Recognizing the Distinctives

In Purchasing an automobile one may have a definite preference for one particular make, but he also knows that there are basic similarities about all makes that bring about general dependability and usefulness.

There are also similarities between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. But we live in a time when Protestants should learn to know those distinctives of their faith that have made it a blessing to countless millions since the days of the Reformation, distinctives that can be surrendered or blurred only at great cost.

There are historical, doctrinal, and political differences between Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church that are of vital importance, and there is no indication that councils, present or future, will remove those differences. If out of these consultations there can emerge a deeper appreciation of the Protestant position, good can be done and tensions eased; but this happy eventuality should in no way diminish the essential Protestant witness to the world.

Protestantism was born by faith, founded on convictions, sustained in adversity, nurtured in Christian doctrine, and propagated by Spirit-inspired courage. Its distinctives are so clear that they themselves erect a wall between those spiritually free and those ecclesiastically bound.

The distinctives of Protestantism have been so clear and their effect on the world so great that any tendency to ignore their validity or question their worth must be viewed with the gravest misgivings. Any answering spirit of tolerance or indifference that is evoked by the apparently new tolerance on the part of Rome must be guarded in order to maintain positions that must not be conceded.

Basic to these distinctives is the authority of the Holy Scriptures above that of men and ecclesiastical organizations. This distinctive motivated Martin Luther when alone before the Diet of Worms he said, “Here I stand.” This was not a dramatic appeal to the gallery but an affirmation of his faith in the full and final authority of the Bible.

Confronted by the organization, scholarship, and power of Rome and ordered to recant, he said, “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture, or by an evident reason (ratione evidente)—for I confide neither in the pope nor in a council alone since it is certain that they have often erred and contradicted themselves—I am held fast by the Scriptures adduced by me, and my conscience is taken captive by God’s Word, and I neither can nor will revoke anything, seeing that it is not safe or right to act against the conscience. God help me.”

This stand is equally imperative today. Otherwise we who call ourselves Protestants are in gravest danger of forfeiting the liberty that has been ours—a liberty that rests deep in the written Word of God, a liberty for which men crossed seas and for which they were willing to die, because without it life would not be worth living.

This final authority of the Bible as over the final authority of the Church is a distinctive many Protestant leaders are themselves forgetting in our time, for whenever the Church imposes her will and power over the conscience of the individual she is assuming a Romish stance and not that of her own historical setting.

The Church has the duty to instruct, but when she claims infallibility in interpreting God’s Word she has too often shown her own fallibility. Historically Protestantism has shunned such claims. For the Protestant his conscience is free to receive and act on the leading of the Holy Spirit as God speaks through his Word. Not so in the church of Rome, where there is interposed between man and his God an organization that claims for itself, independent of the Scriptures, a divine authority and power over the minds, consciences, and wills of men.

Another distinctive of Protestantism is the separation of church and state. Whereas Rome regards the state as the temporal arm of the church and therefore, per se, an agency of the church, Protestantism has historically kept the church clear of political entanglements, exercising only the right of humble petition in the name of the church and leaving to Christian citizens the responsibility for putting into practice the Christian ethic.

The increasing involvement of contemporary Protestantism in political, social, economic, and other governmental matters in the name of the Church is a reversal to tactics of Rome that have proven disastrous to her essential spiritual mission and that will involve Protestantism in ultimate disaster.

The distinctiveness of Protestantism is nowhere more in evidence than in her doctrine of justification by faith alone—a doctrine firmly rooted in the Scriptures that is a source of freedom and comfort to all who rest therein.

This doctrine must not be surrendered, for it is the basis of man’s hope of salvation. Add to this any doctrine of works, and the full and complete work of Christ is made conditional on something man does for himself. Protestantism has never demanded conformity to an interpretation of the Church, nor has she imposed interpretations and disciplines that in themselves negate the glorious fact that “the just shall live by his faith.” This Rome does.

Again, Protestantism has stood firm in its affirmation of the sole mediatorship of Christ. It is in him that we believe, to him that we turn, in his name that we pray, his merit that we claim, his cleansing that we receive, and his blood that atones; and between us and him there is no intermediary—ecclesiastical or personal.

When Protestantism emerged with the Reformation, men began to enjoy freedom of soul and liberty in matters of their faith. There came the unshackling of body, mind, and spirit which is a part of the liberty that is in Christ.

History has shown Protestantism far more capable of Christian tolerance than Rome, for, while maintaining her distinctives, she has always claimed as Christian brothers all who believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Saviour from sin, knowing that within the Roman Catholic Church also there are millions who so believe. But Rome has not accorded Protestants a like status; and if welcome changes may now be in the making, they nevertheless do not overcome the basic assumptions of that faith.

Within the ecumenical movement there are trends having to do with doctrine, polity, and organization, all suggesting varying degrees of accommodation to Rome. These are ominous, for the distinctive witness of Protestantism is involved.

The Church is always in danger where her ecclesiastical structure takes precedence over her message. That danger exists today. A monolithic organization may be outwardly impressive, but it is the message that brings life.

Obviously Rome would gladly welcome us back on her terms. But the distinctives are such, and have been so richly blessed of God, that they cannot be relinquished.

Should this happen, God will raise up others to carry the banner.

- More from L. Nelson Bell

Eutychus and His Kin: April 24, 1964

ASLEEP IN THE DEEP

Whilst I was munching away at my daily assignment of Girl Scout Cookies, my mind turned to deeper things. I state that everybody, and I mean everybody, is reading or is at least aware of that book, Honest to God. I try not to be jealous of its marvelous sale. I try to criticize objectively. But most of all I try to figure out its enormous appeal.

I can go along with the next fellow in any argument in favor of turning the truth loose, and so I see no reason why anybody who wants to shouldn’t read Honest to God; but I am constantly amazed at the people who read that book who haven’t touched another book on religion in the last twenty years. It is as if I should get into an argument about the wave theory as against the corpuscular theory of light without ever having read a book on physics, and that I should then argue one phase as against another just as if I knew what I were talking about. Here is a writer who moves around easily among some of the most esoteric scholars of our day, and people who don’t know a chancel from infralapsarianism are ready to discuss the contributions of Honest to God to modern religion.

I have been wondering what the book will do to church architecture, because good church architecture is supposed to follow good theology. Since God is not up there, we can remove the pointing finger of the steeple. Maybe the church of the future will have us sitting around a pit looking into the ground of being and singing, “Go down, Moses.”

Most of us never had any real trouble with transcendent and immanent, nor with the God up there versus the God down here; but there you are. “He that sitteth in the heavens (wherever they are) shall laugh” (if you will pardon the anthropomorphism).

EUTYCHUS II

SHRINK FROM A SLPENDID HEIGHT

Thank you for Howard Carson Blake’s “ ‘The New Morality’ ” (Mar. 27 issue). He says what I would like to say and see proclaimed repeatedly until it overwhelms the “Big Lie” which has been, is being, and will no doubt be propagated by those who have seized upon Darwin, Freud, and any other pretext to excuse their unwillingness to deny themselves and take up a cross; in so doing, they have, as the Apostle Paul told the Romans, begun to “think up silly ideas of what God is like and what he wanted them to do” (Rom. 2:21, Living Letters).

Without being a “calamity howler” and recognizing that it is sometimes difficult to see the trees for the woods and vice versa, anyone who has made a study of the rise and fall of civilizations over the centuries should be able to see that this drive to put immorality into a respectable position is typical when a social order, having reached a splendid height, shrinks from the responsibility this entails, and, refusing to accept the challenge, degenerates into effete sentimentalism.…

HARRY L. DODGE

Canton, Ohio

As illuminating as many of his comments are, … Blake has failed utterly to discern what Bishop Robinson means by [“the new morality”] in his chapter in Honest to God. Most assuredly it is not the idea that “everything goes,” including fornication and homosexuality, or that everything is relative and nothing is wrong per se. Mr. Blake has won a pitiful triumph over a caricature.

Bishop Robinson points out that the Christian ethic is exemplary rather than legislative; it is not to be taken “either as literal injunctions for any situation or as universal principles for every situation” (Honest to God, p. 111). To do this would ultimately make Christ’s ethic as set forth in the Sermon on the Mount a second rigorous law taking the place of the old law which Christ, by coming to fulfill, set aside. “You cannot define in advance situations in which [love] can be satisfied with less than complete and unreserved self-giving.… Jesus … is content with the knowledge that if we have the heart of the matter in us, if our eye is single, then love will find the way, its own particular way in every individual situation” (p. 112). The so-called new morality attempts to show that what really counts in Christian ethics is love—love for God and the love for my brother whom God has given me—and that once this basic orientation is established, it is not necessary to be legalistically consistent or repetitive in all that I do. Rather, I will be called upon to act in different ways in different situations because love of Christ and of my neighbor precludes my insisting rigorously upon the same exact patterns and procedures for every given situation. Rightly understood, this position never says that “everything is relative” or “anything goes”.…

EDWARD A. JOHNSON

St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran

Hay Springs, Neb.

I was struck by his paragraph questioning the motives of Westminster Press in publishing an American edition of Robinson’s book.…

The question is not, “How much money we make?”—though financial solvency surely is an issue for any publishing house, sacred or secular. The true question, however, is, “Is the purpose of the Church to indoctrinate or to engage in honest and open search for truth?” …

LEROY C. HODAPP

First Methodist

Bloomington, Ind.

There is, and should be, much disagreement with Bishop Robinson’s thesis, but somehow I find his understanding of God’s Word and God’s world more spiritually penetrating and true than Mr. Blake’s article.…

I find it very comforting to remember God is still on his throne and not nearly so inclined to be upset by heresy as we are. He must roar with laughter over our pettiness. It seems to be part of the depravity of man to take himself too seriously.

B. G. MUNRO

First Presbyterian Church

Thomasville, Ga.

It is high time someone had the courage and skill to nail down and label for what it is the sort of demonic claptrap which has been plaguing the religious press for these many years.

There is, of course, as Pastor Blake points out, no new thing in Robinson’s rehash of some very old and very fruitless attempts to lower Christian standards and discredit the Word of God.

CHARLES MENOUGH

Nova Methodist

Nova, Ohio

They speak of their intellectual honesty, thus explaining their non-biblical ideas, but if they are really honest, let them admit in simple, easy to understand language that they do not believe in New Testament Christianity, the Old or New Testament God, or in Christ; let them abandon the pulpit and find a convenient soap box from which to propound their “wonderful” philosophies. I for one will still disagree with them, but at least I’ll be able to have a little more respect for them than I do at present.

W. W. COSTICK

The Evangelical United Brethren Church

Wellsville, Pa.

TRAGIC DRAMA

Dr. James Daane’s article, “The Anatomy of Anti-Semitism” (Mar. 13 issue), is not only excellently written, but may be considered as an important “stitch in time.” I think that it should be published far and wide in the hope that it may avert some serious crisis in Jewish-Christian relationships.…

Instead of condemning the New Testament as an anti-Semitic book, Jewish leaders would do better if they would carefully study the New Testament and show to all concerned that anti-Semitism is incompatible with the spirit of the New Testament.

And there are ample evidences in the New Testament that the Jewish people are still God’s people, that he still loves them, that he has still a glorious future for them, and that a Christian who loves Christ must likewise love and respect them.…

I wish herewith to point out at least one untruth which is generally held as a truth, … that the Jews had no authority at that time to put a man to death; only the Roman procurator had that authority.

According to Josephus, Philo, and certain other Roman writers, the Jews had full authority to execute people whom they had found guilty of a capital sin or crime.

They had executed James, Stephen, for example, without delivering them first to the Romans. We find in the Mishnah (Talmud) examples of execution by Jewish courts of law. In the case of Jesus, the rulers were afraid of the people who would avenge the death of their beloved Master, so they shoved responsibility on the Romans whom the Jews would not dare to attack. Pilate told the accusers to take Him and do with him according to their law (the Jewish law), and instead of blasphemy for which they themselves could condemn him, they now charged him with sedition against the Roman rule—a charge which belonged more to Roman jurisdiction. We may imagine that Pilate did not believe them. But the life of a man, especially of a Jew, did not bother the conscience of that cruel ruler.

Who is more to blame, Caiaphas or Pilate? Jesus said that those who delivered him to Pilate were more culpable.

But what does it matter now? All the participants in that tragic drama are now dust. Only Jesus arose to life again, and it is he that matters.

JACOB GARTENHAUS

President

International Board of Jewish Missions, Inc.

Atlanta, Ga.

For the most Part I was in agreement with the article. However, I feel that Mr. Daane completely fails to understand the Jewish mind on this matter. His statement: “A Jewish denial of history is, as any denial of history, in the long run futile. There is no justification for a denial of the recorded history of Christ’s death, for the authenticity of the records is not doubted by responsible scholarship,” is at this point arguing in a circle, and his misunderstanding of the Jewish position is typical of that shown by Gentiles in the past. He accepts the Jewish involvement in the death of Christ as historically true because it is recorded in the Gospels. He would make it seem that the Jewish people and the Anti-Defamation League in particular are turning their backs on what they know to be true for the purpose of taking a convenient position. I should like to point out that most Jewish leaders believe the New Testament books to be spurious propaganda documents for the purpose of proving the Messiahship of Christ. It is true that many historians after the time of Christ attest to those details surrounding the death of our Saviour, but they were committed to the position that the New Testament was true.… If all Jewish people accepted the historical accuracy of the New Testament, … they would be Christians, and the problem of the death of Christ would not bother them so much.…

MARTIN MEYER ROSEN

Minister in Charge

Los Angeles Dist. Hdqrs.

American Board of Missions to the Jews

Hollywood, Calif.

Please allow me to comment on Mr. Daane’s violent anti-Semitic article.…

His “facts” derived from the New Testament are unfortunately only theological dogma and doctrine, not history. There are grave and serious discrepancies in the four Gospels—discrepancies, contradictions, and omissions which Christian scholars have long known, and even concerning the Crucifixion. The trial of Jesus as described in the Gospels is pure fiction.…

No reputable historian regards the four Gospels as history. In the New Testament, legend and myth are intermingled with fact, and theology not history is decisive.…

The Jewish role in the Crucifixion was precisely nil. Jesus was only one of many Jews Pilate crucified for sedition and rebellion against Rome. If the religious leaders cooperated as he claimed they did, they did so purely out of fear. What is most important to remember, however, is the trial as portrayed in the New Testament violates every single provision of Jewish legal procedure.

