is a novel laden with the world’s grief.

Many significant questions are raised. Do people prefer a noble lie to the truth? Does God care about injustice and misery? Can atheists call Christianity a fairy tale if it actually meets a fundamental need of men? Can excessive humility turn into excessive pride? Should Christians “fail” sometimes just to prove they are human? Should religious hypocrisy be condoned for the sake of Christian unity? Does the study of history, if carried on honestly, lead to a power outside history? Are good and evil paradoxical rather than simply antithetical? From what source come courage, pity, love, and sacrifice in the hearts of men?

Among Mr. Kim’s remarkable gifts is that of symbolism. Even so ordinary an object as the bell in the bombed-out church in Pyongyang is said to ring, and sometimes to clang, by no earthly hand but by the winds of the sky. When an unbeliever asks why the incessant ringing cannot be stopped, he is answered, “It’s too dangerous to get up to the belfry.” Thus by sparse suggestion the thoughtful reader can find meaning everywhere in this novel.

Captain Lee, the narrator of the events, seems to represent the author’s viewpoint and feelings. Not a Christian, Lee is nevertheless deeply moved by the idea of Christianity, particularly as that belief changes the hearts of its followers. To appreciate the full meaning of the novel it must be remembered that Korea in Mr. Kim’s lifetime has perhaps experienced a more genuine Christianity than any other country on earth. It is evident that Mr. Kim has felt the power of God in the Christians of his native country.

CLYDE S. KILBY

A Clear Overview

God Here and Now, by Karl Barth (Harper & Row, 1964, 108 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by James Daane, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Here are seven lectures delivered by Barth during the past fifteen years. The first and last deal with a ten-day conference on humanism held in Geneva in 1949. The first lecture is Barth’s speech on “humanism” (which is almost a sermon) to the conferees, who were all non-Christians except for one Roman Catholic. The key to Barth’s “humanism” (he rejects all “ism” terms as not properly definitive of Christianity) is of course the “humanity of God.” In the incarnate God-man, Jesus Christ, the nature, meaning, and secret of true humanity are to be found, and here only. If this is called “exclusiveness,” says Barth, “then we must let this change stand.” In the last lecture he shows how he fared with the advocates of various other types of humanism. Here we meet some of Barth’s humor, which often has overtones more serious than amusing.

One lecture deals with the nature of Christian proclamation and defines the nature of that grace of God which is proclaimed, and the nature of that free decision to which the Gospel summons man. Another lecture deals very lucidly with Barth’s understanding of the authority and significance of the Bible. Here he pretty much stands alone. His view of the Bible as becoming God’s Word, and as not free from human errors, will be unacceptable to conservative Christians, though they will feel some of the deep earnestness and seriousness that Barth holds for the Word of God as he conceives it. He has strong words of rejection for the Roman Catholic conception of the Word of God as borne by the hierarchy and culminating in the Vaticanum and compares it to the Protestant modernistic understanding of the Word as borne by the universal religious self-consciousness. And Barth warns those interested in the ecumenical movement that they pursue an illusion unless they recognize and respect the authority of the Bible.

In another lecture Barth presents his conception of the Church as an event: the gathering or congregating of those summoned by the Word of God; he then goes on to show what this conception means for church polity, specifically for the proper relationship among the many congregations. The remaining lecture indicates Barth’s understanding of Christian ethics.

This small book presents many of Barth’s basic theological ideas with remarkable clarity. Barth does not get simpler or clearer than this. Part of the credit must go to the very good translation of these essays by Paul M. Van Buren. In an introductory chapter Van Buren shows his basic disagreementwith Barth’s theological method and thereby indicates that though he once followed Barth loyally, he does so no longer. Barth, says Van Buren, like the sixteenth-century Reformers thinks it is enough to hear the biblical message and repeat it today, delivering it as a mailman delivers a letter. Van Buren feels the turning point for theology lies not in the sixteenth but in the second half of the eighteenth century, and he admits amazement that Barth should be so concerned about what the Bible says and so indifferent as to how the Bible says it and how it ought to be said today. The brief introduction lights up the contrast between Barth’s theological method and that of Van Buren and of the whole current school of existential, demythologizing reinterpreters of the biblical message who state its meaning in secular terms.