In placing responsibility on the Jews for the Crucifixion, the New Testament authors not only display malice, but a desire to conciliate, and to curry favor with, Rome. To blame Rome for murdering Jesus would have had disastrous consequences. To accuse the Jews, hated and despised by Rome, was safe and advantageous.

Is not the issue of responsibility irrelevant and blasphemous? His theology holds that God wanted to redeem mankind from sin, and that to achieve this redemption, he ordained that his only Son should be crucified as an atonement. Why a loving God and father should demand such a bloody and cruel sacrifice of his only child, remains to me incomprehensible. If his theology however is valid, then God and he alone is the murderer of Jesus. Since God ordained his death, and demanded that his blood be shed as an atonement, is he not the ultimate murderer?

If his theology is valid, should not he and the Christian world be grateful to the Romans and to the Jews for having collaborated with the Deity in executing his divine plan for the race?…

That the ultimate responsibility for the death of Jesus rests upon God who decreed his death when he created the world, is incontrovertible. Blaming the Jews is merely perpetuating anti-Semitism.

THEODORE N. LEWIS

Progressive Synagogue

Brooklyn, N. Y.

[It] is great and says what needs to be said with a loud voice in these days of weak compromise.

A. GORDON MACLENNAN

Westmount South, Nova Scotia

As for guilt over the Crucifixion itself, we cannot blame all Jews even of that generation, for at most just a few thousand people were in that mob scene. The issue is not whether the Jews can dismiss Judas any more than whether the Christians can dismiss Benedict Arnold. “Consciousness of unity” does not mean responsibility for every wrong doer, in every generation, ever vaguely affiliated with the group involved.

HOWARD N. COOPER

New York, N. Y.

Being a Hebrew-Christian myself, having worked in Jewish missions for years, and now in a pastorate I read your article with considerable interest.…

My own observations substantiate the finding of the survey that more fundamentalist church members blame Jews for crucifying Jesus. I noticed that in this context Matthew 27:24, 25 is quoted, not taking into account that this mob had no authority to speak for the Hebrew people; just as a mob worked up by the police of some country to throw stones at a U. S. embassy is no indication of the feeling of the people themselves.…

MAX DORIANI

Christian Church of Big Run and Gipsy

Big Run, Pa.

Just a note of appreciation for your article on anti-Semitism.…

G. W. BROMILEY

Prof. of Church History

Fuller Seminary

Pasadena, Calif.

Christians, and I speak as one of them, have been guilty of every conceivable atrocity.… Christians have loved and love; Christians have hated and hate. Is it proper to say that “the” Christians hate? Of course not!…

Some Gentiles had the power of capital punishment and executed Jesus. Are “the” Gentiles to be damned forever? Some Christians of the past introduced slavery into the Western world. Are “the” Christians to be damned forever? Let us declare a moratorium on the use of the definite article in reference to religious and ethnic groups. For God’s sake, let all this talk about “the” Jews and “the” Negroes and “the” whites, and “the” anything else stop!

LEE A. BELFORD

Chairman, Dept. of Religious Education

New York University

New York, N. Y.

Your discussion … concerning Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ was out of the top drawer, and I certainly appreciated it tremendously. I was glad to see that The New York Times gave it some publicity also.

PAUL WOOLLEY

Prof. of Church History

Westminster Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

ODESSA AND MOSCOW

I … like to acknowledge, with appreciation, a good treatment of a matter especially when in various quarters misunderstanding about it has developed. I consider your report on the Odessa-Moscow consideration of religious liberty (News, Mar. 27 issue) objective and helpful and want to thank you for it.

O. FREDERICK NOLDE

Director

Commission of the Churches on International Affairs

The World Council of Churches

New York, N. Y.

CROSS … OUT

Re: March 27 issue News item, “Pulpit Meditations on ‘Fanny Hill.’ ” At the risk of adding to Mr. Glenesk’s popularity or notoriety, I must comment. Any church that will put up with that kind of “service” deserves just what they have. If the church and minister could agree on crossing out all but the first name of their church name, it would be most fitting.

T. R. SISK, JR.

The Highlawn Baptist Church

Huntington, W. Va.

• Named after its first paster, The Rev. Ichahod S. Spencer, the church is officially called Spencer Memorial Presbyterian Church.—ED.

THAT FEDERAL AID QUESTION

Congratulations on your articles on “Federal Aid to Christian Education: Yes and No” (Feb. 28 issue). The thesis was so worded that two entirely different subjects were included: governmental aid to Christian schools and federal (as opposed to state or municipal) aid. De Koster directed himself largely (but by no means exclusively) to the first question, whereas Edman dealt with the second but not the first one. In my estimation the discussion could be made more pointed, clear, and profitable if the pros and cons on each of these theses could be presented in separate symposia.

EDWIN H. PALMER

Westminster Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

Let me congratulate you on the very excellent issue on February 28—especially the article by Dr. Raymond Edman on “Federal Aid to Christian Education: No,” and the article by David McKenna on “Evangelical Colleges: The Race for Relevance.” I thought so much of these two articles that I am sharing a copy with each of our faculty and board here.…

M. NORVEL YOUNG

President

Pepperdine College

Los Angeles, Calif.

Professor De Koster certainly presented the most convincing case “for” federal aid that I have ever read. He did it by calling attention to the many ways in which we are already receiving such monies.

Dr. Edman rode the same horse that has already been ridden to death. I feel that there are many better reasons for “not” accepting federal aid. However, let any who are opposed admit the inconsistency of philosophy and practice.

I am “against” federal aid to religious institutions when the cause of one denomination is given better advantage. The students who populate our nation’s colleges, whether state or religious, are citizens of the United States. Any aid they receive should not be interpreted as federal aid to a religious institution.

JIM LOFTON

Parkdale Baptist Church

Harlingen, Tex.

BOTH HAVE CHANGED

I must confess that Professor Hope’s article (Feb. 28 issue) on Roman Catholic-Protestant relations was totally inadequate and displayed much confusion and ingenuousness on his part in regard to the actual situation.…

I am convinced that an accurate historical investigation will show very clearly that the chief reason for the “change in relations” between “Protestants and Catholics” in these days is that since the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation there have been deep and fundamental changes in the actual beliefs of both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Due to the influence of rationalism and [Hegelian] thought on Protestant theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it is no longer possible to state honestly that “Protestants in general” still believe in the biblical concept of Christianity that was reaffirmed and rediscovered by the Reformers.…

Likewise it can be shown that the same rationalistic and relativistic thought has now penetrated and conquered a good part of the Roman Catholic Church in the twentieth century. For instance the theological position held by the “modernists” during the struggles in the Roman Catholic Church from 1893–1907 and which then was condemned by Pius X and the Pontifical Biblical Commission is now fully accepted by the Roman church and her leading theologians.…

W. HURVEY WOODSON

Milan, Italy

THE PROTESTANT DOLLAR

Reference is made to a letter.… over the signature of Chaplain Cary J. Rote of Letchworth Village (Feb. 28 issue) in which he complains that during the past six years he has not received a single dollar from Protestant churches for the retarded children under his care at the village.

I have been at the Wassaic State School for retarded children since March 28, 1957. In that time I have received in excess of $25,000 in gifts from Protestant churches including Mr. Rote’s.

The past Christmas Protestant churches from almost every state in the union gave our children more than 2,000 crosses valued at more than $1,000 and a vast amount of New Testaments, books, games, toys, and all kinds of religious books and papers.…

PAUL R. ASHBY

Chaplain

Wassaic State School

Wassaic, N. Y.

BOTH PLUMBERS AND PROFESSORS

Especially did I like Harold B. Kuhn’s protest against Toynbee’s brand of theology (Feb. 28 issue).

However, I must chide Mr. Kuhn for his theological snobbery and his resentment of “the hidden assumption that an author’s proficiency in one specialized area qualifies him to speak in other fields.”

Conversely, Toynbee might resent Kuhn’s trying to be an author.…

As a professional journalist, with a B. J. degree and a quarter of a century in the field, I have yet to meet anyone—from plumber to professor—who did not think he could spring fully clad as a writer out of the head of some Jupiter. And some have.…

So, disassemble Toynbee’s theology all you will—and more power to you—but, please, let us not erect professional walls between God and man. There are enough walls in the world as it is.

MIDGE SHERWOOD

San Marino, Calif.

REPUDIATION DENIED

On page 21 of your February 28 issue, under the heading “Woe” (Eutychus), there appeared a statement which we wish to contradict.

The Sanctuary Awakening Fellowship has never in any way repudiated the Brinsmead Brothers or the message they are presenting to the SDA Church. There is a continued and friendly correspondence maintained.

Actually, however, since the SAF is a completely nebulous group with no organization besides a mailing list and the SAF Newsletter, or any individual or group which can repudiate or affirm support of any individual or group, it would seem obvious that E. A. Crane is completely misinformed as to the situation which exists in our denomination today.…

GEORGE HARVEY RUE

Editor

SAF Newsletter

Summit, Calif.

TOO BUSY TO TELL

Was it your planning or divine guidance that placed the testimony (God’s Sword Thrusts) regarding Nehemiah 6:3 (“I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down”) right after Dr. McKenna’s sharp article on the question, “Are small Christian colleges obsolete?” (Feb. 28 issue).

While I rejoiced over the writer’s fighting spirit, there kept nagging me a sense of omission. Even more logically than the Christian liberal arts college, the Bible college stands in the gap against the floodtide of secularized mass training. We know that, humanly speaking, we are in a hopeless minority; we know that the remedy we have for the deepest needs of our time is laughed at; we know we cannot “keep up with the Joneses”; but we give our students more than a smattering of biblical foundation, well-taught, and enough to stand its ground in graduate school, in professional life, in an embattled ministry that reaches to the uttermost parts of the earth.

Are we obsolete? Can we survive? Too busy to answer!

RENE FRANK

Chairman, Dept. of Music and Fine Arts

Ft. Wayne Bible College

Ft. Wayne, Ind.

In the biographical note on David L. McKenna, you printed that he holds the B.D. degree from Asbury College. I call to your attention that Asbury College is a liberal arts institution, not officially related to any denomination of the church, awarding only the A.B. degree.

If Dr. McKenna has a B.D. degree from Asbury, it is surely from the Asbury Theological Seminary which is in no way officially connected with Asbury College even though it is located across the street from the college campus. The facts are that many persons are alumni of both institutions; similar theological points of view are stressed in both institutions; but each institution has its own board of trustees and is financially independent.…

ELDON R. SMITH JR.

Chaplain, Captain, NSAF

Bunker Hill AFB, Ind.

• Chaplain Smith is correct; Dr. McKenna’s B.D. is indeed from Asbury Theological Seminary—ED.

C. S. LEWIS AND ORTHODOXY

It was with a great deal of distress that I read the letters anent C. S. Lewis (Feb. 28 issue), particularly those commenting on Martin Lloyd-Jones’s report that Lewis “was an opponent of the substitutionary and penal theory of the Atonement” (Dec. 20 issue). It is apparent from one or two of the letters that this report has upset some Christians and caused doubt in their minds. If this should dissuade some Christians from using and recommending Lewis’s writings, it would be a tragedy of the first order, because in his writings Lewis definitely taught this central and essential doctrine of the Christian faith. Evidence for this statement may be found in the following places. The clearest evidence is in the first of the Narnia Chronicles, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Edmund, having passed through the Wardrobe, finds himself in Narnia and is befriended by the White Witch, who holds all Narnia in a spell of perpetual winter. Edmund chooses to go over to the side of the White Witch, and oppose himself not to his own brothers and sisters, but also to the inhabitants of Narnia, and of course to Aslan the Lion himself. The White Witch then publicly claims the life of Edmund because he has become a traitor to Aslan. Aslan acknowledges the validity of her claim upon Edmund’s life, but he himself allows himself to be slain in Edmund’s place so that Edmund may live. The White Witch’s power is broken and Edmund is restored to fellowship with Aslan and the others when Aslan comes to life again after having been slain as a penal substitute for Edmund. Again, in The Great Divorce, when the big, blustery Ghost complains, “I only want my rights. I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity!” the Spirit replies, “Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.” Finally, in the Space Trilogy, the hero of all three books is Dr. Elwin Ransom, and it is made perfectly clear in the second book, Perelandra, that the choice of the word Ransom is by design and intended to signify that men cannot be redeemed except by a ransom; and although Dr. Ransom does not actually die in the book, he descends to the very depths of the planet in a life-and-death struggle with the villain, and finally emerges above the ground having destroyed the Evil One, but bearing until his last day alive a wound in his heel received in the conflict. In the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, the idea of Atonement is clearly suggested by the remark of the Oyarsa of Mars, “We think that Maleldil [God] would not give it [the earth] up utterly to the Bent One, and there are stories among us that He has taken strange council and dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra [the earth].”

These are the most outstanding incidents. Those who read all seven of the Narnia books will discover a whole world of biblical theology on a child’s level, stretching from Creation through Redemption to the Anti-Christ and the Second Coming and Last Battle, with all the main departments of biblical theology set forth in between. Perhaps Lewis personally did not distinguish as carefully as he ought to have the Satisfaction view of Atonement from various man-made theories which have weakened the doctrine through the years, but in his writings he certainly does “preach Christ, and him crucified.”

WILLIAM J. RANKIN

Mediator Orthodox Presbyterian Church

Philadelphia, Pa.

Congratulations.…

Perhaps those who complained about a conservative evangelical paper including these tributes, because Professor Lewis did not accept all the doctrines they themselves accept, would do well to remember that the basic “evangelical” doctrine is that we are saved by grace alone, and not by subscribing to a series of doctrinal statements, however sound they may be.

J. HAMILTON-BROWN

Nottingham, England

At present I do not think that anyone has mentioned his [Lewis’s] contempt of evolution and his love for the truth of our Lord’s return. Ten years ago there appeared an article by him in an English magazine stressing these points, entitled “Let’s Face the Difficulties.” The main problem, according to Lewis, was that Christ although divine did not know the time of his return. I wrote to Lewis telling him of a businessman who refused to be intrusted with a great secret because his wife was not allowed to be “in” on it. I thought that Christ could refuse to know something of which we, his Bride and Body, were to know nothing. Dr. Lewis replied with a very gracious letter, written in his terrible crabbed handwriting, thanking me for my “fruitful idea”—among other things. If a man loves the Second Coming of our Lord I feel that he is a Christian brother, even if he smokes and likes a glass of ale.… After all, did not Spurgeon and Campbell Morgan relish their pipes?

O. T. BRYANT

Fillmore, Calif.

Smoking pipe or cigar, and drinking beer or wine may disqualify American Christians from the evangelical camp, but on the continent of Europe amongst the strictest evangelicals smoking and drinking (beer or wine) is not considered a theological weakness.

TH. SNITSELAAR

Haut-Rhin, France

The recent attacks made upon some of the late C. S. Lewis’s beliefs ought to be answered lest the eminent reputation and influence of this noble man of God be damaged and so injure the Body of Christ (Acts 9:1, 5; 1 Cor. 12:12–26).…

The only charge against any of his beliefs that could fall into the category of “saving truths” (belief necessary to salvation) is the one regarding the substitutionary atonement. Let his words speak for him (Mere Christianity, Chapter 4): “The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter.… We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is our formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary.…” Mr. Lewis believed that Christ, God in the flesh, “paid the penalty” … “the bill” (compare Rom. 6:23a) of our sins, and was not persuaded that “God wanted to punish men.” Certainly it was rebellious, “fallen” men that God so loved, while at the same time abhorring their sins, which required his expiating.

I think that sometimes in his enormously successful attempts to express himself in clear, modern language, he has … so simplified theology as to startle the superficial reader and the one who is unfamiliar with any but the King James Version of the Bible.…

MRS. TOM DODSON

Fairfax, Va.

CORRECTION

In the letter by Otha B. Holcomb (Feb. 28 issue) he states the cantata “The Greatest Story Yet Untold” as one of John W. Peterson’s. However, the correct composer and arranger of the great missionary cantata is Eugene L. Clark of Back to the Bible Broadcast, Lincoln, Nebraska.…

E. ROBERTS

Chicago, Ill.

THE HOLLYWOOD CHRISTIAN GROUP

I wonder who told you (News, Feb. 14 issue) that Mesdames Jane Russell, Connie Haines, and Beryl Davis are “active in the Hollywood Christian Group.”

It was my privilege to be a co-founder with the late Dr. Henrietta Mears of this group in 1949. My recollection is that the ladies mentioned were active in the group during its first couple of years, but that they became inactive more than ten years ago. The group majority found itself in official disapproval of a strange mixture of spirituality and carnality in a minority, which later arranged unofficial, occasional, and private meetings dubbed by some “the Hollywood Christian Group.” No one resigned or was expelled, and none of the majority wished to take legal action to protect its name.

I myself am no longer “active” in the group, but attend occasionally as a visitor or speaker. The Hollywood Christian Group draws a hundred or more weekly in a well-known hotel in Hollywood with invitations restricted to card-carrying members of the entertainment guilds. To my knowledge, the three mentioned have attended less than once annually in the past ten years. They are heartily welcome, for even those who deplore a “public image” can hold its owner in affection and regard for … zeal.

The Hollywood Christian Group is not a church. It has strict rules for its active membership, including avoiding any appearance of evil regarding liquor and sex. It endeavors to avoid publicity, but now and then gets a black eye through the reporting of the activities of those who once attended. Too readily forgotten are the choice converts of the group’s evangelism, some in prominent places in Christian ministry.

J. EDWIN ORR

Chaplain at Large

Mission to the Academic Community

Los Angeles, Calif.

NO INSULT INTENDED

I cannot refrain from writing to protest your editorial on “A House Divided” (Feb. 14 issue). It is a gratuitous insult to a part of the Church, the Church in the Province of South Africa, which is one of the glories of the Anglican communion in a day when it is not everywhere glorious. It is furthermore an entirely unwarranted and offensive slur on one of the Church’s greatest and most courageous prelates in modern times, the Most Rev. Joost de Blank, archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of the Church in South Africa.

ROBERT V. LANCASTER

Trinity Church

Lancaster, N. Y.

I must protest that you have gotten the facts all wrong as to the difficulties of Anglicanism in South Africa; your history is not factual. Granting that the Province of South Africa is predominantly Anglican Catholic (which tolerance should tell us is nothing wrong), the fact remains that it is the only recognized Anglican body there. The bishops of the CESA body are not in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has said so, nor are they in communion with any other Anglican church. They do not, e.g., send bishops to Lambeth, and inclusion in this council of the Anglican communion is the final test of orthodoxy.…

Finally, elsewhere you suggest that the wearing of the eucharistic vestments is illegal in the Church of England. You are saying that the Archbishop of Canterbury is then acting lawlessly. In this case as well as that of the Colenso affair you are basing your opinions on the almost 100-year-old rulings of the Privy Council of the British government, which the Church of England has ignored and by which the rest of the Anglican communion is in no way bound or even affected. Such petty legalism is the letter that killeth.

ROBERTS E. EHRGOTT

The Church of the Nativity

Indianapolis, Ind.

DIVINITY AT CHICAGO

In writing of her “Pilgrimage from Liberalism to Orthodoxy” (Dec. 6 issue) Rachel H. King asserts that the Divinity School of the University of Chicago had successfully undermined her faith and that she had never hated anything with [more] permanent passion than her Chicago experience.

After reading such an article the Christian public is left with the impression that the Divinity School must be the headquarters of infidelity.…

I am about to receive my B.D. degree from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and I have not lost my faith by attending this intellectual center, but rather have had my faith increased. The student is made aware of the theological problems and the viewpoint of the great theologians of the past and present, but there is no attempt to force a particular theological position.

The orthodox positions of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin are given adequate and fair treatment. I appreciate my heritage from these great men because of the Divinity School. When the orthodox position is presented, the plan of salvation is taught much clearer than is being taught in many so-called evangelical churches. Instead of hating my Chicago experience as Rachel King did, I have enjoyed my experience and thank God for it.

I believe I have a right to speak about experience with some authority having graduated from the pastor’s course of the Moody Bible Institute in 1939 and having been in the pastorate ever since. I have taught Bible courses at the Milwaukee Bible College (now Grace at Grand Rapids) for over twelve years. I have been made more aware of the theological problems of the past and of the present at Chicago, but I still am as Calvinistic and orthodox as [I] was when I entered Chicago.

I have appreciated my experience at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago so much, that I recommend that more mature orthodox men attend this great school.

DONALD C. ELIFSON

Norwood Bible Church

Chicago, Ill.

• Quite apart from considerations of the present situation at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Rachel King’s article told of her experience at that institution nearly forty years ago.—ED.

Books

Three Christians in Literature: Browning, Kierkegaard, Heine

M. Whitcomb Hess

The three writers considered in this essay were contemporaries: the English crusader for Christianity lived longest (1812–1889); the Dane who fathered existentialism had the shortest span (1813–1855); and the German lyricist, born sixteen years before Kierkegaard, outlived the latter by one year (1797–1856). Kierkegaard and Heine were baptized as Lutherans; Browning received his youthful Christian training in the London chapel attended by his devout Scotch-German mother. All of them became recognized as Christians with deep biblical roots.

The voice of each of these protesters against the spirit of the age was raised with vehemence for the “old-time religion,” and raised with power and beauty. William Lyon Phelps called Robert Browning the greatest secular ally of Christianity in modern times. Heinrich Heine was to write some of his finest poetry in the Romanzero (1851) composed in his faith period, during the dark decade of almost unbearable pain on his “mattress-grave” (Matratzengruft) in Paris. But through his reading of the Bible and above all his “conversations” with God during the long night-watches, his spirit had come to a glorious reawakening. His own testimony reads of a conversion as dramatic as that of Augustine and as sure: “The reawakening of my religious feelings I owe to that Holy Book [the Bible], and it became for me both a source of salvation and an object of the most pious admiration.” Romano Guardini in telling of St. Augustine’s conversion stresses the “new attitude befitting the new station,” which is that of humility. Heine expressed that new attitude in the following words:

Strange! After I had jumped about all my life on all the dancing-floors of philosophy, had given myself over to all the orgies of the spirit, and had wooed all possible systems without being satisfied … now I find myself on the same foundation on which Uncle Tom stands, that of the Bible. And I kneel down beside the black praying brother in the same devotion.

Hegel’s former disciple was to prove the genuineness of his conversion by burning a work he had been long in preparing explaining the Hegelian philosophy; and he also wrote a long preface to a new edition of an earlier book wholly recanting parts in such words as these, “I confess without reserve that everything here which has reference to the great question of God is just as false as indiscreet.” But his about-face regarding Christianity has been played down. To the German mind of the period, his denunciation of the specific doctrines of Hegel as having been put into a few words by the serpent of Eden (“When you have eaten of the tree of knowledge, you will be as gods”) was quite unthinkable.

Lone Knights Of Faith

Both Browning and his Danish twin, Sören Kierkegaard, were profound religious psychologists. From the start, each acted as a “lone knight of faith,” to use Kierkegaard’s term. Moved alike by a strong sense of sure Christian mission, each writer brought the Christian message to his readers by way of a series of dramatic monologues. Here the characters speak for themselves; and they speak most eloquently as they exemplify life’s business as the “terrible choice” between good and evil. For they make that choice (as well as excuses to themselves for it) over and over in their everyday lives. Indeed the high purpose of the English poet and the Danish seer was to make clear to an age they saw treating Christ more and more cavalierly that, as St. John says in Browning’s A Death in the Desert,

The acknowledgement of God in Christ … solves for thee

All questions in the earth and out of it.

Thus in open defiance of the German philosophers, notably Hegel, whose doctrine manifestly exalted philosophy over religion, the Briton and the Dane conducted their lone literary crusades for Christianity. As heirs of Luther, these two highly gifted men—both of whom were endowed with minds, like Luther’s own, among the sharpest the world has known—did not so much play down man’s reason (as they were accused of doing) as refuse to enthrone it above man’s faith. What actuated Browning and Kierkegaard was the spirit of Christian living as set over against the letter of formalism—the same cry, in fact, as that of their spiritual ancestor for sincerity toward God. We find Kierkegaard in his own rebellion against the Danish state church in 1854, the year before his death, appealing to that sincerity in these desperate words:

Whoever thou art, whatever thy life may be, my friend—by ceasing to take part (if in fact thou dost) in the public performance of divine worship as it now is, thou has one guilt the less, and a great one, that thou dost not take part in holding God to be a fool, and in calling that the Christianity of the New Testament which is not the Christianity of the New Testament.

For on such Luther-like terms Kierkegaard stressed the need for “reine Innerlichkeit” (absolute inwardness).

Certainly when Kierkegaard launched his psychological faith-campaign in 1843 with the famous Either / Or, basing it, on the one hand, on a flat denial of man’s reason to arrive at the true knowledge and, on the other hand, on the acceptance of the Christian revelation, he was following directly in Luther’s footsteps. So far from faith’s being the outgrowth of knowledge, the opposite is true: knowledge is the fruit of faith. The German rationalism that developed in the centuries following Luther is as false to his teaching as the Sartrian type of existentialism is false to Kierkegaard’s. As the seventeenth-century mystic Isaac Penington declared of the rationalism he saw developing rapidly in Europe, such trust in the autonomy of man’s reason is a harking back to the sin of Eden, the taking over by what the Quaker philosopher called “the darkness within.”

When Penington wrote, the movement was just beginning; at the time of Kierkegaard and Browning, both of whom saw it for what it was, the tide of rationalism was at its height. Both England and Denmark became fertile soil for Hegelianism, as it swept from Germany throughout Europe. It is interesting to note that Heine, who had studied with Hegel as a young man, in the epochal thorough-going repudiation of his philosophy, referred, as had Penington two centuries before, to the diabolism of the reason doctrine. The German poet even had a statement in his will to the effect that for four years he had abdicated all philosophic pride—and this will had been written five years before his death in 1856. In the writings of his last decade, Heine tells further of the way he had been entrapped by the gray spider webs of Hegelian dialectic which he declared were traceable to the Evil One, whom he called “the bluestocking without feet” in the Garden of Eden. In another figure, the poet wrote (in the epilogue to his Romanzero, 1851): “Yes, I have returned to God like the prodigal son after I had herded the swine for a long time with the Hegelians.”

Sincerity In Question

Some German critics doubted Heine’s sincerity in that greatest act of his life, his profession of faith—for the mockery of the gifted ironist had become so ineradicable a hallmark that a number of persons questioned, alas, his good faith here, even in the face of his agonizing, constant physical suffering at the period of his recantation of rationalism. Yet the noted Harvard Germanist, Kuno Francke, did not doubt the sincerity of Heine’s conversion but rather made it the basis of an attack upon the poet. In his History of German Literature, a volume going through a number of editions at the turn of the century, the German scholar at Harvard wrote that “of all the writers of his time Heine is the saddest example of the intellectual degeneration wrought by the political principles of the Restoration.” Calling him “an unworthy disciple of Goethe,” Francke refers to Heine’s theism of his last years (a theism so heartfelt that he incorporated in the will mentioned above an appeal to “the one God, single and eternal, creator of the world” to have mercy on his immortal soul) as “blasphemous godliness.” Here the adjective “blasphemous” is evidently intended for Heine’s desertion of what Francke called “the modern ideal of humanity” as represented in Goethe, Hegel, and others. The German historian thus dismisses him as “from the beginning—religiously, politically, and even artistically a renegade.”

But the Francke indictment of Heine, precisely like the scorn both Browning and Kierkegaard met in their own circles because of their forthright defense of Christianity, is the price paid by the knight of faith in an unbelieving age. It is only the later ages who see the worth of those Kierkegaard called “the sacrificed ones” in the cause of truth. The point, however, to be made here is that the type of reason inveighed against by the Christian writer is what Isaac Penington, referred to earlier, called “the corrupted reason.” It was this type of reason that Luther, trained in Occam’s school, fought; and it was also this corrupt form of rationalizing that Browning, Kierkegaard, and Heine came to see in its proper perspective.