JAMES DAANE

Paperbacks

Books for the Church Library, compiled for the Church Library Department of Christian Herald (1964, 57 pp.). A listing of about 400 significant religious titles, some of which would be more appropriate in a minister’s study than in the library of the average church. The list is offered free to church librarians on request.

Sowing and Reaping, by Emil Brunner, translated by Thomas Wieser (John Knox, 1964, 91 pp., $1.50. Ten sermons.

For the Living, by Edgar N. Jackson (Channel, 1964, 96 pp., $1.50). A discussion of funeral practices, particularly as they relate to grief.

Not by Accident, by Isabel Fleece (Moody, 1964, 72 pp., $1). The reactions of a mother’s heart to God’s removal of her youngest son through an automobile accident.

His Life and Our Life: The Life of Christ and the Life in Christ, by John A. Mackay (Westminster, 1964, 80 pp„ $1.45). A former president of Princeton Theological Seminary writes in a style both delightful and lucid on what it means to be truly alive in Christ.

Counselling Unwed Parents

Thomas Edwin Carter

A leading member of a midwestern church came to his minister with a problem. Obviously tense and disturbed, he said, “I don’t know just how to begin, pastor. Well, to tell you the truth, there is something terrible that I’ve just learned about. Little Jenny told us last night that she is going to have a baby!” And having said this, he lost control of himself and began to cry.

The pastor knew Jenny well. She had been raised in his church, and he had observed her and given spiritual guidance to her for fifteen years. Now he sat with this dedicated Christian as they both puzzled over the question that loomed so large: “Why?” But more immediately another question had to be faced: “Pastor, what can we do?”

Anyone who has faced such a situation knows the feelings suffered by the unwed parents: disgrace, guilt, failure, rejection, hatred, utter bewilderment. In their general confusion upon learning of the pregnancy, approximately half of the unwed parents and their relatives will seek out a minister for help. But will the minister be prepared to offer help? Will he know what sort of guidance and support to give?

This problem is becoming more and more acute throughout the country. There is no accurate way of determining the number of young girls and older women who bear children out of wedlock each year, because of the many alternatives for dealing with the unplanned child. The unwed mother-to-be may have an illegal abortion or enter into a forced marriage. She may decide to keep the baby and bear the shame, perhaps falsifying information for the birth certificate. She may make use of the adoption black market or of the maternity home or hospital with a licensed adoption agency, or she may place the child privately with some “deserving” couple. But taking the number of known births and allowing for variables, it is estimated that some 250,000 children will be born this year to unmarried parents. Contrary to what is usually thought, the rate of illegitimate births for young girls has been less than that for older women. Clark E. Vincent, in his excellent study Unmarried Mothers, reported (p. 1) that during the twenty-year period 1938–1958, the rate of births to unmarried girls from 15 to 19 increased by 108 per cent, while the rate to those aged 25 to 29 increased by 453 per cent.

What is to become of Jenny and the thousands of others like her? The public has many and varied feelings toward unwed parents and their child. Very harsh and judgmental treatment has long been the rule, and though the trend is toward more protective and compassionate care, there is yet much to be desired. Even in the churches, one finds surprisingly much of the old punitive attitude and little of the feeling of Jesus: “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.” It should be realized that the punitive approach with its restrictive treatment does not produce any substantial saving in funds, nor does it generally promote reforms. It does, however, create human suffering, bitterness, further delinquency, and humiliation. The far more desirable attitude—and indeed the only Christian one—is that of rehabilitation. This approach is now practiced to some degree by many professions throughout the country. But it does not yet appear to be the feeling of most Christians. One might suggest that by their feelings toward unwed parents, other persons may sin more than the girl and boy involved.

Getting back to Jenny, what can and what should the local minister do for an unwed mother who comes to him for help? He can suggest a quiet and quick marriage—but he should resist this strong and natural temptation. Marriage may appear to be the morally correct step, and many a minister can point to an occasional success story to prove the wisdom of this. But it should be realized that the couple’s sexual and psychological experiences usually will work against the establishment of a sound marriage. The unwed parents will often admit the impossibility of attempting to base a marriage on their over-eagerness for sexual experiences. Far more than they need a husband or wife, the unwed parents need help that will provide a lasting solution to their immediate problem.