And earlier than any and all of these Christian seers we have St. Augustine’s own coming to “the Truth of man as by God first spoken,” and coming to this Truth via the one only Way, that which Christ Jesus offers us. For the “paradox of faith” is paradoxical only on the surface; but in the war on humanist rationalism, where it is necessary to fight it on its own terms, only the truly faith-filled can see below that surface. In God’s light only do we see light. “He who knows the truth knows that Light,” said Augustine, “and he who knows the Light knows eternity.” And, he adds, “Charity knows it.” As Romano Guardini wrote in his exegesis on St. Augustine’s Confessions, titled The Conversion of Augustine (Newman, 1960):

Such knowledge of the spirit cannot be acquired abstractly; it must be personally experienced, and in such a way that the person experiencing it is drawn into a living relationship with it: I was created by Him “up” there, or rather, by Thee up there; Thou art He-who-tums-to-me, He-who-creates-me. And still the depths of the soul are unplumbed; still this does not suggest the existentiality that Augustine means. Only love can do that because it is the only fitting response to God’s creative act, its reflection of the Creator in the creature. The motion with which love places itself within the I-thou, with which it unfolds, takes fire, ventures, flings itself across and surrenders, thereby finding itself—this is what first renders one capable of seeing that which should be seen: “Charity knows it”—namely, the Light which to know is to become an entity [p. 220].

Here is spelled out unequivocally the true philosophy of faith in all eras.

For, as Guardini has made very clear in the above work on Augustine, universal truths are what exist, not, as rationalism falsely holds, as autonomous knowledge, but as a gift. They appear, that is, “in their proper place, namely, behind the banners of grace, as revelation.” What Guardini has to say in the matter is well worth hearing:

The realities of the spiritual God, of creation, of good and evil and of the soul now assume their true form with all the authority of sacred truth. With this the knower too finds his place: from one who has recognized mere philosophically grounded truth, he becomes one who has heard the word of God and gained a new attitude befitting his new station: that of humility.

Paul Brockelman, writing on Kierkegaard’s “Philosophy of Existence” (Koinonia, December, 1962), makes this point about this “Christian philosopher”: “His concept of existence and his notion of Christian faith mutually define one another.” The same thing may be said with equal justice and succinctness of Browning and Heine. Not only so, but it may also be said of every articulate seer from the dawn of Christianity down to our own day: “He who knows the Light knows eternity.”

Two Hands

I saw two hands

In nowhere

Before sometime and somewhere that

Clapped

And a blacksmith’s shower of stars

Bespangled

Everywhere.

I saw two hands

In sometime

Roll up the clouds and

Wring

A thirsty river’s rain from them

While lightnings leap from snapping fingers

And Milky Way’s walls reverberate.

I saw two hands

In somewhere

By a muddied river’s bank that

Pinched

A piece of clay and

A man stepped forth

Who had two fateful hands.

I saw two hands

One time

In ancient Egypt’s land

Cleave

The carmine sea and

Push a wall of water on either side

To set a people free.

I saw two hands

In fullness of time

On a mystery-laden night

Begrace

An ox’s strawy crib

While a wistful mother wondered

At what rustic sheepmen see.

I saw two hands

At that time when

Time held its breath

Clutching

At the spikes in the tree

On a place of a skull.

‘Come unto me.…”

ROBERT J. REAM

M. Whitcomb Hess, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a graduate of the University of Kansas (A.B.) and of Ohio University (A.M.), has written more than 100 essays on philosophical and literary themes, and also many poems. Among the publications in which her work has appeared is the London “Contemporary Review.”

- More from M. Whitcomb Hess

Try Them with Truth

Allen F. Bray Iii

The modern teen-ager may not be the best or the worst the world has ever known, but both the male and the female of the species are the most publicized in human history. From sub-teens to late teens this age group is the favorite example—both positive and negative—of everything and everyone from the advertising agency to the agonized parent. The care and feeding of the adolescent is the choice topic for columnists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and theologians. Columns in the public press and hours in the public forum are devoted to the eating, drinking, sleeping, studying, dressing, driving, and dating habits of the contemporary teen-ager.

This attention is concerned not always so much by curiosity as by concern. There is, if you will, an élan, even a mystique, about this segment of the population that, in the light of statistical studies and current trends, has caused both wonder and alarm on the part of the bystander (who, incidentally, is not always so innocent).

We are told, for example, that one of every five children born today will become a juvenile delinquent. In the five-year period between 1955 and 1960, the crime rate for those under eighteen years of age increased 61 per cent for larceny, 49 per cent for robbery, 41 per cent for sex offenses, 39 per cent for aggravated assault, 37 per cent for murder, and 26 per cent for auto theft. It is important to realize that these are not percentages of occurrence but percentages of increase. In June of 1962, 58 per cent of those reporting for preinduction physical examinations failed to meet the minimum standards. Similarly shocking statistics reflect a disturbing increase in high school “drop-outs,” narcotics addiction, illegitimate births, and venereal disease.

Statistic-hardened though we have become, these figures become alarmingly significant when placed in context. The rapid rate of increase in crime for this age group, for example, must be set against an increase of only some 33 per cent for the entire population. The fact that 21 per cent of the unemployed in Los Angeles and 18 per cent in New York are under twenty-one years of age in a time when the gross national product of the richest nation on earth is at an all-time high gives added reason for our concern. The soaring increase in various forms of illegitimate actions and addictions must be seen against the backdrop of an unprecedented surge of church building, church attendance, and religious publication.

Obviously there is a disparity between the two sides of our cultural coin. It must be recognized for what it is because only then is there hope of a redemptive reconciliation. When this does occur, however, it will be at the level of involvement rather than indignation, and it will take the form of personal action rather than well-intentioned avowal of general purpose.

Those who live and work with adolescents, particularly those scarred victims of a world they never made—conveniently called juvenile delinquents—appreciate and applaud genuine concern. They are, however, skeptical of the “crash” program, aimed at the symptom rather than the disease. They are seasoned enough to see the juvenile delinquent as but the focus of the adolescent dilemma in a culture that preaches purity but practices opportunism, that proclaims piety but protests sacrifice, that advocates maturity but acts with irresponsibility.

Signs In All Strata

Juvenile delinquency is a symptom of a person or an age out of time. The seeds and signs of the symptom are present in every stratum of society; they are not restricted to any geographical areas, economic levels, or ethnic backgrounds. Therefore the problem cannot be resolved in isolation or merely by intention. It can be recognized in its reality and overcome only by realization of the true nature of relationship and acceptance of the personal consequence of involvement.

The adolescent is a human being, a member of the race of man and the family of God. Therefore he or she is a creature of response. That is to say, the teenager, like any other person, reacts positively or negatively to available stimuli. Juvenile delinquency is not an isolated blemish on the skin of society. It is related—in the sense of reaction or response—to adult delinquency.

If the rate of automobile accidents involving adolescents has increased, can this be separated from the fact that by parental provision and consent more adolescents have cars than at any other time in our history? Can the immorality of the teen-ager be divorced from the moral climate in which he or she is raised? Can “cribbing” on examinations be distinguished in either practice or principle from the amateur fraud annually perpetrated on the Internal Revenue Service by the same righteous parents?

Statistics on the contemporary adolescent group reveal at the same time a good bit about the homes and the society that have nurtured this segment of the population. Teen-agers live not in a vacuum but in a context. They adapt to and adopt the dominant patterns of the nurturing society at the level of their ability and interest. No child is an entity, “an island entire of itself.” The poetic and prophetic words of John Donne thus take on new meaning for the contemporary adult: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The Threefold Guilt

There are three prime areas for recovery and redemption, and each is related to the other two. The home, the school, and the church have all shared in conducting the experiment with the contemporary teenager. Each must therefore accept a due portion of the present consequences. The home, for example, has increasingly abdicated its central place in the life of the individual. The school and the church have been not merely allowed but encouraged to assume many of the parental functions. Parental absenteeism—whether a fact or an effect—leaves a vacuum of affection and example in the matrix out of which emerges the developing personality.

Sometimes this dereliction of responsibility is acknowledged but is rationalized on the basis that “it is good for them to learn to stand on their own feet.” More often, however, it is not recognized, but a vague sense of guilt seeks relief by exorbitant allowances and a variety of gifts. Consumer surveys indicate that in 1959 adolescents controlled some ten million dollars worth of purchasing power. This was not money they had earned but money they had been given, and it was not only derivative of an affluent society but also indicative of an unsought power. The teen-age culture is not a myth; it is a fact. It is, for some, a terrifying step-child of the economy containing the seeds of its own destruction.

The plight of the school is perhaps most clearly dramatized, not in the problem of drop-outs, but in the problem of adequate parking space for student automobiles. Confronted by a demand only distantly related to its purpose, the school has had little choice but to settle for mediocrity in instruction as the norm and the lowest common denominator as satisfactory. The highly touted “pursuit of excellence” is too seldom seen as an individual goal and too often asserted to be a public “right.” It is small wonder our schools have become centers of custodial care rather than the quest for learning, for the constitutional concept of equality has been misconstrued to mean conformity.

Contemporary churches, under the demand to “do something for our young people,” have too often geared their programs of religious education to standards and activities that are no more religious than many present school practices are educational. Confronting a time-centered culture with a timeless theology, many of the churches have taken a lien on their birthright for a serving of adolescent acceptance. Thus they find themselves merely in competition with other social agencies and activities instead of in contradistinction to them. By presenting no clear call to commitment, no direct and relevant summons to an eternal service in which alone freedom is found, many a local church has forsaken the end of its being for a temporary means to the achievement of that end.

We can, perhaps, take comfort from the fact that not all adolescents are represented in the statistics given earlier. Certainly there are many who are sound, contributing, positive personalities. But cognizance must be taken of those who are “lost,” and a greater effort must be expended on their behalf. The statistical summary clearly reveals that the experiments of parental abdication, educational equality, and ecclesiastical popularity have failed. We have tried the device of early independence, the camaraderie of conformity, and the evangelistic “gimmick” of recreation—and these have not succeeded. Is it not perhaps time to try the contemporary adolescent with his due—the truth?

Family Reciprocity

Consider, first, the truth of the Christian family as it informs and is informed by the responsibilities of relationship. The truth of relationship is that each party is both contributor and beneficiary. Indeed, a case could be made for the direct ratio between the two, for this is the truth implicit in the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself”—the keystone of meaningful human relationships. The truth of the Christian family, therefore, is that each member bears both a privilege from and a responsibility toward the other members. To avoid or disguise this essential reality is to deny to the family as a whole, the individual members, and the larger society of which they are a part, the vital element for constructive development and contributory living.

Second, the truth of education is that it is a quest to which one commits oneself. It is not an alms asked of the affluent or demanded of the body politic. It is highly individualistic and by any measure successful only to the degree to which the strength of intention meets the full breadth and depth of information. Whether this be the nuance of a poetic phrase or the knack of carburetor repair is immaterial to the point under discussion. Is it not the proper function of an educated society to stimulate and nurture in truth the variety of latent talents or abilities? Is it not the responsibility of the educator to distinguish in truth between potential and preference, to advise and counsel in truth rather than in accord with popular wish, to present the demand as well as the delight of education, and to define as best he can both the purpose and the pleasure?

Third, the truth of Christian discipleship is that it is a discipline of response. In the words of St. John, “We love him because he first loved us.” This central fact colors and conditions all we do, for Christian responsibility can significantly be interpreted as the response to the God who in Christ was “reconciling the world unto himself.” The proclamation of this truth in word and deed is the task of the Church in every age and through all its members. Those who are marked with the mark of God’s Christ are thenceforth called to discipline themselves in his Way, by the light of his Truth, and the strength of his shared Life. The call to the Christian, then, in this or any age, is a call, not to convenience or to comfort (in the popular sense of the term), but to commitment, to conflict, and to eventual consummation in the Kingdom prepared “from everlasting.” The faithful communication of this truth is the solemn responsibility of the existing Church, and only then can there be the saving opportunity for relevant response.

At the risk of over-dramatizing, but with the support of statistical evidence, it is not amiss to suggest that as far as our teen-agers are concerned, “the night is far spent, the day is at hand” to release them from the bondage of disdain, neglect, and superfluity, and allow them to walk on their own feet in the promised freedom of truth. No less than this is their due. No more than this can we give.

The Shepherd And His Dog

They were helping the shepherd to deal with a lot of very active sheep and lambs, to persuade them into the right pastures, to keep them from rushing down the wrong paths. And how did the successful dog do it? Not by barking, fuss, ostentatious authority, any kind of busy behavior. The best dog I saw never barked once; and he spent an astonishing amount of his time sitting perfectly still, looking at the shepherd. The communion of spirit between them was perfect. They worked as a unit. Neither of them seemed anxious or in a hurry. Neither was committed to a rigid plan; they were always content to wait. That dog was the docile and faithful agent of another mind. He used his whole intelligence and initiative, but always in obedience to his master’s directive will; and was ever prompt at self-effacement. The little mountain sheep he had to deal with were amazingly tiresome, as expert in doubling and twisting and going the wrong way as any naughty little boy. The dog went steadily on with it; and his tail never ceased to wag.

What did that mean? It meant that his relation to the shepherd was the center of his life; and because of that, he enjoyed doing his job with the sheep, he did not bother about the trouble, nor get discouraged with the apparent results. The dog had transcended mere dogginess. His actions were dictated by something right beyond himself. He was the agent of the shepherd, working for a scheme which was just that which was the source of the delightedness, the eagerness, and also the discipline with which he worked. But he would not have kept that peculiar and intimate relation unless he had sat down and looked at the shepherd a good deal.—From Collected Papers of Evelyn Underhill, Lucy Menzies, ed., Longmans, Green and Co., New York. Courtesy of David McKay Company, Inc.

Allen F. Bray III is chaplain and director of religious activities at Culver Military Academy, Culver, Indiana. He holds the A.B. (Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut), the B.D. (Virginia Theological Seminary), and the S.T.M. (Seabury-Western Theological Seminary).

- More from Allen F. Bray Iii

Theology

The Curse on Canaan

Clyde T. Francisco

There is hardly an Old Testament passage more difficult to interpret than the curse on Canaan described in the closing verses of Genesis 9. Study readily reveals the diversified views prevailing among biblical students today; yet many persist in seeing only one possible interpretation of the story. This Scripture was the favorite text of Southern preachers during the Civil War, as they asserted the right of white men to enslave the Negro. Often used even today to defend segregation by earnest, Bible-loving Christians, it is the unrecognized source of the common saying, “A Negro is all right in his place,” by which is meant that his proper position is secondary to that of the white man.

The passage begins by mentioning the three sons of Noah in their usual order, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, of whom all men are regarded as descendants (vv. 18, 19). Difficulties in interpretation begin with verse 20. The King James Version reads, “And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard,” which presents no problem to the English reader. However, he is immediately jolted by the Revised Standard Version, “Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard.” This is in direct contradiction to the earlier passages in Genesis asserting that Adam was a gardener and Cain a farmer. Those who support this translation readily admit this but see the verse as coming from a different source. They claim that the Hebrew can allow no other translation. What are the facts? A literal rendering would be: “And Noah, the farmer, began and he planted a vineyard.” Before the flood, vineyards were probably in existence; but until this time, Noah apparently had not grown one himself. It is even possible that he cultivated vineyards before the flood. The Scripture does not settle this question but implies a new venture for Noah. He is called the farmer because some readers may conclude that he was only a navigator or carpenter by trade! His father, Lamech, was a farmer, and this was probably Noah’s occupation before his call to prepare for the flood (Gen. 5:29).

We are not told whether Noah was familiar with the effects of wine. Certainly he should have been. Jesus asserts that there was “eating and drinking” before the flood (Matt. 24:38), a phrase probably referring to the drinking of wine (cf. 1 Sam. 30:16; Matt. 11:18, 19). Perhaps the temptation to taste the product of his own labor was too strong for Noah and he soon became quite drunk, revealing that he was not accustomed to the habit. A man who gets drunk only once is not a drunkard. He emerges as a chastened man but not a drunkard, who is an addict.

The scene that unfolds is a familiar one. Righteous Noah had been the means of God’s triumph over the forces of evil in the world. The wicked had been destroyed, and Noah and his family had been spared to build a new world. But the man who had weathered the ridicule of his neighbors and every storm of the flood could not meet the challenge of the time of peace. With the opportunity to start an ideal new society, Noah was found drunk in his tent.

Some commentators note that there is not a word of condemnation of Noah for his drunkenness; all the blame seems to fall on Ham. Yet one can hardly ignore verses 28 and 29 in the light of 6:9, where it is said Noah “walked with God.” In the previous chapter the same expression is used of Enoch, whose reward was translation to heaven. Would this have been Noah’s experience also if he had not sinned?

What was the sin of Ham? Some would suggest that verse 24 implies that he had committed some carnal act with his father. This interpretation is quite unfounded and reveals a lack of understanding of the Hebrew attitude toward nakedness. The modern world is influenced so strongly by the Greek glorification of the body that it is quite difficult for us to grasp the attitudes of the ancient Hebrews. In the Garden of Eden the fig leaves could not sufficiently cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve, and God clothed them with skins. When the prophets describe the horrors of exile, one of the most terrible is the enforced nakedness of the captives. During the late Maccabean age the pious Jews were greatly disturbed by the appearance in Jerusalem of a Greek gymnasium where naked men exercised.

What did Ham do to his father? He disgraced him by exposing his shame to the world. Ham could not have been blamed for stumbling on his drunken father, but he was blamed for reporting on his father’s condition. What his brothers did he should have done: he should have covered his father.

Noah’S Enlightenment

How did Noah know what Ham had done to him? Did Shem and Japheth tell him? This is doubtful, for had they done so they would have been guilty of exposing their brother’s shame, even as he had reported on their father. The Scripture implies that this knowledge came by intuition, presumably by divine enlightenment.

Some commentators emphasize that Noah was in a drunken stupor or in the midst of a terrible hangover when he uttered his famous words. The remarks of a man in such a condition should not be taken seriously, they observe. However, Noah seems to be well enough in command of himself to receive divine enlightenment. He is aware of what has happened, and this knowledge could have come only from Shem and Japheth or from intuition beyond himself. Thus it is evident that Noah was in command of all of his faculties when he uttered his oracle. Even had he not been, his words would have been taken seriously by the Hebrews. As S. R. Driver remarks in his Westminster Commentary on Genesis, “It was an ancient belief that a father’s curse or blessing was not merely the expression of an earnestly felt hope or wish, but that it exerted a real power in determining a child’s future.”

More scholars are now suggesting that Genesis 9:20–27 is a unit independent of the other material around it. It is Palestinian in its scheme, whereas the other passages are more universal. The Shem, Ham, Japheth references are here replaced by a new trio: Shem, Japheth, Canaan. The latter are the inhabitants of Palestine rather than of the entire world.

Some see in 9:18 and 22 the hand of a redactor tying the more general list to the Palestinian one by claming that Ham is the father of Canaan, inserting the phrase into each of the verses. In the original story Canaan rather than Ham is the one who exposed his father. This theory solves two major problems at once. It explains why the offending son is called “the youngest” (RSV), for it is Canaan who is guilty rather than Ham; and it unties the knotty question that has always perplexed students of the Old Testament: Why was Canaan cursed for a sin in which he had no part, while Ham escaped unscathed?

Those who espouse this view consider that it solves all the problems of the passage. Shem represents Israel in the story, and Japheth the Philistines. Canaan is to be subservient to both the others because of his obvious involvement in immorality. This is an etiological story, contrived to justify what was already happening in Palestine, the subjection of the Canaanites by the Hebrews and the Philistines. It was originally told at the great festivals of Israel to encourage the conquest and to rationalize what had already been performed.

This interpretation is not without its problems, however. Von Rad admits that the use of the name Shem for Israel is “unusual, indeed singular, in the Old Testament” (Genesis, Westminster Press, 1961). He is under great duress also in attempting to prove that Japheth is to be equated with the Philistines. It is obvious that if Ham is permitted to remain in the passage, the references to Shem and Japheth are more easily explained.

Conservative scholars explain the reference to Ham as the youngest son either by insisting upon the dubious translation “younger” or by contending that the familiar listing Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Gen. 6:10; 7:13; 9:18; 10:1) is not chronological. Some suggest that Shem and Ham are listed together because their descendants lived in close proximity. This writer suggests that the names were preserved by oral tradition for centuries, thus explaining their frequent repetition. The arrangement is euphonic rather than chronological. It was the form in which the names were preserved in the popular stories. The names are not arranged chronologically in Genesis 10: Japheth comes first (v. 2), then Ham (v. 6), and Shem last (v. 21). It is quite possible that Ham was the youngest son of Noah.

Why Curse Canaan?

The most perplexing task confronting the traditional interpretation of the passage is to give an adequate explanation for the curse’s falling upon Canaan rather than upon Ham. There are several approaches to this enigma, one being to regard the oracle of Noah as a prediction of a curse. Noah, given insight into the future of the nations, sees the consequences of Ham’s sin issuing in the fate of his son. With a father like Ham the son is doomed.

Another possibility is that the story of Ham’s sin was told for many years among the Semites and Hebrews. After the Hebrews settled in Palestine and became familiar with the Canaanites, they perceived that the sins of Ham were being fulfilled in Canaan. The consequences of Ham’s sins were being felt by his descendants in Palestine. Verses 25–27 were composed under divine guidance to express this fact in immortal poetry. The displeasure of Noah had fallen upon Canaan.

Were the Canaanites actual descendants of Ham? We know little about their origin, but it is certain that either ethnically or politically or both, they were descendants of Ham. Another thing is clear: they were not Negroes. The curse on Canaan in no way has a bearing upon the Negro-white problems of our times. Some expositors insist, however, that Noah’s curse must have fallen upon all of Ham’s descendants. Canaan was singled out by Noah; but obviously, they say, Ham himself must have been cursed if his son had such a blow, else God was not just. Therefore the Negro as Ham’s descendant must still bear the curse!

Obvious objections to such a stand arise. First, although it is apparent that Ham bore blame for his sin, we do not know what that punishment was. Scripture is silent here, and conjecture is dangerous. Second, does this mean that the other Hamitic peoples—Egyptians, Libyans, South Arabians—also should serve the Indo-Europeans and Hebrews? In other words, should one white man enslave another white man? Few would contend for that. Thirdly, if in the times of ignorance God permitted such servitude, the implication of the New Testament would eliminate such a relationship for the Christian today.

The study of the closing verses of Genesis 9 is involved and complicated, and many of the issues will continue to be roundly debated. But one obvious conclusion can be made: This passage in no way relates to the present tensions between the races; when made to do so it has been misinterpreted and misapplied. It makes no reference to the Negro in any way. Whatever the reason, the curse of servitude was on Canaan, not Ham, and the modern Negro is not one of Canaan’s descendants. The use of the passage to foster racial superiority is an obvious attempt to prove by the Bible a position previously held for quite different reasons. The Bible should be studied in order to correct our attitudes and judge our prejudice, not to reconfirm our previous misconceptions.

Genesis 9:18 and 19 proclaims that all men are descended from Noah and thus have the same common ancestor. If all men belong to the same family, they should be able to live together in that one family in peace. May God help us in our time to find that way in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Clyde T. Francisco is John R. Sampey Professor of Old Testament at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds the B.A. and D.D. degrees from the University of Richmond, and the Th.M. and Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His latest book is “Studies in Jeremiah.”

- More from Clyde T. Francisco

Theology

Liberalism’s Fatal Weaknesses

Jesse J. Roberson

In his recent book, The Recovery of the Person (Abingdon, 1963), Carlyle Marney searches for an “incarnational realism” that would express the urgent need for inter-personal relationships leading to wholeness. He doubts, however, that the institutional churches can offer any guidance. “The man who merely analyzes our situation may do some good,” he writes, “but one looks in vain for help as to what to do and where. As for myself, I have less and less hope that denominational houses can offer any real redemption for us. Indeed, most times, as formerly, the institutional church seems somehow in the way. I look for, long for, some radical reconstitution, knowing all the time it will likely be preceded by an inevitable great turning away” (pp. 100f.).

The words are poignant, because in their honesty they reflect a mood emerging within the ranks of theological liberalism. The “turning away” Marney anticipates has already begun. Protestant churches still achieve small numerical gains in membership each year; however, according to the 1964 Yearbook of American Churches, Protestants constituted 34.9 per cent of the population in 1962, as against 35.2 per cent in 1961. These figures only confirm the mood of many ministers in liberal churches who have begun to sense that organized religion, as exemplified by the liberal churches, has failed.

Much activity is still carried on, and much money is still received and disbursed by liberal churches. Both the activity and the money have accomplished great good; this is undeniable. But the simple statistical indication that they cannot match exploding population figures with a correlative membership increase (and one wonders what honest, unpadded figures would reveal), coupled with the awareness that, despite their unprecedented numerical strength, liberal Protestant churches are almost powerless to accomplish in society more than a bare minimum of their relatively unimaginative and non-controversial objectives—these leave little room for doubt that for all apparent purposes liberal Protestantism, which held out such glowing hope and promise at the turn of the century, has failed at the very tasks it announced were both crucial and achievable.

There is some embarrassment in stating so baldly that liberalism has failed. I myself stand unashamedly within the broad tradition of liberalism as an existential and intellectual stance, as unreconstructed as John Dewey ever was. (This distinction between the liberal tradition and liberalism as a formal theological and operational stance should be kept clear.) Yet, while I regret the demise of liberalism, feeling that it ought to be true, I also welcome the death of theological liberalism as both good and necessary. Why, though, has Protestant liberalism failed and died, despite the heroic work and witness of many liberal ministers?

Dishonesty Or Failure

The maladies of liberalism become more apparent when viewed against its areas of greatest health. The first malady may be labeled, either intellectual dishonesty or failure of communication, depending upon how charitable one is inclined to be. Most ministers in liberal Protestant churches share, quite naturally, the legacy of liberalism. They attended seminaries that at least presented liberalism as a live option, and often offered little if anything else. Consequently, they reject the crude, non-historic, undisciplined literalism of an earlier day; and they are familiar with biblical criticism and other intellectual disciplines encountered in seminaries. Nearly all of them have to some extent accepted the results and conclusions of liberalism.

Except for a minority, however, liberal ministers have not clearly enunciated their theological or Christological position on the parish level, through preaching or teaching. Many of them must be charged with what Walter Kaufmann labels “double speak”: they go through the process of rethinking the meaning of the traditional words and phrases of Christian theology, often radically reconstituting them with meaning that negates Christian faith, if not in its historic sense, then at least as their untutored parishioners understand it; they do not, however, communicate their understanding to their parishioners. At worst this is conscious, blatant intellectual dishonesty; at best it is an abdication of the responsibility to achieve clarity and avoid ambiguity. When “double speak” occurs as an expression of dishonesty, the crime is compounded; no group has spoken more loudly for intellectual honesty than the liberals.

Even a semi-literate liberal is aware of the urgency, made so clear by Wittgenstein and his followers in linguistic analysis, of at least attacking the semantic problem, and of making earnest, sustained attempts to communicate what is in the mind of a speaker to the mind of a listener. Despite this urgency, intensified by mass communications media pounding away in our highly complex industrialized society, liberal ministers continue to affirm publicly what they deny privately. Phrases such as “Son of God,” “Virgin Birth,” “Word of God,” “resurrection,” and many others, are repeatedly used. Questioned privately, many preachers who use these words and phrases indicate that they refer to doctrines and concepts, and that parishioners generally have not had the specialized education necessary to understand the subtleties and sophistications of the doctrines and concepts to which the words and phrases refer. And this is true.