The minister can suggest that he knows a very fine couple who would like to adopt a baby without going through the usual time-consuming and sometimes costly channels. He should, however, strongly advise against this. In many states an adoption can be legally effected only through a licensed adoption agency. Still, private placements are often made because no strong objections are voiced and because this seems best for the baby. Difficulties arise when the baby is born defective or the adopting parents change their minds. Experience has proved that adoption agencies usually do a superior job. A minister, doctor, lawyer, or some other well-meaning person cannot match the ability and resources of an adoption agency. The minister should also discourage relatives who consider adopting the child. It is inconceivable that a child could be reared normally under these circumstances, to say nothing of the effect on the mother.

Many other possibilities might occur to the minister, the unwed parents, or the relatives. All should keep in mind, however, that much more is at issue than the future birth and development of an unplanned child. A spiritual and emotional crisis for all concerned is taking place. The feelings of the parents were briefly mentioned above. The young mother usually feels frantically alone and unable to face her immediate problems, much less the desperate future. One thing she needs throughout this experience is support and understanding helpfulness. The unwed father also feels confusion, tension, guilt, and conflict. If these are not alleviated, his future adjustment to life may be greatly impaired. Both need a wise spiritual counselor. Often the minister will be the only person who can bring a calm and sane approach to the situation. He must be sensitive to the feelings and needs of all concerned. But beyond this, he should be prepared to make referral to other persons and groups whose abilities and resources are needed.

The National Association on Services to Unmarried Parents believes that the unmarried mother needs personal counseling services, medical care, practical assistance with living and financial arrangements, the help of a child-care agency in working out plans for the baby, legal assistance, and pastoral counseling. The Child Welfare League of America is the professional social work organization that sets standards for services to unmarried parents. Its view differs from past attitudes toward illegitimacy, for it completely embraces the idea of saving the people involved, with concern for both parents and child.

Of all the possibilities of help for the unwed mother, the best in most cases is a carefully selected maternity home. If the minister has made a prior investigation, he will be able to refer her to a maternity home or hospital that is equipped to care for her. However, while there are some 200 such agencies throughout the country, not many of them measure up to the best standards.

The progressive and well-staffed maternity home is the agency of society best able to meet the needs of the unwed mother and her child. Because the mother’s immediate physical and emotional needs and her legal responsibilities are more acute than the father’s, the maternity home is organized primarily to deal with her, although some few homes are beginning to work also with the unwed father. The role of the maternity home has changed with a growth in the understanding of the mother, the development of greater skills on the part of the staff, and the increased availability of other community resources. In earlier days the maternity home provided the mother with some measure of environmental and spiritual security, medical care, and moralistic teachings. The basic purpose still includes these with various emphases; yet the ideal situation will seek to meet the mother’s needs as an individual without shutting her off completely from the natural flow of life. The local situation and the degree of confidentiality desired will naturally determine the social and community contacts. In any event, in a good maternity home the unwed mother who wants to make the best of a tragic event in her life can find acceptance and security; constructive relationships with other girls and staff members; planned daily activities; personal growth through self-understanding with the help of social workers, psychologists, ministers, and others; and the all-important medical care.

The experience of unwed parenthood may begin as tragedy, but it can turn out to be a therapeutic and growth-producing event. If the minister’s help is sought, the outcome, to a considerable extent, will be based on his skill and advice. It is very important for him to offer spiritual strength and counsel, to be able to find a reputable maternity home, and to be willing to give the necessary time and effort for long-term support and care. This is not an easy task, nor is it always a pleasant one; but it can be an extremely beneficial and important work in the name of the loving and forgiving God. Because about half of the unwed parents seek help through the church, it is essential that ministers know how to give them the realistic and spiritual guidance that is so greatly needed.

- More from Thomas Edwin Carter

Ideas

Preachers and Their Making

What should go into the making of a preacher depends upon what he is to do after he is made. Unless there is clarity about his task, there will be little assurance about his training. Continual revision of pre-seminary and seminary programs and objectives suggests either that there is considerable uncertainty about the nature of ministerial work or that the task is constantly changing.

A new assessment of the ministry has just been published by Augsburg Press, The Making of Ministers, with the subtitle, “Essays on Clergy Training Today” (Keith R. Bridston and Dwight W. Culvers, eds.). Fourteen churchmen each contribute a chapter. If, as Gibson Winters of the University of Chicago Divinity School contends, a seminarian is no longer the man called by God and set apart to proclaim the given message of the Gospel but often nothing more than a seeker after such truth as can only be found in the ever-varying, historical situations of life; if the “two-world notions underlying the theological formulations of Christian orthodoxy have been collapsing for centuries” and the gathering of Christian people into congregations is really out of date—then a new kind of training is indeed demanded.

On the other hand, if the primary task of the minister in these revolutionary times is still to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, then much more will go into his making than concern for contact and communication between college and seminary and between Christ and culture, important as these are.

The weakness of this symposium lies not in its preoccupation with these matters but in its theological reconstruction of the biblical faith, for such reconstruction entails the danger of turning the task of preaching a message into that of finding a message to preach. When what goes into the making of a minister is determined by a criterion like this, it is small wonder that, as the statistics of the book indicate, many ministers are quite at sea about who they really are and what they are actually supposed to do.

C. Umhau Wolf, pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church of Toledo, Ohio, sounds almost out of context when he declares that ministers frequently indicate a need for much more Bible study than they were given but that this need goes unheeded by seminaries in which “requirements in Bible become more and more minimal.”

Who is to blame for the confusion? Wolf replies: “Berger may blame the community and the congregation; Sittler may blame the congregation and administrative headquarters and in a way put the blame directly … on the minister’s psychological problems. Colleges blame seminaries and seminaries blame colleges.… Pastors frequently blame both the seminary and the college, while college and seminary professors look down their noses as if the average parish pastor is a useless, ineffectual, unintellectual cog.” He also says, “If we find a theological orientation and have prerequisites for professorships, we will be well on the way toward reshaping the ministry.”

The need for some kind of overhaul in the training of ministers is apparent. But unless this overhaul is based upon a clear recognition that the first task of the minister is to preach the Gospel, confusion will not be dispelled, and the hungry sheep will continue to look up and not be fed.

It is essential to the making of any minister that he be taught to preach the biblical message. There is no true minister of Christ who does not in some way share the compulsion Paul voiced when he exclaimed, “Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel.” Because the Gospel is contained in the Holy Scriptures, acceptable preaching must be in some real sense expository preaching. If the Bible is God’s Word, then that Word ought to be preached.

But much evangelical preaching today is weak and shallow. In many churches the pulpit is ineffective not because the minister is a theological liberal but because, even though he is an evangelical, he says so little. Too often he is so little devoted to the study of the Bible and so far from being immersed in its thought-world that he lives from hand to mouth in finding subjects. As each Sunday draws near, he has to scramble about for something to say. The only deliverance out of this bondage to uncertainty is that the minister learn to “open the Scriptures” so that he may use them in much the same way in which Jesus himself used them.

Exposition, moreover, must have behind it a sturdy vertebrate theology. Not every man who lives with the weekly task of delivering sermons can be, or needs to be, a professional, academic-robed theologian. Yet no deeply effective preacher can do without “a pulpit theology.” As he speaks out of a broad yet solid theological understanding of the Scriptures, his sermons will breathe a sense of authority. Theological competence, though not expressed in technical theological terms, brings depth to preaching. And the man in the pew whose minister knows where he stands theologically will grow in faith and doctrine. But when the man in the pulpit lacks a strong theology, his sermons will not build up his hearers in the faith but will rather follow one another like unrelated items on a grocery list.

Despite their evangelicalism, conservative seminaries that offer inadequate study of the Scriptures, ignore historical theology, slight the development of their own doctrinal tradition, and simply pour into the minds of their students the thought of their most recently accepted systematic theologian, are themselves contributing to arid preaching without passion. Evangelical seminaries will make fewer strong preachers if their students can graduate without reading men like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Wesley, and their modern successors. There is no substitute for first-hand encounter with the great seminal thinkers in theology.