The failure to communicate is a reality, nevertheless; and whether it exists through dishonesty or because of irresponsibility, liberalism has failed to transmit its central convictions (or denials). Liberalism has reached the point at which it is impossible to determine from reading a book or listening to a sermon just what a liberal minister means. The prior awareness of multiple meanings becomes a barrier between speaker and hearer. Just what is meant by “salvation through Christ”; and what is promised as “resurrection”?

This points to the strength out of which this weakness grew. Liberalism, instructed in biblical criticism, learned in ancient languages and philosophy, informed by the Religionsgeschichteschule, and sophisticated in understanding historical theology, came to see that historic Christian faith was extensively conceptual and symbolic. Even Roman Catholic theologians have insisted in response to Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God that historic Christian faith has never affirmed what the bishop thinks must now be denied. Consequently, fundamentalism was a heresy, considered in historical perspective, although the oversimplified approach of fundamentalism was accepted largely throughout this country. But liberalism, although perceiving the heretical nature of fundamentalism, has not yet had the genius or the courage to communicate to the laity.

The resurgence of theological conservatism must be noted here; undoubtedly this resurgence is stimulated in part by instances of too-clear communication by liberal preachers, along with other historical factors that have produced “crisis” and other types of modern theology. There is serious doubt, nonetheless, that what was communicated in these instances, and consequently what was heard, was what liberalism had actually represented.

A Misuse Of Freedom

The second malady of liberalism follows from the first: it has mistaken intellectual license for intellectual freedom. Liberalism’s contribution to intellectual freedom is extensive. Fundamentalism’s literalism, specifically in locating heaven and hell spatially and in describing them vividly, is too widely known to require delineation here. To be freed from the necessity of accepting these literalisms in a Copernican universe was intensely liberating for many who existentially experienced this universe and also wanted to participate in the religious community.

Almost without exception, to note only one additional instance of freedom attributable to liberalism, the frontier preachers and others insisted that the Bible must be taken literally, without question or doubt, as the word (s) of God. These preachers meant something radically different, of course, from what Barth means by the Word of God. And it is a baleful commentary on the state of modern theology to indicate that one must understand the conceptual difference implied in the use of a capital letter to be currently literate in theology! Liberalism, through the “higher” as through the “lower” criticism, freed one from the impossible necessity of taking all biblical statements at face and at equal value, and the consequent intellectual contortions necessary to harmonize, through bizarre and wholly gratuitous interpretations, obvious inconsistencies or contradictions. It was with a profound sense of intellectual and emotional relief that liberals, many of whom still held a high view of biblical inspiration and authority, abandoned the necessity of believing all the Bible without question or reservation as a requisite to salvation.

This legitimate freedom, shared now by evangelicals, proved to be a fatal weakness for liberalism. Some liberals saw the error of fundamentalistic literalism and turned to a study of historical theology as a corrective discipline; but many others took the freedom to mean that one could, in effect, gerrymander a theology and a Christology and call them Christian, so long as one included a generous sprinkling of the traditional words and phrases. Consequently, there came into existence almost as many Jesuses and Gods as there were interpreters. It was no longer necessary to submit oneself to the painful, exacting task of understanding the often highly sophisticated historical theology. One was free.

As a result, many liberal ministers still call themselves “Christian,” all unaware that they have repudiated historic Christian faith and substituted humanism in its place; unaware, also, that the addition of a few phrases and words borrowed from the Christian tradition does not, fortunately, make a humanistic discourse a Christian sermon. One points out that any good humanist would heartily agree with everything said sermonically by many liberals, and the liberals vehemently deny this. These undisciplined liberals are honest, if mistaken, in their denials, for they have never troubled themselves, in seminary or elsewhere, to inform themselves historically. (It is simply incredible how easy it is to obtain the B.D. degree.) Many seminaries imply by their naïve, non-historic approach that Christian faith may, in effect, be abandoned. Consequently, as parishioners become adjusted to living under the pervasive modern threats to existence (and it is a commonplace that fear brought Americans to the churches after World War II) and discover that liberalism has nothing to say under the circumstances anyway, they also become increasingly disenchanted.

Neglecting Modern Insights

The third malady, which requires minimal treatment here, may be labeled an inadequate anthropology; the converse strength is the awareness of the social dimensions of the Christian faith. Here again, liberalism’s contribution in attempting to deal with social problems is significant. Still, liberalism too largely neglected the rawer, savage aspects of human nature by failing to understand and appropriate the implications of modern psychological insights that, basically, human beings are emotively and not volitionally impelled. In freedom, one can abandon the concept of a primal Fall when one comes to understand that human nature may be accepted as it is known by experience, without implying or imputing guilt (or, in many instances, responsibility) to the hostilities, aggressions, and other uncomfortable and disruptive feelings that all human beings by nature experience and express. When these are accepted as natural components of human nature, it is no longer necessary to think of human nature as either unnatural or depraved in either a moral or a theological sense, with the imago Dei either completely defaced, as Barth insists, or only formally residual, as Brunner maintains. Liberalism, by beginning with and accepting human nature as encountered, brought peace of mind and emotional freedom, consequently emotional health, to many who desperately needed them.

On the other hand, many liberal ministers, even while acknowledging the baser, instinctual components of human nature, unfortunately assumed that these could be eradicated through educational experience, or through the medium of some apparently free-floating entity sentimentally called love. Love, they said, was the answer to all problems, individual and social. Restructure society in love, and sin and evil would disappear. The Kingdom of God would, because it could, be built by human effort. It may be noted in passing that legal machinery, not religious institutions, brought about the beginning of a change in our racial patterns. Liberalism simply did not effect the necessary individual or social changes because a naïve sentimentalism frequently ignored the urgent necessity of inducing drastic changes within the structure of personality.

Through these weaknesses runs another which must be noted as gently yet as plainly as possible: moral cowardice. There are, it is acknowledged with deep gratitude, notable instances of persecution experienced by liberal ministers for their adherence to and proclamation of their restructured faith. Nevertheless, within liberalism there has been an extensive refusal, or constitutional incapability, to stand up and speak out unambiguously. All theological positions contain elements of subjectivity; therefore, the responsibility for whatever position is affirmed rests with the affirmer. Whether one accepts or rejects the Bible, for example, to any degree, the prior responsibility is always the individual’s. All positions should be stated as clearly and as relevantly as possible, and the consequences borne cheerfully and graciously.

Clarity has not, however, been achieved; in many instances it was not even attempted. There are countless liberal ministers, many of whose congregations are almost totally unaware what their ministers believe. It has seemed safer, more propitious, or more rewarding financially and otherwise to seek refuge behind obfuscations, ambiguities, or denominational promotions, than to pay, first, the exacting price demanded for discovering what Christian faith is all about, or, second, the price of declaring in relevant, forceful, and clear language what faith, if any, is held.

Now intellectual honesty can become a fetish to the neglect of other equally important concerns. But intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice can destroy both personalities and institutions. One cannot avoid the nagging feeling that the nerve of honesty and courage was cut when liberalism abandoned its certainty, however authoritarian or emotionally misdirected such certainty may have been; for even when liberalism, in its many guises, has been proclaimed, it has often been proclaimed in such diluted, placid terms that no observable results have been accomplished.

Some liberals hold on to their liberalism, entirely unaware that history has invalidated it. Others turn to biblical theology, to Bultmannianism or post-Bultmannianism, and to a dozen or so other esoteric theological positions that in time will prove to be nothing more than intellectual fads. Some of the seminaries already include avowedly post-Christian faculty members. Bishop Robinson has attempted to make Christian faith both relevant and acceptable to “man come of age.” Meanwhile, historic Christian faith is repudiated by such attempted reconstructions. Liberalism, under its post-liberal guises, is, as much as anything else, an attempt to hold on to theism and to Christian moorings while operating in essentially non-theistic terms under post-Christian assumptions.

Moreover, one senses an existential despair, barely masked behind the facade of the traditional words and phrases still used ritualistically. It will be interesting, and perhaps revolutionary, to see what happens to liberalism and its blandness. The “turning away” Marney reluctantly foresaw has begun, and nothing is looming on the horizon to offer power or guidance.

Jesse J. Roberson is senior minister of the First Methodist Church, El Centro, California. He is a graduate of the University of Chattanooga (A.B.) and of the Candler School of Theology, Emory University (B.D. cum laude). Before going to El Centro, Mr. Roberson served Methodist churches in Georgia and Arizona.

- More from Jesse J. Roberson

Theology

Saving Faith as Wesley Saw It

John Lawson

Wesley’s classic definition of saving faith occurs in the first of his forty-four “Standard Sermons,” that entitled “Salvation by Faith” (i. 4, 5). “What faith is it then through which we are saved?—It is not barely a speculative, rational thing, a cold, lifeless assent, a train of ideas in the head; but also a disposition of the heart.—Christian faith is then, not only an assent to the whole gospel of Christ, but also a full reliance on the blood of Christ;—a recumbency upon Him as our atonement and our life.” How does this view of faith square with some other views, ancient and modern?

We have heard it said that faith is not “propositional.” I remember seeing an old family Bible with an engraved frontispiece. A divine Hand divides the clouds and delivers to earth the Sacred Volume. Some would object to this imagery because it implies that God reveals himself to man by making known a set of truths regarding himself, which are to be reverently accepted. God declares fixed and objective propositions of theology. The critic who calls himself an “existential” theologian passionately says No to this. God makes himself known to man by confronting him immediately, in the secret place of the heart, by His own mysterious presence. To use the hackneyed phrase, revelation consists in the “I-Thou relationship.” As the Bible says: “The Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.”

What has Wesley to say to this? As is usual in these matters, the Wesleyan judgment upon the critics largely depends upon what they mean by their words, and how far they press their propositions. The doctrine is often propounded that in the New Testament we meet not “the Jesus of History” but “the Christ of Faith.” In its more moderate and cautious statement this can mean something with which we may all agree, namely, that the evangelists were not dispassionately recording biographical data for the convenience of future authors of “Lives of Christ.” Their task was evangelistic. They were presenting such of the facts about Christ as were necessary for Christian faith and discipleship, and presenting them in such a way that the believing man might hope to win others to faith in Christ. So far, so good. However, it certainly does not follow that Gospel-facts presented by faith to faith are thereby rendered unreliable as facts.

The more radical critic takes this doctrine of “the Christ of Faith” much further. To him, Jesus of Nazareth was a village prophet, presumably of singularly upright character and striking personality, who made a signally deep impression upon his disciples. He was put to death, and as the disciples thought about these things their hearts told them that those who had met Jesus had been confronted by God, secretly, within the heart. This, we are assured by some, is substantially all there is to know. The Christians then imagined vivid narratives in picture-language to symbolize this “existential experience.” In particular, they could not bring themselves to believe that such a one as Jesus could really be in bondage to death. Therefore the imagination of faith constructed the story of the Empty Tomb convincingly to set forth this conviction—and very fortunately, no one thought of going to look until it was too late, and one could not tell whether the body that lay moldering in the grave was the putrifying corpse of Jesus, or Judas, or John Brown. Furthermore, the Christian prophet, filled with the Spirit, was convinced that he knew the immediate “mind of the Lord.” His consciousness conjured up authoritative “words of the Lord,” which were read back onto the lips of Jesus.

Thus “the pillar and ground of the truth” is simply the Church, and nothing else. Here indeed is a radical development of the ancient proposition that the tradition of the Church is authoritative for faith. The figure of Christ in the Gospels is not substantial history. Some scraps of the portrait may indeed be authentic historical memory, some critics allowing more, some less. Yet the substantial account of the Lord—his life, his character, his words, and his works—was summoned forth from the religious consciousness of the Church. But at least we know that he was crucified. The old orthodoxy cried out in faith: “My Lord and my God!” The humanist generation modestly reduced this to “Ecce Homo!” The existentialist theologian leaves us with “habeas corpus.”

Beneath The Learned Words

What then is this construction? Strip off the learned verbiage, like so many skins from an onion, and one finds the proposition that men fortified themselves with courage for life, and for martyrdom, from the psychological impact of a victory over death that had in fact not taken place. Scholars may choose to call this the thoughtful modern man’s restatement of Christian faith. The plain man will have a less respectful name for it. To him it is mass-hysteria. And he is right.

As a Protestant I do not wish to have to choose between this system, as the supposed modern heir to the Reformation emphasis upon faith, and the Roman doctrine. However, if I am driven to the choice, I prefer salvation by the Mass to salvation by mass-hysteria.

We can distinguish three possible attitudes to “saving faith.” The first is symbolized by Bishop Butler, author of The Analogy of Religion and the great philosophical defender of orthodoxy in Wesley’s day. By the method of his plea that “probability is the guide of life,” Butler argues for rational religion and for propositional faith. Natural religion is reasonable, for there are very probable marks of the existence of God in nature. From the facts of human life one may argue that it is reasonable to believe in the soul. An air of mystery surrounds even the world known to science, and so it is reasonable to believe in miracles. These propositions are to be rationally accepted, and man is to mold his life in accord with them. But as to the claim for the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the uneasy Butler protests: “It is a very horrid thing, Mr. Wesley; a very horrid thing.” This is objective religion, yet cold and academic, which in effect declares: “True faith is not a disposition of the heart. It is a speculative, rational thing, a train of ideas in the head.”

At the other extreme is the “existential” faith; that is to say, the faith that despairs of reason. The classic figure of the philosopher is Plato, “listening to the music of the spheres.” Herein is the assumption that embedded in the very nature of things there is a rational and intellectual plan, which may be divined by the awakened human mind. The existential philosopher despairs of this aspiring flight of intellect. All that man can do is to stand in the dark and take “a kick in the pants” from immediate experience. It is doubtless possible to use this philosophy, the supposed mental outlook of the modern man, as a means for expounding the Christian faith, just as other philosophical systems have been used in the past. It is possible, as it is doubtless possible to set “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” to Chinese music. Yet the medium of expression is not very suitable.

So we throw away natural religion. Rational argument for the existence of God and the soul is a fruitless strife, for the heavens do not declare the glory of God to him who has learned a little astronomy. We throw away miracles, for science, it is affirmed, now understands the physical universe and declares miracles to be impossible. If it is to survive in the modern world, Christian faith must therefore conduct a “strategic withdrawal to prepared positions,” away from any event that could be verified by physical science, into the secret and non-material world of the mind—until materialistic science explains away the thinking mind as itself an illusion. Thus the “modern” theologian in effect says: “True faith is not a rational thing, a train of ideas in the head. It is a disposition of the heart, generated from the life of the emotions.”