The pulpit in our times is weak. Liberals ignore the only Gospel there is to preach; too many evangelical seminaries hand their students doctrine and theology all wrapped up in neat parcels to be believed and delivered without having first been made the subject of thoughtful and prayerful biblical study. As has just been said, theology is important. Yet not even the greatest of theologies is inspired, as are the Scriptures. Every system of doctrine devised by men stands in judgment under the Word of God, which remains the only unchanging rule of faith and practice.

To achieve a personal theology of the pulpit, the minister must learn to study the Scriptures with a mind not afraid of asking questions. For, essential though theology is, few things are more stultifying to good preaching than the practice of allowing the systematics learned in seminary to become a sacrosanct stereotype for interpreting the Bible. It must be acknowledged that conservative preaching is sometimes not a preaching of the Scriptures themselves but a preaching of seminary dogmatics.

Every minister should indeed be trained in a theological tradition. But he must master it instead of being mastered by it. Even though he is not a professional theologian, he should have a theology that he can rightfully call his own—not that he has originated it but that he has assimilated it and given it an impress from his own mind.

What is needed is a personalized theology. And for this the minister must learn to study the Scriptures with such curiosity and with such imagination that he repeatedly finds himself challenging, criticizing, and sometimes even contradicting what was taught him in seminary. The man who sees nothing in the Bible that disturbs the theology he learned from his professors and inherited from his particular tradition is not really studying the Scriptures. Nor will he be making sermons that come to life. Every preacher of the Word of God should search the Scriptures daily. Unless he does this throughout his ministry, he will fail to stand in deep commitment to his theological tradition and fail to enjoy the thrilling sense of freedom that comes from possessing a theology that, while given him by others, has become his possession through the discipline of his own thought.

Seminaries that train such ministers will not be confused and uncertain about what kind of men they are supposed to make. And such ministers will cease wondering about who they really are and what they ought to be doing and saying. But seminaries that no longer recognize that their first object is to train men to preach the Christian message will continue to be uncertain about what they are to make of the students who come to them.

The true unity of the Bible is, as Pascal said, found in “Jesus Christ, whom the two Testaments regard, the Old as its hope, the New as its model, and both as their center” (Pensée 739). On the Emmaus road the risen Lord placed in the hands of Cleopas and his companion the key to understanding the written Word when “beginning at Moses and all the proprets he expounded in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” It is for the seminary today to train preachers how to use that key in proclaiming the Gospel according to the Scriptures. Other things they will do; this they must do. Nothing can take the place of biblical preaching.

Much is being written these days that defines the task of the ministry as service to others. This literature speaks of “the total ministry of Christ” but defines ministerial service as doing almost everything except preaching. Yet no man will be more confused about himself than the minister who is busy doing things but has nothing to say.

Peril Of The Label

“Psychiatrists use dangerous words.” So says the noted psychiatrist Karl Menninger, founder of the famous Menninger Clinic, in a copyrighted article in a recent issue of the Saturday Evening Post. His counsel to fellow psychiatrists may and should be heeded by clergymen as well.

Dr. Menninger contrasts the harmless professional jargon of lawyers and archaeologists, for example, with the terms psychiatrists use, which can hurt people and cause them despair:

Words like “schizophrenia” and “manic-depressive” and “psychotic,” for example, frighten patients and worry their anxious relatives and friends. The use of these alarming terms also affects us psychiatrists. They lead us back into the pessimism and helplessness of the days when mental illness was thought to be made up of many specific “diseases,” and when each “disease” bore a formidable label and a gloomy prognosis.

Dr. Menninger is frank to say that we have all had spells of mental illness of varying intensity and duration, and what we need at such times is not a “label” but help. A label can ruin a career. One wrong word can “ruin a recovery.” It is not that he denies the existence of mental illness as such:

I agree with the American Medical Association and with the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health that mental illness is our No. 1 health problem. I do not think we help that problem by calling it a myth. But neither do I think we help it by persisting in obsolete terminology. Not only do these terms panic the patient but they discourage the doctor and permit him to justify a program of indifference and neglect.

The use of psychiatric terms, says Dr. Menninger, has reached the name-calling stage where people substitute “psychotics” and “psychopaths” for more traditional epithets such as “liars” and “skunks.” In answer to the question of what should be substituted for the technical terms, he says that often expressions that come from everyday life are more accurate, and that these do not have the same “dreadful or false implications.” For example, the expression “going to pieces” implies “those essential qualities of integration and steadiness which are the basis of our concept of the ‘vital balance.’ ”

The pessimistic effect the technical terms have on his fellow psychiatrists and others, claims Dr. Menninger, may explain why so little is done about mental illness. The situation is shocking enough: “… only about one fifth of the state hospitals for the mentally ill give patients any treatment.”

The awful fact that mental illness has become our number one health problem means that clergymen are encountering borderline cases more and more in their pastoral counseling sessions. And often the minister’s knowledge of psychiatry is borderline, too. It frequently goes little beyond knowledge of the terms Menninger warns against. The wise minister is aware of his limitations in this area, while the unwary is apt to form snap judgments and label a church member while consulting with his family. Sadly enough, such a label seems capable of traveling through a congregation with lightning-like speed. And the church, supposedly the repository of comfort and help, becomes rather a place of the whispered label and of haunting torment to the sufferer. “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.”

The wise minister will consider the authority that is often attributed to his words because of his station. He will recall that it was Paul who counseled: “Let us speak the truth in love; so shall we fully grow up into Christ.”

Significant Announcements From Rome

Two recent announcements from Rome are of high interest. One, emanating from the Pontifical Commission on Biblical Studies and ratified and approved by Pope Paul VI, redefined the limits of acceptable biblical scholarship within the Roman church. The other, made by the Pope in St. Peter’s Basilica on Pentecost, established a special Vatican Secretariat for Non-Christians headed by Paolo Cardinal Marella and analogous to the Secretariat for Christian Unity headed by Augustin Cardinal Bea.

That the first announcement reflects concern regarding the doctrinal implications of such scholarly methods as form criticism and demythologizing seems evident from the declaration that “there are being diffused many writings in which the truth of the sayings and the acts contained in the Gospels is being put in doubt” and also from the statement that “some promoters of this method, motivated by rationalistic prejudices, refuse to recognize the existence of a supernatural order and the intervention of a personal God in the world, coming about through revelation properly presented, let alone the possibility of miracles and prophecies.” While the commission accepted the use of modern historical methods in biblical studies, it made plain the primacy of the theology and philosophy of the church over critical scholarship, the norm being the established doctrine rather than scholarly findings. The contrast between this and the assumption of liberal Protestant scholarship that doctrine is subject to continuing revision in accord with biblical criticism is evident. On the other hand, conservative evangelical scholarship, while not repudiating reverent historical methods, has its norm in the plenarily inspired Word of God, the infallible rule of faith and practice.

The other announcement, setting up a Secretariat for Non-Christians, is a major development that may well have historic effects. According to the Pope, the secretariat will deal with other than Christian religions in “loyal and respectful dialogue.” But to interpret it as a relaxation of Rome’s missionary thrust is probably a mistake. Dialogue, such as Raymond Lull carried on with Islam in the thirteenth century, is an effective method of witness, as the history of missions so clearly shows. It is significant that the Pope said that “the catholicity of the Church is still enormously deficient” because “innumerable peoples and entire continents are still outside Christian evangelism” and that he stressed the value of the term “Catholic,” which “characterized the true Church of Christ.”

For the Jews the establishment of the secretariat raises some real questions. If, as a Vatican spokesman has said, the Pope’s announcement means that all non-Christian faiths—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and others—would come under the new secretariat, Jewish leaders may object to the implications of this classification in view of the unique relation between Judaism and Christianity that sets Judaism apart from all other non-Christian religions. Moreover, Jewish concern has already been expressed about the place under the new secretariat of the statement on Catholic-Jewish relations on which the second session of the Vatican Council last year failed to vote and which is to come before the third session as a separate declaration.