Faith Of Head And Heart

In conclusion, examine the wisdom of the third and central position. This is the word of Wesley: the judicious; the cautiously rational; the ardently spiritual; the truly catholic; the authentically evangelical. Faith “is not barely a train of ideas in the head, but also a disposition of the heart.” First there is “the faith once committed to the saints,” which is the most august body of rational theological propositions that has ever entered into the heart of man to conceive. Here is a witness to an actual and objective saving work of divine grace, performed in history, written in Scripture, and interpreted in the long experience of the Church. Yet it is not by itself enough reverently and thoughtfully to accept this “train of ideas.” By the inward operation of the Holy Spirit, through the means of grace, the faith must come home also with power to the secret inward man of the heart and the imagination. To employ an old-fashioned term, saving faith is “experimental,” and “experiential.” It is objective, but not barely objective and academic. It is personal, imaginative, and charged with healthy emotion, but not purely subjective. It is the actual, the outward, and the rational brought home to be heart by the working of the Spirit.

Certainly, as the critic observes, it is not enough for Christian faith to provide a complete demonstration of the historical fact of the Empty Tomb. Annas and Caiaphas presumably had a better demonstration of this sort than we can ever hope for, and yet did not believe. One must also walk with Christ on the Emmaus road, and receive the heart-warming “opening of the Scriptures,” and the discovery that He is known “in the breaking of the bread.” Yet this work in the heart could not have arisen in the first place, and would not have been sustained down the centuries, apart from the objective divine saving work of grace, performed in this very world and witnessed even by physical signs.

John Lawson is associate professor of church history at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. He holds the B.Sc. from London University and an honors M.A. in theology from Cambridge University. Cambridge also conferred the B.D. for his published dissertation on “The Biblical Theology of S. Irenaeus.” Before coming to Emory in 1955, he was a pastor in the Wesleyan Methodist Church in England.

- More from John Lawson

Pressures on Spain for Protestant Rights

Carl F. H. Henry

Whether larger liberties emerge swiftly or slowly for Spanish Protestants now seems contingent on which of two viewpoints carries the day in government circles. Some government leaders favor immediate enactment of constitutional guarantees to improve Spain’s image on the European scene, while others contend that it would be easier to implement Protestant liberties if they were proclaimed after the Vatican Council’s next session and had the benefit of Pope Paul’s encouragement.

Spanish Protestants now consider the development of a new religious situation inevitable. But their enthusiasm is limited by the fact that the content of the proposed law has not been made known publicly. The phrasing reportedly has been subject to two types of restrictive pressure by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The Evangelical Council for Spain will meet in Barcelona, strongest center of evangelical activity, April 28–29, and will consider a national meeting of Spanish Protestant leaders to face aspects of religious intolerance.

Some Catholic churchmen have urged that Protestant privileges be approved in the form, not of constitutional law, but rather of government decree. Such a decree is inferior to law, since it must respect former laws and depends upon their interpretation. The present law accords Protestants only the right of private worship; it gives them no assured legal standing. For that reason such a development in effect would suspend the opening of Protestant churches and schools and the publication and distribution of Protestant literature upon the discretion of politically powerful local bishops. Protestant leaders, however, think this maneuver has failed. Pope John XXIII reportedly approved constitutional guarantees for Spanish Protestants before his death, and Pope Paul’s concurrence is widely taken for granted.

Under the Spanish concordat with the Vatican, Roman Catholicism is the only recognized religion, is state-supported, and is wholly responsible for primary education in Spain. Up to now Protestants have carried on their work in Spain by government tolerance. Despite periodic harassment and opposition, they now have two seminaries, a Bible school, a half dozen day schools, and more than 400 churches. Although church membership numbers 30,000, attendance runs 50,000. Last year alone twelve new chapels were opened.

If the pressures for government decree rather than law have failed, a second line of ecclesiastical influence is giving evangelicals more concern. Usually reliable sources report that the proposed law is now so worded that it may automatically take away half of what it seems to offer. Article XVIII, drawn up last year, not only proposes liberties for Spanish Protestants but reportedly also prohibits “proselyting”—an undefined term that might become a weapon to exclude evangelism.

Even the half-way proposal would find a Protestant welcome, however, since the present law makes no room whatever for any public religious manifestation other than Roman Catholic. “Any change can only be an improvement,” comments Jose Cardona, secretary of the Evangelical Defense Commission. “We shall press the cause of religious liberty step by step, until every measure of intolerance is defeated.”

The situation of Spanish Protestants has received increasing publicity in the European press since the visit to Madrid on February 24 of Eugen Gerstenmaier, president of the West German Bundestag, while on a political mission concerning the Common Market. Gerstenmaier requested a meeting with Protestant leaders, then told journalists that the treatment of the problems of Protestants in Spain is “the touchstone of Spain’s earnestness” in joining other European nations in efforts like the Common Market. As Gerstenmaier posed it, the issue is whether Spain really intends to share in the transformation of modern Europe or to remain in the Middle Ages. This critique evoked considerable comment in the Continental press outside Spain. Editorial writers asked whether Spain might at long last see the dawn of a new religious freedom in which Protestants would be accorded the same liberties that Catholics enjoy in other European nations.

Spanish Protestants are heartened by increasing interest in their predicament shown by German and British spokesmen. They have been disappointed and even dismayed by the silence of the U. S. State Department, which seems to pursue a hands-off policy.

Gerstenmaier’s thrust in behalf of the Spanish Protestants did not stop at this point. Sharing the anxieties over any restriction on Protestant missionary effort, he stressed that evangelism is part of the very soul of Protestantism and that a denial of evangelistic opportunity infringes on Christian liberty.

In the background of these developments touching Protestants some observers detect aspects of a church-state tug-of-war. There are signs of a new anti-Protestant crusade in regional Catholic publications. But some government leaders clearly resent hierarchical pressures and show a growing interest in the Protestant situation. Madrid authorities have just approved the public listing by hotels of the time and place of Protestant services. Recently the Supreme Court ruled against a 1961 government edict that barred a Protestant group in Valencia from establishing a church, declaring that edict null and void. Yet in Chiclana de Sigura, in central Spain, a Protestant (independent) church remains closed. For many months local civil authorities refused to answer the Madrid government’s request for an explanation, after Protestants filed an appeal. In response to government insistence, local authorities sent a list of fifty names—mostly of local reprobates with police records, socialists, and Communists—representing these as the church members. Protestants then informed Madrid that there were only twenty-five members of the church and that the civil guard had falsified the list. Madrid authorities now face a situation in which local Protestants have been officially defamed by regional officials.

Story Of A Book

Some forty years ago, poor health forced Dr. Henry H. Halley out of the pastorate. He began to use his spare moments to memorize portions of the Bible. One Sunday morning, in a guest pulpit appearance, he decided to recite Scripture rather than preach, and that was the start of a wide ministry in which he merely quoted from the Bible from memory. But to help his audience understand, he would preface his recitations with background instruction. The instruction became somewhat standardized, and he compiled it into a sixteen-page booklet, Suggestions for Bible Study. The booklet had popular appeal, and he continued to add material to it. By this week, during which Halley celebrates his ninetieth birthday, the work had gone into its twenty-third edition. Long known as Halley’s Bible Handbook, the 968-page volume is one of the few religious books that have sold more than a million copies.

An Undawning Twilight

Undeterred by a furor of controversy with protests from the Anglican Primate and the former Prime Minister of Canada, which doubtless drove countless television viewers to their sets, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s production, “Open Grave,” was shown on schedule during Easter week. It purported to be a modern coverage—with press, TV cameras, and all—of the discovery in a Toronto cemetery of a mysteriously uncovered coffin, subsequently found empty, in which the body of Joshua Corbett had been enclosed. Head of the Peace and Action group, which had been responsible for the shutdown by peaceful strikes of numerous arms plants across Canada, he had been hanged in a local jail some forty-eight hours earlier. From the commentator at the crowded graveside, filling in until the police chief received permission to open the coffin, to the studio, where a résumé of the circumstances leading to the dead man’s framed conviction for capital murder was interspersed by shots of his past, his boyhood farm home, previously televised interviews with former acquaintances, the man on the street with a mike shoved at him, the conclusion of the trial, and the jailyard during the execution, every detail follows the now familiar pattern of such events.

To those ignorant of Scripture, it could be just another CBC hour, with a gimmick of a bizarre fictional happening made real by familiar TV personalities. To the initiate there was the stimulus of recognizing labored and not-so-obvious parallels: The betrayal of Joshua by his follower, Jerome Ingram (Judas Iscariot); his refusal to speak in his own defense at his trial; the discovery of the open grave by ex-prostitute Marion Morrison (Mary Magdalene); the testimony of Martin Linden (Matthew Levi) and of Jeffrey Benson, who had been at the execution and the funeral (John Ben Zebedee?); an urbane attorney general (Pontius Pilate).

No one could criticize the respectful earnestness of the treatment, the artistry of direction, the competence of acting. But the biblical student will query the following departures from the elaborately drawn parallel. In view of Pilate’s statement, “I find no fault in Him,” why was J. C. depicted as convicted for the shooting of a policeman? The obvious answer—that the charges of sabotage which were to be laid against him would not bring the death penalty—lends color to the strong suggestion that the entire plot against Christ was engineered by vested interests, an implication that is true but by no means the whole truth. Why was the traitor made to shoot himself after seeing on TV the opening of the grave? Why were all the disciples portrayed as openly demonstrating with placards (HE DIES FOR US, LOVE NOT HATE) at the moment of execution, when on the historical occasion there is no record of their presence? Especially, why did Mary Magdalene’s story, “I told a man who works there; he was nice, though” (that was obviously the gardener), stop there with no suggestion of having seen Joshua Corbett alive, of having told the disciples; indeed with no suggestion at all of the resurrection, apart from the vague answer, “Oh he’ll come back”? And why was Mary Magdalene portrayed as a neurotic of limited mentality with Zasu Pitts’s gestures, whose identification as a “call girl” strikes the only humorous note in the production?

But for the Christian the play falls with a dull thud. The delineation of Joshua Corbett as an idealistic pacifist with faith-healing powers, the omission in any context of a single mention of God, drastically limit its impact. There is only one pregnant moment of emotional depth, when the camera flashes from one to the other grief-stricken face, as the jail bell tolls the execution and the black-jacket boys drive their noisy motorcycles around and around the disciples in calloused curiosity. Yet from the comments of those who knew him, from uncomprehending villagers to a once-skeptical physician, no Person emerges. Only a vague unsatisfactory figure, beside whom the scriptural account and experiential reality of our risen Lord stand in glorious relief. These were among the reflections on J. C.:

“A strange lonesome boy,” fighting temptation to suicide; “Used to sneak up behind you, that’s what I didn’t like about him” (a man in the village).

“He was just a good man who helped everybody, liked people to be good, to be clean, if you know what I mean. He could make people well, too” (Mary Magdalene).

“A very humble, deeply sincere man opposed to violence in any form. He made me understand the urgency of peace and the need of fighting for it” (physician).

The healing darkness of Good Friday, the radiance of Easter, are intensified by the depressive, undawning twilight of this play’s atmosphere. Yet from this elaborate $60,000 production, as from the older sacrilege of such books as The Brook Kidron and The Man Who Lived Again, one note of cheer emerges: the world cannot leave Him alone; it cannot ignore the empty grave.

GRACE IRWIN

Persecution: Twentieth-Century Style

A trio of disgruntled young people in Minneapolis admitted last month that they had subjected a noted evangelical scholar and Ids family to a nine-week campaign of harassment. Their complaint was that the scholar, Dr. Timothy L. Smith, was “religiously bigoted” because he uttered a prayer in his history class at the University of Minnesota. For that the Smiths were made victims of recurrent false alarms, fake deliveries, obscene letters, and abusive telephone calls.

On one occasion, police said, the trio convinced the Smiths’ 13-year-old daughter that her father was dead. Another time a Roman Catholic priest was directed to the Smith home to administer last rites. In still another instance an anonymous midnight caller told Minneapolis police that there had been a killing at the Smith address.

Smith and his family are members of the Church of the Nazarene. He is author of a classic study, Revivalism and Social Reform, which was one of the books chosen last year to be placed in the White House Library.

Among those who admitted planning the campaign of harassment was a 21-year-old woman who had taken a course under Smith and earned an ‘A’ in it. Also implicated were the woman’s 20-year-old former roommate and a 23-year-old student announcer at the university radio station.

The young people said they ended the abuse because it did not seem to be having any effect.

Setbacks In Missionary Aviation

A newly purchased plane of the Bolivian Indian Mission crashed in the Andes Mountains last month, killing four persons. Among the victims was Walter Herron, 53, veteran missionary pilot who was at the controls of the single-engine Cessna 180.

It was the fourth fatal accident in missionary aviation within a year. In each case the plane was an American-built Cessna 180, a model which until now has been regarded as especially suitable for rigorous missionary use.

Also killed with Herron was a Cessna employee and his two children. They were traveling from the Bolivian capital of La paz to Cochabamba, where the North American-supported BIM has its main headquarters. Cause of the crash was not determined.

Herron, a native of Australia, had served as a missionary in Bolivia for thirty years. The new plane was to have been used by his 24-year-old son, Robert, also a missionary pilot.

‘Perturbed And Pained’

The International Council of Christian Churches lost its British Consultative Committee last month. The committee severed its connection with ICCC in a dramatic announcement charging that its officers and members “have been gravely perturbed and pained these last eighteen months by certain developments emanating in the first instance from the action of some of the officials and committees of the ICCC.”

The British committee said it made representations to ICCC leaders, “but although the British brethren surely have a fuller knowledge and a better understanding of the religious situation in their own United Kingdom than have nationals of other lands, these representations were not heeded.”

A resolution passed by the British committee also noted that “it has become evident through recent events that the administration of the ICCC has overridden the Committee with respect to the testimony and activity in Great Britain.”

The ICCC is headed by Dr. Carl McIntire. Its headquarters are located at Collingswood, New Jersey.

Ties were broken with “deepest regret,” the British committee’s statement said. The committee declared that its action was accomplished “after much discussion and prayer” and “with the utmost Christian love to its brethren within the ICCC.” The committee added that “in no respect whatsoever does it change its position of loyalty to the Scriptural Doctrines of the historic Christian Faith or its protest against the apostate Ecumenical Movement.”

Refugees In Distress

Protestant church groups have undertaken the resettlement of 8,000 refugee-squatters in the Sealdah railway station of Calcutta, India, Religious News Service reported. The situation there has been described as the worst refugee problem in the world.

Since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, several million Hindu refugees crowded into India from the Muslim state of Pakistan. Calcutta, less than a hundred miles from the East Pakistan border, was almost overwhelmed. Living wherever they could, more than 1,200 families set up “housekeeping” in Sealdah station. On the platforms, in the booking offices, at the entrances, and in the spaces around the bidding a vast shantytown of dirty thatched huts has grown up.

The daily Le Monde of Paris reported recently that thousands of Christians of the Garo tribe also have sought refuge in India.

Meanwhile, in northeastern India, bloody clashes between Hindus and Muslims were continuing. Many hundreds have already been killed this year in riots in Calcutta and in Dacca, East Pakistan.

The Bengal Refugee Service, an agency of the National Christian Council of India, has embarked on a relocation program for refugees in cooperation with the state. The West Bengal government has provided a plot of land near Calcutta in an area where some industries are beginning to develop. Several hundred families have already been relocated. Plans call for 1,200 to be out by June.

Abortive Rapprochement

Dialogue in Belfast has its limits. Two Protestant ministers invited Roman Catholic priests to address young people’s meetings. But protests became so pronounced (one group even threatened to picket) that both meetings were canceled.

Nevertheless, the ministers of Fisherwick Presbyterian and University Road Methodist Churches in Belfast both got votes of confidence from their boards.

Elsewhere, the incident caused considerable alarm, One presbytery passed a resolution in which it affirms its “steadfast loyalty to those great Scriptural truths which form the basis of the doctrine of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and declares that it will do everything within its power to preserve this Church’s Reformed and Protestant heritage.”

Catholics And Apartheid

A rift in the Roman Catholic hierarchy of South Africa became apparent when Archbishop William P. Whelan of Bloemfontein issued a statement condoning the government’s racial segregation policies. Two other South African archbishops have branded apartheid as “morally indefensible.” Whelan subsequently announced he had issued the statement on his own behalf and not for the entire hierarchy.

Graham In Britain

“About a third of what Sonny Liston got the other night for being beaten by Cassius Clay,” said Billy Graham last month in London, replying to a newsman’s question about the cost of another British crusade. The evangelist had been invited by seventy lay leaders to return next year for another major crusade in Britain and had come to London to discuss the possibility.

During his six-day visit he had talks with the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Prime Minister, and the Leader of the Opposition. Asked how he found morality in Britain, he said he had met only religious and civil leaders, and their moral standards seemed to be very high. (Graham had got into trouble on a previous visit for some forthright statements on the subject.) Addressing some 2,500 at a ministers’ meeting in Westminster, he said that today’s young people are seeking “a flag to follow, a song to sing, a creed to believe.” Their current crazes are ephemeral, he suggested, and he ventured the prophecy that the Beatles would soon get a haircut.

Lord Luke, chairman of the British committee of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, gave a dinner in his honor in Piccadilly’s Criterion Hotel to more than 300, representing the influential in all walks of life. In a brisk speech, General Wilson-Haffenden, who was chairman of Graham’s 1954 British crusade, said the decision to come in 1965 or 1966 was dependent partly on the availability of Earls Court, which has an indoor seating capacity of 27,000. Identifying a fellow general at the dinner who was responsible for hiring out Earls Court, Wilson-Haffenden said: “I don’t know whether he knows what it is to be surrounded by a volume of prayer, but he soon will.”

Although the secular press reported Graham’s visit with little of the hostility so apparent a decade ago, one religious weekly asserted that there was “not the slightest doubt that the majority of thinking churchmen are against a further crusade.” It adduced no evidence for this, however, and one evangelical scholar commented, “Judging from the recently published works and public pronouncements of the ‘thinking churchmen’ this journal evidently has in mind, I am not suprised that they would find Billy Graham’s message unacceptable.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

- More from Carl F. H. Henry

Theology

Current Religious Thought: April 10, 1964

J. D. Douglas

“An exceeding subtle document, inasmuch as the spies from the two tribes beheld certain features of the Land of Unity through different spectacles, so that what to the one appeared to be a giant was to the other a dwarf.” Thus did a startlingly skittish article in The Christian refer to the Anglican-Methodist report, 100,000 copies of which have now been sold. The report is variously regarded as an irresistible summons to that unity which is Christ’s will for his Church; as a clarion call to do battle for principles that are not marketable; and as an academic exercise in controversial divinity. Though described by Dr. J. I. Packer as “a victory for Latitudinarianism in both churches,” it has to some extent cut across the usual party allegiances.

A booklet, What of the Conversations?, published by the Methodist Revival Fellowship, warns against approaching the suggested merger with an open mind, unless that mind is first wholly in subjection to Scripture. Developing the latter theme, Dr. A. Skevington Wood says of the report: “We look in vain for an unequivocal affirmation that the Bible not only contains but actually constitutes the inspired and infallible Word of God.” The Voice of Methodism (see “Jeopardizing the Union,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, News, February 28) testifies to the depth of opposition feeling within that church.

Even more significant is an open letter to the English archbishops and bishops by thirty-nine Anglican evangelical leaders, both clerical and lay. Affirming their desire for unity and welcoming the report, the writers call for urgent consideration of six points, summarized here:

1. The New Testament principle of one church in one place would demand full union with the other English free churches as well as with the Methodist Church.

2. The deadline date should be extended, as the report was not unanimous, opinion in both churches is divided, and hasty decision to go forward could result in secessions from both denominations.

3. The sections on Scripture and tradition, episcopacy, priesthood, and the sacraments need revision, to be undertaken in consultation with conservative evangelical Anglicans (who were not represented on the original committee).

4. To avoid prejudicing other reunion schemes and to maintain the present Methodist intercommunion with other free churches, the latter should be brought into the negotiations immediately.

5. Clarification is necessary on such matters as doctrinal standards, the establishment, the parochial system, and Prayer Book revision.

6. The proposed Service of Reconciliation implies a depreciation of Methodist orders. The “right way” to unite ministries is by mutual recognition, all ordinations thereafter to be episcopal, as in the Church of South India, with which church full communion should now be established, thus “eliminating discrimination against ministers of an episcopal Church who have not themselves been episcopally ordained.”

This last point is interpreted differently by a statement issued by the Anglo-Catholic Church Union. This refers to the wish of Anglican participants in the service “to share with Methodist ministers the gift bestowed in episcopal ordination,” and asserts that “the intention and rite seem to be adequate for the bestowal of this gift.” The union asks for consideration of “other sacramental ordinances” than baptism and Communion.

The report has some supporters among evangelicals. Maurice Wood, the decorated ex-commando who is now principal of Oak Hill College, feels that it is unrealistic after seven years’ negotiations with the Methodists to bring other free churches into the project, especially as Anglicans and Methodists have such close links historically. He is one of several evangelical leaders who see it as their task to share in current ecumenical deliberations, and to support them whenever possible, while still upholding clear biblical doctrines.

The open letter also brought the Archbishop of Canterbury into the fray. About the other free churches, he declared there had been discussions with them in recent years, and that the Faith and Order Conference at Nottingham in September will deal with doctrinal questions important for all the churches. Thus, suggested Dr. Ramsey, it “would make for confusion, repetition and disappointment to substitute another general set of negotiations for them.” Taking up the question of the South India Church (a hotly disputed issue in England), he said it involved a difficulty that the Anglican-Methodist negotiations had sought to avoid: that of an interim period, perhaps a lengthy one, “in which some of the ministers of a Church are episcopally ordained and others not, so that some and not others are accepted by many conscientious Anglicans.”

The archbishop then made some criticisms of a pamphlet by his predecessor. Lord Fisher of Lambeth. Lord Fisher had said that if a Methodist minister who had received the laying on of hands in the Service of Reconciliation were subsequently to wish to enter the ministry of the Church of England, he would need to be ordained by the bishop. Professing to find this statement “astonishing,” Dr. Ramsey stated that “all ministers who will have received what is given in the Service will be indubitably accepted as priests in the Church of God.”

That archbishops should disagree may not be a happy augury, but one of the salutary things about this report is the way in which it has indirectly forced ecclesiastical pundits into forsaking prudent reticence on certain controversial issues for plain speech—and this is achievement indeed.

- More from J. D. Douglas

Religion in the Ring

Professional boxing, the moral foundation of which has always been somewhat tenuous, tottered under religious controversy last month.

Key figure in the dispute was the 22-year-old Louisville Negro originally known as Cassius Marcellus Clay but more recently—since his announced identification with the Black Muslims—as Muhammed Ali or Cassius X. Clay, who dethroned Sonny Liston as heavyweight champion in February, says he will not answer the bell in future fights unless introduced by his new name.

Among the complicating factors is the philosophy of racial segregation espoused by the Black Muslims. Even more troublesome is the open break between Clay’s friend, Malcolm X, and the American Black Muslim movement (which, in turn, is regarded by mainstream Islam as heretical). Malcolm X has urged in somewhat ambiguous terms that his Black Nationalist group arm themselves with rifles and shotguns in order to “fight back in self-defense.” The Black Muslim movement has heretofore forbidden its members to carry arms of any kind.

Some observers had hoped that the dispute might be dissolved if Clay were taken out of the picture by being drafted into the Army. He failed his draft board’s arithmetic test, however, and prospects of his going into uniform dimmed.

Clay’s personal conduct, aside from his braggadocio, nevertheless contrasts sharply with that of many other professional boxers: he has no police record. Liston, on the other hand, has been arrested at least sixteen times and has served two jail terms. His most recent trouble may have cost him his career. Floyd Patterson, who lost the heavyweight crown to Liston, was also a delinquent in his early years, though his involvements with the law were not nearly so serious as those of Liston.

The religious overtones of the present controversy became even more distinct when Patterson offered to fight Clay for nothing “just to take the title away from the Black Muslims.” But Patterson, a Roman Catholic, said his comment referred not to religion but to the Black Muslims’ adherence to racial segregation.

Protestant Panorama

Delegates to the Lutheran Church of America convention in July will be asked to approve a “master plan” of theological education that recommends several seminary mergers.

In England, the Anglican bishops of Chichester and Bristol launched public appeals for funds to preserve their ancient cathedrals. The buildings, which date back to the Middle Ages, are badly in need of repairs.

Eight of the principal Protestant seminaries and Bible institutes of Bolivia organized a joint agency to coordinate accreditation efforts. The newly formed Bolivian Evangelical Theological Education Association will also compile comprehensive statistical data and will seek ties with similar organizations in other Latin American countries.

Ministers should not have the right to strike, according to a statement issued by the cathedral chapter of Uppsala, Sweden. The chapter made public its position in response to a proposal that the right to strike be given all salaried employees of the government. Unless they are specifically exempted, the measure would include Lutheran pastors inasmuch as theirs is the government-supported church.

Deaths

DR. RAY FRANCIS BROWN, 66, director of music at General Theological Seminary; in New York City.

THE REV. EMO F. J. VAN HALSEMA, 73, former president of the Christian Reformed Church Synod; in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

DR. JOHN W. FLIGHT, 73, professor of biblical literature at Haverford College; in Carmel, California.

Miscellany

Air Force Academy officials upheld their chapel attendance requirements for cadets, excepting seniors, but the policy is headed for review in Washington.

The government of Sudan threatens to expel all foreign missionaries. An official warning came following the expulsion of 300 Christian foreign missionaries from the southern region of the country. The expelled missionaries were accused of spreading “false allegations and slander about their alleged treatment while in Sudan.”

Southern California churchmen organized their own motion picture company, to be known as Imperator Productions, Inc. First project is to film the life and times of Adoniram Judson.

Religious Heritage of America is sponsoring a series of three-minute radio programs to “analyze and interpret the moral and spiritual values which played such an important role in the nation’s growth to greatness.” The programs are being aired initially over a network of some 200 stations.

Personalia

Dr. Charles W. Ranson elected dean of the Theological School of Drew University.

Dr. Daniel A. Poling retired from his Sunday evening preaching post at Marble Collegiate Church, New York.

The Rev. B. Edgar Johnson elected general secretary of the Church of the Nazarene.

Dr. Neil A. Winegarden elected president of Judson Baptist College.

Dr. Otto A. Dorn elected president of the Protestant Church-Owned Publishers’ Association.

Dr. B. E. Hardman appointed editor of the English Churchman.

Dr. Tom Allan resigned as minister of St. George’s Tron in Glasgow, Scotland, to recuperate from a heart ailment.

Dr. D. G. Moses elected chairman of East Asia Christian Conference.

The Rev. Edwin H. Robertson named first executive director of the World Association for Christian Broadcasting.

They Say

“We want to build a society in which a person who undresses on a stage does not earn twenty times as much as a laborer.”—Kwaku Boateng, Interior Minister of Ghana, quoted in Die Zeit.

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Lone Knights Of Faith

Sincerity In Question

Two Hands

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Signs In All Strata

The Threefold Guilt

Family Reciprocity

The Shepherd And His Dog

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Noah’S Enlightenment

Why Curse Canaan?

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Dishonesty Or Failure

A Misuse Of Freedom

Neglecting Modern Insights

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Beneath The Learned Words

Faith Of Head And Heart

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Story Of A Book

An Undawning Twilight

Persecution: Twentieth-Century Style

Setbacks In Missionary Aviation

‘Perturbed And Pained’

Refugees In Distress

Abortive Rapprochement

Catholics And Apartheid

Graham In Britain

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Protestant Panorama

Deaths

Miscellany

Personalia

They Say

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