There may also be a strategic purpose behind the new secretariat in solidifying the confrontation with Communism of all who stand for religion of any kind. And for some it may be a straw in the wind that is perceptibly blowing in the direction of the great universal church some students of prophecy see on the horizon. At any rate, the establishment of the Secretariat for Non-Christians opens up vistas that Protestants will view with deep interest.

A Plea For ‘Sexual Democracy’

A professor of psychology at the University of Houston criticized people, according to an Associated Press report, who tell others what is right and wrong in the area of sex. They are “sexual fascists,” said Professor James L. McCary, and they are creating a mass of emotionally unhealthy people. Most of us, he told a group of university students, are sick. We allow others to impose on us ideas of what is sexually wrong and right, and deviating from them in practice, we feel “immoral, bad and wicked” and suffer from sexual neuroses and poor health.

He proposed that this “sexual fascism” be replaced by “sexual democracy” and went on to spell out the democratic approach to sex: “If a person is competent, well educated and adult, if he does not injure others or himself, if his behavior does not offend other people, then he should be able to make his own sexual decisions as to what is best for him.” He urged his student audience to throw off the sexual tyranny of a fascist majority.

His students assumably had little trouble classifying themselves among the “competent, well educated and adult.” And they doubtless thought secrecy the way “not to offend other people.” But if any student gave this “sexual democracy” serious thought, he found difficulty in determining what was “best for him” and yet would not “injure others.” In McCary’s sexual democracy no citizen may tell another what is sexually right. Each decides what is “best for himself.” The flaw in this code is that it provides no point of reference by which to judge what behavior is both best for oneself and non-injurious to other persons.

Sexual behavior is a highly personal matter, but it is never merely an individual matter, as the phrase “sexual relations” indicates. In sexuality another person is generally involved. Although we often hear it said of some practice, “it is not wrong in itself,” the fact is that nothing we do is really “in itself.” This is especially apparent in sexual relations.

It is absurd to call, as McCary does, an objective morality “sexual fascism.” If there is no objective moral law governing both parties, then McCary is right in asserting that it is arbitrary and fascistic for one person to tell another person what is right and what is wrong in sexual behavior. But if there is no objective law, the situation is worse than McCary realizes. For it is absurd to teach that any person who decides he is competent, well educated, and adult, and is offending and injuring no one, may behave sexually as seems “best for him.” Such a person is not bringing in the kingdom of sexual democracy. In the moral no less than the political realm, democracy without law is anarchy.

Is it fascistic and undemocratic to tell others what is moral or immoral in sexual behavior? Does not Professor McCary himself tell Houston students what is sexually right and wrong? If he were wholly consistent with his own position, he would teach students nothing about these matters. By teaching his own brand of sexual morality, he is imposing on others his ideas about what is right and wrong as truly as any Christian moralist who derives his standards from the revealed will of God has ever done.

This modern, democratic approach to sex is the road to boredom. And it is a short road. In the Christian view, sexual differentiation is a reflection of the image of God, and sexuality consequently is one of the profoundest mysteries of human personality. Precisely because sexuality is such a profound aspect of the mystery of human life, it requires transcendent guidance and governance. Which male (or female) is not a mystery to himself? What man or woman without some transcendent guidance really knows what is best for himself or what does not offend and does not injure others? When the mystery of sex is improperly invaded, the result is adulterous—impurity, a dirtying of oneself at the deepest level of his spirit—and quick boredom follows. Properly invaded, it is an endless road of profound satisfaction and ever-deepening human experience. Indeed, the mystery of sex is so profound that it is regarded in the Bible as the proper symbol of the relation between God and his people. In the Old Testament, Jehovah is the husband and Israel his wife. In the New Testament, Christ is the bridegroom and the Church his bride. And heaven’s joys are symbolized in “the marriage supper of the Lamb.”

Christian morality guards the mystery and banishes boredom.

The Baker Affair

The United States Senate has fallen on unhappy days and seems hesitant to apply corrective measures that would restore its stature and cleanse its soiled image. The staff of the Senate Rules Committee headed by Lennox P. McLendon in a report submitted to the committee has taken note of the fact that the Senate has suffered “the loss of much respect and prestige” in the Bobby Baker affair. The report charged that the former Senate majority secretary had engaged in gross improprieties in the course of building a personal fortune he recently valued in excess of $2 million. His salary was $19,600 a year. He had come to the Senate as a penniless page boy at the age of fourteen. While the report does not charge the Senate with responsibility for all Baker’s wrongdoings, it does make the point that “the Senate is responsible for putting Baker and others in places of responsibility without imposing upon them the enforceable standards of honesty and integrity the American people have every right to demand of all their public servants, high or low.”

The report calls for three fundamental reforms: (1) disclosure by senators, officers, and employees of business associations and income; (2) prohibition of association by these individuals with persons and organizations outside the Senate that are conducting business with the government; (3) requirement that all senators respond to requests from any Senate committee to testify about any knowledge they have of a subject under investigation.

Appearing at this late date, the third recommendation carries with it a certain irony. The committee majority had very obviously been unwilling to request senators to testify in the Baker case. The investigation was carried on with a languor unbecoming to the gravity of the case, and promising leads were never followed.

In contrast to Teapot Dome, the Baker case seems minor. But perhaps the former has something yet to teach us, particularly in the work of Montana’s two Democratic senators, Thomas J. Walsh and Burton K. Wheeler, who headed Senate investigative committees though Republicans controlled the Senate as well as the House. The work of the committees was effective, and terrible abuses of public trust were uncovered. But the public was apparently satisfied with the handling of the scandal, and the Coolidge administration was returned to office by a landslide.

Most senators today are arguing that civil rights is a moral issue, and we agree. But so is the integrity of the Senate. A whitewash ultimately satisfies nobody. “Murder will out,” as the saying goes. If the Senate is sitting on a volcano, the crust may be thinner than they think. But the public is entitled to know the truth of the matter. Self-criticism can be endured by a healthy organization, for self-criticism is itself a sign of health.

The Temptation Of The Specialist

“One of the most astonishing characteristics of scientists is that some of them are plain old-fashioned bigots. Their zeal has a fanatical, egocentric quality characterized by disdain and intolerance for anyone or any value not associated with a special area of intellectual activity.” The words of a preacher trying to pick a fight? No, these words are taken from an editorial that appeared in the April 24 issue of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Seeking to explain the origin of “scientific bigotry,” the editorial points to the “enormous pressures toward specialization” encountered by the science student. For the necessary concentration of effort, one of the student’s most useful psychological weapons is “to convince himself that the area of knowledge under study is indeed the most important possible. As a corollary all other intellectual pursuits can be ignored as worthless. It is necessary for virtually all scientists to adopt such rationalizations from time to time. To achieve success one must concentrate on performing a series of specific tasks with complete rigor.”

The editorial points out that one needs not only the ability to specialize but also the ability to escape the “web of his rationalizations.” The scientist lacking the latter is cut oil from other evolving knowledge. While specialization can lead to early establishment of a scientific reputation, in the end “it is often bitterly self-defeating.”

By way of footnote to this refreshingly candid editorial, we may add that one inclination of the bigot is to make pronouncements outside his field. The scientist-bigot faces awful temptations to pronounce, for example, on religious matters, and when he does so, falls readily into scientism. But this is a two-way street. Just as science is not the only vocation that tempts toward over-specialization, the scientist is not the only professional man to speak often with an air of authority outside his sphere. The theologian is vulnerable at this point if he gives the impression of speaking as a trained scientist.

Christians especially should be careful in handling facts in any field of knowledge, for they worship the One who made the gigantic claim that he is the truth. Reverence for the Saviour should lead us unerringly to reverence for truth, all the more so when we see ultimate truth bound up in the person of Jesus Christ. It was he who told his disciples that the truth would make them free, adding: “If the Son … shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” For the Christian, truth has a breadth born of the Creator himself. It is this dimension that effectually liberates from bigotry.

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Peril Of The Label

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A Plea For ‘Sexual Democracy’

The Baker Affair

The Temptation Of The Specialist

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